A breakdown behind the scenes of everything that went into the 3 million dollars in 90 minutes from Grant Cardone’s 10X event.

On this episode Russell goes through a play by play of Grant Cardone’s 10x event and how he was able to make 3 million dollars in just 90 minutes. He also answers 12 questions people have been asking since the event. Here are some of the awesome things you will hear on today’s episode:

• What kinds of things Russell and his team did to prepare for the event so they would have the ability to sell to such a large crowd.
• How this offer differed from the offer he presented at last years 10x event.
• What Russell did to get in state before presenting onstage in front of almost 9,000 people.
• And find out the answers to the 12 questions everyone has been asking since the event took place.

So listen here to hear the amazing tale of how Russell was able to make $3 million dollars in just 90 minutes.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today I’m going to talk to you guys about how I made over $3 million dollars in just 90 short minutes.

Alright everybody, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably heard everybody talking about what happened last weekend, which was kind of crazy. I had a chance to speak at Grant Cardone’s 10x event and yes, the rumors are true. We did my presentation, at the end I sold this special offer and we sold over $3 million in sales. Not just contracts, but collected cash in the bank in just 90 short minutes.

And I’ve got a ton of questions coming in all over the place about how we did it, why we did and all sorts of craziness, so I just wanted to use this episode to kind of tell you the whole back story and to show you the actual process of how we did it. And then at the end I’ve got 12 questions that a lot of you guys are asking as well, that I was going to kind of cover. So that’s kind of the game plan.

So with that said, I’ll kind of jump back into the back story. A couple of years ago was the first time I ever heard about Grant Cardone, one of the guys that works for me, Randy Grizzle, he came to me and said something about Grant Cardone, I’m like, “who’s that.” And he’s like, “He’s this guy.” And he showed me some videos and I was like, “Oh.”

So I became aware of him then and started following him and just started seeing his stuff. Last year, probably a year and a half ago he decided he was going to launch an event, he called it the 10x Growth Con and he launched this event. And I was not one of the speakers when they launched it. And as they started launching and it started getting bigger and bigger and finally one of my friends, Brian Post, he reached out to me and was like, “Hey you should really speak at this event, it’s going to be a big deal.” And I’m like, “I don’t have time to speak at events anymore, as much as I would love to.” And he was like, “No, this is one that I think it’d be worth it to you to do.”

So he introduced me to somebody over there and next thing we knew I was on the page as one of the speakers. And I didn’t know Grant Cardone at the time, and he didn’t know me. In fact, we had a call before the event to find out what I was going to talk about. And I kind of told him and he’s like, “Well I want you to..” I just remember he was like, “I’ve had other people, like internet guys, try to sell stuff and they’re not very good at it. In fact, when you go out there, just go and tell them the price first and just talk about it and people will buy.”

And I was like, you guys know my back story, I’ve been doing this for a long time, over a decade. I’ve spoken on stage a lot and I know the process. And I was like, “This is the way that I want to do it.” And they’re like, “No, no. Just do it our way and it’ll work.” And I was like, “Okay.” And in my head I was like, I’m doing it my way. I know what works. But I didn’t want to be weird on our first relationship, our first call, so I was like, “Okay.”

So I went to that event and I think there was, I can’t remember how many people it was either 2200 or 2800, I don’t remember the exact numbers. But we got there and you know we showed up, Dave Woodward and I show up and had a big box of order forms and we asked them, “When I speak tomorrow I need a couple of sales tables. I need staff to help man the tables, and close sales.” And they were like, “Why would you do that. We don’t have staff for you.” And I was like, “This is how it works.”

And they didn’t have any respect for me at the time, they’d never seen me close or sell. So I couldn’t get them to even give me literally a table to sell from. So I’m like, okay well, this is how we sell. Luckily Alex and Layla Hermosi, who are inner circle members and two comma club winners and soon to be 8 figure award winners, they were in the audience as well. And I said, “Hey can you guys help us to close sales?” And they’re like, “Sure where’s the table?” And I’m like, “There’s no table here.”

So there’s three exit doors, so Dave was at one door with a box of applications and a handful of pens we bought at Staples the night before and so was Alex and Layla. So when I did my whole thing and did my close and people started running to the sides to sign up and Dave and Alex and Layla are pulling order forms out of a box, trying to sign up people in a short 30 minute window there, they were able to close just shy of a million dollars in sales. I don’t remember exactly what it was. Almost a million but not quite in sales at this thing.

And I remember telling them afterwards, because I got off stage and Grant Cardone came up to me and it was the first time we ever met in person. He was like, “I’ve never seen something like that before.” I’m like, “What?” and he’s like, “I’ve never seen a table rush like that. People were running to the back to buy your stuff.” I was like, “yeah I kind of told you guys that, but nobody believed me.”

Anyway, I was like, “That’s how the process works.” I remember afterwards he was like, “I want you to show me how to do that.” So if you watch some of the interviews he had done with afterwards, it was always about that. “I’ve never seen somebody do that before. That was the coolest thing in the world.”

About a month or so later they called me on the phone and they’re like, “Hey, we’re thinking about doing another event, this time we’re going to try to get out 9,000 people, do you want to speak at it?” I was like, “Well, first off, I don’t think that’s possible to get 9,000 people out to an event, but the last event was so good, so if you do it again, I would be more than willing to come.” He’s like, “Cool. You’re going to be our big money speaker.” And they put me on the thing and started promoting the thing for the next year.

And lo and behold, despite my skepticism, they had 9,000 people in the room. It was crazy. It was in Vegas in the Mandalay Bay in a huge arena that I know they do boxing matches there, they do concerts there, it was crazy. So they filled it out.

So probably about month and a half two months ago we did a call with them before the event and they were like, “Okay, this is what’s happening. We’re going to,” I think they’d sold about 8500 tickets at the time, they’re like, “We’re going to have all 9,000 sold.”  I was like, oh crap. So we started talking about how to do the sales process and they were like, “What’s going to happen is we’re going to have an app on the phone, so you just get up and tell everyone to buy in the app, and that’s how you’ll do your table.” I was like, “No, that will kill all the momentum.” And they’re like, “No, that’s how it works.” And I’m like, “No please. Please do not list me on the app.”

And they didn’t. All the other speakers were in the app with their price points and they just click a button to buy. I’m like, “Please don’t put me in the app, the whole social psychology happens when people stand up and they’re all running to go buy something. Please don’t take that away from me, please?”

So they agreed to not put me in the thing. So I was like, “Okay we need tables.” And they’re like, “How is that going to work? In this arena there’s three levels. There’s the bottom floor, first floor, second floor, third floor. And then it’s this huge basketball arena.” So it’s like, there’s people who can go all around the whole thing. So they’re like, “How are you going to do this?” I’m like, “I don’t know, let us brainstorm this.”

So we spent the next couple of weeks trying to brainstorm out this process. Obviously I wanted to go in prepared but the biggest problem was I can’t just be like, “Run to the back of the room and sign up.” Because I’m like, “Run to the back of the room unless you’re on the second or third floor or fourth floor.” Then you gotta run up the stairs and run halfway around the hallway to the other…. Ugh, I was so stressed out. I’m like, how are we going to make this work?

So as I was planning this I was talking to a lot of people and one really good idea I got from Brendon Burchard, some of you guys know Brendon. He told me he spoke at a big event like that one time and what he did, he said that afterwards people always want to get pictures with you, which is true. I was stuck in the casinos and the elevators and everywhere, people trying to get pictures with me.

But he said that what he did was put up a picture booth right next to the sales table and said, “Anyone who signs up today can get a picture with me so you can have it.” He said what happened is a bunch of people ran over to buy and get in line, and what happened is it took an hour or so to get these pictures. So everyone’s seeing this big line of people, so more people will be coming over and coming over, so you just have the ability to keep closing from social proof for like an hour or so afterwards. So I was like, that’s a really cool idea.

So I decided to take that idea and a bunch of other ones and this is kind of how we choreographed it. The first thing you should know from stage selling, one of the biggest things you don’t want people to do, it’s like when you’re about to make your offer is to hand out order forms. People always do this and it drives me crazy. They get to their pitch and they’re like, “Alright everyone hand out the order forms.” And everyone starts handing out the order forms and all the sudden everyone starts looking at each other, getting the order forms, they’re handing it and they’re reading the thing, and they stop focusing on the speaker.

When I stopped handing out the order forms, my sales rate dramatically shot up. So I have a rule that’s never hand out order forms, ever. Make them go to the back of the room to get the order form, therefore it creates the table rush to the back. The problem we had this way, first off, if we wanted to hand out order forms we couldn’t, because there’s 9000 seats, so that’s impossible. Second thing is because there’s tables on different levels and things like that, I was just like, it would have been a nightmare.

Even, and I’ll get to this in a minute, it took about 3 hours to process and get people to fill out the order forms, because it was so many people. I was like, we need to figure out a way to get order forms in their hands but without them knowing there’s an order form, because if there’s an order form it’s going to kill the sales.

So I was like, how are we going to do this? And all the sudden we had this idea for the sneak attack. So let me show you what the sneak attack is, those who are watching this live. If you’re hearing it and you want to see it, go to marketingsecrets.com and you can actually see the video of this, of me explaining this right now. If you’re listening to the podcast though, just kind of walk through this with me.

So the first thing I did was like, “Okay, what if we gave them all packets?” This is the packet right here. I was like, “Inside this packet we’re going to have two things, number one is the order form, because this is what they need to have to fill out. And I’m going to have as little detail as possible on the order form, just enough that they know what they’re getting and have the ability to fill it out.” So this is the order form.

I’m like, “I want this on everyone’s chair, but I don’t want them to see an order form. And the second thing, most people aren’t going to have a pen. If I got 9000 people potentially buying and there’s no pen. I need to sneak attack a pen into everyone’s seat.” So the goal was to sneak attack this order form and this pen into everybody’s seat without them knowing there was an order form there. That’s why we put it in this really cool package that looks awesome. And then inside we put in a couple of things.

Number one, we put in these really cool “I build funnels” stickers. One that goes on your laptop, one that goes on your phone. So they get these, here’s a gift from Russell, reciprocity right. Here’s this really cool sticker. Then number two we gave them these cool pop sockets that go on the back of your phone that say “Funnel Hacker”. I was able to do a couple of things, one was to actually demo how to use these during my presentation. Number two, they put these on their phone, now they’re part of our community, they’re funnel hackers.

So these two gifts that were there, and then I had a note sheet for my presentation. So you get out the sheet here and you can open it up and take notes, what I’m talking about. So all these three things, the whole goal is to be so cool and exciting that people do not notice the fact that there’s a sneaky little order form and a pen inside the envelope. This is how we are Trojan horsing an order form into every single seat in the entire arena.

Then we had this envelope and the back was a big huge sticker that said, “Warning, do not open until Russell Brunson’s presentation begins.” And that was on the back of the sticker. So that was the plan and we started getting these all printed. 9000 of them printed and put together. But then the problem that happened, we found out that seats for the event, they don’t lay flat, they pop up when people aren’t sitting on them.

So our envelopes wouldn’t sit on the seats because they would pop up and they’d fall to the ground. So we’re like, crap now we gotta figure out a way to make sure that these packets actually stay on their desks. So then we went and ordered 9000 of these bags that say Clickfunnels on it, then we put the packet inside the bags and then hung the bags on the chair.

Then the next question was how do we get these 9000 of these out to everybody. So we had to figure out how to do it. So we ended up doing it the night before I spoke. After the event was over, I think we hired 10 or 15 temp workers, plus we had about 10 people from our team and they went out to every single chair and took the packet inside the envelope and hung it on a chair. It took them about 2 ½ to 3 hours to do that to the entire thing, to blanket the entire audience with the Trojan horse order forms, wrapped up with a whole bunch of cool gifts and things like that.

So that was the thing, then the way it was going to happen was that after somebody decided to buy, they were going to run to, if they were in VIP, there was a VIP room with a table. If they were in the bottom floor, there was two tables in the back of the bottom floor and if they were in anywhere in the bowl around they had to go to section 118. So some people would run up the stairs and it was right there. And some people had to run up the stairs and then run clear around the whole thing.

And then what they would do, they would order and take the order form right here and fill it out, take it someone on our team and then someone on our team would then hand them this packet right here, it says Funnel Builder Secrets, what they bought, then they could open this thing up and they had a couple of things inside of it, they pull it out. Number one, here’s a thing that shows them how to claim what they just purchased, so it shows them how to go online, what’s going to happen, how we’re going to text them their login and if they have any issues or support issues.

Number two is there’s a letter to their business partner or their spouse explaining what they just bought so that when they get home they’re not like, “Why did you spend this money.” And then number three was a golden ticket, that said you can come and get a picture with Russell.

So they were handed this packet back, they were supposed to rip this open, grab the golden ticket out and then run up to 118 to stand in line to get pictures with me, and on top of that there were some other cool bonuses that we gave them. The Funnel Hacker cookbook if they brought this to us, then we also gave them the Expert Secrets, Dotcom Secrets audiobook that they could plug in their ear and listen to on their ride home.

So those are the two things that we had created to get them to buy. So that was kind of the game plan. So we went out there, and the second thing is that I was going to do my presentation, but the problem is that everybody at it the year before had seen my presentation. We’d signed up I think 450 or almost 500 people the year before at $1997. And then over the last 12 months Grant has been promoting that presentation like crazy. So I think like half a million people have seen that presentation through him and his audience. We sold a lot of Clickfunnels because of it, thank you Grant. We love you.

But I was like, I can’t give the exact same presentation to the same audience who’s pretty much already seen this thing. But I needed to give the same framework of the presentation, because the framework is what sells Clickfunnels, which has been proven to sell Clickfunnels. And I couldn’t make the same offer because we were charging more, we were charging $3000 and then number two, not only were we charging $3000, but obviously I needed to create a better offer because I wanted everyone who bought last year to buy again, and a bunch of other things.

So that was some of the groundwork. So why did we raise the price to $3000? A bunch of different reasons. Number one my goal was, when we first started this, my goal was to make $3 million dollars in an hour and a half and this is the reason why. When you do an event like this, 50% of what you sell goes to the person hosting the event, you keep the other 50%.

So my goal was to try to make, I wanted to net a million dollars an hour. That way if somebody ever asked me how much I charge an hour I could be like, “Well, it’s a million dollars an hour.” So that was kind of my selfish reason why I wanted, that was my goal. I was like, okay 9000 people, if we can close one out of 9, at $3000 a piece, that’d be $3 million dollars, which means I netted a million dollars an hour for an hour and a half, which would be really, really cool.

So that was the goal going into it. So because of that, I took my framework, my presentation and I re-tweaked it, re-changed it, but the structure was still the same. I customized it very specific to their audience because I know who their audience is and I know what they’re looking for, the types of businesses they have, what their major concerns were. So we crafted the presentation to speak directly to them, and then we made the offer better.

We added a bunch more cool things. We added Funnel Scripts for a year, we added Traffic Secrets and a bunch of other cool things. So the presentation was similar to ones I’d done in the past, but it definitely upgraded for this event.

So I got on stage, excuse me, it was crazy. So we got there, I was supposed to speak, Grant was supposed to speak the second day and I was supposed to speak right after him. But we got there and Grant’s voice was gone and they’re like, “Grant can’t speak, so you’re up right now.” I’m like, ahh I’m not ready for this. We had to kind of scramble, get everything together and they introduced me. I came onstage and did my presentation and at the end of the presentation I sold and from that we had over 3 million dollars collected from the presentation and we’re still, I think we have another half million or so in declines that we’re going through right now.

When all is said and done it’s going to be somewhere between 3 ½ to 4 million dollars. But for simplicity sake, we made at lease, more than 3 million dollars in 90 minutes, which means I netted more than a million dollars an hour for an hour and a half of my time, which was amazing. And it was cool.

