Appreciating the Quiet Times

Christmas seems to come and go so quickly. We really start hearing about it September each year, decorations and wrappings on display in the shops, advertising material enticing you to buy everything under the sun as a gift for someone, and life seems to go into full speed as everyone tries to complete impossible projects before the brief Christmas break. It’s almost like things HAVE to be done before Christmas and then suddenly, it’s quiet.

The quiet times used to unnerve me – being new in business I would worry about where the next ‘job’ was coming from, or when my clients were going to need me again. But, over the years, I’ve come to appreciate and look forward to this break from rush, deadlines and daily needs, and actually do some things for myself, or I should say ‘for my business’. It’s become an annual event to revamp my main website and make it look even better than the last one – something that’s becoming a challenge. This year instead of creating a new template, I’ve found one I like from Templatesbox (I bought a 3 month subscription) and am playing around with that – need to make a few changes to the graphic images they’ve used for words, but think I’ll get there.

I had been seriously thinking of getting new photos done for awhile as my hair hasn’t been short for some time, and then a few weeks ago won an executive portrait package from Ikon Images, through Networking World, which prompted me to do something about it. Then, after seeing the photos, I decided it was time to update my speaker’s website and found a template that had colours to match those in the photo – that’s almost complete now, just needs a bit of tweaking here and there. But you’re welcome to go have a look. www.kathiethomas.com.

So, if you’re wondering about how to cope with this quieter time of the year for your business, have a look around you at what you might need to tweak, change, update. I plan for it these days and start to collect ideas, samples, pictures, printouts from around September each year, and put them all in a folder to pull out straight after Christmas. It also means planning your income and budget too – you might still have payments coming in from the previous month in December, but in January it could be quite different, so you do need to be prepared for that.

If you’ve made some changes in your business for the new year, I’d love to hear about it! KMT

virtual assistant, quiet times, New Year