Summer Business Plan!
Today is the first official day of summer! No school, more daylight, warmer temperatures, and vacation season is fully upon us.
This is a wonderful time of year, but it can also be a challenging time in our business. If you are a mom, summer presents a unique challenge with child care, or just keeping your children busy. Listings tend to sit around a little longer in many cases, and new business opportunities may be slower to come in. And hey … you deserve to have a little fun in the sun too, right?
This is why you need a summer business plan. It can be fun to stay up later and sleep in, spend more time outside, and not work as much when things are quieter. You should do all of these things, but whatever you do, don’t completely take your focus off of your business. It is the work and effort that you put in during these summer months that you will be paid for in the fall and winter. It can be too easy to take it easy this time of year while your commissions and settlements are still happening from Spring and feel like everything is great! But if you totally check out now, come September, October and November you will be feeling the pain, and probably a lot of pressure.
A summer business plan may not sound exciting, but trust me on this, a gentle routine or rhythm to your days will help you to enjoy your time now and enjoy the fruits of your labor later.
I’m still working on what this will look like for me. My boys are 15, 13 and 9. Too old for a “babysitter”, but not really old enough to be left to their own devices all day, every day (Boys = All the fighting). I set up a workspace for myself downstairs so I will have a quieter space to work. I’m working from home more days, and when I got into the office or are out on appointments I try to limit how long of a stretch that I am away. I’ve also figured out that I need to start work much earlier than usual, as just when I am getting my groove, people start waking up, asking about breakfast (lunch and dinner, boys think about food constantly … anyone else have this problem), what our plans are for the day, etc.
This is just week 2 with our new schedule so I am still figuring some of it out, and tweaking as I go. What works best for me is prioritizing my prospecting. I know, I know, that isn’t what you want to hear, but it is what you need to hear. I’ve talked before about my “daily business builders” or daily tasks that help to grow my business. A combination of calls, notes, pop bys, giving referrals, adding to my database and having face to face appointments with clients or my database. I’ve shifted this a bit this year, as I have found that for me in this season what works best is having weekly prospecting goals vs daily. Instead of writing 3 notes per day, my focus is on 15 per week. I still chip away at these things a bit each day, but in a more fluid way … maybe I only wrote 1 note yesterday, but write 5 today. My preference is to do these things in the morning so I will “win the day” and then I have the rest of the day (depending on how busy my business is at the moment) to enjoy however I see fit! Maybe sitting by the pool or swimming with my kids, going on a little outing, taking a walk, sitting on the porch … I can enjoy this time guilt free because I’ve already spent some time moving my business forward.
Do you have a summer business plan? Does your routine this time of year differ from the rest of the year?