I Thought My Quiet Summer Was a Problem. It Turned Out to Be Useful.

I’ll be honest. When things started getting quieter this summer, I worried. As a business owner, it’s very easy to see a quieter period as something that needs fixing. Should I be doing more marketing? Am I talking to enough people? Where should I be looking for more work?

But after the initial worry settled, I started to wonder whether I needed to fill the space at all. Asides from enjoying the extra time I had out in the sunshine, I decided to see the quiet time as a time to make some changes in my business.

One of the first things I did was take a proper look at my services, not just whether they were what people wanted, but whether they still reflected the things I enjoy and the kind of support I want to provide. It’s easy to create services around what you think people might buy, then keep offering them because they’re there.

But businesses change, I changed, I realised there were some things I was was offering that made my heart sink a little.

For a while, I’ve felt a bit uncomfortable with the term “Virtual Assistant”. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being a VA. It just never resonated with me, or felt like it described what I actually do.

When I approached other business owners about what they thought of my pitch they all said the same thing, when they think of a VA, they think of certain tasks, but the tasks I do are much more niche, and a lot more involved. That was enough for me to make the switch. If I’m not connecting with the name and my potential clients don’t view me that way how can I expect the name to work for my business?

So I’ve been exploring different ways of describing what I do. Interestingly, this has already made a difference, when I talk to people now, I’m noticing that they seem to understand what I mean much more quickly. They’re recognising the problem I’m talking about, and relating with it.

I also decided to do some training around sales. That might sound like a fairly practical business decision, but for me it was about more than learning sales techniques. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I feel when I talk about what I do. I care deeply the people I support, but that doesn’t automatically make selling comfortable.

I’ve realised that sales doesn’t have to mean convincing someone they need something they don’t want, it can simply be about clearly explaining a problem I can help with and giving someone the opportunity to decide whether that support would be useful to them.

That feels much more natural to me.

Perhaps the biggest change is one I didn't really expect, I started feeling excited about my business again. Not because everything suddenly became busy, or I had all the answers. But because I started looking at my business with fresh eyes, and I was becoming unstuck from the things that were holding me back.

There’s something quite energising about stepping back from the constant pressure to do more and instead asking:

Those questions have given me much more clarity about where I’m heading.

I don't know whether the summer will suddenly become incredibly busy, and I'm trying not to make that the measure of whether this period has been successful. If things hadn't slowed down, I might not have given myself the space to make some of these changes. I might still have been tweaking the edges rather than looking properly at the bigger picture.

Sometimes we assume that when business gets quiet, we need to immediately make it busy again. But perhaps there are times when the quiet is giving you something else. Space to notice what isn't working, what you’ve been doing on autopilot, space to learn again, and space to remember why you started the business in the first place.

So, yes, I was worried when my summer became quieter than I expected. But now I'm choosing to see it as exactly what I needed.