So that’s kind of behind the scenes. Some of the tricks and things that we did to make sure that that actually worked. I hope I..I’m sure I missed some things. Oh yeah, so after I did my whole presentation, we closed. It was crazy, they took me, they had security guards and the security guards took me back and people were running to all the different places, right. I see people running to the VIP table, I saw people running to the back tables, running up the stairs.

And it was weird because typically when I get a table rush, usually it’s in a smaller room and you hear the hustle and the bustle and it’s really, really loud. And a lot of times, in fact, I’ll do a table rush and it’ll get so loud in the room during the table rush, I can’t even finish my presentation. Whereas with this one, because the stadium was so big, I heard a lot of rustling, but it didn’t get loud.

So it was kind of this weird thing, I have no idea if people are actually buying, I was kind of nervous. So I ended, later when I went off stage and security guards took me to the bathroom, got me a drink and then took me back up to where the picture booth was at. When I got to the picture booth I walked through the door and I look out there and see this section that had all these stantions, I think that’s what it’s called, when people weave back and forth, and about 5 or 6 levels deep are all these people as far both directions as I can see.

And people told me later that the line literally wrapped around the entire arena. I stood there and people come in, I shook their hands, take a picture, next person, next person, next person. And it took like 3 ½ or 4 hours worth for pictures with 1000 or 1200 people, whatever it was. Picture after picture after picture.

I remember my face being really sore when I got married on my wedding night, this was like that but way worse. Way longer, just the perma smile, it was crazy. It was awesome. And then we went back to the hotel that night, went up to the room and we had 8 or 9 people sitting there trying to process all the transactions as fast as they could, which was really cool as well. Just seeing these huge stacks of order forms and seeing our whole team going though processing orders.

And then what happened, by the time it’s done we processed I think we had in the bank like 2.4 million, but there was 800+ thousand dollars in failed credit card payments. So the next morning we sent an email and also texted everybody’s who’s credit card failed, told them to come back to the table. So by the time I woke up in the morning, I came down, the booth, the 10x booth was there and there was a line of people and they had 4 or 5 people deep, wrapping through stantions like a big line of probably 50 or 60 people in line getting their credit cards updated.

And then we texted Grant and his team and said “hey, this was awesome. I think I could push people over the edge. This is a group full of sales people, they probably want to learn how to sell. What if I did a special one day event where I showed them how to sell the way that I just sold? And if you can give me ten minutes, I think I could close another, who knows worth of people.”

So they agreed to let me get back on stage the next day for about ten minutes. I come up there and basically tell everyone, “We did 3 million dollars in sales, if you guys want to see what we did, everyone who already signed up, congratulations you get this for free. I’m doing a one day workshop where I’m going to walk you guys through how we do our presentation. And then for those who didn’t, now is the time. I’m pushing you over the edge. Stand up right now, go get signed up and you’ll get this bonus as well.” And apparently we got another 250-300 thousand dollars in sales came from that. From the double close. We’re nicknaming it the double close. So it was the second close on the second day and it was really, really cool.

I’m trying to think of anything I wanted to share with you guys. So we did that, we did the double close and it was amazing. Such a fun experience.

Alright with that said, there was twelve questions that Julie Stoian pulled off of Facebook that people were asking like crazy, I’ve probably already answered some of these, but I’m going to go through it anyway. And then she’s probably going to turn this into a really cool blog post, if you want to see a detailed breakdown of this with images and screen shots of all the cool stuff we talked about, it’ll also be posted on the Marketing Secrets blog over at marketingsecrets.com.

Alright so here we go. The title of these questions are the 10 questions everyone keeps asking about selling $3 million in 90 minutes. But it’s actually 12 questions, but there we go.

Question number 1: “How long did it take you to create your presentation?” A great question. The framework that I used was the framework from my Funnel Hacks presentation, those who have been following me for the last three years. I did start a brand new slide deck over. Slide number one, I went through and created all new slides, but I was taking a lot of sections from my other presentations and kind of bleeding them in. I started that Monday. I worked on it all day Monday and all day Tuesday. Let’s see, is that right? Monday, Tuesday and then Wednesday I flew to go see Dean Graziosi. So Wednesday I was with him all day and then we flew from Boise to Arizona, spent all day there, from there we flew back to our hotel in Vegas. So that night I spent some time and then Thursday I spent probably half a day.

So probably total said and done, probably 3 full days on the presentation. If I were doing it from scratch, it would take a lot longer than that, obviously. It probably take me about a week and a half to two weeks. But there’s three days kind of re-working it and kind of re-figuring the whole thing out and getting it all to work.

Number 2: “How did you come up with such a great offer?” A couple of things, first off, I’ve had my Funnel Hacks offer for a while. So I kind of know what that is and I was just trying to make it better. So what are the things we can add to make this offer even better than it already is, if that’s possible? So that’s kind of where we started at.

It looks like my battery or camera I’m using for this presentation is overheating. So I’m going to pause this real quick, let the battery cool down, and I’ll be back to answer question 2 through 12 here in a few seconds.

Alright I’m back, hopefully the camera won’t overheat again, but during the break James thought it would be a good idea if I showed you guys a stack of the order forms. So those who are watching the video, if you’re listening to the podcast go to marketingsecrets.com to check out this video.

So here is a stack of all of the order forms that were successfully processed so far. Each one of these counts as a $3000 dollar bill. Yeah, that’s a lot of 3000 dollar bills. So yes, this works. As I’m starting this somebody, it wasn’t one of the questions here, but I saw it as I was scrolling through Facebook before I clicked record. Someone’s asking where I made up my presentation from.

You guys this is the perfect webinar script. If you haven’t read the Expert Secrets book yet, literally I just use the script that’s in the Expert Secrets book. I have a problem with secrets. I just tell everybody my secrets. So the presentation is literally word for word from the Expert Secrets book. Same one that I’ve been using and trying to get all you guys to use as well. So there you go.

Alright, back to the questions. Question number 2: “How did you come up with such a great offer?” So again, I just took our offer we’ve been using in the past and we tried to 10x it. The event name was 10x and I kept saying, Grant told me to 10x the event, how can we make this better? So instead of giving them copywriting training I gave them Funnel Scripts. Instead of giving them a traffic workshop, I gave them Traffic Secrets.

I did a call, I did a webinar blueprint with Jason Fladlien last week before the event and one of the things he talked about is when he tries to include bonuses he’s like, “First off, I try to get proof that the bonus is actually worth a lot.” So one of the bonuses I gave people access to Traffic Secrets, which is John Reese’s course on how to get traffic, we bought the company from him, licensed all the content from him. So instead of me saying, “Hey you get access to traffic secrets.” I literally showed, “Here’s all the wire transfers and all the money I sent John Reese to buy Traffic Secrets. So to give you this bonus, it cost me almost a million dollars to be able to give you this bonus.”

And people were just going crazy like, “Dude, you spent a million dollars and I gotta give you $3000 for that.” so it makes it really big. So example, if you’re trying to create a bonus, one thing Jason says is really smart, “I go and hire someone who is awesome at this thing and I don’t just, usually I can get it for free, but instead I go and pay them, wire them $10,000  or something, so I can show people that I literally spent $10,000 for this interview and you guys get it for free as part of this course.” So it just gives you a proof element.

Anyway, that was kind of a cool thing. So that’s kind of how we made the offer so great. Its software and if you look at also the way I structure my offers it’s like, “When you invest in the Funnel Hacks training today, I’m giving you all this other stuff for free.” Clickfunnels became free, Traffic Secrets is free, Funnel Scripts is free. All the other things are all free, free, free. The only thing they’re paying for is the actual training. So that’s kind of a cool way to structure it.

And then again, I had the bonuses. We had the Funnel Hacker Cookbook, and the audio book they got to leave with, which people love leaving events with stuff that they can show they actually invested in something. So they got the book, they got the MP3 player and then what else, what else? Oh the picture. Something they could only get right there. you get a picture with me so you can take that home and that way you got a picture you can use. I told people to put it on their wall as a reminder of the commitment they made, they’re going to 10x their business in the next 12 months. Those are some of the things from the offer.

“What are the things you do right before the presentation to stay focused?” So for me, I still get nervous, even at the smaller events. Usually I’m nervous about an hour or two before I get on stage, and this one, I was nervous for 2 ½ days before I got on stage. I had this nervous energy, which wears you out.

So part of it, I have to keep my energy up. So eating really healthy, making sure I try to get sleep at night, trying to just keep energy up. In the morning when I’m getting ready I was listening to music trying to get myself in state. And a lot of it for me is getting down there. I had to go the night before and actually stand on the stage. For some reason that calms my nerves when I see this is what it’s going to look like, and what the audience is going to look like, that was a big part for me.

Then when I got down there, it was just like, I pray a lot during these nervous times. I’m praying a lot that I’m going to be able to serve at the highest level, that I’m going to be able to say things that are going to inspire people and motivate people to actually change their life. Yes, a lot of praying. Then when it gets real close, I jump around and try to get my energy out, try to get prepared and ready. And then they start calling your name, and next thing you know you step out there and as soon as, for me, as soon as I got on the stage, I see everybody and all the nerves kind of crash, boom into state, and you just go. Hope that helps.

Number 4: “What is the hardest thing about logistics of processing that many sales so quickly?” So I kind of talked about that, the fact that nobody had pens, there’s no where to send people to order forms. So kind of what we did with those packets and the sneak attack, the Trojan horse order forms and pens, that was the biggest part to get it to work. Then I had enough people to take orders. We literally had people there, over an hour long line, just to be able to take people’s money, which I felt bad for the next 3 or 4 speakers because literally people were out in hallway either buying or watching this whole circus that was happening out there in this huge line. So it was pretty cool.

Number5: “How did you prepare your team and or company for this event?” It was a big, a lot of preparation. Ahead of time we had a pre-meeting explaining the process. When we got there we showed everyone, “Here’s the tables that are happening, here’s what you gotta be doing. When you get this you gotta return this.” And for the most part it worked really good. We had some temp workers there who didn’t pay attention very well, they kind of messed some things up, but for the most part it ran really flawlessly, which is good.

Number 6: “How has it been since the event?” It’s been crazy. I was in Vegas for a day and a half afterwards just processing orders and getting stuff done. It was tough, I remember in the morning I needed to get some water. There was a little shop where we could buy stuff, right next to the elevators.

So I jumped in the elevators, came down, went to buy some waters and I got stuck out there for 25 minutes taking pictures with people. I’m in my jammies, my hair’s all messed up, I’m tired. I’m like, “I’m just trying to get some water for my wife and I.”Someone came up to me and they’re like, “You buy your own water. You’re the only multi-millionaire I know who buys their own water.” I thought that was kind of funny. That was kind of crazy.

And then we needed to get B-roll though. So part of me, we made $3 million dollars in the presentation. I’m going to make a lot more than $3 in me telling the story of this presentation and you’ll see some stuff coming out over the next few months of how we’re going to keep this momentum going. But part of it is telling the story. I had three of my video guys there capturing stuff. And one of them, Dan Usher, he’s making a promo video of the bonus I gave people at the Funnel Hacking Live event. So you guys will see that here in the near future.

But one of the things that he wanted, he’s like, “I want an aerial shot of the event because you can’t fly a quad copter around Mandalay Bay.” So he went and rented a helicopter, one of the helicopters that there’s no doors on it. And then we got to go in the helicopter and they harnessed us to the helicopter, and then we flew at night past Mandalay Bay. I got to hang out of the helicopter looking back as he’s filming me, for a 3 second B-roll shot that we’re going to use in the promotional video. So we did a lot of fun stuff like that.

We got to take my wife shopping to go get some clothes, and myself shopping as well to go get clothes for Funnel Hacking Live. Stuff like that, which was kind of cool. After that we went to Michael Jackson show, which was really cool as well. It was a good time, we had a good time. It was hard to walk through the halls afterward. It was just getting bombarded by everyone wanting to take pictures. It’s tough because I want to give everyone a chance. It’s like, if you bought, you got your picture, that was your shot. Anyway, it was just, I feel bad telling people no and I had to tell a lot of people no. It was tough.

But other than that it’s been crazy. It’s fun watching on Facebook because everyone’s talking about it. Apparently traffic conversion events happening right now and I’m not there, but a bunch of my team is there, and they said that it’s the talk of the whole event. Everyone’s talking about it, which I’ve been getting texts and voxers and Facebook messages from people all over the place that are messaging about it. So it’s kind of fun that it was that big of a deal that people know about it.

Alright number 7: “What’s one piece of advice you give someone about to sell from stage or from a webinar?” Study this book, I spent a year of my life writing this book so you’d know exactly what to say, how to say it, where to say it. And then go watch all my webinars. Even if you’re not going to buy my stuff, watch and learn the process, learn the energy level, all those things you need to be able to produce a webinar and to do it. Model it, model, model, model.

You know one of my friends who’s now got a career writing webinars for people. He told me, “I’ve watched your funnel hacks webinar at least 100 times.” People are doing webinars and I’m like, “Did you watch mine?” and they’re like, “Nah, I haven’t seen it yet.” Are you kidding me? Do your homework. Anyway, there you go.

See how I pitch, why I pitch, see my tonality, my voice patterns, how I do the stack and the close and how I create urgency and scarcity and how I’m answering questions, all those things are keys to it. So you can read it in the book and then go watch it to understand it.

Number 8: “Why did you have people do manual orders instead of digital?” Okay, again, everyone else who sold at the event had people pull out their phones and click on the app to buy the product. A couple of things, number one, when we were in the venue, the app had no internet access. People that were doing that, the sales actually didn’t go through. So a lot of their speakers were like, “Okay when you leave the event, go and find it.”

Number two is half of selling is like the social pressure and the psychology behind social proof that this is actually real. So it’s like, people pull out their phone and buying, nobody knows who else is buying. When people are all running up and they’re running somewhere, they see a line that wraps around the arena, they see all this energy and excitement and momentum. “I don’t know what exactly that is, but everyone else gets it, so it must be something I need to be a part of as well.”  So it causes a social situation you can use as well. So that’s why we did the old school way.

Number 9: “What was the incentive for them to wait in that long of a line during the table rush?” It was to be able to come get a picture with me, which may seem like a dumb little thing but it’s important to people. I just know that every time I walked through the hallway before and after I was getting mugged by people who wanted their picture with me, which is funny for my wife. She’s like, “Why do people want their picture with you?” I’m like, “I have no idea.” It doesn’t make sense to me either.

But that was a big thing, people want that and it gives them something tangible. So that was a big part of it. Plus when they sat in line they got the physical Funnel Hacker Cookbook and the MP3 player, so it just gives them something tangible as well. And to get people to meet you. Someone buys from and invests from you, they want to meet you and they want to shake your hand, and to have a picture with you means the world to them.

Number 10: “Do you feel different now that you’ve broken another huge record?” Honestly no, I feel exactly the same. My goal now is to not let my head get too big. But definitely to leverage it, to grow Clickfunnels even further. So like I said earlier, $3 million dollars in 90 minutes is cool, but the $30 million we’ll generate in the next 12 months because of this, because of the story is more important. And that’s what’s going to happen next. That’s what most people give up. Most people do the first thing and then they stop, leave the first thing. You will watch over the next 4 months how I leverage this. You will definitely see it.

Number 11: “Is Grant Cardone getting kickbacks since it was his event?” Yes, you split the proceeds of your sales 50/50 with the event promoter, they’re the ones who did all the hard work to get the people in the room so they get half of the profits and it’s totally, totally, totally worth it.

Number 12: “Is there anything you’d do differently?” Maybe, but I don’t know yet. You know, I think overall we executed it pretty well. We thought a lot through it and it worked really, really well. I think my double close, my second presentation, I probably would have choreographed that one a little better, maybe get some slides and some things. I just kind of went up and there just kind of talked. So I probably would have choreographed that a little bit differently. But for the most part, really, really happy with how it all went.

