Book a client by Friday: Your bootstrappy action plan

Wanna know how to get a new client fast? If you need a client like *now*, the answer isn't a new funnel — it's getting scrappy, getting visible, and reminding people you exist.

In this episode, Jenna Harding shares the strategies she's used (and seen her clients use) to book clients quickly — some polished, some unconventional, all proven. From wedding charcuterie boards to a cold Craigslist pitch that turned into a $20,000 job, this one's full of real stories that will get you thinking differently about how clients actually find you.

In this episode, you'll hear tactics to get a new client fast (how about by Friday?) 

We'll cover:

• Why social media is the backbone of even your most "offline" client bookings — and what a college professor and an improv friend have to do with it
• The near-100% conversion strategy Jenna's client Cassie Torres used as a wedding photographer (hint: it involved wine, cheese, and her living room)
• How a simple congratulations email to a past client led directly to a new contract — with zero pitching
• The Craigslist approach that landed a $20,000 client 
• Where to look online for people who are actively searching for someone like you right now
• Why re-engaging past clients is the easiest sell you're not making 
• What Jenna's Booked Out Offers clients brainstormed on their last call to get hired fast

The takeaway:

The fastest path to getting a new client isn't complicated — it's a reach-out to someone who already knows you, likes you, and just forgot to call. Your network is warmer than you think. Go remind them what you do.

🎓 Magic Marketing Machine — Jenna's signature program for getting clients from Instagram in minutes a day www.magicmarketingmachine.com

Cassie: https://www.instagram.com/cassietorresct/

Strategic Stories $10 Mini Course: https://jennaharding.com/strategic-stories

🎉 Get clients from Instagram inside Magic Marketing Machine! www.magicmarketingmachine.com

✨Watch a FREE masterclass called “How To Get Clients From Instagram (without wasting hours glued to your phone)"

https://parkdale-republic.lpages.co/evergreen-webinar-registration

Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

🎉 Get clients from Instagram! Tap here to work with Jenna Harding  inside Magic Marketing Machine!

https://www.magicmarketingmachine.com

✨Tap here to watch a FREE masterclass on “How To Get Clients From Instagram (without wasting hours glued to your phone)"

https://parkdale-republic.lpages.co/evergreen-webinar-registration/

Tap here to get your free Posts That Sell Template (This caption got us 10 sales calls in 3 hours)

https://parkdale-republic.lpages.co/10-sales-calls-new

Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

Transcript

Jenna Harding (00:00)
In 2023, when I was planning my wedding, I went to a wedding show, one of those big shows that has all the different vendors for everything you need. And at that point, I had my florist, I had my space. There was just a few more things on my list of things I needed for the wedding, and one was an officiant. So I walked around and I looked for officiants at this big wedding vendor event.

and I met this lovely lady named Colleen and I loved her right she had a peaceful energy and I liked the vibe of her signage and we started talking and it was pretty clear that this was gonna be the girl for me. And through,

chit chatting, she asked me what I did, which is help people get clients from their social media. And I can't turn it off. I just immediately start talking about that. If you give me an inch, I will take a mile and we will be revamping your entire business by the end of the conversation.

The point is I quickly became her client and she quickly became my client, buying my signature program, Magic Marketing even though she'd been in business for over 20 years, she was using social media for the very first time to bring in clients. Now, why am I telling you this?

because as much as I love an online business funnel and bringing clients on repeat from a low ticket digital offer, blah, blah, I also love a boot strappy way to bring in a new client. And sometimes when we need a new client, ASAP Pronto,

The best thing to do is get bootstrappy about it and decide you're going to book one by Friday. So Instagram is going to play a part in this, but also in this episode, I'm going to give you a bunch of ideas so we can all do you know this expression bootstrappy? It's like we can all just like pull up our put on our work boots, get out there and take all the action and just decide you're going to bring someone in,

decide you're gonna get hired this week. Are you with me?

