A powerful lesson I learned from one of my mentors…
On this episode Russell talks about some last minute preparations for the Funnel Hacking Live event. He also shares what you can learn from a Rubber band.
Here are some cool things to listen for in today’s episode:
Listen below to find out why you should be more like a rubber band.
---Transcript---
Hey, everyone, this is Russell Brunson, and welcome to Marketing in Your Car.
Hey, everyone. I always try to figure out a different way to make that sound different every time I say “Marketing in your car”, but it probably comes out the same to you guys. But in my mind, every time it’s a little bit different. A little more energy, a little different type of energy. Today, my energy is excitement and nerves and all these crazy things, because right now we are preparing for our first annual Funnel Hacking event.
And it’s really amazing, like, when we first started putting this event together, I was scared because, like, I hadn’t done events for a long time. And when I was doing them, back in the past, it’s always stressful. We would get, like, 200 people to sign up for it and then only 100 people would show up, and all sorts of stuff.
And you never know, and there’s all these unknowns. And so when we were first doing this, we were like, well, how many people can we get? We get 100, we get 500, we get 1000. We were trying to figure out. So we set a hard limit at 500 and I was like, that’s going to be really hard for us to get, but that will be kind of our goal. And so, we get the room size booked and everything, and then we went and started promoting it.
And we didn’t even promote it that hard, we ended up selling 600 tickets. Which screwed up everything, because it turns out, the Fire Marshal at a hotel won’t allow you to have more seats, they don’t care how many people you’ve sold to. Which is insane. So, we had to go and change the room size and get approval from the fire marshal and like, all these, just, you know — but, good problems to have, right?
Definitely better than the other side around, we’re like, okay, we’ve got a room that holds 500 people, how do we shrink it down to 50, right? So, it’s a good problem to have, it’s just one of those things. That’s happening, and then I’m trying to just make this an amazing event. Like, the people that signed up, it’s crazy. Like, I can’t believe how many of my peers and friends, all signed up. So we’re trying to make this just an amazing experience, and just have awesome content and videos, and just a cool environment.
And we’re giving away a Ferrari, and we’re launching our dream car contest, and all these things. And then I’m making, like, really cool handouts and order forms for the few couple of things we are selling. And just trying to make it like a class act event. And, man, I can’t tell you, I’ve been doing smaller events for a long time, and I’m comfortable with those.
But this one I’m really nervous about. So, anyway, yesterday for us was Memorial Day. Depending on where you are in the world, or when you’re listening to this. So went in yesterday in the office. I wanted to play with the kids, but I couldn’t because I’m just, yeah, I had to get stuff done. So I actually wrote four presentations. I think I’m presenting seven different things at the event.
So, I wrote four presentations yesterday, I had already done two before. And I’ve got one more to do today. But this morning I had Aidan — my little four-year old had his little gym graduation. So I went and did that this morning, which was super fun. And just having, you know, just all these fun things happening. It’s almost time for school graduation, we’re finishing kids’ projects, like, it’s so much chaos right now.
Note to self, don’t ever do an event at the end of May, again, because that’s when everything else on Earth in kids’ lives are happening too. But anyway, it’s exciting. So, now, I’m heading to the office, and I’ve got one last presentation to create. In this one I’m going to be teaching people how to become seven figures, excuse me, six figures a year Funnel Consultants, which is going to be exciting.
And then, at the end of it, we are going to offer our Funnel Certification Program. Which is a really neat program, I’m excited for it, I think it’s going to change some people’s lives. And so, I’m fired up. So that’s what I’ve got going on today. And it’s just, it’s just fun and so, for you guys listening, I’m trying to think what value I can provide for you guys today.
It’s always kind of my thought process when I’m driving, like, what cool can I say or can I share that will hopefully help everyone in their business. And I think for today, a lot of it is just like, stepping outside of your comfort zone. You know, like, I do a lot of stuff and I need people looking at me, man you’re stepping outside your comfort zone, but I really have been.
Like, I’m pretty comfortable with all the insane things I’ve been doing, but this was one, like, I feel nervous in my stomach right now, the event is not for two days. And it’s exciting and it’s nervous and it’s good. It’s a good thing to have, and I think that — I had a mentor, back when I was about 19 or 20 years old. And I remember he was doing this presentation, talking about us and how we needed to grow.
And he did this thing where he held up a rubber band, and he talked about it. He said, “Look, this rubber band, like, by itself, it’s just kind of useless, like, it’s just this floppy little thing that doesn’t do anything.” And he says, “The only way that this rubber band becomes valuable is if it gets stretched. Because then it gets stretched, now it can bind things together and hold things, and it can actually do stuff.
“But it has to be stretched to be able to do it.” But he said, “But if you’re not careful and you stretch it too much, it will snap and it will break. And then it becomes useless again.” But he said that, “For this rubber band to be useful at all, in any capacity, it has to be stretched.” And I started thinking about with what we’re doing, you know, with this event. Like, me and my entire team and everyone who is putting this together, I feel like we’re being stretched.
And a couple of times I felt like we were stretched to the point where we’re snapping, but then, for me, I had to come back. And my wife today was like, “So, you’re nervous, you’re freaking out, what’s happening?” And I was like, you know, I’m not, and I think it’s because, like, it’s okay. You know, like, if everything, if nobody shows up at the event, or if the event flops, or people are like, “Man, Russell, you were really boring on stage,” or whatever.
Who knows, like, all the irrational fears going through my head right now, like, worst case scenario, next week we’ll be back here in Boise, hanging out, having fun, and that was kind of comforting for me. It gave me the ability to kind of relax and just kind of take a little bit of pressure and tension off of the situation, to keep it from snapping.
And so, I hope that that gives you something that can help you today, when you start thinking about that with yourself. That understanding that for you to be useful in any capacity, you’ve got to be stretched, you’ve got to keep stretching yourself and stretching yourself. And if you don’t, you’re just going to be a useless rubber band that just sits there, right?
But also, knowing on the other side that if you stretch yourself too much, you are going to snap, and so, kind of finding that balance and being okay with whatever happens. And if, you know, again, if I show up and I’m the only dude in the room, you know what, my whole team will be there, we’ll have fun, we’ll go, I don’t know, go just have some fun in Vegas, and it will be alright.
But best case scenario, we can do this amazing thing and change some people’s lives and that’s really the end goal. And I was hearing Sean Stephenson, he’s a little tiny dude, motivational speaker. And just really just an impressive individual. He was speaking and I was listening to, like, his public speaking training. He said, “If you’re nervous for, to speak,” he said, “It’s a selfish thing, because you’re worried about how other people think about you,” and things like that.
He says, “When you change it to the point where you’re concerned about them and serving and giving, it takes that away from you, the nerves,” and that, he said, you shouldn’t be nervous. And I’ve been thinking about that. You know, like, part of me is still nervous, I wish I could say I wasn’t. But I’m still, I’m nervous. But I thought it was interesting — I think a cop just saw me. Crap. Yeah, the cop, there’s a motorcycle cop coming in my direction, totally was looking at me while I was talking on the phone with you guys.
But he is, I don’t think he’s flipping around. And if so, I’m about to turn into my office, little driveway thing, and he can’t catch me anyway. Anyway, sorry, back to my train of thought. Where was I? Yeah, so, for me, like, again, I still have nerves, I’m still, you know, it’s the kind of thing, like, I can’t wait to get to the point, like Sean talked about, where it’s just, you’ve got, you know, you’re so focused on the serving part of it that you don’t get nervous.
But I’m not there yet. But more so, I think that, as I keep preparing these things, every time I get nervous I’m like, I’m giving my all, like, if they don’t get value from this, then, you know, then that’s kind of on them, I guess? And as long as I do my best to try to serve and change and help people, that’s really the key. So, anyway, with that said, I’m at the office.
I’m going to go try to finalize and craft this last presentation, with the goal of helping a lot of people to change their lives and be able to take whatever it is they’re doing in whatever capacity, and become Funnel Consultants. That’s kind of the last presentation, and I think it’s going to open up a whole new world for people. And I’m excited to hopefully help facilitate that, and give people the ability they need to reach whatever goals and dreams they have with ClickFunnels and with the certification program.
So, be awesome. I appreciate you guys. If you’re in Vegas, I will see you soon. If you’re not coming to Vegas, hopefully you’ll come to the next one and we will see you at that. So thanks, you guys. I appreciate you and we’ll talk soon.
Powerful stories of people in our inner-circle and ignite program who opened up doors from skill sets they didn’t know they had.
On today’s episode Russell talks about the power of moving forward. Why the process of moving forward can often lead to more or better opportunities.
Here are some of the cool things you will hear on this episode:
So listen below to find out why always moving forward can lead to your success.
---Transcript---
Hey, guys and gals. This is Russell Brunson, and welcome to "Marketing in Your Car."
This message today is one that I think is important, and I hope that a lot of people listen to this and take something from it, because it's been really interesting.
I've been watching a bunch of our coaching clients over the last year or so, [laughs] and there's been this really weird observation, really interesting, that's been happening. A lot of people come in, and when they come in they've got a direction they want to go in, right, and so we coach them in that direction, they start moving forward, and they start moving forward.
Some people just, the first direction we point them in, they run and then they have success — someone like a Liz Benney, who had picked a path, she executed on it, boom, is making crazy money. She's done over five hundred grand so far this year after she picked her path and started running.
