From Unemployed to $10k in Month
Covid hit our business very hard. The decrease in Gross revenue was more than 80%.
Then a few days later the government banned to work filmmakers and event managers. In my worst nightmares, I never thought that my business can be shut down in one day.
This will be a story about me and my friend who lost their dream job in one day… Even it was running successfully for past 10 years.
Unused Fixed Capital
We together had over $100K Fixed capital that we can not use. Most of the capital contained gear for filming, stage, light, and sound for event organization. Due to restrictions.
And expenses were high, without any income to cover them.
Over government-subsidized only salaries, not rent, health care, and other huge expenses.
So we needed quickly to figure out how to get some clients on board to cover huge expanses.
Used to we had events with a budget from $5K — $20K per event, but in November of 2020, we got 0 events. Most of the money in our industry been make between November and next year’s February. And we were receiving calls about upcoming gigs to be canceled.
That made us panic.
What to do with all equipment?
To start to generate some cash flow we could rent out some of the gear for family parties. But the budgets for that kind of event were highly below $500.
So we needed to think bigger.
But… if everything is under lockdown… There isn't anything to do.
Let’s go Online!
That was our idea.
Let’s start to offer online events. As I’m a filmmaker I got a lot of video equipment, my friend had everything to make the event look professional — stage, light, and other stuff.
So … we decided to offer online event support for companies.
Offer our new product to our partners
First thing what we started to do was to reach out our partners that we were working for many years to offer them online event solution.
But the issue was that many agencies were going to bankruptcy. So there wasn’t any demand for our New Services.
What’s next? Where we can get some gigs?
We started to outreach different kinds of companies ourselves and decided to offer our Online Event Management Services by ourselves.
As we didn’t have any budget to buy ads we needed to figure out how to do it without any budget.
First thing. Google it.
And we did get tons of ideas. Like the door to door sales. Cold calling.
Door to door won’t be possible, due to most of the companies won’t accept guests because of restricitons.
And in general, we weren’t that kind of salespersons, we were more as performers, that these options weren’t for us.
Cold Emailing
Then we found that there is a cold emailing option.
In being for us it was a big no-no-no…
Because we didn’t want to spam people with our offers.
And it was unethical for us.
We decided to find another solution.
Actually, there wasn’t that many left. We started to do cold calls. And outreach some big companies via Facebook and Instagram.
But you know what. From Instagram and Facebook messaging, we got 7 replies.
We have passed your information to the responsible service. They will contact you.
And you know how many companies get back to us?
ZERO
So at this point, we needed a new strategy.
Beginning of December
And we still haven’t managed to get new gigs. So it was time to do Cold Email outreach.
After watching this guy explaining how to do it correctly we got a plan on how to execute without any budget.
Prospecting
The first and hardest thing to do was to “find best fitting” prospects.
We managed to find almost 2000 prospects. Most of them were CEO or Owners.
Then we created an e-mail sequence that contained 3 emails and lasted over 7 business days.
And after everything was in place… was time to start sending out emails.
As you see in the picture above we managed to get pretty decent open rates.
49.2% over three email sequence. Amazing!
Google says that on average marketers are able to maintain 18%. But we managed to almost triple the number.
17.3% response rate
This is the best part.
After reaching out to almost 2000 company owners, 280 of them replied. 70 of them were interested. 7 of them bought our services. Which resulted in $10K of gross revenue just for the month of December.
14 of 70 booked us for January 2020.