How to generate £10,000 (cash) in 5 days

It's Monday, you need 10 grand by Friday or you're not going to be able to pay payroll. You got no time or budget for ads. What do you do? Well, this is exactly what you should do, and heads up, it's not sexy, but it's exactly why it worked. My name is Elliott, I'm the co-owner and chief marketing officer at Entrepreneur Circle where we help thousands of businesses grow, and today I want to share the real genuine plays that we would do when we need cash fast. Before we write a single word or spend a single pound, we need to take stock. What assets do we have at our disposal? Your list, your past customers, who would actually take your call. We need to get very clear on where those people are at and how many of them we've got, because that's going to be our best source of immediate cash. Also, let's check if anybody owes us money, because yes, you guessed it, unpaid invoices are the fastest way to collect cash, and you need to pick up the phone. You need to get on the blower and chase them personally. A phone call from a founder is normally the best and fastest way to collect cash. Don't be hiding behind these emails. But that brings us to the very first play, and we call this the 20 calls. But the highest probability cash action you can take is to find your top 20 customers, whether that's based on spend with you, just your relationship, or any other factor, and give them a call. Because you having a conversation with them is the highest chance you've got of selling something pretty much out of anything. And you, the founder, you want to give them a call. And these guys, they already have a relationship with you, they've already spent money with you, they already trust you, but we want to try and sell them something else. Now these calls go one of two ways. The first way, Route A let's call it, is if we have got a clear offer that we can already sell to them. So we have an ascension path, an upsell, we can sell them more of the same things. It makes sense if we have that. Great. The call should be pretty easy. Back, I used to run an advertising agency for 5 years and this was how we grew our revenues quite a lot because we would get our clients in, get them some good results, and then once we had a lot of goodwill in the relationship, I would reach out and say, hey, can we jump on a call? Because I've got a way in which I think I can make you a lot more money. And we jump on a call and I would walk them through, hey guys, look, this is what we're doing now, these are the results that— if we did this, I think we could get you this much additional revenue. And then it just became almost a no-brainer, and it was the easiest sales ever because we already had the goodwill. But in this scenario, you want to Call them up, open with a warm greeting, and say, look, the reason for the call is we are doing this and you're the first person I thought of. Do you want in? Make them a good offer. Now sometimes you have to go down the other route, Route B, which is when you don't have a clear thing, a clear offer to sell. But this call then, we treat it as research or a diagnosis, and we call them up and we say, hey, hope you're doing well. Um, what is the single biggest thing you're struggling with right now? And we shut up and we let them speak and we see what is troubling them. And hopefully it's something we can help them with. And if it is something we can help them, happy days. We can make them an offer and say, you know what, I can actually help you with that. Here's what it would look like, here's what it would cost. Or if we're not quite ready and capable to do that on the spot, we can say, awesome, I can help you with that. Give me a few minutes, I'm going to jump off, pull together some thoughts, I'm going to ping you with my ideas. And then you send back a proposal. With what you could do and the cost, and phone call and chase them up. This requires nothing but a little bit of nerve and is the fastest way to make sales in almost any business. So that's where we start. Once we've done the 20 calls, we then go on to the messages, because we're not going to stop with the calls. While the calls are running, we want to send out the 3-line email to all of our prospects which says, hey, are you still interested in insert your thing? You want you're immediately going to get a bunch of replies, responses, and you need to speed to lead them and reply very fast and get on the phone. A very underrated tool in general is WhatsApp voice notes. So after you've sent that email out and the replies are starting to come in, you're also gonna get about 100 or so of your warmer prospects, or indeed more past customers, and send them a voice note. And this voice note is going to deploy what we call the referral playbook. Which is where we specifically say, hey Jimmy, hope you're doing very well, it's Elliot here. Do you know anyone that might be interested in getting some help with their Facebook ads, getting some new solar panels? Because I'm looking to help 2 more people this month and I thought you might know just the person. Simple voice note. Voice notes get extremely high open and consumption rates because they're very personal and also mysterious. And that messaging, do you know anyone, is a pressure reliever, which means it takes the pressure. It's not a direct ask of the person, it's easy for them to say no. But also it's easy for them to say yes. And in many cases they will self-identify and be like, oh yeah, me, I could actually use that thing. So if you blast out 100 of those WhatsApp voice notes, there ain't no way you're not making some money. After we've sent the messages, then we can sell the future. So selling the future is all around pulling money forward that we were going to get anyway. So this is a strategy aimed at our existing customer base. And we basically offer them a significant, meaningful, and honest incentive to actually pay upfront now for the rest of the year, or for their next payment, or their next term, or whatever it might be. So in our business at Entrepreneur Circle, as an example, we have our core membership is £99 a month. So you can pay £99 a month, or you can pay annually. And if you pay annually, you effectively get 2 months free. If we really needed some cash, what we could do is ring up some of our long-standing members who've been with us for many years and offer them, hey, you're a fantastic member, we love you, we want to keep getting you amazing results. As a result of this, we want to give you an incentive and a few bonuses. If you want to pay up front for the rest of the year, then we will actually give you 2 months bonus for free, as well as invite you in for a special lunch or whatever it is. The juicier the bonuses, the additions you want to make the better. But of course, you normally throw in a couple of free months, enough that it is genuinely interesting and people are going to give a fuck about it to actually do it. And that way, you pull forward some cash from the future into today, which is very helpful when you just really, really need it. But this brings us to the next play, which is the price rise playbook. I talk a lot about prices because for most businesses, their pricing is a very underutilized lever in their business growth. And we could spend hours talking just about pricing and pricing strategy, but I always recommend increasing your prices in most cases. But how you increase your prices is very important. Oh, inside my secret