You’re just one funnel away…
On this special two part episode you will hear the second part of Russell’s “One Funnel Away” presentation from Funnel Hacking Live. In this episode you’ll hear:
So listen here to find out how Russell went from nearly bankrupt to amazing success with Clickfunnels within just a few years.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone this is Russell again. Welcome to the next episode of Marketing Secrets. This is part two of the One Funnel Away presentation.
I hope you enjoyed yesterday’s episode. If you did like it I hope you have shared it and told people to go listen to it. Today is going to be the exciting conclusion of Russell’s bankruptcy and failure stories. I hope you enjoy it, it should be a lot of fun. Listen to it online at marketingsecrets.com, you can watch it, there’s a video there, you can share and see the actual presentation there as well. I hope this helps you, hope it gives you faith and hope in what you’re doing, what you’re creating and where you are trying to go with your business and people’s lives you are going to serve. With that said, enjoy my failures, I hope you guys have a good time with it, see you guys soon. Bye.
Now the pros and the cons of this. The pros, this is really, really awesome. As a beginning entrepreneur I was like, we nailed, lets scale this thing. I probably shouldn’t have done some of this stuff, but we got excited. If this worked here, we should hire more people. We started this and we went from this little thing with 5 or 6 of us to 2 years later we had about a 100 people operation, where this is the model we were doing. Cd’s calling them on the phone, selling coaching, having continuity and it grew really big.
During that time there were some really positive things that came from it, some negative things, some ups and downs, and I’ll share a lot of those things. One cool thing is that while this was happening and it was going really well, my name got out there, so I got a chance to go speak a lot, which is cool. I’d seen a lot of other people speak from stage, and this is where I’ve told you guys this story, anyone who’s gone from Perfect Webinar, I spent about 2 1/2 , 3 years on the road going to seminars, standing in front of a bunch of people like this, talking and trying to sell something and nothing happening, it’s a really horrible feeling. Has anyone done that before?
My first presentation was on a stage like this, probably had 300 people in the room. I did the presentation and tried to do what speakers do and close, hope everyone runs to the back. Nobody budged and then the guy forgot to turn the music on and it was crickets and I was just awkwardly walking off the stage, and then running. I was so embarrassed, when you have those events that are multi-speaker events and all the speakers are selling and everyone is bragging about their numbers, I knew that I didn’t want them to ask me my numbers, because not one person signed up, so I hid in my hotel room. I remember ordering coconut shrimp and Haagen Dazs Ice cream for every meal for the next two days, while I hid in the room eating it and watching movies because I didn’t want to go back downstairs. It was really bad and awesome at the same time, because coconut shrimp and Haagen Dazs is awesome.
But I did that and learned how not to sell and then I started learning from some amazing speakers and people, learning the process and how it works. All the stuff we talk about in the Perfect webinar, all the stuff we talked about day one, about creating belief and breaking belief patterns. All those things I learned on the road in front of people on stage. It was scary, but it was such a good time for me to learn it and understand that part of the process.
As we started to grow, I wanna make sure I cover all the cool things, we had a bunch of different offers we came out with. One of the ones that was more successful for us was a front end offer like this, called Micro Continuity. How many of you guys remember Micro Continuity? This is awesome. So this is the one, it’s probably 8 years ago now. We put it on an MP3 player from Hong Kong, it had 6 hours of this training and that was the funnel we put through.
We kept creating front end funnels to get people into this program and it worked awesome. We grew the company from nothing to 3 or 4 million dollars a year and it was doing awesome. At the time I started looking at other people in my industry. Hopefully one of you guys will get a good idea from this one. I had this funnel, we talk about the value ladder, I had this really cool value ladder here and I was ascending people up and I realized that I was the only person in the market that had a real value ladder. Everyone else was kind of doing stuff down here and that was it. I was the only person selling really expensive stuff.
So I started calling my friends. I called Mike Filsame, “Hey man, all of our customers, we call them and sell them these $5000 things, and lots of people buy that. You should do that.” And he’s like, “I don’t want a call center.” And I was like, “Do you want us to call your customers and sell it?” and he’s like, “Yeah.” So we hooked up with Mike and became his backend. I called up Frank Kern and same thing, we became his backend for a little while. We started calling up a whole bunch of people and then we started becoming the backend. So all these people had frontend funnels and we became the backend for a lot of them. That’s how we took the company from 3 or 4 million dollars to 10 million dollars and it became really big.
I was going to say big and fun, but I don’t think it became that at all. It became really big. We had 100 employees, we had 60 people on phones in a big, huge call center. We had 20 people doing coaching for all the things we were selling and then had about 20 people driving leads and customers and stuff like that. It got really big, and I don’t know if you guys notice this, but I’m really good and selling and stuff, but really bad at the management of stuff. I was not good at managing all these people and it kind of started getting too big.
This is about the time, I was telling you guys, if you read the Dotcom Secrets book, I started waking up and was like, “I do not like what I created.” I got so excited that I started building this thing and then one day I woke up and was like, huh, do I really want to do this?
I think half the conversations I have with inner circle members when they first come in is this, “Do you really want to build this business? Yes, that would work, but sometimes it’s horrible when you get there. Think it through. What do I actually want to do? Who do I want to become? Who do I want to be when I grow up?”
Luckily during that time, it was probably one of the most painful times in my life, but looking back now, it was probably one of the most important times in my life. We had this huge operation and everything was working and then one day in January, literally 11:30 in the morning, one of my sales guys came in and said, “I’m trying to run a credit card and it’s not working. I’m not sure what’s wrong.” I’m like, “That’s weird. Try one of the other merchant accounts, maybe there’s something there.” then someone else came in, “Hey all the continuity orders are failing, I’m not sure why.” Three or four people came in and I’m like, “What’s happening?” I logged into the backend system and not….at 11:37 or something like that, every sale stopped. No sales.
I was like, what is happening. I was freaking out so I called our merchant account company and there’s a busy signal. I call again, busy. Call again, busy. I can’t get a hold of anybody and all the sudden I start hearing from friends. “Dude, everything got shut down. Are you still able to process?” I’m like, “No, what’s happening.” “I don’t know, I don’t know.”
And soon I found out that it wasn’t me, I eventually found out that it was 3 or 400 people at the same time. Anyone who was doing any kind of continuity stuff, the merchant accounts basically came in and said, “Look, we think what you guys are doing might be illegal and we’re shutting all of you guys down and you’re guilty until proven innocent.” I was like, “What? I’ve got 100 people that I’m feeding. 100 people and their families, it turns into 100’s of people. You can’t just stop processing.” Finally after an hour I get through to somebody and the lady on the phone says, “Yep, we shut you down. Good luck ever getting another merchant account ever again. I gotta go.” Boom and hung up on me.
I was like, “What?” at the time I thought I had diversity. We had 9 merchant accounts, all through one company, different merchant accounts but all through one bank. I found out that is the equivalent of having one. Which is why I’m a big believer now in having multiple merchant accounts in multiple different banks, which is a lesson hopefully for everybody. If you don’t know Alex Rowe yet, I don’t know if Alex is in here. But meet Alex, he’s the man who can get you hooked up with lots of merchant accounts. He’s done that for us, he’s amazing.
But it was bad, finally we got a hold of these guys and I’m trying to figure some things out. Basically they said, “You’ve got to prove that you are a good guy.” So we went through, it took us two weeks for them to go through all our stuff, look at our documentation, look at all of our stuff. Two weeks, and they came back and said, “You’re right. You’re doing everything clean, everything is above board. We’ll turn your merchant accounts back on and you’re good to go.” I’m like, “Sweet.” And during that time, when there’s that kind of instability, sales guys are freaking out, they can’t handle any kind of instability, they’re leaving like crazy. People are walking out the door.
I was freaking out, we had all this payroll and no money coming in, so I’m paying it out of my own pocket, everything to just keep things afloat. Going through this process it’s getting scarier and scarier and finally the merchant accounts are back on, you’re a good guy. So you guys, we gotta do a launch really quick to make a bunch of money. So we put together this huge launch and push it out to our customer list and in a weekend we made $250,000, and I was like, “Thank you.” That’s so great. Monday we should get the money, we can pay payroll, I’m telling everyone, “Tell your wives and kids we’ll have money soon. It’s coming I promise. It’s in the bank, going to be here any day now.” And the money didn’t come. Monday it didn’t come, Tuesday it didn’t come, Wednesday it didn’t come. By Thursday I’m calling, “Where’s our money? We need this money.”
The guy looks at the account, “It’s definitely in there.” I’m like, “When’s it coming to our bank?” He’s like, “Well it’s not going to come to your bank.” And I’m like, “Why not?” and he’s like, “You’re on 100% reserve so we keep 100% of your money.” I was like, “What? That’s not good for me or for anybody. How am I supposed to be in business? I got people to pay.” He’s like, “That’s just how it works. The good news is that it looks like you are a legitimate company. No one’s charging back or refunding this money that we’ve collected so far, so what we’ll do is drop you down to 10% reserve.” I’m like, “Ah, thank heavens.” He’s like, “But the $250,000 you collected in the last week, we’re keeping that for the next 6 months as collateral to make sure nothing bad happens.”
I’m like, are you kidding me. We gotta create another funnel. So we make another thing, push it out there, make some money. We start paying payroll for whatever we can but everything’s collapsing around me. That started in January and that started happening at the same time we’re trying to find other merchant accounts at other banks. And all these other banks are like, “Oh yeah, we’re cool. Come in, we’ll give you a merchant account. This is how it works, you gotta make $100,000 a month.” I’m like, “Cool, we’re going to do that in like 2 days. I’m going to need 4 merchant accounts. We can make money. We just need you to give it to us after we make it.”
They’re like, “We’re cool, we’re good at that, don’t worry.” So okay, cool. We get a merchant account, get it all setup, drove a bunch of traffic, and twice we made over the $100,000 a month we were allowed within a day, day and a half, and they froze our accounts and said, “You made too much money too fast. We’re freezing your accounts. We’ll give this money back to you in 6 months.” I’m like, “6 months? Please stop doing this to me.” We ended up with 4 or 500,000 dollars locked up in merchant accounts and it kept getting worse and worse throughout this whole year. It was the hardest year of my life. It kept going down.
Every single day I’m laying off friends and family members and people who I loved and cared about and I’m coming in, “I don’t know what to do man. I’m so sorry. I gotta let you go.” It was such a dark time in my life with thing after thing after thing. I wish I could say from there it got better. That was an entire year, the next January started and one of our friends was doing an event in Vegas, I’m like, “I’m going to go out there and see what everyone…. I gotta re figure out my whole business. Everything’s completely collapsed.”
At the time, by the way, we were in this big, huge office we had rented, that we were leasing. I think it was 20,000 square feet because we all the call center and stuff. I went to the landlord and I’m like, “Hey man, I can’t afford to pay you anymore.” And he’s like, “Okay, well we’ve got a 3 year contract. If you don’t pay me, I’m going to sue you and you’re probably going to end up in jail.” Are you kidding me dude, I’m trying. He would not work with me at all, I had all this fear behind that.
So I’m in Vegas a year later, trying to ask friends what’s happening, what they’re doing in their business, and they’re trying to tell me their stories. I’m like, this is, I don’t even know what to do. That night I got an email on my phone from my dad, I opened the email and it was a shot in a gut. Probably the worst second in my life, that I read that. The email said, “Hey Russell. I’m so sorry.” My dad was doing my books at the time, but we had a bookkeeper in the office, and the bookkeeper was trying her best, but she didn’t know. She knew we were struggling and she didn’t want to stress me out, so she didn’t tell me how much we were struggling. It turns out what she had been doing is she had been paying the bills she could, and the one’s she couldn’t she was trying to not pay them and delay them. And to hide it from my dad and everyone else she was saying in Quickbooks that she paid bills, but then not actually paying them. So it looked like it was clear.
But he had gone through and audited it and found out that she hadn’t paid payroll taxes in almost a year. In the email my dad said, “Just so you know payroll taxes aren’t something where they fine you. If you don’t pay payroll taxes you’re going to go to jail. It’s over $150,000 you owe in payroll taxes.” I was like, that’s the end. It had been an entire year. Every penny I had ever earned was gone. All my people in my teams, it had all fallen apart. I’m sitting there like, “I don’t know what to do.”
The next morning I got on a flight from Vegas back to Boise. I get there and walk in and the call center is empty, all the guys are gone. There’s two people that are left and they said, “Just so you know, the call center across the road just recruited us and we all left. We’re out, see ya.” They walked out. I was like, “I owe the government $150,000, I have no one to help me sell. I don’t know what to do.” I want to quit, so bad I want to quit. But if I quit I go to jail. I also sold coaching to a lot of people I cared about, if I quit all these people that bought coaching from me, I can’t help them. That’s not right. That’s not the right thing to do. I don’t know what to do.
So I went to a bankruptcy lawyer, “How does this work man? I don’t know what to do. I gotta figure this out.” I kind of explained the whole process, told him about my lease. “The landlord says he’ll come after me, the government’s going to come after me. I don’t know what to do.” And he’s like, “The best thing to do is, I should come with you to your landlord and explain that you’re going into bankruptcy and maybe they’ll be nice to you.” So I’m like, “Alright.” He’s like, “Do you have any money?” I’m like, “No.” and he’s like, “What do you got in your pocket?” I was like, “100 bucks.” And he’s like, “Cool, give me $100 and I’ll come and I’ll tell the landlord you’re going bankrupt.” I’m like, “Alright man, here you go.”
So he comes with me, which is actually the best $100 I ever spent. He comes with me to the landlord and he’s like, “Russell’s screwed man, he’s going through bankruptcy. He just hired me. He can’t pay you. You can come after him, but he’s done.” It was this old man, he’s like, “He’s done. The Government’s coming after him. You’re screwed, don’t even try.” And basically convinced our landlord that it was a useless cause. So the landlord was like, “Alright, be out by Friday.”
And we had a big space with office cubicles and phones and craziness. So I’m like, “Okay, we’ll be out by Friday.” But 90% of my team was gone at this point. From 100 employees down to about 7 or 8. The few people that stuck by me, people like Brent Coppieters, love that guy to death. Brent and John and some of the people back then, Brent had taken a pay cut, a 50% pay cut and never…..amazing people.
So the few of us that were left, we were packing up stuff, we put up ads on Craiglist, we got tons of computer and crap, things we’d spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for, we were selling for hundreds of dollars just to get out of it. We made I don’t know, maybe 5 or 6 grand on all of our crap, getting rid of it. We had a huge dumpster, just throwing away everything we had ever created because we had to downsize. Trying to figure out how to get into a smaller building and how do we keep the people we have to have to be able to fulfill on coaching. We have to cut everything else that we have.
So we were downsizing everything, going out and the night we were moving, that Friday we were supposed to be out at midnight or whatever it was, I was sitting in the office, the desks were gone, everything was gone, all I had left was my laptop. I was sitting there, I had my socks on, I had some levi’s and I had no money. I was like, “We have to make some money or else we can’t even move into…I don’t know how to do anything.”
So I sent out an email to my list I had at the time, got a bunch of people to register for a webinar. I was sitting there in a chair with my laptop on my lap, doing a webinar, praying that something would happen. And that webinar saved us. That webinar made $150,000 in sales over the next 3 or 4 days, which gave me the money I needed to pay everyone to not leave, get a new office, get us moved in and get us stability so we could actually breath for a few minutes and figure out the next step, what do we want to be when we grow up.
So we downsized from 20,000 square feet to 2,000 square feet. And we had this really cool moment where we’re like, “What do we want to do when we grow up? What do we want to be?” And as painful as that process was, it was one of the coolest things ever because we didn’t have to keep going on this path. We could pick anything. That’s when I started thinking about, who’s our dream customer? Who do we really want to serve? What fires us up? What gets us excited?
And we started thinking through that and during this process, we started creating again and having fun. What should we do? I had a friend at the time who he had this website that was making him 2 or 3 thousand dollars a month and he got in some trouble, and I had a couple things making a little money at the time and he’s like, “I need to get rid of this site. Can you pay me some money?” So I paid him $20,000, he gave me this little website. This little machine that you zap and it gets rid of cold sores, and on autopilot it was making 2 or 4 thousand dollars a month and I was like, “Oh this is so cool.” So we had this little thing and I was like, “That little business just kind of runs. What if we had another one.”
So we started creating other ones. We had one in the couponing market, we set it up and had a guru in there, it started running and making money. Then we’re like, “What’s another one?” we did one with weight loss, and another. And in a year’s time we launched 12 different companies, each making different amounts of money. During that time is when we launched Neurocel, our supplement company, all these things were happening and it was starting to get exciting again. We were creating we were doing, doing the business instead of teaching the business, which was so much fun for us to do, to learn and see why this stuff works in this market, but not this market.
