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In this episode, I’m taking you inside my Q4 planning process and the way I think about growth when there are so many things we could be doing.

I walk you through it step by step so you can do it with me. We also talk about why quarterly planning matters, why your job as the CEO is to get clear on the target, and why I don’t accept that Q4 has to be a slow season just because “people are busy” or the holidays are coming.

Key Takeaways

• How I decide what’s worth my attention + our team resources
• My exact Q4 planning process (so you can do it yourself)
• The only 3 things you should focus on to maximize sales
• Why you shouldn’t “just relax” and can still enjoy holidays

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

Let’s not be realistic, because screw realistic. Let’s push that limit a little bit while also giving us a chance to hit it. Or at least come close to it. If you have only a few focuses, it allows everybody to get behind that. And the bigger the team you have, the more powerful that is. When you have a group of people all working towards the same thing, the same target, it is really a powerful thing.

And your job as a CEO is to be clear on that. And so I say identify what’s the biggest needle mover, What are the top things that will move the needle the most?”

Embodied CEOs don’t chase trends. They pave the way they lead from within. Move by purpose, unshaken by noise. When you are the source, you do not need permission.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are having a great week. I am super proud of myself. I am getting ahead on podcast recording, and I just set a quarterly goal to be at least two weeks ahead of recording. And in the process of bringing back interviews they’re a lot more work than I anticipated.

It’s just, like, finding the people that I wanna vet and then scheduling them and then the actual interviews. And so I had those happening, but with my new studio, I really do wanna bring back people in person on the podcast, and Austin is, like, the best city for that. So I am in the studio in the office today, and I spent a lot of time…

I had a white space day, which is my favorite, where I pretty much had no calls. I jumped on my team huddle, but other than that, no calls, and did some Q4 planning And just kind of like my process of get everything out that we could do and then choose what we’re going to do and what’s gonna move the needle the most and just setting the vision for Q4, but even into 2027.

Because honestly, a quarter is so short it feels these days . Like, I can see farther even into the future than that. So wild that we are in Q4, but I figured I would actually spend today’s podcast episode sharing my process, ’cause it might be helpful. Some of it is honestly really simple and I was like, “Is this gonna be valuable?”

But every time I do bring it up and I talk to entrepreneurs about it, they do find value in it. And I think that sometimes we don’t do the most simple things when it comes to our planning and our business that can move the needle a lot. So since I just spent time doing Q4 planning in here, I figured I’d share my process, my planning process with you guys.

And maybe it’ll be your little nudge of, hey, we’re in Q4, we’re gonna be going into 2027. Take maybe it’s a half day or a whole day where you’re not in the business, but you can take a step out of it and look at it with a different lens. And look at it through and with the perspective of the CEO and the visionary and where you’re going.

Because your team, if you have one, and also your day-to-day is gonna look to that vision to let it drive you. And I think so often we don’t do this, and then we end up doing kind of the same things. And not like a rat race, but we keep doing the same things and the same initiatives and, like, the same projects and the way we do things, and we don’t take a step back and kinda question it, which is necessary.

And I find in business you gotta rotate around where your focus goes. Like sometimes one quarter our delivery is getting way more attention than our marketing. Sometimes our marketing is getting more attention and our delivery is good. It’s coasted. We just overhauled everything. It was about four months ago that, that our delivery got majority of my attention, and we overhauled every step of our process in onboarding and client delivery, so that we would have the space to scale and be super efficient with our offers that we, you know, brought into the picture this year.

So okay, so here’s my process. First of all, I look at planning very much as like a waterfall, and what, what do we start with and then how do we work backwards all the way down to the day-to-day to be able to bring that into reality? So the very first thing that I started with for Q4 was revenue. Where do I want the monthly, for me, the monthly recurring revenue?

Like, what’s the consistent number that I wanna hit? between our ongoing clients that pay a monthly retainer and a monthly fee and then new sales. And basically I, I look at, okay, where are we g- like almost guaranteed to kind of hit based on our ongoing clients and our recurring revenue, and then what’s the gap that we would need to fill with new sales?

