The Essential Checklist for a Winning Q4 in Business

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It's official. We are down to the last 90 days of 2024. And now is the time when you really have to ask yourself: are you ready to ramp up into 2025? Make sure that you have a full client docket going into Q1 while still enjoying your family time and the holidays. If not, I want you to keep on listening because in this episode, we're going to talk about some things you might want to stay focused on in the last 90 days of the year.

Hey there CEOs, Racheal Cook here, founder of The CEO Collective and your host for Promote Yourself to CEO. I'm so excited about this episode and really going into the last 90 days of the year. Now we talk about 90 day planning all the time here on Promote Yourself to CEO. 90 day planning is one of the most foundational skill sets that we teach all of our CEOs inside of The CEO Collective.

It's what the CEO Retreat is built on, right? But the last 90 days of the year are a little bit different. For a lot of us, they're bumping up against a lot of big holidays. Maybe you're planning on going vacation with your family, you really want to enjoy some of that time towards the end of the year. So that automatically makes the last 90 days a little bit different.

I know personally, we like to take the whole week of Thanksgiving off, and then we always shut down for the last two weeks of the year. So that's that. Three whole weeks that I'm not focused on running my business. I'm focused on enjoying my time with my family. And that makes the quarter a little different, right?

Instead of having a full 13 weeks to work on my business, I now have only 10. So I've got to be really, really clear and strategic. The other thing about the last 90 days of 2024 that are going to make it a little bit different is just the fact that we are in an election year. So being in business for as long as I have, I have now gone through multiple election cycles as a small business owner.

I've gone through the 2012 election, the 2016 election was really when things started to, you know, impact me as a small business owner, the 2020 election, and now this election. So I know going into this election cycle, that it's going to be a lot going on. There's going to be a lot of people's attention on the election, which means November is going to be a little bit different, which means that is going to be a really tough week to be marketing and selling for a lot of our businesses. Just because there's so much going on in the world that is going to be prioritizing people's attention as it should.

But it means that we need to think strategically about how we're showing up the last 90 days of the year. So I want to go through five things, five tips for you to make sure you have a successful Q4 as we close out 2024. And then over the next few episodes, we're really going to be ramping up to 2025.

And what do we need to do to make sure we've got the right plan in place as we're headed into a new year? So let's get into a few of these items I have for you today on making the most of the last 90 days of the year.

The first is to take time to review and reflect your year-to-date progress. This is crucially important.

And I think as small business owners, we tend to just get very head down doing the work that's in front of us, trying to take care of our clients, trying to continue to keep up with our to-do list. And we often just check the box, hit the deadline, deliver the project, and don't press pause and really reflect on what has been happening this year.

What's been working in our business? What's not been working in our business? Where do we need to adapt and adjust? And this is really, really important. I know from talking with so many small business owners, especially those who have felt that this year has been a bit of a bumpy ride, that it has been full of a bit more uncertainty.

Some people have definitely felt that on the bottom line. They felt that there was a lot of uncertainty and a lot of, um, sales activity that they were not necessarily seeing that they were hoping for. It means that we have to always be adapting and adjusting our plan. This is one thing as a CEO of your business, if all you're doing is going heads down, checking the box, completing the to-do list, but you're never really asking yourself: is this actually working? Is this actually getting the results that I need?

If we don't ask ourselves these questions, then we could find ourselves doing a lot of activities that aren't moving our business forward, but they're taking up a lot of our bandwidth. So I encourage you to spend a little bit of time, especially early on in Q4, to just think through what is working and what is not working right now in my business at this time.

You might want to look over things like your financial statements, your key metrics, any goals that you set at the beginning of the year and ask yourself: am I on track or am I off track? Is there anything that actually needs your immediate attention right now? And that is crucial because there might be some things that do need your immediate attention in order to ensure that your business will continue sustainably.

And there might be some things that you need to put a pin in until 2025 and that's totally fine.

The next thing that we want to talk about, the next tip here for having a great Q4 finishing the year strong is: I want you to prioritize your Q4 goals over new projects.

Usually when I work with my clients in their 90 day planning process, I have to kind of break a bad habit that a lot of entrepreneurs have. And that is when we sit down and brainstorm and come up with new goals for ourselves and our business, what we tend to do is come up with all new things that we want to create, that we want to do, that we want to accomplish.

And so every goal setting session is new goals, new goals, new goals. New ideas, new projects. And the challenge with that is then quarter over quarter, things aren't building on each other. And as a small business, we have to be laser focused on what gets results in our business.

We can't just go from one goal to the next goal because we came up with a new idea, because we have a new thing we want to create that has popped up for us. So I want you to sit down and look at: what are your goals that you set for yourself for 2024? What are the goals that you have for yourself for Q4?