One of the things that would drive me crazy about teachers in my industry is that they come in and act like the marketing techniques that work in one space work everywhere. And I learned during that two or three period of time that that’s not true. Everything’s different. There’s intricacies in couponing versus business versus weight loss versus diet versus supplements. There’s differences and I came to respect that because we had a chance to do it in so many different businesses and different things.
We spent the next two or three years creating stuff and during that process, one of the really cool things is I go to Flipa.com all the time and try to find cool websites we could buy and turn to businesses. And there’s a website called championsound.com that was for sale. And it was this cool little email, text message auto responder for bands. I was like, “I’m going to buy that and we’re going to take it and niche it for every market. We’ll make email auto responders and text message auto responders for dentists, or chiropractors.” I was so excited.
It was 20 grand, we didn’t have that much money but I was like this is the future of our company. We have to do it. So we ended up buying this website from these guys off Flipa. We get the website and we’re trying to transfer it to our servers after we paid them the 20 thousand dollars. And as they’re trying to transfer it, they’re like, “You can’t have the Linux server, you need the Ruby server.” I’m like, “What does that mean?” They’re like, “It means that this is not coded in PHP, it’s coded in Ruby on Rails. You have to have a different kind of server.”I’m like, “What does that mean?” “It means you have to go over here and pay $800 a month for a new server.”
Are you kidding me, I don’t have $800 a month for a server. But we bought this thing, so we did and they installed it. Then it didn’t really work. I didn’t know what to do. None of my tech guys had ever used Ruby on Rails so I went to Odesk to hire some guys and they couldn’t fix it. I tried 5 or 6 guys and finally I was like, I wasted 20 grand. I was so upset and frustrated because I didn’t have that money.
On the way out of the office one day I was like, “I wonder if anyone on my list knows Ruby on Rails?” shot in the dark, I have no idea. So I send the email out to my little list at the time. Subject line was like, “Ruby on Rails, looking for a partner. If you know Ruby on Rails, I’m looking for a partner.” I said basically the story I just told you guys, “bought this thing, can’t make it work, if you know Ruby on Rails, become my partner, we’ll make a bunch of money with this thing together.” Sent the email out.
About an hour later I get an email from this guy in Georgia named Todd Dickerson, and Todd’s like, “Hey man, I know Ruby.” I’m like, “You do?” I looked at his picture and I was like, “You don’t look like a nerd. I don’t think you do.” And then I went to Facebook and I Facebook friended him, it was actually six years ago last week. I Facebook Friended him and he’s got a beautiful wife, he’s got a daughter. I’m like I don’t think he’s a coder. I don’t know if I believe that. He’s like, “Yeah man, shoot me the login, I’ll fix it.” I was like, “Whatever I have had 8 guys try to fix it for the last 4 or 5 months and nobody can do it. Whatever, here’s the login.” So he logs in and an hour later he’s like, “Okay, done. It’s fixed.” I was like, “What?” and he’s like, “Yeah, I got it fixed. I just did blah blah blah. And it worked.”
I’m like, “Dude, how did you do that?” and he’s like, “I just love Ruby on Rails. I’m amazing.” He didn’t say that, he’s super humble. But I was like, this guy’s amazing. I’m like, “I have all these other things. Want to help me with these other things?” So Todd came and we started working on this other project. We had an idea for an auto webinar, Todd built out the software behind the scenes, which was Clickfunnels verson 0.0, pre-everything. He built this auto webinar software because Mike Filsame had been talking about auto webinars. Rick Shephard had put in a webinar report. A couple of guys had started talking about auto webinars but nobody had done one. No one was really doing them.
So Todd custom built this whole platform so we could do them, we launched an auto webinar through that and in that auto webinar we made a million dollars in 90 days. The first thing I did from that million dollars is took the money and paid off the IRS and I was like, I’m free. I’m not going to jail. The IRS is paid off, the fines are paid off. That auto webinar literally saved me, literally gave me freedom. Up to that point every night when I went to bed at night I was like they could come knock on my door. I have not paid payroll tax in that long. And that webinar freed us.
We kept doing thing after thing, and what’s funny with Todd and Dylan used to design half of these things, just the contract, he’d design these pages and Todd would take them and code them up and make these funnels. He did funnel after funnel after funnel. We probably had 15 different companies, within those company 2 or 3 funnels. We probably had 40 funnels we built over, thing after thing after thing. And the last funnel we actually built the old school way was the Neurocel funnel. That’s one of the ones that blew up big and made tons of sales, we were having a bunch of fun with it and about that time is when Todd was like, “We should really create something so I don’t have to keep creating websites for you every single day.”
And that was where the idea came for Clickfunnels. So we started that project in front of a whiteboard, like we talked about yesterday. We mapped this whole thing, and Todd went to work to build Clickfunnels and we partnered with Dylan to build the editor and the UI. And then fast forward 7 or 8 months later, we came and we were like this thing is going to change the world. I was so excited. I was like, “We’re going to do a free trial.” And I think the very first month our goal was to get 10,000 members the first month. I’m like, this is going to be the greatest thing in the world.
So we put it out there we created the first funnel, had all the stuff in there, there was a free trial, we had a bunch of people lined up to promote it, we launched it, there were crickets. People came and then left. I was like, “Dude, do you not understand what I’m giving you? I made that page you’re looking at, it’s really good.” Nobody got it, why don’t they get it? There’s something wrong with my messaging. So we changed the funnel again, launched it again, a few of you guys signed up and that was it. They hit it and then they left. We tried again and again. We rebuilt that funnel not once or twice or three times or four times or five times. It was six times it took us before the Clickfunnels funnel worked.
The sixth time was because one of my friends, Mike Filsame invited me out to his event and he’s like, “Hey Russell, I want you to come and sell Clickfunnels, I think it’s awesome.” I was like, “Dude, Mike, nobody’s buying Clickfunnels. We gotta figure out our next deal or figure out something because it’s not working.” He’s like, “No, my people need it, you need to come speak on it. You gotta sell it for $1000.” I’m like, “It’s a free trial and nobody even wants it.”
So Mike’s event was happening that weekend, I was literally sitting in my office watching the event streaming and as I was sitting there I started writing my webinar and I had my slides open, I was following the Perfect Webinar script that I had been working on for ten years. I started filling in the blanks, started making this webinar, true to the Perfect Webinar Script. I literally was watching it, adding the things in while watching Mike’s event happen. That day I finished the slides, next morning I jumped in a plane and flew there. Got to California, put the slides up on the thing, okay here we go.
I started it and the title slide was “My weirdness funnel is currently make $17,947 per day”, talking about the Neurocel funnel and how you can knock it off in less than ten minutes. Showed the first slide, started going through and when we got to the end, got to the stack and the close, we did it and 30% of the room jumped up and ran to the back, jumping over the tables, fighting to get back there. I was like, we did it. That was the message, that was the key. Now I know how to sell Clickfunnels.
We took that message, went back and as a lot of you guys know, especially inner circle members, we started doing webinars every single day, sometimes two a day. One time I did three in a day, which was really hard. Over and over again, I did that webinar live over 70 times over the next year and a half and we went from being a startup with no members to after the end of last year we had over 10,000 members, after this year we have over 30,000 members and it’s continued to grow and grow and grow. And it was that one funnel that changed everything for me.
So this process, for all of us you guys, is an up and a down. It’s always happening and all of you guys are somewhere in this wave right now. Some of you guys are at the top riding it, some of you guys are at the bottom going to crash. Some of you guys are somewhere in between. Always going up and down, but if nothing else at this event, I want you guys to all understand that no matter where you are, there’s hope. It might not be this funnel. I can’t tell you how many funnels flopped. I guarantee I have failed at more funnels than anyone else in this room because we tried over and over and over again. Because of that we found out what worked. The only way to do that is to do it over and over and over again.
It’s a lot easier now, I promise you it’s a lot easier than what we used to do. Poor Todd and Dylan had to custom code every single thing, every single time. Now you can test things really fast. The first time I met Trey, first call he said, “Russell, I’m going to launch a funnel a week, every single week.” And I watched as he launched a funnel, and another funnel and another funnel, he had some marginal success, a little success, more success, more success. I saw him launch a funnel last year, one funnel and within 90 days became the biggest selling funnel in the history of the world.
I was talking to some of the guys at affiliate summit. They said there’s never been a funnel that’s made more money in a shorter period of time than one of Trey’s funnels. I’m not privy to share all his numbers and stats, but it was insane. And it came from doing a funnel a week until he hits the one that just explodes. You don’t know what that’s going to be. It’s important, that’s why this tool is so important. Because you can do that, you can test and try over and over and over again.
You’re just one funnel away…
On this special two part episode you will hear the first part of Russell’s “One Funnel Away” presentation from Funnel Hacking Live. In this episode you’ll hear:
So listen to this first portion of Russell’s story, and don’t forget to come back for the second half.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone this is Russell Brunson, welcome to a special Marketing Secrets episode where I’m going to let you guys see behind the scenes at one of our presentations at last year’s Funnel Hacking Live.
So this presentation is one that I was really nervous at giving, it was called “One Funnel Away” which is the whole theme of the last Funnel Hacking Live event. It’s something that I wanted to share my failures, my bankruptcy stories, the ups and the downs. Everyone here talks about the highlight reel; I wanted to share the other side of it. I don’t typically release sessions from Funnel Hacking anywhere but this one had such a big impact on our audience and let people know that everyone, including me, especially me, has big ups and big downs, yet we’re just one funnel away from success each time. So as we’re preparing for the next Funnel Hacking Live, which will be coming live soon at Funnelhackinglive.com, I was re-watching some of the presentations and saw this one and wanted more people to have this.
So I’m going to break this up into two episodes. This is episode number one, go check it out. Leave me a comment if you like it, subscribe, tell other people about it and hopefully it will give you some hope and faith that the path you are on is right and this process is going to get you what you want and desire and let you serve other people. So that’s the game plan, check out this episode and I will see you on part two tomorrow.
Okay, so what I want to do is go on a journey with you guys, my journey, which started way back over here on my timeline, in my back story. So those who know me or have heard about me or know anything about this, initially I started learning about business when I was a 12 or 13 year old kid, sitting there with my dad watching the news and I was like, “I can’t believe he hasn’t told me to go to bed yet. This is the coolest thing in world.” And the news was on and when it ended Mash came on and I was like, “He must think I’m asleep or something. He hasn’t told me to go to bed.” I’m sitting there trying not to move, I didn’t want to let him know. I’m sitting there watching Mash with my dad, I thought it was the coolest thing in the whole world.
Then when Mash got done, he still didn’t say anything, I was like, “He’s gotta be convinced I’m asleep, this is whole cool.” Then the next thing came one and it was an infomercial, a late night infomercial with Don Lepre. How many of you guys remember Don Lepre? Yes, just an amazing person, he had an infomercial and I was so grateful for his passion and excitement, talking about what he was doing. The infomercial was about how to place tiny little classified ads and you can make a fortune. And it was it was the coolest thing. I remember sitting there listening to him and I was like, “This makes so much sense.” I’m looking at my dad like, are you paying attention to what’s happening? The whole thing made so much sense to me.
He said, “I took a classified ad, put it in the newspaper and I made 30 dollars and told my friends and family, ‘I made $30. I started a business this weekend,’ and they all laughed at me. So then I took that same ad and ran it in a thousand newspapers the next month and made 30 thousand dollars.” And I was like, mind blown. I’ve been ruined from that day on when it comes to the world. I can’t not do something like this. I was so excited, saved a bunch of money mowing lawns and everything and eventually I bought Don Lepre’s kit on the infomercial and I read it all and learned it and wasn’t able to actually do anything though because I didn’t have the money to direct mail and things like that.
But that’s how I first heard about the direct response market. I remember after I got Don Lepre’s kit I was so excited I was at the grocery store with my mom and after we were walking out, on the checkout stand there was a magazine called “Small Business Opportunity Magazine” that a whole bunch of cartoon people on the front of it. How many of you guys have seen that magazine before? That’s it? This is the greatest swipe file of direct response ads ever.
So I didn’t know it at the time, but there were thirty things, how to get rich quick. I’m like, sweet, I want to get rich quick. That’d be awesome. So I had my mom buy this magazine and I went home. If you look at it, it’s 140 pages of ads and four pages of articles, it’s pretty awesome. I was looking at every single ad, “Oh my gosh. I can sell gold chains at the mall and make money.” So I called this number for a free info kit. Free info kit gets sent to my house. And the next page it’s like something else. Page after page, all 140 pages I called every single 800 number to request the free info kit.
And about a week later, I started getting these gifts in the mail. At first it was 2 or 3 letters, then it was 10 or 15, then it was 60 or 70 letters. And I think those companies started selling my name to other mailing lists, because soon it was hundreds of letters. And the mailman could not physically shove the junk mail in the mailbox anymore because there was so much coming in. So I get home from junior high. I’d come home and walk in the house and see it on the bar. I’d see two or three letters for my parents and Russell’s stack of junk mail. They’re like, “There’s your junk mail.” And I’d take it my room and open it and read these things like, this is so cool. And all these money making ideas.
So that happened at a young age. Unfortunately I couldn’t do anything, well I tried once. This one person convinced me that direct mail was the key and all you do is get a list of buyers who bought similar products and write a sales letter and you mail it to those people and a percentage will buy. I’m like, “Awesome.” The only problem is I can’t afford a mailing list, I don’t have any stamps or envelopes or anything. So I’d done something, I made a little money doing some chores. So I asked my mom to take that money and instead buy stamps and bring me home stamps. So she brought me home 38 stamps. That’s how much money I’d made.
I had 38 stamps and I’m like, “This is so awesome.” I used to tell my brothers and sister and parents, my parents didn’t tease me, but my brothers and sisters did. I was like, “I’m going to be a millionaire any minute now. This is going to work.” And they’d be like, “Oh, are you a millionaire yet?” and totally make fun of me. So I had these 38 stamps and I’m like, “If I can get 10% of these people to buy, that’s 3 people. If I sell a $50 product that’s $150. I’ll be rich.” I didn’t know what to do, they talked about sales letters so I was like, “I’ll write a sales letter.” So I printed it out on blue paper because blue paper they’d be more likely to read. So I put it on my parents computer, wrote a sales letter, printed out 38 copies of it. I couldn’t afford an envelope so I just folded it and stapled it.
I didn’t actually have a mailing list, so I opened up the white pages and flipped through and randomly picked 38 names, I’m like, “This is going to be huge.” So I wrote it, put my stamp on it, and all my savings and put it in the mailbox and I was like, “I’m going to be rich. This is going to be amazing.” I sent it out, told everybody, “When this gets out, it’ll be over. I’ll be able to move out, get my own house. It’s going to be amazing.” Unfortunately nobody responded. That was the only time I was able to invest. I didn’t have the money to buy a classified ad in the newspaper so I just kind of kept reading all this junk mail and learning from all these people.
A couple of years later I got into wrestling and forgot about making money. But there was this seed that had been planted. I wrestled through high school, had a lot of fun, got a college scholarship, wrestled through college. When I was going to college I met my insanely beautiful wife, that most of you guys….if not she’s here hiding. I met her and fell in love really quick and spent the next 3 or 4 months trying to convince her, in fact that was probably the hardest sale I ever had, to convince her I was the right one. Did you see that picture? I was kind of a geek, not going to lie. Anyway, I convinced her to marry me and it was amazing. About the time we got engaged, I realized my dad said, “When you get married, I’m not going to keep supporting you. That’s when you become a real man.”
I’m like, “What? But dad I’m wrestling.” And he’d always send me money to pay for food and stuff but he’s like, “No, if you get married, you’re on your own.” I was like, “Crap, I want to get married but I don’t want to grow up yet.” And my wife, fiancé at the time, she was working and making money and got a second job to support us and I was wrestling and didn’t have any money. I’m like, “I gotta do something.” And luckily the greatest thing in the world happened, that happens to a lot of us. I was up late at night stressing out about this and then this little thing popped up on TV, it was an infomercial.
It was this guy talking about how people are making money with these little websites and that they were doing an event at Holiday Inn the next day and you come and get tickets. I’m like, “Oh! This is it.” So I called the number and get my tickets to Holiday Inn and show up and it’s a little, tiny room with 50 really desperate people sitting there. I get there and there’s a dude onstage all in a suit and tie and I’m like, “Whoa, that guy looks rich.” And then he started doing this thing and within 5 minutes he closed me on this $50 thing. I ran in the back and had my one credit card with a $300 credit limit, that’s all I had earned so far. So I bought my $50 dollar thing and I’m like, “I’m going to make so much money with this.”
