watch this if you can't make payroll this week

If you don't know how you're going to make payroll this week, and you're a small business owner, this video is for you. And if you have a line of credit that you haven't used this video, you're probably not even watching this video because you're probably using it. So I'm not going to talk about getting a line of credit or going into debt. I'm going to talk about the person that those things have either been completely used up or you don't have a line of credit and you can't get one from the bank. We're going to be talking about the five things you can do to make sure with within the next few days this week you're able to make payroll. And I had to learn this the hard way, and I didn't do it the right way. Here's what happened. I couldn't make payroll at the end of the week. This happened several times when I was growing the business between 200,000 and 800,000 in annual revenue. It was tough financially. We grew really fast. I did it in a couple years. However, I had a lot of times when I didn't know if I was going to make payroll. I'm going to talk about the five things that I did. I But I did one other thing just to show you what not to do or I guess in case of absolute emergency break glass. I actually used my credit card and I would literally process a fake invoice inside of my CRM to be able to get money from my credit card into my bank account so that from my bank account I could use QuickBooks to actually pay payroll. Not smart. But I can't use my credit card to pay payroll. So I was literally doing fake invoices. I was eating the cost of extra tax. I had to claim that as income. I was eating the cost of the credit card processing fees just to be able to get money inside of my bank account. Before Friday, my new payroll would be ran. So I don't recommend doing that. So outside of a line of credit, running your own credit card and paying fees and taxes on that money instead of doing all of that, oh, let alone interest, because eventually you got to pay it back. So let's just assume we're not going to go down those paths. What are the five things we can actually do inside of our business in the next three to four days to make sure we can make? I'm talking like between 3 and $10,000. Okay. If you want to make 50 grand next few days, that might Be more of a challenge. But if you're trying to make between three and $10,000, here's what you can do. Number one, you're going to want to make sure that your books are actually correct. There have been times that I have seen someone in an absolute frenzy, including myself, and then I realize that my books are incorrect. The numbers that I'm looking at and saying QuickBooks aren't actually reflective of my bank account. So check your bank account. Do reconciling of your books, that is, does what's in my bank actually match up what's inside of QuickBooks or whatever accounting software you're using? That's called reconciling. I do it every single month. If you only do it every quarter, fine. But do this first because I've seen some people freak out only to realize that there's really not a problem, it was just a reconciling issue. Alright, so do that first because at the very worst, if you do that, the next four you won't have to worry about as much. Alright? Number two, we're looking at overdue invoices. Alright? So these bad boys are overdue. These are the people that you've done service for. They accepted the estimate and now they haven't paid you. And it's been a week, it's been two weeks, it's been three weeks, it might only been 24 hours in my opinion. If I have done the work. That invoice is overdue and it's due for collections, baby. And so ideally you have a credit card on file, but at this point we only have a few days. You're not, we're going to change your whole system of your business and get everyone's credit card on file in the next 24 hours. So if you have overdue invoices, what are we going to do? We're going to call them and we're going to tell them they need to pay today. Especially if these invoices are 30, 60 days overdue, I'm going to be getting that money right away. What happens if I call and I don't get a hold of them? I have to leave a voice message. Great. You know what else you're going to do? You're going to email them, you're going to text message them and you're going to get a printed copy of that invoice and walk to their house. I guarantee they will get the message and they will pay you, if at all, just to get you to disappear. I have no patience for people that do not pay. And that's why using Copilot, we require them to have a credit card before they even accept an estimate. Because I never want this. But assuming you have these, especially when it comes to projects, because massive projects, people usually don't pay credit cards or they don't require credit cards, which I understand. Or commercial jobs like, I'm sorry, Mr. Billy Bob, you know, head of 500 restaurants for Denny's. You're going to pay your invoice and it's not going to be in 120 days. It's going to be in 120 seconds. Cough it up, number three. The third thing that you can do is collect on deposits. Okay? So these are projects that have been accepted, estimates have been accepted, and they owe you 50%, 25%. Whatever you require for deposits, they owe you that money once they've accepted the estimate. So now I've gone through all my over to invoices. Now I'm going to go through my accepted estimates and say, what can I collect up front? What can I get prepayment on? If I'm selling a contract, Can I give someone 10% off if they prepaid me today? That's an option. If you have people that are paying monthly for the whole year, call