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Want to know how to use a quiet August to improve your business? The majority of businesses have seasonality where some months being busier than others and other months being quieter than others. For a number of businesses, August is quieter or slower month. If you run a business that has a quieter August you’ve got options. You can decide it is the perfect time for you also to take time off (which I’m all for) or you can decide to continue working and use the extra time as an opportunity to work on your business and improve your business. If you are interested in doing the latter you are in the right place. Keep on reading to learn about 7 ways to use a quiet August to improve your business.
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7 WAYS TO USE A QUIET AUGUST TO IMPROVE YOUR BUSINESS
1 . Review Your Pricing
As a rule, you should be reviewing your pricing at least once a year, but even if you’ve reviewed your pricing in the last year, you can use August to review your pricing. August is a great month to review your pricing because for many businesses, the final quarter of the year (October to December) is the busiest period of the year with most sales. Therefore ensuring that you are happy with your pricing strategy before going into that period is key.
There are numerous different pricing strategies you can use as a small business (and I go into more detail about different pricing strategies here) and on top of that you can even look at your pricing tactics. For example, if you are about to launch something you may offer early bird pricing or if you are trying to encourage repeat buyers you might offer a discount. Also, this is the perfect time to consider if you’ll take part in Black Friday / Cyber Monday and what your pricing will be for that.
You can go even further and if you are offering pay upfront and pay in installment options then you can look at how they’ve been performing and then adjust the pricing depending on whether you want more people taking the pay upfront or pay in installments options.
As you can see, there is a lot to consider with pricing and pricing is something I major geek out on. If you’d like help with just your pricing then my Pricing Power Hour is perfect for you.
2. Audit Your Business
It’s important to ensure from time to time you audit your business. It is easy to get your head down and be in work mode, but to improve your business you need to understand how it is performing. What areas are working well and what areas aren’t. You can look at multiple aspects of your business such as finance, admin, operations, delivery, sales, marketing and support. If you’ve never done an audit before you might find it useful to have a framework to use that enables you to audit the different aspects of your business and then come up with a list of areas for improvement.
3. Work On Your Business Strategy
‘Improve your business’ is a vague term that means different things to different people. Personally, for you to improve your business it means making it better on your terms and for that to happen you need to have a clear business strategy that you are working towards. Your dream business isn’t going to just land in your lap. And what was your dream business last year and what you want now can be two different things. That’s why it is so important to have a business strategy that clearly defines your dream business and lays out how you are going to build it.
For many business owners it’s easy to not make the time to work on your business and this is where you can use a quiet august to improve your business. Set asisde a day to work on your business strategy. Get clear on your vision for the business and then go through how that is going to happen.
Personally, when I work with clients we’ll look at their offer suite, pricing, marketing, sales and operations. This ensures they have a clear plan for the year ahead
| TAKE YOUR ANNUAL BUSINESS STRATEGY TO THE NEXT LEVEL BY WORKING WITH ME – BOOK A STRATEGY DAY
I’ve been running annual planning strategy days with small business owners since 2019. Doing your annual business planning with someone external from your business and with tons of business and marketing experience and expertise makes a massive difference. I’ll support you to face the facts about your current position, dream big about the future and get really strategic about what you need to do in order to achieve those big business goals. I’ll take you through my 5-step planning process and you’ll leave prepared for the next 12 months. |
4. Create a passive income product
If you’ve had ‘create a passive income product’ on my list for a while, then August can be the perfect time to make that a reality. For many business owners having a passive income stream is an aspiration. The ability to wake up having made sales and not having to do any more work because of the sale is a dream. But in order for that to happen you need to have a passive income product that people can buy. A popular passive income product is a course, but before people can buy that you’ll need to create it and get it all set up so that someone can buy and access it automatically.
Depending on the passive income product and your current tech setup it could be that you can make your passive income product in a matter of days or weeks – definitely within a month. So why not set yourself the deadline of having it up and running my the end of August and get creating.
5. Revise your sales and marketing strategy
If you want your business to grow then keeping a close eye on how your marketing and sales is performing is key. You can use a quiet August as an opportunity to review and review your sales and marketing strategy. Maybe you set your strategy at the beginning of the calendar year and so now you’ll have over 6 months of data to analyse. If everything is working fine then you can carry on, but if it isn’t then this is time to revise before going into the final part of the year, which for many businesses is the most important part of the year from a sales perspective.
| GET A PERSONALISED MARKETING AND SALES STRATEGY THAT YOU HAVE ABSOLUTE CONFIDENCE IN
If you want your business to grow then a marketing and sales strategy is a must. That’s why it’s a core part of my Strategy Days. During a Strategy Day we’ll decide what your marketing and sales strategy is for the year, and put together a top line annual timeline so you know exactly what needs to happen when (which will help with batch creating and outsourcing). |
6. Setup or strengthen your sales funnel
If you want to make sales easier in business, then sales funnels are the way to do that. But they take initial setup and that is why many business owners don’t have as many sales funnels as they should in their business. It. Use your quiet August to strengthen an existing sales funnel or setup a new one. If you already have a sales funnel then look at your conversion rate at each stage and see how you can improve that. If you don’t have a sales funnel at all yet look at your offer suite and decide which offer you should create a sales funnel for. I go into more detail about creating your first online sales funnel here.
7. Batch creating your marketing content
In business, there are some things that have to be done in real-time and some that can be done in advance. If you’ve got a quieter period then it is always useful to think about the things that can be done now that will mean in your busier periods you don’t have to worry about them. That’s why batch creating your marketing content in August when you’ve got more time can be a very smart move. If the end of the year is a busy period of time for you then imagine how good it will feel knowing your marketing is already created and ready to go so that isn’t an extra thing you need to do.
In order to be able to batch create and schedule your content you’ll need to be organised. This is where having a marketing and sales strategy, as well as a clear marketing timeline that enables you to know what your marketing focus is on a weekly or monthly basis is super helpful.
*BONUS* – Switch, or add to, your tech stack
Switching over technology can feel overwhelming, but if you know your current tech stack needs to be changed then changing that over in a quiet period makes sense. It makes sense for 2 reasons. Firstly, during a quiet period you have the head space and hopefully the continuous block of time to actually get your head around what needs to be done and do the setup. Secondly, during a quiet period you tech will be used less and therefore having things down (if necessary) for a period of time will have less of an impact.
It could be that you need to change something. For example you could be switching from one email marketing software provider to another. Or it could be that you want to add something new to your business to give your business extra capabilities. For example, after a few years of running my business I decided to invest in Kartra as a one-stop solution for my business that would make scaling my business a lot easier. Kartra offered me the ability to be able to have membership areas and easily create and sell courses and digital products. You can find out more about Kartra by clicking here.
That’s it. You now know 7 ways to use a quiet August to improve your business.
As you can see there is plenty you can do in August to improve your business and put your business in a great place for Q4 (October to December), as well as for next year and beyond. But there is a big difference between having things to do and doing them. August will go in the blink of an eye if you don’t commit to what you are going to do – and in many cases don’t have the accountability to follow through. So make a decision now about what sounds the most important for your business. And if it is an area that I can help with (pricing, business strategy, marketing) then get in touch.
You can check out how you can work with me here.
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