What to do with your winter?
So Winter is here, and it is the slow season for most of us. When I first started my business 17 years ago, the winters brought endless dread. Over time though I began to love them.
I could finally take a break from the “hands on work” and get down to the “Business building work”. The fun stuff!
I realised over the years that the better I planned and organised the better my spring season would be. The more I focused the
Here is how I typically spend my winter in preparation for a great spring.
January Week 1 & 2 - Review and analyse the previous year. Pull reports on almost every metric we collected. Decide what worked and what didn’t. Review problems and frustrations.
January Week 3 & 4 - Use the data analysed in weeks 1 & 2 to plan and formulate goals & targets for the next year. Craft a new plan!
February - Start putting your plan into action! I like to classify my workload and systems into four categories. Marketing, Sales, Money, Operations. I find that I can make the most impact by focusing really hard on one area for predetermined amount of time.
February Week - 1 - Marketing Focus
February Week - 2 - Money Focus
February Week - 3 - Sales Focus
February Week - 4 - Operations Focus
February is also the month I would start running help wanted ads and holding interviews.
March Week - 1 - Final Marketing & Sales preparation
March Week - 2 - Crunch time, review everything handle last minute hiccups.
March Week - 3 - Go Time! - The first day of spring is when I like to have the first bits of marketing hitting our repeat customers.
How about you? How do you spend your winters?
Looks like my plan is set out!
. Edit: forgot to mention I also snowblow driveways for a bunch of my window clients - stressfull business you never know when its going to snow and messes with sleep schedule. Wont be doing it again unless I did it full time. However the marketing is priceless. Everyone is out doing their driveways and I pull up in window cleaning truck and this is time and time again (160cm of snow so far over about 15 snowstorms) so I am building relationships with them all! Every now and then a car gets stuck and everyone cones together to give it a push. It’s funny when I mention doing window cleaning for them in the spring as dirty windows is the least of their worries when theres 2 feet of snow blocking them from being able to leave their house!
