What I didn't expect Q3 to teach me (and what I'm taking into Q4)

You’re getting this newsletter a week later than I’d originally planned, but it turns out that life, and one BEAST of autumnal flu had other plans…

In early July, I opened my dashboard and didn't recognize what I was looking at.

Q2 had been one of the best quarters I'd had. Revenue was growing. The biweekly webinars we'd launched in April were working — actually working, the kind of working where you stop asking is this going to work and start asking how big can this get. My small team was clicking. I was feeling the specific kind of momentum that makes you think you've cracked something.

And then July happened.

The numbers dropped. Profitability dropped further because I'd been investing to grow — ad spend, team costs, infrastructure — all of it calibrated to a revenue trajectory that July was suddenly not hitting. The math didn't work the way it did previously. Or how I’d expected it to continue.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't panic, at least a little. The first instinct in that moment — and I watch this happen with my clients constantly — is to do something completely different. Blow it up. Start over. Find the new thing. The panic impulse is always to make a big move.

I didn't. Instead, I called the team together and we diagnosed.

Mike and Moses — the father-and-son team who run my marketing and manage my full funnel — dove into the data. What they found wasn't one catastrophic failure. It was a combination of smaller things that had compounded against each other: ad targeting that had drifted, email sequences that weren't converting registrations to show-ups at the rate they needed to, and some gaps in how I was coaching Samy through sales calls.

None of it was unfixable. None of it required a new strategy. It required identifying the specific variables that had shifted and adjusting them — which is exactly what I wrote about in my newsletter a few weeks ago.

We fixed the sequences. We refined the targeting. I put together a serious library of content and resources to coach Samy more intentionally. He's extraordinary at what he does, and part of my job is making sure he has everything he needs to do it.

August came in at almost three times July's revenue.

What happened and what didn't: we didn't reinvent the model. We didn't pivot. We didn't find a completely new approach.

We looked at the specific things that had stopped working at the level they needed to and made targeted adjustments. The bus stayed on the road. We fixed the engine.

The comeback felt good. But what I actually took away from July and August wasn't relief — it was clarity. About what I was building. About what it was going to require of me. About the person I was going to have to become to get there.

September has been good. Not August-good, but good. Two things slowed it down — both entirely predictable in hindsight.

The first: we ran a webinar right before Labor Day weekend. Show-up rate was lower than expected. Sales calls got canceled. People were away or checked out. It was a timing call I won't make the same way again, and now I have the data to back that up.

The second: we brought Summer on as our second salesperson, which is genuinely exciting and the right move for where we're going. But she's still building. She's not closing at the rate Samy closes yet, and getting her there is a real coaching investment, one that I’m still confident will be fully worth making. It takes time to develop someone in a way that actually sticks — time I'm choosing to spend deliberately because I know what's on the other side of it.

Both of these things are context, not catastrophe.

In September we also decided to switch from biweekly to weekly webinars. The reason is speed. When you run every two weeks, a single iteration takes a month to test. Weekly means faster learning, faster adjustment, faster compounding. A structural change that I expect to pay dividends in Q4 and beyond.

The pattern, if you zoom out, is consistent. If something works, we look closely at what isn't working as well as it could, we make a targeted adjustment, we see what changes. Repeat.

What's different now is the scale at which we're doing it — and that's where the real lesson of Q3 lives.

In March of this year, this business was me and one VA. That was it.

Six months later, it’s a completely different picture.

I didn't plan this team. I didn't have a twelve-month org chart in January and execute against it. I built toward what the business needed, and the people came in to match it.

But I didn't fully anticipate that this kind of growth would require a completely different version of me to run it.

There's a version of this story where I'm telling it as a triumph — look how far we've come, look at this incredible team. And it is a triumph, genuinely.

But the more honest version is that the growth has asked something of me that I wasn't prepared for, and that I'm still in the middle of figuring out.

For most of my career, one of the things I prided myself on was my ability to get shit done. To do it myself, move fast, and produce results without needing a lot of support. That identity felt like a superpower. For a long time, it probably was.

But the Get Shit Done hustler is not the identity that builds what I'm building now.

When you're a team of one, doing it yourself is the skill. A damn valuable one!

But when you're leading a team of eight, doing it yourself is a bottleneck. It signals to the people around you — however unintentionally — that you don't fully trust them to carry their part.

It creates a ceiling on what the business can do because everything has to pass through you before it can move.

This is Q3's lesson, the one I didn't see coming: I need to grow up. Not more serious, not more formal — but into a fundamentally different way of operating.

Less doing and more leading.

Less executing and more directing, coaching, and getting out of the way so the people who are very good at their jobs can actually be very good at their jobs.

I won't pretend this comes naturally because it definitely does NOT. I still catch myself reaching for a task I should hand off.I still feel the itch when things aren't moving at the pace I'd move them if I were doing it myself.

The "I'll just do it" impulse is strong and probably always will be.

Old identities don't disappear — they just become things you have to notice and choose differently.

But I'm clearer than I've ever been that the business that's possible — the one that's on track to cross the multimillion-dollar mark by 2027 — doesn't get built by the version of me that had to do everything alone. It gets built by the version of me who knows how to lead.

She and I are still getting acquainted. But we're getting there.

If you read Thursday's newsletter, you saw the Q4 framework I laid out — the assessment questions, the low-hanging fruit exercise, the "new CEO" prompt. I use all of it on myself.

The new CEO of my business would tell me to stop letting my own execution habits create bottlenecks. She'd tell me to delegate more completely, follow up differently, and spend less time in the work and more time on the people doing the work. She'd tell me the business is ready for the next version of me — and that holding onto the old one out of comfort isn't loyalty, it's limitation.

That's what I'm taking into Q4.

Q4 is the quarter — for most of my clients and for me. The urgency is real. The opportunity is real. And the version of you it asks for may be a stretch from where you are right now.

That's not a warning. That's the whole point.

In love, growth, and growing into it,

Kasey

P.S. Thursday's newsletter has the full Q4 framework — the assessment, the low-hanging fruit exercise, and the one question I use with every client at this time of year. If you want the tactical version to pair with this one, you can read it here.