You know, maybe you still are working on some of these 2024 goals. Maybe you had something in mind specifically that you wanted to focus on in Q4. But make sure that they are aligned with your big picture for your business and that they are building up towards that vision. This is such a big piece of the puzzle for small business owners.

When we're doing goal setting, it shouldn't be all about creating new all the time. It should be about building towards that ultimate vision that we have for our business.

The next tip to make sure you have a strong Q4 in the last 90 days of the year is to strengthen client relationships.

This is one of those times - I don't think it matters what business you're in at all - but this is such a great time of year to be investing into your client relationships. Making sure that you are nurturing your existing clients, making sure that you are going back and nurturing past clients, maybe people who worked with you earlier in the year or in previous years.

This is a great time to express that gratitude and to thank those clients for saying yes to working with you, for trusting you with their business, with their goals, with their dreams, whatever it is they came to you for.

So this is a time of year where a little bit of effort on the client experience side can have a big payoff. So you might want to be thinking about not only sending something like, you know, an end of the year thank you card or a holiday card, a postcard, client appreciation card, whatever it might be, maybe you send out client gifts.

I also really love to schedule client appreciation events or activities. These could be directly related to your business, or they could be maybe a little social in nature, depending on your specific business. But these are just times where you're able to really connect with your clients on a personal level and build those relationships.

This can be a great time of year for a lot of us to proactively reach out to our clients and let them know: Hey, here's what I see for you. What do you need for the year end? Here's what my recommendations are as we close out this year.

And it can also be a great time to set up year end planning calls or review calls, especially if you are in a business where by you taking the initiative and saying, "Hey, I want to talk about how we're closing out this year and setting you for up for success next year!" You're actually starting to plant the seed for those clients to renew and retain, continue working with you, which is really, really crucially important for all of our businesses to have that client retention..

The fourth thing I want you to think about to have a strong last 90 days is to optimize for revenue.

This is not the time to pull back on bringing more revenue into your business. In fact, for so many businesses, Q4 is the time for sales and to bring in the cashflow. So whether those are sales that you are generating and delivering right now, there's a lot of businesses where Q4 is the big moneymaker. This is when they make most of their sales and they have most of their clients buying from them.

But there's also a lot of businesses where Q4 is a great time to pre-sell people into products, programs, and services that will start in Q1. If you are already booked up for the end of the year - this happens a lot with my service based business owners - if you're already booked up, you can't fit another client in right now, but you know people are thinking about what it is that you do. They've been thinking about potentially working with you and they haven't had an opportunity to say yes, but now they're like, "Oh, I really want to get on your calendar!"

Pre-sell those spots. Go ahead and get them into your 2025 calendar, get the deposit, sign the agreement. Then they both, you and them, can enjoy your holiday season. But you're going into Q1 knowing that you already have a full client docket. And they're going into January knowing that they're making some big moves towards one of their big goals.

So make sure you're thinking about revenue generation. Even if your calendar is currently booked with clients, it's still a great time of year to go ahead and pre-sell people into products, programs, and services for Q1.

And finally, prepare for the new year.

This is the time of year where we do want to finish strong, but we're setting the foundation for what we're going to experience next year in our business.

And there's a couple different things that tend to happen for small business owners. You know, we get really geared up towards finishing the year strong, but then we hit the end of December and we're exhausted. And now we're around family and we kind of lose that momentum a little bit.

And for a lot of us, if we lose that momentum, if we just kind of shut down for the whole month of December, we're not keeping up with our marketing and our sales and touching base with our clients and our delivery... Then what happens is we have to ramp it back up in the beginning of the year. And the beginning of the year for a lot of us can be really noisy. There's a lot going on.

So I encourage you to look at this from a big picture, sustainable lens. Use Q4 as the ramp up. Set yourself up for success so that yes, you can take some time off at the end of the year. But you've already planted the seeds, you've already pre-sold some clients, you've already got the first month or two of the year locked into your calendar. You've got people ready to go.

It will just make the transition from 2024 into 2025, so much easier.

And thinking of preparing and ramping up for the new year, keep your eyes open because we are kicking off our annual Plan Your Best Year Ever very, very soon. So details will be coming in the next week. I cannot wait to share it with you!

We have had thousands and thousands of small business owners take our Plan Your Best Year Ever Challenge. And what makes this challenge so unique is it is built around our 90 Day CEO Operating System framework.

And just like I kicked off this episode, it's not about just coming up with all the new goals, the new projects, the new things you want to create.

It's about building the sustainable systems in your business, the marketing, the sales, the delivery, we call that your Client Growth Engine, making sure you have a clear process to get momentum in your business. That is what we do here. We want to make it easier for you to do the hard work upfront so that you can.

Relax and allow that to rinse and repeat and generate the results for you. So details are coming for you at the, let's see, in the next episode, we will, we should have everything ready and up for you to opt in and get all the details about Plan Your Best Year Ever. But thank you so much. Until then, I will see you in the next episode.