The little app that helps me get done three times more than anyone else I know.

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Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to “Marketing in Your Car”.

Hey, everybody. I hope you have an awesome day today. I was at the office late last night working on some secret projects, but some cool stuff happened. One, for example – I think I’ve mentioned this before. I’ve been working on a book that is my first real book. I really going to get it published and try to do the whole “New York Times ‘Best Seller’” thing, but anyway, I needed somebody to write some blurbs and stuff for the book. I needed someone to write a “Forward” and that kind of stuff.

My dream person to write the Forward was Tony Robbins, because I know Tony, and so I came to him. –“Would you mind writing me a forward for my new book?” I was assuming he’d say, “No,” because he’s pretty dang busy, you know? He wrote me back and said, “Hey, I wish I could, but I’m in the middle of writing my own book, but if you want, I could write a blurb, a quote, to put on the book.” So I was like, “All right.” So he sent me a quote last night, and it was awesome.

I’m driving, so I don’t have it in front of me, but it was something about how – well, I don’t want to spoil the surprise. You guys will see it. It made me feel pretty good. I was excited. I’ve got a quote from Tony that’s going to be on the book, and then I still need a forward written. I think I’m going to get either Dan Kennedy or Bill Glaser for the forward. I need them both. Can you do two forwards? That would be pretty sweet.

Anyway, I’m super excited for the book. It’s almost done. I should have the rough draft all finished by this weekend, and then I’m heading out to a Mastermind meeting out in San Diego, and so I’m going to be proofreading it out there. It should be pretty awesome, so I’m excited for that, for today.

I want to share with you guys a tool. I don’t share enough tools with you guys, I don’t think, so maybe I’ll start doing more of this. There’re three or four tools that I use to run my entire business, and this one I’m going to share with you guys today is about the simplest, most dumb thing in the world. At first, honestly, I downloaded it as a joke, and then I started using it, and now I’d say I probably look at it thirty times a day. It’s one of my most important things ever.

The story behind it is that back when I first got my phone – actually that’s not true. I’d had my phone for a couple of years. One time I was looking for some kind of task management or to do list software, and there’re tons of them out there. Most of them are just lame, but there was this one that was called “Tomorrow”, and basically what it is, is this app on your phone. You have a “To Do” list, and you put in all of your to do’s, and then can see them all there. What you can do is, if you say, “I’m not going to get this done today,” you can click a little button, and it pushes it to tomorrow. That’s all the app does. It’s a to-do list, and then you can push things to tomorrow. I think the joke behind it is, “Oh, just push it off.” You can just slack off and keep pushing things until tomorrow.

I started using it on my phone for a while. I didn’t really use it a lot, but then one day, I don’t know what happened. I was getting ready to look for some to-do software, and I found that they actually have an online version as well that syncs with your phone and with your iPod and your iPad and with all of your devices, so I logged in there. It’s “Tomorrow dot D-O”. Tomorrow.do is the website. It’s free to use. I log in there, and I have my huge to-do list.

What’s cool about it is that in the past, I’d have to-do’s – I’d have a notepad of paper, and things just always slipped through the cracks for some reason. It always slipped through the cracks. I’d have a notepad of paper at my house, and one at the office, and one in my car. I’d have all of these papers everywhere, and it was hard to keep track of everything. Whereas now, with Tomorrow.do, it’s on my phone. It’s at my office. It’s on all of my computers. What’s cool is when I’m sitting there, like when I’m driving somewhere, and it’s like, “Oh crap, I need to do this thing,” I open up the app real quick and type it in, and, “Boom,” it’s saved.

Then what it does is, at midnight, everything that was on tomorrow’s, “Boom,” all gets shifted over to today, because now it’s today. If I’m up late at night, usually I’ll do it at night, if not, then first thing in the morning when I wake up. I’ll see all of my to-dos. Everything that is still in my queue for me to do, and then I just start going through and I just push everything until tomorrow that I know I’m not going to be able to do today. I push, push, push, push, push, and then all I have left a list of four or five things I need to do today, and it just feels awesome.

I go through it, and every time I get something done, I log back in, cross it off, and I can’t even tell you the feeling I get after I cross something off. It’s like the greatest thing in the world. Literally, for the last eighteen months or so, this little tool has been how I’ve been able to push forward and get things done and not have things slip through the cracks, and just keep cranking on things, and so, if you’re looking for a way to get more done and make sure nothing falls through the cracks, and also for me, it organizes my day. It shows me exactly what’s most important, but I don’t lose track of the stuff I still need to do. It’s my favorite thing in the world, and it’s free, so I highly, highly, highly recommend it. Just go to Tomorrow.do, log in and create an account, and download the app. I think the app’s just called “Tomorrow”, I believe, but if you can’t find the app, just go to the website and the website will link to the app as well, but it is awesome.

Anyway, I’m at the office today. I’m going to go in to the office, and the first thing I’m going to do is open Tomorrow.do, look at my tasks, shove everything off until tomorrow that I’m not going to get done today. Then I’m going to start busting out those things, and I’ll bet you I will accomplish more in the next four or five hours than you can do all day, because I’ve got this little tool. You guys, go try it out. You will love it. I’m at the office. I’m going to go have some fun. I will talk to you guys soon. Thanks for listening.

Last night I saw one of the most powerful uses of the “attractive character” ever. Let me show you how Lindsey Sterling used the “attractive character” to get her audience to fall in love with her.

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Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to “Marketing in Your Car”.

Hey, everyone. It’s early, and I’m heading to the gym, but it’s nice, because now that it’s summertime, it looks like noon at 6:30 in the morning. I love summer. I’m excited for it.

I wanted to share with you guys a really, super awesome experience. Last night, my wife and I had a chance to go to a Lindsey Stirling concert. If you don’t know who Lindsey Stirling is yet, go to YouTube and type in “Lindsey Stirling”, and look. There’re a couple of really good videos. One of them is of her playing violin and dancing in fire, and one’s her running through igloos. It's definitely worth watching.

