21: Beating The Summer Sales Slump (or taking a rest?)

Hello and welcome to the Product Growth Lab podcast hosted by Andrew George and Melissa Pickle. This is the podcast for creative product-based business owners who want to grow their business without overwhelm or massive investment. Each episode we explore actionable strategies, real-life stories, and insights from business owners and experts who know just what it takes to succeed. Whether you're just starting out or looking to scale, we're here to help you grow your business on your own terms. Subscribe and join us each week as we dive into practical advice and inspiring stories to fuel your growth journey. This is the Product Growth Lab. Let's get started. So we are officially in the summer, and if your shop traffic is slower than Melissa trying to turn up to the podcast recording, welcome to the summer slowdown.

Today, that is very true. Okay, the summer slowdown. Let's get going here. First off, you should probably say— go for it.

I was going to say, I think, um, everyone kind of has that point where it depends when you start your business. But if you start like more in the winter, like I own my shop on Black Friday just because that was how it worked out, and you think that kind of traffic is to be expected. But that was like, I was started getting sales straight out the gate really. I didn't have too much problem there. Different time, different Etsy. But when it came to the summer, suddenly things started to slow down. I think everyone kind of has that thought, and I think it's kind of nice to know that, okay, you're not the only person. But I think what we're going to explore today is that it doesn't have to, if you don't want it to. There's some people who want their shops to slow down a little bit so they can rest, spend time with their kids, do what they want. But I think we'll kind of COVID okay, what can you do if you're slow, and what can you do if you're being intentional slow? What you can do if you want to take advantage of the slowdown and use it— the time to spend on— strategic— yeah, or what kind of things you can do to try and drum up a bit more sales.

All right, we're gonna cover both of those today. Let's go for it. First thing to know is unless you sell beach gear or flip-flops or that viral hat right now that's got the solar-powered fans in the brim that blow on your face, unless you're selling something like that, your shop has probably slowed down for the summer. It's typical. People are on vacation this time of year, talking about like the May, June, July kind of period, and just about every shop slows down a little bit unless you're in one of those weirdo exceptions that I just said. I don't know why I'm repeating myself. Apologies. No more coffee today. But this can be a good thing for you because trust me, we're not gonna be slow for long. It might feel like a long time right now, but unless this is your absolute bread and butter and you're not making enough to butter your bread here, then it's okay for it to be slow. Andrew, you're just gonna cut like everything I say right now, I swear. That was all bad.

So we're gonna flip the script on slow seasons and show you how to use this downtown Terrestrial line set for a powerful Q4, and we'll also throw in our best strategies to try and drop some sales because there are a lot of people who are making a lot of money in the summer. And you can take advantage of that. Think of like gift shops in tourist towns. Think of Amazon, who, as Tara Garden, are doing a Prime Day. They're gonna make millions of dollars today. People are still spending money. I don't think money spends slow down. It's just where they're spending it that changes.

And you can be exactly— people never slow down on shopping. Even like when they look at like, oh, the economy is in a recession, people are still buying things. It's just looking at what are they buying. Where are they spending their money?

Yeah, so the first thing we should talk about is that rest of the strategy. I think we'll start off on that and then we'll kind of get into the how to take advantage of it. But you are totally fine if things have been busy, if you have been in that hustle mode from Christmas getting everything done, trying to make the most of all these sales, constantly marketing and stuff, and you're feeling burnt out. You can slow down. Just kind of let this be a natural rest period. If you have kids or grandchildren, or you just want to lie on a beach with a cocktail, that is totally fine. Being rested helps you make better decisions. It helps you come up with better ideas. I think I do it myself. It's like, okay, I'm going to take a break, and then 10 minutes of not working is like, oh, now I've had the most brilliant idea to have ever happened, and I need to go and get this thing done. Um, and so it's, it's recovery, it's prep. You can kind of have your little rest before things get crazy. You can do a bit of recovery and you can also do a bit of prep because when Q4 comes, as long as you're doing the right things now, uh, it's gonna be easy.

Oh yeah. So take it slow, rest this time of year if you need to. Take some, take some afternoons by the pool. We'll take some beach time, like take a step back from hustling like crazy. And if you're like, but I need to do some kind of work, because Andrew and I are both that kind of people that's like, we can't sit still for very long. Me because I'm fidgeting, Andrew because he's got genius ideas.

