money4college, sublimenet, and other goofy things I came up with when creating my business…
On this episode Russell talks about some silly names he’s used for his businesses in the past. He also tells a funny story about when he was new to the business.
Here are some fun things to listen for in today’s episode:
So listen below and laugh with Russell as he talks about the struggles of naming his businesses.
---Transcript---
Good Morning, everybody. It’s an amazing day today. Welcome you guys to Marketing In Your Car. Hey everyone, it is really a beautiful day right now. I’m feeling good, it’s a little chilly, but the sun’s up, everyone looks happy outside, and I’m excited. It’s going to be a great day. I’ve got to film 21 more videos today for our new Ignite Your Funnel sign up process. We’re rolling out this really cool thing when someone joins Clickfunnels… We’re all about how figuring out how to increase retention and stick rate and get people consuming the product. We’re launching Ignite Your Funnels. When you sign up for Clickfunnels, you’ll get this 21 day program that’ll walk you through igniting your funnels. It’s going to be really fun.
So that’s what’s happening today on my side. Today’s episode is going to be kind of off topic because I thought this was funny. I’m curious for all you guys out there, what your first business name was? All of us got started, where we’re at today is not where we started. I got started over 12 years ago, which is funny. It makes me laugh because, my very email address ever…not ever, but my very first business email address. I remember I set up a business, because I wanted a very professional business email address. I don’t have the email address anymore, but it’s funny because, my email address I set up was money4college@juno.com and it wasn’t…It was M O N E Y then 4 and then college @juno.com. And in my head I’m like, this is a really good business email address, people will know I’m in this business to make money for college. That was my email address for a long time, not a short time, a long time. In fact, a few people who knew me back then, Mike Filsaime, a lot of times he’ll see me and still call me, “What’s up, money for college?” It’s so funny now because in my head I was like, this is a really good idea. This will be a very professional business entity. I tried to buy money4college.com, but somebody owned it, luckily. Otherwise my whole business would be based around money for college. That’s was my first email address, I had that probably for 5 or 6 years of my business. I was doing all my professional business through a free Juno email address. It was funny, the first time we had 5 or 6 employees at the time and I was using Juno still. One of the guys we hired was a tech dude and he was like, “Why don’t we have email addresses at our domain? “ How do we do that? I didn’t even know that was possible.” He set it up so we had Russell at whatever.com. So that was my first awesome business naming thing.
A while later I remember… I was learning about online marketing and all these different things. At the time, my degree was in Computer Information Systems. I was like, “I’m going to be a programmer. I’m going to program stuff.” Unfortunately, it turns out I’m not that smart. I could never actually figure things out. I had this SQL class, I was really excited. The first two days were like the coolest thing, I was like; “This is amazing.” And by the third day I was lost. The rest of the semester I could never get past the third day. It was over for me. I was not going to be a programmer. I thought I was going to be, and I knew that was the route I wanted to go. I wanted to launch a software company. I spent weeks trying to find the perfect domain name. Everything I checked was gone. This was 12 years ago. It’s funny now, because now you can still find good domain names if you look hard enough. So, I was trying to find a domain, and I finally found it. The one. The domain I knew from the beginning it was going to be… our entire empire would be built off of. My software company was going to be amazing. So, I was so excited so I went and bought it. I don’t think I knew how to buy a domain back then. I think I spent like $40 or $50 on this domain. I bought it, and I was so excited. I had bought some website builder software. I can’t even remember what it was called. Some website building platform I bought the domain through. I was so excited, I spent that whole day. My wife, we just got married. It was our first year of marriage. Poor thing, she’s been through so much. It’s shocking to me that she’s still around. So she’s working while I’m at home trying to make millions between wrestling practices. So I’m in there trying to build this site, and I’m learning how to… this is pre, me using Front Page. This is total horrible website building. I’m building this thing out. I bought a bunch of resale rights to a whole bunch of different software products. We’re selling software, this is pretty exciting. In fact, we’re selling exciting software. My domain I bought was exciteware.net. I’m sure that domains… I don’t think I own it anymore. I was so excited, “We’re selling exciting software, this going to be amazing.” So my wife gets home. I’m like, “Collette, I gotta show you what I just created; this is going to be amazing.” I’m building up the hype and suspense, like I like to do. If I’m like, “This is the domain that I bought”, she’s going to be like, “Alright.” So I gotta build up the hype so when I announce she can hear the angels singing and it can be this big deal. So I’m talking it up, “I’m selling software. I’m selling this software, and this software. All these different software resale rights that I bought. We’re selling exciting software. The domain I bought is Exciteware.net.” I remember she looked at it. And she didn’t hear the angels singing. She didn’t get excited. In fact, she had this concerned look on her face and she said, “When I hear Exciteware, I think lingerie”. I was like, “What?” She’s like, “I’m not going tell my mom you own a website called Exciteware. She’s going to think you sell underwear. Exciting underwear. “ I’m like, “No, it’s exciting software. This is really cool.” She’s like “No, this is embarrassing.” My whole world collapsed. I spent months trying to figure out..
Oh crap, a cops coming out. Please say he’s not getting me. I wonder if it’s illegal for me to be talking on the phone like this. Hopefully that’s not why he’s pulling behind me. I don’t know the laws. Cross your fingers, otherwise you guys get to hear a cop pull me over. There’s a cop in front of me too. I wonder if this is a sting operation. “We listen to Marketing In Your Car, Russell. We know the route from your house to your office, this is a sting op. We’re going to take you down.” I hope that’s not true. We’ll find out in a little bit.
Alright, so where I left off… So my wife is just like, “No, that’s a horrible name.” I was devastated because I spent $40, which back then was more than I made in an entire year. It was all my money. We had zero disposal income. I was making exactly $0 a year my wife was making less than $20 grand a year. We did not have money, so I didn’t have $40 to spend but I spent it. I was devastated. I remember being depressed. This was the foundation for my empire. You just destroyed it because you think it sounds like exciting underwear. I thought that was kind of funny.
So last night, we were in bed talking and I was like, “Do you remember Money4College?” and she was like, “Yeah, do you remember Exciteware?” Oh dear me. We’ve come a long way since then. I thought it was funny.
So, I kept trying to think of other company names. I remember for some reason I always thought the word sublime was the coolest word. SUBLIME. It’s like a slide. SUUUU and BLIME and you bounce off the end of the slide. Sublime. I thought sublime was cool. So I was like, “The only idea I have is sublime. I like that word.” So I ended up buying sublimenet.com that was the company name for the next 4 or 5 years. Which is weird, it didn’t mean anything. But that was the only other idea I had that wasn’t exciting software. So Sublimenet, is a horrible name. Anyway, that‘s what it was. Sublimenet.com was the business name for the next few years. I remember I used to buy domain names and they would be part….Sublimenet would be the company, but I’d have different…Zipbrander or ForumFortunes. All these different products underneath there. I kept trying to find the perfect name. I remember one night; I was on buydomains.com or one of those sites. I’m typing in tons of ideas trying to find one. All of the sudden I found it. It was DotComSecrets.com. I remember, I was just like, “That’s it! That’s the name!” It was amazing for me. It’s funny now because now, a lot of times, I’m like, “should I try to build the info business around that name, or should I not?”
The two cops took a right. The sting operation was unsuccessful they didn’t catch me.
Anyway, even when I titled my book, DotComSecrets, Jeff Walker told me, “It’s the worst name ever!” But I’m like, that’s my thing. Anyway, I still like DotComSecrets. I actually think it’s really cool. Some people think it’s dumb, but it became the name. It was much better than Sublimenet or Exciteware. Now where the info for the coaching side of our business kind of grew from, which is kind of cool.
I remember with Clickfunnels….I almost wish we would have named the company Clickfunnels but we didn’t. Because initially we had 3 software products we were going to build under this brand. It was going to be Clickfunnels, Backpack, and Actionetics, were the 3 software companies we were going to launch with one parent company. We were trying to think of a cool name for it. Most of you probably don’t even know this, but Clickfunnels parent company is Etison. It’s a domain that Todd had bought a long time ago. And we thought it was cool because Thomas Edison is cool. But the whole Edison/Tesla scam thing….the T was kind of for Tesla. So it’s like this weird thing. Initially we were going to give away Tesla’s when people promoted Clickfunnels. Anyway, the company name is Etison. So we were going to have Clickfunnels, Backpack, and Actionetics, as the 3 software products. But after we launched Clickfunnels and it blew up way bigger than we ever thought. Instead of making separate software companies, we made the decision to build everything internally. Now all those products are inside of Clickfunnels. I wish we would have named the company Clickfunnels. We didn’t. It’s similar to 37 Signals. 37 Signals is kind of a random business name. Then they had Basecamp, High Rise, all their different software tools. Recently they changed it so their business name is just Basecamp. Maybe we’ll switch it to Clickfunnels someday. I don’t know. But there’s the history of naming of my companies.
That’s about it, you guys. So I hope that was fun. I know there’s not really any educational purpose to that outside of just making fun of myself. I’m sure all of you guys got cheesy names in your business domain name, email address history. I hope it makes you smile when you think about some of the goofy things you’ve done along the way. There you go. I’m at the office. I’m going to go film 21 videos to help people ignite their funnel. Good stuff’s happening today. I’m also going to make a cool upsell video for our Funnel Catcher course. Yesterday we made a sweet sales video for Funnel University that I’m really excited for. There’s a lot of cool stuff happening. February is going to be insane. I’m trying to get out a lot of things before our March event. The March event ticket sales are going crazy. In the last 3 days we sold 40 more tickets, I don’t even know how sales are coming in, but it’s exciting seeing it. Because I’ve been stressing out, we’re not going to sell enough tickets.
Oh we’ve got really cool direct mail piece that’s coming out this week. It should be hitting everyone this week, actually. If you watch to Marketing Quickies Show, I showed this really cool mail piece that I got from some car dealership. It’s like a forwarded email that the guy printed out and sent to me, it had a sticky note on it. It’s a really cool marketing concept. So, we kind of modeled that. Basically it’s a letter we’re going to email to Ben; we have two Ben’s on our team that are doing outbound phone sales for the event right now. So I forwarded this email to Ben. “Hey make sure people get in, extend the discount through February 5.” So then we printed that out and put a sticky note of Ben saying “Hey, if you haven’t got your tickets yet, give me a call.” Then we fold that up, put in a letter and handwrite the address on it. Anyway, it’s a really cool mailing piece and I’m so excited.
I was trying to send it to all Clickfunnels members, but we didn’t have addresses for everyone. We ended up having addresses for 4,000. So 4,000 Clickfunnels members will be getting that letter this week, maybe you’ll get one. I’m really proud of that direct mail piece, I’m sure the event will show the stats of how it all worked. It’s pretty cool. I love marketing, it’s so much fun.
That’s it guys. Appreciate you all. Have an amazing day and I’ll talk to you all soon.
