April is the cruelest month. April, and maybe May.
At least, those are the months when sales dip for Humes Crafts
LLC in Manhattan, Kansas, because local craftspeople put away their
needlepoint and stenciling projects and pick up their trowels to
plant their gardens.
Or maybe it's November. That's the month when the
various businesses that comprise Joy and Gaylord Staveley's
year-round mountain resort in the Grand Canyon are closed. Among
the Staveleys' Canyoneers Inc. businesses are a whitewater
rafting operation, a summer lodge, a country store, a winter
cross-country ski center and a campground.
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Early December is not a great time for the Dixie Flag
Manufacturing Co. in San Antonio, either. Although he's
creatively managed to find work for his company in every other
month of the year, president Pete Van de Putte Jr. says he just
can't seem to get Texans to buy flags at Christmastime.
Maybe every month has a little cruelty in it. John Hexter of
Hudson Integrated Products, a Stow, Ohio, business forms and
printing distributor, says he can't quite put his finger on
when his downtimes are. He thinks they may be pretty closely
related to his customers' vacations. When they go away, they
don't order his custom office documents--but as soon as they
come back, they want them yesterday.
Downtimes are business bogeys, those strange times during the
year when the phone just doesn't seem to ring. Has everyone
gone on vacation? Is your phone broken? Have you done something to
scare everyone off? Not likely. It's probably just a cycle,
caused either by the particular fluctuations of your business or by
some outside force such as a change in the economy. The first thing
you should know about downtimes is that you're not the only one
who has them.
In fact, in many businesses, even ones that aren't obviously
seasonal, downtimes are quite common. For example, most people in
the crafts business, says Jerry Humes, owner of Humes Crafts, know
about the April-and-May problem. Serendipitously, the downtime
happens to come several months before the fourth quarter, when
sales at Humes' 22-employee retail store are at their most
brisk, so he uses the time to take inventory and prepare for busier
months.
But even if downtimes are neither obvious nor public
information, experts say being aware of and prepared for them is
essential to business success. If you're considering starting a
new business, don't be afraid to ask potential competitors
about the downtimes associated with it. They'll probably be
more than happy to share that information with you. People like
talking about themselves and their businesses, particularly about
things that might be discouraging to the competition.
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