A Period When Work Dries Up Is Part of the Shape of the Business, Not a Failure
Work for the self-employed has periods when requests continue and periods when they stop completely. When work dries up, the first thing that arises is doubt about your own skill and your way of selling. However, waves in orders often occur through factors you cannot move yourself, such as the seasonality of an industry or a client's circumstances. What is needed here is the judgment to decide in advance how to use a dry period, on the premise that there are waves.
If how to use the time is not decided, the open time fills with anxiety. If, while anxious, you accept work on bad conditions, the strain continues even at the time of the next wave. How to spend a dry period is a part of the business's arrangements just as important as the busy periods.
Hold the Moon's Cycle as a Measure for the Length of a Dry Spell
The Moon completes one cycle of its phases in about 29.5 days. When work dries up, this cycle of roughly one month becomes the first measure for gauging the situation. If the dry spell is within one cycle, it is often within the range of a seasonal wave or a client's timing, and is not necessarily a stage for hurriedly changing your policy.
If there is still no movement after cycles are layered, change what you are measuring. Is it that inquiries themselves have decreased, that there are consultations but they do not lead to contracts, or that orders from existing clients have stopped? By dividing the content of the dry spell and viewing it separately, the measures you take also change. The cycles of the stars are used as a guide for deciding the interval of that review. This is not a matter of being right or wrong.
Divide the Use of Open Time into Three, and Decide
The time of a dry period works well in a form that uses it broadly divided into three. The first is preparation for resuming: work for starting the next job quickly, such as maintaining tools and equipment, organizing the work place, and reviewing your estimate templates. The second is maintaining connections: work that keeps points of contact within a range that does not become a sales pitch, such as reporting recent news to clients and greeting past customers. The third is resting.
Do not mix these three; decide the allocation for each cycle. For example, for someone who takes on garden tree care alone, one form can be considered: in a cycle with few requests, maintain the pruning tools and send seasonal greetings to past customers, and assign the remainder to rest. A day when you do nothing is also part of the arrangements, if it is a day you decided to rest.
Draw the Line in Advance for Judgments to Accept Work at Lower Conditions
If a dry spell drags on, the feeling of wanting to accept work even at a lower rate or on lower conditions grows stronger. That judgment itself is not always bad, but if there is no line to how you lower them, conditions lowered once become the next standard. While you are in a busy period, deciding the range in which you may lower conditions, and the line you will not lower, protects you during a dry period.
Concretely, there are methods of accepting work in a form that can be returned to what it was, such as making it a condition limited to a period, or making it a condition with a narrowed scope of work. If you are unsure about a judgment, a reliable form is to think by what your own time and physical strength will be like after accepting that work. A star reading does not become material for deciding conditions.
A Record of Dry Spells Becomes Preparation for the Next Wave
Recording how you spent a dry period is also one form of preparation. Briefly leave when work dried up, what you did during that time, and what became the trigger for work returning. As records accumulate, the shape of the waves of your own business comes into view. If work dries up at the same period every year, you can put that period into your plan from the start as a period for rest or preparation.
A horoscope is something to use as the turning point for this record. If you have the habit of writing down the situation each cycle of about 29.5 days, you can view a dry spell by documents rather than by emotion. If you have documents, judgments made in impatience also decrease.
Review, on Top of the Wave, What You Decided at the Bottom of the Wave
In a dry period, you may come to want to change the way of doing the business itself. That feeling itself is natural, but a safe form is to review a large change of policy once more in the period when work begins to return. Judgments in a bottom period tend to lean toward anxiety.
What this article recommends is not a method for eliminating dry spells, but having arrangements that do not collapse even when work dries up. Turn the three of preparation, maintaining connections, and rest for each cycle, and leave records. That accumulation becomes the power to continue a solo business for a long time. Please use the cycles of the stars as a guide for keeping that rotation going.
In a dry period, the state of other people in the same trade also tends to weigh on your mind. However, there is no need to judge your own situation only by the busyness visible on the surface. If the shape of the business differs, the shape of the waves also differs. View where you are now within your own waves, using your own records as the standard. The habit of judging by records rather than comparison steadies your feelings in a dry period, and leads to keeping your concentration for the next work.