If you have severe ADD like me, this may help…
On this episode Russell talks about how to get work done that you associate with pain and don’t want to do. He also talks about the struggle with A.D.D.
Here are a few fun things you’ll hear in today’s episode:
So listen below to hear how Russell gets crap done that he doesn’t want to do.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Welcome back. Hope you guys are having a good time. I’m heading to the office and its cold today. And of course I didn’t wear shoes or socks, I got flip flops on. My car…the gas light just turned on which means I have to get gas right now, in my flip flops in the freezing cold. You’d think I’d be a little smarter than this at this point, but I’m not. So there we go, one more time for my wife to tell me “I told you so. For not wearing your socks and shoes today.”
I don’t know about you but I can’t’ stand wearing socks it’s not worth the 30 seconds of warmth you get from the walk from the car to the door. I don’t know, I hate that at night if I wear socks….or go to church. Socks are tight around your ankle and you take them off and there’s that sock line. And that sock line doesn’t leave immediately. It stays there for like an hour, maybe I got swelling in my calves or my cankles, I don’t know what it is, but it’s no good. I’d rather go bare foot all the time. And that’s what I do. Except for church. It’s cause we’re in America. My aunt and uncle live in Samoa. I went to church out there, with them. In Samoa they wear, you know those lava lava’s, those nice flowery ones people wear in Hawaii and Samoa. So they have them at church and the men wear formal lava lavas. They actually look like…honestly looks like a big skirt. They have a belt on them and they’re long and they all wear sandals. They can wear it Samoa, why can’t I in Boise. It’s not that weird. Maybe I’m going to start wearing lava lava’s and flip flops to church. Is that sad I’m laughing at myself?
Back on to mission for today. We’re kind of on a series of time management and getting crap done. I wanted to share another thing that hopefully will help you guys a lot. I don’t know about you, but there are some things in my to do list of things that I need to do, that for some reason when I look at them I have so much pain associated with those things. That I’ll do almost anything to avoid them. I know you guys all know what I’m talking about. I’ll look at something, If I do that…..your subconscious mind associates pain with some things. Probably the best example, we have a new offer coming out called, Funnel University. Maybe you’ve heard of it, if not it’s going to be awesome. I wanted to make a really good free plus shipping offer to get people into that program. There’s a bunch of cool stuff I’m filming today. One of the things I’m doing is….I found out…I’m off on another track, but I’ll come back I promise.
We did a periscope a little while ago. I talked to you guys about how we did 150k from this periscope. All I did was take the perfect webinar script that I normally do on a webinar. I did it on a periscope and we made 150 grand. That concept works, I can do the one thing, the 3 secrets, the stack close everything the same way we do in a webinar, but I can do it on a video. My next thing I’m going to make a sales video, a VSL, but I’m going to follow that model. So we’re doing that with Funnel University. We’re actually filming that today, which I’m excited about. It should turn out epically amazing. We’ve spent a lot of time and effort to make this one sweet. You will all see it soon.
For that free plus shipping thing, I wanted to write a book similar to the DotcomSecrets Labs book, something that’s really powerful and useful. So I wrote this book called Funnel Stacking, The Three Core Funnels and I walk you through tripwire, perfect webinar, and high ticket funnel. I show the sequencing and the email sequences that pushes you from one to the next. How we ascend people up in the whole….everything. People always ask about that, so I’m like, “I’m going to show them everything. Here’s the email templates, here’s the stats, the numbers page by page. Just everything. So I was really excited by that. When we were in London, I actually wrote the first chapter. It took me…. it was when we got to London and our times zones were messed up in our brains, it was 2am which, I think is like morning time for me. So I spent like 5 hours that night writing this thing. I wrote chapter one. When it was done, it sucked. I hated it. I don’t know about you guys. Writing is hard for me, it’s not something I just flow with. I had so much pain afterwards. That chapter sucked! It took me two months to get the next to sections done. Because every time I looked at that I was like, “Remember that night in London, It was painful, my eyes hurt, I was tired, my kids were up”. All these things associated with that one task that caused pain. So much pain that I would avoid it at all costs. I’d be like, time to write the book, and all the sudden something popped up. Of course I’m going to go to sushi with you guys today. Me, who hates taking phone calls, the phone would ring, and I’d be like let me answer real quick. Anything on earth I could do to avoid that task, I would do it. I think all of us have that same kind of problem. When there’s things we know we have to get done but we don’t want to, somehow our brain finds a million ways to deviate from it, because we have so much pain associated with that thing. The brain is always looking for pleasure. Where’s the outlet, where can I get pleasure. And we’re looking for every escape possible. For me, some people are stuck in that spot forever, I’m guessing if you’ve got a task, a website or business that you haven’t launched yet, it’s because of that. You’ve got so much pain associated with the birthing of this thing that you just never do it. And that’s why you’re frustrated and not happy with yourself and not accomplishing what you want to accomplish. I’ve been trying to figure out different ways for me to smash through those things. I’m going to tell you my strategy, what works for me. Hopefully some variation of it works for you.
So when I have a task, that I have so much pain associated with it, that I know my body, my brain, my mind, and everything is going to sabotage me. Keep me from doing that. I know that I have to overload my senses. I have severe ADD, as I’m assuming most of you do. Most entrepreneurs have some form of ADD and even if you’ve never been diagnosed, I’ve never diagnosed, but I know the symptoms. I know the root issues, I know how it works. I‘m a big believer that ADD is not a bad thing; I think it’s a super power. It’s kind of like the X-MEN. You got these dudes that can fly, some can be invisible, some have metal things that shoot out of their hands. They’re super humans. The whole show of the X-MEN, the humans, the normal people are trying to take away their powers so they can be normal with them. It’s like, “Dude you can fly, why would you try to get rid of that? It’s not a bad thing”. I feel the same way about ADD, it’s a super power. Everyone’s trying to give your kids drugs and talk about how it’s bad. But you look at everyone who’s hyper-successful today that I know all have severe ADD. It’s a good thing, but you gotta learn how to channel it. So with typical people, you can look at a task and you focus on it and you accomplish it, right? For people like me, and probably you who have ADD if we focus on one task, it stresses us out. It’s hard to do.
So in school; and I was a horrible student in school, but one of the reasons, teachers are like focus, don’t talk, don’t make noise, listen to me. I’m trying to listen to this teacher talk and I’m stressing out. There’s just this one thing happening and your brain is going a million miles a minute. So one thing I learned, I had a chance to meet the #1 ADD doctor in the world and he confirmed this, and its cool; I’d have to have something in my hands and fidgeting with it, to be drawing on my paper. I’d have to be doing 8 other things just to be able to understand to my teacher. Because ADD people, we have to be doing multiple things or else you can’t focus on anything. The more things you’re doing the more you can focus on one thing. In school I’d have to fidget or tap my pencil, be doing something. If you look at me now, when I’m in the office, I’m on a conference call, I’m doing 8 things. I’m usually drawing while I’m flipping the paper. I’m doing all these things just so I can focus on the one thing that‘s actually important. It’s really weird, but that’s how our brains work. If you understand that, it’s kind of cool. For me to actually write the book, I had to completely short circuit all my other senses. Otherwise, I’d be looking at Skype, looking at Facebook, jumping back and forth. What I did…If you’ve seen my office, I’ve got 3 monitors, I’ve got a treadmill desk, a rising desk, things like that. So what I did I took all my chats, my Facebook, everything, I moved them on the two side monitors. And then I used my rising desk to raise my monitor up, put my treadmill under my desk, turned on music. So what happened, I started walking on the treadmill. So I’m walking on the treadmill, I’ve got music playing, I’ve got all these things happening around me. And I’m focusing just on one monitor, and the only open on that monitor is a word document, as well as an image file, I have all the images for the book. I was not allowed to get off the treadmill until the book was done. I started walking and what happened for me, all the other senses were…..for you to walk, and to think and to read and to have music playing. All these things happening at once, your brain has to focus. So I did that and it short circuited all my body’s ability to go and complain, “Hey, why don’t you check Facebook?” “I can’t check Facebook! I’m walking, if I check Facebook I’ll fall off this thing. Just back to the book.” It kept forcing me to go and do and accomplish.
There’s the trick, guys. There’s the hack, something I do. So if you’ve got something like that….I remember one time when I’m going to go to Barnes and Noble to sit at the café and I’m going to write this thing out. It didn’t work for me. I’m looking at these people walking by and I can’t focus. For me, it’s all about getting a spot where I have to focus on the one thing without having all these other external things happening. Maybe a coffee shop would work for some of you guys. It didn’t for me. I kept wanting to go look at different books and magazine. I was doing research. I kept standing up and walking over to the books.
That’s something that worked for me. The biggest thing I would do with you guys, your strategy is going to be different, but the concept is the same. There’s a task or something that’s causing so much pain inside you that your body is forcing you to not do it. So understand that you’ve got to force yourself to do, but you’ve got to figure out a way to do it, in a way that keeps you focused. We talk about, we’ve been doing a lot of work with addictions and things like that. A big part is you’re always moving towards pleasure and away from pain, because that’s how our bodies work. You’re moving towards pleasure and away from pain. So if you can surround yourself with….when you have something that is naturally towards pain, so you’re swimming upstream, you’ve got short circuit the other things around you, so you can focus, then also tying pleasure to it. How do you make this pleasurable? So for me, as soon as this book is done, boom we’re going to sushi. Or, as soon as this chapter’s done, what’s going to happen… For me, it’s a blend of those two things. One is, doing a lot of things so your mind can focus on the one thing at hand. Number two is tying a big reward to it, so that that pleasure is more pleasurable than the pain and experiences you go through.
There’s some ideas, some techniques I use. Hopefully that helps you guys a little bit. I’m at the office now. Today’s filming day. So I’m going to be recording 30 something videos today for four or five different projects. That’s how we roll over here. So that’s what I’m going to be doing today, you guys. Appreciate you all. Have an amazing day, and I’ll talk to you all again soon.
The real secret behind delegation and getting stuff done.
On this episode Russell talks about how he gets so much work done. He shares a secret of how to do that by outsourcing and how to make it work for you.
Here are 4 cool things to listen for in today’s episode:
So listen below to hear how to find A players to help you get more stuff done in your own business.
---Transcript---
Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. I’m already halfway to the office so this one might be short. Nevertheless this is part of a new series I’ve started, between marketingquickiesshow.com and marketinginyourcar.com. These are my two content things, so if you’re not on both you’re missing out because we’re going back and forth on the storyline. Yesterday on my marketing quickies show, Mike Stanczyk, some of you may know Mike, he asked me, “I want to know more how you’re so productive, how you get stuff done, your work ethic”. So, I’ll talk about some of those things. So yesterday, on the live periscope, I talked about a concept called “lead or gold”. It kind of goes into the core foundational mindset of how to get a lot of crap done. So if you go to marketingquickiesshow.com and click on the one that says “How to get a lot of crap done”. That’s a foundational piece on what I’m talking about today. So my goal for the next week is to share a bunch of ideas of how to get a lot of things done. So that’s the first one. So go listen to that, it’ll be number one.
