You are on the list. Here is what that actually means.
Roughly three emails a year. No newsletter, no sequence, nothing else. When one arrives, it will have dates in it.
First, ten seconds of housekeeping
There is a confirmation email in your inbox. Click the link in it.
I know exactly how that looks after a page that has told you three times this is not a newsletter. So here is precisely what it is. It is proof that the address works and that you were the one who typed it.
Until you click it, I cannot send to you at all. Which means when a window opens, the email with the dates in it does not arrive. That is the only reason it matters, and it is entirely in your interest rather than mine.
If it is not there, check your spam folder or whatever your company calls the place good email goes to die.
What happens next
- I open my calendar three times a year, in short windows. Outside a window there is genuinely nothing to book, which is why a list like this exists at all.
- Before each window opens, you get an email with the dates in it. That email goes out before the announcement, before the website updates, before LinkedIn. The people on this list choose first, and with a handful of dates spread across several months, choosing first is usually the whole difference between the week you need and the week that is left.
- Between those emails, you will not hear from me. That is the deal and I will keep it.
Why most people on a list like this never get a date
I would rather tell you now than let it happen to you.
The email arrives. The dates are there. And they cannot move.
Not because they changed their mind. Because a workshop needs an approval, an approval needs a business case, and a business case takes three weeks to assemble if you are starting from nothing. By the time it clears, the week they wanted has gone to somebody who was ready.
The people who get the date they wanted are almost never the ones who wanted it most. They are the ones who did the internal work before they needed to.
So here is the internal work
Three things. None of them involve me, none of them cost anything, and all three are done in an afternoon.
One. Find out who actually signs
Not who approves in principle. Who signs. In a lot of organizations those are different people, and the difference only becomes visible when you are in a hurry. Find out while you are not.
Two. Get one number
Pull your last fifty escalated contacts, then check how many of those same customers had already contacted you in the fourteen days before.
I have never run that exercise with a team and had the answer come back at zero. Whatever it is, it is the spine of any business case you will ever write about escalations, because it turns an argument into arithmetic.
Three. Know the number before you need it
Here is the Investment Guide. Look at it now, quietly, with nobody watching your face. Finding out the range six months early is free. Finding out during a window costs you the window.
Do those three and when my email lands you are deciding rather than starting.
This is not a newsletter, and I meant that
You will not start getting weekly emails because you joined this list. Nothing about that changes.
I do write every week, about difficult conversations and what actually moves an escalation rate, and some of the people on this list read it. But that is a separate decision and it should be yours to make rather than mine to assume. It lives here if you want it.
If you do not, nothing happens, and I will see you when a window opens.
And if it turns out you are readier than you thought
People join a waitlist because it feels like the low commitment option, and then realize about a week later that they already know what they want.
If that is you, the application is here and it takes about four minutes. Applying does not commit you to anything either. It just means I write to you personally instead of waiting for a window, and I will tell you honestly whether the timing you have in mind is realistic.
