Can you indulge me for a minute? I want you to picture something with me. It's January the second, 2026. It's my birthday, but that is not what's relevant here. It's January, 2026, and you're sitting at your desk and you're looking at your bank account. What number do you see? Maybe you're looking at it and you are feeling proud.

Maybe you think, you know what? All that work I've put in it is finally paid off. I've built something real here and this feels good. And if that's you, amazing, I want you to keep listening because we're going to talk about how you can make that number even bigger and more intentional. But I'm also going take a stab here and think that for some of you listening, that's not the feeling that you get.

Maybe when I asked you to do that, it made your chest feel tight. Did it give you a knot in your stomach because you were hoping that this year would be different? Or maybe it's just flat out disappointing because deep down you know that you are capable of so much more. You've got beautiful products, your customer service is next level, but you just can't seem to get it to translate to dollars in the bank.

So here's my question for you. Do you wanna change that? Because what if instead of that familiar post-holiday financial anxiety, instead of just crossing your fingers and hoping that you made enough to survive until spring, you aren't dreading February and March. What if you were looking at a number that excited you, a number that you had actually planned for and achieved?

Hey there, and welcome to the Bringing Business to Retail podcast. I'm so glad that you can join me. I'm Selena Knight, and if that was your first episode that you've listened to, you might be thinking, huh, that's a little bit woo. Trust me, I am all about strategies that grow your business and your bank account, but sometimes we need to push ourselves a little bit outside of our comfort zone in order to get the breakthroughs that we want.

So please just indulge me on this one. Now, going back to your visualization. Maybe the number that you see is $50,000 sitting there. That money is gonna be ready to fund your next inventory, buy without any stress, or maybe it's $200,000 for you and for you. That means that you can finally have the money in the bank to hire that team member that you have been dreaming about.

Maybe it's a marketing manager, maybe it's a full-time store manager. Whoever that person is for you, maybe it's a half a million dollars, and that is going to give you the freedom to make decisions from abundance instead of scarcity. Now, I don't have to tell you that the difference between an okay year and one that has you smiling and dreaming bigger isn't luck.

I mean, sure, you might stumble across the next lab, booboo doll. I mean, how ugly are those things? But for 99.9% of the rest of us having a good year comes down to something a heck of a lot more simple and thankfully much more achievable than finding the next cult status item. Today I'm sharing something that will fundamentally change how you approach Q4.

And honestly, I hope it changes the way you look at your entire business. I'm gonna call it, I'm not very good at coming up with names. Let's call it the January Vision method. And it might just be the difference between the number that you just visualized and the one that you really, really want. Because here's what I know to be true.

Too many retailers cross their fingers and they hope that customers will buy over the holiday season. Strategic retailers design their outcome, and I wanna show you how to do that. So let's dive in now, before we get into the nuts and bolts, I need you to be brutally honest with yourself about something when you think about your business right now.

And okay, we're going a little bit feely, feely here and digging in. And yes, if this is your first episode, you might be thinking, this is way too woo for me. Trust me when I say most of these episodes are how tos and this episode is going to be how to in just a moment. So when you think about your business right now, not what you're posting on social media or what you're telling your friends about, but the real version, how does it feel?

How do you feel? Are you constantly guessing? Are you wondering if you ordered enough inventory or not enough? Do you literally cross your fingers and hope that this latest promotion or sale will work, or that the campaign that you're running will finally hit because living like that. Is exhausting.

Living in a cycle of hope and panic is not what grows your business because if that is you, I need you to understand something that is survival mode. And survival mode will never, ever get you to the vision that you have for your life and business. Because here is what happens when you're in survival mode.

Your brain literally shuts down the parts that are responsible for creativity and strategic thinking and long-term planning. It's like your nervous system goes. We don't have time for big picture thinking right now. We just have to get through today. Your body starts operating from fight or flight, your lizard brain kicks in.

You are reactive instead of responsive, you are making decisions based on fear instead of opportunity, you grab at quick fixes instead of building sustainable systems. And here's the kicker. We are about to head into the busiest most opportunity rich time of the entire year for nearly all of you listening.

Q4 is when fortunes are made and businesses fatten up for the lean season when all of the work that you've put in can finally pay off in massive ways. So do you really wanna go into this season of opportunity and navigate it from survival mode when your brain is just focused on getting through instead of capitalizing on the biggest revenue opportunity of the year?

I mean, that's like trying to run a race and holding your breath. I mean, you might survive, but you're definitely not gonna win. And just this week, inside of our scale, your store accelerator, one of our retailers, said that they felt like they were flying blind when it came to Black Friday, Christmas, and the whole holiday season.

