Pre-Sell Your Fall to Beat the Summer Cash Dip

Rachel Cook: There's a specific kind of quiet that scares small business owners. And it's not the quiet of a slow, lazy summer afternoon. It's the quiet of their July bank account. Clients are off on vacation, nobody is starting anything new, and you can feel the summer dip coming the way that you feel a huge storm before it lands. I used to brace for that dip too. Now I don't. And the reason is one move that I make almost every single summer. I pre sell my fall. I get the yes. Now while it is quiet. The deposit comes in, the contract gets signed, the start date is set for September or October in the future. And then I actually get to enjoy my summer knowing that revenue is already on its way. There's no more bracing, no September panic to fill up the calendar again. Because here's the truth. Most people miss the summer cash dip isn't usually a demand problem. It's often a timing problem. And timing you can fix. That is what this episode is all all about. Let's get into it.

Narrator: Are you ready to grow? From solopreneur to CEO, you're in the right place. I'm your host Rachel Cook and I've spent the last decade helping women entrepreneurs start and scale service based businesses. If you're serious about building a sustainable business, it's time to put the strategy, systems and support in place to make it happen. Join me each week for candid conversations about stepping into your role as CEO, uh, hard lessons learned along the way, and practical, profitable strategies to grow a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout.

Rachel Cook: Hey there CEO Rachel Cook here, founder of the CEO Collective and host of the Promote Yourself to CEO podcast. I hope you have been enjoying the series all about setting yourself up for success this summer. We have tackled so many topics in the last few episodes. Everything from doing a mid year review, making sure you looked back through the first half of 2026, and now you're looking forward at the second half. We talked about reviewing your calendar and plugging in the notes to Future Me so that you have reminders of commitments you're already making and you're protecting your time and your capacity. We talked about how the summer slowdown can affect us in our business and how you can use this time to think strategically and work on the big picture strategy, work on upgrading the infrastructure for your business. And we talked about setting a summer schedule so that you are putting some boundaries in place, clearly articulating them and you're able to take some more time off and really enjoy this season. Well, there's One thing we haven't talked about yet, and that is how to manage the revenue. For a lot of small business owners, summer is a challenging season because this is when they start to see revenues dip. And it makes sense. Just like we want to go do summery things and enjoy days at the beach and vacation and time with our family, our clients do too. They want to do all the summary things. They want to go on vacation, they want to take their time off. And this makes it a little extra challenging for small business owners because that means it gives those potential clients a reason to not get started yet to not sign up for our products, programs and services. They don't want to make a commitment to something when they know they've got a vacation that's coming up right in the middle of it. It makes it too hard to juggle all of those moving pieces. But we need revenue, right? Unless you're going to focus on building all the revenue you need in the other nine or ten months of the year so that you can live off of that during the summer season, then you need to come up with a strategy that is going to continue to have cash flowing in your business. Now, there's a lot of different ways you can make sure that you still have revenue coming in the doors. Maybe you have retainers in your business, so you already have clients who are committed to paying you month after month after month. Maybe you have payment plans and those payment plans are going to continue to be collected whether people are on vacation or not. But what if you need another strategy, another way to bring revenue in the door? Well, today I want to share with you a simple strategy that I give clients all the time. I give clients every single early summer, late May, early June. I start talking to them about this strategy because you don't want to be white knuckling it through the summer months. The simplest, easiest way that I know to help bring revenue in the door is to go ahead and pre sell your fall pre sell your products, programs and services to start in the fall. Here's what that looks like. You get the yes now while it is a little quieter, which means the deposit gets paid, the contract gets signed, and the start date gets set for the future. It can get set for the end of August, September, October, whenever works for both you and your client. You're locking in the start date and in advance. And you're not starting the work right now, you're simply locking the date for them on your calendar, committing that you will start with them in the future. The deposit can be Whatever makes the most sense for your business. It really does vary from business to business. It could be 25% of the fee, it could be half, it could be a flat booking fee to hold the start date, or it could be just the first payment if you have payment plans. The point here is that you have real money changing hands and you have a contract that is signed. So the commitment is real on both sides. This is what a lot of small business owners do and we don't always see it from the outside. Often very in demand service providers are booked months in advance, especially in the uh, B2B, the business to business space. A lot of creatives that I have worked with in the past who do websites or branding or copywriting or maybe they're running intensives or retreats, the opportunity to work with them isn't you can book and start right away. It is, you have to get on their calendar in advance because they are that and demand. But you can borrow this strategy. You don't have to wait until you have, you