By David Fellman
Business tends to slow down during certain seasons for many printing companies. I remember when business owners used to look forward to that, a natural break from the hectic pattern of the "busy" months. Whether it happened in the summer or in the winter we'd get our people their vacations...take equipment off-line for maintenance...maybe take some extra time for ourselves on the boat or the ski slopes or the golf course or whatever our own favorite indulgence might be.
I don't know too many printers who would look forward to any slowing of business in these times, seasonal or otherwise. And I'm often asked if there are things that you can do to take seasonality out of the equation.
Customers Cause Seasonality
One of the basics I want you to understand is that your customers are the cause of any seasonality in your business. Or to put that another way, any seasonality in their businesses simply travels down the line to yours. One obvious answer, then, is to not put all of your eggs into a basket that conforms to a single seasonal cycle.
I'm always amazed at how few printers make a conscious effort to shape their customer list. If you want to know the real truth, I'm flat-out shocked at how few even understand the current make-up of their customer base.
Here's an exercise that will help you to gain a clear picture of the seasonality of your business. Sit down with a list of the customers who combine to make up 80% of your volume. Plot your actual monthly sales volume to each of those customers for at least the last 12 months, and 24 or even 36 would be better still.
The peaks and valleys on this graph will tell you if there are seasonality factors among this group of individual customers. And obviously, the longer the timeframe you're able to chart, the better you'll be able to identify the real trends. But what do you do with this information? How do you make it more than just an interesting collection of facts, and turn it into a tool to improve your business?
Understand Then Shape
Let's say that 20 individual customers make up 80% of your business. When you plot their monthly sales, let's say that 14 of them give you some level of consistent volume through the summer and fall, drop way off in the winter, and start picking back up again in the spring.
The opportunity to shape your customer base is found in those other six customers. Let's say that three of them give you consistent business throughout the whole year, about the same volume every month. Let's say that the other three seem to do most of their work in the wintertime, and they're slower while the majority of your top customers are active.
The trick to shaping your customer base is to determine what it is about these six customers that makes the different. Why do their printing needs flow along a different cycle? And then the most important question: who else in this town has similar needs, and will keep me busy during the months when so many of the rest of my customers are slow?
Numbers Game
You're going to turn a certain percentage of the people you target as prospects into customers. I can't tell you what that percentage will be—or even should be—but I think you have to accept the validity of that basic statement. If you target 10 businesses that happen to be slow in the winter, and turn a couple of them into good customers, you will do your business some significant overall good. But you'll probably also be setting things up to be even crazier during the "busy" months, while not doing anything to get more business running through the shop in the slower months. On the other hand, if you identify and target prospects who run on a different cycle, you stand to gain more business with less stress.
Sound good?
Dave Fellman is the president of David Fellman & Associates, Cary, NC, a sales and marketing consulting firm serving numerous segments of the graphic arts industry. Contact Dave by phone at 919-363-4068 or by e-mail at dmf@davefellman.com. Visit his website at www.davefellman.com.