So for me, revenue is that big picture where, first of all, it’s logical. You can’t argue. It’s a number. And so you start with, where do we want to be? And so I started with, where do I want to be by the end of this year in terms of monthly revenue consistency? And then I go, “Okay, now,” blank piece of paper. I literally have a huge pad.

I keep looking over there ’cause it’s over there. I have a, I have a huge pad of paper and I just start brain dumping everything we could do. Like, all the things that would imp- impact that. And that actually doesn’t just mean marketing. You also have within our delivery, like, we have over 100 clients that we work with.

And so within our delivery, there’s opportunity for either retention or upsell and reselling and, and looking at that metric, which honestly, our retention and our resell and upsell is extremely high and good. And so majority of my efforts for this quarter is going to go into scaling marketing, ’cause we’re ready to do that on our delivery.

Whereas last quarter was heavily focused on delivery. Really since our July challenge that kind of shot up our sales. We overhauled all our delivery and, like, processes and AI and all that. So then I look at it and I go, “Okay, what are all my ideas that I could do?” And for me, it feels like a messy process, but it’s because it’s not complete thoughts.

It’s, like, all these ideas that I’ve had of different workshops I could host or do we do the challenge again? Do we scale the live webinar? What would that look like? and I just dump it. Social media, podcast, speaking, everything we could possibly do. I get it all on a paper and I take that list. So I go, “Here’s all the things I could do to grow the business to the number I want by the end of the quarter.”

And then I also go, “Okay, now, with what I know in terms of our current business, what are all the things that are either gaps, challenges, problems, something that I want to improve based on what I already know is happening in the day-to-day?” So a big one is AI automation and just different projects. I feel like I had a hard time putting that on the quarterly goal, ’cause I was like, it’s such an ever-evolving process.

Like, I’m never gonna be like, “Yeah, we’re done” with, you know, AI because it’s changing so fast and new things are coming and, and new ideas are coming. But I do have some specific things that I know will move the needle. So I make the list of everything we could do for growth, and then I make the brain dump list of everything I know we could be doing either better, more streamlined, we need to relook at it and just kind of quality control it or audit it.

There’s a lot that happens in my business, you know? With 100 clients and 18 employees and there’s just a lot that happens, and you can’t look at everything every single day, every week, or even every month, and you kind of have to choose focus areas. So I make a huge list of that Everything we could do, all my ideas, even if they’re crazy, get them out.

What we could do, what would move the needle. Everything that we could fix, improve, put attention on that I know is happening in the day-to-day, and I get everything out. And I take, like… It took me, like, an hour. And it’s a very… Like, I have to be, like, standing up, walking around my office. I don’t know. In movement, because it’s, like, flowing through me, and it’s not completely clear yet.

I talk to myself. I don’t know if you guys do that, but I’m a very, like, verbal processor, so I will talk out loud. One thing that helps me is voice notes to my AI agent. Even if the AI agent is not even that helpful in, like, telling me what I already know it helps me to verbally talk to it and then get a response back.

But I will tell you AI is really bad at business strategy. Like, most of its marketing strategy and business strategy that it weighs in on for me, I’m like, “This is not good.” So that’s an example of someone’s art, business strategy, marketing strategy that I don’t think AI can replace. Anyways, so I get those two lists out.

Then I sit with those lists and I go, “Okay, we only have three months, Emily. Three months is not a long time. You think it’s a long time, it’s not a long time.” And we have the regular, you know, places in the business that need attention: client delivery, our weekly webinar. Like, we already have these systems happening.

So we already have all that. If we look at these lists, what would move the needle the most? Like, we can’t do all of this. So if we had to get it down to a two or three in each category, what would move the needle the most in terms of getting to that, that goal where we wanna be? And I really boiled mine down to a social media number because for me, this year, content has been a huge focus.

The monthly recurring revenue number, which then is driven by pretty much new sales, what, what I wanna, what I wanna hit for new sales. And so I know, okay, if I wanna hit those new sales, I already know that we have the weekly webinar. We could scale that, and I know those numbers ’cause I’ve done, gosh, y- 27 weeks of, of that probably.

