A little trick to help you crush your goals…

On today’s episode Russell talks about setting a big, hairy, audacious goal at the beginning of the year to 3x revenue and how close to that goal he has come and how he plans to achieve it in the next couple of days.

Here are some of the fun things to listen for in this episode:

• What Russell thought when such a big goal was set.
• What some of the Hail Mary passes are that will hopefully help the company achieve the goal before year ends.
• And what the goal for Clickfunnels is next year and how Russell plans to achieve that even bigger goal.

So listen below to hear what kind of Hail Mary passes are being thrown in this last week of the year to help Clickfunnels achieve their goal of make triple the money as last year.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? Good morning. I hope you guys are doing awesome. It is so cold here right now in my car. Freezing, I forgot to wear a coat. Dang it. Why do I always do that? Anyway, I hope you guys are doing awesome. I just wanted to share some cool stuff with you guys today because I’m so excited I have not been able to sleep.

I don’t know if you guys have the stripe app on your phone, but last night I was refreshing it every thirty seconds. It’s so fun. I love this game. Seriously, this is the game we get to play, and it is the most insane, fun, cool, exciting, frustrating sometimes, but always rewarding game. So much fun.

I want to tell you guys about something that we are attempting to do right now, which is super crazy and fun. And I want to show you my execution plan because I think it will help you with whatever your execution plans are. Just kind of see how I look at the world and how we’re trying to hit a big goal in a very short, finite period of time.

So basically this is it, I haven’t told publicly anywhere, but for you guys I can tell you because you’re my people, you’re my peeps. So what our goal was last year in Clickfunnels, we wanted to triple our revenue. And that was one of those, what do they call them? BHAG’s. Big, hairy, audacious goals. So it was like, “Let’s triple revenue.” And it was one of those things that I was like, “Yeah, that can happen.” And everyone was like, “yeah, that can happen.” But you never really know, you know what I mean? It wasn’t something that we stressed about everyday like, “What’s the revenue, what’s the revenue?” because I’m a big believer in setting a big goal but not, I don’t want to say not focusing on it, but not…..I don’t want that goal to destroy the customer experience. I want to focus more on how do we serve these people and then that goal will somehow magically appear.

So that was the goal, so we had this thing where we wanted to 3x our revenue, which is a lofty goal. But why not? We might as well do it, we got nothing else happening this year, let’s do it. So that was the goal and we started going towards it. We didn’t really know what or how we were going to do it, but we were just trying a whole bunch of things. You guys probably watched over the last year a lot of the things we tried. We tried this, we tried this. Some things were huge smashing successes, and some things were failures.

So we get to December, this month, the month of the coldness. And I kind of, not that I’ve forgotten about the goal, just hadn’t really looked at it. So I asked Clint who is my accountant, “So where are we at on this goal.” And he told me and I was like, huh. And the number we had to get in December was, we had to make what we normally do, without sharing revenue numbers, we needed to make an extra 1 ½ million dollars on top of what we did the month prior, which was a record setting month for us, to be able to achieve that goal.

We were like, huh. So we basically have to break our best month ever and increase sales by an extra $1.5 million. And it was like, okay, maybe. Then we’re like, December is like the worst possible month to do. In our industry typically December is the worst month. No, that’s not going to work. Anyway, all these doubts and fears, like there’s no way we’re going to make it. Let’s still make that the goal. So I told him, because this is the big thing with goals, if something is in front of your face all the time, you’re more likely to achieve it. When I want to lose weight, I write on the board next to my scale, how much I weigh each day. It’s visible so you see it.

So I said, “okay, every single day, I want you to send how much money we’ve made year to date and then how much money we have to make to hit our goal.” So every morning for the last 27 days or whatever I’ve got an email that says, “Hey, so far we’re at this much for the year. This is how much you have to get to beat your goal.” So it’s like, “Crap, we’ve got that much money. That much money.” So we started doing things and started making us be creative. So we started going and doing it. And if you listen to the podcast, we had a webinar earlier this month that did 800 grand, which is awesome.

And as awesome as that is, it’s like half of what we needed to do in extra new money. So we’re trying different things and doing a bunch of stuff. And then we have Christmas, everyone is taking a week off for Christmas, and this is happening, that’s happening. So what happened, at the beginning of this week, which is the last week of the year, we looked at it and it was like, “okay this is what you have to make.” And looking at it we were like, we have to make an extra half a million dollars on top of still doing all the other revenue we normally do each day. That’s what we have to do. How do we make an extra 100 grand a day every day this week? That’s what we had to figure out how to do.

And it wasn’t 100 grand a week, it’s an extra 100 grand. So much stress. What we did, and this the lesson, is we sat down and said, “okay, we can’t just plan on one thing working. We’ve got to have a couple of different back up plans.” So we had a little meeting and I said, “Okay, we’ve got some Hail Mary passes. We’re going to throw a bunch of Hail Mary’s in the air, and hopefully we’ll catch one or two or three of them. So we came up with 5 Hail Mary passes. You know in my business, it will be different from yours, but we came up with five. One of them was, I had this idea, what if we took a bunch of our old, unreleased content. Funnel related events, and stuff we had never sold and put that in a packet and call it Funnel Immersion, some of you may have seen that.

So we launched that yesterday, and lo and behold the first day, it hasn’t even been…..it’s been like 15 hours and we’ve done more than 100 grand already with that. I was like, “Yes, one Hail Mary pass was caught in the end zone. But we haven’t won yet, so what else can we do?” So I started looking at our database, looking at our people and started segmenting things. So okay, what are the other big opportunities to make big money quick?

One of them is our certification program. So I looked and over the last 12 months there’s been 14,000 people that have registered for our certification webinar. And from that, obviously we don’t have 14,000 customers, so I said, “okay, we’ll take that segment, they’re obviously interested, let’s push them to take action before the end of the year.” So we sent our campaign to these guys to basically say to call in and say, “Hey basically don’t apply. You’ve already applied. Call this number ASAP and we’ll get you in the certification program.”

So we did that and the certification is $10,000, so yesterday we came into the office, with phones ringing off the hook. They’re dialing, interviewing people making sure they’re a good fit for the program. And sales are going up, boom, boom, boom. That Hail Mary pass, we threw it up and so far it’s halfway caught? No, it’s been caught. We still have 3 days of sales on there to figure out how much we’re going to get from that, but there’s another one.

We had one where people keep begging us for years for the option and we always fought against it inside of Clickfunnels, but we decided to make it available just when people log in. So when people logged in this week, actually started yesterday, a thing popped up saying, “Hey, you have a onetime offer. You can get two months for free if you buy yearly right now.” And that was the Hail Mary pass we threw up and it landed. It’s working.

And then our event, we’ve got I think 8 booths, and we haven’t sold any booth space yet, so Dave has been out there calling people like crazy trying to sell booths, and he closed the first one yesterday and he’s got three or four more lined up for today. Anyway, we just had all these different contingency plans, and we all jumped in and started executing them. It was based on looking at all our opportunities and segmenting them out.

Funnel Emersion goes to everyone. Certification goes to people who have raised their hand last year about certification. And everything is kind of like that. Dave’s going out to different affiliate partners, who are the ones who can bring in a lot of sales in a short period of time? So we’re doing deals with them in the next three days trying to get them to push before the end of the year. Just doing a whole bunch of different things, and looking at it now, we’re still three days away, but I think we’re going to make it, which is insane.

It’s so exciting. I’ll let you guys know for sure, if and when we do. But you’ll know if I’m on New Year’s Eve doing a Google Hangout for 22 hours trying to close everybody on buying stuff, then that’s probably why. Just a head’s up, so you guys know on the inside. It’s because we have to reach our goal. We’re so close, we’re going to make it. It’s just exciting.

So that’s fun. Now to take that to next year. We set a big, hairy, audacious goal, a BHAG for next year, to triple revenue again, which is insane. Especially when……it’s one of those things that’s just like, “Huh.” But that’s what it was last year too. I was saying, “Huh, might as well. What else are we going to do.” So this year we said let’s triple it again, which if we do that, would be insane. Goll, it would be insane.

So my question for me and for our team, how are we going to do that? And we’re like, “Huh. Well.” We can’t just come up with one idea, we need a whole bunch of Hail Mary passes and if one or two or three of them hit, we could actually hit that goal.

So we come up with some big Hail Mary passes. One of them is the Book launch, the way we’re executing the book launch, tie the book launch to the infomercial. That’s one huge Hail Mary Pass. We’ve got, I don’t want to ruin all the surprises. We’ve got some cool happening this year. We have four or five Hail Mary Passes, and if one or two, we’ll probably hit two. If two or three of those Hail Mary Passes hit, we’re going to hit it. If they don’t, we don’t. But at least we’ve got like four or five balls up in the air.

I’m not a big football dude, but the best games to watch are the ones where they’re down and they’re throwing these Hail Mary passes and they’ve got four downs til the game’s over, and they’ve got four Hail Mary passes. And it’s like, ready, hike, and everyone sprints, quarterback lobs it in the air as far as he can, boom, drops the ball. Okay, we’ve got 12 seconds left, 3 plays, hike. Lobs it up in the air, lobs it up in the air. And they get four shots to lob this thing in the air and they just gotta catch one. They don’t need four, just one and they win the game.

And that’s how I feel about this a lot of times. Some of us we go into battle, we go into this game and we’re like okay, all our eggs are in the one basket. If this thing works then I’ll be rich. And then when it doesn’t you’re screwed because that was it. You had no other balls in the air. So I like looking at this as like, okay, not so much contingency plans, but if this doesn’t work, then this. No, let’s throw three things in the air. Let’s try this, this, and this and hopefully one of them will hit. And if it does, then it works, if not that sucks. But at least we got three shots at the goal, right. Three is better than one, usually.

I’m not saying by this, create three different businesses, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying three different ways to execute on this idea to get her done. Anyway, I hope that helps. I’m freezing. I’m going to go inside and get warm. But appreciate you all. I’ll let you know how we do on the goal. And if you haven’t bought Funnel Immersion yet, go buy it. Help support the cause. Help Clickfunnels triple, it’ll be amazing. Alright, appreciate you all and we’ll talk soon.

Some interesting things I learned from Dan Kennedy.

In this episode Russell talks about listening to Dan Kennedy talking about wealth attraction and relates some of the ideas and some of his own.

Here are some of the super interesting things you will hear in today’s episode:

• Why money doesn’t care if you are a pastor or a pornographer. Good people don’t automatically make more money.
• Why Russell believes that you should always give away 10% of your money, whether it be to churches or charities or whatever.
• And why some things don’t make sense when you are generous with your money, but you should do it anyway because it works.

So listen below to find out why giving your money away, actually helps you make more money.

---Transcript---

Hey everybody this is Russell, welcome back to Marketing In Your Car. Hope you guys are having a great day. I’m actually backing out of Fred Meyer, just picked up some stuff for the kids. Some milk and eggs that we ran out of. While I was there, I’ve been listening to Dan Kennedy’s Wealth Building Course. Or Wealth Attraction, how to attract wealth into your life, which has been a really interesting, really interesting. I’ve been listening to Dan Kennedy stuff forever. If you look at my, some of you know on my phone, I’ve basically….As we’re moving from the old office to a new office, I’m trying to compress all my courses into….instead of having 8 billion cd’s and DVD’s, which I’ve had in the past, my brother and I are going through and shrinking everything into audio books and then I put them on my phone.

My phone right now has close to a quarter of a million dollars in marketing, sales, and personal development courses on it. If you ever want a ton of cool stuff, steal my phone. Just kidding, don’t steal my phone. So I’ve been going through all the different courses and by far the person I have the most courses from is Dan Kennedy. I think I bought everything he’s ever published ever since the beginning of time. It’s fun, I still go through his stuff and still love it.

So this is his wealth attraction course, which is different than his typical making money and marketing, direct response marketing stuff. So it’s been interesting. A couple of things, that are not new things, but the way he said them just re-sparked my brain and I wanted to share a couple of things with you.

So first one, he’s talking about, we all know this is true, the entrepreneurs out here, that a lot of people think that what causes wealth? Well if I’m smarter, or work harder, or am a better person. But those things don’t necessarily create wealth. There’s people that are, you can keep trying to become a better person, but the laws of the universe or whatever don’t give you more wealth because of that. And one thing he said that was kind of profound, he said, “Wealth does not care if you are a pastor or a pornographer.” That’s not…..the pastor’s not going to make more money than the pornographer. Money does not care, money is paper. It has not soul, it’s just a thing and that’s what it is. S

o we have to understand that because a lot of people try to make more money by becoming a better person. I’m not saying we shouldn’t become a better person, and you definitely should not be a pornographer. Let me step that back really quick. Just caveat that, lest you think that I’m condoning that by any stretch of the imagination. But it’s interesting if you think about that. Money is indifferent.

A lot of times we’re trying to get more money or more wealth and things like that and we’re focusing on things that do not have a direct correlation with more wealth, which is interesting. We start talking like, what are the laws of money that actually cause you to get some, get more and get a lot of it. And you think about it, it’s interesting, again if you rewind back  who knows, a couple of hundred thousand years ago, a hundred years, a thousand years, whatever it is. Money was barter. So I’ve got a chicken that lays a bunch of eggs, my buddy’s got a cow that has milk. He needs milk more than I need eggs, I’ve got a ton of eggs and visa versa so we trade. I value, because I have so many eggs, these eggs mean less to me than that milk. And because you’ve got so much milk that milk means less than these eggs.

Because of that we both look at it, and the cool thing he talked about in the course, money is not a zero sum game. One person wins and someone else gets screwed. Kind of like, I guess I don’t know, I don’t do stocks. But I think the stock market is that way, right? For someone to win, someone else has to lose. With money, the exchange doesn’t work that way. It’s both people can win on both sides of the transaction. So how do you actually make money? How do you get wealth? It’s coming down to creating something that is more valuable to somebody else than the money that they’re holding. And that’s it. That’s the laws of wealth.

How do you create something that’s more valuable to somebody else than the money they have in their pocket? If you can create something that’s more valuable then they will give you that in exchange. That’s it, that’s the magic. That is how you create money. Boom. It’s really that simple. Has nothing to do with you becoming a better person, or working harder. Nothing. It all has to do with you having something that provides more value to that person than the money that’s in your pocket and if so, they’ll trade you.

And if you can create something, that’s the power of the internet and the power of digital products and software and all these cool things, you can create it once and then sell it over and over again. That’s how you become wealthy rapidly. So I thought that was kind of interesting. I think all of us, on top of us trying to focus and become better people, it’s understanding the science behind money.

What is it that gets people to have more perceived value in that thing you’re trying to sell? How do you actually create an amazing product that is more valuable to people? How do you position it, sell it, get in front of those people who would devalue it? Because not everyone is going to value it the same way. I value a cryosauna at my house really, really high because I love it. But you probably think I’m insane. In fact, most of you are probably rolling your eyes every time I talk about it. But for me it was more valuable than the money, so it was a logical transaction for me.

So that was interesting and I think something we should all think about. Keep focusing on being good people though, because that’s really important too. The next part of the course he’s been going through, which is fascinating coming from Dan Kennedy because Dan’s very much like a direct response. You put an X here and this comes back, this is the return on your investment, blah, blah. And he’s talking this whole section about giving. He’s like, “The math makes no logical sense to the engineers and it works. All you do is give 10% away, give it away.”

Which is funny because if you look at church, it’s a tithe. 10% the Lord says that we should pay a tithe. So Kennedy is saying the same thing, give 10% of your money away. And if you do that more money will magically appear. It doesn’t make any sense, the math doesn’t make any sense. Try it for a month, you’ll never go back. Do it often, what you should do, he said that every time he goes on a trip he takes a 100 dollars and breaks it down to 10 dollar bills and over tips every single person. “I just want to give away money as often as possible, because when I do, it multiplies. I don’t know how it works, doesn’t make any sense, but it does.”

And it’s cool for those who are Christian, or I don’t know, the other religions that everyone believes, but it’s a very biblical thing. That the Lord has promised that if you pay tithing, if you give, he will open up a window. He will dump so many blessings on you that you can’t even handle it. And as I’m listening to Dan Kennedy, this guy who is very, not a spiritual person by any stretch of the imagination, but sharing these things, I think it’s the most fascinating thing in the world.

I remember studying under Matt Furey for a long time, I got a bunch of Matt Furey courses. And Matt is a lot more on the woo woo side of things, so I would expect it more from him, but one thing he said to me that had a huge impact on myself, he said, “The size of the whole that you give through, Will be equal to the size of the whole you received through.” So if you’re really stingy with your money and really stingy giving it away, and sharing and helping, your ability to receive money will shrink as well.

