Tea with the Queen

6 Ways to Prepare for Lower Revenue Over the Holiday Period

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Silly season is almost here – and for a lot of us, it means taking a break from business and wondering how to prepare for lower revenue over the holidays.

Sure, rest and recovery from a busy year is important – but it’s not without its drawbacks. Hitting pause on your business inevitably comes with a significant dip in revenue.

So how do you prepare for this cycle of lower revenue, whether it’s over Christmas, school holidays or a period where you just need some downtime?

Personally, I’ve discovered a blend of mindset shifts and practical actions that have really helped me reshape my approach to maintaining stability during lower revenue months.

Today, I’m sharing 6 ways that will not only help you stay afloat over the holiday period, but set yourself up for a successful year ahead.

1. Build a Financial Cushion Throughout the Year

Firstly, having a dedicated account where you routinely tuck away a small amount every month can be a lifeline. This is about creating a reserve that cushions those lean months. In my business, I follow the ‘Profit First’ approach, which I’ve mentioned before. This involves setting aside a slice of profit each week for peace of mind and to handle lower revenue periods. It’s a little safety net that helps you sleep better at night, knowing that you’re prepared for any hiccups.

2. Offer Bite-sized Products

Next, consider what bite-sized offerings you can introduce during this time. Do you have downloadable PDFs, on-demand training or evergreen content that could bring in some extra cash? Many people gear up for success in the upcoming year around this time, so this is an ideal opportunity. It’s all about providing something of value that can work for both you and your clients with a little upfront effort.

3. Plan for the Year Ahead

Take a forward-thinking approach and use the coming weeks to strategise for 2025. After experiencing a restless Christmas in the past, I realised I needed to plan better. Is it about generating higher revenue through the rest of the year, or having a bumper month in November? Preparing adequately now prevents stress later. We need to shift our mindset to be comfortable with taking breaks and being okay with lower revenues. Working proactively on this mindset helps avoid burnout—an all too common problem for so many business owners.

4. Understand Your True Needs

Another fundamental step is understanding what you truly need to manage. Often, what you want versus what you need can be vastly different. I encourage my clients to determine their base financial needs, separating personal living requirements from business expenses. Understanding this allows you to plan effectively for those leaner months.

5. Streamline Your Expenses

As November approaches, it’s a perfect moment to audit your expenses. Are there subscriptions or memberships you’re no longer using? Cutting these can significantly aid expense management. It’s vital to address those ‘holes in the bucket’ and trim excess spending. Balancing your revenue and expenses is key to maintaining your financial health.

6. Embrace Late Opportunities

If you’ve realised the slowdown is here and you’re just tuning in now, don’t panic. There’s still time to act! Even nearing Christmas, people are still buying. Many are purchasing not just for now, but to set themselves up for a fruitful January. Consider offering a product or service now to be delivered in the New Year. Remember, the myth that ‘no one buys in December’ is just that—a myth.

The golden rule is not to surrender just because it’s late in the year. Ensure you continue selling until your curtain drops for the holidays. Watching your energy reserves and managing time effectively is equally critical. After all, the last thing you want is to enter your well-deserved break feeling drained, anxious or unwell.

I’d love to hear how you plan to take on these tips. Have you managed to avoid succumbing to holiday period stress before? Perhaps you’ve got a strategy that’s worked wonders. Let’s keep the conversation going!

LINKS

For a copy of Emma’s book, ‘Go-getter: Raise your mojo, shift your mindset and thrive’ – https://www.emmamcqueen.com.au/book/

