Behind the scenes call with Myron Golden and Russell Brunson.
On this episode you will hear Myron Golden talk about the reason’s people make a lot of money versus a little money. He goes through the four levels of value for creating income and explains each level. Here are some of the insightful things in this episode:
So listen here to find out what the four levels of value are and how much money each level is worth.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to a very special impromptu Marketing Secrets podcast. I just got off of an inner circle call and it was so awesome I wanted to share it with you.
So I’m on an inner circle call, and the inner circle are my 25k members and there’s 100 of them and we have a group closed at 100 people. Once a month I do consult calls with all of them and one of them today was with Myron Golden, who is one of the coolest people in the world. And in the middle of this thing he dropped, I don’t know 10-12 minutes of the coolest thing about how income and the different levels of income, it was so good I wanted to share.
After he ripped on it for like 15 minutes I was like, “Can I put that on the podcast?” and he was like, “Sure man.” So I’m doing this really quick before I jump on the next call. I’m going to plug this clip in here. This will help you understand the levels of income and if you’re stuck where you need to shift and what those changes are for you to get to where you want to be from an income and finance standpoint. It’s awesome. So listen right now and I hope you enjoy this episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast.
Myron: There’s a reason people who make a lot of money, make a lot of money. There’s a reason people who make a little money, make a little money and it’s because income is the result of value created and offered in the marketplace. So value is what creates income and there are four levels of value and if you’re operating on one of the lower levels, you can only make so much money. I will just tell what the four levels of value are so you can just kind of wrap around that.
There are four levels but there are five resources. The top level of value, you have two resources you can use. So every level has one resource, the top level has two resources. The lowest level of value is implementation. That’s the lowest level of value. That is the people who do the thing. So if you do the thing, you’re the person who does the thing, you make the least amount of money. I basically tell people in the presentation if you’re an implementer, I know how much money you make. You make somewhere between minimum wage and $80,000 a year. You make minimum wage if you’re working as housekeeping staff at a hotel, or McDonalds. You make $80,000 a year if you’re like a mechanic that works on Rolls Royce or Bentley’s or something. That’s your income window.
And then the next level of value, and by the way, the resource you use at that level is your muscles. You use your muscles to make money. By the way, I shouldn’t show that on camera, but it’s here to protect, not to harm you. Anyway, pardon my corny, I’m a corny dude. What can I say? So the resource you use, your muscle to make money. The whole premise of the concept is that money is spiritual in nature, it is not materialistic in nature. So if you’re using a physical resource, like your muscles to make money, then your income is going to be limited. If you want to make more money then you have to operate at a higher spiritual level. Does that make sense so far?
The next level of value, which is the second to the lowest…
Russell: The two resources there were muscle and what was the other resource?
Myron: There’s only one resource at that level, that’s your muscle. The top level has multiple resources, the bottom levels only have one. Does that make sense? So the lowest level is implementation. The second to the lowest level is called unification. That is you use, your resource is your management skills. You use your management skills to make money. You don’t do the thing, but you manage the people who do the thing. So you make more money than the people who do the thing, but you still have a limited income. You’re going to make somewhere on the low end, between $40,000 a year, on the high end a quarter of a million. $40,000 if you’re a manager at Taco Bell, high end, quarter of a million, you’re a middle manager, vice president or something at Lock Heed Martin.
That’s your income window. If you want to make more money than that, like working harder in the same level doesn’t make you more money. So the next level is called communication. It’s the second to the highest level of value. Communicators are some of the highest paid people in the world. I’m not talking about people who communicate a message from their head to somebody else’s head, but people who communicate a message from their heart to somebody else’s heart. They can make, they use their words to make people feel something. You know exactly what that looks like because you do it all the time.
So you’re communicating a message. When you use your mouth to make money, on the low end you’re going to make $100 grand, on the high end you might make 100 million. Low end, 100 grand you sell cars. You make $100,000 a year. High end, 100 million, You’re an actor. You’re an A-list actor, you might make a $100 million dollars a year. You’re Robert Downy Jr. You’re a Denzel Washington. You’re an A-list actor, you’re a singer. You’re an A-list singer, you produce albums. You’re a Jay-z, Usher, Beyonce. You are communicating. You’re either an author, a speaker, an actor, a songwriter, a playwrite, or a sales person.
You launch this business called Clickfunnels even though you don’t know how to program, but you do know how to communicate the message. #justsayin. So communication is the second highest level of value and people who get really good at communicating can make a lot of money. People who resist communicating, and if I quote a friend of mine who lives out in Boise, Idaho, they just hate money.
So communication is the second highest level of value and you use your mouth to make money. That’s the resource, you use your mouth. And it almost doesn’t even seem fair, because fair is not a real concept. It doesn’t seem fair that people who talk make more money than people who move things, who have a hammer and nails, or dig holes. But they do.
I have these guys come out here and look at my roof today and the guy told me he’s working for this roofing company for 40 something years and his skin was all leathery and he had sores on his hand. I was like, oh my goodness. It’s so painful. He uses his muscle to make money and he’d been doing it for 40 years. I just thought about that just now. Sometimes people will be physically diligent so they can maintain a state of mental laziness. They won’t work hard at learning a new thing, but they’ll work hard at doing what’s already not working. That’s the kind of progression I’m taking people through.
And the highest level of value, are you ready? Drum roll please. Highest level of value is imagination. You use your mind to make money. That’s one of the resources, you use your mind. The other resource with your imagination to make money, is money. So those are the two resources you use your mind to make money with. Are there people who make money trading stocks and options and commodities and all that stuff? Are there people who do that? Absolutely.
Are there people who lose money doing the same thing? What’s the difference? The difference is how they use their mind. So your mind is your greatest resource for creating wealth. But most people, we’ve been programmed our whole life not to think. Most people don’t think. They think they think. They just think they think, but what they really do is they’re really regurgitating pre-programmed responses that were programmed to them while they were plugged into the matrix and they think they’re having a thought.
So Mind Over Money Mastery is a program where I teach you how to use the three highest level resources and the two highest levels of value and teach you how to use your mouth, mouth mastery. I teach you mind mastery and I teach you money mastery. That’s why it’s called Mind Over Money Mastery. Thank you.
It's amazing that marketers don't discuss this simple and lucrative funnel fix more often...
On this episode of Marketing Secrets, we have the last bit of knowledge Russell wants to share from the affiliate mastermind. This time it is a tip from Trevor Chapman. Here are some of the super informative things you will hear in today’s episode:
So listen here to find out how making your page load faster could significantly improve your conversion rates.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to the last of the secrets I want to share with you from the affiliate mastermind. This one has to do with page load times.
Okay, so I hope you have enjoyed some of the recaps we’ve shared this week. There’s one more cool thing I wanted to share with you. I’m not going to actually show you the video clip of it. But I do want to explain the concept because I think it’s pretty valid and I think it’s interesting and it’s something I’m going to be testing and it’s worth it for all you guys as well.
So this actually came from Trevor Chapman, and Trevor is one of my inner circle members who was there. It’s interesting, he was talking about doing all sorts of stuff with his funnels trying to figure things out and he ended up starting to put Google analytics on stuff to look deeper at everything. And as he was looking at analytics he was trying to figure it out and he couldn’t find someone, so he’s like, “I gotta dig deep in this and try to figure some stuff out.”
And a couple of things he found that were interesting and I think it’s worth listening to. So number one, he said that basically 68% of visitors, I don’t know if it was his page or if it was an industry stat from Google analytics, but 68% of people leave the page before it finishes loading. So they see your ad, they click on it, come over to the page, the page starts loading and 68% of them leave before the page finishes loading, which is interesting.
So he started going back in and started saying, “My page is loading too slow. I need to increase my page load speed. If I’m losing 68% of people before the page even loads, that’s 2/3rds of my traffic or whatever the fraction is on that, never even see my ad.” So he started doing stuff to lower things. Lowering the image size, lowering page size, page structure, a bunch of stuff like that and increasing how fast the page loaded. And he got his, I can’t remember how much he decreased the load time, but from 25-30 seconds down to 10 seconds, down to 5 seconds. And as he did that he 2-3x’d his income. Not by changing the page or ad or anything, just by reducing, increasing the page load time, which was super fascinating.
In fact, he kind of mocked, he teased me because the clickfunnels.com homepage right now, I don’t think I ever optimized those images, but it takes almost 30 full seconds to load the entire page, and he’s like I bet you 68% of people never see that thing. I’m like, “That sucks.” So that was kind of interesting.
Then he made another observation that for me was super fascinating. He talked about how people like me say ugly pages convert better, or your page….a webinar registration page without a video on it increase conversation rates and all sorts of stuff. He’s like, “I always thought it was because ugly pages convert better. No, the problem is a lot of times pretty pages take way longer to load.” You’ve got beautiful background images and a video file and all that kind of stuff just takes longer to load. That’s why people are leaving.
Where with the ugly ones, it’s just html code, there’s text and some stuff, they load faster and therefore instead of 68% of people leaving, it maybe drops down to 23%. You’re getting twice as much traffic just by increasing the load speed time. I thought that was fascinating and interesting. So I’m going to be doing some more testing, but I wanted to share with you guys, with everyone as your doing it, because I don’t know 100%, I take everything with a grain of salt, but I do think he’s onto something. I do think the page load time is interesting.
I do know on the Clickfunnels side, this is something that should be comforting to you guys, Todd spends time every single month trying to decrease page load speed on our side, doing stuff to optimize the pages, get the code out faster, all those kind of things so that page load is happening faster. In fact, I’ve seen over the last probably year, I’ve seen him shave across network wide, tens of millions of pages that people view every single day on ours, shaving time off by multiple seconds.
So we’re always optimizing on our side. But you guys as you’re building pages in Clickfunnels, just know that. Know that, man if I have a background image, how big is that file? If it’s 3 megs and I got 3 of those things, that’s 9 megs just in background images. That’s not good, especially when you’re pulling it on your phone or mobile. It gets really, really bad. In fact, we just created a new tool inside Funnel University, for those of you who are Funnel U members, it should be there by the time you’re here. But it’s an image re-sizer. I had Dorel on my team build a little software app where basically you take a background image, throw it in this thing and what it’ll do is take an image that’s like 3 or 4 megs, you’ll click a button and it’ll pop the image back out, it looks exactly the same but it decreases the image size from 3 or 4 megs to like 300 megabytes or whatever, 1/10th the size.
So I’m going back to all my old images, my e-cover image, my picture image, any image I upload in Clickfunnels, I have on a page, I’m putting back through that thing and shrinking the size of it to increase page load time. Just know, those are things you should be looking at because, man, if you can increase your conversion by 10%, 20% 30% just by images loading faster, that’s a lot of money without having to write better copy or any of those kinds of things. Just page load time.
So Trevor Chapman, thanks for bringing that top of mind to me. And hopefully everyone who’s listening on the podcast, it’s something definitely worth doing. And it’s something you should all look at.
With that said, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode of Marketing Secrets podcast. If you loved this episode, a couple of things. Number one, please go and share with those who you love. Tell them to go subscribe and listen. Number two, please read a comment. I do read the comments over at itunes.com, leave a comment and let me know. Number three, the best thing you can do to increase us, right now, last I checked we’re number 5 in the business category, if we want to be number one, it’s all about listen time. The more you listen the higher we get ranked.
So go and binge listen. Go back to episode number one, click play and let’s catch up on the last 5 years together. Basically since we started launching Clickfunnels is about the time I launched this podcast and you get to hear the ups and downs, behind the scenes. Everything we did to go from zero to over 100 million dollars in sales and it’s all free here on the podcast. You just gotta go binge listen at the very beginning. So come back to episode one, let’s have some fun and I hope you enjoy the podcast. I appreciate you guys being on here and we’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye.
Your supporters might be secretly mad at you if you're neglecting to do this simple thing.
On this episode Russell talks about validation and why it’s important to validate people when they have done a great job. You’ll also hear from Julie Stoian at the mastermind event talking about how validation motivated her into working harder. Here are some of the cool things you will hear in today’s episode:
Listen here for that and more on this episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to another episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast. This one, we’re staying in the affiliate event. I’ve got so many more cool things to share with you guys. I want to talk about a concept that was brought to my attention again called validation.
Alright so at this affiliate mastermind group we had again, our top 20 affiliates were there. And one of the people who came was an unlikely person on our leader board, I say unlikely because I didn’t know much about her prior to this, but now that I know her, it’s very likely. There’s a reason why she’s successful and I hope she knows that if she’s listening to this. But it’s Julie and if you guys watched the affiliate contest you saw it, she did awesome throughout the contest and she came in and ended up being on the top ten leader board, ended up being number 4 I believe in this contest.
She has become the first Clickfunnels affiliate to win a car, Julie Stoian and a whole bunch of other awesome stuff. What’s interesting is she joined this contest, I didn’t know these things, it was in the middle of her moving, she was in the middle of her own product launch, a bunch of stuff and she started going and she started trying to be part of this launch and help support us. Throughout the launch, first off I guess and I didn’t know this, a bunch of people were doing Facebook Live’s with me and she wanted to do a Facebook Live and I guess she reached out to Dave and asked, and Dave was like, “We can’t, Russell’s got 30 a day and we just can’t do it.”
And rightfully so, she was kind of upset about that. A little while later, other things happened and she kind of blew up and it was funny, it was the first time she’d really been brought to my attention. I was watching her videos and I was just like, man, she’s killing herself trying to help support us and I was so grateful for that. And she was upset, which always adds a little layer of whatever. I saw her video and I was just like, at first I was kind of hurt, oh man. Then I started comments and the more I started reading I was like, she said something that she kind of dropped in a comment, “He won’t even let me do an interview with him.”
I was like, “She just wanted to do an interview?” So I just posted, “Do you just want to do an interview. We can do that.” And she wrote back, “Yes, I’d love to.” I’m like, “Okay, if that’s it, let’s just do an interview, that’d be fine.” And we ended up doing the interview and she sold a bunch of books and she kept doing it and she ended up being number 4.
And she came to this event and she was talking about the top 10 or 15 things she’d learned through this affiliate contest, which were really, really cool. I’m not going to share all of them, because obviously a lot of the stuff that was shared at the event is private for those who were there. But one of the things that was interesting is she talked about is just validation. How me and Dave Woodward on our team, how us validating her, is what got her to keep moving forward. And I’m going to show that clip really quick so you guys can kind of just hear her say in her own words why that was so important, because it’s interesting and I want you guys to hear that. And then when we come I wanted to kind of talk about that because it’s important to so many aspects of our lives. So let’s watch that clip right now.
Julie: At one point in the contest, I was angry. I was really angry because I had asked for an interview and I didn’t get one, and then I saw other people getting one that were further down the list than me and I was just, I was mad and I felt like I was missing out and my feelings were hurt, but I was angry. So I posted on Facebook that I was mad about the $20 bid, and I also didn’t understand the context of the whole Dream 100 because I’d never gotten any of the other packages because I wasn’t part of Russell’s Dream 100.
So I felt like I was in this ridiculous game where the rules were changing and I wanted their attention and I wasn’t getting it. Well Dave and Russell both validated me and from that moment on I went from “I don’t know if I want to do this. Maybe I’m going to quit.” To “I’m yours forever.” The validation that happened at that moment of being able to reach out and say, “I see you. I see what you’re doing, I’m appreciative. Do you want an interview?” I had all kinds of motivation I never had before.
So in my own business, when I see my customers or my clients floundering but they’re really trying, and I’m not talking about the trolls and the thugs and the people who are just the complainers, but the people who are really trying and they’re just drowning. That one seed of “hey, I hear you.” Can change everything and that’s what it did for me. Because I was ready to quit and then Russell and Dave reached out and I was like, I’m not quitting. It completely changed it for me when you guys reached out. I was done. So in business that matters to me, and I think that’s how I’ve created customers for life in my own business. And why I got as far as I did.
Russell: It’s interesting huh, how us validating her got her to go and do these things and to do stuff. I started thinking back about my life, in fact Brandon Fisher who’s one of our main video guys, he talked about this too as well. When I validate, or when someone validates his work or whatever it might be, how powerful that is. And a lot of time, and I forget this and I wish I was better at it. But a lot of times your employees or your spouse or your kids, a lot of times they’re doing stuff because they love you and appreciate you and want you to be happy and I think sometimes, especially in the business world we get caught up in, “What do they want? They want a raise.” And we think about that because it’s the monetary side.
But a lot of times it’s, a lot of people that’s important obviously, but what’s more important sometimes is validation, saying “Thank you.” Saying, “You did a great job.” And I’m not perfect at that. I struggle with that. I wish I was better at that. But it kind of brought it back to my attention and I feel like the team we’ve built at Clickfunnels is second to none. And I feel like one of my roles that I need to become better at is validating people and just thanking them for what they do and telling them they did a good job and things like that.
So I’m making more of a conscious effort of that, to do it more often. Because it’s been interesting, as I’ve built this company with my team, even when I said the word “I” right there, I said “I’ve been building..” I felt like that’s not true. Is that weird. I was like that wasn’t true. So let me step back, as we’ve been building Clickfunnels, because it has not been me. It’s been a team, an army of the most amazing people on earth who have built that together.
A lot of times people think it’s me because I’m the bouncing monkey, “Oh get Clickfunnels.” But I’m just one little piece of this machine that’s been growing. A lot of times I get validation from the market, which makes me feel good. People like my comments, or they comment or share or whatever and I get the pat on the back for a job well done but for the rest of the team, they don’t necessarily get that. It’s just coming from me or coming from somebody else. So I think sometimes I forget that because I get the ego boost. I mean that’s why.
Honestly though, why do I share so many videos? Why do I do podcasts? Why do I do so much stuff? I like the validation. I like when I put something cool out there and people are like, “Dude, that was awesome.” I get that validation and I think too often I don’t give it to the people who are the rest of the army behind what we’re doing. And a lot of times my family, my kids, my wife….It was a good reminder for me, it was humbling. I hope it’s a good reminder for you too.
With that said, thanks again for listening to this episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast. If you loved this episode, if you love anything you’ve learned so far, please share this. Let other people know about it. Last I checked we were number 5 in the business category. We’ve been beating out some of the legends and we’ve been there for a long time now. And the way we get to number one is you guys sharing, telling other people about it, binge listening. In fact, the best thing to increase the ratings of the podcast for all of us is for you guys to binge listen.
So if you like this one, go back to episode number one and go through these things together this weekend and let’s binge listen together, it’ll be kind of fun. Appreciate you guys. We’ll see you guys on the next episode. Bye.
Do you say "yes" to too many opportunities? If so, this episode is for you.
On today’s episode of Marketing Secrets, we hear another excerpt from the affiliate mastermind. We hear Garrett Pearson go over the rules he must follow in order to see a project through. Here are some of the awesome things to look for in this episode:
So listen here to find out what rules a project must fall into for Garrett to take it on, and why you should be doing something similar with your own business.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell. I want to welcome you back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. This episode I’m going to be talking about some of the rules you need to setup before you say yes to any project.
So for today’s podcast, again this is another cool thing that we got from the affiliate mastermind group. One of my friends, his name is Garrett Pearson, he runs a bunch of cool companies, and we’re actually launching a company soon together, which I’m really excited for. I won’t ruin the surprise yet, but it is amazing and you’re going to go crazy. Should I tell you more? After you see the webinar you will want to create a software program inside of your company. That’s all I’m giving you.
With that said, Garrett came and showed the business we’re building together, kind of presented it to all the affiliates, because again, I think that every affiliate, I think every business should have a software component to it. I think you’re kind of crazy if you don’t. Of all the businesses I’ve been in, I’ve been supplements, info products, ecommerce, everything, by far my favorite business ever is software, which is probably why I love software, as you can tell.
But one thing that Garrett talked about, they have a list of rules that they, before they see a project, he’s like, “I have a new idea for a new software product every hour. If we didn’t have a filter…” and at first when he started his business, he didn’t. He’d just create everything. He said, “We created this filter.” So I asked him if he’d share that filter with everyone during the mastermind event. So I’m going to have him share that filter, I’m going to show you guys that clip right now.
His filter may be different than your filter, but listen to this because you need to create your own filter. And I struggle with it as well. So many opportunities come by and I’m like, “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, I gotta say yes.” And it’s like, no you have to create a filter otherwise it will consume your whole business and life. It’s something that I’m working on and so it was a good reminder for me. So I want you guys to hear Garrett’s filter, the thing he runs things through before he jumps in and says yes to a project. So let me show you that clip right now.