Today I want to talk about, it kind of shifts over to the side of delegation and outsourcing and things like that. I remember when I first got into this business, I could always tell the life cycle of where a new entrepreneur is. Because as soon as they’ve outsourced the first time they all want to create a course in outsourcing, Because, “You could pay people a little bit of money and they’ll do stuff way better than you do it.” It’s a big “Ah Ha”. Initially that’s what a lot of entrepreneurs do. They hire their first outsourcer. For me it was someone in Romania. I paid $20 and he built a software product that I ended up selling for $67 and I made tens of thousands of dollars on something that I paid a guy $20 to build. I remember having that “Ah Ha”, “Wow, I cannot believe that that was even possible.” So I think a lot of us start out on that journey. And the problem is that as we start outsourcing some things, where most entrepreneurs get stuck is it’s hard to let go of the reins. I’m sure you’ve had that before. You give someone something and they don’t do as good a job as you. You try to get them to do it again, and they don’t and after 2 or 3 times you just take it back. And it’s like, “Screw that, I’ll just do it myself.” And I still struggle with that, I’m sure you do as well. Which is why I do so much stuff.
So a couple of things I want to speak to you on that, that have allowed me to get so many things done. And this isn’t something that happened overnight, but I’ve been doing this business for over 12 years so I’ve hired literally hundreds and hundreds of people to do different tasks. I’ve hired people that are the cheapest, and I’ve hired the most expensive, and I’ve hired people in between. What I’ve found, I wish I had the link to the article that Todd, one of my partners in Clickfunnels sent, that talked about the difference between A players and B players. It showed that A players were 3,200 times more productive than a B player. So a lot of us try to get B and C players because it’s cheaper, but in reality its way more expensive. A lot of times you can find one person who can do the work of 10, 15 or 20 people. It may seem hard to believe, but it’s true. Todd’s a good example of that. In the past we had 6 full time programmers in Boise trying to build the shopping cart software, we spent 3 years and probably three or four hundred thousand dollars trying to do it and we never got to a point where anyone could use it. Todd came in and looked at the shopping cart software that we were thinking about using, spent the next two days rebuilding it from the ground up and it worked. It took him two days what took 6 people 3 years and never got live.
Now let’s talk about finding A players. I think the biggest thing….You gotta kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince. I remember people saying that when I was dating before finding my beautiful, amazing wife. I think it’s the same thing. You gotta hire a lot of people until you find the rock stars. So what I do a lot of times now, let’s say I have a project, I’ll go to Upwork, used to be Scriptlance and Odesk, I think it’s Upwork. I’ll go to Upwork, I’ll post a project, but I’ll hire 3 people to do the same project. People are like, “Russell why would you do that? It’s going to cost you 3 times as much money.” the reality it doesn’t, it cost less money. What happens is I have 3 people build the same thing, one person sucks at it, one person does something kind of weird, and one person is a rock star. But you don’t know until you get 3 people you have something to compare them against. So I have 3 people do a product. Usually it’s not my big idea; it’s not this huge thing. I’ll post and get 3 people to do a smaller project. It’ll test their skill set, but it’s not something I’d pay tens of thousands of dollars for, but I do that to find an A player. After I find an A player I’ll go back to that person and say, okay here’s the actual project that I want you to do. And hire them to do a bigger project. That way I only have A players on our team.
And that’s a big part of it. When you do find A players, figuring out ways to lock them up and keep them close to you, because again an A player is worth hundreds of B players. A really good example is when we launched Clickfunnels initially it was Todd and Dylan who built the whole thing. Then as when we start scaling we knew we needed to bring other people in to help. One of those people was Ryan. Prior to Ryan, we hired a couple of people that were B, C and even D level people. It was horrible. Not only did they not progress things, everything digressed. Everything moved backwards. And we found Ryan; first off he was culturally a right fit. He was our same age; he was cool, same timeline in his life. He was a great cultural fit. He brought a whole other level of things. He came in and brought Clickfunnels this thing we needed that we didn’t have. He’s been amazing. After a while, the demand on Clickfunnels is really high. It was getting to him and his family. He had a side website making a bunch of money and he got to the point he was going to leave and pursue that, or find a job where he got paid the same for a lot less stress. We knew that if we lost him it would be painful, so we came back and said he is an A, maybe an A+ player and we need him. We needed to lock him up and so we came back and did what it took. Paying him more, giving him equity giving him profit share, whatever it takes. Because one person like him is worth dozens of other people. If you lose someone like that, it can cripple you. It can destroy you. What I would say, is looking at your company through a different lens, where it’s less, “let me hire the cheapest player possible” and shifting that to, “let me find the A player rock star”. Incentivize them in a way where everybody wins. I look at my company now and we have A players. A whole bunch of A players. “Russell, how are you able to get so much amazing stuff done?” Because we only have A players. The B players we get rid of, they’re gone. They’re not part of our organization. All we have is A players, “How in the world are you competing with companies like….Lead Pages is a good example. They have 100, or 200 employees, we’ve got 25. How are you able to compete and dominate those guys?” Because we have A players. You bring in VC money, guess what you hire? A bunch of B players, right. Because that’s what they want you to do; they want you to spend their money and build out a team and you need directors and managers and all this crap and people that don’t actually do anything. So yeah, you can spend their budget but you get a bunch of B players. That’s the difference. I look at any VC backed company, there’s a bunch of B players getting funded by dudes that have money, and it shows. So that’s the next step. Again, if you listened to the periscope before, or if you haven’t go to marketingquickiesshow.com, talk about the foundational mindset you need to get crap done. The whole lead or gold concept that I learned from Gary Halbert.
Today is all about delegation. But don’t delegate to people who are worse than you, delegate to rock stars. Yesterday for example, I had to get done a sales letter for a new Clickfunnels process we’re doing. I sat down and I locked myself….I had to get it done; I had no choice…lead or gold. I got this thing done. Normally it would be me that designed the sales letter, but Dylan, who’s my partner in Clickfunnels, he’s a rock star. He’s the best designer I’ve ever seen in my life. So I gave it to Dylan, now I’m not nervous because he will make it better than I ever could. The biggest problem a lot of entrepreneurs have is that we’re delegated to people that are worse than us. When you do that, that’s where this back and forth and struggle and headaches and everything come from.
Start the process today of finding you’re a players. A players have different motivations. Some its cash, some its partnership, some they want a cool project. There’s different motivations. It doesn’t’ mean you have to pay them a lot of money upfront. A lot of times A level people are motivated by different things. A good example is Todd, when Todd started working for me, I feel bad about it now, but he worked for free for an entire year. He had different motivations. It wasn’t to get money. His motivation was to be part of something bigger. After a year, I realized we hadn’t paid him anything. I’m like, this guys really useful, we should pay him something. “Hey man can I pay you?” he’s like, “Yeah, whatever.” so I started paying him. After another year, one day I was hanging out with him and he was showing me all these job offers. He was getting 3 or 4 job offers a week for 4 times what I was paying him. I’m like, “Dude, why don’t you take those?” He’s like, “I want to be part of something bigger.” Crap, I need to pay him more, because I’m going to lose him. So I’m like” Hey, can I pay you more?” And he’s like, “Sure, whatever.” So the A players typically have different motivations. Its figuring out those motivations are and aligning them with you. But if you’ve got vision and you know where you want to go. Finding the A players and getting them to align with you isn’t necessarily a hard thing. Because most of the people I’ve found that are A players are less money motivated and more mission and vision motivated. That’s what drives them. So find your passion, your mission, your vision and sell them on it and that’s how you get the rock stars. If you want to go for the cheapest you can go to Odesk or Upwork and find those kinds of people, but it’s going to cost you more in the long run.
So there you go. That’s the strategy for today. Hope that helps. With that said, I’m out of here, I’m at the office. Going to get stuff done. I will talk to you guys all again soon. Thanks everybody.
Let me tell you a story about what happened last night.
In this special episode from Las Vegas, Russell tells a crazy story about how he almost got shot. He also talks about why Sushi with Pop Rocks is amazing.
Here are some fun things to listen for in today’s episode:
So listen below to hear Russell tell this crazy story about an officer involved shooting.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and this is Marketing In Your Car. Alright that’s a lie, I’m not in my car. I’m in Las Vegas. My wife and I are here for a couple of days. The Pruvit event is happening, so we’re here to support that. And to be speaking a little bit, sharing one of the funnels we’re building for the Pruvit guys, which will be cool. Other than that we’re hanging out in Vegas. Brian, who is the owner of Pruvit, we didn’t know this until we got here, they booked us a room, and he booked us a huge suite. I feel like a rock star right now, this suite is bigger than my house. Well, not quite but it’s pretty awesome.
I wanted to tell you guys a crazy story. Last night we decided to go to a show so we jumped in Uber. We’re headed out to the Bellagio, because the show is in the Bellagio. So we’re getting there, we had to be at the box office by 7:30 to get our tickets. Being the great planner my wife is, we got there at 7:15. We pull into the Bellagio front entranceway, past the fountains. We get out of the car, we get our tickets and then we decided to go to Yellowtail. If you’ve never been to Yellowtail, it’s a sushi place inside of the Bellagio. It’s famous because they have a sushi roll that is rolled in pop rocks.
Now the way I found out, a couple of years ago I was in this club called EO, you may of heard of it, it used to be called YEO, Young Entrepreneurs Organization , then all those young entrepreneurs got old and they changed the name to EO. There’s still a YEO and then there’s EO, there’s two of them, right. So I was in this group, I was only in it for a few months and got kicked out because their rules are if you miss a meeting you can’t keep coming. I got kicked out cause I missed a meeting. Anyway, I’m in my EO Forum, we all went to Vegas together, when we were here, I don’t drink and all of them did. We did indoor skydiving, and they all wanted sushi and they were all real drunk. They were like, “You’re the only one sober here, Russell, you can order something for us.” So I’m like alright and I’m ordering sushi like crazy, I have no idea what I’m even ordering. I’m just ordering a bunch for a table, like ten guys. Then they’re bringing out sushi and we’re eating tons of it. These guys are getting drunker and drunker, and I’m just eating sushi having a great time. All the sudden I grab one of these rolls they brought out, pop one into my mouth and it starts popping. I’m like, “What the heck is this,” I grab the waiter and I’m like, “Dude, my mouth is popping. What’s happening?” and he’s like, “Oh yeah, that’s our,” whatever roll”, we roll it in pop rocks.” That is the coolest thing ever. So next time you’re in Vegas go to the Bellagio and eat at yellowtail and eat pop rock sushi, cause it’s amazing.