So there you go guys, that was what happened at 10x event. That’s how I made $3 million dollars in 90 minutes. It was tons of fun. Look out in the near future as I tell this story more and I’m kind of walking you guys through the details. We will have an offer coming out that’s going to share all the information from behind the scenes, going through slide by slide, minute by minute of my presentation. That will all be coming soon. Make sure you keep listening to the podcast to find out when that’s coming out.

With that said, thank you guys so much. If you want to see the video of this or read the transcripts, go to marketingsecrets.com, you can read it all there. Appreciate you guys, and we’ll talk to you guys all again soon. Bye everybody.

A quick glimpse behind the scene of what’s happening here on our biggest, most crazy, funnel to date.

On today’s episode Russell talks about the new Project Mother Funnel that should be rolling out in the next 30-60 days. Here are some of the awesome things you will learn about it in this episode:

• What Project Mother Funnel is and what it’s designed to do.
• How it will help decrease churn rate by weeding out the customers Russell doesn’t want.
• And how it will help new customers stick.

So listen here to find out what you can expect when Project Mother Funnel is finally live.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone this is Russell Brunson, welcome to Marketing Secrets podcast. Excited to have you guys here today. If you have not yet rated and commented and subscribed to iTunes, please do that right away because I’m about to share with you some amazing stuff.

Alright everybody, so I wanted to talk to you today about an internal project we have called project Mother Funnel. I’m really excited about it, and I think I’ve told you guys a couple little secrets about it, but today Brandon Poulin from Lady Boss Weight Loss asked me, “What is Mother Funnel? Tell me about it, I want to know.” So I started telling him and I was geeking out and I’m like, alright I’m going to do a podcast on this today because there’s some cool strategy behind it and what we’re doing.

Now I want to preface this, this strategy may not be perfect for all of you guys, or at least not all of you yet, but long term it’s something that’s really, really cool. So we, as you know, launched Clickfunnels and some of you guys heard my story before. It took us five funnels before, excuse me 6, 6 funnels before it finally took off. And then when it took off it was awesome and it’s grown and it’s been nuts. It’s been literally Christmas every day since then.

Well, I’m not going to lie, there was a couple of Halloween’s in there. But for the most part, Christmas every single day. But it’s been awesome and what’s interesting though is when we first launched Clickfunnels, our goal was like conversion, conversion. How do we get as many people in as possible? And that was always the thing. That’s why we had the free trial, we had high converting landing pages, and all that kind of stuff. And it’s been really, really good. I’m not talking down against any of that.

But it’s interesting as we’ve grown, I remember when we were first launching Clickfunnels Todd told us, based on how many people were adding each day, he said, “As soon as we get to the point of about 60,000 subscribers, we won’t be able to grow anymore based on our churn numbers…” I don’t know the churn numbers, but let’s say 10% of people churn each month, at 60,000 members, that’s 6,000 people every month who are churning. And if you’re adding 6,000 each month and we keep churning….whatever, whatever the numbers were, at about 60,000 members, that’s where we stop growing. It just flat lines.

And that didn’t make any logical sense to me, until we got to 55,000 customers and then it started getting slower, and then 56 took way longer, and 57 took way longer. We’ve been sitting at 57 for the last couple of weeks and we’re getting close to 58, but everything is slowing down to a screeching halt. I’m like, “Todd, Nostradamus Todd was right again. How does he know everything all the time?” It drives me crazy. Don’t tell him I told you that.

But he seems to always be right and he was right again. So on our side I’m like, okay what do we have to do. So obviously, we’re doing a lot of things. We’re fixing, cleaning up onboarding, cleaning up the user experience, UI, some cool UI stuff coming out you guys, in the next couple of months, which is so exciting. But on my side because I don’t have any skills to do anything other than sales funnels, I’m like, “How do we do the sales funnel and change it out?”

So what’s interesting is we had this thought of like, the problem is that we have conversions so high that everybody can come in and sign up, which is good news. We’re growing but now we’re at a spot where it actually hurts us because there’s so many people coming and all that kind of stuff, so how do we flip this around?

About the same time we did some testing, we were looking at all of our different front end offers, different books, things like that. I did a podcast on this, I believe. But there’s a huge difference in what product somebody purchased immediately before they joined Clickfunnels, and their stick rate, their churn rate, there’s a direct correlation. So if they buy this product first, they’re going to stay way longer, versus this product when they left.

So I was like, holy cow, this whole pre-framing pre-suasion thing that we keep talking about, is actually true. It’s a legitimate thing. The pre-frame somebody enters your world in will have 100% to do with how long they stick, what they do, how they buy, how they ascend, everything. So I’m like, dang. We need to focus more on architecting the pre-frame. So that’s where project Mother Funnel came about, and it’s something that, it’s not new. It was called Project Super Funnel last year and we just didn’t have the team and people in place to do it.

And after we started building out this agency, finally got to the point where we have the team now. We’ve got the copywriters, the designers, the programmers, the developers, all the people we actually need to make Project Mother Funnel become live. In fact, one of them, I can’t remember who it was, was the one that coined it, “This is like a mother funnel!” I’m like, “That’s the new name.” So it’s literally called Project Mother Funnel on our Trello board.

Anyway, so this is kind of the gist of how it works. The goal is two things, number one is to actually decrease conversions to weed out the people that are most likely going to churn anyway. And then to, after we weed out those people, then to significantly affect the pre-frame somebody goes through before they sign up for the trial. There’s the concept right, so how do we do that?

So when somebody comes, you’ll see this live in probably the next 30-60 days. No, 60, the live event’s in like 28 days, hopefully it’ll get done sooner than that. Maybe we’ll go live after the event. Anyway, you come off the landing page, and on the landing page there’ll be a video and then it basically asks you which one of these markets you’re in. We’ve kind of broken Clickfunnels down into ten segments now, so someone will self select. “Oh, I’m an agency.” Or “Oh I’m in this.” Or “I’m in this.” They’ll select the type of business that they’re in.

And then after that, then we’ll redirect them, get them to opt in, take them to a sales page that’s specifically written for that market. This is the pre-frame, we’re trying to adjust and affect the pre-frame. So they’ll go through and see this pre-frame of this page, that will show them how Clickfunnels works for them. The number one cancellation reason we have outside of “It’s too expensive.” Is, which by the way is not a valid excuse, so I don’t believe it. But the number one valid excuse people have for why they cancel is because they can’t figure out how it actually works for their business or their industry, or whatever.

So this page will identify which one of these ten markets you’re in and then it specifically sells you on that. It’s like, “Oh cool, you’re in retail, let me show you how funnels work for retail.” And it sells them specifically on where they are. So it should be a frame that’s going to increase their stick rate because they’ve come through this frame, it helps them understand how Clickfunnels actually works for their business, and then they sign up for the trial.

So we lengthened the process, decreased initial conversion, pushed out a lot of those who would just churn out anyway, and those who aren’t going to churn out, and I don’t know who they are, we increased the likelihood to stick because of the pre-frame we took them through. And then after they either sign up for the trial or they don’t, then they get three emails afterwards, each email has a case study of somebody in their industry showing how it worked for them specifically and then pushes them back to their specific sales letter, so there’s three of those in a row. And then there’s other testimonials and stuff like that, but there’s a whole follow up sequence now that is specific to their market and their situation as well.

So that is kind of what Project Mother Funnel is and it’s exciting and I’m pumped for it. Anyway, you guys will see the fruits of it here in a little bit, but that’s the concept behind it. I hope that me explaining that helps some of the wheels in your heads to spin. Again, I don’t necessarily say, “Let’s decrease conversions on our page and make it harder.” But sometimes there’s a point of like segmenting the audience, weeding out the people you don’t want, and then increasing the pre-frame to make that person stick longer, and I think it’s amazing.

So there you go. It could completely flop though, for all I know. We’ll find out here soon. Anyway, it’s awesome. I hope you guys loved it. If you, again, if you aren’t listening or following, if you’re on iTunes, please go subscribe, comment, let other people know about the podcast. If you are YouTube watchers, please click on the like, subscribe, follow our channel, we got a whole bunch of cool stuff coming, and new videos that you guys are going to love.

Appreciate you all, thanks so much for paying attention and listening in, and we’ll talk to you guys again soon. Bye.

The quickest way to get your team to help you win.

On this episode Russell talks about how to get over the initial pain when you start something new and create desire. Here are some of the awesome things to listen for on today’s episode:

• Find out why starting a new business is similar to starting a new sport, because it doesn’t get fun until you have a win.
• Hear the fun story of Russell’s first win in wrestling, and how that is what made him decide that he was a wrestler.
• And find out why you need to start will small wins in order to work your way up to the big ones.

So listen here to find out why you need to be able to have a win, in order to create desire, in whatever it is you are doing.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. On today’s episode I’m going to talk to you guys about how to get yourself and others past the initial pain, so you can get to desire, fast.

Okay so today I want to talk to you guys about something that I was actually having a conversation with John here in my office a few minutes ago, and it came up. He was talking about, and John is the guy on our team that runs all our traffic, he’s amazing, and he was a ballroom dancer growing up, in high school and then college, and right now his kids just started learning how to dance and we were talking about that a little bit.

And he said, “It’s probably kind of like you, you’re teaching your kids how to wrestle right now, and how excited you get watching them.” And then we started talking about just how hard it is at first though. When my kids and also me, first started wrestling, at the very first it’s not fun, because you’re bad and you go out there and get beat up by a lot of other kids. In wrestling it’s not nice, they beat on you and it’s really bad. And John was talking about in dance, it’s the same thing. You go out there and you’re really bad at first.

So looking at ourselves as coaches, if you listen to my recent podcast, as you grow in your company you go from being an entrepreneur to being a coach of coaching your team. That’s how your progression grows as you try to scale companies. So I’ve been looking a lot at how do I coach? How do I my team better, and how do I coach my kids in wrestling?

It’s interesting because when somebody first starts a process, it’s not fun. In fact, it usually sucks at first. And it doesn’t matter if it’s wrestling or dance or if it’s Facebook ads, or building a funnel. Whatever, there’s this part at the beginning that sucks, where you have to get through the initial pain. You have to get through the pain of learning and trial and error and the frustration. And it’s tough. So how do I get people past that initial pain to the point where you actually have success and you like it and you desire it?

I was thinking back on my wrestling, and I think I might’ve told this story before, but when I was wrestling growing up, I started in 8^th grade. Actually, I started when I was really young, and I guess I hated it. So I did a year when I was 5 and then my parents said I quit because I hated it. So I started again in 8^th grade and I was like, it’s kind of fun but I didn’t really like it. I was just kind of there because my dad was making me and I was getting beat up a lot and I was like, this just kind of sucks.

Then I started learning and then 9^th grade started and I still kind of like, I was going to practice and my dad would come after practice and try to train me so I wouldn’t get beat up as bad. I wasn’t good but I was kind of figuring it out a little bit. I still remember I had my first wrestle off and I wrestled this kid who’d been wrestling for 2 or 3 years and I beat him, which meant I was going to be JV. I was so scared because that meant I was going to be in a match, it was going to be in the middle of the gym and everything.

So that week the tournament, or the wrestling match happened. I still remember wrestling Brighton High School, and I go to weigh ins, and in weigh ins I go and step on the scale and then the guy steps on the scale after me and he’s this guy and he has a mustache. To this day I still can’t grow a mustache. And he’s on there in a mustache and I’m like, what in the world?

I remember going out and going up to the gym and they had the wrestling mats out and getting warmed up, and the only people in the stands were my mom and dad and like 3 other parents and that was it. Everyone’s going out, everyone in the first match is going out, and the second, and I’m getting so nervous. Finally it’s my turn and I go out there and I’m in my singlet, super nervous and awkward and there’s this guy across from me who’s got a mustache.

I was like, this guy, this is real, this is a big dude. So I shake his hand we started wrestling and at the end of the match I won. I remember getting my hand raised and looking up into the audience and seeing my mom and dad, seeing my dad jumping around. From that moment forward I was a wrestler. That’s when I got the desire I needed.

When you have desire it becomes easier. When you have desire, you’ll do anything. I wouldn’t eat for four or five days out of the week to cut weight, to make weight, because I loved it so much. When desire happens it becomes easy.

So a lot of you guys, it’s the same thing. In business you kind of want to do it and there’s kind of that phase in there where you’re like, “Do I do it, do I not do it?” And a lot of people get stuck in that before they ever get the desire. When you get the desire it all becomes easy, because now you’re obsessed with it, you’re going to read and study and do it whether you’re successful or not. You don’t even care, you’re just going to go, go, go because you got that desire.

So for me, it’s like as a coach of you guys and also a coach of my team, and now my kids, it’s like how do you create that initial desire fast? You have to get past that initial pain and learning curve so you can get to the desire as quick as you can.

So that’s my question for you, for yourself, for your team, for everyone. How do I get past the pain and get to the desire? Because when the desire hits, it’s fun. I always tell people I’d rather have kids with desire than kids with talent. Because talent doesn’t mean you’re going to be successful, desire does. In fact, I never thought I was a very good athlete growing up, but I had insane desire. Same thing in business, I don’t think I was the most charismatic, I was nervous, I talked too fast, still kind of do a little bit. But I had desire and I loved it and became obsessed with it. So that’s the key, getting past the pain until you have desire.

So for yourself initially, look at yourself. Are you in this pain point? If so, it’s like how do I create desire? How do I make it so I’m obsessed with this thing, where it’s fun and I love it and I can’t stop thinking about it? That’s what you gotta get to because that’s when it becomes easy. It’s not work anymore, it’s just fun.

With my kids I’ve been thinking about that. How do I get them to have desire? Wrestling, the best way to get desire is to get a win. Right now, and especially when my kids first started, they wanted to quit every single day. They’d come up to me literally on the water breaks, “Hey dad, can we quit now?” I’m like, “Dude, we’re in the middle of practice.” They’re like, “Well, can we quit now?” “ No, you cannot quit.” And then they go to matches and just get beat on. And it’s like, I have to get them good enough that they can win, because when you win, then you’ll get desire.

So I think for you guys, it’s like how do I create that initial win in your business, in your life, in whatever it might be? Because you get that first win, you taste it. I got my hand raised and I’m looking at this guy with a mustache and I beat him, boom, that’s when I had the desire. That’s when I became a wrestler. That’s when, for you, when you became an entrepreneur. That’s when you became whatever it is for you.

So how do you get those quick wins fast, so you can create desire? How do you get past that initial pain? A lot of entrepreneurs come to me initially, come to me like, “I have this idea a for a project, Russell.” And they give me these projects that are insanely big. I’m like, “That sounds amazing. If you had ten million dollars in funding you should run after that. But you don’t. So let’s pick a smaller thing. Let’s get a win. Let’s practice.” My first win was a little product called Zipbrander. And then how to make potato gun. And then a form fortune. These little stupid things that were little wins, but then that little win creates the desire, and then that desire is what drives you to the big wins.

So think about that for yourself. How do you create those little wins? How do you get past the initial pain so you can have a win and get desire? When you’re training new people on your team, how do you give them the initial win so they have desire? So I’m putting it out there as a thought. I don’t know the answer, it’s different every situation. But just know that’s your goal, to get past the initial pain of a new thing, so they can create desire, then from there, they’ll go on their own, and it’ll run and be easy.

So I hope that helps you guys, appreciate you all. Have an amazing day, and if you are on iTunes right now, please go like an comment. We just opened up a new channel, which is where you guys are on right now. So if you go comment on the new channel, that’d be awesome. If you are on the old channel still getting these, you are not able to leave a comment. But if you go to iTunes and search for Marketing Secrets, you can subscribe to the new channel and you can leave a comment, which would be awesome. And if you are here on YouTube watching this, please subscribe to our channel, like it, leave a comment and I’d really appreciate that. That’d be awesome.

Thanks again you guys and we’ll talk to you soon. Bye.

A private vox from inner circle member Bryan Bowman that I thought would benefit you.