We just finished Christmas, but it’s Christmastime, and I think it’s a really profound thing. Not that we should be looking at this like, I need a positive ROI, I’m going to give money away for a positive ROI, but it works that way. It’s weird. It’s one of those things that you don’t have to understand it, and don’t have to do it for that reason, but if you do it, you will get those benefits. In fact, in the scriptures it even says, The Lord says, test me. Try it out, see if you don’t get back more blessings by doing this thing. And I don’t care if it’s….I pay my tithing through a very official, through my church, a very official form, and some people don’t, they just give it away and I don’t think it really matters, it’s a concept of giving.

Like I said, Matt Furey said, “The size of the whole you give from will be equal to the size of the whole you receive from.” And I think it’s interesting as I’m learning Wealth Attraction from Dan Kennedy, that he would spend probably 30 minutes just on that topic of giving money away. He started sharing tons of stories about people who gave money away who….And typically, when people give money away, it’s usually out of guilt. They see other people giving and they’re like, oh I feel like I have to give. It’s not that, it’s the opposite. You budget 10% of your money to go towards giving, and then you just give it away. It could be tipping people, paying through churches, it doesn’t really matter. Giving, that service of you sharing, that somehow magically, doesn’t make sense how it works, but it works.

And it was interesting to hear that from Dan Kennedy. So anyway, there’s some wealth building to share with you guys that are kind of cool, I thought. One being that money doesn’t care who you are and it’s all about creating things of so much value that people will trade you for their money. And understanding that that’s the law, the science, the laws of how you make money. And that becomes your focus. How do I make this better? How do I make this better? How do I get to more people? How do I get to the right people, people who actually want this thing? That’s how you make money. That’s really the core of it.

And then understanding also, that as you are making money to be sure to give because first off, it’s the right thing to do and that will help you with the whole “I want to become a better person” Thing we talked about earlier. But second off, if you’re looking for a positive ROI, there’s no other place you can get a better one that doesn’t make any logical sense. So just do it.

I had a friend, this is kind of funny, back in high school. One of my wrestling buddies. And he was a super cool guy, one of my best, closest friends through wrestling, but he was definitely not on the religious, spiritual side of things. He never went to church, he never followed any of what you may call a commandment or rule or anything. But it was interesting, one day we were cutting weight and we were just, when you’re cutting weight in wrestling, you’re losing ten, fifteen, twenty pounds a week and you’re miserable and tired. So the guy you cut weight with you just tell stories and talk a lot and it’s how you get through the pain of it.

We are sitting there cutting weight and he told me one time he said, “Yeah, I pay tithing.” And I was like, “you do not.” He’s like, “I really do. I have my dad, he takes 10% of my money and gives it to the church each week.” And I was like, “Why would you do it. You don’t believe anything.” And he’s like, “No, I believe that.” And I’m like, “What do you mean?” and he’s like, “I don’t know how it works, makes no sense, but every time I do it, I make more money. So I just do  it.” I was like, “Are you serious? You don’t even have any belief or faith. All you know is that principle works, therefore you are giving 10% of your money away and it just magically works?” and he’s like, “yeah, I don’t know how it works, it just works.”

That always stuck with me. How cool of a thing that was. So anyway, I wanted to share that with you guys. I hope that helps. I’m home, my wife just walked out and looked at me like, “Why are you sitting in the garage talking on your phone? You should be bringing the groceries in.” So I’m going to go. Appreciate you all, have a great day and I’ll talk to you guys soon.

A powerful tool to use in your storytelling.

On today’s special Christmas, hot tub edition of Marketing In Your Car, Russell and his son Dallin talk about contrast and why it makes life and business better.

Here are some fun things you will hear in this episode:

• Why the contrast of being in 102 degree hot tub makes the freezing cold temperature outside more fun.
• Why we should look for contrast in all areas of life including food, relationships, and business.
• And what Russell’s Christmas tradition involving Marshmallow Matey’s is.

So listen below to hear Russell and Dallin’s thoughts on why contrast in your life makes it more interesting.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson, welcome to Marketing In Your Hot Tub. It is actually Christmas night and I’m in the hot tub right now. We just had all the kids in here, but all of them have left except for Dallin is the last remaining hot tuber, how you doing bud?

Dallin: Good.

Russell: So Dallin, if you guys saw Funnel Friday’s this week, was on Funnel Fridays and he actually built a funnel. What was the funnel about that you built?

Dallin: Snow balls. Rocks snow balls.

Russell: Yeah, Jim Edwards built a script to throw snowballs with putting rocks in the snowballs, evil snowballs huh?

Dallin: Yeah, evil. You don’t want to mess with it.

Russell: But it was pretty good right? You built the funnel in about 15 minutes.

Dallin: Yeah, it was supposed to be 30 but I got under pressure.

Russell: Normally people get 30 minutes but I gave Dallin 15 because I knew he could do it.  And he did, the funnel was amazing. It was pretty good.

Dallin: I’m really good at it.

Russell: So if any of you guys are wondering or want to see that, go to Funnelfridays.com and look at the Christmas special and you’ll meet most of my kids, were on that episodes except I don’t think Norah came in.

Dallin: Yeah, but Bowen didn’t come in.

Russell: Oh yeah, Bowen didn’t come but most of my kids are on there, so if you want to meet them go to funnelfridays.com. But tonight I have a really special message. So that’s what I wanted to talk to you guys about today. The topic I’m talking about is a thing called contrast. So I’m telling you this while we are sitting in the hot tub, it’s 7:54 pm Christmas night. We had a great Christmas day today and now we’re outside and it’s dark and cold, there’s snow, there’s about ten inches of snow. In fact, yesterday we were out in….we bought this four wheeler rhino thing.

Dallin: That’s awesome. It’s like a snow thing that picks up snow.

Russell: Yeah, it has a snow plow on the front of it, and we hook tubes to the back and pulled the kids around the yard for….it was really fun.

Dallin: Now I know how to drive a car.

Russell: What? Don’t talk about that. So it’s really, really cold and then we jumped in the hot tub and it’s like 102 degrees and it’s really hot. So the kids, would be getting in the hot tub and then they’d jump out into the snow and do snow angels and they’re screaming because it’s so cold and they dive back in and they’re screaming because it’s so hot. And back and forth and back and forth. And what’s cool if you think about that, what’s making this experience really fun is the contrast.

And I started thinking about other things where contrast is the key. And I really think that happiness in life is tied to contrast. We had a church Christmas party and they decided to have Collette and I be in charge of it. So we had the chance to throw a party for 500 people and one of the ideas that came out of it, one of the guys on our committee, he had an idea. He’s like, “We should do a hot chocolate bar.” And I was like, “Oh that would be awesome.” So we had this huge hot chocolate bar, we boiled I don’t know, thirty gallons of hot chocolate.

Dallin: With a lot of good candy.

Russell: We had tons of toppings like York Peppermint patties, cinnamon bears, marshmallows…

Dallin: And then my favorite flavor ran out right when they came in.

Russell: So we had a whole bunch of stuff, and the point of this story, we had a huge hot chocolate bar, which was good, but what made it great was the contrast. We had an ice cream scooper scooping a bunch of ice cream into the hot chocolate. So we have this hot, hot chocolate with cold ice cream and the contrast is what made it magic.

You go like that with most foods. If you go to a restaurant and you get sweet and sour sauce, you get sweet and sour is the contrast, that’s why it’s interesting. A lot of foods are that way. They have two…..for Christmas somebody may have sent me a bag of this and may have eaten the whole thing by myself. It was a bag of chocolate covered pretzels. The chocolate is sweet and the pretzels are salty. So it’s salty, sweet and the contrast is what made it interesting.

Dallin: Dad, not cool to tell that in front of your kid.

Russell: You want to eat it now? But you think about most parts of life, the relationships I have with people that are the most fun are not where they’re like me. I do have a lot of fun with a lot of entrepreneurs that are just like me, but even within that there’s a lot of contrast.

There’s contrast within my family, contrast within my beliefs, contrast within ideas. And that’s what makes things interesting. Is the contrast. From food, from relationships, from all these kind of things. What I want to talk about today, a lot of people probably don’t know this, but it’s also the key to good story telling.

Dallin: And cars, and hot tubs.

Russell: To hot tubs and cars? It’s the key to good story telling, it’s the key to good selling.

Dallin: That’s compare and contrast. Boom.

Russell: Okay, boom. Dallin’s comparing contrasted. He compared a car and a hot tub. Did you contrast them?

Dallin: No, not really.

Russell: Okay, so let me explain this. So when telling a story it’s the contrast that makes the story interesting. So from a higher level view it’s like, you tell a story, “first I was broke, then I was rich.” That was the contrast. “first I was fat, then I got skinny. First I was sad, then I became happy.” That contrast is what makes the story interesting. That’s from an overarching story level. That’s kind of the arch that people normally go on.

Dallin: It’s like with the cereal I had this morning too.

Russell: Dallin wants to throw things completely off topic. Okay Dallin, let me finish this story and then you can tell about cereal okay?

So then it’s also from a macro level, the micro level is the same thing when you’re telling stories. You get down to the actual pieces of the story, it’s also the contrast. You dig down and as you’re telling the details, the contrast in the details is what’s interesting as well. So it’s like, right now if I were telling the story, we’re sitting in the hot tub and part of our body was so hot because it’s 102, 103 degrees. It’s really warm, but my head and neck is above water and when the wind hits you it’s bitter cold. And it cuts you, it cuts you down even into the water because it’s so cold, but then the water is so warm that it pushes that heat back up. So I’m telling the contrast of the cold and the hot, which makes it intriguing, makes it interesting.

So when you’re describing each of the individual pieces of the story there’s contrast in all of them. You’re writing emails, there should be contrast in your emails. As you’re talking about things, “I was this and I became this. I felt this, but then this happened.” There’s a scripture that all my Mormon friends would now about where Lehi in the beginning of the Book of Mormon, he talks about how there’s got to be opposite in all things. If it wasn’t for the dark you wouldn’t know ….if it wasn’t for evil you wouldn’t know good. There’s a reason why there’s contrast. Without sadness you can’t have happiness. Without that contrast you can’t know happiness until you’ve had sadness. You can’t know joy until you’ve had pain. You can’t do what’s right unless you know what’s wrong.

Dallin: Wrong.

Russsell: Yeah, Dallin’s getting it. Hopefully everyone’s catching on at the same time. But it’s that contrast in all things in life. That’s what makes life interesting, is that contrast.

Dallin: Sad, happy. Bad, good. Loving it, hating it.

Russell: What other contrasts you got?

Dallin:  Ellie and school.

Russell: Ellie and school? Ellie’s is his sister, and school? Okay.

Dallin: They’re really far contrasts.

Russell: Ellie and school are contrasts. But you think about it you guys. It’s interesting because that’s the key. Depends on how you look at it. If you look at it like, I’m going to eat something, let me make some contrasts. I’m going to tell a story, I’m going to sell something. I’m going to write an email to…

Dallin: Billy Bob Joe.

Russell: What?

Dallin: Billy Bob Joe.

Russell: Who’s Billy Bob Joe?

Dallin: You’re sending an email to Billy Bob Joe.

Russell: Okay…..Alright, that makes no sense, but whatever. So I hope that, amongst the random thoughts, I hope you guys got some value from tonight. From the contrast of sitting in the hot tub while the cold is on my, blowing against my skin and kind of freezing up top.

Dallin: That’s why it’s cold, hot tub. Car, contrast.

Russell: Yes, alright Dal, you want to tell the story from breakfast this morning?

Dallin: Yeah, sure.

Russell: Alright, tell it loud so you can all hear.

Dallin: So our dad took a huge bowl, one that we use to make cookies and stuff.

Russell: A big salad bowl.

Dallin: Yeah. For Christmas he got a big Lucky Charm thing…

Russell: it was Marshmallow Matey’s. It’s the generic Malt-O-Meal knock off version of Lucky Charms. Speaking of, real quick of Lucky Charms, the reason why it’s so good is the contrast. There’s the oats that are not sweet and the marshmallows that are sweet, that’s why it’s so good.

Dallin: Yeah, but our dad dumped it all in and filled the whole bowl up, which he didn’t use a normal cereal bowl.

Russell: The whole salad bowl of Marshmallow Matey’s.

Dallin: And he ate all the oats first and then he sugared up with all the marshmallows.

Russell: So this is my brothers and sisters have done our whole lives. So Santa brings us sugar cereal, we always used to get Marshmallow Matey’s because it’s twice the size of Lucky Charms, because you get a big old Marshmallow Matey’s bag.  So I would fill a salad bowl full.

Dallin:  I wish I did it this morning too.

Russell:  You can do it, I got leftovers.

Dallin:  Tomorrow morning I’m going to use a big salad bowl.

Russell: And we do it so the rule is you can’t eat a single marshmallow until all the oats are gone.

Dallin: Unless we accidently eat one.

Russell: No, if you accidently, you have to spit it back out.

Dallin: What the…?

Russell: Yep.

Dallin: But what if you don’t know it’s in there.

Russell: Yeah, I guess you don’t know. But you should know. You have to be really careful, it take’s probably 20 or 30 minutes. I Snapchatted me doing it. But then I ate the whole thing, so when you’re done with it though, you’ve got this whole bowl of marshmallows and the marshmallows are oozing into the milk. So the milk’s like syrup as well. So at the end you drink the marshmallow syrup milk and it’s the reward for sacrificing 30 minutes of your life to something that’s completely ridiculous.

Dallin: Oh yeah, so tell them about the mission companion thing.

Russell: So I went on a mission for the Mormon church, I was in New Jersey and Santa Claus knew how to get Marshmallow Matey’s up to New Jersey. So Christmas morning I pull the huge salad bowl out, it’s tradition you have to do it. So I was eating it and it took like an hour…. Dallin’s dying over here. My companion, after a half an hour is like, “Elder Brunson, you gotta stop. I can’t handle the noise of you eating every little piece of cereal. Get out of this room.” Poor guy. He probably hates me for that.

Ooh, Dallin. Feel my hair it’s frozen hard as a rock.

Dallin: yeah, that’s why I was grabbing it.

Russell: So I have one more story for you guys about contrast. Actually it has nothing to do with contrast, but it’s a cool story. When I was a kid we went on a family reunion up somewhere for winter time and it was like this. We went to a hot tub, and we walked from the hot tub back to our condo and it was freezing. And my cousin, Juliana, her hair froze. And she grabbed it, bent it and it snapped her hair off, broke her hair.

Dallin: And she didn’t even feel a thing.

Russell: Which is crazy. So I wonder if I could give myself a haircut right now?

Dallin: Oh, hi Norah. Or Aiden.

Russell: Oh, there’s the kids. Oh man. I think we’re going to have to end the hot tub party while everyone else is having fun inside without us. Aiden is in his ninja turtle outfit, driving Norah’s new scooter.

Anyway, appreciate you guys for listening. Hopefully you got some value out of today. Remember contrast in all things. It’s the spice of life, makes it interesting, builds….

Dallin: And funniness.

Russell: And funniness, it builds your relationships.

Dallin: And Billy Bob Joe.

Russell: and Billy Bob Joe.  Helps you sell things.

Dallin: And cars.

Russell: Helps you eat better.

Dallin: And hot tubs. And Lucky Charms.

Russell: Alright, we’re going to go. Peace out everybody, thanks so much for everything. Talk to you soon.

Dallin: And microphones.

Russell: What? Bye.

Dallin: And everything. And snow. And Norah.

Cool trick to help entrepreneurs get the stuff done that they don’t like to do.

On today’s episode Russell talks about taking personality tests and finding out valuable information about himself and his wife. He goes on to share what he learned about himself and how he’s using it to keep himself motivated to complete tasks.

Here are some of the fun things you will hear in this episode:

• What is one of the big differences in his and his wife’s personality, and how knowing that helped with communication between them.
• What he learned about his own personality and how he can use it to stay motivated.
• And find out how long Russell drove an unregistered car because he didn’t want to go to the DMV.

So listen below to find out what kind of personality Russell has and how knowing will help him with his business.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, good morning. I hope you guys are doing awesome today. I’m out driving in a winter wonderland, which is really cool except for the fact that the sun shines off the white snow and it’s totally blinding me, it’s killing me.