Yeah. I can't go away without bringing my laptop. I'm like, I need it. It scares me. Like, what if, what if I have to do something? So I think the second option here is to take the time and invest it more in your products and your backend, I think is the next place to start. That's a slightly suggestive comment. We can start with your backend. And the thing I'm most passionate about when it comes to your backend is your email flows and automation. How can you spend the time getting things into place so that when you are busy and you don't have time to write lots of emails, you don't have time to do all the other stuff, that those things can be in place to automatically happen. I'm currently refreshing my Orders on Autopilot course, which includes a lot of email flows. I actually— oh, I need to add that to my to-do list. Saw Klaviyo added a whole nother type of flow we can do, and I'm like, okay, we're going to expand the course a little bit. But I'm excited about that and offering the chance to do it, to tell people you can buy the course and DIY it, or I'll do it for you. You can spend the time— like, pay me, you can go and lie on the beach. I'm allowed to I spend my time doing it because it's going to be easier and faster for me than it is for you. But I'm like making sure I have all that stuff in place in my own business and making sure that other people do too, so that you can go away and give yourself a break and know that these things are fighting automatically. And that when it comes to Q4, this stuff is already done. And then just after email flows, things like your socials, having all that prepared in advance. I know we have one client who is a social scheduling Pro.

She is a maverick. She is a wizard. She is whatever kind of top-line scheduler you can imagine. I just don't have words today. My God.

No, she sells— she, she sells— I'm in the summer mood— she sells planners. So it makes no sense that she's a planner and has this stuff done in advance. But if you want to be like that, take some time, plan things out in advance, and start getting those things done. I'm trying to do that more and more. I'm not quite perfect at it. Sometimes I'm like, I have— sometimes I'm okay if I have a plan and still have to do it in the moment. At least I know what I'm doing and not starting from scratch. But trying to get those things out in advance and taking the time to go through any other assets you have. So like, if it's whatever you're selling, your Etsy, Shopify, Amazon, whatever it is, go into your product listings. Are your photos up to date? Do your descriptions still make sense? Is all your like stock and things correct? I was, um, looking on my Etsy and I'm like, Etsy's been slow for a while. My best-selling product line isn't on there for some reason. Like, it's still there, it's just showing as out of stock. I'm like, oh yeah, it might sell if like you could actually buy it. Hopefully that you're not as stupid as me there though. Um, but checking on these things are still working. Sometimes Shopify doesn't do this unless you specifically set up Um, if you have variations, so things in like different colors, if you run out of one color but the other one's in stock, it won't tell you that you have the other color out of stock. Uh, so check out those things. Everything works, all your shipping, and like just check all of those things, like your about pages, FAQs, just like going through your site. It's all great. If you watched or listened to our Shopify updates episode? Are you prepping for the new Shopify Horizon themes now? Cause it's a slightly slower period. Your social bios, your link in bio, like the amount of times I go in and see people linking to things that don't exist anymore or are totally irrelevant now. It's like, I was going to buy your thing. I was actually on, this wasn't a product seller, it was a like course and services person. And the— I was gonna follow my social media, the social media buttons didn't work. I was trying to look at the different options they had, um, I went to a 404 page and 3 of the buttons didn't work. I'm like, how are you managing to survive as a business owner? Because there's like, you— no way to follow you or spend any money. Yeah, go ahead and check that. Like, do they, do they know it's broken? Because there's people— I have broken stuff and eventually someone tells you, but they It's like 1 in a million people that actually do that. I didn't tell the person this stuff was broken. So make sure that you're checking that out, having tools like Hotjar and stuff so you can watch. That's how I discovered a really big problem with my site about a button not working. Um, it's because there's all these recordings of people trying to push the button and nothing happened. I was like, oh, that might be a problem. So can you do in the unsexy admin task, you know, right? Times bar. What kind of set you up doing things like SEO. If you use, uh, well, I'm not sure the podcast, I know we talk about the clients. SEMrush have their like site audit tool that gives you a whole bunch of stuff that's broken and messed up with your site to fix. And it's like techie and boring and there's always like a bunch of stuff.

Having those times to do that, like, even just like 30 minutes a day over the summer working on these things. Is such a huge deal when you get to crazy season.

