Hey,

Nobody wants to think about Black Friday in the middle of summer. That’s exactly why this email exists.

Every November I get the same messages.

“Our ROAS died, CPMs exploded, can you help us fix Q4?”

And the honest answer, in November, is usually no.

By then the levers that matter are already set.

The brands that put up big Q4 numbers make it look easy in the moment because the actual work happened months earlier.

Q4 is a harvest.

You don’t plant anything in November.

You just collect what you planted over the summer, at the highest prices and the heaviest competition of the year.

This year the calendar is even less forgiving.

The big summer sale event already came early, October now carries its own major sale window, and every year more of the peak demand gets pulled forward.

The runway between now and your Q4 is shorter than it looks on the calendar.

To be clear, I’m talking about boring infrastructure, the kind that decides whether November spend scales into profit or into chaos.

Here are the five builds that decide your Q4, in the order I’d start them.

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Build 1: The creative bank

Finding a genuine winning ad takes 6 to 10 weeks of testing, iterating, and repackaging.

If you start that process in October, you’ll be paying peak-season CPMs to learn lessons, which is the most expensive classroom in e-commerce.

Start the testing now instead.

Summer CPMs are the cheapest learning you’ll get all year.

The goal: walk into November with a bank of 5 to 10 proven concepts, each already repackaged into multiple formats, so peak season runs validated creative and zero experiments.

The math is simple and brutal.

If roughly one concept in five becomes a scalable winner, and you want five proven concepts for November, you need to test around 25 concepts over the next three months.

That’s two per week, starting now. It’s also exactly why the brands that “get lucky” every Q4 started shooting in the summer.

If you read the creative system issue two weeks ago, this is where it pays off.

Run the 70-20-10 split through August and your November account runs almost entirely on the proven 70.

Build 2: The warm pools

Q4 converts people who already know you.

Cold strangers seeing your brand for the first time during Black Friday week are the hardest, priciest sale of the year.

Warm audiences, engaged followers, email subscribers, and past visitors convert at a fraction of the cost.

So the summer job is filling those pools.

Content that earns engagement.

Lead magnets and quizzes that capture emails.

Prospecting campaigns judged on cheap reach and new visitors, even when their direct ROAS looks unimpressive.

You’re prospecting in the summer to harvest in Q4, and the brands that skip this step spend November renting attention at the worst prices of the year.

One layer of this deserves its own sentence: every email and SMS contact you capture now is a nearly free Q4 sale later.

A quiz or lead magnet that adds 2,000 subscribers between now and October is worth real money in November, when a single well-timed send to a warm list can outperform a full day of peak-CPM prospecting.

Build 3: Honest measurement

If your attribution flatters you in July, it’ll flatter you catastrophically in November, when spend triples and every bad number gets multiplied.

December is the most expensive possible place to discover your dashboards were lying.

Fix it while the stakes are low.

Split branded from non-branded reporting.

Check your attribution windows against your real buying cycle.

And set up a simple weekly scorecard around contribution margin after ad spend, cost per new customer, and payback, so scaling decisions in Q4 take five minutes instead of five arguments.

That scorecard is the exact sheet I use with clients: Internal Scaling Scorecard​

If you’ve read my last two issues, the acquisition split and the attribution windows are precisely this work.

Fix them in July and every Q4 decision you make inherits honest numbers for free.

Build 4: Inventory and cash

The most expensive mistake in Q4 has nothing to do with ads.

It’s your hero product going out of stock in late November while your best campaigns are finally flying.

Reorder lead times stretch exactly when everyone else is ordering too, so the inventory math for November happens now.

Same with cash.

Early November usually means heavy spend before the revenue lands.

If you don’t model that gap in advance, you’ll cut spend at precisely the moment you should hold, and hand your momentum to a competitor who planned better.

Run the simple version this month: take last November’s daily spend curve, scale it to this year’s target, and lay it against your expected cash inflows week by week.

Whatever gap shows up in that model is the gap you’d otherwise live through in December, except in the model it costs nothing to fix.

Build 5: The offer, decided early

Decide your Q4 offer architecture now, while there’s still time to protect your margin.

A blanket sitewide percentage is the laziest option and the one that trains customers to never pay full price again.

Flat amounts, gift-with-purchase thresholds, and bundles usually protect margin better and feel bigger to the customer.

Then test the mechanics once before peak.

Run your offer structure in a small September moment and you’ll walk into the big week executing a proven play instead of praying over a guess.

I’ve written before about brands that trained their customers to wait for discounts.

Q4 is where most of that training happens, so pick mechanics you can still live with in January.

Your move this week

You don’t need to do all five at once.

One build per week between now and the end of August covers everything with room to spare:

1. This week: pull your creative learnings from the last 90 days and brief the first summer testing batch.
2. Next week: pick one email-capture play and launch it.
3. Week three: split brand from non-brand and check your attribution windows.
4. Week four: run the November inventory and cash model.
5. Week five: lock the offer architecture and book a September dry run.

None of these are glamorous.

All of them are cheap right now and brutally expensive to improvise in November.

Do the boring summer work and November stops being a gamble.

Skip it and you’ll be sending me the same message everyone else sends me in November.

Talk soon,
Andrej

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PS: Here's an example of the exact weekly scaling scorecard we use with clients (contribution margin, cost per new customer, payback, and the green/yellow/red thresholds), ready to copy: Internal Scaling Scorecard​

PPS: Me, every summer, to every brand I know →​