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Marketing Secrets

Welcome To Russell Brunson’s Marketing Secrets Podcast. So, the big question is this, “How are entrepreneurs like us, who didn’t cheat and take on venture capital, who are spending money from our own wallets, how do we market in a way that lets us get our products and services and things that we believe in out to the world… and yet still remain profitable?” That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Russell Brunson, and welcome to MarketingSecrets.com.
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Now displaying: Category: marketing in your car
Jan 16, 2017

The thing that’s probably keeping you from actually getting what you want.

On this episode Russell talks about the first time he met Tony Robins and what he learned about himself when driving in a car with him. He talks about the importance of not being driven by significance.

Here are some of the interesting things in this episode:

  • Find out how Russell felt meeting Tony Robins for the first time.
  • Hear how Tony helped Russell realize what drives him, and why it needed to change.
  • And Find out why being driven by significance will lead to a miserable life, and why you should strive to be driven by love and connection instead.

So listen below to find out how Russell has changed his perspective since meeting Tony Robins.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody, welcome to Marketing In Your Car. It is so cold here. Insanely cold. All of the ice, or the snow is now shards of glass and it’s crazy. That was the noise, if you’re wondering why. I was driving over the shards of glass in my car.

Alright, so today I have a very special message and this one’s important for everybody including me. Alright so I’ll tell the background of this story. A lot of you guys know I talk about Tony Robins a lot. He’s coming to Funnel Hacking Live, I’ve been a big Tony fan for forever, as long as I can remember. And the first time I met him was a really cool story.

So I went to UPW, actually let me step back. What happened is I was at my house one day working when all the sudden my phone rang, I picked it up and it was somebody on Tony’s team saying, “Hey, Tony Robins want to meet you. Can he meet you today?” and I was like, “Is he in Boise?” He’s like, “No, he’s in Salt Lake, can you come over. He wants to meet you.” I was like, “I’m in Boise.” And he’s like, “Oh, I thought you lived in Salt lake, that won’t work then. He’s going to be in Tron the next week doing UPW. Can you come and be his guest and then he’ll have a chance to meet you there.” I was like alright, how cool is that, yes.

So I booked my everything to go to UPW the next week, and I’d never been to a Tony event, I didn’t know what it was. I assumed it was like a marketing event. So I showed up with my backpack and laptop and I was going to sit in the back and take notes. And I get there and people are jumping and dancing. If you’ve ever been to a Tony event it’s closer to a rock concert than a seminar. Anyway, I was not expecting that. By the end of day one you walk on fire, day two I had shin splints, I lost my voice completely. That’s how crazy it is. So if you haven’t gone yet, you should really, really go.

At the event, first thing he teaches this really cool concept called the six human needs and I don’t have time to go through all of them right now, but I need to touch on it, because it’s important for the next part of it. So basically the six human needs, there’s four human needs of the body. There’s certainty, humans want to be certain. And then there’s variety, you want things to be crazy. Those are two needs that kind of conflict with each other, but they’re both there. And then there’s significance, we want to feel great about ourselves. And then there’s love and connection. I think I’ve done a podcast in the past about this, but I could go on for, I could teach a two day seminar just on that because it’s so cool. And then there’s the needs of the spirit, which are growth and contribution which is a whole other….anyway, we could go deep but I want you to understand that there’s those four.

So significance, love and connection, certainty and variety. Those are the four that we have to get met in our life. And there’s one for you. Just so you guys know, there’s one that’s your driving force in life. You’re either significance driven, certainty driven, variety driven, or you are love and connection driven, and it’s interesting.

So I’m going to leave that there. I wish I could go deeper, but I can’t in this podcast, because I won’t make it to the office, it’ll be a long call. So anyway, so I’m at UPW, he teaches this stuff, I’m fascinated by it and then the next day I’m supposed to meet him. So day two of the event, Tony’s not facilitating it, there’s somebody else facilitating it. So I started getting text messages from Tony’s assistant. “Hey Tony wants to meet with you in an hour.” I’m like, “Alright.” Then I get a text like 45 minutes later, “It’s going to be two hours from now.”