But other people, and I would say probably the majority of people, don't have sex, success — ooh, I almost said the wrong word there, [laughs] don’t have success right out of the gates, and I know it's frustrating for them, but it's interesting, because a lot of people that happens to, and I see it, they just fall away. They just give up, and it's done.
But there's others that are super stubborn, and I think that I would probably fall into this category as well. [laughs] They're really stubborn, and they're like, "You know what?" They keep moving forward, and they keep moving forward, and they keep moving forward, and because of the act of them moving forward, doors become open to them, if that makes sense.
I remember when I was — I think I shared this on a podcast — who knows how long ago, but when I was first getting started, I had some friends who saw what I was doing, and they came and wanted to work for me. After a year of working with me, they weren't making any money. I was, obviously, and one of them had this insight, and he told me the next day, "You know what we realized? It's not so much, Russell, that you're smarter than us, or anything, the only difference between you and us is you're always moving forward. You're doing this, you're doing this, you're doing this, you're doing this.”
He’s like, “More than half the time, what you're doing is not working," [laughs] "but ten, twenty percent of the time it does work. Just the act and the motion of you moving forward working on stuff is opening doors and making other stuff happen."
Anyway, I had a really good experience that just happened ten minutes ago. I just got a VOX from one of our coaching clients, and it just re-illustrates this point. He's a cool guy. He came to our coaching program and he picked a market that honestly, I don’t think it was a good market for what he wanted to do.
He wanted to sell to engineers. It's just not a market that's super passionate or ripe. They're not rabid buyers, but he was passionate about it, so he spent all this time and energy, and he built the perfect webinar and he launched it. He drove traffic, and he launched it. He kept going. He was squeaking by and making pennies here and there — making some money — but he was so passionate. He kept going back and kept tweaking it and making it better, and tweaking it and making it better.
While he was doing this, he was frustrated because he wasn't making money, right? But what he was doing was he was honing his skills, he was fine-tuning, he was getting better and better at what he was doing. About two weeks ago, he met one of our other coaching clients who is having some success, having webinars, is doing really well with it, and basically said to him, "Hey, I love your product. I think your webinar's good. I'd like to pitch it. Do you mind if I pitch it?", and this guy's was like, "Yeah, man, I would love to not pitch my own webinar."
So this guy took the other guy's webinar and looked at it, was looking at it and saying, "Well, based on all the work I did before, this is how I'd change it," and he tweaked it, and he fine-tuned the presentation, and he went last week, and he did it live for this guy, [laughs] and he crushed it — did like three times as many sales as the main person did, doing his own webinar.
Both of them got excited. One's like, "Man, I made a bunch of money doing someone else's webinar. The other guy's like, "I made a bunch of money, and I didn't have to do the webinar. I actually made more money having this guy do it than if I was doing it."
They just did another webinar. It just ended like fifteen minutes ago, and they closed over $20,000 in that webinar. These guys are going crazy now, and because of this, I talked to this guy, and I said, "You know what? You should start a webinar-pitching business where you go through, tweak people's webinars then pitch it for them, and take a percentage of the profits."
I think he's going to do that now. I just look at it — he came into the coaching program trying to go in this direction, and we coached him through that process. So far he hasn't made a lot of money from that process, but the skills set he learned along the way have now become this valuable asset. He's going to make ten times more, maybe a hundred times more from this, but he would not have ever gotten that if he wasn't moving forward, moving forward.
Another guy, who is one of the coolest people. He’s probably listening to this, so I won't embarrass him with his name or anything, but he knows who he is — we've worked with him on his funnel. He's been struggling. He has not been making money with his funnel, but through the process, he's gotten really good at something else — his Facebook Ads. His Facebook Ads, I remember, John and my team looked at his ads, and he's like, "I have never in the history of my life seen an ad that was this good, that has this high of engagement and quality score," and all these types of things.
His ads are amazing, he just can't get his funnel to convert. He's driving these things, and so last week, I saw him do what was brilliant. I was just so impressed with him for doing this. He posted on Facebook in our group, and he was like, "Hey, my funnel's not making any money yet, but I'm really good at Facebook Ads. In fact, look at these things."
He's like, "If you want, I trying to get better at this skill and see if I can master another niche. If any of you guys want, contact me, and I'll do your ads for free." From that, he got a whole bunch of amazing people to raise their hand, obviously, and he's doing this. Right now, what he's doing is he's honing this skill. He's getting better and better at it, and through that process, I don't know yet where the future's going to go for him, but my guess is he's going to make a lot more money with this direction than he was with what he was doing.
It was the byproduct of what he was trying to accomplish. It's interesting what happens when you're moving forward constantly. You don't know where success is going to come. If you've ever read the book "Rework," it's one of my favorite books of all time. He talks about how one of the powerful things you can do with your company is make money off the byproduct of what you're doing.
So you're doing a bunch of stuff. What’s the byproduct? To give you an example, our "Dot Com Secrets Labs Book," we ran a bunch of split tests, two or three years, and also we had all these split test results. I compiled them into a book, and we launched that. That turned into an extra three or four million dollars last year.
It was the byproduct. It was just my split-testing results from other stuff we were doing, taking the byproduct of what we were doing. You never know where these opportunities are going to come and what skill sets you're going to create to become really, really good at.
So what I wanted to say for all you guys is just, is the process is less of getting something perfect, and more of moving forward. As you move forward, and you continue to move forward, you don't stop. You keep moving forward, and moving forward. Doors will open. Opportunities will come to you. Things will keep falling into your lap that you never would have thought were there before. It's just really, really impressive, from both these guys, I've talked about it before. There's more that I could share.
Another example is one of the guys that came to our training and wanted to be a copywriting teacher. He kept doing this, kept doing this, kept doing this, and spent six, seven, eight months trying to do that, and finally got so fed up and frustrated — and man, I'm so proud of him for this, though, but a month ago, he got so frustrated that he was selling his front-end products. No one was buying his up-sells, no one was buying off his webinars, so he just picked up a phone, and starting dialing every single person that had bought his product in the past. They might not have bought a product, they had showed up to a webinar, or bought one of his free-plus-shipping things — just started calling them, almost frustrated, and the first month, made thirty grand just calling his customers and saying, "Hey, but this coaching thing from me."
Then yesterday he told me he did this webinar. He had two people buy this free-plus-shipping thing, picked up the phone, called those people personally, and sold ten grand, just buildt from one little thing.
It's again, not the opportunity he thought he was going to do. That was not his goal when he got started, but it was in the process of him moving forward, that his skill sets go better. He learned things, he honed things, and he got better and better and better, until, boom, a door opens up. That's the door you run through.
It's really interesting. I was even watching — there were two podcasts where I was talking about what happens when your funnel flops, and I shared a story. I'm going to share it again, because I think it's relevant to this, where Bryan Tracy was talking about how he was watching this TV show, and it had all of these millionaires on there, and they asked the millionaires, "How many times on average did you fail in business before you became a millionaire?"
They went through and surveyed everyone and they found out the average person was like eleven times they failed before they became a millionaire. Bryan Tracy comes back and says, "You think it's because they all luckily, the eleventh time, stumbled upon the magic formula." He said, "No, what happened was, the first time they screwed up, the second time they screwed up, and after ten or eleven tries, they couldn't help but be successful because they'd tried everything else."
That is the key with this, you guys. Anyway, I'm so proud of these people in our group that are doing that, because I'm seeing, and again, it's usually a different direction than we even point them in initially, but because of the process of moving them forward and doing these things, they start building up skill sets that they give them the ability to become powerful and marketable and be able to open up whole new worlds and whole new doors for them, so I thought it was interesting.
On the opposite side of that, we've got coaching clients, who I love as well, who are going through this and they keep focusing on one funnel, on one thing, and one thing, and they want it to work, and they keep trying, and it feels like they're pushing a square peg through a round hole. It's like, "You've got to learn how to pivot and shift and try things and move things around. If this doesn't work, try this and try that," because we don't know what people are going to respond to. We can guess. We try to get as close as we can and we pray and hope that we're going to get it on the first try, or the second, or the third, but traditionally it doesn't work that way.
You've got to be flexible. You've got to be willing to pivot, and keep moving around and moving forward until those opportunities open for you. I had an interview today with a lady, and she was asking me about that. "What happens if someone's funnel doesn't make money?"
I said, "Do you know what? Did you know that Click Funnels failed the first few times we launched it?" She's like, "What?", and I'm like, "Yep. We launched it — bombed. I could have just given up. I was depressed and sad. I could have licked my wounds and cried about it, but, no, I said, 'Okay, it didn't work this trip around,' and we tried it a different way. Boom — failed again. We tried it again, and the third time, it was a home run, and blew up, and now has become what it is. And it's growing insanely fast, but again, it's because we were moving forward, and opportunities open up when you're moving forward."
So if nothing else you get from today, you guys, it's time to keep moving forward. When you do that, you may not get what you thought you were going to get, but you will get what you deserve, I promise you that. You will become what you need to be, and the doors and the opportunities will open up to give you the abilities to shine.
Anyway, I hope that helps you guys. I just thought of another guy in our group — same kind of thing. Came in, wanted to be an MLM guy, and now he’s driving traffic for ten different people, because he was moving forward, moving forward always, so move forward, you guys. Have fun.