So we’re in the Bellagio, of course we’re going to go to yellowtail and get pop rock sushi, because what else are you going to do in Vegas. There’s nothing else better. So, we’re in Yellowtail, eating pop rock sushi having a great time. We have an hour before our show and we decide to walk around outside to the fountains. We go outside the Bellagio, there’s a bridge. So we walk onto the bridge and all the sudden we look over to the side and on both sides there’s thousands of cop cars, everywhere. We notice we’re on the bridge, we’re looking over, and all the sudden there’s cops on both sides of the bridge yelling, “Get off the bridge, get off the bridge!” So we run over the bridge to get to the other side. There’s cops blocking the escalators and all these things. So we get over there and we’re like, “Crap, we need to get back to the Bellagio. But the whole street on both sides of the Bellagio is completely blocked by cop cars. There’s no way to get back. We walked over to this cop, “How are we supposed to get back?” and he’s like, “You have to walk clear around this other way and then jay walk if you are ever going to get back to the Bellagio tonight.” And we’re like, “What is happening?” and he’s like, “I don’t know, I think they’re filming a Bourne movie or something.” So we’re like, “Dude, are you serious? We’re going to see the Bourne movie. We’re going to see Matt Damon.” We’re going crazy, excited. How cool would that be to see the Bourne movie? So we walk around the whole thing, jay walk to get back to the Bellagio. We’re out front where the car pick up. We’re looking out and we see cop cars wrapping the whole thing all around. We see cop cars, we see new cars. Maybe that’s like the film crew and all these things. We’re just watching like, “This is so cool. We’re going to see this big celebrity come out. We’re just waiting for something awesome to happen. Then nothing awesome happened. We had to go back to our show.
We went to the show, saw the circus. I can’t remember what it’s called. Circus thing where they do flips into water. It’s pretty cool. Then we leave and the whole thing is still blocked off, “Man, this must be a huge movie shoot. It’s been like 3 or 4 hours since we were there.” We call the Uber , and the Uber guy’s like, “ the strip is all blocked off, he can’t’ get here to pick you up. So we had to walk for like a mile to find the Uber dude. So then we did that, and Ubered back. So then we get home and then today, we get the news paper in our huge suite. The front page says, “Shooting closes part of the strip. Part of the strip was closed Friday night as police investigate an officer involved shooting that occurred on the sidewalk in front of the Bellagio fountains after man was reportedly waving a gun and pointing it at people. Metropolitan police dept. officer, Harry Ladful confirmed the incident was an officer involved shooting and that the male suspect, whose name was not released, is in police custody. Later police briefings on the scene, metro captain, Matt McCarthey said that at least two people were grazed by bullets during the shooting. The suspect was being booked in the Clark County Detention Center on numerous charges.” This is the best part. “The shooting occurred in front of the hotel casino fountains, 3600 Las Vegas BLVD south, just after 7:15 pm. 7:15! Do you remember what I told you a few seconds ago? We pulled up in the Uber in front of the fountains at 7:15! I could have been one of those dudes that was grazed by a bullet, which is crazy. Later in the article it says that a lot of people thought that it was the filming for the Bourne movies, but it was not. The Bourne movie was filmed last week. That 3 or 4 times parts of Vegas had been shut down this week for filming for the Bourne movie, but it wasn’t this.
So isn’t that crazy? Yeah, it was pretty crazy. That was our night. We survived luckily, but it was close. We could have been grazed, as multiple people were. I just wanted to share that with you guys. That was kind of cool. It has nothing to do with marketing or business, but I thought it was interesting and kind of fun and kind of crazy.
That’s it you guys, I’m going to go down right now to the Pruvit event. I’m going to see some real marketing happening. It’s fun watching this with Pruvit, they’re a network marketing company. It’s fun seeing how network marketers run their events, and how they do all their stuff. The one really interesting thing to me is that the majority of their time is on building belief and building relationships. You go to any of our events it’s focused on giving cool ideas and tips, things to increase what you’re doing. It’s all content. This is not. It’s like recognition, team building, belief. It’s interesting. It’s backwards in my mind. There’s obviously value. You go to MLM events, sometimes there are 2 or 3 thousand or 5 thousand people or more, where you don’t normally see that at the training events. We’re going to try to do more and more the blend of those two things at our events. We’ve got, personal development, team building stuff along with all the content. Hopefully get the best of both worlds. I thought that kind of was interesting.
I’m going to go hang out. I’m sure I’ll be sharing with you guys messages from inside. Whatever happens. Appreciate you all. Have an amazing day. We’ll talk soon.
Secret notes from within this week’s hack-a-thon.
In this special episode with Dave Woodward, Russell and Dave talk about how proximity is power. They also share how bouncing ideas off a bunch of people makes finding an answer easier.
Here are a few cool things to listen for in today’s episode:
So listen below to hear how proximity with your employees equals power.
---Transcript---
Hey everybody this is Russell Brunson I’m here today with Dave Woodward and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. We are on day 3 of our hack-a-thon. It’s been good. So we wanted to talk about a topic that is very important and we are seeing the fruits of over the last 2 days. As a lot of you guys know we’ve been doing the hack-a-thon here, which means basically all the head Click Funnels developers and Dave who’s running all the business development/joint venture/affiliate stuff is in town. Plus everyone in the office here.
Anyway it’s funny. We’re in my office and jammed in there, there’s like 10 people. Yesterday I had to go to the bathroom at 2am and couldn’t get out cause there were too many people in the room. Everyone was together and we’re getting stuff done and moving it forward. So the message I want to share with you guys is that proximity is power. Initially I learned that from Tony Robbins. Where did he talk about that? UPW? What’s the context? I’m going to make Dave teach a little bit. But what’s the context of Proximity is power? If you can remember off the top of your head.
Dave: The whole key to proximity is power is you are able to get much more done, it’s almost like the mastermind concept where you have so many minds working on the same thing and you have the ability to communicate much quicker. Be able to bounce ideas off and because of that you are able to. It like one plus one equals three or four because you are so close and you’re able to actually see, you get all this…he’s also talking about all the senses and modalities…but being able to have all that together at one time you are able to focus and get things done super quick. You can bounce ideas off of each other without any delay. You can see the emotion behind everybody. It’s the whole idea.
Russell: It’s funny because when we do these we get more done in 3 or 4 days than the rest of the quarter.
Dave: Yeah, it’s crazy. You could do these at least once a week but that doesn’t make any sense. Do once a month?
Russell: Once a week…. People have always said, “Man, Clickfunnels has evolved so quickly in the last 12 months”. It has. That’s with everyone remote. If everyone is in the same room, we would have rebuilt the internet at this point. Even last night it was 1:00 and I was working on this issue in my head. It’s been stuck, I’ve been frustrated. It’s been hard to move forward because of one block I couldn’t figure out. I started complaining about it. Everyone was there, we started bouncing Ideas. All of the sudden, the answer was there. This is the answer. That answer was like dominos. Suddenly within 15 minutes of talking with everyone. The answer came together in perfect clarity. Now we know exactly what to do. So today we are executing that and getting it done.
Dave: It’s that domino effect that is real critical. Kind of talks about one huge domino, as soon as it goes everything else falls into place.
Russell: So awesome. It’s interesting, we’ve built our company and one of the people we’ve modeled a lot with Click Funnels is Base Camp, 37 Signals. If you read the book they wrote Rework, which is one of my top 10 business books. Also wrote Remote. So they’re all remote, and that’s how Click Funnels has been built. I wanted everyone in the same office, but… our 2 co-founder ones in Atlanta and one’s in Toronto and they weren’t moving to Boise. So it became a virtual company, which turned out good. But that’s what happened. In Remote they talked about that fact. If everyone works from home, you get more stuff done because you’re not interrupted with meetings, gossip and crap that happens in an office. Which is true. Even with 37 signals, they have a corporate office in their town. Once a quarter they get everyone together and play foosball, they work, just get stuff done. That’s what we do with this. It’s amazing. It’s nice because it feels like when your apart everyone is working on pieces of stuff. Whereas, together it’s more like what’s the vision? What’s the entire movement of the company? What’s the heart and soul? Which is cool. We’ve had a chance to define and figure out those things. And solve bigger problems.
One of the big problems we have in a tech company is support. How do you keep up with taking ….How do you get faster customer support? How do you get all these things? Two nights ago, we worked until 2 o’clock, then everyone went home. The tech guys went back to a hotel. They said they were in the lobby until 3:30 or 4. Talking about that thing; tickets. How to make it so we have no customer support tickets and all of our customers are happy. Which is a big question to ask when there’s not really an answer. By 4 in the morning, logical reasoning and ideas fly out the window and crazy things start coming.
At 4 in the morning they had an idea that was amazing. This is what needs to happen. They came in the next morning. This is what we thought. Wow! How did you come up with that? That’s not a normal thing. What was interesting, when we started communicating it to the people involved. We felt like there would be resistance from one person. And there was, but then that person just removed themselves from the equation. All the things fell into place to be able to execute on this new vision.
Dave: I think the key is if you’re going to have a remote business, you have to get together on a regular basis for that proximity. You can’t continue to be remote all the time.
Russell: It’s true with anything, like mastermind groups… Everyone comes to Boise which is not a destination location, but we do it anyway. Getting everyone here together. I think it’s true with all aspects of your life. Not that I’m giving marital advice. A lot of marriages or family relationships fall apart because there’s not proximity. My family, once a year, we all get together for a week. The things that matter, proximity is huge.
The moral of today’s story or podcast is understanding that you can still have proximity even if you are a remote team. Figure out time once a quarter, at least, to get together. That’s it. Anything else cool?
Dave: we have some awesome things happening in click funnels which you’ll be seeing shortly.
Russell: Tons of good stuff.
Dave: Consumption. That’ll be a cliff hanger. Consumption.
Russell: Should I set up a big cliff hanger.
Russell: I’m trying to find….There’s a new place in Boise that has a juice bar. We’re trying to find it because I really want a juice. I think I’m another block away.
One of the big questions last night is, how do we give a better customer experience? How do we get people consuming the software? One of the biggest things, this is a lesson I learned ten years ago from Alex Mandossian, he had a product or a teleseminar called Consumption Theory. It was about how if you can get your customers to consume your product, that’s it. Most info product businesses don’t grow because there’s no consumption. People don’t read the product they don’t implement. How can you get your consumer s to consume your product more? One cool story he told was, whatever the shampoo company was, proctor and gamble, 20 years ago, whatever it was, people would shampoo once a week. How do we get people to consume more shampoo? So they changed the directions to wash, rinse, repeat. People read that, I’m supposed to repeat. So people went from shampooing once a week to three times per shower session. Consumption shot up. And this thing that was, “Every once in a while wash your hair”, became you have to wash multiple times per shower. It increased consumption. That was our big thing. How do we get more consumption of Clickfunnels. We looked at return rate and drop offs and those things. They all have 100% to do with consumption. So how can you increase consumption of your customers? So that’s the question I propose for you guys to think through. As we implement our new, we call it, Operation Consumption. I will share with you guys the details behind the scenes.