On this episode Russell plays a voxer message he received from Bryan Bowman about burnout. Here are some of the cool things you will here in today's episode:

• How whiteboarding helped Bryan re-light a fire within him.
• And what two questions should every entrepreneur be asking themselves to avoid burnout.

Listen as “The Goat Farmer” drops some powerful Q & A during this episode of Marketing Secrets.

On this special episode Russell is interviewed by Dana Derricks for Decade in a Day. Here are some of the fun and informative questions you will get to hear the answers to:

• What would be the one thing Russell would suggest anybody starting out in business should focus on?
• What’s Russell’s biggest secret to building funnels?
• What Russell wishes he would have done differently?
• And what Russell’s team relieves him from?

So listen here for the answers to these questions and many more from Dana Derricks.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to Marketing Secrets podcast. I’m so excited to have you here. Today I’m going to share with you a behind the scenes interview with my man, Mr. Dana Derricks.

Hey everyone, welcome back to Marketing Secrets. If you have not yet subscribed, if you are on iTunes, please subscribe and leave us a comment. If you are watching this one YouTube, please click on our YouTube channel and subscribe so you keep getting amazing videos like this.

Right now, what I want to share with you guys is behind the scenes of an interview that happened earlier last week. Dana Derricks is in my inner circle program, he just started year number two and when someone joins my inner circle, or they re-up after a year, I let them be part of what we call Decade in a Day.

Decade in a Day is basically where I take a decade of my life experiences, my business experiences and jam it into a day for that person. Basically I do this about once a month with my inner circle members. And it was really funny because this time, Dana showed up and instead of just asking me a bunch of, or instead of doing a normal consult back and forth, he just came back and said, “Hey I have a whole list of questions I want for you.”

Some were really good questions, some were off the wall, there were all sorts of place, it was hilarious. But there was some really powerful, strong things that came out of the interview and I thought between the humor and the gold, I thought it would be awesome to share with you. So I asked Dana if he’d be willing to let me share this with you guys. And luckily for me and for you and for everybody, he said yes. So I want to take you guys behind the scenes of a Decade in a Day call with Dana Derricks.

Like I said, for those who don’t know Dana yet, you will appreciate and love his humor. He is a goat farmer, he’s speaking at Funnel Hacking Live, and some of these questions are amazing. With that said, we’re going to jump over to the interview and have some fun.

What’s up Dana?

Dana: Yo! What’s up?

Russell: How’s it going man?

Dana: Good, good. How are you guys doing?

Russell: Amazing. (Other people greeting and cheering.)

Dana: Oh this is going to be great.

Russell: This better be great.

Dana: Yeah, no pressure, right.

Russell: We were betting before we turned it live, we’re like, “Is he gonna have any goats in the office with him?”

Dana: Well, if it wasn’t so cold, I probably could have made that happen.

Russell: That’s amazing. So obviously, I know you really well. Do you want to tell everyone who you are, who doesn’t know, and then we can have some fun?

Dana: Yeah, we can do that. You’re in for a treat by the way. You’re going to like this, I’m glad I’m last. Whoever set that up, kudos to them. They deserve some treat, Mandy.

Oh man. Hold your breath.

Russell: Literal or no?

Dana: You’ll be fine. You ready?

Russell: I’m ready. Ready to rock and roll.

Dana: Are we live?

Russell: You’re live.

Dana: I thought you had to press a button or something. Hey what’s up everybody? I’m a goat farmer, I don’t know technology very well. We’ve been live for 5 minutes, I’ve blown 5 minutes of my time. If you don’t know me, my name is Dana, I’m a goat farmer that Russell let into the inner circle. Also I write copy. And that’s about all.

Russell: And books, a lot of books.

Dana: Oh yeah.

Russell: I got a few books from you this week and I was like, “Did you write both of these this week?” amazing.

Dana: Kinda. Yeah did you get that package?

Russell: Yeah, that was amazing. Thank you.

Dana: Oh yeah, no, for sure.

Russell: It was like, here’s the salad you can eat now and here’s what you can have after the BORT. Did you hear we changed it from BART to BORT?

Dana: You did?

Russell: A Big And Ripped Transformation and BORT is Big Or Ripped Transformation, so you get to choose. We’re calling Bart- Bort now. So feel free to do that, he’ll love it.

Dana: Bort Miller, I love it. Yeah dude, the secret about sending stuff in the mail is it’s a lot harder to opt out of receiving mail in the mail, as opposed to like email. So that’s kind of the trick.

Russell: During your presentation you should show that clip from Seinfeld where Kramer’s like, “I’m out.” And he breaks up his mailbox.

Dana: That’s good. I like that. And you can tell when they do opt out because your stuff comes back to you. That’s awesome.

Okay, so I guess I have something prepared. I don’t have slides or anything. I don’t really understand technology that well. So I have a list of just a bunch of questions I’m going to ask you, if that’s okay?

Russell: Heck yeah.

Dana: Alright cool. So there’s going to be three sections. The first is just business, the second is life, and the third is whatever questions we’re going to open it up to. You guys can ask me, feel free to pick my brain all you want. And then the audience can interject. I don’t know where they are, but if you guys can see anything that they’re saying, let’s do it. Cool?

Russell: Let’s do it.

Dana: Alright, I might, if you start talking too long, because I’ve got this spaced out just right, I’ll probably just cut you off, okay? Don’t worry about it, I’ll control the time. We’ll start off easy okay.

What would you estimate to be the ROI on the spend of one goat over a twelve month period?

Russell: For average humans or for Dana?

Dana: You’d be surprised. I’d say average humans.

Russell: For an average human it’s probably not very good. You can milk goats, right?

Dana: You can.

Russell: Can you eat goats? You probably don’t eat goats, do you?

Dana: I wouldn’t advice it.

Russell: You milk them, you shear them to get wool?

Dana: No, they have weird fur.

Russell: So just milk. Alright.

Dana: Pretty much, milk and cheese.

Russell: Milk and cheese. I bet you double the ROI. I bet you pay a thousand for a goat you get $2 grand back?

Dana: That’s really close. That’s real good. Did John tell you that.

Russell: No, that was off the top of my head. I had no idea.

Dana: Nice. Good, good. You’re going to have goats soon.

Russell: I have astro turf on my field now, they can’t…

Dana: They’ll eat it, don’t worry. What would be the one thing you would suggest anybody starting out in business to focus on?

Russell: Like the initial, when you’re first, first beginning?

Dana: Yep.

Russell: Probably focusing on developing yourself through serving other people, until you actually become amazing at whatever it is you want to sell in the future.

Dana: So other people’s results instead of your own?

Russell: Yeah. Go and serve people, get results, then that becomes the catalyst for everything else.

Dana: Nice. What would be one thing you would suggest, anybody that’s already having success, to focus on?

Russell: Is this going to become a book someday? This is like the chapters of a book. He’s pre-writing it, he’s making me write the book for him.

Dana: Getting content one way or another.

Russell: I can use this time however I want Russell. So people who are already having success, I would say the biggest thing is, a lot of times, especially with creators, we have success and then we get complacent for a while because I think initially when we start, a lot of times we are thinking about ourselves. And then you get to the point where it’s like all your needs are met. And most people sit complacent until they realize that this has nothing to do with them. Then you transition back to how do I serve people more? That’s when the next level of success happens.

For me, business for me was selfish for a long time. I was trying to figure out how to make money, then my needs were met, and then more so, then it’s like, now what? It wasn’t until I really started focusing on the contribution side of it, then all the sudden, then it lights you back on fire again because you don’t….someone asked me yesterday, why don’t you sell for whatever? And I’m like, I don’t need money at this point in my life, this is about the contribution which is like, the exciting part. Money gets dumb. After you pay your house off, you’re like, well I don’t know what else to do.

Dana: {Inaudible} Okay, awesome. Love it. What’s your biggest secret to building funnels?

Russell: I don’t start building a funnel until I’ve found another funnel that I’m modeling, like a concept. So I’m always very clear of this is where we’re going. And number two I focus most of the effort or energy on the copy or the stories. Each page in a funnel is its own story that you’re telling, you’re crafting to get them to take the next action, and that’s where we focus. Anyone can do a funnel now with Clickfunnels. Woo hoo, I’ve got a funnel. It’s like understanding and mastering the story, even the short form story. I’ve got a headline and an opt in box, what’s the story I’m telling there? What’s the story on the landing page, and the upsell page? Basically taking the Perfect Webinar structure and breaking it down into, over a set of pages and orchestrating the whole thing together. So that’s where I spend most of my…

Dana: Okay, would you also say it’s like, then connecting the dots too? It’s like taking them on a journey. Because people think you just throw them in the top and then they end up in the bottom. But you have to hold their hand throughout.

Russell: Yeah, hold their hand and it’s like, when I’m doing a funnel I always think about if my mom was to come and buy this thing….like let’s say she bought this superman little thing. She’s like, “This is awesome.” And then she buys that and then she looks and “What should I get next?” and I’d be like, “Okay, let me explain to you why you need the next thing.” And it’s not like, I get people who all the time that ask me, their questions are like, “What price point should my upsell be?” and I’m like, that has nothing to do with anything. Price point is completely irrelevant. They just bought this, what’s the next logical thing that they need or they think they need to get the end result they’re trying to get. Whatever the price is, doesn’t really matter. It just doesn’t logically make sense. “I have this, now I need this, and this is where I’m going.”

Dana: Dude, you’d be such a good goat farmer, because it’s like, they get out, they’re in the neighbor’s yard. So you gotta go over there to get over there, and you gotta bring just enough treats to get them back into your yard. So now they’re in your yard, which is an improvement, but they’re still not in the pen. Then you gotta get them over to the gate with another set of treats. Then you gotta keep them there long enough to get the gate open and then get them back into their actual pen. It’s the same thing as funnels, right?

Russell: Goat funnel secrets. You should tell this, that’s actually really cool. That’s what you’re doing, that’s the name of the book we’re writing right now, isn’t it?

Dana: Maybe. That’s awesome. What’s your biggest secret to traffic and getting people into your funnels?

Russell: You know the answer to this already. But our biggest focus is Dream 100, at all levels. SEO’s Dream 100, PPC’s Dream 100, Facebook ads Dream 100. Dream 100 is affiliates. So it’s like, I’m a hyper, big believer in we’re not going to create traffic so who’s already congregating to that traffic, and then we Dream 100 them from every level, every aspect. We’re doing SEO stuff right now and it’s like, it’s funny because everyone’s like, “How do we get back links?” and it’s like Dream 100. “What do you mean?” I’m like, “Find who’s got the best blog with the best traffic, the best page rank, we Dream 100 them and get an article, and then that gets the dream link we want back and that solves all problems.”

Dana: Awesome. What’s your biggest secret to converting traffic once they’re in your funnel?

Russell: I always say that the world we live in right now, there’s two steps. The front end direct response, it’s all conversion to get somebody to do whatever to get them into our world, and then when they’re in our world I transition from, I don’t transition away from direct response, but I layer in branding with direct response and now it’s like personality and direct response principals together. Because the front end doesn’t, personality doesn’t get somebody to opt in, typically a new person. It’s like hard core curiosity, the right hook to get somebody in, and after they’re in, to keep them there, it’s like I instantly transform into brand and personality and things like that.

The better connection I can build with people the faster, the easier the conversion is. So it’s like putting in all this time and effort into building trust, rapport and the conversions become easier and easier afterwards.

Natalie Hodson did a video I think two nights ago. I watched it last night, a Facebook live. It’s her like, “Don’t buy my courses.” And then told her whole story about why she started doing this and how she, it told her whole story of how she came into this business and how much money she has to put in ads to sell a book and how she’s able to have…told that story and I told her, I voxed her like, “This is so good. Everyone who opts in, make them watch this first because they will instantly love you, and then they will buy everything else you have from that point forward.”

But that would be horrible as a front end ad. Nobody would ever buy off it. But you convert them in, use that attention now to build a brand and a connection and then conversion becomes super easy. Now its just taking them on a story of your life and you’re offering them bits, the story of how you created that and how that story comes back to them.

Dana: Love it. So with that too, that’s part of the strategy of entertaining and putting out, just letting them into your life. And I think it’s important for people to know too because ultimately, looking at the stats, that stuff you could argue is a waste of time, but at the end of the day it’s not because you’re doing exactly what you’re suggesting, that’s the overall strategy on that, isn’t it?

Russell: 100% Because I could do an offer nowadays not to my own audience, if I try to drive traffic to it, it would never convert. But I do that same offer to my audience and we’ll do a million dollars in a webinar because it’s like, they love me, they trust me at this point, they have a connection with me, if I’m creating it, whereas with cold traffic it wouldn’t work. 

It’s that, I don’t know, when I got started in this game it was 100% direct response, and there was like the branding guys who I always hated. And now it’s like, the mushing of those two worlds together. Direct response to get them in, and then the branding to build a connection and then the hand off is like, I think that’s the future of marketing. Those two schools of thought merging together into a super power.

Dana: That’s awesome. I totally get that as a direct response guy. Okay, before I ask the next one, I have to just throw a disclaimer. I was not involved in all of the question selection. So, just putting that out there.

Okay, so I wanted to clear the air and dispel the rumors. Is the CEO of Lowkey Pages actually running the company from prison?

Russell: I think so.

Dana: Okay, awesome.

Russell: I’m pretty sure.

Dana: Must be, with the branding it makes perfect sense.

Russell: Did you know that the real CEO of the real Lowkey Pages got, anyway, I probably shouldn’t say it publically on video. Never mind.

Dana: I didn’t do any back research on that one, that was a mistake. What’s your best advice for somebody deploying the Dream 100?

Russell: I think it’s understanding tiers of levels. When I first got in this game I remember the people that I was trying to connect with were Joe Vitale, Mark Joyner, all these guys who were legends and I tried so hard to get their attention. No matter how creative I was it just kind of fell on deaf ears. I remember being offended and kind of upset at first, but I was, I don’t know, I was just kind of a nobody at the time.

So after trying it out for a while and not having success I was like, this doesn’t work. Then I met a bunch of people that were kind of at my same level, or a little above me, but they were approachable. It was guys like Mike Filsaime, I don’t remember who it was back that, but a bunch of guys like that. We were all kind of the same level. So I started connecting with them with Dream 100, and because they weren’t up here, they were here, we became friends and we also crossed with each other, helping each other. It was cool. In a very short period of time, within a year, year and a half, all of our businesses came up to these other guys.

At that point I started contacting these guys again and they were like, “Oh I see you everywhere man.” And I’m like, “I’ve been sending you stuff for years and you never respond back.” And then they answer your call and it’s like, “Yes, send a package to Tony Robins, that’s amazing. He’s probably not going to do a deal with any of us.” It took me 10 years to get Tony to finally promote something, 10 years of my life, and he was like, “Russell’s book is awesome, you should read it.” But 10 years it took.

That’s awesome, but what’s better is look around at the market right now, and who’s kind of at your level and start connecting there. It may not be a billion dollar win over night, but a whole bunch of little wins add up and eventually you’re best friends with whoever you need to be up here, at that level. So I think that’s the biggest thing I would tell people.

Dana: Man, I hope the inner circle is listening. Because that is a great lesson for all of us. There you go. How many times were you on the verge of completely giving up?

Russell: Like how many days did that happen or like….

Dana: How many different times do you think?

Russell: There were a lot, one happened early. It lasted a couple of weeks. Oh, I’m going to figure out the piece. After our company collapsed and I had to lay off 80 people overnight, it was everyday for two years. I would have quit if I didn’t have tax obligations to the IRS that would have thrown me in jail if I would have quit. I had some really good motivators. For two years I hated this business, and I did not like it even a little bit. Until we finally paid the IRS off, it took that strain off, where it’s like, now creativity could happen again and then it became fun again.

