For years, I’ve been teaching clients the Matt Furey “$10,000 Gun-to-Your-Head Challenge.”
I first learned this from one of the original internet marketing pioneers – Matt Furey – in 2007.
He said…
“Imagine you have a gun to your head and you have to make an extra $10,000 this month… What would you do?”
It’s a somewhat crude, yet highly effective exercise to generate creativity.
Sometimes this type of bluntness is exactly what we need to get past our usual excuses and rationalizations that are keeping us stuck.
Here’s how this helped a client of mine not only make more money…
But ALSO free up more time.
This was our email conversation:
“Craig, life has been absolutely insane in the last month. Both in a good and bad way. We have pretty much been working non-stop with no breaks since we got back from Vince’s Mastermind in Vegas.
We were able to generate over $100K in new sales from our latest coaching launch and $35K in sales from coaching client renewals! All this in less than a month!
Your exercise of "if you had a gun to your head and had to generate an extra $10K by the end of the month..." really came into play. And it paid off because we were able to 10X it :)
If we hadn't generated the additional revenue we did, our company would be in serious trouble.
The bad news is that now we are working too much!”
***My reply
First, congrats! Super proud of you.
Second, let's build the systems so the business doesn't rely on you to do everything.
You should be doing sales and marketing.
Other people should be handling the operations.
So let me re-ask the Gun to the Head question:
If there was a gun to your head, how would you free up an extra 10 hours per week this week?
(NOTE: On a call with another client that is making money but has no time, I asked this differently and said, “What do you HATE doing every day?” … From his answer we built a plan to offload a major time suck, give one of his team member’s a huge opportunity, and open up a lot of hours on his calendar.)
Back to my original client…
***His reply
Thanks Craig! Great question.
I'd start by properly documenting all the systems and operations so we could do what you just said -- focus on the sales and marketing.
Not having to handle the ops side of this would free up at least 10hrs/week.
***MY REPLY
Frank Den Blanken does it by recording the videos of the task and then having the assigned team member write out the text version.
Sometimes the team member improves the process...
And this also allows Frank to check their work / understanding.
So again…
You don’t write out the tasks in text…
You simply record the loom video.
Then your team member writes out in text (so it teaches them better as they write it out)
And if they can improve the process along the way, it's a double win.
*****
Now over to you…
If YOU had a gun to your head right now and had to come up with an extra $10k (or 10 hours per week)...
How would you do it?
When you frame it in this context…
It helps to suspend your doubts and excuses so you can really get your creative juices flowing.
Give it a try — you might be surprised what you come up with.
Success Loves Speed,
Craig
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