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As we reach the fourth quarter of an extraordinary year, many small businesses are consumed with the challenges of executing, ensuring inventory is in place, fulfilling orders, or driving demand through advertising and promotions. However, the early fourth quarter is also an ideal time for some quick checks to ensure your business ends the year strongly and is well-positioned to hit the ground running as we move into 2026. Here’s my advice on how to take full advantage of this window of opportunity. Preparing your business for a strong finish — and an even stronger start to the New Year. Fall Housekeeping for Your Business Start by doing a bit of “Fall Clean-Up” of your Q1 through Q3 books using these suggestions from Quickbooks. You can ask your bookkeeper to do this to get clean results month by month, quarter by quarter, and year-to-date, with comparisons to the same period last year and ratios against sales revenue for COGS, marketing costs, shipping, etc. Closing the books on a quarterly basis keeps your records clean, improving your ability to manage growth and cash flows, and providing insights that allow you to invest in new growth opportunities as you identify them. Step Back and Assess Look at your clean set of books and reflect on what has worked and what hasn’t so far this year. There’s been a lot of turbulence in imports, supply chain, and consumer behavior in 2025. Do this on your own, or with your circle of most senior, trusted lieutenants or executives. Probe your team about performance issues such as: Which of your marketing channels are performing? Are you getting the ROI you need? Hubspot has a guide for this, which can be useful to examine before going into the media maelstrom of year-end holidays. If you work with a marketing agency, ask them for a pros and cons assessment of marketing performance in 2025 and how they can optimize it moving forward. It’s critical to assess overall marketing and agency performance at least quarterly to adjust to seasonal and business trends. Weekly monitoring of marketing performance is critical to ensure you’re staying on plan, protecting your budget, and adjusting as necessary. Daily check-ins also work, but since daily swings are common, it’s often difficult to ascertain if a change is noise in the data or indicative of something that requires a shift in marketing strategy. Review the same period performance from last year for a comparative snapshot and ensure you take seasonal changes into consideration. Consult Your Business Tax Advisor Consult your CPA and or tax attorney for steps you can take now to minimize your tax burden. Share your “clean” set of books and ask for tax optimization advice. Many businesses can take steps to reduce their tax burdens through management of invoice timing, accounts payable, and inventory. The new tax changes implemented with Congress’s passage of the OBBBA provide significant opportunities to reduce taxable income with new depreciation schedules and expensing of software development costs. Depending on the state you will file in, the timing of inventory purchases, receipt of physical inventory, and payment of invoices can generate an immediate impact on your 2025 tax liabilities. MORE FOR YOU Refresh Your Business Plan With three-fourths of the year gone by, you can create a full-year “outlook” for 2025 that is grounded in reality while highlighting things that can still be optimized or changed in the last few months of the year. This can include updating your sales forecast, projecting cash balances, and managing year-end inventories. As strange as it might sound, the path to sustainability in your business might involve taking steps to actually get smaller. Do you really need the level of inventory you have going into the new year? The economic shocks of 2025 might be a reason for a more cautious or defensive stance in 2026. Like Mike Tyson says, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”. Creating a plan allows you to adapt to changing market conditions – you’ll be proactive rather than reactive. Preparing for changes allows you to begin thinking about alternatives now so your business is ready for whatever the market may throw at you. Consider Year-End Business Tactics As the end of the year approaches, there are a handful of specific steps you can take to quickly impact your cash flow, taxes, and organizational effectiveness. Just be sure to double-check with your accountant or tax attorney first! Tactics to consider: Prepay expense invoices if your goal is to minimize 2025 taxes. Determine if you are eligible for bonus depreciation as allowed for in the “Big Beautiful Bill,” and consider investments that can be immediately written off. Tweak or improve the bonus plan for your key employees to get them laser-focused on your year-end business goals. If you’re a retail or holiday-leveraged business, give your staff absolute clarity on your expectations for holiday personal time off. Most retailers depend on Christmas for their strongest sales of the year, so operations must run smoothly. Any hiccup can quickly hurt the short-term bottom line and have lingering impacts on customer loyalty. Ensure everyone is on board with the work schedule and have a plan in place for coverage in the event of unexpected illnesses or other staffing shortages. Assess Your Business’ Team and Resources The fourth quarter might not be the time to change out staff, contractors, or tools. But this could be a time to line up alternatives in the background to address any areas of dissatisfaction and kick off 2026 with a fast start. It’s helpful to question whether you are satisfied with the support you’re getting. Has your team been delivering? Are you over-leveraged with one provider or too dependent on supply from one geography? It can be helpful to examine: Supply chain providers Advertising channels Marketing agencies. Put AI to Work for your Business Are you fully leveraging AI tools? Many small business resources (packaged software) are now building AI into their products, but you might need to take specific action to take advantage of them. For more on this, one of my fellow Forbes columnists has an entire column devoted to the topic of game-changing AI tools. Plan Your Business Future Give your team clear marching orders by early November, aimed solely at operating with maximum efficiency to adopt new tools during the remainder of the fourth quarter. If your business experiences peak seasonality in the holiday season, you might be pressed for time to do all these things right now. However, you might set this aside until right after December 25th, to reflect upon during the slow period that occurs after Christmas. Doing this now will give you the time to make tweaks and adjustments before the New Year begins. Editorial StandardsReprints & Permissions