So I’m excited for a couple of reasons. One is we are super close to launching our Marketing In Your Car Free MP3 player. I know you’ve been hearing it on the outro for a little while. I thought it was going to be shipped here from China faster than it was, and it took forever and now we have it sitting in a warehouse and I haven’t had a chance to write the video, but soon.

In fact, I think the first week in January we’re going to launch it. So it’ll be a free mp3 player with the first 250 episodes. If we do this it’s going to bring a lot more of our friends and family into the Marketing In Your Car fold, which I’m excited for. I did a podcast a little while ago talking about the strategy behind what we’re going to do and now we’re actually doing that. So it’s going to be kind of cool to see that and hopefully grow our member base substantially and get more people listening while they’re in their car. So it’ll be cool.

Now what I want to share with you guys today, I had a really cool Voxer conversation back and forth with Dana Derricks, which is one of our inner circle members, about a concept. I thought it was super cool and I just wanted to share it with you guys, because I think it’s important. He messaged me saying, “As I’m getting more and more successful and I see you, how do you justify doing something? How do you justify going to the DMV? How do you justify going and getting a haircut? Because the opportunity cost of your time is so much higher. You go get a haircut, you’re driving there, driving back, an hour of your time. If you were to pay a client that, you would have charged them $10 grand for that hour or $5 grand, or whatever that is. Instead you’re doing this whole thing. It’s way cheaper to pay someone to come to your house and cut your hair while you’re working so you don’t have to slow down.” Or if the pool breaks down you gotta go home and sit by the pool for two hours waiting for the pool guy to come and fix it. How do you justify those kind of things?

And I was like, that’s interesting and I started thinking about that from my point of view and it’s funny, recently I’ve been doing all these cool personality tests to learn more about myself, which I recommend for everybody. I did the 16 personality for my wife and for me. We got some crazy cool insights from that. One of them, I’ll just share with you guys to hopefully give you an idea of the kind of gems and gold you can find through here.

One of my wife and I’s frustrations we have with each other is a lot of times I’ll say something like, “Hey, what do you think about this?” and she’ll be like, “I don’t know.” And she always goes straight to I don’t know, and it used to drive me crazy. You gotta think about it for a little bit. And when she did the 16 personality tests, one of her personality traits was, there’s one like how we do things based on more thinking or more feeling.

And James Friel, who was out here with us doing the Trello stuff with us the other day, he had us take this personality test. And my wife’s was very much like, she makes decisions based on feeling not on thinking. So it was 80% was feeling and he had kind of a similar situation, except he’s flipped, he’s thinking not feeling. And he said that Yada, his girlfriend, when she’d say, “What do you feel like having for dinner.” He’d be like, “I don’t know, I don’t feel anything for dinner.” And she’d be like, “What do you think you want for dinner?” he’d be like, “I want this.”

For him, if he said thinking vs feeling, it would automatically just, his brain could comprehend that. Then he could think exactly what he wanted to think. It was hard for him with “What do you feel like for dinner?” “I don’t feel anything for dinner. I don’t know.” So my wife is the opposite. So the other night I said something like, “What do you think about this?” and she’s like, “I don’t know.” And I was like wait, “What do you feel like, how does that make you feel?” and it opened up this huge conversation. This little tweak and it was huge. So there’s buried gold in these personality tests.

16 Personalities is cool. The other cool one is the Disc Profile. So Mandy on our team does a whole bunch of really cool things for the inner circle members, she’s one of the….me and her kind of coach inner circle. She does more personal development standpoint, I do the marketing standpoint. Together we’re a super cool ninja team that make people even more amazing than they already are, if that’s possible. But Mandy makes everyone take a Disk Profile. When I took mine one thing she told me that’s in there is basically I’m a big believer, or I have to have a positive ROI on things or else I don’t want to do them.

I started thinking about that and I’m like, that’s kind of true. If I don’t see an ROI on something, it drives me crazy and I can’t do it. From a religious standpoint, honestly why I struggle reading scriptures and things like that, because I’m reading it, but what’s the point of it? So for me, I’m building in these forced ROI things for me to do what I need to do. For example, and this is more the churchy side, because it illustrates it really well for me.

For example, when I speak at church, and I have to prepare that week, I’ll focus on reading, I’ll enjoy it so much, studying and get ready because I know that at the end of it I’ve got to give this presentation, so there’s this ROI. The reason I’m doing this is so I can give a really good presentation at the end. Now obviously I don’t speak every week at church, the way Mormon church works, you speak once every 5 years and everyone gets a chance. So it’s like, alright 5 years from now, I’m going to get speaking opportunities, that’s not going to work. So what I’m starting to do is I’m working on launching my own podcast where basically I will throughout the week study and learn and I’ll be creating a talk and I’ll give that on the podcast and that’ll be my ROI. That’s what I’ll be looking forward to. I’ll be working because I have to have this thing for the podcast. Now there’s an ROI, now I can justify in my brain, why you do this or that. Things like that.

Anyway, that’s just an example. But everything in my life. What’s the ROI? As Dana asked me that, I started telling him, “you know, for me, first off, it’s hard. I got a new car and I was supposed to go to the DMV. I didn’t for two years, I just drove around with plates that didn’t work. Me going to the DMV opportunity cost was so….there was no ROI, it was useless.” One of the ways it’s useful is if I get pulled over. I’m just not going to get pulled over. And I didn’t for two years. Finally someone on my team forced me to go. They took me there and forced me to sit down and I got it done. But it was two years of driving without whatever the DMV’s supposed to give you.

The pool example, I kind of told him, “Well you know if the pool, for me to go sit and wait for the pool guy for two hours, it’s going to drive me nuts. There’s no positive ROI other than the pool works. So for me it’s like, what’s the benefit for my wife and kids? What’s the ROI for them?  Oh here you go,  I have a chance to spend two hours with them. I’m going to sit there and whatever that is. But that’s an ROI, it’s not fixing the pool, it’s the time with my kids. And as soon as I can justify that and make that, then I’m like, cool I can do this because this is the ROI for me and my brain.”

And I never thought about the hair cutting thing, I’m actually getting my hair cut today, so I thought that was kind of funny. It is kind of a waste of an hour of my day. Just to go get my hair cut, I should pay my girl to come here and cut my hair while I’m working on the treadmill or something, I don’t know. It would be kind of funny.

Anyway, I just thought it was interesting. For you guys, as entrepreneurs probably a lot of your brain works similar to mine, where you need that positive ROI. So sometimes when you’re struggling to get something done, at least for me, it’s because I can’t see that. So I have to associate what is the ROI that I’ll get from this. If it’s something I’m excited by I can go do it and I can conquer it. That’s why this book that I’ve been killing myself to get it done, I know the ROI on the other side of it, is the only thing that keeps me moving. Because there is so much pain associated with writing a book for me. But I know in my mind what the ROI is. From a financial, from a transformational, all the things that I care about and why I’m doing it. I see that ROI and it’s what drives me to keep moving forward.

Anyway, I just wanted to share that with you guys today because I thought it was important and hopefully you guys can start attaching ROI’s to things that you’re struggling with. And I think if you do that it’s going to give you the motivation that you need to get those things done. So there you go. With that said, take some personality tests cause that’s cool too. Alright, appreciate you all. Have an amazing day and I’ll talk to you guys soon.

I apologize in advance, but on this one I get a liiiiiittle bit violent.

On this episode Russell talks about reading the Amazon reviews of his first book and getting angry about the few negative reviews and relates it to an experience he had during his wrestling days.

Here are some of the other interesting things to listen for in today’s episode:

• Why Russell chose to read the Amazon reviews of his first book.
• How being angry at the negative reviews made him want to do something he did to a fellow wrestler years earlier.
• And why the human race is too high maintenance these days and why we need to stop complaining.

So listen below to find out what one and two star reviews have to do with wrestling.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell. I hope you guys are doing awesome today. I am leaving my house for the first time and it’s almost 4:00. I’m actually leaving my house and heading over to my buddies gym because I’m going to do something that nobody wants to do. It’s going to force me to be accountable to myself and to other people. I’m going to get fat rolls pinched; it’s called a pinch test.

He pinches me and says, “Russell, this is your body fat percentage.” And as much as I do not want to know that, because I assume in my mind it’s 7% like I was back when I was wrestling, when I find out that I’m probably at 20, 21, 22 I gotta admit I’m gonna cry a little bit. But then I’ll at least have a standard to know where I’m at and then I’ll have something to work against.

A lot of us I think, our biggest problem in life is we just are winging it. We’re like, “I feel like I’m doing good. I don’t know.” But we don’t have something to measure it against. Not gonna lie, I’m one of those people. In fact, that’s probably why it’s easier to cheat a lot of the time. Whether you’re cheating on eating or exercise or whatever. You’re like, “I’m not really measuring against anything, so I have no idea if I’m getting better or worse, therefore I might as well just eat this candy, because who really knows.” So this is gonna hold me accountable.

I’m gonna do this right now, then I’m going to party it up all through Christmas vacation and then on Monday, the day after Christmas it begins. And I’m gonna be strict and it’s gonna be awesome. So that’s kind of my game plan of what I’m doing right now.

But the reason I’m leaving today at 4:00 is because I’m in book writing mode. I literally, if you saw me right now, you would laugh. I look like a hermit, I have not shaved, I’m in my sweats/jammies. I’ve been in my room just writing, writing, writing and I got three chapters done today which is a lot of work, but it’s turning out awesome, which means I probably have 5 left and I’ll be done with this book. We’ll have it over to the editors, actually the editors’ editing while I’m writing. I finish a chapter and send it to the editor, because I’m not gonna lie, way beyond my deadline. I had to be extra to be like, “Hey do you mind just doing this weirdly, as I get them done.” So I sent her three chapters today and keep on moving forward.

Hopefully I can get two more done tonight, that’s my goal. Then I get out of being grounded. I’m literally grounded. I told my kids….they’re like, “Dad, why aren’t you going to your office.” “Because I’m grounded. I’m not allowed to leave. Too many friends at the office, they just talk. I have to be in this room locked down.” So that’s what I’ve been doing. It’s funny, as I’m writing this book, and one thing that inspires me to write this book is the response I got with the first book. How many people have told me so many good things? People, even my peer and mentors.

I was so scared for some of friends to read my book. In fact, the person I was most scared of to read my book was, Rich Schefren, someone I totally look up to and respect. He’s probably read more marketing books than anyone on Earth. In fact, if you Google Rich Schefren, book reading process….you will see a dude who is insane. He has a video on YouTube, 20 minutes long, totally worth the watch, but basically he reads the book and speed highlights it all. Then he goes and cuts the binding off the book. After the binding is done, he scans the book and sends it to the Philippians and the Filipinos’ go and transcribe the highlighted portion because that’s the only portion that he cares about.

From there they make this other book file that he takes that book file and puts it on his iPad, and he’s done that for the last ten years. So he’s got like 50 thousand books like that. Then what he’ll do, in the morning he’ll be like, “Hey, I’m going to be giving a presentation on sales today. What are the top 10 sales books in the world. The top 20, top 50 sales books. So then he’ll go and pull his notes from the top 50 sales books, load them into his iPad and then reads it in ten times speed. He’ll sit there on his treadmill for an hour or more in the morning and re-read the 25 top sales books in the history of the world, that morning. At two or three times, and then he goes out and knows everything on earth about sales. It’s the coolest thing ever.

I wish I could just hang out with Rich for a week and do that. It would be so cool. But I can’t because I just am not that structured, but I wish I was. I remember when I sent him my book, actually I didn’t send him one. I sent it to a bunch of my friends and I specifically didn’t send it to Rich because I was like, he’s gonna read this and he might not like it. He’s read everything so I was so scared. So I saw him a couple of months later at a Traffic Conversion event before we launched the book. He’s like, “Everyone keeps talking about your book. I want to get a copy.” I’m like, “I’m scared of you reading it, not gonna lie. If you don’t like it I’m gonna be crushed.” So he’s like, “Give me the book.” So I gave it to him and he read it on his flight home and he loved it, which was cool. He sent me a cool video of him in a smoke lounge talking about it and it was, for me, validation from my peers that I did something good. Which for me, is harder.

I assume my customers will like my stuff, but a lot of times my peers…it’s scares me because I want them to like me. We all have the same fears. We want to be liked, and I want them to like me. So that was the big thing. And then I put it out there and people liked it and it transformed people’s lives, which is cool. So cool. It just makes me so happy. So today I was like to give me motivation to keep reading, I’m going to go to Amazon and look at my reviews and read it. And it’s like 4.9 stars or whatever. I’m like, “yeah, everybody loves me.” And I’m reading them all. And there’s a little graph, it’s like 5 stars, 4 stars, 3 stars, 2 stars, 1 star.

And there was a little percentage that clicked on 1 star. I was like, “What? Who doesn’t like my book?” So I clicked on the 1 star and it went there and I was like, these people, I’m glad that Amazon doesn’t give you their address because I’d be in the car and drive to their house. People were like, “That book was a 250 page sales pitch.” I’m like, are you kidding me? Literally there is a page and a half in the very back where I mention Clickfunnels, that’s it. This is…..I’ve read books that are 150, 200 page sales pitches. This was not, in fact I specifically I don’t want this to be a sales pitch. I’m going to write an amazing book and hopefully if I’ve earned it after 250 pages I can mention one cool thing I do in a page and a half.

And all the thing I was mentioning was, “by the way, these funnels I’m talking about, you can do it really easily in Clickfunnels, you should go get an account for free.” I saw a couple of those, people who were like, “This book is full of fluff.” I’m like, “Fluff? Are you kidding me? That was twelve years of my life, reading over a quarter of a million dollars in books and courses. And then breaking them down and putting them into an actual, logical step by step system. The time it took me to write that book, was ten years of trial and error and like a year of writing to give this book to you. And it was like, it was all fluff. I wanted to just jump at that person. If they were in my wrestling room right now, it would be…..

Okay I probably shouldn’t tell this story, some of you guys will lose respect for me. But it must be told because this is what would happen to the person had they been here with me. So there was this guy that used to wrestle with us and he was unfortunately a good wrestler. In fact, he beat me one time and I can’t stand that guy and I won’t mention his name, but for those of you guys who are in my wrestling world, his initials are WW. So I’ll leave that for the few people who will know what I’m talking about. So he was this guy, super annoying wrestler. Nobody liked him. But unfortunately he was kind of good so he beat people.

Like I was saying, he beat me once in a Greco match where I was cutting weight and it was just a fluke, but he beat me. And then I beat him like a little girl every time after that, including in college when I had a chance to beat him. I was wrestling in a college match, he was in a different college and I started wrestling him and in the first period he went and did a two on one arm bar on me on our feet…..what’s it called? Baseball grip, he hid my hand under his stomach so the ref couldn’t see and started trying to break my wrist, pushing my wrist in towards me.

So I reached back and punched him in the head and shoved him off, to get him off my wrist. He was literally trying to break my wrist. The ref’s like, “Whoa, what are you doing? You can’t punch him in the head.” I’m like, “He’s trying to break my wrist.” So then I went ape on this dude, I ended up in that period getting up by 14 points and then I pinned him because I wanted to humiliate him and pin him just so it was a double humiliation. I digress, the initial story, this is years of my life beating this guy but he deserved it, so it was fun.

So anyway, we were at a wrestling camp, and if you knew him, some of you guys will think, Russell you’re so mean. I’m really not mean. If you understood the situation, who he was and how he treated people. And there was only a couple of guys who were better than him so we had to make sure that he, oh man, I can’t believe I’m telling this story, we would humble him. So at the freestyle and Greco wrestling camp he was at with us, our goal was to pick him up and slam him down on the ground over and over and over again so that he knew that we were all better than him.

So three of us guys and him and we were wrestling… and I’m not saying we were doing this against a defenseless guy, he was a good guy, we were just better. We just made sure he knew and he’d feel it. Anyway, that’s what I would do to these guys if they were here. I’d pick them up and slam them down and as they get back up I’d pick them up and slam them down again and just keep doing that until my, like my friend WW, wasn’t able to walk off the mats because he was so sore. Anyway, he recovered and is probably why 5 years later in college he tried to break my wrist, if I think about it. Maybe Karma was coming back to get me. There you go, I was doing the wrong thing as a high school thing. Anyway, my wrist didn’t break, so it all ended up good and I won that match.

