Seasonality Nobody Accounted For

Everybody knows their season and most are wrong

Ask a business when its quiet period is and you get a confident answer.

Plot three years of monthly figures and the answer is frequently different by four to six weeks, and occasionally a different season entirely.

The belief comes from memory, which weights the recent bad months heavily and quietly forgets all the ones that were perfectly fine.

Which matters, because a decision made in response to a quiet month depends entirely on whether that month was supposed to be quiet.

Where the belief goes wrong

• One bad year becomes the pattern.
• Enquiries and jobs peak at different times.
• The lag between the two is forgotten.
• Weather years differ more than seasons.
• Holidays move between months.

The second causes most of the confusion. Enquiries can peak six weeks before the work does, so a business that feels busy in August is frequently measuring a July that was busy on the telephone.

Plot it once, properly

Which takes twenty minutes with three years of monthly figures.

Put each year as a separate line on the same chart, months across the bottom.

Three lines that rise and fall together show a genuine seasonal shape.

Three lines that move independently mean your business has no strong season and every drop is something else.

That single chart settles more arguments than any amount of monthly discussion.

It also tells you the size of the swing, which is what makes a drop readable rather than alarming.

A worked example

A business believed their quiet period was February and planned around it.

Charting four years showed enquiries fell from mid-November and recovered in the second week of January, with February being ordinary.

February had felt quiet because the jobs from the November enquiries had finished, which is the lag rather than the demand.

They moved their seasonal offer to late October, before the fall rather than after it.

The following winter was noticeably better and the change was entirely in the timing.

Four years of figures had been sitting in the account throughout.

Compare the same month, never the previous one

Which follows from the shape.

June against May tells you about the difference between June and May, which is seasonal and known.

June against last June tells you about the business.

That is the whole rule and it is broken constantly, because month against month is what every default report shows.

Where somebody presents you with a month-on-month comparison, the first question to ask is whether it is against the same month last year.

If not, it is a chart of the calendar.

Working days matter more than people think

A smaller effect that explains a surprising number of drops.

A month with twenty-one working days against one with twenty-three is a ten per cent difference before anything else happens.

Add a statutory holiday and a school break and the gap widens further.

For a trade whose enquiries arrive on weekdays, that alone can account for a drop somebody has spent a fortnight investigating.

Count the working days before concluding anything about a month that looks light.

Seasonality is a plan, not just an explanation

Which is the constructive half.

Knowing the shape tells you when to run an offer, when to do the maintenance, when to take time off, and when to hire.

It also tells you when a quiet period is genuinely unusual, which is the only time investigation is warranted.

Write the shape down as four lines: busy from here to here, quiet from here to here, enquiries lead work by roughly this long.

That is more useful than any dashboard and it changes annually by very little.

Pin it somewhere the whole business can see, since the person taking the bookings benefits from knowing it as much as anybody.

Watch for the shape changing

Since it does, slowly.

A trade's season can shift over years as customer behaviour, weather patterns, or the local market change.

Redraw the chart annually with the new year added and see whether the lines still overlap.

A year that departs from the shape is either an event or the beginning of a change, and only time distinguishes them.

Note which you think it is at the time, so next year you can check whether you were right.

Recording your own prediction beside the figure is the only way to find out whether your reading of the business is any good.

Search demand has its own season

Worth separating, since it is measurable independently and frequently leads everything else.

The number of people searching for your trade rises and falls through the year regardless of anything you do, and your impressions in search console track that directly.

So a month where impressions fell and your position held is demand rather than a problem, and that distinction is visible in one report.

Plot impressions by month alongside your enquiries and the two usually move together with a lag.

Where they diverge, that is the interesting month and the one worth investigating.

The counter-case

Not every business has a season.

Plenty of trades are steady year-round, and looking for a pattern in noise produces a confident belief in something that is not there.

Three years is also a small sample, and a single unusual year distorts the apparent shape substantially.

And a genuine decline can hide inside a seasonal fall, which is why the year-on-year comparison matters more than the shape.

The shape tells you what to expect and the comparison tells you whether you got it, and both are needed.

Plot three years on one chart, compare against the same month last year, count the working days, and write the shape down.

The twenty minutes

1. Get three years of monthly figures.
2. Plot each year as a line.
3. Look for a shared shape.
4. Note the size of the swing.
5. Check the lag between enquiries and work.
6. Count working days before concluding.
7. Write the shape down.

Step five is the one that corrects the common error, since a business remembers when it was busy working rather than when the telephone was ringing.

Why month against month misleads is covered in comparing this month to last month badly.

Frequently asked questions

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