Happy Monday, {{ First Name | closers }}.

Tomorrow is the equinox, the official start of fall and the last day this year that daylight and dark call it a draw. After tomorrow the nights start winning. Enjoy the pumpkin spice while it's still warm enough to drink it on the patio.

Now, back to business. Two weeks ago we did the gap math together. You pulled the profit and loss, wrote down the difference between where you are and where you said you'd be, and divided it by your average commission. That was the assessment half of Finishing Strong.

This one is the execution half. Fourteen weeks left, and this issue is about what you do with the closings you're about to make.

One thing before we dig in. If you're not listening to the podcast yet, September is a good month to start. Every Monday I'm sitting down with somebody who runs the same kind of seasonal, referral-driven business you do, a roofer, a real estate attorney, a print and promo guy, and asking them how they finish their year. Different trades, same problems: lumpy money, reputation on the line, a calendar that runs out. You can find every episode here. The attorney conversation about deals that almost died is worth your Tuesday commute.

— Steve

A commission check lands and it feels like a win. It is. But part of that money already belongs to somebody else, and the only real question is whether you find that out now or in April.

Here's the discipline. The day the check clears, move fifteen to twenty percent into a separate account you do not touch. Not a mental note, not a promise to yourself. A different account, at a different bank if you're the kind of person who raids the savings. That percentage is a starting point, not a prescription, because your real number depends on your income, your filing status, and what your spouse brings in. Your CPA can tell you the actual figure in about ten minutes.

Why bother now instead of January. Because the fourth quarter is the last stretch where you can still change the outcome for this tax year. Anything that has to happen inside the tax year has to actually happen by December thirty-first, not get decided in March when you're staring at the return. Retirement contributions run on their own rules and some of them extend past year-end, which is exactly the kind of thing worth a phone call rather than a guess.

Two dates for the calendar. Your fourth quarter estimated payment is due January fifteenth. And if anybody has suggested an entity change for next year, that conversation belongs in October or November, not in the week you're trying to file.

This is tax prep light, not advice. If any of it looks off against your situation, loop in your CPA before you move money. The commission you protect is worth more than the one you chase.

Everybody wants a December closing. Almost nobody counts backward to see whether it's actually possible.

Run the real math. A financed purchase needs somewhere around thirty to forty-five days from contract to keys, and longer when the appraiser is buried. Now stack the holidays on top of that. Lenders run short-staffed the last two weeks of December. Title offices close. Appraisers take vacation. County recorders keep holiday hours, and a deed that doesn't record doesn't close, no matter how good everyone's intentions were.

Work it backward and you land on a real date. In most markets, a financed deal that isn't under contract by the middle of November is a January closing, however badly everyone wants otherwise. Cash moves faster, but not as fast as people think when the other side's attorney is out of the office until the fifth.

So do something with that date. Take your pipeline and split it into two lists: deals that can realistically close this year, and deals that are already January. Then stop treating them the same. The December list gets your urgency, your daily follow-up, your willingness to chase the paperwork yourself. The January list gets a calm conversation with the client right now, while it's still early.

That conversation is the whole point. A client who hears "this is going to be a January close, and here's exactly why" in September thinks you are on top of your business. That same client hearing it on December twentieth thinks you dropped the ball. Knowing the date beats wishing about it.

There's a version of finishing strong that's really just finishing fast. Push the deal, hit the number, cross the line, collapse into the holidays.

That works. Right up until March.

The last ten days of a transaction are where your reputation actually gets built. Not the listing presentation, not the photos, not the marketing. The final stretch, when something goes sideways and the client is watching how you handle it. That is the part they describe to their sister at Thanksgiving, and that is the version of you that gets referred in January.

Rushing is how a deal you closed in December becomes a phone call you dread in March. The disclosure nobody read closely. The repair addendum that got agreed to out loud and never got signed. The walkthrough that got skipped because everyone was in a hurry to be done. None of those feel like a big deal on the day. All of them get expensive later.

So build one habit for the rest of the year. Before any deal goes to the table, take fifteen minutes and read your own file like you're the attorney who's going to review it in six months. Is everything signed. Is everything disclosed. Does the paper match what actually happened in the deal. If something's missing, you've got days to fix it instead of months to regret it.

That's the same discipline as clean books, just aimed at a different threat. Both are about making March boring. Calm at the closing table is a service you provide.

Same book as two weeks ago, on purpose. Brian Moran and Michael Lennington.

If you picked it up, you're roughly two weeks into a twelve week year, which makes this the right moment for the thing the book is actually built around. The weekly execution score.

Here's how it runs. At the start of the week, write down the actions you're committing to. Actions, not outcomes. Twenty calls, four follow-ups, one hour in the database. At the end of the week, count how many you actually completed and divide by how many you planned. That number is your score. The authors make the case that anything at eighty-five percent or better reliably produces the result, which means you stop guessing whether you're on track and start knowing.

What makes it work is what it measures. You do not control whether a listing comes in this week. You control whether you made the calls. Scoring the actions instead of the outcomes takes the one thing you can't manage out of the equation and hands you back the thing you can.

If you haven't opened the book yet, don't try to catch up. Read chapter one, start the weekly score this Monday, and leave the rest until January. Two weeks from now you'll have run it twice and you'll know whether it fits the way you work.

And if you read the whole thing already and changed nothing, that isn't a reading problem. That's the exact gap the book is about.

👆 Go ahead and click the image to order the book from Amazon 👆

✅ Open a separate account for tax set-aside and move fifteen to twenty percent of every commission into it the day it lands

✅ Split your pipeline into two lists, deals that can close this year and deals that are already January

✅ Have the calm conversation with every client on the January list this week, before they're disappointed

✅ Reconcile your books through September thirtieth so the fourth quarter starts from a real number

✅ Pick your five committed actions for this week and score yourself FridayPull the year-to-date profit and loss, write down the gap, and divide it by your average commission

If you only do one thing, do the third one. Your one move this week is the January conversation. It costs you twenty minutes, it protects a referral you haven't earned yet, and it is the single easiest thing on this list to skip.