And then he pitched on a website and it was $3 grand and everybody’s running back buying websites and I’m like, “I can’t afford a website. Dangit.” And then he pitched website hosting at $80 a month and all these things. They’re teaching, “If you call your bank you can get your credit extended.” I’m like, “Oh, sweet. I didn’t know that.” So I’m calling the bank like, “Hey can you make my credit line a thousand dollars.” I’m learning all these things, getting my credit card bigger, which was kind of cool. The I bought everything he told me. I needed the whole thing, so I buy it all. He convinced me, he’s like, “Paypal is evil. You have to have a merchant account. And it’s $6000 for a merchant account.” I’m like, “I don’t have $6000 yet.” And he’s like, “Well you can’t make money online without a merchant account. $6 grand.”
But I couldn’t afford that, but I had everything else. I went home and I was like, “cool, I have a domain name, I got hosting, a thousand dollars worth of internet web stuff.” I jumped online and I’m like, “I’m going to have a website.” I was getting excited. I started Googling things and eventually within 15 minutes I realized website hosting is not $80 a month, I realized a domain name is not $1000. I was like, crap I got taken. I was freaked out.
So I ended up calling the next day, I was like, “My son is a minor and he was at your event last night and he charged all his credit cards and he needs to be out of this contract.” And they got me out of the contract and gave me my money back. That’s one trick, if you ever need to get out of a contract, it’s worked almost every time. So those are the real Dotcom Secrets.
So at that point I was in, I was like, “Oh my gosh. I need to sell stuff on the internet. That started this thing about the time my wife and I were getting married and I was trying to sell stuff. I was selling all sorts of things. I remember initially thought it was eBay. Maybe people make money on eBay. I remember driving to the thrift store buying everything I could find that I thought was worth value. On my bike, with grocery sacks full of crap, riding my bike back home. I bought a Michael Jackson record. I was like, “Records are so old, this has got to be worth hundreds of dollars.” I ended up selling it for 13 cents on eBay. I was so depressed. I was boxing and shipping things out and when all was said and done I made $40 or $50 but my costs were $150-200. I was going and trying to find boxes for all of these weird things I had bought. It was just horrible.
I was sitting at the post office with 18 different boxes of weird things, records and all these things. And there’s this dude standing there with a big box full of cd’s. hundreds and hundreds of cd’s, and I’m here with a wheel barrel full of odd boxes and I’m like, “Dude, what are you selling?” and he’s like, “Oh I sell information products.” I was like, “What does that mean?” and he’s like, “All these cd’s have info burned on them and people pay me and I ship them a cd.” I’m like, “Is it the same cd?” and he’s like, “Yeah, I have a cd burner. I just burn them. Then I put them in these things and send them out.”
I was like, “Are you kidding me?” They’re all the same size. I could just buy one box, it would be so much easier. So that’s when we started talking about information products. I was like, “I didn’t know that was even a thing.” I got all excited about information products and started Googling stuff and started learning about information products.
I ended up buying this cd and it was a cd that 8000 coloring book pages for kids and the guy was selling it, I emailed him and said, “This cd is cool. Can I buy the rights to this cd, I want to sell it?” and he was like, “I’ve never done that before, but sure for $200 I’ll sell you the rights and you can sell it too.” I’m like, “Sweet.” So I gave him $200 that I didn’t have and he gave me the rights and I had the cd and basically all I had to do was burn it on a cd burner and I could mail it out as many times as I wanted. And he had a big long sales letter he let me use, so I put his sales letter up and started trying things.
What was cool, I started making sales. Not a lot, every other week it would make a sale for $20. I would burn the cd and ship it out and I was like, “This is so cool.” Information products became the thing and I was trying to figure out how that whole thing worked and I started bumping into people like Yanik Silver and all these different internet marketing guru’s and watching what they were doing, selling information products and I was just hooked at that point.
About that time I started watching what they were doing and I started learning and creating different things. In fact, one of my very first products ever, does anybody in this room remember the product Zip Brander? Three people. I had all these info products and I was buying resell rights to other people’s products and I’m selling these things. And I was like, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a way if when I sent this digital file to somebody, when they first opened it, instead of just getting the file they see an ad for my product and then they see the file? That was my first light bulb. It’s like zipping a file, but when you zip it would be branded and when they open it, they see your ad first. I was like this is it. I thought this was it. That was my idea, I thought it was going to change the world as we know it.
So I bought zipbrander.com and I remember Arman Morin at the time was one of the guys I was studying. I was like Arman is so cool. Every one of his sites were so similar and I’m looking and Arman always had a big header graphic with his picture with his arms folded with a suit coat on. I was like, that’s what I need. So I got a picture of me folding my arms in a suit coat. And he had a header, so I had a header that looked just like his. His were always Ecover Generator so I was like Zipbrander, looked identical. This is where my funnel hacking started. He had this big long sales letter. I was like, this looks weird, but Arman’s doing it so I’m going to do it.
So I looked at his sales letter and wrote my own based on that. Then I was like how do I create this, I didn’t know that. My first thought is I should just become a computer engineer. That would be the coolest thing. I want to make software. So I switched my major to Computer Information Systems so I could learn how to code. It was about the time the semester was changing. So I get to class the first day and the teacher gets up there and starts talking about code and databases and all these things and structures and I was sitting there like, “oh crap. I have no idea what he’s talking about. Not even a little bit.” Within about 15 seconds I realized I am not a coder and never will be a coder. I couldn’t even understand. I thought it was a Spanish class or something. I was like I don’t even know what he’s saying.
But I didn’t know how to change my major again, so I just kind of stayed in it. I kind of got depressed, that was my one idea. I guess I can’t do it. And then I remember I was listening to a tele-seminar. I was at a wrestling tournament and we were driving to California, it was a 16 hour drive. I downloaded on my, it was pre-iPod’s, it was this tape player thing, a whole bunch of tele-seminar’s that Arman had done. I’m listening to these things in the back of the car where all these other wrestlers are partying and having fun and listening to music and I’m listening to these seminars. They were totally making fun of me the whole time, if you meet any of my wrestling buddies, they relentlessly made fun of me the entire trip. “You’re such a nerd. You’re never going to be able make money.” I’m like, “I swear I will.”
So I’m listening to these the whole way and on one of these things like 22 hours into this thing Arman says, “I don’t code software. I go to Scriptlance and I pay guys in Romania and India hardly anything to build stuff.” And I was like, Arman’s not a programmer? I thought he was a programmer. There are people in India who can do this? So literally that night I jumped on Scriptlance and actually prior to that I had tried to hire a company to do it and they had quoted me $5 thousand. I was like, “Okay, I don’t have that.”
So I took the same description I had given these guys and posted it on Scriptlance and instantly I got, all these people started bidding on it. One guy was like, “I’ll do it for $5000.” “I’ll do it for $2000.” “For $1000.” “For $500” and it came all the way down to this guy in India who was like, “I’ll do it for $20” I was like, “I got $20” So I picked him.
He was like, “So this is how I’m going to do it.” I was like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Just do it.” He spent 2 or 3 days and sent it back, “Here it is.” I tried it. Zipped a file and opened it and my ad showed up and I was like, “you did it. Oh my gosh.” And he’s like, “yeah, thanks for the $20.” And I was like, “No, this is going to be huge. I’m going to make millions of dollars and I feel guilty giving you $20, can I give you an extra hundred?” and he’s like, “Yeah.” So I gave him $100 and I felt good about it.
That was my very first software product that I ever did and it didn’t make me millions. I probably made 10-20 grand with that product. But it was the first one that I had a sales letter, started driving traffic, doing Google ads, I was finding JV, all these things and I started selling it and that was the first thing that made me any money. Isn’t that exciting? How many of you guys want Zipbrander? The first 30 people in the back….just kidding. It doesn’t work anymore. The coding stopped working 10 internets ago. So it’s done.
But that was my first software product, it was so cool. About that time was when I started learning more about info products. That when the Potato gun came out, the potato gun DVD. All these things, doing all these little businesses and none of them were huge smashing, million dollar successes. I didn’t pull a Dan Henrie and read a book and 5 months later made a million bucks. I was like, “Hey I made 5 grand here. Oh I made 200 dollars here.”
These little things kept happening, it was so cool. And every project did a little better. It was like slow momentum, every one did a little better than the last one because I got more customers coming in and more people. I kept making things in different markets, potato guns and all these sorts of different things and every one of them got a little better and it was fun. I remember back then I started doing tele-seminars and I’d get 30 people online and I’d talk about something and sell it at the end and some people would buy it and it was so exciting. That was the start of this whole thing for me.
Then one of my friends, BJ, he’s sitting over here. He was a wrestler in Nebraska, I wrestled at Boise State, it was my senior year, I’d made pretty good money. Probably $150-200,000, somewhere in there my senior year. He’d heard about and Boise State was wrestling Nebraska and we’re sitting there wrestling and we’re glaring at each other because we’re opposite teams and afterwards he’s like, “Hey man, someone told me you’re making money. Is that true?” I was like, “Yeah.” And he’s like, “How are you doing it?” So we talked about it a little bit.
We flew back to our places to finish out college and we kind of talked back and forth for a little while. Then after college got done he’s like, “Hey man, I want to do what you’re doing. Can I get a job?” I was like, “You want a job?” and he’s like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “What would you do all day?” and he’s like, “I don’t know. I’ll do what you’re doing.” I’m like, “okay, can we talk about marketing stuff.” He’s like, “I love talking about that.” I’m like, “This will be so cool. I have no one to talk about this stuff.” I thought it was just me.
I’m like, “So you’re actually into this stuff.” He’s like, “Yeah man.” I’m like, “Okay, yeah I’ll give you a job. Come on out.” So he jumps on a plane, flies to Boise and literally moves into our office. Slept in our office for 6 months. He’s like, “so how does this work?” I’d never had an employee before. “I don’t really know either. I’ll pay you, we can talk about marketing and sell stuff and it’ll be awesome.” Me as an entrepreneur, I was in this mode of eat what you kill. I’d sell something, make a bunch of money and I was like, sweet. Then we wouldn’t do anything for 4 or 5 months, then create something, sell it, make a bunch of money and that’s the model I was on for a long time.
Then BJ came and wanted to be an employee and I was so excited. I’m like, “sure.” He’s an employee and the weirdest thing happened. Every two weeks he wanted to get paid whether we made money or not. I had never heard that. I was like, “Okay, here’s some more money.” And then two weeks later, more money. I was like, oh crap we haven’t sold anything for a long time. Then he had some other friends who came along like, “This is cool. I want to work for you too.” I’m like, “Alright come on over. Let’s get jobs.” So I gave them jobs, his buddies and his wife and some other people. I got all these friends that want to talk about marketing with me, this is so fun.
So we had all these people coming over but the problem was that every two weeks they wanted to get paid, but we weren’t selling anything. So I’d go lock myself in the back room and be like, “Don’t bug me guys, I gotta make money so we can all hang out again.” So I’d close the door and start working and selling stuff. They’d be like, “Dude can we help you?” I’d be like, “Shut up! If you talk to me I can’t make money to pay you, so go away.” They’re like, “We feel bad, we want to help you Russell.” So I’m like, “I don’t have time to train you, otherwise we can’t make money to pay payroll.” That was this thing.
What’s interesting is, this is one of my first lessons as an entrepreneur, that was tough. We had 5 or 6 people at the time. We hired this video guy that was….there’s so many side stories, I can’t tell you all of them. He was an Indian guy who had shorts up to here and had a braid that went past his shorts. Because he told me in the interview, “Yeah, I’m a video guy.” I’m like, “Are you kidding me? We could do videos!” and he’s like, “Yeah, I got all sorts of video stuff.” So we hired him and it turned out he didn’t know anything about video at all.
But I didn’t dare to fire him because I had never fired anyone and I was so scared. Everyday we’re like, “I wish he would just quit. I don’t dare to fire him.” I don’t know what to do. All these weird learning things. This went on for a while. I was launching something every week trying to make money to cover payroll and it was this huge thing and became horribly not fun for a long time. It kept getting worse and worse to the point where it was December, it was the beginning of December, it was freezing cold and I was looking at everything and every penny I’d ever made was gone. Every idea I had how I could hustle and sell to different markets was gone. I was just drained, I didn’t know what to do.
It was Christmas time, I was outside and I went to go hang up lights around my house, and someone had sent me an iPod Nano and Stu MacLarin had done an event, I don’t even know if he knows this, he sent me the links, so I downloaded the links to his event on this iPod, plug it into my ears and start hanging up Christmas lights, which I had never done before, it was a horrible job. Turns out you can hire people for really cheap to do that and the lights look really straight. Mine were like, they looked really bad. I kept stapling through the wires and kill the lights. It was bad. And my fingers were so numb. I had this little light coat on and my fingers were so numb and I had to have my gloves off to squeeze the thing and I’d put them back in to get warm and I’d go back and I didn’t want to go back inside and get warm because I was so depressed.
I knew that the next payroll was coming up in a week or so and I was like, I don’t have money. I don’t know what to do. Tomorrow I need to go in and tell these guys or it’s going to be really awkward when payroll does come and I’m like sorry guys. So I have to tell everyone this. So I stayed outside in the cold because I didn’t want to go in and I was trying to think. So I’m stapling these Christmas lights around the house as I’m listening to this audio. In the audio there’s two different speakers talking about different business models. Back then no one was calling these things funnels, but they talked about these different business models that they were doing.
One of them was an offline guy, his name is John Olmos, some of you guys have heard about him, he’s the guy that taught me about the attractive character. He said, “I have this thing I’ve been doing where I create these cd’s and tell everyone it’s so controversial that I can’t put it on the internet.” Which is the funniest thing ever. “Because of that you have to pay me $5 and I’ll ship you this cd.” He said, “What happens is I ship them this cd but then that customer financed me sending them a sales letter.” I was like, that is brilliant, we gotta do that. I remember I filmed this cd like two years earlier, or a DVD. I was like, we could do that. We could burn that DVD and we could start sending that out.
So that was the first presentation, John Olmos. The next presentation was this guy named Matt Bacak, who’s become a close friend since then. Matt was talking about his business model, he said, “What I do is send out cd’s and people who bought cd’s, I call them on the phone and we sell them coaching.” And I was like, “You can call people on the phone.” I’m an internet nerd but I was like, “Wait..” and I was super scared but I knew there was a guy that worked for me at the time, one of my 5 or 6 friends, who had sold things on the phone before
All the sudden I was like, “Oh my gosh. What if we figured out something we could do where we could save this thing. It might actually be possible.” I’m started getting more excited. I’m hanging up Christmas lights and I’m just like, this funnel was going through my head and I’m like okay I think I’ve figured out a blend of what these two guys are saying, it could actually work.
So by the time I got done hanging up Christmas lights I texted all of them, “Guys, you don’t know this yet, we’re about to go bankrupt, but I got an idea that I think can save it. Let’s meet tomorrow morning early, I’m going to walk you guys through what I think could actually save this business.” Send.
They’re all texting back, “What? We’re going through bankruptcy.” And I’m like, “Yeah, we’re about to.” Luckily they all came in the next day and I’m like, “Okay you guys, I got a model. This is what we’re going to do. Remember that DVD I did like two years ago? We’re going to take that, it’s going to be a free DVD, it’s going to be so controversial we can’t sell it on the internet. We’ll charge $4.95 shipping and handling. We’ll send this DVD out to them and inside the DVD we’re going to have a sales letter where we’re going to sell $5500.” I don’t know why we said that price, but they’re like, “cool, what are we going to sell for $5500?” And I’m like, “I don’t know. What do you guys want to sell?”
So we had our white board and we’re like, “If someone is going to give us $5500, it would have to be something amazing.” And we made this huge list for 2 hours of all the amazingness. I was like, “That would be awesome, but I’m not willing to do half of that stuff.” We’re not going to have them sleep at my house, we’re not going to…we crossed out all these things. I’m like, “I’m actually willing to sell this. I think people would actually buy that. That would be insane.”
So we took that and at the same time we added a newsletter. So if somebody bought the cd they joined a newsletter that was $37 a month. So they came here, joined the newsletter, $37 a month. And that was the funnel. Back then we didn’t have Clickfunnels so luckily we had one or two nerds still working for us that were able to put these pieces together and we had this really rudimentary, horrible looking funnel and it was live within a day and we’re like, “Okay let’s try it.” At the time I had a little tiny email list, this is pre-Facebook, this is Myspace days. So we push some traffic to this and we end up selling a couple hundred of these cd’s. In the cd we shipped out to them came a sales letter talking about this and it put people in a continuity program and then we called everybody about the cd, “Hey you bought the cd, how would you like to come to Boise and we’re going to give you this.” This was our hail mary pass. Please let this work.
