The Summer Most Business Owners Get Wrong
It's the first week of June, and my kids, all three teenagers, are officially home. School let out at the end of May, so our calendar is suddenly wide open. And I know for a lot of small business owners, it's so easy to just write off the next two months. Summer's here, so you put your business on the back burner until fall.
After all, everybody's gone, everybody's on vacation, everybody's kids are home. I get it. This slower pace is real, and if your May was as crazy as mine was at the end of the school year, you probably do need some time off, and I want you to take time off. That's one of the beautiful things about this season, taking time off, reconnecting with your family, allowing yourself some deep rest.
Trust me, as my kids get older and older, my twins are gonna be juniors next year and my youngest is in eighth grade, I am so aware that we have just a few more summers left before they leave the nest and go off into the world. So I'm hyper-aware of that, and I want to treasure this season together while they're still at home.
But here's what I know after almost 20 years of running a small business. Summer can't just be two months in your year when you completely ignore your business. It's a season in your business, and this season still needs to be designed intentionally. It still has a job to do.
So while everyone else is coasting on vibes, checking out, doing the absolute bare minimum, I'm here to tell you that I both enjoy my summers, take a lot of time with my family and for vacation, and this is a season when I do some of the most strategic work I do all year. This has been my season of strategy and systems for well over two decades.
I'm recording this in June, and I've already planned out most of 2027. This isn't me being intense. This isn't me suddenly converting to hustle culture, you would never hear that from me. This is me refusing to scramble in the fall. The chaos a lot of people feel in September, it's not a fall problem. It's a summer problem.
That is what I want to dial into today. This whole episode is about how to set your fall up for success intentionally while still being able to enjoy your summer months.
A Quick Word Before We Dig In
Are you ready to grow from solopreneur to CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host, Racheal Cook, and I've spent the last decade helping women entrepreneurs start and scale service-based businesses. If you're serious about building a sustainable business, it's time to put the strategy, systems, and support in place to make it happen. Join me each week for candid conversations about stepping into your role as CEO, hard lessons learned along the way, and practical, profitable strategies to grow a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout.
Hey there, CEO, Racheal Cook here, founder of The CEO Collective and host of the Promote Yourself to CEO podcast. It is summer mode here. My kids are out of school, and if you've been listening to the last few episodes, you know that I take summer just as seriously as I take the rest of the year.
We kicked off this season of content talking about doing a Mid-Year Review. If you didn't listen to that episode and grab the workbook, I highly recommend it, because this is about the time when goals start to become a distant memory. If you don't have these built-in feedback loops in your business, in your operating system, then you have to force yourself to press pause and reevaluate. Where are you? Are you on track? Are you off track? What do you want the second half of the year to look like?
Then I shared a follow-up talking about my habit, the notes to future me, and how I use these to look at my calendar and protect my capacity. I leave notes for myself when there's something going on so I'm not overcommitting on my calendar, so I'm truly taking the time off I need, so that if there's something busy in my personal life, I'm intentionally making sure my work week is a little lighter and I can balance it all.
Batch Recording and Designing Each Season
Well, we're continuing the conversation, because it is currently June. I am sitting here batch recording the rest of my content for June and July and August. I like to batch record at least two or three months in advance as much as I possibly can, and it's all because I like to be very intentional about how I approach each season in my business.
Summer is a slower season for a lot of us, but what I tend to see is businesses go from summer's a slower season to summer is a just-stop season, and that I truly feel is one of the worst things you can do. I get it, the all-or-nothing brain kicks in. It's easy when your clients are already saying, "I'm gonna be out of office, I'm gonna be on vacation, I don't have time to come meet with you or work on whatever we're working on together." Maybe your demand is dipping a bit. Maybe your inbox quiets down.
It's easy to get stuck in that all-or-nothing trap of, everybody's on vacation, there's no point, I might as well take the entire season off. I'm not arguing with rest. Take rest. Take real time off. I always take at least two weeks off every single summer to enjoy my family.
