Q4 starts Thursday.

Most owners treat that like a countdown to the holidays. Slow down, coast a little, do the party, pick it back up in January.

I treat it like the one stretch of the year when a big chunk of your market is holding money with an expiration date stamped on it.

Not metaphorically. Literally. There are dollars sitting in budgets, benefit accounts, and tax brackets right now that disappear on December 31 if nobody spends them. The people holding that money know it's going to vanish. Most of them are going to let it happen anyway, because nobody gave them a clean, easy reason to use it.

That's your job for the next thirteen weeks. Be the reason.

I've watched this play out in practice after practice. Slow November every single year, like clockwork. The owner assumes it's seasonal and there's nothing to do about it. Then they send a handful of emails and a text to patients who have money sitting in their flexible spending accounts, and December fills up. No new ads. No new website. The money was already there. Nobody had asked for it.

So let's go find yours.

Every one of these applies to a different kind of business. Some of you will have one pile. A few lucky ones will have three. Read all four anyway, because the mechanics are the same and you'll probably spot one you didn't know you had.

Pile one: corporate budgets.

If you sell to other businesses, this is the big one. Department heads get a budget for the year. If they don't spend it, two bad things happen. The money goes back to the company, and their budget gets cut next year because clearly they didn't need it.

So every October and November, there's a quiet scramble inside mid sized companies to spend what's left on something defensible. Training. Consulting. Software. Marketing projects. Equipment. The person holding that budget isn't looking for the cheapest option. They're looking for something they can approve fast, invoice this year, and explain to their boss without a long meeting.

That means you win this money with speed and simplicity, not with a better price.

Pile two: flexible spending accounts.

For 2026, employees can put up to $3,400 into a health FSA. Some employers let people carry a small amount into next year, up to $680, but plenty of plans don't allow any carryover at all. Whatever's left over past the limit is gone.

Now think about who touches that money. Dentists. Chiropractors. Physical therapists. Optometrists and eyewear shops. Hearing clinics. Dermatology. Acupuncture and a lot of functional medicine, depending on the plan and the paperwork. If you run any kind of health or wellness practice, you have patients walking around with a few hundred to a few thousand dollars they are about to lose, and most of them forgot it exists.

Pile three: met deductibles.

This is the sneaky one. By October, a lot of patients have already hit their insurance deductible or their out of pocket maximum for the year. That means the treatment they've been putting off is cheaper for them right now than it will be on January 2, when the whole thing resets to zero.

Every practice with a stack of unscheduled treatment plans should be treating this like a sale that the insurance company is running on their behalf.

Pile four: business tax write offs.

If you sell equipment, vehicles, software, or improvements to other businesses, the end of the year is when your buyers start asking their accountants how to lower their tax bill.

The numbers are bigger than most people realize. For 2026, the Section 179 deduction limit is $2,560,000, and 100 percent bonus depreciation is now permanent for qualifying property. The catch that matters to you: the property generally has to be placed in service by December 31 to count for this year.

I'm not your CPA and neither are you, so don't go handing out tax advice. But you can absolutely say, "If you're planning to buy this anyway, a lot of our customers time it before year end. Worth asking your accountant." That one sentence has closed more fourth quarter deals than any discount I've ever seen.

Not money, but it works the same way.

Homeowners want the project done before family shows up for Thanksgiving. Businesses want the new system running before the January rush. Couples want the thing finished before the holidays so they're not living in a half torn up kitchen on Christmas morning.

If you run a home services business, a deadline already exists in your customer's head. You just have to say it out loud. "If you want this done before Thanksgiving, we need to lock the schedule by October 17." That's not pressure. That's information they actually need.

Take ten minutes and answer four questions.

Do I sell to businesses with department budgets? If yes, pile one.

Do my customers pay with FSA or HSA cards? If yes, pile two. If you're not sure, check your payment processor. Those cards show up in your transaction data.

Do I bill insurance and have treatment plans sitting unscheduled? If yes, pile three.

Do I sell anything a business owner would put on a depreciation schedule? If yes, pile four.

Then pull the list. This is where most people stall, so let me be specific about what you're pulling.

For pile one, you want every past client, every current client, and every proposal you sent in the last eighteen months that didn't close. The dead proposals are gold. Those people already wanted what you do. They didn't have budget at the time. They might have budget now, and it expires.

For piles two and three, you want every active patient who has been in within the last eighteen months, plus every patient with an open treatment plan they never scheduled.

For pile four, you want everyone who got a quote this year and didn't buy.

If your contacts live in Go High Level, build a smart list for each pile and tag them. If your contacts live in six places, which I know they do, give yourself one afternoon to get them into a single spreadsheet. You can't send a campaign to a list you can't find.

Dates, not intentions. Here's how I'd run the next ten weeks.

Week of October 5. Build your lists and write your messages. Half a day. Don't overthink it.

October 7. First send to pile one and pile four. Business buyers plan earlier than consumers. You want to be in the room while they're still figuring out where the money goes, not after they've already committed it.

October 14. First send to piles two and three. Patients don't think about this until someone reminds them, and you want to be first.

November 2. Second send to everyone. This is the one that actually converts, because now the calendar feels real.