Even with little tiny tweaks, we increase stick rate by 10%, which is an extra $8 million next year. It’s insane. It’s a thought process worth having and thinking through. That was one we had last night at 1:30 in the morning. Oh, here’s the answer, it solved 80 problems at once. So look for podcasts in the future called Operation Consumption. That’s what’s coming up. There’s your cliffhanger.
Keep listening, you guys. I know you want to unsubscribe, but you can’t now. You have to keep listening.
Also, Dave’s about to launch a new podcast called Clickfunnels Radio that’s coming out February 1st. So look for that. I’m sure we’ll be promoting it through on our channels as well. February 1st look for Clickfunnels Radio. He’s going to be interviewing tons of successful click funnels members. You can see what they are doing, get some ideas. It’s going to be awesome.
Alright, we’re at the co-op. We’re getting juice. We’re out of here. Thanks you guys. Have an amazing day. We will talk to you soon.
An interesting story that happened to me earlier this week…
In this episode Russell talks about how if you want to be successful in life you need to do what no one else is doing. He also tells a story about why he was secretly recorded in a car.
Here are some cool things to listen for in today’s episode:
So listen below to hear why Russell gets asked if he’s a doctor.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing in Your Car. All right, all right, so I am on my way right now to the Boise Co-op. It's kind of like Whole Foods, except for it's not Whole Foods. The Whole Foods is a forty minute drive from my house to get to, and they just opened a co-op that's a fifteen minute drive. I'm really excited. I'm headed there to go see what they got and what's going to be happening. I've been doing a lot of cool stuff with my diet lately and really enjoying it, getting energy and feeling good. It's been awesome.
I've recovered week one of our crazy week. We had the four day, two day Mastermind and another two day Mastermind, then I flew to L.A. to speak at Nick Unsworth’s event. We did some good stuff there and now I'm back hanging out with the kids and the family. Everyone's flying in tomorrow and starting on Monday we've got a hack-a-thon with all the ClickFunnels developers and partners. We're going to be locked down for sixteen plus hours a day, building, and creating, and moving the needle for all of you guys. It'll be a lot of fun and exciting. I'm sure I will be podcasting on the way to and from some of those and we'll talking about world domination, and it'll be a lot of fun.
Today I wanted to tell you more of a funny story. My kids are insane. I don't know where they get it from. Definitely not from me. You know how some kids are really calm, and nice, and peaceful? My kids aren't. They're nuts, which is fun. They probably get it from me, but we have a lot of fun, we play hard all the time.
Anyway, in the last week, one of my kids was climbing up the shelves and tore one of the shelves out of the, a bookshelf thing out of the wall. Then same kid was jumping off of the sink and his shorts, grabbed the cupboard underneath, the little handle and ripped another drawer out. Anyway, it was just nuts, right?
Then it's sitting there for awhile waiting for me to fix them, and I'm not very good at fixing things so they've just been sitting there. Finally, called the handyman, got some guys to come and fix it. It's two guys that came in and it was in the morning and I was with the kids, I was going a little bit slow because I had just finished four days of Mastermind. I was going to be flying out in five hours and wanted to hang out.
Anyway, my wife brings him in and says, "Hey this is my husband Russell." He looks at me funny and then he starts working on the shelf. As soon as everyone leaves, he's like, "Hey I have a question for you. How old are you man?" I was like, "I'm thirty five." He's like, "Wow. What are you, a doctor or something?" I was like, "Something like that." I was like, "No. I have a bunch of online businesses and things like that." Anyway, it was so funny. I thought it was funny because he thought I was a doctor.
That's everyone's goal now, is to go and create so much amazing cool stuff, that people can't even fathom how you're able to do it at your age, or because you're too old or too young, or whatever. Do things nobody else is doing. Dan Kennedy, I heard him one time say, "If you want to be successful in life, look what everybody else is doing and do the exact opposite," which is kind of true in most circumstances because most people aren't doing much. It's crazy to me.
In fact, also on Friday, the same day, I was lucky enough to have Justin and Tara Williams from Eight Minute Millionaire the podcast. They did a bunch of other cool stuff. They're in our Inner Circle mastermind and they've done some amazing things. They agreed to let us film their story. They came to my house and we filmed their story and it was amazing. They're intense real estate investors. I think they said last year they flipped a hundred and twenty houses, made over a million dollars in take home from that. They spent nine years doing the real estate business. They want to do the coaching business. Got into it and struggled and things like that. They said that since they joined our Inner Circle six months ago, they made more money in the last six months than they did the first six years of their real estate business, which was awesome, so cool, so cool having them tell their whole story.
On the way from my house, I drove them back over to the office in my really dirty car, which was embarrassing, and unbeknownst to me, Justin was apparently was recording this. I feel bad for his wife. Apparently he records all their conversations so if later on, "No you said this," like, "No, no, no. You actually did say this. Let me pull out the recording. Here's the transcripts. Page thirteen, line six. This is where you said this thing," or whatever, right? He records all their conversations. Some of them show up on their podcasts.
Anyway, apparently I didn't know this at the time, we were driving from my house over to the office and he was recording our whole conversation. I think it might show up on his podcast. If you guys go to eightminutemillionaire.com and subscribe, you may hear a conversation I didn't know was going to be happening. I knew it was happening, I didn't know it was going to be recorded. Anyway, I thought that was kind of funny.
We were talking, and I thought it was interesting, it goes back to what I was saying earlier about looking at what everyone else is doing and doing the opposite. I was telling him how when I got started online, how hard it was for me because I did it and I was like, "Wow I want everyone I know to go. It wasn't that hard. I want to show everybody how this works." I was showing my family, my friends, and everybody I could meet. I found out really quick that most people wouldn't do anything. I don't know if it was they were lazy, they didn't believe, or they didn't care, whatever, but it's weird. I tried to give this gift I felt like I've been given to everyone, and most people they didn't want it.
Tara, in one of her podcasts a little while ago, she was really emotional telling the same thing, how hard it was for her. She felt like she had this gift and she wanted to share it with people and either they wouldn't take it, or they whatever the reason was. I remember that was probably ten or eleven years ago that I remember going through that. Finally, I personally shut down where most people in my personal life have no idea what I do, which is why I think most of them think I'm unemployed or they're really confused and they come over and their like, "What do you do?" I don't talk about it because of that. For years I did. I tried to talk and share and tried to help people and most of them won't. I don't know why. But that’s how the majority is and I think I said something in the recording. I'm trying to confess to these things now, in case you guys hear it later I guess.
The drive here, I'm like, "Look at all these cars. All these people, most of them I don't understand what they're doing." You know what I mean? It's weird to me that the masses won't do stuff. They follow this path. They wake up, they eat their cereal, they go to work, they come home, they eat some ice cream, and they go to bed. That's this path and there's so much more. There's so much happening. There's so much amazingness and things you can do, and serve people, and most of them miss it because they think it's going to be too hard.
Justin, and Tara, and I were laughing about it. It's really not that hard. When you look at the grand scheme of things, putting in a couple months of really hard, focused effort, and then pay you forever. It's not as hard as doing what you're doing now, as going to six or seven years of college, to be able to then go to more college, to be able to then get a job that what you make from that job doesn't actually even cover your payments. It's this whole cycle that we're in. We were talking, that seems like a lot more work, a lot harder than this path, which is putting in a shorter period of time and trying to create something amazing. Anyway, I thought that was interesting.
For those of you guys that are listening, that means you are on the right path. You are trying to create, and help, and serve. You know what? It's funny in this business because you're, I don't know about you guys, but typically not that you're alone, but you're kind of alone. Right? You're here at your house or on your computer, wherever, you're doing these things, and you're creating and putting stuff out there and you don't always see the fruits of it.
All last week was an amazing blessing that I got. Amazing gift. Part of it was because I went to the mastermind, I had my mastermind so we had probably sixty of our high end clients there and hear some of their transformational experiences were amazing. I got a chance to hear Justin and Tara tell their story, which was amazing. Jason O'Neil who joined our Inner Circle about a year ago, Friday he passed a million dollars in sales. He sent me a screen shot of a million, like, "Oh so cool."
Then hearing all of these people what they've done since the last meeting, and that we had a little piece in that, obviously it's them doing the work, but we had a little piece help facilitate that and hopefully inspire, and motivate, and point in the right direction. Cool.
Then I went to Nick Unsworth’s event and I landed my flight at five and I think I spoke at seven. I had this little two hour gap. I came and everyone was gone to lunch, but as soon as I walked in the room, one person came over to me and said, "Hey Russell, I need you to know how ClickFunnels and your book has changed my life." Then another person came in and for the entire two hours from five to seven before I finally had a chance to get up and speak, it was a line of people, and everyone said the same thing. It was such an amazing gift, something that you don't get often, but when you do get it, it makes everything else worth it. It makes all the craziness and the hard nights, and the risking your money, your effort, and your things, and when ClickFunnels crashes and people are yelling at you, and it makes all that worth it.
Anyway, I want to share with you guys because it was awesome for me and I know that we don't get that often. For you guys, that's why it's important to do some of the live events and things like that because you have a chance to see what you're doing. It's not just a number or a stat. It's a person. That's really, really cool.
That's what I got you guys. I am at Natural ... I'm at Boise co-op, Natural Foods. I'm going to go check this place out, see what they got. See if this is going to be my new shopping center to keep me feeling good. Yeah, on that, I appreciate you guys. Have an amazing night and talk to you soon.
Did you miss the Inner Circle meeting? If so, here’s a little of what just happened.
In this episode Russell talks about the first two days of his mastermind group. He tells some interesting stories about things that have happened there.
Here are 3 interesting things in today’s episode:
So listen below to hear about some of the cool stuff that happens at the Mastermind Group.
---Transcript---
Good morning everybody, and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Hey everyone, so I'm heading out to day number three of the Mastermind. My guess is, if you listen to my other Mastermind video, or audio, podcast, it was late, I couldn't get it to upload from my phone or my brother, so you'll probably get these after the whole Mastermind is done. First two days were amazing. I've been in a lot of mastermind groups. I've paid a lot money to be in, and just like me as an attendee, that was the best mastermind group I've ever been to. It was really, really amazing. Just grateful for everyone who came and shared, and was a part of it.
Last night was cool because our second mastermind group is going today and tomorrow, and so last night we all got together and did a big dinner party and hung out, and got to know each other, and then Drew Cannoli, some of you guys know Drew from Fitlife.tv came and spoke and talked about his journey, and how they built up their following initially, and a bunch of cool stuff. Then gave everybody some Organify, which was cool. It was really, really fun. He told a story about how they kind of had started, and grew this big following, and had, you know, millions of followers on Facebook. Then Facebook changed their algorithms, and they couldn't reach anyone. They were losing about $50,000 a month. That's when I had a chance to meet him. At about that time they had a supplement they were about to roll out and stuff. We coached them through that funnel on how to build it out, and they launched it, and now it's doing over a million dollars a months. So cool. Anyway, it was amazing, a really fun experience. I think everyone had a good time hearing his story as well, and it was cool.
