How Small Businesses Can Weather the Slow Summer Season
With Fox 5 DC anchor
Jay on managing the small business slow-summer squeeze: cash reserves, working capital timing, and the levers operators actually have this quarter.
Related doctrine: Working Capital Gap · Minimum Mandatory Profit
Read the full transcript 546 words
Owners treat summer as something that's usually happening to them. Their clients are unfocused, the employees are unfocused, even the business owner is actually unfocused. So the result is that they kind of say it's happening to them. The doldrums aren't about weather, it's actually about planning. And planning has a lot to do with different aspects of the business.
Some of those areas would be knowing their numbers. A lot of people look at lagging indicators. They look at accounting. Know what's going to happen between Memorial Day and Labor Day, and what your business actually has to produce. Some of the other areas would be looking at your systems in terms of your paper flow, your workflow, business process flow in general, and being able to map out is there a smoother way that when we hit our busy time we're going to be able to have a better system in place.
Some of the other areas are going to be like just simple vacation coverage. A lot of individuals assume that everybody knows who's off and when they're off and what events they have to come up with. Putting some sort of centralized system around vacation really tends to help as well so that you have coverage. That's one of the biggest areas.
Another area you can look at is investing in training for those periods of time. If you're going to do any type of training in any type of area of your company, do it in the summer when things are slowed down. Also look into tech, maybe software that you've been thinking about and you want to put into your company. All things that we should really incorporate not now but right now as they like to say.
You're going to look at where is our bottlenecks that happen in our busy season. Is our paperwork getting done in a timely manner? Paperwork could be simply just, are they invoicing on time? You want to be able to look at that system itself and do a clean audit to make sure that actually flows properly because you want to get your money in as fast as possible. That's just a small example.
We go through about 12,000 companies a year, and everybody's asking this question: what can I do with AI? And I'll start with the very basics. Most people have a lot of manual systems. They don't really have what they would call an ERP. So to be able to take something that's from manual, you can use AI to help you automate some of these functions. You're going to have to learn how to use AI, not just play with AI. You can actually put these automations in place. And then if you do have automations, the ability to glean information you wouldn't even think about for additional clarity. Those are the things that during the slow period of the summer, that's the technology I would be trying.
If you read a lot of the news articles right now, it's actually for the first time cash flow. Believe it or not, tariffs were such a big thing before, but cash flow has risen to the top for the first time in forever. And it's a big big impact.