She did a show up here in Boise in a really small venue called “The Knitting Factory”, where only about five or six hundred people could jam into this place. It’s standing room only. We went to it, and it was awesome. I’ve heard a couple of pretty cool things in my life, and this was one of the neatest experiences in entertainment I’ve ever seen. We were talking about it beforehand, the fact that, if you watch her, she plays the violin while she dances. It’s a really cool blend of talents. It’s just so different. She was on “America’s Got Talent” a bunch of years ago, and Pierce Morgan kicked her off [laughs], and all of this stuff, but she just kept going and going, and now she’s got this. I think this is her second tour, and she’s done really, really well. What’s interesting is, if you look at her, she’s really good at playing the violin. I’d say she’s an above-average violin player, and she’s a good dancer. I wouldn’t say she’s a great dancer. She’s a good dancer, but the fact that she blends those two together makes her unique and different, and literally, the show last night, I felt like was world-class. I can’t even say enough about how awesome it was.

It was interesting, though. There was one thing I wanted to mention, because I thought it was profound from a marketing standpoint. I don’t think many other people really caught it, but as you guys all know, I’m obsessed with this whole marketing thing. I’m looking at what people are doing and why they’re doing it and how they’re doing it and the reaction from the crowd and stuff like that. The one thing that she did that was super cool – she came out, and she played two or three songs, and everyone was going crazy. Then she needed to take a break really quickly to change outfits. She goes off the stage, and all of the sudden, behind, on the main stage, there’s a screen that’s got effects and all of these things happening. All of the sudden, this thing pops up, like a little movie, and it says, “I don’t think we’ve been officially introduced yet,” and then it shows Lindsey when she’s an infant, and it shows her as a toddler, and it shows her as a two-year-old, and a three-year-old, and then five, and six. It’s showing her throughout her whole life – these little video clips of her saying cute little things and doing stuff, and showing her dancing, and showing her practicing violin. All of her experience that got her to this point, basically, you saw in this little three-minute video, and literally, instantly, it went from everyone going there, thinking who she was and seeing her as a fan, all of the sudden, everyone saw her at a different level.

At the event last weekend, I talked a lot about the “attractive character”. I’m sure you guys, if you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you’ve heard me talk about that and the importance of it and what it does for your brand and for everything you’re doing. I would look at that video, and it was just like, “Man, look at how it changed everybody in this room. We all went from Lindsey Stirling and people who wanted to get out for the night to do an event to people who were fans. She did that all in a little three-minute video. It was not professionally done, but it brought out all of the elements of attractive character, and it was awesome.

I’m in the gym, but I want to keep talking about this, so I’m going to pause it, and hopefully when I come back out to the car, my recorder won’t have shut off. I’m going to pause this, and I’ll be back in forty-five minutes.

All right, I am back. That was a hard workout [laughs]. So I’m going to continue where we left off. We were talking about Lindsey’s concert. I was talking about the video and the whole attractive character concept, and I’ve had a lot of people ask me, when we talk about attractive character, “How do you introduce yourself to the audience, and how do you build this relationship?”

A lot of times, I think people are confused. They’re thinking, “How do I do this on the front end before someone meets me?” You create your own squeeze page or on your landing page or whatever, to get somebody in the door, just like Lindsey. She started the concert. She came out. She did two or three songs, and then after we built that initial rapport, it’s like, “Here, let me tell you my story.” Boom – all of the sudden, it sucks you in. For us, usually on your front end or your squeeze page, it’s kind of blind, trying to get somebody in the door. Now if they’re in the door – “Boom.” Now it’s where you introduce your attractive character and everything else.

One of the big questions we had at our event last weekend was from one of the girls that were there. She was really cool. She was talking about how, “How come all of the ads are ugly, and they’ve got red outlines, and you go to these squeeze pages, and there’s no branding? They’re just ugly. I want to have banners that are brown and yellow and that use my colors,” and all of these things. I was trying to explain it to her, and I said, “That’s fine, but there’s a time and a place. Your initial goal is to get as many people in your front door as possible. Because of that, you’ve got to use what works, and what works a lot of times is this cheesy stuff – headlines and color schemes that probably don’t match your brand and your fill, but that’s okay, because your initial goal is to just get them in the door.” As soon as they come through that front door, for us at least, we immediately transition from a kind of a cold, high-conversion funnel to our branding stuff.

That’s the way that we look at the way that we drive our traffic. It’s a two-step process. Step One, bring them in with whatever converts the best, and then immediately, now that you’ve got them, they’re on your list. Now it’s time to start building your brand and your attractive character and all of those things, where now you’re getting them to build the relationship. That’s how you start getting people to convert better on the back end, because I agree one hundred percent. I think that branding on the back end is important. In fact, I think you’ll sell way more.

For example, this week we sold four people our $25,000 package, which is awesome. That’s by far a record for our high-end coaching things in a week. We sold four of them on the phones. I never could have done that off of a cold campaign, where somebody comes in off of a cold squeeze page, and we call them to sell. No, they come in off of a cold campaign, and then after we’ve got them, now we share our attractive character, and we share stories, and we share our branding. We do all of this stuff to warm up that relationship, and get us to the point where somebody will come in at a higher level.

Anyway, I’m not sure how exactly that relates to Lindsey’s concert, but it’s just something that’s interesting. The other thing, and again, this is me, from the marketing standpoint. I always look at situations and stuff from the perspective of, “What would I be doing different if this was mine. If they hired me as a consultant, what would I do?” One of the big things that I notice – oh, and there’s a cop, a motorcycle cop, shooting people with his gun [laughs], and I think I clipped it.