But I don't want you to go into all-or-nothing thinking where you disappear completely, because the version of you who disappears this summer is the same version of you who's scrambling in the fall, who let your marketing completely dry up, which means you don't have any potential clients ready and eager and waiting to work with you in the fall. That's the version of you that's still in the feast or famine cycle, and we need to stop that.
Slower Is Not the Same as Stopped
So we want to let go of the all-or-nothing thinking, and we want to think a little more strategically, a little more intentionally. The reason summer feels slow is actually the same reason it's useful. It's useful because when things are slower, you finally have time to work on your business, not just in it.
This is why I started this episode saying this is some of the most strategic time of my year. This is where I can really put on my CEO hat and look at the big picture, do some big-picture planning and strategy, and tackle some things I know are going to set me up for success long term.
So slower seasons are not the same as stalled out. Slower seasons are not the same as stopping everything. Don't check out just because your clients did. I want you to leverage this slower season.
Your Business Has Seasons, and So Do Your Clients
The thing we all have to remember is that your business has seasons, and so do your clients. The more you understand this, the easier it's going to be to ebb and flow with those seasons.
Almost nobody understands this in their first few years of business. It's easy, if you've never gone through it, to still be in that employee mindset where every day is the same, every month is the same, every quarter is the same. That's typical if you're getting a paycheck that doesn't change at all throughout the year. But if you're an entrepreneur and a small business owner, you are so much closer to the actual rhythms of seasonality.
So you can't plan as if every month is identical, the same demand, the same client volume, the same energy all 12 months of the year. That is magical thinking. That is wishful thinking. You want to understand what the seasons look like in your business.
In my business, I know that Q4 and Q1 are my biggest seasons. Q4 is October, November, December, and I'd almost loop September in there too. September, October, and November really are the biggest parts of my year, because for my audience, my community of women entrepreneurs, that's when their kids are back in school, fall is kicking in, everybody's got their new-school-year vibes. Even if you've been out of school for 25 years, you still feel like, okay, now it's time to lock in and finish the year strong.
Same with Q1. January, new year, new vibes, new goals. January and February especially are big seasons where my clients are actively looking for the type of support I provide. So I plan those in advance to be growth seasons. I plan to be selling during those seasons, I plan to be growing my business during those seasons, and I'm paying a lot of attention to what my ideal clients are doing and thinking.
But other seasons are quieter. Q2 gets a little quieter. April, May, and June tend to be a season where some of the new-year energy and excitement has come down a little. Reality has set in, and this is where I can be more of that practical voice. Here's what we've gotta keep doing, here are the habits we've gotta embrace, here are the rhythms we've gotta put in place, here are the operations we need to make sure are in place. That's usually where my Q2 is, how do I keep everybody moving forward.
Q3 has a different job. Q3's job is to build capacity now for the demand I know is coming. We've been spending so much time talking about capacity here on Promote Yourself to CEO, and the thing is, if you want your business to grow, you have to build the capacity in advance. You can't wait until the demand shows up and then try to build the capacity. That leads to scrambling. If you don't have the infrastructure to onboard those clients and take great care of them, you're going to find yourself overwhelmed, head barely above water, working all the time just trying to keep up. So now is the time I'm building capacity for the demand I know is coming once the calendar hits September.
Reading Your Clients' Calendar Like Target
So you want to know not just your seasons, but your clients' seasons too. You need to know where their attention is right now. This is something a lot of us don't pay attention to until you've been in business a little longer.
I often think about a retail calendar, or even a magazine editorial calendar. You'll see common themes throughout the year, and they tell you a lot about what people are focused on. Let's talk about Target. If you go into a Target right now, what are they starting to put out for sale? Right now they still have all their summer stuff out, they're still in summer mode. We were just hunting down all the deals for our yard to get ready for summer, getting all the mulch and soil and plants. So we're just coming out of the season of people preparing for summer.
