Seasonality

As we all know there are four seasons in the year and numerous holidays that fit into those seasons dictated by the school academic year. If in business you were to take the academic calendar as time where no work could be done you would be sacrificing 25% of the working year, even higher if you consider the private school sector.

So are you willing to write off 25% of your working year to seasonality and just give up during that time?  Lame excuses such as – they won’t be there at the moment, no one is around this month or worse still, I’ll wait until after the holidays just don’t work. The king or queen of procrastination and FAFFing about always has an excuse or a reason not to make contact or take action – seasonality should not be an excuse not to get on with it.

It is true that in my industry and many other businesses can quieten down during the holiday seasons; training courses or conferences don’t run due to a percentage of people being away. The clue here is in the phrase ‘a percentage’ of people. What is that percentage because we all know that not everyone can be off at the same time.

So how many people are off at any one time from a business during the main holidays every year? It is true to say that the owners and directors of many micro businesses struggle to have any fixed holiday each year, however their staff still have a legal opportunity to holiday. Contrast that with larger blue chip and multinational organisations where everyone is entitled to and will take a holiday, just not at the same time.

At any one time there could be 20-40% of staff off on holiday during the main holidays, any more than that and the company would have issues trading. Turn this around and this means that 60-80% of staff are still at work at any one time during the holiday season. How quickly do you need answers? Can they not wait two weeks until the decision-maker comes home from holiday? This doesn’t mean you should give up trying to get hold of them; you should continue as normal and follow up as normal. Using seasonality as a reason not to make the effort is simply lazy, get on with business as usual, leave messages on answer phones and emails with assistants and stop FAFFing about avoiding doing business.