The month rises

I had the shape of this month wrong for years, and it was an expensive thing to have wrong.

I paced Ramadan like a launch. Heavy in the first week, a loud opening, then a taper, then whatever was left for the end. It felt right. The month begins, the campaign begins, the noise belongs where the news is newest.

The shopping does not do that. It rises.

The first ten days are food, bought steadily, mostly decided before the month even started. The middle stretch is quiet, and on a dashboard that quiet reads as a campaign going off the boil. Then the last third arrives with the clothes, the gifts, the gold, the toys, everything bought for somebody else, and the week before Eid, expected around the end of the month depending on the sighting, is the biggest week of the year in several categories.

So the plan and the customer were pointing in opposite directions, and I could have drawn both curves on one page at any point in those years and never did.

What the plan was actually following is worth saying plainly, because it was not analysis. The film was ready at the end of February. The offer had been signed off in January. The team was rested in week one and finished by week three. The money followed the readiness of the work.

Now I hold back a third of the month for the final week, and I defend it in the meeting against somebody who wants it in the opening, because the opening is where the work is proudest.

The account with money left on the night the shops are full is the one that is visible when people are buying.