In about a month, Target is going to be thinking ahead to back to school. And once we get past that, they'll start thinking ahead to the holiday season, starting with Halloween. So why don't we think this way about our small businesses? We need to start anticipating what our clients are going to be focused on, and that helps us meet them where their attention actually is, not where we wish it was.
If you can't answer this for yourself, you might find yourself frustrated that you're doing a big promotion this summer, maybe a launch, maybe selling something new, and then wondering why it's flat, why you're not getting the results. It might be because your people have loaded up the minivan and they're on the way to the beach, packed with bathing suits and boogie boards and the dog. They're not thinking about your offer. So you have to think a few steps ahead of your ideal clients so your business can align with what your clients actually need.
Where Every Summer Plan Starts
So every summer plan kind of starts in the same place. First, the Mid-Year Review. We don't start with any new big anything. We press pause and we check in. We did a whole episode on it, and the workbook is in the show notes. This is where you look at your real numbers to date, and then you look forward through the next six months. We think about what worked versus what just felt busy.
Then we look at our calendar for the next six months and use the notes to future me strategy to block out the things that are important to you. Block out the trips, block out vacations, block out when you have to pick up your kids from summer camp. Block out the weeks where there's a lot going on in your personal life and you know you don't want to put too much on your calendar that week.
I highly recommend looking at your kids' school calendar if you have kids, and right before school starts back, leave yourself a note from future me saying, don't do anything this weekend other than get the kids ready for school. I find that the further ahead I plan it out, the less I have to scramble when the busy season hits.
I'm building the capacity and I'm able to build in a lot more buffer. So every hour I'm planning right now is an hour I'm not spending panicking in October when I'm trying to get so much stuff done, plus help my kids study for the SATs or do another college tour. I'm recording this at the beginning of June, and I'm already in my planning season for next year, looking at what I want 2027 to look like. Again, I'm building the capacity and the infrastructure for the business I want before the season hits.
When the Plan Starts to Feel Like Too Much
I know that's a lot. We're not done. If the review and the plan and the project list are starting to feel like, oh god, Rache, this just makes me feel overwhelmed, a pile of work in a season I really need to be slower, I want you to know I hear you. Breathe.
Doing this all from scratch, alone, in between picking your kids up and dropping them off, is a lot. This is why I have the On-Demand CEO Retreat. If you've gone through the Mid-Year Review, the next step is to create your 90-day plan on your own schedule, around your summer instead of on top of it.
It's also bundled with the Client Growth Engine, the first system we implement into every single business we work with inside The CEO Collective. This is the last time the On-Demand CEO Retreat and the Client Growth Engine will be available at this price point, so make sure you check the link in the show notes, so you can plan around your business instead of on top of everything.
Updating Your Systems and Tech Stack
So once you build the plan and the capacity you know you'll need in the fall, now you want to make sure you're building the business. What can you focus on this year? I don't do all of these at the same time, I want to be really clear. I'm giving you some ideas of high-value areas that will increase your capacity. You don't need to do all of these. Maybe just pick one area to work on and really dig in.
The first thing I'm always looking at is the systems and the tech stack that run your business. If you have tech that's a huge part of your business, especially as a small business owner, let's say you have a client relationship management software. I have a lot of people in the health and wellness space who have to have a HIPAA-approved CRM, and sometimes they need to upgrade. Maybe you have another setup. For me, I have to have a members portal where all my clients can log in and get access to everything I'm sharing with them.
So if you have a tech stack that needs updating, this is a good time of year to do it. Upgrade it or migrate it now. Migrating your tech stack during a really busy season is a special kind of torture. If I had to migrate my email marketing system to a different system, it would be hard enough because I've been with the same one for so long.
This is where I see people overcomplicate things, trying to do big tech upgrades during the busiest time of the year, and that's when they run into a lot of issues, because that's also when they're trying to get clients into that same tech stack. So evaluate all the tech and systems that run your business, whether it's your CRM, the way you do your marketing, the way you work with your clients, any of the tools you're using. This is the time to update those.
