Every quarter 2 kind of follows the same pattern: we are all high off excellent Quarters 4’s the year before, leading into Christmas holidays and new year riding that high in Q1 feeling good.
March 25 rolls around, and there’s a bit of a moment where companies start looking around at calendars and realising end of financial year reporting is coming in 3 months and they need to tighten the belt, drop some resources, make that bank that they need to look good on their annual reports.
What happens next is:
- Hiring Freezes
- Layoffs
- More Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs) in case the company needs to force people out; they have documented proof that the employees were not doing very well
- Spend on items deemed not critical gets frozen
No word of a lie, Ive worked at a company where the CFO was emailing the technical team about a $10.00 a month subscription wanting to know what it was for and if it can be canceled….and that’s not the only low cost item they would email about 🙁 FML what are we even doing here bruh.
On the Startup side
- Startups will notice that investment firms just don’t reply.
- Investment offers get smaller, capital drip feeds into the market no free flow funding all around
- Deal terms get harsher.
- If a company is backed, pressure is put on them to reduce burn rate, meaning downsizing, lower the engineering budgets.
- Reports and founders activities are under more scrutiny at this time, everyone pulls out the microscope to read the reports.
*Not all investment firms do this, some are sharls and see this as a stock trading chart. They buy the dip, or another saying is to buy when things are low and sell when the markets are riding high.
For Ecommerce
- It gets rough, sales are down and its becomes more expensive for them to acquire new customers on Ad platforms.
- These new tariffs have everyone shaking their heads – I honestly think the tariffs are way over the top aggressive. Trading between countries should not be so heavily taxed. This creates a problem where brands start looking for chapter options leading to lower quality.
- Tariffs increase company cost of goods (COGS).
- Customers will be spending less coming out of the Christmas holiday period overspending on gifts and birthdays, into January fitness month and realising thatthey well overspent and need to double down on repayments.
Quarter 2 is always the sluggish down trend 3 month widown, for me in AUS its also winter where we lose our sunshine and beach weather and get smashed in the face with rain and grey skies. It sucks ass.
If anything Q2 is a good period to have some more thought about your marketing channels, how are you acquiring customers, can you find new sources, what can you do about pricing either raise it or do a discounted window and looking at competitors to see what you could use for your brand to get an advantage.
For me, I have a full-time job and a handful of side business startups, I have a crummy time at my job during Q2, but I had a great time on some of my startups because Im a solo founder, I can move agile and change my pricing; Im low burn. A bit of icing on my cake is that AI is giving me the support I need to move fast and not get caught in the Q2 traps others may get snagged on.
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