The Only 3 Emails You Need When You’re Short On Cash

There are 3 emails every business owner should have in their back pocket because sooner or later something bad is gonna happen and you're gonna look at your bank account and say to yourself, "Holy crap, I need cash now." A cash crisis can be caused by a lot of different things. It could be a surprise tax bill, I know that's happened to me before, the loss of a major customer, the bank cutting your line of credit or calling in a loan. It could also be a failed product launch or a big deal falling through. It could be tariffs, supplier price hikes, supply chain disruption, or any one of a thousand other known and unknown landmines that business owners CEOs have to contend with pretty much on a daily basis. Most CEOs look at it and they think it's a sales problem, or they think it's a margin problem, or maybe it's just a bad luck problem, but it isn't. It's actually a trapped cash problem. The cash that you need to get through whatever cash crunch you're dealing with is already in the business. It's just locked away in one of 3 specific places, and in this video, I wanna give you 3 emails that you can send right now, today, to unlock that cash. Now, I have used these emails to pull hundreds of thousands of dollars out of businesses in crisis, including my own, and I'm giving you these emails along with the playbooks for how and when to execute them. Oh yeah, and while I will be walking you through all 3 emails in this video, if you want just a swipe file with the word-for-word copy and paste text along with a playbook that breaks down which variations to use in which situation, there is a link for that down in the description, just there to make things easier for ya. Alright, let's get into it. Cash-getting email number 1 is the invisible Simple offer email. Now, anytime cash gets tight, our first instinct is usually to try to make more money the way that we've always made money, and that's usually by finding new customers, by getting new sales, but that's actually the slowest path to cash. The fastest path to cash is selling to the customers who already know, like, and trust you, the customers and the prospects. Your top prospects and customers, they're all walking around right now with wallets out trying to figure out who to give their money to. They got problems, they've got needs, and they desperately want somebody to solve those problems. And the nice thing is, is they already trust you. Some have already bought from you. But here's a problem: about half of the people on your list aren't really even sure what you do or what you sell. And you think that they do, you think that they know, but they don't. They've forgotten about it long ago. They forgot about what the heck it is that you do. And then very often we introduce and come up with new things to sell, and we forgot to tell our people. So that's about half of them. The other half, they just wish that you would come up with something new because they do like you, they do trust you, they did love that past transaction, they just need you to come up with something new for them to buy. And the beauty of this first email is that it speaks to both groups at the same time, and it's why it's always the first email that I send anytime I need to generate quick cash. Like I said, it's called the invisible offer. Let's get into how it works. Hey, name, quick question. What is one thing that you'd love our help with that we don't currently offer? That's it. It's not a pitch. Notice there's not a link in there. It's simply asking them for their feedback. So the way that I want you to think about this is I want you to handpick 25 to 50 of your top customers, your warmest prospects. We're not sending to the entire list here. It's not necessary. It's not even a good idea. We want those people who they've already bought from you. And/or they're highly actively engaged. They're clicking on stuff, they're opening things, they're responding to stuff. This is really a quality thing, not, not a quantity thing. There's this company MoEngage, they did the study and they found that personalized emails sent one-on-one get an average 42% open rate. 42%! Now compare that to 14 to 27% for mass emails and The reason this works and the reason I want you to send it one-on-one is because you're going to get a 2 to 3x result minimum if you do it that way. Don't try to make this email longer than it needs to be. We want to keep it short, we want to keep it tight because again, we want to make it look personal. We want it to almost beg for a response. It's a simple question, they can evaluate in a second what it is, and if they think enough about you and your brand, they're going to respond, and that's going to start the conversation which will hopefully lead to a sale. Now, for some reason you feel like you don't quite have an intimate enough relationship to send send so little. Here's a slightly longer version that you can send. As you can see here, it says, hey, first name, quick question I've been asking our top customers. So you're kind of telling them you're a big deal, you're getting this because we respect you. What's one thing you wish we offered that we currently don't? It could be anything— a product, service, training, support. We'll just put in some stuff that's just kind of there to get them to think about it. Even a one-line reply would be incredibly helpful. I appreciate you being a part of this community. For what it's worth, the shorter one still works better. Now, if you want to do this over the phone, so maybe you've got a real relationship, a solid relationship, you feel like if you call they're actually going to answer, here's a phone or an in-person opener. When you ask this question, you need to then shut up because you're going to