And I have those numbers down so solid. So I have that, and then I’m going, “Okay, now what are new initiatives, creative initiatives?” This is where the creativity gets to live. It’s not in coming up with new businesses and new offers and new ideas around that. It’s going, how do I scale this foundation that works and have creativity and freshness and newness around that?

Maybe it’s a bonus. Maybe it’s a new workshop. And so I have lots of ideas around that. But I kinda look at that, and then I bring it to the calendar of actually Q4. And I look at, okay, well, we have our live event that we’re gonna promote. Are we doing a Black Friday sale or not? Are we gonna do the challenge again this year?

Like, all these questions. And okay, where is there room for something new, something innovative that will drive those sales? And then exactly how many sales do I need to hit in October, November, December to hit our quarterly goal and kinda put us where we wanna be going into the new year? And so for me, I, I basically boiled down our goals to a social media goal, a follower count, because that’s easy to track.

It’s not that I care about the followers, but it’s easy for me to go, “Okay, our content’s doing well if my following is growing.” And then I have a couple of initiatives within that that are like, here’s what I think will grow the following the most beyond what we’re already doing, which is a lot. And then, okay, here’s our new client sales goals, so here’s the goals for that.

And I have– I’m not actually gonna share it yet ’cause still fleshing out the details of that, but I know that I’m gonna do a fresh workshop. I know I’m gonna do a fresh bonus around something that I’ve built into with AI and dashboards, marketing dashboards. And then I look at, okay, the other list, if I were to look at all the AI automations and the things that we can do to streamline our delivery- I have some goals around the podcast, growing the podcast.

Actually, that was a big focus, is getting ahead on podcast recording a firm date to relaunch the interviews, and then I have some ideas for ideation around what I talk about on the podcast and, like, being in top charts. And then another one of my goals is speaking. I want to speak on more stages, and I do think that that is…

When I look at that, that’s a big needle mover to visibility and clients, but it’s kind of like content. It’s a slow burn. You have to find the events. You have to make the connections. You have to apply or whatever you know, is required, and then it has to be way out in the future. So it’s not really a quarterly goal to say, “Book me this many speaking,” but it’s a quarterly goal to get the system and the process in place, start implementing it for 2027.

So that’s more of, like, my 2027 goal that I’m starting in Q4. The point being I take my two big lists and I say, “What are the top things that will move the needle the most?” And I keep saying that, and I keep repeating that in this episode because here’s what I see most entrepreneurs do. One, we’re not very good with the reality of how long things take and how much we can handle And I like to be somewhere in the middle of push and stretch beyond our limits while still hitting most of our goals.

You know? Because when you have a team, if you have a team, you know they’re motivated when they hit goals. Like, if you constantly give a team goals that are so far stretched and so far they’re not gonna hit them, then going out the gate, they’re like, “These are pointless because we can’t even hit these goals, and we know that from day one.”

Whereas entrepreneurs, we’re different. You can give us a stretch goal, and we will go and push and, like, die trying to hit that goal, and we don’t really care if we hit it or not, as long as we went really hard. And I do love Elon. I think Elon Musk does this really well, where he actually pushes his team and his companies hard to hit a goal that’s almost impossible, and he makes, like, the number one focus.

When I read his book, I loved how he put, you know, like, one goal that was written everywhere, and everyone was going for this date or whatever. And a lot of times they don’t hit the goal, but they come way closer than they would have if they would’ve set it as realistic. So I like to be in between this place of let’s stretch, let’s push, let’s, let’s not be realistic, because screw realistic.

Like, let’s, let’s push that limit a little bit while also giving us a chance to hit it. Or at least come close to it. And then if you have only a few focuses, it allows everybody to get behind that. And the bigger the team you have, the more powerful that is. When you have a group of people all working towards the same thing, the same target, it is really a powerful thing.

And your job as a CEO is to be clear on that. And so I say identify what’s the biggest needle mover, because if I were sitting across from you right now and I was talking to you, and if I were to say, “What are … If you could only do three things,” like, outside of the day-to-day operations of your business, delivering for clients, if you post on social media, like, keeping up and maintaining all those things.

