A little honest planning now will make December feel far more manageable (and you’ll be ready for the New Year!).
Twelve weeks. That’s roughly how long there is between now and the point at which most small businesses quietly down tools for Christmas and we all know that time has the habit of disappearing faster than it should!
October feels cosy and spacious. November arrives with a jolt. And then suddenly it’s the second week of December, the diary is chaos and the things you meant to do before the year ended are still sitting on a list somewhere, provoking all sorts of guilt.
The antidote is simple, if not always easy: a few good questions, asked now, with your priorities turned into a manageable plan to spread tasks out before the pace picks up.
What follows isn’t intended as a to-do list; it’s a prompt. Just twelve questions, in sets of three, covering your business, your marketing and you (well, eleven questions and one task!). They are designed to help you work out where to focus your energy over the next 12 weeks so that you finish the year feeling purposeful rather than merely survived and you’ll be able to take a proper Christmas break without worrying that there are still things to be done. (If, like me, you’re a scribbler, here’s a downloadable, printable pdf version of them that you can write all over, if it helps!)
Make a cuppa (and a biscuit to ensure your sugar levels remain optimal for concentration). Give yourself 20 minutes. Answer honestly.
Your Business
Start with the fundamentals. Before you think about marketing or visibility, it’s worth being clear on where your business actually stands and what you most need from the weeks ahead.
1. When does your financial year end? What could you do in the next 12 weeks to make that period less of a scramble? Think about invoicing, outstanding quotes, expenses and any work you’ve been meaning to complete or close off before the year turns.
2. Is there an opportunity in the next 12 weeks – a seasonal angle, a timely offer, a reason for clients to act before the year ends – that you haven’t yet made the most of? Anything timely or specific to your industry that might make a seasonal tips or blog post?
3. Are there clients you haven’t heard from in a while who might welcome a friendly check-in before Christmas?
4. What’s the one business goal you’d most regret not having made progress on when you close for Christmas?
(That last question is worth mulling on for a bit; the answer is probably something you already know and have been nudging to one side since January. Twelve weeks is enough time to make meaningful progress on almost anything, if you decide to.)
Your Marketing
For small businesses, the final quarter of the year is one of the most important for visibility and one of the easiest to let slide while you’re busy delivering work. These questions are designed to help you make sure your marketing is working as hard as it should be between now and December.
5. Do your website, Google Business Profile and social media accurately reflect what you’re currently offering – and will they still be up to date in December?
6. How many new Google reviews would you like to have collected by Christmas, and who are the first three clients you could ask this week?
7. Which marketing activity has generated the most enquiries for you this year and are you planning to do enough of it between now and December?
8. Does your business need to stay visible over the Christmas period*? If it does, what’s your plan?
*A note on question eight: the answer genuinely varies by business. If your clients are largely other small businesses who also close for two weeks in December, going quiet over Christmas may cost you very little. But if your clients are active year-round, or if January is a key month for new enquiries, staying visible through December matters more than you might think.
If you’re not sure where to focus your marketing energy between now and Christmas, my Monday Marketing Mailer delivers one simple, 15-minute task to your inbox every week – free of charge. Read more about it here or sign up by dropping me an email; your first nudge could arrive next Monday!
A word on Christmas marketing specifically: you don’t need a John Lewis budget to use the season to your advantage. In the run up to last Christmas, I wrote about how the principles behind the big Christmas TV campaigns – emotional storytelling, consistent messaging, a clear sense of what makes you different – can be borrowed and scaled down for small businesses. It’s worth a read if you’re thinking about how to approach your marketing between now and December.
And if the idea of 12 weeks of consistent marketing activity feels daunting, my 100-day Challenge makes the case for why showing up every single day – even just for 20 minutes – produces results that are quietly extraordinary.
You
The most overlooked part of any end-of-year planning exercise..! Small business owners are good at planning for their businesses and their clients. They’re considerably less good at planning for themselves, which is ironic, given that the business tends to run rather better when the person at the centre of it is doing all right.
9. When are you planning to close for Christmas (and how and when will you communicate that to your clients)? (Please refer back to question 5 on this!)
10. What would you like the final entry in your 2026 business diary to say?
11. What’s one thing – in your business, your marketing or your life outside work – that you’ve been putting off all year, and could you make it happen in the next 12 weeks?
12. Now that you’ve answered these questions, make 20 minutes this week to map your priorities into a simple 12-week planner, one column per week, three rows for business, marketing and personal, and pin it somewhere you’ll see it often. That way, what matters most between now and Christmas stand a good chance of actually getting done!
Question eleven is deliberately broad. For some people it will be a business thing; a new service they’ve been meaning to launch, a website they’ve been meaning to update, a conversation they’ve been putting off. For others it’ll be something entirely personal: a trip they keep not booking, a course they keep not signing up for, a friendship they keep meaning to make more time for.
Twelve weeks is long enough to do something about almost any of it. But only if you decide now, rather than in the second week of December.
What to Do With Your Answers
Once you’ve worked through these questions, you don’t need a complicated planning system, capture your answers in whatever way will work best for you. I’d suggest that a simple list of just three priorities – one for your business, one for your marketing, one for you personally – is enough to give the next twelve weeks a genuine sense of direction.
Put notes in your diary for four weeks’ and eight weeks’ time to review them and adjust as needed.
(And, again, if you’d like to print these questions off and scribble on them, here’s the downloadable pdf.)
One small task each week, done consistently between now and Christmas. It won’t transform your business overnight but it will mean you have a more restful Christmas break and arrive in January with a more visible, better-reviewed and more active online presence than you had in September.
That’s worth twelve weeks of fifteen-minute nudges.
(With thanks to Google Gemini for the image of what the Minerva Marketing Advent calendar looks like!)