Every self-employed professional has experienced times when work gets slow.  Often, these times immediately follow a large project or projects that took all of our time and we put our marketing efforts on the back-burner to focus on getting those projects out the door.  The problem is that the marketing cycle takes time to come to fruition.  The length of time from finding a new project to invoicing and payment can easily be a month or more.  That means that by the time we realize that things are slow, we’re probably at least a month away from sending out any new invoices.  That can make for an awfully long month.  How do you survive or even eliminate these slow periods?

The first moment I begin to see that things are getting slow for me, I take action.  As mentioned, the time between noticing that I don’t have any invoices in the pipe, and the time to see payment from a new invoice, can easily be a month or more, so my advice is to get moving on this the very first moment you notice a slowdown.

When things get a little slow for me, here’s how I usually address it:

• I develop an extremely targeted/narrowly focused mailing list, say 20-40 potential clients.  By extremely targeted, I mean I make a list of my ideal clients, then pick the very best subset of them.  These should be new clients that you’ve never done business with before.  The idea here is to grow your client list.
• I send a personalized letter introducing my business to everyone on the list, personalizing each one with names, etc.  I use quality paper.  I personally sign each letter with an ink pen (no computer signatures).  It’s also very important that you focus your letter on how you can help them generate more revenue.  Limit talking about yourself or your business to only a paragraph or two.  The bulk of the letter should be used to convince them that hiring you will actually make them money.  With my list of say 30, I’ll usually try to send 3 to 5 letters out each day. That helps prevent me from getting an avalanche of responses all at once, and it leaves me time for meetings, etc should I get a few responses right away.  I also absolutely hate marketing, so this way I get my poison in small doses over time instead of all at once.
• In the letter, I always include a free or heavily discounted offer. That may sound counter-intuitive, but the whole point here is to get my foot in their door and get some facetime with them to develop a relationship and/or to find a need that I can fill for them. Free offers work best for me. I get new clients that way quite often…they figure if something is free, they have nothing to lose by trying me.

Now, even if business is good at the moment for you, you should try to do this every other month or so. That way, your client list will hopefully keep growing, and if nothing else, it’s a constantly running marketing program. By only doing a few each day or week, you keep yourself insulated from the shock of spending big bucks for an advertising campaign when money is already tight, and you also get into the habit of constantly marketing yourself and enlarging your target market.  That’s a great habit to get into and over time, it will help smooth out that feast or famine cycle.

How do you handle the slow times?  Leave a comment and share your ideas!

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