ask them the question and they're going to think and it's going to be silent and that silence is going to feel awkward. That silent awkwardness is your friend and you need to let them Fill it. If you jump in, you're giving them a pass and they're not going to respond. So, let the silence linger and then let them fill it and when they do fill it, ask them, okay, great. What else? Because I know from experience in doing this, the first answer that you get from people is usually not the best one. Just kind of the first thing that popped in their mind but if you're like, okay, that's good but any other ideas? It's the second, the third things that are really, really good. When you send this out and when you start to get replies, you're gonna get 2 types of replies. The first type of reply is somebody responding basically asking you to do something that, wait for it, you already do. I know you're thinking that's crazy, my people already know what we do, they already know what we offer. I hate to break it to you, they don't. They either never did or they did and they forgot or they knew and now you added some new stuff. The point is they're too busy focusing on their lives and their problems to keep a running list of your entire product and service catalog. It just doesn't happen and it's great when they don't know about it because when they respond and they say, hey, yeah, I wish you did this, you can respond back and say, great, we actually do that, we have that, here's where you can go and get it and it turns into an instant sale and the beauty is you get the sale because they asked for it, not because you sold them. We sent out this email saying, hey, what do you want from us? What aren't we doing that you wish that we were doing? And at The Scalable Company, one of the number 1 replies that we got, one of those common replies that we got was, "I wish that we could just work with you and your team one-on-one to build out our company operating system." Now, if you're watching this for the first time, you don't know what we do, that's what we do at The Scalable Company. I wrote a book on the process, there's a lot of people who've read the book, they've tried to implement it on their own and they just wish that we could help them with the implementation part. There's a lot of people who don't know that we do that because they haven't been on a list, they haven't seen all the offerings and things like that that we do. And we didn't do a good enough job of selling it. So we were able to respond to these folks and say, "Good news, this is exactly something that we do. We'd be happy to do that for you." And out of all the promotions that we ran the quarter that we did this, this was actually the most successful promotion from a revenue generation standpoint, and it wasn't even intended to be that. So, you're gonna get about half the people asking for stuff that you already sell. Amazing, that's instant revenue today. That's gonna help with the cash crunch. The other half, they're actually going to respond with ideas for things that you don't do, and when that happens, great, you've got 2 choices to make. Either you could say, "That's an amazing idea," or "We could do that later," or "It's kind of a stupid idea, we're never gonna do that, but I'm not gonna say that." The point is you could kind of bank back the idea and say, "This is something that we could do later," and that was actually something that we did. I mean, literally the first time that we ran this at the Scalable Company, we again had people saying, "We wish that we could just work with you one-on-one to get our operating system built out and customized." At the time that we sent the email, we didn't have that as a service. It wasn't something we did. Again, we had books, we had courses, we had group type programs, but we didn't offer a one-on-one implementation, and I didn't really want to do it because I knew it'd be a lot of work, and I knew putting those systems in place would be a pain in the butt, but here it was, lots of people asking for it, and the first time that we sent this out, guess what? We needed the money. This was years ago when we were first getting this company started. Revenue was choppy and it was not where it needed to be. And so when people are saying, I'm willing to give you money right now for this thing, well, we were willing to take that money and it became a forcing function to create what became our flagship offering. That's why I love this, because it's the ability to generate revenue today by people asking for things that you already sell, and it's also the ability to generate revenue today by just saying, okay, yeah, I'm willing to do that. Just remember, at the end of the day, the fastest cash in any business is not from the customers you you don't have. The fastest cash in any business is from the customers you have, the prospects you have that you simply haven't sold yet. Cash-getting email number 2 is the "This stops now" email. Every single time we run this play in a business, we're freeing up $10,000, $15,000 a month, often a lot more. Most companies that are doing a million dollars or more, they're being eaten alive by 100 forgotten subscriptions and expenses that nobody even remembers buying. And it's sort of like when you go out to dinner and you bring back a bunch of leftovers. I want you to imagine like you open your fridge and there's nothing there but just like leftovers from all these past meals. The difference is it's not food, it's the free trial you forgot to cancel, it's the software that an old employee set up and never even told you about, it's the vendor that you stopped doing, using back in 2022 but who's still billing you on retainer. I know that sounds ridiculous but that actually happened. I'll tell you that story in just