Now we're heading in for day number 2. I've been taking really, really, really good notes on each of the presentations, like my big takeaways from each of them, so I'm excited. I'm going to do a couple of series where I kind of just break down some of my biggest takeaways from the mastermind group. Just hopefully give some of you guys some value who obviously can't be here, because I have some really, just like amazing takeaways. When you get this caliber of people in a room, they're all doing different things, and everyone just gets, so many cool ideas. One of the new members of our group, they signed up less than a week ago, and they live in Australia, and they jumped on a plane, and flew out here.
A super cool couple and they were talking about, their whole story where basically they were doing these membership sites, and somebody asked them to speak at an event about membership sites. They spoke at the event, and they sold a little membership site boot camp, teaching people how to make membership sites. Then they had like, I don't know, 100 people who came to this boot camp, and then they decided to sell like done for you thing. They did like $200,000 in sales, and they were going crazy. Then they did it again 6 months later, and made 2.5 million dollars in sales. The next time, they built this whole system around that, and they have, like their seminars choreographed, like minute by minute, what happens, and how it happens, and they've just perfected this model. They showed the whole model to everyone. It was just like, holy cow. Ahhh, it was just so cool.
Then you got, you know, people who are webinar experts walking through all the best things that they were doing in their webinars right now. We've got some of the best sales guys in the world teaching their sales scripts, and what's working now, and how to generate leads for those. Just person, after person, after person, was just like dropping gold bombs. I just felt honored to be...I constantly...it's amazing to me that I get paid to do this, but just honored to even be in that room. Some of you guys know, when I got started, the first mastermind group I joined was Bill Glazer’s. At the time I was probably making around $100,000 a year or so, and I get in this program, around all these people who were making a whole lot more than that. I was the youngest and the most immature, I think I still am the most immature in the room, but definitely at that point. I didn't know anything. I remember doing my little session where I got to share my business with people who gave me feedback, but where I got all the value is like listening to all these other people share their business.
Back then during the real estate guru booms, like half the room was real estate gurus. They were talking about the events they were doing, and the webinars, and this, and all these different things. I was like, I never even thought of those as possibilities, and then after that meeting I came back, and started implementing some of the things other people were doing in their business into mine, and made my business more full and more complete. Then, you know, every 3 or 4 months I go back to those meetings. I did that for 6 years in Bill's group. Our business got better, and better, and better, and better, and better. I probably would still be in that group, but Bill sold the business, and I kind of disconnected from that because Bill was really my first mentor in there.
After that, I started looking for a new home. I was like, I need this, this is part of what I need to be in, one of these things every few months, and I joined, I think I joined 4 or 5 other groups. It wasn’t me just picking a random group, I did my research to find out like, what's the best group? You know, and I went to the group, and I was like, ah so let down, then what's the next best group? Went to that group. Let down, and let down, and just, anyway it was frustrating. Basically at that point I asked everybody, and they were "well, you've been to the best ones, so if you didn't like those, you should probably start your own, because there's nothing else better than that". I was just like, dang. That was really, like, one of the main reasons why we started this one, and why we built it.
At first I was nervous, because I'm like, what if people don't come? What if we get crappy people? All the different fears that kind of come with that, but, man, like I look at the roster of who we attracted into these groups, and it's amazing. It's pretty fun. It's been 2 days so far, I've got 2 more days, and I'm just back here just gleaning ideas off each person, and figuring out ways to perfect more so what we do, and it's pretty exciting.
That's all I want to tell you guys. I just want to give you guys an update, letting you know all the cool stuff that's happening, and I'll probably, I don't know when, maybe Friday this week. Friday I have the morning off, I've got to fly out of town, so maybe I'll jump on, and just go through my notebook with you and share, share my top 10 big takeaways from the 2 groups, and hopefully give you guys a ton of value, and hopefully cause some desire for you guys to join the group, even though there are not many spaces left.
In fact, I had a cool idea the other day. I was like, at our Funnel Hacking event, which, if you don’t have your tickets yet, go get them, FunnelHacking.com, Marcus Lemonis is speaking. It's going to be amazing. I was thinking about having a board that said, Inner Circle, and then, like, I think I told you this before, like we're capping the inner circle at 100 people, and I'm not opening up again. I want to have a board that has everyone's picture, like all 100 pictures, or you know, whatever it is at that point. It's probably like 95, 96, and have like the 5 spots with like, blank heads. And just be like, "There's the group you guys, when it's filled, it's filled. The only way that a spot opens up again is if someone drops out", and just like, you know, and that's it. Let people go fight over those last couple of spots, if there are spots left at that point. Then when that happens, I'm basically going to turn the site where it was sold over, and just have like that, the pictures of 100 people, and then when one drops out, we'll say, "hey, this guy dropped out. Who wants a spot?" Then it will be up for auction, and I guarantee at that point those spots won't go for $25,000, they'll be going for a lot more.
It's kind of fun. I'm really liking this whole concept. Anyway, that's about it, you guys. I'm heading in, and have an amazing week, and I'll probably talk to you guys on Friday, with hopefully a recap of all the cool stuff. All right, thanks everybody.
Can you believe this happened on the drive over?
In this episode Russell talks about The Inner Circle and why he’s going to lock it down when it fills up. He also talks about why you should join the Inner Circle and help grow your own business.
Here are some cool things in today’s episode:
So listen below to hear why you should join Russell’s Inner Circle to learn valuable things to help grow your business.
---Transcript---
Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to another episode of "Marketing In Your Car." Hey, everyone, I hope you guys are having an awesome day. I'm about to start a week that I am so excited for. This week is Inner Circle week. I'm actually driving to the hotel right now to come hang out with our top level clients and friends. I feel like they're more like a family now. That's what's happening and I'm so excited.
For those of you guys that are listening to this who are part of that group, I'm excited to see you. I feel bad, I just got a vox from Brent on our team. He's heading there to help with registration and hang out and everything. He got in a wreck on the way there. For all of you guys, this is a public service announcement from Russell. If you're listening to me right now and you're in a car, please be careful. I'm going to be careful, as well, because we don't want to get hit like Brent. Actually, he hit them. He saw something on the side of the road and looked at it like, "Oh, what is that," and then smacked into the dude in front of him. His airbags went off and everything. It was kind of serious. I'm hoping that while we're talking, because I'm behind him a little ways, that I'll drive by him and I'll actually see him and we can all honk and yell at him or something funny. Not that getting in a wreck is a funny thing, because it's not, but when it's your friend and he's not hurt, then it's hilarious. There you go.
I know that some of you guys saw some of the Inner Circle campaigns and people have been asking me like, "Did you fill it up? What happened," and all that kind of stuff. Kind of what happened is, as you know, in the past, we've had two coaching groups. We had Ignite, which it was $12,000 and then had Inner Circle that's 25 and they've both been amazing groups, but I decided this year that I just wanted to focus on the Inner Circle. We closed down Ignite, which is kind of scary, because that was probably 2 million dollars a year in revenue that we decided, "Oh, let's just turn it off. Let's turn it off and focus on these other guys."
Then we started thinking, "How many people can we run in our Inner Circle." I've been in Inner Circles where people have done it right and I've been in ones that people have done it wrong. I felt the right was is to have a group of about 33 people in a meeting, because in two days, you can have everyone present. It works really, really good. I've been in other groups that had 100 people in it and it just doesn't work well.
In fact, I'm in a group right now that has 100 and my first meetings next month and I'm curious to go and see how they facilitate it. I've yet to see it done well. I want to keep the group small enough that we can keep that same intimate atmosphere, but it'd be fun to have 100 people. I'm trying to figure out the math behind it. How do we do this so we can have 100 people in it? Basically it came down to having three groups. At a time, we had two groups and I'm like, "Hey, we're basically we're to fill one more group, so three groups of 33.3 people, so it equals 100 people, right." In December, we did the math and already two groups were full and the third group was starting to get full, so we sent an email basically saying, "Hey, Inner Circle's closing down. Ignite's already gone. If you want the last spots, they're going really, really fast." From that, I think somewhere between 12-15. I don't know. I'd have to look at the exact numbers, but people that joined in December, at 25 grand a piece, so that was awesome from a revenue standpoint, but more so from like, "We're adding more people to this family." It's exciting.
We have a few more spots. Our next meeting after this is in May, and we have our Funnel Hacking event before then and a bunch of other stuff, so they'll be sold out by May. My goal is to basically lock it down. We have really high renewal rates, people that were in it that come back each year. My goal is to hopefully not have to ever open it up again and let people just keep coming back. When spots do open up, we'll just let the waiting list know, "Hey, there's one new spot," or "three new spots," or whatever and keep it filled. Keeping 100 people and that's it and working really close with 100 entrepreneurs at a time and really trying to cultivate that and turn it more and more into a family. That's what's happening.
This is fun. This week, we basically have two groups happening. In May, we'll have three groups. That's what's going down in the Inner Circle. The way we facilitate ours, and everyone kind of does them different, but basically, over two days, everyone has a chance to get up and share for about 30 minutes, first off what's awesome in their business, because that's fun to always hear. The one big thing you got since the last meeting that's been crushing it for you. The second thing is asking, "I want some feedback from the group?" It's kind of like group consulting, where everyone in the group is a rock star. It's not just like, "Here's Russell's advice." It's like, "Here's this group of 30 other people that are amazing. Here's them sharing what they would do in that situation and getting their feedback and stuff like that." It's a really neat thing where you just get amazing feedback.
Afterwards, late nights, everyone's hanging out and you've got relationships that are built and from there it's really extending that relationship and extending everything and growing it for the next three or four months for the next meeting and stuff like that. It's exciting. I love it. That's what I'm heading to right now and having a chance to hang out with our Inner Circle family. If you're in it, I'm excited to see you. If you're not in it, you should just get in it. The spots are going to be gone and then they're going to be gone. If you go to RussellBrunson.com, you can get more info on it. My guess is, within the next month or so, there will no longer be spots in the Inner Circle. Hopefully, there never will be.
People keep asking me, "Russell, you shut down your Ignite coaching, so that's gone. Inner Circle's now locked out. What's your purpose and what are you doing now? What's you business like?" I keep looking at that, because ClickFunnels is where our focus is at. It's growing consistently and is doing well and I think it will continue to do that. Inner Circle's capped out, so that business is there. We'll keep creating front end products and bringing new people into ClickFunnels.
For me, it's really looking at now, "What are some strategic projects that we can partner on, that I can bring my magic tricks to and the other people can become runners and operators of these businesses." We kind of have three that I'm doing this with right now.