We did that, we focused on it. We drove traffic to it, and when all was said and done, over the next two week period of time we got 800 people to get our free cd. From that, the way we used to do it is everybody was on continuity. So we had 800 people that were on this $37 continuity, but it was free for a month, so we weren’t making any money here. But we had 800 people’s phone numbers who we were able to call.
So we started calling them, and we didn’t know anything about phone sales or anything. We were like, “Hey man, you bought this cd, you want to come hang out with Russell?” They were like, “Yeah.” And in that two week period of time we sold 10 people at $5500 a piece, which ended up being $55k and that funnel saved Christmas. Is that awesome? It’s awesome.
I was able to pay all of our payroll. We had some money left over, it was awesome. And the cool thing is 30 days later, this thing started and all these people were on continuity and suddenly we had a business. This is when I learned the power of continuity. David Frye, who’s one of my favorite people in the whole world, he’s here in the audience I think, he used to always say, “Until you have continuity you don’t have a business.” And I never understood that until this. There’s David smiling over there. I love that guy. Now I found out, I had all these people.
So what happened, I don’t know the math, 800 times $37 a month, it’s like $25 k a month and we knew we have continuity now. Every single month we have $25k, that means I can pay for employees. I realized, you don’t hire employees before you have continuity. Now we had continuity. Now we actually had people covered and we could actually focus and think and that was the first funnel that saved things and turned it around for us.
Pretend this message was for you and take it to heart.
On today’s episode Russell and Steven talk about how they and others have been able to find their voice, figure out what they’re good at and be successful. Here are some of the cool things you will hear in this episode:
So listen hear to find out what you need to do to make your business successful.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell. Welcome to the camping edition of Marketing Secrets Podcast. Hey you guys, I wanted to do a really special podcast today because I think for some reason that a lot of people thought this whole entrepreneurship business was going to be easy and they’re going to get rich quick and all these types of things and the reality is, it’s hard. It’s really hard, especially the first two or three years.
You’ve got to find your voice, create your brand, build a movement, create products people actually want, figure out what you’re selling and how you’re selling it. There’s a lot that goes into it initially and I think that sometimes we get seduced by how quick and easy it is. Because overnight success stories of people making a million dollars in five months, come on the back of three or four years of work and effort and time.
Recently one of our coaching clients, they’d been struggling, and I saw they were doing the motions and weren’t having success and I realized that the reason was they hadn’t put the time in ahead of time. I sent them a voxer, about a 15 minute vox message that went over this. I edited out from that message all the stuff that related to them, because it doesn’t matter who they are, but it was a message that I think everybody needs to hear and should hear. Because you have to realize there’s a lot that goes into it. Maybe there’s another business you can start, maybe you can go start an Amazon business or things like that where you just need to buy a product and post it and that’s how it is, but if you want to be a leader, expert, change the world, it takes time.
People go to school for 12 years to try to get a job that pays them 50-100 grand a year. If you’re trying to become a multi-millionaire, you think that’s going to happen overnight. It takes energy. So I want you guys to listen to this voxer, hopefully it’s a coaching call for you. Think about the effort you’ve got to put into it, the team you need to build, who you need to become to have those huge successes. Another thing I talk about, a couple of people I mention. Anthony, I’m talking about Anthony DiClementi from Biohacking Secrets. I talk about Kaelin, if you look up lady boss weight loss, you’ll see Kaelin. I mention a couple of other inner circle members by name, I may not have said their full name, but that’s who they are, so you have some context. But listen to this voxer, use it as a personal coaching call for yourself and I hope that it gets you excited and fired up to put in the effort you need to take over the world and change people’s lives, so there you go, talk to you soon.
Steve Larsen: Hey what’s going on everyone, this is Steve Larsen and I work for Russell, I am his assistant and he’s asked me to go and clean up a lot of this podcast. So as you listen to this episode, just know that Russell is answering the question, “Really, if I’m just one funnel away, then how much farther away is that funnel?”
Russell: Yeah, I don’t know all the answers ever, but from my experience, I think you’re seeing people’s highlight reels and you’re not seeing the rest of it. Things can be short-cutted, they can speed up, but Anthony for example, if you knew Anthony’s whole story, it wasn’t like he became this Biohacking kid. Anthony was my coaching partner for three years and he was barely scraping by for three years in the weight loss market going hard and heavy targeting weight loss and women.
Weight loss is by far the most competitive market on planet earth. So it’s like to be successful there you have to be super, a very unique angle, or have an amazing story, or deal with the best sales people, or best copywriters, or whatever to dominate. Anthony tried weight loss for the 3 ½ , 4 years that I knew him and struggled, struggled and for him to have success we had to shift from weight loss into a completely different angle, blue ocean, biohacking thing, and that’s where he’s finding success.
But in that time, if you look at his story, he came down with Lyme disease. He spent two years biohacking himself on his deathbed trying to figure out how to survive. After he figured it out he went on this mission where he literally, I love Anthony because his heart is so big, I would say conservatively he probably coached a thousand people in three years, most of them for free because he couldn’t afford it because he just loved people so much and cared so much about them. And that’s how he found his voice, how he has so much certainty. When you talk to Anthony, it’s just absolute certainty. So people plug into that. Abosolute certainty.
When people follow me, with this thing that I’m good at, I have absolute certainty. I have no wavering doubt. They plug in because Russell is certain, so I need to follow that. But that certainty doesn’t come by positioning or posturing it, it’s by putting in that work ahead of time and just mastering it to the point where you just know. That’s Anthony’s journey.
Kaelin’s is different. Kaelin has such an amazing story, how much weight she gained, lost, and she happened to become one of the best sales people ever. I don’t think there’s any, there’s very few humans on earth that have become a better sales person than Kaelin, which is why they’re dominating that market. She’s so good, clear on her messaging. She’s one of the best I’ve ever seen, she’s dominating there.
Caleb’s got, he’s not an overnight success story either, he’s young but that dude grinds more than anyone I’ve ever met. Insane amounts of hours and time and effort and by the time he was 13 years old he’d read more books than I had. He had done hundreds and hundreds of Facebook Lives before anything started hitting. That kid’s put in 10,000 hours plus before he’s 15 years old. That’s not what you’re seeing. You’re seeing, he’s a 13 year old kid, he’s successful. He didn’t just step into that. Some people do, some people are insanely talented, it doesn’t make any sense. It does happen, but for most of us, it’s not that way.
I didn’t make a penny online for 2 plus years, and the next 5 years were hardly anything, it took 7 or 8 years before I found my voice to be able to be in this market and have certainty where I felt that. So how do you get that absolute certainty? It’s by putting in the time, by doing that.
Steven: I actually am the coach for the Two Comma Club Coaching program, and I love it, it’s so much fun. It’s fun to see because I’ve been doing this game now for about 4 years now, and for the first several years, I actually made no money with it at all. I was with anything about funnels, business entrepreneurship in general, and all I knew was I wanted to be an entrepreneur and I started putting my head down and working and did everything from stalks and options, real estate, commercial and residential, I went and did ebooks, door to door sales, I did telemarketing. I did everything and it was all with the back drop of wanting to be an entrepreneur and provide value in the marketplace and go do this stuff.
And I failed my face off. It was one of the most humiliating things in my entire life. My wife and I were living on loans and college. And because my wife was basically the spouse of the suffering entrepreneur, and I didn’t want to be that story and it turned into this really painful experience. But I literally was listening to Russell’s podcast, I was listening to these other entrepreneurs and their podcast. It was honestly them and YouTube motivation videos and all this stuff that just kept me going with it. And just the sheer belief that it would work and mad obsession over the topic.
If I could turn around and tell myself some things now, it would certainly be that I really wish I would have spent more time crafting my voice early on. I like what Russell’s mentioning inside of this podcast right here, telling that you’ve got to figure out the voice. And the way I did early on was by regularly publishing. I would get out there and I would just speak. There was a time, after I read Dotcom Secrets, I went and I was like, “Hey I know enough to at least teach someone else.” And I literally held a 3 hour, free class inside of a stranger’s home. They had all these people there, friends and family, and I recorded the whole thing and that became my first info product.
I didn’t know that’s what it would become. It was just pure obsession over the task, over the topic that kept me going with it. So number one, one of the biggest things everyone struggles with when they start doing this thing is they have to find their voice and if they can’t find the voice, where do they draw the line in the sand? Where does the polarity come from? Where’s the passion? Where’s the stories and the background? And if you’ve never spoken before or put yourself out there before, you’re never going to know how those things actually fit together. It’s awkward for a lot of people who are just starting out inside Two Comma Club Coaching because they have never figured those things out, they don’t know what that’s like.
So not only are they trying to create a brand new product, number one. Not only are they trying to create the sales message, which they’ve never done before either. Number three, they’re trying to find their voice. They’re trying to do three things at the exact same time. And you can do it, but when people are going out and expecting, “I’ve been doing it for two months.” But they’ve never actually been successful with it, when you look at it from that angle it’s humorous. Of course you’re not successful right off the bat. You’re trying to figure out your voice, your product and your message all at the exact same time and it’s been two months and you’re not happy with it.
So you’ve got to think of it from the other side. These guys that have been publishing for a super long time are people who have been giants inside the marketplace. You look behind every one of the success stories, and every single one of them has got these amazing stories, usually they’re rags to riches stories, or stories where there was so much failure at the beginning, but they kept their heads down and kept pushing forward on the whole thing.
So those are the three things. As you start moving forward, you’ll learn more about this in Two Comma Club Coaching, really that piece right there will put so many of the things in place for you to keep going forward. Find your voice, find your voice. And I was really against finding my voice. It sounds stupid. I didn’t want to listen to Russell, I didn’t want to listen to what he was saying. It was before I worked for him, or before anything else. But I’d be listening to his podcast and he kept saying, “Hey, you gotta get out there and you gotta find your voice, start publishing.
I was actively against that. I was like, “There’s no way I’m going to podcast, there’s no way I’m going to start Youtubing. There’s no way I want to do any of that crap. I don’t want to do any of that.” And it was at his event in 2016, I had no money and was literally building funnels and trading funnels for a ticket. And trading funnels for a plane ticket, and a hotel nights stay. I had no money, I just knew I had to be there. I’d been hustling for several years by that point.
I got there and sat down and listened to Russell and I was like, “Okay, I’ve worked my butt off to get here, I have no money, I don’t know how I’m going to make it. But what I’m going to do, is whatever he says, I’m just going to do it. Because I’ve put in the time, I just want to make this work and I know it will. I just need to keep working it and working it.”
So what I did is went and I sat down and started taking notes and all the sudden Russell stands up and goes, “Every single one of you guys needs to get up there and you gotta start publishing.” And I was like, “Crap he said it. I gotta do it.” And I went out and started publishing regularly and the first 20 episodes that I did were really awkward, they were bad. But something happened, something clicked. My voice changed, something happened, my confidence changed. I got stronger polarity. What I believed started coming out stronger.
As I went out and started interviewing the people and started talking to those in the industry, I figured out the place for me to exist in the ecosystem without being competitive with everyone else. That way I could collaborate and not compete as hard in my own little blue ocean niche. Amazingly, when I started doing that, just like those in Two Comma Club, I know a lot of you guys listen to this podcast, so that’s a little shout out to you guys. But I know a lot of you guys, what I say to you is if you go and start regularly publishing, you’ll number one, find your voice. But number two, the place for your offer to exist, where you need to create your new opportunity, your new niche, that place will bubble up and emerge out of the red ocean, the red submarket ocean.
It’s amazing what will start to happen. You’ll start to figure out the message. The market will start to tell you everything that you need to know. You don’t know enough to actually be successful on your own, you don’t. The market will tell you everything always. Don’t try to come up with it on your own. If you do that, fantastic way to fail, fantastic way to lose money. I did it for years, I could tell you all about it. Really, what this game is, is go funnel hack, which does not mean pages. If the offer is online, yes that means pages. But go funnel hack an individual. Funnel hack their voice, their offer, their message.
What you do, you start to see this picture that emerges out of the sand. “Oh my gosh. That’s what I have to go make.” Here’s the formula, here it is. That’s your best shot, you take your best shot at launching that thing and then you step back and wait. And what ends up happening is all these people will start to give you feedback. “I wish it had this.” They’ll come in the form of complaints. “I wish it had this. Your product sucks at this.” Don’t push that stuff away. Those are the things that let you know you’re doing well. They let you know what to create and do next. You take the aggregate voice, aggregate complaint about your product, the aggregate feedback and those are the things, that’s the market telling you what to go make. Then you go make that thing.
And what’s nice, when you do that, take those pieces of feedback, you number one, take your best shot. Number two get feedback. Number three you turn around and tweak it and relaunch it. Now you’re in this cool adoration cycle, but the pressure is not on you anymore. You’ve already launched the thing, it’s already up, it’s already rocking and you’re getting feedback. That’s what I’d say. That’s just my commentary on this piece right now. I completely stand by and behind everything that he’s saying with this. In order to gain confidence, you gotta live it and you gotta live in it every day. You gotta be the expert, the go-to person inside the industry itself.
Russell: It’s harder when you don’t have a story. Even the one that I’ve watched, and I know a lot about the weight loss market, I’ve struggled with weight throughout my life and coached a lot of people in that market. So I was watching it, not to critique certain things, but the one thing I know from the weight loss market, and people I worked through it is that people and weight loss are very skeptical. If somebody doesn’t have a story where they were overweight, they don’t understand what it’s like to be me. That’s their belief.
In the video you talked about how to target certain areas, how to reduce fat. I was like, cool this is a good topic. It’s something people are concerned about because people have love handles, they have this and they do want to target spots. And then the advice is kind of like, “Don’t target a spot, lose all your weight.” And I felt like that message was not, most overweight people that I know would have, that message was not sharable, but the opposite. Would have pushed them away like, “You have no idea, you’ve never had love handles.” That’s how they would have reacted.
I know that because I’ve worked with so many overweight people. And you guys should know that, you should know if you told somebody that, “Don’t worry about your love handles, you gotta lose this.” Because you told someone that face to face, you should have known that, that this was your market. You should know that would have repelled those people, because the number one concern that people in the market has when they start working with a trainer is this person has no idea how I feel because they’re not overweight.
That’s why Kaelin’s story is so central to her success, because that’s their biggest belief. That is the biggest limiting belief in that market that people have. In my market it’s different. In my market it’s like, “If this stuff works so good, why don’t you give it me for free?” That’s my market of beliefs. That’s what I’m fighting all the time. You gotta know that in your market. And that comes from doing this over and over again. Doing it, getting people offended and then doing it again, the next time they don’t get as offended. It’s kind of like the movie Groundhog Day. Every time Bill Murray comes back he relives the life, he does it wrong, tweaks it, comes back, does it again, does it wrong. Tweaks it, comes back, does it again, does it wrong. Eventually he has a good life. But how many years he was in that Groundhog Day experience.
When you do that in volume, a lot, but I also thing, defining your message better. Because where can the money be made right now? It’s not in traditional weight loss, it’s in the fads, or blue oceans, keto diets. That’s the hot thing. When we launched ProveIt we were kind of the first people coming out there and now there’s been this huge swell of thousands of different keto brands, products, things like that. Some are succeeding, some are failing but it’s the ones that are diving into this market that’s hot.
If you look at, again Expert Secrets 101, find a hot market, ask them what they want and give it to them. What they want and what they need. You gotta find out exactly what they want and sell them that and then fulfill and give them what they need. That’s the big thing, you gotta understand the market super well and the only way you do that is by putting in the time and effort. So that’s being completely honest. You have to differentiate completely how this sub-market that you’re in right now, Dave Woodwork works for us and his wife is in that market, she tried for four or five years to succeed in the weight loss market, and she’s got amazing stories.
She’s been a personal trainer forever. She’s struggled because she’s stepping to play against the best of the best. So finally she’s made the shift, her program is called Have It All Moms, it’s focusing on moms and how weight loss helps moms. It’s not just weight loss but these other parts of personal development. She’s carved out this ocean and now she’s finally getting traction, but it’s four or five years in the big leagues and she’s a great sales person, she’s all these things and she’s struggled.
So again, for you guys, you gotta find your market, you gotta find the market of what people actually want, what they’re looking for, not what they need, we fulfill what they need, but we’ve got to sell them what they want. So that’s that. There’s the art and science of this game, hopefully you’ve heard me talk about that. And I think most people that struggle as entrepreneurs are typically the A students. I’m guessing you’re an A student, by default. Because they’re really good at the science, but the art is something you feel. It’s different.