For those of you guys who are going to be at Funnel Hacking Live next week, I’m so excited. We had five hundred tickets. We opened up a couple more. We sold about six hundred. It’s just crazy, so we should have over six hundred people there, and it’s going to be nuts. I’m excited to meet a lot of you guys in person, and I’m going to try to put on a show that will change your business, change your lives, and really rock your world.
That is the game plan, and hopefully we will deliver. I’m confident that we will, and excited for those of you guys who are coming. Thanks again, you guys. I’m out for the weekend. Have an awesome day, and we’ll talk soon.
Lessons from a whirlwind weekend that started with a potato gun exploding in my face.
On this episode Russell talks about a whirlwind weekend he had which involved a carnival, a camping trip, and flying to and speaking in 2 different cities.
Here are some of the interesting things you will hear in today’s episode:
So listen below to find out how Russell nearly blew himself up and then went on to speak at 2 events just a few hours later.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing in Your Car.
Hey everyone, this is Russell. I’m doing this Marketing in Your Car for a couple reasons. One of them is so I don’t fall asleep while I’m driving because I don’t want to die and I really need you guys to help me out, so that’s one part of it. It’s super late. I just landed on a plane.
The last 48 hours of my life have been completely insane. I just want to tell you about it because I think it’s just funny and I thought you guys would enjoy it because you guys are going to hear all my strange things that happen to me. It started with a potato gun blowing up in my face and ended with me driving home from the airport.
This is my life for the last 48 hours. I don’t do a lot of public speaking anymore, going traveling and stuff like that because it’s hard with my wife and kids, and business and everything else but for some reason, I got booked to do two things this weekend. One was to speak at Ray Hick, just a really cool guy, really someone I respect a lot in this industry.
He was doing his high end mastermind for his $25,000 clients in Park City, Utah and he asked if I could come in and speak for awhile. Again, Ray is someone I really look up to so I was like, “Yes, I will definitely come up and do that.”
Then Steve Olsher did an event called Internet Prophets Live and asked if I could come speak at that one too. I said yes. I had those two events happening this weekend. I booked them, had flights and everything planned. I was going to go out there and do it.
Then my wife tells me about a week ago, “Hey, don’t forget that on Thursday,” this Thursday or whatever, “we’ve got a carnival for the kids and then Friday is our church camping trip.” It’s called fathers and sons. We take our boys out camping.
I was like, “Oh no, I have those plus I’m supposed to speak at Ray’s event and Steve’s event the same weekend.” It was the middle of when I was supposed to be speaking, so I had to call those guys up and say, “I’m so sorry, I can’t come the day I’m supposed to be coming. Can I shift the days, move things around?”
Anyway, somehow luckily because there’s not a lot of flights coming out of Boise -- Boise is a little airport -- somehow luckily for me, we lined it up where I could basically go Thursday to the kids’ carnival, Friday, work for two hours in the morning and then pick up the kids and go camping that night, camp all night Friday night.
Then wake up in the morning, race home, drop the kids off, and then race to the airport, fly from Boise up to Salt Lake, and then Uber drive from Salt Lake to Park City, speak there, and then fall asleep that night, wake up at six in the morning, drive from Park City back to Salt Lake, fly from there to LA.
Then speak at his event, fly home, and land in Boise. That’s what I just did. I just landed in Boise after that whirlwind of traveling, speaking, traveling, speaking that was wrapped at the end of a camping trip. It turned out really well. We had a fun time.
But the camping trip is where the fun began so let me start there. I was camping with the kids. You know, you guys who know, who follow my business and all that, I started this whole business with potato guns. That was the first thing.
I got a ton of potato guns. I had 10 or so of them in my garage. We’re packing up for the camping trip. It’s funny, because we’re camping for one night and we literally had my wife’s extended cab Denali, huge car, completely filled to the brim with coolers, sleeping bags, tents, and pads, and potato guns -- just crazy.
I’m like, “How in the world? This is one night’s sleep. How did people back in the day go camping?” Nowadays, you’re basically bringing your whole hotel with you. It’s crazy. We had it in there and had the potato guns.
So we get there. We were the first ones there because I took the kids out of school early. I’m like, “You know, if I’m going to go, let’s make it fun,” so I pulled the kids out of school, went to lunch and then drove down there and got a campsite, just goofing off.
Then we broke out the potato guns and started shooting these potato guns which is like one of my favorite things to do. I really enjoy it. So we’re shooting potato guns, having fun. Then one of the potato guns misfires. The potato doesn’t come out of it.
I know not to look at the end of the barrel because that’s safety rule number 101 in my how to make potato gun course. I’m the potato gun guy. I know the rules. We wrote the rules, so I don’t look in the end, but I go back to the chamber which I had just sprayed for a minute, a whole bunch of hairspray and I capped it off.
I opened up the back of it and all the hairspray starts coming out of it. Then I flip the back side open and look in there. I see potato jammed in there. I’m trying to figure out, “Why in the world didn’t it shoot? The fuel is coming out. I don’t see any gaps around the potato. Why did it not work?”
So I flick the igniter just to see - yes, stupid Russell. I flicked the igniter to see why in the world it doesn’t work, and this huge fireball goes boom, and comes out the backside right into my face. My eyelashes curled in half. You know what happens if you light your hair on fire.
They curled in half. Then my eyebrows completely got singed off. Then the whole front of my bangs just shrunk up, you know how hair when it gets on fire goes, all the front of my hair. First, I’m trying to figure out, “Am I dead? What just happened? My whole face just caught on fire. Okay, I survived.”
Then I started feeling my eyebrows. “These feel all crunchy. Something weird is happening.” I feel my crunchy eyebrows and my hair. Anyway, needless to say, my face had caught on fire. We kept shooting potato guns until both of them got jammed and ruined.
Then we just packed up and went back to camp. That night, we were making s’mores. By the way, if you make s’mores, the best way to do them is instead of using chocolate, you use Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Oh, if you try that, it will change your s’more experience.
I don’t even like s’mores anymore unless they have Reese’s. Now it’s amazing. We had tons of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and we had the whole thing, making s’mores and went camping. We went to bed that night in the tent with the kids, super fun, great time.
Next morning, wake up and pack up the whole thing, get in the car, and I look in the mirror and I couldn’t even believe how horrible I looked. I’m like, “I’m supposed to be speaking at Ray’s $25,000 mastermind group in four hours.”
We race home and I have 20 minutes when I get home to the time I have to leave to the airport in time. I’m in the bathroom with these little scissors, snipping off the singed hair off my eyebrows and eyelashes, and my bangs so that I don’t look like I have singed, curly hair. It took me 20 minutes to snip off all the tons of singes.
I still didn’t get it all out. My hair looks horrible right now still. I shower real quick. Then I don’t even have time to pack my bags. It’s basically one night, two cities. I just get my backpack, throw in my clothes and stuff, and jump in my car, race to the airport, and then fly.
I almost missed my flight. It was crazy. I got to the airport 30 minutes before my flight was supposed to leave. Luckily I didn’t have any check-on backs so I was able to get on. I flew to Salt Lake, took an Uber up to Park City which was awesome.
We go to Park City. I had a chance to meet with this group who was different than the group I normally hang out with. I’m an Internet nerd so I’m usually with Internet marketing nerds. This was a bunch of network marketers.
It was a small room, probably 30 people or so in a big suite overlooking all of Park City. It was amazing. As soon as I walked in the door, they were in the break. I walk in and Ray comes, “Hey, how’s it going?” and hands me a microphone.
I put it on and he’s like, “You’re up.” “Oh, what did you want me to talk about? You didn’t even ask me what to speak on.” He’s like, “Oh, just talk about this.” So I go out there for an hour and talk about some stuff.
It was really cool. I talked about everyone talks about their product or service, selling things like that. I just talked about that’s not what it’s about. People buy based on results. I asked what everyone was doing.
There was people in Beach Body, people in all these different network marketing programs. I told them, “The biggest, most powerful thing you guys can do is go and work for free for someone. Go get a result. Go and prove that what you have works. If you got a product, go and give it to other people. If you have a service, perform that service and just wow someone.”
I told the story about how when we re-launched our coaching program, I needed some good success stories. The first thing I did is I worked for free. I called up this guy named Drew Connolly, flew out to his office and worked for free for him, served him, and was able to help their company grow, and then from that, I was able to capture proof of video testimonial of that experience and then used that video testimonial to leverage and to grow our coaching program.
I showed them the right way to capture those and everything, and just said, “You know, whatever your product is, step one, go out and serve. Go and get some people results. After you get results, then you can capture those on film and record those on your iPhone or whatever it is to make a really good video. Now, that’s the leverage you need to do everything else.”
I talked about that. I talked about my Dream 100 strategy. I showed them how to do that. I showed them this concept of how to penetrate Dream 100 to dramatically increase your traffic and a bunch of cool things, stuff that if you’ve read the DotCom Secrets book, and in fact, there’s a bonus chapter if you upgraded and bought the audio book, there’s a bonus chapter called “The Dream 100” that I taught that whole concept with.
I showed that whole process which was cool. Then I got to go to an amazing restaurant and hang out with all these network marketing guys, and hear their stories. These are all of Ray’s top earners. There are guys making a million dollars in network marketing.
