🚪 It's a one way door

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Hey Reader,

What if we made the email shorter?

Here's 3/5s of the email you got last week.

Messy Musings

One of my favorite decision making frameworks comes from amazon and it's about 2 types of doors:

One way doors (decisions) lock after you go through and there's no way to go back
Two way doors (decisions) are just as easy to go back through if you don't like what's on the other side once you go through them

Most people view the majority of decisions as "one way doors" where they want to be super prepared to make a decision, agonizing over it for days, weeks, or even years.

What amazon found is that most decisions are "two way doors" and it's actually quicker in the long run to make the decisions as quickly as possible so that you can go "thru the door" and then evaluate if you "like it" based on what's on the other side.

yea... that's really conceptual

Jo and I go on walks most days, and in the mid west right now it's kinda a roll of the dice what the weather is outside. I could spend 10 minutes at my desk looking up the weather, looking at the radar, doing the mental math on the humidity to determine if 60 degrees today is sweater or shorts weather... or I can just step out the front door and know in 10 seconds then come back in and dress for the walk.

This week we're treating the email format as a two way door - you've seen us evolve the format of these emails over the months. And we're about to try some more:

We're removing the Breakroom & Resources sections - in theory they were ways for us to convert people & give extra resources. And we could have done a ton of planning, but we chose to just try them out for a few months - and they got low or no clicks most weeks, which we're inferring that people didn't want them so we're removing them.
We launched the 80 ideas as a lead magnet email sequence - and we like the section, but we've been feeling (and hearing) fatigue on multi email welcome sequences, so we're retooling it as a PDF and rounding up to a nice 100 ideas by adding a Vision category that we've been chatting a lot with people about recently

Is this the "final form" of our email? - Nope

Cause it's all a two way door, except for deleting subs - that's a 1 way...

This Week's Needle Mover

Use "Attract or Repel" Language: Filter your audience using highly specific "attract or repel" language. If someone has to ask what it means, they aren't your niche.

"That thang got a hemi"

If you watched much tv in the 2017(?) time period you probably saw an ad campaign for Dodge Ram tucks all about "hemies"(?).

If you have no idea what that means, you weren't the clientele they were targeting, on purpose.

One of the benefits of getting clear on the niche that you can drive outsized results for is the ability to use language that immediately attracts your dream clients, and steers away window shoppers that will fill your calendar with sales calls that (likely) go nowhere.

If you're a car salesman and have a customer walk into the dealership asking for a hemi, you immediately know that they're bought in on the expensive trucks, and now you're just talking about the trim packages.

Last month I updated copy for one of our coaching offers, and got this feedback from someone within a couple days:

For the right people they felt seen, for everyone else it felt like something they couldn't relate to at all.

What's language that you can use to simultaneously attract dream clients, and repel bad fit clients?

Get the other 79 Ways to be more profitable

This Week on the Podcast

What does it take to run a successful photo studio?

This week we sat down with Hannah of @alwaysflourishingphotography to talk about the business model of a photo studio, how she markets, and what she's thinking about as she's getting ready to open her second photo studio location.

"[S]ocial media is great, but also just in person connections, right and just putting a face to the brand and just sharing about what you do and how people can use this space."

"[D]on't just have your logo on the door, right? Like have more information because when you see a studio, you might just think, that's a photographer studio. Like I can't use it, you know?"

"I feel like I've already built a strong trust with my community of photographers, my community of business owners, just from building a personal brand that people feel like is authentic and that they can trust on socials."

One of my biggest takeaways is that while social media is part of running a photo studio, many of Hannah's customer come from building in personal relationships & showing up in her local community.