Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones

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Flip the Funnel for Your Personal Life

As I wrote this book, I kept on thinking about how a flipped-funnel mentality related to various industries, departments, processes, and consumer behavior. In Chapter 9, I showed how flipping the funnel can be equally effective for employees as well as customers.

But is this theory relevant to our personal lives as well? Perhaps it was the inspirational message of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and its transformative impact on people’s personal lives that made me wonder whether a flipped-funnel approach could work for individuals as well. I came up with the following theories about how this book’s central themes can translate from our professional lives to our personal lives.

On one level, it’s about balance. It’s about how we, too, operate at the wrong end of the 80:20 rule, and how it adversely affects our lives—either directly (through bad choices) or indirectly (based on the opportunity costs of not doing something more valuable).

In 2009, I lost 50 pounds. I flipped a funnel in terms of how I approached food. I used to live to eat; now I eat to live. Or perhaps I should say that I eat better to live longer. I turned the restrictive and unpleasant notion of dieting on its head and approached my shift as a lifestyle change.

When I existed at the wide end of the funnel, my life was a free-for-all. Everything went: no restrictions, boundaries, or framework. The end result at the narrow end of the funnel was probably proportionate ...