But a lot of times, I sometimes nowadays even, it’s funny because some days it’s like, why are we doing this? I don’t know what causes that, but I think for me, whenever that does happen it’s like a selfish thing. When I’m thinking about myself more, but what’s cool is I’ll go to bed and sit there miserable and see my phone and I’ll see a bunch of voxers from people and every time I have a voxer and someone says something nice to me I star it.

So I have a whole list of starred ones, so I’ll go and listen to those. And all these people who are like, I got one of yours in there, I got other people. It’s just like, you hear them, their gratitude for what you’re doing. Thank you for what you do…it’s like alright, that’s why we do this. Then we’re back into the game. So it’s less often nowadays for me, for sure. During the down times it’s tough and it happened a lot.

Dana: That’s awesome. Okay, cool. And he’s definitely not lying folks, because when I was out there writing copy for you, I remember somebody did something stupid, I don’t know, somebody said something or whatever and you got like, “Geez, seriously?” You’re like, sarcastically I think you said, “I don’t want to be CEO anymore. I just want to create stuff.” And I’m sitting there in the corner, thinking, I glance over at Dave thinking, “I’ll be CEO.”

Russell: I want your problems, Russell. That’s awesome.

Dana: Yeah, so I’ll be on deck.

Russell: I think about this a lot. My goal was never, 15 years ago when I started I wasn’t like, “Someday I’m going to be CEO of this big, huge company. I’ll be on video.” No, I just wanted to create. For me this is art. Why do I keep creating funnels? People are like, “Your company is doing great.” It’s the art for me. I’m an artist, this is how I do my art. I just love it. A lot of times I would much rather hang up the CEO hat and go back to the art of doing the thing.

Dana: Yeah, it’s awesome. Looking back, what do you wish you would have done differently?

Russell: From Clickfunnels as a whole, or business as a whole?

Dana: Yeah, let’s look at business as a whole.

Russell: I think, man, the first 10 years of my life I was running around trying to be all things to all people, and like 3 ½ - 4 years ago was the first time I was like, kind of set my flag in the ground what I was going to do. As far as Clickfunnels as a whole, looking back on it now, I would have started a software company way faster. That’s 100% sure. Of all the business models I’ve done, it’s the one I like the most.

But I would have done it different too. I think if I was to start over from scratch, I would have just done Clickfunnels and that would have been it. We wouldn’t have had Backpack and Actionetics and all these other things. I would have made it simpler. I look at some people have software where it’s sticky but it’s simple. Like it does one thing. There’s power in that. You’re tech team can focus on making that one thing better and better and better as opposed to…

Like right now, our biggest problem we’ve had until just recently is our tech team can focus on this part over here, and it’s like, “Okay, everyone move over here and over here.” So now we’re at a point where, as we did that the last time through, we are taking focus here. We hired a whole bunch of people to learn it while they were in there focusing and then we left, and now they’re focusing on making it better.

The mistake is three years to get to that point. So I think I would have made simpler software that everyone could focus on one thing. That’s the thing too, with Clickfunnels I have so many messages I have to sell now, so many. I would have focused on just a simple message, simple tool, simple thing.

Dana: I love that. Do you know what a Juicy Lucy is? The burger?

Russell: No, sounds amazing.

Dana: It is. It might be a Minnesota thing. So Brandon and Kaelin flew out for a Viking game and then we went and hung out for a while and they took me to this bar in this weird neighborhood, it was really sketchy, to get a Juicy Lucy. So it’s basically a burger with cheese in the middle, and it was this place called Matt’s Bar in St. Paul, Minnesota, it’s world famous.

Anyway, we get in there, and I’m with Brandon and Kaelin, we get in line for the burger, it’s just a nasty looking place, really bad, but great burger, world famous. And what we noticed was, they served us the burger with fries and ketchup and a napkin in a crappy little basket, and then we had water. And then I think it was Kaelin, was like, “Hey, do you have ice?” And they’re like, “Nope.” A bar without ice. And I was like, someone else asked for something but then I asked, “Do you guys have a fork?” “Nope.”

So they have Juicy Lucy’s and French fries, and they do that better than every other person and that’s why even despite all their shortcomings they’re the best. So it’s a good a lesson, I think, for everybody.

Alright, lightening the mood a bit. Did you know that James P. Friell is actually a really nice guy, deep down?

Russell: He’s actually a nice guy, deep down.

Dana: He is.

Russell: I see glimpses of that, I think it’s possible.

Dana: Is he there? Where is he? He has the day off.

Russell: Did he leave for the day?

Woman: I don’t know. His computer’s here, I don’t know where he is.

Russell: His computer’s here. We’ll make fun of him when he gets back.

Dana: Of course he’s probably skipped out early. Okay, what are you glad you did and wouldn’t change, business wise?

Russell: Biggest thing I’m glad I did, and this took me 12 years before I did it, was actually bringing in partners. I was first 12 years like, “No, I’m Russell. I’m the guy who started this business, blah, blah, blah.” So because of that, you could hire people, but that’s it. Clickfunnels came around, Todd and I sat down and brainstormed the whole thing with Clickfunnels and he’s like, “Hey, I’m only going to do this if we can be partners instead of like an employee.” And I was just like, ugh. And the prideful Russell was like, “No, I’m not…” but then I was like, witnessing my whole business crashing, I’d been humbled a lot. I was like, “You know what, let’s do it.” And it transformed everything.

So grateful for that, and I think if I was ever to start a company again, I think my first step before everything, would be assembling my Avengers team, or my Justice League team, whatever you want to call it, before it got started. I need the best in the world of these 5 spots. I gotta identify, here’s the 5 or 6 people, the things we need and I’d go and spend the first year just recruiting those people and getting them in place, then create the thing. Instead of starting as an entrepreneur and hiring employee one and employee two, it’s so much faster just to go the other way around.

Dana: Awesome. What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever sent in the mail?

Russell: Physical mail?

Dana: Mmmhmm

Russell: I don’t have mine, but I’m going to tell you my friends story because it’s the craziest ever.

Dana: I think I know it but..

Russell: Did I tell you this already? So my friend, he pooped in a box and then he mailed it, and apparently it’s a federal offense to send poop. He did it at college and the college mail room got it and smelled it, and he actually got expelled from Brigham Young University, but it never went through the mail. But apparently it’s a federal offense to mail poop.

Dana: Wow, so it got intercepted before it departed from BYU campus?

Russell: It could have been bad.

Dana: Wow. Okay, so I don’t recommend that.

Russell: I think the weirdest thing I’ve ever mailed, not mailed but it was like pizza, I’ve done this a lot of times, called up a pizza delivery place wherever a guys at and deliver like 10 pizzas at once. Stuff like that.

Dana: yeah, just to get people’s attention.

Russell: Yeah, it works good.

Dana: Love it. What’s something that having a team relieves you from?

Russell: It lets me, like right now with Clickfunnels people ask me, “How do you keep up with the software?” I’m like, I don’t. I use it and I complain and that’s all I do. And that team does everything. So I don’t have to worry about that. I only have to focus on the part I like, which is the marketing. And that’s all I have to, I get to stay within my unique ability and not the blend of all other things. And I think that’s the key of, in fact, James P. Friell if he were here, he’d quote some famous old guy who said something that was really cool.

But the division of labor, something, something. There’s the quote, he can find it for us. Basically letting me do my unique ability and having every other person do their unique ability as opposed to other things. Mandy, when she started coaching with us, it was really cool. She gets to focus on the coaching of it. At first I was like, “Okay and then do this and this and this.” And then she struggled. The administration of it wasn’t very good.

Melanie is amazing at administration, how about Melanie help Mandy, and now it runs awesome. And Melanie is the most amazing person at that in the world. So it’s like, everyone has a good and unique ability, whereas I used to try to bring someone in a role and give them 30 things to do, because I thought they should all be able to 30 things. When they did one thing with their unique ability and everything else just sucked.

I did a podcast on this a little while ago, but I think the reason is because as entrepreneurs, we start the business initially and we have to do all 30 things, and we suck at most of them, but because we have so much brute force, we have success. And then we hire people, expect them to do 30 things like we did, and that’s the wrong way to look at it. You bring someone to do the one thing and be the best at that. They take that piece away from you and do it a million times better and then you can keep doing that. That’s what gives me the ability to do that, just focus on my unique ability and just nothing else.

Dana: Love it. I reserved 30 second timeslot for you to give a shameless plug to something you’d like to sell, starting now.

Russell: Hey everybody, welcome to the pitch section of the Decade in the Day. I would really like to sell, I have nothing else to sell these guys. I kind of want to do….I got nothing man, I don’t even know. Oh I know what we can do!

Okay, you see this book, it’s pretty cool. This book I’m not going to sell, but we just wrote a book called Network Marketing Secrets for MLMer’s, and it’s exactly this thin and it’s got cartoons like this in it. It’s so awesome. So that’s going to go live in like a week and a half, so you guys should go buy that, even if you’re not in network marketing. Just to support me and to funnel hack me.

Dana: Awesome, love it. How do they get it? Is there even a URL yet?

Russell: There will be networkmarketingsecrets.com.

Dana: go there. Okay, dude that was actually really good off the cusp like that. Well done. I should have given you a heads up. Okay, now I have reserved myself 30 seconds for a shameless plug. Mine’s more rehearsed. Go.

So all the time, people ask me, literally all the time, “Dana, how do you sell a book for $2,000 when everybody else sells them for $20 bucks? How do you charge $20 grand for something that other people charge $500 for? How do you make so much money as a goat farmer with only 4 goats in your herd?” and I’m just like, dude, it’s simple. It’s the Dream 100. If you haven’t had a chance, or if you don’t know what the Dream 100 is, go get Chet Holmes Ultimate Sales Machine book. If you do and you’re ready to just go hog wild in it and explode your business, then go get the Dream 100 book.

Russell: Where do you get the Dream 100 book, Dana?

Dana: Dream100.com. Okay, cool.

Russell: What’s the price on it, is it still….?

Dana: It’s $2 grand, well, unless you find the secret link where you can get it free plus shipping. But yeah…

Russell: Is the secret link dream100.com?

Dana: forward slash free. Don’t share it. Oh boy. What’s the biggest domino you tip over every day?

Russell: Dang, these are good questions. Every day? For me now, it’s making sure that my team all has what they need to get done what they’re doing.  I look into my role now, it’s less of me doing things and more of me coaching people who are doing things. Making sure that everyone has the ability to run in the morning, so they’re not waiting on the direction. You know what I mean?

And we have a lot of east coast people, so before I go to bed at night, I try to make sure east coast people have what they have, so when they wake up 2 hours before I do, they can start running. That’s the biggest thing.

Dana: Awesome, that’s great. I heard the internet speed in Boise is capped at 1.5 Megabits per second. Is that really true? If so, how can such a successful tech company be headquartered there?

Russell: Is that true, Melanie? Do you know?

Melanie: I have no idea.

Russell: I have no idea. We do get angry though, often at it. Is that really true?

Dana: I have no idea. I’m in a much more rural area, so I doubt it. I just published my 5^th earth shattering book for entrepreneurs and sellers, should I keep writing more and put them on the shelf for a while to collect dust and do nothing at all with, the hundreds of hours invested in them, or start promoting and sell them? That’s a jab at myself because you called me out on the last mastermind.

Russell: No I think, what’s funny though, at the last mastermind is where I had my big epiphany too, of focusing on the value ladder, and then all our creativity should be focused on the front end of the value ladder, bringing people in. I spent almost every day since then, trying to get the rest of my value ladder in place. I’ve killed two businesses that both made over a million dollars a year, because they didn’t fit in the value ladder.

So I took that to heart and hopefully you have as well. But I think that’s it. You can keep creating stuff, but as long as there’s the back end to support it.

Dana: Love it. The only other time I went to Orlando Florida, my fiancé ended up coming home pregnant. Should we put out a PSA to warn couples traveling there for Funnel Hacking Live that there’s something in the air down there?

Woman: Did you hear Melanie’s laugh?

Russell: Melanie’s dying over there. Are we doing a wedding when we get down there this time too, so it could be, the first time you got pregnant, the second time you got married?

Dana: I got people lobbying for it right now. It’s going to become a hashtag, yeah. Okay, I’m just going to skip to the good ones. I read about a story about a farmer who was visiting your house, that tripped into your pool, in the pitch black, and fell flat out on your pool cover and nearly ripped it apart, and scared all of your children in the process. Is that true?

Russell: It is so true. I wish the camera would have been rolling for that, because it was amazing. We have a pool color that’s the same color as the cement around it, and it was dark outside. So Dana goes and walks right to the pool cover and it’s like woosh. And my kids are like, “No!” it was amazing.

Dana: Oh man. Okay, finishing up here. Will you sell me your domain name Dream100secrets.com please, you’re not even using it.

Russell: Do I own that one?

Dana: Yeah, you’re not using it though. I could use it.

Russell: I might be up for that. Definite maybe, definite maybe.

Dana: Just think about it. Okay, well I’ve exhausted all the good ones. Unless there’s any good ones in the chat.

Russell: Did we check the chat? I have no idea.

Woman: Everyone’s going crazy.

Russell: Everyone’s just laughing at you.

Woman: “Loving this.” “This is amazing.” “This is gorgeous.”

Russell: No good questions.

Dana: That’s alright, unless you have anything for me?

Russell: Let me think. When are you launching the super funnel? Actually, did I tell you what we called it inside our office now, for us?

Dana: This is going to be good.

Russell: Which board is it on? There it is. This is called Project Mother Funnel. This is our Mother Funnel that sends people all the way through our value ladder in the shortest period of time possible, in the most exciting way possible. AKA, Project Mother Funnel. My question for you, with your new value ladder and multiple front ends, when is your Project Mother Funnel all going live? I’m holding you accountable. We gotta cover up that wall.

Dana: I know, I wish I could show you through that wall. It’s still there. I’m going to say ASAP, how’s that.

Russell: I love it. I’m getting this done by my birthday, March 8^th. It’s my birthday present to myself. Can you get yours done by March 8^th?

Dana: I’ll do it. And what’s the bet then? Who has to do what?

Woman: That’s how you motivate Dana. It’s not money.

Russell: That’s good. Let’s see, I has to do with wedding or goats or both.

Dana: Yep.

Dave: If you lose, Dana, you get married at Funnel Hacking Live.

Russell: He wants that though.

Dana: I actually do.

Russell: They want a beach wedding. So on the beach we could do it.

Dana: We could bring the beach to us.

Russell: I have sand, there’s sand in Boise. We could bring it in the room. It’d be a pain but it’d be worth it.

Dana: How about you have to bring a goat to your office for a day, if you don’t hit yours. And I have to sleep with my goats for a night.

Dave: You’d enjoy that though…

Russell: Yeah, there’s different levels of that.

Dana: There we go…I have to….Don’t knock it until you try it guys, geez.

Russell: How about this, if you get the whole thing live by my birthday I may be willing to sell you Dream100secrets.com, if not I’m launching a competitor product, I’m going to take you out.

Dana: Geez. This is going to be a nasty smear campaign. Okay, deal. I take the deal.

Russell: That’s awesome.

Dana: What happens if you don’t get it by March 8t?

Woman: Oh, he will.

Russell: Goat for a day, I’m in on that.

Dana: Okay, that’d be actually a good episode. Alright, thank you guys. I appreciate you.

Russell: Thank you Dana, you’re awesome, man. Have a good weekend.

Understanding the “Pride Cycle” can keep your business protected from yourself.

On today’s episode Russell talks about the pride cycle and how he stays humble. Here a few of the amazing things in this episode:

• Find out what the pride cycle is and why you have to go through it to learn how to stay humble.
• Hear how Russell keeps himself humble so he doesn’t have to go through a third crash.
• And find out why sometimes pride isn’t the reason for your crash, you just needed to go another direction.

So listen here to find out how to keep yourself humble in your business so you don’t have to be humbled.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and welcome to a late night Marketing Secrets podcast.

