How to Use Slow Business Months to Your Advantage

The other day I saw this tweet from Cody Sanchez. She says, my dad had the best line about entrepreneurship. You aren't truly in the game unless you find yourself in the dead of night, head in your hands, sitting in the dark, with no idea what to do next. It's so true. Anyone can be an entrepreneur. When sales are flowing in and everything feels easy. It's when you're in a cash crunch and nothing's working that you really see what you're made of. In this video, I'm going to share three lessons that I've learned about how to survive lean months as an entrepreneur. Then I'll share a step by step game plan you can put into action right away. Business has seasons and it can change from summer to winter really quick. If you don't know how to survive the winter, you're either going to go into debt or you're going to go out of business. Or even worse, you're going to have to go get a job. In order to explain these three lessons, I need to tell you about a show called Alone. If you haven't seen it, Alone is a show where 10 people try to survive alone in the wilderness. They have limited supplies and they're in charge of filming themselves. And the last one standing, the last one to stay out there gets 500k. Whenever I watch the show, I can't help but think about entrepreneurship. Because just like Alone, entrepreneurship is a game of survival. You eat what you kill. And even if you have a team, even if you have employees, at the end of the day, it's still on you. So let's dive into the first lesson from Alone. Number one, pretty cabin, no food. One of the massive mistakes that people make on the show is spending too much time working on their shelter. They'll build a ton of calories building these massive log cabins for themselves so they can be comfy when the winter comes. But while they're busy building their future shelter, other contestants are figuring out how to get food. Now, a lot of the people who end up winning the show have very simple shelters. It's like a teepee with a tarp around it. It doesn't have to be comfortable. It just has to be enough to last a few months. You see, the same thing happen in business. The most successful entrepreneurs I know spend their time on revenue generating activities. They may not have the flashiest brand or the best logo. They only invest in that stuff when they have a lot of extra money coming in. So if you're in a cash crunch right now, all that matters is sales. So I want you to make a list of all your expenses right now in the business, from highest, most expensive to lowest. Start at the top and see what you can cut. Do the same thing with your calendar. Look at how you're spending your time. See what you can eliminate. Cut any expenses or activities that don't help you. You eat that don't contribute to the bottom line. So that's a good start. But you can't just eliminate things. You have to add things in that help you make sales. And that brings us to point number two. Burn calories. To get calories, the only way to win alone is to find a consistent source of calories. But here's the rub. In order to get calories, you have to expend calories. And this can feel risky to go searching for food, but if you don't leave your shelter, you'll just starve. You can't hunker down for two to three months and assume someone's going to deliver a pizza to your shelter. And the thing is, you just will go crazy in there if you don't give yourself something to focus on. And yet, this is how a lot of entrepreneurs approach a cash crunch. They freeze up, they stay secure, and they rely on their savings. Instead of investing their time and money on things that would help them bring in sales, they hunker down and wait. But this is a scarcity mindset. It doesn't work in the long term. And it doesn't work because no matter how much money you have saved, eventually it's gonna run out. The entrepreneurs who succeed don't just focus on surviving. Today, they're investing their time and money on things that allow them to keep going tomor. On the show alone, there's three main sources of food. Hunting, fishing, and foraging. The contestants who win are almost always the ones who figure out how to fish. And it's the same in business. When you're in a cash crunch, you don't want to be searching around looking for the one big client. So the one big game that's going to feed you for months and months because it's too risky. And the other thing you don't want to do is just forage for little berries, like low end offers, little sales, because those just don't sustain you. Ideally, what you want to do is go to your pool of existing clients, potential clients, your warm network, and you want to go fishing. So what that looks like is making a specific offer to people who already know, like, and trust you. I'll cover exactly how to do that later in the video. Number three, Stay paranoid. The most successful contestants on the show alone are very paranoid. Even when they get food they don't eat at all. They ration it. So imagine that you're starving, you've gone a week without food, and you finally catch your first fish. You're probably going to want to eat the whole thing, right? But the smart contestants don't do that. They build a smoker and they can serve the fish and they eat a little bit of it each day because they know they might not catch another fish tomorrow. We need to do the same thing as entrepreneurs. When it turns to summer, it's easy to forget what the winter was like when you didn't have sales coming in. But you need to remember those times, those days you were stressed out to encourage and motivate you to put some of that money away for the hard times. They say Bill Gates insisted on having six months of savings at Microsoft where they could pay all their expenses for six months without a single dollar of sales coming in. And he did that because he wanted to be proactive. He didn't constantly want to be in a place where he was reacting from a scarcity min. So you're not out of the woods when you make those first few sales in a cash crunch. Keep going and don't immediately spend that money that you make. I personally like having