Pretend like you’re, you do everything you’re doing right now the same as long as it’s working. And you could only really focus on up to three things until the end of the year as your main focus in your business. What would those three things be? Because The thing about growing a business and entrepreneurship, especially once you get to that, you know, $5,000 a month and above, there’s not a shortage of things you could do.

There’s always too many things. There’s too many ideas, too many initiatives. And you have to constantly weigh, if I put resources into that, if I put my time, if I put money behind it, if I put team resource into it, and company resources into this, what does it take away from? Because the one thing we have limited is time.

And when you align your time, and if you have a team, their time, and you’re all working in the same direction, I’m telling you, it’s like 100 times more impactful. And so if… You’re not gonna have a shortage of things you could do. The point is, here’s all the things we could possibly do, and now what is going to make the biggest impact?

And what is the key metric that we’re gonna measure to make sure that we hit that goal? Because if you just say, like, “Increase my clients,” or, “Increase my following on social media,” or, you know, ” Improve this,” it’s like, there’s no scorecard to that. You, you do need to have a scorecard. I mean, obviously, that’s…

What is it? SMART goals or whatever. You gotta have something where you can, like, check it off. So those are in usually metric format. So if you could only focus on three things between now and the end of the year, what would those things be? So your kinda to-dos, if you’re listening to this, is give yourself half a day Give yourself a half a day away from Slack, away from email, away from any client work, anything in the business, and let yourself go think about what’s worked well this year, what has not worked well this year.

What is in alignment with your vision, with your dream? Part of my planning, too, is I go pull up… I have a list for 2026. I think I’ve talked about it on the podcast at the beginning of the year. Like, I called it 2026 Reality Creation. And I, I make categories, so I have, like, business, health, family, different categories of my goals for 2026.

And I never hit all my goals, by the way, because you know what? They change. I don’t know how the year’s gonna play out. I don’t know how my priorities are gonna shift. But I do have a vision of where I’m taking my reality, and I categorize it. And so when I do quarterly planning, I do pull up the year.

Especially we’re going in Q4, I’m like, “Where have we not hit this year that I had as a vision that’s still important to me, that’s still a priority? And then what do we need to set for the quarter?” Then I take that, and I can make it monthly. So I did the quarterly goals, and then I said, “Okay, now for October, how many new clients are we bringing on?

How are we bringing those clients on? What’s the revenue goal for October? What are the actual projects, initiatives?” I pull up, we have a calendar. What’s our marketing calendar look like? How, what emails are s- we sending? What ads are we running? And I plan all that out, and then that drives our team, ’cause I have my team.

But creating the assets, creating the promo material, creating all those things to actually go and implement. And this sounds so simple, but I would say more often than not, at least the entrepreneurs that are below seven figures don’t have this in place. And I do find that our seven-figure clients do have this in place.

managing their marketing calendar, for example, is something that we do with VIP clients, is manage that and, and plan that out and plan the promotions. And you get to a place where you’re planning three, four months out your promotions. And when you can be that proactive, it becomes so much easier to hit your goal.

So then I have my monthly, and now I have it October. Here’s exactly what we’re doing. My team’s gonna be on the same page. And then that drives even down to what we do every week. It’s like, am I moving these things forward? Are we moving the promotions forward? Are we moving the projects forward? Are we moving the campaigns?

Like, what are we doing to make sure we hit those targets in October which feed up to the quarterly, which feed up to the annual? So I would really sit with It’s the end of 2027. Like, what are the things that you’re gonna be disappointed if you don’t get them done, or would feel so great to finish the year off with it finished, with it done?

And also, what are the things you could do at the end of this year to start to set the foundation for next year? Because that’s the other thing I wanna say is, as we go to the end of the year, sometimes I see people take their foot off the gas Because they’re like, “It’s the holidays, my sales maybe go down, people are busy,” blah, blah, blah.

And to be honest with you, in a lot of industries, the end of the year has got a lot of opportunity for sales. You’ve got Black Friday, you’ve got holidays, you’ve got end-of-the-year sales. If you target B2B, people wanna spend money at the end of the year as tax write-offs before the year ends. And sure, you have different objections, you have different reasons why your audience is thinking things.

