30 days ahead: 30 days before the first day of the peak month. It is the day the last four weeks of preparation begin; for a 2x peak month, preparation starts here.
In this book, "30 days ahead" means 30 days before the first day of the peak month. The last four weeks of preparation begin on that day. By that morning, the Sheet that employees left during the regular months is already in the Folder. Over the next four weeks, you publish the Line, the Closing, and the Entrance. On the first day of the peak month, everything is in place. If you rush to get things ready after the peak month has started, it is too late.
Picture it. On the morning of the first day of the peak month, the Line on the homepage and the Sheet in the Folder are already in place. Your employees, calm as usual, get on with quotes and deliveries. No one is in a hurry. Take a moment to picture the quiet atmosphere of that morning. By the time you finish this book, you will be the one standing there.
Here is a quick outline of what follows. First, see what is missing (Chapter 1). Next, decide your peak months (Chapter 2). The methods of preparation are in Chapters 3 and 4, how to think about the time used for preparation is in Chapter 5, and the content of the preparation is in Chapters 6 through 11. Chapter 12 runs one peak month over 90 days, Chapter 13 covers how to get back on track when things stall, and Chapter 14 covers how to hand over decisions.
What you'll learn in this chapter: Where should preparation start? With the facts (photos and documents), then the Line on the homepage, the CTA, and the order-acceptance conditions, one per week, in that order.
Heading into the peak month decided in Chapter 2, what should you put in place in the last four weeks, and in what order? That is what this chapter is about. The three places seen in Chapter 1 (the Line, the Closing, the Entrance) are built up in order, starting from the facts in the Sheet.
From here on, the topic is reaching the goal by changing how you work, not by effort. Instead of adding overtime or people, you change the order of preparation. In digital marketing terms, this is how to run the preparation period for a campaign: gathering material, the main message, the call to action (CTA), and lead-qualification criteria, put in order one after another.
Scene: Four Weeks of Trying to Do Everything at Once
At a parts-machining company, one month before the peak month, the president asked an employee: "Collect photos, fix the copy on the homepage, change the inquiry form, and write up our order-acceptance conditions too."
Four weeks later, each of them was half done. The photos were partly collected. The copy was still a draft. The form was still the old one.
It wasn't that the employee had been lazy. It was simply that no one had decided where to start.
If they had decided in the first week, "this week, photos only," what would have been left four weeks later?
Preparation has an order. When you make curry, you cut the ingredients before you add the roux, right? In the same way, first come the facts (the Sheet). Next, the main message (the Line). Next, the CTA (the Closing). Last, the order-acceptance conditions (the Entrance).
What happens if you skip the order? It's like working out the seasoning without any ingredients: the Line and the Closing can only be filled with plausible-sounding words. Sentences written that way drift back into words that could be placed on any company's page. When you keep to the order, what was finished the week before becomes the material for the next week. That is far easier both for the employees doing the preparation and for the top executive checking it.
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