So there you go. Holy cow, there’s my Russell tangent for the day, so sorry. Anyway, I repented for that, I’m a nice person now and I don’t beat people up. But if I wasn’t and I could see these one star people, that’s what I would do. One and two stars, both. They were just like, one guys’ like, “I got no value. In fact, I stopped reading the book after the first ten pages.” I’m like, “It’s because you stopped reading the book after the first ten pages. Read page eleven, there’s some amazing stuff on that page. And thirteen and fourteen and all the rest of the pages. I don’t know what else I can give you. The book was free, you covered shipping and handling. Or you went to Amazon, it was $10. Seriously.” It made me go crazy.

It reminded me of something Tony Robbins taught me. So this is for me, I’m mostly telling myself this to get me, make me feel okay with continuing writing my book. But he was talking about how high maintenance human beings are in today’s day and age. And what will happen is that people will go out there and risk tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars to make a movie for you. They’ll hire the best actors and screen writers and script writers and spend two or three years of their lives and hundreds of millions of dollars to go and to write a story, create it, build an environment and a fantasy and make this thing amazing and produce this movie, and then they give us this movie  and they ask us $10. That’s all, $10 for you to go watch this movie, and look at 2 or 3 years of these guys’ life and hundreds of millions of dollars risked on their side and all their asking is $10. And then they come and entertain you for 2 or 3 hours of a movie.

And Tony talked about how, if you look at that, kings back in the day would have Court Jesters and things like to be able to be entertained. They didn’t have a fraction of what we can get for $10 today. Yet we’ll be so pompous and arrogant as to go to a movie that, I’m just going to use this as an example because I really liked this movie and a lot of people didn’t. But the Batman vs Superman, we pay our $10, we go there and at the end we say, “That movie sucked. It was a waste of my money, a waste of my time.” Are you kidding me, these people risked hundreds of millions of dollars to entertain you and it cost you $10 and two hours of your time and you’re complaining it was a waste of your time and money? Oh people.

With that said, I want something for all of you. First off, is when you got people like that who come back to your amazing-ness that you create, that you are putting out there, risking your time and energy and your time away from your family to create and to do, there’s gonna morons out there who complain and say, “Look, it was a waste of my ten bucks.” And for those people, guess what you should do to them, you should freaking WW them. Pick them up, that’s kind of funny. WW Wrestling…but that’s not what I’m talking about. You pick them up and slam them down in your mind over and over again until they can’t walk and then you move on with your life because they don’t really matter. Then you go back to the people you’re serving and worry about them because that’s who does matter.

This is like the worst moral of the story ever. So that’s half of it. Just forget about those people that are gonna be the complainers. The second half is don’t be that person that complains. The people that do that, you’re not a good person. Somebody is risking all this stuff to give you a gift. Don’t complain about it. If you don’t want to go to the movie, and if you didn’t like the movie, it wasn’t……but don’t complain about it. The thing that they are giving you and the return of what they’re asking you for, is insanely low and we should be grateful. I’m grateful for people who risk and do these things for us. I’m grateful, after writing now my second book, I’m grateful for anyone who’s written a book, it is not easy.

The time, the stress, the headache, pressure that goes into that, I’m grateful. Even if I didn’t like your book or agree with your beliefs or point, it doesn’t matter. I’m grateful that you put the energy and effort into it and gave it somebody because you believe it’ll change their life for $10 or $5, whatever a book cost. I just want everyone to be thinking it that way. Because I think that makes all of us better people and makes the world better and gives the creators less fear to go and create. Because that’s it’s. If you’re not creating then what’s the point.

So I hope that helps somebody, I don’t know. At least it’ll help me to forget about those one and two stars. And hopefully no one lost respect for me because of what I did to my buddy, WW. But he totally deserved it, so it’s all cool. Don’t worry about it. I didn’t do anything that was outside of the bounds of what someone should do in a wrestling room. So it was all good. Anyway, with that said, appreciate you all, I’m about two minutes away from my pinch test, pray that I’m not over 25% body fat. If I am though, it’s okay. I’ll get back to work and get back to where I need to be. Thanks everybody. Talk to you all again soon.

Amazing stories from three of our inner circle members.

On this episode Russell talks about heating problems at home and why we shouldn’t complain about our problems with life or business. He tells two stories from members of his inner circle and how they became successful despite cards being stacked against them.

Here are some of the enlightening things you will here in today’s episode:

• How two guys from Ukraine were able to make 7 hundred thousand dollars even though the average salary there is just $200 a month.
• How a woman in Nigeria was able to overcome unbelievable obstacles to sell supplements and make $50 million dollars.
• And why Russell is grateful for the trail blazers who made it easier for him to figure out how to make money.

So listen below to figure out why you have it easy and should be able to figure out how to make money.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell. Welcome to a freezing, freezing cold Marketing In Your Car. Today it’s cold outside. It’s under 10 degrees, but what’s worse is my house this morning, our bedroom was 55 degrees. We have something wrong with our heaters. I think I probably complained about this last winter too. Our house is kind of big, and with a big house comes heating issues. Trying to keep the whole house warm.

Last year we had the same thing. We had this huge struggle. The heater and the water are tied together. We can’t get a warm shower or warm heat. So it’s just bitter cold. I’m ordering all these space heaters. We’ve got the heating guy and the plumbing guy coming over today, but I don’t know. It might be another cold winter.

Other than that, today is amazing. I actually wanted to share with you guys two stories today, lest any of us want to complain about our situation, or our business. Because that seems to be something fun that people like to do. I see it on Facebook all the time. I see it in personal conversations, there’s always some excuse about why we can’t have success. So I want to take those excuses and smash them with a hammer and jump on them, then catch them on fire. I guess you can’t really catch glass on fire. We’ll turn it so hot that it freaking melts the glass. And then it turns into sand again, I don’t know. Whatever.

I just want to get rid of all those things because if you’re living in America, or Canada, or most countries, we don’t have obstacles and if we do, we need to be able to get over them. There you go. It’s out there. Any time in your mind that you’re like, “I can’t figure this out because of blah.” That’s not a good excuse. You gotta figure it out. Time to stop not thinking and start thinking. That’s it. So I want to tell you guys a couple of stories of some of our inner circle members who have given me, have taken from me all my excuses I ever have about anything, ever again from this point forward, moving on forever.

So the first one I want to tell you about, two of our inner circle members, Andrew and Vlad from the Ukraine, they are so cool. They’re from the Ukraine, I think the average salary in Ukraine is like 200 bucks a month or something like that. And over there, they’re not internet savy, people aren’t. Nobody buys things online, it’s not a…..you don’t push someone to a website and they pull out their credit card and they buy. It’s just not something people do. They don’t trust it, they don’t believe in it.

So Vlad and Andrew they want to have success online, so they start figuring out, okay here’s this obstacle. Nobody can buy things online, yet we want to sell things online. What do we do? How do we figure this out? So these guys, who, again the average salary for a well paid person over there is $220 a month, and they were like, we want to become millionaires, how do we do that? A million dollars over there is like a billion over here. So that’s wanting to become billionaires over here.

So they get to work and start doing everything. First thing, after they join the inner circle and they listened to some of our stuff, they start doing webinars weekly. We’re going to do weekly webinars because Russell said so. They didn’t go, “I don’t want to do a webinar every week.” Or “I don’t know if I can get Facebook ads to work every single week.” Or all the other excuses many people told me since I started saying you should do a webinar a week, every single week for the rest of your lives.

There’s always some excuse coming out. So instead of making excuses they just started doing it. As they’re doing this webinar they are like, people just don’t…..they can’t push someone to a website to just buy, people don’t trust it. So to get people to buy on their webinar, they set up a little call center. They ended up hiring a bunch of people to take phone calls, but still people are scared to take credit cards over the phone. So what happens  a lot of times is that people will actually mail them cash, they will do sorts of things. They were telling us the other day, and this comes back to how afraid that economy is of credit cards. The person was not willing to give their credit card over the phone because they thought it was going to be stolen. So what they did, they took their credit card or debit card, or whatever it’s called and then they wrapped it up in an envelope and mailed the credit card to them, and the letter said, “Hey if you guys can take this credit card, go to the ATM machine, here’s my pin code, run it, take the cash out, and then mail me my ATM card back.” So they did.

They’re hustling trying to figure out how to collect money. They’re getting people to ship them their ATM cards because that’s more safe for their country than to go buy things online. They’ve got call centers that they’ve built out. They’ve got people sending cash. Every obstacle known to man about collecting cash, they don’t even have merchant accounts, they’ve been able to do it. And guess what they did last year with their webinar? Drum roll please, in a country where the average salary is $200 a month, and people are scared to buy online and it’s so under-developed people can’t even buy online. Last year they did 7 hundred thousand dollars. In fact, that was a couple of months ago, so it’s probably more than that, but that’s last I heard. 7 Hundred thousand dollars from their webinar.

Is that insane? Does that not make you think, wow I’m in a country where people love buying stuff online. I’m in a country where people are used to it. I’m in a country where the average salary is not $200 a month, it’s a lot more than that. If you have any issues, like my people won’t buy, they’re broke and don’t have any money. Those issues are not real. They are all in your head. Stories you are telling yourself, stories I’m telling myself. They’re not real. If you’re willing to think through it, and not have those excuses and those road blocks and just smash through them, you can do what these guys have done over there in the Ukraine.

It’s funny because their next goal is they want to do a webinar here in America. He’s like, “you guys in America don’t know how easy it is.” And I’m like, “I know.” They did 7 hundred thousand dollars over there, they’re going to become billionaires over here. So that’s number one.

Number two. Sorry, I’ve got a stuffy nose too, so I apologize. One of our new inner circle members, and I don’t know them super well yet so I’m not comfortable sharing names and stuff, but I will share this story because it’s worth it. As I get to know her better throughout the year maybe I’ll share more stories. But they own a company over in West Africa, Nigeria, that area. They sell supplements and pharmaceuticals and things like that, and they’ve got clinics and as a company they did 50 million dollars last year, which is amazing in and of itself, especially in a third world country.

So apparently she saw my funnel hacks webinar and saw how it’s doing selling supplements, so she wants to start selling supplements, joins the inner circle comes in and we had our decade in a day on Friday to try to go through their model, their plan, things like that, and she showed me this thing, and it’s crazy, first off, she went and built out a supplement line, with 70 supplements. She’s like, “As soon as we release this, we’ll be knocked off instantly.” And I guess it’s illegal to buy supplements in the country right now unless you get all these legal things. So most people buy all that stuff on the black market, so they’re competing against the black market, people who are selling underhand.

Second off, is over there, they don’t really have addresses. So if your customers have addresses, you already have an easier job than she does. If your customers don’t have addresses you can’t be like, “Hey ship my product out to whatever West, whatever North, whatever. Here’s the street and zip code.” because they don’t have that. They’re like, “we’re in the third house on the left down from the store.” That’s the reality she lives in. She’s like, “There’s no way to ship products to people.” If there was, most of the time DHL will do it, but it’s 7 or 8 times more expensive than what we’re paying here. All these hurdles, all these variables. If I would have heard that I would have been like, “Well I guess we can’t sell supplements in Nigeria, we’re going to the states.” That would be my….I’d be going to where’s the least barrier of entry and kind of slide in.

But instead she’s like, “No, these people need this stuff. It’s going to help them and if we can figure it out we’ll be the only ones here. We will be able to be a monopoly. We’re the only ones who can do it.” So they went and got all the government approval on their supplements. So they’re the only people in the country allowed to sell supplements besides the black market. They’re not allowed but they’re going to do it anyway.

So she got this window and she’s like, “We can’t ship to people ‘s houses, so we had to figure out a way to solve shipping issues.” So what she did is insane, so cool. You ever heard of Amazon lockers? I never heard of this before, but if you Google Amazon lockers, they’re these lockers that are in different cities. Say you’re in Chicago or somewhere where you may not have…..I don’t know. Anyway, they’re lockers. Amazon will deliver to these lockers and they notify you and you go there, you go to the locker and there’s 50 lockers and you type in a code and it pops out, here’s the product you ordered. It’s pretty cool. Instead of delivering directly to your house, it delivers to these lockers and the lockers, people go and pick up their stuff. Kind of like a mailbox, mailbox etc or something like that. But it’s called Amazon Lockers.

So she saw that and was, “oh cool. That solves my problem.” So she went out and bought I think like 15 or 20 of these locker systems that she could use, and then she went, they had to be secure because people will break into these things and steal stuff there, so she went and negotiated deals with 15 or 20 banks to have these lockers inside of their banks all around the country. So now she’s got a distribution channel all around the entire country. So when these supplements are done and the funnels done, people can buy it, but once again people don’t…..it’s just crazy. So many hurdles.

People won’t buy stuff online over there, so they have to do everything cash on delivery. Everyone has to say, “Yes, I want to buy this.” Click the button to buy it and they have to put in some information. I think she’s going to have them pay a dollar or something just to prove they have a credit card. Then she actually delivers to the locker, the locker notifies them and they go pick it up at the locker and they pay cash at the locker to get the actual product.

Now, I don’t know what’s going to happen with this business yet, but I’ve seen how she’s turned less than that into 50 million dollars a year and I think that…my guess is that she’s going to turn this into hundreds of millions of dollars, because she’s figured it out and she’s solved these hard, hard problems.

So I wanted to share both of these stories for you guys today, hopefully just to put things into perspective. When there’s a will there’s a way. That’s it. If you’re struggling right now and you’re here in the states or in Canada, in a country that has postage, credit cards, zip codes, street addresses. I promise you guys that the answers are there. It’s been done over and over again. The trail’s have been trail blazed. People have gone before you. You just need to look and model. I look at entrepreneurs like this, I’m so grateful to have in the inner circle because they’re an inspiration to me and everyone else. You look at that and you’re like, “Man, if they can figure that out there, what can we do here? What can we accomplish in a society, in a land, in a country where this is something that’s normal. That people want to do. Where people are online buying stuff, 10, 15, 20 times a day, you just got to convince them that your stuff is exciting and cool.

I hope that gives you guys inspiration, I know it has for me. I really, every time I look at my life and business now, I’m like there’s no excuses. Every problem is solvable. These basic needs that these guys don’t have, they figure out ways to solve those problems and we can too. We just gotta think and be creative and sit back and try to figure out the answers because they’re there.  The good thing for most of you guys is that most people already figured out the answers for you. That’s what Funnel hacking is about. Look at the answers, be able to look at all the stuff people have already solved, look at that and work off of the hard work of others.

I’m grateful for everyone who’s gone ahead of me in this industry and business and trail blazed for me so I could step into those grooves and kind of run a path that they’ve already created for us. I definitely was not the inventor of any of this stuff, but a beneficiary of it for sure. Someone who’s proud and grateful for those who’ve gone before us and hopefully I can trail blaze some stuff for you guys and you can jump in and follow me as well. That’s the goal.

Anyway, with that said, my nose is so stuffed right now that I’m going to stop this recording even though I’m not quite to the office. Hopefully you guys got some value out of it. I hope you just kind of look at your perspective a little differently and realize that we’ve all got it pretty good. Appreciate you all, have an amazing day. I’ll talk to you all again soon.

Behind the scenes of what I got from my consult day with James Friel so far…

In this episode Russell talks about hiring James Friel to help him and his team manage their projects better using Trello. He explains why it’s important when you are running a business to be organized and make everybody accountable for things.

Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in this episode:

• Why it took Russell listening to James talk about Trello several times before he actually is getting around to implementing it in his own company.
• Why entrepreneurs are more likely to need management software like Trello.
• And why you should give James Friel money to help your business.

So listen below to find out how and why Russell and his team are finally getting organized on Trello.

---Transcript---

This is the end of the year right now, its getting close to Christmas and normally people do all their planning and stuff in January for how I’m going to take over the world next year. But I kind of want to be prepared so when January 1st hits we can be off on the….out running and sprinting.

So because of that, this week became a planning week, which is hard for me to do. I don’t normally plan things. Usually I have a whole bunch of ideas in my head and we start running and everyone kind of learns about all the ideas as we are moving forward, which is a horrible way to manage people, by the way. I think it drives everybody crazy. In fact, Todd, I think you guys all know Todd by now, hopefully. If not, he’s the dude who built Clickfunnels. He told me today that the only way he knows what’s happening in the business is by listening to the podcast. You guys are hearing things as everybody else is.

So I’m trying to get better at that. It’s fun, one of the guys who joined our inner circle last year, his name is James Friel, super cool guy. He came in and one of his nicknames is the contract CEO, where people will hire him to be the CEO and go in their company and fix things and make it all work right. And we were trying to figure out how to make a sexy thing for him to sell and it was kind of hard at first, his first headline is something like, “How to become more predictable and sustainable.” Or something like that and I was like, no one’s going to give you money for that, that’s horrible. We gotta make this sexy.