All right, I’m back. I was looking at what they’re doing, and they had this pre-band come out first, and they were great. They sang and got everybody excited, and then they took thirty minutes to reset the stage and everything. Then Lindsey came out, and again, she was just awesome, from the very first second she walked in. What was interesting is I’m looking at this room. There were maybe five hundred to a thousand people, all jammed. We’re all standing-room only, and it’s a really cool facility, and literally, there were probably ten of us – my wife and I, and a couple of others who were jumping around, having fun, and everybody else was just kind of standing there looking at her. I think everyone enjoyed the experience, but we were at the equivalent of a rock concert or more, and nobody’s moving around.

I was thinking a lot about Tony Robbins, when we did his events, and when we were at his event, I’m the kind of person who, I don’t like dancing. We didn’t dance at our wedding. I just don’t do that. At my first Tony Robbins event that I went to, everybody was dancing like crazy, and for the first eight hours, I refused to participate in the shenanigans. I did not want to be dancing, right? [laughs] After a while, he broke me down to where we were all just going crazy, and it was awesome. I remember that next day was the first time I ever met with Tony. We had a little private meeting, and we were talking. We were in Toronto, and he said that it always takes a while to get the audience in a state where they’re willing to jump around and dance and go crazy and leave their inhibitions behind, and he said that at some events, that happens really, really fast, and other ones take a long time. He said that Toronto took a long time. It took five or six hours before he felt like he’d broken through and everyone was playing full out.

So it took a process, but I was thinking about what Tony does. When you show up at his event, he’s got thirty people on stage dancing, and they’re trying to get the whole audience dancing, and everything’s moving, so as soon as he walks out on stage, the whole audience is already dancing and moving and jumping around, and so it’s easy to kind of step into that and start running with it.

At Lindsey’s thing, everyone was sitting around waiting, waiting, waiting, and then she comes out at level ten, but nobody had been moving and dancing and jumping, just people like my wife and I, who’d been to Tony Robbins. We like jumping around now [laughs]. We’re jumping around, and everyone else is sitting there, even after her seventh or eighth performance. It was insane. It was so good, and again, my wife and I are jumping around crazy, and she like comes out to the audience, “You guys are awesome. There’s a pack of girls out there going crazy,” and literally, there was probably twenty of us, maybe in the whole audience who were going nuts.

I think for her I would look at, before she comes out, getting a bunch of people on stage, getting the audience dancing and moving and coach them and train them and get them to get in the right state that you want so that when you show up, their energy level’s at a different level.

Two times ago, when we were in New York, we went to “The David Letterman Show”, and what was really interesting was the fact that before the show, we had someone who took our entire audience and coached us through the entire process and coached us through what we’d need to do. –“This is what David needs. He needs you laughing. He needs you moving. He needs your energy,” and they’d coach us through it, and when we got into the studio, and it was the same thing. They’d coach us through it again, and they got us all prepped. Then Dave came out, and, “Boom,” we were at level ten by the time he showed up. I think from a marketing standpoint, that pre-frame is big.

Now that concept can work anywhere. When I used to do teleseminars and webinars, I would get on there, and they were all quiet and then when we’d get started answering, I’d say, “Hi, this is Russell,” and I’d get started” I remember five or six years ago, I was doing a teleseminar with Armond Morin, and I showed up ten minutes early. He was on there for ten minutes prepping the event, getting people excited, getting them fired up. –“This is what’s going to be happening. You’re going to have a chance to listen to Russell, and it’s going to be great. Thank you so much for coming,” and then he had this loop, where he kept on getting people fired up for this thing, for ten or fifteen minutes before we started. Then, “Boom,” we started, and we were at a level ten.

So that state, the state that whatever people enter into whatever experience – your teleseminar, your webinar, your event, your sales process – there’s a lot of ways you guys can manipulate that. If Lindsey’s crew were to hire me, that’s what I would be focusing on – how to manipulate that pre-frame before she shows up, so that when she shows up, and when she stepped on the stage, it would be at a level ten from day one. And I’d say that idea is for you guys too. Think about all of your sales processes, how to crank that up and get your audience at level ten before you start speaking or selling or teaching.

I’m back home. I’m going to go eat and get ready for the day. I appreciate you guys. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you have a chance to go to a Lindsey Stirling concert, do it. It was awesome. Worst case – just go to YouTube and type in “Lindsey Stirling” and watch some of her stuff, and you guys will be blown away by her talent, for sure. All right, guys. I’m out. We’ll talk to you again soon.

When is it smart to expand and grow your company vs keeping it small and lean?

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Hey, everyone. This is Russell, again, and welcome to “Marketing in Your Car”.

All right, guys and gals, and everybody else who’s listening in, I’m heading to the office today, and this is what’s been on my mind, because we’re about to do a really, really cool thing. As you guys know, I’ve been talking and bragging and being super-excited about Click Funnels. Last weekend, as you know, we did our Mastermind, and we did our live event. Some of my buddies were at the event, Garrett and Scott – they run a couple of sites. They run TrustGuard.com, ShopperApproved.com, KartRocket.com, and they’ve been really, really successful in the software space. In fact, I can’t tell their numbers, but last month they did insanely well for themselves.

What was cool is while they were sharing their pricing model and how they upgrade people and stuff like that, it opened a huge light bulb in my head, because the way our old pricing was structured, we really had some virtual limits on what we could do and how much money we could make. Anyway, that’s where things were at, and after they showed us their pricing model, it opened up the door to a whole new world, and I’m really, really excited. And then they showed us where they had this mini call center that ascends people who get a free trial, and sends them in to a yearly contract which goes from $0 up to, for a year, $3,000 or $4,000 for that contract.

