By Justin Blanchard
Summer is traditionally a period during which businesses run almost on autopilot. Employees and customers often take vacations. If the business has decently designed processes, it will continue to run smoothly throughout the summer, but without much leading towards iteration and innovation.
But it doesn't have to be that way. I'm a big believer in the power of vacations and downtime: after all, a rested employee is a happy and productive employee. The fallow summer months present numerous opportunities to take a hard look at business processes and make plans for productivity, efficiency and infrastructure enhancements. Here's how:
Ensure Business Continuity Over the Summer
If you spend the summer compensating for missing employees, there won't be any time leftover for reflection. Working in the infrastructure hosting space, I have a simple strategy to make sure that my businesses can run with a skeleton crew.
The first step towards achieving this is by implementing automation. This works best for repeatable processes like email drip campaigns for lead nurturing or infrastructure deployment.
Second, no employee should be absolutely irreplaceable. I implement "shadow employee" programs where every position has at least a couple of employees who can take over basic duties. Shadows won't work in their role during peak productivity, but they'll keep things running. When an employee is about to go on vacation, they spend time getting their shadows up-to-date with their current workload.
Work On New Products And Marketing Strategies
I like to spend the quieter summer months challenging the assumptions I have about the way my business runs, comparing those assumptions to data and developing new strategies.
Often, I'll test those strategies with pilot programs or A/B testing. For example, last year it struck me that our marketing approach was making certain assumptions about the technical knowledge of our customers. I decided to tweak our content marketing strategy to target C-suite executives, who aren't CIOs or technical experts, with white papers that explained the benefits of our platform in simpler, more conceptual language. It was a success, and we've since broadened our approach to content marketing.
Upgrade Your Technology
Summer is a great time to upgrade your technology. My business depends on providing our customers access to cutting-edge server and network technology. Upgrading the underlying hardware and software of our platform during busy periods like the holiday season is all but impossible, but summer affords us the slack we need to deploy and test new infrastructure.
Don't Forget That You Need Time Off, Too
Entrepreneurs and founders tend to forget that they need downtime too. They're driven people who are often obsessed with their business. But it's a mistake to think that even the most driven founder can work at full-tilt for months on end while innovating and maintaining maximum productivity. That's a recipe for burnout and poor performance. Do yourself and your business a favor by taking at least a few days away from the business for rest and relaxation. You'll return reinvigorated and ready to face the next set of challenges.
Justin Blanchard is CMO and co-owner of ServerMania Inc., a web host providing customers with cutting-edge technology, backed by superior customer service at a price businesses can afford.