vault, I have a complete price rise playbook that we have executed in Entrepreneur Circle for our software company Genie AI, for our high-ticket coaching program called Master Plan, and several times. And every single time we do it It has led us to have a record month every single time. We don't do it that often because we can't just keep increasing our prices, but every now and then, because our businesses are capacity-based, i.e., we can only have so many people on the program at any one time, once we fill the capacity, it makes sense for us to increase the prices. The price rise playbook goes as follows: you send out an announcement email to your list and you say, hey guys, I need to let you know we are going to be increasing our prices from X to Y on this date. The reason we are doing this is because— and then we list what we're going to do. Because in most cases, people will just think you're a greedy bastard increasing your prices for more profit, and we want to make sure no one has that assumption by telling them what we are actually going to do with the additional funds from increasing the prices, which in nearly every case is continuing to reinvest in the product to make it better. Because as a business, you should have a process, uh, of constantly making your stuff better, hiring more people, on and forth, as we do. We explain the reason why and let them know where the money's going, and then we give them the countdown and the deadline. But look, if you want to book a call with us or buy the thing before this date, then you get access to the lower price. This is just your friendly heads up. And you start a little countdown timer. We'll normally allow anywhere from 2 to 3 weeks for this. There's a nice window where people have got plenty of time, and we send a couple of follow-up communications between then as well. People have ample opportunity to get in and secure the low price if they want before the prices then go up. Of course, you have got to actually put your prices up in order to do this, and it's a good way for you to do that. But also, it gets everybody on your list who is on the fence over the line, especially those who are more concerned from the financial risk perspective. And honestly, if you do all of those, then you already have banked a shit ton of cash. However, the biggest play is yet to come because the price rise play, pretty epic. But let's just say you can't do the price rise play because prices have already gone up recently. Well, this is where we deploy the limited time mega offer campaign. I first crafted this with a client several years ago when they had an urgent requirement. They needed 40 grand of cash in the next like 4 days, otherwise they weren't going to be able to pay everybody's salaries for Christmas. It was very stressful. We crafted the limited-time mega offer campaign, which is a limited-time 72-hour special offer that is mega, like so outrageous, has never been seen before in that business space, etc. It really does drive action because when you're in a crunch like we were then, you have got to go all in and throw everything at this. So we make sure the offer financially works great, but it has to be very good. In the instance where we actually ran it, it was with one of our clients who had a high-quality timber company. They supplied fancy wood to people that build mansions. Very interesting business. Their stuff was very luxury, which means it was never discounted. So our mega offer was actually only 15% off their stuff, which on its own doesn't sound sexy at all, but in the context of that industry was very sexy because you never get a discount on this stuff. It's like getting a discount on a Chanel bag, as an example. What we do is we then send out a bunch of emails and SMS messages, typically 3 emails 3 SMS messages a day for the 72-hour window while this offer is open. And we make it very easy for people to either reply or click through and obviously opt in. A bit a lot of people miss with this, something I call the perfect storm. The perfect storm is the narrative as to why you are doing this offer right now. And normally there's a compelling narrative that you have created that not just is created by you but also has some elements of factual data or objective truths to it. So as an example, uh, currently right now we're seeing across the space an increase in short-form video consumption, which is very third-party verifiable, which is leading to diminished attention spans, which is leading to increased brain atrophy as some new studies are coming out. And as a result of that, people's attention spans are shrinking. We're having to deploy different marketing strategies. Therefore, we are going to make this special offer available to you. This is the bit that everybody misses, and it's creating the perfect storm. See, people don't just buy because of the urgency, but they buy because of the compelling narrative around it, around why this reason right now exists. That's what we want to create. Every good offer has a great reason why it's being made. That's a significant change in the industry, some new science and research coming out, some significant updates in their business, a new product launch, a key milestone— whatever it is, creating a narrative drives increased conversions, as long as it's a compelling narrative. And then you blast that out. And when we did this, we generated £106,000 of cash in 22 hours. Christmas was Saved. Of course, everything we mention has to be integral and has to be real, so capacity, time limits, etc. It has to shut off because we believe in integrity as a good thing. Last but not least, a few of these plays have sent out a bunch of stuff to a bunch of people and lots of sales have been made, cash has been collected, but there's still a large amount of people that were exposed all of that stuff and didn't respond. This is the final cherry on top of the cake. Call it the feedback email. Feedback email is a plain text email, ideally goes out from the founder, that simply says, hey Elliot, uh, you haven't bought our stuff. I'm just wondering if you could ping me one or two lines as to why. Did we lose you? We see what they say. Now the responses to that are very insightful, as people will say, I'm not interested for XYZ reason, or you get some clear feedback on the offer— wasn't too, wasn't interested, blah blah blah. Or be like, actually, yes, I'm interested, that wasn't the right time. Or yes, I am interested, I was just busy, I didn't get back to you. You actually end up getting feedback and sales. This last little— the cheering. There you have it. Get your unpaid invoices, do the 20 calls, send out the 3-line emails, sell the future, raise your prices, run the mega offer if you've got a week. None of this needs a single penny spent on ads. You're paying with your time, effort, and energy. And you're really pulling out, extracting cash from this potential that exists in your list and customers and relationships already. The beauty of this stuff is you don't have to wait until you're in a cash crisis. You can simply do it at any point and enjoy a nice bunch of cash. Run these plays systematically in our business every few months, making sure we're going hard on nurturing and value in between Because all that nurturing value, whilst hard to measure, is actually filling the potential pot of cash that's hidden within our assets that we're going to extract later on. Have it. This video— subscribe for more. I'll see you in the next one.