I really think that that’s the route that we need to go with our company. We completely changed our pricing structure because of it, and with that, we started looking at, “Hey, if we’re going to do this model – what they’re doing, we’ve got to have our own mini call center that’s [? 49:24] ascending trial people, and doing demos, and upgrading them, and this whole thing,” If we’re going to do that, and we’re going to do it right, we’ve got to build a team to be able to do that [laughs]. We’re about a month away from rolling out Click Funnels, and we want to have people in place so that when customers are coming in, we’ve got to obviously have a support team, which is going to be big, but also a team to upgrade and to do demos and everything else. We were mapping it out yesterday. To do that, we’re going to need a small team of people, initially, of, who knows? Four or five people, maybe, which now brings me to my own personal fears.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve got fears in business. Earlier in my career, I went and got excited, and we ended up building a company with over a hundred employees, and it was scary, but it was exciting. But it went down, and so now I’m in a spot where we’ve got something that I think is going to grow, and it’s going to grow really, really rapidly, and we want to make sure that the infrastructure and everything’s in place. So what do you do? Do you not build those things out, and try to keep it small and lean, and support suffers a little bit? Or do you put the extra costs in and try to go big? There’re so many variables, and so the question on my mind today is to grow, or not to grow? What do you do?

I’m just kind of walking you guys through my mindset, because part of me wants to have this whole infrastructure in place from Day One so that we can scale, and part of me is nervous about that, and I’m sure that a lot of you guys are kind of in that same spot. A lot of people are always asking me, “Russell, we’re building our company. Who should we be hiring first? When should we be hiring people?”, and all of that kind of thing.

Some of the best advice I got was from the book, “REWORK”. He talks about in there that you only hire when it hurts, and so anyway, I have these three or four different internal dialogs happening inside my mind, and I’m not sure of the answer yet, so I’m excited to say I’m going to meet with the team and be going over that, and figure it out. Obviously if we do decide to take this span, we’re going to start with the smallest team possible, but also big enough that we’ll be able to handle the influx.

Some of the cool things that we’re planning when we roll this out, as you guys will see, we’re going to have a Tesla club. We’re going to be giving away a Ferrari. We’re going to be doing a bunch of really cool things, and to be able to facilitate that, obviously, there’s going to be a lot of growth, and we need to have things in place, and so we’re in this ‘chicken and the egg’ kind of spot, and it’s really fun, and it’s really exciting. I’m excited to see what comes from it, but anyway, that’s the game plan today.

One of my big focuses is to figure out, internally, are we going to grow or are we not going to grow? Are we going to figure out smarter ways to do it? Are we going to try to have this happen with people that are outside of the company, or are we going to try to do internal? If we do keep it internal, do we get a bigger office? What are the plans? What should we do? So instead of doing it the way I used to do it, where we would just start running – which there’re benefits to the ready-fire-aim model, but I want to try to do this right this time. I want to make sure that as we’re growing, that we’re growing correctly, and that we’re doing it in a way that doesn’t put our company at any kind of risk or harm, but in a way that we’re growing very organically, but very rapidly as well.

Anyway, it’s a fun conundrum. I don’t know if that’s the right word. It’s a fun puzzle. I don’t know about you guys, but man, business is so much fun. It’s every day waking up and you’re playing this game, and you’re trying to figure out what goes where and what’s going to be the best way of how to optimize it, but every single thing you’re doing, you’re always risking. You’re gambling, and sometimes you’re gambles pay off, and sometimes they don’t.

One of our 25K clients – I had a call from him yesterday. He’s a young, 22-year-old kid who’s crushing right now, doing over a hundred grand a month, and he’s doing awesome. It’s interesting. We test things, and he’s like, “I’ll run ten things, and eight of the ten will be losers, but those other two just blow up, and they make everything else worthwhile.”

It’s interesting, and so I look at us in our spot right now, and it’s exciting and fun in trying to decide which direction we want to go, but doing it, again, more methodically this time, as opposed to just running and jumping like I often did in the past. For you guys, I hope that gives you some excitement, and helps you start thinking about your business. Is it time to grow? If so, what’s the strategy? What’s the right way? What’s the wrong way? How do you do it virtually versus internally?    All of the fun things we’re coming up with – I’ll let you guys know in the future what we come up with, and where we’re headed.

Part of me would love to get a new office. Our office is nice now, but one that’s a little bit bigger, where we could have more space for our team to be doing that kind of stuff, but then also, it would be fun to have our own little spot where we could do our own little video studio, and a couple of other things, and so I may call my old commercial real estate realtor up here in Boise and look around and see if we can find a spot that’s a little bit bigger that give us the ability to have some cool stuff like that. So who know? I’m excited.

I’m at the office. I’m going to go have some fun today. I’ve got about two hours of work, then I’m heading to jiu jitsu, which will give me about an hour and a half to go and try to beat some people up, which always helps me out, and then tonight, we’re going to go watch Lindsey Stirling, which will be pretty exciting. If you don’t know who Lindsey Stirling is yet, go to YouTube and type in “Lindsey Stirling”, and look for the video where she’s playing the violin in the fire. She’s a rock star, and that’s who we’re going to go see tonight. It should be a fun day. I’m excited. Thanks, you guys, and we will talk to you all again soon.

A simple lesson that Russell learned from his carpet cleaner.

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Hey, everybody. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to an amazing, beautiful outside day, and a new episode of “Marketing in Your Car”.

I just want to share. I had something that made me smile over the last day or so. I thought I would bring it up to you guys. As you know, we had a big, huge event out here in Boise for the last four days. It was awesome. People loved it. It’s some of the best stuff we’ve ever done, and I’m really proud of it.

One of the things we talked a lot about was funnels. We talked a lot about how to structure your funnel the right way, how to make a lot of money, and one thing I taught is that the concept of that amateurs focus on the front end, and smart business owners like you and me focus on the back end. How do we structure that? How do we put more of our effort over there? After that, I had a funny experience.