know, a wait list to do this strategy. You can start booking people in advance right now. This is a great way to both build your demand to fill your calendar and be booked out months in advance and to manage your capacity and manage your calendar by intentionally deciding when those start dates are going to be. Now, uh, you might be thinking, this feels a little pushy. I don't know if I like this reaching out to ask people right now to work with me. It just feels a little pushy. If that is your reaction when I'm talking about booking people in advance and pre selling your fall, then usually that indicates that you have some sort of belief that proactive sales is pushy. And we need to tackle that. Right? Because sales truly should be a win win every time. If a sale isn't good for you and your client, then it's not a sale worth making. If offering your product, program or service feels pushy, then that is worth unpacking. Because it usually means that somewhere in the back of your head you've decided that what you offer is an imposition or it's not genuinely as helpful as it could be, or that it's not as valuable as it could be. As if those clients are doing you a favor by buying from you. That's not true. Right? You know that your clients appreciate the work that you do together. You know the results that they get from working with you. So your ideal clients shouldn't experience you being proactive as being pushy. They really should experience it as care and thoughtfulness as leadership. They should appreciate it when you are looking out for them, when you're helping protect their time and helping them get the result that they are looking for. Here's what you're really protecting your clients from, your future clients from is the September Scramble. The September scramble is when everybody comes back from the summer all at once. Suddenly, school's back in session, people are hitting their routines again, they're ready to get back to their goals. They're back in work mode. And, and it is an intense few weeks for a small business that's not really ready for that. It can be incredibly overwhelming. It can make you feel behind, and it can also have you feeling like now you've gotta accommodate for every single person who waited until September to book you for the project that they want done before the end of the year. Now, this whole series on the podcast has been about using summer strategically so that you avoid that scramble for yourself. And that also means helping your clients avoid that scramble. Right? We want to think about how we are helping them be more proactive and achieve their goals, because that's what all of us are here to do, is help our clients get the results that they are looking for. So the test is if your product, program, or service makes their life easier, gets them results, and is something they want to have done or have started or made meaningful progress towards before the end of the year, then your solution for them is get locked into my calendar now so that you're not scrambling in September. That's a gift to them. That's not a hard sales pitch. I have practiced this myself with the CEO Collective and with other programs that I have. I will often open a, uh, early enrollment months ahead of a cohort actually kicking off. And I do this because my clients are, uh, like me, they are big busy, they have busy lives, and their calendars get filled fast. One of the hardest things is making time for a program like the CEO Collective. And this allows them the Runway. They need to block out time for the work they're about to do with me before their calendar is completely filled up. This also lets them take a little bit longer with all of their onboarding. And this is actually a bonus for them. For many of us, just the onboarding work, like the prep work, before they get started with the real work they've signed up for. That can be a lot, right? That can require a lot of time and energy. But when we pre sell the CEO Collective for fall, then people have more time to get all that onboarding work done to Send it over to me. I can take my time getting all of the strategy built out for them so that they can walk into their first CEO retreat in September feeling ready and not feeling like they've just scrambled through the first month headed into the fall. So what do you need to do? How do you position this? How do you talk about this to your clients? I keep it pretty simple and straightforward, honestly. I like to be really clear and honest with my clients. Hey, I know that summer is a season, you are taking some downtime, and it doesn't feel like the right time to get something started. And I also know that you want to have this done by the end of the year. You wanted to start this by the end of the year. You want to go into fall already with your game plan ready to go. So you tell them now. Don't wait to get on the calendar. Don't wait to start. The time to book is now, so the work is ready to go when you need it. Get on the calendar now so that you can plug everything in well in advance, especially if you are a service provider. And let's say there's something that they're trying to accomplish before the end of the year. Um, I will often hear people who say, like, they want to have a new branding photo shoot done by the end of the year. Well, guess when photographers are busiest, it's gonna be September and October. If you want that done by the end of the year, you better get on their calendar now. If you're saying you want a new website or a new brand or, or copywriting for a big program that you're planning to launch, you gotta get in the calendar in advance. Cause that work takes time. And sometimes it can take months for somebody to go through an entire rebranding process or website development process. So you wanna let them know how long that process takes, how much time it really takes, and encourage them to get it in their calendar now. Instead of waiting until they're already in the season, their calendar's already getting full, and now they're trying to add that project on top of everything else. Okay, so keep it simple. You can literally keep it that simple. So what happens once somebody says yes? Then