Episode Summary

If you’ve ever experienced the “feast or famine” cycle in business, you know how painful it can be. Many business owners struggle to find a balance between consistent sales efforts and handling new business as it comes in, which leads to big swings in revenue and profitability. 

In today’s podcast, Melissa Swink discusses the “feast or famine” cycle, its impact on sales and growth, and six strategies to combat it with the help of a virtual team. She shares personal experiences and examples of how to leverage help from a virtual team to maintain consistency and increase sales. Virtual assistants can smooth out your sales cycle and help you experience steady, consistent growth through tracking leads, list building, outreach campaigns, new product launches, creating marketing content, and email funnels and campaigns. Don’t miss this week’s tactical tips! 

Key Highlights:

• Understanding the feast and famine cycle in business 
• How this up-and-down cycle hinders sales and business growth
• How leveraging help from others helps maintain consistency and increase sales
• Tactical strategies for how a virtual team can help a business with tracking leads, list building, outreach campaigns, new product launches, creating marketing content, and email funnels and campaigns

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone, welcome to the Make Space for More podcast, where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about the feast and famine cycle and how that can impact the sales and overall growth of your business, and most importantly, six strategies to get help with these areas in your business so that you don't fall into this roller coaster time and time again.

And my motivation for sharing this today really was inspired by my daughter's last day of school. Today's the last day of school as I'm recording this. And so like a lot of working parents facing this time of year, you know, our schedules are going to be changing a little bit. Our routines are going to be a little bit different. And sometimes that also means, you know, backing off of the business and that is completely fine. I'm here for it. I'm embracing it. I live in Wisconsin. Our weather is cold many times during the year.

And so when we have this beautiful summer weather, I want to get out and I want to do different things rather than the day to day that we have going on during the school year. And there's nothing wrong with any of that. But when I was thinking about this, I was thinking about how can I avoid that feast and famine cycle in my own business and make sure that I am putting the time in and leveraging the help of my team to keep our sales consistent and our growth consistent during the summer months. And

First things first, want to check in with you and see, have you heard of the feast and famine cycle? And whether you've heard of it or not, you may have experienced this in your own business. And I'll give you an example. When I was working as a solopreneur, I would experience times where we had a lot of new clients coming on board, we had a lot of new projects coming in, and I was spending a lot of my time working in the business, serving these clients, delivering on these projects.

would wrap up and then suddenly I would find myself without an adequate amount of work. And so then, of course, I'd have to drum up some more business, start doing some more networking, doing some more outreach, and then get to that point where we're closing more sales again. And it was just this roller coaster of having lots and then too little. And I think that a lot of us us us us us have experienced that in a

I know that again, I have experienced this many times throughout the years of owning my business. I've seen clients experience this as well. And I've seen this show up in really two primary sources. And then we're going to talk about how we can get help from others, maybe team members that you have or a virtual assistant team like ours can help you maintain some consistency and increase the growth in sales in your business.

so that we're able to level off and avoid this roller coaster effect that I'm about to describe. But I'm seeing this in a couple of ways. Just like I had mentioned, client work, struggling to balance working in the business versus on it. We get into these busy seasons and it can be really hard to balance getting the work done, which is extremely important. We want happy customers, happy clients. We wanna deliver on the things that we said we were going to and serve them well.

but then sometimes working on the business and doing business development and sales and marketing takes a backseat because there's only so much that we can focus on at a time. There's only so many hours in the day. I also see this seasonally. So like I had mentioned, summer is one where I see clients kind of taking their foot off the gas pedal a little bit. I know I myself will be doing some of that. There's nothing wrong with that. However,

I also see this during the holiday season as well, I should mention. Those are two times of the year that I really observe this in my own life and certainly with our clients as well, where right around Thanksgiving, that's kind of the time that people start getting busier with family activities, getting ready for holiday celebrations. There's a lot happening at school, I know, during that time. And so things kind of taper off during the last...

six to eight weeks of the year, and then we drum back up and are highly motivated in January. I see that feast and famine cycle happening seasonally as well. And the reality is, is that we are going to experience busy times in our business. We're going to experience times where our family and other activities are going to take more of a priority over the work that we're doing, and there's nothing wrong with that. But,

I highly recommend getting help from others, not only to balance, but even increase your sales and your growth during these busy times, during these different seasons of life. And so I'm gonna share with you today six ways that a virtual assistant or if you have other team members, you have an assistant, how others can help you accomplish this and get off of that roller coaster of lots of growth and then lots of dry.