a second. They're still costing you, they're still cluttering up your fridge, and until somebody opens up that fridge and starts throwing things out, it's going to keep creating expense clutter. The way that you open that fridge is with the email that I call "This Stops Now." So let's get into how it works. Now, and I promise you, you send out an email to your leadership team with the subject line "This Stops Now," it's going to get opened. It starts out intentionally very direct, almost kind of threatening, but then watch as we go through it how the tone changes to being more warm and collaborative. That's very intentional, we'll get into it. So, subject line, this stops now. Hey team, I was reviewing our monthly recurring expenses and they've gotten out of control. We're paying for tools and services that I know we aren't using and in some cases, probably don't even remember buying. This stops today. Here's what I need you to do. Export your credit card charges for the last 3 to 6 months, filter for recurring payments and sort them from most to least expensive. Bring your list to a meeting on, insert date, "Here, and we're gonna review every line item and create a keep-kill-question list. At the end of the meeting, we're gonna cancel the kill list and add up how much cash we just freed up and where we should allocate it. It's gonna feel so great getting this cleaned up." Now again, notice kind of the asymmetry— very direct, almost threatening— into a "this is gonna be great, this is gonna be fun." The reason that we're doing this is because we want them to take notice, we want them to take it seriously, but we don't necessarily want them to be defensive about it. We want them to see that this is a collaborative thing, not that like they necessarily did something directly wrong that they're gonna push back against. So, you send the email, your team gathers all their different expenses, then you hold the meeting and you get everybody together. And it's important that you get everybody together, ideally in the same room. If you try to do this asynchronously, if you try to do this just via email, I promise you, you're not gonna find all of the expenses that you need to find, and that's because the magic of this, the way that it works, is you're gonna go line by line through your expenses. You're gonna say, okay, expense number 1, what do we think? Keep, kill it, or question it? Now, there's gonna be some that are obvious. Everybody's gonna say keep it. Great. We'll highlight that. I've got it printed out. We'll highlight it with a green highlighter, and we'll move on. Okay, next one. Keep, kill, or question it? Now, there's gonna be some that's pretty obvious. Everybody's like, we we can kill that thing. If some people say kill, some people say keep, mark it yellow, move it on, and then when you— when you're done processing the list, go back through the yellow items and what you want to do is you want to say, okay, this is one that we're going to question. Who believes that we should keep it and why? And this is where the magic happens because what you're asking everybody on the team to do is to justify the expense. You don't just learn more about where the company is spending money, you're also beginning to build a culture of good stewardship within the business. You're not telling your people you're not allowed to spend any money, you're slapping their hands. You're basically saying investments are fine, but just spending money willy-nilly is not. The other reason we wanna question is because when some people start talking about the expenses that they think they should keep, you're gonna hear other people on the team saying, "Wait, I'm already paying for something like that. We already have another tool that does that." And not only is this a waste of expenses, but it also means that we're having to kinda create different systems that aren't going to fit together. And so that's why the questioning process is so important. Now, once you've done that, execute the kill list. Like, go through the kill list to cancel it and do it right then and there. If you say, "Oh yeah, no, we'll do this later." No, you won't. Later equals never. I actually recommend creating a running tally of how much you've saved because this is where the energy is going to come from. And remember, it's not just about what you save. What's even more valuable over time is the cultural shift that takes place, the shift to better stewardship and frankly the shit that takes place when your people start to think like owners. Every single time we do this, we save $10,000+ a month, at least 5 figures. Remember, we had one company, they had 17 different SaaS subscriptions across 4 different companies that all fundamentally did the same thing. They were able to consolidate this to one company, one team subscription, cut it down to like 20% of what it was and get better access and better collaboration across departments. Another company, they were paying a consultant $4,000 a month that they had stopped using 2 years before, and the person who had lobbied to bring this person in had left, so the stakeholder was gone, and that person never bothered to mention that they had hired this consultant. The consultant, shocker of all shockers, never bothered to mention that the person stopped calling, and yet the retainers invoices kept getting sent, accounting kept paying them because the accounting team didn't know that they were supposed to stop, and there you have it. 2 years, $4,000 a month, so that's like $50,000 freaking. It's crazy. In every business, there's at least $10,000 a month in hidden expenses. You just have to know where to look, and you have to be ruthless enough to find it and to cut it when you do, and that's what the "This stops today" email lets you