We interrupt your regularly scheduled program to bring you something …

Timely, practical, and heartfelt

Not one, but two write-ups to help you and your people survive the coming holidays.

And that’s not all.

We’ve also got three free resources, two new episodes (ICYMI), and a singularly “Sean” take on AI that isn’t bulls***.

Panagiota Hatzis

VP of HR, HexClad

Preventing Q4 Burnout Starts in Q3

Spoiler alert.

Q4 isn’t three months. It’s really just a hyperconcentration of six weeks. In fact, it’s often less than that.

For most of us in ecommerce, the holiday season kicks into high gear one or two weeks before Black Friday. It ends the Monday before Christmas, when shipping cut-offs descend.

Roughly 29 days to …

Send it. Sell it. Scale it. Ship it.

We put our heads down and grind. After all, who can’t sprint through 29 days — even without weekends?

If that’s the case, let me ask you: Why are we all so exhausted come January 1st?

Because what we might think of as a sprint — and our friends + family certainly do — is a marathon that starts in Q3.

By the time you’re checking ad performance at 11pm on Black Friday, you’re already in your feelings.

Q4 burnout doesn’t start when your ROAS tanks or your 3PL breaks down. It starts in September … when you begin telling yourself, “I’ll rest after the holidays.”

I’m here to offer a prevention protocol to burnout during peak season that starts today!

Forecast a Stress Budget
Practice Strategic Surrender
Build Your Circuit Breakers
Operating System: “Both/And”
Transparency as a Tourniquet

1️⃣ Forecast a Stress Budget

Treat your mental energy like ad spend …

You have a finite budget.

What should you do? Conduct your own “stress audit.”

List everything that drained you last Q4. Which can you automate, delegate, or eliminate this year?

The 80/20 principle: Consider that 80% of your Q4 stress and performance comes from 20% of your decisions.

Identify and pre-solve those decisions in Q3.

2️⃣ Practice Strategic Surrender

It starts with saying no to non-essential commitments now, before you’re in survival mode.

Your Q3 “no” prevents your Q4 breakdown.

Accept the reality: Q3/Q4 in DTC is inherently intense. Fighting this reality creates additional stress on top of the workload itself. And that’s a total waste.

Energy redirect: Instead of spending mental energy resisting the built-in demands of this time of year, channel that into preparation and boundary building.

Reset guilt: Plan your Q1 recovery before Q4 starts — while you can still think clearly. Make it non-negotiable. That way, you don’t feel guilty about needing it later.

3️⃣ Build Your Circuit Breakers

Remote teams in particular need to establish “coverage windows” instead of demanding 24/7 availability.

Communication prep: Talk to your team about what asking for help looks like. Model it one-on-one, in group settings, and in places like Slack. Give them permission to do the same.

The goal: Make asking for support a system, not a failure; a feature, not a bug.

4️⃣ Operating System: “Both/And”

I live and die by this OS …

Two things can be true at the same time.

“I love this business and I need a break from it.” Or, “I am feeling burned out and enjoy the intensity of the holiday season.”

Here’s what it looks like: In meetings, start with emotional check-ins, not just metrics. Even better, use the language of metrics to describe emotional states — like your stress budget (above) or your stress level (below).

Model saying: “I’m excited about our launch and stressed about timelines.” How do we adjust now to make sure we hit these deadlines going forward?

5️⃣ Transparency as a Tourniquet

My personal rule …

When my stress level hits 7/10, I must tell someone.

Not to complain. But to strategize what can be done differently or more efficiently.

It starts at the top.

Leaders, share stress levels with your team weekly along with how you’re handling it + what you’re doing about it.

Show them that struggle doesn’t equal failure.

After you’ve done the prevention, there is also a short recovery protocol.

Real recovery takes several weeks, not the couple of days you'll want to take off. Boundary setting and process tweaking are imperative to iterate on before, during, and after.

Plan productive, restful activities into your time off that occupy your brain. Exercise is the easiest one. Just collapsing and ruminating on what happened isn’t rest.

Do this today …

Block time in February for post-Q4 strategy sessions and create a private note or document to record both your high points and low points. This will force you to proactively apply learnings from this year into next. It can also be a profound outlet.

Author Brianna Wiest blew my mind when I read her perspective on how self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing:

“True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.”

Take that with you into your peak season planning and see how that shifts your priorities.

Remember it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Those who thrive in Q4 aren’t the ones who push harder … they’re the ones who built sustainable systems in Q3.

Sean Frank

CEO, Ridge

AI That is Not Bulls*** FULFIL NEWSLETTER AD

There is a lot of talk about ai, but a lot of it is bulls***

I caught up with Fulfil's ceo at Beanstalk last week- because we spend time together.

ST posted a picture of himself and Chad. I do not know why he did not post a picture of us.

The AI features they are rolling out?

INSANE.

Fulfils MCP lets you ask Claude questions
and interact with your own data

It is crushing it to get answers to questions and help our teams. You can ask it stuff.