Garrett: We had to come up with a way to stop us from doing too much. Because you have to focus, like Russell said, you have to focus. So here’s how we stay grounded. We don’t do a software if it doesn’t pass all of these things, okay.
So is it sexy, does your product fill a need or want in a desirable, attractive way? That’s pretty obvious right? You’ve got to find something that people want. More importantly in the software world, is it sticky? So in the software world, if you want recurring billing, you want recurring revenue, you need somebody that’s going to pay you over and over again, month after month, or year after year. So is it sticky? Is it going to be difficult or painful for a client to stop using our software.
So Clickfunnels is a good example. I don’t know what Russell’s churn rate is, and that’s people that stop using it, but with the amount of users he has, that’s just part of doing business in the software world. But it’s super sticky, because if you’ve got ten funnels you’re not going to leave.
Russell: Even if you hate me.
Garrett: Exactly! You’re not going to leave, right? So our shopper approved software, it’s a rating and review software for ecommerce companies. They start using us, they get even 50 reviews, they’re going to stay with us forever and keep paying us and paying us. So is it sticky? That’s really, really important. For example, with Allison’s, it’s definitely sexy, it’s definitely sticky because you’re going to keep using it over and over again, hopefully. So people are going to keep paying her month after month.
Can you charge recurring billing? We don’t do anything unless we can charge recurring billing. So it’s very, very important because the recurring billing is where software, as we’ve already talked about today, why it’s the 9th wonder of the world. Can you sell it via call center? Now this is for us, these can be different for you guys. We love to sell our products in a call center. So for us, if we can’t sell it in a call center…for example, where something wouldn’t work for us, if it’s $47 a month. Because we can’t sell that in a call center because our guys won’t make enough money, our sales team won’t make enough money. So if we can’t sell it in a call center, we generally don’t do it.
Can you promote it to your existing customers target market? Now this is for us, because we already have software in certain niches right. So we try to build stuff that we can sell to our existing customers, or that market. Now this software funnel is an exception, but sometimes you gotta make exceptions, right.
Is it programming excessive? If it takes us more than 6 to 8 months to develop with one or two programmers, generally we won’t do it. Is it customer service friendly? It’s gotta be customer service friendly or it’s going to be a nightmare to work with over time. So those are the things that we go through and if it doesn’t pass those, we don’t do it.
Russell: Alright to recap what Garrett said. Is it sexy? Is it sticky? Can you charge recurrent? Can you sell it through a call center? Can you promote it to existing customers? Is it programming excessive and support friendly? For them those are the filters they need to have. You don’t have to have the same filters for you. Sometimes you don’t want a call center. Maybe that’s the opposite filter, like it cannot be sold in a call center, it’s gotta be sold online. But you gotta pick your rules. These are the rules of what I’m willing to do and not willing to do.
Otherwise, as I’ve found in my life, and I still struggle with it like I said. If you’re not careful, you’ll commit to too much stuff. If you suffer from over commitment, that’s the problem. I would definitely say that I fall in this trap. In fact, it’s been interesting, in the last two weeks, two people have been placed in my life. One I haven’t seen in 16 or 17 years, a spiritual leader who I have so much respect for, but I haven’t heard from him in 16 or 17 years, and I hear from him and a couple of weeks later he’s in my office, sitting there talking to me, and then he’s gone.
And then, just today it happened again. Again, someone I respect a ton. And both of them basically said, almost word for word, said the same thing. “Russell, you gotta slow down. You need to be in this for the long haul.” I think God is telling me something consistently and I’m hearing it loud and clear and now I’m trying to figure out for myself, I’ve got to create my filters, I’ve got to create these rules for myself because as you guys can probably see, I’m running faster now. We’re doing a lot of stuff, which is good, it’s fun, I love it. But at the same time, if I’m not careful I’m going to burn out. I need to be in the for the long haul for myself to keep me happy in the long term in my life, for my customers, for my partners, for our employees, for everyone.
So just a good reminder for me and hopefully for you as well. Thanks again for listening to the Marketing Secrets podcast, I hope you appreciate it, if you do, if you learn anything please share this with your friends. Please come into iTunes, please comment, let us know. We’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye everybody.
The harder you try to get it, the more success escapes you.
On today’s episode we hear another clip of John Lee Dumas talking about a quote from Albert Einstein that taught him not to chase success. Here are some of the cool things you will hear on this episode:
Listen hear to hear John Lee Dumas explain how being a person of value led to being a person of success.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson and the Marketing Secrets podcast. I’ve got another really cool thing to share with you from our recent affiliate mastermind.
Alright everybody, this is one that I thought was really powerful. This was also a really cool strategy shared by JLD, John Lee Dumas of EO on Fire and he talked about when he was growing up he wanted to be successful. So he was doing things to make him successful. He was going to school, getting jobs, trying to become successful and somewhere in this journey he said that he heard a quote from Albert Einstein and the quote, I’m probably going to mess this up. Let’s do this, I’m going to cut to the clip so you can hear him actually say it and tell the story, because he’ll say it more articulate than I can. So let’s listen to that clip right now and we’ll come right back.
JLD: So at 32 Years old I kind of had this realization when I read this quote by Albert Einstein, which was, “Try not to become a person of success, but rather a person of value.” And I was like, I’ve been trying to become a person of success my whole life and it hasn’t really worked. So what is this value thing?
So I started really doing some research on what it meant to be a person of value and that’s when I started looking around my world saying what people are adding value into my life? And those people, really in 2012, were podcasters. I was like, these people are adding free value to my life and they’re amazing. Maybe this is something I can look at. So this is something that led me down the path of launching my own podcast so that I could then create free, valuable, and consistent content. That’s my 3 special ingredients for success. Because I deliver free, valuable and consistent content, I was able to grow an audience.
Russell: So I thought that was such a key because I know that for most of us, for me, I want to be successful and if we’re running towards success, a lot of times we don’t realize that that’s not what makes you successful. It’s figuring out how to provide value, how to be a person of value. That is the key. And when you do that you’ll get the success that you want.
There’s so many things in life that we have that problem where there’s a direct path to success, but instead of going and getting it, we go and do things on these huge loops to try to get the success we want. One of the funny ones, when I first started working with Tony Robbins, started learning all his 6 human needs and things like that, it was interesting because prior to that my wife and I had a conversation. I was out there trying to build this business, trying to do all these cool things and trying to impress her so that we would have more love and connection between me and her. And I was going on this huge route trying to get more love and connection.
I remember one day I came home and I was all excited about this stuff and my wife you could tell that she missed me and she was like, “I just wish you’d come home.” And I was like, “What? I’m doing all these things for us.” As sometimes we say. And as I thought more about it I was like, I’m doing these things for myself. I’m trying to feel more significant, more of all these kind of things so that I can impress her so that we can have love and connection. I’m going on this huge route to get love and connection where I could have just come home and gotten the same love and connection.
It’s just interesting sometimes as humans we go on this route. And I think this is one of the things I got out of the affiliate mastermind. It was just like, if you want to be a person of success, don’t pursue success, pursue being a person of value and the person the provides the most value to the audience, to the people, to become successful. If you understand that, the game changes. Hope that helps, hope you guys enjoyed this podcast. Thanks again for listening to Marketing Secrets. Please, if you like this episode or any of the episodes, share it, comment on it, love to hear it. I appreciate you guys listening and I’ll see you guys on the next episode. Bye.
In my 15 years of doing business, I've never heard this critical business concept explained so perfectly.
On this episode of Marketing Secrets Russell lets you listen to how John Lee Dumas describes his ideal and perfect customer. Here are some cool things you will hear:
So listen here to find out what John Lee Dumas’s perfect customer is like, and how you can nail yours down as well.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today I’ll take you behind the scenes of our recent affiliate mastermind talking about building out your customer avatar.
Alright everyone, so this last week we did an affiliate event for my top 20 affiliates for the Expert Secrets book, which was really cool. We had them all fly out here to Boise, we hung out, shared ideas, talked and it was really, really cool. In fact, the next few episodes of the podcast, I’m actually going to do right here in my home office. I’m here right now and I’ve got my notebook with a whole bunch of cool stuff and there are a whole bunch of really good takeaways that I think were valuable enough to share with you.
We also happened to film the event, so I’m going to get Brandon on my team to grab some of those clips and plug them into here so you can actually see some of the footage and some of the ideas and concepts, I think are really, really important. I know the last few podcasts I’ve done have been some long ones. Some an hour long, 90 minutes, so I’m going to get back to a shorter form to share some of the really cool things.
So first I want to talk about JLD, John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneur On Fire, who is I think the number one Clickfunnels affiliate right now. He’s going to be the first affiliate in Clickfunnels to make a million dollars himself, that’s his goal and he’s killing it. He’s also probably one of the lowest maintenance, if not the lowest maintenance affiliates I’ve ever had and partners. He’s just an awesome dude, and I love him and love working with him and it’s awesome.
So he was at the event and what was cool was that we had him do some Q&A with the group and somebody asked him, “I’m building a podcast,” and the first thing JLD asked was “Who’s it for?” and they’re like, “It’s for this kind of person, this kind of person, and this kind of person.” He’s like, “There’s your problem, you need to be able to identify exactly who your person is.” And then he went into this state where he shared exactly who his dream customer, his dream client was. I’ve never in the history of me doing this business, which is now 14 or 15 years heard someone more perfectly explain their customer avatar than JLD did in that moment. And I’m so glad we got it on film. I’m going to play that clip for you right now so you can see exactly what he said.
And as you’re listening to this I want you thinking through that because that is how clear you have to be on exactly who your customer is, and that way you create your product, your podcast, whatever it is you’re doing, you match it to your customer and that is the secret. So let me show you that clip right now.
JLD: So who’s you’re perfect listener?
Audience member: Our perfect listener would be a business owner, or an entrepreneur, or a real estate investor.
JLD: So that’s really vague. Perfect listener should just be that one individual that you see as that perfect, ideal client. Because once you’ve made that step and that decision as a podcast host, everything changes. So for me, when I was trying to figure out what I wanted Entrepreneur On Fire to be I was overwhelmed because it was hard for me to find what the path that I wanted to take my listeners on.
When I really sat down and said okay, my listener, or my avatar is Jimmy. He’s 37 years old, he has a wife and two kids ages three to five. He drives by himself to work every single day, it’s a 25 minute commute to work. He gets to a cubical at a job he hates for 9 hours. He gets done with his job, drives home, it’s a 35 minute commute home. He gets stuck in a little bit of traffic. He gets home and hangs out with his kids, has dinner with his family, puts his kids to bed, hangs out with his wife and then he has a little Jimmy pity party at the end of every single night because he’s sitting on the couch saying ‘Why do I spend 90% of my waking hours doing things that I don’t enjoy doing? Commuting to a job I don’t like, being at a job I don’t like, commuting home and only 10% of my waking hours doing things that I love. Like spending time with my kids and my family.’
Jimmy is my avatar, he’s the person that, as he’s driving to work, should be listening to Entrepreneur On Fire so that when my guest is sharing their worst entrepreneurial moments he can understand that it’s okay to fail. That you can learn lessons from failure. And that when he’s driving home and my guest talks about their aha moment, he can talk about how you take an aha moment and turn it into success. And then instead of having that pity party at night by himself on a couch, he can listen to the lightning round where my guest is sharing their best advice they’ve ever had, their favorite book, their favorite resource, so he can start to put together the pieces of the puzzle.
So for me, whenever I come up to any question I have above the direction of my podcast, I go to my avatar and I say, “WWJD, what would Jimmy do?” And I know from that one answer that that’s the way I gotta go. So if you sit down and really say hey, this really is the one perfect listener of my podcast, then you’re going to know that person inside and out. You’re going to know where that person hangs out, what Facebook groups they’re in, what LinkedIn groups they’re in. How to advertize to them, what lead or ad is going to be appealing to them on Facebook, that’s going to get them to download it and be promoted to your show.
And again, this is you ideal, perfect client. You can probably picture right now, this person that whenever he sits down in front of you, you’re just like, “Dude, you’re like my favorite client.” And he’s like, “I know I’m your favorite client.” That’s the person that you want to be drawing in. So if you sit down and really just figure out who your perfect one ideal listener is, everything changes from that point forward and all the decisions you make are based off of that. So every piece of content you make for your podcast is speaking to that avatar, that one person. Every call to action you give, every intro, and every call to action, and every outro is for a specific purpose.
So for instance, in my podcast, Entrepreneur On Fire, you’ll hear me, I have seven rotating calls to action on my intro’s and outro’s. One’s going to say, “Hey this John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneur On Fire where I interview the world’s most successful entrepreneurs 7 days a week. By the way if you’re struggling with a goal right now, you should check out the Freedom Journal, because I teach you how to accomplish your number one goal in 100 days, so visit thefreedomjournal.com” And that will be one call to action that will bring people down one specific funnel that will result in them purchasing my journal, the Freedom Journal, for $39.
And then I have the call to action in my outro that says, “Hey guys, I hope you enjoyed the chat with Russell today. He rocked the mic as always. Oh, by the way, if you’re thinking about creating your own course, your own podcast, I have a free course called Free Podcast course, it’ll teach you how to create, grow and monetize your own podcast in 15 days.
So then they’ll go to that URL, they’ll sign up for the free podcasting course, which lead them to my free master class, which I do every two weeks live. And then the master class will lead to me pitching them Podcaster’s Paradise, which is what we have for our premium podcasting community. So every single call to action I have is for Jimmy to take him into one of my 7 or 8 functioning funnels that I have to result in some kind of revenue being generated at the end.
So I think the steps you can and should take is really nail your avatar, understand who that person is as an individual, and then start creating one, two, three calls to action that you’re using in your intros and your outros that are getting them into a beginning part of a funnel, that’s going to result in your ideal action, which might be a phone call. Which might be, whatever, you know, investigating their first dollar with your company. Whatever that result is, that’s the funnel you’re taking them in. Does that make sense?
I hope you guys loved that. As he was talking I was trying to take notes. I’m like, oh good we got a video. It’s pretty powerful and I want to make sure you guys all know your customer avatar that clear as well. If not, it’s time to do your homework, stop the podcast and go think through that. Because as soon as it becomes that tangible, where you know who they, everything else becomes easier. With that said, thanks you guys so much for listening and we’ll see you on next week’s episode of the Marketing Secret’s podcast.
If you’re not as successful yet as you’d like to be… I know why. This episode I went off on a 96 minute rant that’ll get you back on track.
On today’s special road trip edition of the podcast Russell talks about some exciting events coming up, some personal development rules he follows, and why it’s okay for people to outgrow Clickfunnels. Here are some of the cool things to look forward to in this episode:
So listen here to hear this extra long, extra informative and extra exciting episode of Marketing Secrets.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to a special edition, a road trip version, edition, whatever you want to call it of Marketing Secrets podcast. I feel like we’re going old school, for our long time friends and followers, this is like a Marketing In Your Car. But I’ve got a long drive ahead and I want to welcome you guys to the podcast.
Alright, alright everybody. I just started a super long road trip heading to Burley, Idaho. It is my wife’s grandma’s 100th birthday. So we’re heading down to the big birthday party. Isn’t that crazy, 100 years old! It’s really, really fun. My wife and kids actually left a day and a half ago. I had to get some stuff done, so now I’m heading down for the big party.
So basically I have a two hour road trip and was heading out the door, super excited and I’m totally unprepared. I forgot my camera to record podcasts, I forgot my little ear buds, I forgot my sunglasses. Oh well, what can you do? I forgot my battery charger for my phone, oh well I’m still excited.
So I’m heading down and I’ve got some time to talk to you guys. So I wanted to share some cool things. First off, one thing we’re working on is, as you’ve probably heard, we’re about to launch our viral video with the Harmon Brothers. They’re the guys that did Squatty Potty and Poopourri and all the other awesome things. What’s funny, everyone asks me, “Oh I want to hire them too, their stuff is awesome. How much does it cost?” and I think people think the quote is going to be like 10 or 15 grand or something, but it’s actually half a million dollars to hire them to do a 3 minute video for you. It’s not cheap.
So we paid a lot of money to get this video created and then I was like man, most people do a video and then they launch it and it kind of just, you hope it goes well and sometimes it does, but I’m like, if we’re going to launch it, I want as much oompf behind it as humanly possible. So I was like, we need to do a launch party. So that was kind of the first thought, but how do we do a launch party? I’ve never done one before but it’s gotta be just kind of like a regular party. Well maybe we should get some cool speakers, some cool influencers and affiliates out here, so who would be cool to have? Oh Gary Vaynerchuk would be cool. He’s not speaking at Funnel Hacking Live, but he’d be a really cool fit for this event.
So we called him up, he said yes. We had to pay him about 100 grand to get him to come to Boise to speak. But we’re like where in Boise is actually cool enough to host an event like this? There’s not a lot of cool hotels. So the Boise State football stadium, the big Skybox there, is kind of cool and hold 3 or 400 people.
So we’re like, cool we’ll do this. We rent the Skybox, but who are we going to invite. We need to make this really, really cool. I think it was Alex Charfen told me this, it might not have been him, but I think it was. Basically said that entrepreneurs like to create events out of everything to make it memorable for them and for everybody else. So I was like, we need to make a big event.
So anyway, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. We can invite our affiliates, that’ll be kind of fun, we’ll invite a bunch of them. But who else can we invite that can share this video? We can invite people that aren’t necessarily our affiliates, just other influencers that if they share the video it would dramatically boost it. So okay, let’s do that.
So we set up this event, I was going to speak, Harmon Brothers were going to speak, Gary was going to speak, then we start reaching out to influencers and they’re like, “We don’t really care about people speaking. We want a party.” And we’re like, it’s going to be kind of a fun party. We’re all fun people. They’re like, “No we need a real party.” So we’re like, how do we throw a real party?
So we started just kind of brainstorming and what came out of the brainstorm was what if we rented out the actual football stadium and tried to play bubble soccer, that’d be kind of fun. What if instead of playing bubble soccer, what if we tried to play the biggest game of bubble soccer ever? What if we had the Guinness Book of World Records come and….
Anyway, that was kind of the initial crazy thought and then Dave was like, “I’m going to figure out how to make this work.” So Dave spent the next two weeks on the phone getting the Guinness Book of World Records, and then getting Boise State to let us come, and all the licensing fees and it’s been this insane project. So we got all that done. We don’t have any influencers who have kind of, we’re in this thing with a lot of money. We have no influencers actually coming. So then I was like, okay, I have to go old school. Practice what I preach.
So the last two days I’ve sat in this car and recorded almost 200 videos, personalized videos for all these influencers, which was a lot of work. We made a page, 200 pages for 200 different influencers and now Monday, we’re in the process of contacting all of them and inviting them to this huge party. Anyway, it’s been crazy and none of them may come, but hopefully they will. But regardless it’ll be a fun party. We’re going to set a world record, we’re going to launch a viral video and that’s one of the many things we’re doing.
We also have 12 events in the next 43 days happening in Boise. One of them just got done so it’s actually down to 11. Monday we have a design-a-thon where we’ve got 30 designers coming out and we’re busting out a whole bunch of new templates for the Marketplace that’s launching during the new onboarding, everything’s going live in Clickfunnels when the viral videos hits and about a billion other things. It’s crazy. The next 45 days will probably be the most stressful, crazy days of my life. But if we can pull it off, it’s going to be nuts.
I keep saying that, I did the same thing with the book launch. I think there’s something about me, I think something’s wrong, the wiring in my head where I always think that after this life will get normal again. But then I just keep stacking things on. I think part of it is just momentum, it’s hard to get momentum for a lot of people. But when you have momentum you don’t want to slow down, you want to keep riding the wave. So I feel like I’m 14 minutes into my 15 minutes of fame and I’m enjoying the ride and I don’t want to slow down, so I’m like, we just keep rolling stuff out.
We’re launching a new book, the Funnel Hacker Cookbook, this month. It’s crazy. If you guys could see what’s actually happening behind the scenes, I don’t think you’d actually believe it. Funnel Hacker TV, we started filming that because we wanted to show people, but that’s still just a glimpse, it doesn’t come close to everything that’s actually happening. It’s nuts.
