Tuesday, September 22nd, 2026
A guy I've known for about six years called me last Wednesday and said the sentence I hear every single September.
"Slow summer, but we'll make it up in Q4."
I asked him one question. How long does it take, from the first real conversation to money in the account, for a deal in your business to actually close?
Long pause. Then: "Maybe six weeks? Two months?"
So I asked the follow up, which is the one that does the work. Not what you think it is. What was it, on the last ten?
Longer pause. He didn't know. He said he'd look.
He called back Friday. The median was seventy-one days. Not six weeks. Seventy-one days from first conversation to signature. And he had thirteen deals in a pipeline he was planning to close before New Year's, most of which hadn't had a first conversation yet.
Here's what that means, and it's the reason I'm writing this today instead of in November when it's a eulogy instead of a plan.
Today is September 22nd. There are exactly one hundred days left in the year. Seventy-two of them are weekdays. And for that guy, any deal that doesn't have a first conversation on the calendar by roughly October 21st is not a 2026 deal. It's a 2027 deal wearing a 2026 costume in his forecast.
He has twenty-nine days. He thought he had a hundred.
That gap, between the days on the calendar and the days that can still produce revenue this year, is what I want to give you the arithmetic for today. It takes about forty minutes to calculate and it will change what you do tomorrow morning.
Let's go.
The Hundred Days Are Not A Hundred Days
Start with the honest count, because the calendar lies to you by about forty percent.
One hundred calendar days from today. Seventy-two of those are weekdays. Now start subtracting the days where a buying decision is not going to happen no matter how good your follow up is.
Thanksgiving is November 26th this year, which is a Thursday, which means the entire week of November 23rd is functionally gone. Nobody signs anything. Nobody gets the approval from the person who's traveling.
December 31st falls on a Thursday, which is the worst possible version for you, because it means the last full working week of the year is December 21st through the 24th and then everyone is gone. Realistically, anything that hasn't closed by around December 18th is closing in January, and January is its own problem because the first two weeks are people getting back into their chairs.
Run the subtraction and you land somewhere near sixty days where a human being with authority will actually make a decision. Call it sixty if you're generous with yourself, which you are.
Sixty. Not a hundred.
That's the first number. Write it somewhere you'll see it.
Find Your Actual Cycle Time, Not The One You Tell People
This is the part almost nobody does, and it's forty minutes of work that most operators have been avoiding for their entire career.
Open wherever your closed deals live. Your CRM, your invoices, your email, a spreadsheet, whatever you actually use. Pull the last twelve closed-won deals.
For each one, write down two dates. The date of the first real conversation, not the first ad click or the first newsletter open, the first actual human exchange where somebody expressed a want. And the date the agreement was signed.
Subtract. You now have twelve numbers.
Now, and this is the part that matters, take the median and not the average. Sort them smallest to largest and take the one in the middle. The average gets wrecked by that one deal that closed in four days because the guy already knew you, and by the one that took nine months because of a legal department. The median tells you what a normal deal actually does.
Write that number down. That's your cycle time. Most operators I do this exercise with are off by somewhere between thirty and sixty percent, always in the optimistic direction, because we remember the fast ones. The fast ones are the ones we tell stories about.
If you want the honest version rather than the comfortable one, use the ninth number instead of the sixth. That's roughly your seventy-fifth percentile, and it's the number to plan with when you actually need the revenue to land.
The Cutoff Formula
Now the math that gives you your date.
Your cutoff is December 31st, minus your cycle time, minus your revenue recognition lag.
That last one is the piece people forget and it's usually the expensive one. There's a gap between a signature and the money being real to you. Deposit terms. Net 30. An onboarding period before the first invoice goes out. A kickoff that can't happen until January because of their side. If you sign on December 15th and your terms are net 30 with a start date in the new year, you did not close a 2026 deal. You closed a 2027 deal in 2026.
So be specific. How many days between signature and cash, on average? Seven? Thirty? Forty-five?
The formula:
Cutoff date equals December 31st, minus median cycle time in days, minus recognition lag in days.
My friend from Wednesday: seventy-one days of cycle, fourteen days of lag. Eighty-five days back from December 31st. October 7th.
Not October 21st, which is what I told you earlier. That was the version before we counted the lag. His real cutoff is October 7th and it is fifteen days away.
Run yours right now. It takes ninety seconds once you have the two numbers, and then you know the single most important date on your calendar that isn't a holiday.
The Three Buckets
Once you have the date, everything in your pipeline sorts into one of three piles, and each pile gets completely different treatment. Most people treat all three the same, which is why Q4 feels like running in sand.
Bucket one: in motion and inside the window. These are deals that already started and can mathematically still land. This is where every hour of your selling energy goes between now and your cutoff. Not prospecting. Not content. Not the website. These.