Hiring Before You're Drowning
The next area worth looking at is your team and your team capacity. This is something we see a lot in small business. When seasons are slow, we think, oh, I don't want to hire more people right now because it's a little slower. But the reality is, if you're going to need that extra support in the fall, now is the time to do the work of hiring the right person.
What I often see is people panic-hiring. They wait until they're so in the weeds and drowning that they need help immediately, and that's when they try to hire. Then they're throwing people into the deep end. They're not giving those new hires a good onboarding experience, they're not training them, they're not setting them up for success, and that leads to a lot more problems than it's worth.
I already have a lot of clients right now who know they want to close this year with a fully onboarded hire on their team. So this season, they're doing all of the hiring work, getting real clarity about the job description, building out the hiring process, building out what the interview process is going to look like. They're actually building a hiring system right now, a recruiting system, so that by the end of the summer they can have somebody hired.
Then they have a whole other onboarding system. We build out onboarding systems in 30, 60, and 90-day milestones so that new hire can be successfully onboarded, successfully trained, and actually able to take things off your plate during the busy season, instead of drowning and feeling like, oh my god, did I make a huge mistake saying yes to working for this small business?
People need runway. There's a phrase that's so overused, but it's also so true. Hire slow, fire fast. A lot of people do it the opposite. They hire fast because they're panicked, and then they take forever to let go of that person. But the reason they had to let go in the first place is because they hired too fast and didn't set that person up for success. So if that's something you know you'll need in the fall, if you can already look at your year so far and tell that you have a bottleneck and need more people on your team, that's worthwhile focusing on in the summer.
Getting Your Delivery Out of Your Head
The next thing I'd look at is your delivery behind the scenes, especially if all the processes of how you work with your clients live in your head, which means no one else can ever work with your clients the way you do and get the results you get. That means you have literally made yourself the ceiling for how many people you can work with, how many people you can serve, how many people you can get results for. This is where you've gotta get things out of your head and down onto paper.
So you might want to look at, are there things I just need to update for my clients? Are there things I'm saying to my clients over and over again that I can make a workbook, a guide, or an asset for? Maybe you're a coach like I am. What is something you're constantly repeating, constantly explaining? Document it for them, so you can stop saying it over and over and just send them the resource.
Maybe you already have a lot of resources. Anyone who's worked with me in The CEO Collective, or joined any of my other programs, knows I am always creating a new SOP, a new template, a new training, so I need to review those on a regular basis. Sometimes they get out of date. Sometimes I can make them even better, because now more people have used that resource and I have new ways to make it more useful. This is a great time to do that if you need to make things more leverageable for yourself.
Your Client Growth Engine, Marketing, and Sales
The final area I make sure we look at during the summer months is our Client Growth Engine, our marketing and our sales. There is so much leverage you can create here for yourself, but I find a lot of small business owners depend on their own willpower to show up and do the marketing they need to create the business they want.
If your marketing and sales run entirely on motivation and discipline, if they only work when you're consistently able to show up week after week after week, then you're setting yourself up for a really rough time at some point down the road. I've shared with y'all, I don't build anything on willpower, because willpower is the first thing that goes when life gets hard, when things get complicated, when things get busy.
So I always build assets well in advance. I've already mapped out my sales calendar for the entire year. I know what I'm selling every single month, and I batch create all of my marketing well in advance. I like to be about four to eight weeks ahead of all the marketing and sales assets I need.
What does that mean? It means right now I'm recording all the content for the next three months. I literally spent a day outlining everything. I'm spending a couple days recording everything, editing everything, getting it scheduled, and I'll do the same with the podcast, the newsletter, the social media. If I have sales to bring in over the next few months, those emails are written and scheduled. I'm getting them scheduled well before the actual enrollment or cart opens, so the heavy lifting is done.