We’ve been getting our carpets cleaned for probably the last three years from this guy, and he’s a really nice guy. My wife always talks about him, but I’d never had a chance to meet him. So he was coming over to our house, and he was cleaning the carpet again. I’d say this is the sixth or seventh time we’ve hired him to clean the carpets. He’s made some pretty good money off of us. So I was talking to him, and he said, “Yeah, so you used to own CitySmart.com, right?” to which I said, “Yeah.” “City Smart”used to be, back before Groupon came out. When Groupon was only nine cities, we saw what they were doing, so we  launched a Groupon here in Boise called City Smart, and we were growing it and everything, and then Groupon and Living Social came in and beat us out, unfortunately, but it was a lot of fun.

Supposedly we ran his offer on City Smart, and I asked him, “That’s interesting. How did it go for you?” and he goes, “It was horrible, the worst thing I ever did.” I said, “Really? What happened?” He said, “Well, I did it, and from that I ended up getting like, I don’t know, 150 customers. I went and cleaned the houses, and I made no money off of it. It was a complete waste of my time and energy.” I said, “Really? That’s interesting. So how did my wife meet you?” He goes, “Well she bought one of the things off of City Smart.” I was like, “Interesting,” and then I just kind of left it there, to see if he would pick up what I was laying down, and he totally missed it [laughs].

I just want for all of you guys who actually understand marketing and business to smile with me, because that guy didn’t realize that that little cheapy thing he’d run on City Smart, that at least us, if nobody else, at least us – we came in so far, and have hired him at least six or seven times since then, probably spent $1,000 or more with him, and we will continue to keep doing that, because he’s a nice guy and does a great job. I’m guessing those other 150 people we gave him – clients that we drove to him – I’m guessing a big percentage of those guys probably hired him to come back again and again. I would bet that if he looked at his stats from that City Smart promotion, it was probably the best thing that his business ever had – ever.

And that wasn’t even considering the fact that he’s a horrible sales person. If it wasn’t for my wife and the fact that when she meets somebody she likes, she just keeps hiring them over and over and over again, but he never follows up. If you look at one of my buddies, Joe Polish, he teaches carpet cleaners how to  build these big businesses, and what he teaches carpet cleaners is that when someone comes in, get them on a continuity program where you go back every three months and clean their carpet. If he was to pitch us a maintenance fee, where we paid him ninety-seven bucks a month and then three times a year, he came and cleaned our carpets at a discount, we would have done it, and I’m betting out of those 150 other people, a lot of other people would have done it as well [laughs].

It just made me smile. It’s unfortunate, but it made me laugh, that someone like that, who got all of these leads from us was upset about the experience, whereas it’s exactly what’s fueling his business right now. I just want all of you guys to know, and I want to make sure all of you guys understand that I know [laughs] that amateurs focus on the front end. I would rather lose $20, $30, $40, $50 on the front end sale if it acquires a customer, because that customer, as you’ve seen with my wife and I and the carpet cleaning did buy, and we’ve continued to buy it over and over and over again.

So for you guys, think about your businesses. What are you being short-sighted on? What are you freaking out on because the front end is not quite right? What could you change around to make it a lot better for you and for your business?

I’m at the office. It’s a beautiful day. I’m excited. Remember, amateurs focus on the front end, and you guys, as people inside DotComSecrets and inside the “Marketing in Your Car” podcasts, you understand that we focus on the back end. That’s it for today, you guys. Have a great day, and we’ll talk to you guys all again, soon.

How coaching people, through what you do naturally everyday, can change your business forever.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to “Marketing in Your Car”.

Hey, guys and gals. It’s been a while since I’ve done a podcast. It’s just been nose-to-the-grindstone, going crazy, and I just haven’t pulled up for a moment. I’m driving right now to get my haircut. My hair also has not had a chance [laughs] to have anyone pay attention to it. I look like a wookie. My hair is huge, so I’m getting it all cut down today, and getting prepared for an event that we’re doing here in Boise next week for all of our Inner Circle members. It’s going to be awesome. I’m really excited.

Here’s some backstory on it. It’s interesting. I’ve wanted to write a book for [laughs] probably ten years now. I keep trying, and it’s hard, so finally last year, I just decided, “I’ve got to do it.” You look at the best people, and they hire really good ghost writers, so I went to out there and tried to find a ghost writer. My biggest thing is that I wanted the book to be the same things I teach at events, the things that I believe in, and that we do every single day, and I wanted it to sound like it came from me. I went and researched a bunch of people, and I found someone who specializes in writing in your actual voice. She’s been awesome, and so I hired her. She’s not been cheap, by any stretch of the imagination, but she’s writing a book for me. It’s important.

She’s been working on the book, and doing the book’s been forcing me to set down, chapter by chapter, in excruciating detail, and record audios and mind maps, and everything in my core – the things I teach. It’s been really fun, as I have been getting out all of these things. What’s interesting is, she may have told me, or somebody else told me, “When you start writing a book is the first time that you really start understanding what you actually do.” It’s been interesting because the mechanics behind what we do every single day, when you try to teach them to somebody at this level, it changes. You really have to dig deeper, and you start getting connections in things you wouldn’t normally see or do. It’s kind of fascinating.

As I was doing this whole thing, I said, “You know what? I know on the back end we’re going to want to sell something, so I want to do an event where I actually go through and I teach all of this stuff as well, plus it will force me to get into these thoughts much deeper,” so I’m putting them down, and we mapped out an event, which is the event happening next week. It broke down everything we were teaching into twelve core secrets. You guys know “DotComSecrets”, so it’s “Twelve Dot Com Secrets”, and they’re all focused around doubling your traffic, conversion, or sales.

It’s been really, really fun. If you guys haven’t had that experience of writing a book yet, I really definitely recommend doing it. It actually reminds me a lot of my wrestling in high school. I was a great wrestler. I was a state champ, I think, second place in the country. I went to college, and then when I was in college, they started inviting me to come teach at wrestling camps.

