I’m not going to lie. November was just about one of the worst months I can remember working in the nearly 80 months I’ve been in business at Hotel Lobbyists. I average handling approximately between 16 and 20 leads a month – that is, actual RFPs that I source to the hotels. Some months have been as high as 30 like in July of 2010. But this November I sourced 7 leads to the hotels. Granted, November is a holiday month, but when compared to the previous five Novembers, there were 14, 10, 15, 22, and 15 respectively. So 7 is, at the very least, the very least.
And it wasn’t just that I only sourced seven leads in the month, just one of them closed in the month, and I wound up taking on three cancellations this month. Thus the net business exchanged in the month was clearly negative. That might be less horrific if it didn’t follow two similarly horrendous months by the name of October and September.
The Glimmer of Hope that I speak of in the title of this blog is that, in just two days in December, I’ve already sourced the same number of leads to the hotels, 7. And so that’s the kind of thing that keeps my hopes alive for this industry. That on any given day, or weeks, the volume can increase exponentially with little rhyme or reason. I expect 2014 to be another down year – the data is there to support this hypothesis unfortunately. But I expect it to the be the last of the down years for a while. As long as I keep having weeks like this and ideas rolling around my entrepreneurial mind, there is no giving up. Not even close.