do. Cash-getting email number 3 is the hand raiser, and out of all of them, this one is the one that has the potential to generate the most revenue. Um, also there are 3 different variations of this that I'm going to give you. There's actually a lot more than 3. I'm going to give you my 3 favorite variations, but it's one general concept. Now, the reason that this one can be so effective is that unlike the first email where we targeted just your top 25 to 50 most engaged prospects and customers, with this email we're sending out to your entire list, your entire database, because The goal is to connect with all those old, what we call dormant leads. Now, your dormant leads are made up of all the people who almost bought from you but never did, and a lot of founders will treat these like dead leads. There's no such thing as dead leads unless they've outright said, "No, I'm never gonna buy from you." Your leads aren't dead, they are just sleeping, and the reason I can say that is because based on our internal testing and data, we've discovered that on any given list, there's between 3 to 6% of that list who is ready, willing, and able to buy something right now. Now, the rest of the list, there's a small sliver that will never buy from you. They absolutely are ready today. The key is, how do you identify those 3 to 6% and get them to raise their hands and acknowledge themselves so you can market to them so that you can sell to them without burning out the rest of the list? Because these are the two big mistakes that marketers and business owners make all the time. Mistake number one is they treat their entire list like they're in that 3 to 6%. They treat their entire list like they're ready to buy now. It's simply not the case, and when you do that, this is when you wind up burning out your list. But we also don't want to make the second mistake, which is to say, well, because we don't know who's ready to buy now, I don't want people to unsubscribe, so let's just not sell anybody anything. When you do that, not only do you not generate the revenue that you need, but also good leads die on the vine. They wind up just buying from somebody else. So I want you to picture a stadium filled with all of your leads and prospects and if your lead list isn't that big and a stadium isn't working for you, picture a large room, picture a party, picture an arena or a bar, either way there's a lot of people that are on your list. If your list is just 100 people, that's a lot of freaking people. Now, going back to the stadium analogy, most of the people if you're down on the field, they're not really paying attention, they're not really watching the game, they're checking their phones, they're talking to the person next to them, They're basically tuned out because they're not that interested. But somewhere in that stadium, there's a few dozen people who are waiting to be noticed. They're hoping somebody will pay attention to them because they're ready. The hand raiser email is sort of like a kiss cam at a sporting event. It picks kind of the most engaged people out of everyone else in the crowd and it shines a spotlight on them. And unless it's like a Coldplay concert and you're with somebody you shouldn't be with, The people who are engaged and excited, they want to be featured on the kiss cam. The people who aren't, they're not bothered by it at all because they're not being featured there. This is exactly what hand raisers do. And I'll tell you, back in 2016 when I got into a cash crunch and I didn't have enough in the bank to cover payroll, the playbook I'm about to show you is the exact playbook that I ran that allowed me to generate the necessary funds to get my people paid and to get— keep the business alive. So, this works, let's dig into it. What I'm going to give you right now are my 3 favorites and I want you to pick the one that you feel like is going to be most appropriate for the type of leads that you have or if you want, you can run on all 3. Now, the first one is the "What would it take?" hand raiser and we want to use this hand raiser if we're reaching out to old prospects who ghosted us. They just expressed some interest and then they backed off and this happens all the time. You've done this. There was something that you were really interested in, there was something that was really, really important, you started to engage, you signed up for a list, maybe you booked a meeting, you said you were going to come by for a test drive or something like that, and then life happened. This email is designed to re-engage those folks. Goes like this: Hey name, I know we talked about offer, but it wasn't the right time. What would need to happen for this to make sense now? First things first, hey name, I know we talked about this offer in the past. You're basically acknowledging that there have been a conversation. You're acknowledging a previous positive action that they took. You're basically saying, "I'm following up with you because you reached out to me first." That's essentially what you're doing. But you're also acknowledging that it wasn't the right time, so you're not saying that they said no. You're not making them feel guilty. You're not putting them on the defensive. You're basically saying, "Obviously, it wasn't the right time." We're simply inviting them to collaborate with us and to determine what would need to be true for it to be the right time. Again, for the people who are not interested at all, they're not ready at all, they're just gonna see this, they're gonna ignore it, and that's fine. It's the reason that we want it to be short, it's the reason that we want it to be generally forgettable. If they're not ready, poof, out of their mind. But if they are, now we're inviting them to a conversation, now we're inviting them to reply, to