So people who are really good students struggle with that because it doesn’t come naturally. When the C students are the ones really good at the art of it, but they struggle with the science. So for most businesses I recommend for people, if you’re in that spot, figure out who you are. When I got started in this business, one of my mentors told me, “Look, in every business there needs to be a starter and a finisher. You gotta figure out who you are, then surround yourself with the other people.” And at that time in my business I was like, “I’m a starter, really good at starting, really bad at finishing.” I needed to surround myself with finishers, so I started hiring people that were really good finishers.
That’s why people always ask me, “Russell, how do you get so much stuff done?” its because I have the ability to start a thousand things, but I have a team behind me who finishes them all. But I know what my strengths are, I know what my weaknesses are. If you go to Tony Robins Business Master, he talks about every company has three types of personality types. You gotta have, an artist, an entrepreneur and a manager. The artist is the person obsessed with that thing. One of them has got to be obsessed. That’s the artist.
The next person is the entrepreneur, the person out there risking and going crazy. Going out there and doing stuff. Then there’s the manager who’s in the management roles. So I’m looking at that, inherently what are you best at? Are you best at managing? Are you obsessed with the art of this thing? Or are you the entrepreneur who wants to go out and sell the crap out of it? I think at Funnel Hacking Live, one of the presentations they talked about that concept, they called it a hustler, a hacker and a designer. In Clickfunnels, I was the hustler, Todd was the hacker, and Dylan was the designer, that was the three pieces.
And not that you can’t learn the other stuff, you can, but that’s not how businesses grow, by us figuring out our weaknesses and focusing on it. In business it’s the opposite. Find your strengths and quadruple down on them and abandon your weaknesses and plugging other people into those spots. So it’s backwards. Yes, you’re capable of learning those things, but don’t because it’s so much better to find those people and plug them in.
Even Brandon and Kaelin, you look at them and the reason they are successful is you have Kaelin who is the artist, she’s obsessed with her art and she’s also one of the best sales people ever. So you have that, but her by herself would fail. She has her husband who is the manager, entrepreneur, risking, that kind of thing. Because they have both halves, is why they’ve blown up. For me, I don’t have a spouse that’s out of the house so I brought in team members and partners and that’s why we were able to blow up.
Let’s take our strengths, I know what they are. I’m really good at this piece, let’s find somebody that that’s their strength, let’s team up and now it’s like you can have way more impact with people. Whatever that is, really understanding the market, and being obsessed with that. Whoever it is that’s the artist in your business needs to be obsessed with that. Reading 400 blog posts a day, listening…I listened today, I’m a marketing guy and there’s probably few people on earth that know more about marketing right now, than me. Not to be cocky, but I’m kind of obsessed with it. Today I think I’ve listened to 8 or 9 marketing podcasts, I bought three products, I recorded 23 videos, actually 29 videos recorded on the topic, I got done at 6, came home to eat dinner with my kids and I’m actually going back in because I’m so excited about this thing that I gotta keep going back in.
So that was today for me, because I’m obsessed with the art of it. There’s got to be someone there that’s that obsessed with it, or else it’s going to be really hard to drive it. I got the messages back, the first message was like, “Oh hey, I just did some Facebook Lives and nobody showed up. It was just crickets.” That shouldn’t bug you, if you’re an artist you should not care. You love to hear your voice and you just want to talk, study, share and learn and give and share and talk. Whether people are listening or not, it should not matter.
Whoever the artist is in the business, that’s the level of obsession they need to have to be able to succeed. So it’s understanding that, and if that’s not you it’s cool, find someone that that’s how obsessed there are and then plug in yourself where you’re obsessed, put those two things together and now you’ve got a force of nature to be reckoned with. But there’s got to be….that’s the pieces. Any business, you have to get it into orbit and you can’t do that by being a normal human, and just waking up and doing your thing. It takes raw obsession. That’s why it takes an entrepreneur to launch a business and get it into the stratosphere. Hire a bunch of MBA’s and people to plug it in and just keep it moving, but it’s obsession that get it into orbit. A rocket can’t get into orbit unless it’s got these huge boosters that just blow the crap out of it and push it off the ground.
But again, it’s tripling, quadrupling down on your strengths and backing off your weaknesses and finding people who your weakness is their strengths, that’s how you build a company and blow it up fast.
If you missed Russell’s LIVE Q&A from www.dropthemicshow.com, you can hear this weeks questions on this episode.
Today we have another bonus episode of Marketing Secrets where Russell answers questions about marketing from other funnel hackers, including:
So listen to Russell answer these questions and drop the mic.
If you missed Russell’s LIVE Q&A from www.dropthemicshow.com, you can hear this weeks questions on this episode.
Today we have another bonus episode of Marketing Secrets where Russell answers questions about marketing from other funnel hackers, including:
So listen to Russell drop the mic as he answers these questions.
A personal message to a friend who is struggling.
On this extra long episode Russell talks to a friend from elementary school about how to go from being a technician and having a cap on his income to being a rainmaker and having an unlimited ceiling on his income. Here are some cool things you will hear on this episode:
So listen to Russell explain how to go from being technician to making it rain!
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to an insanely late night Marketing Secrets podcast. I am here, for those watching on tv, I’m in the car. Over there you can see Norah. It is late, insanely late. In one minute it will be midnight here and we’re about to take you guys on a very special Marketing Secrets Podcast.
Alright, I hope you guys are doing amazing. Right now my little baby Norah and I are on a mission. It’s a secret mission to get her to hopefully fall asleep. We started weaning her off the bottle about a week ago before our family vacation because we thought it would be so much nicer to not have bottles on this trip. That was a good idea, huh Norah.
But what we didn’t think about was the fact that she’s insane and now she won’t go to bed at all. She won’t take naps, since her naps happen when she finally passes on. We got back from the lake, we’re on a family vacation, we went to the lake and had a really good time, and then she wouldn’t fall asleep and we were driving back and forth and finally when I went to the store to buy something for dinner tonight. When we were coming back she passed out and she slept for 3 hours. She was so beat. Then she woke up and now she won’t go back to bed.
So this is the second night in a row. Last night I was also out driving until about midnight, 12:30 she fell asleep last night. It’s 12:00 right now, hopefully in less than 30 minutes she will be asleep. But I am on vacation having a good time. If you listen to my last Marketing Secrets podcast it talked about how vacations can be really tough for entrepreneurs. I feel like we’re not moving, there’s no momentum. We’re stuck in a spot. That’s somewhere that I definitely feel.
As much fun as vacation is it’s also hard for me, I got stuff to do, people to see, places to go. Actually, it’s interesting as I was packing the car up as I was about to leave, between hiking stuff in and out to the car and everything I was checking Facebook and it’s interesting. There was a friend who I don’t think I’ve seen him, I think the last time we talked was in elementary school. I remember 6th grade, it’s kind of a funny story. In 6th grade we were moving these big boxes and he had this big box and he dropped it. I don’t know why I remember this, but I remember him saying it was super embarrassing to drop this box of stuff and he was saying, “Someday this is going to be one of those things that people remember me by. Remember that day you dropped this huge box.” I remember thinking that was really interesting.
And now, it’s 30 years later and I remember that day, it’s kind of funny. But anyway, I remember he was in junior high and high school with me but he was a basketball player and I was a wrestler so we didn’t really cross paths a lot. But I knew who he was and grew up in elementary school and I always had respect for him. When the book of faces came out, Zuckerberg, it was kind of fun because you can go back and remember high school, junior high, and elementary school friends. And people from wrestling and different aspects of your life and you start adding them on Facebook. So he was one of the names that popped up years ago, I added him and hadn’t thought much more about it.
Every once in a while I saw posts from him, so I kind of knew what he was doing, but not a lot. He shifted his job or his business or career a couple of times and didn’t seem like he was having a lot of success. I remember it seems like last Christmas or something, he posted something really negative and I felt bad for him. But it’s also one of those things that when I first started my business and started learning about entrepreneurship and learning how to sell things and all this world became open to me, I remember at first I wanted to share with everybody. I tried to share with friends, family members, people at church, everyone I bumped into.
I was so excited to tell this thing that I had learned. I was so excited I would share with every single person. It was so mind blowing to me that most people just “Oh, cool. Nice.” I’m like you don’t understand it’s not just nice. It was so frustrating to me. But it’s funny because that was, I always tried to change everybody and save them and help them because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. After a couple of years of that I realized that none of the people I tried to help ever did anything with it. It was really depressing me, so that’s when I shifted back and started doing the business for a long time.
I think I got into coaching because I wanted to share it, and it was cool when I started coaching. It was people who would come, people who it was their idea first and came to me to learn how to do it. Those people I could mold, help and change because they had the desire first. It’s because of that I’ve been very cautious the last decade of my life going out of my way to talk to people about this stuff unless they raised their hand first.
So I saw him last December say something and I didn’t see my spot to say something, so I didn’t say anything. Then as I was leaving, I was going through Facebook, again we’re packing the cars and I’m sneaking out to do what you do with the phones. So I see this post, this long post and it was again a negative thing and he was talking about how much he was struggling and trying to make money and all these things, and I think he said that this last year he made $25,000, and that was what he made in an entire year. He was really struggling and trying to make things better for his family, life and wife and he couldn’t figure it out and was just frustrating and was just kind of venting.
How you doing Norah? She’s so cute back there. I hope she falls asleep soon.
Anyway, I felt for him. I was just like, do I say something or not. For whatever reason I decided to just reach out to him. I was like “Hey man, the problem..We haven’t talked in 20+ years, I don’t know if you know who I am. The problem is you’re not focusing on the right thing. I can help you but I don’t want to intrude, it’s not my business. I can help you, I know what’s wrong, it’s an easy fix. In the last year and a half, few years we’ve helped. I’ve been a coach to almost 200 people now to become a millionaire. Tens of thousands of people to make 100 thousand or more in year. I know the game, I know what it takes and what it doesn’t take.” I said something like that and my next post was, I wish I could read it right now. “I’m not trying to pitch you on some MLM. I honestly, if you want help I can help you because I know what’s wrong.”
He was like, “Really? Yeah, I want to know.” So I told him a couple of things and I said, “If you do those things, I’ll record a podcast for you while I’m on my trip and kind of go into more detail.” So this last 3 days I keep thinking about that and I’m excited so that’s what I’m actually doing right now and I hope it benefits all of you guys. Because I think for most people who are stuck, it’s not something that unique to you, it’s not. A lot of times we think our situation’s unique, but it’s not. It’s a pattern that happens over and over again. The key to breaking patterns is recognizing it and realizing what the correct pattern is and replacing it. It’s not hard, it’s just hard because it’s the first time most people have gone through it personally.
So that’s kind of the context. I just wanted to share this message, it’s really for him, I’m not going to go super specific, but I think it’ll be helpful for everybody. I know that typical people I talk to in this podcast are people who are entrepreneurs already and this is kind of I guess for someone who’s on that line between the job maybe and the entrepreneur. That line where it’s like, you’re not fully an entrepreneur running this way, but you’re struggling at the job thing and you’re in between. That’s what this podcast is for and I hope it kind of helps.
With that said, I’m going to jump into this. So the first thing that I kind of told him in the message, the first thing is you’re focusing on the wrong thing. And he’s like, “I’ve been focusing on perfecting my craft.” And just kind of some perspective, the industry he’s going into is film. So he’s trying to do movies and videos and all that kind of stuff. So he’s like, “I’m focusing on getting better at my craft and I’m also doing a lot of networking.” So I go, “okay, yes. You are completely focusing on the wrong two things. You are focusing on things to help you get better at your thing, but you have to shift your focus to making money.” That’s a weird concept because it’s something that I remember the first time I had that epiphany. I need to learn how to make money. I was in school learning all this crap and I’m looking at this stuff and studying and I was like, I’m not actually learning how to make money. I still remember one of my biggest gripes with college is I took two semesters of accounting and two semesters of finance and they never once taught you how to do your own taxes, which is insane. School sucks.
Just throwing that out there for those who are wondering my thoughts on the whole thing. But it’s crazy the fact that they don’t teach you that thing. And I realized I’m not learning how to make money here in school. And I started studying how to make money. It was interesting how different it was. It’s not what you’re learning in school. And now fast forward, I think it’s been, let’s see…it’ll be my 15th anniversary in a month from now and we got married with a year left in school. So 14 years I’ve been graduated from school. Looking back on it now from this sign. Sorry I’m waiting for a stop light, but there’s no stop light, there’s a stop sign. Little Norah’s still awake.
Anyway, as I look at it now from this lens looking back, it’s interesting, a lot of times we want something. I remember growing up, you always hear your parents and people say you gotta go to school to get a good education so you can make good money. We all heard that. That’s a thing that parents say a lot. So we assume that those two things coincide. Good job, good education equals more money. But not necessarily. Now I look at again from my perspective, 14 years later, it’s interesting.
I was thinking about this a lot over the last two or three days especially. If you want to look at the structure of how people make money, because there’s definitely, there’s you make money and there’s places you don’t. And most places you’re focusing on, like when he said he was focusing on getting better at his skills in networking. He’s focusing on something that’s good, but it’s not making money. So I’m going to start at the top.
The top is a pure entrepreneur, so the top of a business, the hierarchy chart, so the top is the entrepreneur who starts the business. Typically, at least the entrepreneurs that I like to work with, the entrepreneurs are passionate about something, but their mostly passionate, not just about that thing, but getting that thing out to people. That’s what defines an entrepreneur. If any of you guys have read the Emyth, by Michael Gerber, he talks about what happens with a lot people is they think they’re entrepreneurs, and they get a job at the bakery shop and start baking cakes. They see the owner of a bakery shop and they’re like, “This guy is an idiot and I could do better than him.” And then what Michael Gerber says is that they have an entrepreneurial seizure.
They think they’re smarter so they start their own bakery. The problem is that they’re not an actual entrepreneur, they’re a technician. They’re somebody who is in the business who is doing it. They’re making the bread, the cakes, the stuff but they look at the entrepreneur who they think is an idiot, so they have the entrepreneurial seizure and say they want be the entrepreneur and start their own business and say, “I can make bread better than anyone else. I can make cakes.” And they’re passionate about the thing and create the business and what happens to the business? It fails.
It has a 90+% failure rate. Because it’s technicians, it’s people who think that the key is the thing. They think that the cake is what runs the business. It’s their passion about the cake, the creation of the cake, they don’t understand that that’s not the business. In the business the entrepreneur’s job is being passionate about getting the cake out to as many people as possible. That’s where the money’s at. That’s why most businesses fail. Because it’s not the entrepreneur running it, it’s someone who had an entrepreneurial seizure and is a technician and is trying to do that thing and thinks they should start a business because of it.
My first question for everyone listening to this, are you the entrepreneur? The good news is we go deeper into this…….holy cow, a deer just crossed the path……There are ways to make money, not as an entrepreneur in a business. But it’s not where you probably think that they are. I’m just thinking for example, a doctor. Doctors make good money. How many times did you hear that you have to become a doctor to make good money, or a dentist to make good money. So those people make good money, but not there’s no limit to your income money. Because a doctor is a technician. They are just highly paid technician because a lot of school goes into it. But they’re still a technician. They’re not an entrepreneur, they have a definite cap on their income growth, always.
So just depending on what technician you pick. Let’s say you’re going into a company to get a job, you’re capped by the earning potential of that role you take on. If you’re a doctor, a dentist, a baker, support person. You’re capped at whatever that thing is, which is fine, it’s just knowing that’s where you’re capped at.
If you want no cap, the first spot you have to look at is entrepreneur. But to be an entrepreneur you have to understand that it’s not being passionate about the creation of the thing, it’s being passionate about the selling of the thing. There’s a big reason why I wrote the Expert Secrets book. It’s because typically Experts who are really passionate about their topic are also passionate about getting their topic out. By definition they are entrepreneur’s because they are trying to get the message out about that thing. They own the bakery, they make the cake, but they’re more excited aobut telling people about the cake. That’s what makes them successful about entrepreneurs. That’s why I love working with entrepreneurs.
So there’s the top of the….let me flip the car around, I’m getting out to no man’s land now. So that’s the top of this pyramid scheme of business. I don’t know if you want to call it that. But the entrepreneurs are at the top. And that’s what most people look at. The entrepreneur is the person that makes all the money. But they’re all the person who risk everything. Entrepreneurship is a scary thing because you have no earning potential at the top, but you’re also the one with all the risk on your back. For a lot of people you can’t just go out and become an entrepreneur immediately, especially if you have a wife and kids. Because you have to have security. There’s this huge draw with people who have entrepreneurial desires, but they also have security needs between your family.
