Problem · Owners
Our revenue is feast or famine and we cannot break the cycle.
A great quarter, everyone too busy delivering to sell, then the cliff, then the scramble, then a great quarter born of panic. Founders blame the market, the team, or the season. It is none of those. Sales effort runs inversely to revenue, which guarantees a trough 90 days after every peak, and the only fix is a demand system that runs whether or not you are busy.
How people search thisfeast or famine business cycle · inconsistent sales pipeline · revenue up and down every quarter · how to get consistent leads · boom and bust revenue small business
Every tier runs continuously, especially when you are busy. Baseline at $2,500 keeps the drumbeat going. Kinetic at $10,000 keeps an outbound seat booking meetings through your busiest month, with the number in writing. Pricing is published.
The five causes, briefly
Selling only happens when delivery is slow. One channel, and it is referrals. Leads die in the seam between marketing and sales, where more than 70 percent are never contacted. The pipeline math has never been written down: meetings needed, cost per meeting by channel, close rate by source. And four vendors with zero owners, each celebrating a metric that is not meetings. We wrote the full diagnosis as a field note, linked below. This page is the fix.
The fix, in order
Write the math down first: how many qualified meetings a month hit the number, and what each costs by channel. That is the first hour of every engagement we run. Own the seam second: a response standard and a follow up sequence, which costs discipline. Add the channel you control third: content if you publish nothing, search if you have a site and no paid demand, outbound if you need meetings this quarter. Then run all of it continuously, because busy is when the next trough is being built.
What continuous looks like at each tier
Baseline, $2,500: a newsletter, a post, and social every month, so demand exists before you need it. Catalyst, $5,000: one Google Ads campaign and a landing page with leads worked within a business day, so the phone rings in July. Kinetic, $10,000: an outbound seat working the list through your busiest quarter with a meeting number in writing, so the calendar for next quarter fills while this one delivers. The tier ladder exists because the fix is structural, not a campaign.
Questions on this problem
Because the meetings booked in a busy quarter close in the slow one. Outbound has a 60 to 90 day lag. Stop it in March and the trough arrives in June.
Same fix, with timing. Outreach lands in the months after study section notices, when the money is real. A seat working that calendar smooths the summer.
Two quarters of continuous operation, in our experience. The first fills the seam; the second is when the outbound lag catches up and the trough does not arrive.
George Stoff, Founder and Lead Engineer
Thirty years building software, brands, and demand. On every account.