dry times and dry spells as well when it comes to your sales and incoming growth. So the first way that you can leverage help from others in avoiding that feast and famine cycle and increasing your sales is to track leads and follow up activities. So you may have heard that statistic, the rule of seven, where it takes seven impressions in order to

Bring somebody from a place of just discovering you and your services to actually doing business with you know There's a lot of debate on is that number higher sometimes that number is lower sometimes I get a glowing recommendation from Another contact that I have and that person is like yep. I know I want to work with you. Let's talk about it I'm excited sometimes that sometimes you know, that's seven fewer touches that's fewer than seven touches I should say and

you know, sometimes it's more. It just kind of depends on your type of business and how long your sales cycle is. But what's super important is that we get some help with tracking those leads and tracking those potential customers and following up on a regular basis because we don't want those opportunities to slip through the cracks. I know there have been plenty of times where I've had a conversation with a potential client and for whatever reason, it was not the right time for us to work together.

but the door was open for future opportunities. If I didn't have help with keeping track of who those people are and following up with them on a regular basis, I'm losing those opportunities automatically just by having them fall off my radar. And this might sound familiar for you as well. So getting a VA or an assistant or somebody on your team to help own and keep track of those relationships and...

nurture them throughout the course of the year, whatever timeline kind of makes the most sense based on their situation is hugely beneficial for not letting those opportunities that you've already worked for slip through the cracks. Okay, example number two, list building. List building is another one that you can get some help with, especially if your pipeline is a little bit lower than you would like it to be right now, or maybe you are

interested in pursuing to new opportunities and you're looking for some potential contacts and connections that you can make to grow that new area of your business, having a virtual assistant help you with that list building, great place to start. I'll give you an example of this. One of our clients was interested in obtaining a list of businesses within a certain mile radius of his office currently of

firms that were owned by people who may be retiring in the next five to 10 years. And he was interested in acquiring their book of business and bringing that into his own office under their umbrella of services. So our team was able to spend some time researching this criteria for him and creating a list of people that he can begin to reach out to and establish some relationships with. Again, he's a busy person. He's...

meeting with his own clients, he's running his company, he has an office of service providers that he's working with. He doesn't necessarily have time to do this himself, or maybe it's something he intended to do himself, but it just kept being put on the back burner because there was always something more urgent, more important and more pressing that he needed to spend his time and attention on. It's great to have an extra set of hands to support you and help keep these things moving forward. Okay.

I'm going to go ahead and piggyback on this example in this story with item number three, which is outreach campaigns. So using that same client as an example, once we built a list of, I think we had about maybe like 50 people who fit this criteria, we then worked with him to design a series of touch points using a variety of communication methods in order to start.

reaching out and nurturing those relationships with ultimately the goal of having that opportunity to potentially buy out that business when that owner became ready to retire. And so our virtual assistant team, and again, for you, if that's, if you have a VA team or if you're looking for a VA team, something to keep in mind of something that they could help you with. If you have an assistant or an existing team, get some help with this.

Get some help with not only building up your pipeline, but then also making a plan for how are you going to consistently reach out to them? And also most importantly, who can help you do so again for that consistency because your plate is full, right? The title of this podcast or the name of this podcast, Make Space for More. You have a full plate and we need to look at ways that we can make space to allow in more growth.

and scalability in your business and getting help from others is definitely key to that. Okay, number four is new product or service launches. This is something that you can get help with from others in order to move these projects moving forward because you are likely spending a lot of your time on the existing business that you have.

creating the products that you have currently, servicing the customers you have currently, and you know that there are other opportunities to maybe serve these clients or bring in new clients. And again, really easy to put that on the back burner, especially when work is busy or we're taking some time to enjoy with our loved ones and our family members during key times of the year like summer, vacations, holidays, things like that.

we can get help from others to keep those new products and services moving forward in terms of a launch. So to give you an example, one of our clients owns a retail store full of healthy products for your body and for your health and for your home. And she wanted to launch a course to really educate her clients on how to best use these products in their day -to -day life to become happier and healthier people.

