I'm not as sure on the influencer side, advertising is cyclical. I will tell you our slow times are July and September. I don't know why. Those have historically been slow months for us but advertising works in waves. If you're a style influencer brands don't want to spend money on advertising when things are on sale. Anytime there's stuff on sale there's generally not as much advertising going on because you don't want to drive people to your site to buy something on sale. You don't want to advertise the fact that you're on sale because it means you couldn't sell it full price.

It definitely is cyclical. There are definitely slow times. You should be able to answer this question yourself because you should be keeping financials and you should have every month, how many brand deals you got, how much money you made. You should be tracking month over a month what you're making but maybe, more importantly, tracking year over year what are you making, what did you do in Q1 of 2017 versus 2018? What are your goals for Q1 of 2019? What does that mean? What's your average deal size this year versus last year? How are you going to try and grow that this year?

What is your retention rate? Lay out every client that you work with in a year and then look, every client that you worked with in 2017, how many of those did you work with in 2018? If the number is 10%, you have a huge retention problem. For some reason brands aren't coming back. If it's 70%, awesome, you're doing a great job and you should pat yourself on the back but you need to understand your financial situation, you need to understand your business, and you should be able to plan around that.

We now can look at it and say, "Okay, we know September is usually hard for us. We're not totally sure why but now we just plan for September to be tight. We know that we're not going to make as much there. As we plan out our spending for the year, we know that we might be 20% down in September than what we usually are." It's important to look at your own calendar and look at how things are working for you, and if there are peaks and valleys and don't assume necessarily that those peaks and valleys will just flatten out at some point.

We have found that those trends are pretty sticky and that they recur over and over again. Get your finances in order people. It is incredibly important. If you don't understand your business and your money then you are going to have a very hard time being successful. I don't understand it. I'm not good at it. I don't care or not excuses. I have an agent is not an excuse. I have a business manager is not an excuse. There isn't a successful entrepreneur business person in the world who doesn't have a pretty deep understanding of the financial health of their organization. I don't know what else to say.

Here's something, good person to follow if you want some tips Justin Bridges, someone that we interviewed before you can-- I don't know what episode he is but Tim might put it up somewhere or you can just search in the search engine. We talked a bit about this but he also talks about money management and how to manage your money more effectively on his Instagram all the time. He's a creative who used to work in finance. He also will answer any questions on Instagram if you sent him a DM about finances and how to manage things. There are resources out there. It doesn't have to be that scary. Get your bills in order of people.