A Business That Depends on Things I Can’t Control
A good chunk of what I run depends on people wanting to be outside. ATV tours, off-road racing, water sports, desert adventures. None of that happens if it’s raining, if the roads are closed, or if gas prices spike and people decide a road trip to Vegas can wait until next year.
For a long time, that bothered me more than it does now. I’d watch a weather report the way other people watch a stock ticker. A storm system two states away could ruin a weekend before it even arrived. I couldn’t do anything about the weather, but I could still feel responsible for the number that showed up at the end of the week.
That’s the real problem. Not the weather itself. It’s building something that depends on a factor you don’t control, and then acting as if you do.
Why I Stopped Betting on One Thing
The fix wasn’t forecasting better. Nobody forecasts the desert better than anybody else. The fix was spreading the exposure across enough different offerings that one bad week in one part of the business didn’t sink the whole month.
If the ATVs are slow because of heat, the water sports side might still be busy. If racing season is between events, tours can carry things. I didn’t plan it this way on a whiteboard. It happened because I kept adding pieces over the years, and only later did I notice that the pieces didn’t all go down at the same time for the same reason.
That’s the real lesson for anyone building something that depends on outside conditions, weather, travel trends, fuel prices, whatever it is for your business. You don’t solve the uncontrollable part. You build enough around it that no single swing in it can take you out.
The Instinct to Panic Is the Thing to Manage
The part I actually had to work on wasn’t the business model. It was my own reaction to a slow day. Early on, a bad weekend would put me in a bad mood for a week. I’d start questioning decisions that had nothing to do with the weather.
Now I separate the two things. A slow Tuesday because of wind is not a signal that something is wrong with the business. A slow Tuesday every week for a month, regardless of weather, is a different conversation. I watch the pattern, not the single day. One data point tells you almost nothing. A month of them tells you something real.
What I Actually Watch Instead
I pay more attention to volume over time than to any one day’s number. If bookings are trending down across a season compared to the same season last year, that matters. If one Saturday is slow because there’s a sandstorm, that doesn’t.
I also watch which parts of the business are carrying the others at any given time. That tells me where to focus, and which parts might need a new angle before they become a drag instead of a cushion.
What I’d Tell Someone Building Something Weather Can Cancel
If your business depends on something you don’t control, the first thing to accept is that you don’t control it. That sounds obvious, but most people still build as if a bad month is a failure on their part rather than a condition of the business they chose.
The second thing is to build more than one way to make money inside the same business. Not a different company, just a different offering that doesn’t fail for the same reason the first one did.
The third thing is to decide in advance what a real problem looks like versus a normal swing. Write it down if you have to. A slow day doesn’t need a reaction. A slow season does. Knowing the difference before it happens keeps you from making decisions out of a bad mood instead of the numbers.
I still check the weather every morning. I just don’t let it run my week anymore.