this is the next step. This is the key to this actually working. What happens after they say yes? What happens after they send, uh, in the deposit and have signed a contract? And again, until they've sent a deposit and signed a contract, it is not real. We don't count that as a sale until those two things have happened. The next step is they get started with onboarding. Now, this should be a process you already have in place. For every single product, program or service you have, you should have some sort of onboarding process for that client. And I find this is especially important when you are booking things out in advance because people want to know that they just made a smart investment in hiring you and working with you. So you want to go ahead and send them what they need to prepare for the engagement. It doesn't matter if the engagement isn't happening for two or three or four months. You want to go ahead and get them the prep work now, not the week before they start. When they're scrambling because September is crazy busy and they're trying to juggle a new school year and a new schedule and all the new things, you get it to them. Now, once they've said yes, deposit has been paid, contract has been signed, the start date is locked in. You let them know exactly what the timeline is going to look like. Here's your start date, here is what you need to do before that date, here is what I will do before that date, and here is when I will check in with you next. You want to make sure that they know that there's another check in that's going to happen before they start. You don't have to check in with them nonstop all summer long, but it's nice to kind of pop in and give them a reminder to make sure all their prep work or all their onboarding has been completed before the actual start date. Especially if you need that in order to make sure you can start on time. A clear timeline is what makes people more comfortable paying now and starting later. It's what lets them know that you have a process. You're a professional, you, you're gonna handle everything for them and make sure they have exactly what they need to make this a successful engagement. If you need homework or prep for them, have it built already, okay? Have a system in place so that you can send it immediately. This is also where the pre sell becomes a gift to clients. And I think this is just so true for deeper level work that requires some thinking time. When they sign up for working with you well in advance, then they get a little extra time to think through everything. And sometimes that can be really hard to do in a normal busy season. So quick pause because this is exactly where pre selling your fall lives or dies. It's the system pulling off one pre sale with a scramble of emails and a deposit link doable, making it something you can run every summer without Reinventing it. Each and every time that's a different thing. And that is what we teach here at the CEO Collective. It's what we encourage you to do when you build out your client growth engine, the repeatable system underneath your marketing, your sales and your client experience. So pre selling becomes something your business just does not. A heroic effort to bring cash flow in when you desperately need it. We want you to start thinking like a proactive CEO, like a strategic CEO. That's what this bundle, the On Demand CEO Retreat and the client growth engine help you build. We are currently offering the On Demand CEO retreat and the client growth engine at the lowest price it is going to be and the price is going up. So if you want to get started and have more strategy underneath your business, have a clearer game plan of how you're going to approach Q3 in your business. We would love, love, love to support you. Okay, now let's talk about how simple the outreach can be because this is where you can really overcomplicate it. I know this is where a lot of people want to overcomplicate it. The good news is you can make this incredibly simple. So simple you don't even need a sales page if you don't already have one. You can run the entire pre sell with a handful of emails and a way for people to book the consult with you or put down a deposit on your calendar. The core message that you're sending to your audiences. I have a few spots opening in September and October. If you want XYZ to be completed by the end of the year, here's how to get on the calendar now so that you don't have to stress about it while you're relaxing during the summer. Some variation of that. Keep it simple. A few clear emails. You're describing what it is that you are offering the service. You're explaining what the results are, what, what the benefits are, how it works, what the timeline is. Maybe you're sharing some case studies and emails and then you share a booking link and once they have that consult, you send them the deposit and uh, link to the fill out the deposit link to send the deposit and fill out the contract. Um, or you know, maybe they're just going directly to a page to pay immediately and you don't have a consult process depends on how you work that. Now who do you send it to? You don't necessarily want to send it to your whole audience at the same time, especially if you are just looking to pre sell a few spots. Um, you don't have to send it to everybody. Maybe this isn't an offer you run all the time. I will often pre sell a, um, one on one C.E.O. uh, strategy intensives. And that doesn't go to my whole audience. Often I can pre sell that by uh, making a curated list out of my audience. And here's what that means. The first thing I do whenever I'm doing a pre sale like this or I'm trying to sell something that is really for a small segment of my audience, I will start with people who are the hottest clients. What do I mean by that? I mean people who've already worked with me, my past clients, my current clients. Those people are always going to get first dibs on any opportunity to work with me. That is not like a public facing opportunity. So those are the first people I'm going to reach out to. And often I will send personal invitations to those people. I will even sit down and record personal video