I don't want to be updating a sales page the night before I'm trying to sell something. I don't want to be writing the sales emails the same week I'm sending them out. That causes unnecessary stress. It really does, and you don't have to do that. The real secret here is that if you've been selling your offer, product, program, or service over and over for years, you can mine your past content. You can mine your past emails. You can use things you've already created and just zhuzh them or tweak them a little instead of starting from scratch each time.
Messaging, Positioning, and the Referral Engine
Now, some other things worth your summer. One, messaging and positioning. This is something a lot of us forget to look at, and then somehow we start to realize, oh, my website feels a little not like me anymore, this sales page doesn't really reflect what we're doing in this program right now. That probably means you've outgrown your messaging or positioning. Something has changed.
Chances are, if you're still saying what you said two or three years ago and you're not getting the same results, that means the market has changed, you've changed. It's time to sharpen your messaging and positioning. This is work worth doing during the summer.
The next thing worth doing is your Client Growth Engine, making sure you've gone through every single part of your marketing, your sales, and your delivery, and you've ironed out all the kinks. You've built the systems to make it easier and easier to keep showing up, turning potential clients into paying clients.
Especially for my service-based businesses, if you're a referral-based business and you sell based on consults, where people book a consultation with you, even the most high-touch, highly relational businesses I see don't have these things locked in. They're leaving real growth on the table. You want to build out a real referral engine. You want to build out a consultation system that includes pre-consult education. You want to make this process as friction-free as possible, so your potential clients are having the best experience from you from the very first touch point.
What This Buys You in the Fall
So what all of this actually gets you, and this is the part you don't need to plan for once you've done it, is that fall comes and you're not scrambling. You get to enjoy your fall too, not just your summer. You get to go apple picking. You get to enjoy Halloween. You get to enjoy the cooler months and pumpkin-flavored everything. You get to enjoy it because your systems are built, your content is loaded, your team knows what to do. You walk into that busy season with more capacity instead of dread.
Calm is capacity. We need to really remember this. Calm is capacity, and you can spend the summer building a little bit of both.
This is one of the ways to break free from the feast or famine cycle. It's not a fact of running a business. Feast or famine is a planning choice. It only smooths out by making sure you're doing the work in the slower, quieter seasons that holds during the loud seasons, and your business stops depending on your stamina.
Let's be honest, there are nights when I wake up and didn't get a good night of sleep, and that day I'm just not going to have the stamina I maybe needed first thing on a Monday morning. If you're depending on your stamina all the time, you're setting yourself up for unnecessary frustration. We want to make sure you aren't building based on motivation and stamina and willpower, you're letting your systems take the heavy lifting off your plate.
Your First Two Moves This Summer
Okay, so that was a lot of ideas for what you can do this summer, and it's not the whole list. Here's what I want you to do with this.
First, pick the season's first move, and that's the CEO Mid-Year Review. Go back to that episode, grab the workbooks, take an hour, and go through your Mid-Year Review. Once you've done that, choose one summer capacity project. Just one. Maybe it's updating your tech stack, maybe it's mapping out your next hire, maybe it's a messaging refresh, maybe it's getting ahead of your marketing and sales. Build that into your 90-day plan for Q3.
And if you want the structured version of how we do 90-day planning, I encourage you to check out the On-Demand CEO Retreat. It's currently bundled with the Client Growth Engine right now, and again, this is the last time I'll be offering this bundle at this price point. The link is in the show notes, and I encourage you to go get access. You can do this whole CEO Retreat on your timeline, at your pace. It usually takes a few hours to go through, but once you know this system, you'll start a rhythm that consistently helps you build capacity, manage your capacity, and increase your capacity as your business grows.
Next Thursday, we're going to get a little more practical again and talk about how to protect your summer schedule and set boundaries, so you can actually enjoy your time off without worrying about your clients or training everyone to expect you to be on call seven days a week. I'll see you then.