So we worked with him last year, turning what he does into this sexy, exciting thing. So to do it initially he was showing me all the cool things he does, there’s a lot of stuff, he’s crazy talented. But one of them was, his project management system and how he does it with Trello and Slack and Gann Charts and this whole thing. I was like, “I use Trello, I got it figured out, I don’t need help.” And he was like, “Dude, I think you need my help more than anyone.”

And in fact, this is funny, I’ll tell you the rest of the story but I’ll give you the punch line right now, but he’s been at our office for two days working on this and he told me last night at dinner, out of all the companies he’s ever worked with, mine was the most messed up. He’s like, “It’s amazing you guys have done as well as you have.” I was like, “yes, good selling can make up for a lot of bad systems.”

Anyway, so stepping back. So this is in January of last year he’s like, “I’m coming to inner circle meetings, let me come in a day early and I’ll take you guys through the process that I would normally charge people 20 or 30 thousand to do.” I was like, “Alright, cool.” So he came in and showed me his whole Trello system and blew my mind. I was like holy crap, no wonder I never got anything done ever. I need to change everything.

So we changed it all around and I implemented I’d say probably 75% of what he said, because the rest I was too smart to listen to. So 75%, which is basically I started using Trello for myself, my own systems, personally. I tried to get everyone on my team on it, but it lasted like 8 seconds, and nobody did it again. But I was doing it myself and things became better  because at least I had my thoughts out in a way.

It’s not just like…..if you’ve used Trello before, it’s free. You can’t even give them money if you want. They’re the worst marketing company of all time, but their software is awesome. The problem is their software is so awesome you can do pretty much anything you want with it and because of that people like me just screw it up. So James built this system that makes it very simple, very easy. It pulls out the human error and pulls out all these issues, and it’s awesome.

So I started using it and changed dramatically transformed my productivity and my ability to get things done, which is probably why we had a lot of success this year. In fact, this is crazy. Last year was awesome, and this year we’re trying to 3x what we did last year and we’re within a few hundred thousand dollars of hitting. So we’re on our march through the end of the year to hit this certain number. If we hit that number then we’ll  have tripled what we did last year, which is crazy.

Then our goal is to triple it again next year. If we do that, they’re going to have to write a book about it. I’m not writing it because I’m tired of writing books. But someone’s gotta write about it because it’s amazing. Anyway, stepping back. So it was awesome, but I only implemented about 75% because I couldn’t get my team on board and it was hard.

Then fast forward, at the next inner circle meeting in the summer he came and everyone basically in the inner circle I found out, was kind of like me. We’re really talented entrepreneurs who are really good at selling stuff and we no idea how to manage ourselves or our processes or anything else. Sound familiar? If that sounds like you, you’re probably an entrepreneur. Welcome to the cool kids club.

Anyway, I had him stay and give a presentation to the inner circle group on how it is in the Trello system and I saw it again and I was like “Oh! There’s the other 25% I’m not doing. Why am I not doing? I should just do it.” Then I got all excited to do and then embarrassingly to myself and everybody else, I didn’t. Then I had him train our whole inner circle as a whole and everybody got excited again, I got excited again and didn’t do it. Finally at the end of this year I was like, you know what, we’re not doing it.

So James what would it cost to fly to Boise for 2 days and sit here and make us do it?” and that’s what he did. Yesterday he was here all day, even as much as I’m using Trello over the last year, we still cleaned it up, simplified it, made it way better. And then we got everyone on the team doing it and now there’s this one key piece that I was fighting doing because it requires a person to be in charge of the whole system and now we got Michelle McPherson running that piece of the system, she’s amazing. And now the whole 100% is going to work. Day one was getting it all implemented. Day two we’re focusing on moving it forward and getting everyone using it, which is cool.

And then basically, James every week for the next 8 weeks is going to be doing company meetings. We don’t even do company meetings. We do meetings in different departments, like the programming team meets, and the support team meets, but the marketing side, that I’m kind of in charge of, we don’t….we do meet but it’s like we get online and talk about the cool stuff we’re doing. There’s no point or focus with anything we’re doing.

What’s cool about this new system is that there’s meetings built in that are all tied around Trello and the goals and the dates and everything inside of that, which is cool. He’s going to be teaching us how to do the meetings the right way and then moving forward for the next 8 weeks, once a week he’ll be jumping on our meetings with us and getting us all in this group. So by January we can hit and scale things a lot more rapidly.

They always say, “what got you here probably won’t get you there”. And I feel like there’s different levels of skill set. There’s a skill set that gets you from 0 to a million dollars, a different skill set that get’s you from one million to 3, at least these were my barriers. There’s a different skill set form 3 to 10.  A different skill set from 10 to 30 and I feel like  the skill set from 30 to 100 is different and it’s not necessarily my strengths, my ninja skills. It’s something different as this piece. It’s the organization, structure and systems.

We were building systems out in Trello, we were like what’s all the things you do every single month consistently, the exact same thing? So we made these systems for it. I was like, holy crap this just made my life so much easier. Funnel University is a good example. There’s like…..we do the exact same thing every single month. And every month we’re like, “What do we do next? What’s the next thing? Oh yeah.” And we re-think it through every single time. And now it’s like, there’s a system. Just a Trello card. We just copy it every January, it’s a recurring thing. Or every first of the month It pops in. Automatically recurring, it just pops into the thing, we know what we gotta do it, and we do it and it’s amazing.

And now we know we gotta do it too because someone’s in charge of running it. Everyone’s got due dates. Everyone has things and they’re held accountable to somebody, which is awesome. Including me, I’m held accountable. “Hey Russell, why didn’t you get that crap done?” “Uh, I don’t know. I need to get it done.” I’m held accountable too, which is awesome and everyone’s held accountable.

And there’s somebody who knows what’s happening. Right now, I kind of know what’s happening at least on the marketing side of all the projects. But I’m the worst person….me as an entrepreneur is the worst person to know everything because then everyone has to come to me for every single thing and nothing ever gets done. So now the way that the systems built out, I’m not tied into it.  Michelle will be that person that knows everything and then I’ll just have to know my pieces of the thing, which is so cool.

So anywho, so that’s what’s happening. It’s been awesome. We hung out at dinner with him last night and talked about over the last year. A year ago is when I kind of….I was the one telling James, “This is awesome. You should be selling this.” And so he’s been doing this for a bunch of companies, where people hire him and they come in and he actually becomes the CEO of their company to implement this system and spent three or four or five months with them in this last year. He’s also worked with twenty or thirty entrepreneurs where he does the whole thing remote and get’s the team on for half a day and builds the whole thing out remote. Works a lot less expensive than having him fly out to your office like we did.

But regardless, if you are an entrepreneur or someone who wants to become an entrepreneur, but especially the entrepreneurs that are out there listening, and you guys are like me at all and because you’re good at selling and marketing and because you kind of figured things out you are able to do a lot of things that……..good marketing makes up for a lot of things. Dan Kennedy used to say, “There’s nothing that the good sales letter can’t solve.” And I kind of believe that. But  I think there’s a limit. I think good selling can get you so far, but it’s the systems and the organization and structure and all that nerdy stuff that they probably teach in business schools, I don’t know I didn’t go. But I’m assuming that’s what they teach in business schools that we’re not good at.

So if you guys want to be able to expand and grow I highly recommend figuring that piece out. And there’s two ways to figure things out. There’s the school of hard knocks and do what I did, spend ten years trying to figure it out and realize one day that you’re an entrepreneur and that’s not your skill set. And the second way is to give James money and he’ll do it for you. That’s what I did.

This is someone who I had him out doing it once in my office, then I sat through it twice more and then I still paid him to come out because it’s that important to our growth.  So for any of you guys who that’s the piece where you feel like you’re juggling too many things. Or you know I should be systemizing things and I don’t know how to. Or your team is always confused.….

Or I think it’s more for you the entrepreneur, because if you’re confused, “How do you guys not know what we’re doing? I know exactly what’s happening, how can you not read my mind?” If you’ve ever felt that way before, which I think most of us do, then you should definitely give James money. You should just write him a check and not ask any questions. Write it blank and then have him fill it in for whatever it’s worth because it will be worth it.

Anyway, if you want to work with James, this is not a pitch. Yeah it is. This is a pitch, this is a blatant pitch. I paid him money; you should pay him money too. The link, if you go to cheatsheet.jamespfriel.com and I think there’s an opt-in where you get a cheat sheet with some cool stuff and the next page there’s a video with me talking about my story. That was my story from a year ago. So imagine what my story would be like even now. It’s even that much better. But if it’s something better that you guys need, than I need, then I would definitely message him and see if there’s a way he can do this for you.

Like I said, you don’t have to go as intense as I did and hire him and his team fly out and help you guys set it all up. You can do it remote. He did it for a dozen plus people over the last year remote as well and it works. You can get your whole team on board.

It’s one of those things that… I read the e-myth, I went through the e-myth course, I understand the value of what this piece is and I thought I was kind of doing it, but then when you have it right , you’re like oh wow. I don’t think we even had a system technically.

It was funny, I was listening to this Dan Kennedy thing from back in the….probably 15 years ago. And in there he’s talking about, “Everyone’s trying to figure out how to put a system into their business, the reality is you’ve already got a system, everybody’s got a system, but your system kind of sucks right now.” So you can take the crappy system you’re using or you can try to strategically plug in the right system, because the wrong system is going to hurt you more than no system. It’s impossible to have no system, if you’ve got no system it means you’ve just got a really bad one. Because something’s happening, it’s just happening really poorly.

I don’t know if that made any sense, but it sounded cool, right? Just kidding. Alright, I’m at the office, I got day two with James and the crew. We’re going to be in Trello and slacking everything, getting things built out. That’s what I’m doing today and that way I take one little step backwards, to plan to focus, system so I can go a thousand feet forward and take over the world a little bit more next year. So that’s the game plan guys. Appreciate you all, have a great time. Go visit James, tell him hi. Give him some money, write him a check. I get nothing for this endorsement other than James is awesome and helping me and he should help you too. Thanks guys, talk to you soon. Bye.

I didn’t think this was going to work, but it totally did.

On this episode Russell talks about some results of his recent webinar. He also talks about why being consistent with your own email list is important.

Here are some of the cool things you’ll hear in today’s episode:

• Some slightly vague stats from Russell’s recent webinar that listeners have been dying to hear.
• What emailing to the consistent buyers list about the same offer for 2 1/2 years has taught Russell about being consistent.
• And why you should continue to email your own list because when it comes time for them to buy, they will buy from the person at the top of their email.

So listen below to see why consistency is important and could end up making you money.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell, I want to welcome you guys to Marketing In Your Car. It’s a cold, snowy day here. Two of my kids have got fevers at home, sick. Man, you gotta love the winter time. We had a fun birthday party for the twinners on Saturday and church was good Sunday, so I’m excited for the week.

This week we are focusing on planning internal system structures. We got James Friel, AKA the man, who is flying to Boise, I guess he’s probably already flown to Boise. Gonna meet with him in like 12 minutes. So he’s coming in, Michelle McPherson on my team is coming in, and all the marketing side we are focusing, the next week, on getting our systems built out so that we can be more consistent so that next year, we’ll just focus on selling the stuff all day, every single day. It’s gonna be awesome. That’s what’s happening today in our world.

It’s funny because a couple Marketing In Your Car’s ago I was talking to you guys about how I was doing a big webinar and I’ve so many people hitting me up on Facebook and Voxer and all the channels that people can grab my attention on, asking me for results show. “Russell, we want a results show. We want to find out what actually happened on the webinar.” Honestly, I get nervous sharing the results with people. I don’t know.

I think it’s part because back in the day when we used to sell to more of the business opportunity market, people would only buy if we talked about the numbers, and now it’s like, we don’t talk about numbers, we just talk about results and the results for our customers, you know what I mean, let’s talk about what happened to these people and these people, and that’s what we focus on more, so I don’t ever really share our own stats that much. It’s just weird. So I won’t share them exactly, but I do want to share a little bit. Just enough to get you guys excited. That’s the goal.

If I can inspire action, that’s the only thing that matters. Because it does not matter what we made to anybody, except for me I guess and probably some guys on my team. But for the most part it doesn’t matter. What should matter, hopefully it insights you to take action on what you’re doing.

I’ll tell you the moral before I tell you the punch line. The moral of the story is that you should be promoting your internal list often. Back six years ago we had our first auto webinar ever, we made it a point once a quarter, we’d promote our webinar to our list and make the same amount of money every single time. It’s like, it doesn’t make sense though, because if you’ve all heard it, you heard me talk about it, you should have already bought it, if you haven’t bought, why are you not buying this? What’s going on? But for some reason it worked and we did that for 2 years. Every quarter we’d redo our webinar, promote it to our same list and make the same amount of money.

It’s interesting. I think I told you guys, we’re planning on retiring this webinar, changing the offer, and increasing the price. So we thought let’s just do one more big webinar to our own list, which is crazy because, again, if you follow me, I’ve kind of been talking about the same thing for two and a half years. Talking about Clickfunnels and funnel hacking and funnels. Anyway, so I just always assume that everybody on our list, who has ever heard my voice has already bought Clickfunnels. But apparently I’m wrong.

In fact, some of you guys right now are listening to this and you’re not a Clickfunnels member. Are you serious? Do you hate money that bad? Do you not trust me? I don’t even know what to do anymore. If you’re not a Clickfunnels member, I don’t know, honestly….if I didn’t have Clickfunnels, I have no idea, I can’t even recall how we had success in the past. I don’t even know how that’s possible, but it’s so easy with Clickfunnels, so there you go. There’s my shameless plug.

Again, I assumed everyone had purchased it. So we did the webinar, we promoted it, we ended up getting almost, not quite, but I think it was almost 6 thousand people from our list register for the webinar, which is crazy. I think it was like 5800 or something if I remember the numbers right. And then we had affiliates promote another one that was happening the next day, which was basically a replay of the one we just did. We got some affiliates, it didn’t go huge, we had about 1 thousand register through the affiliates, probably upwards of 7 thousand people total registered for this webinar, which is nuts.

Actually, it’s interesting, probably closer to 7500. Okay, that’s interesting. Alright, so I’ll just share the number that’ll help you get to the number. Basically we averaged about $100 for every single person who registered for the webinar, is about what it ended up being. From this campaign from 5 day webinar sequence. We had about a little of 3 quarters of a million dollars is what we pull out of our own list in December, promoting the same offer we promoted every single day for 2 ½ years, just because we made an event out of it and made people exciting again and kind of redid it.

What’s interesting is, Dave Woodward, on our team went and pulled all the stats and numbers and what’s crazy is that a lot of people who were signing up, they were people who, a lot of people who never had a Clickfunnels account, which is interesting to me. People who had had a Clickfunnels account, but had canceled. People who had had a Clickfunnels account, but it was paused and then there’s people also who are Clickfunnels members, but the majority of people who bought were people who had exited, who had left, isn’t that crazy?

So somehow or another they came in, they had used it, they drank the kool-aide and decided they didn’t like it and they left or whatever. Then this campaign got them re-fired up and re-excited and re-bought into the vision of Clickfunnels and Funnel hacking and that kind of thing. Our one big fear is, is it going to cannibalize our MRR? So for software, the metric that drives all of the focus is MRR which stands for Monthly recurring revenue, so every month we’re watching that number increase and grow and trying to keep it a very steady path or percentage. We’re trying to keep the consistency, so our big fear is, man if everyone who is a CLickfunnels member takes this, because when you buy the software you Clickfunnels Backpack and Actionetics free for six months. That could kill our MRR if everyone buys it.

But what’s cool is it didn’t, it actually spiked our MRR because more people were coming in. Plus, yesterday for example, was Sunday, so we had queued up two emails for Sunday, and we sold a lot of funnel hacks packages, but we also had over a thousand people who created Clickfunnels accounts yesterday. So not only did it get people to buy upfront, people who didn’t buy upfront, it got them sold on Clickfunnels, they went and created an account anyway. Isn’t that crazy?

So there’s all this lift that happens from that, from the live event, from a promotion like that to your own existing customers. Anyway, I thought it was really interesting, so my moral of the story for you all who are listening, those of you guys who have been doing what we have talked about since last year, where you’re doing a webinar every single week, go back to your list of these webinar people and do a webinar to all of them. “But Russell, they already heard about the webinar, they already saw it.” It doesn’t matter, now they’re ready and prepared to take this journey with you, when they might not have been before.

