Daydreams of warm, sandy beaches or mountain escapes are enough to inspire many entrepreneurs to depart the office for a much-needed vacation. These breaks may seem especially timely if your industry experiences a significant slowdown in summer. But for truly growth-focused small businesses, these quiet weeks offer golden opportunities—with competitors on vacation or running with a skeleton crew of employees, it’s your chance to kick your business into high gear. The following strategic actions can help you build momentum now so you can sprint ahead of them by the time fall arrives.
Take advantage of this often slow period to conduct a thorough, unbiased analysis of your rivals’ current market position, reviewing their social media activity from the past few months to spot any gaps. What are their customers complaining about in reviews? Which services do they explicitly fail to offer? Such competitive intelligence is invaluable since you can use it to develop new service offerings or marketing messages that directly address what their customers are missing. You may be able to convince these relevant leads to change their allegiance to your business.
Because many clients are on break themselves, the last thing they may want is to hear a sales pitch. Instead of being blatantly salesy in your messaging, turn transactional relationships with customers into more loyal partnerships. For example, send targeted emails and text messages that offer summer greetings or helpful information like market details and enticing discounts (e.g., a quick, free consultation to plan their needs for the upcoming quarter). Such friendly gestures can strengthen their commitment to your business, remind customers of your consistent presence, and spark valuable conversations that your competitors could miss.
This is some of the most impactful dialogue you can have with your clients. Every owner believes they understand what their customers want, but a slow period offers you the chance to move beyond assumptions and discover the truth through honest, unfiltered feedback. Set up a request for comments on your social pages, and consider emailing recent customers to get in touch or post reviews for constructive criticism. Ask open-ended questions like “What did we do well?” and “What is one thing we could do to improve your experience?” Look for trends; the insights you gather should directly influence your upcoming growth plans.
Your competitors’ marketing may be on autopilot, relying on things like prescheduled posts. Your strategy should be to do the opposite, flooding the digital space with high-value, eye-catching content that makes your brand stand out—think infographics displaying industry trends, summer-themed tours of your office and team, and quick-tip videos that solve common customer pain points. Scheduling such content will capture the attention of scrollers who are tired of your competitors’ automated communications.
The biggest enemy of a small business is inefficiency, which can manifest in such money drains as wasted manhours and slowed delivery times. Identify some of the most tedious and repetitive tasks in your business, whether it’s client onboarding, invoice follow-up, or something else entirely. Review the steps of each of these workflows, then research and implement affordable automation tools, such as CRM integration, email sequencing, and/or AI solutions, to streamline them. By fall, you’ll have gained hours of valuable time to focus on more revenue-generating activities.
Autumn’s colors, holidays, and much-anticipated scenery are full of marketing potential. To get ahead of that season and leverage its festivities, plan some appealing initiatives in advance. For example, you could host a pumpkin patch and serve fresh cider at a networking event or theme your social media posts around fall activities like foliage sightings. Additionally, budget now to promote appealing specials you can hold in fall, like a Halloween “Spooktacular” with free first consultations or 10 percent off slow-moving products. Making these efforts early can give you a leg up over competitors who may fail to lay out fall strategies sufficiently early.
Your people are your greatest asset. While your competitors’ teams are short-staffed during summer, use this quiet time to invest in yours, highlighting growth. Arrange targeted, skill-based training sessions between employees’ vacation days, like seminars on new industry best practices or customer service role-playing based on recent feedback. These initiatives will not only improve their skills but also boost their morale—and maybe even their retention—especially if you listen to their own training requests. Take every opportunity to enrich your team’s talent and engagement, and you can better contend with your rivals.
Keep in mind that even if you are also vacationing this summer, you can still implement these strategies once you return. The key is to strike while the iron (and season) is hot. Use this time wisely, and you’ll have the chance to make foundational changes and strategic moves that will set your business apart in the long term.
TAKE ACTION:
Set aside time for these efforts, starting with the ones that best suit your current priorities.
Say you have your sights set on a new enterprise—perhaps one in the ever-growing digital communications, health-care, or dining industry. But as you craft your business plan, you encounter some significant warning signs that you’re in for a bruising battle, fighting tooth and nail for market share, running down costs, and pumping funds into marketing just to gain a foothold in this crowded field.
But what if instead of contending for a small slice of that pie, you bake a completely new one? Chasing such tantalizing alternatives is at the heart of the blue ocean strategy: creating uncontested market space and making the competition largely irrelevant. For business owners, understanding and applying blue ocean thinking (and red, its alternative) can be a critical framework for generating sustainable growth.