One is, you guys know the company Pruvit, which is the keytone drink that I'm obsessed with. I was able to come in and they gave me a percentage to do what I'm good at doing, my funnels and all that kind of stuff. I'm not involved in the day to days or anything like that. I'm involved in what I'm good at and I can just do that and nothing else.
Same thing with ... Some of you guys know Anthony? We're doing the same thing with Biohacking Secrets, where he's the owner, operator. I come in and get to do my things in exchange for a percentage.
I do another project like that with Christian who is the guy on our team who ran it. He's been running the Ignite program. He's got an amazing survival business he's building out and a similar concept. I'm not trying to get a lot of these businesses, because they take a lot of time and energy and effort and money, honestly.
Oh crap. There's a cop coming. Please say he's not coming after me. I will be late if I get pulled over right now. Cross out fingers that he passes me. I'm going to hold the phone down a little lower. I'll talk louder so hopefully you guys can hear me. I think he's pulling the dude over behind me. Sweet. We didn't get caught. Oh crap, he just passed that guy. Cross your fingers that it's not me, you guys. I'm really nervous. He's actually pulling up right beside me, but I think he's going to pass me. Can you guys hear him? He's passing me right now. Can you guys hear that? Sweet. It's not me. I'm officially safe.
All right. Now that I'm safe, we can get back on tangent. I don't even remember where we left off. That got me nervous, because the event starts in 25 minutes. If I get pulled over right now, I'd be late. That's a good sign. That actually happened to me one time. We were doing an event at our old office. I was on the freeway and I was already running late. I was speeding and I got pulled over, so I showed up to my own event 20 minutes late, which was really not a good thing, obviously.
I don't know where I left off, but I think I left off somewhere. What I'm thinking about doing, I don't know, but I think this would be cool, but I don't know how to do it the right way. If you guys have any ideas, let me know. I watch Shark Tank a lot and that's a cool premise, but you get to see them pitch a deal and then that's kind of it. Then you see The Profit, which is cool, because Marcus comes in and rebuilds the whole business and that's fun. I want to do a hybrid of that. How do we make something where it's online thing and people can come and say, "Hey Russell. Here's our business. We're going to be the owners, operators and runners, but we want you to come in and do your ..." The three or four things that Russell's actually good at it, I'm going to come and do in exchange for equity. It'd be fun to do something like that where people come and get to present it to me and then we get to pick which ones we want to work with. Over the year, capture the story of that and film it and make a mini online TV show, showing that process. How many of you guys would like that? How many of you guys think that'd be pretty dang cool.
That's what I'm kind of looking at the future. I was telling Jason O'Neil, whose one of our Inner Circle members who, either today or tomorrow, he’s going to pass a million dollars in sales, since he joined the Inner Circle. It's super exciting. I was telling him, "Getting $25,000 from you to sign up with really, really cool, but what would be cooler is if I got 20% of everything you did. That would have been way cooler if I would have structured it that way. We didn't." I'm trying to find the right projects and deals where we can do that. How do we do that, but then make it in a fun way where everyone else can see behind the scenes and watch? I like to show that stuff. I think there's value.
I'm thinking about that, so if any of you guys have an idea. Two things. First off, we need a cool name for it. Without a cool name, it's not worth doing, right? The name is 90% of it, so if there's a cool name, I'll probably do it. Then, we need a cool concept, because I don't it to be like Shark Tank. You come pitch to me. I don't want to be mean too, I don't want to be Marcus Lemonis. I want something cool where we figure out a cool blend of that.
We were thinking about doing something ahead of time, where people get to apply between now and the funnel hacking event and at the funnel hacking event, do a whole session where people get to present their business and show… let everyone will watch that process. I think that would be kind of fun, as well. I don't know. Who knows if that will happen before then, but I think that would be a cool concept.
That's some of the stuff that I'm thinking about. For you guys' business, I wonder what you guys are all thinking about. After you get the initial foundation built, where you've got a good offer and traffic and customers, it really comes down to, "How do you make exciting, fun, cool things that people want to participate in? How do you change this?"
Sorry. I just hit the traffic on the freeway. Crap. I bet you we're getting close to Brent's wreck, actually. I bet that's what the cop was going to. Great. I'm going to be stuck behind all these people, because of Brent. Brent's going to make me late to this event now. That's kind of my thoughts. I hope you guys are having fun with your business. If it's not fun, then why are we even doing this. The harder part is initially getting the offers and the structure and the funnels and the audience. After you have the audience, it can become really fun. How do we inspire people? How do we motivate them? How do we get them excited about our product, our service and what we're doing.
With that said, that's about it, you guys. We're not going to see Brent, because I'm stuck on the freeway. We're 20 minutes out and I'm not even moving right. Cross your fingers I make it to the Inner Circle on time. If not, it's all Brent's fault, not mine. Just kidding. I appreciate you guys. Have an amazing day. I'll talk to you guys all again soon. Bye.
Understanding the power and importance of the teach-ability index.
On this episode Russell talks about what he learned from a known con man, Kevin Trudeau. He also gives you an idea of what his new book, Expert Secrets is about.
Here are some cool things to listen for in this episode:
So listen below to hear what difference saying “What if…” has made in Russell’s life.
---Transcript---
Hey, everyone, good morning! This is Russell Brunson and welcome to another episode of Marketing In Your Car. Hey, everyone. I can't help but laugh every time I do that. But anyway, there you go. I have no other way to do an intro, so that's all I ... I need to go to intro school and learn some other cool stuff, but for now that's what I got. I'm driving past my house and there's this huge alfalfa field next door to us, and usually every morning ... Today there's not, but there's like 500 geese in there and then deer, big deer with antlers and everything. We count about 7 deer that, every morning, come through our yard and then at night they go back the other way. It was pretty cool.
All right, so I got something cool for you guys today. Some of you may know I've been writing my second book. I swore I'd never do it again but here we are. I felt like there was one more message I needed to share with the world and the book is called Expert Secrets, and I really feel like ... In fact the intro of the book I talk about is this the prequel to DotComSecrets or the sequel? Where does this fit in the queue? It kind of depends. If you've got an existing business, I think DotComSecrets is the first book. If you don't then Expert Secrets is the first book.
If you have an existing business though, I think Expert Secrets is the second book. It gives you a very systematic, step by step timeline of what to do and what order to do it in. I'm excited. I feel like, it's kind of like when a weight loss author writes a diet book. I was thinking about Dave Asprey wrote The Bulletproof Diet. Here's the guide. Here's everything that he knows about losing weight. That's kind of what DotComSecrets was like. Here's everything. Then the next book they usually come out with is the cookbook, like, "Hey, here's the Bulletproof Cookbook. Here's all the recipes you should use." That's kind of how this is.
This book feels like it's my recipe book, like, "Okay, so all the stuff we talked about in DotComSecrets, you want to implement it… What order? What comes first? Why?" Thinking about things like attractive character. You start here and you transition to here, and which funnel do you use first, second, third and why do you use them in that order? All those kind of fun things. I'm excited. It's turned out really really good. We're I think about a third of the way done with it and I was really nervous to write this, because there's been a lot of people that have written things on how to become an expert and stuff like that and I didn't want it to be another one of those books. I wanted it to be something special, and so it took me forever to figure out how I wanted to do it and structure it.
I feel like we're there and it's turning out cool, so I'm proud of it. With that said, there's a lot of cool things I've been thinking about while I'm doing that. I'm going to talk about one of them today. It's a concept I might have talked about on the podcast in the past. I don't know. I've done so many episodes I can't remember everything that I say so if this is a rerun for the hardcore ones, this is something to just keep thinking about. But a long time ago I bought a product by ... I'm going to blank out his name now. He's the dude that ... Kevin Trudeau. Kevin Trudeau, who's in jail right now, but one of the best infomercial pitchmen in the history of time, and someone who I do not agree with his ethics.
He's done a lot of bad things to a lot of people I care about, but from a skill standpoint, dude's amazing. He came out with a product a few years ago called Your Wish is Your Command. In the product he acted like he was in Switzerland and there's all these kings and stuff he was teaching to. It was all BS. He recorded it in a studio in Chicago, and so it's kind of like the whole product is based on a lie, but the content actually was really good. Take that for what it's worth. But one of the things that Kevin talked about in the product was a thing I'd never heard about, but he called it the teachability index, and I talk about this in the Expert Secrets book a little bit. But he talked about, if you think about in your life when you grow up, right?
When you're a little kid you're like a sponge. My Norah, today she took 3 steps. She's just learning how to walk, our little 10 month old, and she's like a sponge. Everything she's doing ... She took a step and we're going crazy and she's doing little things. Kids are so teachable. Look at my kids right now. Anything they touch they just figure it out, like video games or math problems. Anything we give them, boom, they figure it out so fast, so much faster than us adults ever do. You look at that's how life is. We're growing, we're evolving, we're learning. All these amazing things are happening, and we do it through elementary school and then junior high, then high school, then college, and then some horrible thing happens at the end of college. It's the worst thing that can happen to any of us.
We get a degree, and that degree means, "Congratulations. You have learned everything you need to learn and you're smart." Guess what happens to almost all the population at that point? We all stop. We’re like, "Sweet. I know what I need to know. Let's go into the workforce now and implement what I learned in school." The thing that sucks about that first off is that the school system's horrible, so you didn't learn half of what you need to know, but second-off, our teachability index drops to almost nothing. I got in that slump just like everybody else where I thought I knew everything, and that's why I think I fell in love with this whole business, because I started learning and it opened up my eyes.
But, the same thing happened, I opened up and I started learning all this stuff and doing it and started making money, and then what happened? I started teaching it and then boom. It was like I had graduated. I know what I need to know and I kind of shut down for a couple of years, which was horrible because I stopped evolving, stopped growing. It was kind of like this stagnant point for me, and the real turning point for me was when I went to a Tony Robbins event. I remember sitting there at the event, and people are jumping around, going crazy, and singing and dancing and he's sharing all these things.
For the first 5 or 6 hours, I'm sitting there with my arms folded like, "No. I'm not dancing. I'm not jumping. All that stuff he's saying is BS. I don't believe it." I really kind of shut things off, but Tony's got a way, and he's pretty good at what he does. After about 5 or 6 hours, I remember I had ... For me, I don't think at the time I thought it was a breakthrough, but I was kind of like, "You know what? Screw this. I'm going to jump around and be happy because everybody else in here is except for me." I started jumping around and being happy and then I started thinking, "Instead of me saying no, Tony's wrong, what if I just say what if? Let me just change the thought in my head from no to what if."
I did, and he started saying something. Instead of me immediately shutting it down like all of us do, because we're educated and because our teachability index is zero, instead of doing that, I said, "What if?" What happened has been life changing for me. It's opened up this whole new world of possibilities and ideas, and things and people, and experiences that I never thought were possible before. For me now, I'm very careful to not say no when new ideas come to me. It's not that I can't say no after I've investigated them and prayed about them, and learned about them and implemented them and tried them and tested them, but I try not to say no initially.
