Paul Mattison, owner, Mattison’s Restaurants
In the summer, we try to focus on the local community, and our marketing changes accordingly. We’ve started a year-round rewards program that gives points for every dollar you spend, and in the summertime we’ll do double points on certain days in certain restaurants. We’re more aggressive about doing things to get people in the door. Also, in the summertime people tend to eat a little lighter so we use ingredients that are more in tune with the season, lighter salad dishes, simpler sauces and ingredients. We don’t cut staff unless we have to, but we do have some staff who know it’s going to quiet down; they choose to go back north, we allow that flexibility.

Lee Younger, owner, The Pineapple House Home and Kitchen, Main Street at Lakewood Ranch
This may sound strange, but in the summer we are actually open later, until 9:30 or 10 p.m., especially on the weekends. During the heat of the day there aren’t that many people out and about. Once they’ve had dinner, the weather is cooler, they come out and they want to browse. We’ve had some of our best sales at night. One couple bought a Waterford chandelier at 9:30 at night, and we ended up selling another new client thousands of dollars worth of work. We merchandise a little differently, too. We don’t push our heavier scents; we bring out our lighter, more summery fragrances in our candle and soap lines, like polar ice and citrus.

Bob Harris, owner, House of Lords consignment furnishings store
We cut the staff down by 20 percent, from nine or 10 to seven or eight, but they don’t mind because they’re retired anyway; one of them, in fact, goes away for the summer. Eighty-five percent of our inventory is consignment, and we keep the same amount during the summer because the more we’ve got the more we sell. The quality changes, though; we get better quality when the snowbirds are here than when they’re not. The volume of business usually fluctuates by about 20 percent in the summer—not a lot because the people we cater to are quite a wide range, the snowbirds don’t make that much difference.

Michael Chokr, marketing director, The Diamond Vault
We don’t do the same volume in the summer, but our business is still traditional; people are still getting engaged and married and having things changed and fixed and repaired. We scale back on our marketing dollars by about 30 percent from June to mid-October, and we change the way we market—more top-of-mind awareness, more broad branding—we send the message that we’re still here.

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