It was cool to see their process because these guys make their money not by selling products but by building teams of people and teaching these people how to build teams of people. It was cool to see how business works in that sphere among the elite people which was cool.
Then that night, I went to bed, woke up in the morning, again, six in the morning, Ubered back to Salt Lake, flew to Steve’s event. Steve’s event was interesting too because it wasn’t like a normal Internet marketing event where everyone gets up and teaches and sells, things like that but it was more they had what he called a 20/20/20 where they had 20 minutes of teaching, and then 20 minutes of actual workshop time where people had to go work, and then 20 minutes of Q&A.
I watched some of the other speakers do that. Then I was going to do that, and then I ended up last minute changing my process and just gave my Funnel Hackers presentation because I felt like that’s what that audience really needed. It was really cool.
I kind of did that. It was awesome. I didn’t get a sale. It wasn’t a selling event. I just gave the first basically hour long of my presentation. Afterwards, I had a lady come up in tears crying, talking about how it changed everything she’s doing. It was really rewarding for me.
It was fun. A ton of people had my book and I got to sign the book. It was really fun. After that was done, one of the attendees threw me in their car and drove me back to the airport, jumped in the plane, sat on the plane passed out, and then woke up right when I landed.
Now I’m here, hanging out with you guys. It was a crazy weekend, a ton of fun. I was able to accomplish a ton of stuff in a very short period of time and just grateful, really grateful for this opportunity that I have to be able to go and share what I’m passionate about.
I was thinking about both of these events, I didn’t get to sell anything at them. I just got to go and try to inspire people and to share my story and talk about for me, what my thing that I’m passionate about which is Click Funnels and just talk about how it’s affected me and changed my life, and changed other people’s lives.
It was so cool to see as I shared that with people, them have breakthroughs and get how this could help them as well. It was fun. It came back to what I talked about earlier where I had a chance this weekend to work for free.
I didn’t get paid. I paid my own way. I paid for my own flights, my own hotels. Not only did I not make any money, but it cost me money to do it but it was a chance for me to go out and work for free. I just want to encourage you guys to do that.
I know that we’re always there, building a business, trying to make money but there are times when you just got to give back and work for free. I looked at that lady who was in tears when she gave me a hug when I left. Who knows what that is going to do for her? I don’t know yet.
Because I was willing to go and work for free and try to share, and try to share my message and what I do, it affected her that way and a lot of other people. I think it’s a blessing that we all have, that it’s good for all of us every once in awhile to give back as much as you can and hopefully change someone’s life.
There you go. I’m almost home, feeling a little more energized than when I started talking so thank you guys for keeping me up, not letting me pass out and die behind the wheel. I’m also happy that I survived the potato gun incident. Hopefully by the Funnel Hacking event in two weeks, my eyelashes will have grown back.
If not, sorry about that for everybody who is going to be there. All right everybody, I appreciate you guys. I am going to sign off and go get some sleep, and will be back at it next week, having fun, inspiring, trying to spread the message, trying to get more people in the Click Funnels, trying to take over the Internet marketing scene with it.
One last thing, for those of you guys who are going to be at the Funnel Hacking event, I’m going to show you a blend of two worlds, of the network marketing world and the Internet marketing world. We’re going to take the best from network marketing and strategy that companies like Mary Kay use and ViSalus, and all the big network marketing companies use to inspire and motivate their customer base to spread their message, and we’re going to bring it to Click Funnels.
If we execute it correctly, every single one of you guys listening to this podcast right now could be driving a brand new Corvette or Tesla or Ferrari, or whatever car is your dream car, and I’ll be paying for it. It’s going to be sweet. I’ll fill you in with more details soon, but just to get you excited about what’s coming up.
I’m back home. Talk to you guys soon. Have an awesome night. If you shoot potato guns, make sure never to look at either end, not just the top end. Thanks guys.
Are you frustrated because nobody is buying your product? This episode will show you the secret to guaranteeing a success!
On today’s episode Russell talks about what to do if your funnel flops. He talks about how the average millionaire fails 11 times before they have success.
Here are some cool things to listen for on this episode:
So listen below to find out what to do if the funnel you have built flops.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell. I want to welcome you to Marketing in Your Car.
All right everyone, today, the message for you guys today is all about publishing, about putting stuff out into the world. It’s been interesting as I’ve seen those in our high end coaching program who are successful versus those who aren’t. It’s almost one very common theme that happens over and over again.
Those who are having success are publishing a lot of things. They’re writing emails, sending out blog posts, making funnels, making videos. They’re doing stuff. They’re moving forward. The ones who aren’t making money, they’re focusing on one perfect funnel and not doing anything else except for making this thing just the most perfect thing in the world.
They’re spending months and months trying to do it. The nice thing about Click Funnel is it’s about the process we teach at Funnel Hacking. You should be able to build a funnel in a day, maybe two days if you’re slow but it shouldn’t be longer than that. If you get a video camera, the iPhone cameras nowadays are better than any expensive things.
Throw up a camera, record something, throw it out there. It’s all about just getting stuff out there and publishing. I remember Jeff Walker. I read an email from him a couple of years ago that really illustrated this for me really well. He talked about how the best thing you could do in business is start publishing stuff, putting things out there because you can find out what people are responding to.
So many people I know are putting all of their eggs in this one basket of a webinar or video sales letter, whatever that thing is. They’re putting so much effort on that that it may or may not work. A lot of times, they don’t work. I would say half the time, my stuff doesn’t work either.
Hopefully, each time, we get better and better at making things right but half the time, it’s not going to work. You’ve got to get good at just publishing and putting it out there, and seeing if people are responding to you.
Put up a funnel and direct some traffic. If people don’t respond to it, then do another one. Create something new. It’s not that hard. It doesn’t take that much time. If someone doesn’t buy your product, guess what? Maybe no one wants to buy your product.
I keep seeing people who have been spending six, eight, ten, 12 months trying to get somebody to buy their product when it turns out nobody wants their product. Marlon Sanders, one of the original Internet marketing guys, I heard him speak one time.
His presentation was called A Dead Duck Can’t Fly. He got up there saying, “Look, I don’t care how great you think your product is. A dead duck can’t fly. You can keep making new sales letters for it and new videos, do everything but sometimes, a dead duck won’t fly - or all the time.”
If you know your product is dead and nobody is buying it, or whatever the issue might be, you’ve got to understand, sometimes people aren’t going to buy it. Maybe the product, as much love, effort and stuff you’ve put into it, maybe people don’t want it. I had a friend when I first got started in this business, man, 12 years ago.
I met him and he was selling this ebook he had written. He was so passionate about this ebook. He kept trying to sell it and trying to sell it. He spent two or three years trying to sell this book and nobody would ever buy it.
I remember saying to him, “Ken, I don’t think anyone wants to buy this book. You need to create a new product. You need to try something different. You got the skill sets. You know how to write a book. You know how to put up a sales letter. You’ve done the whole process once but you need to create a new product because nobody is buying that one. Nobody wants it. As much as you love it, nobody wants it.”
I remember he told me, “Russell, I can’t. I’ve spent two years of my life on this. I can’t stop now. I can’t quit now.” I just got to tell you guys, sometimes it’s okay to be a quitter. You got to quit sometimes. You just have to.
You can’t just keep on. Eventually, the market will tell you if something is sellable or not. It’s really cool how that works. If people don’t want it, they’re not going to buy it. If nobody is buying it, it’s because nobody wants it. That’s a lot of times the issue.
Sometimes, obviously the issue is not getting traffic or your sales letters don’t sell well, things like that. But sometimes just people don’t want what you’re selling. You got to be okay with that. You got to detach yourself from the emotion of it and just focus on what do people want.
Awhile ago, when I got started, there was this really cool course called The Underachiever Formula. I later bought that company and renamed it Underachiever Secrets. As you can probably tell, all my stuff is “secrets.” But in that product, it was from Frank Kern and Ed Dale who initially published it.
What they talked about was brilliant. It said, “This is the process. This is how you are successful online. Step one, you got to find a hot market. If you’re not in a market that’s hot right now, you got to change your market. I don’t care how passionate you are about whatever, if it’s not a hot market, people aren’t going to buy it.”
Maybe they’ll buy it a little bit but if you want to make a lot of money, you got to find a hot market. Find a market that’s rabid, that people love buying things, people that are currently buying lots of other things. That’s step number one.
Step number two is after you find the hot market, then you have to ask them what they want. Never assume that the cool thing you want to create is what they actually want. My guess right now is if you’re selling something and nobody is buying it, it’s because you didn’t ask them what they wanted.
You thought about what you would want and you created that. It turns out you’re the only dude or dudette who wants that thing. Am I right? You got to ask them what they want. Survey them. Do teleseminars. Do webinars. Ask questions.
Call up your customers and find out what their pain points are. Find out what they actually want. Then after they tell you what they want, then you create that. You don’t create your own thing. Again, the way this whole process works, it’s by surveying -- surveys and finding out what your audience wants.
It’s by publishing, sending out emails, making Facebook posts, driving traffic to it, and seeing what people respond to. If no one is clicking on your posts, if you’re spending $20, $30, and nobody is sharing or clicking on your posts, then guess what? Nobody wants it, okay?
That’s fine. Move onto the next thing and keep moving until boom, eventually you’re going to hit a quarry. That’s what people want. I can’t tell you over the 12 years of me doing this how many products I’ve launched and they’ve flopped. I mean, flop after flop after flop.
