12 Aug The Year-End Move Most Owners Make Four Months Too Late
Every year, in the last week of December, my phone rings with some version of the same call. An owner who just looked at their numbers for the first time in months, asking what can still be done before year-end arrives.
And every year I have to say the same gentle thing: almost nothing. Not because the situation is hopeless, but because the moves they’re asking about—adjusting owner pay, catching up on profit allocations, smoothing a tax surprise, fixing the pricing that’s been quietly eroding margin since spring—were never December moves. They were August moves. By the time the holiday lights are up, the year isn’t ending. It already ended. December just does the paperwork.
After twenty years of those calls, I’ve come to believe something that sounds backwards until you sit with it: your year is decided in August, not December. Let’s talk about the year-end moves you can make now to set yourself up for success.
What August actually gives you
August hands you two things no other month can.
First, eight months of real data. Not projections, not hopes, but actual evidence of how this year behaves: which services carried the profit, which clients paid on time, what your true monthly costs settled into after the January optimism wore off. Eight months is enough to see the patterns clearly and honestly.
Second, August provides you with four months of runway. Enough time for a change to actually land. Raise a price in August and you’ll feel it in this year’s numbers. Trim the expense creep now and it compounds through four billing cycles. Have the tax-planning conversation while there are still legal, sensible moves available to you, because most of them are off the table once the calendar flips.
December might provide a clear picture of how the entire year went for your business, and that’s important. But what it does not provide is ample time to make adjustments before you jump into the new year.
The check-in most owners never schedule
I want to give you a peek behind the scenes at Reconciled Solutions and share with you what I encourage my clients to check in on during this time of year. You’ll notice that it’s deliberately simple; it fits in one sitting with a cup of coffee and your year-to-date reports.
Start with the question your business exists to answer: are you paying yourself what you planned to? Not what’s left over. What you planned. If January’s intention and August’s reality have drifted apart, that gap is the most useful piece of information in your books. (If you’ve never worked out what your revenue needs to be to support your pay, my Reverse Engineer Your Owner’s Pay calculator does exactly that math.)
Next, look at where the year drifted. Nearly every business leaks in the same often overlooked ways by August: subscriptions nobody cancelled, a service line that’s busy but not profitable, receivables aging past comfortable. None of this is failure. It’s what eight months of running a real business accumulates. Seeing it in August is a strategy. Discovering it in December is a eulogy.
Lastly, pinpoint the moves that genuinely still have time to change your outcome. We’re not talking about twelve goals, just one or two. I’m a fan of treating September through December as its own little year, with its own plan, the way The 12 Week Year teaches. Four months is short enough to stay honest, but long enough to matter.
Here are a few things you might want to tackle before the end of the year (and they’re absolutely doable):
- Owner’s pay. Adjust it deliberately rather than going by whatever’s left.
- Your entity election. Whether your current structure still fits the business you actually have now is a conversation with a real deadline attached. Election changes have filing windows, and “we’ll look at it in the spring” usually means another full year in a structure that stopped fitting you two years ago.
- Your benefits package. Open enrollment decisions get made in the fall, and they set a meaningful piece of next year’s labor cost. Deciding what you’re offering, and what it costs you per employee, belongs in this conversation and not in a rushed November email.
- The tax conversation. Start on this now, while options still exist.
Take some time to think hard about next year’s pricing
This is the part I’d protect time for, because pricing is the fastest lever you have and the one most owners set once and forget. Three things belong in that thinking this year.
The world is showing up in your cost of goods. Have you been following what’s happening around the Strait of Hormuz? A conflict on the other side of the world is reaching Main Street, and it’s requiring even the smallest business to think a little like a world-class economist. Are you seeing tariffs, product shortages, delays, a supplier moving manufacturing, or fuel costs working their way into every delivery you pay for? If any of that is touching you, now is the time for the deep thinking that reframing a pricing strategy actually requires.
AI is changing what your service is worth. If you run a professional services business, you need a point of view on this. What tools and processes change because of AI, for you and for your competitors? What does that do to what you can charge, and to what clients expect to pay? At minimum, decide how each person at your firm is using AI in their day-to-day work, and make sure they’re clear on what’s approved and what isn’t, what’s encouraged and what’s discouraged. A policy you’ve actually thought about beats everyone quietly improvising.
And then the hardest one: labor. Most of us, and certainly our employees, are walking around feeling like a price tag got stuck to our foreheads, wondering whether the work we do today needs to be repriced or re-evaluated. Pretending AI isn’t happening is foolish, because every single person on your team is already thinking about what it means for their job. So think it through on purpose. Will you need to hire the same number of people? Do responsibilities change? Where does the humanity in your company’s work live, and where does the machine genuinely step in? These answers won’t come easily, and for most businesses labor is the single biggest cost. That’s exactly why you start now, while you’re gauging rather than reacting.
Year-end moves simple enough to survive Q4
Here’s the part I care most about, and it’s no coincidence I’m writing this during National Simplify Your Life Week. Whatever plan comes out of all that has to be simple enough to survive your busiest quarter, because complexity fails, and it fails hardest exactly when you’re slammed. A one-page plan you’ll actually look at beats a beautiful spreadsheet you abandon by October.
One page. Your owner’s pay target, the two or three moves you’re making, your pricing decision, and a twenty-minute weekly date with your numbers to stay honest. That’s the whole system.
The owners who feel calm in December aren’t the ones who worked harder that month. They’re the ones who decided in August what December would look like.
So this is your August call, the one that replaces the December one. Pull up your year-to-date numbers this week. If you look at them and you’re not sure what they’re telling you, start with my free Profit Assessment, or go straight to the Reverse Engineer Your Owner’s Pay calculator and get your real number.
What’s the one thing you already know you’ll wish you’d fixed in August?
