This week’s column is brought to you by the letter Q and the number 4.

That combination is one to strike fear in any Startup Junkie’s heart. Anyone who’s been around business a while knows that nothing gets done between Halloween and New Year’s. While BigCo employees are planning their holiday vacation time, companies that live paycheck-to-paycheck are either a) sitting on their hands and sweating or b) working their butts off. Neither alternative is good.

In the fourth quarter, your clients and investors have maxed out their yearly budgets and are looking ahead to holiday parties and bonuses. They’ve tied their purse strings with double knots. So the little guys go on a forced diet. Either they wait out the end of the year — not really an option — or they bust tail to appease the few customers who are paying. Consulting shops are cranking out proposals like mad, so their blue-chip clients will be ready to drop them a nice fat project come January 1.

Every place I’ve ever worked full-time has faced the dreaded Q4 Crunch. I’ve seen November and December bring pay cuts, bounced checks, layoffs, and worse. One company closed its doors the Monday before Christmas. The staff that made it to the bitter end, through all the layoffs, were rewarded with no severance pay.

This doesn’t have to happen to you. The savvy Startup Junkie won’t get caught napping when the ship sinks. You just have to be alert for the warning signs — the icebergs, to stretch the analogy. Christopher Wilson points out some good ones on The Robot’s Soapbox, in a post titled When to leave your (first, second, third or nth) tech job. Wilson goes overboard a few times, but skim the 100-plus comments on the post. You’ll find some hints of impending doom there that may be useful. Inspired by Wilson’s post, I came up with a few of my own signs that your startup may be headed for disaster:

• Key position turnover. If your company is on its second president and third CFO, what do the executives who left know that you don’t?

• Excessive overhead. If your company has over ten employees, and a third or more are managers (or marketing assistants or HR generalists or “coordinatorsâ€?), it is not using its resources wisely. Worse, the people at the top of the food chain may be using all that bureaucracy to hide behind.

• Feature creep. If your company is selling a product and deadlines keep moving backwards because “we need to add just one more thingâ€?, the decision-makers either have cold feet or are getting bad advice. If you don’t sell something, pretty soon there’ll be no money left to add features. If your development team is on a death march — facing extreme pressure to meet impossible deadlines — someone upstairs is panicking.

• Secrecy. No, employees can’t know every detail of the money that’s coming in and going out. But most companies keep many more secrets than they really need to. The excuse is usually morale or envy — which is exactly what results when they start keeping secrets. They don’t want you to quit because you think the company’s going under, and they don’t want the rank-and-file to be jealous of the upper class. Bosses hem and haw when asked about the future of the company. Executives meet behind closed doors all afternoon. Rumors spread, and morale hits bottom. When your buddy gets laid off, but that do-nothing manager is still holding down the furniture in his corner office, envy follows closely behind.

• Corporate culture, or lack thereof. Do you mingle with anyone not in your department? Does Joe Sales know what Bob Tester does all day? Do people mingle at staff meetings and ask questions, or do they just follow the bouncing PowerPoint animations with glazed eyes? It may sound trite, but the company that plays together stays together.

Let’s say you’ve seen one or more of these signs in the halls of your workplace. You may be reluctant to leave the sinking ship and strike out for points unknown. You might not have your exit strategy ready. You may feel obligated to stick around: you like your boss, and don’t want to leave her holding the bag. You also don’t want to burn any bridges — this is a small town when it comes to technology, and chances are you may work with the same people again later. Well, George Bailey, this isn’t the 1950s anymore. The “company manâ€? has gone the way of the mimeograph. Very few employees are indispensible. When it’s time to tighten the company belt, they’re not going to keep you around just because they like you. Nor is it their responsibility to look after your best interests. So put on that life preserver, and get your resume ready. Or dust off that killer business plan you’ve been wanting to work on. And don’t make the mistakes you’ve seen your employers make.