Many industries rely on the peaks that winter spending or summer vacationing can bring, whether it’s the retail rush around the holidays or the summer spike for hotels. Such issues are especially notable in the events sector, where everything from the weather and holidays to school schedules and geopolitics can impact demand and revenue.

So, how do you get through peak seasons with maximum efficiency while maintaining profits when those peaks dip?

Are you currently equipped to deal with seasonal upswings? There are a couple of ways to assess your current situation and better understand seasonal staffing patterns:

If you’ve been active for at least a year, it’s time to check your accounts. Look for seasonal patterns and swings.

Did you generate more revenue in the summer or during the holidays? Were you forced to reject some clients, or did you simply push your current workforce harder? If it’s the latter, analyze how much that impacted your business—work stress, absenteeism, resignations, etc.

Let’s suppose that the market suddenly changes, and you’re inundated with clients.

Can you handle them?

Consider your current bandwidth and think about how you would deal with such an increase in demand. Your employees have limits. They’re not machines, and pushing them too hard could lead to burnout and resignations, costing you more in the long run as you struggle to fill the gaps and train new employees.

Every company that’s subject to seasonal fluctuations needs an emergency staffing plan. There are challenges to hiring on-demand workers, but it’s more feasible than bringing full-time staff onboard and dealing with increased employee costs long after the uptick ends and revenue retracts.

Here are some of the challenges and solutions for hiring temporary staff:

Encourage your team to interact. Keep them connected, and push your company ethos into every new staff member. The earlier they learn and the more they participate, the less alienated they will feel and the sooner they will integrate.

Hire only the staff you need. You want to make life easier for your team, but at the same time, you don’t want to drive up your payroll, as you’ll be more exposed to sudden downswings.

Use platforms like GravyWork to hire on-demand workers as and when you need them. You can deal with whatever influx you receive and won’t be overburdened when it’s over.

If your quality drops, your profits will follow. Keep clients happy and make sure those positive reviews and testimonials keep coming by teaching all staff your business ethos and monitoring quality output.

We’re in the midst of a tech revolution, and if you want your business to be the best it can be, you need to embrace it.

If you’re looking to streamline or enhance your business, turn to the following technologies to boost your output and keep your clients happy:

Event-management software provides event businesses with a complete solution for managing their daily activities. Software suites like Eventbrite, Cvent, and Whova can help you manage and promote events, communicate with clients, check employee productivity, and keep your guests happy.

You can use event-management software to analyze market trends and find resource gaps, and as many software suites now incorporate AI technology, they can even take over menial tasks. You’ll waste fewer resources dealing with daily tasks and can direct those employees into more customer-centric jobs.

It’s hard to escape AI right now. Billions are being invested in this technology and it’s advancing a ta terrific pace. Most of the headlines are wrapped up in the groundbreaking and controversial aspects, whether it’s scientists using AI to find new medicines or developers creating problematic news apps.

But, at its heart, AI is just a way to read and process data. As an event manager, you can utilize AI solutions to better understand the needs of your clients and attendees, such as discovering and targeting specific preferences or incorporating on-trend activities.

Video conferencing and virtual reality mean it’s easier than ever to create hybrid events. Attendees don’t actually need to be in an event space to attend. You could greatly increase the number of attendees without renting bigger spaces or hiring more emergency staff to deal with them.

GravyWork is the perfect solution for dealing with seasonal fluctuations. Hire qualified event staff when you need them, choosing from an array of professionals with wide-ranging skill sets.

Whatever you need for your business and however long you need it, you’ll find a professional to meet those needs at GravyWork.

Create a free business account today to peruse the platform, see what’s available, and start planning for the next big client rush.

After hiring temporary staff, you need to make sure they are doing a good job:

Praise them if they do a good job. A little positive reinforcement can go a long way. If there are issues with their performance, let them know. Don’t doo critical, but don’t be too soft, either. Offer constructive feedback, sandwiching criticism between a couple of positives—you’re always on time; you need to be more respectful and understanding with clients; your colleagues seem to love you.

If it’s all negative and there are no positive slices of bread to stuff the meat of criticism inside, it could be time to let them go. There are plenty of other skilled on-demand workers out there.

You can’t accurately predict exactly when demand will ebb or flow, but if you know your business and industry well, you can get a rough idea. Once you have that data, start preparing for the upswings—use on-demand emergency staffing platforms like GravyWork, incorporate AI technologies and event management software to complete menial tasks, and keep checking your data.

If you can get these aspects right, there’s no reason why you can’t prepare for the best and the worst—thriving during the good times and surviving during the bad ones.