Why I'm running my business by the season this winter

I've been back in Gippsland for fifteen years this month and one of the absolute joys of being here is that the seasons are properly distinct. Real seasons. The kind of seasons where the light visibly shifts. Hot summers when green hills turn yellow. A kaleidoscope of colours falling from trees filled with screeching corellas. The ground hardens, the frosty mornings beg you to find your gloves, and the whole landscape rearranges itself four times a year without fail.

You can't really ignore it when you live here. The farmers I sometimes work with don't ignore it - their year is built around it. So are the trades who put their tools down earlier when the light goes, the cafés that swap iced coffees for soup, and the swimming families like ours who shift to noisy indoor pools and darker drives.

Businesses move in seasons too. Lately I've been thinking about why so many of us, sitting at desks running service businesses, pretend we don't.

We are encouraged to run as though it's always summer. Always producing, always launching, always "on." Always optimising. Always one more campaign, one more reel, one more push. The marketing world we have built - particularly the part of it that lives in apps - runs on a relentless summer logic, where rest looks like falling behind and quiet looks like irrelevance. And it's not working for the kind of businesses I serve.

I work with a lot of service businesses where the long-term relationship matters more than the reach - healthcare services, clinics, trades, shops, consultancies, advisers. The kinds of businesses in places where customers might also be sitting next to you at netball, where word of mouth travels at the school gate, and where being trusted matters more than being trendy. The kinds of businesses where summer-only marketing burns you out fast, and rarely brings in the right people anyway.

So this winter I'm trying something different. Not a system, not a launch, not a new framework or service - just a different way of working that feels truer to where I actually am, and where my clients actually are.

For me, that means listening more. To my own business - the parts that are working, the parts I've outgrown, the services I've stopped enjoying, the ones I want to do more of. 

Listening to the data quietly sitting in my inbox and my booking system, telling me things I've been too busy to hear. Listening to the clients I have now, who need different things from me than they did a year ago. Leaning into the slower rhythm of a Gippsland winter, which seems to give permission for the kind of thinking that doesn't fit easily into a Tuesday afternoon between two Zoom calls.

It also means being honest about where I am, and where I'm not. My winters are always heavy in project work and strategy, which looks like me in uggs in a quiet office, my laptop running hot, my favourite hoodie on and the coffee machine on more often than is probably good for me.

Winter for me is busy but it’s also the time where I can leave proper white space in my calendar because I’m not travelling so much. 

My clients' winters all look different. Some of them are heading into their own quieter season alongside me. Others are in the middle of their busiest stretch of the year - accountants and tax agents about to be buried for three months, retailers gearing up for spring, businesses with big summer launches already in motion. Their seasons aren't mine, and mine aren't theirs.

The work for me, this season, is partly about meeting each of them where they actually are rather than where my calendar says they should be.

And it means showing up here differently. My content, my social media, and the way I post will reflect this season - more listening, more reading, more quiet useful thinking, less always-on noise. To make room for it, I've archived most of the last ten years of content on social media. New season, clean slate, fresh start. A lot of it was great. Some of it had gone past its use-by. All of it was getting in the way of what I want to build next.

What's next?

If you've been feeling tired, behind, vaguely guilty, or quietly worried that you're doing your marketing wrong - none of that is necessarily true. You might just be trying to run a winter business in a summer rhythm. Or working harder on bringing new customers in than looking after the ones already there. Or chasing visibility when what your business actually needs is a quiet morning and a long, honest look at what's working.

That last bit - the long honest look - is exactly the work I want to do with you this winter.

A decade of being up close and personal with businesses in regional areas has shown me one thing clearly - the businesses that grow steadily and last well are the ones whose leaders know how to listen, know how to look after the people they already have, and know how to choose their moments for the louder work. The rest is mostly noise.

So I've built a way to do exactly that work, together. Do Less. Connect More. is a new six-week, one-on-one coaching program for small business owners who are worn out by marketing that's become a second full-time job. Over six weeks we reset your strategy, your content rhythm and your customer experience and we finish by locking in the habits and the roadmap to keep it all going without me.

Six 90-minute sessions (all recorded) built around your real business. It's the work I do best, packaged for exactly the season we're in. If you've read this far nodding, book a discovery call and we'll talk it through. And whether or not that's a yes for you right now, the invitation to spend winter with me still stands. The posts will be fewer and always useful. The thinking will be deeper and always honest (I know you wouldn't expect anything less from me). If you're running a business and any of this resonates, I'd love your company across June, July and August.

Mac&Ernie is a marketing strategy and customer experience consultancy based in Warragul, Victoria, serving businesses across Gippsland and regional Victoria. macandernie.com.au