Too Many Bad Guys

It seems like there's an easy fix for everything these days. 

If you believe my Facebook feed, and increasingly the InMail invitations in my LinkIn account, I'm only two weeks away from writing a book and making $200,000 a year. I'm one community meeting away from being stacked with fractional CMO work. And mere days from a calendar full of ideal prospect bookings for my consulting business.

If Jesus was the sheriff and I was the priest
If my lady was an heiress and my Mama was a thief
And Papa rode shotgun on the Fargo line

There's still too many bad boys

Tryin' to work the same line

                - "If I Was A Priest", Bruce Springsteen

It feels like everyone's working the same line these days. So many people have discovered the secret -- this method, that method. How am I to trust someone who claims to have just had a $50M exit and yet has a virtual background with a white couch and minimalist paintings on the wall? It comes across like a Jesus avatar with a glitch in the matrix.

The formula is the same. The person reaching out is the founder of the company.  They've taken a close look at my business (they've even [had a bot] personally scrape my homepage and embed it in their generic voiceover). They've concluded that I'm the ideal candidate for their community or program. They invite me to schedule time on their calendar for a FREE CONSULTATION, which invariably takes me to a calendar in someone else's name -- apparently a qualified colleague and often an experienced graduate of the same program they're trying to recruit me into.

I go through with these calls occasionally under the guise of research, but often it's just to satisfy my curiosity.

There's a formula to the calls: Yes! I'm willing to invest thousands of dollars in my own success; Yes! I'm ready to start right away manifesting the future I deserve. Yes! Absolutely I agree to follow their program by the letter because it works! And it has worked for thousands of other authors, fractional executives, and consultants.

I recall an anecdote -- maybe in one of the books by Malcom Gladwell or Dan Ariely -- where you can get people to say yes to a big thing, if you first ask them for some smaller things. The example given is political canvassing: Do you support my candidate? Yes. Can I give you a small sign for your living room window? Yes. Can I give you a sign for your lawn? Yes.

Presumably at some point there's a limit, though there's at least one person in my neighborhood who's leveled up to a billboard sized endorsement.  

Another anecdote I remember -- perhaps from the same author, perhaps not -- where just including the word "because" increases the likelihood of getting to yes. Even if the reason isn't really a reason. "May I jump ahead of you in line because I'd like to go ahead of you in line" gets more to agree than simply "May I jump ahead of you in line."

Is everyone following this same playbook? How has this gotten so popular? I guess maybe because...it must work?

Not all these are "bad boys" as Bruce might call them. I've actually had some legitimate businesses at the other end of some version of this. But it all seems so -- inauthentic. It seems manipulative. Most of the time, the sales rep, uh er, "business consultant" on the other end of the line seems to be, well, lying.

Where'd all the good people go?