One of the aspects of running a small business where we take a relatively small number of reasonably large orders is that I'm always getting the feeling of "feast" or "famine". A few weeks ago, I was seeing a slight slowing down of bookings (hey - I'm a worrier) and a lower level of booking ahead than I've seen in a while ... and yet in the last couple of weeks there's been a surge in enquiries and I'm now looking right forward through the Autumn and looking to arrange November so that we can maximise the training time we have. Even having to tell people of limited availabily of course that are months ahead.

I'm often asked about seasonality in our business and, yes, it exists but it's not exactly what you would expect. Our quiet period is the run up to Christmas and early in the new year, rather than the summer holidays; people tend to take advantage of a quieter time at their place of work to fit in the training that they're otherwise too busy to take, and that bolsters our order book even for months such as August.
(written 2005-07-21, updated 2006-06-05)

 G500 - Well House Consultants - Running a training company
  [3610] Training to do a job, or training to pass an exam? - (2012-02-13)
  [3361] Blowing our own trumpet - MySQL resources - (2011-07-18)
  [2940] Training course locations - Melksham, UK; Buxton, UK; Lake Constance, Germany; Venice Italy, the USA and India - (2010-08-30)
  [2924] Job applicants - wondering why they apply - (2010-08-16)
  [2838] Respecting our customers anonimity - (2010-06-29)
  [2144] Looking for a career change - Physician to Web Site Designer - (2009-04-28)
  [2084] Books and distance learning from Well House Consultants? - (2009-03-15)
  [2074] Weekday or Weekend PHP, Python and Perl classes? - (2009-03-10)
  [2049] Why Choose Well House Consultants for your course? - (2009-02-20)
  [2021] Short health and safety course - (2009-02-02)
  [2003] Discount Training Courses - PHP, Perl, Python - (2009-01-21)
  [1963] Best source to learn Java (or Perl or PHP or Python) - (2008-12-28)
  [1884] Recession? Depression? - (2008-11-14)
  [1433] Linux, PHP, Tcl, Ruby, C, C++ - last minute training course availability - (2007-11-16)
  [1393] First Alternative / what has happened there? - (2007-10-16)
  [1369] One business, four different angles! - (2007-09-28)
  [1040] What the customer is looking for - effective training - (2007-01-17)
  [1022] No courses. No hotel guests. Rushed off our feet! - (2007-01-05)
  [978] Wellhouse Manor, Hotel, Melksham - (2006-12-10)
  [926] Training rooms to learn Open Source programming - (2006-11-15)
  [838] Talking about other training companies. - (2006-08-19)
  [813] Monday Morning at Well House Consultants Melksham - (2006-07-24)
  [652] Morning Post - (2006-03-20)
  [627] JIT or JAU - (2006-02-27)
  [545] Is training seasonal? - (2005-12-28)
  [470] I wanna be a Python trainer - (2005-10-20)
  [402] Netless - (2005-08-05)
  [251] WIBNIF - (2005-03-19)
  [171] Skills and techniques of being a successful trainer - (2005-01-06)

Back to Managing conflict and disappointment

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Tough Love
BBQ Season
Training course plans for 2006
What is a callback?
Feast or famine
Managing conflict and disappointment
Overloading of operators on standard objects in Python
Central London Courses - Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, MySQL
Exceptions in Python
Bridging to the customer requirement