Plenty of Indian service businesses are seasonal without ever calling themselves that. Work clusters around festivals, or the financial year end, or a monsoon, and then goes quiet.
The trouble is that costs are not seasonal. Salaries, rent and EMIs arrive at the same pace every month.
Know your shape before you plan for it
Take the last two years of monthly collections and put them side by side. Almost every business has a shape, and most owners have a rough sense of it that turns out to be wrong in one or two months.
You cannot manage a pattern you have not actually looked at.
The busy month is where the fix happens
This is the whole thing. The slow month cannot be fixed in the slow month. What it needs is money set aside during the good one, and that only happens if it is deliberate.
A fixed percentage of collections in peak months, moved to a separate account on a fixed date, is the entire technique. Separate account matters, because money in the operating account gets spent by the operating business.
Shift what you can
- Negotiate longer supplier terms for the lean period rather than the busy one
- Schedule large purchases and maintenance for peak, not trough
- Time annual payments to land when money does
Use the quiet time rather than enduring it
The slow month is the only time you have for the work that never gets done: chasing old receivables, cleaning up records, training, reaching out to customers who have gone quiet.
A business that treats the lean period as a project month rather than a waiting room usually finds the next peak is bigger.
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