The concept of red and blue ocean strategies burst onto the business scene when strategic thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne published their groundbreaking book Blue Ocean Strategy in 2005 (and updated it in 2015). This culmination of a decade-long study of business schemes across over thirty industries challenged conventional wisdom that success hinged primarily on beating one’s rivals. Such traditional thinking, they argued, operated from an overly militaristic perspective of seeking competitive advantages within existing industries.
Through their work, Kim and Mauborgne proposed a paradigm shift. Instead of focusing on competition, leaders should turn to value innovation: the simultaneous pursuit of superior value for customers and lower costs for the company. Their research highlighted businesses that had succeeded not by winning battles but by avoiding them altogether—and opening vast new market spaces in the process.
To effectively navigate these strategies, it’s crucial to understand the distinct characteristics of each “ocean” that entrepreneurs can wade into.
The red ocean: competing in known markets
Businesses that take this approach, named for blood in the water, occupy popular market space and strive to earn their own share of existing demand and outdo competitors. To succeed, they must typically choose between offering a highly differentiated product at a premium or a low-cost product with standard features. The result is price wars, aggressive advertising campaigns that directly compare products, and research into incremental product improvements.
Leaders must also diligently suppress operational costs and hyper-differentiate their organization with unique branding. A prime example is the intensely competitive and saturated telecommunications market, where a few major companies are constantly vying to persuade the same customers.
The blue ocean: exploring new market spaces
While it’s possible to succeed in a red ocean, Kim and Mauborgne’s alternative may be more lucrative: shifting to the clear waters of a blue one. Here, you leverage innovation to effectively make the competition irrelevant. To pursue this path, you offer the market something fundamentally new and more valuable, the likes of which potential consumers haven’t seen.
However, because markets may be unfamiliar with your products or services (or at least your company’s unique approach to them), creating and capturing new demand may require that you initially sell your offerings at low costs. You will be asking prospects to take a leap and try something unfamiliar, so succeeding in blue oceans means successfully convincing them that you not only are worth the risk but also offer a value proposition that no one else does. Additionally, you’ll need to continue innovating should competitors imitate your ideas or otherwise enter your space. Continually pushing new ideas further and introducing new ones can help prevent a blue ocean from becoming a red one.
Many companies have taken such avenues to stellar success, including these examples:
Amazon
This megaretailer is an example of a company that consistently works to turn a red ocean into a blue one. While it already dominates the crowded field of e-commerce through competitive pricing and customer service, it continually forges ahead with creative initiatives like Amazon Web Services and drone deliveries (in a few states), thereby creating entirely new markets.
Cirque du Soleil
Instead of competing with traditional circuses that relied on star animal acts and expensive performers, Cirque du Soleil eliminated these high-cost elements in favor of a theatrical storytelling performance that appeals to adults and youth alike, making it a Las Vegas mainstay and international sensation.
Netflix
Initially, Netflix disrupted the video rental market by eliminating late fees and physical store visits (major customer pain points), instead creating a subscription-based, mail-order DVD service that offered unparalleled selection and convenience. Later, it executed another seemingly blue ocean move by leapfrogging into streaming media, further enhancing convenience and becoming content creators in their own right.
You may find that your route to success begins with market research, either independently (e.g., conducting social media polls) or via a third-party researcher. The results of said research can reveal which type of ocean lies before you should you follow this enterprise.
However, Kim and Mauborgne’s lesson is clear: don’t fight harder in red oceans; fight smarter in blue ones. Understand where the competition is fierce, and keep an eye out for unexplored opportunities. Should you sail with confidence and preparation into an innovative space, you can position your business to not only survive but also grow, profit, and lead.
For more info, visit blueoceanstrategy.com
TAKE ACTION:
Learn more about practicing these methods by enrolling in one of the authors’ strategic programs.
As companies grow and evolve, professionals are often expected to wear multiple hats. Among the most vital are the roles of manager and leader; however, even though these mostly rely on distinct skill sets, many people are tasked with doing both, sometimes without realizing it. But when you understand their differences and how they complement each other, you can become more effective, intentional, and impactful in your role.
Although they often overlap in practice, management and leadership have fundamentally different priorities and methods. The former is rooted in process, structure, and stability. Managers keep things running—they coordinate teams, monitor performance, and ensure that work is completed on time and according to plan. The best managers excel at execution, building systems that help to reduce inefficiencies and ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.
Leadership, by contrast, is about direction and innovation. Leaders create the vision and motivate others to pursue it. They ask bigger questions, such as where the company is going and how it may need to evolve. Great ones inspire and challenge others to stretch beyond the status quo. Here’s another way to think about it: managers focus on doing things right, but leaders focus on doing the right things, as the classic paraphrased saying goes. Neither is more important than the other, but each one can have distinct benefits for your organization and keep it moving forward.
