Back to school, back to business: how to ace Q4 

Maybe it’s programming from my youth, but every August, something in me still perks up at the smell of a freshly sharpened pencil. 

Maybe it happens to you, too. Even decades removed from a classroom, there’s something about gearing up for the back-to-school season that makes us want to buy a new notebook, sit up a little straighter and promise ourselves that this is the year we’ve got it figured out. 

It shouldn’t be a surprise that your business also runs on a school calendar, whether you’ve noticed it or not. Summer is just like recess where everyone is a little slower, more relaxed and more likely to answer an email three days late because they were hanging out by the water. Once September hits, it’s game on. The bell rings, homeroom starts and you’ve got roughly 90 days until the final bell of the year rings and the grades get posted for everyone to see. 

That’s your last quarter and final exam. 

To walk into it ready, don’t cram the night before hoping you remember the material. Instead, you should  prepare to post your best grades yet. 

Grade yourself first 

If you don’t check your work as you go, you won’t find the mistakes until it’s too late to fix them. 

Maybe you run your whole year, specifically Q4, looking at revenue first and profit last. You total up what came in, pay everyone and everything else, then with whatever’s left over (if anything) you call profit. It’s the accounting equivalent of doing your homework at 11:58 p.m. and submitting it regardless of the state it’s in. 

Instead, before the quarter even starts, decide what your business needs to keep. Not what’s left over, but what comes off the top before you touch the rest. Pay yourself and your profit line like they’re the most important assignment due, because they are. Everything else, payroll, tools and the new monitoring platform you’ve been eyeing, gets built around what’s left—not the other way around. 

You don’t get to a healthy, sellable, sustainable MSP by hoping profit shows up. You get there by grading yourself first, every single time starting now. 

Know your homework 

Every student has that one subject where they’re falling behind and hoping nobody asks them to read out loud. Every MSP owner has that one part of the business, too; something they know isn’t quite right but keep pushing to next quarter because there’s always something more pressing that demands attention. 

Before you build your Q4 plan, be honest about what your actual homework is, even if it isn’t the easiest or most enjoyable thing to work on. Ask yourself, what’s actually holding your business back from its next level? 

Is it that you don’t have enough new business in the pipeline? That’s a sales problem. Or that you’re busy and growing but somehow still tight on cash every month? That’s a profit problem. Is it that the team is drowning, tickets are backing up and nothing runs without you personally in the middle of it? That’s an order problem.  Your systems and processes aren’t holding their own weight. 

Pick the one that’s broken, not just the one that looks the most. The one that, if you fixed it, would make everything downstream easier. That’s your Q4 assignment and everything else is extra credit. 

The class you can drop 

Eventually, you get to choose your electives. And the smartest students aren’t the ones who take every class available; they’re the ones who know exactly which ones to skip so they can go deeper on the ones that matter. 

Your client roster works the same way. Somewhere in there, you’ve got clients who take up a disproportionate amount of your team’s time, patience and goodwill relative to what they actually pay you. You know exactly who I’m talking about. I bet you can picture their name in your ticketing system right now. 

Before you build out your Q4 push for new business, take a hard look at who’s already on your roster. The clients who pay well, refer often and treat your team with respect are on the honor roll. Study them and try to figure out what they have in common, then go find more of them. For the clients who drain you for a fraction of the return, you may want to consider letting that class go so you have room for the ones that actually raise your GPA. 

Growth isn’t just about adding more; sometimes it’s about making room for better clients.

Don’t do all the homework yourself 

Being the “responsible student” doesn’t mean doing all the work yourself. A lot of MSP owners fall into that trap, and it usually ends in burnout. The more indispensable you make yourself to the daily grind, the less valuable your business actually becomes to your team, your future buyer and to you. 

As you head into the final quarter, take inventory of everything you’re doing and ask yourself: Does this really require me? If the answer is no, it’s time to delegate it or just stop doing it altogether. You’ll be shocked how much of your “essential” work was just habit. 

The owners who walk into Q1 exhausted, are the ones who tried to do every project themselves in Q4. Then there are those who walk in energized who spent the last quarter teaching their team to do the work without standing over their shoulders. 

The bell is about to ring 

School doesn’t end because you ran out of time. It ends when a bell rings on a schedule you don’t control, whether you’re ready or not. 

Q4 is the same, as December 31st is coming whether you’re ready or not. By then, you’ll know whether you graded yourself first and did your real homework. You’ll also know whether you dropped the classes dragging down your average and handed off the work that was never really yours to keep. The only question is what kind of report card you’re going to be holding when the bell rings. 

You’ve got the notebook and the sharpened pencil. Now go earn the grade. 

Related: Q3 Producers Club: culture and growth