logged into my old invoicing software and I was looking at my client list from 2019. So these are all people who hired me to be their social media manager. I had a bunch of retainer clients and as I was looking at them, I noticed something. I noticed most of them found me through social media, big surprise, but the other people who maybe came into me,

from a referral or who I knew from a past life or a past job, they still in a way came in from social media because it's not like I was seeing them every day. was because of my content that they knew what I was up.

to and it kept me top of mind for them. So for instance, one of my college professors hired me to run the social media for his new business, because you know, at that point it's 10 years after college, and he only knew that I did social media because of what he saw on social media. So even your family, your friends, your network, your old colleagues, social media is going to be the thing that tells them who you

how you can help them and how they can hire you. Actually, just today, I was looking through my Facebook stories, which I never look at those. And I saw an old face, someone I used to improvise with, lovely girl, Meredith, and she was saying, hey, does anybody have a room that they want a freshen up? They want a redesign because she's doing interior design. I didn't know that. I was like, yes.

I immediately messaged her, I was like, absolutely, we wanna put an addition on the house and my husband and I have no idea how it should look. So I messaged her right away, like, of course I will pay you for your interior design skills she lives on the other side of the country, I didn't know what she was up to. Thanks to social media, I do and it's an easy yes because I already know her and I already trust her. So.

Kind of two prongs to this. That's why I said social media is gonna be a part of this. It's gonna be a part of your bootstrappy strategy because it keeps you top of mind. It makes people remember what it is that you do. and even if you meet someone say networking or at an event, they're probably going to check out your website and your social media to see what you're all about. Especially if they're not ready to buy right in that moment. All right, let me tell you,

a really genius strategy one of my clients used that had almost a hundred percent conversion rate when she did this.

Her name is Cassie Torres. You can follow her on Instagram. I'll put her in the show notes. And she said this was years ago, but I had to include it because I just think it's so smart. So she was a wedding photographer. Her and her husband, think they were a duo, wedding photographers at the time. And they would invite brides-to-be to their house and give them charcuterie and wine and chit chat.

so that they could get to know them when they were deciding if they wanted to hire Cassie as their wedding photographer. And she said that almost every single person they had over for drinks would end up hiring her. One person she could remember didn't, and a few years later called her to do a boudoir photo shoot. So it's practically 100 % conversion rate.

And part of why I think that strategy worked is because your brides need to feel comfortable with you. They need to actually get along with you, wanna spend a 14 hour day with you, all of So the customer has a great time at this little wine and cheese schmooze. They get to know Cassie, they immediately love her and then they work with her. I thought that was the smartest little real life funnel.

Cassie is one of my clients inside Magic Marketing Machine. That's my program that helps service-based business owners get clients from Instagram and run your account in just a few minutes a day.

program right now called Booked Out Offers, and it is a level up from Magic Marketing Machine. So it's only open to people who have taken MMM, and the goal is that in a 12 week accelerator, we sell,

out your offer. So we start by figuring out what the capacity for your offer is. There's a lot of surprises there. A lot of people don't realize their actual capacity. And then from there, we put all the wheels in motion so that we can hit capacity with it at this point by July 1st. So by summertime. So last week in our booked out offers call,

We were having a lot of fun doing this brainstorm. Like what can you do to book a client right now?

Another one I'll share that booked me a client right away and is kind of bootstrappy and also unexpected. So I was reading Book Yourself Solid. This is years ago as well, which is a great book. I highly recommend

One of the things recommended in that book is to do weekly outreach to your network. I think he says send five emails a week or five emails a day. I don't know, but just starting to really get your name in front of people and remind people that you exist because sometimes that's actually all it takes. And sending out thank you notes.

helps nurture your relationship with someone, and it feels good, and they feel good. There's a bunch of reasons why it's a positive experiment to just start reaching out to all sorts of people from your past. Especially if you're like me and you have an eclectic past with lots of different niche communities. Anyway, I reached out to a past client while I was reading this book because I'd heard she was pregnant, and I reached out to congratulate her, and the email thread went something like this.