Now, I latched onto that phrase, flying blind because. It hit me in the heart because that is exactly what so many retailers are doing, and it was the simple fact that people were nodding their heads as she said it. They're running their businesses based on hope and crossed fingers, and it doesn't have to be that way.

Honestly, it really doesn't. What I can tell you firsthand, because I am inside the backend of successful retail and e-commerce businesses every single day. The ones who are hiring new team members, the ones who are really taking vacations where they're not on their phones constantly, they're not flying blind at all.

They know exactly where they're going, and they know exactly how to get there. Now, sure, there are bumps in the road. Not every promotion they run works. Not every product they buy in sells, but they've put the work in. And that all starts with something that most people think is very, very boring. And it sounds super scary.

Forecasting. I know I failed accounting twice. The concept of forecasting when I heard about it was literally like, I don't understand numbers, I don't get it. But here is what I've learned. Forecasting is not about predicting the future, it's about creating it. Now, if I can share a story about a homeware store owner.

Who was in our scale, your store program a little while ago. Let's call her Kelly. Now, up until now, Kelly would go to the trade fairs in August and she would just wander around and she would buy the things that she thought would sell. She didn't really have a plan. Her budget was just based on how much money she had in the bank or how much her line of credit had left in it.

But one of the questions that I ask inside of the accelerator is, what does your next level look like? And for Kelly, her goal, the one thing she really wanted was to hire her first full-time employee. She had two part-time store managers. She had a lot of part-time people, but she didn't feel like she had the safety net.

The money in the bank, the liquid cash, to be able to confidently hire someone full-time. She was very, very scared that if she brought someone on full-time, she would have to let them go because she couldn't pay for them. But she also wanted to take her family on a real vacation. So she said to me, not one where I am constantly checking my phone every five minutes.

I wanna be able to take my family on a vacation and not have anyone have a go at me about the fact that I'm working. I love that for her. You know why? Because she was so precise. She knew exactly what she wanted. And when you have a goal, it is so much easier to work out what to do next. And so here's what we did with Kelly.

We worked backwards. What would that number have to look like for her? So she decided it was $200,000. Remember how I asked you, how much money do you want to see in the bank in January? She wanted $200,000 in her bank account on January 1st. Cash liquid. Liquid means you can go and spend it right now. Now, some of you might be thinking, oh my gosh, if I had $200,000 in cash in the bank, I would feel like I've won the lottery.

Other people might have more than that in their accounts. Right now, the actual number is irrelevant. What's relevant is that she had a number. Because Kelly had already worked through her business expenses, her cost of goods sold, she'd calculated what she would need to generate after she had all of her liabilities taken out, and she realized that she would have to make $800,000 in revenue in Q4 to net $200,000 after all of her costs $800,000.

Now, for some of you again, that number might seem massive. Or it might sound small, depending on where you're at. The number doesn't matter. What matters is this, that $800,000 became her North Star. Every single decision that she made from July onwards was filtered on that one question. Will that get me closer to doing $800,000 in Q4 revenue?

Her inventory buys her promotional calendar, her email marketing strategy, her social media content, everything was designed to support that goal. She didn't hope she didn't cross her fingers. She engineered the result, and you wanna know what happened. She hit $825,000 in q4. She had $210,000 in the bank on January 1st.

She hired her first employee in February. And yes, she took that vacation, but here's the part that hopefully will blow your mind. She told me later that the whole experience was less stressful than her previous years. Why? Because she wasn't guessing anymore. She had a plan and she had executed it, and sure it was messy and at times it was overwhelming, but having that big hairy goal drove her forwards.

Okay, so let's get into the method that makes this kind of transformation possible. As I said, we're gonna call it the January vision method because come up with anything more exciting on the spot. It's got four parts, and we're going to start with the most important one. So let's think January 1st, 2026.

Close your eyes again for a second. Seriously do this and picture yourself on January 1st, 2026. Not just your bank account, not just your business, but your whole life. What does it look like? I mean, it's not that far away. Are you stressed about money or are you confident about your financial position?

Are you working 70 hour weeks or do you have people handling different parts of your business? Have you hired team members? Are you taking that trip that you've been talking about for three years? Or you are you still going to be saying maybe next year? Here's what most people don't understand. Your January 1st vision, it should scare you.

If it doesn't require you to grow and to stretch and to become a better business owner, then it's not a vision. It's just a wish, or you might be playing a little bit too small. Kelly's vision scared her $200,000 in the bank felt impossible. Her highest at revenue month that she had ever done was about the same $200,000.

That was not profit. That was revenue, but that fear, that urgency. That is what created her plan to think differently, to start planning, to be more strategic, to stop operating like a hobby business owner and start operating like a CEO. So what's your January 1st vision? What do you want your bank account to say?

