Seasonality
Seasonality is the yearly shape of your demand, with busy and quiet months that repeat. A quiet quarter in a seasonal trade is the pattern arriving on schedule. Plan for it.
What it means
Most one-person trades are not flat across twelve months. Outdoor work slows when the weather turns. Some trades go quiet around the holidays. Others dip when clients are away or spending less. Once you have been through it, none of this is a surprise. It is a pattern, and a run of bad weeks is something else.
If a seasonal dip surprises you every year, each quiet month brings a scramble. If you call it seasonality, you already know roughly when it lands and how deep it runs. You also know what to set aside from the busy months to cover it.
A landscaper earns $9,000 a month from May to September and $2,000 a month from December to February. That $7,000 monthly gap is seasonality. It is not a bad year. The same gap shows up most years, in roughly the same months.
Waiting for a quiet month to arrive instead of naming the pattern in advance. A predictable dip then feels like an emergency every year.
See also
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