Splitting a year of budget into twelve equal pieces is an accounting decision that has quietly become a marketing one at almost every small business I have worked with.

We pulled three years of their own sales data — not industry benchmarks — and found the demand curve was much spikier than the spend curve. So we underspent deliberately in the flat months and banked it.

The uncomfortable part is that the flat months then look like failure on a monthly report. We changed the report to a rolling twelve weeks so nobody had to defend a bad-looking March.