a separate business savings account where I'm taking off the top a little bit of my sales each month and creating a buffer. All right, so those are the principles. But what specifically should you do to bring in sales? Now, I'm going to give you three steps, and it all starts with carving out time on your calendar to focus on sales. This means that if you were going to redesign your website or you were working on this big blog post to build your audience, you need to put that aside for now and focus on what brings cash in the door. The quickest way to make money fast is to focus on people who are already aware of you, not try to get awareness from new people. So that means focusing on your past and current clients, the people who are already in your sales pipeline, and your existing audience. Okay, so step one is reach out to past and current clients. First, make a list of your past clients who you'd love to work with again, and start reaching out to those people. This could be as simple as just calling up a past client and seeing how they're doing. It could mean reaching out to a current client and seeing if there's an upsell A way you could serve them more deeply. But don't overcompensate. You're just reaching out to people to see how you can help. You'd be surprised at how quick and easy this is because it's so much easier to get someone to pay you more who's already paid you than to get someone to pay you for the first time. Here's an email you can send to past clients. So the subject is, how are things? You say, hey, John, thought of you today. I think last time we talked you were doing this new program for your marketing. How'd that go? Once they respond, you can invite them to hop on a quick call. And often there ends up being an obvious opportunity on that call as you're checking in to either re enroll them or ask for a referral. Sometimes I'll sort of make a little joke and I'll say like, so when are we going to work together again? You'd be surprised at how often they'll laugh and then say, actually, I've sort of been thinking about getting some more support. Okay, step number two is to follow up with potential clients. These are people who are already in your pipeline. You've had at least one conversation with them to consider working together, but for whatever reason, they haven't gotten back to you. The loop isn't closed yet. So I want you to follow up individually with these people and if they're still a fit for what you offer, enroll them. You can use this template called the Magic Email from Kai Davis. And it goes like this. You just reply to your last unanswered email and you say, since I haven't heard back from you, I'm going to assume this is no longer a priority for you. This email usually gets a quick response and they'll either say, I want to work with you, or they'll say, yeah, I did go a different direction. And then at least you can close the loop in your mind. Okay, step three, make an offer to your existing audience. So now what I want you to do is I want you to reach out to your existing social media network, your email list, your network, people who already know you, and I want you to make a specific offer to work with you. So there's two options. The first thing that works is inviting people to a free consult to discuss working together on a specific issue. Or. Or number two, you can sell an actual offer in the email, in the message that's a little bit lower end. So a single session, a course, an audit, whatever it is, I'd probably stick to Option one, the Free Consult Unless you're very good at copywriting and you have a large audience to draw from, one thing that works really well for booking free consults is to share a case study from a previous client of yours. So here's an overall structure you can use. First, you're going to describe what your client was struggling with when they came to you. Then you're going to talk about what you did together that helped. Then you'll talk about how their life or business is different now. And then finally, the call to action. If you want similar results, book a call with me. If you want some examples of emails and social media posts that I've put out successfully to book free consults, I've put together some templates for you@gregfaxon.com Swipe and it includes some examples of these case study invites. So go to gregfaxon.com swipe if you want to download that. Now, if you don't have an audience or you try this and your offer falls flat for some reason, you can reach out to referral partners, people who share the types of people you want to work with, and you can offer to run a free workshop for those people to get access to their audience. I want you to work this process until you're either out of your cash crunch or you've completed all three steps. Then, and only then do I give you permission to go back to the long term stuff. The website, the content. That stuff is all fine. It's just that you can't continue to make those investments if you run out of money. And of course, as you do all this, don't forget about your existing clients, right? Because if you can't retain your existing clients and they were about to come up and resign and pay you, then that's a huge missed opportunity. It's easy to get in your head during lean months and feel like it's always going to be like this or there's some fundamental problem with your business. But remember, every business has ups and downs. It's a natural, healthy part of entrepreneurship. All you can do during those down times is just stay grounded and stick to your routines. This is not a time to ask big questions about whether you're doing the right business or whether this is your passion. It's all going to be clouded by the fact that you're not bringing in money. It's not fun. Come back to the practices that help you not freak out. Meditation, good sleep, exercise, eating well. All of that. If you follow the strategies in this video, you'll come out out of it a much better entrepreneur. And remember, if you want that swipe file with examples of posts that you can put out and emails you can put out to book free consults, make sure you go to gregfaxon.com swipe thanks for watching.