Coping as a Seasonal Business

Many businesses aim to secure a steady flow of income at all times so they can pay their expenses and expand at a relatively flat pace. However, there are some businesses that need to accept that they can’t do this for whatever reason. These are usually known as seasonal businesses; businesses that see massive fluctuations in their income due to their seasonal nature.

For instance, fashion is considered seasonal in nature because new clothing collections are released on a seasonal basis. Every couple of months, a fashion label will show off their latest designs which are only sold in limited quantities before they disappear to work on their next lineup.

While this type of business is great in some ways, it can also be hard to operate when your income is staggered so much. To help you out, we’ve put together a couple of tips that will help you cope with your seasonal business.

Use Downtime Efficiently
Seasonal businesses will naturally have long periods of downtime. How you use this downtime is going to be crucial to how you manage your business. For example, if you run a software development company then most of your profit will come when you actually release your software. When you’re not actively working on a project, you could use your downtime to research the market and analyze statistics to help you prepare the next update, or you could outsource your development talent to make a bit of money while your programmers are not needed. For some more ideas, take a look at this post from TheNextWeb.com for more ideas on how to make the most of downtime.

Embrace the Seasonal Business Model
Accept that you’re a seasonal business by making the most of your situation. Build excitement on social media before you release your product or enter your highest profit months so that more and more people take notice. When it’s not your season to shine, hold off on marketing and go dark for a while. Minimize the money you spend on marketing and only engage in “free” advertising such as posting teasers on social media instead.

Manage Your Budget
If you know that you’re a seasonal business then it should be easy to predict when you’ll be low on capital and when you can expand. As a result, you need to play to your strengths and save money when you aren’t making any. It can be difficult to balance, so you may want to consider looking at UnsecuredCapital.com.au or a similar service to get unsecured business loans to help you pay for your expenses. Unsecured essentially means that no collateral is needed which is less stress for your business to handle.

Diversify Your Products
Even though fashion businesses are considered seasonal, they all make a steady amount of income throughout the year with basics and permanent collection pieces that are mass-produced and always available. Depending on your business model, you could follow the same procedure and offer simple products on a permanent basis, but still focus on your seasonal strengths to make large spikes of capital.