We are midway through October and the pressure is on. Most businesses by now have a very good idea about how their Q4 and total year of 2024 is going to end up from a revenue perspective so all that is left is to manage the costs and profit.

Unlike revenues which are driven (mostly) by customers, expenses are typically all controlled internally and can be much more easily managed and manipulated. This is one of the biggest reasons you will see cost-cutting of budgets and people over the next 10 weeks.

As we head into these last few weeks of the year, it’s important to drive revenues, manage expenses, and deliver on promised profit targets. In addition, it is important to keep a close look on the things Wall Street is focused on so you can adapt and evolve to meet expectations.

Based on research and conversations with our executive-level clients, here are the 3 big things Wall Street is looking for in Q4 2024:

Every new manager dreads it - Giving feedback in the moment.

Business organizations and their talent development leaders are still dealing with the long-term impacts of the post-pandemic world where some people remain working remotely and others are back in the office five days a week. If you haven’t noticed, things are very different, and there are many leaders who will say that they are getting worse and not better.

One of the more fascinating leadership challenges of this new normal is that some skills that were previously (before the pandemic) taken for granted are needed more than ever but the problem is not enough people working in an organization know what to do.

Take for example the skill of being able to work across the organization. Pre-pandemic, that meant someone from manufacturing walking over to their colleague in the supply chain, having a brief conversation, together calling up the salesperson to confirm the forecast, and then grabbing a coffee with the distribution team to make sure the orders will be delivered on time the next morning. In our new reality, too many of the people working remotely don’t have strong personal relationships with each other and are not able to get things done in an informal, organic, and productive way that transcends the enterprise.

Something fascinating happened today during one of the Board of Directors presentations that was the culmination of a 4-month business acumen training program. The purpose of the Board of Directors presentations was for each team who had run their simulated company over 5 simulated years to share their strategy, goals, objectives, accomplishments, and guidance looking forward.

Typically, these presentations are very good, but also very straightforward. Well, today, things got a little interesting for one of my teams…

They opened their presentation with the following, “Board of Directors, we stand here before you today humbled. Humbled by our failures, humbled by our behaviors, and humbled by your support of us to fix things and bring our company forward with such great results. During the first three years of our tenure, we did not get along. As a matter of fact, several of us stopped speaking to each other because of the arguments we were having about our strategy and metrics of success. It was an awful, gut-wrenching experience and there were several times each of us was ready to quit the simulation and the program.”

“However, by the fourth year, we got our act together, created alignment, understood our customers, created the perfect value proposition, and executed flawlessly. We went from tears of pain to tears of joy and as you know, we have achieved the highest total shareholder return in our market with an over 125% return including dividends.”

I had the opportunity to spend some great time with one of our manufacturing clients at a General Manager Business Acumen training program in Shanghai last week. The purpose of the program was to develop their strategic leadership and business acumen skills further so that they could address another challenging year in 2025.

In our program, we utilize a highly customized business simulation to present the participants with the chance to learn by doing and take their key learnings right back to the job in terms of “bridge-backs.” One of the most important concepts we focused on was free cash flow.

I am pleased to share some of the learnings and takeaways in the blog as a way of sharing with our Advantexe community. Here are five key reasons why free cash flow is going to matter a lot more in 2025: