Feast-Famine

A hypothesis that delayed replenishment and episodic use are alternating the system between excess and shortage.

When your consulting calendar is full, you do zero marketing, because who has time. Three months later the calendar empties, you panic-pitch everyone you know, and eventually work floods in, at which point marketing stops again. Two years of this and your income chart looks like a mountain range.

Feast-Famine is the hypothesis that delayed replenishment and episodic use are alternating the system between excess and shortage: the pipeline only gets refilled after it runs dry, and refilling takes months, so by the time supply arrives you are starving, and once it arrives you stop replenishing. Make it predict. If this structure is running, the gap between marketing bursts should roughly match the sales lag, and famines should begin a predictable interval after each feast starts. The strongest rival: your market itself is seasonal, and no amount of steady marketing would smooth it. The distinguishing test: maintain a small, fixed weekly marketing dose for two quarters regardless of workload, and see whether the trough shallows; seasonality would persist, feast-famine would soften. If confirmed, the intervention is continuous replenishment sized to the delay, not bigger panic bursts. What changes is that the cycle stops feeling like luck. Do not diagnose feast-famine off a single bad quarter; one swing is an event, alternation is a structure.