I remember my first summer after my freshman year, going to these camps and teaching younger kids. I remember the big epiphany I had on things. I can remember working with these kids and teaching them stuff and showing them stuff, and they wouldn’t get it, so I’d have to break it down and break it down until the point where it was just so simple that they’d be like, “Oh, I can see how it works.” When I would do that, it made me start realizing why the wrestling move worked. –“The reason why this works for me is because of the way my positioning was this, the way my hips were this, my arm was here, my leg was here.” You start seeing things you don’t see at a level when you’re in it all of the time, right?

I really think that going back and teaching wrestling camps during the off season helped me a lot as a wrestler. I just was able to learn so much more about what I was doing. You never really see it, and after you realize that this is working because of this, this, and this, then you look at it like, “Well, where else can I apply those principals, those things that are working?” So that’s what’s been happening with this book. It’s been interesting.

One thing that I wanted to do was I wanted each chapter to be a stand-alone, yet they all kind of build on each other, but I wanted them to be like if you were struggling in one part of your business, you could take a chapter and just read it and learn something, but I was like, “I want to go deeper than that. I want it to be like where you can just pick up an image and look at the image, and the image – like if you haven’t read the chapter, you look at the image, and it won’t really make sense, but when you read the chapter, and you come back to that image, it makes perfect sense.” That way, it’s kind of burned into your memory, so if you come back a year later, and you’re flipping through the book, and you see this diagram or this sketched-out concept, instantly, everything you learned before will come back, and it will be just like a flood of memories –“Boom.” It will be there really, really fast.

And so, what’s cool is that for every single core concept I teach and I do and I believe in that we’ve been doing, I’ve been breaking them down into these really cool, drawn-out process flows, where Step One is this, Step Two, Step Three, and so on. I literally went through an entire yellow pad of paper sketching out all of these different concepts, and I’ve been taking pictures of them, and I send them to one of my designers, who then takes it, and makes it look like a really professionally hand-drawn image instead of my scribblings on yellow paper, but it’s really cool.

Today what was fun is one of the chapters – I have a whole chapter that’s when we get to the sales and the copywriting and how we sell stuff online section, that I call “Inception Secrets”. It comes from a presentation I actually gave at mine and Daegen Smith’s event, where I was talking about how in sales and marketing how much business has changed.

In the 1980s, the average attention span of a person was twenty minutes, and today, the average attention span is only nine seconds. Is that crazy? Every nine seconds, your brain’s looking for the next text message or Facebook or e-mail or whatever, and so you can’t focus. Because of that, that’s the world we’re selling in now. If you look at how sales has been taught for years, you know that these brilliant copywriters back in the day, Eugene Schwartz and all of these guys that you study and learn about, while what they taught was correct, and what they showed is true, it’s not as relevant today, just because the environment that we’re selling in is so different.

They would have evolved and gotten to the point where they could sell something in nine seconds, but they didn’t have to back then, and so the Inception Secrets is this evolution of copywriting and how it’s changed. One of the big things is that people that don’t want to be sold to. They love to buy things, and so if you can create a selling environment where they think it’s their idea – you’re basically showing them a process, and then all of the sudden they have this epiphany that they think is their epiphany. It’s kind of like the movie “Inception”, where they would place an idea inside of somebody’s dream which would cause them to do or say or change something.

That’s what the whole concept of that chapter was. It’s like, “How do you illustrate that? How do you create these epiphanies in people’s minds so that they don’t feel like they’re being sold, that they’re buying in?” That was a concept at Todd’s event, but it was like, “How do I materialize that in to a graph where you can look at it and have a process that you can follow to be able to create an inception?” It took me about a day to sit down and really map that out and all of the pieces and all of the things, and it will come out and say, “Boom. Here’s the graph. This is how you do it. Here’s how you create inception in somebody’s mind in the sales process.”

In the next chapter, I go through the different sales scripts for different points in the sales funnel, and I think there’re six core scripts that I use, and again, I go through and down and break those down into excruciating detail, like every single thing. It turned out so cool, like one of them is basically my copywriting template, and it’s based off of – I can’t remember who I learned it from initially. I think it was Gary Halbert, or it might have been Dan Kennedy, but anyway, I talk about the core fundamentals of a sales letter as a star, a story, and a solution.

A star is the person the sales letter is about. The story is their story, and the solution is the product that you’re offering, so it starts out with the three sections, but then inside each section, what’s the process you take somebody through? In the star section, I think there were five things that you take somebody through, and then in the story, I think, there were twelve things, and in the solution there were eighteen things. When you write your copy, you pull out these three diagrams, you start at number one, and, “Boom, boom, boom.” By the time you’ve gone through the whole thing, you’ve got your sales letter written very simply and very easily, knowing that you’re following a proven model.

I just went through all of my old sales letters and literally, I just had like this huge table of everything I’ve ever done or learned or created about writing copy and broke all of that stuff down into these little simple diagrams. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m excited for it.

“What’s the point of this podcast?” you may be asking. Outside of getting excited to see the book someday, and then hopefully getting excited for the event, if you’re coming – and I’m sure we’ll sell recordings of that later on down the road, but what’s the point of this podcast?

I think that the real point of it is a couple of things. First off, it comes back to when I talked about back when I was wrestling. I was a good wrestler. I was a state champ. I took second place in the country. I was an All-American. I did great in high school, yet it wasn’t until I started teaching other people what I was doing that I was able to break down things to a fundamental level where I really found out what made what I was doing work. When I learned that, I was able to apply it in so many different areas, and I think it’s the exact same thing with businesses. I think for you, whatever it is that you do, or you teach, or whatever your business is, I think one of the most powerful exercises you  can do is try to teach it to somebody else, even if you’re not a “How to Make Money” or “How to Start a business” business.

If you want to grow your business, one core thing that you can do is sit down and work with other people showing them how to fix their business, or change their business, and start getting your thinking at a different level. You start realizing why what you’re doing is working, why your funnels look this way, why they’re converting, and which part’s not.

