A couple of years ago in the fall, we started having this problem with flies in our house. It had gotten cold outside and they all wanted to come in where it was warm.
There’s this certain light in the foyer that for some reason they liked to swarm around.
We tried swatting them but they came back. Every day there would be more and more.
My competitive alpha male lizard brain kicked in. So I got my Shop Vac out of the garage and started going after them. “Maybe if I just vacuum them all up, I can get rid of them with brute force.”
I’d walk in the room in the morning and they’d be sitting there the next morning, more of ’em.
We bought fly traps but more kept coming.
Then we bought fly paper and stuck it up all over the house. My wife started getting headaches and I realized, uh, all that flypaper is toxic and probably NOT GOOD for anybody.
As embarrassing as it is to admit this, it wasn’t until this point that I finally said to myself, “Maybe I am only trying to solve this problem at a surface level. What if I got to the ROOT of this problem?”
“So… where are all these flies coming from anyway?”
The next day, Laura found it.
There was a rotting bag of potatoes in the back of the pantry, underneath something where nobody had bothered to look.
Every day that stinkin’ bag of potatoes was breeding more flies.
My friend, I could have had 100 fly strips, 3 shop vacs and armed my wife and kids with fly swatters, and the flies would have kept coming back until that bag of potatoes turned to dust.
We threw away the potatoes and the flies were all gone in 2 days.
So my question for you is:
WHAT SIMPLE, STUPID PROBLEM ARE YOU TRYING TO BAND-AID UP WITH FLYSWATTERS, SHOP VACS AND POISON, THAT WOULD GO AWAY BY THROWING AWAY A ROTTEN BAG OF POTATOES?
Think about it.
Perry Marshall
Tell me your bag o’ potatoes story below in the comments.
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About the Author
Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.
He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.
10 Comments on “Flies, Fly Strips & the Frustrations of Band-Aids”
I’m thinking, flies for me would be great! Just learning, teaching myself new tricks for my new after hours business. And at this point, I’m thinking that flies could teach me a lot, (maybe the hard way but…) I do not believe in band-aiding problems though, it will always come back to bite you in the backside.
Our first house as newlyweds was a tiny, COLD bungalow. We saved money for years to replace the windows. After plunking $5000 into new windows, we were still cold! Turns out, the weatherstripping on the back door was missing.
Ouch!
I used this story for an article, myself: https://studyskills.com/students/do-i-need-study-skills/study-skills-resolve-50-of-caseloads-according-to-school-psychologists/
I spend a lot of my time and effort making compost. It is time well spent, but these need not concern us here.
One thing I learned was that flies congregate where stuff is rotting. I took some rather fly-infested horse manure and put it on my compost heap. Within an hour the flies had gone! They simply did not like the conditions in the heap – warm, moist, active.
On the other hand, the beneficial creatures abound. They make the compost better.
Whenever I have flies around, I know that something is wrong with the compost or that something is rotting. The real alchemy is that there are so many flies for so small an amount of rot!!
From the bathroom came a blood curdling yell: “THESE ARE MY GOOD TOWELS… WHY ARE YOU WIPING YOUR SHOES ON MY TOWELS!”
Hmmm, curious.
I wandered in to find a scowling spouse standing over the hamper holding one of her finest towels with a few big streaks of mud on it. “These are my best towels why would you do this?”
“I didn’t,” said I. “Well, I certainly didn’t do this, so you must have!” said she.
Thinking out loud I said: “Well… if I didn’t do this and you didn’t do this, then someone else did.”
I immediately got goosebumps, and a chill between my shoulder blades.
I walked over to the bathroom window – it was unlocked. Not good. I slid it open and looked down at the ground below to see muddy footprints and streaks of mud going up the wall.
Long story short my best guess was that it was neighbor kids. The next morning I called the middle school to find out what time the school day was over. Later that day I came home from work a few hours early, parking my car the next block over.
So I am waiting behind the slider door in the kitchen, and right on time… 15 minutes after school was out, I hear the the bathroom window slide open.
As you can imagine…they were sooo busted. It was not a fun moment for any of us.
Again, long story short – there was a bonus: one year of free lawn mowing. This included the additional benefit of getting to remind them how it feels to have your home invaded – by friends and neighbors.
