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The date your high season actually started, not the one you remember
Walk away with the exact date, week, and day your high season started and ended last year, marked against your own numbers instead of your memory.
By Yodai · Published September 6, 2026 · Updated October 12, 2026
If I asked you when your busy season started last year, you'd probably say something like "in June" or "around Memorial Day." That's a memory date, not a paper date, and a memory date can be off by weeks, in either direction. That mistake is what makes you order too much inventory in April, open up an extra hour on the schedule before you actually need it, or launch your ad campaign two weeks too late.
Last year left an exact record of when sales or bookings picked up, day by day. It's in your sales dashboard, your calendar, or your bank account. You don't need to guess: you need to look.
Pull the records, not the memory
Pull up last year's sales or booking list, with dates, starting three months before your busy season and ending a month after it wraps up. It doesn't matter if it comes from your dashboard, a spreadsheet, or a notebook where you copied down the calendar by hand: what matters is that each entry has a date. If you work with bookings instead of sales, the process is the same, just swap sales for confirmed appointments.
- 1Group by week
Add up how many sales or appointments happened each week, Monday through Sunday. A single day doesn't tell you much, it can fall on a weekend or a holiday and throw you off; a full week is reliable. - 2Mark your baseline
Look at three or four weeks you know for sure are slow, out of season. Average the sales or appointments from those weeks: that number is your baseline. - 3Find the first sustained jump
Go through the weeks in order and mark the first one that doubles your baseline and stays there the following week. A one-day spike from a promotion or a social media mention doesn't count: your busy season is the one that holds, not a lone spike. - 4Mark the drop-off
Keep looking ahead and mark the first week that falls back below the floor. That's your end date, and it doesn't have to match the one you remember either.
Here's what that looks like on a chart. An online swimwear store had it in their head that the season started in mid-May. The sales list said something else.
The first three weeks hover around ten units. In the fourth, that triples and stays there. That week, week 19 of the year, falls on May 6, not the mid-month date the store remembered. About ten days' difference doesn't sound like much, until you count it as ten days of prices that didn't go up, or ten days of extra ad spend.
Mark both dates, start and end, on a calendar or in a note, with the exact week and the number that gives it away. That's the foundation the rest of this season builds on: how much more you sold during those weeks is what to look at next.
With those two dates, you now have the real window of your busy season. What you don't have yet is the number that makes it useful: how many times more you sold in your peak week compared to an ordinary week. You'll calculate that in the next lesson.
- The real start date of your busy season, pulled from last year's sales or booking list, not from memory.
- The real end date, marked using the same baseline method.
- Whether last year's ad campaign pushed demand, or just showed up in time to ride it.