I think one of the biggest strategic advantages I’ve had over a lot of the other Internet marketing coaches is just first off, I’ve run a lot of businesses. I do a bunch of stuff. The second off is because our coaching business has been so successful for so many years, I’ve had a chance to work with hundreds and hundreds of different businesses every single year, so I have had a chance to look at different funnels and their processes and coach them through it. Again, I think I get a unique perspective on it because of that, and so I want to tell you guys that same kind of thing. If you’re in business and you want to grow, then focus on helping somebody else’s business, because it will help you so much more to start seeing those things. But then also from your content standpoint, whatever it is you’re selling, how can you teach people more? Even if you’re in a weight loss space, how can you get you more hands in, and teach you more, and break things down more so that you can become better and better at your craft and your art?

That’s the first big take-away, and I think the second one is, just because this was so valuable for me, is try to take all of the core things you teach, and again, if you’re writing a book, it could be fifty pages on a concept and how can you map it, how can you break that down into one piece of paper, sketched out, like in a process for Step One, Two, Three, et cetera. –“Here’s the way you do it.” I was thinking about this as I was going through, like what I do in business is very, very – there’s an art and a science. The art is the beauty, and you’re tweaking and testing and trying all sorts of things. And then there’s the science, which is like, “Here’s the specifics,” and I think the Internet, at least in my business, is more art than science. I think there’s so much art to it. It’s me taking my art, but I have to translate it into a scientific process so that other people can model it, right? I don’t know if that makes sense to you guys. I’m rambling a little bit, but it’s a really cool process.

What you do in your business is art. It’s hard to teach art to other people. I can tell people, “Here’s the conception,” and go into things, and hope that a lot of them do the stuff, but most people don’t, except for the other artists, right? For example, I remember teaching events, and I had a bunch of people there who just wanted to get a process down, and they can’t. I’m telling them all of these different ways they could do it, and they can’t figure it out because of that. People like, for example a Daegen Smith, who was in the room. He’s an artist. I could show him all of this stuff, and he could take that and turn it into his own art. But other people might take that, and it doesn’t help them, so to really help other people, I think, for the masses, because you’ll be able to help other people sharing your art, but if you can to tweak it so that you’re turning your art into a science, again, into a process, now other people can replicate it. That’s where it’s going to be so much better.

An example is one of my trainers that I work out with. I was asking him, “What should I be eating?” He’s like, “Well it depends. There’re all these elements, these variables, and it all depends on all of this stuff,” which is all true, and I get that. That’s the art of it, though. It’s looking down and being able to look at the person’s situation and their life and this and that, and we paint this picture of what’s going to work for you. That’s awesome, but for the masses, you can’t do that. How do you create a template where you can plug people in? That’s where I think the scalability comes in with your content, your offer, your art, and how you can scale it.

I’m in one of those kinds of things where I’ve been sitting at thousands of things, and I’ve been looking at them and mapping them out for the last ten hours, and so maybe I sound kind of weird to some of you guys listening, but I hope you got something out of it. I really hope that you guys take some time and take your art and break it down into a science. Try to make it something that’s a process. As you will see when my book comes out, it’s my best attempt possible to do that, and then second off, go and find somebody else who wants to be like you, coach them through it, because the process of coaching someone through your process and what you’re doing will open up so much stuff for you.

I am here, ready to get my hair cut. Ready for my head to be a little bit smaller [laughs], and excited for those of you guys who are coming out to the event next week. We’ll be hanging out, and we’ll be covering some stuff, and you guys will get the first copy of all of these worksheets I’ve been working on. I’ve been creating a huge book in a binder for everybody that has all of the stuff in there, and then the next time that it will be open will be when my book is done. Hopefully, we’ll have that done by the end of summer. I’m going to try to do one of those “New York Times ‘Best Seller’” campaigns. That’s one of those things on my list I want to accomplish someday, is to get on that list. That would be kind of fun. Hopefully this book will be the tool. I’ve spent more time and energy on this, I think, than any other project I’ve ever done [laughs], so hopefully this will be the tool to get us there, and change some people’s lives, and help get everyone thinking a little differently about their business. I’m excited, and I’m here, you guys, so I’ve got to bounce. I will talk to you all again soon. Thanks, everyone.

An interesting look on how to build a hundred million dollar company.

---Transcript---

Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to a very late-night “Marketing in Your Car”.

Hey, you guys, it is now 1:30 in the morning. I have almost officially been awake for twenty-four hours straight. I woke up yesterday [laughs] or today or whenever it was, at 4:30 in the morning. I came in early and spend three or four hours busting stuff out before everyone showed up. We worked all day, and we pulled mostly an all-nighter. I just started fading about twenty minutes ago. I just dropped Todd off at the hotel, and now I am driving back home to go get some sleep.

But as tired as I am right now, I don’t think I’ve ever been this fired up about a project ever in my life. We’ve created and we’ve sold a lot of stuff that I’m passionate about – a lot of things that I think are awesome and life-changing and all of those kinds of things, but this is the first time that...Today, I literally spent twelve to fourteen hours just building out funnels and click funnels, and I can’t tell you – I can literally do now what used to take me a programmer, a designer, and a webmaster – what it took three people to do, I can do now myself, and in a fraction of the time. I built an entire automated webinar in under an hour, and that’s because I was writing all of the copy. I was doing everything – the entire thing, from scratch, and got the whole thing done. We built out membership sites. We built out funnels, and I can’t even tell you how excited I am.

I think it’s going to change our industry. I think it’s going to change my personal life. I told everybody, “Even if we never sold this, what we’ve created would still be worth it, because this will change our business forever.” It just gets me excited and fired up about how we’re creating something that is that big. I just started thinking about how in most businesses, I think a lot of the time we sell ourselves short. We think about how to make money or what’s cool. How do we solve this problem for people? We create these little things. I’ve been doing this for a decade now, and this is the first time I feel like we’ve approached something and gone after something that’s bigger than any of us, and the fact that we’ve executed it as well as we have is just...I can’t even tell you how excited I am. It’s so cool.

