On the second Saturday in July, a family-run canoe and kayak outfitter on a spring-fed river does everything a small tourism business hopes for. Every boat is out by ten. The phone keeps ringing. The parking lot is full of cars from three states.
It is also the worst day of their season. The shuttle line back to the put-in stretches past the bait shop, and some guests wait long enough to get sunburned before they ever touch the water. A church youth group that called that morning has to be turned away. By Sunday night there are two new reviews, both about the wait, neither about the river.
The following Tuesday, more than half the canoes sit on the rack. In September, when the water is clear, the crowds are gone, and the weather is often the best of the year, the outfitter’s ads have already been switched off for the season, because summer felt full.
The owners come out of that summer convinced they need more marketing. They are half right. What they need first is a plan that treats each of those problems as information. The Saturday line, the empty Tuesdays, the quiet September, and the two reviews are not four separate failures. They are one picture of where demand is, where capacity runs out, and where the business has room to grow.
This piece is about how a strategy session and the package that follows turn problems like these into a sequence a small tourism operator can defend, follow, and measure. The outfitter is invented, but the pattern is common to anyone whose business lives inside a season.
A seasonal business already has tactics. The outfitter has a website, a Google listing, a social account, a few ads, a rack of brochures at the visitor center, and a loyal set of families who come back every summer. What it doesn’t have is a sequence: a reason to do one thing before another, and a way to tell which thing is working.
Without a sequence, three things tend to happen.
Spend follows feelings. When the lot is full, the owners feel successful and keep spending. When it’s quiet, they feel anxious and cut. Both reactions are understandable, and both are backward.
Every problem gets the same answer. A long shuttle line, an empty Tuesday, and a quiet September all get the same response: more posts, more ads, more visibility. But a shuttle line is a capacity problem. An empty Tuesday is an audience problem. A quiet September is a timing problem. More visibility makes the first one worse.
Nobody can say what the plan is. If the owner’s daughter, who runs the front desk, were asked what the marketing plan is for next summer, she would describe a list of things they usually do. That is a habit, not a plan.
A proposal meeting is about what an agency can sell. It usually ends with a menu: a website refresh, an ad budget, a social calendar. The business picks items, and the agency starts working.
A strategy session is about what the business has to decide. It starts with the season that just happened, not the services on offer, and it ends with choices the owners have made, in writing, that the work will follow.
The difference shows up in the questions. A proposal meeting asks, “What would you like more of?” A strategy session asks, “Where did you run out of room, where did you have room to spare, and which of those do you want to change next year?”
For the outfitter, that second question changes the conversation. The owners stop talking about needing more customers and start talking about which customers, on which days, in which months, and how many they can actually take.
In Harvard Business Review, Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg argues that many organizations struggle less with solving problems than with figuring out what the problems are. He describes how managers, spurred by a penchant for action, tend to switch quickly into solution mode without checking whether they really understand the problem.
A strategy session slows that switch down on purpose. For each problem the owners bring in, the session asks a few plain questions.
The Saturday line turns out not to be a marketing problem at all. It’s a scheduling problem that shows up in marketing, through reviews. The fix starts with launch times and shuttle runs. The marketing job is to set expectations honestly and point overflow toward days with room.
A session is worth the time only if it produces four things the business can act on: a priority, a capacity limit, a channel choice, and a measure. Each of them has to be specific enough to say no to something.
The outfitter can’t fix everything next year. The session forces a choice. In this example, the owners choose weekday and September trips as the priority. That means peak Saturdays are no longer a growth target. They’re something to manage.
That choice has consequences. Saturday ads stop. Saturday promotions stop. Effort and budget move to the days and weeks with room.
Every plan for a seasonal business has to know where the ceiling is. For the outfitter, the ceiling isn’t the number of boats. It’s the number of guests the shuttle and the staff can move safely in an hour, and the number of groups the put-in can handle at once.
Writing that limit down protects the business from its own success. A campaign that fills a day beyond what the shuttle can handle doesn’t create growth. It creates more reviews about waiting.
Different problems need different channels. Weekday trips are rarely booked by the same people who book Saturdays. They’re booked by groups with flexible calendars: church youth programs, scout troops, summer camps, retiree clubs, school clubs in late spring and early fall, and local employers planning a team day. Those groups are reached through direct outreach and relationships, not through broad ads.
September visitors are often couples and small groups planning a trip a few weeks ahead. They’re reached through search, the Google listing, and a clear page about what the river is like after Labor Day.
So the channel choice is specific. Direct outreach to groups for weekdays. Search and listing work for September. Nothing new for Saturdays.
The measure has to match the priority. If the priority is weekdays and September, the measure is weekday and September bookings compared with the same period last year, checked at agreed points during the season. It isn’t total website visits, social followers, or Saturday revenue.
A good measure also has a date. If outreach to groups hasn’t produced weekday bookings by a point the owners choose in spring, the plan says what changes.
The package should also say, in writing, what the business won’t do. For the outfitter, that might include no discounts that teach guests to wait for a deal, no promises about water levels or weather, and no new peak-day campaigns while the shuttle is the bottleneck. Writing these down makes them easier to hold when a busy July day tempts everyone to say yes.
The outfitter’s quiet September points to the most common mistake in seasonal marketing: spending when the business is busy and going silent when customers are deciding.
Guests don’t decide on a river trip the morning they arrive. Families often plan summer trips months ahead. Groups book even earlier, because they need dates approved. September couples may plan a few weeks out. The money and attention a business spends in the middle of a full July does little, because the people who will fill next month have already made their plans, and the business can’t take more on peak days anyway.
