How to Protect Against Seasonal Fluctuations in Your Small Business

Running a small business is hard enough without throwing seasonal fluctuations in cash flow into the mix as well. While some may believe that seasonal changes only affect businesses such as Christmas ornament retailers or swimwear shops, the reality is that every small business owner will experience a dip or sudden rise in sales at some point throughout the year.

Whether it’s going without an income for months, or experiencing a sharp influx of sales to the point where you run out of inventory, seasonal fluctuations can cause many overwhelming problems for business owners. Today, we're going to tell you the best ways that you can prepare your company for those unexpected highs and lows.

Have a Clear Plan

Do you already have a business plan in place? While this should cover topics such as your target market, product research, and more, it’s also vital that you think about what would happen in the case of fluctuations, including both an influx or reduction in sales. Study your industry well in order to predict shortfalls or opportunities and prepare for them accordingly.

Track Your Progress

If you’re not keeping on top of sales, market changes, and customer enquiries from the get-go, then fluctuations in cash flow will take you by surprise, meaning that you’ll be ill-prepared to deal with them. When it comes to making informed decisions in your business, this data is key - not gut feelings or hunches.

Make Your Business Scalable

No one wants to throw money away on resources they won’t use, so the trick is to be able to scale your resources up and down as needed. Demand and your need for resources go hand-in-hand, so don’t over-commit. For example, if you only need additional assistance for 3 months during the year, don’t commit to a year-long contract with a member of staff.

Diversification is the Key

By diversifying your products or services, you can better protect your small business from the harmful effects of seasonal fluctuations. You could diversify where you sell (geographic diversification), what you sell (product diversification) or who you sell to (customer diversification). 

While this might sound like a lot of hard work, it could be as simple as selling your winter stock during the summer months online to those living in the Northern Hemisphere.

Be Realistic

It’s important to be realistic about your expectations (rather than setting them too high), particularly during the beginning stages of your business. After all, no one wants to stretch their business, nor should they suffer from the dreaded ‘business owner burnout’. 

If, at the end of the day, you’ve sold your stock and met your budget, then this is a far better situation to be in than one where you’ve got tonnes of excess stock and are unable to pay your employee wages.

Avoid Ignorance

If you do experience seasonal fluctuations, it’s vital that you take action immediately to counteract its harmful effects. Start by seeking the advice of a business professional and then begin working on a solution. 

Can you offer a special promotion during a slow period or stock up on items which are the most popular? These are just some of the questions you will have to navigate as you work to protect your business against seasonal ebbs and flows.

Through taking on this advice, you’ll soon have a small business that isn’t just scalable, but also effectively protected against seasonal fluctuations. Onwards and upwards!

Author bio: Melanie Doncas is a content writer for Lumi, an Australian fintech specialising in unsecured business loans. She is passionate about helping SMEs, entrepreneurs, and startups to grow their business.

How to Protect Against Seasonal Fluctuations in Your Small Business

Running a small business is hard enough without throwing seasonal fluctuations in cash flow into the mix as well. While some may believe that seasonal changes only affect businesses such as Christmas ornament retailers or swimwear shops, the reality is that every small business owner will experience a dip or sudden rise in sales at some point throughout the year.

Whether it’s going without an income for months, or experiencing a sharp influx of sales to the point where you run out of inventory, seasonal fluctuations can cause many overwhelming problems for business owners. Today, we're going to tell you the best ways that you can prepare your company for those unexpected highs and lows.

Have a Clear Plan

Do you already have a business plan in place? While this should cover topics such as your target market, product research, and more, it’s also vital that you think about what would happen in the case of fluctuations, including both an influx or reduction in sales. Study your industry well in order to predict shortfalls or opportunities and prepare for them accordingly.

Track Your Progress

If you’re not keeping on top of sales, market changes, and customer enquiries from the get-go, then fluctuations in cash flow will take you by surprise, meaning that you’ll be ill-prepared to deal with them. When it comes to making informed decisions in your business, this data is key - not gut feelings or hunches.

Make Your Business Scalable

No one wants to throw money away on resources they won’t use, so the trick is to be able to scale your resources up and down as needed. Demand and your need for resources go hand-in-hand, so don’t over-commit. For example, if you only need additional assistance for 3 months during the year, don’t commit to a year-long contract with a member of staff.

Diversification is the Key

By diversifying your products or services, you can better protect your small business from the harmful effects of seasonal fluctuations. You could diversify where you sell (geographic diversification), what you sell (product diversification) or who you sell to (customer diversification). 

While this might sound like a lot of hard work, it could be as simple as selling your winter stock during the summer months online to those living in the Northern Hemisphere.

Be Realistic

It’s important to be realistic about your expectations (rather than setting them too high), particularly during the beginning stages of your business. After all, no one wants to stretch their business, nor should they suffer from the dreaded ‘business owner burnout’. 

If, at the end of the day, you’ve sold your stock and met your budget, then this is a far better situation to be in than one where you’ve got tonnes of excess stock and are unable to pay your employee wages.

Avoid Ignorance

If you do experience seasonal fluctuations, it’s vital that you take action immediately to counteract its harmful effects. Start by seeking the advice of a business professional and then begin working on a solution. 

Can you offer a special promotion during a slow period or stock up on items which are the most popular? These are just some of the questions you will have to navigate as you work to protect your business against seasonal ebbs and flows.

Through taking on this advice, you’ll soon have a small business that isn’t just scalable, but also effectively protected against seasonal fluctuations. Onwards and upwards!

Author bio: Melanie Doncas is a content writer for Lumi, an Australian fintech specialising in unsecured business loans. She is passionate about helping SMEs, entrepreneurs, and startups to grow their business.