Alright, so for you guys I wanted to share, because I’ve been thinking a lot about this last night as I was working super late. I was like, why am I here? It’s been two nights that I’ve been here until like 2:30 in the morning and I’m loving it. Outside of hanging out with my kids, there’s nothing else I would rather do than that. And I’m like, how do I get people to where they’re this passionate about what they do and their business and what they’re selling?
I did a podcast a little while ago talking about the number one trait I found between entrepreneurs who are successful and those who aren’t and the biggest trait is that the ones who are super successful, they’re the ones who are extremely passionate, not just about their product but about the marketing of their product. They start geeking out on the marketing. That’s the key. Those who obsess with the marketing are the ones who have the most success, which is why for me it’s been a big deal, that’s why I wrote the Dotcom Secrets book and the Expert Secrets book, and why I do the events. All the stuff I do is because my goal is to get you guys, I want to make marketing and sales fun. If this is something that you guys, if I could make this the entertainment. To study and learn and geek out on the marketing, then that’s been my mission on this earth.
Because when I was learning this stuff, it was exciting for me but honestly it was kind of boring. The people teaching and talking about marketing, yawn, they were boring and I had to wade through a lot of boring crap and now I’m trying to make it exciting. I’m trying to bring my raw passion to you guys and I hope I’m doing my job. I’m doing my best. Because if you get pumped up and fired up about the marketing of your thing, then that’s how you get the ability to make money, free yourself, and give you the ability to not just make the money but impact more people and serve more people and that’s the goal.
So I’m thinking, outside of me just everyday trying to get you guys pumped and excited and fired up about how much fun the marketing of your thing can be, I was thinking about this last night, how do I just take that part of my brain out and shove it into your brain so you’re fired up. I started thinking about it and I think the key for someone to be truly passionate about the marketing and the selling of their thing, they first have to be truly passionate about their thing.
Because you think about that, I talked a little bit about this in the Expert Secrets book, initially you don’t wake up, well I did, but I think most people don’t, maybe that was my gift of whatever. But most people don’t wake up excited, “I’m going to learn how to do marketing!” It’s not the thing that pumps people up. But there’s something else that happens, there’s something that you got excited about in your life. It could a book you read, it could be audio, could be video, could be just a weird thing, I don’t know. Whatever it is that your thing is. Everyone has their thing, your thing is something.
So your thing that got you pumped up, whatever that was, I want you to think about that because that’s the key that unlocks everything. First you get excited about that thing because it’s exciting to you. You go through this time of growth. You start studying it and you learn and geek out and start growing and growing and growing and growing and at first it’s honestly kind of a selfish thing. There’s nothing wrong with that. What’s the dude from Wallstreet say? Greed is good. Initially it is, I think. Not long term, but short term greed is good. Greed is what gets you to unbalance your life in a way initially, not long term but initially. Initially you have unbalance your life to focus on a thing to have greatness come.
When I met my beautiful wife and I wanted to fall in love with her, for me to be successful in that I had to be greedy. I had to shift all my time and all the other stuff I was doing and other people and other things. I had to unbalance my life to focus everything on that relationship so that we could fall in love and get married. The same thing happened with business. The same thing happened with wrestling. When I started wrestling, I had to be greedy about that thing. I had to get so unbalanced in every other thing in my life and just focus on that thing, because that’s what it takes to be great at anything, right. That raw passion.
So first, the greed of that thing, of you desiring that thing is what initially starts. Some of you guys it was weight loss, some of you guys it was Biohacking, some of you guys it was finance, some of you guys it was history. It doesn’t matter, whatever it is that you geek out about. So the greed of the excitement that you feel initially for that thing is what makes it so you can completely unbalance your life and absorb and go into that thing. That’s the first key because to be an expert, to be able to share your message, all those things we talk about and to actually care about the marketing about your thing, you’ve got to be ridiculously passionate about the thing first. Otherwise you’re not going to wade into this territory, you’re going to go through all the pain of being an entrepreneur and getting that thing out into the world.
Because I know a lot of us paint this beautiful picture of entrepreneurship and it is eventually, but initially it’s not. Initially it sucks. Initially you have to go through so much. It’s like giving birth. My wife has given birth to 5 kids, 4 times, one time was twins. Giving birth is not pleasurable. The initial thought of it, that creates the baby. That’s pleasurable just like your business, the thought of it is exciting. You’re romantic about the thing you’re going to create. Sorry, my jeep is super loud when I go into overdrive.
Anyway, that’s pleasurable, we all enjoy that. I enjoyed what it took to get my wife pregnant, that’s awesome I enjoyed what it took to create the seed of Clickfunnels and the business, right. That part’s fun, and then after the romantic side happens, for pregnancy there’s nine months of pain for the woman. My wife, I watched her go through this 4 times. She gained weight, she felt horrible, she felt sick, she was throwing up. Business is the same way, after you go through the romantic part, now it’s painful. You have to work hard and you can’t sleep and you have to deprive yourself of friends and family and life and all the pleasures in life to birth this thing that you have. And most people give up during the birthing process, because it sucks.
With a baby you got no option, the baby’s coming whether you want it to or not, but the birthing of a business and to be an entrepreneur, it’s so painful most people don’t make it through it. They always say that 1 out of 100 businesses succeed, but the reality, 1 out of a million businesses never even get to fruition because the idea is planted, but the birthing of the thing never happens because it’s so painful.
So if you’re not obsessively, insanely passionate about your thing, I’ve got to break it to you, it’s going to be hard to birth it. Those hard times come and it sucks. So I think that not only do you have to become passionate about the market, because I’m trying to make that part fun, so the birthing process is actually fun. Maybe I’m the equivalent of the hypno-birthing class. My wife and I did hypno-birthing for the last kid, which was actually really cool. We did classes and they tried to make it really, really fun. So maybe I’m the hypno-birthing coach. Trying to make the process of birth fun for you even though you know it’s still going to suck. But maybe you can have a good time along the way, you should, it is really fun.
But I was like, if you’re going to go through that birth process, you have to be so excited about the baby, that’s the key. My wife and I were so excited about the twins, we were so excited for the other kids and that’s why she was willing to endure that pain because we were so passionate and excited about the kids.
So for you, it starts with before you can be an entrepreneur, before you can birth this thing, you have to be insanely passionate about your thing. And there are people who will tell you otherwise. “No, it’s math…blah blah.” I don’t know, I think you can make money without passion, but you can’t leave a legacy, you can’t do what’s really important without it.
So my next phase of this, we got a long road trip, you guys. I hope you don’t mind. But the next phase of this is how you become passionate about this thing? You’re like, Russell I see you. You’re jumping around, excited, screaming every single day, but I wake up in the morning and I’m tired. I wake up in the morning and I don’t always feel that passion. And I get that. I want to share some stuff, this is maybe personal development, according to Russell. I don’t teach personal development, I probably never will, but I have my thoughts on it, I have my feelings. So I do a lot of it myself. So I’m going to give you, during our road trip together, some of my thoughts and the personal development stuff that I had to go through and we have to go through and hopefully some of these things will help.
So number one, the first thing is all of you guys, you’ve got to quit being so bleh. That’s the official term for it, bleh. My daughter, she puts on this little monster mask, it’s so cute and then she’ll go “bleh.” That’s what most of you guys are doing. If I ask you what you’re working on, you’re like, “Bleh.” You’ve got to be excited, if you’ve listened to the podcast, probably three hundred episodes ago I did one talking about being awesome. People always ask you, “How are you doing?” and everyone goes, “I’m alright. I’m doing okay.” First off, if you’re doing okay, it means your life sucks. You need to stop it. “I’m doing okay.” My kids, I told them, when somebody asks you how you’re doing, you never say I’m doing okay. I’m doing good. Good is the enemy to great. If you’re doing good, that’s not a good thing. If you’re going to change the world you can’t be like, “I’m doing good. It’s alright.”
Notice this, everyone will ask how you’re doing and you’ll always say doing good. First thing to change, you are no longer doing good. You are doing awesome, all the time. My kids, if you ask them, “How you doing?” “Awesome.” If you ask me, “How you doing?” “Awesome.” You need to reprogram your brain from “I’m doing alright.” To being awesome. When people ask you that from now on, this is rule number one, you have to say you’re doing awesome. It may seem like a dumb thing, but you will see how it changes people around you. “How you doing?” “I’m doing awesome.” They’re like, “Really. Huh, nobody ever says that.” If you say you’re doing good, bleh. You just did that, bleh. You pulled an Ellie, a monster Ellie. Ellie’s my daughter that does that, bleh. So no more bleh’s. You’re doing awesome. And if you don’t feel awesome, guess what the first step to feeling awesome is? Saying that you’re feeling awesome. Okay, that’s number one.
Number two, stay in control. If you ever go to a Tony Robbins event, which you should, if you don’t you’re insane. I’m not allowed to say yet, but he may be hanging out with us at our next Funnel Hacking Live event. But regardless, you should go to at least UPW. You get to walk on fire and hopefully have a chance to go to Date with Destiny as well. If you really want to have a shift in your life, Tony is the person that will take you and shift you. That’s why I don’t teach personal development because Tony is the best in the world and I couldn’t do better, even remotely close, so I’m not even going to try. If I felt like I could I probably would go and try to serve that market, but Tony’s the best, so I’m not going to.
So I leave it to Tony and also Brendon Burchard, Brendon’s the man. Tony and Brendon, those dudes will shift yourself, personal development wise, so go and study them. Tony especially, because walking on fire is insanely cool. But one of the main things you learn in Date with Destiny is a thing called state control. So state is the thing that you are in as you are doing something. Sometimes you’re in a happy state, and a bleh state. Most of us we live our lives in a bleh state. You have to learn how to change your state like this. The coolest thing I learned from Tony is that I actually control the state I’m in. I don’t think most people understand that. You control the state you’re in. You can change it, you can be depressed or be happy, you can change it that fast.
When I learned that and became aware of it, it was insanely cool. I would have a long horrible day at the office. I’d be beat up and tired, worn out, come home and as most people do, I could walk through the door and be like, bleh. Be a bleh dad. But I was like, no. I don’t want to be a bleh dad. So I walk in tired, beat up, angry sometimes, frustrated, all the crap you go through sometimes during the day, I get to the door and I say, I could either walk in and be a bleh dad, or I can change my state. What am I going to do? I’m going to freaking change my state.
So I do what Tony Robbins talks about, there’s three things he calls the triad. I make these three shifts in my life, my physiology, my focus, my meaning, I shift those things and boom, that fast I walk in and guess what? I’m not a bleh dad, I’m a freaking awesome dad. I have fun with my kids, I play with my kids, and they’re going to remember that.
When I walk in the office, some days I haven’t slept for more than an hour. I walk into the office and guess what I feel like? I feel like I want to die sometimes, I’m so tired. I walk in and could be like, bleh. But guess what happens if I walk in at state, guess what happens to all the people around me? They will match my state, because I’m the leader. If I walk in like bleh, they will all become bleh. This is the official term by the way, it’s bleh. So if I walk in bleh, they’re all going to be bleh. If I walk in at a freaking ten, they are all going to rise to my level, to my state. State control is huge. You can control your own state, but the other cool thing is that you can control the state of the people that are around you.
People always come to our office and they’re like, “Is it always like this?” the answer is yes. Why is it like this? It’s because I’m freaking setting the pace when I walk in during the day. I walk in knowing that the pace that I set, everyone’s going to match me at that pace. If I come in bleh, they’re going to be bleh. I work with other companies, and partners and friends and people and what’s interesting, we will work with employees of a business owner and whatever the state of the business owner is, and you know that by seeing their videos and all their stuff, the entire company matches that state. It’s insane.
So if I want to dominate the world, I gotta learn to change my state. So understanding state control is huge and so much more simple than you think. Tony Robbins talked about, go to UPW. There’s three things, he calls it a triad, there’s three things that are involved in state control. I’ll kind of go through these, I’ll probably just slaughter them, so go study Tony. Worst case, go to YouTube and type in “Tony Robbins State Control” or something, I’m sure you can get some videos of him teaching it as well.
But the triad, there’s three things you gotta change. The first thing is your physiology. You’re body, this amazing gift that God has given us functions and drives everything. Have you ever notice that depressed people look depressed? Bleh. Sad people what do they do? They look sad. They’re body matches and mirrors how they feel. So a lot of times you think, “I’m sad, that’s why my body’s like this. My shoulders are drooping because I’m bleh.” Sometimes, because your body’s drooping, that’s why you’re sad. Just changing your physiology, changing your state, how you hold your body, will actually change how you feel. It’s insane.
He talked about a group of people who were clinically depressed, not just I’m depressed, I’m sad, clinically depressed. They were in a clinic, they were in rehab because they had such bad depression. They took this group of like 50 clinically depressed people and took them off all their depression medication, which all medication really does is change your state. Changes our physiology, honestly we’ll talk about that in a minute, but it takes them off all their meds and makes them stand in front of a mirror for thirty minutes a day, with their shoulders back, smiling. Even if it’s a fake smile, or angry, makes them smile for thirty minutes. Guess what happened? Just by changing their physiology and forcing themselves to smile for 30 days, every one of the people who had clinical depression were healed. They were miraculously saved from their depression.
Now there are times when, I have friends and family members that deal with depression, so I’m not short changing that, but I promise you that by shifting your physiology you can shift everything. It’s huge. I’ve seen people who are depressed shift their state, shift their body and they get un-depressed. It’s crazy.
So if I want to be in a happy mood, if I want to be in a good state for my kids, my wife, my whatever. If I’m going to a meeting or whatever, the state, how I hold my body has a ton to do, 50% of how I enter a room has to do with the outcome of what’s going to happen. That’s not scientifically proven, that’s just what I’m guestimating based on what happens. That’s a big thing. So figure that out. How do you control your body?
Look at what depressed people look like and if you hold your body in a way that depressed people hold their body, you’re going to be depressed. If you hold your body the way sad people hold it, you’re going to be sad. If you hold it in a way of the happy people, you’re going to be happy. Look right here right now, do I look happy? The reason why I’m doing this, if you watch Funnel Hacker TV, “Why is Russell so excited?” Because when I’m in an excited mood, I feel better, I get more done. I get people around me to raise to my level of vibration and they get excited as well.
There’s this weird thing, and this is scriptural, for those that are the church going folk, and those who aren’t it doesn’t even matter. Light cleaveth to light and dark cleaveth to darkness. One of my coaches, Tara Williams talks about this all the time, vibes, vibrations. People like, “He’s got a good vibe, she’s got a good vibe.” Sense the vibration. And if you think of this like tuning forks. Let’s say you have a tuning fork here and you want to, if you hit two tuning forks next to each other, they will eventually match their vibrations. There’s a high pitched one, a low pitched one, they will meet in the middle because vibrations match. Light cleaveth to light, dark to dark.
The same thing happens with you. If you come in and you’re a tuning fork and your vibration’s high, people are going to suck you down to their level and you’ll be depressed. Or you’re going to come in and freaking just blow your mind with the level of energy and vibration and everybody will rise to you. You have to understand that. They’re either going to suck you down, or you’re going to rise up.
That’s one part of state control, is understanding that your body has so much to do with it. Now that you understand that, how else can you control your body? This is why us nerdy, entrepreneur, biohacking people talk about the importance of our body. Alex Charfen at the Pirates Cove mastermind said that “for any of you entrepreneurs that aren’t treating your body like a professional athlete, you’re insane. You’re doing things that professional athletes aren’t. You’re trying to accomplish things that they can’t even fathom. If you’re not taking care of your body, you’re insane.”
It’s true, what you put into your body effects your physiology. When I eat crap, guess how I feel? Crap. People always ask me why I take so many supplements. Because different supplements I take effect my physiology. I have rules with my supplements. Most of you all know, I’m a Mormon, therefore I don’t do a lot of things. I don’t do alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, any other crazy stuff, I don’t do a lot of these, but there’s some supplements that I do take because they affect my physiology.
I do take some caffeine, because caffeine affects you physiology. You take it, it increases your energy. Your physiology changes, it helps me get into state faster. There’s other supplements I take, I could go days on supplements, but there’s things I take because they affect my physiology. There’s things I don’t eat because they affect my physiology. If you look at how I eat, I usually don’t eat breakfast. The reason why is breakfast typically makes me feel sluggish and tired, my physiology goes down. I usually eat one huge meal a day. When I’m at the office Melanie makes me this huge salad, it’s got high fats, tons of vegetables, I eat it and there’s almost no carbs outside of the carbs inside of vegetables because carbs make me feel sluggish and tired. I don’t want to feel tired. So I just eat the vegetables meats and fats because that keeps my energy, my physiology good.
When I’m at home, if I’m going to eat junk, typically I eat it at the end of the night, when I’m about to go to bed, because at that point I don’t care about my physiology, I’m going to fall asleep. But I don’t eat at dinner, I usually won’t eat all the other nice stuff. I’ll go and pick the veggies, the meat off, whatever my wife makes and I’ll eat that because I know that if I eat the rice and the carbs, stuff like that, guess what happens? My physiology drains and I’m going to be a worse dad for my kids. I know how it works.
So if I want to stay in peak state for my kids, I have to stay in, I gotta keep my physiology going, so I’m very careful of what I eat. Sometimes, I’m not as good as a lot of my biohacking buddies, sometimes I just screw up, and if my physiology…this is probably the bad thing. This is the negative of personal development. But if I eat something and feel like crap, I’m like, “Well, I feel like crap. I’m going to feel like crap no matter what, I might as well make my taste buds feel good.” So then I go all out and if I have a bad day, I have a really bad day. Because I’m physiologically jacked anyway, let’s have some fun. Anyway, there you go. Alright, that’s number one.
Number two side of the pillar of Tony’s triad is shifting what you focus on. Have you noticed that depressed people focus on depressing things? Have you noticed that happy people focus on happy things? But Russell, there’s so much sad things happening in the world. I know there is, but guess what I don’t focus on? The sad things that are happening in the world. Guess what I don’t watch? The freaking news. Want to know why? Because the news focuses on depressing things. I don’t want to be depressed. I don’t listen to depressing things. I try to focus on people and things that get me pumped up.
I listen to podcasts of people that inspire me, that get me excited. I read things that get me excited. I focus on stuff that gets me excited. In business, crappy stuff happens every single day and I tell you what, when you go from a million dollar company to a 10 to 100, the level of crappy crap that comes up everyday exponentially increases. They say, someone told me the other day that every three months an entrepreneur’s focus with decisions could either make or break them.
That’s true when you’re running a million dollar business. When you’re running a hundred million dollar a year business that happens a lot more often. I would say probably every three hours. I’m not kidding. There’s a lot of crap that hits me in the face every single day and if I focus on the negative, I would be in a state of depression right now. I have to look at it and I’m like, “Oh, that sucks. Alright, this is the answer.” And I turn my back and run from it. I do not focus on it for more than 5 seconds, otherwise I will lose my state.
What are you focusing on? A lot of you guys get overwhelmed and get stressed. Do you not think I get overwhelmed? I have 12 events happening in the next 47 days. We’re doing the biggest launch in the history of the freaking internet. We’re re-doing the complete onboarding process, I just wrote a new book in the last 30 days. It’s not a tiny book, it’s a freaking cookbook, it’s a 500 page cookbook. We’re doing a design-a-thon in two days. If you knew how much stress I have on my plate. I don’t know, I’m pretty sure most people would crack under the pressure. I’m shocked that I haven’t yet, but the reason why is because I keep moving on.
Dan Gable, the greatest wrestler in the history of wrestling. Well maybe not the greatest anymore, but he is the legend. He is the Michael Jordan of wrestling. So Dan Gable, someone asked him one time, because he went through all of college never losing a match. His very last match he lost, he got so pissed off that he went and started training for the Olympics and he actually became an Olympic champion and not a single person scored on him. And what’s crazy is while he was training for the Olympics, it’s so crazy. The Russians actually said, they came out publically and said, “We are going to train an athlete with the only goal to beat Dan Gable from the Americans.” And Dan Gable was like, “No, I’m the greatest wrestler who’s ever lived, no one’s going to beat me.”
So what did Dan do? He would work 7 hours a day, working out 7 hours a day preparing for the Olympics, then he’d go to bed at night. Then as he’d go to bed at night, he laid there in bed saying, “The dude in Russia who is trying to beat me is awake and training right now. And that pisses me off and freaks me out.” So what did Dan Gable do? He woke up at midnight and he’d go running. Because he knew that his opponent was competing, was training and it stressed him out knowing that his opponent was awake while he was sleeping. He did not like that so he got up and kept working out.
