The Four Cores is the four axes that support this book's method: stop generative AI before anything is finalized; the top executive decides how time is used; what you publish is a factual Line; and peak months are set only a few times a year.
The Structural Ideas at the Heart of This Book
The thinking in this book comes down to the following three ideas.
First: The results of a peak month are decided before the peak month begins.
No one practices running on the day of the sports festival. Peak months are a bit like that. A peak month is not a month for preparing; it is a month for using what you prepared. The preparation itself is finished in the regular months before it and in the weeks leading up to it (starting 30 days, 6 weeks, or 8 weeks ahead).
Second: A website's competitive strength lies not in screen design, but in having the facts from your work preserved in words.
The reasons clients choose your company usually lie in your work, not in a beautiful screen. Yet surprisingly often, those reasons are not written anywhere on the website. If they aren't written, there is no way for new prospects to learn them. What a website needs are the facts that exist only in your work—facts unique to your company.
Third: Make decisions from records, not memory.
"I'm pretty sure it was about this much last year." Memory is surprisingly unreliable. So set goals from the records of last year's results, check the progress of preparation by what has been left behind, and release generative-AI drafts only after a person has compared them against the records.
The Method at a Glance
Let's lay this out on a one-year calendar. Here, we'll use the example of a company whose busiest month is May.
Start of the year: The top executive decides the peak month from records. Open last year's order records and confirm, "Yes, it's May." Use the number of orders in May last year as the yardstick for this year's goal. The point is to decide from records, not from gut feeling. This is the starting point of Annual Quota Optimization.
Regular months: Employees leave a Sheet for the next peak month. Employees do just one thing in regular months: put a Sheet for the next peak month into the Folder. That way, no one has to hunt for photos and documents once the peak month arrives.
April (the four weeks starting 30 days ahead): Prepare the Sheet, the Line, the Closing, and the Entrance, in that order. In week 1, employees gather the Sheet; in week 2, they revise and publish the Line (the main message); in week 3, they publish the Closing (the CTA); and in week 4, the Entrance (the order-acceptance conditions). The top executive checks just one thing at the end of each week.
May (the peak month): Use your preparation. Don't rebuild any pages. Run deliveries and quotes with the Line and the Sheet you published in advance. All the top executive does is look at the Weekly Memo (four check items reviewed only once a week), once a week.
June (review): The top executive leaves the Three Lines. The plan for the next peak month starts from these Three Lines (the three review items).
Figure 4. The flow of a year (when the peak month is May)
Repeat this flow for each of the few peak months in your year. That is the method of this book. By replacing the month names with your own peak months, you should be able to use the same structure regardless of industry.
What changes when you put this method into practice? You move from a state in which every peak month is consumed by rebuilding the website and hunting for documents, to one in which you can focus on deliveries and quotes with the preparation you made in advance. And each time a peak month arrives, you can start planning where your last records left off. At the very least, you no longer start from zero.
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