Hey Reader,

Do you know how to put a Jeep wrangler into 4 wheel drive, to go over a "foot tall" rock?

Yea we didn't either.

~4.5 years ago we were in Sedona doing a photo shoot for a dietitian who had rented a Jeep for her photo shoot.

We were closing in on the end of her photoshoot, and daylight, and the last thing on the shot list was about 100 yards into an offroading trail. Only problem we realized after we got to the trail... there was this foot tall rock ledge all the way across the road right at the entrance to the trail.

Very clearly the offroading trail went over it because there were tire marks on the rock and continuing on the other side.

We could even see the pull out we wanted use... and we were in our YouTuber era where we were vlogging (sigh that was a fun 4 month side quest)

Clearly we figured out how to cross the rock, only almost bottoming out the stock rental Jeep...

But why would they make the road go over a massive rock right at the beginning?

It turns out it's incredibly intentional - that rock was a filter.

If you put the most demanding obstacle of the whole trail within feet of the parking lot, then no one can take a minivan 2 hours down an off-roading trail and get majorly stuck in a place that's really hard for a wrecker to come an pull them out. Tow trucks can instead pull them out from the parking lot when they get stuck on the obstacle trying to start the trail.

And it turns out this isn't just done in off-roading:

• In mountain biking this type of thing is called a "squirrel catcher" to prevent 'squirrely riders' from attempting a trail too advanced for them.
• In caving, a "squeeze box" is something they have at the entrance to caves to make sure you can fit through the tightest spaces in the cave before you go deep underground and get stuck
• Airlines have a box before the gate to put your carryon in before getting on the airline and realizing your bag doesn't fit in the overhead bin
• Theme park rides have height checks before you even enter the line and wait for an hour just to learn your kid is too short to actually ride the ride safely

What if we applied all those types of "filters" to your business?

Do you have clients getting stuck deep into your projects and you waste a ton of time "rescuing" them?

Do you say yes to 'squirrely' clients who's results crash & burn cause your offer is too advanced for them to take advantage of most of what you do?

Do you let people bring more baggage into your projects that doesn't fit 'in scope' and now it's somehow your problem?

Could you use a better sign at the entrance of your inquiry process so that people won't get annoyed learning they're not a good fit after going through multiple steps of your sales process?

Pre-qualifing is an after thought for most people

For physical services the filters tend to be common sense: a diesel mechanic can fairly easily turn away someone that shows up with an electric vehicle... because sure, they're still a mechanic, and mechanics work on vehicles... and they could probably help. But they specialize in diesel engines and people understand that.

For creative services it's not always as obvious to people - when we were "branding photographers" we would sometimes get asked if we did the brand design as well, or if we would create the posts for people to market their business, or coach them... okay so we did say yes to that last one 🤷‍♂️

All of these were just signs that people didn't fully understand what they were buying. And fairly quickly questions like that would lead to follow up questions from us to "filter" if they were actually a good fit.

For all of these filter examples - it's only the advanced, premium, or expert versions that have the more strict filters.

• Anyone can drive on a regular dirt road - but a well known off-roading trail in Sedona requires special equipment (a capable off-road vehicle) to not get stuck.
• Anyone can ride a bicycle - but an advanced mountain biking trail requires a level of skill to not get hurt.
• Anyone "can" travel with as much luggage as they want on a private jet - but to have affordable flights we collectively agree to luggage that fits in standardized bins.

As you're an expert at the service that you provide, whether you like it or not there are certain things that determine if you're able to deliver results for someone or not.

Building in up-front filters are courteous ways of saving everyone time (and preventing major headaches for yourself).

Where to start with your filter?

Our favorite is a simple question: "what has to be true for someone to see my promised result?"

It's easy to default to simple demographics like "millennial", "small business owner", or "women", but try to get more specific. Here's a couple of ways we've gotten more specific on our filters:

• Type of business: Service - generally online or creative in nature
• Their customers: Other businesses (B2B)
• How they make money: A signature DFY offer with supporting offers built around that (even if they don't do much DFY work, it's still their authority)
• Dreams: closer to 10x than 2x - or they want to play big, not just a little more of the same

We've honed in on this because we've learned that our knowledge, proprietary frameworks, & experience can return the highest ROI when these things are true - so we started focusing on those things while opening up the filter on other things like gender, age, years in business, industry, team size, etc that didn't have a big effect on how much of an impact we could have.

What needs to be true for you?

No really I'd like to hear - hit reply!

See you next week,

Lyndon

Ps, did those bullet points sound like you? Jo just refreshed our coaching guide, if you're nosy curious, you can see it here.