There are certain parts of the year when business owners and their teams have potentially very differing views. For example, many business owners find December difficult, as it’s a short month, when lead conversion can be deadly slow, as we’re all more focused on mince pies than anything else. Their team members love the extra time off. May is another month that can be hard for business owners, but that their team enjoy, as there are two Bank holidays in quick succession, often with the long Easter weekend just before.

This year, it’s even worse, with THREE Bank Holidays in May, so NOW is the time to get your plan in place!

The keys dates to watch out for are:

• Easter Weekend is the 7th – 10th April.
• The Early May Bank Holiday on the 1st.
• The Coronation of King Charles on the 8th.
• The Spring Bank Holiday on the 29th May.

If your business has the opportunity to piggy back any of these causes for celebration, then that’s great! Hopefully you’ve got a fair idea already of how you’ll do that. You’ll have an offer lined up, your pricing in place, supplies and marketing scheduled and will be working out your resourcing to ensure you can take full advantage.

If you’re like us though, and know that those are going to be days when everyone’s out of the office, and potentially taking extra days off to make full use of the break, you need to plan now for the impact that may have on your cash flow.

Think about how the cash coming into your business drops off in January, as you’ve made less sales in December. That will be how you’ll go into the latter half of June, and the summer period, unless you consciously plan for it now.

• You may need to push harder this month and next, to make sure that those are months where your sales are higher, and your pipeline fuller than usual, to sustain you over a quieter May and into the holiday period.
• You may need to think about some extra resource to enable you to make those extra sales or get those extra leads.
• You may need to park some other activity to ensure you explore every one of those leads and avoid letting them slip away.

It may also be that you decide that there’s an angle you can take during that period, that will enable you to leverage the Coronation that doesn’t apply to the ‘usual’ Bank Holidays. Anyone who has the capacity for a Royal connection should find this easy, but a little thought now, when you have time to spare, may be far more productive than a panicked brainstorming session later.

The most important recommendation is to make sure you have looked at your cash flow, looked at your sales in December 2022, or over the May period historically, and planned for the impact that the three Bank Holidays may have.

Be sure too to plan something in there for your team to celebrate all together too, as an antidote to the extra effort you may all be making between now and then.

We’d love to see what you come up with on all counts, so do let us know!

As always, if you’d like to discuss any aspects of your offers, cash flow or plans, please get in touch.