Somewhere around the third year of running PipelineRoad, I stopped fighting the dips. Not because I’d become complacent, but because I’d finally recognized them for what they were: seasons. Predictable, recurring, and — once you stop panicking — useful.
Every business has cycles. Revenue cycles, energy cycles, creative cycles. The popular narrative, especially in the startup world, is that the trajectory should be a straight line going up and to the right. Any deviation from that line is a problem to be solved, a fire to be put out, a failure of execution or will.
This narrative is wrong. Or rather, it’s incomplete in a way that causes real damage.
The Agricultural Metaphor
Before the industrial revolution flattened time into a continuous production schedule, work followed the seasons. Plant in spring, tend in summer, harvest in autumn, rest in winter. The cycle wasn’t optional. You couldn’t will a crop to grow in January. The rhythm was imposed by nature, and fighting it was futile.
Modern knowledge work has no such external rhythm, which means we impose one — or, more commonly, refuse to impose one and pretend every week should be equally productive. Monday through Friday, January through December, the expectation is constant output. Shipping. Building. Performing. Always on.
But human energy doesn’t work this way, and neither does creative capacity. There are periods when ideas come easily, when the work flows, when you feel genuinely capable of the ambitious things on your roadmap. And there are periods when everything feels stale, when the same tasks that energized you last month now feel tedious, when your conviction about the direction you’re heading quietly erodes.
The first kind of period feels like summer. The second feels like winter. And the mistake most founders make is treating winter as a crisis rather than a season.
Reading the Cycle
Learning to read the cycle — in yourself and in your business — is one of the most practically useful skills I’ve developed. It doesn’t require any mystical attunement. It requires paying attention.
In business, the cycles are partly external. B2B SaaS has a predictable rhythm: budget cycles drive buying behavior, which drives pipeline, which drives revenue. Q1 is slow because budgets are still being allocated. Q4 is fast because budgets need to be spent. Summer is distracted. The pattern varies by industry, but the pattern exists.
Then there are the internal cycles — the ones specific to your company. The energy that follows a big client win. The slump after a major deliverable ships. The creative burst that accompanies a new strategic direction. The drag that settles in during the execution phase. These cycles are real, and they repeat with enough regularity that you can plan around them if you’re paying attention.
At PipelineRoad, Bruno and I have learned to structure our year around these rhythms. We front-load strategic work to the periods when our energy for big thinking is highest. We schedule operational sprints for the periods when execution comes more naturally. We protect space for rest when we know the cycle is bottoming out, because pushing through a trough with brute force doesn’t accelerate the recovery. It delays it.
The Myth of Consistency
The self-help industrial complex has enshrined consistency as the supreme virtue. Show up every day. Do the work regardless of how you feel. Discipline over motivation. There’s truth in this — the people who only work when they feel like it don’t build much. But it’s a partial truth, and the missing part matters.
Consistency of effort is not the same as consistency of output. You can show up every day and still accept that some days will produce more than others. You can maintain a rhythm without demanding that every beat carry the same weight. The farmer shows up every day in winter too — but the winter work is different from the harvest work. Maintenance, not production. Repair, not creation. Rest that looks like idleness but is actually preparation.
The founders I know who have sustained their energy over years — not just the sprint of the first two years, but the longer game of building something durable — are the ones who’ve made peace with the cycle. They don’t panic during the dip. They don’t take credit for the peak. They ride both with a kind of equanimity that comes from having seen the pattern enough times to trust it.
What Winter Is For
The hardest thing to accept about the cycle is that the slow periods aren’t wasted time. They’re generative in a way that’s difficult to appreciate while you’re in them.
Most of my best strategic insights have come during the fallow periods — the weeks when nothing feels urgent, when I’m not running from deliverable to deliverable, when the space opens up for the kind of slow, ambient thinking that produces original ideas. The insight doesn’t arrive on schedule. It arrives when there’s room for it. And room only exists when you stop trying to fill every moment with production.
This is true for teams as well as individuals. The teams that sprint constantly burn out. The ones that cycle between intensity and recovery sustain their output over years. The creative teams that produce the best work are the ones with enough slack in the system for ideas to develop before they’re pressed into service.
As I write this at the end of a year, the temptation is strong to make resolutions, set targets, build a plan that assumes twelve months of uniform effort. I’ve done this before. It’s never worked the way I imagined.
What works is simpler: know the season you’re in. Work with it, not against it. Plant when it’s time to plant, harvest when it’s time to harvest, and when winter comes — and it always comes — trust that it’s not the end of the cycle. It’s part of it.