A Summer With Half the Enquiries

Establish it is the season

Before anything else, check this month against the same month last year rather than against June.

A trade with a genuine summer trough will find the fall almost exactly matches previous years, which changes the situation entirely.

A fall that is materially worse than last year is a different problem and needs a different response.

Ten minutes settles which of the two you have, and every subsequent decision depends on the answer.

The discount question

• It arrives every quiet season.
• It works, in the sense of filling time.
• It resets what customers expect.
• It attracts the price-driven customer.
• It is difficult to reverse.

The third is the cost nobody accounts for. A customer who hired you at a reduced summer rate expects something near it in October, and tells other people what they paid.

Do the other things first

Since there is a sequence and discounting belongs at the end of it.

Contact past customers, which is the cheapest source of work and the one nobody uses until they are quiet.

Chase the quotes you sent that never got an answer, which is a list you already have.

Ask your adjacent trades whether they have anything.

Take the smaller jobs you normally decline, which fill days without changing your price.

Each of those produces work at your ordinary rate, and most businesses reach for the discount before trying any of them.

A worked example

A business dropped its prices by fifteen per cent in a quiet July and filled the month.

Three of those customers came back in the autumn expecting the same rate, and two of them mentioned it to others who also asked.

The following summer they chased unanswered quotes instead and contacted every customer from the previous two years.

That produced about the same volume of work at the full rate, from a list that had been sitting in their records.

The chasing took two afternoons.

They have not discounted since.

If you do discount, structure it

Since occasionally it is the right answer.

Attach it to something other than the price: a specific date range, a particular service, a booking made now for work later.

That gives a reason for the lower figure other than that you were quiet, which is what protects the rate afterwards.

State the end date plainly and honour it, since an offer that keeps being extended teaches people to wait.

And never discount your headline rate, which is the number people remember.

Reduce something specific instead, which is recoverable.

Use the capacity on work that pays later

Which is what a quiet month is actually for.

The photographs you have not taken, the pages your site does not have, the prices you have never published, the review requests you owe.

All of those are work that produces enquiries in three months, and all of them require exactly the time a quiet month provides.

A business that spends its quiet season building the things it never has time for enters the next one from a better position.

One that spends it worrying enters it identically.

Write the list in June, before the trough arrives, so that the time is not spent deciding what to do with it.

A list written in advance gets worked through and one written in the quiet week gets abandoned.

Manage the cash rather than the enquiries

Which is the part that actually causes damage.

A predictable seasonal trough is a cash flow problem rather than a marketing problem, and it is solved in the months before it.

Knowing your quiet period lets you hold back rather than spending in the busy months, which is the whole of the remedy.

That is a duller answer than a campaign and it is the one that keeps businesses solvent through a normal August.

Where the cash is genuinely tight, the conversation is with your accountant rather than with your pricing.

A short-term arrangement made calmly in July is considerably cheaper than a discount that resets your rates permanently.

Do not go quiet with your customers

Which happens and compounds the problem.

A business with fewer jobs frequently also stops posting, stops emailing, and stops asking for reviews, precisely when it has time for all three.

The trough then extends into the autumn because nothing was built during it.

Keep the ordinary rhythm going, since it costs little and the visibility matters most when work is scarce.

The one message to past customers in a quiet month is frequently the highest-return thing you will do all year.

It costs an afternoon, reaches people who already trust you, and arrives at the moment you have capacity to take the work.

Book the autumn now

Which is the specific use of a quiet month that most trades overlook entirely.

People who need work done in September are thinking about it now, and almost nobody is asking them.

A message to past customers saying you are booking September and October, sent in the last week of July, reaches them before they have started looking.

That converts quiet-month capacity into a full autumn rather than into filled July days at a lower rate, which is a considerably better trade.

It also means the busy season starts with work already committed rather than with a scramble.

The counter-case

Sometimes discounting is right.

A business with fixed costs and idle staff is losing money every empty day, and filling days at a reduced rate beats not filling them.

New businesses without a customer list to contact also have fewer alternatives available.

And a genuine decline dressed up as seasonality is the dangerous misreading in the other direction, which is why the comparison comes first.

Check it against last year, chase quotes and past customers first, structure any discount around something specific, and use the capacity on work that pays later.

The quiet month

1. Compare against last year, not last month.
2. Chase unanswered quotes.
3. Contact past customers.
4. Ask adjacent trades.
5. Take the smaller jobs.
6. Build what you never have time for.
7. Discount last, and structured.

Step two is the fastest return available, since a quote nobody answered is somebody who wanted the work done and has not yet had it done.

Establishing the shape of your year is covered in seasonality nobody accounted for.

Frequently asked questions

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