The Four Seasons of Your Business
We aren't designed to hustle at the same pace all year long. Knowing which season of business you're in guides how to manage your energy and attention to be in tune with the natural pace and cyclicality of growth - without burning out.
This framework is inspired by and a bit of a mash-up of the Business Birthing Handbook by Jennifer Armbrust and the Heart of Service framework by Linsday Mack.
Important to know? Seasons can last a natural season, 90-ish days. Or you can have micro-seasons within a launch cycle, or macro seasons where the birthing, building, harvesting, and rest phases last for YEARS each.
Spring: The Gestation Season
The Spring Season is where seeds are planted, ideas are born and percolating, relationships are started, and the energy of new life starts to emerge.
There’s a lot of mental energy you’re expending in this stage: dreaming the ideas, making those connections, and wrestling with them as they take shape. Researching, learning, problem-solving, decision-making as you develop the firmer foundations of what you’ll grow.
Gestation seasons are times when things are growing, there’s a lot of activity happening, but it’s all under the surface, and things are in the process of forming themselves. It’s almost like we’re gestating them, we’re holding them, they’re growing within us, but they’re not ready to be born yet. And it doesn’t mean you’re not ready, it’s not ready, there’s something wrong. It means that our creations and our offerings are alive, they have their own life cycles, and they’re taking the time it takes. - Lindsay Mack
This is the stage filled with so much possibility: what will these seeds become?
It’s also the stage that every entrepreneur wants to get through: when will I be done with this uncertainty and just know what the heck is it that I’m growing?
In this season, we don’t want to be careless with our ideas, seeds and sprouts - but we don’t want to be too careful here either.
Make the outreach, knowing that how you describe yourself won’t be perfect.
Float the trial balloon for the new program and do that market research, still knowing that you’ll be revising your idea many times forward.
Test your side hustle or new product without divesting of your day job or your current clients that you might have outgrown.
In that vein, avoid making big investments too early - you don’t quite know what your idea wants to be yet!
Summer: The Building Season
Just like going from seed to harvest, going from idea to successful execution requires labor.
But instead of daily watering, tending, fertilizing, checking for bugs, and weeding - and doing this all under the hot sun…
We’re showing up regularly in a relational or broadcast way.
Deepening your IP, and your positioning, and strengthening your offers and systems.
The never-ending (in a positive way) number of people with whom to connect, build relationships, and follow up!
Most of the time, summer is seen as a season of light, and fun, and relaxation! But in this metaphor, this is the season where our energy is the highest, so it’s time to build out and transform our ideas from concept to reality.
This is the season of the sometimes-boring, often monotonous work of getting it done. The hard work that isn’t sexy, that no one really acknowledges, is often physically grueling and requires focus. (That’s often the moat that separates shiny-idea syndrome from sustainable harvests).
In Actualization, you confront the physical realities of money, time, energy, health, resources, people, regulations, commerce, and Capitalism. You need to work creatively with constraints. Reduce your stress and suffering by letting go of attachment to your perfect vision and watertight engineering. - Jennifer Armbrust
The real truth is that there’s no overnight success - at least not one that’s sustainable. The people you see succeeding now were doing the foundational work of relationship building, market development, and/or content creation consistently for a long time.
In Summer, you have to keep an eye on your energy because of the level of effort required to do the building and to channel your creativity in a focused manner.
The vessel of the body needs a lot of care when we’re in this kind of season. So it can take a little while to discover what that is or what the best kind of rhythm is for us. But if we’re willing to let go and allow ourselves to be a vessel for whatever wants to come through or is wanting to come through at this particular time, it can be a pretty incredible experience to move through the season. - Lindsay Mack
Fall: The Harvest Season
Harvest represents the final push toward this season’s results, where we harvest the fruit.
Even though you’ve been laboring the last few months in the build, it’s time for another final round of energy to harvest what has been growing over the last cycle.
This might look like the launch of a new program, an event, a new brand, or a new book, which means confronting the seemingly never-ending punch list of todos.
Or this might be more subtle: the seeds you’ve been planting finally are resulting in inquiries and proposals and actually doing the work to get you paid. This means juggling seed planting and system building for the future, while simultaneously delivering for your clients right now.
This season lasts beyond the harvest or the birth of something new - it includes what immediately follows as well, actually caring for what's been created. I'm not a parent, but I imagine this is like the postpartum stage where there’s no sleep, up all night with feedings, and wondering when you’ll take a shower.
(As someone writing a book now, I’m steeling myself for the reality that the success of books with my size audience isn’t about the launch. It’s about promoting it and talking about it for 2-3 years after publication without getting bored of talking about it. The longest harvest season ever).
Winter: The Rest and Reflect Season (aka Integration/Hibernation/Death and Rebirth Season*)
* I need a singular name for this stage, maybe? Or maybe not?
Once you’ve harvested, it’s time to rest, reflect, and recenter for what’s next.
The first step is Integrating what you’ve learned.
It’s a really necessary period of reflection and review of what it took to create something: would we do it again? Would we not? Integration seasons are hugely radical because they interrupt and dismantle the cycles of work that are often born or are in some ways sort of connected to capitalist structures, which are really more like a hamster wheel. There’s not a whole lot of space for deep aftercare after a big experience. - Lindsay Mack
This season also includes the mini-seasons of Transition and Hibernation.
Where we are winding down where we’re at… but not yet knowing what’s to come. We’re on the bridge between what’s present and what’s next.
Finally, we might confront a full Death and Rebirth season. Where we’ve outgrown an aspect of our business and we’re being invited to sunset what was and allow it to become food and fertilizer for the new seeds and sprouts in our business.
In this season, the requirement is space. Time. Silence and solitude can let what’s next be meant to emerge.
When you’re in this season, be careful about the inputs you consume, because so much of our industry is “go-go-go” without a break and can shame us if we don't know what's next. We live in a world that instills that mentality of relentless growth, always being ready for something new, never having a period of re-centering to let the stirrings of what’s next take shape.
How this shows up practically in my business
In the macro of my business, after about 2 years in the Gestation season, I’m full-on in the Building season.
My brain is always on, always producing - writing this newsletter, teaching my monthly business dialogues, launching new frameworks, streamlining offers, and writing the book. It’s the creative output of 5+ years of learning, ideating, and seed planting to get me in a stage where I have enough growing to take this creative excitement and run with it as far and as fast as I can - without burning out.
I’m having to really take care of myself to ride the edge of my creative desires, my vision and ambition, and the reality of what one human can actually get done in a season.
In a micro perspective, I’m in the harvest season. I just completed enrollment for this round of Deeper Foundations, having spent the last 6 months preparing for this launch both in building out the course even deeper and growing relationships with potential students and course advocates.
The build phase was a project last year, much more than I had anticipated: re-imagining how and what I teach, creating new frameworks for all of the concepts, creating and filming content for the course over the last 6 months, and finally executing the launch and enrollment. We just launched this week and I’m excited to get to dive in with this cohort. And also excited that the laboring on course content development is done!
Which means that no matter how many ideas I have, I’m slowing my pace. Entering into a rest cycle, as I’m in this for the long term and need to tend to my health as I keep building.