It was kind of like Michael Jordan where he goes out there. They said he missed more shots than anybody else but he also made more shots than anybody else, right, or more game winning shots, whatever the thing is. You got to put a lot of stuff out there.
I cannot tell you - I have a road of hundreds of offers that we have published that have flopped, but we’ve got a handful, maybe a dozen that have blown up and become multimillion dollar projects but I would never have got to those dozen had I not flopped over and over again. You guys got to understand that this is a process.
You building out a sales funnel, think of it like school. You go to school for four, six, or eight years depending on what your major is. When you’re done, you go out there and then start trying to do it. It’s the same thing here.
Your first funnel, your second funnel, or your third funnel and your tenth funnel, this is your education. This is you learning the process, learning how to write copy, learning what people respond to, learning what they’re not responding to.
I’m sick and tired of people getting all upset, “Oh, my Web site’s not making any money,” and they want to quit. It drives me crazy. The first one didn’t work. Make a second one. If that one doesn’t work, make a third one and keep doing it until you’re successful.
When I was first getting started, I remember I was listening to this seminar from I think Brian Tracy actually. He was talking about there was this news show. They had 15 self-made millionaires up on stage.
I’m going to screw up the numbers but the concept, I understand. Basically he asked these guys, he said, “How many businesses did you fail in before you became a millionaire?” They were trying to add it up.
They cut to a commercial break and came back. Everyone added it up and they said that the average of all these 15 millionaires was they had launched and failed I think it was 11 times before they were successful - 11 times, 11 companies they’ve screwed up on before they made millions!
Okay, then Brian Tracy asked, “Do you think it’s because they all got lucky on the eleventh time?” Do you think Einstein got lucky on the whatever, 3000th time he tried to invent the light bulb? No! What happens is you try one thing and it doesn’t work, people don’t respond, so you try something else, and try something else.
Eventually, you’ve tried everything that doesn’t work. Eventually, the next thing has got to work. Eventually, you’ve figured out all the ways that people are not going to buy and one of these times, you’re going to hit one that people do buy.
The difference between me and the person listening to this who is not having success right now is not publishing enough. People are like, “Russell, you put out so much stuff.” Guess why? Half of my stuff flops, okay? I’m not sure which half is going to flop until I put it out there, so I got to keep putting it out there and keep putting it out there, and keep putting it out there.
When they respond to something, and you say, “Boom, this is the winner,” then you keep ringing that bell and keep pushing and keep pushing it. For example, when we launched Click Funnels the first time, guess what? It was a flop. I hate to admit it, it was a complete flop.
We launched it, we did a big huge launch with prizes, and it was a flop. Nobody bought it or very few people bought it. For me, I felt the product was still good but I had to figure out something else so we tried another thing and tried another thing.
I probably rewrote the sales letter, I don’t know, 10, 12, 15 times and none of those things works. I finally was so depressed I was going to give up and Mike Filsaime called me and said, “Hey, I need you to speak at my event about Click Funnels.” I’m like, “Dude, nobody is buying this thing.”
But he’s like, “You got to figure it out and you got to sell a $1000 version of it.” I created a new webinar pitch. We called it Funnel Hacks, launched it at the event, and the rest is history. Since then, we’ve sold over 3000 copies at $1000 apiece. That’s $3 million right there in the last six months.
Then on top of that, we’ve used at that as a tool to add over $4000 active customers to pay $97 a month so it works. But guess what? It didn’t work the first time or the second, or the third, or the fourth, or the fifth, or the sixth, okay?
You guys got to be comfortable with publishing. This is your education. The first, second, third, fourth, fifth funnel that you guys do, just plan on it not working and be okay with that. Quit complaining. It’s so funny, in every other business in the world, people understand that hey, you got to spend time, effort, and money.
My friend is a chiropractor. He had to go to 10 years of school. Then he had to go get a SBA loan to build his office. Then he had to go get clients. Five years later, he’s profitable. Somehow, for some reason, we think that the laws of business don’t function online.
There’s too many people out there teaching get rich overnight, get rich quick, all that stuff and you can, and people do but it usually comes with a lot of effort, a lot of work, a lot of you cutting your teeth trying thing after thing until you find out boom, that’s what works. When I got started, it was 18 months before I made my first dollar online - 18 months!
I don’t even know what I was doing for 18 months but I was trying, spinning my wheels before I realized how to actually sell things. Obviously the coaching, programs, tools, and everything we’re giving you, my goal is to shortcut that success. That’s why we teach the Funnel Hacking concepts.
You find someone who has already failed 1000 times. You look what they’ve gotten and you model it from there. Typically, if you do that, you’re going to be starting at a better spot. You’re going to be starting about where they left off.
Hopefully, you’re going to cut out tons of the trial and error but even with that, you got to understand that it’s okay if your first thing or your second thing, or your third thing doesn’t work. You are creating a business. You are trying to attract people.
You’re seeing what people respond to, and when you figure out what they respond to, then you ramp it up and scale it. One of the guys in our coaching group we’re working on is kind of in the survival market. He’s done three, four, or five versions and has this ad that just works like crazy but the different landing pages he’s got just haven’t been working.
He’s tried two or three or four. I actually created one for him. We have a couple versions. So far, none of these things are working but he’s getting traffic. Things are happening. He just hasn’t quite figured out what’s that thing that these guys are going to respond to.
As soon as he figures that thing out, boom, it’s game over for him. You got to try. You got to be patient with it. You can’t complain and whine because that’s how this game is played. Anyway, that’s my rant for today. I hope that for those of you guys who are publishing stuff, it inspired you to know you’re on the right track.
For those of you who have failed, I hope it inspires you to know that I fail all the time. For those of you guys who are getting started and you’re frustrated because you’re not making yet, I hope that paints a clear path of what to expect and how to get there.
The last thing I want to mention before I jump into the office here is, is it worth it? Is it worth it to fail five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten times before you smash one out of the park? Yes, it is because one of these things that goes right, one of these things that connects with your audience, the right way when they respond they want to buy, you can make money in a month, two month period of time than most people make in a lifetime.
It’s worth it but you got to understand that it doesn’t always happen first try. You got to become okay with that and go on the second try and third try. Just keep doing this because you will keep learning and find out what people respond to. Eventually, you’re going to hit a grand slam.
It happens all the time to those who don’t quit after the first failure or the second, who keep going because they’ve got faith. They’ve got a vision. They’ve seen that it works for other people. They’ve seen that man, this guy named Russell, it works for him. This guy over here, this girl over here, if it works for other people, it can work for me.
I just got to figure out what my audience responds to and create exactly what they want. If I do that, like I said, you can make more in a month than most people make in a lifetime. It’s definitely worth it. Don’t get frustrated.
Stay the course. Have fun with it. This is your education period. This is your time to learn and to grow and to have fun with it. If you do that, I promise you guys it will be worth it. It’s worth it in the long run. All right, I’m at the office.
Today I’m going to have some fun. I got a lot of fun things I’m publishing and see what people will respond to, see what gets them to part with their hard earned money. I’ll find out. If it works, we’ll scale it. If not, we’ll check out something new tomorrow. Appreciate you guys, hope you have an awesome day and we’ll talk soon.
What the last 24 hours have been like without my personal email address…
On this episode of Marketing In Your Car Russell talks about how he got control of his email and his Voxer account and how that helped his stress level and why he hopes it will give him more time to spend with his family.
Here are a few of the interesting things you’ll hear in today’s episode:
Listen below to find out how Russell cleared some of the stressful clutter from his life.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone. This is Russell, and welcome to "Marketing in Your Car."
Hi, everyone. Late night, just got back from the grocery store, heading home, and I want to tell you about something cool that I think I'm doing that I want to recommend to you guys to do, I think. [laughs] I'm pretty sure I am. I'm kind of stressing out about it right now, but I think that after I get through the withdrawal symptoms, this process is going to be awesome.
As some of you guys know, we just had our book launch, Click Funnels launch, a baby, we have our live event coming up. We just moved offices, and we're about to move our house. All this change, and all these things, and it's been insane keeping up with everything.
On top of that, we have all the normal things that we have to do, right? And for me, as some of you guys know through our coaching program, I give our higher-end clients access to me through Vox, so I get Voxers all the time. There's just all these things that are pressing on me, and it's like it's getting to the point where it's hard to bear, all of it, and so I've been trying to think, "How do I structure things differently so that I can get out from under this pressure?"
I remember Dan Gable, who, those of you guys who know wrestling, he's like the Michael Jordan of wrestling. One time someone asked him about pressure, "How do you deal with all this pressure that's on your life?", or they asked him if he believed in pressure, and he said, "Well I believe in it. It's there. I just don't choose to put myself underneath it."
I was thinking about that. I feel like I've been putting myself under enormous pressure, [laughs] and I have this horrible problem where I just say "Yes" to everything. I want to do all these things, because it's completely exciting to me. So I've been trying to weave things out and trying to simplify my life and everything.
Anyway, over the last 24 hours or so, I've made some big jumps, like some crazy huge leaps, and I want to walk you through them, because again, I'm in the withdrawal process right now, and it's stressing me out, but I think it's going to be really good, long term.
