I remember an October forecast meeting where I was looking at the exact same spreadsheet the principals were. No mystery on the number: work in progress, backlog, all of it right there in front of everyone in the room at the same time.
But the real conversation was never about the number. It was about how solid that number actually was. Any backlog project could get paused or pushed with a single client decision. And underneath that sat a second, quieter question nobody said out loud: do we push to keep everyone busy through the holidays, or do we let the team actually take their time off?
The real problem
Most firms answer that question by default, in one of two ways, and both are wrong.
One camp flurries: a last push through the holiday parties, a handful of “let’s connect in the new year,” then nothing. The other camp coasts from October on, wait and see, and effectively hibernates until January forces everyone back out. Either way, January starts cold.
I was the coaster, for years. Whatever will be will be, it is what it is, that was basically my whole Q4 philosophy for longer than I’d like to admit.
The principals in that forecast meeting weren’t, though. They knew the backlog because they were the ones actually talking to clients, not waiting on someone to bring them a report. I had the number. They had the relationship underneath it. That’s the actual gap.
Here’s why it’s worth closing. BD doesn’t get an off season the way other businesses do. There’s no planting time and harvest time. It is always ON.
And the work on your desk today is the result of something you did twelve to twenty-four months ago. So every quarter you let the machine go quiet doesn’t just cost you that quarter. It costs a year or more of thin pipeline landing on someone’s forecast spreadsheet, long after you’ve forgotten you ever let it slide.
The move that actually works isn’t coasting or panicking. It’s harvesting what you already have: the relationships and half-finished conversations that never got a real follow-up, and being deliberate about which three or four of them get real attention before the year closes.
A framework for Q4 that actually works
I use some version of this every year now, and it’s what finally got me out of la-di-da mode for good.
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Audit before you act. Before you do anything else, pull your actual contact list or CRM and look at the whole year: every prospect, every client conversation, every “we should grab coffee sometime” that never turned into coffee. Don’t filter yet. Just see the full picture. Most people skip this step and go straight to outreach, which means they’re guessing at priorities instead of seeing them.
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Sort into three buckets, not one long list. Bucket one, warm and active: people already in a live conversation who just need the loop closed before year-end. Bucket two, dormant but valuable: relationships that went quiet earlier this year through no fault of anyone, just time and busyness. Bucket three, seeds for next year: two or three new relationships worth planting now so they’re not starting from zero in February.
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Pick three to five names total, not thirty. This is the part people get wrong most often. Q4 planning fails when it turns into a list of forty people to “reach out to eventually.” Eventually never comes. Three to five specific names, with a specific next step for each, is a plan. Forty names is a wish.
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Calendar the conversations before December’s chaos hits. If you wait until “things slow down” to have these conversations, they won’t happen. December doesn’t slow down, it just gets replaced by holiday parties and year-end deadlines. Put actual dates on the calendar in October or early November, while there’s still room for them.
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Use the season’s built-in access, on purpose. Q4 isn’t just holiday parties and year-end deadlines. It’s misty fall mornings, lunch huddles in a favorite coffee shop, a happy hour where you’re both just waiting out the rain and the traffic together. That’s real, natural access most quarters don’t hand you for free.
I’m Filipino, so for us the holiday season doesn’t start in December. It starts the moment the months start ending in “ber”: September, October, November, December, all four of them count. But here’s the thing nobody tells you: you can attend every single one of those events and parties, and if you don’t pre-plan or follow up, you’re mostly just wasting time and opportunity.
What I actually do is send the event out ahead of time, to my internal team and to the key contacts who are likely to attend or should be there. That does two things. It gets a group going (BD by pack is a whole topic for another day), and it gets everyone reaching out to each other before the event even starts. Nobody wants to walk into a room and not know a soul. People want someone to talk with, someone to stand with, someone who might introduce them to somebody new. Do that groundwork, and the follow-up afterward is building on a relationship that’s already further along than it would be if you’d walked in cold.
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Meet each relationship in its own season, not just yours. Q4 doesn’t hit every sector the same way, and treating it as one universal “busy season” is how you miss your best openings. If your relationships are in roofing, asphalt paving, or any outdoor trade, their work grinds to a near halt right now, which means they actually have more time to talk than almost any other quarter. If it’s a TI client planning to host their own holiday party in the space you helped build, don’t wait for an invitation. Bring the meeting to them, meet them where they already are, and be useful instead of just present. If it’s an education client, most of them are mentally on vacation well before the break actually starts. Reach them before vacation fever hits, or don’t expect a real answer until you’ve got a solid plan for January instead of a general “let’s catch up.” Know where each relationship’s own industry actually is this quarter, and plan to meet them there.
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Make it contagious. Don’t keep this exercise to yourself. Herd mentality works in your favor here: when one person in the office is visibly doing focused, deliberate outreach instead of just drifting through December, it gives everyone around them permission to do the same. Share your three to five names with your team. Ask what’s on theirs. Check in on each other’s before the year closes. Teamwork makes the dream work isn’t just a poster on the wall. A firm where five people are each running this exercise generates a lot more than five times the momentum of one person running it alone, and it turns Q4 planning into culture instead of one person’s individual hustle.
How to actually do this, this week
Block ninety minutes this week, one sitting, not spread across five days. Pull your contact list or CRM and ask yourself three questions for the whole year behind you: Who did I have a real conversation with that never got a real follow-up? Who went quiet on me, or I went quiet on, without any actual falling out? And who is one relationship I know I need to start building now if I want it to matter by spring?
Write down three to five names. Next to each one, write the actual next step, not “reach out,” but the specific thing: “invite to the December chapter event,” “send the article I promised in August,” “ask for fifteen minutes before their budget planning starts.” Factor in where their industry actually is right now (slow and talkative, or racing toward a break) and put a date on it. Not “this month.” A date.
Then don’t file it away privately. Bring it to your next team huddle. Ask a colleague what their three to five look like. The exercise works fine solo, but it works a lot better as something your whole team is visibly doing at the same time. That’s when it stops being one person’s discipline and starts being how the office runs Q4.
That’s the whole exercise. It takes ninety minutes and it’s the difference between a January that starts warm and a January that starts from zero.
Year End Goals
Forget New Year’s resolutions. A resolution set on January 1st is a goal for a year that hasn’t started yet, made with none of this year’s momentum behind it. A year end goal is different. You set it while the current year is still open, while you can see exactly what’s unfinished, and while there’s still time left on the calendar to actually move it before everything resets on you.
The number was never the hard part. Anyone in this seat can pull up pipeline, backlog, and WIP on command. What Q4 actually tests is whether you turn that number into a short, specific plan while there’s still time to act on it, or whether you’re about to spend January finding out the hard way that you didn’t.
Q4 isn’t extra time tacked onto the end of the year. It’s the only quarter where you can look backward at everything you built and forward at everything you’re about to need, in the same ninety-minute sitting.
If your Q4 plan is going to include the parties and dinners this quarter always brings, the harder question isn’t who you’ll talk to. It’s what you actually do in the 72 hours after.
That’s what this week’s paid piece is about: a simple 3-tier system for sorting every conversation you have this season, and the exact words to send for each one, timed to the window before the moment goes cold. If steps 5 and 6 above are about showing up in the right room at the right time, that piece is about what you do the second you leave it.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I’d genuinely love to hear how your year is going. I’ve heard mixed signals across the industry lately: some firms are having banner years, others are still holding their breath about Q4.
I’d also love to know if any of this resonated, and if it’s actually useful to you.
Your BD BFF, Ivi
