Truthfully, we’ve been in business for more than six years, and I’ve been finding the last few months TOUGH! To summarize, we thought we had made a breakthrough a few months, but! we have just fallen back to the way things were last year.
Our business has a lot of repeat and long-term customers, who come back regularly. BUT as their kids get older, other options begin to seem more relevant to their children. Parents’ ideas change too. So when the kids grow up, their circumstances change. This summer saw a particularly volatile period of older customers leaving and new ones arriving. From May to September, we lost nearly 20 customers, which is a large batch of our customer base. We picked up some to replace the exiting customers. Some of that couldn’t be avoided, though. I guess we should have seen it coming. Actually, we did, but it came sooner than we expected in many cases.
It is frustrating to manage a business, only to discover that the biggest problem you face is in fact your own shortcomings. Our business really needs to find a way to market ourselves effectively in the local community, to make our personalities more prominent, and to become more persuasive perhaps. A tall order in my book, as I am not a leader type personality. But I think I may have to become such.
Oh, well.