Despite their differences, leadership and management are undeniably connected in many respects—in fact, their most powerful traits often reinforce each other. For instance, leaders without management skills may struggle to bring their organization’s vision to life since ideas can flounder without structure, accountability, and follow-through. Managers without leadership qualities, meanwhile, may keep things running efficiently but leave their teams uninspired, causing them to lose motivation.
That’s why the best professionals can blend both. They connect daily tasks to long-term goals, use strategy to guide operations, and motivate people while managing performance. You don’t have to hold a formal leadership title to lead, and you don’t have to be in operations to manage well. Combining these capabilities can elevate your effectiveness, no matter your current role.
It’s helpful to recognize how your instincts shape the way you interact with others and where you may want to stretch yourself. You may notice you tend to lean more toward being a manager if you:
On the other hand, you may be more of a leader if you:
Many people fall somewhere in the middle, and that’s actually a good thing. The idea isn’t to necessarily switch roles; rather, it’s to strengthen your skill set by embracing traits of both.
Strong leadership doesn’t replace good management—it builds on it. So once you’ve established structure and clarity, leadership gives those systems purpose and momentum. Here’s a closer look at how you can begin strengthening both sides of the equation.
Developing management skills
While leadership drives vision, solid management keeps the engine running. If you’re looking to sharpen your managerial effectiveness, focus on these core areas:
Improving leadership skills
With management fundamentals in place, leadership skills can then help your team grow, adapt, and stay engaged. These four behaviors can elevate your impact:
It’s also helpful to seek feedback from trusted peers or mentors. Understanding how others perceive your approach to leadership and management can reveal blind spots and opportunities you might not notice on your own. Reading books, attending workshops, or observing respected leaders in action can also deepen your insight and provide practical strategies to try.
Organizations need both effective leaders and strong managers, but the real magic often happens when the two merge. When you lead well, you energize your team. When you manage well, you keep them focused. Together, these skills foster a culture of clarity, trust, and forward momentum. Ultimately, leadership and management aren’t competing forces; they’re complementary capabilities. And the more intentionally you integrate them, the more powerful your impact will be.
TAKE ACTION:
Consider your current strengths and default behaviors to determine if you are leaning too far into managing tasks or leading without follow-through.
Zack Jurasek, founder of Texas-based GlowRow, discusses what makes his company’s nighttime kayaking tours unique, including its technical ingenuity.
Tell us about yourself. Have you always enjoyed being on the water and building things?
I worked for fourteen years in the engineering field and was a commercial pilot for about five years. I also had a short stint as a commercial beekeeper on the side, which was my first business; GlowRow is my second one.
My real passion for GlowRow came from flounder-gigging with my dad when I was a kid. We’d walk around in ankle-deep water with a lantern and a gig and catch our dinner for the night; when we did, we could see everything under the water. I wanted to re-create that experience, allowing people to witness aquatic creatures in their natural habitat. That’s exactly what people do in our clear, well-lit kayaks and paddles.
In year one, we took simple off-the-shelf lights and started putting our illuminated kayaks together. However, we test everything in a hypersaline environment—the Laguna Madre, one of six hypersaline lagoons in the world—and by year two, the lights were literally falling apart. I knew I had to build something that would last.
Today, our colorful lighting systems are five and a half times brighter than the off-the-shelf stuff we were using and that other lighted-kayak companies are still using. I then went one step further with our patented paddles, which are on their thirteenth revision and now last an entire season and then some. It’s really a marvel to see.
Did you have any challenges or doubts along the way?
I formed the LLC in May of 2021. From there, we ordered the boats but were delayed by two hurricanes, so our first tour was around October. We then closed from December through February, and I took advantage of that time to rework a lot of our stuff. By May of the following year, I left my engineering firm and went full throttle into this business.
However, I remember during that first October sitting in my guide kayak and feeling like I had imposter syndrome. Even though it’s such a cool experience that I really wanted to share, I couldn’t imagine people actually paying me to be on the water with them. I had to think differently so I wouldn’t feel guilty.
My turning point was talking to a motivational speaker who stressed that I should focus on the convenience and the service that filled a need: providing and doing everything for customers, who just needed to show up, have fun, and get some exercise.
Was there anything you had to learn on the fly?
Definitely, but not in all cases. I always do a lot of research on the back end, making sure all of my I’s are dotted and T’s are crossed, such as contracts, policies, and insurance, before we set up a new location. We’re very professional in every aspect of it because of the risk factor associated with nighttime kayaking; that’s also why we’re strictly ages eighteen and up.
