The Four Seasons Of Business

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories, it's about the grit it takes to get there. Hi everyone, this is Julie, and today I want to talk about the 4 seasons of business. Just like there are 4 seasons in our world, in nature, there are 4 seasons in business, and I I wanna share the cycle. And I think the reason this is so important is because it helps you find your footing when you know what season you are in. So let's just dive right in. And I start always with spring. And spring is in nature, new, exciting. There's planning, there's momentum, there's possibility, right? And then we move into summer, and summer is usually hot. There's a little bit of a slog feeling as kind of the heat drags on a little bit. And we're still talking in nature, you know, if you have a lawn, grass, I know outside by July, August, things start to dry out and get brown, and you're like, "Man, is my grass dying? And is it ever gonna come back to life?" Then fall comes, and it's sort of this breath of fresh air, literally. You know, the leaves change, there's harvest, there's pumpkin. If you go to Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts, you know, it's just like, There's this sort of renewed energy that comes with the fall and the harvest. And then you have winter. In winter, it gets really cold. People start to hibernate a little bit. Animals hibernate. Everything sort of goes down under. Okay, so those are the four seasons in nature. Now, if we think about them in business real quick, spring is going to be that time in your business where everything feels new and exciting. There's planning, there's momentum, there's possibility. And then as those plans start to take root. The summer comes, and this is where you might feel some increased pressure, and it feels a little bit like a slog, and maybe there are some obstacles and some disillusionment that sets in. Then we move into fall, and that's what we would call a breakthrough. Your efforts start to work. There's a tipping point where all of this energy and effort you've put in, and you're starting to see it finally come back, and there's a sense of a harvest, you know, a, a resurgence in revenue and profit. And then winter comes, and winter is more of a sort of degrowth season in business. And I don't mean degrowth as in you go out of business. I mean that maybe revenue levels off, it plateaus, maybe it goes down a little bit. It might be in part because of the economy, or it could just be you're in restructuring, you're hiring more, so your profit goes down. You're trying to stabilize what you have. Maybe you're trying to rest after big launches. So These four seasons in both nature and in business are really helpful to keep in mind when you're in the weeds day to day. So the biggest issue for most business owners is that they don't really realize what season they're in, right? Or the second problem is they think when they're in any of the seasons, really, they think it's going to last forever. So it's dangerous in spring and fall when things are going well because you think this is going to be the way it is forever, and it's not. And in summer and/or winter, you might feel that too, like, oh my gosh, my business is terrible, it's never going to recover, because those seasons are really hard. And so that leads to spending too much time in the past or in the future. And we do this in life too as humans. We, we don't know how to enjoy the present, and so we think about, oh, remember when, you know, it's the good old days, or only if, and we project into the future. So even though I, you know, I don't hate capitalism, I have a very complicated relationship with capitalism. The actual ideology has us thinking that everything just grows exponentially forever when nature says otherwise, when nature says pretty much everything is a cycle. So how does this actually show up in business? So I'm going to use one of my businesses, Funnel Gorgeous, which I co-founded with Kathy Olson back in 2018, and I'm going to kind just quickly give you the story of how the spring, summer, fall, and winter worked in Funnel Gorgeous. So when we launched in August of 2018, I would say from May to August, we were in a spring season. We were excited. There was lots of planning. We had just met. We were going to do this amazing thing. It was going to be so cool. And we ended up launching a course in August. I think we made about $55,000 in sales. We didn't really know we were starting a business. We just thought we were going to do something cool together as JV partners. So that was our spring. Our spring season was kind of short, it was just a couple months. And then from September 2018 through the following May, so basically an entire school year, we went into a summer. And this is because we didn't realize we were building a business, and so we really weren't thinking very strategically. But we did realize our audience loved our designs, and so we started releasing these design drops, as we called them. But we were barely making making money. It was literally the definition of a slog. We were slogging through selling these $49 templates, making maybe $10,000 a month, working our butts off, and it felt a little bit like, man, what are we doing here? So in June of 2019 to October of 2019, so basically a long summer season, we finally had a breakthrough. I remember Kathy going to an event or a conference and she messaged me and she said, why aren't we making 6 figures a month? This seems ridiculous. And there was this sort of resurgence of passion and like, get it done-ness. And we launched a new program in June of 2019 called Webinar Gorgeous. We did our first retreat. We launched our viral course Offer Cure, which means it's not about going viral, it's about creating offers. But it went viral because it was so good. And we had this harvest. We had this audience that we had been building even though it was a slog through the summer and we were barely making money. We were growing an audience. And so we had this sort of harvest moment. June 2019 was the first month we had made $100,000 in business in one month as the Funnel Gorgeous team. And so we enjoyed all the fruits of all of that labor building that audience. So we had a fall that lasted about 4 or 5 months. And then from November of 2019 to March of 2020, we kind of went into a little bit of a winter. We had this big audience and we had a little bit of an oh shit moment, and that was because we were building everything on ClickFunnels and we could see the writing on the wall that that wasn't gonna be a good idea. And I had this intuition and this sort of premonition that things were gonna go sideways over there. And so we looked at our business and we were like, well, we have these design drops, we have these two courses, and that's great, but like, how are we going to actually make this sustainable? We also had our own businesses, our own products, and we were like, what do we do with this? So we went