5 things to do during slow business season

5 things to do during slow business season

As small business owners we have all experienced that moment of anxiety when sales are low and there is no sign of movement on the horizon. When this happens we tend to 1) freak out as if it were the first time, and 2) spend hours of precious time marketing our products or services in the most ridiculously inefficient ways. What if we took all that (mostly) wasted time to actually improve our businesses? Here you have some ideas on things to do during slow business season.

Reorganize your office

Try a different furniture layout, create a thinking/reading corner with a comfy armchair and a whiteboard, take a look at your shelves and recycle what you don’t need anymore, change the posters/pictures/mood boards on your walls, create dedicated folders for all those papers that are always flying around… In other words, revamp your workspace vibe!

Update your accounting books

Top 1 task we all tend to procrastinate on: keeping our tax files up to date. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has spent 4 hours updating my files the day before the quarterly estimated tax payment is due. It’s not the funniest thing to do but you know your future ‘you’ will be glad you took the time now.

Learn something new

This is a perfect time to start working on that skill you have always wanted to develop. Nowadays there is an incredibly wide range of online courses, workshops and tutorials of a very good quality, lots of them for free. It doesn’t even need to be something really difficult or extense. Learn how to do some basic photo manipulation on an image editor in order to create your own promotional images for social media or how to customize the welcome email that is automatically sent to your new subscribers.

Optimize your business processes

All the effort you put now on improving your processes will save you lots of time in the future. For example, do you usually send the same email over and over again when someone ask for info about one of your products? Save it as a template. Creating a group of pre-written messages on your email software or simply on text files on a folder so you can copy and paste them will make you much more efficient managing your inbox. There are a lot of other similar processes you constantly use on your business that can be improved.

Take a day off

Have you ever heard about that? I know it sounds terrifying and dangerous but believe me, it can only do you good. You will have the opportunity to catch up with your friends and family -who might have been wondering where you were- and will come back to your workspace full of new energy and ideas.