Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I've got an audio excerpt from an answer I provided on my YouTube channel. You can check it out at thejonathanstarkshow.com and it'll redirect you to YouTube if you're into watching videos. Otherwise, you can just listen to the audio here on the podcast. Enjoy.
Hey, Jonathan here. I've got a question from Tutto Carto and they ask, it seems that big companies have a tendency to spend a lot during the last quarter of the year when there is remaining budget. How to build on that when trying to get contracts? I actually have a reminder in my calendar for September 1st every year. There's basically 100 days left in the year at that point and that is the time of the year that I think is the best time of year to sort of revive leads that maybe went dark over the summer, to do outreach, to spin up potential new deals, to reach out to your network, sort of shake the trees and see what falls out.
I originally got this idea from Blair Enns who has a blog post about it that I can link to in the description of the video. I can't remember the name of it right now, but when I first saw that blog post, it sort of revealed something to me that I kind of always knew, but it was subconscious, which is that at least as a software developer, new projects sort of come in waves and cycles throughout the year.
After Thanksgiving around there in the US, as you're getting closer to the holidays, stuff just dies off. So if you don't have new things lined up in like September, October, and early November to be working on through the holidays and then into the new year, the odds of getting something are very slim at that point. Like if you've got no new projects by Thanksgiving, the odds of you getting one over the holidays are like slim to none. I suppose part of this has to do with people who have budgets that are left to spend, especially for things like training, but you want to get those, like that's your sort of sprint to the finish line is like September 1st. That's when to really pour on your marketing efforts, really do a lot of outreach to people, be really active, and try to land some deals that will take you through that downturn during that season.
Because everyone's just on vacation, it's impossible to get a meeting together. It's similar in the early summer when kids go on school break for the summer and a lot of families plan their vacations, and it's just impossible to get a meeting together with decision makers because they're like flying all over the place. No one's in the office all at the same time. So, you know, there are these cycles in the air, and definitely starting from September 1st until basically the end of November, that's your window for spinning up new projects.
Okay, so hopefully that helps. Let's see, anything else? Yeah, okay, hopefully that answers it. I'm Jonathan Stark. If you have any other questions, if you, viewer, have a question, hashtag AskJonathan on YouTube, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and we will get to it as soon as we can. See ya.
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