Hey everyone, I’m in my home tonight, right now. My wife and my kids are asleep, I’m about to head to bed. I still got kind of a stuffy nose. Monday my cold went away, then Todd and Ryan and Karen and Nick and a bunch of people flew into town this week to do a big hack-a-thon, working on some new updates in Clickfunnels, Clickfunnels Actionetics MD, and a bunch of just insane, cool things that we’ll be showing at Funnel Hacking Live, and we basically pulled two all nighters in a row and low and behold my cold came back.

So now we have official proof that sleep does correlate to if you’re going to get sick or not. So yeah, you should sleep more often. So tonight we actually went home early, it’s a little after 10, so I’m going to get some sleep tonight, which I’m excited for.

But I wanted to share a quick message with you guys that I thought was really cool. I was catching up with my Voxers with my inner circle members and answering them and I had a really cool conversation tonight through Voxer with one of my inner circle members. He’s a Clickfunnels member, Two Comma Club winner, and an inner circle member his name is Akbar Sheikh. A lot of you guys may know him, he’s very prominent in our community. And it was a really cool conversation.

I’m not going to share the whole thing, first off, just confidentiality with my clients, second off, it doesn’t matter. Kind of the end result of what we talked about ended up being really cool and I thought I would spend a little bit sharing it with all of you guys because I think it’s important.

So Akbar was talking to me, he basically was talking about business owners and entrepreneurs have success and a lot of times they stop being humble. There’s a concept called the pride cycle, so those who went to seminary like I did, there’s a concept called pride cycle and this is how the pride cycle works.

So first is you are humble and you’re eager to learn and try to grow or whatever. And because you’re humble, you start having success. You start learning and growing and developing and you go in this circle. So those who are listening, you can’t see my finger, but those who are watching, I’m making a circle with my fingers. It started kind of going up, having success, start learning and more good things happen and all the sudden you get to the very top and boom, you’re having success. And what happens when we start having success, we start drinking our own kool-aid and becoming prideful and start thinking, “Man, I am amazing.” And what happens at the top of that, this is the backside of the pride cycle.

So then the Lord, or whoever it is, humbles you and basically you become humble back at the very bottom, and you cycle, and then hopefully you’re sufficiently humble where you can learn and grow and start this process up again. You go up and then you get to the top of the cycle, and then usually people at the top become prideful and then they crash again. So this is the pride cycle.

This is happening around all day long. It’s been happening since the beginning of time. You can see it with political leaders, religious leaders, you can see it in people, humans, anyone in your own life, you’ve seen it. I guarantee you’ve see it. If you step back and look at your own life, you’ve seen the pride cycle. It’s a true thing that’s happening.

So we were talking about that, I think people a lot of times ask me, “Russell, how do you stay humble with things happening.” Because I’m scared of the pride cycle. I’ve gone on the full loop and the bottom is not very much fun, so I’m trying to figure out how I stay up here. And the thing that I know is that when you’re prideful, you have to crash. If you believe scripture, it says, “The Lord will have a humble people, either you will be humble or he will humble you.” So I’m like, okay I’m going to be humble, because I don’t want to be humbled, that sounds horrible.

And it’s interesting, the next thing I kind of told Akbar was about, I had a friend that was in Mexico on this marketing thing and I was talking to this guy that became a friend later, and he’s super wealthy. He buys and sells businesses, and makes a ton of money. What’s interesting, we’re talking and he wanted to hear my story so of course, as most entrepreneurs do I tell him the highlight reel of how cool I am. And he’s like, “Oh, not impressed.” I’m like huh.

And he asked me, “So have you always just had success?” And I was like, I kind of told him, “Well, twice I’ve pretty much bankrupt my companies.” And he’s like, “Well tell me that story, that story sounds more interesting.” So I kind of tell him the story and then he’s like, “Good, good.” And I’m like, “What do you mean good? That’s not good.” And he’s like, “No, you’ve cycled. I will never work with an entrepreneur who hasn’t cycled at least once.” And I was like, “What do you mean cycled?” and he said, “You built a company that crashed. If you haven’t cycled, you’re still going to drink your own kool-aid, read your own bio and believe it. It’s not going to be good.”

And I was like, oh how cool is that? First off, cycling sounds way cooler than failing, but second off, I was just like, how interesting, it’s the pride cycle. He only works with people who have at least cycled once, because they’re sufficiently humbled that they’ll listen to advice and they’re going to grow.

So Akbar and I were kind of talking about this, and then his message back was like, “I’ve been down at the bottom, but I’ve gotten to the spot where I’m kind of at the top. I don’t want that to be part of my story. I don’t want the crashing part of my story, what do I do?”

So I just wanted to share this piece of advice, because this is kind of what I told him and I think that it’s important for all of us to think about. So what I told him, first off, from a business, basically I learned….because he asked, “Is it about diversification? Is that the key?”and I was like, “Well, kind of.” I believe in diversification in some things but not your business. I think everyone should go…whatever your business is going to be, you should go all in. You shouldn’t diversify your business. I think having multiple businesses is the fastest way to destroy your business.

And I know that from personal experience, from a decade of it. So this is not me just philosophizing, this is me doing a lot of businesses and none of them could grow. Having a sole focus, you’re not diversifying your businesses, you’re diversifying the pieces around your business. Where are the singular failure points? For me, my first time, or my second big business crash was, I was running on one merchant account and that was it.

So it was like, diversification of merchant accounts to protect myself, so if this goes out and this goes out, I have protection. So that was number one. Diversification of traffic sources, yesterday’s podcast I talked about the Facebook slap, it’s coming. If all your eggs are in the Zuckerberg basket, you could be in trouble.

I know so many people that all their eggs were in Google’s basket, it was PPC, and PPC shifted, businesses gone. When then it went to SEO and SEO’s shifted, businesses gone. Diversifying your traffic source, you need to make sure you’re doing traffic from at least two sources. If you have a sales person, at least two sales guys. If you’ve got a programmer, at least two programmers. Diversification inside the business to protect, but not diversification of your business. You shouldn’t be doing 5 different businesses. That’s the opposite of good.

So that’s number one. And then number two, is trying to remain humble. And it’s hard sometimes. So it’s like, I need to keep myself sufficiently humble, because if not I’m going to be humbled. So it’s like, what does that mean? For me it means praying to God, it means not being a jerk. It means remembering that it’s not me, it’s an amazing team of people. It’s remembering that the only reason I’ve been given these gifts and these blessings is because there’s a purpose for it. I’m trying to help other people and if I lose sight of those things, my head can grow fast.

And I understand, I have a fat head anyway, I can’t wear hats. This is actually a true story. I can’t wear hats because I have a fat, the circumference of my head is enormous. I’ve tried my whole life to wear hats and I can’t. You’ll never see me in a hat ever, because my head’s so fat.

So my head will continue to grow and swell, so that’s number two. Just being aware of where you are on this pride cycle. If you are sufficiently humble, that’s good, stay there. And then as you start having success, try to stay humble because it’s hard.

Number two thing was, I look at all the people that I know, over the last 15 years of doing this, and I’ve seen people go through this cycle. The ones that don’t make it back up are the ones who are too prideful to learn. It blows my mind. Between Christmas time and now I’ve had three friends who have had businesses that have crashed, that have come to me saying, “Russell, I see what you’re doing. Is there any way I could come to your office and just shadow you and see what you’re doing so I can understand and get my business back up?” and all of them are close friends and I was like, “yeah, I would definitely be game for that. But first you gotta read my two books. Read Expert Secrets and Dotcom Secrets, because that’s the foundation. So read those, then let me know and you can come.”

So I told them that, and none of them have read the books and won’t come. They won’t learn. I’m like, are you kidding me? I feel like at this time of my life, I’m at the top of my game. Again, this is me when my head starts to swell. I don’t think there’s a lot of people who understand marketing better than me, at this point, marketing and sales. Not because of a big ego, but I’ve dedicated a decade and a half to this right, at a high level. Super intense, super immersion, super not just theory, but testing and testing. I don’t think there’s many people who know more than that.

But I also think there’s more people that study more than me. I still study because I want to stay sufficiently humble. I’m always learning. I’m in mastermind groups, I pay other people for coaching, I have multiple coaches happening all the time. On my phone, if I was to show you my iBooks account, I have I would say conservatively at this point, probably 350-400 thousand dollars in courses on my phone that I listen to every single day. Old school stuff, new stuff, I’m always trying to learn because I don’t want the market to shift and me be left behind.

I need to be sufficiently humble so I can continue to learn, so I can see what’s happening, be aware of the trends, be aware of the evergreen things that are never going to shift. I’m always learning. Partially for me and also, I heard Rick Chefren say this one time, “I get paid to think for a lot of people. That’s why I have to learn and study because I’m sharing with other people and I’m thinking for other people.” I feel an obligation to that too.

I have a lot of people following me and listening to me, and I need to consume and learn and keep on top of the game so I can continue to get back. Because I get paid from my tribe to contribute back. So that’s number two.

And then the third thing is sometimes we need to cycle. Sometimes it’s not always because you’re prideful, sometimes you’re just going the wrong direction. I look at my business over the last 15 years, I was running in a direction, and I thought it was right at the time, maybe it was right at the time. I learned a lot of things and met a lot of people and we served people the best that we knew at the time, and then everything crashed because that thing shifted.

And then I started this direction, running, running, running the best I could, the best that I understood. I made a lot of mistakes but I met amazing people and I learned and learned and learned and built this thing up and then it crashed again, and then it shifted.

I look at during those times, during the crash, I was just devastated. I thought I was doing the right thing, I thought I was doing what I supposed to be doing, but it didn’t work so apparently something was wrong. A lot of times, like with me, it’s not because you’re doing something wrong, maybe God needed you over here, but you were running this direction. So he had to force this thing so you’d be humbled enough to listen, to move. And then boom, humbled enough to listen and be able to move again.

I look at my life now, I look at the path, I look at the people that I met because of these things that I wouldn’t have met otherwise, that have built Clickfunnels. I met Todd because of a crash here, I met Dave because of this, I met Brent, I met John, I met all the people on my team, Ryan, and all these amazing, and I mean there’s so many people on my team, I could go on for hours. But those people, I picked up each of those people during these journeys, these ups and these downs that became a part of our team that made the foundation that we needed to be able to build Clickfunnels.

I look at now, my life, I’m like, can you…those things were necessary. So sometimes you can be doing everything right but you just have to trust God. God may need your business to crash for him to get you to where he needs you at. And it’s just being okay with that. In fact, I was talking to, who was it the other day? Someone the other day, about that in my own life. I was just like, Clickfunnels is awesome. I love it, I believe it’s my mission. But maybe this might not be the end mission. Maybe there’s something I’m supposed to do over here. What does that mean? I don’t know yet, I just need to pay attention. I try to be sufficiently humble so that when it comes it’s like, maybe the business crashes, maybe I need to sell the business, maybe I need to keep it forever. I don’t know, just trying to be humble enough to listen so we know. What’s the plan, where we’re trying to go.

So it’s just stepping back and putting our faith in God and saying, look, I’ll go where you want me to go. I’ll do what you need me to do. If you need this to end, that’s okay. What am I going to learn from this? Where am I going to go from here.

So anyway, I hope that helps somebody out there who’s listening. Because it’s pretty cool, pretty special. So there you go. There’s the pride cycle. This is seminary, early morning seminary. I didn’t go to early morning seminary. It’s seminary 101. But that’s what happens.

So for you guys to understand, where are you at in the pride cycle? Are you at the bottom, are you humble? It’s so awesome, cherish that, study, learn, grow, stay humble, and then as you start coming up towards the top, stay humble because that crash is never fun. But if you do crash, understand there’s a purpose for it.

Hope that helps you guys. I appreciate you all. Have an amazing night. I’m going to get to bed, get a couple hours sleep before the morning waits, a few hours. So much fun. I’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye.

What to be aware of with the new “Facebook Slap” and how to protect yourself and your business so you can not only survive, but you can thrive.

On today’s podcast Russell talks about the recently announced Facebook slap that is going to change everything for direct response marketers. He also reflects on some of what happened during the Google slaps years ago. Here are some of the helpful things you will hear in this episode.

• Find out what the Facebook slap means and how it will change things for Russell and other direct response marketers.
• See why Russell has experience with these sort of things and why that makes him well informed and qualified to help others.
• And find out what you should be doing to get ahead of the game and not be hit so hard with the changes on Facebook.

So listen here if you want to find out how to stay profitable despite all the changes coming to Facebook.

---Transcript---

Uh oh, the Facebook slap just happened and now you gotta get a funnel. Welcome to Marketing Secrets podcast.

Alright everybody, I have been prophesying of this for so long, so long. For those who are new, the newbies who have only online for a year or two years, or five years, or eight years, I wanted to give you a history lesson. The networks, they don’t like you or me, guess who they like, they like money from big brands who don’t annoy them, who just write big checks and have big, huge marketing budgets and don’t care if they’re profitable or not.

People like us, who care about direct ROI, us direct response guy, they don’t like us very much. But they endure for a little while because it’s what builds their platform, and then they smash us. So that’s what happened with Google back in the day. They were awesome, then they smashed us. That’s what happened to every platform since I’ve been around, for now 15 years.

You’ve probably heard of the Google slap, then the other Google slap, then the other Google slap, and then this and that. I kept warning people, don’t put all your eggs in Zuckerberg’s basket. Zuckerberg doesn’t care about you. I’ve been talking about that, in fact, I did a whole presentation at Funnel Hacking Live about that last year.

But it’s happening, the Facebook slap has officially begun. Zuckerberg just announced it about a week ago, and I want to let you guys know a couple of things. Because a Facebook slap is actually a really good thing for people like you and me who are doing funnels. If you’re not doing a funnel now, this is going to force you to finally learn and understand funnels.

Alright, so here’s the context, Zuckerberg came out and was like, “Hey, we’re going to change how Facebook’s algorithm works. So instead of having…” He said that this algorithm would make people spend less time on Facebook, which seems insane. But here’s what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to squeeze out the direct response marketers and build a bigger platform for the branding marketers.

So this is how it works. What they do is make it so what you will see now more so, is more of your actual friends. So your feed will have less business stuff and more brand stuff, excuse me, personal interaction. So you’ll see more of your friends and stuff, you’ll see fan pages and stuff like that are going to be dropping dramatically, and groups will go up, because groups they consider social interaction. So groups and your personal stuff, you’ll see a lot more of in your feed, and you’ll see a lot less of the business pages, fan pages, and ads.

So what’s going to happen, because there’s less stuff for you to scroll through and just mindlessly scroll, you’ll actually spend less time on Facebook, that’s his plan. So you’ll spend less time on Facebook, there’ll be less ad spots, and when supply and demand does that little thing, guess what happens? The price goes up.

So ad costs will be going up. They’re showing some stats and basically in the first quarter it’s supposed to be up, I can’t remember, 30 or 40%. And by the end of the year almost a 100% increase in ad costs. So what does that mean for people like us?

A couple of things, number one it means that the competition, a lot of these people who are just throwing up Facebook ads, and becoming ad experts overnight, they are going to be gone. They will not be able to sustain it anymore, and most of them will not be intelligent enough to diversify their traffic off of Facebook.

A couple of things for us Marketing Secrets people that are funnel hackers. We are smart enough to know there’s more than one way to drive traffic. Facebook is a source, not the only source. And if you’ve been looking at your business that way, then you’re fine. And if not, it’s now time to start diversifying, freak out. Yes, freak out, diversify now. If you wait for a year to diversify it, a lot of you guys will be in trouble. Just diversify now, start looking at other traffic sources.

Look at YouTube, do your own podcast, looking at all these things. Using this time now when ads are a little bit cheaper to drive people to these other networks to build up your podcast, to build up your email list and things like that, build up your medi chat list and those kind of things. Because the ad cost are going to dramatically go up.

