Seasonality is the idea that business volume ebbs and flows at different times. While landscapers and lawnmowers know that their busy season coincides with summer, seasonality is affected by a lot more than just the weather. Retailers’ busy season coincides with holiday shopping (of course), wedding season is in the summer, and so on.

Check out http://www.google.com/trends to view the seasonality of any keyword search.

It’s easy to figure out the seasonality when it coincides with a certain month of the year; even if the link is not obvious, (for example, Pablo Picasso is a hot topic in February/March, but unpopular in July and December). But what about businesses that don’t experience seasonality within a calendar year? It’s tougher to spot the busy and slow seasons when they may extend over a period of 2 or 3 years, and you don’t know WHEN the season starts and ends, nor the duration.

So how do you figure out what drives seasonality for a particular industry? Look for leading indicators.

Leading indicators can tell you what is about to come. Such as in the weather - right before a major hurricane, it usually gets pretty windy outside. One of the most interesting is the “Lipstick Indicator” which Estee Lauder spotted. During recessions and uncertain times, they noticed that lipstick sales went up. “Why?” you ask? Probably because women want something luxurious to feel pampered, but can’t afford expensive items anymore, so they settle for lipstick. Amazingly, this indicator has been quite reliable over the years. In fact, right after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, lipstick sales doubled.

Sometimes leading indicators come right before an event, sometimes far in advance of an event, but once you spot them they can be very valuable, because it warns you of what is coming. Leading indicators can signal either to hire more help to prepare for a busy season, or cut back on inventory heading into a slow one. Your goal as a business owner is to smooth out the peaks and troughs of cash flow and business volume. Looking for the indicators of your seasonality can help you predict and adjust your business plan quickly to compensate.

“Supercrunchers” is a great book that discusses how to crunch numbers on any problem, to figure out the driving forces behind events. I definitely recommend everyone to read it, if you haven’t. The idea behind it is that you can use your own past sales data to crunch numbers to discover hidden patterns that you haven’t noticed. Regressions are a powerful tool in crunching these numbers, so find a strong statistician to help you run through the data.

And of course, remember that in order to HAVE peaks, there have to be troughs. Plan for them, and when the slow times come, don’t panic. Use some of the surplus you enjoyed in the busy season to get you through the slow season. And watch for those leading indicators to help you know when business will increase again so you can gear up for it.

I added about 100 new Utah businesses to the list this week. The new list of firms comes from the MoutainWest Capitol Network of fastest growing Utah companies by revenue. This is a good list to be familiar with.

Note that most firms dropped in rank, primarily because of the extra firms added to the list, but notice that that the American Academy of Professional Coders was the only firm to increase in rank.

Add your comments below to request consideration for next months’ index.

Someone Should be Asking for More Work
So you finally got that IT project done and after all the hassles and bugs, things seem to be working smoothly. Your anxiety levels are returning back to normal and your managers seem to have the new processes under control. But what about your other employees? What are they doing now? Since the IT project helped automate things, how are your employees using their extra time? You probably answered in your mind, “I don’t know” or “I think they’re doing ____.”

I’ll bet your data entry employees haven’t come in to your office, or their managers’, and asked what they need to do next. Now they’re less efficient because they’re doing less work in the same amount of time as they had before. But, if you do have an employee who came to ask for more work, give them a bonus. They’re probably worth keeping around.

If your IT project reduced duplicate or routine work like data entry, but your employees are still on the payroll for the same amount of money even though they’re not doing that routine work anymore, then it might be time to re-evaluate the status of some of your employees. Here’s a delicate way to examine the effect of your recent IT project on your employees, their responsibilities, and what they might have time to do now.

IT and Employee Evaluation
An IT Project Evaluation Survey is a tactful way you can evaluate the decrease in work load on employees because of a recent IT project. This evaluation survey is constructed, and should be presented to your employees, as an opportunity to evaluate the IT project. It is very important your employees should not feel threatened or that they are the ones being evaluated. The short survey questions transition from evaluating the IT project and how the IT project HELPED your employees, to how much work it reduced for them in their daily responsibilities, and then back again to evaluating the IT project and allowing them to give their input about future IT projects. Communicating that the survey is being used to evaluate the IT project - not the employee - is key to getting honest data. This survey will help you first estimate how much free time employees now have because of automation; second, get an idea of how well the project is fulfilling it’s purpose; and third, what IT project could be tackled next to further reduce “busy work”.

Your Evaluation
Before distributing the IT Project Survey to your employees, take the opportunity to complete a copy of the survey yourself. The IT and employee managers should also take the survey. Doing so will give yourself and your managers an opportunity to indicate their expectations and experiences with your technology project and compare them to your employee’s experiences.

Download Survey
You can download the evaluation in a PDF to print. If you want to modify the questions you can download both a PDF and the excel file by downloading the zip file.

Using the Data
First, realize that survey data is a collection of opinions. Be sure to weigh the employees’ opinions against those of their managers, IT staff, and your own observations. I’d recommend tabulating your results digitally for future reference and tracking your IT projects over time. Additionally, the data will only be valuable if used to direct the efforts of the affected employees.

Discussion/Feedback
Did your managers agree with using an IT evaluation to determine what to do with the extra bandwidth, or did the managers already think their employees were busy enough? How many hours did your IT project free up per employee per week and what do you plan to do with that extra time? Are you going to reallocate employee resources or downsize your payroll?