Yeah, those boring times to clean up all of those things that kind of stress you out. Like, I have— like, I was going through to like all the emails and like the saved emails that you need to just admit, like, email bankruptcy with and send to the bin. Like, random saved links and stuff. Like, if I go on my phone, there's like 100 tabs of stuff I was going to come back to. There is no longer— like, just cleaning all the crap up. I was going through my, uh, like CRM system and cleaning up. Like, I had like 1,000 and something tags, and I'm like, I don't need to be tagging this much information points with people. And all like old workflows and sales, but it was just like there was hundreds of things and it was slowing me down and making it harder to find stuff. Like, okay, I'm going to take some time to do this. I really like like times when there's nothing to do. Sometimes when I'm like stuck on a train and the Wi-Fi is not really good, it's like I can't sit and do like a large task, but I can hardly get a good enough connection to be able to like delete a tag. But having all this done in the summer will make it so much easier when it comes to Q4, or even like the, like end of Q3, beginning of Q4. How much of this stuff can you do now? And it's also never too early to start planning. Halloween or Christmas collections.

It is officially Halloween season, okay? So if you need to prioritize planning something, it's Halloween right now. It is full-blown in the stores, and if it's in the stores, they're looking for it online. I haven't had too many Halloween ads popping up in my feed yet, but they are starting. At the moment, mostly in the crochet world for these adorable little wobble things, but I don't like crocheting characters, so I'm not interested.

I was somewhere and I saw it and I was like, is that Halloween? I was like, it is.

I know Christmas gets Halloween is not really a big deal by you, right, Andrew?

Not as big as— yes, I like it. I was having for you trick-or-treating, but yeah, it's never been quite as like early started, but it seems to be popping up already, which makes me think Christmas will probably be next week, right? Oh my God, Christmas prep, I don't think you can ever be too early, especially if you're kind of like smaller scale shop doing like your own little launch and stuff. It's totally fine, you can start planning soon enough. But if you're trying to do like the be in the gift guides and do like big launch and have like influencers and all that stuff, you are too late. I think a bunch of deadlines have passed. All the like major retailers have had their like Christmas launch events. So it's, which I'm not saying for the most, that's not the kind of people who listen to this podcast. You're not like a major retailer. But like for us, I think it is time to be like, okay, how much is there to do? And especially nothing ever seems to have completely gone back to normal since COVID Origin and stuff, again, supplies still is a bit of a Nightmare. Can be. You need to order it early. The stuff, like, I always drag out the same Christmas collection every year. I think this year I have to change it because I think things have been discontinued. But the first like 9, 10 months of the year, you can totally order hundreds in stock. After that, suddenly everyone wants them and there's none left. So I like need to learn my lesson. Okay, instead of ordering 10, there are 100.

Yep, that's pretty accurate right there.

Yeah, I need to clear my backlog there. I keep ordering new things and then never having time to do them. And, uh, the— my bath is broken. The bath is Christmas stock storage. It's full of like hundreds of hats and gloves and all sorts of crap, and it's like, okay, now it's time to clear that out. I'm probably gonna place the bath, and like, I can't replace the bath till I sell the Christmas stock.

You're making me think like there's a prime Christmas item that I did not place the order with my supplier recently, and I'm just to check and it's like, oh shit, they got like 20 left of the thing, which is not really enough to place the order, but maybe I should anyway. I am not gonna get free shipping on that order, but I should be going into them being like, how much does it cost? Can you get me a quote and a timeline for 1,000 of these? Or at least several hundred.

I know, um, my main supplier, if I'm like, if there's like 20 left, but I want 100, I can put in 100 as the stock and as soon as they it. Like, they'll send them to me now, and as soon as the other 8 are available, they're mine. Nice.

I do think about— I have to do— I do have to check, like, do I have backstock from last year? I don't remember.

But it's important. Like, I've already been thinking about it, like, what am I going to do this year? What new stuff do I want to do? How can I get things like photo shoots and stuff out of the way? Because that is what I'm talking about. And, um, I'm also, as someone who works with e-commerce businesses, thinking about, okay, what can I offer to help this year? And I have absolutely too many ideas. Like Claudio, who I work with, just released all their Black Friday stuff. I'm like, ooh, I love getting prepped for Black Friday. I'm gonna need to like set some time, look at it, and be like, okay, how can I help people do this too? And I think moving into the next kind of section, the kind of plotting without the pressure. We kind of acknowledge you started touching on it, but now's the time where you can still, you can still kind of have the like daydreaming and the thinking about it and the waiting for inspiration to strike before it's like, although most of my life has proven that's not true.