A strategy session maps the decision windows for each audience. When do church groups set their summer calendars? When do schools approve field trips? When do couples start searching for fall weekends? The marketing calendar is built around those windows, not around the days the lot is full.
The same thinking applies within a week. Google’s guide to ad scheduling explains that an ad schedule can specify the hours or days of the week when ads show, and can raise or lower bids for specific days and times. For a business that wants weekday trips and can’t take more on Saturdays, that is a practical way to match spending to capacity. It’s a tool, not a strategy. The strategy is the decision about which days need help.
Two well-studied ideas explain why a written plan works better than good intentions, especially in a business with a short, intense season.
In a study titled “Exploring the ‘Planning Fallacy'”, Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Michael Ross found that people tend to underestimate how long their own tasks will take. Their predictions focus on plan-based scenarios about the future rather than on relevant past experience. In one of their studies, the optimistic bias disappeared when participants were asked to connect relevant past experiences to their predictions.
Seasonal owners know this feeling. Every winter, the off-season looks long enough to rebuild the website, reach out to every group, and train new staff. Every spring, it turns out it wasn’t. The remedy the research points to is simple: plan from last season’s calendar, not from next season’s hopes. That is why the first thing a strategy session asks for is the record of what actually happened.
The National Cancer Institute’s summary of research on implementation intentions describes them as if-then plans that link situational cues, such as good opportunities to act or critical moments, with responses that help reach a goal. The idea is that deciding in advance what to do when a situation arises makes it easier to act when it does.
For a river outfitter, the critical moments are predictable. A plan can name them:
None of these requires a meeting in July. They were decided in winter, when the owners had time to think.
Here is how the outfitter’s four problems look once the plan exists.
The Saturday line becomes a launch-time system. Instead of first-come, first-served, guests reserve a launch window. The shuttle runs on a schedule the staff can actually keep. The website says honestly what a peak Saturday is like and suggests a weekday for a quieter river. The growth isn’t more Saturday guests. It’s fewer unhappy ones, and some of them become weekday guests.
The empty Tuesdays become a group program. The outfitter builds a simple weekday offer for groups, with a clear description of what a group day includes and who to call. The owners or a staff member reach out to youth programs, camps, clubs, and local employers during the window when those groups set their calendars. The growth is on days that already had boats, staff, and shuttle time to spare.
The quiet September becomes a second season. The outfitter keeps its listing and website current through the fall, publishes a page about what the river is like after Labor Day, and shifts ad spending into late summer and September instead of July. Its returning families get a note about fall weekends. The growth comes from a month that was already open.
The high-water closures become a promise kept. Rivers rise. Outfitters check conditions using sources such as the U.S. Geological Survey’s Water Data for the Nation, but no plan controls the weather. What the plan controls is the response: a prepared message, a clear reschedule policy, and updated hours everywhere guests look. A guest who is rescheduled well on a closure day is more likely to come back than one who was never told.
Each of these turns a problem the owners were embarrassed by into a specific, measurable piece of work. That is what “plans that turn problems into growth” means in practice. The problems were the most useful data the business had.
The session produces decisions. The package turns those decisions into something the team can follow without the owner re-explaining it every week. For a seasonal tourism business, a finished package should include:
A package like this is something the front desk can open in July and use. If the only person who understands the plan is the person who wrote it, the plan isn’t finished.
Trust in a plan is the difference between a deck and a decision. A deck describes possibilities. A decision says what will happen, who will do it, and how everyone will know whether it worked.
For a family business, trust also depends on whether the plan respects what the owners know. They know the river, the regulars, and which weekends flood. A plan that ignores that knowledge will be quietly set aside by June. A plan that writes it down, and builds on it, becomes the family’s plan rather than the agency’s.
Trust grows at the checkpoints. When the owners see weekday group bookings recorded against the plan’s target, or see that the fall page is drawing searches, they can trust the next decision. When something isn’t working, the plan already says what changes. Nobody has to argue about whether to panic.
The same discipline applies outside tourism, but the problem looks different. A nonprofit often comes into a strategy session believing its problem is awareness: not enough people know about the mission. Frequently, the real problem is the path. People who already know the organization have no clear next step from interest to volunteer to donor. More awareness doesn’t fix a missing path, just as more visibility doesn’t fix a shuttle line. The session’s job in both cases is the same: name the real problem, then sequence the work around it.
The more of the past season the owners bring, the less the plan depends on hope.
A few decisions make the session faster and the plan more honest.
Picture the same Saturday a year later. The lot is still full. But guests have launch times, the shuttle runs on a schedule, and the website told everyone what to expect. A youth group that called that morning was offered the following Wednesday, and took it. Tuesday has two groups on the river. The September page is already drawing searches. When a review mentions a wait, the reply explains the system and invites the guest back on a weekday.
The river is the same. The demand was always there. What changed is that the owners decided, in winter, what each problem was telling them.
If your season left you with problems you keep meaning to solve, start with the evidence. Mark last season’s calendar with the days you turned people away and the days you had room to spare, and bring it to a strategy session with us. We’ll help you decide which of those days to change first.
Photo by Andrew Ridley on Unsplash
Written By
Darlene Gagnon is the founder of WeKinnect Global Branding Agency. Guided by the core value of Service before Self, she works with entrepreneurs and family-owned legacy businesses. She focuses especially on restaurants, arts, and travel and tourism. Darlene writes on Branding, Positioning, Marketing Strategy, Public Relations, Storytelling, and Entrepreneurship. WeKinnect serves entrepreneurs and family-owned legacy businesses across restaurants, arts, travel and tourism, banking, home services, nonprofits, and the pet industry, and Darlene brings that same spirit of service to every piece she writes.
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