It’s interesting, one thing that kind of puts it in perspective for me, I have a friend in the dating market, his name is John Alanis and he spoke at, he’s the one that actually taught me the whole attractive character stuff, he’s awesome. And he spoke at Daegan Smith and I had an event a little while ago called the Invisible Funnel. At that event he spoke probably three or four hours about the attractive character and he was showing us his email marketing strategy and, it’s funny when I first met him he was emailing his list twice a day and trying to convince me to do that. I never got to that point yet. I still get paranoid.

I got to a point where I started emailing at least once a day, most days. So that’s kind of where it started with, but then he, at that event, he showed how he emails his list 9 times a day now through different personalities and personas. I was like, 9 times a day! That’s crazy. Why would you do that. He said, “Russell, you gotta understand. My men, they are on my list for entertainment purposes only. Most of them got girlfriends, they joined, they’re interested, they want to learn stuff, we have a good time hanging out. It’s not until somebody breaks their heart that they need my thing. When their girlfriend breaks up with them, that’s when what I sell actually matters. I gotta make sure that second that that happens that I am at the top of their inbox. If it happens at noon and someone else is at the top of their inbox, they’re buying that guys stuff. So I gotta keep emailing consistently so whenever the breakup happens, whenever the heartbreak, whenever that pain happens, that’s when you want to be at the top of mine.”

So I’m not that aggressive, but think about it. People buy your product because they’re in pain at that time, or there’s a need for them at that time, that might not have been there the first time that they registered. When they registered, they came through and were like, “That sounds kind of cool.” But they didn’t take action for some reason. The second time around is when they’re like, “Wow, this should and must become a must.” And so you never know when you’re going to hit thme, so it’s just being consistent in your messaging and you’ll find people when they’re ready.

There you go guys, I’m at the office. Going to go hang out with James Frill, get some Trello on. James Friel, AKA mister Trello. I hope that’s the name he’s still going with because he was going to get an image done and everything. I’m really excited. Appreciate you all, have an amazing day and I’ll talk to you guys soon.

Part two of the podcast I started earlier today.

On this part two episode of the Hero’s Two Journey’s Russell talks about the 5 turning points of conflict. He outlines each point and then tells his own story using those 5 points.

Here are some interesting things to listen for in this episode:

• What these 5 points of conflict are and how they can help make a story more full and interesting.
• Hear some examples of the turning points in movies like Finding Nemo, Rocky, and Cars.
• And hear Russell’s own story of success with an outline of the 5 turning points of conflict.

So listen below to find out what the 5 turning points of conflict are and why they are important in a story.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? My second podcast in one night because I love you guys so much. I got to the office, had an incredible time going through all the cool stuff I was sharing with you guys, with the team and getting it built into the book and then working on Funnel Hacker TV. It’s so exciting, so many fun things happening.

I wanted to come back and check in with you. I’m driving home right now. It is snowing, it’s incredibly cold, I forgot to wear a coat because I’m a genius and I’m driving about 1 mile an hour because my car does not do well in the snow. This way, we’re all hanging out so if I die or something I can let you know to let my family know how much I love them. So that’s the game plan, no, just kidding. The nice thing is that the drive to my house from the office is all back roads. That’s why I do Marketing In Your Car is because there’s no fear of scariness.

For all of you guys that yell at me every once in a while, “Russell, don’t do the podcast while you’re driving, you’re going to kill the baby animals.” Or whatever.  So do not worry, it’s all good.

So with that said, I just offended half of my audience. I will repent by sharing some magic, cool stuff for your guys if that’s okay. So earlier I talked about the Hero’s two journeys and hopefully got you guys some cool ideas and thoughts on that. Now I want to talk about the conflict, the piece in the middle.

So the conflict is what creates the emotion for the story and its key. I’ve been working off of this epiphany bridge script, which has been good. It’s working awesome. But I think tonight I’m going to rebuild that and tie it more into this because when I saw this piece of it we started looking at it like it’s insane, so cool.

If you’re vision, you should all do this along with me, picture you’re one of my sketches from my book. The top of your sketch write out the 5 turning points of conflict. Underneath it we’re going to have 1,2,3 and then underneath that 4 and 5. There’s kind of….didn’t fit 5 across in a big line, at least with all the text I have.

If you look at any story, the back story happens. We get to know the character, we fall in love with them and we’ve got this relationship. Then they physically leave their location, they’re about the leave something and the first thing they do when they leave, the reason why they leave, they’re introduced or given a new opportunity, which is actually really symbolic. If you start listening to my old podcasts and talked about this whole new opportunity thing and building your culture and building a following. So the character gets a new opportunity, that’s turning point number one. It’s like Lightning McQueen gets this shot to go race again for first place.

What are other movies. Rocky gets this opportunity to fight Apollo Creed, in every one there’s this opportunity that happens. So they physically leave wherever they’re at and they’re going to this new place for this new opportunity. It’s hard to read my handwriting here while I’m driving. But they’re moving to a new situation. So that’s the first turning point of conflict. This new opportunity that’s presented to them and then they move to a new situation.

The first situation is all about getting climatized, figure this thing out, it’s kind of cool. And then all the sudden in the second turning point of conflict happens. This is called the change of plan. Number two is the change of plan where it’s like, I thought I was going here for this thing, but then there was this change of plan, so something changed.

So Lightning McQueen was leaving to go, hopefully I can pull out all the stories while I’m doing this all at the same time…..so Lightning McQueen is going on this journey to California to race but then there’s this change of plans and he’s stuck in Radiator Springs and now he’s gotta figure out how to get out of this situation. There’s always a change of plans.

My potato gun story. My first opportunity was I can sell things on the internet and started doing that and it’s awesome making money. Then all the sudden Google slaps me and there’s a change of plans. So I had to change my plans and move things around and then we start making progress within this new realm that was different than we thought it was going to be. So the progress happens, which then brings us to turning point of conflict number 3, which is called the point of no return.

Now, every story, the hero comes to a spot, a point of no return. They’re sitting there and they can either go forward or they go back to their old life. And it happens in all of the movies. Where Nemo’s got to decide…not Nemo but the dad is going to decide, am I really going to go after Nemo or am I going to go back? This is a scary journey, am I really going to do this or not?

Michael Hauge talked about the movie The Firm, I’ve never seen the movie but I read the book in high school. And in that scene that the guy, the lawyer, he has an opportunity to work in the best law practice in the world and he gets in there and figures out, this might not be what I think it is. These guys are actually bad guys. And all the sudden it comes to this point of no return, he’s got two options. The FBI’s contacting him saying look, you’re working for the mafia and you can help us take them down, and he’s got to decide. Do I go with the FBI? Do I take down this law firm that I thought was my future, or do I go back to the law firm and make money off the mob and know that things are wrong and that his point of no return he has to decide one way or the other. That’s he’s with the good guys or the bad guys.

Every story’s got that, the point of no return. They’ve got to make the choice and finally they make the choice and as they do that, then it adds this whole new level and layer of complexity and complication and increases the stakes. Now it’s like, alright you picked the FBI, now you’ve got to take down the firm. Whatever the story, it’s the point of no return. That’s where they’ve got to go to the next part of the story. Going through this thing, new higher stakes, and then what happens, typically, is that you hit turning point number 4, which is the major setback.

This is where you hit something that’s like, you’ve got this plan, everything you are focusing on and all the sudden all is lost. You get this setback and the thing you’ve been trying to do is no longer possible, it’s gone. All hope is lost, it’s gone. You have no more opportunity for that thing. All of the sudden there’s this one little glimmer of light that’s like, the only way this can actually work is if this thing happens.

It’s interesting, Michael Hauge when he was talking about conflict, the conflict has to be so insurmountable that it’s almost impossible, otherwise people won’t care. The thing has to be so huge that it’s impossible because that’s what creates the emotion. That’s what makes the desire, that’s what gets us excited and buying into the character. So right here is kind of the last thing. Everything is going along and it’s been harder and harder and all the sudden it’s like boom, this new setback and it’s like, I can’t win. There’s no way I can win, it’s physically impossible. Unless….then there’s this little glimmer of hope, unless somehow I can get to that. But that’s not possible. The odds of that are almost zero, but you have to look at that and say, well we have to do one last shot. This is our final stand.

So that transitions you to the final push, which pushes you to turning point number 5 which is the climax of the event, which is boom. Here’s this huge thing that’s about to happen, the climax. And that is usually the end of the story. The big thing happens, Lightning McQueen does the race. The climax you can win, you can lose, it depends. But the climax is usually where, again it’s the death and the rebirth of what we talked about last episode, which is the death of their faults and beliefs and the rebirth of the new person. And it’s at the climax. They become who they’re supposed to become.

And that’s the last big turning point, the climax. Then after that, the movie has to show the aftermath. Because the aftermath does a couple of things. First off, it shows us that the hero completed their journey. They got what they were actually looking for. They may not have won what they wanted. Rocky didn’t beat Apollo Creed in the first one, but he accomplished it, that’s when Adrien runs out. Adrien, Rocky I love you. That’s the aftermath, we saw that he hit his goal, so we feel complete as the viewers of it. You see who they’ve become, you see that they were able to cast off this identity they had and become something different. And they have new beliefs and new faith in themselves. And that’s what the aftermath’s all about and to kind of wrap up the story.

So isn’t that cool? I know it’s kind of hard to hear through a podcast and it’s easier when you read it, so that’s why you gotta get the book when it comes out, because it’ll make more sense. You can see the diagrams and the graphs. But it’s cool, the five turning points of conflict.

Turning point number one is the opportunity that they take. Turning point number two is the change in plan. Turning point number three is the point of no return. Number four is the major setback, and number 5 is the climax. Then there’s a little arrow going between each of those ones. So the arrow from opportunity to the change of plans is called the new situation. Then we’re going from the change of plans to the point of no return. The arrow’s progress pushing to the point of no return. After they’ve gone through that there’s an arrow that says complication and higher stakes, that arrow pushes you to the major setback. Then there’s an arrow that says final push that pushes you to the climax. And from there we have the aftermath.

Oh crap. Sorry I’m slipping a little bit. Someone slammed on their brakes in front of me. There you go the five turning points of conflict. So based on that, that’s the overarching theme of all movies and most stories and novels and things like that. I’m going to take the old epiphany bridge script that we’ve been using up to this point and try to see how I could, if I could weave it into that. I was playing today with that. I was telling a bunch of my stories with this overlaying on it, and it was interesting with how much more full it made the stories, which is cool because I was thinking my potato gun story, which hopefully you’ve heard a billion times by now, it’s so annoying.

But I told with the old epiphany bridge story, it worked but it wasn’t quite emotionally impactful. So I laid this on top of it, I was like, “Okay, what is the new opportunity for me?” The new opportunity for me was, I wanted to make money and learn about internet marketing and selling information products, which lead me to this new situation where I created a potato gun product. Boom, boom, boom. Started making money selling it and life was good. All the sudden boom, I had this change of plans where Google slapped me and I wasn’t profitable and I was like, crap.

So I tried to figure out this new world. What do I do? I’m making progress and trying different things and moving along and having a little bit of success here and there but a lot of things aren’t working. All the sudden I come to number three, this point of no return, which is basically my wife who is supporting me is like, “hey, are you going to help support us or are you just going to be broke our whole lives?” I’m like, “No.” and she’s like, “you either got to make this internet thing work or you gotta focus in school so you can get a job someday.” I was like, oh there’s my point of no return.

So I was thinking, what do I do? I hate school, I’m barely graduating. I’m not going to get a good job. Or over here I can try this thing that’s not work, but I love it and believe in it. I’m at this point of no return and I say, screw it. I’m not going to focus on school. I’ll do enough so I can get my degree and I can wrestle but I’m an internet marketer, this is who I am, who I want to become. So I transition and start trying to figure things out and so that’s my point of no return. I start on this journey and then we’re going through and let’s see…..

So then we had a major setback, so then I’m trying everything and nothing seems to work, I’m about to give up and then all the sudden I get a call from my friend and he says, “Russell, all my sites are failing. I just want to figure out this thing it’s called an OTO, it’s called Upsell.” I’m like, “What?” there’s a ray of hope, what if that worked. If that worked, holy cow that would change everything.

So I’m like, okay I gotta try it out. So I take this one last hail -mary pass and throw an OTO in there, turn my ads campaign back on and boom, it worked. We started selling products again profitably and things were good. And that was the climax, number 5. We start selling, profits coming in. Potato gun market’s not huge but we learned the model and we start doing other businesses and now look at the aftermath and it’s like holy cow.

Because I did this thing called funnels, everything’s amazing. And I’m not sure on there, the internal and external. The journey of achievement is to be successful online, which I hit. And the second one is the journey of transformation. And I learned that it’s not just trying to sell products and being transactional but creating experiences for people and its serving them at a higher level. That’s the power of an upsell, the power of funnels. You’re looking at your clients like, how do we actually change their lives? We do that through the process we take them through. When I discovered that it became everything.

Now I focus on transformation and blah, blah, who knows…. Anyway, there’s me telling the story while I’m holding my paper trying to go through the process. But do you see how more full that is. It’s showing all this stuff.

Anyway, I hope that helps. I’m almost home. If this didn’t help and you’re completely confused, I totally understand. Do not worry, the book will be out soon and you can read it in there and it’ll make way more sense. The book eventually will be at expertsecrets.com, I think the page is blank right now, but someday it’ll be there, if I finish it. So cross your fingers. That’s what I got. Thanks everybody, we’ll talk to you guys all again soon.

Holy crap! Look what I figured out over the last four days.

On this episode Russell talks about The Hero’s Two Journeys and what they mean. He talks about why the second journey is actually more important than the first.

Here are some of the really cool things you will hear in today’s episode:

• What the difference is between the journey of accomplishment and the journey of transformation and why you can’t have one without the other.
• How every movie and story has these two journeys, but you just don’t realize it.
• And what Russell’s own Hero’s two journeys was like.

So listen below to learn about the Hero’s Two Journeys and how they relate to business.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone it is a beautiful snowy, snowy day. I love the snow, it’s so much fun. I hope you guys are having a good time wherever you’re at in the world. Some of you guys are probably super hot, on a beach hanging out, which is cool. For me, I’m here driving in the snow. It’s about 12:30 in the afternoon, I’m going in late because I’ve been writing, trying to get the book done. So I’ve been spending a lot of time at home locked away. I’m trying to get things done without people around me, and then I have to go and share the ideas because it gets the energy of everyone in our office, gets me fired up and gets me motivated to keep writing and creating.

But it’s kind of fun, the last three days, I was supposed to have the book done last week. Last 3 almost 4 days now, I’ve been focusing on the one chapter and it’s the epiphany bridge and if you listen to the podcast you hear me talk about the epiphany bridge and as I’m explaining it……it’s tough because when you explain things live there’s an easy way to do it. You guys have probably heard me explain the epiphany bridge on the podcast and I think most people probably got it. But as you’re writing there’s a lot of things you have to fill in because your audience may not have the context.

When you guys are hanging out with me, we have context, we know…..there’s understanding you have when I share something it’s like, “Oh that’s how it fits in the context of all the stuff Russell’s been sharing with me.” But a book there’s a vacuum where someone could be getting off a book shelf and have no idea who you are. There’s more filling in between the lines you have to do.

So the epiphany bridge, I could explain it easily, but to get the full impact that I need, I need more. I spent the first night, I can’t remember if I told you or not, but I spent three hours studying the story just to get back into that state of how you actually tell a good story. What’s the structure?

And I think I mentioned there’s a really good audio called the Hero’s Two Journeys, by Michael Hauge and Chris Vogler teach the story. And Michael Hauge is like a consultant for script writer in Hollywood, and Chris Vogler does similar stuff for novelists. I kind of resonated a lot more with Michael Hauge, in fact Michael came and spoke at one of our events.

Dayton Smith and I a couple of years ago taught this concept called the Hero’s two journeys. And it’s cool because I listened to the audio of it, and he spoke at our event. And he was, it was super awesome to see the story. You look at all movies and all books, they follow a very similar story structure, so that was fascinating back then, but I didn’t really know how to apply it. I’m not doing Hollywood productions or Hollywood movies, so how to this apply to our world? That was probably 5 or 6 years ago that he spoke at our event. It’s been kind of up in the air for me for a long time.