Anyway, throughout the whole day, I think our meeting was supposed to be at 10 in the morning, I was getting texts every 30 minutes for 10 hours. They kept pushing and pushing and pushing and finally I get a text, “Okay, Tony is ready to meet you. Here is the address.” This is pre-uber and I’m like, “Okay.” So I jump in a taxi and give them the address and they’re like, “This is like 45 minutes away.” I’m like, are you serious, is Tony not in the hotel?

So I get in the car and we’re driving and I’m hoping we’re going to the right place. This is going to be really embarrassing if I’m….So the taxi driver takes me to this hotel, drops me off, I text him, “Okay, I’m here.” And then this guy texts back, his name is Jay Garrity, and Jay would, just to kind of put it in perspective, so you feel my nervousness of this situation, Jay used to be the right hand man for I’m blanking on his name right now, for Mitt Romney when he was doing the first political campaign, the first time he ran for president. He was Romney’s right hand man, and then Tony hired him after that. In fact, most of Tony’s team at the time were old Romney advisors, which is kind of interesting.

So we get to the hotel, Jay Garrity comes down from the elevator, very professional, the opposite of me. He’s like “Mr. Robins is not ready to meet you yet, so sit in the lobby and wait.” So I’m like okay. So we’re sitting in the lobby waiting and it’s almost like secret service, that’s what it felt like. Jay kept looking at his phone, looking at his phone. Not ready, not ready. Probably sat there for another 45 minutes. Then all the sudden he’s like, ‘Okay, Mr. Robins is ready to meet you.”

We stand up and I was like, “Ahh.” Super intense and crazy. We jump in the elevator, go up to the floor, start walking down this hall really fast. We get to this room, the door’s open, there’s two security guards on both sides inside the room. I’m like, what in the world. We walk through the security guards and all the sudden Tony, this giant of a man, walks in and says, “Russell, welcome!” and gives me a huge hug. I’m like, “What.” Super crazy.

Then he has me come sit down and he’s made me dinner, you know someone made me dinner. And at the time he was pure vegetarian, so its like this dinner that was the most amazing thing in the world and it was pure vegetarian. I was like, “I could be a vegetarian if I had someone to cook this way.” It was amazing. Then he took out his recorder, clicked record on it, set it on the table, opened up a journal and started drilling me for an hour, asked me question after question after question. It was insane, I’ve never been more nervous in my whole life.

Drills me for an hour, we’re done. We finish eating, we talk for a little bit and then he’s like, “I gotta go back to the event.” So we go down and jump in this big suburban. Someone’s driving. Tony and I sit in the back and talk and it was interesting while we were talking, he was talking about a deal he was thinking about doing with someone in our market. I won’t say his name because most of you guys would know who this person is. He was like, “I don’t think I’m going to do the deal because he’s very significance driven.” I was like, “Huh, interesting.”

And then after he said that, I started thinking, at first I’m like, oh man that sucks for that guy. And then I’m like, wait, what drives me? Am I significance driven? Tony can see into my soul. I’m freaking out, what does he see about me? What’s driving me? I was so paranoid and panicky, it was crazy.

Then we got to the event. Tony’s like, ‘I gotta go, call ya later.” Jumps out of the car, goes into the hotel, and I’m standing in the front lobby like, “Huh.” That was the most intense three hours of my life. It was just crazy. But that thing he said, “Very significance driven.” So I started thinking, what does that mean? Basically it comes back to the four human needs. One of those is the driver for you that drives most of the decisions in your life. But this person he said it was significance.

I was like, apparently that’s bad. If Tony didn’t want to work with this guy because he’s significance driven. I was kind of confused at first. Then a couple months later I went to Date with Destiny. If you go to Date with Destiny, it’s a six day event that Tony has, it’s amazing. It’s like UPW times ten. In fact, I feel bad for people who go to UPW and only get to walk on water because you’re missing the depth of what Tony actually has to offer.

So I go to this next event, and the events there’s so much stuff he covers. But if you look at the one, the biggest things you work with at the event. He helps you identify the six human needs, which one is currently the driving force. And for most people it’s either significance, or certainty. I wish we could get into a couple hour talk on this, because it would make more sense, but he also said, the quality of your life is 100% dependent on your ability to, how do I say it right? It’s 100% tied to the need, your driving need.

