Vol 1 · Issue 92 · Sunday, August 16, 2026

Every year, right around the second week of January, I get a version of the same phone call.

The voice on the other end is tight. Revenue fell off a cliff. Nobody is answering. Deals that were supposed to close in December are now "circling back in Q1." The tone is somewhere between confused and betrayed, like the calendar personally did this to them.

And every year I ask the same question. What did last January look like?

There is a pause. Then, quieter: "...about the same."

And the January before that?

Longer pause.

This is the part that gets me. Not that the business has a slow month. Every business has a slow month. It is that a person can be surprised by the same event, on the same schedule, for four consecutive years, and still experience it as a crisis rather than a season.

It is Sunday. You have got coffee and nobody needs anything from you for an hour. This is the exact kind of thing worth thinking about on a Sunday, because it cannot be solved on the Tuesday it happens.

Start here, because everything else depends on it.

Open your books. Pull monthly revenue for the last twenty four months, thirty six if you have it. Put it in a column. Look at it.

Not the total. The shape.

You are looking for months that show up low in both years. One bad August is noise. Two bad Augusts is a pattern. Three is a fact about your business that you have been treating as bad luck.

Do this with cash collected, not revenue invoiced. This matters more than people think. If you invoice on delivery and get paid in thirty or forty five days, your revenue dip and your cash dip are different months, and the cash one is the one that keeps you up. Plenty of owners have correctly identified their slow month and then still gotten squeezed, because they braced for the wrong thirty days.

While you are in there, pull the other side too. Look at expenses by month. Some of them are lumpy in ways that stack badly. If your insurance renewal, your software annual, and your quarterly tax payment all land in a month that is already soft, that is not a slow month. That is a collision, and it is entirely predictable, and you can move some of it.

Here is the thing that reframes the whole problem.

Most slow months are not caused by the market. They are caused by you, roughly sixty to ninety days earlier.

Think about your sales cycle. If it takes you sixty days from first conversation to signed agreement, then whatever lands in October was set in motion in August. And what were you doing in August? Probably delivering, because September and October were busy, and when you are busy you stop selling. Then the delivery finishes and the pipeline is empty and it feels like the market went quiet.

The market did not go quiet. You did, ten weeks ago, and this is the echo.

This is the most common version by a wide margin, and it produces a sawtooth: good month, so you stop prospecting, bad month, so you panic prospect, good month, so you stop prospecting. Around and around. Some owners run that loop for a decade and call it the nature of the business.

There are real external causes too, and you should sort out which you are dealing with:

Write down which cause is yours. The fix is different for each one, and guessing wrong means you spend money solving a problem you do not have.

Once you know when and why, there are exactly three things you can do about it. Fill it, fund it, or use it.

Fill it means pulling demand into the gap. This is the one everybody reaches for first and it is the hardest of the three, because you are fighting the reason the month is slow in the first place. It works when the cause is your own behavior. It works badly when the cause is that your buyers genuinely do not have budget.

The version that actually works is pulling demand forward rather than trying to create it during the dip. Sell in advance. If November is dead, you are not running a November campaign, you are running a September campaign that books November. Retainers, prepaid blocks, deposits, scheduled starts. A discount for booking early is not a discount, it is buying certainty, and certainty is worth a lot more than the ten percent you gave up.

This is where having a list you actually own pays for itself. Not followers, a list. When you need to move something in a hurry, you want to be able to reach a few thousand people who already know you without asking a platform for permission. Mine lives on Beehiiv, and the honest reason I bang this drum is that a list is the only marketing asset that gets more valuable while you sleep and cannot be taken away from you by an algorithm change.

Fund it means the dip stays a dip and you stop caring, because the money is already sitting there.

Sit down and figure out the actual gap. Take a normal month's total outflow, everything: payroll, rent, software, your own draw, taxes. Then take what actually lands in a slow month. The difference is the gap. Multiply by the number of slow months. That is your buffer target.