Is that obsessive? Heck yes. Did he crack under pressure? No, he went to the Olympics and won. Not a single person scored a point on him. That’s Dan Gable. Now someone asked Dan Gable, I heard this in an interview one time, they said, “Dan don’t…” and afterwards Dan went on to become the head wrestling coach of Iowa Hawkeyes and won more NCAA championships in a row than anyone in any sport, I believe. Anyway, insane. And someone asked Dan Gable, “Don’t you believe in pressure?” and Dan’s like, “Yeah, I believe in pressure, it’s everywhere. The difference is that most people sit underneath the pressure and they sit on it. I believe in it, I just don’t put myself underneath it. I step aside and I focus on what I need to get done.”
And most of us, it’s that same way. I don’t know about you guys, sometimes I have so much stress and so much pressure, I’m about to crack. Then half of that is just in our heads. So I’ll sit down with a pad of paper, especially at night when I can’t sleep, I sit with a pad of paper and write down what I’m stressing on. I write all those things down, when you write it down it’s like, oh that’s actually not as bad as I thought. And then you can fall asleep, get yourself out of the pressure.
Sometimes we’re focusing on all pressure and stress and all this stuff and that’s why we don’t succeed. Don’t do that. Write it all down, prioritize it and be like I can’t control what I can’t control. I’m going to move forward out of the pressure. Go. And sometimes I don’t get crap done. I’m sure that all the stuff I have to get done between now and our viral video launch, most of it is not going to get done. A lot of it will, most of it will. But sometimes you can’t affect it, so you do whatever you can and as you get closer and closer to deadlines all of the non essentials fall away and then you get the essentials and that’s how the game’s played.
Alright, this is fun, we’ve been going 32 minutes you guys. I hope you’ve been having fun. I don’t know where I left off. Physiology, shift your physiology. Number two, what you’re focusing on and then number three, what’s the meaning. I think number three is meaning. If not I’ve been teaching this wrong, or thinking about it wrong.
Number three is the meaning we’re attaching to things. A lot of times something bad happens to us and we attach these weird meanings to it. And we, it’s really cool, we have this unique ability as humans to attach meanings to things, right. And usually what happens is subconscious; we don’t know that we’re doing something right. If someone punches you in the face, subconsciously our body attaches a meaning to that. So this person is mad at me, we attach the meaning, I need to fight….sorry, let me step back.
Someone punches us, right. Our meaning maker attaches this meaning to the thing. That person is mad at us, we must fight them back. So I go and try to fight someone. Or someone punches us and maybe the meaning is this person is going to kill me, that’s the meaning we attach so then we run away. There’s all sorts of things. Every single day, something is happening and we’re attaching these meanings to it and these meanings direct where we’re going with our thoughts and actions and everything else. But as soon as you’re aware of this, you can actually change the meanings that are coming to you.
I actually don’t know if this is part of the triad, it may not be. I can’t remember now. Go YouTube Tony Robbins. Regardless, I want to talk about meaning, because meaning is a big thing. When you’re aware of this it’s kind of cool because now it gives you the ability to kind of shift meanings. So when somebody, we’ve had some morons, and they are morons, this week that have been attacking Clickfunnels and at first I got so mad I want to kill them and fly to their house and beat them, because that’s the wrestler in me. My body attaches a meaning to what they’re doing.
But then what’s cool is Tony taught me this technique where you stop and say, okay, what if that’s not the meaning they’re attaching, what if it’s actually this meaning? You shift the meaning that maybe they’re attaching and if you shift the meaning associated with an experience, it’ll change your perspective, which changes everything. So we gotta become good at consciously picking the meaning we’re attaching to things. If someone screws us over we can attach a meaning saying “That person is a horrible person trying to screw me over.” But if you attach that meaning, be careful.
Because as soon as you attach that meaning to something, guess what happens? Now the situation you enter, the state you enter is going to be based on that meaning and it can get really bloody and get really bad and things can turn really bad, which is going to increase all these other pressure, noise and other bad stuff. But if you come in and say, “Look, that person is a total douche bag,” I don’t know if I can say that on TV. I apologize if I can’t. Anyway, that person is a horrible person, but maybe their having a bad day today. Maybe they’re struggling, maybe financially, whatever. You attach a different meaning to the situation, then you come and you’re like, man that person screwed me over, but this is probably why he did it. Or why she did.
If you attach that meaning it gives you a different set of tools to deal with the situation. So what happens now in my life, if something happens and instantly a meaning is attached by my brain and what I’ve found is that most of the times that the instant meaning that’s attached, is going to leave me in a really negative path. It’s weird how it works. So too often I run down that negative meaning and bad things happen. So I try to consciously stop and try to take the exact opposite.
I remember Tony at Date with Destiny he does this thing, he says, “Find an experience in your life that pissed you off.” For me it was something with my wife, and my wife was at the event then, sitting separate, so she was sitting four rows ahead of me and there was an experience and they said to write down the experience, so I wrote it down. They said, “Write down all the meanings you attached to that experience.” I was like, “My wife is mad at me, she doesn’t love me.” I wrote down all these different meanings that I had attached to that situation.
And then Tony said, “Write a big line down the side of the paper and next to each of the meanings you attached to that situation, I want you to write the exact opposite of that thing.” So I was like, “My wife is mean to me, but on the other side, she actually loves me. My wife is super selfish, no she is actually so giving that she struggles.” So I wrote the exact opposite of each of the meanings that I had attached to the situation.
But what’s crazy is after handwriting out probably three or four of the things, I started crying. I started crying because I realized, I love my wife and I know her, and I realized the true meaning of what happened in that situation, was actually the exact opposite of the meaning I had attached to it. I instantly realized that I was in the wrong and she wasn’t. I broke down crying because I was like, “Oh my gosh. Where else in my life is this happening? Where I’m attaching these meanings subconsciously to a thing and I’m actually wrong?”
I realized that day that I have to take control of my meaning maker, the meaning I’m attaching to every single situation. So something happens now and instantly I get the negative meaning, it just happens that’s in our brains wiring for some stupid reason. I stop and I’m like, what’s the opposite of that, what’s something that if I could attach a different meaning would make me look at this person through a different angle, a different lens, a different light? I shift the meaning and it shifts everything. It shifts how I feel about the person. It shifts how I approach them, it shifts the response. It changes everything.
I wish I could say I am perfect with this, I am not. If you’ve ever been on the back end of a backlash from me for stuff, I apologize. Because I’m, I can be a prick sometimes. I didn’t realize this until the other day. We have a contractor, he was killing himself for us, and I imagine it’s got to be a pain in the butt working with me sometimes. Because I’m vocal, I’m on TV, I’m on Instagram, I’m ranty and ravy and talking about everything. And without thinking I kind of shared publicly my thoughts and part of it’s because I’m a media personality. If I came out like bleh all the time nobody would listen. So I’m usually on the extremes, I’m extremely happy or extremely upset because that’s what’s interesting.
So I feel bad because I published stuff that was negative towards that person. And the other day it was kind of brought to my attention, “Wow, Russell this person is really working his butt off for you and you’re saying these things.” And I had this moment again where I kind of broke down and I was like I’m a bad person sometimes. And the meaning I was attaching to all these situations was like, they’re lazy, they don’t care, they’re not working hard enough, or whatever. I’m attaching all these meanings and I had this fun little moment where I had this exercise where I was like, okay, if I switch the meaning, what’s actually happening? And I was like, oh man, I’m a jerk.
I realized it again, so I reached out personally and apologized and I don’t know if it’ll make it better or not, but I was wrong. I’ve had other situations this week where again there’s this person who’s honestly, it’s always the people you help the most. It’s someone I helped a lot, to have a lot of success, I bent over backwards for them and now they’re publically attacking me and us. It’s just….it’s funny, the meaning, even now, the meaning I want to attach to it wants to come in there. I’m like, no stop. Get out of my brain. Because I know, I know the reason why this person is being a douche bag. I’m going to use that word, I apologize. I know the true meaning. It’s not the one that makes me feel better about myself, which sucks because that one makes me feel so much better about myself. But it’s the truth.
So I’ve tried to attach that meaning to it, even though every time I think about the situation, my blood’s boiling just thinking about it again. But I gotta go back to the meaning that I attached on purpose. So the more you guys are aware of this the more you can affect. That’s a big part. There’s number two in personal development.
So where have we gone this far? So far we’ve talked about not being bleh. We talked about shifting your state in the circumstance. We talked about shifting the meaning you’re attaching to things. Alright so here’s a couple of things. Yes, we’ve been going for 40 minutes, but I still got another hour and a half drive, so we’re going to keep on talking. It’s like on Wedding Singer, which is one of my favorite movies of all time, do you remember when he’s all depressed after his girlfriend gets married on him and he’s hosting the wedding party and he’s telling all these jokes? And the one guy’s like, “Hey wedding singer, you’re the worst wedding singer I’ve ever heard.” And he looks at him and he’s like, “Well I have the microphone so you will listen to every word I have to say.” One of my favorite lines ever. That’s how I feel right now. I have the microphone so you will listen to every word I have to say.
I guess you can turn me off, hopefully you won’t. Hopefully you can hear me. This is car is so loud when we’re driving. I hope this is coming through because I think there’s some good stuff in here for people.
Alright, next thing. We talked about being not bleh, we talked about getting in state, we talked about meaning, these are pieces to help you function better as a human being. I always tell people how much of an impact Tony Robbins had on me. It’s because he made me aware of these things and there’s so many more. I wish we could go to UPW. Go walk on fire. I think you can get a ticket for $500 to a thousand bucks. If you are broke and don’t have the money, go get a credit card and finance it. If you’re broke, you’re going to become more broke. Who freaking cares? At this point, what’s the worst that could happen? You’re going to go bankrupt? Dude, you’re broke, it doesn’t matter. It always blows my mind when people are like, “I don’t have any money, I can’t invest.” Then you have nothing to lose. Go take out a loan. Go take out five loans, who cares? Worst case scenario is you lose it all. If you have nothing, then you have nothing.
I taught the cub scouts, the 12 year olds, I did an entrepreneurship merit badge and one of the guys asked, “how old do you think these kids should start?” I was like, “They should start now. I got a dozen friends who are teenagers who are making insane amounts of money.” The guy who asked said, “Just so all you kids know, you have nothing. If you lose it all you didn’t lose anything, so who cares?” Anyway, it always makes me laugh because people are like, “you can risk a lot because you have money to risk.” I’m like, “Dude, it’s way easier to risk when you’re broke.” Worst case scenario you lose everything, but everything is like rent on an apartment, but that’s not that big of a deal, you guys.
When you’ve got 150 employees whose lives depend on you, I promise you it is a lot scarier to risk at that point. Nevertheless, I digress. Where was I going? I don’t even remember. Hopefully there was something in there of value.
Okay, what I want to talk about here is you gotta risk. You’re creating this thing, you’re giving birth, you’re going into this thing…..Oh I remember what I was talking about. I was talking about investing in UPW and talking about being broke. Yeah, go to UPW, go to Date with Destiny. Invest in these events because it’ll transform you, it’ll help you to become super aware of yourself and other people. That’s what Tony gave me that was so important to me. Most of us live life on autopilot and we’re just going through the day bumping into things and things are happening and you’re just not aware of how we work. When you’re aware of how you work, it’s like now you can affect things, change things, tweak things. I can change my approach, I can change other people’s approach. For me it’s been huge to understand me and people better. So yeah, go to those things it’s worth it. There you go.
I have a friend down in Australia, his name’s Mal Every, I don’t know why this just popped in my head but he says, “I don’t have a problem with you if you’re broke, but I do have a problem if you stay broke. There’s too many opportunities in this world. If you stay broke, it’s because you’re not trying.” You’re literally not trying. Anyway, I don’t know why I said that, but it popped in my head therefore it must have been important.
Alright, the next thing I want to talk about. If you want to be successful in life the next piece outside of not being bleh, and figuring out state control and attaching meaning to the right things, the next thing is you have to stop dabbling. Stop freaking dabbling. School has screwed up all of us. School has taught us how to dabble. You sign up for college, you take 20 credits, 20 cool things that you want to learn about. What they do is they spoon feed you and force you to dabble over a semester. So they give you a little bit of information in math, you spend 50 minutes. Then you go to the next class, here’s a little bit of science, a little bit of history. So you dabble in a whole bunch of little crap and you try to remain and retain all this stuff and then you go back the next day and you dabble a whole bunch and you dabble and you dabble and you dabble for like 15 years of our life.
Let there be no mistake. You will never be hyper successful if you are dabbling. Dabbling is the opposite of what you need to do if you want to be successful. If you want to be successful in something, you have to go deep, you have to immerse, you have to be obsessed with that thing. I guarantee you the people I’m competing against right now in our business, the reason why we are kicking the crap out of all of them is because they are dabblers. I promise you, there’s not one of my competitors that spent as much time in the last 48 hours, in the last week, in the last 5 weeks studying marketing and business and growth and personal development as much as I have. And for most of them, we’re already way past them, so why in the world, why are they not…..? I don’t know.
But they’re dabbling and that’s why I’m able to pass them. When you start immersing and you go deep, a couple of really cool things happen. First off, you will start seeing connections that you cannot see when you dabble. I sucked in school because I could never see the connections. I spent an hour in history, an hour in math, then an hour in debate, then an hour in logic, I’m trying to figure out how to make the connections. Unless you go deep in something, you can’t do it.
The reason why I’ve written two books is not, yes I like writing books, yes I like sharing it. When I write a book, I have to go in such deep immersion that I start seeing these connections that you don’t, you can’t see when you dabble. When I started writing the Expert Secrets book, I was doing a whole bunch of things. Some things consciously, some things subconsciously and as I started focusing on this book and trying to make a really, really good book, it forced me to read and study and geek out and immerse myself in a whole bunch of different things and through that process, I was not dabbling, I was immersing. I don’t know if it’s God, if it’s your brain, but when you immerse yourself, I feel like the reward for that, all these connections that you don’t normally see, all the sudden start being open to you.
Howard Berg told me, he’s the world’s fastest reader. He said when he goes to do a topic, most people read a book and they form their opinion based one book they read. He’ll read 30-40 books to get a really clear view of the reality of the situation. This is what 30 authors have said and you get a very clear view of it. And that’s how I feel about immersion. When you immerse yourself and you go and listen, study, read, you really geek out and become obsessed in your thing. I don’t know if it’s your brain, God or the universe, whatever you want to attribute it to, I know who I want to attribute it to. But he opens up pathways, he opens up connections for you and lets you see a whole picture and that’s your reward for immersion.
So that’s the next step in this you guys, you have to stop dabbling. So first off, the first phase in this comes back to you being greedy. The first phase is figure out this thing you want to be obsessed with. Maybe it’s not the marketing yet, and that’s okay. Because phase one is about being greedy and mastering it for yourself and becoming who you need to be to serve the world that you’re trying to serve. So go and now is the time to become unbalanced.
In the bible, well if you listen to this song, I think it was…who was it? A time for every season, there’s a time under heaven for everything. A time and a season for everything, right. This is your season to immerse in your craft and become the best in the freaking world in your craft. Again, there’s a time and a season, this is the time and season right now for you to do that, for you to immerse yourself. So that’s phase number one and that’s going to give you the ability to become who you need to be. And you’re going to become completely unbalanced. Your work life, your social life, your family life is going to become unbalanced during that period of time, but you’re going to be able to immerse yourself, you’re not going to dabble. You’re going to unbalance and become awesome at your thing.
And then there will be a transition phase where you’re going through and becoming so passionate about it, where there will be this weird time where all the sudden, I don’t know what it is, you can’t get filled up anymore. For me, I was doing all this marketing for all of our businesses and companies. We were doing the Neuropathy product, the weight loss, the dating, all these different businesses and we’re doing it and there came a point where I stopped getting fulfilled by just doing the business and I didn’t know what it was. I started going through this slump. I didn’t feel the momentum, didn’t feel the progress.
I was like, ugh. I didn’t feel it and that transition is because eventually you can’t keep growing in that immersion. Because eventually you’ll see the connections, you’ll see everything, you’ll be going through this immersion and then you will…. I don’t know how to say it, not that you’ll become perfect ever, but you’ll become more perfected in that thing. Where it’s hard to squeeze a lot more oranges to get any juice out of it, to really fill you up.
And that’s what I talk about in the Expert Secrets book, that’s where you transition from this growth, to the only way you can keep growing is transition into contribution. And this is where entrepreneurship is born. This is where you realize the only way for me to actually keep sharing this and to keep having that juice is to start contributing and giving back and sharing with other people. And what you find is insane. As soon as you take this path and this gift, this thing you’ve been geeking out on and immersing yourself on and become obsessed with, you start sharing it, that juice starts flowing again. It’s like the next wave and it’s so fulfilling. That’s why I’m doing an hour long podcast instead of focusing on the road and listening.
That’s why for me right now, I started listening to, when I start doing personal development and growth and start learning and studying, as I do that I start shaking because this is good. I’m getting juice, but if I could share this with other people I’d be getting ten times what I’m getting now. That’s why I publish so much, that’s why I share so much. It’s because that contribution will fill you up more than the growth will eventually.
But first you gotta fill up. Again, you gotta become unbalanced so you can become who you need to be. But after you’ve hit that point, and you’ll know it because you can’t get the same thing out of it, until you start contributing. And that’s logically where you start shifting to contribution. That’s when you start becoming obsessed with the marketing. That’s when you start geeking out there. That’s the key you guys, that’s what it’s like. At that point, you don’t care about the money. This is what I talked about a few podcasts ago.
The people who struggle are the people trying to make money. When you’ve been geeking out on a thing and have filled yourself up and now you’re shifting to contribution, you do not care about money. I could not care less about money at this point in my life. It’s fun, it keeps track, it’s how we know that we’re doing well. It’s such not a driving force, you can ask…..I do not have logins to my bank accounts. I have no idea what’s in there. My accountant, I’m always like “Hey can I buy this?” and he’s like, “Yeah.” And I’m like, “Okay, cool. I have no idea.”
My wife, I don’t have access to my bank accounts, personal, business, anything. I do not know what’s in there. I don’t want to know. It means zero to me at this point in my life. The only thing that means anything to me now is contribution. That’s what fires me up. That’s the state you gotta enter business and entrepreneurship in. Those are the people who are successful. The come in like, “This thing that I have, this gift, this thing. I’m so passionate about it, I have to figure out how to share it with other people.” Then guess what’s going to happen? Then it’s going to be easy to become obsessed with the marketing because the marketing is the means for you to get your message out, for you to get your product and your service out.
All the sudden it becomes exciting. I think that’s why I struggled in school so much. I would learn and read a book and it didn’t matter to me. If you’re going into marketing and you’re struggling, this marketing, I’m learning this stuff. I learned about squeeze pages, traffic and conversion but you don’t care. It’s because it’s like school. I study a thing and I write a paper but I don’t care about this paper, there’s no point to it. If you’re struggling studying the marketing it’s because there’s no point to it. But as soon as you find your thing and you obsess with it and you’ve grown and filled yourself up and shift to contribution, now when you start studying it, the marketing becomes alive. It lights up and becomes alive again.
I remember, I always thought I was dumb. I hated reading, I hated studying, I hated school, I hated all those things and honestly, I thought I was a dumb kid. I started my business and started selling these little things, it was crazy because I was selling some stuff and I was not doing that well. I remember it was pre-podcasts, but everyone used to do tele-seminars back when I got started. I would download all these tele-seminars and I would listen to them. Guys like Arman Morin, Alex Mandossian, those are the guys I listened to. Marlon Sanders, these are the guys I listened to initially. And I would listen to them on my headphones. I would burn these tele-seminars onto cd’s and put the cd’s in and listen to them while I was on my wrestling trips and I would learn stuff.
They would say stuff and I’m like, “That’s so cool. I’m going to go try that.” And I’d try it and the craziest thing would happen, I would try something. I was making a little bit of money and then I’d try something and make more money. I was like, are you kidding me, that freaking worked. I gotta try something else. I listened to another tele-seminar and I would try it and are you kidding me, that freaking worked! And then another one and I was like, that guy wrote a book. I’d read his book and I’m like, I’m going to try it. And then guess what happened? I’d make more money. My thing would go out to more people and I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” And all the sudden reading became alive for me, studying became alive for me, marketing became alive for me.