What do you want your business to look like? What do you want your life to look like? Write it down. Make it specific, make it scary. Make it exciting. 'cause everything we do from here is designed to make that vision inevitable. So part one, what do you want? Part two, we reverse engineer it. So once you have your January 1st vision, we work backwards.

Now, this is where most retailers get it completely wrong. They think about Q4 as people are gonna shop. Let's just see what happens instead of here's what needs to happen. So if Kelly wanted her $200,000 in the bank, we had to get specific about what that meant for Q4, October, November, December, after accounting for cost of goods, operating expenses, her team wages, her marketing, her tax obligations.

Ooh, sneaky one that lots of people forget. We knew she needed to generate $800,000 in revenue between October and December. Now this is where it gets a little bit interesting. Now, once you know your Q4 revenue target, you can start making strategic decisions instead of emotional ones. So for Kelly, $800,000 over three months meant roughly $266 a month.

So she looked at her average order value, she looked at her conversion rates, she looked at her conversion rates during the holidays, and then she calculated how many customers she would need to reach each month, and then that information, that data. Gave her the decisions on what she needed to do in terms of her email marketing strategy, her social media advertising, her budgets for paid ads, and her promotional calendar.

She realized she had to do a lot more. If she had to go from her biggest month ever being 200,002 now consistently hitting 266,000 things were gonna have to be different. She realized that she needed to grow her email list by 40% before October to hit her revenue targets, and that shaped her entire September strategy.

She discovered that her current inventory levels would run out by mid-November if she hit her targets, so then she had to go back, go to her suppliers and plan for a second inventory drop in early November. So do you see what's happening here? She's not guessing. She's reverse engineering. She's not hoping her way to success.

She's planning it step by step. And this is what I mean when I say forecasting shapes your entire marketing strategy. Your entire budgeting strategy when you know that you need to reach. 500 more people to hit your targets, you will go and do something to do that. You'll go and send more emails, you'll create more content.

When you know you need to increase your average order value by 20%, you'll design bundles and upsells that add value, and you'll have the inventory to do exactly that. All righty, so part one, where are we going? Part two, reverse engineer how we're going to get there. Part three, let's map out September and October.

So Q4. Remember Q4 is October, November, December, but here's the thing. Q4 planning does not begin in October, right? It does. It sells in October, November, December, which means we can't be planning in October. You have to start earlier than that. September in a pinch, August is even better. August is gone by the time you're listening to this, so September it is.

If you want to hit bigger revenue targets in Q4, September and October are your foundation months. So this is when you are building your email list. It is when you are creating your promotional calendar. It is when you are planning your inventory. It's when you're going to market to buy your products.

It's about setting up all the systems that make it much more possible for you to hit your targets. So Kelly spent September focused on building her customer database. So she wanted to increase her overall email database, her customer database by 40%. That is a lot. And so she knew it was more expensive to do that in October and November.

So she started in September. She knew she needed that bigger audience to hit her revenue targets and she didn't wanna pay as much for them. So every piece of content, every social media post, every email was designed to track those ideal customers and get them onto her email list. And October was all about anticipation and early sales.

So she didn't wait until Black Friday to start selling. She created an exclusive earlier bird promotion for her best customers. She started dripping out the offers to her customers so they could see, they could get prepared. Remember, they're already in the buying mode at this point, and so they're looking for, what am I going to buy?

What is out there? So. Not only did that generate revenue for her, but it also helped her gauge demand for some of her holiday inventory. And so by the time November hit, she wasn't scrambling. She was executing a plan that she had been refining for months. Can you see the difference here, strategic versus reactive survival mode, eine kicking in or planning with intention.

And here's something that most people don't think about timing. So when you are working backwards from your goals, you know exactly when to start your email campaigns. You know how to space out your promotions so that you're not cannibalizing your own sales, and you know when your inventory needs to arrive so that you can maximize your selling window.

You're not just throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping that something sticks. You're conducting a symphony and every note has a purpose. Okay, so part one, what do we want? Part two, reversed engineered it, and part three, we mapped out those beginning pieces. We mapped out September and October. So what is part four is where the magic happens.

It's where you execute. When you have done all this prep work, when you have your January vision, when you've reverse engineered those targets and you've mapped out September and October, execution becomes easier. Now, I'm not gonna say it's becoming easy because marketing is never easy. There is always that little span in the works.

But when you are prepared, those spanners don't become roadblocks. They're just obstacles that you can navigate around. Because you are not second guessing every decision. You are not panicking when a promotion doesn't perform exactly like you expected. You're not wondering if you ordered enough inventory or too much.

You know your numbers. You trust the plan, and you execute. Kelly told me something that I will never forget, and it's always like, it's so heartwarming to hear these sayings that I say over and over again and then somebody says it back to me. So she said to me just privately, she said, Sal, for the first time in my business, I felt like the CEO that you always talk about and not the shopkeeper.