Then fund it from the good months, automatically, as a percentage, before you get a vote. A fixed percent of every deposit moves to a separate account on the day it arrives. Separate bank, not a sub account you can see, because visible money is spendable money and you know it as well as I do.

This is unglamorous and it changes your entire relationship with the calendar. A slow month with three months of buffer behind it is a season. A slow month with eleven days of runway is an emergency, and emergency is where you make the decisions you regret: the client you should not have taken, the discount that reset your pricing, the hire you let go two weeks before you needed them again.

Use it is the one almost nobody plans for, and it is the one that compounds.

You have a stretch every year with less client work and it lands on the same weeks. That is the only real block of building time your business gets. If you spend it refreshing your inbox and feeling anxious, you have wasted the single most valuable structural gift your calendar hands you.

So decide now, in August, what August's slow cousin gets used for. Build the offer. Record the training. Fix the onboarding that has been half broken for a year. Write the SOPs. Do the hiring. Rebuild the website. Whatever is on the someday list that never gets a Tuesday.

The rule is that you decide the project before the month arrives. If you show up to the slow month without a plan, you will fill it with worry, because worry expands to fill available time better than any project ever will.

Now put it on paper, and do it backward. This is the part that makes it real.

Pick your slow month. Say it is November.

Ninety days out, which is August, meaning right now: prospecting volume goes up, not down. This is the counterintuitive move and it is the whole game. You increase sales activity during your busiest stretch specifically because that is what lands in the hole. Everybody does the opposite.

Sixty days out, September: the pre sell offer goes live. Book November work in September with a reason to commit early.

Thirty days out, October: buffer check, expense timing check, move anything lumpy out of November that can be moved, confirm the build project and block the time for it on the actual calendar.

November: run lean, execute the build project, do not panic, do not discount, do not take the bad client. You knew this was coming. That is the entire point.

December: measure it. Was the dip shallower? Did the buffer hold? Did the project ship? Write down what you learned while it is fresh, because next August you will not remember.

Whatever you use to watch this, make it automatic. A monthly number you have to go assemble by hand is a number you will assemble in January and never again. Wire the revenue, the cash collected, and the pipeline count into one place that updates itself and lands in your inbox on the first of the month. Make.com will do it in an afternoon and then never ask you for anything again.

You do not have to do all of that today. Here is the compressed version, and ninety minutes is genuinely enough.

Twenty minutes: pull twenty four months of cash collected by month. Find your two softest months.

Twenty minutes: figure out why. Behavior, buyer cycle, or your own life. Be honest, especially about the first one.

Twenty minutes: calculate the gap. Normal month outflow minus slow month inflow, times the number of soft months. Now you have a buffer number instead of a bad feeling.

Twenty minutes: put three things on the calendar. The date prospecting ramps up. The date the pre sell goes live. The build project and the week it starts.

Ten minutes: set up the automatic transfer. Percentage of every deposit, separate bank, starting with the next one that lands.

That is it. In ninety minutes on a Sunday you convert a recurring crisis into a scheduled event, and scheduled events are just work.

I have been around a lot of businesses at this point, and the thing that separates the ones that feel calm from the ones that feel frantic is almost never revenue. I know six figure businesses that feel calm and seven figure businesses that feel like a house fire.

The difference is whether the owner is being surprised.

Surprise is expensive. It costs you the bad decisions you make under pressure, and it costs you the sleep, and over enough years it costs you the appetite for running the thing at all.

Your slow month is coming. It came last year and the year before. The only variable left is whether it finds you ready or finds you shocked.

It is Sunday. The coffee is still warm. Go pull the numbers.

Talk Soon,

Dan
Dan Kaufman
Founder, Dead Simple Growth and Pinnacle Masters

P.S. If you want the actual spreadsheet I use for this, the one with the twenty four month cash view and the buffer calculation already built in, reply with the word DASHBOARD and I will send it your way. It takes about fifteen minutes to fill in and it is the closest thing to a crystal ball you are going to get.