I remember copywriting I was like, one of my first websites I set up and I didn’t have a sales letter and someone’s telling me about this copywriting thing and I was like, are you kidding me? That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. I’m not going to write words, I don’t want to learn that. I remember just being angry because I didn’t want to learn copy. It sounded so boring and stupid.
Anyway, I tried to hire a copywriter, and the copywriter, it was actually Michael Thornton was the first copywriter I tried to hire and his quote for me at the time was 8 or 10 grand or something and I was like, “Whoa! I haven’t made that much money in my entire life combined at this point.” So then I tried to read a book on copy and again, it was horrible. I read it and I was like this sucks. I had to write my very first little sales letter. So I wrote it and then it was crazy because it made money.
So then I started listening to some copywriters and the guys like, I remember it was Michael Thornton actually, I was listening to this presentation he gave at this big seminar and he was like, “We tested this thing and it turns out that a red headline out converted a blue one.” So I changed my headline to red and sure enough it out converted. I was like, what the crap? Okay, what else does this guy got? I remember he tested a brown background, it did better in this thing. So I’m going to do a brown background. So I did a brown background and sure enough it out converted. I’m like are you kidding me?
Then he said to try a new headline, his headline swipe file had all his headlines. So I tried four or five headlines and one of them dramatically beat the other one. I was like, what? I changed the headline and I doubled my income. Normal humans, if they want to double their income, guess what they gotta do? A doctor would have to go back to like 16 more years in medical school to specialize and double their income, work another 15 years and then maybe they would. I changed 13 words on a headline and all the sudden guess what? Copywriting became alive for me. It got exciting and all the sudden I want to read every freaking copywriting book I can find, because I’d read through and most of it was garbage or rehashing stuff but I’d read one sentence that was like, “Oh, you should end each line with a dot, dot, dot. Because it keeps the readers mind open and doesn’t close out the thought and they’re more likely to keep reading.” I was like, what?
So now to every single email and every single thing I’ve ever written, I add a dot, dot, dot, you’ve probably noticed that before. Guess what happened? Everything increased. And I started going to marketing seminars. I’d go to a five day seminar and listen for five days and every single speaker who is talking, I knew everything. I’ve done that, knew that, heard that, rehash, rehash and then one speaker on day 6 would say one thing where he’s like, “Oh yeah, this one time I added an exit pop where I gave a discount and 20% of the people took the exit pop.” I was like, wait, what? So I go back to my thing and add an exit pop and my income would increase by like $100,000 a month. From that one little thing.
I remember I was like, I sat through 5 days of crap and got that one thing and it was so huge for me that it made the whole thing worth while. Or I would be at an event, got nothing and I’d go out to eat with everybody and I’m the Mormon dude, everyone goes to the bar and I’m like, I don’t want to go to the bar, I don’t want people to think I’m drinking. So I’d go to the bar, and I’m not joking, I’d order milk because I didn’t want people to think…..if I ordered a sprite people might think I’m drinking and I’m like I don’t want people to think I’m drinking, so I ordered a milk.
So I’m holding a milk and I’m at the bar and everyone’s drinking and they’re like, “Why do you got a milk?” I’m like, “Oh, I’m a Mormon, Mormon’s don’t drink so I’m drinking milk.” They’re like, “that’s weird.” And then they’re kind of drunk and the coolest thing about drunk people, drunk people don’t have any filters. They lose the inhibition to filter stuff or whatever. So I’m drinking milk, totally sober, they’re completely drunk and I’m like, “Hey so, what’s the biggest thing you’ve figured out?” and they’re like, “Oh man, okay so we did this thing on our squeeze page where we did blah blah blah.” I’m like, what? He just told me that. I would spend four or five hours in the bar drinking milk, asking people questions and getting nugget, after nugget, after nugget. I’d go back and add it and sure enough I’d add this little thing and it’s like Russell, you gave yourself a three thousand dollar a day raise by doing this one little thing. That’s a million dollar a year raise.
How do average humans get a million dollar a year raise? They don’t, they can’t. It’s physically impossible to do that. How did I do it? Some dude at a bar who is drunk off his butt told me this little thing and then I did it. Where do you guys think I got the Perfect Webinar from? I am not a genius, but guess what? I went to all of these events and saw speaker, after speaker, after speaker pitching and maybe what they said sucked, but I heard how they did a close, I heard how they did a trial. That guy said that thing. All of the differences…it’s funny because Stephen’s always like, he always talks about the Russellisms, the things Russell says that are so cool in my presentations. I didn’t make most of those things up, most things I heard another speaker say it and I’m like, that’s amazing, wrote it down and it was worth everything.
It would make me laugh, I’d go to an event and I would get one or two little nuggets like that and I’d come back and it would give me a two to three, maybe four thousand dollar a year raise and I hear someone online complain, “It was a pitch fest. All they do is sales stuff.” I’m like, “You went to that event to try to learn how to sell things. Why do you hate money so bad? I saw the same thing you did. I gave myself a four thousand dollar a day raise.” I don’t know what else to do.
It’s because they haven’t figured it out yet. It’s like they’re going to school and they’re pissed because the professor bored them to death. It’s like, when you go with this different lens, when you’ve got something you are so insanely passionate about, that all you care about, you don’t care about making money, spending money. All you care about is figuring out how you can get this to more people and when you get one little nugget after five days of information and that one thing does this huge thing, that’s worth it.
I hear people complain, they go to forums, “That event sucked, it was a pitch fest. I heard that stuff before, they didn’t teach me anything new.” It’s because they’re not real entrepreneurs. They haven’t fall in love with the marketing of the thing. If you’ve fallen in love, this is how you know you’ve fallen in love with the marketing of your thing, it’s when you literally stop watching TV for the shows and you watch for the commercials. That’s how you know. It’s when you’re listening to the radio and you’re waiting for the songs to end so you can hopefully hear a really good direct response radio ad. It’s when you’re scrolling through your Facebook feed looking for ads. It’s when you’re like weird crap that you know you don’t care about, but you’re praying that they will start re-targeting you with their ads.
It’s when you log into your wife’s Facebook account, not because you give a crap about what she’s doing, or care what she’s talking about, but you know that she is seeing different ads than you are and you want to see what those ads look like. That’s when you know that you’re passionate about marketing. That’s when you know that you’re so obsessed with getting your message out that it’s become, that’s the level you gotta be at.
But I think I’ve come to grips now, I think it used to piss me off when people weren’t obsessed about marketing, but now I think I get it. It’s like, I don’t think you can be obsessed about marketing at first, until you have first gone through the growth phase for yourself. You’ve got to become ridiculously obsessed initially with your thing, because that’s the first phase. You’ve got to immerse yourself there and after you’ve done that, then when you start shifting the entrepreneurship side, the growth, to the contribution and sharing it. That’s when you will become obsessed with the marketing. That’s when copywriting became alive for me. That’s when split testing became alive. That’s when all the geeky crap that I shouldn’t care about, none of us should care about, that’s when I started caring about it, that’s when it became alive.
Does that make sense you guys? That’s when I can sit there for five days and watch sales pitch after sales pitch after sales pitch and hear a single word about what they said, but just watch their hands, their hand motions, how they’re anchoring the stage, what they’re pointing to, why, when and how and be excited.
One of my buddies, Darin Stevens, he literally went to a Tony Robbins event, he went to the entire thing. I can’t remember if he told me if he watched the recordings of it or if he did when he was there, but he watched an entire week long Tony Robbins event with no audio on. No audio. Why would somebody do that? Because Darin wants to be the best person in the world at controlling the stage. Understanding how your physiology and stage presence and how you’re anchoring the stage, what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, how you’re doing it, why it works. What did he do? He took the best person in the world, Tony Robbins, and he watched him and took out all of the audio because the audio distracts you from he’s actually doing.
I can’t tell you guys this enough. Funnel hacking is not just about looking at the outside, it’s about really understanding what people are doing and why they’re doing it. Yes, I’m selling products and services to you guys, but at the same time watch how I’m doing it. So Darin went and watched Tony Robbins because he wanted to see Tony’s hand motions, what he’s doing, why he’s doing it, how he’s doing it, and he wrote this huge write-up for me, he sent me, it’s insane. It’s about all the stuff that Tony is doing, the reason why Tony’s pounding his chest at times, why he’s going like this, why he’s doing the ‘whoa, yes!’, why he’s pointing to different directions while he’s anchoring and seating and all those things are not accidental. They’re real and they’re purposely done.
When I’m on stage and talking about stuff, when I’m walking on different parts of the stage, sometimes its accidental. But for the most part, I’m doing things on purpose. I’m anchoring the stage, I’m taking you on timelines, I’m trying to bring you back to different places so you get emotionally impacted based on things that are happening. Same things happening in a webinar, tele-seminar, not podcasts because I’m just driving and talking, but maybe I am, who knows.
But I want you guys to understand, all of these things are there for you. I spent 14 hours yesterday, 14 hours going through every email I have ever sent with swipe files, squeeze pages, templates. I found every template I ever had paid for, designed because every template I designed I went and had all these people, the examples, a decade of funnel hacking. I went through yesterday and archived all of it into trello boards based on page type, based on funnel type, based on all sorts of stuff. And I’ll probably never use those pages again, but I wanted to be able see them and categorize and be like, the reason why that page was awesome was because of this.
There’s actually this one little block, there’s a dude that figured it out, on these squeeze pages, I’m not going to ruin the surprise for you, but if you type in squeeze page warning, those who are in the know will know that there’s this dude who had a squeeze page and at the very top he had this warning block that says, “Warning: Blah, blah, blah” That increased conversions on squeeze pages by insane amounts and most people never knew about it. Then he mentioned it, I think he’s in the dating market, he mentioned it at a mastermind and then dozens and dozens of people have done it, but most people have never seen it before. If you were to do it on your pages right now, it’s insane.
I totally forgot about it until I’m looking at my swipe files right now and I’m like, oh yeah. There’s so many things. I think so many people get bogged down in this other stuff that they forget about that. Become obsessed with the marketing. Go through all this stuff and legitimately do and it’s going to make it so much fun, it’s going to make it alive for you guys and I want to give you that gift. But that’s the transition.
So anyway you guys, this has been a long one. I hope you got a lot out of it. I just want you guys, I know that you have something inside of you. I know that you have the ability to change people’s lives. I believe that, probably more so than you do at this period in your life. If I didn’t believe that I would not be doing this stuff. I make plenty of money running a software company. I don’t have to do all this stuff. I don’t have to talk or write books, but I’m in a spot in my life now where my contribution is to get you off your butt so you contribute as well.
I am trying my best to touch as many people’s lives as possible through the things that I do, but I just know that the clearest path for me to have impact on the world is to touch you as an entrepreneur because you have the ability to affect more people. You may not, some of you guys know this. Some of you guys know that we have people that literally have hundreds and thousands, if not millions of people a year that they are touching and affecting. If I could magnify what you’re doing just a little bit, it amplifies that. If I can show you something that gets you to convert more people and gives you more money so you can actually serve people at a higher level, that’s huge.
And some of you guys are at the beginning of this journey now and you’re like, “I don’t have anything Russell. I’m not that passionate yet. Or I don’t have a voice, I’m nervous, I’m awkward.” Whatever, I promise you, I wish I would have been podcasting and blogging 12, 13, 14 years when I got started. The Russell you see today was the most awkward, nervous, weird person on planet earth 14 years ago. I couldn’t carry on a conversation with a human being, let alone with a camera for an hour and 8 minutes now. That comes with a lot of practice.
It’s kind of what we talked about at the beginning. Unbalancing your life and becoming obsessed with something. I don’t care what that is for you. But you need to do it, find something that fires you up. Right now if you’re not that passionate about anything, that’s okay. Find something that gives you a little spark, because initially it’s a spark. I wasn’t that passionate about marketing at first, but there was a spark. Once you have a spark it’s like, okay now let’s throw some kindling on the fire. There’s a spark of something, go find other people who are obsessed. You have a lower vibration right now, they have a higher vibration, we talked about this earlier. Go find people who are obsessed and get around them. Listen to their podcast, read their book, if they have an event, finance your house if you have to, finance that event and plug into their vibrations so they will bring you to the excitement level that they are at.
I am trying to do that every day with my marketing, if you have not noticed. Most of you guys, when you came into this world, you did not know about marketing, you didn’t care about marketing. You didn’t care about funnels, that was not, you didn’t get into this world saying, I’m going to build funnels. You either had a spark saying I want to make money, or you had a spark saying I want to share something. You had a spark and for some reason you bumped into me because I’m so loud and obnoxious and annoying and everywhere.
You probably saw a YouTube video and you’re like, “Stop targeting me on YouTube, Russell.” But I’m trying to take your spark and ignite it. I’m trying to give you as much waves of excitement and passion and vibration as I can muster up, so that your vibration will rise to my level.
So for you, where do you have a spark? Find that spark and then find the people around you in that market who are on fire and plug into them. Give them any amount of money that they need. I’m serious about this. If you’re broke it does not matter, you’re going to be more broke. I don’t know how to get that, I was at Grant Cardone’s event, I think there were like 2500 people in this long room and you were seated based on how much money you spent. People in the front spent 15 grand to be there and in the back they spent like 500 bucks. The further back you got, the less money you spent.
What’s crazy to me, is when I pitched my product, the people in the front ran to the side of the room and bought. And the further back you went, the less and less people ran to the back. You may say, “Russell, it’s because the people in the back didn’t have as much money, therefore they did not run to the side.” I would argue with you that you are wrong. The people in the front have money because they have invested money. They’re used to spending money in investing and then they have more success. The people in the back are broke because they’ve never invested in themselves. That’s it. That’s honestly it.
They’re already broke. Grant Cardone said this to me backstage, he’s like, “Don’t the people in the back understand, if you’re already broke it doesn’t hurt you to be more broke.” It doesn’t. I don’t know if that’s financially irresponsible. But I did a whole podcast on this called entrepreneurial scars, our founding fathers who I believe were inspired from God, who created the constitution of the United States, they gave us this thing. Because in this country we needed to give the entrepreneurs the ability to risk everything and be okay with that.
If entrepreneurs didn’t have that ability, this country would have stagnated and died. I am a huge believer in that. Capitalism 101. If entrepreneurs don’t have the ability to risk everything, everything stops growing. But if entrepreneurs have an out, then guess what? They can risk everything.
So it’s scary at first, but I promise you it’s a lot less scary to risk everything now, then it is when you have a whole bunch of stuff. So now is the time for you guys to risk everything because you don’t have that much. I don’t want to be a jerk, but it’s true. Now is the time to risk things. It gets harder and scarier when you have people and money and all these kind of things.
I always tell people, for you, you have to figure out what is the worst case scenario if you fail? It gets people to look at that thing straight in the eyes and say, I’m okay with that. That is the key to be able to risk stuff. Because a lot of times there’s this fear of, the worst case scenario, something bad is going to happen and they can’t be successful. You gotta stop and write down for you right now, if you were to fail, if you were to go and get a bunch of credit cards and blow it on mastering your craft and getting around the best people in the world and raising your vibration, everything, what’s the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario, you go bankrupt.
You go bankrupt, what happens? You can’t get a credit card for like a day or two maybe. You can’t get a home loan. Okay, well you’re going to have to rent. Can you rent? I don’t know, hopefully. There’s programs, the country….I know I’ve rented to people who, there are things. Anyway, maybe it’s financially responsible. I’m not a financial planner, don’t listen to me. I’m just saying that if I was in that same situation and I was starting all over again, I wouldn’t worry about that. I would not worry about that.
I have built and lost everything twice now, and guess what? It was alright. It’s okay, but the biggest thing is if you don’t build something, you don’t try something, if you don’t go deep on something, then you’ll never know, you’ll never know. Anyway, make sure you clear it with your spouse first to get their buy in, I’m just saying. Those people in the back of the room at Grant Cardone, if they had run to the back and invested I think it was $2,000, that’s not that much. If they would have invested $2,000 they would have gotten the exact same thing that Brandon and Kaelin got.
Those of you who listen to the podcast, you’ve heard me talk about them. Brandon and Kaelin were down to their last money. The network marketing company they were in ended up kind of falling apart, they stepped away from it. They had zero dollars left in their account. They had a credit card and a couple of other things and they saw my pitch for funnel hacks, it was $1,000. They watched it and they were like, “We have to buy it, we have to buy it. We don’t have a thousand bucks.” They were freaking out and finally decided, “We’re going to buy it.” I wish they were on here right now to tell this story because it’s awesome.
So they said they were going to buy it and then Brandon was going to buy it, and going to buy it and then he wussed out. He’s like, “I’m not going to do it.” So he didn’t buy it. Instead he went to Clickfunnels.com and paid $100 for Clickfunnels. He went back to Kaelin and said, “I didn’t do it. I just bought the $100 thing.” And she’s like, “We said we were going to buy it.” And he’s like, “I know. We don’t have any money.” And she’s like, “It doesn’t matter. We don’t have any money anyway. Who cares if we buy something with it. We don’t have any money.” Zero and negative $1000 is pretty much the same thing. It’s not changing the quality of your life.
So they went back and ended up buying the $1000 thing and she was pissed because now they were $1100 in debt as opposed to $100 and then guess what they did? They had something they were really passionate about. She had lost, I don’t know, 60 pounds. She was in weight, she was already passionate about something, she’d already gone through the growth. She had already filled that. Now she was transitioning, they were transitioning to need to share this with other people.
So what did they do? They did similar to what I did. For them, they did it a little different, this is what I recommend for you guys though. They bought the Funnel Hacks training and then they watched video number one. They started watching it and as soon as they got into it, they paused it and they did that thing. They pushed play again, they started doing, they did that thing. They implemented what I said. Paused it. Did that thing. Pushed play, pause, play, pause. And for two or three months or weeks, I can’t remember how long it was. That’s all they did.
They put it all in place and when it was done, they launched their business. They’re initial launch, I think it was Thanksgiving or Christmas, they were driving to their families and they told me that they had enough gas money to get there, but no gas money to get back. So they filled the gas in their car, started driving, they got down to their families house, they were staying in a room and they started going through it and they launched this thing and luckily for them they rolled it out and made $20,000, that paid for gas money to get back.
And then they started geeking out, started plugging in, they started doing what I did. Again, I didn’t want to learn copywriting, but when I found out you change a headline you change 13 words and you give yourself a thousand dollar a day raise, it suddenly becomes really interesting. So they plugged in the podcast and I watched these guys over the next year, over the next two years and it was crazy.
I would do something, I remember I did a podcast where I was on a webinar with Jason Flatlien, who is one of the best webinar performers on this planet, at the end of the webinar Jason did this weird thing for 90 minutes. I was so pissed at him because I thought he was going to kill webinar sales. Turns out he doubled our webinar sales, on the drive home I was doing the podcast and I’m like, “Holy crap! Flatlien pulled this thing out of his butt. He did this thing, I never even heard of it, doubled, literally 2x’d our sales.” The podcast went live the next day.
Brandon and Kaelin listened to the podcast, they said, “Freaking Russell Brunson.” Which is the same thing I used to say when I’d be like, “Freaking Dan Kennedy. Freaking Michael Thornton. Freaking John Carl.” All the guys I studied. They’d some little nugget and I’d try it.
So they said that, they went back and added the same thing to the end of their webinar and they messaged me back, they said, “Freaking Russell Brunson. We did it to our webinar. Doubled sales.” I was like are you kidding me? And every single thing, they listened to my podcast and they’d tell me every time I’d say something, they’d take it and try it and Brandon said, “We’re like a week behind you on your implementation. You do it, we implement it a week later and we’re doing it, and doing it.”
And I want you guys to understand, that’s when this game becomes fun. It’s when you realize that man, listening to Russell rant about this stupid thing, if I add this one little piece, all the sudden I go from helping 100 people a day to 120 people a day, that’s pretty cool. My bank account goes from $1200 a day to $1300 a day. You gave yourself a $100 raise today, are you kidding me? People don’t do that.
We used to have a big mantra in our old office, we’d always say, we’d come in and be like, “How can we give ourselves a raise today? How can we give ourselves a raise today?” And it was like looking for that gold nugget. Looking for that little thing. Looking for that headline, split test, that tweak that I did, that little nugget. What could we do that’d different? That’s how the 108 split tests book was born.
