# Profit First for seasonal businesses — how to not go broke in the slow months

If you run a pest, lawn, HVAC, or contracting business, you already know something most business books don't acknowledge: your revenue isn't a smooth line.

It's a wave. Summer is loud. February is quiet. Some months you can't hire fast enough; some months you're checking the bank balance on a Tuesday morning wondering if you're going to make payroll on Friday.

Profit First — Mike Michalowicz's system — is one of the best practical financial frameworks for small business owners I've seen. Multiple accounts, percentages-based allocations, force yourself to take profit before expenses instead of hoping there's something left over.

The problem is that the book mostly assumes a business with reasonably steady monthly revenue. Most home-services businesses are not that. So here's how to make Profit First actually work when your year has two seasons.

The core idea, summarized

You open multiple bank accounts:

  1. Income — everything that comes in lands here first.
  2. Profit — a small percentage moves here every two weeks. You don't touch it.
  3. Owner's pay — what you actually pay yourself.
  4. Tax — set aside for the quarterly hit.
  5. Operating expenses — what's left, the only account you spend out of for the business.

Every two weeks (or whatever cadence) you move money out of Income into the other accounts by fixed percentages. You expense everything from Operating. If Operating runs dry, you have an expense problem — not a "I'll just dip into the Profit account" excuse.

For a steady business this is brilliant. For a seasonal business it has one big failure mode: your percentages were set during the good months, and they bury you in the slow ones.

The seasonal fix: two sets of percentages, one reserve account

Here's what I do with seasonal home-services owners:

Step 1 — Set your percentages off your annual numbers, not your monthly

If you pull only-monthly Profit-First percentages from your July numbers, you'll allocate way too much to Profit and Owner's Pay, and Operating will be starved by November.

Instead: total last year's revenue, total last year's expenses, total your owner's draw, total your tax bill. Run the percentages off the annual. Then those numbers are your baseline.

Step 2 — Add a sixth account: the Bridge

Open one more account. Call it Bridge (or Reserve, or Off-Season, doesn't matter).

During your busy season — for most home-services businesses that's April through September — allocate an extra percentage of every Income deposit into Bridge. Five percent, ten percent, depends on your seasonality.

During your slow season, you draw from Bridge to top up Operating so payroll doesn't break.

The math: you're not changing your annual percentages. You're just front-loading some operating money so the slow months don't crater the business. The Bridge account makes the wave a little flatter without lying to yourself about what the business actually earns.

Step 3 — Don't touch Profit in the slow months

This is the rule that owners break first, and it's the one that matters most.

When February gets tight, the temptation is to pull from Profit. Don't. That's how a Profit-First system unravels — the Profit account becomes the emergency fund, and now you've got no profit and no emergency cushion.

If you're tempted to raid Profit, you set Bridge too low. Note it, fix it next year, but don't break the rule this year.

What this looks like in practice

A pest-control client doing roughly $2.4M annual revenue, with seasonality that runs about 70% of the year's revenue between April and September:

  • Annual Income → split into Profit (5%), Owner's Pay (10%), Tax (15%), Operating (60%), Bridge (10%).
  • April–September: every deposit gets the standard split plus an extra 8% into Bridge.
  • October–March: standard split, no Bridge addition. When Operating dips below their 1-month-of-payroll floor, they pull from Bridge — never Profit.

They went from "checking the bank balance every Monday morning" to "looking at the bank balance once a month" inside one fiscal year.

The hard part isn't the math

The hard part is the discipline of not spending money you have in accounts you're not supposed to spend out of. That requires a system, and Profit First gives you one. The seasonal adjustment just makes the system survive your actual business.

If you're running a home-services business and the slow months scare you, the answer is almost never "sell more in February." February has weather. The answer is to make every July dollar do more work — including building you a bridge to February.