How Your Business Wastes Money When Everything Is Done In-House

Outsourcing specific tasks, operations or processes to a third-party provider seemingly wastes money unnecessarily. Because of this assumption, many companies keep all aspects of their operations in-house in an effort to conserve financial resources. However, a closer look reveals that this may not actually be the case. Your company may save money in various ways by carefully selecting aspects of your operations to outsource to specialists.

The Efficiency of Skilled Experts

Experts and specialists have considerable training and education in complex concepts, tasks and more. Their expertise may enable faster and more effective completion of related tasks than what you may accomplish on your own. 

For example, a tax accountant may be able to prepare your business tax return much faster than you could do. In the process, a professional accountant may identify more opportunities for tax savings. This is only one of many service providers that may provide savings and quality in through their efforts. 




Another example could be a contract manufacturing company that can take some of the stress out of your supply chain customer relationship management or even handle it for you.

7 Tips for Making Your Small Business More Successful

Any business owner will likely tell you that being an entrepreneur isn’t easy. Most successful entrepreneurs have their fair share of stories of how the whole world seemed to be conspiring against them during their company’s early days. 

Most can also describe in detail the seemingly endless amount of setbacks they encountered on the road to success and what it took to overcome them. And most, when asked, “What’s your secret to success?” will echo the words of United States Army General Colin Powell, “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”

If you own or are trying to start a small business, you probably have a good idea of how difficult it can be, but you also probably know that if you play your cards just right, your small business can take off and become successful. Sure, being an entrepreneur can be hard, but that’s not all it can be. 

It can be fun, exciting, engaging, rewarding, and adventurous, among many other pleasant things. If you own or are trying to start a small business and are feeling like the whole world is out to get you and are wondering what you can do to change that, here are 7 tips for making your small business more successful.

Step 1: Find a Mentor

If you don’t have one already, the first step you should take to get your small business going in the right direction is to find a mentor. There are plenty of successful business owners out there who would be willing to sit down with you and give you advice, or agree to mentor you and walk you through how to improve your business. 

A lot of good resources can be found online, and online mentors can be just as effective as in-person ones. Having a mentor is invaluable, so if you don’t already have one, that’s a great place to start.

Step 2: Get Some Feedback

When you’re looking for feedback, focus on two groups of people:

Your employees. They know better than anybody about what can be changed internally that would make a positive impact on the company.Your customers. They are the ones engaging with your product or service, and it is them whom you are trying to serve. Your customers can give you feedback on what they do and don’t like about your product or service, including pricing, functionality, usefulness, and more. 

Step 3: Observe the Professionals

Take a look at a few companies that are similar to yours and have done well. Make notes of what they do and don’t do that you like and don’t like. Pay attention to the differences between how they operate and how you do. This can give you valuable insights into the changes you need to make for your business to be more successful.

Step 4: Set Some Goals

Once you have talked to a mentor, gotten feedback from your employees and customers, and observed similar businesses that have done well, you should have a great list of what you could do to increase your chances of success. 

This is when it is important to take some time to set some goals that you want to work toward. Which aspects do you want to improve first? Where do you want your company to be in one year? Five years? Ten years? These goals will help keep you motivated and focused.

Step 5: Change Your Business

After you have set your goals, use the feedback you received to make the necessary changes to your business. Remember that what you were doing in the past is what got you to where you are now and that in order to get to where you want to go, you’ll need to try something different. Take the changes one at a time and things will improve before you know it.

Step 6: Improve Your Marketing

Marketing is fundamental to every business and can always be improved. Evaluate how effective your marketing is, then take steps to change it for the better. Focus on:

• Reaching your target market
• Defining your brand
• Taking advantage of social media
• Encouraging word of mouth marketing

Step 7: Realize that Failure Isn’t Final

If worse comes to worst and you decide to throw in the towel, realize that none of your efforts were wasted and that failure isn’t final. Realize that you have gained indispensable experience and knowledge that will help you in your daily life and with any future businesses you start or work for. 

Even skills like learning how to file bankruptcy as a small business owner are good things to know, so never count yourself out or think of yourself as a failure.

5 Financial Situations You Need to Be Prepared for after Retirement

One of the most important responsibilities that people have is planning financially for retirement. While people can spend decades saving and preparing for retirement, there are five financial situations in retirement that need to be factored in to any retirement preparation plan.

Medical Expenses

The first financial situation that can affect retired people are underestimated medical expenses. Retired individuals could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars during their retirement years on medications and unplanned medical procedures. As the cost of health insurance has continued to rise, and people are beginning to live a lot longer, this cost is likely to only increase considerably in the future.

Declining Home Value

A cost that affects a lot of retired individuals today is declining housing values. Many retirees have a long term plan that includes selling their home, downsizing, and living off the equity that they built over time. However, with housing prices declining all over the country, this may not longer be a reasonable plan. Retirees need to avoid relying on this equity for financial support as it could disappear at any time.

Lack of Social Security

Historically, Social Security payments were enough to provide most retirees with enough money to survive financially. Over the next few decades, the amount of retirees will continue to grow, and the amount of workers will not be available to support them all. This will lead to declining benefits.

Death of a Spouse

The fourth financial situation that you need to be prepared for is the death of your spouse. As emotionally straining as losing a spouse can be, it can also be financially challenging. The cost of a funeral can easily exceed $10,000 and those that lose their spouse could lose social security income as well as pension income, depending on the pension plan. Because of this, all people need to factor this in when preparing for retirement. In the case of a wrongful death due to medical malpractice or another issue, filing a lawsuit may be a good option. When hiring a wrongful death attorney in Sacramento residents will be guided through the legal process.

Support for Children

One of the most frequently underestimated expenses in retirement is the cost of still having to financially support children and grandchildren. Due to tougher job markets and rising costs of education, many grown children have to continue to live at home and accept financial support from their parents, even after the parents have moved on into retirement.