I was able to do a lot more split testing before Todd Dickerson, my partner in crime in CLickfunnels, we used to build the best sales funnel we could, we’d get it out there live, pre-clickfunnels, it was a pain in the butt. We’d build the whole thing out, and get it live. Todd would login, he’d use visual website optimizer, it was our split test tool at the time, he’d split up like a thousand different tests and try to beat my control. And he always did, pretty much every time.
And that was the goal, I made the best version we can, Todd let’s see if you can beat it? And he would test, test, test, test and he beat it, beat it, beat it again, beat it again. And it was like every day, how do we give ourselves a raise today? That was the game we played and that’s how the 108 split tests book was born. That’s how half of what I know about funnels was born at that time. We were just testing every funnel variation idea, planning pages, template, idea, everything we could we dream of for a 2 ½ 3 year period of time, it’s how I became who I am today. It’s how I became the dude who probably knows more about funnels than any human being on earth because I hacked more funnels, tested more funnels, we did more than anybody.
And during that time of growth, that was the growth time for us, we were doing it on 12 companies we owned. We were doing it for a whole bunch of other people, which by the way, that’s a story for another podcast, don’t do 12 companies at once. But that’s what we were doing, that’s how we mastered this craft. That’s how I know more about funnel psychology, I believe, than anyone on earth. Because I did it. I did more of it. We tested so many thing. I was like, holy crap. I thought for sure this would have won. But this won, and this didn’t win. This helped on page one, but it made page three conversion go down. I got my gift because of the insane amounts of work that Todd and I did during that time.
Todd and I and my entire team, by the way. We didn’t have it nice like you guys have now days. I went on a little rant to someone on my team the other day, we get people now to come to Clickfunnels who first off, they don’t use Clickfunnels the way it’s made. So those of you guys who are having bugs, I want you to hear this. Because if you have bugs, it’s because you’re trying to do crap that Clickfunnels is not made to do. You’re hacking things and you’re doing stuff. If you use Clickfunnels the way it works, there’s not bugs. I don’t have bugs in my funnels. I don’t know why everyone’s got these bugs.
It’s because you’re trying to do things that you think are going to be better and they’re not. It’s because you’ve been listening to the Confusion Soft guru’s explaining why you need 55,000 different variations of funnels. If you just learn how to sell, all that crap would go away. Every time people say, “There’s all these bugs in Clickfunnels.” I’m like, “I’m not seeing them man, because I build funnels on it every single freaking day and I’m not seeing the bugs.”
There are little things here and there and we fix them as they pop up. But for the most part, you are creating bugs by trying to do stuff that does not matter. So that’s number one. Number two, you’re paying between $100-300 a month for the software. We had a really, really bad competitor come out, which we’ve had I’d say probably at least 30-40 Clickfunnels killers who have come out in the last 3 years since we launched Clickfunnels. They all come and go and they all try to undercut us in pricing.
I always get all these people like, “So and so cut you out.” And maybe someday we’ll have a big competitor, I mean who knows. I’m excited for that day, I actually enjoy competition. Some of you may probably have noticed. I got no problems with that. When I was wrestling, all I tried to do was fly around the country to find the best in the world so I could learn to beat them so I’m game. Anyone wants to step up legitimately, please do. But please don’t come in here disguised like, “We’re going to beat them by undercutting their price” Everyone’s coming out like, “You’re losing all your customers because they’re undercutting your price.”
I’m like, “Are you kidding me? The people who complain about spending $100 a month to run their entire company, I don’t want them as customers.” In fact, we’re honestly thinking about doubling or tripling our prices just to show, to give the virtual finger to everyone who’s trying to undercut us. We don’t want those customers. You can go there. If you can’t spend $100 to run your company, you should not be running a business at this point and time. Honestly, that’s how I feel.
I want to walk you through a walk down memory lane at how we used to build funnels because this is the reality of how it used to work. We would have an idea, I would then have to go funnel hack dozens of people to see what would be the best thing, so I’d probably spend 2 or 3 thousand dollars funnel hacking a bunch of people’s things. Because I didn’t have a way to mock up templates. So I’d funnel hack and take tons of screen shots of all these templates of all these different pages and then I’d have to go to one of my designers, I had a bunch through the years. I’d show them, “This is the process I think would be best. I think I want a landing page here, and this, this, this. I want this from this guys funnel. I like this over from this one. I want this from here.”
So I’d map out the funnel process I wanted to test. But I want this guys design but this over here…..it was a nightmare. So our designers would go and try to create a page but I’d be like, “No, but this and that…” and it would literally be 6-8 weeks of us going back and forth just getting the design and the funnel structure right. They’d have to hand code everything. So we’d get all this done. Then we’d have to go and after we got all the pages done, so it looked good, we’d go back to our developers and say, “okay, here are all the pages, here’s the order forms, here’s everything. Now you gotta actually make this work.” So they’d have to go and custom and go into PHP and coding and sequel database to build up so the order form would actually work. We actually went to a database, they’d have to set up the security certificates, they’d have to set up all the API’s to go to the 20 or 30 different things that we would need.
And it would take the developers on average, probably another 30 days to hook up all of those things. So my cost just in salaries at that point and time were probably at $15, maybe $20 grand in salaries just to get all these things done to that point. Then we still had to write the copy, which eventually I started liking copy, so I did a lot more of that myself. But prior, I started having a lot of copywriters. I would spend on average between 10-15 grand for every sales letter we would write. Whether it was somebody else, or it would be my own time, which would take me probably 6 weeks or so to write all the copy for a funnel.
We would then plug all those things in, and we’d be 3 months, conservatively 3 months and usually a little more than that, and conservatively about $30 grand per funnel in. Before we could test it. Before we could test it.
So for you guys to be like, “That’s $100 and I could only build 30 funnels. I still have to get an SMTP mailer to send my emails out.” I have no empathy for that. None, zero. I want you to leave us and go to the competitors. Please, for the love. Leave us, go for the $37 option. I want you to be their nightmare clients, I do not want you to be using Clickfunnels. I don’t have any empathy. Zero. Not one iota of empathy for you if you cannot pay $100 or even $300…..if you cannot pay $300 to run your company, you are not an entrepreneur, you should leave this business. Honestly, you should just stay as an artist and go to the beach and do your thing and have a hat out there to get tips. That is your level of being an entrepreneur. I don’t know what else to tell you. Please leave. You can go, you have my permission. I don’t not want or need your money.
But if you were trying to freaking change the world and sell stuff and make a business, that’s what we’ve given you. If you wanted super insane, complex stuff, you may have outgrown Clickfunnels. That’s fine, if you’ve outgrown Clickfunnels, go hire people to custom code stuff, I’m okay with that. You’re going to be like, “Oh your software’s buggy.” It’s like you’re trying to customize crap that your should be spending 20 or 30 grand on, like we used to. You can do that. Go for it. You have my permission to leave. I do not need your $297 that bad. I promise you that.
The headaches that go to some people who are trying to, who are complaining to me about the bug they find when they try to add the 47th upsell on the 13th email sequence if somebody clicks yes versus no, twice instead of once. That’s not what we’re made to do. And the reason why, after freaking testing a million things when you go back and do it the way I had to do it, those three months and that $30 grand was for the initial test. Then Todd would have to go split test a whole bunch of things and then guess what we found out? Half the time we’d get the pages to convert but the funnel wasn’t profitable.
So then we’d have to come back and say okay, this entire funnel didn’t work so we have to rebuild the upsell, downsell sequence. I had to go back to the drawing board and it’s not me spending 15 minutes in Clickfunnels, cloning the page and doing a split test. No. It was me hiring another copywriter to write a new version of the video sales letter. It was me figuring out new layouts and designs and functionality and trying to re-custom freaking code all that crap from the ground up, then we’d have to go re-build the entire funnel, then re-launch it, drive new traffic. If the funnel didn’t work we’re into another $10-15 grand in for the second test. “Oh my. $300 costs so much. I can only do 400 split tests at once.” I’ve got no mercy for you okay.
Sorry for the rant, but this freaking important. Alright, so the reason why my funnels are simple, and I want you guys to understand this, is because your funnels need to be simple. I learned this from having to custom code stuff. If I made these complex freaking funnels that everyone thinks are so cool now days, because of Confusion Soft and others, they draw these little diagrams and they try to impress their clients by how complex their funnels can be, that’s not going to serve you at all.
I want you to understand this, that will not serve you. It will screw you up and you’ll be finding bugs in Clickfunnels because it’s not build to do what you’re trying to do. With the design hack-a-thon happening next week, we are building out 30 types of funnels. These are the funnel structures you should use. You should work to plug the crap you are selling into these funnel structures, not the other way around. You should not try to say, “oh I got this good idea, I’m going to do 14 upsells and then I’m going to have a mini survey on upsell number two and then I’ll sell them this.” No, just plug the crap you have into the existing stuff.
The tiny potential maybe incremental sales you could get by tweaking this thing, is not worth….I promise you that if you put the same effort and same time and money and energy into hiring a better copywriter or mastering….there’s a dude who I pay $100 to write each headline for me. When we have an offer I’ll give him a thousand bucks and say, “Write me ten headlines.” That’s a better investment of your time than trying to have 16 different upsells. Because having a different headline can change your conversion. That will do more for you than the complexity that you’re trying to do.
My rant is over. I think it’s over. Should it be over? I just want you guys to understand that. Clickfunnels is built for customers like me, who want to get a message out quickly. They want to take the best proven practices, and they want to focus on the stuff they can control. If you want a cheaper option because you feel like $100 is too much to invest in the entire background and infrastructure of your business, you have my permission to go. I hope you enjoy it. And when your business makes enough money that you can switch, we will gladly welcome you back. Or you can do what the wise man did and built his foundation on a rock.
I don’t know if you guys remember that song from Sunday school but the wise man built his house upon the rock, and the foolish man built his house upon the sand. And when the rains came tumbling down, the rains came down and the floods came up, the rains came down and the floods came up, the rains came down and the floods came up and the man on the sand washed. And the man on the rocks stood still. This is primary songs 101, guys.
So if you want to build your house upon the sand, go the cheap option you should. You definitely should. And if and when you want to get super complex, if there’s reasons and cases, Clickfunnels wasn’t built for, don’t feel bad you guys. I’m okay with that. You can outgrow us. Clickfunnels is a company that’s built for businesses in this certain range and I understand that and I respect that. That’s who we want to serve. If we try to serve everybody, we will not succeed either.
So a lot of times if you guys come to us and you’re like, “Oh, this is a bug, this is a bug.” A lot of times we’ll hear that and say, “It’s not a bug. It’s the limitation that we have put on our software because that’s not something that we want our users doing.” Because if we open that to everybody then it adds a whole other level of complexity. Clickfunnels is already complex, I don’t want to add more complexity. I want to make more simplicity.
I honestly, if I wouldn’t have uproarings and riots in the streets right now, I would take away some of our features. I would pull things out, I would simplify a lot of stuff. And you will notice over the next year or so, we have a bunch of new UI people and new teams coming in and our goal is simplification. Trying to make things more simple and easier, not more complex. Like, “Russell, what’s the newest feature coming to Clickfunnels?” There are some cool new things coming out, but at the same time a lot of its simplification.
At Funnel Hacking Live we opened up Actionetics and someone messaged me the other day, “you had this cool feature in Actionetics, it was the best thing you have and then you guys pulled it away two weeks later. Why did you guys do that?” I’m like, “Two reasons, number one: What people were doing was making smart lists that have literally 800 different things in there. I understand you guys want to be segmented, but I promise you that level of segmentation, it hurts you more than it will ever help you. And number two: It destroys our database. It’s not good. If you want that kind of complexity, please go and build that on your own. But this is for, Clickfunnels is built for entrepreneurs to move quickly.” The opportunity, you being able to launch two funnels instead of one is the difference. That’s the goal of it.
I’ve been going for a long time you guys. I don’t even know where I’m at. I hope I haven’t passed where I’m going. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this podcast, it’s been a lot of fun. I hope you guys actually listened to the whole thing. There were a lot of really, really cool stuff that I really wanted to share with you guys in here. I hope you got a lot of value out of it.
To recap, don’t be a bleh, build your empire, become unbalanced and focus on becoming who you need to be, and then after you’ve done that and you’re ready to transition to contribution then shift your balance and be obsessed with the marketing of it, have fun with it. This game is fun you guys. Every day I wake up and I’m like, I can’t believe I get to do this. I can’t believe I had a two hour drive today and I can’t believe I get to hang out with you guys and share and talk and based on my stats, between YouTube and our podcasts, we’ll have between 15 and 20,000 people who will listen to this whole entire thing. It’s crazy.
20,000 people and if each of you got one little nugget out of that thing and I gave 20,000 of you guys the ability to affect an extra 10 people, that’s 200,000 people that we affected. And if you’re able to get an extra 100 people, that’s 2 million people I was able to affect. If you get an extra thousand that’s 20 million people. It’s insane the ripple effect. I hope that I didn’t waste any of your time and you guys got something, one or two or three little nuggets.
But look at these things that way. Go into this, go into everything, go into your study time, go into your podcast, I’m putting out a lot of content and I’m hopefully making it entertaining and fun for you guys, but you’re always looking for that one little thing, “oh, that’s how Russell….” I had probably a dozen people message me when they saw how I do my….One of the Funnel Hacker TV episodes I had my Expert Secrets board and I finished the Expert Secrets book and I closed the board and they saw that. That’s how you manage your projects. Now I see how you get so much stuff done. Everything’s compartmentalized. You have your teams, different projects, and trello’s the way you do it. That little thing was huge for people. One little nugget, and you never know where they’re going to be picked up. You never know when gold’s going to be dropped and you can grab it.
So plug in, immerse yourself in this stuff you guys. My goal is to get your vibration up to mine so you can be as passionate as I am, because if you are, that’s how you’re going to change the world. That’s how I’m going to change the world. I can’t do it without you. So I need you guys there. So step in, plug in, have fun, enjoy the process, simplify your funnels, and build your company upon a rock. With that said you guys, I appreciate you all and I will see you guys soon. Bye everybody.
Behind the scenes of how we were able to profitably grow our company without taking on any capital.
On this special episode with Brent Coppieters from Russell’s team, they talk about some behind the scenes things that need to be figured out while you are growing and scaling your company. Here are some of the cool things you will hear in this episode:
So listen here to find out some important behind the scenes things you have to think about when you’re in the process of growing your business.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. I’m here today with Brent Coppieters on the Marketing Secrets podcast.
So everyone, I got a really special podcast for you today, I’m so excited for. Right now, where are we at?
Brent: Kauai
Russell: Kauai, Hawaii. This has been our backyard for the last week, and we’re heading home tomorrow, which is kind of sad. But I wanted to get Brent in here to help you guys out. Because obviously in the Marketing Secrets podcast I talk a lot about the marketing stuff, and Brent has been with me now for over a decade. How long is it actually?
Brent: Eleven years at the end of July.
Russell: Eleven years, dang that’s crazy. So that’s when you started? Was anyone else here when you first got started officially?
Brent: Anyone who’s here now?
Russell: Brittany? Was she here?
Brent: Brittany came in after. I don’t think anybody else who was here before I started is still here.
Russell: So Brent’s been the longest, long term person, except Doral maybe. Doral in Romania. We got a Romanian. Our backlight is kind of lit, it’s hard to see us. Brent’s been around for forever and done tons of different roles. Right now he runs the entire operations of Clickfunnels so I wanted to have him kind of talk about the stuff because it’s a big part of growing and scaling a company that we don’t talk about a lot.
But first do you want to talk about your back story, as far as getting into this whole thing. It’s kind of a funny story.
Brent: How much back story do you want?
Russell: We should move over here to the couch so you can see a little better. So I met Brent at church initially. Do you want a pillow?
Brent: Yeah.
Russell: That’s how planned these things are. What was one of the first impressions, about this whole business, when you got introduced to it? Because I know a lot of people got through that, especially spouses or friends or potential employees or partners that don’t know this world at all, it’s kind of weird at first.
Brent: Yeah, I had no idea. I was at, met Russell through a church function and didn’t really know what he did. When I kind of thought he made money on the internet, I initially thought eBay, he sold stuff on eBay or you know, I had no idea. I really couldn’t understand. So he had some of the business partners and friends that he kind of worked with at the time and I kind of pulled those guys apart and was kind of asking those guys, “What does he really do?” and one of our mutual friends, he knew that I didn’t understand so I talked to my wife who said, “I don’t know what this Russell Brunson guy’s doing, but it is freaking crazy.” Our friend was sharing the numbers that Russell was doing.
He was going to University, I was going to school as well. He was making more money than my parents combined income was, more money than they had ever made. So I was like, I gotta find out what this guy’s doing. So, like any friend, we invited him and wife over for dinner on a Sunday afternoon. So I just started asking him really carefully, “What are you doing? What exactly is this?” And he just kind of started sharing what he was up to, what he was doing. Obviously he doesn’t brag about what he’s doing, the success he was having and he was having tremendous success.
After they left, we had a good dinner and visited and then they left. I couldn’t sleep for three days. My head was spinning.
Russell: I ruined him.
Brent: You did, I was screwed at that point. After that happened I couldn’t fathom the success. But what was more important there was the value he was providing the world.
Russell: Was that before or after all our kids, we had twins and they had their first son the week before. I can’t remember if it was before or after.
Brent: We had met you before, we’d been friends for a little while. I think that we had our kids and you guys moved right after that.
Russell: All I remember is we had our twins we were in the NSU for two weeks basically. So we rented a hotel room in the hospital and just hung out there and goofed off, and I remember he was coming. “Don’t you have to go to work, or what are you doing?” He thought I was going to go…
Brent: Yeah, I told my wife, “We gotta take dinners over there or something, we gotta help them because they’re in the hospital with these twins because they can’t leave and he can’t work because he’s in the hospital.”
Russell: Little did they know the internet was working.
Brent: I had no clue.
Russell: So that was fun, so then a little while later, Brent started working for us. Initially it was affiliate management for how many years? You did that for a long time.
Brent: Yeah, like 8,9 years, roughly. The hats were always being moved but…
Russell: It’s a small company, you do a lot of everything.
Brent: Yeah, so probably 8 years to really focus on business development, affiliate management and partners and stuff like that.
Russell: And, just so everyone knows, I recently on the podcast had the presentation I gave from Funnel Hacking Live, the One Funnel Away, about the stories, and I talked about Brent in that and it made me cry in the middle of my presentation, it was kind of embarrassing. But you were here for the good and bad. When we went from 5 employees up to 100 and back down to 5 and all the stress up and down. I’m curious, honestly why you didn’t leave when everything collapsed and crashed.
Brent: That’s a good question.
Russell: I don’t know the answer either.
Brent: You’re going to get me vulnerable. Working with an entrepreneur, especially Russell, you know where their heart is and there came a point where he was trying to help too many people. He was employing a lot of friends and family and people that he wanted to provide opportunities for and that was great to a certain point. But there was a point there where the business changed a little bit, evolved and we were needing to make some changes with it. And those changes wouldn’t allow him to support everyone he was supporting.
That was very difficult for him. My wife and I, we cared and loved Russell and Collette and their family. We came to a point where I didn’t want to be a burden, I knew he was stressed and worried about taking care of people. I had a conversation with my wife, where I said I would rather keep our friendship, than have him feel stressed about supporting, having an opportunity for me to keep working there.
So one day I kind of came into your office, and had a real chat. I probably said some things that, I wanted him to understand how important what he was doing was, and also I wanted him to understand that I was okay to leave. I didn’t want him to feel like he needed to provide for me. I would be fine to figure things out. I just wanted to make sure he was okay. Because it was at the point where you were helping so many people, really one hiccup you could have lost everything. All your savings was going back into the company and at some point you just can’t keep doing that.
Russell: Yeah, I got really scared, but somehow we pulled it around.
Brent: Pulled it around and obviously you had to make some tough phone calls and decisions that changed the company at that point.
Russell: Basically we had to, we had 100 and some odd employees, we had all these wrestlers working for me, we had let go the whole wrestling team. We had to downsize. We shrunk from a 20,000 square foot building to 2000. It was rocky and scary but it gave us the ability to refocus and figure things out. Remember we went on a couple trips where we were trying to figure out who were the people still having success in our market. We jumped in a plane traveling to different people’s offices. We spent time with Ryan Dyson and Perry Belcher, trying to figure out what they were doing. With Alex Chafren, what they were doing. People who were our friends, just kind of used this time to figure out what’s actually working today and how do we shift our business model and change everything.
