MBA1232 Managing Inconsistent Sales in Your Business + Free Ride Friday!

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Hey, today is Free Ride Friday so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. This Friday and this month we're giving away ezcourse, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. It retails for $500 over at EasyCourse co. But today and every Friday somebody will win it for free. All you gotta do is leave us an itunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on itunes. Alright, let's jump into today's episode. Hey O. Welcome to the hundred dollar NBA show making the impossible possible every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn how to manage inconsistent sales in your business. For many of us the amount of revenue we make in our business month to month will change, it will go up, it will go down and it's all based on different factors. Obviously if you sell toys then Christmas is your season. Sales go up come January, February it's slow. And if you're in the Northern hemisphere and you sell swimming pools, winter is not your time. On the flip side, if you sell snowboards and accessories, then winter is popping for you. It's super busy. But to run a business efficiently, you need to predict revenue. You need to be able to know how much money you're going to be making so that you can budget accordingly and grow accordingly. So how do we manage all that? That's what we're going to be talking about in today's episode. Even with our business and the podcast, we have seasons. We, we have times when it's up and when it's down, and it's the same way year in, year out. And we have to plan accordingly. And I'll show you how in today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. If you have a podcast, a web show, a blog that runs on sponsorship, you know that January and February normally are really slow months. Why? Because a lot of businesses haven't really established a marketing budget until after the holidays, well after New Year's, and it takes a while to get the ball rolling. But if your business expenses are relying on the same money you made in December, then in this example, you're in trouble. So what do you do? Well, number one, you can't rely when the facts contradict what you believe. What I mean by that is that you have to run your business through its course of the year and take a look at your revenue every month. Look at the traffic you're getting to your website, look at the traffic you're getting to your physical store. You're going to see a trend, and you need to see where the ups and downs are. Some of these will be obvious, like the pool example I give. You sell pools. Obviously, winter is going to be a tough time. What you need to do is you need to account and budget for the full year. How much money are you making throughout the whole year? That's my revenue. And I don't go monthly. I know how much I should be spending every month based on my annual annual income, annual profits. Now, that's one strategy. But there are ways to plan accordingly and try to balance things out a little bit. So, for example, the sponsorship example, with January and February being slow for anybody who has sponsors on their content, you should always try to sell as far in advance as possible and actually give people deals for longer sponsorships or longer deals. And this will work with even another product. I'll give another example in a bit so for example, for the show, we give a discounted rate for those who book spots for 12 months or six months. This kind of covers us. So even if they bought the spots in November, it covers them all the way through the end of April and allows us to absorb some of that loss or that shock of lack of revenue during the first few months of the year. Because hey, we sold those spots and collected the cash beforehand before we got to that time. We're like, hey, no one wants to buy now. If your product or your business is based on seasons or the actual weather, like winter and summer, it's time for you to open up your market a little bit, go a little bit more global. There's another hemisphere in the world called the Southern Hemisphere where everything is the opposite. These markets are often underserved when it comes to these types of businesses. People that live in New Zealand want to buy a snowboard in June. If you live in Chile, a good time to buy swimming pool cleaning materials or cleaning devices is November, December, that's summer for them. So your marketing efforts should change to those regions of the world where when you normally have slow time or slow revenue in the Northern Hemisphere, this allows you to have consistent sales regardless of what time of year it is. Now, there might be other reasons why you'll have inconsistency in sales in your business. This is why I highly encourage, no matter what your business is, to incorporate some sort of way to have some reoccurring revenue. For example, if you're a coach or a trainer, instead of only relying on working by the hour or coaching packages, sell those, those are great. But also sell a community access to a forum or a group or a mastermind call, and they pay a year in advance. If every one of your coaching clients paid, you know, $200 in advance to be a part of a monthly call 12 months out of the year, or be part of a Slack group or a community forum where they can meet other like minded professionals and ask you questions. That's gonna buffer some of the inconsistency in your business because you can rely on that revenue because it's happening in advance by the year. And again, back to the first point of measuring your revenue annually and not monthly. So you can measure your expenses that way or budget in that way. This is gonna allow you to really have some consistent annual revenue. Another way to have consistent revenue is have some sort of service contract. Are you a web developer? Hey, why don't you also have a service contract where you're their web person? You're maintaining their website and they're hosting throughout the year. If you charge them 2, $300 a month as a monthly retainer to take care of their website and their needs and their updates and make sure that, you know, their security is on the up and up, that's a really reasonable price for a business because hey, they don't have to hire somebody for that full time. You're taking care of it for them. And again, it gives you consistent revenue month after month, year after year. If you know there are certain months in your year, in your calendar year where things are slow in your business, try to ramp up marketing and even promotions and sales prior to that month when people actually are spending money so you can actually maybe double your sales the month before. So that month that is slow afterwards is covered. It's all about planning ahead once you know the patterns. That way you're not at a loss that month and your annual revenue is.

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Guys, to wrap up today's lesson, every business will go through seasons, will go through ups and downs. Your job as the CEO, as the leader of a company, is to plan for the full year and plan ahead. And to also have some sort of way to have consistent income throughout the year regardless of these ups and downs. A retainer, a service fee, ongoing community fee, some sort of reoccurring revenue, or even doing promotions prior to your slow months to to make up for those slow months. Guys, today's episode's not over. It's Free Ride Friday. I gotta give away a lifetime membership to EZ course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is. Mr. Toner. Remarkable. Five stars. I thoroughly enjoy this podcast with Omar. From his opening heyo to his closing tip. There are so many insights to be gained by listening. Even though I'm 30 years into having my business and being a business owner at 10 minutes long, each episode is easy to digest. I'm able to use something from nearly every episode. Wow. Thank you for that amazing review. Mr. Toner, you are our free eyed Friday winner. Your mission is to email me at omar@100mba.net so I can hook you up with that lifetime membership to Easy course. Anybody can win. Just leave us an iTunes rating in your review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. You enter the draw automatically every week when you leave us a review until you win. Thanks again for listening. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. When you don't plan for the full year, when you don't plan ahead, when you don't know these ebbs and flows in your business, it could be an emotional rollercoaster. You feel great about your business one month and next month you feel like man, things are down and slow and not as good. Did I do something wrong? This is why I really believe it takes about 12 months to to really understand the business and the market you're in. If your business is less than 12 months old, there's nothing wrong with asking somebody in your marketplace, somebody who has a business that's similar to yours, not a competitor. If you sell snowboards, maybe somebody who sells winter clothing, it'll give you a little bit of a heads up about how your business is gonna do throughout the year. All right, I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take.

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