Hi Seller Community. Each business experiences a sales dip sometime or another. Maybe it's seasonal, maybe it has to do with the economic climate.
As a business owner, how do you stay positive and/or calm? What do you remind yourself? What keeps you going?
There are a couple of things that keep me calm and positive.
I understand my long term goals in life, I know why I am in business and I understand what I need to do to achieve that goal. If you extend your time horizon to 10, 15 or 20 years, the little things that happened today or this week are so miniscule that you will not remember them.
I also try to only focus my time and energy on the things that I can control, if it is outside my control... I may whinge about it but my focus is always on things I can control.
The way I look at things on a day to day if there is a mistake or issue. It doesn't matter who made the mistake, as the business owner I take responsibility. I then look for a solution to the problem and implement that change. For me, a mistake is always an opportunity to improve be that in training a team member in the correct process so they can improve or changing a process so the business can improve.
Hope that helps.
As has been said already, I donโt even seriously pay attention to dips. All that matter to me anymore are trends. The most important metrics that I track are all based on 4-week averages as compared to the same 4-week averages in my previous season. Usually, if there is a short-term dip I can guess that it is going to happen before it happens. Case in point is now. My last 3 weeks slowed down much more than expected, even for the cooler end of ice cream season. It was obvious a month or so ago that the recession had finally arrived, no matter what the experts were saying. So, we adjusted. Thankfully this is the time of year that I slowly cut back my staffing, which just happens to coincide with my high school/college staff returning to school. I just trimmed their hours more and much sooner than expected.
Actually, Iโm glad we decided not to make 2022 the year we experimented with winter frozen treat sales. I have the strong suspicion that this holiday season is going to be brutal, at least if my recent sales trends are any indication (which they usually are). That suspicion was one of the biggest reasons we decided not to try anything new this year โ Iโm pretty sure weโd have regretted such a move. Thereโs always next winter!
What keeps me going, staying calm and positive? The blessings of sobriety! In 61 years on this earth Iโve learned one immutable fact of life โ life is filled with ups, downs and plateaus. Recovery, and meditation, taught me not to focus on any one event, not to get stuck in my head. I do what I can. I adjust. I change. But I keep moving forward without wishing for something different for the parts that are totally out of my control. I can only change what I can change. The rest, as they say, is life.
