The week between Christmas and New Year is the quietest week of the year at IBC Denver. The bay is closed. The drivers are home. The phone — the one we do not have — is not ringing. The email volume drops by about 80% because everyone we sell to is also on a holiday break. Pellet, the office cat, has the warehouse entirely to herself.
I always come in for at least one day during this week. Not because anything needs to get done, but because the silence is useful in a way the other 51 weeks of the year do not allow.
What I do with the silence
I walk through the bay and look at the inventory. Not in the operational way — I am not counting units or running a cycle count — but in the slow way, where I just look at the totes and notice patterns. Which sizes are stacking up. Which prior contents we are seeing more of. Which customers are sending us totes I do not recognize the names of, which means we have a new buy-back relationship I should learn about.
I read through the email backlog and reply to the small number of inquiries that did come in over the holiday. People who write to a small business between Christmas and New Year tend to either be insomniacs, or in a different time zone, or under unusual time pressure. They never expect a reply. Replying anyway is one of the easiest ways to start a long-term customer relationship.
What I do not do
I do not plan. I have learned over the years that strategic planning done in the silence of a holiday week is usually wrong, because the silence makes everything feel more important than it really is. Plans I have made in this week have a poor track record of surviving contact with the first Tuesday of January. So I deliberately do not.
I also do not write the year-end review of the company. That happens in mid-January when I am back in the rhythm of the business and the numbers feel grounded again. Year-end reviews written in late December tend to be either too rosy or too dark, depending on the mood of the Christmas dinner the writer just attended.
Why I write this every year
Because when I started the company, nobody told me that the silence was a feature, not a bug. I assumed every quiet week was a sign that we were failing. It took me about four years of owning this thing to realize that the holiday silence is the nervous system of the business getting a chance to rest. I would have benefited from somebody telling me that, and now I get to be the somebody who tells the next person.
See you in January.
— Aldo Ramírez, IBC Denver