My first Q4, I treated it like a normal month

I started selling in July 2022. Five months later it was November, and I did what most beginners do without realizing they are doing it. Nothing different.

I sourced the same way. I sent my inventory in the same way. I did not touch FBM. I did not build a list of brands, I did not watch a single sale date, I did not think about my cash for one second. November showed up, I sold more than usual, and I felt pretty good about myself.

Across that November and December I cleared somewhere around three grand in profit. For a guy five months in, that felt like proof I knew what I was doing.

Here is what I actually learned, and it took me until the next year to see it. Q4 does not punish you for showing up unprepared. That is the trap. If you send in mediocre inventory in a mediocre way, Q4 still pays you more than October did, and you walk into January thinking you had a good season. You never find out what the season could have paid you, so you never change anything.

I only saw it in year two, when I ran the same two months on purpose. Same guy, roughly the same skill. Different preparation. It was not close.

Every Q4 since has taught me the same lesson in a slightly different way, and I say it to my students every single year: you are going to finish December wishing you had more money, more inventory, and more products ready. That is the whole game. So here is the version of it I wish somebody had handed me in September 2022.

September is the month nobody respects

September feels like nothing is happening. That is exactly why it is the most valuable month you have.

September is for looking backwards and building lists. If you sold anything at all this year, go pull your data. Which brands did you actually sell? Which of those are you still ungated in? Which source websites came through for you, and when do those stores historically run their sales? Every one of those answers is a lead you do not have to go find in November, when you will not have time to find anything.

If you are new and have no data yet, you still build the list. You just build it from the outside instead. The brands you can actually buy. The retailers you can actually get to. The categories you are not gated in.

Nobody's Q4 is won in December. It is won by walking into November with a list already made.

October is a deadline, not a month

This is the line I repeat until people are sick of hearing it. If the end of October hits and you still have money sitting there and you are still thinking about it, you are late.

Not doomed. Late. Send something the first week of November and it can absolutely still work. But you are now betting on check-in times, FC transfers, and the hundred small things that go wrong more often in Q4 than any other time of year, because Amazon is buried too. Your inventory needs to be live before the demand shows up, not while it is happening.

The shape of the season is simple. FBA early, FBM late. FBA is your floor, and it is the money that comes in while you sleep because of work you did in October. FBM is your ceiling, and it is mostly a December tool, because December is when you can react to things FBA cannot touch. Amazon goes out of stock. A local store still has the thing. Somebody needs it by Thursday.

November should not rob your December

This one quietly costs beginners real money and almost nobody warns them.

Your inventory checks in, sales start coming in faster than anything you have seen, and it feels incredible. So you leave your price where it moves, and you sell out of your best products in the third week of November.

Then December arrives, seller counts thin out, prices come up, and you have nothing left to sell.

I am not telling you to hold everything and get cute. It is case by case, and it depends on your seller count, your stock, and whether the listing looks like it is improving or not. But you should at least be asking the question, because sell it fast is an instinct, not a strategy. If a little patience turns a $20 sale into a $25 sale on the same unit with no extra work from you, that is a decision worth making on purpose.

The thing that actually caps your Q4

Here is what I ask my students, usually right when somebody tells me they are in a sourcing rut.

If I approved 10k worth of leads for you tomorrow, could you buy them?

If the answer is no, you do not have a sourcing problem. You have a capital problem, and more sourcing will not fix it. Those are two completely different problems and people burn months solving the wrong one.

So the capital question belongs in September as well. Not in November, when the sale is live and you are staring at a product you cannot afford. Banks are slow. If a line of credit is something you are going to look into, that conversation starts weeks before you need the money, not the day you need it.

And I am not going to give you the fun part without the ugly part. Debt can multiply your Q4 and it can also end you. Borrowed money buying bad inventory is still bad inventory, except now it comes with a payment schedule. Depth does not make you smarter either. It multiplies whatever seller you already are, so if the judgment is shaky, going deep only makes the mistake bigger.

For most people reading this, that means going wide and staying wide. Smaller quantities across more products. One random gating, one bad deep buy, one product that turns out to be seasonal in the wrong direction, and the Q4 you needed is gone.

Then January arrives, and nobody talks about January. Volume drops off. Returns land all at once from a season where you sold more than you ever have, and it feels like the business broke. It did not break. It is January. Clear your dead inventory in December while there are still buyers, because if something will not move in December at a lower price, February is not going to save it.

Run your September properly and you are already ahead of where I was.

Since it is relevant and I would rather just say it than be weird about it: I am running my next cohort straight through this season. It starts the first week of October, two calls a week until the first week of December, and then the calls stop and you keep access to me for the rest of December.

That shape is deliberate. The calls end right about when the teaching should stop and the executing starts, and I stay reachable through the month where the mistakes are expensive and time sensitive. Small group, on purpose. A couple of seats are already taken and only a few spots left

If you want the details, comment "Q4" and Il DM you the details.

And if you do not, that is genuinely fine. Take the calendar above and go run your September.

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My first Q4, I treated it like a normal month