So that’s a hard thing to just gamble and jump and say “I’m going to become an entrepreneur.” And I understand that. So a lot of times the entrepreneur is not the first place for people. I feel super blessed. I started my entrepreneurial journey about the time I met my wife and I was able to do a lot of things because she supported me, I was going to school and we didn’t have kids. We didn’t have this need for security at this point when I was getting started, which I’m so grateful for. I have so much respect for those that step into the entrepreneurial role when they have those things because it’s so much harder.
So it’s always easier to start being an entrepreneur and risking everything when you don’t have a wife and kids and things. So that’s kind of one thing. That’s one spot. Again, there’s different places to make money in companies, so there’s the best spot, maybe not the best spot, but one spot. The entrepreneur at the top, that’s number one.
Then underneath the entrepreneur inside the organization there’s gotta be technicians, doing the things, baking the cakes, cleaning the teeth, cutting people open, the technicians. This is what schooling is actually…the only reason school is actually good is because it creates technicians. If you want to be a doctor you have to go to school. If you want to be able to drill teeth, you gotta go to school. If you want to become a baker or a butcher, baker, candlestick maker, any profession.
Another deer just ran by. I don’t want to hit a deer. That would be scary.
But any profession, that’s what schooling is for. So when you’re going into school you are thinking about that. Any major you decide to go after, there’s a kind of associated salary range you’re going to fit into. Sometimes it’s big, like doctors make good money. But you’re always capped. A technician will always be capped, by definition of what they are. You just are. If you’re coming into a business and You’re a technician looking at this, you’re capped. Your salary is capped.
So my friend who is doing video stuff, he’s looking for jobs in a business where he’s the technician. Again, he was saying in his post that he made $25,000 last year, because the need you are filling inside whatever company you are trying to plug into. That’s what they have budgeted for that. That’s what you’re able to make. You’re capped. You can’t go above that, unless you work more hours, more days. Sometimes you find another company that has a bigger budget. That’s another thing, and again there’s nothing wrong with a technician, it’s understanding that there’s a salary that’s set for that thing. There’s a budget set and that’s what happens.
The goal of a business is not to make the technician rich. I had a finance teacher at Boise State, tell you what, most teachers I had at school were always like, “What’s the job of a business?” “To create jobs, stimulate the economy.” They always had this happy go lucky, tree hugging attitude about business. I had this one finance teacher that said the only goal of a business is to make the owners money. That’s it. If the entrepreneur, the owner is not making money, the board of directors, whoever is running it, if they’re not making money, the business dies. That’s the only purpose and only point of a business is to make the entrepreneur money. Everybody’s got to understand that.
If you’re a technician there is no desire for anybody for you to make more money than what your set salary is. You’re going to find entrepreneurs, in my company I’m very compassionate towards people and I love what they do. I love creating things for people and having incentive plans, but for the most part, as a technician you’re in that range. You have to understand if you’re going to school, that’s the earning range you’re going to be in. Are you okay with that? If you are, cool. Go for it. That’s awesome.
But don’t complain later when you come back and say I’m not making what I want. You picked a profession, you picked being a technician, you picked this piece and that’s all it’s worth. It doesn’t matter how much school you went to or how much time and effort you put into it, that’s what that task is worth to the entrepreneur. You have to understand that, technicians are essential to a business, they need to be there. That’s what colleges, universities, programs were all created for, to create those people. Those people are important. But again, that’s the pros and cons of that.
Check it out guys, look at this. Pan over. She’s asleep. 12:19, it’s a good sign. This podcast might not be three hours long now that she’s asleep. Otherwise, it could have been a really long one.
Alright, there you go. Entrepreneur, unlimited potential, tons of risk and the role, the reason why an entrepreneur’s successful is because they’re passionate about the selling of the thing. Getting the message out, not just the message. Not just passionate about making cakes, but passionate about getting the cakes in as many people’s mouths as possible because they’re obsessed with the end product. That’s the difference. There’s entrepreneurs.
Number two level down in this pyramid is the technicians, who are the one’s doing the jobs to make this whole thing happen. Super essential but have huge earning caps, depending on what technician role you picked makes your earning cap. There’s one spot, and this is the spot that I want everybody to understand because this is the other spot inside of a company where you have no earning potential. Excuse me, I said it wrong. You have no earning ceiling, you have unlimited earning potential. Scratch that, that could have been really bad and messed up the whole thing. You have unlimited earning potential, literally the sky is the limit.
That last piece, so we have entrepreneurs, we have technicians, and the third are the rain makers. They’re people that make it rain. They’re people that bring leads and money into the business. They’re the rain makers. Now entrepreneurs love rain makers, why? Because they make it rain. Do you guys understand that? That’s the secret sauce. Most technicians don’t understand that. Because all they know is I went to school to learn this thing to do this task, so they do it and do it. But the person that gets rewarded the most, outside the entrepreneur of the company, are the rain makers.
Typically in most, not most, but a lot of businesses that I own, that I’m involved with, the rain makers a lot of times are entrepreneurs who maybe if they would have started their entrepreneur journey ten years earlier, they would be the entrepreneur of the business. But for whatever reason they’re not. So they came, they can have, a lot of times we call them intrapreneurs. In their role in the company, they have the ability to grow and expand as much as they want. They’re rain makers. What do they do? They make it rain. They bring in customers and make money. They bring money into the company.
So if you look at this from an outside perspective, if you selling this stuff in college terms. It’s marketing and sales. Marketing brings people in, sales takes their money. That’s kind of what it is. And it’s funny because, I don’t know what it was, even like most technicians, if you go to school and you tell someone you want to be a sales person, the viewpoint, or even marketing, I’m in marketing, or I’m in sales, the technicians are the ones who are always looking down on you. “oh, I’m a doctor.” They look down on the rain makers because they think it’s a sub….I don’t know. They think it’s not as good, not as dignified.
What they don’t understand is that the rainmakers make the money. It is the most dignified, most important position in the entire company. Without the rain maker’s the technician has no job. Without someone bringing people into your business and then getting the money from those people, there’s nobody to be a technician to. You make as many cakes as you want, but if some dude didn’t bring those people into the store and take their money, they’re not going to buy a cake. It’s the most important role in the business, outside the entrepreneur who sets the initial risk to get it going.
So even though the technicians talk down on us marketing and sales people, it happens to be the most important role in every single business. You can tell when businesses are stupid, when recessions come and they cut their marketing teams and they cut their sales teams. It’s insane to me. I had a chance in my life to live through one of the recessions, 2008. I had a bunch of friends who were in marketing jobs and they were making it rain for the company and the company started struggling so they cut the marketing. I’m like, you’re insane. Cut the technicians, they don’t do anything. Don’t cut the blood coming into your company. Marketing and sales is the blood, it is the rain. The rain makers are the key.
So rain makers. They don’t have a ceiling, in most businesses now days. Especially if you become good at it and not a little bit good, but really good. You can come to a company and say, “I can bring in unlimited leads for you.” Guess what they will do? They will give you anything you want. All company need leads. The other thing they need, sales. They take those leads and turn them into cash, turn them into money. That’s how the entrepreneur gets paid, that’s how the technicians get paid. It’s by the rain makers. Bringing people in and taking their money. That’s it. We can try to be romantic about it, but that is it.
You have to understand, if you want to be wealthy, and I’m not talking about making good money as a technician, because you can do that. You gotta go to school, that sucks. If you want to become wealthy, become rich, make a lot of money. You have to shift your focus from becoming good at being a technician, to understanding how to make it rain. If you can make it rain in a business, you are infinitely valuable. As a technician you are only valuable as that task is to the person, to the company. They know, they got a budget for it. There you go.
So if you’re working for a company saying, I do video. Guess what? They have a budget for that. We pay video guys $3 an hour, $12 an hour, whatever that is, $20 an hour.
For my friend, the company you are working for, they budget $25 grand so that’s all the money you are able to get. Because you’re a video person, you’re a commodity. That’s the other thing about technicians is they’re commodities. It’s funny, I was talking to my sister the other day here at our family vacation or whatever, and she teaches piano lessons. I love my sister, she’s honestly in my top 3 favorite people on planet earth. She’s teaches piano and she’s like, “I’m so busy, I can’t keep up with anything.” And I said, “you should double your prices.” And she’s like, “I can’t double my prices.” And I’m like, “Why not?” and she’s like, “If I double my prices I will lose half my people.” I’m like, “okay, well you lose half your people but you double the money, that means you get double the free time for the same amount of money.” And she’s like, “I can’t do that because that’s the set price for what people charge for piano lessons where I live. So if I raise my prices, they’ll just go to somebody else.” I’m like, “Because you’re a commodity. Guess how much people pay for marketing consulting advice?” She’s like, “I don’t know.” And I’m like, “Neither do I, but I don’t look what everybody else charges and charge the same thing, I charge the most I possibly can.”
For example we had somebody contact our office and they wanted to do a one day consult with me and I was like, “I don’t have time for a one day consult.” And they’re like, “Well, how much would it cost?” and I told Brent to tell them it’s $100 grand and they can do 8 hours and they have to come to Boise and I’m going home at 5:00 to be with my kids. He kind of laughed because he knew they wouldn’t say yes to that. He went and pitched it to them and came back 5 minutes later. He’s like, “They said yes.” And I was like, “There you go.”
Want to know why? Because I’m not a commodity. When you’re a video person you’re a commodity. When you are any kind of technician you are a commodity. When you’re a doctor, you’re still a commodity because guess why? Another doctor comes along and he’s better than you or less expensive than you, whatever. They can replace you with the other person because you are a commodity. The rain makers are not commodities. That’s what you have to understand.
The rain makers are unique. They understand something that they can’t just learn in school. They know how to get, especially in school because there’s no school that I know of yet, that teaches a marketing program that is actually good. So there you go. So if you’re in school trying to become a rain maker, you should drop out today. If you want to be a technician stick to school. If you want to be a rain maker, it’s time to leave.
If you’re in school, honestly if you’re trying to do a sport. That’s why I was in school. Do that. If you’re trying to find a beautiful spouse, school is agreat place to meet great looking women and probably good looking men, I have no idea. But that’s a great spot to be in school, but just til you find your spouse and then leave. It’s time to go. If you want to make it rain, it’s time to go.
The rain makers are the ones that are not a commodity. There’s no cost associated, people don’t budget that out. Because they are like, I don’t know. If I came to a company and was like, “I’m going to build you guys a sales funnel and this funnel has potential to bring you unlimited leads for forever and make you unlimited amounts of money.” They’re like, “How much does that cost?” I’m like, “However much I want to charge you for it.” They can’t price shop. How are you going to price that? Russell Brunson charges 100 grand for a day. How do you price shop that? Go to somebody else? Ask Gary V. “What do you cost?” and he’ll give you his price but he’s going to teach way differently than I would. If you want what I got, I’m the only one that’s got it. You gotta pay me what I want to charge you for it. I’m not a commodity.
If you’re a great sales person, you’re not a commodity. Great sales people are rare. If you’re an amazing sales person you can walk into any organization and say, “hand me your leads. I just want 20% of everything. I eat what I kill. I’m going to 20% of what I kill.” There’s no business on earth that I know of, that if you walked in and said “Look don’t pay me, just give me all your leads. I want 20% of what I kill.” Almost all of them will say yes to that. Because you’re a rain maker. You have no ceiling. Just kill a whole bunch of stuff and you get your cut.
Same thing with the person who is making it rain, bringing the leads in the door. A lot of times you’re like, “Russell, I’m a video guy, I’m whatever. I don’t know how to make it rain. Right now I’m basically a technician. I’m plugged into this technician thing.” You gotta start studying, not how to become a technician, you’ve got to become good at your craft, I agree with that. You have to become obsessed with it, but you have to become good at understanding how to make money.
The study of making money is the key. So how do I make money? It’s understanding if you’re a video person, doing video is a commodity. But if I can understand how to use video to bring in the leads, it changes things because now I’m not a commodity. I’ve got a friend who charges 100,000 to make you a video, plus 10% of any money that video ever makes you. Technically he’s no better than anybody else. In fact, some would argue he’s a lot worse at video than most people, but he knows how to take that video and have it turned into cash and bring in customers. He knows how to use it to make it rain.
So for those of you guys who are in my world, I’ve got some tools to help you learn how to take whatever technicians skills you have and learn how to make it rain. So I told my friend, I gave him some advice, “I’ll record this podcast but you have to do some things for me first. First thing you need to do is go back to this podcast, Marketing In Your Car, first hundred episodes there’s a cheesy jingle. Next 200 episodes there’s a less cheesy jingle, still cheesy. And then recently we transformed it into the Marketing Secrets podcast, which I really like the name and the new jingle is freaking amazing.” Don’t you guys agree? So we’ve got that.
I said, “Go and listen to every episode, start at episode one and go through all of them. What’s going to happen is you’re going to immerse yourself in how to become a rain maker. You’ll learn a bunch of random crap and none of it’s going to tie together, but it’s going to get your mind immersed in this mindset. And if you don’t like me or my voice, you can go find someone else. But find someone who is obsessed with marketing and sales. And he ranks the stuff that people pay unlimited money for and start immersing yourself. Listening to it all day every single day so your mind is just wrapped into the concepts. With geeking out and going deep with my podcast, your mind is going to get into it but you’re not going to have a blueprint, but you’re going to have all these thoughts going through your head all over the place. It won’t be a path, but it will be immersion. Immersion is the key.”
Tony Robins talks about this a lot and I’m a big believer in pretty much everything tony says because he’s a giant and he’s got stage presence like nobody else and he’s amazing and a billion other reasons. Tony’s the man. He taught me about immersion. If you want to learn something, don’t dabble. There’s dabblers out there all over the place, who dabble. My guess is things in your life that you struggle with are things you have dabbled in and things you excel at are things you immersed yourself in. That’s just how it works.
If you want to learn how to make it rain, you’ve got to immerse yourself in the concepts of people who are making it rain. So number two what I told my friend. I said, “There’s two books you’ve got to read.” And I shipped them out to him. First book is Expert Secrets. In this business there’s two sides of the business, there’s the art and the science. The art really is the selling and messaging and positioning, all those kind of things. Storytelling and that kind of thing, that’s the art. So I said, “Read the Expert Secrets book first because that’s the art. Second read the DotCom Secrets book, because that’s the science. It’s the art and the science to making it rain.”
When you read both those books, there’s two different perspectives that you’ll feel in the books. One is very much like the structure, the science, the Dotcom Secrets, the science to how the game is played and the Expert Secrets is the art. A lot of people think they have to master all of this, and you don’t. Especially if you are someone who would love to be an entrepreneur, but for whatever reason you’re not able to. You want to be an intrapreneur in a company. Go into a company and be an intrapreneur for a company. Look at that and say, “I don’t need to know all this stuff. But I gotta understand it all. I need to understand the art and science and figure out where my skill set fits into that.”
So my friend that’s doing video stuff, you have a skill set that in the right hands is worth a lot of money. In the wrong hands its worth 25 grand a year. If you find a company that’s growing, the right company, the right person to plug into and come and say, “I want to make it rain for you.” Brandon Fischer who started doing video stuff for us 2 ½, 3 years ago. He came in and I met him and my brother does video stuff for me, we didn’t really need another video person, but he came to me and was like, “Hey, I want to learn what you’re doing. I’ll do video stuff for free for you.” I was like, alright and he started doing it for free. He did some amazing stuff and started capturing stories for me. He captured Liz Benney’s story of her telling her experience with Inner Circle.
Basically he didn’t come to me as a video guy, he came to me as, “I can capture the story that will make your company look a million times better to make it rain.” So he captured the story of Liz Benney, so we took that video and put it on a website, started driving traffic to it. That Liz Benney video, I couldn’t track it today, but that video has probably made me at least 2 million dollars if not more. That video helped me make it rain. That video asset to me wasn’t worth 25 k a year, it was worth a heck of a lot more. Because it helped me make customers, convert those customers, and get money from those customers.
But he didn’t come to me as “I’m going to be a video guy.” He came to me like, “Let me serve you first.” The best thing about rain makers, if you’re good at what you do, which is why it’s important to be really good at your craft. That is important. Become obsessed, literally become so obsessed with what you do you become the best in the world at it. Or at least the best that person’s ever met. Become obsessed with it. That’s important.
The second thing is figuring out how to use your skill to make it rain and becoming obsessed with that. That’s the missing key. Because then you become an intrapraneur, you come into a company….Don’t come in and try to negotiate a huge fee, because number one if you negotiate a huge fee, the first thing you’re going to do is lock yourself in as a technician. Technicians get paid a salary. As soon as you negotiate you lock yourself in and then you’re there.