They were good kids and I wanted them to feel the heat long enough to make a lasting impression. Talking to one of them almost 10 years later he said that that was the most difficult thing he’d ever gone through. Which was funny because they only had to mow the lawn around 6 to 8 times total (it never occurred to them that the taller it gets the harder it is to mow).
The main thing was that they had to deal with me every time they mowed the lawn, and if I heard any grousing (every time) I would remind them how terrible my wife felt as a result of what they did and that this was their way of showing her that they were sorry.
I chose this course of action (mowing the lawn for a year) rather than informing the cops or having a confrontation with their parents, because I had recently read a study that showed that the only 1 to 1 correlation to criminal recidivism was age. If you were 19 or older when you got into big trouble with the law, you were likely to see it as a mistake. But if you were younger, you were likely to identify with your crime – seeing yourself as a thief, a thug, whatever… you were a criminal.
These were good kids who took a wrong turn, and I wanted that to stop with this incident. I figured that the longer they were compelled to interact with us, the less likely they were to remain clueless about the damage created by their little “adventure.”
No more rotten potatoes.
Great story. This reminds me of a story of how a guy dealt with an Internet troll who made some pretty scary threats:
http://www.traynorseye.com/2012/09/meeting-troll.html
I love you, Perry!
I had the same problem with a similar source. Until the rotting source is removed, there simply is no rest for the wary fly catchers!
I really wish I could be more pragmatic like you but find that my head is filled with too much mush and not enough fortitude.
Thanks for all your good tips. You are among my most fave teachers!
You’re right Perry. Some problem-child IS getting fired!
My wife and I have 4 nephews and nieces living with us in our home. The youngest is 20 and is expected to be an adult by getting a job and/or go to college. Well he doesn’t want to be bothered with these details of life. So he leaves in the morning before everyone else and is always mad in the evenings when we wonder what he did all day. Our family talks at least 5-10 hours a week about helping him. But he doesn’t want help, just left alone. So we are sending our “bag of potatoes” to someone in another state. We get some mental time back and he can “rot” in someone elses house.
Hi Perry,
I am like you in that I can’t stand the get-rich-quick mentality that some marketers offer unsuspecting entrepreneurs, but for me in more ways than one.
It’s not the part about naive people getting fleeced; I don’t like to see it and would never take part in it, so that leaves me in a smaller pool of people to approach with hair-brained ideas.
I was approached two weeks ago by a lady who had bought a turn-key system and wanted to hire someone to do the web video via Craigslist. I contacted her and told her that I’d be happy to do that (because that’s one of my services) and here is my rate, blah, blah, blah. I also do websites, blah, blah, blah.
She asked me if I could guarantee results. I told her that the system she bought is the one guaranteeing results. If it’s a proven system then it should work if executed well and I offered to help her with that as she said she was doing quite well with it.
This is one fly.
Some other flies are all the people who start a Google AdWords account and that first $100 doesn’t really yield much of anything.
That’s a bunch of flies to me. Nattering, annoying… They make me wish I could do more to just GET RID OF THEM by helping them make money.
Another fly is another customer that had hired me to get more conversions and improved her CTR from 2% to over 20% in some cases and overall above 10%. I tried to explain to her that her real problem was that for every 500 people who visit her site she only has one purchase and she needs to work on her site (which was off-limits for me to change). I did what I could to help her avoid tire-kickers by putting the dollar amount (not cheap) into the ad and it didn’t seem to deter too many people and so it was easy for me to conclude that it was the site. And it was easier for her to conclude that I didn’t do my job.
That’s another fly and I hate to admit to how many of these there are out there.
I don’t know if the solution to my fly problem is to take a course with you or not because my financial problems are too great to convince my wife to spend money we don’t have in hand or in credit so I don’t even suggest it. I figure I’ll land a big fish and then I can go. Last year I got a retainer of 10K but had to put most of that towards swelling bills.
I guess what I’d like to know is how can I ferret out the root of people’s problems and show them that I have done my job so that they can’t feel too comfortable blaming me. On one hand, I can knock the ball out of the park for people who have an audience or a following but it’s so much harder and often ends in failure for people who don’t have a following.
Should I try to educate them up front on what they can expect? Heck, I dunno. Your feedback is appreciated.
Educating people from scratch is missionary work and it’s super wasteful. You should have your own criteria for disqualifying potential clients such that it’s a genuine privilege to be taken on as a client by you. You need to decide “Joseph’s Rules” for engagement and filter everyone through those criteria. Move up the food chain a few steps.