Wednesday Wisdom: How Long Ice Cream Lines Relate to Running a Successful Business

Wednesday Wisdom and Business Inspiration for Women Entrepreneurs and Female Business Owners

You’ve seen them. You’ve been in them. You know, those long ice cream lines when you begin wondering why a frozen treat deserves more wait time than an important doctor’s appointment. Although your patience level might be tested on a beautiful summer day, the owner of the establishment is sweating inside thrilled with the ramped-up business as she flashes back to non-existent lines during other months. They’ve dreamed and planned for this moment hoping if they built the right business, marketed it properly and consistently, the customers would come.

This time of year, is no different than the six-week retail push from Thanksgiving to Christmas when a majority of sales take place either saving or sinking retail business projections. Go to any mall when the ice cream lines are long outside to find short lines inside Central New York enterprises because consumers are more interested in summer breezes, fireworks, and picnics then shopping. These enterprises beg for cold weather as much as ice cream businesses rejoice in hot weather.

It’s all about cycles. Life has cycles. Business has cycles. To thrive or survive in any cycle means proper forecasting, planning, and marketing. Reviewing past revenue records demonstrates financial highs and lows over a year. Besides regular, or in the recent year irregular changes in the economy, reviews, plans, and action are essential in surviving your company’s sales cycles.

As an event planner with my first company, I knew I had limited event revenue in the dead of winter and high peaks of revenue in summer and fall. I planned for this topography by asking for larger deposits and payment periods from my nine-month event clients to keep financial reserves on keel. After 1, 3, and 5 years in business, looking at numbers and graphs helps planning for the next same stretch of business. Don’t ever underestimate the value of cycles, whether good or bad, in effective planning of your enterprise.

This Wednesday Wisdom should remind you that while you are standing in that long ice cream line to remember the importance of an updated financial analysis of your numbers on a periodic basis. If we don’t review where we are, to where we planned to be, we can’t steer our businesses forward as successfully as we originally thought.

Don’t reject your numbers, study them, embrace them, and revise if you must, and then treat yourself to any frozen treat of your liking enjoying the merriment of a long line, like the one you’ll be creating for your company.