Hey, just popping by because I heard you're having a baby. Congratulations. Hope to talk to you soon. And her response was something to the effect of, yes, thank you so much. Also, I have a new web series. We need a social media manager. Are you available? It was honestly that easy. Just putting yourself in front of somebody and I mean, I feel like I'm.

repeating myself now, but reminding them what it is you do and that you are the best, like, and that you are awesome and that they should want to work with

If you want to do this brainstorm exercise yourself, another thing you can think about is how you have hired someone. Maybe you don't have a quirky Craigslist story on how you booked a job. Oh wait, I didn't tell you my Craigslist story. Oh, my Craigslist story is this is how I booked a $20,000 job doing this.

I went onto Craigslist and I looked for people who were hiring social media managers and then pitched them myself, like as a freelancer. I think most of the people were looking at it like they needed to bring someone on as a job. And I was just like, Hey, I do this freelance. Can I help you? And I got a client and it was like a couple blocks away from my house. this was at the time when I actually had to travel to my clients and take their photos and take their videos and all of that. And yeah, it ended up being hugely lucrative for me at the time. Awesome.

Thanks to Craigslist. So you might not have a quirky Craigslist story, but can you think of ways that you have hired someone and where you found them? I live in a tiny little town and actually it's barely even a town, so I regularly find people on Facebook. Like I'll ask my local Facebook group, does anybody recommend a stump grinder?

or like I said, we're building this edition. And so of course I went to Facebook and looked at my community to see if anybody recommended someone to do builds.

My neighborhood has a community bulletin board and I will read all the events on the bulletin board.

if you're on threads, it's so common on threads for people to post about what they're looking for and then they just get completely bombarded by service providers offering their services. Or if you're lucky, someone will suggest you, recommend you to the thread.

and then you can follow up and that always makes you look good because it's you being recommended by someone else instead of pitching yourself. So posting on threads about what you do or looking through threads for people who are looking for someone like you.

I challenged my booked out offers clients to all reach out to one past client to offer them a new package.

I just posted about this on Instagram leading up to mother's day. I got an email from the florist that I ordered flowers for, for my mom last year and the subject line said flowers for Anna Marie, which is my mom's name. So of course the subject line caught my eye and they were like, Hey, mother's day is coming up. you want to get your mom flowers again? Or do you want to get

Anna Marie flowers again. I'm like, heck yes I do. That is so smart of you to remind me that I bought flowers this time last year. Heck yes. Go back to those past happy clients. It's going to be the easiest sell.

man, I've got these ideas for days. We did a really huge strategic stories push last December. Strategic stories is my $10 mini course that helps you, well, funny bridge the gap between your content and your clients actually buying something by knowing what to post on your stories every day for a work week. And then at the end of the week you sell and it's this $10 mini offer. didn't discount it.

I didn't give anything extra, I just did a week long email only push for it last December leading up to the end of the year. And I figured not a lot of people are selling between Christmas and New Year's because most people sell, sell before that. so I figured, inboxes are probably pretty empty. Why don't I sell people this $10 offer so they have content that they can whip up quickly.

And that did so well, not discounting it, not giving any other reason except for reminding people that the offer exists and like encouraging them to buy it through maybe five emails.

Get bootstrappy, invent stuff, come up with ideas, reach out to people. I feel like we get so obsessed with scaling and funnels and hey, I have a job because you want a funnel.

that works and like a pipeline bringing people in from Instagram. But sometimes you need a client by Friday And I hope this episode has inspired you and given you 10 action steps of how you could go out there and book one and make it happen. We are go getters, you and me. We take

Action, we get what we want, we build this business.

All right, that's all from me. I'll see you next Monday. We're gonna talk about how to get specifically local clients, because I know I have a lot of people listening, a of business owners who want that local audience. So we're gonna talk about how to get local clients and get local attention to your Instagram specifically. Global reach equals local leads. That's your teaser. All right, we'll see you then.