- "Which skus should I bundle for BFCM?"
- "What are my shipping costs by carrier, region, and weight for orders over $150?"
- "Show me a heatmap of revenue per state"

Claude x Fulfil Customer Heatmap Example

And it tells you- In seconds.

Your ERP should make your life easier. Not slow you down.

This is what good AI looks like.

Better tools that work.

Learn More About Fulfil

Panagiota Hatzis

VP of HR, HexClad

This segment first appeared in the Operators Newsletter (N0017) on Oct 28, 2024. But it is worth repeating in full.

Five Ways + 10 Tactics to Address Burnout Amid Q4

Long hours. High expectations.

Constant monitoring of all platforms to see if your ads are sending it. Anticipating customer service inquiries and working with your new 3PL to make sure it’s boxing your product to your new packing standards.

In short, Q4 is a lot.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed at work, you’re not alone.

The last three months of the year are prime time for burnout. As some of the most eager and entrepreneurial people I’ve ever worked with, the stress is inevitable.

But that doesn’t mean it has to get the better of you. Here are 5 ways + 10 tactics to get a grip on burnout in Q4 …

1. Surrender

Accept that the demands of Q4 in ecommerce are high and will impact your schedule. That’s not specific to your company, that’s specific to working in this industry.

The mental shift here matters.

🚫 Say no if you think saying yes to something is going to stress you out more while distracting from your KPIs. Avoid the guilt of canceling at the last minute up front.

🏝️ Time off doesn’t happen magically. Plan ahead for time off in Q1 as something to look forward to. For leaders, proactively encourage your team to do the same.

2. Deal

Dealing with your stress is different than dealing with the thing that causes your stress. Read that again.

Take time to address what is stressing you out, and then find 20 minutes of physical activity to help close the stress cycle.

☯️ Stress is binary. You have to process it both physically (the key time is 20 minutes) and psychologically — like asking for help when you need it.

🧠 If you’re thinking about work over the weekend, your brain literally cancels your rest … from being restful. Recite the ABCs to distract your mind. Seriously.

3. Acknowledge

Burnout isn’t limited to work. You can feel burned out from parenting, coaching, volunteering, and working.

Make sure you’re considering all the contributing stressors to your life — in and out of work.

💪🏽 Take a percentage inventory of how much each main area of your life is “stressing you out.” Be honest about it and reflect on how you can flex up or down.

🔟 If you’re in a relationship, rate how stressful your day was on a scale of 1–10. The person with the lowest number helps carry the weight; highest gets a pass.

4. Both/And

Experiencing burnout doesn’t necessarily mean you hate your job (or whatever it is causing you stress). You can be burned out and love what you do.

Don’t overthink it or place too much weight on any one aspect of how you’re feeling.

🤗 Embrace the both/and perspective on life. It can change how you view anything and everything. Many things can be true at the same time, and that’s okay.

✅ Write down the 3–5 things that give you life the most. Then, find an accountability partner to make sure you fit in at least one of them once a week.

5. It’s Okay

Stress isn’t necessarily a bad thing! Being stressed is healthier than staying in your comfort zone. Prolonged stress unaddressed over a long course of time is unhealthy.

More than just okay, stress is unavoidable. What matters is finding ways to deal with it head-on.

🆚 Reframe how you’re thinking of stress. Instead of “bad” and lasting forever, define it as natural and temporary. How you talk about it to others and yourself matters.

🫀 Pay attention to your body. Like they say — it keeps the score. Take little breaks for self-care during the busy season and plan for bigger ones afterward.

Burnout isn’t something you can avoid in totality. Stress is bound to happen. Ambition almost guarantees it.

If nothing else, accept it.

As a leader, pick one or two tactics (the emoji paragraphs) to focus on with your team each week. If you’re interested, here are some additional resources:

Burnout (book + workbook) by Emily & Amelia Nagoski, also has a PDF for the workplace
Hooky Wellness quiz takes 5 minutes + ends with personalized recommendations
Anything from Brene Brown, her podcast with the Nagoski twins is the perfect place to start

THE FEED (ICYMI)

How to Get Your Brand AI Ready

The Untapped Potential of YouTube Ads: Strategy, Measurement & What Drives Results with Brett Curry

RESOURCES

Contribution Margin by MER Calculator

A ton of you wrote back to our last newsletter asking for Connor Rolain’s Sheet: “At HexClad, forecasting starts bottom up by calculating contribution margin at different MERs. Here’s the tool we use to do that.”

5 Psychological Shifts You Need to Know

Friend of the show Sarah Levinger dropped a massive — and massively helpful — Black Friday, Cyber Monday guide. It’s over 8k words, packed with the kind of psychological savvy + marketing tactics that make us love her.

60-Day Roadmap to Holiday Success

The good folks at Postscript (also friends of the show + the newsletter) released their own holiday playbook stack. It’s a step-by-step, day-by-day, channel-by-channel guide. Why? To get you fully prepared for Black Friday.