raise their hand and say, "Hey, yeah, actually, you know what, last time was a little bit too expensive," or "Last time, you know, we were really, really busy, but I think now is the right time." The next type of hand raiser, hand raiser email number 2, is the "Are you still?" Email. This is the classic. This is— some people refer to this as the 9-word email, which was originally developed by my buddy Dean Jackson. Hey, first name, last time we talked you wanted this specific outcome. Are you still working on that? Is this still a priority? Again, you're not asking them to buy anything. You're simply referencing a past conversation or some specific knowledge that you have about them and what they want to reopen a conversation loop. Now, If it's not a priority right now, if they're not interested, again, delete, move on, they forget about it, no harm, no foul. But if they are and if they're frustrated that they have not yet achieved that outcome, this is when they're going to respond and say, "Yeah, you know what? It still is a priority. Let's talk." Now, the way that you mess this up is if you get overly specific. If you say, "Are you still working on that? If so, go buy this thing." Again, the idea of a hand raiser is to get them to raise their hand and acknowledge The goal of this email is not to get a conversion right away. We simply want to generate a reply. The third type of hand raiser is the "Can I help?" and this one might be my favorite of all because it is the most versatile. It works for almost any type of business. It works whether it's a past client, uh, customer, prospect, or just somebody fairly cold. And I'll tell you why I know this one works in just a second, but here's the email. Subject line: "Can I help?" Notice, very short, very simple. "Anything I can do to help you/your company move faster?" I've never met anybody who was looking to do anything who didn't wish they could get that thing faster, okay? If you're moving slow, you wish you were going faster. If you're moving fast, you wish you were going faster, okay? Everybody wishes they had the thing that they want and they wish they had it now. The second reason why this is so powerful is that "move faster" can take on whatever end result it needs to take on. It is intentionally vague. It gives the prospect an opportunity to sort of fill that void with whatever move faster is for them. I get cold outreaches all the time, all the time. This is the one that actually worked on me and the reason that it worked is because I remember going to my team and asking if we could, you know, do something like, "Ah, you know, we can't do that in our CRM. It's still messed up, you know, marketing automation stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah," and just give me the runaround about how We couldn't do whatever the heck it is that I wanted to get done because something was messed up in our CRM. I was like, oh my gosh, why can't we just get this thing to work? Fast forward later that afternoon, I get this email. Hey Ryan, anything I can do to help your company move faster? Sure enough, it was an agency that was a certified partner in the CRM that we used, just Bang, perfect timing. If you will reach out and if you will do this on a consistent basis, you're not going to hit everybody, but 3 to 6% are going to have something going on they wish were moving faster. And as long as you will stay committed to this, stay out front and reply to people when they do engage, you're going to find those hand raisers, you're going to find those people who are looking for your help. But you don't have to guess if these people want to buy. You know that they want to buy because only people who are interested in buying something from you are going to respond to this. That's why it generates cash so quickly and it's why the sales process is so fast. What about the other 94 to 97% who aren't ready now? No problem. Again, because these emails are so short, because they're so forgettable by design, they're just going to scroll on, they're just going to archive, and it's not going to create a lot of bad will, uh, like sending just overt direct sales pitches would. And this is how we strike that balance between not pushing too hard and burning out the list, but not promoting at all and having these leads die on the vine. Now I want to tell you, if you want to screw this up, make these hand raisers longer, okay? If you want to screw these up, just add a bunch of stuff. Feel like you need to explain everything. Um, hey, anything I can do to help the company move faster? By the way, and by move faster, I mean this and this and this and this and blah blah blah. And by the way, did I mention that we're the, you know, highest ranked whatever in our category? If you do that, you will ruin it. This works because it looks personal. One sentence, one line, two at most. The other way to really screw this up on the hand raisers in particular is to include a link. If you include a link in this that they can click on to go get information, you've just broken the frame. The idea is they see it, they respond, and then the conversation keeps going. Alright, so if you ever find yourself in a cash crunch, these 3 emails are what you need to pull you out. They're also great just for generating cash even when you don't quote-unquote need it. So, I hope no matter what, whether you're in a cash crunch or not, I hope you give them a shot. But at the end of the day, this is important, the real goal is not to get out of a cash crisis. The real goal is to build a business where you never get into a cash crisis in the first place, and if you want the operating system that we use that keeps cash flowing, that's what I talk about in this next video. So, be sure to check that one out and I'll see you there.