Summer Slump? Here’s Your 3-Step Strategy to Stay Ahead

Giving yourself permission to work less. And that's really challenging. Generally speaking, as entrepreneurs, we're very ambitious. We have a lot of goals. We are really good at, you know, pushing ourselves and throwing ourselves fully into something. But it's so important to take that time and take that space and use that energy towards something that is like healing therapeutic. Relaxing for yourself. Recently, I took up paddleboarding, which I'm so excited about, I absolutely love it. And I need to get out home or like what was the point of buying the paddleboard if it's just going to sit in my garage all year, and I'm not going to get to use it right. So giving myself permission to work less is almost like sometimes I have to trick my brain and do things like write that on my list. Like this week, I would like to go golfing with my dad in the daytime while my kids are at camp and not feel guilty about it. So if I put it on a to do list, that's one way of making myself give myself permission to do it.

This is The Entrepreneur School Podcast where we believe you can run a thriving business and still make your family a priority. This show is all about supporting you the emerging or early stage Entrepreneur on your journey from solopreneur to CEO while wearing all of the other hats in your life. My name is Kelly Sinclair and I'm a brand and marketing strategist who started a business with two kids under 3am, a corporate PR girl turned entrepreneur after I learned the hard way that life is too short to waste doing things that burn you out. On this show, you'll hear inspiring stories from other business owners on their journey, and learn strategies to help you grow a profitable business while making it all fit into the life that you want. Welcome to Entrepreneur School.

Hello, welcome back, I wanted to let you know that you are catching this episode being recorded in real time, I often do some batching and get ahead of myself in a nice perfect world where I have a lot of content ready to go. But I wanted to make sure that on occasion, I'm creating some episodes that are really what I like to call entrepreneurship in real life. So these episodes are a little bit like behind the scenes, what's going on with me things I'm thinking about things I want to share with you that may have some personal in, maybe a little more personal in nature and business and how it can apply to you. Because let's be honest, we have to deal with all of those things as we are navigating this thing called business and especially right now because it is summertime. And I don't know about you. But in the summer, I don't feel as motivated to work at all. So I want to talk about some important reminders, three top reminders that will help you keep your business running in the summer. So that when you get to September, you're ahead of the game and not feeling like you're playing catch up not like when you take time off of work. And you come back in and you have all these unread emails and you're like, What do I even start. So just so that you can continue rolling through this time of the year. These are three things that I want to share with you. So number one is to be flexible with your schedule. Now you may already be really great at this. And if you are please reach out to me and give me some tips. But I have always struggled with figuring out my work schedule with children. And what I know for sure is that it is something that changes every season, every season of sports or school or summer or winter, or like whatever kind of season that it is. And so acknowledging that is the first important thing. And for me this year, I decided to do an experiment. And I think it was a bit of a fail. But I didn't put my kids in camp all summer like I put them in some camps but not the entire summer. Normally, I would make sure that they had childcare every single day so that I could work every single day. And this year, I just thought I don't want to. I don't necessarily want to work every day. And I think my kids are older now. They're eight and 10. We just celebrated my little ones eighth birthday last week. And I figure you know, they're fairly self sustaining. They can get their own snacks, and I can work part days so that was my idea. I'm going to just work in the morning and then in the afternoon where they're going to do something fun or get groceries or whatever it is with the kids. But I will just have shorter days of work. It was really challenging, I did not love the times when the kids were not at camp. So for a couple of weeks in July, they weren't at camp. I just they were always in and out and and they ended up having like neighbors and a bunch of other friends over. And there's always like so many kids in my house, and I was trying to work in and just was not great. So I'm pretty excited that they have camps coming up. And I know that they are like scheduled childcare for the rest of August. And that feels good. So that I can kind of sit down and crank out a few more things that I want to get done. Because what I find is like depending on what kind of work you have, if you have to use your brain and be strategic and be trying to sort of think through big things, you need to not have that interrupted, particularly, which can be challenging if your kids are at home. So I'm looking forward to having some of that time to record some more podcast episodes, do some of my own internal revamping, which I'm working on, which I told you about before, my heartbeat is summer, which is upgrading all of my offers, and new things are coming out starting in September. And I'm really excited about it. And I just need to have some time to spend doing it. So this whole idea of being flexible, I think it applies all year long. But for me even more so in the summertime, so not having that, like, I think the feeling is if you you feel like you're not working as much as you think you should, or you wanted to that's the problem. If you give yourself some grace and flexibility, it becomes a little bit more easy to manage, which sort of takes me into my second point, which is the actual need to take time to recoup. Now, we did a bunch of vacations already this year, like I've been to Hawaii and Phoenix and Palm Springs, and I'm certainly not short on vacation, I like vacation. I think it's important. I prioritize trying to get six weeks of vacation a year as an entrepreneur because I don't have a boss telling me when I can and can't work, which is amazing. And right now, I'm mostly frustrated that my husband does, which means that I either need to go places by myself or with my kids by myself or you know, suck it up. But ultimately, this whole idea is that giving yourself permission to work less. And that's really challenging. Generally speaking, as entrepreneurs, we're very ambitious, we have a lot of goals, we are really good at, you know, pushing ourselves and throwing ourselves fully into something. But it's so important to take that time and take that space and use that energy towards something that is like healing therapeutic. Relaxing for yourself. Recently, I took up paddleboarding, which I'm so excited about I absolutely love it. And I need to get out more like what was the point of buying the paddleboard if it's just gonna sit in my garage all year, and I'm not gonna get to use it right. So giving myself permission to work less is almost like, sometimes I have to trick my brain and do things like write that on my list, like this week, I would like to go golfing with my dad in the daytime while my kids are at camp and not feel guilty about it. So if I put it on a to do list, that's one way of making myself give myself permission to do it. So as we know, your business has different seasons that coincide with sort of what your product or service are. Sometimes what the market is doing summer tends to be a slower time in most industries. So using this time to really get yourself fully, you know, re energized so that you can like put your foot down for the last quarter of the year is always a really great idea. So you have that energy to take into September that whole. Like there's that whole it's September is like a January. And there's no studies that show this. People have that same sort of renewed energy in September with the whole back to school feeling the whole idea of like, let's finish crushing our goals by the end of the year, which is really great. So it's a really great time in the summer to do some of that behind the scenes work, which is why I'm sharing that I'm doing it with my own business. And I've offered the opportunity to some clients. And if you're still interested in this, please reach out to me to work directly with me on your own hot this summer, which is the opportunity to look at your offer suite look at your marketing plan. figure out exactly who it is you are targeting so that you can double down on that in September and beyond. So that you can get those clients and really boost up your business the way that you want to and grow it the way that you want to with a really strategic focus plan. That's what we're doing inside of hop is summer as a container, which I love that I'm doing it for myself and with clients at the same time.