Number two, we’ve been talking about this since day number one at Clickfunnels. Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. That’s the first chapter, the introduction of Dotcom Secrets book. If you haven’t read it, go and read it. Dotcomsecrets.com, go get the book because it’ll help you understand that whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. As ad costs go up, you have to spend more money to acquire a customer. That’s actually a good thing.

That means all the little people who are just dabbling are going to go away becuas they’re not able to spend more money. For us, the intelligent ones who are studying marketing and sales and funnels, that’s okay. That’s why we build funnels.

You know, I think last year, 2017 a lot of people got away with one funnel and they made a really good income. I think that’s going to be harder and harder. I think understanding the concept of funnel stacking, we talk a lot about in our community here, where you have one funnel that then leads to the next funnel, is vital. It’s going to be vital to your success. Having a fully developed value ladder is going to be vital to your success.

Now a couple of things about value ladder that I want to just touch on. I wish I could re-write that whole chapter in Dotcom Secrets book, because everyone thinks they need these complex value ladders that got 80 steps. Clickfunnels right now has 3 steps, that’s it. Okay, we’ve got all the front ends on the front step, we’ve got Clickfunnels webinar and sales, Clickfunnels in the middle, and then we’ve got our coaching program that’s not even available right now, but will be after Funnel Hacking Live, on the back end.

So that’s it. It doesn’t have to be complex, but there needs to be levels. Because your front end funnels, one that used to be profitable, are going to be break even funnels. If that’s your entire business, you’re going to struggle.

So the good news is, the Facebook slap has come, we know it’s happening now. It’s not like when Google slapped us, it was like they just turned soft overnight, we all just got shutdown. Right now you’ve got about a year. Over the next year you’ll see your ad costs go up 20-100%. So just be aware of that. Now it’s time to start understanding that and putting in, “Okay, this funnel is to acquire customers, if I’m profitable right now, it’s awesome, am I going to be profitable in six months, if my ad costs double or if they go up 50%. If not, I can start tweaking that.

It’s like, Okay we’ve acquired a customer through this funnel, now we need to send them up the value ladder and there’s your profit.

So if you’ve been following me, you’re listening to this stuff, you’ve read the Dotcom Secrets book, you’ve read the Expert Secrets book, you’ve gone into this, this shouldn’t freak you out. But if you haven’t, you should be a little bit nervous. You should go get Dotcom Secrets, read it, understand sales funnels, value ladder, these are the core principles that have worked since day number one.

This is not something new. In fact, it’s crazy, the online world made this so easy. Traditional offline, I cut my teeth learning this game with Bill Glazer and Dan Kennedy and all these people who were doing direct mail and classified ads and TV. Where it’s like, nobody breaks even on TV, you lose money. And you lose money for 5, 6, 7 months before you’re profitable. That’s where my foundation came from, the Dotcom Secrets book teaches that foundation. I think we’ve been spoiled because it’s been so cheap to acquire media online.

And that’s been awesome, and hopefully new platforms will continue to rise up that we can come and arbitrage attention from it at a discount. But just be aware that right now, Facebook is now shifting. They’re making that transformation. This is the first Facebook slap.

I got a little mini slap about a year and a half ago. They shutting down ad accounts, but they took the gas pedal off that one and made it a little bit easier, which has been nice. But this one’s happening and it’s not going away. So it’s like, now is the time to prepare for it. Start to get better at acquiring customers at your front end funnel, and getting better at sending them to the next step.

This will be a huge theme at Funnel Hacking Live. I got some crazy, amazing presentations, they’re all by funnel hackers. You guys will be able to learn about some of these things. But right now I wanted to give you guys a voice of warning, because this is what’s happening.

But luckily this is not like a shot where you just get shot and you die like back in the Google days. We’ve got time, but it’s all about understanding that and preparing and building out your value ladder. Go back, read Dotcom Secrets again. Read it two, read it three times. Internalize those concepts, figure out your value ladder, identify it, figure out your break even funnels, acquire customers profitably now so you can get to the point where you’re breaking even in six months to a year from now and be able to start sending people up.

So the Google slap is here, but the funnel hackers don’t need to worry, it’s all going to be good. If you’ve been following the principles we teach you day number one, you’re protected, so don’t stress about it. But if you’re not, it’s time to start looking at that, start building out your value ladder, getting prepared, because it’s coming.

Alright you guys, appreciate you all, sorry I got a stuffy nose, I probably sound a little funny. But that’s about it. So I’m heading back into the office, today we’ve got Todd and Ryan and Nick and Karen and a whole bunch of people at the office, it’s so much fun. So I’m going to get back to work. We were up late last night working and now it’s early in the morning and we’re starting the game over again. I’m sure the next couple of days I’ll do a lot of podcasts and I’ll probably be really tired, so I apologize in advance.

If you’ve enjoyed this at all, please go to iTunes, rate us, review us, we had to re-create a new feed, so we are starting back over on the reviews and stuff like that, so please if you love this podcast, if you reviewed in the past, please come back and review it again, we’d appreciate that. And we’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye everybody.

Even though we have 150 employees, only 20 of them are in Boise, so this is how we keep momentum happening.

On today’s episode Russell updates a little on if his kids are enjoying wrestling and he also reveals one secret to making a remote team work. Here are the awesome things in this episode:

• Find out which of Russell’s kids actually appears to have enjoyed the first wrestling practice out in the wrestling room, despite so much complaining.
• And hear what one of the important factors is to having a remote team work successfully.

So listen here to find out one of the reasons Russell’s remote team works out so well.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Alright everybody, I hope you guys are doing amazing. A couple of things, first off, did you have a chance to go to marketingsecrets.com recently? If not, it is a gift to you guys. We have been archiving and categorizing and making amazing magic over there and not telling anyone about it yet. So if you go to marketingsecrets.com you can find all back archives of the show, the videos of the show, transcripts of the show, plus a whole bunch of other amazing things are coming in there. Funnel Hacker TV is now all archived on marketingsecrets.com. Behind the scenes show is over there. We got tons and tons of stuff.

There’s my beautiful wife. Hello. Hold on.

Alright, I’m back I had to talk to my beautiful bride for a second there, for those who are listening, you probably have no idea what’s happening. Anyway, what was I talking about? It must have been awesome, because I totally forgot. Oh marketingsecrets.com. So check out the blog, so much good stuff there. It’s happening, we’re adding and we keep making it better and better. In fact, we got this new insider’s guide in there that are basically a book. An entire Dotcom Secrets, Expert Secrets book, just we’re doing it all in blog post format. First one that’s going live this week, 11,000 words, all focused on network marketers and funnels for them. I hope you guys enjoy it, go check it out.

Alright, I just wanted to share something cool. If you listened to the last podcast, I was kind of, I don’t know if I was whining. But after I got done with the kids wrestling practice, I was just like man that was hard. None of them wanted to be there, they wanted to be there, but it was a lot harder than I thought. Kids broke out in fights in the middle of practice. Collette was gone to do a barre class, so Ellie came out with Norah and had a big poop. So I’m changing a poop while I’m trying to coach. It was just crazy.

So anyway, Sunday, superbowl Sunday we went out to the gym because, I don’t know, I like watching the commercials, but I don’t really care that much about football. The night before was the wrestling superbowl basically. Penn State and Ohio State wrestled and it was the greatest dual I think I’ve ever seen, ever. So that was my superbowl, Saturday night. Sunday it was just like going to church and then playing with the kids and then coming in for the commercials. That’s kind of how we do it.

So anyway, I’m out in the wrestling room, and Aiden, my little 7 year old, who the whole time is like, “I don’t want to wrestle, this is scary.” All that kind of stuff, he’s like, “Dad, watch this.” And he did the moves. He did them the way that I taught him. He did his drop step perfectly and then he came and did a push pull, he did his under hooks. Everything I taught him, he did it perfectly. And he was all excited. I was like, “oh my gosh. It is already happening. He actually liked wrestling, even though he hated the entire experience, the next day when he knew the move, he loved it.” It was exciting and I just wanted to share with you guys because I thought it was awesome.

Alright, so I got one quick thing to share with you guys today, as we are about to start a week long crazy hack a thon with Todd, and Ryan and everybody in house. And this is something we learned from the Book of Remote. If you haven’t read the Book of Remote yet, or Rework, actually anything from those guys over at 37 Signals, they’re awesome. I can’t remember, I think it was Remote. When we launched Clickfunnels initially we were thinking about making everyone move to Boise and that kind of stuff. And then we decided not to and do more remote.

So we got about 20 or so people in Boise and then everyone else, 130 people are all remote, which is crazy. So we use a lot of what Jason Fried and those guys have trained on, it’s like our Bible for growing our company because they grew Base Camp and did something similar. But once we had talked about being Remote, was once a quarter they bring everyone in together to get that proximity, so they can work together for a week and then they go back out on their own.

So that’s what this week is. Everyone’s flying in and we’re all going to be together and we’re working on a bunch of really cool things, for Actionetics MD, which is going live at Funnel Hacking Live. What’s Actionetics MD, Russell? Oh, only the greatest thing ever. If you thought Clickfunnels was cool before, thought Actionetics was cool before, wait until MD comes out, because this is where we’re taking it to the next level. I’m excited for that.

So I encourage you guys if you have a remote team, get them together, come together. Tony Robins talks about that, proximity is power. So even if you have a remote team, that’s okay, get them together, fly them together, go to a hotel room, something. Get them together because that proximity is power and it gives you time to brainstorm and be together and amazing stuff happens from it.

So if you haven’t read the Book of Remote, go and read it, because you can build amazing companies and cultures, even remotely like we have, which we were really scared of initially, but it’s worked and it’s worked really, really well. But the big key of it is what we’re doing this week. So I’m sure if you’re watching Funnel Hacker behind the scenes show you will see a little behind the scenes of what’s happening. If not, you’re missing out. So be there or be square.

Alright guys. Appreciate you all. Have an amazing day and we’ll see you guys soon. Bye everybody.

Semi-deep thoughts from inside the wrestling room.

On this episode Russell talks about how trying to teach his boys to love wrestling the way he does has been met with a lot of resistance, but why he isn’t giving up. Here are some of the cool things in this episode:

• Why even though Russell’s boys have not really enjoyed wrestling so far, it’s important to push forward anyway.
• Why anything new that you try to do brings resistance, but if it’s important you need to continue to move forward.
• And how getting his boys to do wrestling is similar to starting something new with your business. You need to be passionate about it if it’s going to work.

So listen here to find out why you should continue to push forward in the new things you try, despite the initial resistance you will get.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and welcome to a special wrestling room edition of the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Hey everyone, so I’m here in the wrestling room at my home, well I guess technically it’s in my detached garage, but those who haven’t seen it, if you’re watching the video version, this is what it all looks like. It’s my little piece of heaven here on earth. I love it.

Today was the very first ever wrestling practice I did with my kids and their friends here. These are the t-shirts we made because I’m a little eccentric and we can’t have a practice without a t-shirt. So we made t-shirts and everything. But it was fun, we had I think 12 or so boys here, from my little kids age up to the older kids and it was fun. But it was hard.

It’s interesting, obviously wrestling has been my passion for my whole life, I want my kids to be in it, but for some reason they just have so much resistance to it. It’s like, ugh. I remember this year my 12 year twins started wrestling finally and the very first day they went to practice, I didn’t know practice had started yet, I thought it was starting the next day. They came home, both in tears, “We hate wrestling, we’re never going back.” I was like “oh man.”

So I called the coach up, got to know him and he said, “You should come help coach then.” I was like, “dangit.” So I decided to be an assistant coach and spent the next two months, two and a half months or so, everyday at wrestling practice, which ended up being amazing with the kids. But it was hard because between each break, “Can we quit yet dad? Can we quit yet?” I watched my kids get out there and get beat up, and I’m just like, “Am I doing the right thing?”

Part of me is like, you gotta make your kids be tough and force them to do hard things, but then part of me is like, man, they’re not having any fun. Am I a bad dad for doing it. This is the emotional turmoil that goes through my head as I’m trying to learn this whole parenting game, which is way harder than I thought it was going to be. Making millions of dollars is way easier than raising kids.

Anyway, they finished the season, they had a good time. By the end of it, Bowen, who is the one who hated wrestling the most, told me that wrestling is his favorite sport. And then Dallin, he got injured pretty bad, I think I did a podcast on that, but he liked it as well. So finally I’m trying to, now that the season is over I’m like, “We got a wrestling room in our backyard, let’s get a bunch of kids together.” I’ve been trying forever and finally, today was the first day we made it happen.

I have my little boy Aiden out here too, and some of his friends and it was crazy. It’s something you just need to do, as you start new things again you forget how much resistance normally comes when you start something new. I’ve been trying, honestly for 2 years, to have this wrestling practice. Six months ago I printed these shirts, I’m like, “We’re doing it this weekend.” And we didn’t do it again and it finally happened today.

And even today, last night Aiden, my seven year old, going to bed he’s like….I’m like, “You have to go to bed now.” Because it was like 10 o’clock, “We gotta get up for wrestling.” “I don’t want to wrestle in the morning. I have homework and all these things.” I’m like, “you have homework? You’re in first grade, dude.” He’s like, “Yeah, I have 5 hours of homework, I can’t do wrestling, I have to do homework in the morning.” I’m like, “Whatever dude.”

Just fighting. This morning he was fighting, and everyone was fighting, they didn’t want to come. Then they came out here and the boys were fighting and the twins were fighting, and then luckily their friends showed up, which was good. And then we did practice, and practice was way….it’s just funny, in your head you’re like, “They’re all going to listen, we’re going to do all these things, we’re going to get through stuff.” Oh it was hard, we had an odd number of people so I had to be a drill partner, plus coach, plus trying to coach everyone, anyway, it was tough and there was so much resistance.

And then at the end my boys start fighting and their crying, and I tried to do the little wrestle off’s to teach the kids wrestling and two of my boys are crying by the end of it because they got hurt. So much resistance.

Anyway, the reason I’m making this video is two-fold. Number one, I think someday it’ll be fun to come back here, and if I can get these kids past the initial pain of a new thing, it’ll be fun to show them this and be like, “this was day number one of practice guys, this is how beat up your dad was and how tired and how bad I wanted to quit already.” Because man, you start anything new, the initial resistance is insane. You have to push this boulder up a hill and if you’re not insanely passionate and obsessive about what you do, you’re not going to make it up that hill, there’s just too much resistance that happens initially.

Lots of people tell me, “I’m going to start a business, I’m not passionate about anything. Can I just…” They just want to do something. I’m like, “Yeah you can but there’s a lot of resistance that goes into starting a business and you gotta push this boulder up a hill and if you don’t love it, you’re going to…” Like if I didn’t love wrestling, and love just spending time with the boys, I’d quit after today. As much fun as it was, it was horrible, it was so hard. It was not horrible, it was good, it was just not the picture I painted in my head.

I think a lot of times we get into business, we have this picture in our head, this is what it’s going to look like, it’s going to be amazing. And then you get in there and you’re like, “Huh, nobody wants my stuff. Wow, traffic is expensive.” Problem, problem, problem, problem. And if you’re not insanely passionate initially, the resistance will stop you, will bury you before you ever get there.

As I’m trying a new thing, in a new chapter in my life, of being a coach of my kids. As I’m going through that resistance I just wanted to share with you guys because we all go through it. Most of you guys listening to this podcast, you’re here because you want to learn marketing and business and scaling and things like that, you probably weren’t thinking about me talking about wrestling coaching, but it’s the same principal. Anything new we start, we will be immediately met with tons of opposition and resistance, no matter what it is, especially if it’s a good thing. The better it is, the more opposition and resistance you will get. That’s a sign that you’re doing the right things.

So with that said, I’m done. I’m going to go sit in the hot tub. I got a stuffy nose, I’m kind of sick. But I’m just going to celebrate today, act like it was everything I dreamt of and more so I can forget about some of the hurdles, so that way we’ll be able to keep moving forward and keep doing this.