If you come in the other way and say, “I’m going to work for free and make it rain and then I just want a piece of what I bring to you.” If you bring it that way and come in and help make it rain, it’s completely different. Jay Abraham, one of the great marketing, strategic minds of all time, his whole thing is he would come to a company and say, “I’m going to come and work for free I just want 20% of the increase.” He’d come to a company and add 40, 50, 60, 100 million dollars to a company and just took 20% of the increase. That’s what rain makers do. That’s what sales people do. You are creating opportunity. You’re creating money for them and taking a percentage of what you create. That’s the key you guys. That’s the key how to be an entrepreneur inside of an organization and have no limit.
Guess who they don’t fire in a company? The person who makes it rain. If you go into a company and you make it rain, that’s it. You write your own paycheck from that point forward. So how do you do that? Number one, immerse yourself in this stuff, in the marketing and sales. Immerse yourself. I would recommend doing it with the podcast. Because I think I’m obsessed with podcasts. It’s the best way to have it ring through your mind all the time. Start at episode one of my podcast, click play and go until you’re done. A lot of you guys, start over.
This is not for my own ego, partially for my own ego, but mostly for you guys. And again, if for some reason I talk to fast or I’m annoying or whatever, I don’t care. Plug into somebody, plug into Grant Cardone, Gary Vaynerchuk, or plug into John Lee Dumas, I don’t care. Whoever you resonate with, plug in and go. Don’t unplug. Every single day, all of your free time, you’re driving, you’re walking, your bathroom breaks, be listening to podcasts constantly. That’s going to give you the immersion, because immersion is the only way for you to get the connections. This connects to this; you’re going to start seeing the big picture.
Number two is you need a strategy and a blueprint. For each of you guys, there’s two books that I’ve written. I’ve put my heart and my soul. I’ve read thousands of books, sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stuff, to be able to figure out what actually works and put it into a book you could read in a day. So read the Expert Secrets book, number one, and then read the Dotcom Secrets book. Expert Secrets will teach you the art, Dotcom Secrets will teach you the science.
Then you’ve got to look at what your skill set is and where does that plug into the art and science. Again, you don’t have to do everything, but figure out what you are good at. What I would recommend doing, this is kind of the next step, is those who have gone through my certified partner program, we certify people to build sales funnels, the ones that are the most successful, the ones that bit, realize they’re not the best at everything. Henry Kaminski, one of my buddies was in the inner circle for last year, he talked about when he first came in, he was a graphic designer. He’s like, he didn’t say it this way, but similar. He understood the art and the science. “I’m really good at graphic design but I don’t know this other stuff.” So he started studying and learning it. He realized there’s pieces to this.
If you read Dotcom Secrets and Expert Secrets you will realize there’s pieces and you become an expert in all of it or what he said he did, “I built a voltron team.” Some of you guys, if you’re and you don’t know who Voltron is you can go Google it. Or you might remember Power Rangers, might be a better one for you guys. There are different versions. But Voltron is basically, there were these five, same with Power Rangers, same story, probably the same everything. But there’s five people who had their own super power, they went out there and they were really good. But there was a big bad guy who would always come and they couldn’t defeat him individually. They had to group together and become Voltron and all five pieces came together and they’d fight and they could win.
So Henry said, “I realized I was a good designer, but I’m bad at strategy so I had to find this strategy person to partner with.” So he partnered with his strategy guy, Dave Arsonal. Then he’s like, “I need someone good at selling.” So he partnered with a salesman. He partnered with three or four people and built this Voltron team and he went out there and in less than a year he made a million dollars with his little company.
Because he understood, “We’re rainmakers and I’m good at this piece but I need a couple of people together and we can make it rain. We need someone who can drive traffic, someone to do sales, and I’ll do the art.” He did that.
So for you guys and for my friend, after you understand the art and science, you’ve immersed yourselves, you’re learning all these kind of things, you buy the expert Secrets and Dotcom Secrets book, read both of those and understand the art and science of how to make it rain. Now you’re looking back to say, “How do I fit in this? What am I passionate about? Am I good at the story telling part, am I good at funnels?” Figure out those pieces and then you can go to companies and look at that and say, “I’m really good at this piece. I can bring this thing to you.” Or find a partner, find people and come in and say, “We can do this thing.”
A good example of this you guys, I don’t normally share these kind of numbers, but I wanted to just kind of help. Some of you guys have seen the Harmon Brother’s videos, some of you guys know that we are about to launch our Harmon Brother’s video, which I’m really excited for. They did Squatty Potty, Poo-Pourri, Chatbooks, Fiber Fix, a whole bunch of great videos. They make these videos and they’re good, really good. They go viral and they’re amazing.
I wanted to hire them to do a video for me so I messaged them two days after they’d actually messaged me, which is kind of funnel. They had this funnel, the Fiber Fix funnel, they said the video went viral but the funnel isn’t converting and they wanted my help. I was like, “Funny. I just wanted to email you to see if you’d do a video for us.” We got on the phone and tried to talk through it and both of us are rain makers. Our videos make it rain, we know what they’re worth. I was like, “How much does it cost to create a video?” I was thinking maybe $50, 60 grand or whatever. With a very straight face he was like, “We charge $500 thousand up front plus 20% of ads spent.” I was like, “What?!” and he looks at me straight, he didn’t say this in so many words but, in the words of this episode he said, “We know how to make it rain, so that’s what we’re worth and that’s what we charge.” A few months later I wrote them a check and now they’re going to make it rain for us.
Same thing, they came to me with the Fiber Fix funnel, “We want you to fix this funnel, how much does it cost?” I’m like, “you can hire someone fix the funnel it will be 10 grand, but for me it will be a quarter of a million bucks.” And he’s like, “Whoa, why are you so expensive?” and I was like, “Because I know how to make it rain.” So then they did their deal, because it worked.
As I went with the Harmon Brothers and we did the video, it’s been the most amazing experience, I can’t wait to show you the whole behind the scenes video. There’s some on Funnel Hacker TV, you see bits here and there. But it’s amazing, it’s not 2 brothers who do this whole thing. It’s these guys who started a business and then their process is really cool. When we hired them, basically they said, “We’re going to do a writing retreat.” And they found three amzing writers to write three different scripts for us. So we go to this cabin and they have three writers come and read their script. Each script was insanely amazing, but three different comedic scripts.
And these guys again, are writers that they hired, they’re sketch comedy writers. They each wrote three and came back and said, “Which of the three do you like the best?” we picked what we liked the best and then all three guys took those, in this cabin, we went back and all three of them went and took the best script and they took all the jokes, the best jokes, wrote a new script and came back and showed it to us again. It was even more funny. We went back and forth for two days until we had the script.
Then after we had the script, they went and said, “Okay, for this script to happen we have to have props.” So they hired someone to build stages, and they needed videos and hired video people. They hired all these people to make this amazing thing. Last weekend we went and filmed it and hopefully we’re about a little ways away from launching it.
Again, with them, it wasn’t just them. They had built a Voltron team of people that could go and execute to make it rain. You have to start understanding that. Come back to where we started, the hierarchy of business. There’s the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur is there and they are obsessed with getting the message out about their thing. Not about the thing, about getting the thing into other people’s hands. That’s why I love entrepreneurs, because they’re tied into this whole marketing thing. Good entrepreneurs are obsessed with the marketing and selling of the thing. They are the ultimate rain maker.
Number two is the technician who do the thing, which are essential to the business, but again you’ve got a cap, you’re a commodity. Understand that there’s a cap and you’re a commodity, but you’re in there. You’re going to have a good, typically secure financial thing, all those kind of things. You get security but you’re not going to have unlimited income.
Then you’ve got the rain makers. So for you guys looking at understanding what a rain maker does and what it is and how the process works. Figuring out how to take your skill, your super power and uncommoditize yourself and make you unique, make yourself rare. Make it so people pay you half a million dollars if you make them a 3 minute video. Is that crazy?
Someone pays me a quarter of a million bucks right now to make them a funnel. For me, not that it takes me that long, I just know what order the pages need to go and what message in each page. I know how to make it rain. I’ve been obsessed with this thing for over a decade.
For you guys, it’s time to become obsessed. Become obsessed in your own company. And if you’re the entrepreneur in your company listening to this, become obsessed. You’ve got to be the lead rain maker. Find the technicians, plug in the right people, and like I always say, find A players, not B players. A players are 32 times more effective than B players. Find A player technicians and pay them well. Because you don’t want to go find other technicians. Plug in the best technicians you can find, then go find rain makers. And if you try to cap rain makers, they will leave you. Understand that. You, as an entrepreneur, find rain makers and give them the ability to have unlimited ceilings in their income. Because if they do that, again, a rain maker is just an entrepreneur who for whatever reason, life circumstances isn’t able to go out on their own to do it, which is totally cool. There’s nothing wrong with that.
If it weren’t for all the intrapreneurs in our business, our company is 99.9% intrapreneurs. If it was not for my intrapreneurs we would not be where we are today. I try to create our businesses in a way where people can grow and have unlimited earning potential. That’s the key.
For you guys listening who, that’s you and you’re stuck in the technician role or you want more, or you’re in this thing where you want to be an entrepreneur but you can’t or whatever. This is where to focus on. Learning how to make it rain and then building a team around you. Finding people, other pieces and networking, not so much finding jobs, networking to find people to help you to be able to make it rain. As soon as you have a team, as soon as you personally or your team can do that, you can go to any business on planet earth and write your own paycheck.
Then it comes down to picking the right businesses, and that’s a whole other lecture for a whole other day. Because I’ve seen some funnel consultants who go and they get paid ten thousand dollars to build a funnel, other guys get a hundred grand, the only difference is who they are pitching to. It’s interesting, I’m privy to share the details, but the Harmon Brother campaigns, if you look at the Purple Mattress, its $1000 mattress. Because every sales makes $1000, it’s been one of their most successful campaigns. Chatbooks has been amazing, probably the most viral video they’ve had, but each sale doesn’t bring in, the value of each customer is a lot less, so it’s harder to continue to make that one rain.
Same thing with all you guys, if the customer or the client that you’re working for, if they’re average customer value is $30, if you’re working for a restaurant, making $30 it’s not good. But if you’re working for a customer where each customer is worth 25 thousand dollars, it’s a lot easier to justify what you want to charge people. Stuff like that.
Alright, well it’s late. It’s almost 1:00. I gotta get my 6 hours to go to the water park. I’m going to end today’s podcast, but I hope that helps you look at how business works and understanding that for you to be successful and make money, you have to understand how to make money. You gotta learn how to make money. Don’t just learn your skill because if you do that you’ll become a technician, which is fine if that’s where you’re happy. But if you really want financial freedom and wealth and no limits and no ceiling, you want to be able to grow, it comes down to studying money and understanding how it works and understanding the marketing and the sales, getting people in the door and getting their money from them. It’s the most valuable part of any business. I don’t care what the hoity-toity doctors tell you. I don’t care what all the people in school and colleges, it’s the most dignified, most important role in business.
If it wasn’t for it, business would stop. The economy would stop. So it’s figuring out how to plug in your skill set into that piece of business. Because that’s where the money’s made. When you’re part of people making the money it gives you the ability to have percentage of that. So I hope that helps. So for my friend who’s listening and everyone else listening, once again, immersion. Get the blueprint. Figure out what your unique abilities and talents can plug into that blueprint to make it rain for a company. When you do that, you got what you need and a whole bunch more.
So I hope that helps you guys. I hope that helps my buddy. I won’t say your name because, you know. I appreciate you and hope to hang out with you someday again. Everybody else, have a good night, talk to you guys soon. Bye everybody.
Here is a bonus interview with Russell Brunson and Dr. Accurso.
I think I figured out why it's so hard for all of us to go on vacations.
On today's episode of Marketing Secrets Russell talks about why, as an entrepreneur, it is so hard to go on vacation, and how he gets through it. Here are some of the cool things to listen for in this episode:
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast.
Hey everyone, I hope you’re excited for today. I’ve got this weird thing; I think a lot of entrepreneurs suffer from this. Maybe it’s just me. But today I’m going on vacation for a week. I’m actually looking forward to it, but at the same time it really stresses me out. It’s one of those things that’s funny because everyone always tells me, “Russell, you need to go on vacation. You’re going to burn out if you keep doing the stuff you’re doing at the pace you’re doing it.” All sorts of stuff.
But it’s weird because…..sorry I’m trying to do it with the new camera tripod while I’m driving.
Anyway, it’s weird because when I’m at the office and working and doing my thing I never feel stressed. Everyone’s like, “Are you stressed? Are you overwhelmed?” I’m like, not really. I feel like I’m kind of in my flow, my motion or whatever you want to call it. But then I go on vacation, I get super stressed and anxiety and sitting there and not doing stuff is really hard for me. That’s why reading on vacations, at least I feel like something’s progressing.
It’s interesting, at Pirates Cove mastermind we had Alex Charfen come and help him to kind of figure out how to monetize his entrepreneurial personality type content, which I’m excited for. It’s funny because I told him I first heard him speak 2 or 3 years ago on the entrepreneurial personality type and it was amazing. I felt like I connected with him and I was like, now when I hear something like that I want to give somebody money for something. There’s no way for me to give him money. It’s funny, I asked him if I could buy the entrepreneurial personality type from him and he’s like, “No.” and then he’s like, “Why?” and I’m like, “Because I don’t know exactly what I’d do if I had it, but I could make a crap ton of money with it.” And so he joined the coaching program right afterwards, so I could help him do it.
So it’s kind of fun. We’re helping him go through the process now and he’s going to kill it, it’s exciting. But one thing he talked about that was interesting about entrepreneurs and if you haven’t studied Alex’s stuff, it’s worth it. And it’ll be soon in a format, it’s going to be a podcast, it’s going be a training program, a bunch of stuff. He’s kind of going through the whole Expert Secrets process now to figure out how to take it to something. I’m excited, when it’s done, I’ll be the first customer. And I think that all of you, because you’re all like me, should as well.
But it’s the entrepreneurial personality type, but he’s talking about personality traits of entrepreneurs. And one thing that’s kind of weird, I think I’ve heard him give the presentation three times in his core, main presentation and all three times there’s this one part where he talks about how entrepreneurs don’t identify with happy or sad. I was like, “Whatever, I identify with that.” And then the more he started talking about it, the more I was thinking, when am I happy or sad? People always say I look happy. But I’m just kind of a happy person.
It’s funny, this is probably more personal than you guys want to know, but I went and got my testosterone taken, actually three years ago when we were launching Clickfunnels and it came back at 160. The doctor literally told me, “Your grandma’s got higher testosterone than you right now.” And 6 – 8 months later I did it again and it was like 350. And then I got it done this week and I was 450. But every time I’ve gotten it done, the doctors always told me, “How are you standing here? You should have no energy, no motivation.” And I was like, “No, it’s the opposite. I have so much motivation, so much energy.” He asked me all the symptoms, “Do you feel tired.” And I was like, “Sometimes.” And he’s like, “Do you have memory?” I’m like, “No.” He’s like, “Do you feel depressed.” I’m like, “No.” all these things and at the end of it he’s like, “So why are you here?” I’m like, “My testosterone is really low.” And he’s like, “You have no symptoms of it.” And I’m like, “It’s just because everything’s so exciting right now.”
And I started thinking more about his with Alex’s stuff, that entrepreneurs don’t relate with happy or sad. I started thinking, there’s sadness obviously, when someone dies or things like that. But as a whole, you wake up in the morning and it’s not like I’m happy or sad. So when he was telling me that, I was kind of confused. I wonder how most people view happy and sad, it didn’t really make sense to me, and then the next slide, the next portion he said a word and I got chills. I was like, “Whoa. That’s what I do.” And he said, “Entrepreneurs don’t feel happy or sad, what they feel is either momentum or a lack of momentum. They’re moving towards something or they’re not. They’re moving away from something.”
That’s what we relate to. What we relate happiness to is motion forward. And what we relate sadness to is not progressing, not moving forward. I think it’s just fascinating. Momentum, movement, that’s what drives entrepreneurs. It’s not happy or sad, it’s movement, momentum. I was thinking about that today, I’m going on this vacation. It’s funny because I’m leaving today, I was up late last night. I was up early this morning. I’m trying to get stuff done, and I almost enjoy the process right before vacation, getting so much stuff done because I’m freaking out because I gotta leave at this time. I’m running and running, I’m moving, momentum. And then you go on this vacation and you stop.
Everyone wants to just chill out. They want to sit, they want to just sit at the beach. I don’t know what it is, sitting at the beach it doesn’t do anything for me. It’s just weird. For me, I have to have momentum in this experience, this vacation or else I’m going to drive the rest of my family and friends and everyone that’s with us, nuts. They probably don’t even know, they’re like, “Why is Russell twitching over on the side?” And it’s because I need momentum, I need something.
