Hey, it's Samantha Hartley of the profitable Joyful Consulting Podcast. This season, we've been talking about questions that improve your business and your life by helping your brain to, like, automatically go into finding solutions and solving problems mode and being creative and imaginative. So today's question is no different. It's really intended to help you to grow quickly under pressure and to come up with your best ideas about how you might do that.

So the question is, if you had to add $100,000 in the next 30 days, what would you do? How would you do that? So I personally love this question, and I use it all the time in my business. I use it with my clients, and sometimes my clients will come to me and they will say, Hey, I need to generate $100,000 next 30 days. What should I do? So it's totally based in reality for me.

Now I'm going to share with you not just how to think about it, what I would do in that situation. And you know what some takeaways are for realistic application of this question to your life. But I want to specifically share with you, first of all, like how I go about answering a question like this when someone brings it to me. What are the parameters for me of this as a question in reality and then as a question, as a thought experiment? As a thought experiment, we could do anything we wanted. We could say, Hey, if you need to make $1,000,000 in next 15 minutes, what would you do? You know, we get ideas from that kind of thing. I like this one to be fairly realistic. So, I want to have an amount of money that seems like, you know, I mean, I've personally, I've sold a hundred thousand in 30 days before I've sold multiples of that before. So it doesn't seem impossible to me. And it still might get some great ideas out of me, but I might want to work with different numbers. If you feel like, Oh my God, I can't even imagine selling that much, well then maybe this is the right number to experiment with. So think of this as a fun exercise and play around with it. But really do this exercise because it totally has real world applications.

How do I go about approaching this question? So the first thing is we have 130 days, so we don't have, we have a short timeline. We cannot do anything complicated. We need to know what is the fastest, easiest way I can bring that in. So I'm looking for fast, easy ideas.

The second thing is if it needs to be a sure thing. So let's imagine like a loan shark is going to break your knees at the end of this if you don't get the money. Okay. So it has to succeed. So I really need to look to things that either I've done that I know succeed or or I've really seen someone very close to me do that succeed because we don't want a lot of experimenting. We don't have time for experimenting within the parameters of this thought experiment.

The next thing is, what are the guidelines of this? You know? Am I going to like, go steal this money or am I going to sell my house? I don't want to do that. I want this to be a thought experiment that gives me realistic ideas that I can apply to my life. And so I want to kind of create some parameters here of what I would really do if I really had to do this in real life. So I wouldn't sell my house and I wouldn't steal the money, but I also would not sell something to a client who wasn't perfect. I don't want to work with not perfect clients. I don't want to work with clients who are difficult or what they need is like, not exactly what I do. I might do something in this situation that's a one off, which I will tell us not to do. I might do something like that in this situation, but I still want it to have some important parameters. It has to be with a perfect client because like, why would you do that to yourself? And it really has to be work that you want to do, because I don't want to sell something that I don't want to fulfill. And believe me, in life, I've had that happen. There've been plenty of times when I've thought, Oh, I think I might want to do that. And then I found out I don't want to do that with them. Or actually that work wasn't fun and interesting.

So you can hear that as I'm creating these parameters for myself, I'm getting clearer that I need to do something that I've done before. I need to do something that is a sure thing. It's not the thing that sometimes one, okay, sometimes didn't. And then as far as this, the work, what the work is going to be, I probably need to do something that is realistically in my joy and genius zone. If I'm going to fulfill it, I need to be great at it and love doing it and get a lot of energy from it. So it has to be that. What's my unique skills and talents and strengths and interests like it really needs to play into those. All those. As you may remember, I called my joy and genius zone. Your joy and genius zone, things that you're amazing at, best at in the entire world and also give you energy. Can't be. They have to be both.

So what kind of work might that be?

Now the only exception to this might be if I want to sell something that a colleague has done and take a commission from that. So that's a possibility. Here you can hear that I'm already kind of getting other creative ideas about how I could get this money in for, fulfilled the specifics of the exercise like sell a 100K within 30 days. And in this situation, maybe I don't fulfill that.

So those are all ways that I would go about thinking about it. Now, if, as has happened to me many times, the client came to me and said, I need to sell a 100K in the next 30 days, or I need to sell 250 in the next 90 days. Like, this is realistically what clients will say to me sometimes. What's the first thing I would do? Well, because we don't have a lot of time. We want to go remember, with no knowns. You want to sell to people who already are familiar with your brand and your services. Because in 30 days we don't have a lot of time to teach our value. We don't have a long sales cycle to explain why this is good and to go up the many chains. So who are those people who already know you and your services and are mostly convinced of your value already? That's going to be your current clients, past clients, a subscriber community, people who are familiar with you, fans and followers and referral partners. So people who send the business to you, refer a business to you once or twice on a regular basis, whatever that may look like. Potentially. Also other people's audiences where they, your person can sell you into that audience. And with the hello effect, you could come in and sell something to them. So a lot of these are going to be, you know, that's who you're going to sell to. Basically, it's where I would start and it's the approach that I would take. And by the way, do take