I just know that if I do this consistently for a month, for six months, for a year, my kids will be good. They’re going to like it, I’m going to like, we’ll have wrestlers that know what they’re doing and practices will become fun and it’ll be awesome. But it all starts somewhere and today was my starting day.

Whatever it is you’re starting at, or wherever you are meeting the most opposition right now, hopefully this gives you a little bit of hope and faith and the energy you need to push through that opposition, because the amazing stuff is right on the other side. We just gotta get there. It’s happened so many times in my life, in so many different areas, and I’m excited for it to happen out here in the wrestling stuff, as long as the kids don’t quit.

So there’s my job. It’s harder when it’s yourself, you don’t have to quit. But the kids are like, “We don’t like this.” It’s harder. But they’re liking it more, it’s getting better.

So alright guys, with that said, I’m going to go and maybe take a nap or something, I don’t even know. But whatever you’re doing, break that resistance, talk to you guys soon. Bye everybody.

Something special I learned this week when I stopped doing my morning routine.

On today’s episode Russell talks about changing up his morning routine by driving his kids to school and why it has been so great. Here are some of the amazing things Russell talks about in this episode.

• What caused Russell to stop and notice that he was missing out on something really special with his kids.
• What kind of a difference he feels in his life since he began driving his kids to school each day.
• And why it’s so important to stop and look around you and notice the relationships that you may have been neglecting.

So listen here to find out why Russell is going to continue to drive his kids to school, and why you should stop and pay attention to your own loved ones, because you never know what you’re missing out on.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Alright guys, I have to get excited like that every time just to keep you guys awake, if you’re listening to somebody else’s podcast and then come to mine, hopefully that will wake you up.

I’m here in the office, kind of in the back room, and we’re filming a bunch of cool things here this week with Operation Underground Railroad. For those who are going to be at Funnel Hacking Live, we’re going to be premiering a documentary we’ve been working on with them about how they’re saving kids from human trafficking and it’s an amazing, emotional, cool thing. So I’m excited to share that with you guys.

But today I want to talk to you guys about something else. The title of this podcast is going to be, Drive Your Kids to School. Obviously, some of you guys don’t have kids. That’s okay, I’m not just saying this as a thing, drive your kids to school, but it’s like a metaphor of a bigger thing.

I’m pretty busy, as an entrepreneur, I have a lot of things happening between our company’s 150+ employees, 55,000 active customers, millions of subscribers, and a lot of other stuff all going on that we have to keep up with and it’s crazy. And if you watch any of my stuff you know that we’re everywhere all the time, buying ads, trying to be super aggressive in our marketing, because we believe in what we’re doing and what we’re saying.

In fact, I saw someone yesterday, no today, on one of my Instagram ads it said something like, “Russell, you’re trying too hard, I see your ads everywhere, it makes me not want to buy anything from you. You need to chill out or something.” I was like, chill out? Are you kidding me? I’m a man on a mission, I’m trying to change the world here, I don’t have time to chill out. So I’ll chill out when I retire someday here. But right now it’s important and I’m pushing hard, because I believe in what we’re doing and I believe it’s not just a financial thing, it’s bigger than that. And you guys know that, who listen in. You understand what I believe and my mission and all those kind of things.

What I want to share with you today is, last week I had my kids, and one of my kids didn’t want to keep taking the bus to school. He was kind of like, a lot of kids in the bus don’t use good language, and the bus driver is kind of jerk and stuff like that. So my wife started driving them to school in the mornings which was really cool. And then a couple of times Collette couldn’t, and we have a nanny that comes in the morning so she started driving them.

I was just watching that and I remember one morning last Friday or something, I was making my supplement drink and mixing my powders and my pills and doing my big morning routine crap that’s so important. Everyone talks about morning routines. And I watched Brandii, who’s an amazing human being, she’s our nanny, take my kids and drive them to school. And I was like, I’m missing that experience with my kids because I’m too busy doing my morning routine or whatever it was.

So Monday came and I said, I told Bowen and Dallin, my twins, “Hey I’m going to drive you to school today, and I’m going to start driving you from now on.” They’re like, “Really?” I’m like, “Yeah.” So I jump in the car and I drive them, and it’s not a very long drive, but it was so cool because, I pick up one of their friends in the morning, so I listen to them talking to their friends and it was this cool thing, where I had this intimate glimpse inside their real world.

We see the world of our kids when we’re at our home and stuff, but you don’t see it, them with their friends and it just gave me this intimate, really cool glimpse of, wow, that’s what’s happening at school, that’s what they’re really talking about. So I just sat there quiet listening in. And that was the first day.

After I got home, Aiden and Ellie, there’s the bus stop, but it’s literally a 2 minute walk from our house, not even that, maybe a 1 minute walk. But they usually get a ride when it’s snowing, because whatever. Aiden’s like, “You took them to school, can you take me to school?” And he’s so cute, he’s my little seven year old and I was like, “Yes, I will take you to school.” So I get home and I drive them to school.

So I did that Monday, and I did it Tuesday. Tuesday I was like, “Okay, I’m going to get these kids in a good state for school. So I picked them up and I had music blaring, and got them all excited, got them in state. Every day this week I’ve been doing that and taking Ellie and Aiden as well, to school. And it’s crazy, it’s only been a week, today’s Friday, so it’s the last day of the week doing this process and I was like, it’s been so cool.

This morning I’d been lifting weights and I came in and my kids way more connected with me, Ellie’s like, “Hey can you make me a Popeye egg dad?” which is a kind of egg thing we make. I was like, “Yes.” So we made that. And then Dallin, “Hey dad will you make me one too?” So I made him one. And Ellie came and had me comb her hair and put it in a little ponytail and then I took the kids.

So much more connected to my kids and when I got home my wife was way different than normal. It’s funny, I’m always trying to impress her with all these crazy things that we do and she doesn’t notice it, this taking my kids to school, how much of a profound impact that had on her, and it’s just special and cool and I’m so grateful I figured that out now and not 4 years from now, or 5 years from now when the kids are about to graduate and they don’t want me to be around.

So I just want to share with you guys because first off, it was just special to me and it was really cool and something that I’m going to keep doing. But second off, I wanted that to be something I share with you guys because I know, again, everyone’s situation is different, some of you don’t have kids to drive in the morning, but conceptually, what is it that you’re doing right now in your business or in your morning routine or something, where the most special things to you, you’re not noticing them? You’re missing them?

I look back at the last few years; I probably missed a lot of that. I could have driven my kids to school a lot over the last few years and I missed it. Luckily, now I’ve fixed that, and I’m so glad it was earlier than later, now I have the next few years to really have that time with my kids that I was missing out on.

But for you what is it? Is it a spouse? Is it a kid? Is it a family member? Is it someone else you love and care about? Is it a project you know you should be doing? What is it? What is the thing that you’re missing because you’re so busy doing your thing?

I just recommend to stop and look around a little bit and don’t miss the moments, because this last week has been really special for me and it was because last Friday, a week ago today, that I noticed. I stopped long enough to notice it, and then luckily I listened to the voice in my head and I did something about it.

So look around and listen for the voice in your head, hear what it says, and then do it. See what happens.

I hope that helps somebody. I got a stuffy nose, so I apologize if I sound funny. But I hope this helps you guys. I know it’s been a huge help for me this week, and is literally going to change the trajectory of my life. That little shift is going to be huge. Alright with that said, get back to work, or stop your work and go hang out with your family or kids or someone. That’s it. Thanks you guys, appreciate you, talk to you guys soon. Bye.

What I’ve learned during the systemization process inside of Clickfunnels over the last few months.

In this episode Russell explains how to replace your own level 6 skill sets with people who have level 10 skills in one thing. Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in today’s episode:

• Why having the ability to take his daughter to the Little Gym helped Russell reflect on why it’s awesome to be an entrepreneur.
• Why entrepreneurs need to figure out how to do everything to get their businesses off the ground.
• And why it’s a good idea to replace yourself with people who do better work, once you’ve made a million dollars.

So listen here to find out how you can find a lot more people who are better than you to run your business for you.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing Secrets podcast.

Hey everyone, I just got done. I took off early today and went and took Norah to Little Gym, which is so stinking fun. She is so cute. Now I’m heading back to the office to go get some stuff done.

But just grateful today for being an entrepreneur and having the ability to just take off and go to my daughter’s little gym thing and have fun with her and not have to worry about anything. One of the hidden benefits of being an entrepreneur.

Alright, so I wanted to talk to you guys today, and this is something that we have been talking about a lot recently. Probably because we are in the middle of it in our company, but it’s like getting the systemization in. The first time I ever heard about systems, I read the book Emyths, by Michael Gerber. I remember it was probably 12 years ago or something and at the time, I started my business and I had learned how to do everything, because I didn’t have any money, outside of programming. I never learned programming, so I hired this guy named Dorel in Romania who still works for me to this day.

So he did all the programming stuff and I had to figure out everything else because I didn’t have any skills. So I had to learn how to write copy, I had to learn how to, I didn’t do images either, I hired images. But I learned all these different pieces. Marketing and traffic and sales. It sucks when you first get started because it’s just you and you don’t have any capitol or money so it’s like you have to get really talented. I think that’s one of the big reasons why, if you’ve heard the intro to the show I make fun of people who take on VC money because they don’t have to learn any of the stuff. They cheat, they get a bunch of money and hire people and there’s never anyone on the team that actually has the skill set to run the show.

There’s got to be someone who has done everything once or else it’s hard to….I don’t know, that’s just my thoughts and feelings. So I was doing everything from writing copy, doing customer support, driving traffic, doing sales, project management, everything, it was just me and Dorel. And then someone, I think it was Talman Knudson or someone at an event mentioned this book called EMyth and I thought, oh it’s the internet market….I thought E was internet, or email, I don’t know. So I remember we were going on a trip down to Lake Powell, my wife and I, and so we’re heading out, swing by Barnes and Noble, I go in the book store, the business section and there’s this book called the Emyth and I was like, “This is the one they’re all talking about.” So I bought it.

Jumped in a car and drive 12 hours down to Lake Powell, Utah, jump on a houseboat, go in the middle of the boat, pull out my new book, learn my internet marketing, start reading and it has nothing to do with internet marketing. I was kind of disappointed at first, but I had nothing else to read, so I kept reading this thing. It was all about systemization, talked about how most entrepreneurs feel. They’re juggling this thing and this thing, juggling 10 different plates, trying to keep them all up top because you know if one falls the whole thing is going to collapse.

He talked about basically going in there and each of these things you’re spinning, create a system around it, plug some of that system in and then run with it. And then doing that through all the different things until eventually you’ve got this thing systemized.

That was kind of the gist, and I’ve never gone super deep with Michael Gerber’s stuff out side of that, I have a couple of friends who disagree with what he says. But the conception is this is brilliant. Build systems to replace the things that I’m doing. I honestly struggled with that for a long time. I think most entrepreneurs do because I think this is the whole point of the podcast. I think I know why, now that we’re doing it the right way.

I think the reason why is because you as the entrepreneur who had to figure out all this crap ahead of time, you had to figure out how to do all these things. You’re taking on like 20 or 30 different skill sets initially that you have to learn to be able to launch a business, which is hard. And some things you’re really good at and some things you are horrible at. But you had to figure out how to do it because there’s no one else doing it.

I had to learn how to write copy because I remember somebody explained it to me one time and I was like, “ugh, that sounds horrible. I hate writing.” And they’re like, “Well, you could hire them, but they’re really expensive.” And I didn’t know how to hire them, so I went, the only person I really knew at the time who considered themselves a copywriter was Joe Vitale and I went to his site and he was charging like $6 a word for email copy. I was like, $6 a word, even the little words like ‘a’ and ‘the’? I guess I gotta learn this crap.

So I had to buy books and study and practice and read and learn and it was painful but I had to do it because there was no one else who could do it at the time.

So then we get to this point where we’re trying to systemize things and we start bringing people in and I think the biggest problem most of us have, is we assume that the people we’re bringing in will have all of the skills we have acquired to get this thing off the ground. I think that’s why I’ve always been frustrated. I bring people in and I’m like, “You can’t do this. Yeah, you’re good at this one part, but you’re horrible at all these other things.” We try to find rock stars to replace us, which is not easy at all.

What I’ve been learning through this new process, this systemization we’ve been doing with James P. Friell, is it’s less about that and more like figuring out all the pieces and bringing in people who are just amazing at that one piece. So what’s going to be weird, how do I say this the right way, because I don’t want to make it sound offensive, because it’s not even a little bit? I feel like for me and for most entrepreneurs, we probably get to level 6 or 7 skill set at a whole bunch of things, that gets this idea off the ground. So that’s kind of where we’re at.

The goal is not to bring in someone that’s the same thing. It’s picking each one of those skill sets that you’re a 6 at, you take that apart and find a 10 level person and plug them into just that one thing. The problem with that, in our mind as entrepreneurs because I know how we all think is, did you say it’s going to take 10 people to replace what I’m already doing. Yes, but those 10 people will be able to do level 10 of what you’re doing, not level 4 or 5 or 6 or whatever you’re doing right now. So it’ll actually become better, but it takes more people to do it. There’s not anyone who writes copy and do customer support.

Even though you had to do that, they are not going to do it. You’ve got to find a level 10 support person, a level 10 copy person, a level 10 funnel person, a level 10 designer, all those pieces you plug them in and be okay with the fact they don’t do all the stuff you did. They’re just going to do that one piece, but they’re going to do it way better than you.

If you try to give them 2 things or 3 things, they’re going to suck at all of it and they’re going to way worse and you’re going to get frustrated and annoyed and fire them. It’s like, understanding that, their level 10 skill set is going to replace your 6, now you get 10 people and all the sudden, now it becomes magic.

I’m looking at what’s happing right now in my business. I’ve always been, I’ve had an amazing team and I’ve been building this team for a long time, and it’s been good. But as we’re specifically trying to replace me on things that I currently do, which I do a lot of things, I still do a lot of things. I’m trying to now do, pull myself out of those pieces and it’s been scary. But I’m trying to find level 10 people at each spot, plug them in and now it’s like, they take what I did and make it better.

I think that most entrepreneurs are probably level 10 at one thing. I think I would say I’m level 10 at one thing, so I’m keeping that piece because I love it, but the rest of it, we’re getting other people. Anyway, I hope that gives you hope, because I know that I’ve systemized stuff in the past, I always get frustrated because I think I would try to give people 3 or 4 things, “Hey you’re going to write copy and do this and do this.” And they can do one or two and the other ones make them struggle and just, they were never able to be rock stars, and it was my fault. I didn’t let them shine, whereas now, stepping away from this and realizing to just have them focus on that one thing.

Just because you did 10 doesn’t mean they should be. In fact, it’s going to hurt themselves and you and everyone. I think that’s part of the problem, not the problem, I guess the opportunity of the entrepreneurship. We have to master 10 things to get this thing into orbit. As soon as you get to that million bucks it’s like, okay, now I just bought my freedom. Now it’s time to take this cash and replace myself with level 10 people.

At first it’s going to be scary because you’re going to spend all your cash on these level 10 people. But if you get level 10 people, then the cash will dramatically increase. If the cash does not dramatically increase, it means you didn’t find the level 10’s.

Anyway, I hope that helps. It was kind of a big aha for me recently. Just watching, I went to go with Norah and I did a little meeting with my team and I’m looking at, that’s the person who replaced this part of me and that person plays that part of me, and that part of me. I look at all these things and I’m like, all of them are better at those things than I am and it’s just so great and I get to go play with my daughter now and they’re doing their piece of brilliance and I can go spend time with my daughter.

Pretty special, pretty cool. That’s the goal, at least that’s been the goal for me. I’m finally getting and I hope that gives you guys some faith and some hope, especially those who have tried to systemize, have tried to replace yourself and tried to hire people and have been frustrated. I get it, and maybe this little piece that I got over the last day or two will help you as well. So I hope that helps. I’m going to get back in there and build some funnels. Thanks everybody and we’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye.