Take advantage of extra capacity when you have it

With summer in full swing here, there's very few new plants I'm starting for the garden.

Summer plants are already planted and there's not a lot of fall plants that can get started quite yet.

Which means I have some empty space in the garden and in the seed starters.

So I decided to take a bunch of my years-old herb seeds and grow as many as I can in empty spaces. Most won't grow and the few that do won't grow to full size in time, but a little bit of extra basil is better than no basil.

Taking advantage of unused/underused resources is a huge topic of business management but it's easy to get started with.

Look into what times of the year where you're getting less orders. It might be a common time every year, e.g. April, May, June. Looking into a monthly sales report or my app's cohort report can help you identify those times.

Now think about what you can do to increase orders during that time.

A sale?

An event?

New product releases?

The idea is that since your store is slower at this time, it's an ideal time to try to boost sales. You have the capacity and won't need to staff or scale up like you would if you had a sale during your busy periods.

That's just for orders. You'll have plenty of other underused resources that might could benefit from other strategies too, e.g. excess shipping capacity could be the ideal time to re-balance your inventory at different locations.

Eric Davis