 Awesome photo by admiral-general-m-âââââ-godshepherdly. It happens every summer. Work slows down. People take vacations. If you’re still in a business-building mindset, it can be, well, a little maddening.
In this article, we’ll review some things you can do to be productive when others aren’t. To prep your business for the upcoming season of busy-ness. This article might not be for you. In that regard, it’s probably self-selecting: If you’re reading this, you’re still plugging at it. If you’re on vacation right now, this one will sail right past you. Mind you, we’re not judging here. You can fall into either camp; we don’t care. But between the summer preppers and the summer tanners, this article is aimed at the former. Down-time is your time Think back to the busiest part of this year so far. When you had so much work you’d wake up wondering how you’d get through that day. Now, on that day, think of all the things that you didn’t do. That you couldn’t do. Why not? You were too busy. Pretty simple. So now is the time to tackle all of those things you’d put off amid the rush of peak season. This is the time for all you cobblers out there to make your kids’ shoes. This is also a very good time to be selfish, in a biz-dev sort of way. Review what you’ve got, what you’re presenting to the world. Go through your website. Page by page. Remember all those little niggling details you’d intended to fix and/or update? Now’s the time. Ditto for your firm’s presentation deck(s). Weed out the outdated stuff. Make mentions of new, recent wins. For that matter, this is the best possible time to write new client success stories, a.k.a. case studies. (Need help with those? Contact us. We do tons of ‘em.) Pull together all the client-facing materials from those engagements. Use them to jog your memory. Steal from them, liberally, anonymizing as you go, to create all-new world-facing evergreen material. And what about your blogs? Are they looking sorely out of date on your site? Now’s the time to curl up with a nice cup of coffee or tea, and knock out a bunch of them so that you have a good backlog of evergreen material to push out on schedule. (Honestly: Do you think we wrote this July blog in July? Here at Copel Communications, we practice what we preach!) Speaking of blogs, you have a fully-populated editorial calendar for them, right? Well, if not, now’s the time to brainstorm your quarterly/monthly/weekly/whatever topics. (We have a good article to help you with that.) Get into production Blogs—which force people to (ugh) read—are just one way to push out your business. Some of the other ways are surprisingly interlinked:
And you can push them out just as diligently, using the exact same editorial calendar you’d created for the blogs. Of course, you can delegate as much of this responsibility and production as your comfort-zone dictates: The writing. The voiceover. The video production. The on-camera talent. And so on. There are other relatively self-indulgent things you can do during summer down-time, too. Take a good look at your office and your stuff. Is that desk chair begging for replacement? Could the walls use a new coat of paint? Good luck attempting any of those tasks during the busy season. If you can’t beat ‘em... And of course, there’s one other thing you can do during down-time: Relax. If you’ve accomplished even half of the things we’d listed above, you deserve a well-earned pat on the back and a nap. Heck, everyone else is taking time off. Things will get busy enough, soon enough. So enjoy the down-time. If you combine that with the productivity tips above, you’ll have the best of both worlds. And need help with any of those things? Contact us. We’d be happy to pitch in.
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