So that’s when I’ll sneak away and I’ll read. Or I’ll be sitting there, they’re all talking and I’m thinking about something. “Oh my gosh, I could do this.” And I’m creating while I’m sitting there thinking because I’m nervous. It’s just funny, my wife will be like, “You’re on vacation, you’re not allowed to talk about business.” And I’m like, “If I don’t talk about business, everything halts and stops progressing in my life.” And the lack of momentum, the lack of movement, the lack of direction is what will then make me depressed and sad and stuck.
It’s a funny line that we have to deal with, especially all of you entrepreneurs who are out there. Because we just see the world a little differently and I think a lot of people think we’re freaks because of it. There’s nothing bad with it. I don’t think it’s something bad. It’s why businesses are created, why there’s momentum in the world. I think it’s because of entrepreneurs who’s entire soul drive is momentum towards moving. We have to have that.
So while we go on vacation because we love our wives and kids and family members, it’s probably the hardest, most stressful part, which is so weird because it’s like, “Go relax. Take some time, you’re going to burn out.” And it’s a little different. Anyway, I’m excited. I’ve been plotting, I have 3 big vacation this summer, I’ve been plotting all of them, what books to read, which order. What courses I’m going to study, what things I’m going to be moving. It’s just funny how that’s been the most exciting thing for me, planning what I’m going to do when I’m not doing anything. I’m such a nerd.
Anyway, there you go, that’s us entrepreneurs. So if you’re an entrepreneur and you don’t relate to happy or sad, and you do relate to momentum and movement and you stress out about vacations, that’s where I’m at and I relate with you. Nothing else on your family vacations is somewhere you’re stressing out because you do nothing, I get you. So while that’s happening think, ponder, vision, dream. At least for me, that’s what keeps me going and lets me function like a normal human being with everybody else. So that’s all I got you guys. Have an amazing day and have a good vacation if you’re going on one too. Talk to you guys soon, bye.
The secret to get people through the failure gap.
On today's episode Russell talks about disagreeing with a designer on what a customer needs from Clickfunnels and how they were basically saying the complete opposite of each other. Here are some of the interesting things you'll hear in the this episode:
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast.
Alright everybody, welcome to Marketing Secrets. I’m here today in the Clickfunnels kitchen, the first time I’ve ever filmed in here. I’m excited. You guys want to see a quick view of what the kitchen looks like? Oh, there’s Dave. We’ve got a whole bunch of cool stuff. We actually built this kitchen because for a lot of the products we work with, for some reason we always need kitchen scenes, so we always rented different kitchens. And then we’re like, if we build a kitchen make sure we have a good scene so we can actually film stuff. So we do, but since we’ve had it we’ve never used it for filming.
For today, I want to share with you guys something kind of interesting. And I want to make sure when I say this that it doesn’t come off bad. Because it has a good purpose, but it’s important for you guys to understand. Some of the background behind this, to set it up so it all makes sense to you guys. We had a designer that worked for us for a while to come on and help with user interface, UIUX, those type of things in Clickfunnels, a really smart guy. What he liked to do is call and interview customers.
At first I was really excited. So he’d go and call 40 or 50 customers and interview them, finding out what they want, what they didn’t want. All those kind of things, which I thought was cool. We’ve never done that before. Some of you guys might have actually talked to him, which is cool. Based on that he was trying to build UI and structure based on customer’s feedback.
A couple of things I found with it. One is it was kind of almost a frustration, because I came to him saying, “This is what I want to have done.” And he treated me kind of like if I was a customer, “Hey, cool. These are good ideas.” I’m like, “No, you need to do this because I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. I’m not a survey.” We always kind of went back and forth and in his mind it’s like, we need to find out what the customers want, which I agree with. But also this comes back to Henry Ford’s quote about if I were to ask my customers what they wanted; they would have said they wanted a faster horse. You have to also understand that customers don’t always know the vision where we’re going. That’s why we’re creating stuff, we’re visionaries. We know where we’re trying to go.
So it’s kind of interesting, so he no longer works with the company, still an awesome guy, but that was kind of this frustration I had. I remember for a long time we’ve wanted to update our on-boarding in Clickfunnels, and we wanted to do a whole bunch of cool things we haven’t been able to do. This week is actually fun for me because we’re focusing on that.
Another side story, I was listening to Growth Hacker TV, there was an interview with a guy who bought the Warrior Forum. He also owned Freelancer.com and a bunch of other companies. He was talking about how they grew to a billion dollar evaluation. And one interesting thing he said is that they buy these companies and then they look at the traffic coming through and spend a lot of time optimizing the processes inside the processes to make more money from all the traffic coming, which is kind of the phase we’re in right now.
We have anywhere from 800 – 1000 new people a day that sign up for Clickfunnels, just organically. They’re coming from who knows where. And thank you for coming, I don’t even know where you came from but I’m grateful to have you here. And they’re coming in and we lose a bunch of them the first month, there’s a big drop off. After that it stays really steady, but there’s a big drop immediately. So we’re trying to figure out that process. How do we capture people and keep them in?
There’s a lot of cool stuff we’ve done that decreased our churn rate, which is the number metric we look at. It increased our retention. But right now we’re in a big overhaul, how do we simplify the sign up process? How do we make everything easier? It’s fun, you guys will see some new stuff coming to Clickfunnels here in the next 60 days. A lot of new stuff will be coming live, which just simplifies the process and makes Clickfunnels easier to use. So we’re excited for that.
But I was listening to this guy, and he talked about that’s what he was doing. They just worked on the optimization of the sign up flow and that’s how the companies blew up. They didn’t really focus on the traffic and these other things. And we’re always focused on the traffic. But it’s like, how do we make sure the funnel’s right so we’re not losing people out of the holes in the bucket?
So with that said, there’s a bunch of on-boarding stuff that I wanted to do and I know Todd wanted to do, so we kept trying to get this guy to do that. We want prize, we want to do free t-shirts, we want badges, we want to gamify the process. And he kept coming back saying, “How does gamifying the process help the people get the end result? We need to get people to the end result and this is just keeping people busy in the middle.” And it’s funny, Todd mentioned that this morning to me and I Voxed him back, there’s this quote from Dan Kennedy that I heard back in the day that actually ties this in, but I couldn’t remember exactly what it was. So I ended the Vox and said, “I’m going to go find the quote and come back to you.”
So I ended up finding the quote and I posted it there in Voxer and the quote said, “You’ve got to confuse activity with accomplishment.” Now I’m going to be careful when I say this because some of you guys are going to look at that and it might be frustrating or confusing or whatever. So I posted that and in the thing it said, Dan Kennedy, “You have to get your customers to confuse activity with achievement.” So Todd read that first before my Vox, and he thought I was saying, “Oh the designer was right. That’s just going to get people confused. Focusing on activity as opposed to achievement.” But if you listen to my Voxer, it was actually the exact opposite.
So what’s kind of funny, me and this UI designer both said the identical thing but for the exact opposite side of the argument. He was saying you don’t want to give people activities that keep them from the achievement. And I was saying, you want to give them activities so that they feel achievement, so someday they get to achievement. You want to confuse activity with achievement. Does that make sense?
So Kennedy said that, basically, as a retention strategy. People come in and are going to leave. He said, no you need to give them things to do, so they have activity that’s happening. Because the activity is what keeps them engaged. If we look at our Clickfunnels stats right now and numbers and things like that, the interesting parts are people that stick are people that have a custom domain, they log in at least 2 ½ times per week. There’s all these stats. People that stick are people that are going in and doing stuff consistently. So we know that’s the metric. People logging in and using it are the key. So how do get them to log in and use it?
Well just telling them to build a funnel, you’re going to have achievement, you’re going to achieve a funnel. People will try for a little bit and then they’re going to leave because they didn’t achieve anything. Because the goal is this huge thing. The goal is you’ve got to eat the whole entire cow. That’s the goal. If you’re giving your customer the goal to eat the cow, the problem is they’re going to come in and if they don’t eat the cow really quick, they’re going to leave.
So what you have to do is confuse achievement with activity. Give them activities to do that make them feel like they’re achieving something along the way. So they come in and you set the table, you give them their appetizers, they eat that and they achieve something. For us we’re gamifying the process. You come in, watch the video, build your hero funnel, we send you a t-shirt. So you had activity, so you felt you achievement, even though you didn’t achieve the thing you want yet. You felt achievement, which then drives you forward to do the next thing and the next thing, and the next thing.
All of us want our customers to have the achievement at the end, the problem is that they sign up and then there’s the achievement, there’s this huge gap in the middle that they’re going to fall into, disappear and die. So because of that we have to confuse activity with achievement, because that activity will make them feel micro-achievement which will get them to the big achievement at the end. That’s the goal, that’s the message for you guys.
As you’re creating your training programs, software, ideas, products, services, whatever it is you’re creating and doing, I want you thinking about that. You have to go and create activities that get people to feel small wins, small achievements so that it will drive them through this chasm, this gap, to get to the big goal, the big achievement that you want them to have. If you don’t have those, if you’re not confusing activity with achievement initially, they’re never going to get to the achievement.
So that’s kind of the message for today. I thought it was kind of interesting. I thought it was funny that we both we had the same argument for why we wanted to do this on-boarding process. But he was saying it was a negative thing, but I was saying it was a positive thing. I think it’s very positive, and I think we all can and should be visiting it. So I hope that helps you guys, and with that said, have an amazing day. Go back through your programs, products, services, member’s area and figure out how you can weave those things in, because as you give people little wins along the way, it will give them the momentum they need to get the big wins. That’s all I got for you guys today. Thanks so much for everything, see you guys soon. Bye.
In our 30th episode of Funnel Friday's Russell and Jim take some time out from building funnels to chat about the Expert Secrets Book Launch and Russell getting his message out to the world.
If you missed Russell’s LIVE Q&A from www.dropthemicshow.com, you can hear this weeks questions on this episode.
Today we have another bonus episode of Marketing Secrets where Russell answers questions about marketing from other funnel hackers, including:
Who know doughnuts could be so helpful…
On today’s episode Russell and his kids talk about why they like to go to Krispie Kreme doughnuts instead of some of the other doughnut shops. He also shares a story to relate why its good to show your customers behind the scenes of what you do. Here are some of the fun things you will hear in this episode:
So listen to Russell and his kids talk about this cool way to market your business.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast.
Alright everybody, today we got a special episode. We just got done cleaning the church and then we went and got a prize for the kids. What was the prize we got guys?
Kids: Krispie Kreme Donuts and the hats.
Russell: Krispie Kreme Donuts, and the hats. We’re driving the new Funnel Hacker Jeep, which we have a camera mount in here. So now I can do Marketing In Your Car and Marketing Secrets while we’re driving and not have to worry about getting hit and dying.
Kids: Marketing in Your Jeep.
Russell: Marketing In the Jeep. I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet, if you haven’t go look on Snapchat or Facebook or whatever. It says Funnel Hacker on the side of it, it’s kind of fun. And we had Norah in here yesterday so that’s why Bowen’s sitting in Norah’s baby seat, because that’s the last seatbelt we had. So what should we tell those guys about today? We gotta tell them a marketing principle.
So let’s do this, I want to talk to you about why you like going to Krispie Kreme versus the other place?
Kids: Because they got good donuts.
Russell: Because they got good donuts. Why else?
Kids: It’s not very far away.
Russell: Okay, it’s close proximity. Why else?
Kids: We haven’t had breakfast.
Russell: You haven’t had breakfast yet. Are they healthy?
Kids: They have a good price. No, they’re not healthy. They have a good price, they’re not far away, and when you go in you see them make the donuts.
Russell: Oh, this is the key. This is the key, Ellie, that I want to talk about. So when you go into Krispie Kreme they let you, say it loud so they can hear you. Aiden said it too. So there’s a glass window and you can actually watch them make the donuts. The donuts come through on a conveyer belt, you see the frosting put on them, you see them dunk under the thing. First the dough right, drops them into the cooker thing that cooks them, then the frosting comes on top and they put the sprinkles. You get to watch the process.
Kids: They sometimes, rarely, give you free samples.
Russell: And sometimes they give you free samples for hanging out.
Alright so here’s the marketing lesson for all of you who are listening today. So Krispie Kreme does a really cool thing to make kids want to go to Krispie Kreme versus DK Donuts, Dunkin Donuts, all the donut places.
Kids: Dunkin Donuts is DK Donuts.
Russell: No DK is a small brand, Dunkin is a huge chain. Anyway, what Krispie Kreme does is allow you to watch the process, which is really interesting. Because my guess is most donut shops have the same process, yet……..You guys we gotta stay on point for the show. They’re right, DK has bunch of other options, sizes and varieties and Krispie Kremes are all the same thing. But the moral of this is that they let you watch the process of how it works.
I know I’m going to forget the story because I’m in the car with four kids going crazy. I’m going to forget it right now, but the message I know all my old school marketing buddies are making fun of me because I can’t remember the name and people or which book it was from. But there was a guy, who was actually a beer company and they were selling beer and this marketing guy came in to, I can’t remember now, this is blasphemy. I can’t remember the name of it.
I just hit a squirrel. I missed it. A squirrel went underneath the car. That was close.
Anyway, there was a marketing dude, he comes into the beer company and he’s trying to figure out the hook and angle and big idea of why everyone should give them money versus the other beer companies. And the marketing guy comes in and wants to see the process and how it all works and he goes in and watches these guys. He sees how they make the beer, I don’t know, I’m not a beer drinker. I’ve never drank so I have no idea how it actually works. But they showed how they made it. And the marketing guy was so fascinated. They’re like, “That’s how everybody makes beer.” And he’s like, “Yeah, but nobody else has seen this. Nobody else even knows this is how it all works. So I want to show that process.”
So he made a commercial and he actually showed the process of them making the beer and that became this huge campaign that blew up the company. So Krispie Kreme is the same way, they show the process. There’s a reason I do Funnel Friday every Friday, because I’m showing the process.
Kids: You didn’t do it this Friday.
Russell: I didn’t do it this Friday. Good point. And Funnel Hacker TV and all these things, why am I doing that? Because I’m showing the process, I’m letting people see how I do it, how I consume the product. And the more they do, the more they see me drinking my own Kool Aid, the more likely they are to also drink said Kool Aid.
So the moral of the story from this Krispie Kreme episode for you guys is to let your audience see the process of how you do whatever you do. We are in the reality show era of the world and your audience wants to view what’s happening. That’s why I’m showing this right now, me and my beard in my car with my kids in their Krispie Kreme hats, and being annoyed at me. Bowen was telling me, “Your mustache is ugly dad, but your beard is cool.” He wants me to shave this.
Dallin: You have a mustache.
Russell: It’s kind of weird huh. I need to shave.
Dallin: I don’t know everything, never mind.
Aiden: I’m free ladies.
Russell: Aiden just said, “I’m free ladies.” You’re the coolest!
Dallin: What did he say?
Russell: He said, “I’m free ladies.” And jumped out of the car.
Dallin: You need to send this to me.
Russell: That was amazing. I love Aiden, that our little six year old, if you’re listening and not watching. If you’re watching on Marketingsecrets.com you just saw Aiden in his Krispie Kreme hat tell you….that was hilarious.
Dallin: Send this to me please.
Russell: The moral of the story, the reason why I’m doing this with my hair messed up and my beard, with my kids and our donuts….
Ellie: You have a beard?
Russell: Isn’t it sweet? You want to feel it, it’s really scruffy. It kind of hurts, I gotta shave it. The reason I’m showing you this stuff behind the scenes because I’m showing you my life. I’m showing you how we do what we do and that’s what draws people. If you read Expert Secrets, you know the goal is to draw people into you and your personality and all those kind of things. So draw them in you guys. Do it, open up your life a little. I know it’s scary sometimes. That’s what Instagram is for, your stories. Facebook Lives, podcasts, etc.
Dallin: The real moral of the story is that Aiden is a ladies’ man.
Russell: Aiden is the ladies man. Anyway, that’s the moral of today’s story. Does that sound good to you guys? With that said, thanks so much for tuning into marketing Secrets. If you have not read the Expert Secrets book go to expertsecrets.com. You should go there and read it because this is just one of those secrets that’s going to help you blow up your message.
Dallin: And if you haven’t read the first book too, read it.
Russell: What’s the first book called?
Dallin: Dot, I forgot what it’s called.
Russell: You’re close, Dotcom…
Dallin: Dotcom Secrets?
Russell: Yes, Dotcom Secrets and Expert Secrets. They should read them both right?
Dallin: Yeah.
Russell: Which one’s your favorite.
Dallin: I didn’t read it.
Russell: Anyway, appreciate you guys, thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you soon. Bye.