This week as I’ve gone back through it, and I’ve been looking at it and listening to it through a different lens. I have a structure with my epiphany bridge story, is it the same as the hero’s two journeys? Is it different? What things am I missing that I should be bringing over? And it turned into this 4 day geek out session on Story, which has been so much fun. But now that it’s happening, I’m seeing this clear picture of……it’s amazing.

I’m going to give Mike Hauge credit for a lot of this stuff because I’m learning it again through him and I’m trying to tweak it in a way that fits into my lens that I view the world through.  But some cool things, and I’ll share a couple of them and then I’ll be out of…probably wont have time to go through all of them.

The cool thing is first off, talk about every good story, there’s three core components. There’s a character, then the desire of the character, where he’s ggoing, the physical desire ( I need to go over there) then there’s the conflict. So if you have those three you have a story.

You have a character, little red riding hood. She has a desire, I want to take my grandma a bag of goodies. Then the conflict, the big bad wolf wants to eat her along the way. And that’s the story and if you have those three elements, you’ve got the story. The three core things.

What’s interesting is that typically as marketers, we look at the desire is where we try to create desire in people’s minds. I want the big house or car or wherever this thing you want to get to is. I want to lose weight….we try to create desire in that. But what’s interesting is in the story desire is not created by the desire, emotion is not created by the desire. The Desire, the emotion we want in a story, the emotion comes from the conflict. That’s what people actually care about it. If there’s no conflict people won’t care about the story.

If my story is that I woke up and drove to the office, there’s no conflict there, nobody cares, it’s boring. So the conflict is what creates emotion, which makes the story actually interesting. There’s kind of that.

We talk about characters, always the back story, and I’ve kind of pulled out, there’s about 5 or 6 ways you can build rapport with it, and with a character. In a movie they try to do those things prior to……it’s the first ten percent of the movie, so prior to the attractive character, or the character, or hero, whatever you want to call it, leaving on this journey. So you try to build rapport and usually it’s happening in one spot.

And about ten percent into the movie there’s this thing  that happens that usually physically they leave the location that they’re at and go somewhere else. Frodo leaves the shire and he goes on this journey. What happens is there’s always this visible desire we have called the Journey of accomplishment, the hero’s first journey, the journey of accomplishment. I need to accomplish this thing. I gotta take the ring to Mordor and throw it in this lava pit. Every story’s got that. There’s this journey. That’s the journey we’re all watching and we’re visible and we’re aware and going with this character on this journey trying to help them achieve.

But then there’s also this second journey, that’s why he calls it the hero’s two journeys. And the second journey is not visible to the naked eye. We don’t see it. Frodo’s got to become a man, we don’t see that piece of it. All we see is the desire of where they’re trying to get to. And then the conflict that’s happening along the way.

So that’s what’s fascinating, there’s this second journey happening, and that second journey is the journey of transformation. The first journey is the journey of accomplishment, second journey is the journey of transformation, them becoming a different person.

So if you look at the back story of the story, what’s happening is that we’re creating an identity that this character believes about themselves. It’s all their old beliefs or all their current beliefs. They believe this and this and all these things that are important and have created their identity. And then they go on this journey of accomplishment and during the process they have this journey of transformation where this identity of who they think they are breaks away and these old beliefs fall off and then these new beliefs are born and it shifts from their identity to their essence.

And essence is the key. That’s where we want to get to, that essence of who we actually are and having the hero discover that during this journey. What’s interesting is that in good stories the hero will accomplish the thing that they wanted to, that they went on this journey of accomplishment, they accomplish that thing. But then usually it doesn’t matter. They throw it away or they don’t care because the real journey was this journey of transformation, where the character became something more.

So as I was, yesterday as I came to the office I started geeking out, so I mapped out on a whiteboard and showed the whole thing to a bunch of guys on my team. I was explaining it all to them and then everyone was kind of like, “Give me an example of this journey of transformation.” And I was thinking and all the sudden it popped in my head and I remember this story of Cars.

So Cars is, we just watched it on the Disney Cruise with my kids like 25 times, so it’s top of my brain right now. Lightning McQueen is this hero. There’s this back story, we hear all this stuff, he almost wins the Piston cup, there’s a three-way tie, so now they’re gonna race. So now he’s got to leave, he’s physically leaving this spot.

During the back story we understood his identity, what’s important. He’s a rookie, He’s in line to win the piston cup, blah, blah. We also see his character flaws, we find out before he leaves on his journey that he doesn’t have any friends, even Harv, his manager, he thinks is his friend isn’t actually his friend, he doesn’t even like him.

He’s getting in this car and we realize that he’s actually…there’s this pain that he has and he doesn’t know who he is. He’s going to win this thing and that’s his identity. He has to win the Piston cup or else he’s a failure in life. He’s gonna be the first rookie ever, so he jumps into the……Harv, they start on this physical journey. Leaving the current location for somewhere else. The desire for him is to go to California to win the Piston cup. That’s the visual goal we all see. Then what happens, Harv falls asleep, he falls out of the car, gets stuck in Radiator Spring and that introduces conflict. And all this conflict starts happening. And through this conflict he becomes a different person.

Then what happens is the end of the story he gets the ability to go accomplish his desires. So he leaves Radiator Springs, he goes to the race, gets in the thing, doing this race and has this opportunity to win. He’s out there racing the track and goes through and it comes down to the last minutes of the race. He’s going through and passes everybody and he’s in the front and he has become the victor, he’s gonna win. His desires that he’s been trying to accomplish this entire movie, the whole journey of accomplishment is now his, he owns it. And then all the sudden Chick Hicks hits the King’s wheel and the king flips up, boom, boom, boom, car wrecks. Smashes everything and he looks up and as he’s about to cross the finish line he looks up and sees in the monitor he sees the King destroyed.

And he remembers the story about Doc and him being destroyed and all the sudden he realizes in that moment, he changes. And he realizes that this journey of accomplishment, things he’s trying to accomplish, does not actually matter. And he throws it away, slams on his breaks and stops an inch in front of the finish line and he sits there and Chick Hicks flies past him and wins the race. And then what does he do? He backs up, goes back and finds the King, goes behind him and he starts pushing the King to the finish line. The King says something to him. He says, “What are you doing, Rookie? You realize you just threw away the Piston Cup?” and then this is where we had this glimpse of the transformation Lightning McQueen had. He said, “You know an old race car once told me, all it is, is an empty cup.” And he pushes the king through the finish line and the story…..the hero’s second journey, that transformation, he accomplished it. He became somebody more. Something different, something better.

Isn’t that amazing. And it’s like, that is the story line for movies. It’s the hero’s two journeys. And when you see it, it starts becoming so clear that all these, every movie there’s this external journey, the external desire they are going for, but then there’s this internal journey that happens and I want you to think about this for yourself. Because, we’ll get more when you get the book, it’ll explain how this fits into the epiphany bridge and all that stuff.

But for a lot of us, that’s our life. We all get into whatever we’re doing because we have this thing. I got into wrestling because I wanted to be, at first a state champ, I wanted to be a national champ. Here’s my journey of achievement. That was all I lived, thought about. That was the only thing that mattered. I went on this journey and hit my state champ, I became an All American and went to college and my last goal was to become an All American in college. My whole life, everything rode on this journey, I was going on this thing, and I didn’t hit it. I fell short, I didn’t even qualify for the national tournament my senior year, fell short. And it was over.

And I didn’t get my thing that I’d been trying to achieve. But then for me as a person, I stepped back and I looked and I said, “What happened in the last 12 years of me pursuing this dream?” what was the journey of transformation for me? Who did I become because of that? If I didn’t go on this journey, even though I didn’t hit my desire, even if I would have hit my desire, what was put in my path? Who did I meet? How did I change who I am? How did I become someone different, someone better because of that?

If I hadn’t gone on that journey where would I be today? It would have been a whole different trajectory. But the journey of transformation happened because I was chasing that desire. So let’s get into business, want to make money, that’s the desire but then what happens along the way? Holy cow, you feel, you realize and this is true for me, you realize that the things you create actually have an impact on people and it can change their life. And suddenly it shifts from I need to make money to how can I have an impact? A transformation, that’s the switch.

That’s why there’s so many people who go through weight loss, this desire to lose weight and in the process they’ve learned something about themselves. And they have so much passion about it and they want to share it with other people and that’s why they become trainers and coaches and experts and all these crazy things.

It’s so fascinating. It’s in movies, in life. All over the place, the hero’s two journeys. It’s excited. So that’s what I got for you guys to you. I’m almost to the office. I have more that I want to share, but I’ll have to save it for another podcast. Maybe I’ll do it on the drive home tonight because I have the paper right here. The next thing I’m looking at is the conflict. How do you break down the actual conflict that’s happening inside of this story. The hero’s, after he’s left home, he’s going through this thing, what are the levels of the conflict. I actually have it sketched out right here; it’ll be in the new book. I’m calling it the Five Turning Points of Conflict, and it’s awesome. So maybe I’ll share that tonight or whenever the next podcast comes out. Least that’s the game plan. If not, then go read my book because it will be in there for sure.

I hope that is exciting for you guys, gets you a little pumped up about story and thinking through that as you’re telling your stories. Because the end of the day no one really cares if the hero achieves the accomplishment. The audience cares that the hero becomes something and gets the journey of achievement, or the journey of transformation. That’s what we actually root for. That’s how we fall in love with characters. Rocky part 1, Rocky didn’t win. But who did he become? That’s why we love Rocky. Alright, I’m at the office, guys. Appreciate you all, have an amazing day. I’ll talk to you guys probably later on tonight. Alright, bye.

Final Clickfunnels webinar?

On this extra long episode Russell talks about doing a webinar for Clickfunnels today, and why it’s the last time. He talks about where he was a year ago, and how things have changed for Clickfunnels in that year.

Here are some interesting things you will hear in today’s episode:

• Why Russell thinks doing a webinar a week for your business is still a must, but why his business is different.
• What revelation led to The Expert Secrets book and the possibility of doing an infomercial with Dean Graziosi.
• And what you can expect to see with Clickfunnels when things change in January.

So listen below to hear what kind of changes are coming for Clickfunnels in 2017 and why.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson I want to welcome you guys back to Marketing In Your Car. Now, it’s funny I get people all the time that ask me what microphone I use due to its amazing audio quality, and it’s just my phone. I don’t do microphones, I just hold it and talk into it. I figured if I had to get a microphone set up I never would have done it. I just want to be able to do these whenever I want to. Whenever I want, so I need at least the most simple, easy setup possible and that’s how we did this, which is really cool.

I actually just got a brand new iPhone, so this is my first time recording on this new iPhone, which I’m kind of excited about. With that said, it snowed last night, if you follow me on Snapchat….I may be killing Snapchat, I haven’t decided yet, but it’s kind of frustrating but it’s also kind of fun. I may be moving it over to Instagram Stories or something, I don’t know.

But we went, half my kids are out in the snow playing in it. Norah and me were in the hot tub, it was really fun. Then the kids want the fireplace on, so I ran in my bare feet in the snow to turn the fireplace, it was some good times, but I survived it and lived to tell the story.

Today is exciting day because today is webinar day. We’re doing a webinar, I was doing the stats, 4500 people registered. What? Which is going to be exciting. It’s funny, we’re getting towards the end of the year now and I want to share a message that’ll loop back to the beginning of this year. For those of you who have been listening to the Marketing In Your Car podcast, if you haven’t been, go and binge listen to all of them and catch up because there are some important things you’re missing. Just kidding, kind of.

There was a podcast I did, I think in January. I was driving home and it was snowy as well. I think it was called the business model for the next twelve months. So if you go to marketinginyourcar.com and search on the page for business model, or twelve months, it should pull up and you listen to it. But I walk through a challenge I give to everyone, that basically do a live webinar every single week for the next twelve months and transform your life and business and it’ll be amazing.

What’s interesting is that, as I’ve been saying that over and over and over again, very few people have. Surprise, surprise. But the people that have are doing some amazing things. Some are speaking at Funnel Hacking Live, some are doing different things. One of them, I’m going to brag, I hope they don’t mind. I’m sure that they’re probably listening to this, but Brandon and Kaelin Poulin are examples of people who just, every time I’m like, “Hey you should do this.” Just do it and it’s amazing. And last month, and they’re in the weight loss space, they sell $147 product and you might think, well how much can someone make doing a webinar a week every single week for a year? And I tell you it compounds. It’s a compounding interest game.

I remember some famous guy said something about compounding interest, which was cool, but I don’t remember the quote or the actual concept behind compounding interest. I only know how to sell stuff. But it’s the same thing I think. It compounds. Just to put into perspective, when I met them at Funnel Hacking Live, they were doing about $100,000 a month that was in March or April, whenever Funnel Hacking Live was. Then they joined Inner Circle and kept doing it, and kept compounding and compounding.

November, I actually sent an email out the other day, I was like they did almost half a million dollars in November. And Brandon messaged me back, “What? We passed 600 grand in November.”  So I want to put it in perspective for you. $600,000 selling a $147 information product in the weight loss industry. That’s the power of what we’re talking about, this compounding interest, this compounding effect of consistently doing the same thing over and over and over and over again. And I’ve shared it with some of my friends, people who are successful, I had one friend I won’t mention his name. A great marketer and super cool guy, and his company has been stuck at about $3 million dollars a year for a couple of years.

Which is funny, for some reason, I was stuck at 3 million a year for a long time, that was my sticking point. There’s different sticking points, for me to break a million dollars was really hard, took me four or five years in a row, I was trying to break a million dollars from January 1^st to December 31^st, and I missed it multiple years in a row by a couple tens of thousands of dollars, like 20 or 30 thousand dollars. There’s some mental block, and after I broke that I shot to 3 million and stuck there for a long time. Could never really break through that, in fact, I broke through it one time, when we built a big company up and had a huge staff, but our profits were horrible, then we shut that down and I was stuck at 3 million again for 3 or 4 years consistently, could not break that mental barrier.

What changed it for me was that transition to selling a lot of different product, because that’s the mindset of marketers, I gotta create the next big thing, to make more money to how do I make something consistent that I just keep pushing people through. For me it was the webinar. We did the webinar and I committed to our team, because everyone….it’s funny, when we launched Clickfunnels, a lot of my friends, and I saw it in forums, in Facebook groups, people were like, “Clickfunnels looks cool, but it’s Russell’s flavor of the week. I don’t want to move my whole platform and then next week he’s on to a new thing.”

I was like, “Crap, I have to show people that I’m serious about this. This is the future, this is my focus.” So a lot of my friends actually, didn’t sign up for a year and half to two years because of that. They were afraid I was going to move on, because that was my pattern. That’s all of our patterns. We do something initially to build a big audience of people. Then the way we start making money is create new things to sell to them. And that’s part of the strategy, there’s value in that, but what’s more valuable is creating a front end offer that’s evergreen, consistent, that you’re always driving people into. There’s a consistent message, consistent onboard, everyone comes through the same channel, buying the same thing, understanding the same concepts, then as you’re building your culture and all these other things, come off of that.

So I started doing these one things consistently, that was kind of my promise to Dylan and Todd initially, “This is going to be my focus, don’t worry guys. I’m not chasing the next shiny object. We’re going to focus on this.” It took me three months before we figured out how to sell it right. We had multiple failed product launches initially. Then we figured out the webinar was how we were going to sell it, and it worked.

We did the webinar over and over. And I did the webinar every week for almost a year, probably more than that. Some days I would do two to three webinars in a day, which is a lot. I don’t know if I could handle that nowadays. When we first got started, that’s what I was doing. I’d do a webinar and get off, then do another one and get off. If you do it, those of you who have done a webinar, a two hour webinar, it drains you. All your energy is going into it, and to do two or a couple times three in a day, it was tough. But I was learning my message, finding my voice, understanding where people were getting stuck, perfecting it and going over and over.

And the nice thing about doing it live is it gets everyone on your staff and team focused on this thing. This last year, we had so much success and the webinars were kind of shifted over to automated webinar, and that’s been running for most of this year, so I haven’t been doing them live that much this year. But I paid my dues, so it’s okay for me. For you guys, you gotta pay your dues first then you can. After you’ve done it 50 or 60 times live, you’re allowed to automate it.

So we automated it a lot this year, it’s been good, a consistent stream of money, but it hasn’t been this big focal point. So we wanted to do one big last hurrah, which is happening today in a couple of hours, to do the funnel hacks webinars. So we did a big push and got 4500 people on it. 4500 people means we’ll get a thousand on the webinar. We consistently close 20 percent, that means 200, so we’re looking at probably 150-200 thousand dollars live on the webinar. And then from replays we should double that. Gets us to 3 or 4, but then we’ll also have a big urgency and scarcity scare since this is the last time we’ll be doing this webinar, in fact we’re doubling the price of this offer and changing the webinar as a whole coming into the new year.

