I find that summer is a funny time of the year in the business world, I’ve been doing it long enough now to identify “trends in trade.” Christmas is always a deadline, (a trend I’ve spoken about in previous blogs https://jfw-cabinet.com/furniture-deadlines-and-time-off-christmas-time-at-john-f-white-ltd-cabinetmakers/ ) and Summer is pretty much always crazy!
School holidays are probably to blame, not just because we produce education furniture, but because a large proportion of the population take family holidays during this time… So I usually see a large influx of panicked correspondence in July which could be anything from enquiries to orders. I know why, all the decision makers are trying to complete as much of there to do list as possible before they set the out of office reply message. “Not my problem now I’m on holiday” Can’t blame them either, you want to go on holiday and relax and forget about it all!
BUT, we are lucky to have a large customer base, so everyone is doing that all at one time and I am bombarded! I find this overwhelming as my brain can’t seem to allocate the various tasks into urgent, not so urgent and can wait categories, it just puts everything into the MUST BE DONE RIGHT THIS SECOND OTHERWHISE YOU’RE A FAILURE category. Anyway, once this influx of correspondence has been dealt with (with the help of coffee in the day and beer at night) I have a brief window of calm. Then the world comes back! The decision makers return from their holiday refreshed, revitalised and raring to go. I imagine they’ve finally had time to read ‘7 habits of highly effective people’, ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad, ‘Atomic Habits’ or one of the many million motivating self help business books out there… So they’re PUMPED!! And little old me is burnt out! I just want to go on holiday and read the ‘four hour work week’ or ‘Free Time’ anything to help me work less and be free of the rat race!!
I digress… They’re BACK! Revved up and taking no prisoners. There’s orders and deadlines to boot. Kids are back at school in September so the work has to be done by then, also certain commercial clients have quiet spells during the holidays so we have a similar pressure there… Simply we’ve got to get it all in before the world gets busy again in autumn. So it’s all hands on deck!!
Then all hands put in holiday requests….. Summer is holiday time is it not? I am a huge believer, as you will have gathered, in holidays! We need them, we all need to rest more to do our best work, so I never, or very very rarely deny a holiday request, we always make it work, sometimes it’s a struggle but the team always steps up! They’re a brilliant bunch!
Another challenge is suppliers, there staff are on holiday so there are longer lead times on materials, longer delivery times because every local council digs their roads up in the summer while the kids are off… It’s just one big challenge!
This blog seems to have turned into a bit of a rant, apologies, I didn’t mean it to, please don’t think me ungrateful, I really appreciate all the work, but, I’d love it even more if this sort of thing would happen in November, February, March and April…. Then we could enjoy the summer weather a bit more.
Anyway, got to go!! BUSY!!
Have a great weekend all!
Adam