I’m a huge fan of performance based compensation. This Compare Hospital tool from the Department of Health and Human services should help empower health care patients to avoid poor health care treatment, and what to expect in terms of both treatment and cost.

The Hospital Compare tool lets you compare 1) how well your local hospitals care for their adult patients, 2) the RESULT of care or treatment - whether they lived or died within 30 days of treatment, 3) what patients are saying about their recent hospital stay, and 4) how much Medicare hospitals paid on average for certain conditions or procedures.

You should really check out your local hospitals, but return and let me know if you were surprised at the results of your local hospitals, like I was? Have you shared this with your friends and family, because it could save their lives - literally.



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If your business model requires employees to help you provide your good or service, then being able to identify: who is looking for jobs (and more specifically Utah jobs), where they live, and how to reach them can help you fill your job openings. This post shows how you can use Google Trends to find people looking for jobs.

Recruiting Out of State Employees
If your firm is in a position to recruit employees from out of state, then this data should be interesting. These are the states that have the most searches for the keyword “jobs” over the past 12 months. You will also notice the overall trend, and top cities in the country searching for the term “jobs”. South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama are the three top states searching for "jobs". Looking at the bar chart carefully though, South Carolina has a significant jump on the amount of searches compared to other states. Orlando, Tampa and Denver are the top cities in the country searching for "jobs". However, the total searches in the subregion states are greater than each of the top states individually.

Updated "Jobs" chart.

This data comes from Google Trends over the date range Feb. 1, 2007 - Jan. 31, 2008. As you can see, the national trend of people searching for "jobs" has gradually decreased suggesting lower unemployment on average in the U.S. It seems many people like to look for a new job around the beginning of the new year.

I’ve done some research, and with the chart below you can compare these states that are searching for jobs with that of national averages, such as: national unemployment rate (4.5%), the median HH Income of $48,023, and the percent of population with post-graduate (after high school) education of 27.2%. South Carolina is among the top states with high unemployment levels. Georgia has greater than average unemployment, and also a higher than average income level; possibly suggesting a high level of job dissatisfaction. The trend of dissatisfaction may be supported by the fact that Colorado–with their low unemployment and high wages and better-than-average education level–is the third among states searching for jobs.

At work we’ve been looking into advertising with Business.com. I’ve been corresponding with them about their systems, ad serving technology, and giving them a hard time - like I always give ad sales reps. A colleague walked in on my phone call with them and was intrigued because he knew something about advertising with them that I didn’t know at the time.

He prompted me to put the call on speaker phone, so I did and muted it as the sales guy kept talking. My colleague, who had advertised with Business.com while in a different industry, told me to key in a couple keywords at Business.com. I keyed in the phrase and we started scrolling down through the results. We got about 2/3 of the way down the page and just like he had predicted there was his previous employer’s listing.

Business.com’s business model is very similar to a yellow pages advertising directory, with the added advantages of the internet. Business.com allows their customers to allocate themselves to product categories like software, finance, real estate, etc. Advertisers can also bid for keyword search results just as with Google, Yahoo, or other search engines, in order to be featured at the top of search results. The category listings are usually the more expensive placement because users navigate to listings via the categories from the home page.

I very quickly caught what my colleague was inferring as we looked at each other and pointed at the results. My colleague then asked the salesperson, “When are these listings updated? Because a listing I placed, and then discontinued a month or two later, for a company I use to work for, is still in the directory.”

The sales rep responded:

“Not all the advertisers are active and if they’re still on the page then we haven’t updated the listings or category, or we don’t have other advertisers to replace them.”

To verify what we think we’ve found I contacted a former associate of my colleague who still works at the old firm. I asked him whether they still advertise with Business.com, and this was his reply:

“We don’t currently advertise there. As you probably know you can buy a listing in their directory, or use their PPC services. Last year we actively did both, but we currently do not have any spots there now.”

So, the lack of clients and delay in updating category listings may pay off for ex-advertisers with Business.com. I don’t know exactly whether you can do the “self-serve” advertising program, or if you have to work with a sales rep and spend a minimum of $750/month to have your listings linger.

At a minimum, if you’ve advertised with Business.com and discontinue, your company name will become a keyword result and considered a “Sponsored Link” result when queried. This can be great exposure for brand names, like “SEO” for seo.com, or “realtor” for realtor.com (both of which are not current advertisers).

This business practice is evidence of the balance Business.com faces, like yellow page advertising, with providing quality content for users and selling ad space. I am surprised though that they allow listings to persist like they do.

I’d like to start tracking innovative Utah companies and publishing their online progress, or regress every month. We can use this type of list for a lot of things, but I’d like to show where internet professionals can look to for a good, local, example of good online strategies. As well, it’s pretty neat to think about working for the top firms, if a corporate job is your thing.

Index Description
As you will see, this internet rank index for Utah companies is composed of the estimates from Alexa and Compete rankings, and the two estimates are averaged. The list is then sorted with the highest rank first.

Personally, I’m surprised by the rank of some of the companies over others I thought would be much higher.

If you have a suggestion for another category to measure or source of data we can use to estimate the most innovative Utah companies, then, by all means - leave your comment below and we’ll take it into consideration next month. I’ve thought about adding the number of back links from Yahoo or a Google Page Rank. I just don’t know yet how to weight each variable. Either way, tell me what you’d like to see. Enjoy!

If you think we should see another company on the list then comment about that too.