So September, I'm so pumped about it's also my birthday month. So I always love September anyways. So we will have new offers coming from chaos and calls your entrepreneur school. And that is something that I'm really looking forward to sharing with you. And I'm not going to spill the beans too much more right now. So the last thing that I want to share, before we wrap up this short episode is, though it's summer, and though you need to take breaks, and though you need to slow down, potentially be more flexible about what you're doing and give yourself a lot more grace about, you know, the to do list and the things that you're checking out for not checking off, I still challenge you to stay consistent in some way, shape or form. You need to not like close the book on your business and sale pick it back up in September. But like, see what you can do that would be a regular, consistent action for you. Now, there is certainly no prescription for this. I absolutely despise it when people say you need to just do 16 stories on Instagram and three posts and five reels and and spend 20 minutes engaging with people every day like but no, I don't believe that that is sustainable at all. So you need to figure out what is going to work for you. And I've been doing an experiment here where I'm doing daily, external facing actions that move the needle.

Now we've talked a lot about taking a messy action on this podcast. And that means doing things that involve somebody else. So whether you're sharing something out there putting the post on social media that puts yourself into somebody's line of sight, or whether you're connecting with somebody who could be a potential collaborator, or a potential client for you, these things are really, really important. They really do make a difference. So I'm doing this while juggling, figuring out when I'm gonna go paddleboarding, figuring out when I'm gonna go golfing and figuring out if my kids even brush their teeth today, which nine times that attend the answer's no. But I decided that no, I need to keep this up. And as we shared an episode a couple of weeks ago was our 30th episode of entrepreneur School, which is mind blowing, I can't believe we've been doing this for six months already. And I wanted to share that success. And I know I have a PR degree. So I do know that this is a relevant conversation to be having with local media. And while I have hitched media, tons and tons of times, as a consultant for my clients, I have personal relationships with a lot of the media here in Cochrane. As a result of that, I was still nervous to put my own story out there to share about my own business and just shine the spotlight on myself. So I get that feeling like we we have a hard time doing that, right. We want to be modest. We know it's not a big deal. Somebody else says it's a big deal. Go ahead. But it's hard to make yourself say that it's a big deal. But I did it. And I pitched the podcast anniversary. Two went to the local media and ended up getting radio coverage to online articles, and print it went into print paper, which even had a front page preview. My picture is literally on the front page of last week's Cocker to Eagle beside a giant picture of our local like Country Music Hall of Fame celebrity George Fox, which is super cool. So I was just blown away actually, by the coverage that I got, you know, the the article was a half page in a newspaper. And typically like as a PR person, you what I would have to do with my clients before is sort of measure the value of that, which means you measure it against the price of an advertisement of that size in that publication. So that's a big investment that I got for free. I should have looked up what that actually would equate to but it's for sure 1000s of dollars of coverage and people have reached out to me directly as a result of seeing me in the paper even if it's just you know, family friends who are like, Yeah, I saw your face your local famous so that was nice, but it just goes to show that When you put yourself out there, you can see some results. And you can see them even quickly, which is amazing. So I'm pretty proud of that.