You mentioned the age minimum. Can anybody be too old for this?
No, sir. The oldest guest we’ve had is ninety-seven. I remember that night well: I was guiding her, and, goodness gracious, she couldn’t stop saying that it was the best thing she had done in her entire life. That’s what really keeps my fire going—we’re positively impacting people’s core memories. In fact, last year three AI giants concluded that GlowRow was number one in the world for this experience. We’re always striving to elevate that bar just a little bit higher than everyone else.
Are government standards part of the equation?
Most definitely. The US Coast Guard does annual vessel inspections for each one of our kayaks to ensure that we’re compliant for nighttime operations, and the Texas Parks and Wildlife has its own set of standards. Each state is different as well, so we’ll have to verify compliance with each as we expand, despite meeting US Coast Guard federal regulations.
Is your business at the mercy of the weather overall?
Steve Jobs said it best: You can never connect the dots looking forward, only backward. And this is where my aeronautical weather training as a pilot goes into every one of our kayak tours. We constantly look at weather, wind data, and radar forecasting to determine if it’s a go or no-go situation. Our policy is that there can’t be lightning within twenty miles or winds above 27 miles per hour. It’s very strict.
Would you discuss your passport program? How successful has it been?
Whenever people with our passport card kayak at one of our ten locations, they get their passports punched. If they get all ten, they get a $200 gift card, along with two shirts and two cell phone protectors—it’s a whole prize package.
I actually pitched it to Texas’s tourism department in the governor’s office, and they were 100 percent behind it because the passport marketed Texas as a whole. They helped push it a little bit and were a key factor in us getting ABA Magazine’s recognition as the top North America destination in 2023. I couldn’t be more grateful to those folks.
Is GlowRow open year-round?
2024 was the first year we went year-round. We took a chance by staying open through February—and by the last week of December, we were sold out for winter. It blew my mind. Goodness gracious, people were showing up in droves. Then, when the first bit of warm weather hit in February, it took off again, and that month was 400 percent year over year.
Do any customer stories stand out in your memory?
Oh, man. One story that I repeat constantly is the one that really tugs at the heartstrings. One night, I was out with only a group of three, and since we’re already sold out for that evening, we went forward with it. Our guide was doing the briefing, and one customer just started crying. I asked her if she was OK; she said she was, but it was a lifelong dream of hers to paddle with dolphins.
This is the reason I do this. I don’t do it for the money. The first year, every dollar went right back into GlowRow. I didn’t start paying myself until the second year, and I take a small salary. I’ve created a movement—that’s the important aspect of it.
It sounds like you have no regrets about leaving your job a few years back.
No, sir. No regrets whatsoever. I was stuck in a cubicle, and it was soul-sucking. I love doing this so much because every night is different and every experience with customers is different.
What’s next on your agenda?
Our next flagship of engineering is our trailer. I’m glad you asked because I get really excited about talking about it. Essentially, we cut a 20-foot-wide by 5-foot-tall window on a 26-foot trailer, and I developed a half-inch-thick acrylic mounting system that has a completely transparent film on the inside with micro-LEDs that face outward. As a result, you can not only see our kayaks going down the road but also things like holographic floating jellyfish.
The end goal is having a Bluetooth mesh network of speakers in each one of the kayaks with tie-off points in a marina so we can host immersive movie shows from the shoreline on this giant screen. In addition, we’ll have a remote-controlled alligator head in the water for a movie like Lake Placid or a shark fin swimming around the marina while folks are watching Jaws, really amping up the whole fear factor.
Honestly, I have no marketing background whatsoever. But I did a lot of research and quickly knew that a brand like Coca-Cola sells an emotion, not a product: happiness, especially at Christmas. Red Bull sells adrenaline. That’s exactly what GlowRow taps into: we don’t just sell the experience; we sell the emotion of accomplishment and taking that fear aspect and moving it into fascination. That’s where we really shine—or glow, so to speak—and this new venture exemplifies that.
Down the road, do you plan to expand outside of Texas?
GlowRow Germany is happening! We also have a solid base in Virginia that’s going to open in a few years. In addition, we’re planning Florida locations and one in Southern California. We’ve even had interest from New Zealand.
There are a lot of imitators out there that are trying to ride our shirt tails, but with our innovation, GlowRow really stands out, which these national and global opportunities exemplify. I don’t take the mantle of number one lightly, and I have to keep resetting that bar and standards. That’s what any industry leader should do.
For more info, visit glowrow.com