Bucket two: not started yet, and past your cutoff. Here's the discipline. These are next year's deals and you should treat them like next year's deals starting today. That doesn't mean ignore them. It means stop pretending they're going to save your Q4 and stop forecasting them into a number you're going to feel bad about in January. Nurture them properly, on a real sequence, with a real start date.
The relief in that reframe is bigger than you'd expect. Half of Q4 anxiety is holding deals in a mental category they were never going to make.
Bucket three: stalled, started, and probably dead. These are the ones where you sent the proposal in July and got a "let me discuss internally" and have been sending gentle nudges ever since. These are not pipeline. They're a haunting.
Bucket three is where I'd spend your Thursday. Not nurturing them. Closing them out. Which brings me to the only sales tactic in this whole letter.
Close The Loop On The Undead
Every stalled deal is costing you twice. Once in the revenue that isn't coming, and once in the attention tax of it sitting on your list making your pipeline look healthier than it is.
The move is to give them permission to say no, in a way that makes it easy and doesn't sound passive aggressive. Something like this, and I mean actually this short:
"Hey, I'm closing out my Q4 planning this week and I don't want to keep showing up in your inbox about something that's no longer on your list. Totally fine either way, should I put this to bed for now, or is there still something here?"
That's it. No new offer. No discount. No urgency theater.
I ran this on eleven stalled conversations in early September. Six said put it to bed, which I already knew and hadn't admitted. Two said yes there's still something here and gave me a real reason it stalled that I could actually address, and one of those is now moving. Three never answered, which is also an answer.
Six hours of headspace back, and a pipeline number I could trust for the first time since June.
The uncomfortable part of that exercise is that a pipeline you can trust is usually smaller than the one you were carrying around. Mine was. But you can plan against a real number. You can't plan against a hopeful one.
The Capacity Check Nobody Runs
One more piece, and it's the one that bites people who do everything else right.
Add up what you're trying to close before December 31st, and then ask whether you could actually deliver all of it if every single deal said yes in the same week.
Because they might. Q4 does that. Three things that sat for two months all move at once in the second week of November, and now you've sold work you cannot staff, in the exact stretch of the year when nobody is available to help you and you've already told your family you'd be around.
If the honest answer is no, you have a pricing decision to make, not a selling decision. That's a different letter and I wrote a version of it two weeks ago.
I keep this check simple. Total delivery hours of everything in bucket one, divided by the real working hours I have between now and the end of January. If that ratio is over about seventy percent, I stop adding and start sequencing start dates instead.
Four Ways This Goes Sideways
Using the average instead of the median. One anomalous deal wrecks it. The median is the whole point.
Counting the signature as the finish line. Signature is not cash. Count the lag or the exercise is decorative.
Recalculating it every week. Run this once now, once in early November. Any more than that and you've built a hobby instead of a system.
Letting the cutoff become an excuse to stop prospecting. The cutoff tells you which year a deal belongs to. It does not tell you to stop making deals. January revenue is built in October, and the operators who go quiet in Q4 to chase Q4 are the ones with a terrifying February.
The Cutoff Map
I built the worksheet for this because I've now walked four people through it on calls in the last three weeks and I was tired of rebuilding it live.
It's called The Cutoff Map. Inside: the cycle time calculator with the twelve-deal table already set up, the cutoff formula with the recognition lag field, the three-bucket sorting grid, the close-out message written out in full along with three variations for different relationship temperatures, the capacity ratio check, and a one-page sequence for the fourteen days on either side of your cutoff date.
No cost, no sequence behind it, nothing to sit through. Copy it into your own workspace and use it.
If you run it and your cutoff date has already passed, hit reply and tell me. That's not a disaster and it's more common than you'd think, it just means your entire Q4 job changed this morning from selling to setting up January. That's a real plan. It's better than the one you had at breakfast.
And if the deeper problem is that you genuinely don't know your cycle time because the deals don't live anywhere you could pull them from, that's the thing to fix first, and it's the conversation Pinnacle Masters exists for.
Do This One Thing This Week
Don't do the whole map. You won't.
Pull your last ten closed deals and find the median days from first conversation to signature.
Just that. Twenty minutes with your invoices or your inbox.
Then subtract it from December 31st and look at the date.
However you feel when you see that date is the correct feeling, and it's information you didn't have when you woke up. Most of the people I do this with go quiet for a second and then say some version of "okay, so I need to move."
Yeah. That's the point.
The calendar isn't going to tell you. It just sits there showing you a hundred days like they're all the same, and they aren't, and it's never going to mention it.
Go find your date.
One step, one day. Grace over guilt. — Dan Kaufman
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