YouTube Channel

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Emma: [00:00:00] Hey there. Today I want to talk about preparing for lower revenue months and you may not have thought about it or you might be starting to stress about those lower revenue months. And as we move into the silly season, it's very common for businesses to take a break and with that break can also be lower revenue, right?
Because we're not necessarily working. And so my question for you is how do you prepare for this cycle? How do you prepare to have some downtime? And this doesn't always need to be Christmas. It could be school holidays. It could be when you need a break. All the things. And what I would say is this is partly mindset and partly very practical.[00:01:00]
And so I thought I'd share with my, my tips with you about what I have done, because I have been in this space over Christmas a couple of years ago now, where I was really stressed about lack of revenue and so I had to really work hard on creating a mindset that was okay with lower level months, right?
But I also put into place some really practical things I'm going to share with you today. First of all, and this is probably throughout the year, have an account that you can put a small amount of money into every month just to build up a reserve. You should be doing that anyway. As a business owner, I use profit first, as we've talked about in this podcast before.
And so what that means is I put a little bit of profit away each week for instances of lower revenue months, or just for me to have peace of mind that we've got enough money in the bank account. So if something goes wrong, touch wood, if something goes wrong, we're able to deal with it. Yeah, so having a small amount of money in a bank account, helps you sleep at night.
My second tip is, are there [00:02:00] any bite-sized offerings that you can offer at this time? they might be downloadables, they might be PDFs, it might be on demand training that you've got. they could be evergreen things, anything that can bring you in some extra dollars at this moment in time. I'm noticing that a lot of people tend to buy things to set them up for success in 2025.
So if there's something that you've got specifically that will help them get set up for 2025 in a way that helps, that could actually work for you. You may need to do a little bit of, um, work at the front end to make this work, but I have seen it work time and time again with a couple of my clients.
Number three, spend the next few weeks working out how to set yourself up for 2025. So one, how to not be in this place next year, and that's going to require a little bit of planning. And I, after having a restless kind of Christmas a couple of years ago, I went, right, what do I need to do? Do I need to bring in higher revenue for the months to come?
January through to [00:03:00] June, or do I need to have a bumper month in November? What is it that I need to do to make sure that I'm planning to have buffer in the bank account? Right? We have to work on our mindset in this. It's okay to have lower months, as long as you're prepared for them. The trick is not about having the lower months.
The trick is about your working proactively on your mindset to say it's okay to have lower revenue months and it's okay for me to have a break. I don't always have to be on. That is where burnout starts. So we don't want to do that, but we have to actively work on our mindset to say I can switch off and I cannot worry about cash, that's okay, but that is a constant issue that my clients face.
Some of them are like, Oh, what am I going to do? So we create an offer that works for them. them have very good plans in place. So they front load the start of the year. Some of them front load the middle of the year. They take advantage of, end of financial year. They take advantage of Black [00:04:00] Friday.
You know, they do all the things so that they've got money in their bank account. And then I think my fifth tip is about work out what you actually need so you're not stressing. I mean, what you want and what you need might actually be two different things. Yeah. And so I, I often say to clients, what is it that you actually need?
What is your base level? And we work through that. If you don't know what your base level is, now is a great time to sit down and go, actually, what do we need? And I referenced this in another episode of the podcast, especially as if you're a sole trader, you don't necessarily sit down with your other half and say, as a family, what do I need to bring in?
And then as a business person, if I add all my expenses on top of that, what do I need to bring in? And what does that mean for December? What does that mean for each month? I like to almost stack my months so that I've got February through to November, with my normal generating revenue. And I'm knowing that December and January [00:05:00] are probably going to be a bit light on And that's okay if you can make that work The other alternative is that you you take less time off you take less time off and you work out what you can actually do to bring in a little bit more money.
The other thing I do in November is I look at my expenses and I cut out what I don't use anymore. So they might be subscriptions to the things that I've signed up to, there might be memberships that I've signed up to, there might be apps that I've signed up to, you know, I kind of have a clean sweep in November.
Of all the things that I'm actually not using anymore and that kind of helps with expense management as well. And I think it's a really good hygiene factor for businesses to do some of that stuff. Yeah. Because we, there are gaps in our bucket or holes in our buckets that we just don't do anything with because it's too hard.
So for me, I've got a couple of, subscriptions that I just don't use anymore and I just need to kill them. I need to kill them and I need to be okay [00:06:00] with killing them and making sure that the expenses are lower. Because at the end of the day, you have two levers. One is revenue, how to make more money.
The other one is expenses, how to reduce costs. So if you can work with those two levers, you're doing really well. number six, my sixth tip is if you have left it a bit late and you're listening to this going, Oh, Emma, I wish you'd recorded this five months ago. Yes, I know. I hear you. Sorry about that.
But do challenge with yourself over the next couple of weeks, you would be surprised at how many people are still buying and how many people are still selling as we head into Christmas. And it might be that they're buying before Christmas to use in 2025 and you can do the same so you can set yourself up.
For a bump of January, you can also set yourself up to sell a product in or a service in December, but deliver it in January. That could work for you as well. If you're feeling like you're a little bit stuck and you're worried about what you're going to do [00:07:00] over holiday period. There is a myth that goes around and I want to share the myth with you because It is absolutely a myth.
No one buys in December. That is a load of crock. People are still buying. If you have an offer that's valuable, that's going to help them with time or revenue or efficiency, people will still buy. so don't let that, myth get in the way of you continuing to sell. We still have a couple of weeks before Corporate Australia goes on holidays, before we all close down because school holidays is at our doorstep.
We still have a few weeks left. So whatever you do, don't give up just because it's the 2nd of November or the 2nd of December. Make sure you keep selling all the way to when you finish. I would love to hear how you go. I would love to hear if you have kind of given up already. I also know that people's time.
attention and [00:08:00] energy is fits and spurts. We're all getting a little bit tired towards the end of the year and we're all looking forward to that break and we're all going, how are we going to do the juggle because school holidays, you know, can suck sometimes. Anyway, so make sure you're looking at your time, your energy and your attention because the worst thing that you can do is push, push, push.
And then you're sick over the holidays or your family gets the dregs or something else happens and you think, I don't actually have the energy to deal with this. So what will you do? What is a couple of tips that you will take and you will do in order to ensure that You're set for your lower revenue months.
And by the way, some people are absolutely kicking butt over December and January. That's the biggest month ever. And if you think about retail, if you think about e commerce, man, they are like gearing up to sell, sell, sell. Anyway, hope you found that found this episode useful. [00:09:00] I'll see you in a week.