If you are watching, you can see I have the biggest smile on my face as I tell you this, but you can probably even hear it in my voice. That's what this method does. It transforms you from someone who is just hoping for success to someone who's creating it. When you plan your success instead of hoping for it, everything changes.

I'm not gonna say that it is gonna be perfect. Your messaging becomes clearer, your offers become more compelling. Your entire business energy shifts from scarcity to abundance. Now, I know that some of you listening are thinking, well, this sounds a great sale, but I'm not good at marketing, or, I don't have time to do this.

Or, you know what? This all feels too complicated. It's all right for her. It's not all right for me. So I want you to stop there. You know what is complicated? Running a business on guesswork, wondering if every month you'll have enough money to pay your bills, constantly feeling behind and reactive and stressed, and that lizard brain kicking in.

You know what is way easier, having a plan and following it. The reality is for a lot of you listening, Q4 isn't just about holiday sales. It is about funding for your future. Think about it, your Q4 revenue, October, November, December, the holiday season. It can fund your entire Q1 in inventory. It can fund team expansion, it can fund your marketing budget for next year.

Your personal goals, it could take you on that holiday. It is not just about surviving the holidays, it's about setting yourself up to thrive all year long. So when Kelly hit that $200,000 savings goal, that money just didn't sit in her bank account looking pretty. That money became her Freedom fund. It allowed her to hire that first full-time employee, which gave her time back.

She was able to spend more time on marketing, which meant of course the business grew. It funded much larger inventory purchases for spring, which increased her profit margins. It gave her money to do the marketing, and it gave her the confidence to actually go and raise her prices because she wasn't operating from this concept of desperation anymore.

One strategic quarter like Q4 in the holiday season can literally change the entire trajectory of your business. Only if you plan it, only if you design it. Only if you stop hoping your way to success and start creating it. The window for building out your holiday sales plan is closing fast. And if you need help working out what to promote when you should run different types of promotions, or how the heck do you create offers that your customers say, shut up and take my money.

I want to invite you to join me in the double my holiday sales bootcamp, where I'm gonna walk you through exactly how to kickstart your holiday promotions so that you can sell more stuff and make more money. Now, this is not just about tactics, it's about strategy. It's about designing success instead of hoping for it.

If you are tired of flying blind, this is for you. Over four live training sessions, yes, live. I'm gonna be hosting these in real time. I will show you how to create campaigns that drive real results. You will stop throwing random promotions at the wall like promotional spaghetti. You'll go from guessing and hoping your next promotion might work to confidently knowing exactly what kind of campaign to deploy for any business situation.

In session number two, remember, these are live. I'm gonna share with you the three mistakes that are costing you time and money when it comes to promotions. So there are three sneaky little saboteurs that are killing your promotions behind the scenes, which cost you money, cost you time, cost you sales, and they're probably not what you think.

But once you go through this session, you won't do them again. And then in live training, session number three, step by step, this is the one that everybody loves. I'm gonna show you how to create irresistible offers. This session breaks down the simple four step formula that makes customers stop scrolling and start spending.

So you'll leave this session knowing exactly what words make people think. I need that. Now, here's my credit card. All of this wraps up with a live masterclass on how to maximize sales during the peak season. I'm gonna show you how to turn all the things that you've learned into actual profit generating system that works.

Now, this bootcamp is designed to kickstart your holiday promotions and take you from not knowing what to promote to having a clear roadmap that transforms this holiday season from survival mode into your biggest revenue breakthrough. I would love to help you build out the plan to get you to that January goal that you want.

We kick off in just a few days and you can claim your spot at double my holiday sales.com. Will I see you there? Because here's the truth. The January that you want starts with the plan that you make today. Don't let another year go by wondering what could have been design the holiday season that you want.

Join me over at double my holiday sales.com. Okay. That is all for today's episode of the Bringing Business to Retail Podcast. Until next time, remember, you don't guess your way to great results. You plan them now, go and make it happen and join your spot in the double My Holiday Sales Bootcamp. Just like it says on the box, you can do it at double my holiday sales.com.

Alrighty, I'll see you on the next episode. So that's a wrap. I'd love to hear what insight you've gotten from this episode and how you're going to put it into action. If you're a social kind of person, follow me at the Selena Knight and make sure to leave a comment and let me know. And if this episode made you think a little bit differently or gave you some inspiration, or perhaps gave you the kick that you needed to take action, then please take a couple of minutes to leave me a review.

On your platform of choice because the more reviews the show gets, the more independent retail and e-commerce stores just like yours, that we can help to scale. And when that happens, it's a win for you, a win for your community, and a win for your customers. I'll see you on the next episode.