Bone yard

My clients don’t know it, but I keep a Bone Yard for each of them.

….SAY WHAT?

If you’re already scratching your head, don’t worry. It’s not an actual yard of bones I use to spook them into booking more projects.

Let me explain.

My family are avid players of dominos. It’s a very serious game about connecting colorful tiles into “trains” on a playing table.

Each player chooses their hand of dominos at the start of the game, and the tiles that aren’t currently at play are divided into piles between each player called bone yards. (Crazy name for such an innocent game, right?)

On your turn, you get to play a domino by connecting it to the matching tail-end of another one on the table.

If you can’t play from your hand, you have to draw from the bone yard.

Trains can get complicated as the game goes on. The can make spirals, double back, or veer off to the other side of the table where you have to pass the domino over for another player to set it for you.

But what I love about the bone yard, the discarded dominos that weren’t chose to start the game, is that one draw from it can snatch your win from the jaws of defeat in the later rounds.

(I still remember the game I won against my brother with a draw from the bone yard. It was with a three-dot tile that hadn’t been seen since the second round. He still gripes about it when we start a new game.)

So, at the beginning of every new project I open two docs—the first draft doc, and my editing doc I name the Bone Yard.

The Bone Yard is for every word, every line, every idea I come up with during a project. If something gets cut from the first draft, it’s sent to the bone yard.

Nothing EVER gets deleted when I work with clients, because years of stomping my brother at dominos taught me to value every idea—even the ones put to the side in the beginning. It could always be used for the next project.

Like the trains on the table, marketing funnels and flywheels can get complicated.

When you’re out of ideas for new and interesting ways to sell in your business, you’ll want a bone yard in your back pocket.

Because you never know when you’ll draw a “three-dot tile” idea for your next campaign or marketing message.