It’s funny how much pain there was during that time. We flew to London. How important it was for the transition for what became Clickfunnels and everything else.
Anyway, so many fun stories we could talk about forever. But we don’t have time for all those things. What I want to talk about a little today is, probably a year into the business when we first started growing, it’s funny I got a message today from Alex Chafren, he’s like, “You sound so calm.” Probably because we’re here in Hawaii but he was like, “I don’t know any other person running a hundred million dollar company that’s as relaxed and able to respond to people.”
Anyway, when we first started, we didn’t know what we were doing. It was just kind of like, we know how to sell stuff. Started selling Clickfunnels, it started growing and all the sudden all sorts of new headaches came up with that. From a software standpoint with Todd and we brought in Ryan and they had to deal with infrastructure, ups and downs. I think based on ranking we’re the 700th most visited website in the world. But that’s not counting anyone’s custom domains. If you take away custom domains, we’re probably in the top 500 websites in the world.
There’s not many humans on earth that have ever dealt with that kind of scaling and infrastructure. Todd had never done it, Ryan had never done it. They’re figuring this stuff along the way and we’re hiring consultants. On the marketing side we’re trying to grow and then all these things and as everything was growing one thing we didn’t have in place was any of the internal company business stuff. We were good sales people, good coders but we had to do that.
It was funny because, you’d never had experience with that either though.
Brent: Not really, no.
Russell: We had this time where internally there were, everything was shaking and we said basically “Brent, we’re going to take you from affiliate management and you’re going to run this role.” And didn’t know what to expect, if it was going to work or not going to work. He was able to step into this thing and turned it really simplified. I’ve had zero stress about that part of the business since you took it over. From that time we went from 20 employees to I don’t even know where we’re at now.
Brent: 135 or something. Employees and contractors, we got a few different folks.
Russell: Lots of people. So I’d love to talk, first you step in that role and it was probably disorganized and stuff. What were your thoughts? What did you have to go and figure out? What’d you have to learn to be able to turn it into what it is now?
Brent: I think the big thing is Russell’s vision for the company. We’d worked together long enough that I knew where he wanted to go. Even inherently just kind of knew. The big thing about Russell is his ability to surround himself with good people. That was the first part, evaluating who we have currently. Are they on the right seat on the bus, is a big part of that too. So we tested different things, and some things worked and some things didn’t work very well.
We brought people and we started the phone stuff a little bit with the clickstart program and some of those guys were better than others and we’ve evolved that program. But the big thing about it is obviously support. We had, when you guys initially started hiring support team members, those guys were rock stars, and a lot of those guys are still with us today. They have evolved in their positions in the company because of their commitment and their love of Clickfunnels. I love when I get to interview and talk to people and when those individuals say, “I love Clickfunnels.” That is the coolest compliment that we can get. When get people that raise their hand, they want to work with us because they love Clickfunnels, they love the mission, they love the ability to help people.
I think the biggest challenge was how do we grow with it? Because the marketing side, was growing so fast, it’s important that we’re providing and helping our users and helping them have the best experience possible. Also, Clickfunnels isn’t just some easy push button software. It is easy to use once you understand it, but there’s a lot of different parts of it and understanding marketing is a big part of it.
So we needed to bring on people who could understand Clickfunnels, who understood marketing and also understood Russell’s style, the way you were taking everything.
Russell: It’s crazy because I think when you took over the role of that, it wasn’t just support but that was a big piece of it, obviously. There’s probably what, a dozen support people at the time?
Brent: Yeah, there was probably about 6 to 10. Well, probably 10.
Russell: 10 at the time. You found a way to take that….it’s funny because one of the criticism sometimes of Clickfunnels is “Support’s not live all the time. Awebber’s live.” Awebber’s been growing for 20 years. They probably get 4 new signups a day. Clickfunnels right now, it’s been a while since I looked at the stats, but it’s anywhere from 500 to a thousand sign ups a day, every single day. Coming to Clickfunnels and trying to learn this huge platform that runs your entire company. How do we stay in front of that.
Our goal eventually is to get to the point where it’s real time support or as close to that as possible. But there’s no one else in our space that’s ever had to deal with that. That have grown companies that fast. Most big companies like Strive don’t have any support at all because they’re like, we can’t therefore we don’t. We still need to have that support and education and stuff like that in place.
I think what you did initially, I know that Ryan was a part of this. Ryan Montgomery helped set this up initially too. But just for those that don’t have support teams or maybe have three or four people and are starting to scale something, you kind of broke people into teams. Do you want to talk about some of that initial stuff that you guys did there to make the scaling side of support easier?
Brent: Yeah, so we moved over to Intercom, that allowed us to do like live support. It wasn’t right live, but people could submit conversations and we’d respond to them and that’s what we used to start. We’ve grown, our response time, that’s how we kind of gauge our success, our response time. There’s a lot of software companies that offer live support, from 8-5. Ours is essentially turned on 24 hours, we’ve got team members all around the world. When we initially started we actually had an international team and we had more domestic teams, but as we realized, and continued to scale and grow, we had more and more people international. We’ve got international folks on every team. We’ve got domestic folks on every team. So they can kind of work that schedule out as needed.
But as we came in we saw the amount of conversations we had, these guys are answering 8-9 thousand conversations a week, our support team. It is crazy. Our billing support is unreal. We’ve got a team of billing support team members and most of them are in our office. We’ve got a few individuals who aren’t. But the big part of it is having leadership being in those positions. So every support team we have has a team lead who is the person we reach out to and help with training and they now can pass the messages and training on to the other team members.
Russell: So how many teams do we have right now?
Brent: So technical support teams, we have 8 technical support teams. We have one billing support team. We’ve got one team that focuses on some other different partners we have and worked with in the past. We’ve got a team that helps with our Quickstart program, that’s a program people can signup with and it allows them to get some help on the initial setup and we’ve got a team lead that helps run that team.
Russell: The thing that’s cool about this, for any of you guys who are scaling, in fact this is what happened at first when we were scaling. There was one person in charge and had 10 people underneath them and we were trying to grow and everything was growing and that person couldn’t handle any more growth. Because it’s hard to have more than 8 to 10 people you report to. You get bigger than that, it gets stressful and it’s really, really hard. So what Brent did, he came in and said, “Okay, the people we have that are rock stars, make each of those a team lead. And let’s put employees underneath each of those and the team lead can train the employees and make sure they’re doing good. And he’s only got to deal with the 8 or 10 team leads, deal with them and then they are dealing with the individual people. It gives us a communication channel to get through and now he’s not having 90 direct reports back to him. He just has the 8.
Another cool thing we did recently, because the other big thing we have and some of you guys will have something similar with your businesses is, there was a competitor that has software that has pages that generate leads. Their software does one thing, there’s one button you can click and that’s it. It’s very, very simple. Clickfunnels is like, we’re building a landing page, your funnel, your shopping cart, your affiliate platform, your auto-responders, there’s 8 thousand things. For us, we can’t just hire someone in Boise, Idaho and be like, “Hey, now you’re a support person for Clickfunnels.” There’s such a learning curve they have to understand to be able to do that.
So a couple of things, number one is that most of our hires come from people that are members of our software, which is a big thing for you guys to think through. In inner circle this comes up all the time. Where do I find rock stars? I guarantee the rock star you’re dreaming for is already a customer of your product right now. Look at your internal customer base for your rock stars, because they’re going to know your product, be passionate, they’re going to care more than someone you pull off the street. That’s number one.
Number two is we needed, how do we train these people? I think initially each team lead just trained their people, and they were getting bogged down in the training and not being able to support and manage and stuff like that. So we talked about a new team that’s the training team, right?
Brent: Well a big part of this that helped, Mark came up and helping work, he does a lot more direct work with the team leads.
Russell: You guys know Mark Bangerter, he’s killing it, he’s awesome.
Brent: You know he still kind of balances customer education and he helps with support management. So Mark came in and we had the idea, we brought new people on and initially they would slow down the rest of the team. So we pulled another team lead out, we pulled out Andrew Newman, and now his focus is just training. So as we bring new team members on, he’s focusing on those guys. As we look at, he doesn’t have anybody currently to teach, he’s reaching out to people who have been on the team and maybe lack knowledge about Backpack or Actionetics, and then he’s pulling those guys out and he’s doing training with those guys so that we can get everybody up to the same level.
Russell: That’s cool. We did something like that back when we had our big call center before the big crash of what year was that? Crash or 08, crash of 09. Because we had 60 sales guys and the problem is the same thing. We’d hire sales guys off the street and someone’s gotta train them, so we had a training team. So every sales guy would come in and go through a two week training with Robbie Summers was the one that managed that and then the ones that were good we’d then put them on the floor under another team. And the ones that sucked, we’d just get rid of them.
And that’s kind of the same thought here. Let’s bring people in and have someone who’s dedicated to training them and when they’re ready, then put them on a team so they can start running with it. Everybody’s opposed to pulling people back.
It’s just crazy all these, these are all the things we’re learning as we’re growing and scaling. Someday we’re going to write a book about this whole journey and this whole experience, because I think a lot of times companies are built like, there’s a dude with an idea, they hire venture capitalists and bring in a management team, all this stuff and build a company. Whereas with us it was like raw passion and that’s what’s grown this whole thing and kept it afloat. It’s been a fun ride so far.
Brent: It’s been an unbelievable ride.
Russell: So I appreciate all your work and help and everything you do. Hopefully this gives some of you guys ideas as your growing your support teams or development team or management or whatever those things are. If you look at also, I had someone, it was Andrew Warner from Mixer the other day, he interviewed me, he’s like, “How are you able to write books and run a software company and do coaching and all these different things?” And the same thing is kind of what Brent mentioned earlier, I’ve gotten really good at surrounding myself with amazing people. Where I feel like it’s almost like there’s parts of the company that people are running. You’re running all the operational stuff, I don’t have to worry about that, the hiring and firing, the finding other people. Brent does that. So I just talk to Brent and then all the people stuff is taken care of.
Todd and Ryan run the development team, Todd’s running it. I talk to Todd all the time, but it’s just happening and I don’t have to stress about that. I’m kind of running the marketing team. Dave’s running, there’s john, there’s probably 5 or 6 people that I deal with directly inside the company and I’m able to do the parts that I love the most, that I’m the best at. And I think a lot of us entrepreneurs and most of the people in those positions all get profit share and equity in the company and I think one of the big mistakes I made when I first got started was I was so protective, this is my, I wanted so much control over everything that I stifled everything. Whereas when I was able to give up control and bring in rock stars and people that have skill sets that I don’t and now, because they have a stake in the game, I don’t have to worry about everything, every decision, every single thing.
I trust Brent. He makes a thousand decisions a day that I never even questioned or think about because I trust him. Same thing with Todd, they know they do that because they’re willing and able to do that. So I think a lot of you guys, if you’re struggling with growth, you don’t have the ideas, you’re not going to bring on venture capitalists and destroy your soul and you want to grow something. The opposite of that is bring on really smart people and give them a stake in the game.
It’s kind of like Chet Holmes used to tell me, he said that in his company, everyone was based on a percentage of sales, there was no salary based people. He said what’s cool about that is that big months everyone gets big checks, small months everyone gets small checks but everyone’s in it together. I think that building teams that way is better than bringing in a bunch of money and hiring the right people, or hiring the best people. It’s hiring the right people and giving them incentive to where they can grow and do whatever they want.
In fact, I’m going to share one thing. This is cool. Am I allowed to share this, I probably can. This was, we had these accountants, most marketers don’t like accountants, but we had these accountants and every year I’d have to go the accounting meeting and then they would always talk about all the stuff to do to try to lower your, anyway, it was super annoying. It was the worst meeting of my year, I would lose all motivation and momentum for an entire week because I was so stressed out. I remember driving home from one of those so pissed off at the accountants for trying to ruin my happiness in life. And I remember in this podcast, I have to go find it, but I was like, “My goal is I want, not only am I going to max out my tax bracket but I’m going to have everyone I know around me, all my partners, all the people that are pushing this, I want to max out their tax bracket as well.”
We were talking about this earlier on this trip here in Hawaii, there’s probably half a dozen people or so on our team now, that have maxed out their tax bracket because of this whole concept that we’re talking about. That is the coolest feeling in the entire world.
Brent: It’s pretty awesome.
Russell: It’s pretty amazing. So there you go, Uncle Sam, there you go. Anyway, that’s all I got. You have anything else you want to add?
Brent: No, I just think, you said unbelievable, it truly is every day. How cool is it to be able to come and work with friends and good people that, it’s just a positive place. Our company culture is a big deal and you drive that and it’s been really fun to see people come into our office or just come into our business, our space and feel that, and even those who just work remote, we’ve got a lot of team members that work remote, most of them are. And it can be kind of a lonely road out there, but we do things to try to help them feel the love. Russell will send swag to people and just unexpected things that make people feel the love and help them know we appreciate them and that’s a big deal.
Russell: So here’s a question, for those who may want to join Clickfunnels team, how do they?
Brent: We have a link on Clickfunnels, at the bottom of Clickfunnels under Careers, but we’re always looking. If someone out there is passionate, you want to be able to find a place with us, hit me up. You can hit me up on Facebook, email, brent@clickfunnels.com, send me an email. I can direct you where to go, we have application up.
Russell: That’s awesome. Thanks man. So that’s a little behind the scenes of how the HR, the growth, the internal stuff, what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. Again, we’re just learning all this stuff along the way. Someday we’re going to write a book about it when it’s all done. Because the lessons we’ve learned along the way have been cool. So hopefully this gave you guys a couple of ideas and things as you’re growing and scaling your teams, and that’s all I got. Thanks everybody. Thanks Brent.
Brent: Absolutely. Thanks guys.
Russell: Bye.
There’s no school like the old school…
On today’s episode Russell talks about plans to use what he has learned from TJ Rholeder while on an anniversary trip in Hawaii, in his business once he arrives home. Here are a few interesting things you will learn in this episode:
So listen here to hear Russell’s upcoming plans for his business, or watch the video version so you don’t miss out on the beautiful scenery of Kauai.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell. Welcome to today’s episode of Marketing Secrets, that is in the rain here in Kauai.
Alright everybody, I want to welcome to today’s episode of Marketing Secrets, it is raining on me right now. I don’t know if you can see that over here, if you’re watching the video version. But it’s beautiful here and I wanted to do an episode, this is going to be really good, I’m going to come and hide under the bush or something. I’m just going to sit here and get wet, it’ll be more fun this way.
Anyway, we’ve been in Hawaii almost a week now on my 15th anniversary, which is amazing being married to my beautiful wife, Collette for this long. I’m trying to get to do an episode with you guys, hopefully on the flight home or something, on what it’s like living with and being married to an entrepreneur. We’re trying to pick our keynote speaker for this year’s Funnel Hacking Live, and it’s funny because we got tons of people voting for everybody. Somebody posted Oprah, and someone put Russell’s wife and my wife got more votes than Oprah, which is pretty exciting. So we’re trying to get her at least to jump on the podcast. So that’s the goal and the game plan.
What I want to share with you guys today, the rain’s gone that fast, but there’s birds right behind me. Let me clean my phone off real quick. So what I wanted to share with you guys, I’ve been listening to a whole bunch of cool marketing stuff between the long drives around the island, all the cool stuff we’re doing. The course I was listening to was TJ Rohleder and if you don’t know TJ, he’s one of the legends in our business. He is one of the direct mail kings in the Bizop world, and he’s become a friend. We had him speak at one of our events a while ago, which was amazing.
What’s interesting, the course I was listening to was How To Become Super Rich in the Opportunity Market. He teaches people how to make money in the teach people how to get rich market. What’s interesting, as I was listening to it, if you read the Expert Secrets book, I talked about three core things you gotta do to build a mass movement. Number one you gotta have the attractive character, the attractive leader. Number two you have to have a future based cause. Number three you have to have a new opportunity.
What’s interesting is as I was listening to this, he’s talking about how to sell opportunities but basically if you’re doing a mass movement the way we’re talking about, it’s always a new opportunity. Everything he’s talking about, the opportunity is the way he positions it is how to get rich, how to make money, here’s the opportunity market as he calls it. But in my mind every market is the opportunity market. So I’m going to see if I can interview TJ and dig deeper in that because his stuff was brilliant, it was all targeted towards selling people stuff, how to make money. But if you look at it from the lens of the Expert Secrets book then it kind of works for all of them. Because every single opportunity, everything you’re selling should be a new opportunity. So I’m going to try to see if I can do that.
Plus, TJ launched his company, he lives out in Kansas and he actually bought a hospital and renovated the whole thing and that’s where he runs his company out of, an old hospital, which is kind of cool. I kind of want to go down there and see his whole operation. It may come to an episode of Funnel Hacker TV soon. Where I go down there and tour his hospital and see his whole organization. In the last ten years they’ve sent out 9500 different direct mail campaigns, which is crazy.
Some people will get on his list and they might get between 2 or 300 letters in the mail per year, depending on what sequence they take, what offers they say yes to and no to and all sorts of stuff. Super inspiring.
But what I want to talk about is a couple of core things I learned from him that I think are really good for all of you guys. The first one is not from TJ it’s actually from a Bill Glazier thing I was listening to. So Bill was partners with Dan Kennedy at Glazier Kennedy and he was my marketing dad for five or six year that I was in his inner circle. And one of the things that was cool that I was studying from Bill this week, he was talking about how at the very beginning of the year they have their big thing. So they do two events a year, they did InfoSummit and Super Conference. For me, I do Funnel Hacking Live, that’s my big thing.
They said they categorized all their promotions based on the importance. So number were their two events, number two was this, number three…they had it all mapped out and mapped out the entire year, the promotional schedule at the beginning of the year to make sure they fill the events and all these other things fit in there.
I was thinking about that, and I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not super good at mapping out my promotional calendar and schedule and things like that. I kind of just go week by week, month by month and do stuff. And what Bill does in this course, and it’s an old course, but he maps it out and then they do everything. So It started thinking about this and at one of our inner circle meetings, Justin Williams was talking about with his stuff now, as you guys know if you’ve been listening to our podcast for any length of time, the two magic things that marketers have are urgency and scarcity.
So he started doing with his is, he re-launched courses throughout the year and he’d open and close them. So he’d have the urgency and scarcity close. That’s where most of the sales always come in, during the closing of the thing. Also if you listened to when Stu launched Tribe, he’s talking about Michael Hyatt when he launched his membership site, the big secret they had was opening and closing. So twice a year they’d open up the membership site and then it was closed. I started thinking about that and I’m like, right now most of our programs are open all the time, which is good. But the urgency and scarcity is not there. So I think what I’m going to do is start calendaring it out where twice a year our things are available.
So twice a year people can buy our certification program, twice a year people can join Funnel University, twice a year they can get Fill Your Funnel, twice a year….all of our core offers are only open twice during the year, and they’re closed down other than that, which is kind of fun. It gives us the ability to have urgency and scarcity and build up the hype and the buzz, and it gives me each month, something to focus on. This month is Funnel U month and we’re going to open and close it. The next month is this, we’re going to open it and close it and all content and all things can be related back to that one thing.
So that was the first thing I kind of started re –thinking through when I was listening to Bill Glazier talk about how they structured their promotions around their events. That’s the first cool thing. Now with TJ, a couple of cool things that he does, I think it was good for me to hear again, it’s good for all of you guys to hear again.
So TJ is in the business opportunity market, mostly through direct mail. He has 50,000 letters he mails every single week. Week in and week out consistently, they know 50,000 letters will go out every single week all for new customer acquisition. New customer acquisition, 50,000 letters every single week. And that’s just the schedule. I think for a lot of us we get in this thing where we have these front end funnels, these break even funnels where we bring people in, then we have our monetization funnel. So I think a lot of us, we create a really good webinar funnel let’s say, and then that becomes our focus. And then that’s it, we’re driving traffic and that’s the business.
TJ if you look at this again, he’s got his frontend lead gen offers and he’s mailing 50,000 pieces a week. He said at his peak, he was selling a $50 course from his frontend lead gen stuff, and he said he would spend up to $500 to sell a $50 course. From there you go into all the backend funnels and the backend things he was selling. But he had this consistency of 50,000 pieces every single week.