November 30. The "one month left" message. Short. Almost blunt.

December 10. Last call. Give a real deadline for booking, and mean it. If you can't physically deliver the service by December 31, don't sell it as if you can.

December 31. The money's gone. You either got it or somebody else did.

That's five touches over ten weeks. Nobody is going to feel spammed by that. Most of them are going to feel helped.

Keep every one of these short. Long emails read like you're trying too hard. Here are starting points you can adapt.

For corporate budgets:

Subject: Before your budget resets

"Quick one. A lot of the teams we work with have budget left in Q4 that disappears in January if it isn't used. If that's you, we have a fixed scope [your service] package we can invoice this year and start whenever works for you. Want me to send the one page overview?"

That's it. Notice what it does. It names the problem they already have, it offers a fixed price so they don't have to wait for a proposal, and it separates when they pay from when you deliver. That last part matters more than anything else in the email, because the buyer's problem is timing, not interest.

For FSA balances:

Subject: Your FSA money expires December 31

"Friendly reminder. If you have money left in your flexible spending account this year, it may not roll over into next year. A lot of what we do here is FSA eligible, including [two or three specific services]. If you want to use it before it's gone, reply to this email or book here and we'll check what's covered for you."

For met deductibles:

Subject: Your treatment might cost less right now

"If you've already met your deductible this year, the treatment we talked about may cost you significantly less before December 31 than after January 1. We're happy to check your benefits for you so you know exactly what you'd pay. Want us to look?"

That offer to check benefits is the whole trick. You're removing the homework. People don't avoid treatment because they don't want it. They avoid it because figuring out what they'll owe feels like a part time job.

For tax timing:

Subject: If you're buying anyway

"Heads up for anyone planning a [equipment or system] purchase in the next few months. A lot of our customers time it before year end and ask their accountant about the write off. If that's on your list, we need to lock install dates by [date] to get it in service before December 31. Want me to hold a slot?"

A reminder alone moves some people. A reminder attached to a simple, pre packaged offer moves a lot more.

Here's what I mean. Instead of "we have availability," you say "we have the Year End Package." It's one thing, with one price, and a clear list of what's included. Nobody has to wait on a custom proposal. Nobody has to schedule a discovery call. They can approve it in the time it takes to forward the email to accounting.

A few ways to build one.

Prepay a bundle. Five sessions, three months of service, a quarterly block of hours. Paid in 2026, used in 2026 or early 2027, depending on your industry and what your accountant says about how you should book it.

Bundle the thing they've been putting off. The crown and the cleaning. The assessment and the first four visits. The audit and the implementation sprint.

Add a small bonus that costs you nothing. Priority scheduling in January. A free follow up. A written plan for next year. Something that makes the package feel like the obvious choice without cutting your price.

The goal isn't to discount. The goal is to make the decision so easy that someone holding use it or lose it money picks you before they pick nothing.

You should not be sending these by hand, and you definitely should not be remembering to send them.

Set each pile up as a short automated sequence. In Go High Level, that's one workflow per tag with the dates above baked in. If your list lives somewhere else, Make.com can pull contacts from your spreadsheet or practice software, drop them into the right sequence, and stop the emails the moment someone books so you're not reminding a person who already paid.

That last part is important and almost everyone forgets it. Nothing kills goodwill faster than a "don't forget to use your benefits!" email two days after the patient came in and used their benefits.

If you want help writing the variations, open ChatGPT or Claude, paste in one of the templates above, tell it who your customer is, and ask for five versions in your voice. Pick the best one. Edit it so it sounds like you actually talk. Ten minutes, done.

Let's run a plain example so you can see why this is worth an afternoon.

Say you run a practice with 1,200 active patients. Maybe a third of them have an FSA. Call it 400 people. If the average leftover balance is even $500, that's $200,000 sitting in your patients' accounts that expires in December.

You don't need all of it. If one in ten of those people books something worth $500, that's $20,000 in revenue from five emails you wrote once.

Now do the same math on a business services company with 60 past clients and 25 dead proposals. If three of them have budget to burn and you close them on a $12,000 fixed scope package, that's $36,000 in Q4 revenue from people who already knew who you were.

That's not new marketing. That's asking people who already trust you to use money they already have before they lose it.

The money doesn't stay put. It goes somewhere.

The corporate budget gets spent on whichever vendor showed up with a simple offer first. The FSA balance gets burned on a panic purchase of prescription sunglasses on December 29. The deductible resets and your patient puts off treatment for another year. The tax savings goes to your competitor who mentioned it on the sales call.

None of those people were waiting to hear from somebody else. They were waiting to hear from anyone.

You've got thirteen weeks. That's plenty. But it only works if you start in October, because by December everybody is running the same play and the inbox is a zoo.

Pull your list this week. Write the first message. Put the dates on the calendar.

Then go collect money that was always going to get spent. It might as well get spent with you.

Talk Soon,

Dan

Dan Kaufman

Founder, Dead Simple Growth and Pinnacle Masters

P.S. Not sure which pile is biggest for you? Reply with EXPIRE and tell me what you sell and who buys it. I'll tell you which pile I'd go after first and send back the exact first message I'd put in front of that list.