How Christmas effects business - It's not always good!

Hi there, just read through your issue. Why not use Christmas to drum up new business? Have a Christmas gathering with current and past students, encouraging them to bring friends and family. During the gathering have your promotional material available for new visitors. I would imagine your customers work in groups and make friends, I'm sure they would like to catch up with one another. They could bring you new business for the start of the year.

That's a great idea :-D

We do become more active in other areas of a charitable nature this time of year, mainly with the homeless, or those with no family.

But you're dead right, no activity is bad activity 

Xmas is an odd time for us. Like you, people tend to switch off advertising wise so we see a drop in listings, fewer upgrades and forum activity goes a little quiet over December.

But we do see a surge in Post Office searches, and noticed our Royal Mail blog post is doing well, so we do quite well monetizing that traffic, which helps with xmas slump.

But I tend to use November - January for project planning and tackling outstanding issues which have been on the back burner all year. This year is no different and we are waiting for a major site to go live who is utilising our search database to display their members, and we are half way through a local government project to provide a trader search facility. Quite exciting (well for us), but a reminder that local authority and private business run in different timezones 

Hi, I am the new kid on the block and just joined.

2014 has gone by so fast, my business has grown (hooray!) and then shrunk back (boo!). So December for me, apart from my other duty as the unpaid family Christmas Events organiser, its also a time to get my "ducks lined up" as 2015 will soon be with us and I want to hit 2015 running!

Hopefully 2015 will see a steadier growth of my business which in turn will be more sustainable.   

I think what I liked about SDPromoparrot's reply is the PMA being shared - as is the case with all members here. 

Thinking outside the box, and never letting a down moment go to waste is key. Collagenius, peaks and troughs! 2015 will be a great year!

Steve, yup. I hear ya. I think I need to get in the faces of the local authorities more. We work all time zones... ;-)

Well normally I'm quiet at this time of year, this year with the relatively new business (2 years) I'm running round like a headless chicken all over the South East I'm not even sure how I ended up covering this area was only targeting London, now I'm getting up at 4 in the morning and getting home around 10 in the evening and it has been like this for the last 6-8 weeks. I could easily take on another 6 guys and still not be able to cope with the workload. It might sound great, but I can tell you it's not healthy Its not fun either and I'm beginning to hate it rapidly 

Can you not subby out the surplus leads, skim and have longer in bed?

We'll, it's really good business is on the up - but - if I ever stopped enjoying what I did for more than 2 weeks in a row, I'd probably just sit under the desk.

How can you get the enjoyment back? Would P/T workers help?

Ok well this is the situation, I have a call center handle all the telephone calls, I will receive anywhere between 10-80 calls a day plus on average around 30 emails to deal with. If I'm honest I'll ignore just through pure lack of time around 90% of these callers / new leads. The call center staff get a lot of abuse because I've failed to or been unable to call someone back. I've got 3 electricians on a sub contract basis, I do all the plumbing, from breakdowns to installations, site surveys, invoicing ordering of materials and so forth. I can be working in London, Chelmsford, Bury St Edmunds and Brighton all on the same day. I've never targeted any areas outside of Greater London yet get calls from as far a field Scotland to Devon to Kent and Wales. I ended up pulling the plug on all paid advertising some six months ago. I'm also involved with a Scottish boiler manufacturer, so I get all their work and deal with all their inquiries in the South East. Oh and I have an online shop where I've started to sell boilers.

I only set this business up because Google hammered my old site, I was quite happy just swanning around London making a living that paid the bills, never had any intention of being anything other than being little ole me with me tool kit. But now I find myself having gone from one extreme of being killed by Google to the complete opposite. I'm very apprehensive about taking anyone on full time as I can do without having to do more paperwork and paye. But I've now got this feeling that the business is now getting a bit of a bad name simply because it cannot handle the workload. I am in no doubt of where this business can go, I'm just not sure I want to go with it, probably more to do with confidence than anything else, cant even say it is a seasonal problem as I knew six months ago things were changing drastically.... oh well time will tell..