The next thing that I would do is in the end of the earlier when we were looking at the parameters of what this is like, what we're selling, I would take that offer. It's an offer that it's easy for you to fulfill. Either you're doing this already or it would be very simple for you to fulfill the work. That way you're not selling something that you don't want to do. I would take that offer and I would have something new about it. A limited time, a limited number of spaces and promote it. So a real promotion, that's the kind of thing that can last 30 days. So you've got a new opportunity, a new results, a new case study to share, some new reason to get on someone's radar screen and talk to them. So with past clients, it's always a good thing to say, Hey, how are things going for you? Now I have a new and improved way to get results or oh, I notice some things have fallen off the wagon. How about I come in and give you a booster? You know, certain things like that. There may be people who thought about working with you, but hadn't yet. And so those are a good audience to go to. And then, of course, that subscriber community, this is the chance to make an offer.

Now, the last parameter that I would tell you about, you do have a time sensitivity here, and it's always good to sell with time sensitivity because it creates an urgency for people to invest. Although I don't like people to jump into something this significant without really being pretty sure and clear about it. So that's why I love this audience that is familiar with you already.

The last piece, though, that I think that is really important is one I want to simplify every thought experiment by saying, what could you sell just one of them? So if I were going to make a 100K in the next 30 days, I would do that with one client. That would be my intention. I'd sell 100K client. So someone comes to me and they say, We want to add $1,000,000 to our business next year. I'll always ask, Well, could you do that with one client? Hmm. I don't know. I hadn't thought about it. Probably not. Okay. What can you do with two 500s, huh? Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. I'm not sure. I'm not. I don't think so. Okay. How about four 250s? Well, that we could definitely do. We have 250K clients.Now there's your answer. Right. So four 250K clients. So when we think about adding $1,000,000 to our business. Oh, that seems really heavy. But if you think you could add four clients that you want a 50K a piece, that seems doable. That is exactly what I do with this thought experiment. I would say adding a 100K in the next 30 days. Sell one. Do you know what's fast and easy and simple? One. One client at that, that turns this whole thought experiment into like, that's an action step. Can you go to your past clients or your subscriber base, your community of followers? Can you go in there, your referral partners, and find one single company, one decision maker that can say yes to you? They can say yes to writing $100,000 check. Yes, you can. We do it all the time. I do it. My clients do it. Like this is a doable thing.

So that is the way I would go from taking this thought experiment and turning it into action. Now, just a couple of takeaways that I want to share with you. You know what's fun? A thought experiment in which we pretend that we have to earn $100,000 in the next 30 days or else like consequences. You know, it isn't fun when that's a real life situation. That's not fun when you have a tax bill or when something's do or and somebody quit or something break like that. Real life stress is not fun. So if you take the things that you learned from this thought experiment and you do it proactively and preemptively, we don't need to do it in life. We don't need to. But, if you do ever need to do that, you're prepared.

Okay, so the first thing I want you to take away from an exercise like this is like I can imagine a worst case scenario and I can plan for it. The second thing that I want you to take away is do more thought experiments. These are so fun, right? They're really good for us. And you don't have to make it a formal thing. I mean, you could do this in a staff meeting with your team, an ideat together. But you can always just do this also, just like, I don't know, on the treadmill or, like, walking through town. And just think to yourself, like, well, if I had to add 100K in3 0 days, if I wanted to double my business in the next year, if I wanted to like whatever you're wanting to do all of these questions that I'm asking over the course of the season, just like thought, experimenting with them and just thinking about it, I think it's super fun and healthy.

And then the last thing I'm going to quote Harvey Mackay, he wrote a book called Dig Your Well Before You're Thirsty. You'll notice that a huge part of our plan here depends on having a who, having that client base, having that referral partner, having that community of subscribers and followers and fans that you can go to and sell something to. You want to cultivate that community before you need them. You want to have people buying stuff from you, knowing your brand and your value before you get to the point where you're like, Oop, I need to sell something fast. It's really time consuming to create that fan base and that and teach about value. That's a thing that you want to be doing ongoingly through your LinkedIn presence, through your social media, through your personal brand and personal presence. All of that work that you're doing, you are teaching and cultivating the value proposition in advance so that one day when you're thirsty, you'll be able to go to that well.

Hope these questions have been inspiring for you and helps you to come up with cool ideas for yourself and your business and that they're also empowering so that you feel safe and secure knowing that you can take care of yourself financially now and in the future. And with that, I am wishing you a profitable and joyful consulting business.