A deadline peak publishes the required documents and the dates first.
What you'll learn in this chapter: What about work with immovable deadlines? Work backward from the deadline, and publish on your website in advance "what we need from you, and by when."
Chapter 3 explained preparation starting 30 days ahead, using the example of a month that gets busy because projects pile up. This chapter deals with the other kind of peak month: one whose busy month is fixed from the outset by deadlines set by the calendar or by regulations.
When the deadline can't move, how do you reach an ambitious goal? The clue lies in how you coordinate with clients. In digital marketing terms, this is announcing a sales season that has a deadline: letting clients know on your website, before the deadline, what you need them to prepare.
Scene: Documents That Arrived Three Days Before the Deadline
This is the story of a company that takes on fiscal-year-end work. In the second half of March, a batch of documents arrived from a client. When they opened it, two required items were missing.
When they called, the contact said apologetically, "I didn't know those documents were needed."
Three days remained until the deadline. Employees stayed late into the night, and other quotes were put off.
Looking back afterward, the names of the missing documents were exactly the same as the year before. If only they had been written down somewhere in advance.
If the deadline is fixed in advance, the steps of preparation can also be fixed in advance by working backward from that deadline. That is what this chapter wants to convey.
First: Decide the preparation start date by working backward from the deadline. For peak months in which projects pile up, the peak month and multiplier were decided from last year's results. For the peak months in this chapter, the deadline date is known in advance, so you count back from it to decide when preparation starts.
Second: The Sheet consists of documents rather than photos. "Documents" here means the paperwork you need the client to submit. Much deadline-driven work cannot start until the necessary documents arrive from the client. So what you prepare in this chapter is telling clients in advance "which documents we need from you, and by when."
The order of the four weeks (the Sheet, the Line, the Closing, the Entrance), and the top executive checking just one thing every Friday, are the same as in Chapter 3.
Example: Work with a Deadline Fixed at the End of March
Suppose a company takes on work whose deadline is the end of March every year. This company's peak month is March. Starting 30 days before March 1—that is, around the end of January—it prepares over four weeks.
What troubles this company most is discovering in March that "those documents still haven't arrived." So, before the peak month begins, it publishes on the homepage "which documents we need you to send, and by when." Clients know what to prepare before they even inquire. And the company can limit the work it takes on in March to requests with all documents in hand.
Fiscal-year-end deliveries, work timed to the financial closing, work timed to application deadlines for subsidies and the like: in any industry, if the work has a deadline fixed in advance, the method in this chapter can be used.
There are two types of peak month: those created by projects piling up, and those whose deadlines and due dates are fixed in advance by the calendar or by regulations. With the latter, the preparation start date can also be fixed from the outset.
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