I started thinking about that. He’s mailing 50,000 new names every single week, what’s the equivalent of that for my business? I need to make sure I have something consistently doing that every single week to one frontend offer. He talked about one of the big things also is he’s not mailing 2 things or 3 things to that 50,000. They have one offer, the hottest converting one and that’s where they drive all their energy, all their money, everything.
And for us, I think all of us, we have our hot offer, we need to be spending as much as we can to get people into that thing consistently every single week. Just knowing I spend 50 grand a week, or 10 grand a week or a thousand bucks a week, whatever it is for you, into that frontend thing. If you break, if you think about this, break it down, there’s kind of two sides to this, or three sides depending on how deep you want to get. We talk about this at this upcoming Funnel Hacking Live, but there’s a process.
There’s basically three types of funnels. There’s acquisition funnels, getting people in. There’s ascension funnels, ascending up within your membership. Then there’s monetization funnels. But for this argument today, I’m just going to talk about the two. So there’s an acquisition funnels, so what is your one acquisition funnel that you can consistently do X with? For me it might be I need to sell at least a thousand books a week, or I need to spend 10 grand a week, or whatever that thing is for you. You just know that and you have to do it consistently. We have to sell a thousand books a week and we should build a whole team of people whose entire goal is to sell a thousand books a week, or 5 thousand, or whatever that number is for you.
Back when I had a call center, that’s how it was. We had free plus shipping leads and we had to get 8 thousand leads a month to get enough leads for our sales floor and that became the focus of the business. For you it’s like, think about TJ, what is the frontend offer that’s consistently bring people in? And then from TJ, it’s so crazy. I’m hoping I can go down there and film his whole operation for you guys because I want to see it to. But like I said, as soon as someone gets through the frontend then he’s got all these direct mail campaigns that go out offering these two step things.
So he’ll send out a letter for a free cd about whatever to the existing customers. So he’s only sending it to people that already bought his $50 thing, then he’ll put them onto a sequence that gets a free cd. Then if they respond to the free cd he puts them in a sequence to sell the thing that that cd upsells to. Then he puts out the next offer and the next offer and he keeps putting out all these frontend lead gen, I guess their acquisition and monetization letters to the buyers of his 50,000 a week thing. So 50,000 a week bringing people in. And after they come in and bought the $50 thing, then he starts sending them letters trying to get them to raise their hand about specific opportunities that he’s going to sell them. If they respond to those then they go into a whole other sequence. They might get 10, 15, 20 letters to sell a 2 or 3 or 5 thousand dollar course on the backend.
And that’s kind of the process that he does over and over and over again. So for me, what I’m looking at, what I want my focus to be, is somebody comes into my world, and again I’m focusing way more effort consistently on this, I’m going to call it 50,000 letters a week, but for us we’re not doing direct mail right now, so it’s not that, but that’s the concept. The frontend lead acquisition. Then if they come in, we’re taking our core courses and we’re opening them and closing them, opening them and closing, opening and closing them, opening and closing them throughout the year. So those are our monetization funnels after people come in.
So that’s kind of the game, and I’m really excited for it. So that’s the game I’m going to be playing and I hope you guys model that. The other cool thing I’m going to be doing, and I’ve been thinking a lot about this for probably two weeks. It started at Scout camp and it’s been in my mind even here as we’ve been in this beach house. Having one really good follow up funnel sequence that takes people through my offers in a very strategic way. So we have igniteyourfunnel.com, which is right now, we’re using it for something completely different, but I’m going to be changing that to where this is an opt in form where we get people to opt into and then it’s going to take them through a sequence. I haven’t quite mapped the whole thing out, but first thing I want someone to buy is what?
For my business the first thing I want someone to buy is Expert Secrets, so I’m going to be like, have a video of me explaining why they need Expert Secrets and why it’s step number one. Actually, let me step back, step number one is not going to be the book. Step number one is going to be, on the podcast you guys heard a little while ago, the two episodes on You’re one Funnel Away, I’m going to show that video to build connection with people immediately after they opt in, from there I’ll tell them to get the Expert Secrets book and then from there, what do they need next? I’ll logically build out a really long sequence that’s going to be this ascension funnel that takes them up through our core offers in the middle.
And then the big thing that our team is going to be focusing on is RKPI’s how many opt in’s a day are we getting inside the Ignite Your Funnel funnel, the Ignite your Funnel ascension funnel, ascending them through all of our offers. I’m trying to think how this whole thing works together. It might be when someone opt’s in the first time they go through this ascension funnel, that all those offers will be open to them, open and close, like in Evergreen format. And after that they’ll bump over to a monetization funnel. Our longer term email sequences that then they’ll be on when we open and close them each month. I’m not positive on that, still figuring out the details. But it’s fun to think through it. Anyway, that’s the game plan.
So those are some of the fun things I’ve learned and been thinking about while I’ve been here having some fun in Kauai on my 15 year anniversary. I hope that gives you guys some ideas and things to think about. So kind of to recap the important things.
Number one is focusing on consistently bringing new blood into your business. 50,000 letters a week rule, should we call it that? 50,000 letters a week rule, consistently bringing new blood in. I remember Garret White at the last Funnel Hacking Live talked about people that make it rain, the rainmakers are the ones who dominate this world and this business. You gotta be focusing on making it rain. If you want to learn how to make it rain, right now the program is closed, but depending on when you’re listening it might be open, is our Fill Your Funnel course. Fill Your Funnel is all about how to make it rain, how to get new customers into your funnels. So that’s number one.
Number is then after they come in, what’s the monetization? So maybe number two is the ascension funnel, which is for me it’s ignite your funnel, which takes them through our offers in chronological order of when I want them to see things, opening and closing them in Evergreen format. And at the end of that, then put them into our monetization team, monetization funnels, which then would be taking our core six offers and opening and closing them twice a year. That’s going to be the business. That gets me really excited. Really, really excited.
So anyway, that’s the game plan guys. I’m glad I had a chance to talk this out with you guys, it’s making it clearer and clearer in my mind. I hope you guys something of value out of that too. But like I said, I don’t just talk about this stuff, I practice what I preach so you will see me implementing these things in the very near future. Hopefully you guys will see them and enjoy them and model and funnel hack them for what you guys are doing because I know this stuff is going to be amazing.
So that’s all I got you guys. Anyway, here’s one last view. Here’s the beach house we’ve been staying in. It’s an AirBNB, we were going to get a hotel and we looked at AirBNB and we found this. AirBNB or BRB, I can’t remember which one. It’s like 5000 square feet, my wife and I are up here and Brent and Amber are over here. There’s all this open space and there’s even like huge guest house over here that we got massages in the other day. It’s crazy.
We’re literally, this is our beach. It’s just ours. And it’s crazy. I was flying the quad copter today, I learned how to finally fly the quad copter. I took it out over everything. So if you’re watching Funnel Hacker TV, which hopefully you are, you’ll have a chance to see above this place and beyond, it’s insane. It’s probably a little expensive, but for your 15th anniversary you go all out. Look at that, that’s our beach. We rented these paddle boards too, I guess if you’re listening on the podcast you can’t see this.
But a couple of cool things also, just so you guys know. This is obviously on the audio podcast, which right now as of today, we’re number 5 in the business category, which is awesome. We’re still killing it there, we just also released this as a video podcast, if you go to iTunes at the very top there’s audio podcasts, you can switch to video podcast. We also have Marketing Secrets as a video podcast now too. So if you want to watch the videos, or if you want to watch the videos you can go to marketingsecrets.com and they’re all listed there along with the transcripts, see if you want to listen to what I’m saying and read along. The transcripts are at marketingsecrets.com as well.
With that said, I would love it if you guys would give me a review and a rating over on iTunes. Like I said, we’re number 5 in the business category, the other guys above me still have more ratings, it’s not fair. I’m killing myself giving you guys the best stuff I got, I need some more ratings. So if you can take 5 seconds out of your busy day, stop everything, go over there, leave a rating and review, tell me what you think about Marketing Secrets, let the world know, that’d be awesome.
And then the other thing is please subscribe to the video podcast as well. Feel free to watch the videos there if you want, that way you can see some of the beautiful scenery behind me. Yeah, that’s all I got you guys. Thanks again for listening, have an amazing day and we’ll see you guys soon. We’ll be back in Boise next week, back to a normal schedule. I got some cool stuff I want to publish and share with you guys. I gotta finish my anniversary and then get back to you guys soon. Appreciate you all, see you guys soon. Bye.
These two things are probably keeping you from charging what you want and selling what you want.
On this episode Russell talks about people pushing their own purchasing decisions on you, and why you shouldn’t do that. Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in today’s episode:
So listen here to why you gotta spend money to make money and why you should never force others to spend money the same way you do.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell. Welcome to a special Hawaii edition of Marketing Secrets podcast.
Hey everyone, my wife and I are in Hawaii right now, Kauai, actually, on our 15 year wedding anniversary. Well next week is technically our anniversary, but it’s been 15 years so we’re here with some of our friends who it’s also their 15 year. It’s been really great. We didn’t do a hotel this time, we actually AirBNB’d it, so I don’t know if you can see back here. I’ll show the AirBNB for those who are watching on Marketingsecrets.com you can see the video. If you’re on the podcast you can’t see this, but it’s crazy. This is the AirBNB we rented. It’s 5 or 6 thousand square feet on this private beach.
We have our own beach and we’re here right now hanging out. My wife just got soaked by a wave, we just got done getting massages. I’ve been kind of MIA for a little bit. I’ve got some content going out while I’m gone. Last week I had scout camp so I was gone for scout camp all week and little access to anything. And then this week I’ve been in Hawaii. I should have done, I was going to do some more stuff but you know, trips, it’s really difficult for me to unplug, and now that I’m unplugged it’s really difficult for me to plug back in, to be completely honest.
Anyway, it’s definitely interesting, but having a good time here. There’s dudes out kite boarding, I don’t know if you guys ever kite boarded before, but I’ve always wanted to kite board, so I may try that. It would be kind of fun actually.
I hope it’s not too windy for you guys to hear me. I was trying to figure out what I should share with you guys here to kind of give some inspiration or some thought or an idea for how you can better market your business with the things you’re doing. So I was thinking about that, what’s something that would be the biggest value for you guys and I think one of the biggest problems we have, and I’ve seen this ten times since we’ve been here in Hawaii, is that they place their own ability, the way they make their purchasing decisions on other people.
For example one of the things, I had a GoPro here, and I brought the GoPro and I had the little handle, but I forgot the little screw thing that screws the GoPro to the handle, so we go to the store. I was like, “Hey, I need to buy one of those screws.” And they’re like, “Oh, we don’t sell the screws.” I was like, “You have those handles right? Give me a handle then.” And he’s like, “But you just need a screw?” I’m like, “Yeah, but just give me the handle, I’ll just do that.” And he’s like, “Dude, it’s $47 for the handle, if you go down the road, two or three streets down there’s a place and they might sell screws there.” and I’m like, “No dude, just give me the handle.” And he’s like, “But it’s $47.” I was like, “I don’t care, I don’t want to drive two or three streets down the road to find a place that might sell a screw.” For me, the $47 is so much cheaper than the opportunity cost for me to go do that thing.
It was kind of funny and so many things happened like that. We tried to buy something, or do something and people are putting their purchasing decisions on, they would never do that, they’d never spend an extra $47 just to get a screw, because for them they’d do all these other things. I think a lot of times we get caught up that way with our customers. In fact, I’ve had people before be like, “They’ll never buy that.” I teach them in Expert Secrets and they’re creating the course and they’re like, “No one would ever pay $997 for that. No one would ever pay $400 for that or $500 for that.” Don’t put your purchasing decisions, the way you’d logically do things on somebody else. It has nothing to do with it.
You have to look at what your customer wants. If you create something they really, really want where what you’re creating is worth more than what it is you’re getting in return, the money, then they’ll buy it. If you create something that sucks, it’s not going to happen. It’s got to be something that’s amazing.
So many I think that people don’t sell stuff, or they don’t sell stuff for what it’s worth because in their mind they’re like, “I don’t think I would want to pay for that.” Which is another problem, it’s a mental thing you gotta get over as well. You’ve got to be willing to buy stuff too. But it’s just interesting how that’s such a barrier.
I remember when Justin and Tara, in our inner circle and Two Comma Club winners, when they came to inner circle, they had their real estate program, they were selling for $2000 and they paid $25 grand to join my inner circle and the first meeting all I basically told them is they should sell a $25,000 thing and they’re like, “My people won’t pay that.” And I’m like, “you paid it.” And they’re like, “Huh, we did pay you $25,000.” They valued that, they didn’t value the real estate education much because they already know it, they already do it. But the education they wanted they were willing to pay for that. And because they were willing to pay for it, they were able to ask for it. So they sent an email off to their list and sold 18 people at $25k the next week, it was crazy.
But it was just a little mindset shift. It’s interesting, I have a lot of people I know who will try to sell a thousand or a ten thousand, or a twenty five thousand dollar thing, but then they’re not willing to buy that from somebody else, and I think there’s a lot of incongruency. It’s really difficult to sell a $25,000 thing unless you’ve bought one before.
A big reason why I joined Dean Graziosi’s and Joe Polish’s group is because I know in the future I’m going to have a 100k group and I wanted to make sure I’d be willing to invest in myself that much before I ever asked somebody else to. It’s the same for you. It’s this weird karma thing, if you’re not willing to invest in yourself and your business, it makes it a lot harder for people to invest in your business. I think the reason why it’s easy for me to sell books is because I buy a lot of books. I love buying books, so it’s easy selling books. People who struggle with that, they’re like, “I never bought that in the past.” Well if you’re not going to buy it, then you’re not going to love it.
I buy, I probably shouldn’t say this on camera, but I spend 2 or 3 thousand dollars a month on supplements, depending on the month and if I’m refilling and stuff. So for me it’s easy to sell supplements because I buy a lot of supplements. There’s congruency and a lot of things that people don’t have.
So make sure that you’re buying stuff. Make sure that you’re not putting your buying beliefs on other people. These are all such important things. Check out this little swing from our tree here. But, these are just things that I think are important. There were probably 5 times while I’m here in Hawaii, where I just wanted to strangle people who are trying to place their buying decisions on me and I’m like, “Let me give you money. I just want this thing. Quit trying to talk me out of it.” It’s crazy.
So that’s what’s happening here in Kauai, Hawaii on our anniversary. We’ll be heading home next week, so by the time you watch this I’ll probably be home and back at it, which is exciting. We’ve got a lot of things coming up. The viral video we created with the Harmon Brothers is launching on September 15th. We are throwing an epic party which we are streaming everywhere, so you guys will be able to go see it. But we’re really going to try to set the Guinness world record at the launch party, with a whole bunch of influencers and other stuff. It’s going to be so crazy.
It was funny, we were planning this and Dave Woodward had all these crazy ideas that we’re really logical or possible, and that’s where greatness usually starts from, an idea that’s not logical or possible. And then he went and figured out a way to get it done and now we’re going to be doing it. So it’s crazy. I’ll share more details as it gets closer. But that’s kind of what I got for you guys today. So beware of putting your purchasing decisions on other people. Number two is beware of asking people to purchase things that you aren’t willing to purchase.
And again, if you’re a real estate coach you’re probably not going to buy real estate coaching, you might if you’re like me, I buy every marketing coaching program on earth. I’m obsessed with it. But I also invest in other things with those types of dollar amounts, it’s not incongruent for me to ask people for those things as well. Because not investing yourself is really painful and hard and annoying to try to get people to invest in your stuff. The money universe doesn’t work that way very well for whatever reason. So anyway, that’s what I got you guys. I hope you’re enjoying your day as much as I am, and we’ll talk to you guys all again soon. Bye everybody.
I got a whole bunch of questions this weekend about this topic and I want to give you my two cents.
On this episode Russell talks about listening to John Reese’s new podcast and people thinking he was talking trash about Expert Secrets. Here are some things you will hear in this episode:
So listen here to find out why Russell doesn’t believe that John was talking trash, and how can both be right.
---Transcript---
What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets Podcast, this is a short one you’re going to get in the jeep while I’m going to grab my kids from the last day of scout camp.
Alright everyone, I wanted to shoot you guys a quick message because I have been up in the mountains for the last almost week now. I got a sweet beard. So those that can see my beard line, this is why I can’t invest in a beard oil company, or grow a beard for that matter. I don’t know why, I’ve never been able to. My brother’s got a beard that’s thicker than the hair on my head, so this is the best beard you are getting from Russell.
I wonder if I were to buy Rogaine and rub it on my beard parts. Sorry, I’m going back and forth in this little cab in the road with cars everywhere. Anyway, if it would actually grow in thick, I should try it someday, but I won’t because I don’t really want a beard to be completely honest.
So my message for you today, I’ve wanted to throw this in. So I was just in my buddy’s cabin and I tapped in the internet for a few minutes and got all these messages flying in and seeing what I missed in the last week. It’s funny, I got a bunch of people who messaged me about my man, John Reese’s podcast. So hopefully you guys are listening to it, if not go to iTunes and search the Wacky Minded John Reese. He is the dude who is the first guy to make a million dollars in our market. He is the one that inspired the Two Comma Club Award, and he has inspired so much of what I do and is someone who I appreciate. He has become a friend and he’s been a mentor and he’s just pretty much the man, so it’s worth it. Go search the Wacky Minded John Reese and plug in. He’s posted two podcasts as of today. I listened to both of them yesterday and they’re awesome, I love it.
But I got a bunch of people messaging me saying, “Did you listen to John’s podcast, at the very end he was totally talking trash about Expert Secrets.” I was laughing because I listened to the whole thing and at the end I was listening how he was talking about how he doesn’t believe people should need to be a personality and things like that to be successful in their business.
It’s funny because at that same moment, I Facebooked John and said how much I appreciate him and his podcast is amazing and stuff. Obviously, I look at things from a different angle than John does, it doesn’t mean anyone is right or wrong. That is what is so cool aobut this business. Marketing is, I always tell people this, it’s an art and a science. The science is the structure, like pages and all that kind of stuff that we talk about and geek out in our funnel world. And then the art is the stuff on top and people do it different ways and different business models require more or less of those types of things. So it kind of depends on what you’re trying to do and what you’re creating and things like that.
So the reason why I wrote Expert Secrets and why I’m so obsessed with the Market is because I believe in it so much. I believe that personality and connection with the audience are what people are craving. I think you can add an expert front end to any business and dramatically scale it, and we’ve proven it over and over and over again. And it’s awesome.
John was basically saying you don’t have to have that, and I think his message is right because a lot of people struggle because they’re not that person, they don’t want to be the personality, they don’t want to blog and Facebook and podcast and do the dog and pony show that I do every day. And I totally understand that and respect that. But what I am saying and proposing from an Expert Secrets standpoint is that if you do, you will take what you have and blow it up and catch it on fire.
I believe that I can go into any company that is a product based company focusing on traditional stuff and add an expert front end and at least 10x those companies. In fact, that’s a challenge, I want somebody to take me up on that. So I would say first off, John is right. Second off, I’m also right. So it’s just different ways to look at it.
John’s background is not, he talked about the podcast, he didn’t like being in the front and being all those kind of things, which I totally respect that. But when he did, he made a million dollars in a day, just saying. So there’s something to that, there’s power, the connection you can get with somebody blows things up, right. The connection is what gets people to share videos and gets people to talk about it, gets things to grow and all those things. Without that connection it’s harder to get, not impossible. In fact, I told someone, a peer wanted to start a business and asked me what I would recommend for them and just because of their personality, I told them they should start an Amazon business, that makes more sense for them in this spot in their life and personality. In an Amazon business you don’t have to have all those personality things, right. Just get a good product, a good price, a good description, images and doing the stuff to get it ranked.
If you want to take that and blow it up then I would find someone, if you’re not that person partner with somebody who could become the personality and use that person’s personality to blow it up. Because I could take any Amazon product off the shelf, tie it to a personality and 10x it overnight. That’s the power, so we’re both right.
I just wanted you guys to know that I still love John, even though he probably wasn’t talking about me specifically but people as a whole. So with that said, these guys all think I’m weird because I’m the one guy out here podcasting while they’re all scouting it up. Anyway, take that for what it’s worth. Alright, so I love John, love his advice and those of you guys who are nervous about the expert stuff, you can start a business that way, just know that this is how you amplify and scale and build a mass movement of people who buy over and over and over again. People connect more with people than brands.
I hope that helps and that’s all I got for today guys. See you all later, bye everybody.