Now, of course, she's running a retail store and she saw this opportunity not only to bring more people into the store, educate them on how to best utilize the products and services that they offer, but then also to help her current clients and her current customer base understand what else they can help them with. And so she's running the store. She does not have time for...

doing this launch and launching this course all by herself. So this is something that she was able to outsource and keep that moving forward, which again, will ultimately the goal is to bring in additional sales through increasing the client relationship she currently has, but then also attracting new customers to her store as well. All right, number five, in terms of what you can receive help from others.

in order to consistently grow and scale your business is create marketing content. And I'm going to use myself as an example here. As I've shared in the past on this podcast, one of the first things that I personally started outsourcing even before I started actively building my team was social media content. I would get into a mode where I would block off, say, a morning to...

create social media posts and content and I would feel really proud of myself with the work that I had done. I had the graphics, I got everything scheduled out and then two months would go by because I would ultimately just get busier with other things and my social media profiles would be dormant for weeks. So we'd have consistent posts every couple days.

and then nothing for months. And that is something that I see over and over and over again with our clients who are just trying to do so many different things that social media is something that falls off. Sending email newsletters is something that falls off. Updating the website, something that just falls off. And it can be such a relief to get some help with these things and be able to continue to build that.

credibility and that trust through consistently communicating and keeping your online presence up to date. That is huge. And again, nothing that you necessarily have to do for yourself. This is something that you can leverage a virtual assistant or an executive assistant or other team members that you may have to help you do this so that we don't have dormant accounts or we don't have a dormant list that hasn't heard from you in six months.

and then you're suddenly emailing them every week, we want that consistency to ultimately build trust and credibility over time to again increase that sales and growth over time. All right, the last thing that I recommend looking at getting help with in order to avoid the feast and famine cycle in your business is email funnels and campaigns. These can be really good opportunities.

to encourage clients to proactively work with you throughout the year. And I'm gonna give you an example of a client that we are currently working on a project with. We are creating a series of emails in order to encourage some of his existing clients, but also potential clients to proactively work with his company throughout the year. So one of these touch points is to give you an example, holiday gifting, right? I realized that I'm recording this in the summer.

You may be listening to this in a different time of the year, but I think what happens to a lot of us who do client gift giving and corporate gift giving at the end of each year is all of a sudden, we have summer and then fall rolls around and then it's Halloween and pretty soon we're like, yeah, we need to send holiday gifts out to our clients. And then there's just this frenzy of, who are we sending to? How much do we need? What are our ideas? How much is this going to cost?

wait a minute, I haven't been setting aside funds for that. There's just all these things where this stuff just sneaks up on us because we again have 110 other irons in the fire at any given point in time. So our client is looking to help them by creating these touch points throughout the year. Like, hey, now is a great time if you're planning on sending out corporate gifts this year, now is a great time to block some time to...

talk with your team, bought some time on your calendar to talk with your team and establish a budget and a list for who we want to be giving gifts to this year. And then he has another follow -up touch point of now is a great time to start shopping for ideas. What do we want to be sending to our clients this year? And that sort of thing. And then that way he is serving his audience by helping them to adequately prepare so that they're not stressed out.

at the end of a year and trying to get these things sent out at the last minute before everybody goes home for a holiday break or trying to beat that holiday rush of shipping gifts and all of that. He is serving them and also encouraging more people to ultimately choose his company to do business with. And that's something that I'm really excited about, something that we work with a variety of clients on, just serving the audience well.

but then also building that trust and that credibility in order to ultimately encourage them to do business with them. And that is something that you do not have to do on your own. That is something that you can get some support on. So all of that being said, if you have a business bestie or someone in your network who has a goal of increasing their sales this year, please consider sharing this episode with them. They just might get an idea for how they can get some help.

with making this happen. They don't have to go it alone. Maybe there's one thing in this episode where they're like, yes, that has been sitting on my back burner. I am ready to get some help from somebody, whether it be a virtual assistant or maybe somebody on my team to help me move this forward. And again, keep my pipeline full so that no matter what's going on in my business, I'm still actively growing and scaling and reaching the sales goal that I've set for the company this year. So.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope that this was helpful for you to get some ideas as to how you can get some help with ultimately increasing your sales and avoiding that feast and famine cycle when life gets busy, exciting times are happening, vacations happen, and you're able to, again, maintain that consistency and so that you're not on that roller coaster of we have great months and we have really crappy months in our business. So...

Thank you so much for your time today. I encourage you to follow and subscribe for future episodes to learn more about how you can grow and scale your business beyond you. Have a wonderful day and we'll talk to you in the next episode. Bye -bye.