Here are some ways your agency can come out of the slow season stronger and healthier
Our first moment of panic running Aerial Canvas occurred in 2019. We had grown from $40k to $200k a month in revenue. Our headcount grew from 5 to 25. We thought we were riding a rocket ship to market domination. And then it completely blew up in our face.
In November, our bookings started to plummet. In a matter of weeks, our revenue dropped by 40%. Every day, we lost more and more money. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the first time we were being pummeled by the effects of seasonality.
By December, we weren’t sure if we were even going to make payroll. Suddenly, the 5 employees I hired this fall didn’t seem like such a good idea.
People had put their trust in me and quit their jobs to join my company. But was I really cut out to build a business or had I just gotten lucky? So much seemed unknown and uncertain.
Between November and February, the slow season in Real Estate occurs because people are on holiday.
Families are enjoying their last holidays in their homes before they sell in the Spring. As a result, inventory shrinks by 40% nationwide.
When you are small and growing so fast, you don’t notice the effects of seasonality because your sales already fluctuate so much.
But with 30 employees, a 40% drop in our business meant we needed to make up $200k of new business in just three months. We weren’t going to grow ourselves out of this one.
As any entrepreneur, we’ve made a lot of mistakes but we’ve also learned a lot over the last 4 years on how to handle the slow season. No matter what, revenue will dip and you need to roll with the punches. In this article, I will cover some things you can do to generate new forms of revenue and other ways employees can be productive and prepare for the next Spring.
Our first mistake was when we sat down with our team to talk about the slow season, we forgot who we were talking to. Most people who sign on to an agency as staff aren't trying to be entrepreneurs. We started AC because we are entrepreneurs and we thrive on ambiguity and risk.
Our staff, on the other hand, were looking for security and stability and that should have come from the confidence and leadership of my co-owner and I. Instead, we communicated uncertainty about how we were going to make payroll and if we would survive the Winter. That didn’t help anyone do their jobs better right at the moment we needed everyone focusing on their work.
Communicate to your team what they should expect to see over the Winter. The industry slows down by about 40% over the Winter. That means while you are working to get new business, you certainly aren’t going to continue on the growth trajectory from the Summer and Fall.
Then, discuss what is on everyone’s mind: their hours. Your staff will fall into two camps; those who need the same number of hours all Winter, and those who don’t because they’ll be travelling or on other work. For those who are going to take reduced hours anyway, have a meeting with them one-on-one to plan out their Winter hours with you. If you also have contractors on staff, discuss with them ahead of time how you are reduce their hours.
For those staff who need the same number of hours, communicate that you have plans to fill in some of the missing hours with internal projects and training opportunities. But how can your staff build value in your business that is worth their rate while they aren’t on shoots? We’ve got some ideas.
Once you’ve set expectations and prepared the team for the slowdown, what do they do when the time actually comes? We’ve found a lot of internal and external projects that can drive value for the business.
You should treat these projects like you would any revenue-driving project. Budget their time and set goals and ideal outcomes. We typically budget 50 hours per slow season per employee. That replaces about a third of the hours they lose to a slowdown in business. But your number of hours may look different depending on the backlog of work you have and how much you saved throughout the busy season.
Gathering good customer feedback is a great project for slow seasons because it helps you go into the busy season with even more effectiveness. There are multiple strategies for customer feedback that I’ll briefly cover. Customers prefer to give feedback in different ways and there is value in quantitative and qualitative feedback, so I encourage you to take a multi-pronged approach.
A survey is a great way to get quantitative feedback from dozens or hundreds of customers. Pull a list of all of your customers from throughout the year and load them into a campaign manager like Mailchimp.
You will probably need to send a few emails, so write a few pieces of copy that you’ll send out every week or so for a month. Feel free to offer a small prize like a gift card for a few winners.
The survey should take fewer than 3 minutes and shouldn’t require them to look up any information. This method is about quantitative data, so the more the merrier. I recommend no more than 10 questions and no more than one open ended question.
Your final question should be “Are you open to a call from our team to discuss your responses?” This gives you some leads for the second customer feedback strategy.
When your staff have a morning or afternoon off without shoots, I recommend getting them on the phone banks for some calls out to customers.
Their targets should be people who haven’t completed the survey and those who have and said they were open to a discussion. The goal of the conversation is to get more specific feedback about their experience.
For example, if an agent only hired you once 2 months ago, ask “What could we have done to earn your business again?” If an agent is a small, but repeat customer, ask “What are we doing well that keeps you coming back?”
Make a list of your top 10 customers and take them to lunch or dinner. The goal of the conversation is two-fold. First, you want to get feedback like you do in your mass calls.
Second, you want to ensure that you are aligned with your biggest customers. What I mean is to ask them about their plans for the next year and how they expect to grow. Discuss how you can support their growth and align your business goals.
The purpose here is to deepen your relationship with the customer and improve your consistent monthly revenue. Perhaps that involves a monthly retainer where they get a price break, but you get consistency. Or perhaps you create some custom packages for them they can offer their agents.
Once your surveys and interviews are done, begin collecting all of your data. There are two things to look for.
First, of course, are areas of improvement. Where are your customers expressing pain points that you aren’t adequately solving? Is there a particular service or area of customer experience that your team is lagging behind on?
Second, are the areas you’re doing well in. This should inform your marketing materials. You may be selling your Services one way, but perhaps your customers are using them for a different purpose you hadn’t considered before. This can expose your business to new niches and new channels of revenue.
Another project is creating marketing assets. Review your service descriptions and work samples to ensure they are communicating your latest capabilities and the value they provide to your customers. Did you add any services mid-season that you didn’t have time to properly advertise? Get some work samples done and posted in your pricing page.
Your customer feedback surveys may also generate some new ways of communicating the benefits of your services. Make sure to include those in your descriptions.
Whether it’s creating marketing assets or shooting customer orders, now is the time to expand your employee skill set. Is one of your business generalists interested in expanding out into photography? One of your photographers going for their drone pilot license?
When you hit the busy season again, you should have a team that is more flexible, more capable, and ready to offer more services than the season before.
Your customer feedback surveys may also reveal some areas of improvement that you need to address. Perhaps your turn around times haven’t been consistent lately and so you can discuss with your editors some new skills, workflows, or tools that can speed up the process without sacrificing quality.
As you are growing fast, it’s important to have a mindset of sustainability and not to overextend your company with hypergrowth. Growth is desired, but hypergrowth can be deadly to your business. When you bite off more than you can chew, you might have the negative consequences of “overpromising, underdelivering” - quality slips, customers stray, employees lose confidence, your systems break, and your reputation is burned. In this process, you get stressed and make irrational decisions which could yield more negative consequences to your business.
Luckily, we have advice for you to stay on the path on sustainability.
For us, the slow season used to be a time of retraction and constant concern about cash flow crunches and employee turnover. Over the years, we’ve learned to set good expectations and create productive projects that make Aerial Canvas a better company every year.
If you’re going into this slow season with a lot of anxiety and don’t know where to start, I recommend starting with some feedback. Give your favorite customer a call and ask them about how this year was for them and how you can be a part of their success next year.
If you’re looking for more guidance on navigating the slow season, be sure to sign up for my newsletter below. I’ll reach out to you personally and provide advice on growing your business.
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