So there’s a lot of built in urgency and scarcity. So my guess, we’ll probably end up with 5 or 6 hundred thousand from this in immediate sales, but the lift from that is huge as well, because even people that don’t buy, now they are indoctrinated into our process. They sign up for Clickfunnels, they start buying the books, all the other pieces start happening and there’s so many big benefits that come from the consistency of the webinar.

So I just wanted to kind of circle back to when we talked about, almost a year ago, and get back to that. Like I said, my friend who’s stuck at $3 million I told him, “This is the model. You gotta do a webinar every single week.” He was like, “I can’t write a new webinar every single week.” I was like, “No, you do the same webinar every single week.” He was like, “I can’t do the same webinar every week, my audience will get tired of it.” I was like, “Exactly, that means you gotta bring in a new audience.” And he was like, “No, that won’t work. We make our money by creating new things, and it takes me a couple of months to create a new thing.” And I was like, “That’s why you’re stuck at 3 million dollars, because you can’t.” It’s a hard, hard road to grow past that until you find……

I know that, from a decade, ten years of me trying that and launching and re-launching. No, focus on creating a front end, it becomes so amazing, good, and powerful that you can consistently bring new blood in that brings new blood in.

The second half is that you’ll find these businesses that are stuck at 2 or 3 million dollars a year. Usually after a year or two of that they start getting atrophy and it starts shrinking and there’s usually a couple of reasons. One is the entrepreneur is burned out of creating new offers. Number two the audience starts shrinking. I don’t know what it is, we all get good at bringing in an audience initially, and then we have it and we stop focusing on that. We’ve gotta be focusing consistently on new leads coming in. It’s a life blood of your business, even if you don’t want to grow, just want to maintain, it’s essential to have.

It’s interesting, I have been listening to an old course, an old Kennedy, actually Bill Glazer course, it’s called Think and Grow Rich for Renegade Entrepreneurs, or something like that. I found it somewhere. So I’ve been listening to that and the firs thing he talked about is renegade entrepreneurs thinking to grow rich is that they all have a focus on consistent new lead generation. No matter how good their business is doing, they are always focusing on consistent new leads coming in.

As I move into this new year, we are changing the webinar offer. We’re changing the pricing. We’re doing a lot of cool things inside of Clickfunnels and how we sell it, but I’m not going to be doing this webinar anymore. So for me it’s like, what’s the new horizon? What are we shifting to?

I still recommend for 99.9% of all business, the focal point should be a front end webinar. In fact, we will still have webinars that are selling on the front end. But for me, I think I’ve talked about this with you guys before, my whole goal now, we just passed, it’s crazy. This week we passed 25 thousand active customers inside of Clickfunnels. That’s not people who signed up and left, that’s people who are actively being billed, happily. It’s…..we never thought we would get to that. We talked about that, “Oh yeah, when we have 100,000 customers…” but we never thought that was a real thing. But a little over two years in we’re at 25 thousand active customers, which is crazy.

So for us, it’s like how do we expand that market? How do we get it bigger? We can keep doing it through webinars, and we will, but I think for me and my business, and again, I’m not saying this for all businesses, because I do not think this is across the board, but for Clickfunnels to grow….we’ll continue to grow in the channels we are, people that have existing businesses that need a funnel, but the big opportunity for me and our team is, and it’s funny because a year and a half ago when I started down this project, for new customer acquisition, how do we keep the fuel in the pump? It was funny, we were looking at, trying to figure out, what’s the offer I create so that all small businesses will start using Clickfunnels?

I was stuck for 3 or 4 four months, trying to think through that, trying to figure things out. And it’s funny, I may have told this story before, if not it’s worth telling again. So you guys may hear it twice. A year and a half ago I had joined Joe Polish’s 25k group and the night before the first meeting, I got invited by some cool people to come to this little dinner party. It had about ten people in it, so I come to this dinner party and Dave Woodward came with me to the trip, but he wasn’t able to come to the dinner. And prior to that Dave and I were talking about it, “How do I create, a book I need to write, or is it a webinar? What do we need to do to penetrate and get all of small businesses to start using Clickfunnels? And we’re thinking through it and thinking through it. And it’s funny how when your brain is on something how things just open up.

So I’m at this dinner and sitting across the table from me is Dean Graziosi and Dean is someone I’ve always looked up to and he’s been on TV for 15 years selling his books. I think he’s probably sold more books through direct response marketing than any other human on earth. The person who might be closest is Kevin Trudeau but he’s in jail right now so I’m not going to work with him. But Dean’s the best, and he does things in a really clean way that aren’t cheesy, that aren’t like the dirty stuff.

And I’m sitting across, looking at Dean and we’re talking about, I don’t even know, something unrelated, and as we’re talking I had this epiphany, I don’t know, I look at it probably more like a revelation from Heaven, but who knows, whatever it is. That thing that is like, “Russell, you are going to be writing a book, you’re not going to be targeting small business owners, that’ll take care of itself. You have to expand the market and the book you’re going to write is going to be called Expert Secrets.” I own that domain, but that was never in my vision to write a book called that. “The book’s going to be called Expert Secrets and somehow Dean’s going to write an infomercial for you.” I’m sitting there listening to Dean talk about his kids or whatever, and I was like, “What? Did I just hear that right, because I don’t know if that makes any logical sense whatsoever. Then my brain comes back and its like, it doesn’t need to. I was like, alright cool.

All I had was this little glimpse, “Okay, you are writing a book called Expert Secret, it’s going to help you expand the market and Dean’s going to write an infomercial.” I’m like, okay do I tell Dean that he’s writing an infomercial for me? No, don’t tell him, he’ll think you’re weird. It’s like on a first date, I think this is my wife, should I tell her? No, don’t tell her on the first date, hold that in. That’s how I kind of felt. So that was kind of the beginning of it.

So I went back that night to the hotel room and I saw Dave and I was like, “Dave, I’m writing a book, it’s called Expert Secrets and the whole goal is to expand the market.” And he’s like “I got chills. Yes, we need to do that.” I’m like, “Alright.” So Julie, who is my writer, helps me with my writing projects, I voxed her that night. “Okay Julie, I’m writing another book.” She’s like, “You said you were never writing a book ever again.” I was like, “I know, we’re doing it anyway. I’m wiring you some money, give me the info again.” That night. I wire her and then I start writing this book and we start going down this process and I have no idea how all these pieces are going to take place, I just know that it’s supposed to. So I’m going to start running that direction.

So we start running. Some of you might already know I wrote the whole book and then this summer I was editing it and trying to get it ready for the publisher and I realized that I hated the book. So on Snapchat I highlighted all 250 pages of it and deleted it. Messaged Julie and said, “We’re writing a new book.” And she’s like, “What? We just wrote a book.” And I’m like, “Yeah, we’re writing the same book again, but this one is going to be way better.” And started over, I’d been working on that project, in fact, today I finished Secret number 7, which is chapter number 7. For some reason I have to name everything secrets, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I just like secrets better than chapters, so whatever.

And the book is legitimately, I’m so proud of it. I can’t even….so proud of it, so excited to share it with everybody. It’s gonna change a lot of lives. Change how people look and view how we sell and how we influence and how we can affect people’s lives. So it’s gonna be awesome.

And then I’m in Genius Network, I go to that….Excuse me, now I’m going to rewind back. This is the next morning after hanging out with Dean, I’m in the genius network and I love Joe and Genius Network…..Just the way that…..I’m not a super huge fan of some of the way that…….I’ll leave it there.

I’m out in the hallway talking to Jason Fladlien. Jason’s a big mentor of mine and I’v e learned some things about belief that….I was telling him the last time we were hanging out, “Do you realize those things you told me about belief have changed my whole life.” He was like, “ I don’t remember talking to you about that.” I was like, “Really? It was a really big deal to me.” He’s like, “I don’t remember that.” It was funny.

I was talking to Jason and I told him we had launched a certification program, I was like, “We’re shutting it down.” He was like, “Why would you shut it down.” I was like, “It’s not working.” And we tried to talk through it and we were going to shut it down, and he was like, “Why don’t you find some rock star to run it for you?” and then I was thinking, if I can find the right person, then yes I would do it. But I don’t see that vision.

Then a couple of days later, we’re sitting in a room talking about shutting down the certification program and all the sudden, I can’t remember who it was, but someone mentioned Norah and all of us in the room got chills, it was like, yes, she is the right person. She will take this to the next level. Norah is that person. We called her up, begged her and she came in and built the certification program. And what’s interesting, the certification program, we’re certifying all these amazing people now who were building funnels…

I just pulled up and Steven is looking through the office window in a Santa hat, waving at me going crazy and saying Webinar Day.

Anyway, this certification program is certifying all these amazing people who are now going and penetrating getting funnels into local businesses, which is cool because I was trying to figure out how to get that, how to go that direction and it didn’t make any sense. Now I know that those markets will be filled through the certification program, which is so cool to now see the vision later.

So we’re working on the book, go to the next Genius Network, and I went to the last one and I was like I was not planning on re-upping, so I was like, it’s been good and I like it but it wasn’t what I needed right now in my business. The night before the last meeting, Dean’s like, “Hey come to my office.” So I swing over to his office and we talk for a bit. He shows me his infomercial studio, I’m sitting in this thing and I’m like, this is where he’s going to be filming an infomercial for me, but he doesn’t know that yet, how do I not awkwardly bring it up? “Hey man, just so you know you’re building an infomercial in this studio.”  It was pretty cool.

And then, I was talking about how cool it’d be to have him do an infomercial. I just dropped it as if it just came in my head, not that I’d been plotting it for a year and knew it was going to happen someday in the future. I was like, “Man, that’d be so cool to have you do an infomercial. What does it look like?” an d he’s like, “I don’t do infomercials for people, but I might be willing to do one for you.” I was like, “Really.” And he’s like, “Yeah.” And he gave me some cool compliments and I was like that’s cool.

And then he kind of mentions in bypass, Joe Polish and I are thinking of doing a 100k group, would you be interested? And I said, “If you help me do an infomercial I’d definitely be interested.” And he was like, “Alright, I think we can make that happen.” And we kind of left it at that. I was like, oh my gosh. That night I was all giddy, this may actually happen. There’s now a path that this could actually, that this might possibly happen.

So the next morning at the 25k meeting, the first thing Joe and Dean do is they launch, “Hey we’re launching a 100k program.” Dean’s like, “Brunson’s thinks he’s in.” and I was like, “I’m in.” and they handed me an order form, I filled it out and joined the 100k program. I’m like, I don’t know the answer but I know that this is the path. Somehow Dean’s making the infomercial and I just need to be closer to him.

So that was kind of it, and now the 100k program, we had our first meeting a couple of weeks ago, I think I talked to you guys about that. And what’s cool, is at the meeting he asked me if I would train for a little bit. I was like, “What do you want me to train?” and he asked what I thought would be best for this audience. And I said, “I know what would be best.” So I shared some stuff in expert secrets book, it’s almost like a test to see how this audience would respond to it, and they went nuts. Insane. I was like, yes the message is right. The book is right.

And I told Dean, my book’s about this concept. And Dean’s like, “I want to help you with the infomercial.” And I was like, “I want you to help me with the infomercial.” And he text the other day, “I think I have the perfect host for your show.” I’m freaking out that all this stuff is happening. For me the market expansion is the book, Expert Secret and using it through an infomercial. I mean we’ll be doing a normal book launch and pushing through channels that we’re good at. But I see a very clear vision of how we can use Expert Secrets to create the market to get people to……

Because the hard thing with a small business owner, let’s say it’s a chiropractor. If I go and I’m like, “I want to show you this thing called Clickfunnels.” And he’s like, “Alright.” And I show it to him, “Look you can drag and drop and move things on the page.” And he’s like, “Isn’t that how all website builders work?” because he doesn’t build his website. It’s the consultant that they hired or the webmaster that does that. To them it’s not a big deal, so the only way to get to them is to become a consultant, which is why the consultant program is working so well.

I’m like, if we want to expand, we have to create people who are going to be using Clickfunnels. How do I create somebody? I show them the value they have within themselves. I show them that they’ve got talents and hobbies and skills and the thing that they goof off on the weekends because they love it, could actually become a career for them, if they learn how to structure it right. As soon as I can convince them of that, which is the goal of the book, then they need Clickfunnels the tool to be able to actually implement it. And that’s the magic.

So that’s how we are going to be expanding our market. That’s going to become our new front end. Don’t forget, unless you’re worried I’m shutting down webinars, after they go through the book the next funnel is the webinar. The message will be a little bit different. In fact…..it’s already been 21 minutes. I’m sorry. I’ve been sitting in the parking lot freezing because I’m so excited to hang out with you guys. So I’ll just tell you some more.

So what’s going to happen is they’re going to get the book, through radio, infomercials and online, all these different channels are gonna be pushing it. After they get the book, then there’ll be a survey they take. The survey will identify what type of business they are and then there’s a different webinar based on each of those types. And that’s the future, where we’re going. At least I think so. It could definitely change in the next few months. But that’s where we’re going. And Dean may decide next week that he hates me and not do an infomercial and I’d be totally cool with that.

But so far I said, that’s the direction I’m going. But for most of you guys, the book is a much harder direction, longer and I think that for every one of you guys, if you join the inner circle, 99% of you guys, I’d say, you need a webinar and you need to do it every single week. And you’d say, “I want to automate it.” And I’d say, “Go back to this podcast episode.” And I’d make them go back and listen to it and say, “After you have perfected your message then you have my permission to automate it, but not before.” And that’s kind of the same thing I wanted to mention today.

It’s been a year now. And those that heard that message a year ago, if you’ve been listening, you could be in the spot where Brandon and Kaelin are, where you did 600 thousand in sales on a webinar in November. Or maybe you haven’t done the webinar yet, and it could be both ways.

There’s a kid, I’m learning his story, 4 or 5 people keep telling me, I haven’t met him yet. In the Clickfunnels group, he’s an 18 year old kid who was a pizza boy a little while ago and he learned the perfect webinar and he did like, I don’t know, 3 or 4 hundred grand selling something through a webinar. And he’s a young kid, first time he’s ever done it. But he did it and he’s doing it consistently and that’s what you guys gotta do. So I’m asking you right now to recommit. Because I don’t want to have this conversation next year with you.

The conversation I want to have next year with you is, “Russell, I made so much money this last year. What should I do?” I’m going to say, “Come to Kenya with us and let’s build some schools together. But first we gotta get you to a spot where you can.” And the way we get you there is by having a consistent funnel. You’re bringing leads in every single day, new blood into your business every single day.

And it’s happening through a front end webinar. And that’s the model. So go back, marketinginyourcar.com search for the next twelve months, or business model for the next twelve months, something like that. And listen to that, and follow that like it’s the gospel truth, because it is.

There’s times for all these other funnels and all these cool things we’re doing, after you’ve acquired the customer. What’s cool is that you can focus on doing the live webinar once a week and the rest of the time you can focus on cool new products and services you can create for the existing audience, but all of your ad money, your time, your effort, your focus, should be on getting new people in through one consistent message. After you have that, then you can go back and create new things for those people. But that should be your focus.

There you go. This may be the longest marketing in your car in the history of all time. We’re at 24 minutes and 15 seconds. I’m going to bounce. I got some work to do. We’ve got a webinar today. I have no idea what the numbers will be, but I’m excited to do it. And then retiring this message, which is kind of sad. Not completely retiring, I’m just definitely changing it for the new funnels to be very specific.

The one…… for people wondering why, this webinar I talk about supplement funnels, which has been a double edged sword. It’s got a lot of people excited about supplements, but people who don’t have a supplement, there’s always just gap after bridges. So the new version webinars, webinars-plural, we identify who they are, and if they’re a retail store, we have a webinar showing them retail funnels. If they are an expert, we’ll show them expert funnels. There an ecommerce person will show them ecommerce funnels. We’ll be very specific to funnels we show in the webinar to the type of person who’s listening. So that is what we’re doing.

Because the first two years of this has been brute force. We try to get everyone with the best message we can create. The second ten years will be more like a sniper war where we craft the message perfectly for each audience. It will hopefully increase conversions, stick rate, decrease churn, and build the culture even better. Thanks everyone for listening. Appreciate you all, have an amazing day and I will talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.