into a little bit of a hibernation. We went into a winter. It was about 4 or 5 months where we tried to figure out what to do with our existing businesses. We went and got ourselves an official operating agreement, and it was very much like infrastructure, strengthening and stabilizing our infrastructure. Now COVID hit in March of 2020, and at first we thought this was going to sort of elongate our winter season, but the opposite happened and spring came anew. And all of a sudden we had all these people at home in quarantine. Oh my gosh, maybe I should do remote work, maybe I should do online work. And man, it was like our new business had just relaunched, right? We were official now. We weren't just JV partners, we were co-founders. And so from March 2020 to December 2020 felt like one really long spring. We launched Launch Gorgeous, we launched FG Society, we launched our software FG Funnels. I mean, it was just like offer after offer after offer, and we had incredible revenue growth. And it felt like we were planning and launching, planning and launching, planning and launching, and it It was amazing. It was amazing in the middle of one of the hardest things that our world has gone through with the coronavirus pandemic. And then in January of 2021, summer hit. And like any good spring plan that goes according to plan, what happens? You have growth. And growth requires more support, right? And it requires more stability. I've got these tomato plants that my boyfriend planted outside right now, and they are barely holding up because the support we gave it when it was a small plant is now no longer sufficient, and all that fruit on the vine is causing the vines to bend and break because we didn't give it enough support. This is what happened to us. We had the holy crap, this is hard year. So it was a year of summer. We had hiring, then we had HR drama. We had like, oh my gosh, this is incredibly difficult. We had growing pains. We had more haters that year than we had ever had before. Disillusionment set in big time. And so one thing that is sort of annoying about spring when things work is that it always leads to summer and nobody wants summer. We want to avoid summer, but summer is— summer comes after spring. It's just part of the cycle. We had so many haters that year and we— that was the first year we did $4 million in sales. And I thought, my Lord, I don't know if we're going to make it. It was so intense. So after that year, we had a little bit of a fall reprieve, just a little bit, about 3 months. We had our big Marketer's Heart event in Disney, and that was so fun. We had all these people, we had our audience with us, and we did our first True North launch. And there was just this sort of like, ah, okay. You know, like after a really hard year, we had this sort of little mini reprieve where we felt like our efforts had been working really, really well. And we got to celebrate with our audience and and we had a great, we had about a $700,000 launch in True North and it was just, it was amazing. But that didn't last long. Fall didn't last long in 2022. And by March of 2022, probably until the end of the year, maybe even into the first couple months of this year, we went into winter. We realized if we are going to stay in business and we're going to continue to grow as a company, we really, really need to stabilize what we have. And so we took a hit on profit margins. We also sold less because we were busy in the weeds doing all of that building. So we had less sales, lower profit margins, and really just trying to stabilize what we have. And you know, as I'm doing this, I realize I got you all the way to the end of 2022 from 2018, but you can see how spring, summer, fall, and winter kind of work in a cycle. And sometimes it's hard to know what cycle you're in until the cycle ends, and then you can kind of look back. So I don't even know that I can sit here and categorize 2023 right now, but probably by the end in 2024, I'll be able to look back and see where winter went to spring, summer, fall. Maybe we had all 4 seasons this year. I'm not sure. But also just want to say, once in a while, the seasons don't always go in order in business, right? It goes in order in nature, but not always in business. So how do you handle each season when it comes, right? So when spring is here, Enjoy it and make the most of it, right? Working harder is really common here because you're excited. It's very energizing, but just know in your head it won't last. And the tendency sometimes for business owners is they like spring so much they want to stay in spring, which means they like to just do endless planning. Okay, don't do that. Just know that spring has its place and it's fun when it gets there, but it's not there forever. We love this season as entrepreneurs, of course, but don't go on a hiring spree thinking that spring will last forever because it doesn't. Now, when you find yourself in summer, the biggest, most best advice I can give you is it's not going to last. Okay? So just like the good times don't last, the bad times don't last either, right? Drink water, stay hydrated. Remember why you started, right? And don't try to make big decisions in the heat of the summer when your reserves are low, okay? Don't drastically destroy your business and go on an eat, pray, love journey because you just can't handle it anymore. Stick to the plans you made in the spring, even if you're tired and even if they feel like they're not working. Then when fall hits, again, enjoy it, make the most of it, know that it won't last, and use the opportunity to possibly seed a few ideas for your next spring. Save some cash reserves on that harvest We like this season as entrepreneurs, but remember, fall usually leads into winter because your infrastructure has to grow to keep up with the harvest. Now, when you hit winter, the urge is going to be to not rest. It's going to be to work harder. But if you listen to my podcast episode on the float season, I do feel like we are in— I don't know if we're in a summer or winter, but we're not in a spring or fall right now. That is for damn I'm sure. So you want to focus on slowing down so that you can speed up. Focus on that infrastructure. Don't panic that you'll stay in hibernation mode forever, and try to continue to market even if you're feeling a little bit burned out. Okay, so I hope this was helpful. Obviously there are seasons of your business personally, and then there's seasons that happen sort of societally or in niches and markets. And so it might be that even the world, the internet marketing world, which is quite small actually, might be in a winter or a summer, you might be finding yourself in a spring or fall. That's okay. I just hope that understanding that business runs in cycles, just like nature runs in cycles, will help you have a little bit more of a bigger vision when you're stuck in the day-to-day. As always, talk to you soon. There you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.