First off, the first step was email. I had to get control of my email. I have had the same email address for like 12 years. Everyone in the world has it. I'm on a million newsletters, a million different things, and right now, on average, I was trying to measure between that. I use a service called Sane Box, which takes all your junk and tries to filter it out and get rid of it before it gets to your inbox.
But even with that, I get over a thousand emails a day hit my inbox, and between that and Sane Box, it's about 3,500 emails a day. It's insane. I don't even know how...if you ever emailed me and I didn't write back, that's probably why I didn't. It just gets so overwhelming, and every time I walk in, I'm just sick to my stomach. I don't even know what to do, and it just never goes away. It just keeps growing and growing and growing.[laughs]
I've been so scared to not have it, like, "What happens if I miss an email? What if I don't see something?", and so because I'm checking my phone a million times a day because email's coming in so fast that it's pushing emails off the screen, and I don't want to miss anything. Anyway, there's all this stress that comes from it.
So my first thing I decided to do was I needed to kill my email address, which was crazy. I set up a new email address, and then I was like, "Well, I don't want to just tell everyone my new email address, because I'm going to start getting a million emails." So what I did is I set up an auto-responder thing on my old email address, and I'm still going to have Kelsey, my assistant, go in each day and just browse, and make sure that I'm not missing anything super important like bills or things like that, who knows, whatever could come through.
But now there's an auto-responder for emails on my old email address that pops up and says, "New email address — how to contact me inside." You open it up, and it basically says, "Hey, I was getting 3,500 emails a day. I can't keep up with it. But if you're awesome, and I'm assuming you are, and you want to contact me, then this is how you can do it," and I push them to a form to fill out. I push them to a Wufoo form, and basically the Wufoo form says, "What's your name, your email address, your Skype number, and what's your question?"
When someone goes to that form, they don't have my new email address, but they can fill it out, and then I get that. Wufoo emails me the form that they got, so the form pops into my email address that says Name, Email Address, Skype, and their question. I look at that question. If it's something for me, I can respond if I want to, or if I don't, I can forward it to Kelsey or to Brent or to someone on my team to take care of it, and that person never gets to me.
If it is someone that I want to hear from, then I can respond back to them, and then that person's got access to my inbox. I did that on Friday, before I left. It's Saturday night. It's been 24 hours, and it's been stressing me out because my email inbox only has three emails from people who've actually got the thing, filled it out. Two of them I didn't want to respond to, so I forwarded them to someone else, and then one of them was someone I wanted to. I responded to them, and that was it, and it's crazy.
I even went back to my old email box, scanning through to make sure I'm not missing anything, but for the most part it's really refreshing. There's no one contacting me, and it's kind of stressing me out because of that, which is kind of cool.
The next thing was Voxers. I've got my high-end clients on Voxer, which used to be really, really easy, but as we've grown, it's gotten more and more, and so I always try to get back to people really, really fast, and the problem is that means I'm answering Voxers all day long, all night long, all the time, and I just needed to get more control over that.
So what I did is one of my friends from our Mastermind group — his name's Joe McCall — he bought me a new iPhone while we were there, which was super cool. He gave me this brand new iPhone, and so I turned this into my new iPhone. I've got a new install of Voxer on it, and I just gave this one to close people that I really needed to communicate with, people that I want instantly, like I need to have the contact with my wife, my team, things like that.
The other phone, I kept on my Voxer conversations, and I kept it at my office. I didn’t even bring it home this weekend. I don’t even have it. People are probably Voxing me, and I don’t have the ability to respond back to them. I’m going to respond back to them on Monday when I get to the office, and then I’ll just have that at the office, and I’ll do client work there, and then when I’m home, I don’t do client work there anymore, which is kind of cool.
That was the next barrier that I put up, and then the next thing is, my assistant Kelsey's been my assistant for four or five years. She's been doing the support role and assistant and things like that. Now I'm trying to make her more of an assistant. Each day, she comes in to my office, and the day, gives me a write-up of what's happening the next day, tells me what's in my inbox, who I've got calls with, what's happening. She's been kind of controlling my whole life. She's been checking my emails. She's trying to put up as many barriers around me and take care of me, so I don't have to stress out.
She gets my lunches now, all these kind of things, so I can focus on what I do best, which is what brings the money in. The next thing I'm going to try to start doing is I'm going to try to start — because I don't know about you guys, but at the beginning of the year, I set a goal. One of my goals was to spend more time with my kids than I do at the office. So far, I haven't done that yet, but these are the first steps to get me to that point. Next, I'm going to start trying to spend more time in the mornings with my wife, maybe take her to the movies once or twice a week in the mornings. Spending more time with my kids — coming home a little earlier.
Anyway, I'm trying to get this under control, and it's hard for me. I don't know if you guys are like me, serial entrepreneurs. This has been a hard, painful process. I totally keep checking my phone, and there's nothing there for me. There's no one to talk to, which is good. I've got to focus on who I love the most.
As I said, I'm going through withdrawals right now, but I think, hopefully, in a couple of days I'll realize that nobody really needs to talk to me, that I'm going to be okay, and I will go have a chance to be more present with the people that I love and that I care about, and things like that.
Anyways, it's kind of cool. I'm excited for it. It's painful right now, but I think it's going to be good, and I just want to recommend for you to do the same thing, to start putting up some barriers. Start making some rules. I remember Alex Mendosian, one of my first mentors, and one of the smartest dudes — just an amazing guy. I remember him telling me probably five or six times over the last 12 years, I've heard him speak about retiring your email. Once a year, he'll offer you an email address. I've never done it. I've been so scared, and I finally am doing it. I'm finally getting out from under that pressure, like Dan Gable said.
So I can focus, and I can create better. I can be better, and be more, and I'm excited for it. I hope that this gives you guys permission to do that, to turn off your email. It took me a while to figure out the right way to do that, and I think that that way that I figured out works. It's really smart, and I think it's working really good. Again, we're basically vacation auto-responder messages back to them. It tells them to fill out a form. The form gets sent to me, and I decide if I want to respond or forward it to somebody else, and it's really simple and easy to do, and something that I recommend for you guys to test out and to try.
Anyway, hope that helps. I am home with the groceries. I’m going to go in and be with my wife and my baby, Nora, who’s probably still awake. Everyone else had better be asleep. [laughs] I appreciate you guys for listening. I hope things are awesome, and if you don’t have your tickets to the Funnel Hacking Event, go and get them. It’s going to be amazing. FunnelHacking.com is where you can get them at, and outside of that, I appreciate you guys, and we’ll talk soon.
What I learned over the last two days at our private inner circle meeting.
On today’s episode Russell talks about the cool stuff that happens during The Inner Circle Mastermind Group and some things that he has learned from them.
Here are some cool things to listen for in this episode:
So listen below to find out some of the stuff you may be missing out on if you aren’t a member of Russell’s Inner Circle.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing in Your Car.
Hey guys and gals, so the last two days here in Boise have been amazing. We’ve had our inner circle mastermind group here. I got to tell you, I have been in a lot of really good groups. I was in Bill Glazer’s for six years. I was in Ryan Deiss’ once. I’ve been in a lot of them. I’ve been in Joe Polish’s.
I’ve been in as many as I could join. I got to tell you that the group - and I’m not just saying this because I’m biased. I got more value out of the group than I have out of any other group ten times over. Just the caliber people that are in it are amazing.
I’m grateful to be the one that gets to facilitate it. It’s one of the most amazing, cool things in the world. It’s interesting, I used to have a mastermind group probably seven, eight years ago that ran for two or three years. We just shut it down eventually because it wasn’t super profitable and the groups were okay.
They just weren't where I wanted them to be at. It was kind of whatever. When we relaunched this about 18 months ago, I was really nervous, “Do I want to do this again? Do I not?” The first meeting when we did it, we had signed I think eight people that had joined the inner circle so it was only a one-day meeting right before we did a three-day workshop.
Then the next meeting, we had the group had grown to be a two-day meeting. Then the next one, we had a two-day meeting but it was so packed. We had 30 something people that were in it which is a good problem. People are excited and they want to join.
Then this time, we turned it into a three-day meeting just because we had so many people in it. We’re actually going to be splitting the groups now. I told them last time I was going to split the groups too but everyone freaked out, “No, we’d rather have bigger groups.” Anyway, so I don’t know what we’ll do but we’ll see.
I’m sure if we keep growing at the pace we have, we’ll have to open another one. It’s just been the most amazing experience for me and for them, got a ton of good stuff. We’re actually going to be going today and do half a day with everybody because what was interesting, there’s always themes that happen at these events.
The last inner circle, the theme was definitely focused around webinars. That was the topic everyone was focusing on. That’s what we were digging deep into is webinar funnels, cycles, and what you do and how you do it. It was really fascinating.
It was really cool to see that and get tons of value out of that as a group. Then as a group, everyone went out and over the last four months since our last meeting, people have been doing webinars. We have people making $50,000 a week right now doing webinars. We have people, one guy just passed $100,000 doing webinars.
It’s really fun watching all of the success coming from that. That’s been cool. Then the theme this time -- we weren’t planning on it at all. It just evolved into that -- has been high ticket phone sales. Everyone is starting to try to add elements of that into their company and trying to figure out how to get that as part of what they’re doing.
And so today we decided to do bonus session. It was kind of cool. I’m going to be coming in here in about 30 minutes, about 45 minutes actually and I’m going to be showing off two different high ticket sales funnels that I believe are probably the two most effective high ticket phone sales funnels online. One of them is mine, I’m not going to lie.