them up. I'll give you 12 months of service for 10 months of payment if you pay right now. Again, is this the best thing? No, it's not a very good thing when you're trying to cram for payroll. But this is what you can do to make it through deposits. We're looking at accepted invoices that require money down in order to get the job scheduled and get the job ready to roll. I would also look at any estimates have been sent that require a deposit. Because I know if I can sell them, I can literally call them up like, hey, if you want this job, fantastic. I'll give you 10% off if you close the job today. Oh, great. Okay. It does require 50% down payment. Great. That'll be $2,000. What's your card number? That's awesome. So any sort of estimates, whether they've been accepted, I just need to collect the deposit. Or if they have been not accepted, I will follow up with them and close the deal and get the deposit paid on the phone. Again, you can avoid these sort of issues by using a software, kind of like Copilot. There's other ones out there, but overdue invoices should never happen. Have a credit card file deposits. Dice for the pause. Wrong. I did deposits. There we go very good English. You can also avoid have this problem by every time someone accepts an estimate how a deposit threshold set in copilot so that you already have the deposit sitting in your bank account before they even are allowed to accept the estimate. So that's another little hack. All right, number four. Alright, we're going to wrap it up baby. We are going to wrap up any projects that are currently almost finished. I've done this before for businesses and owners of Augusta Nation. I do these steps and all of a sudden they make 15 or $20,000. Because there's projects that you know, they're two or three week projects. You only have a day or two left on the job. Wrap it up baby. Why? Because I want to collect and I'm going to finish the job. I'm going to go knock on the customer's door and be like, you now owe me. Here's the invoice, I'm ready to go because I need that money now. I don't got time to wait. I need to make sure I can hit payroll. And so if I'm going to go wrap up a project, I'm going to go collect on that same day. And that leads me to number five. You're like all of these things I've done already. Great. We're going to go and sell.

One day jobs. Alright, well what's that mean? I'm gonna go door knocking, I'm gonna send out emails and text messages to all of my customers and I'm trying to sell jobs that can complete and get payment today. So I'm like, I don't have any jobs, I don't have any work. I don't have any jobs to get deposits on. I don't have any overdue invoices. There's no projects to wrap up. It's super slow. Okay, great. We're going to go sell jobs. Not jobs that are going to take three weeks. Do I don't I need to survive? And anytime you talk about survival in life, in business, usually not a great scenario. If you're trying to survive in the Sahara desert, it's not a great life nor is trying to survive and make it to payroll. But we need to have it done. Like I don't enjoy it, but it needs to happen. I need the oxygen, that is the cash to be able to pay payroll this week. So I'm going to sell one one day jobs jobs that I can complete today and collect payment today. So in landscaping, that's something like can I do a property cleanup? Can I install mulch. I need money now. If you're doing other industries, think about what job can you get done in less than one day? Because those are the jobs you're going to go. Door knocking. Those are cold. That's cold outreach, talking to people who don't know you. But ideally, this is the time to send emails to, to all of your existing customers. We call them one click estimate emails. Inside Copilot, you send a whole bunch to people, they click on a button and says, oh yes, I want an estimate, thank you. And you could send that out to a whole bunch of people at the same time. All people inside of your database that have already done business with you in the past. That's why it's so important to keep track of emails and phone numbers inside of a database. That's why copilot exists. But what you're going to do is sell these one day jobs. I don't care if you text them, but call them one by one. Their whole objective here is to sell these one day jobs. And although the reason I mentioned door knocking and putting out door hangers is because you might not have any contact database, but if you have a contact database, why would I reach out to people that have never heard of me knocking on their door, interrupting them instead of people that have already done business with me, they already know like, and trust me, they've already exchanged value with me. I already know they need services. I've done it in the past. So you know what you could actually do is actually look through your database and see which people have done jobs at this time of year. So for example, if it's March, you're like, well, I have no work. I need to be able to schedule jobs and get these one day jobs sold and paid. Great. I'm going to go back to last year and say who did business with me between March, April and May. I'm going to try to sell all of them because there's a really good chance whatever services they needed last year, they needed it again. If they had their house clean, then they probably need it now. If they had a tree trimming and a bush trimming, then they probably need it now. So I'm going to sell those one day jobs, whether they be people inside my database or if I got to go knock on doors, got to talk to people who never known who I am, that's what I'm going to do because I need to make that cheddar by payday.