Not for Halloween and not if you want to get in holiday gift guides. If those two things are not on your goal list, yes, you can, you can, I hesitate to say lightly dream. I would say heavily dream, strategically dream, get it going because we, we are in this zone. Like, we're recording it right now in the beginning of July. It is blink and we are back to school. It is open your eyes from the blink and we're at Halloween, and then it's just a sneeze away from Christmas. So these times are going to get so much faster. And if you have littles, if you got kiddos— I know I'm dealing with it right now where I am the primary line of daycare, and for this month at least he is in rec from 9 AM until 2:30, including all of my Zoom calls that I have in the morning. This gives me a 2-hour workday, a 2 workday to get this going and to get everything done. So it is, it is a strategic level of dreaming, not, not a light whimsical level of dreaming unless you're in the car. And then anything to get away from like the dumb YouTube sounds in the backseat, that might be lightly whimsical dreaming.

But it's, it's a place where you can do kind of the more intentional dreaming and planning and you can like do your mood boards and do your Pinterest and stuff. I always plan out my collections on Pinterest. It's not the panic like, oh no, I need to have my supplier's catalog and just like type out things in order and get crazy about it. It's like I can still kind of do it more.

I spent the last week doing that.

I've been a part of it before. I'm like, we still have time. It's like you can plan your Black Friday intentionally, you can plan your collections intentionally. We're not quite panic season yet, but we'll let you know when we are.

But we're gonna get there faster than you want to get there, which is the way the year works, just period. January— we talked about it last week— like, January, it's a whole new year and you have all the time in the world to do whatever you want. And then I swear you fart and it's August. You're like, what happened? Maybe it was a brain fart and it's August.

I still have a bunch of things, like little goals and stuff, at the beginning of the year, and I'm like, I still have time, it's still the beginning of the year, it's still Q1, and it That's so not true.

It's Q3.

I don't know what happened.

This is also, so we will say here, we don't have it in our notes, but I did just think of it because my brain is waking up from my one cup of coffee. No lion's mane this morning. That's my problem. But as you look at the seasonality, if you're not making a lot of sales and you don't want to do the big sales focus right now, you should be doing a lead gen focus. You should be building your list up that way when the holidays do hit. Hard, you have that list kind of primed, ready to buy from you instead of trying to do lead gen and everything else. Then maybe right now you're building up your social so that you're getting these things prepared for the holiday rushes. You're getting that audience, that know, like, trust out there in the world.

Yeah, I think we might do a little bit of a Christmas prep, kind of, well, Q4, all it can kind of include Halloween Thanksgiving and stuff, uh, but like a Q4 prep, uh, series of episodes to help you, uh, get all that done.

I think we should definitely do that. We got to put that— I'm gonna write that down on a sticky note that's not occupied by something else.

So I think those are the main points I wanted to make today. The main thing to think about is summer slowdowns don't mean you're failing. They mean you just mean you're in the— this kind of season, you're in the summer season. You can rest, you can recalibrate, but you can also strategically prep. For what comes next. And if you want to use this time to try and drum up some extra sales, it can still happen. I think that's another big thing to take away is that you don't have to stop making sales. But if you want help to plan your next flash sale in just a few hours to make sales this summer, you can grab our Flash Sale Inner Snap Guide at theproductgirlapp.com/flash-sale.

And we're curious to know, what is your status on the summer months, on this weird end of Q2, beginning of Q3 period where sales are weird, schedules are weird, the whole world is weird? How are you taking advantage of it? Or if you're like, I'm checking out, I'm ignoring it, we don't judge, at least out loud. We're very curious. Let us know how you're doing. If you're like our one client who who by the time we hit the end of July, she has everything scheduled out through December. God, she's amazing. I know she's a planner, but still, that is amazing to me. I am happy to be a week out on scheduled stuff. Or if you're more like myself and be like, that's today.

All right, we have another client who is— who does a bunch of shows in the summer, is in gift shops, is stocked in the Smithsonian stuff. These places are busy in the summer. Um, so there's always ways around it. But that's everything for today. Thank you so much for tuning into the Product Growth Lab podcast. We hope you found today's episode insightful and inspiring. If you enjoyed the show, leave a review. It helps us reach more creative entrepreneurs just like you. Stay connected and keep experimenting. Follow us on your favorite podcast platform and don't forget to join our community for more resources, tips, and support. Until next time, keep growing and creating. This is the Product Growth Lab signing off.