I try to say “what if” and then put it to the test and see. The things that are good come back and can be really, really good. A good example of that, when I started learning about all this, the high fat diets, and at first my brain's like, "No. Eating a stick of butter is not a good idea. No. My whole life I learned butter's bad." Okay, this morning ... I ate more butter this morning than I ate probably in the first 25 years of my life and guess what? I'm in the best shape of my life. Not the best shape of my life, when I was wrestling I was in way better shape. I'm not going to lie, but the best shape of my adult life. I'm losing weight like crazy. I've lost a pound a day every day for the last 5 days.
It's interesting and it all came off of a “what if”. What if this whole thing that we've been thinking was true this whole time wasn't true? What if butter actually is amazing and wheat is bad? No, it can't be ... heart healthy wheat. Anyway, I started changing that and again, it's transformed my world. I look at my business and it's no longer stagnated. It's dramatically growing every single month. I looked at my relationships, I looked at all these other aspects of my life, and as I shifted my responses from “no” to “what if”, it changed everything. What I've done is I've basically increased my teachability index. I've opened myself up to learning again, and most people don't.
In the book what I'm talking about, and this is kind of my message for you guys today, is as we get into whatever our business is and where we consider ourselves an expert. We're either an expert doing what you're doing or teaching it. Some of you guys are teachers as well, but a lot of us, our teachability is zero and we're kind of teaching what we've gained so far in our life, and I think that's wrong. When I was hanging out with Howard Berg, the world's fastest reader, one the of the first times I was hanging out with him, I asked him his opinion on God because I want to ... He's read over 30,000 books. The dude's a genius, right? I was like, "What's your opinion on God?" He's like, "Well, you know, a lot of people will read one book on a topic and that becomes their truth."
He said, "For me, I look at that as one author's opinion, so I like to read 10 or 20 or 30 books on a topic and then I get a whole bunch of people's opinion and I have the ability to see the whole picture and then from there make my choices." He would go on like, "This is what these guys believe and this is what these guys believe, and this is what this ..." He started sharing ... It was insane. If you ever meet Howard Berg ask him for an hour of his time and ask him his thoughts on God, because it was fascinating. It was the coolest thing in the world. Any topic you ask him and he can go into that like, "Oh, well most people read one book. I read 40 on the topic. This is what I think." He's just like, "You get a holistic picture as opposed to just a fragment."
I think for us as educators, as experts, as whatever you want to call yourself, it's time to open back up your teachability index and become a student again. Become obsessed with it. In fact, the very first thing I talk about in the Expert Secrets book, I call it the Expert Maker Funnel, and it's doing a telesummit or some type of a summit, because in that summit, you transition from whatever you are to ... Your attractive character profile becomes the interviewer. In that interviewer role, you have a chance to interview tons of other people. It's just like reading 50 books. Interview all these other people and suddenly what's going to happen is your picture of your reality is going to change. It's going to grow. It's going to become way better.
I think that it's time for all of us, if we really want to serve our people at the highest level, it's time to transition away from being the leader all the time, and become a student, and really open your teachability. Because you're going to learn and gain so many things you can help your people with that you couldn't just by sticking with all that you're doing right now. That's my message for today. You're going to love the book. It goes so much deeper than that. There's so much more which I could share, but we're at the office, and I got to get to work and help try to serve some more people, get this message out because I think it's important and it's worth sharing. That's what I got for you guys today. Have an amazing day and I'll talk to you guys all again soon.
A bunch of cool things we implemented this week that you may be interested in…
On today’s episode Russell talks about how he organizes and gets his team to get things done in a timely manner by having Monday meetings with the team. He also mentions a new free plus shipping offer that you should look out for soon.
Here are 3 fun things in this episode:
So listen below to hear about some of Russell’s cool new ideas.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to Marketing in Your Car. All right everybody, so my last episode of Marketing in Your Car did not make the publication route. I feel bad because it was so funny, but I figured it would probably be best for me not to do it. Sometimes you know they say, "If you have nothing ..." or, what is it? "If you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all." What I did, you guys know Lead Pages just came out with a new announcement for some of the new things, and I did a whole podcast as if they had hired me to be their consultant. I wanted to point out just all of the mistakes they made, and I felt so bad, I was like... I basically was a consultant and consulted to them, it was really funny, I couldn't keep it.
Before I posted I sent it to a couple people and they said, "While it was hilarious and really actually pretty good it would have actually helped Lead Pages a lot if they listened to it, we probably shouldn't do that. So I didn't, so I apologize, but just know it was really funny and you guys should try to consult for your competitor sometimes because it's really, really, really an enjoyable thing to do. Don't publish it live because somehow it's going to bite me in the butt I knew, so anyway. If any of you guys have a chance to steal my phone someday it's archived in here, I've got it. It's just not going to make it to the ... what do you call it? It's not going to make it on the ... hit the cutting room floor or whatever, so yeah.
Any who, today what I want to talk about is, remember last week or two weeks ago I was talking about compartmentalizing your days and stuff like that. I did, so yesterday was Monday and I figured I want to make sure that everybody on my team organization is running the right direction, right? The worst thing is by Wednesday people are like, "So what do you want me to do this week?" You're like, "It's Wednesday, why didn't you ask me on Monday, or even Tuesday, or even Wednesday morning? Two and a half days you've been sitting around doing stuff but not like the right stuff." So I figured Monday is my day to aim, right? I'm sure you guys have heard this story about Abraham Lincoln where ... I think it was Abraham Lincoln, or some dude, maybe someone else. Where it's like if you were going to be in an ax racing contest with somebody else what would you do? It's like, well I would spend the first six hours sharpening my saw and the last hour winning? Whatever that is. I totally screwed that story up, but you guys get the point right? You can chop with a dull saw but it's going to take way longer than if you spend time sharpening.
Monday is now my sharpening/meeting day to make sure everyone's pointed in the right direction, and trying to do a little more training consulting to people on my team. With all my core people that I work directly with I set up daily, or excuse me, weekly meetings. Not long ones, like fifteen minute meetings, and then we've got accountability throughout the day so each person at the end of the day they need to vox me with kind of what we call a return and report. They can return and report what they did throughout the day. They say, "Hey Russell, today I did this. Tomorrow I'm working on this," then they have to tell me any issues they see standing in the way of completing what they're doing tomorrow. "Hey, I really need some help from a graphic designer, Russell I need this," whatever they need from me, and boom, I can give it to them and help them keep running.
That's kind of nice, we plugged that into place and it's going well so far. Yesterday I had more meetings than I ever wanted to have in my life but I also learned more about my business than I think I ever knew. Realized some things we were doing right and some things we were doing wrong, and some things that I need to do to step up and really feel in the gaps. That was really cool, I really am glad that I did that. We also spent time, John on our team runs our ad agency, it's an internal ad agency and we're the only client. He runs that. I had an hour long meeting with him yesterday and we just had a chance to brainstorm, and talk through things, figure out what funnels I can make to help him better. What he was doing, and get ideas. It was awesome, usually I know he's amazing and he's doing stuff but it was fun for me to see it and be able to think, "On my side what I can do to help amplify this and make it better?"
Yesterday Brent was out of the office but I’m having a meeting with him today because he's back. We're building out this huge new front end call center thing based off of the book Predictable Revenue, and today we're going to meet on that and start planning ... it's just, it's cool. I really enjoyed Monday meeting day. Now today, Tuesday and Wednesday, are Russell's funnel building days. I get to build funnels all day today and tomorrow, I'm so excited. That's awesome, then Thursday is the day I get to sell, then Friday is fulfillment day. Which is fulfillment of coaching, creation of projects, et cetera, et cetera. So far one day into this and I'm really liking it, so I'll report back to you guys as we keep going forward. So far I'm really, really liking it. That's very encouraging.
Second off I had an idea this morning for a new free plus shipping offer that I am so excited for. You guys are going to hear it first before anyone else even heard of it, but we're going to have it executed here within the next two weeks or so then it will be live and you guys will see it. I was just thinking I want a cool free plus shipping offer to get people into Click Funnels, what would be a fun exciting thing. I was thinking about one of our Inner Circle members asked me about something you guys have seen when we did the big ... we blew up the Neurosales sales letter and had it huge on our office wall and they were like, "How did you do that? We want to be able to put our funnels up on the wall." I was like, "What if we made a magnet pack that had a whole bunch of refrigerator magnets in it that you could go on your refrigerator and it has ten sales page, ten upsale pages, ten webinar… all of the core funnel pages you need, right? We just have a magnetic pack then you go in your refrigerator and move things around and build your dream funnel on your refrigerator. How cool would that be?
We're making that, so that's going to be our next free plus shipping offer to get people into Click Funnels. I just thought that was one of the coolest things ever, and if you think that's cool it means you've been geeking out with me long enough that we're all on the same page. We are making that, funnel magnets is coming soon. I’ve got to go buy funnelmagnets.com or something like that, but anyway, that is another fun thing that I get to work on. One thing I wanted to kind of say related to that, I had a lot of interviews during the Christmas/New Years break, a lot of podcast interviews and stuff like that, we kind of loaded them up during that time so I could ... we're working a little less and just doing more of those. One question I got consistently a couple times it's just like, "Russell, what's next?"
I kind of smile I say, "You know what? For the last ten years of me doing this business I was looking like, what's next, what's next, what's next." I realized that's what was the problem, I kept trying to figure out what's the next thing to do. We spent all this time, effort and energy building something, we roll it out, and I was looking at what's next. When we launched Click Funnels a year and a half ago, and I've talked about this with you guys before, I sat back and said, "Okay, I need to try and focus." We sold the supplement company, we shut down like ten other side projects that we were doing and we started to focus. I was really nervous, I was like, "My entrepreneurial ADD ... I'm a creator, I want to create things, I want to figure out new funnels, new offers, things like that," that gets me excited. I had a friend, I'm not going to give him credit for it. Okay, I'll give him credit for it, his name is BJ. BJ Wright, some of you guys may know him.
BJ said something like, "What if you just instead of use your creativity to create a new product, what if you use your creativity to figure out more ways to market Click Funnels?" I was like, "Huh, that's actually a really good idea." If you've noticed over the last twelve months every funnel we have put out, every offer we put out, everything, including my book, they are all bait to get people into Click Funnels. Anyways, kind of interesting, just want to throw that out in case you guys haven't noticed. You probably noticed it but if not there it is. It's like this funnel magnet, that is a cool, creative, awesome idea we can do that will get people into Click Funnels, there yeah go.
Anyway, I'm at the office, I gotta bounce. Have an amazing day today, block out your schedule you guys because so far it's been amazing and I think that we all should be doing that. Other than that I will talk to you guys again soon, bye.