The Q4 Setup Play: Close What’s Real and Lock Next Year’s Momentum Before the Holidays
Jason BrownNEW BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT: Business Operations Unlocked Now Live On Amazon!
Here’s the hard truth about Q4 that no one talks about. Q4 is never about saving this year. There isn’t enough time for that anyway. If you’re trying to save the year in Q4, something went majorly wrong earlier in the year.
Have you ever heard a sports coach say this:
“We didn’t lose because of the last second goal against us. We lost because of the dozen times we messed up throughout the game.”
Q4 is the same thing. You don’t lose the year in Q4, you lose it along the way. So, what should Q4 really be about? It’s about setting up next year, so you don’t repeat the failures of this year and building momentum that actually lasts.
But, if you’re like most business executives, you know Q4 can be an absolutely brutal time of year with serious pressure from higher ups to execute more, pull results forward, and push as hard as possible into the year end. By the end of the year, everyone is burned out and it takes several months to recover.
You’re stuck between missing the number and looking like you don’t know what you’re doing, or hitting the number and watching your best people start looking for the door.
I’ve lived this reality, and this article shows how to turn the chaos into consistency.
If you’ve been following the series, you already know the pattern. Q1 was about the late-January script that keeps plans from dying by February. Q2 was about locking momentum and building the steady story. Q3 was the mid-year reality check so you weren’t scrambling into the back half. Q4 is the last chance to refuse the cycle that turns every year into the same scramble.
Here’s how you’re going to turn your Q4 from chaos into consistency:
- Focus on hitting the ground running next year.
- Focus on closing what’s possible.
- Avoid the New Year drop-off.
- Take stock of what worked and what didn’t.
Lock the calendar before the holidays so next year starts with momentum
Do this by setting up your calendar in Q4 so you’re ready to hit the ground running next year. Two key things:
- Set up your annual team meeting. Get the location on the books and get your team members moving on setting up travel plans. Don’t let your annual meeting slip past Q1. February is ideal timing. It’s enough time to get people back up to speed after the holidays and to get a first pulse on the markets, but not so late that plans are already behind.
- Get some early-year conferences on your calendar and set up travel. There’s nothing better to get you and your team back in the groove in the new year than getting out early and talking to people. See what the market is doing. Get a sense for what people are talking about. Get a pulse on their feelings for the year ahead. If you remember, this plays directly into the Q1 plan (the late-January script is here: Q1 Article).
Book both of those this week if they aren’t already locked. The window closes faster than it feels like it will.
Close what you can. Avoid the pull-forward trap
In the Q3 breakdown (Q3 Article), we talked about how to plan and execute to hit budget for the year. Q4 should be focused on prioritizing what’s left and closing everything possible. But don’t pull projects (and sales) ahead unnecessarily. Stuffing this year looks good in the short term but guts your progress in future years and makes it even harder to recover. Do this too many times and senior management gets used to you pulling in big Q4 orders which is unrealistic in the long run, hurts credibility, and puts extra stress on your team when they should really be focusing on hitting the ground running next year.
It only takes one down year for you to switch from Q4 hero to totally unreliable and unpredictable. Do it two or three years in a row and senior leadership stops treating the Q4 spike as exceptional. They treat it as the new baseline. Then the only way to look competent is to do it again. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
What do senior executives like more than a hero Q4 result? Year after year consistency, a growing book of business, and a clear story they can tell owners and shareholders. The urge to be the hero is strong, but you don’t want to be the leader called in to deep dive meetings over the next six months defending every decision because you missed a quarter that was unrealistically high to begin with.
Give people time to recharge
Q4 naturally has a lot of holidays built into it. Don’t fight it. Instead use it to your advantage. If you’ve followed this process, your team has worked ahead to build a solid plan for the year and execute hard on it. Q4 is the time to take time to reflect on the year, acknowledge the hard work, recharge, and prepare for what’s to come next year. Some leaders try to always push, but this just leads to burnout and resentment. As a leader, make sure you encourage people to take time in Q4 to celebrate the good, learn from the bad, and prepare for next year.