The other one is another one that I think is amazing. In fact, I’m going to be the person whose funnel this is will be actually speaking at the Funnel Hacking event and will be showing off this funnel. If you don’t have tickets to Funnel Hacking yet, go and get them, FunnelHacking.com. I’m going to be showing those off today first.
Then we’ve got our two sales guys that do all of our sales coming in. These guys are amazing. Some of you guys know my back story. We used to have a sales floor of 60 full time sales guys. The two best guys were Robbie and Randy. They were the two best guys we had on our team.
Now that we no longer have our sales floor, we didn’t have any phone sales for three or four years. Then we decided to bring back in - they came back in. It’s crazy. These two guys alone are doing as much volume as 60 guys were doing before back in the day which is nuts.
Part of it is the process and part of it is them but the process is really cool. We went from back in the old days when we had our 60 sales guys, we were averaging about $120 for every lead we got. Right now, we’re averaging over $1100 for every lead we get. We’ve almost 10xed what we were making for every lead we would get which is cool.
That has to do with the process. Then Robbie and Randy are the two best sales guys I think on earth. They’re amazing. They really are. Robbie is going to be going over the script today, showing everyone the script, going through it, training them on it so they can go back and train their staff on it which is going to be really cool.
In the second half, Randy is going to come and talk about his close because he’s got this thing he does that is - I remember about a month ago he sat down with me and he asked me some questions, “Why do people buy from you?” I was trying to tell him, “Oh, they buy because of this and this.” He said, “Wrong, that’s not why people buy. I’ve talked to more of your customers than you ever have. I’ve talked to thousands of your customers. Let me tell you exactly why people buy.”
He explained it. It was nuts. It was one of the coolest things ever. He’s going to be sharing that with everybody today too. It’s pretty exciting anyway. We’re having a good time. Most of the people that are there are going to come over to the office today and just see our operation, see what’s going down, how we run what we do which will be kind of fun as well.
It’s exciting but I just have had a great time with those guys and some interesting things. One of the things I learned from the mastermind group, one of the guys in our group, his name is Joe McCaul. Joe first off is just a stud. He’s one of the coolest guys I’ve ever met. He’s been helping me with my real estate nightmares in St. Louis, getting rid of my homes, getting the other ones fixed up.
He’s a crazy nice guy. He messaged me I think two or three weeks before the mastermind. He’s like, “Hey Russell, I want to make $250,000 new money before the mastermind. Here’s my strategy.” We went back and forth on it a little bit. Then he executed on it.
He got to the meeting all depressed because he only made $98,000 in the two weeks or whatever. It was so awesome. He’s awesome. One thing he was talking about, his primary lead generation source is podcasts which is kind of cool, seeing as you guys are listening in the podcast.
He said that they found podcast listeners are way more affluent, they have more money. People that buy from iPhones are worth way more. I’m guessing that 90% of you guys right now are probably listening in on the iPhone or some version of an Apple product, so the highest quality leads.
That’s his entire lead gen strategy, based off podcasts which is so cool to see how he was doing it and why he was doing it. He was telling us that I think it was Expedia or one of the airlines, they found that same stat, that Apple buyers were worth more money so if you came from an Apple device, they showed you the more expensive hotels.
If you came from Android, they showed you the cheaper hotels to increase conversions which is awesome. That was really cool. Jay Bower spoke. He’s going to be speaking at the Funnel Hacking event. He’s a big guy that teaches a really cool webinar process that he does. He’s a webinar host, a full-time webinar host.
Every Thursday night, he hosts a webinar for somebody. He makes $100,000 a week doing it. He just showed his whole process for how he does it, the sequence when someone registers, what they do when they show up, and the aftermath and all of the operational side of a webinar. He had 40 or 50 different points of what he did, each step along the way to increase the tendency of more people to show up.
Just a couple quick bombs I’ll drop to share with you guys as our faithful listeners, one of them that we’ve been doing for the last little while that he talked about as well is he uses GoToWebinar. Three hours before the webinar starts, he changes the title in GoToWebinar.
Say your title is “Funnel Hacks,” “Funnel Hacks Presentation.” He changes the title to “**Starting Now,” or, “Starting in three hours**,” then “Funnel Hacks.” Then it says, “Do you want to update all participants about this change?” He says, “Yes.”
Then boom, it emails everyone who is registered with the new webinar title which is, “Webinar starting in three hours.” Then he changes that in two hours, then at one hour, and GoToWebinar will automatically send that out.
He does one more 20 minutes ahead. He gets GoToWebianr to send out four emails for him off of their IP which gets amazing deliverability. That’s what he’s doing to get people on which is awesome. We’ve been doing that as well and it just works great.
One thing I got from him, we did a webinar the other day and we did over $100,000 live on the webinar which was really cool. That’s always my goal. We hit it about once or twice a month which is exciting. Anyway, we did $100,000 on this webinar.
Then I was looking at Jay’s follow-up sequence that he taught at the last mastermind meeting. One of the steps that he does is so cool. Some of you guys may have seen this last week. He’s got a girl who goes and will not transcribe the webinar but rewrite it in cliff notes format.
She has a picture of the slide and recaps each slide. He took mine and a couple other people in the mastermind group, and took our presentations and had this girl go through and do it. She gave me back this 70 page word doc with basically the cliff notes of my webinar.
The last day of the webinar, before I closed down the replay, I just said basically, “Cliff notes,” or something like that, and emailed it and said, “Hey everyone, the webinar is coming down tonight at midnight. Because of the short time I want to speed this process up for you. Step one, download the cliff notes here. Step two, watch the webinar here. Step three, here’s the direct order link to go get started and get your discount, blah, blah.”
In that follow-up sequence, we did an additional $150,000. That turned into a $250,000 webinar and more than half of it came from the follow-up sequence from stuff we learned from Jay which is nuts. Jay will be at Funnel Hacking as well, a bunch of cool stuff.
I’m at the office, you guys, grabbing some stuff to head over to the event. I got to go but I want you guys to know we appreciate you. If you want to be at our next inner circle mastermind meeting, go to DotComSecretsIgnite.com. You guys need to be there.
They’re amazing. It’s by far the best marketing group online, and I know because I’ve joined literally every other mastermind group seeking for the right people, and all of them -- no offense to all the people I went to -- they weren’t good. We built an amazing group. If you feel like you could be or should be part of that, go to DotComSecretsIgnite.com.
Let Robbie and Randy know that you want in the inner circle and we’ll get you set up for our next meeting which is in September. Other than that, make sure you also get to the funnel hacking event, FunnelHacking.com.
And also guys, one thing that Joe talked about on podcasts is you got to ask your listeners for reviews. I never do that. It makes me nervous. I don’t even know how to review a podcast. If you like Marketing in Your Car, if you could do me one last favor today, go to I’m guessing iTunes and leave some feedback.
I’m going to go try to figure out how to read the feedback. I would really appreciate it because that would be super cool, and maybe get a few more people listening in while I’m driving to work. I appreciate you guys. Thanks so much and we’ll talk to you soon.
What people and systems are you putting in place, so that you can focus 100% of your time on your super power?
On this first episode after moving to a new office Russell talks about a few cool things that he has going on right now including the new Funnel Hacker TV podcast. He also talks about finding and focusing on your super power.
Here are some fun things you’ll hear on this episode:
So listen below to find out why it’s important to know what your super power is.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell and I want to welcome you guys to Marketing in Your Car.
All right everyone, I’m excited to be here with you guys. I think this is my first podcast since we’ve been in the new office. I did one talking about going to the new office. Now we’re there. We moved in. It’s fun, exciting, new, and all the fun stuff that comes with that.
This is the first time I think I’ve messaged you since I’ve been over here. So I’m actually driving home right now. I’m actually, just sometimes I don’t plan things. We’re also moving our house soon. Soon, my house will be close to the office.
Then it will be a short commute again but for right now, the house is far away. You guys may get a couple episodes that will be a little bit longer than normal. I hope you guys don’t mind. It should be fine. Anyway, I hope that things are going awesome for all you guys. I’m having a ton of fun.
It’s been insane how business has been. You know, every month, we keep growing and this month, we just smashed through our records again from last month which last month, we were like, “There’s no way we’re going to beat these,” and we did it again. It’s exciting.
Hopefully we’ll keep it rocking and rolling. A couple other exciting things, some of you guys know we launched the Funnel Hacker video podcast today which I’m finally excited. I’ve been talking to you guys about it for awhile. I hope you guys go and subscribe.
It will be in iTunes hopefully by tomorrow but right now, it’s just online. ITunes will be all right for it but it’s video based because we’re showing you guys awesome cool stuff. I would say make sure you subscribe to the video based one.
Basically, all you got to do is go to FunnelHacker.tv and see episode number one. It was really fun. Basically I sketch out the concept of a funnel. Then we bring the person on whose funnel we’re sketching out. They’re going to show us, talk to us about the psychology, why they did what they did, and then for all those guys who are DCS Labs members, you’ll get the funnel for free in your account which is kind of cool.
That’s kind of what’s happening. I did the first episode one was on the DotCom Secrets book launch. I showed that off. Hopefully it will give you guys some cool insights and ideas from that funnel. That’s what’s going down over there.
