How to stop a quiet month catching you out (Do This Instead)

For twelve months, Dave never spent a penny on marketing.

He's a dog trainer, a good one, and the work just kind of fell into his lap. A happy client would tell a friend at the park. That friend would tell someone at puppy class, and this meant his diary stayed full and he was smug about it, too.

“Why bother with marketing when word of mouth does the job for free?” 

Then came his first quiet month.

The phone went quiet, not completely dead, just quiet. Then a week passed with fewer enquiries, then another. 

Dave started checking whether his phone was actually working, and thought the phone company had some kind of block on it for some people.

The referrals had simply slowed for no reason he could point to, and he was struggling to turn the corner.

And this, let introduce to you, is the trap with word of mouth.

It feels like a marketing strategy because it brings you clients, but you don't control it, and it can bite you on the arse when you’re not expecting it.

All you can do is just hope that next month is the same level of clients that you've had for the past year or so.

But hope isn’t a marketing system to rely on.

And word of mouth, although great at times, is a terrible thing to depend on.

Here's the tip for this short newsletter, and the thing Dave wishes he'd done from day one.

Build one channel you actually own. An email list of people who know you or who have known your business in the past.

This could be your past clients, enquiries that never booked, the person who follows you but hasn't bought yet. 

When you can reach those people on demand, a quiet month stops being a crisis, and that's the difference between a business that hopes and a business that decides.

It's also one of the many reasons why I built the Pooch Profits community, which is soon to be a room full of dog business owners who are done leaving their diary to chance.

Where dog business owners can swap what's working and what isn't, network in groups, and support each other.

We're still in the founding member phase, so the early members lock in their price for life before it climbs.

So, if you're tired of crossing your fingers every month, come and join us. 

Reply with COMMUNITY, and I'll send you the details.

You might just get a surprise.

Colin