Here’s the truth about Q4: Your customers are spending Q4 taking time off, preparing for next year, and putting out last-minute fires too. If you sell B2B, and you’re a good supplier, it can be almost impossible to get your customer on the phone in Q4. Face to face meetings? Forget about it. Your customers are too busy putting out fires and closing opportunities too. If you’ve done everything you should, you’re not on that list. As much as you want to push forward, recognize that there may be other important things they need to close out before year end.
Give your customer space so they can deal with their issues, check in periodically, wish them happy holidays, and let them know you’ll be ready first thing next year. If you’re in the middle of a long-running project, you might have to be more engaged obviously to make sure milestones don’t slip, but try to plan extra time in Q4 so that people aren’t stressed and can take time off. They’ll thank you later and buy in harder when it’s time to get back to work.
If you’re in the B2C space, Q4 can be hectic with the holidays, but with proper planning in Q2 and Q3, you hopefully have a solid plan in place and a solid foundation to work from. The best advice I have is to not disrupt the flow of the plan. People may try to jump in with urgent orders, changes in schedules, and extra pressure to get product out. Accommodate what you can but don’t cut corners. You interrupt the flow too much and everything will quickly unravel.
Triage the incoming requests and issues so you can handle them when the team is ready for it. If you’ve got a history, use the data to schedule some open time in the assembly line or team schedule to handle these inevitable fires that always pop up. Plan some redundancy in resources for sickness and make sure you have inventory on hand. Sales can’t sell what they don’t have. Work out an acceptable level of inventory to carry with the finance team. It’s crucial to have alignment so that free cash flow doesn’t get crushed at year end while ensuring the sales team has product to keep pushing into year-end without disruption.
Don’t let the cycle repeat
Here’s what you don’t want to happen:
What can happen in bad situations is that the C-suite team gets an incredible amount of pressure to push as hard as possible into year end and pull forward as much as possible so the yeard end financial numbers look amazing. Then, year-end comes suddenly and everyone is burned out.
By the time the new year hits, everyone is still trying to recover from Q4 and work doesn’t really get started until February / March. Annual goals and targets and strategies don’t get approved until Q1 and then it takes several more weeks to push it down through the whole organization. It can be mid-year before you have locked in goals and targets and strategy for the year.
And of course, by that time your team has tried to work through the first two quarters without any real guidance or goals to aim for which just sets up another year of running behind and cramming everything into Q4.
The cycle repeats, management always just asks “what’s next?” instead of celebrating wins and giving people time off, and it creates a vicious cycle of burnout and employee turnover. Throw in the employees that leave at the end of Q1 after receiving their performance-based comp and the situation just gets worse.
By the time you’re trying to lock in the year’s plan the people who carried the last three years are already gone, and replacing a skilled person commonly runs tens of thousands of dollars and months of time. And that’s not even counting the lost tribal knowledge that disappears too.
Then, a bad year or two hits, the layoffs start, budgets get cut, and the company spirals until senior management turns over. Sometimes even that doesn’t solve the problem, and the company can get even worse.
Don’t let that happen. Take the time to start getting ahead now and fly above this downward spiral. You do this right and top talent will flock to you because you ‘get it’. People feel respected, energized, and ready to crush it year after year.
The good news is it’s never too late to start, even in Q4. Draw a line in the sand today and say, “not again.” Carve out time now to start your plan for next year. You may have to sacrifice some gains this year by shifting around some priorities and staying firm on schedule (don’t pull ahead), but you’ll make it up and much more in the coming years when you have this plan executing successfully.
Block 45 minutes this week. Get the annual meeting on the calendar for February. Put two early-year conferences on the books. Write down the one or two things you will refuse to pull forward just to make the year-end numbers look better. Then tell the team. That single conversation is how you start breaking the cycle.
Remember:
- February meeting locked.
- Early conferences on the books.
- One or two items you will not pull forward.
These three things are the concrete way you push back today without just saying ‘we’re burned out.’
If you want the full system that sits underneath these quarterly plays, the Executive Playbook for Business Growth is free and includes the Excel workbook and the three-phase framework: https://www.jasonunlocked.com/pages/executive-playbook-for-business-growth
Business Operations Unlocked is live if you want the deeper version of the same thinking.
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You do this right and next year doesn’t start in March, it starts with momentum. Act today and get ahead of the game.
