This is a Cattle Chute.
Before these types of chutes were invented, Cattle were sent down a long straight line. It stressed the cattle because animals tend to like to go back to where they came from.
You can imagine what happens to stressed animals that are used for food. It’s not great.
One day a woman by the name of Temple Grandin (ridiculously awesome name) figured out that curved chutes and round crowd pens worked better because:
- As animals go around the curve, they think they are going back to where they came from
- The animals can not see people and other moving objects at the end of the chute
- It takes advantage of the natural circling behavior of cattle
I think this is a great way to look at marketing.
You create amazing content to get the right people into the Round Crowd Pen. Then you let them circle as long as they want. If they want to circle for a day that’s fine. If they want to circle for a week, that’s fine. If they want to circle for 9 months that’s fine.
But over time one of them will go down the chute and lead themselves to where they need to go. And all you need to focus on is getting more and more of the right people into the pen.
You can’t stress about when people will go down the chute. You know they’ll do it when they are ready. Some days it will be a lot. Other days it won’t be many.
But if you do things consistently, then you know over time the size of your pen will grow. Your sole focus is on the care of the people that enter your world.
Happy Neighbors.
There are old-school marketers that will go through this course and scoff at the things that I’m saying because they know better “tricks” to get people down the chute quicker. And I want people to move down the chute as well but at their own pace.
Now, there is a major fault to this approach and it’s one that I’ve done many times.
You Can’t Stop Gathering
There were many times when I would get an influx of money from people coming down the funnel and because of that, I would focus my time on them which I never saw as a bad thing. These people gave me money so it was important that I continued to cultivate the relationship.
But this was usually to the detriment of the people that were not in my world yet. I would stop gathering more people into my world. I would turn the off the switch.
As you can imagine this is a major problem when money stops coming in.
Let’s stick with the Cattle Chute analogy to make things easier.
To get the Cattle into the chute, you tempt them with amazing grass. The best grass in the world that you grow yourself. It’s important that you tend to this grass and keep it growing so it’s easier to move the cattle.
One day, you decide you need to spend less time on the grass and more time on the cattle in the pen. There are a lot in there and you want to see how you can get them to move down the chute.
Some cattle you’re able to move while others continue to go in circles. They aren’t ready and you don’t know when they will be. You’ve tried everything to move them but nothing works.
So you decide to do some work and get more cattle into the pen, but there is a problem.
You don’t have any more grass. You stopped growing it so the cows stopped coming. It’s going to take time to grow it again which means it’s going to take time to get more cattle into the pen.
You can’t stop getting content out into the world that brings people into your world. While it’s important to take care of those that do enter your world, you can’t see them as separate from those that haven’t yet.
Everything is connected together in a system. One piece is not more important than the next. If one piece is broken then the entire system is broken.
While this course doesn’t focus heavily on content outside of your email/site funnels, that doesn’t mean it is less important.
Time
You don’t get to airdrop a fully working Cattle Chute right onto your land. It takes time to build.
It also takes time to grow the grass and attract the cattle. Perspective is important here and it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that you’re building a system that will take time to grow.
But how long is too long?
Let’s find out.
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