So anyway, what I wanted to talk to you about is tonight while we were working and talking through things, we kept referencing a guy named Jason Fried. He’s a guy who I had a chance to actually interview a little while ago, maybe about two or three years ago now. He owns a company called 37 Signals. You guys have probably heard of him before. Actually they just changed their company name to Base Camp. They’re the creators of Base Camp.

A while ago they wrote this book called, “REWORK”. In fact, Stu McClaren, one of my favorite people in the world, was the one that recommended REWORK to me. We were at Pirate’s Cove at my Mastermind meeting, and we were talking about books and stuff, and he said, “Hey, you should read this book, ‘REWORK’,” so I went and bought it. It’s a really quick read. You could probably read the whole thing in maybe an hour and a half to two hours. It’s basically that Jason and the partners, when they were creating Base Camp, wrote a book about their experience with the business, and it was the exact opposite of what everybody else was doing.

I remember that I read the entire book, and I remember there were simple, fast chapters – just one concept at a time, and I remember going through it and thinking that every single mistake that I had made in my business, they addressed in REWORK [laughs] as a thing, and I was like, “Man, I wish we would have done this or that,” and so forth. I’ve probably read it three or four times over the last five or six years, and like I said, I had a chance to interview Jason on the book. He was a cool guy.

I remember the same month, I tried to interview him and also Gary Vaynerchuk. Jason was like, “Yeah, man, I’ll do it,” and jumped on the phone. Super low maintenance, it was awesome. Didn’t ask for anything, just giving back to the community, and Gary Vaynerchuk [laughs] said that he’d let me interview him if I bought five hundred copies of his book, which was about eight or ten grand or whatever that was. It was like, “Huh,” and anyway, just a really cool guy.

But some of the lessons – one of the things they talked about was when they created Base Camp. They were a website design company, and they were trying to do project management software, and there was no good project management software, so they went and they created their own. They created it the way they wanted it. They scratched through an itch, and created this thing that as it turned out, everybody wanted it, and, “Boom.” This launched their whole company. I think they have over a million users right now. I think that’s what they said. A million users, paying up to ninety-seven bucks a month, which is crazy.

We were talking about Click Funnels. We built Click Funnels to scratch our own itch, to try to speed up our process of launching offers and rolling out funnels. We created it for us, and now I have the privilege of sharing it with others. That’s the way I really look at it.

It’s interesting, but anyway, there’re so many good lessons in that book, I can’t recommend it enough, you guys. I think the fact that we’d read it – everyone on our team had read it multiple times. I think it’s really influenced a lot of our thoughts and our decisions in how we’re growing our company. We were looking at, as we started growing Click Funnels, the company’s called Etison, E-T-I-S-O-N, we were talking about how to grow it, and we saw that there were two different routes.

One route we saw was with a company called, “iContact”, where the owner, Ryan, went and took on funding and did the whole VC thing and brought in money and had millions and millions of dollars of investor money. He grew it that way and they weren’t really profitable until he sold out. And man, he sold out. I think they sold for about seventy or eighty million dollars. I’ve never built a company that way. I don’t understand that way, but that’s the way he did it, and so for a while, we were looking at it, and we were like, “Wow. Let’s build a company like that.”

But then you look at the other side, and you look at 37 Signals. You look at the way Jason has built it, and all of the lessons they teach in REWORK about only hiring when it’s painful, keeping it small, and that your goal isn’t to try to grow. Your goal can be just to serve people and all of these lessons that are counter to what the rest of the world teaches, and I think we made a decision as a team that we wanted to do it this way – the way that the guys in 37 Signals did. That’s the way that fits into our lifestyle and what we want to do. Like I say, I can’t recommend that book enough.

They also came out with another book recently, called “REMOTE”, and what’s interesting about REMOTE is, if you guys watch “TED Talks” – I think it’s at Ted.com – you search for Jason Fried. He gave a TED Talk about this as well, what the book’s all about. He talked about [laughs] – and this week’s been a perfect example of it. He talked about how when you need to get work done, where do you go? Nobody says, “I go to the office to get work done.” They say, “Well, I come in earlier. I stay late,” or, “I do it during my lunch hour.”

It’s interesting how people at work don’t get work done [laughs], right? They’re talking. They’re doing all of this kind of stuff, and he talked about the fact that if you send all of your employees home and have people work remotely, how much more stuff you can get done, because at work, people don’t work. They’re talking. They’re hanging out. All of this other stuff’s happening. I remember in the TED Talk, he’s talking about, “Would you rather have an employee...?” like everyone’s employees are at the office so that they can be focused, but what if your employee was at home watching TV all day while they were working? If they were watching TV, yes, they’d be distracted a little bit, but that’s a lot less distracting than the boss coming in, or the secretary, or the water cooler talk, or every single person passing through their desk area that wants to communicate and chat. It was interesting when he put it into that perspective, and the book, REMOTE, is all about that – having everybody start working remotely.

As we’re building this new company and thinking a lot about these types of things, and the direction we want to move with things, and how to structure things, and how to grow, I really think that the guys that we’re looking at and I think that the guys that you should be looking at, as well, is 37 Signals, or Base Camp is their new company name. So definitely get REWORK, get REMOTE. It could be your reading for this weekend. Those books are worth their weight in gold, I can tell you that much for sure.

Anyway, you guys, I am home. It’s now 1:47 in the morning. I’m going to get some sleep. I’m taking my three-year-old son to the zoo tomorrow morning, which is super exciting. I’m fired up. That’s the game plan.

Look out you guys. Click Funnel’s coming soon. We’re going to open our second wave of beta next week, and we’re going to roll that for about a month, because we’re going on vacation [laughs]. My family and Todd’s family, and so when we get back from vacation is when we’re going to do the big roll out, but it’s all coming soon. All of the pieces are falling together.

All right, guys, I am in my garage, so I’m going to check out, and I will talk to you soon.