Feast and famine
How to get off the cycle.
Why the trough happens, what it costs you, and the method that ends it. Set your own figures as you read. Nothing leaves this page until you ask.
What happens
You are good at the work. A mandate lands. You deliver it properly, which takes everything you have.
While you deliver, you stop publishing and you stop writing to people you do not know yet. There are no hours left, and the client in front of you is paying now.
The market does not wait with you. It keeps hiring, and it hires whoever it saw last week.
So the mandate ends, you look up, and you are starting from zero. You are not resuming. You are introducing yourself again, to a market that has spent four months forgetting what you do.
That takes months to reverse, because a buyer decides on their calendar and not on yours. Meanwhile nothing is coming in, so you take the next thing at a price you would have refused in a good month. Then it lands, and you stop again.
The trough is not caused by a bad quarter. It is caused by the good one before it.
Who this is for
You sell your own expertise. Your name is on the work. Two or three mandates make your year, which is why one lost quarter hurts.
You are not looking for your first client. You have a practice that works and a revenue line shaped like a mountain range.
Nine months, in order
Numbers made up. Shape real.
The trough is month eight. It was built in month one, on the day you were proudest of your work.
Your practice
Six figures, and the rest of this page is yours.
What you invoice for a typical mandate, start to finish.
From the first day of work to the last.
Your honest average over the last two years, not your best year.
After anything you buy in. Before your own time.
Used to price your own hours later on the page. Divided by eight.
How much you come down on price when you have been empty for a while.
Your own shape
Now draw yours.
What you invoiced in each of your last eight quarters, oldest on the left. Round to the nearest thousand, nobody is auditing you. Three quarters are enough for a line to appear, eight make it worth looking at. Nothing leaves this page until you ask.
Use the quarter the work was won if you can. If you invoice a long mandate in stages, your quarters look smoother than your pipeline ever was, and it is the pipeline you are trying to see.
Long mandates do not break this. A six month mandate fills two quarters and leaves the next ones empty, which is the shape, drawn. What does break it is invoicing a mandate in stages long after it was won, because the money then lands in quarters where no work was sold. That is why the instruction above says the quarter the work was won.
What the sawtooth costs
The cycle, at your numbers.
A zero gap is a ceiling, not a promise. Nobody runs at a hundred per cent. It is here because the distance between your line and that ceiling is the only honest measure of what the cycle takes from you.
Closing the gap
What continuity is worth.
Drag it to whatever you think is realistic for you. The arithmetic follows.
The only way out
Publishing and outreach have to continue while you deliver.
Not more of them. Just never zero. The lag is the whole reason: what you do this month decides the quarter after next, so the only work that saves month eight happens in month one, while you are busiest and least willing.
Everything else treats the symptom. Networking harder in a trough is late. Dropping your price in a trough is the loss you just measured. Waiting on referrals hands your calendar to other people's memory, and memory fades at the speed of your last visible piece of work.
Publishing keeps the market seeing what you are for. A buyer who has read you for six months does not need convincing, he needs a reason to call this month. A buyer who has not seen you since April meets a stranger with a good CV.
Outreach starts conversations without waiting to be remembered. Ten a week, to people who fit, keeps a pipeline off zero.
Now the honest part, and it is why this survives in people who already know all of the above. You will not have the hours in month one. You never do. And the hard part of publishing is not the writing, it is deciding what to say, which is the most expensive thing you own in a month when your head is full of somebody else's problem.
Option one
Building it yourself, priced honestly.
This is the option nobody costs before starting it. Here it is, itemised, at your own rate.
| What you would build | Hours | At your rate |
|---|---|---|
| Positioning and message, written and tested on real replies | 12 | €2,250 |
| Target list, a hundred accounts researched and kept current | 10 | €1,875 |
| Sending infrastructure: domains, records, mailboxes, warm-up | 8 | €1,500 |
| Sequences written, then corrected once replies come back | 10 | €1,875 |
| Content system: topics, formats, the first month written | 16 | €3,000 |
| Then every week, for the rest of the year | 3 × 52 | €29,250 |
| Year one, in your own time | 212 | €39,750 |
And the part that is not hours
Sending infrastructure is unforgiving. A domain that gets flagged is finished, and the replacement takes three weeks of warm-up before it can send anything. That is a quarter of your fix spent twice.
A list that looks right and is not costs you nothing on the day and everything for three months, because nobody tells you they were the wrong people. They just do not reply.
Sequences that get replies are not the same as sequences that get the right replies, and the difference only shows up in the calls you sit through.
And the failure mode this whole page is about: you build it in a calm month, it works, and then a mandate lands and it stops.
Option two
The floor, if you keep it yourself.
A plan written in a calm week is written by someone who will not exist in a busy one. So write a floor: the smallest amount you could hold in your worst week of the last two years. Written as counts, never as intentions.
Over ninety minutes and it breaks in a busy month. A floor that breaks is worse than none, because it teaches you that you are the sort of person who does not keep these.
Three rules make it hold. It has a fixed slot in the calendar, the same one every week, with a name. The topics are decided before the mandate starts, so publishing costs writing time instead of thinking time. And it runs in the week the mandate lands, especially then, because that is the week the next trough is being poured.
Option three
Somebody runs it while you deliver.
The reason this option exists is in the table two sections up. The work is not difficult. It is relentless, and it competes for the exact hours your client is paying for.
Handing it over is the only version where the line does not depend on your week. What it costs is not on this page, because it depends on what you sell and to whom, and a number without that context is noise.
If you want it in writing
I will send you your own numbers.
Everything you set above, and everything it produced, in one email you can keep. I read every one that comes back, and if a figure looks wrong to me I will tell you which and why.
One last thing
This shape survives in people who are excellent, and it survives because every decision that produces it is correct. Serve the client in front of you. Do the work properly. There is no single moment you can point at and call a mistake.
The mistake is structural, and structural problems do not yield to working harder in the quarter where it hurts. They yield to something small that never stops, held in the week when stopping felt obviously reasonable.
Pat