My fall marketing/business prep list (in case you need one too)

July and August are the slowest months in my business.

Every year I forget this, and every year around mid-august I have a small panic attack about less money coming in.

And then I remember that I have four kids, it's sunny outside, and this is the only stretch of the year where I can actually be around for it. So I take the quiet as the trade-off it is. Revolutionary concept, I know.

But the sun sadly is on its way out, September is coming, and this week is the week I get my business as ready as I can for back to school season.

Here are the 5 things I'm doing this week:

1. Updating my calendar availability

I use Calendly, with pre-set availability for coffee chats, client website kick-off calls, and everything in between. It already pulls from my family calendar and my other commitments so nothing double-books.

But back-to-school is the right time to look at whether that schedule has been supporting me or sabotaging me. Am I opening up more spots? Limiting them? Protecting a morning I keep giving away?

That answer is going to be different for everyone, so I won't tell you what yours should be.

👉 What I will say: if you're still going back and forth over email trying to find a time, please stop. That's hours a month you're never getting back. Any booking tool that lets people grab a time on their own is worth setting up, even if you never do another thing on this list.

2. A once-over on my marketing calendar

I set a marketing calendar at the beginning of the year. And then the year happened.

Offers shift. What clients ask me for shifts. My capacity shifts. So I'm going back through it and changing what I want to talk about and when, which promotions I'm actually running, and what workshops are going on the schedule.

Important part: I'm not creating any of the collateral yet. No graphics, no emails, no landing pages. I'm just making the plan.

Those are two different jobs and trying to do them at the same time is why people abandon their marketing calendar in February.

3. Booking focus sessions

A plan with no space in the calendar to action it is a very nicely formatted piece of fiction.

So I'm booking the time now. Some of it through Flow Club, which is one of my favourite ways to stay focused when I'm working alone. If you've never come across it, it's group co-working: you book a slot, you say out loud what you're going to work on, everyone mutes and works, and you check in at the end. It sounds a bit odd but it absolutely works. It is a paid subscription, so if you want to test the concept for free first, Focusmate is an alternative that has a free tier that gives you a few sessions a week.

And some other sessions I book with my colleague Jen, who runs Marketing Club. We do focused work days together and we always come out the other side having cranked through something big that had been sitting on both our lists for a month or more.

4. Choosing where I'm actually showing up

No surprise here: email is my number one. It's where you are, it's where people reply, it's where people book. So it gets the best of what I make.

What I'm changing is what happens after the email. I used to have my team repurpose every email into a blog post and social content, and I got away from it when things got busy. I'm going back to it, because it gives me visibility in more places without me having to invent new content for each one.

But one-way content isn't the whole strategy, and it definitely isn't relationships. So I'm also committing real time to being in the places my clients already are, having actual conversations. For me that's a handful of Facebook groups, a Podia community, and possibly some guest-hosted workshops. More on that another time.

👉 Posting at people is not the same as talking with them, and only one of those has ever led to a client for me.

5. Deciding what I'm actually selling

This is the one that makes the other four matter.

I'm mapping out what I'm selling between now and December, and, more importantly, how much of it my capacity can genuinely hold. There's no point promoting four things in October if I can only deliver two of them without falling over.

For me that's the monthly workshops, website builds, and the coaching sessions I've been trialling. That's the list. Everything I plan has to point at one of those.

Remember that mild panic about money I mentioned at the top? This is the step that fixes it. Not more posting. Deciding what I'm selling, making sure it's visible, and giving myself the room to actually deliver it.

None of this is all that exciting, but all of it is why October doesn't flatten me ;)

And the sixth thing, which I'm not doing this week because I've already got one, is having a system so this isn't a scramble every single month. That's what my September workshop is about. It's not live yet, but if you want first dibs when it is, just hit reply and say WORKSHOP and I'll make sure you get the link.

-Brittany

P.S. If your version of this list feels overwhelming rather than useful, that's usually a sign you need someone to help you cut it down rather than add to it. I've got a few one-off coaching spaces open... 30 minutes or an hour, no package, no commitment. You bring the mess, we make a plan, I send it to you, you go do it. Reply to me if you want to learn more or grab the link to book :)