When Business Is As Unpredictable As The Weather

For those of you who don’t know, I live in Melbourne. Sure, it’s a great city to live in (especially as I live way, way out of the busy city centre, near the beach) but it’s sure hard to know how to dress in the morning!

Melbourne can easily go from sunny and warm, to cold and rainy in a matter of days. It’s the middle of November and I’m still lighting my fire to keep warm. And today, the legendary lyrics of the mighty Guns ‘n’ Roses keeps running through my head – “in the cold November rain”.

Anyway, I’m not really up for a chat about the weather but it did get me thinking. There’s something about the rain that makes me sit down, stare out the window and evaluate things. I’ve come to notice that my business is a lot like this Melbourne weather. It changes from week to week. Some weeks I feel dried up and others I’m flooded.

Do you feel this too or is it just me?

Here’s how it works for me. I have my regular Virtual Assistant (VA) clients so I don’t go out looking for new VA clients. My work largely depends on how busy my client is for the week. It’s the flow on effect. For example, when a client has an event running, I’m flat out in the weeks leading up to the event as I take all the registrations, process payments, create nametags….but when the event is over (and before the next one starts), I have nothing from them.

This works the same way for many of my clients. Most of the time, it all evens out and when one client is quiet, another is busy. That’s another reason why I trained to become a copywriter to add another service in my business to make up for the lean weeks.

I like the seasons of my business. It’s great to have to occasional downtime so I can focus on my business. I often get too side-tracked writing for others that I forget about myself. And having recently been writing about ‘content marketing’ for a client, I realised I need to use my dry times for myself.

If you’re constantly flat out in your business, congratulations, that’s fantastic. Me, I’ve never aimed to work full time, so I’m quite happy with my busy-ness mixed in with some quiet times.

Remember, always make time for yourself and your business. After all, isn’t that why you started your own business anyway?