Feast, Famine, Repeat

Every operator I know has lived this cycle at least twice. Most have lived it a dozen times and never once called it by name.

You land three good clients in a five week stretch. The pipeline looks fat. Your bank account looks like a decision you made correctly. So you stop selling, because now you have to deliver, and honestly it feels responsible. Grown up, even. You tell yourself you’ll circle back to business development once things settle down.

Ninety days later the work wraps. The invoices clear. You open next month’s forecast and it’s a ghost town with tumbleweeds rolling through it.

So you panic. You send the emails you swore you’d never send. You take the client with the bad energy and the worse budget because something is better than nothing. You rebuild the pipeline from a standing start, land three good clients, and stop selling.

Feast. Famine. Repeat.

Most men diagnose this as a sales problem. It is not a sales problem. It’s a scheduling problem wearing a sales costume, and until you see it that way you will keep solving it with more hustle, which is exactly the thing that caused it.

Here’s the mechanic nobody explains.

Between the moment you first talk to someone and the moment their money lands in your account, there is a gap. Call it the lag. For some businesses it’s eleven days. For others it’s seven months. Yours is whatever it is, and I’d bet a decent steak dinner you’ve never actually measured it.

That lag is why the cycle feels like bad luck instead of arithmetic. When you stop selling in March because you’re slammed, nothing bad happens in March. Or April. The damage shows up in June, by which point you’ve completely forgotten what you did in March. You blame the market. You blame seasonality. You blame the algorithm.

You did this. In March. On a Tuesday, when you looked at your calendar, saw it was full of delivery work, and quietly decided that outreach could wait a week.

The lag means the consequences of your input decisions arrive so far downstream that your brain never connects them to the cause. That’s it. That’s the whole trick. Feast and famine isn’t a mysterious force of business gravity. It’s the delayed echo of a schedule you stopped defending.

And here’s the part that should sting a little: the busier and more successful you are in the moment, the more confident you feel about skipping it. Nobody stops selling when they’re desperate. Everybody stops selling when things are going great. The cycle is powered by your best months.

I stole this idea from people who train seriously, because they figured out something business owners still haven’t.

A guy who’s been lifting for twenty years doesn’t train based on how he feels that morning. He has a program. The program says squat three times a week, and so he squats three times a week, on the days he feels like a machine and the days he feels like a bag of wet cement. The load stays constant. His feelings are not invited to the meeting.

Amateurs train when they’re motivated. That’s why amateurs look the same in December as they did in January.

Your pipeline works exactly the same way. You need a load that does not move, applied every single week, regardless of how the current month looks. Here’s how you build it.

Step one. Measure your lag.

Pull your last ten closed deals. For each one, find the date of first real contact and the date the money hit. Not the contract date. The money date. Average them.

That number is your lag. Write it down somewhere you’ll see it. If your lag is 74 days, then what you do this week determines your revenue in late October, and nothing you do in late October will fix late October. That reframe alone is worth the exercise.

Most guys are shocked by this number. They think they’re running a 30 day business and they’re actually running a 90 day business. Which means they’ve been steering a boat by looking at where it already is.

Step two. Set your floor.

Your floor is the minimum number of genuinely new conversations you will start every week. Not emails sent. Not connection requests. Conversations, meaning a human being knows who you are and responded.

To find the number, work backward. If you close roughly one in six, and you need two new clients a month, you need twelve conversations a month, so your floor is three per week. Round up, because your close rate is probably worse than you think and everybody’s memory flatters them.

Three is a fine floor. Five is better. Twenty is fantasy and you’ll abandon it by week three, which is worse than picking three, because a floor you break is not a floor. It’s a wish.

Pick the number you will hit on your worst week of the year. The week the server goes down and your kid has strep and a client is unhappy. That week. What can you still do that week? That’s your floor.

Step three. Give the block a name and a chair.

Two hours. Same days every week. On the calendar with a name that means something, not “biz dev,” which is a phrase people use when they intend to do nothing.

Call it The Floor. Call it Constant Load. Call it whatever makes you feel a small twinge of shame when you drag it to a different day.

Then treat it like a client meeting, because it is one. You just haven’t met them yet. Nobody moves a client meeting to Thursday because they had a lot going on. You moved it because that appointment was with your future self, and your future self doesn’t send passive aggressive follow up emails when you no show.

