🏴‍☠️ What Christmas Reveals About Your Business

Christmas week is quiet.

Emails slow down. Meetings disappear. Clients go dark.

For a few days, the noise drops enough to hear the truth.

I was talking to an consulting firm owner this month.
He told me, “This is the only week I can think clearly.”

That wasn’t a compliment to his business.
It was a confession.

Best Links

💰Sales: If you’re a visionary then you know you’ve got gaps. But what about your strengths? Learn to turn instinct, judgment, and vision into repeatable decisions your team can execute without needing you on every call. Read Visionary by Mark C. Winters (Link)

🌟 Industry Trends: Anthropic and The Wall Street Journal ran an experiment where an AI agent based on Claude was given control of a real vending machine’s pricing, inventory, and customer interactions to see how well it could run a simple business. Over a few weeks, clever staff convinced the system to drop prices, give away inventory, and rack up losses (Link)

🍏 Extra Credit: Output Thinking teaches founders and leaders how to build systems that focus on outputs so the business can grow faster, operate without owner dependency, and free you from day-to-day grind. (Link)

Here’s what Christmas quietly exposes:

If you step away this week and everything still moves, you’ve built leverage.
If you step away and your phone lights up nonstop, you’ve built dependency.

Most founders tell themselves they “choose” to stay plugged in.
But buyers know the difference between choice and necessity.

In diligence, this shows up fast:

• Deals stall when the owner is unavailable

• Decisions wait for one person

• Momentum dies the moment leadership pauses

One buyer said it to me bluntly:
“If the business can’t breathe during the holidays, it can’t survive a transition.”

That comment alone knocked seven figures off a deal.

Christmas is a live stress test buyers never announce.

Not because revenue spikes or drops.
But because time pauses.

Strong businesses use this week to:

• Ship without escalation

• Close work that was already well-structured

• Let leaders think instead of react

Weak ones reveal:

• Informal decision control

• Bottlenecks disguised as “care”

• Systems that only work when the founder is watching

This is why buyers ask odd questions like:
“What happens when you’re unreachable?”
“How does work get approved when you’re out?”

They’re not being polite.
They’re pricing risk.

Your action items this week:

Ask yourself three questions before the year ends:

1. What decisions still required me this week

2. Which fires only exist because ownership is unclear

3. What work advanced without my involvement at all

Write the answers down.
That list is your real roadmap for next year.

Not resolutions or 10x growth goals.
Compound 1% improvements and win.

Before You Go

We’ve been quietly walking founders through a new valuation dashboard that shows exactly where dependency and transition risk live inside the business.

If you’re curious to see how your business performs, reply and we’ll schedule a walkthrough in January.

Enjoy the quiet if you can.
And if you can’t, now you know what to fix.

Merry Christmas,
-Kinza