invitations letting them know, hey, this is what I have available. I would love to work with you in this. Here's why I would love to work with you. I know you are working on this, that and the other. Um, if you want to learn more, here's the link to get all of the details and let me know if this is something you would be interested in for the fall. So I will actually send out highly personalized messages to a lot of people. Does it take a little extra time? Yes, for me. Because if I'm talking about like the one on one CEO strategy intensive I offer, that's a high ticket offer. So I will take the time to send personal invitations. Once I've sent out to my hottest list of past and current clients, then I will expand out to the next warmest layer of clients. And that is people who I've probably already talked to in some way. I have more familiarity with them. I know them, they know me. And I know that this is something they would probably be interested in. But maybe they haven't worked with me before. Maybe we have had a conversation, maybe we had a sales call and they weren't quite ready yet. They're still interested in working with me in some way. And uh, maybe I just need to make the right offer. The last one wasn't the perfect fit. So I will again send out personal invitations. Then I will expand a little bit more. So you can see I'm going from my hottest list of potential yeses, expanding out from the hottest to the warmest. Then I expand out a little bit further. Then I'm going to send it to my email list. I'm going to send it to my email list. Those are really my insiders. Those are the people who are usually the most interested in learning about working with me because they've taken the additional step of hearing from me via email. I will go to them and then I will finally go out to social. If you hear about something on social, it's either a big public facing launch, um, or yeah, I haven't filled a higher touch thing. Um, usually I like to focus on who is the warmest all the way to the coolest. And that allows me to send out a group of invitations. Like I'll go to my hottest people over a few days. If none of them respond or you know, I still have some spots left, then I'll go to the next layer and then I'll go to the next layer. The people who already trust you are the most likely to book. And that early momentum makes the rest a little bit easier. One of the things that you can often do is say, hey, you're on the hot list right now. You're the first one to hear about this. I've only got five spots available and as of right now, I've only sent this out to 25 people. Next week I'm going to send it out to my larger list of clients, that is 350 people. You can use that also as a way as you're expanding from hotter to colder to say, oh, I already invited my past clients to this. I filled three out of the five spots, I've got two left. And that's why the rest of my audience is hearing about it. So you can think about that as a way to take this from just a couple blasts to everybody to really tightening it up. The more you can personalize the pre sell, especially if this is a higher ticket offer, like a four figure offer, five figure offer, the more you can personalize the invitation, the more likely they are to actually be interested. Right. Um, and usually that's what really works for this is when we're talking about your higher end work. This isn't pre selling for like a course, that's a couple hundred dollars. There's no need to really pre sell that. We're talking about things that are going to be more intensive, more time consuming, higher commitment from the clients and higher commitment from you to deliver the product, program or service. So I hope this was helpful for you. I've talked through this with a couple of my clients. I've already seen them start to pre sell everything from their highest ticket One on one offers to group coaching programs that have a start date in the fall. I've seen them do this to offer services that they're going to start in the fall. I've seen them use this for retreats, um, or workshops, things that people need to block out in advance. Keep in mind that this move doesn't have to be complicated. It just doesn't have to be complicated. Y' all make a list of your dream invitations, your past clients, your current clients, the handful of people that you have communicated with that you know are high interest in working with you. And you know that they had wanted to get started or they'd wanted to tackle this before the year is over. Send them a personalized invitation, not an email blast. A personalized invitation. Is this still a goal for you to complete this year? I'm booking now for people who need it by Q4. I'm, um, booking now for people who are wanting to get this accomplished before the end of the year. And that could be the whole thing. Few emails to people closest to you, a way to book, a way to get a deposit, a way to sign the contract. You could have this running by next week. So go, uh, ahead and try this out. I want to hear from you. How is this landing? Have you ever done anything like this for your business? I find that this is one of those simple things that when you position this and really think of this as I'm, um, being of service, I'm helping my clients block time for something that's high priority for them well in advance so that they have time to do it justice. I'm helping them avoid their own September scramble. I'm helping them make this a priority while they can still enjoy this season. It's such a win, win. So next Thursday is the last episode in this series, and it's the proof that all of this can work. I am, um, in Italy with my family for a month. In fact, I'm there right now. I'm recording this well in advance. I'm sitting in Richmond, Virginia, as I'm recording this. But we have a month in Italy, almost a month in Italy with my family this summer. And I'm going to tie this whole series up with a bow by sharing how I was able to keep the entire engine running while I am, um, in Italy with my family. It's practical and magic at the same time. I can't wait to dive into it. I think you're going to get so much out of that episode, too. All right, I'll see you then.