We got the big live Funnel Hacking event at the end of the month, so www.FunnelHacking.com which is kind of cool. We got one other cool funnel thing happening that we just started putting together yesterday or the day before.
I was thinking about in my own company, when I want to get crap done, what do we do? I call up Todd, Dillon, and whoever it is from all around the country. We all fly to Boise, sit in the office for three days, and we don’t sleep. You guys know about this because if you listen to the podcast, you hear me most nights coming home at four in the morning talking about these things, our hackathons.
It was called hackathons. I thought, “What if we changed our coaching program around a little bit?” You’ll actually see some big shifts coming from our coaching program here. It’s based off this idea of what if we gave people an experience where instead of us coaching for over a year -- which is good but you know, it’s extended. It’s long -- what if we gave people an emerging period where they come to Boise and we do hackathon with them and their business?
In three days, or four days, whatever it ends up being, we do it all. I’m really excited. We’re going to do the first test run probably in June. We’re going to bring eight people in. Basically what’s going to happen is we’re going to have for sure two and maybe three sales funnels we’re going to build out.
We’re going to build out a webinar funnel where I’m just actually going to write their whole webinar pitch just because people always screw it up it seems like. I’ll write the webinar pitch. Then I’ll actually pitch it so they can watch me pitch it and record that so they have that.
Then they will have a chance to pitch it. I’ll critique them and stuff like that. I’ll build out the sales funnel. It’s not like my team will. It will be me. I’m just going to do it all because I’m probably one of the faster guys on my team now doing it. I’m pretty picky about it because I know what works.
I’ll just build out those funnels. We’ll also build out their high ticket funnel. I’ll have my video guy take them out, film all the emotional story based videos we need for the high ticket funnel. Then we will go and train their salespeople.
They’ll bring two salespeople with them. My sales guys will train their sales guys. Then work on Traffic Geyser, get that set up and running and working. When all is said and done, they will leave with at least two funnels and up running, trained salespeople, a webinar pitch, everything, and it’s going to be called the hackathon, the funnel hackathon. I’m excited.
I’m sure you’ll see more about that over the next few months but it’s in embryo right now which is kind of fun. It’s being developed and designed. I’m really excited for it. Hopefully some of you guys will want to come to that.
We will get done in three days what it would take a typical person six months or more to get done. It will be fun. It’s not like again you’re hiring a copywriter or something. You’re hiring me. I’m doing all the work which will be really fun.
I’ll really enjoy it. Right now eight because we want to have small groups, eight people, eight webinar pitches in a three day period of time. It will be awesome. I’m excited. If you guys want to come to that in the future -- actually, if you want to book it now, if you go to DotCom Secrets Ignite, go apply and my sales guys will call you.
Just be like, “Hey, I want in on the hackathon,” and they’ll be like, “How do you know about the hackathon? We haven’t even started selling that yet,” and you’ll be like, “I know, I’m in the Marketing in Your Car podcast. I listen and take action.” We’ll get you in.
That’s about it. What I want to talk you guys about today now that you got some cool updates, some cool stuff that’s happening, I want to talk to you about one of the interesting conversations that we had today in the office.
It’s funny because when you start as an entrepreneur in most business ventures, it’s you, right. It’s you juggling everything. You’re wearing every single hat. When I got started, I was the product creator, the copywriter, the Web site designer, the support agent. I was doing all of the pieces.
I didn’t even know. I had to figure everything out because there was no one there to help me. I wasn’t making any money so I couldn’t hire people. That’s how a lot of businesses start. Then as you start growing, obviously after awhile, you start handing things off to different people and hiring people or bringing in partners depending on the route you go.
Then from that point, you spend the time just focusing more on what you’re good at. Anyway, we’ve had some interesting conversations with my partners at ClickFunnels today. We had a conversation just about that thing where each of us have our own superpower.
I think everyone does. I think everyone on earth has their own superpower. I think God gives everyone a superpower, something that they’re uniquely qualified to do. I tell my kids this all the time. “What’s your superpower?” and they all know what their superpowers are.
I think that each of us, especially in your company, everyone has their own superpower. A lot of times, when we start growing, we get people to do different pieces of it but still usually in a smaller company, everyone is wearing a lot of hats which is necessary for awhile but as you start growing a little bit, and without trying to hire a ton of people because that’s not what we’re trying to do but really getting the stars on your team to be able to focus on their superpower and get really good at it.
You look at of all the tasks I do every single day, and there’s like a thousand things I do everyday, there’s one that makes the most money. It’s when I’m on a webinar pitching. When I’m on a webinar, I’ll make more money in 90 minutes than I do the rest of the month combined. How can I - what can we do so that I’m always on a webinar?
We’re looking at both Todd and Dillon who are some of the most amazing developers I’ve ever seen in my life. They’re developing stuff and they’re awesome at it but then half the time, they’re sitting back where they have bug fixes and requests, all these things they have to do that aren’t their superpowers.
They have to do those though to keep things moving forward. The problem is that because of that, things can’t move forward. It’s one of those chicken and the egg scenarios, you know how it works. What we’re trying to focus on doing is looking at what each one of our superpowers are and trying to barricade ourselves around so the only thing we’re allowed to do, the only thing we’re able to do is what our superpower is so we can move that thing forward because again, in 90 minutes, I can make more money than I could in six months doing all these other things.
The same thing with Todd, Dillon, or with you, whatever your job is like you focus on your one superpower, you can make your company more money than doing all the rest of the stuff. How do you protect yourself and barricade yourself at a spot where you can just focus on that? What people do you need to add to your team that can take off those other pieces from you that are strangling you?
You know, when we moved to the new office, so much stuff was happening, so many things were juggling. I was so overwhelmed with everything so I took Kelsey, who has been my assistant for four years now. She’s been my assistant and support. She’s done both roles.
Because of that, when support goes up, I lose her. We broke her away where she does overflow support now but her main job is making sure that I can get my job done because the big thing is she can answer support, it takes all day but if she can facilitate me selling, we’ll all make more money. It will facilitate me selling.
We’re trying to put this barricade around me, all these little things that are holding me back like getting my office clean and creating things right here, meetings, all the other things that I don’t like doing and that are a struggle for me, she’s trying to barricade those from me so that I can just - it was funny, Brent on our team was like, “All we want Russell to do is sit behind his computer on the microphone and just sell stuff. If he can do that all day long, everything else will take care of itself.”
Just my thought today as I’ve been thinking about this from conversations we’ve been having for me is just how can I barricade myself as much as possible so that I’m only focusing on my superpowers? The other stars on my team, how can I barricade them so they’re only focusing on their superpowers?
If we get everyone doing their superpowers and obviously with any kind of company, there’s always, you have to wear a lot of hats but if we can shift it where instead of spending 80% of our time wearing a bunch of hats and 20% of our time doing our superpower, if we shift it to 80% superpower, 20% the other stuff, or if you can get to the point where you’re doing 90% or 100% superpower, how much more of a dramatic impact and a change can you make within your company to your team, to your customers, to the world?
That’s kind of my thought. That’s my focus. That’s what I’m looking at is what can I do to become better at that and really be able to get myself and my team focusing on that. Anyway, I hope that helps for you. I know all of you guys are doing different things and at different points and different spots in your business but it’s just a smart thing to start thinking about.
I remember the first time I understood this concept was when I read the book The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. It’s so funny, I was at an event with all these people. This was 10 or 11 years ago. All these people were talking about it.
I thought The E-Myth was an entrepreneur book or an Internet marketing myth, like email, e-myth. I was going on a family trip down to Lake Powell, Utah which is like a 10 hour drive from here. On the way out of town, we swung by Barnes & Noble and Collette’s like, “Get a book,” so I got The E-Myth because I’m like, “People talk about this. It looks awesome.” I started driving. We get all the way down to Lake Powell. We get in this boat out in the middle of the lake.
We sit there. I pull out my book to read. Within five minutes, I realized this has nothing to do with Internet marketing. I was like, “Oh, dang it. I thought this was an Internet marketing book I was trying to read. Now I’m stuck on a lake and this is all I have.” I read it.
I’m grateful I did because it talked about the systemization of businesses and how to pull yourself out of them, and a bunch of really cool stuff. If you haven’t read that, go read it. If you have read it, now is the time to start applying it more so in your life.
I’ve done it to a good point but I haven’t been religious about making barriers around my time, not just making barriers to make barriers though because you don’t want the rest of your company to fall apart but making a barrier by replacing that piece and putting the right person in place so that the ball doesn’t get dropped.
I’d rather have other people in my team wearing multiple hats than myself. That’s really the goal. Anyway, I hope that helps. I hope you guys are doing awesome. I’m almost home so I’m going to end today. I appreciate you guys listening in.
Again, go check out FunnelHacker.tv. It’s www.FunnelHacker.tv. Oh, and the other cool thing is that we are now giving away free Funnel Hacker t-shirts. If you go onto ClickFunnels, if you haven’t logged in for awhile, log in and the first thing that pops up is this cool 12 minute on-boarding video.
You go through the on-boarding video and when you are done, we will ship you out a t-shirt. It doesn’t cost you a penny as long as you’re a ClickFunnel member. That’s a gift for being awesome and being a ClickFunnel member. With that said, I am out of here. I will talk to you guys soon.
Have fun and drive safe. Thanks guys.