If you want the block to actually hold, you have to know whether it did. Feelings are unreliable witnesses here. Every operator I know believes they spent more time on business development than they did. I’ve used Rize for exactly this, tracking where the hours actually went instead of where I remember them going. The gap between the two is usually humbling and always useful. You can’t defend a block you never verified.

Step four. Track the leading number, not the lagging one.

Revenue is a lagging indicator. It tells you about decisions you made a lag ago. Staring at it is like driving by watching the rearview.

The number you track weekly is conversations started. That’s it. One number, written down every Friday, in the same place, for the rest of the year.

Some weeks you’ll hit three and close nothing. Fine. The number isn’t a promise of revenue, it’s a promise of consistency, and consistency is the only thing that turns a lag from an enemy into an engine. Do it long enough and the lag starts working for you: you’re always harvesting something you planted eleven weeks ago, and you always have something in the ground.

Step five. Never renegotiate the floor during a feast.

This is the one that matters and the one you’ll break.

There will be a month where you are genuinely, legitimately slammed. Where skipping the block is defensible and every rational voice in your head says the work in front of you is more valuable than the work you’re prospecting for.

Those voices are correct about this week and catastrophically wrong about November.

If you must flex, flex the size, never the existence. Cut the block from two hours to forty five minutes. Cut your floor from five to two. But do not zero it out, because zero is not a smaller number than five. Zero is a different category. Zero is how the streak dies, and streaks don’t die gradually. They die once.

I want to set your expectations properly, because the first stretch of this is genuinely unsatisfying and that’s where most men bail.

Weeks one through four, you’ll feel productive and see nothing. You’re planting into a lag. Nothing has had time to arrive yet. This is the phase where your brain, which is addicted to feedback, starts whispering that this isn’t working.

Weeks five through twelve, things start landing, but unevenly. One week brings two deals, the next brings nothing, and you’ll be tempted to conclude the whole thing is random. It isn’t. You’re watching a small sample of a process that only smooths out with volume.

Somewhere around week fourteen, if you held the floor, something different happens. You stop being able to point at where a given deal came from, because there are too many threads running at once and they’ve started overlapping. Conversations you started in June are closing while conversations you started in August are warming up. The peaks and valleys flatten into something that looks almost boring.

That flatness is the whole prize. A boring forecast is the most underrated luxury in business. It means you can hire without flinching. It means you can turn down the client with the bad energy, because you don’t need him. It means you can price properly, because desperation is the single largest discount most operators give and they give it without noticing.

Everything you want from your business is downstream of not being desperate. And the only reliable way to not be desperate is to have started enough conversations eleven weeks ago.

“My business is referral based. This doesn’t apply.”

Referrals are conversations you didn’t schedule. That’s the whole difference. A referral business without a floor is just a feast and famine business with a nicer origin story, and you’ve noticed by now that referrals dry up precisely when you’re too busy to stay visible to the people who make them.

Your floor can be referral shaped. Three conversations a week with people positioned to send you work counts. Reconnecting with a past client counts. The mechanism doesn’t matter. The constancy does.

“I don’t have time when I’m delivering.”

You don’t have two hours a week. Out of roughly fifty working hours. That’s four percent.

You have the time. What you don’t have is the willingness to disappoint a current client in favor of a hypothetical one. That’s not a calendar problem, that’s a courage problem, and I say that with affection because I did it for years.

“I hate selling.”

Then stop selling and start talking to people. Three conversations a week where you’re useful to someone. No pitch required, no close required, just useful. The pipeline is a byproduct of being in enough rooms. Most of what men call “hating sales” is actually hating the version of sales they invented in their head at the last minute because they had no pipeline and got desperate.

Guys with a full pipeline are relaxed on calls. Guys with an empty one are not. The floor is what buys you the relaxed version.

Your revenue doesn’t swing because the market swings. It swings because your effort swings, and the lag hides the connection long enough for you to blame something else.

Constant load. Boring, unglamorous, applied on the good weeks and the bad ones. That’s the whole answer. It will not feel impressive on any given Tuesday. It will look like a completely different business in eleven months.

The men who win this aren’t the best closers. They’re the ones who never stopped.

Take fifteen minutes. Open your last ten closed deals, calculate your lag, and write that number on an index card.

Then open your calendar and put two hours on the books for this week. Give it a name. Set your floor number.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Fifteen minutes today, two hours a week, and in ninety days you’ll stop having a ghost town month ever again.

Refined. Relentless. Unapologetic.

Marcus