Like, they’re- they are in the holiday season, they, they are sometimes stretched for time. But you can offset that with a reason to sign up f- right now and start in January, or messaging around why they should start right now. You know, you gotta, you gotta meet your audience where they’re at. And so I believe that you can have a super strong end of the year and a super strong Q4, and be present with your family.

I see a lot of times people, it’s like one or the other. It’s like we finish off the year, and we hustle, and we grind, and we get all this done, or we get to be present and we don’t have to worry about that. And I’m like, “You can have both.” And, and this is the thing with, I feel like, sol- with solopreneurs and, like, the online space.

It’s like you would never see a large eight-figure company going, ” We just need to take our foot off the gas and, and let things coast for the end of the year.” No, they… You can still take time off, and you can still be present while planning for growth. And the reason why you don’t see seven and eight-figure companies doing this is because they can’t.

Like, I don’t have… I cannot be like, “Oh, let’s take our foot off the gas and let’s not grow the company,” because how am I, how am I gonna pay payroll? Like, that’s just not an option. So if you don’t have a team yet and you’re in that place, don’t make it an option. It’s not an option to take your foot off the gas and decline your revenue over Q4.

No, how can you make it your best months? I say the same thing in summer. People do the same thing in summer. July is slow. I’m like, “How do you make it your best month?” Don’t accept that. Don’t accept that as a fact. It’s not a fact. Even if other people experience that, you don’t have to experience that.

And so how can you finish this year off extremely strong? But if you are well-planned and intentional, you can also take time off and enjoy the holidays. And that’s also why get support and don’t try and do everything yourself. But there’s actually a lot of opportunity at the end of the year in all different industries.

Obviously, health and weight loss, B2B. Like, people, if you can meet your audience where they’re at with what they want and what they need based on the fact that it’s the end of the year and a different time of year and a different season, they’re in a different mindset. They’re in a, “I wanna finish the year strong, I wanna get ready for the new year,” whatever that means.

If you, if you cater your messaging to that, there’s a ton of opportunity And that doesn’t have to mean sacrifice how you want to spend the holidays at all. Like, that’s… you can have both. So look at your quarter four and pre-plan for that. ‘Cause we’re at the beginning of October, you can already be planning if you are doing a Black Friday sale, if you are gonna do an end of the year sale, if you want to do a special launch at the beginning of December so you front load your sales so that at the end of the year you can do less.

Like, those are the questions you want to ask yourself now so you go into this quarter very intentionally. And set yourself up for Q1, because the people who become in your audience right now and join your list, not every one of them, but a lot of them will be your buyers in Q1. So a lot of marketing also has a delayed effect because if we slow down our growth, if we slow down growing our audience and growing our leads right now, you will pay for it in January and February.

Absolutely you will, which is why I preach consistency. You know, the, the most perfect strategy is where you have consistency happening in your audience and lead generation with immediate return on investment. L- one or 2% of those leads are buying, while also building up the bucket and the pool of people who haven’t bought yet.

And that’s, like, the most beautiful combination for a business. That’s exactly what we implement for our clients. It’s like the blend of consistency with immediate revenue. And building that month over month, quarter over quarter is literally the secret. So alright, you guys, happy quarter four planning. I, I cannot believe we are in quarter four.

I will do some podcast episodes probably on recap of the year, predictions for next year what went really well. This was a great year for us. Like, we just had our biggest month in business. After having our biggest month in business in July September was another big month. And so I get people asking me, like, “Is…

Are… Is your business struggling?” I just had someone this weekend, “Is your business struggling ’cause of the economy?” Da-da-da. And I’m like, “Actually, no.” Like, we’ve had a really good year. And I think it’s because of some specific things we have done and same with some clients. And so I’ll definitely do some end of the year recap things.

But happy planning. Go into this quarter intentionally, strategically with that space. Give yourself that space. That is the job of a CEO. And then ideally, get support in implementing it, which of course you can go to helpmystrategy.com. We have all different ways that we work with businesses in building this out and executing this.

Thank you, guys, so much for tuning in, and I will talk to you next week.