So if your driving need is significance, that’s going to make you miserable. Whereas your driving need is love and connection, the opposite, then you’re going to have a great life. Same thing with the opposite, if your driving need is certainty, while it’s important, it’s a need we have, if that’s the driving force in your life, you always have to be certain about everything, you’re going to be miserable.

So it was basically helping you identify what is your driving need. Then learning how to shift that to the other thing. If you’re significance driven, learn, teaching how to be love and connection driven. If you are certainty driven, shifting it to variety. Because the quality of your life is going to be completely dependent upon your ability to have variety and love and connection. That’s what gives you a good quality of life, not the other two.

But most people, it’s these other things that drive them. And that’s what’s interesting. I was listening to that and for me, I’m and I think, most entrepreneurs, I’m definitely heavily driven by significance. In fact, now that I’m so aware of it, I hate it. In fact, in the world I work in, most, not most, but the majority of the people that I work with, the reason why they are in the guru business or whatever is because they are significance driven. And that’s why I always hear people, you get to know who these people are, and you don’t actually like them because they’re driven by this thing, no one knows, they don’t know what the cause is, but it’s because they’re driven by significance.

I’ve been doing a deal with a person who are trying to, someone who I highly respected and that’s why I’ve done this deal, I’ve never met a human being on planet earth that’s more significance driven than this person. And it’s completely ruined the deal, it’s ruined the relationship so much so, this is someone that I idolized. This is someone that if you would’ve told me 5 years ago that I would have a chance to talk to them, I wouldn’t have believed it. And now I’m avoiding their texts, phone calls. One of the most annoying human beings on earth because the significance is such a driving, the only thing this person can see is significance. Everything is tied to his personal significance and it’s destroying him.

I looked at this business, the people around him and he’s destroyed everything because he’s so significance driven. As a person he’s still brilliant, but a miserable life. I can’t imagine it. And I have this struggle because it’s a constant thing for me, and I’m sure for a lot of us. Significance drives us, we feel that. That’s why we’re entrepreneurs, why we’re out there. Why we want to be onstage and write books. But I, because I’m aware, I try to check that all the time because I hate that. That’s the thing I actually hate about myself. I hate that I’m significance driven.

When people give me good compliments, I thrive off that. I love that. But then when I, after I feel that, it bugs me because I’m like, “No.” I love that, but I can’t and shouldn’t be significance driven. IT’s not a good quality of life. I need to be driven by love and connection, by variety, these other things that actually increase the quality of your life. Because connection, even if it’s not about “Look about how great I am.” It makes you feel good, but it doesn’t help anything else. Love and connection is where you’re using your tools, your gifts in a more meaningful way.

So I don’t know. For you guys, I just wanted to share some of that in a ten minute message, I wish I could go so much deeper. But start thinking about that stuff. What drives you? If your personal significance is the driving force for you, I’d recommend stepping back from that. And it’s always going to be there, but being aware of it, like, “Man, I am just doing this for significance to make me feel better?” and if that’s the main reason you’re doing something, it’s the wrong reason. If the reason is that you really care about people and you’re trying to give them something, you have this love and connection towards them, it’s just a better way to live. I think people will see it and notice it.

I hope people notice that for me. I, despite the fact that it’s a constant thing that’s there in front of me all the time, I’m constantly trying to check it and put it in the back and default to the love and connection, these other things because I know what’s important and what actually helps other people, not just your own ego. Ego is the enemy. I haven’t read the book yet, but I bought it and I bought the audible. There’s a book called Ego is the Enemy, I’m excited to read it because I think that’s what holds most of us back from true love and connection. From happiness, growth, from all the other things we want. I feel like, our ego and significance we’re craving is what holds us back from that.

And if we are aware of that at least we can do something about it. I wasn’t aware of it. I look at my career the first 5 or 6 years of my business, prior to meeting Tony, I was not aware of it and it drove me, and it drove me, and it hurt my marriage, it hurt my family life, it hurt my relationship with friends. There were a lot of issues and again, I’m so far from perfect. I still do things because of significance, and I hate it. But I’m aware of it now, and I try to not make decisions based on that. I try to make decisions based on love and connection. How will this help others as opposed to how does this put me on a pedestal?

And it’s been good, it’s been really good. The relationships that have come from it, because of that. I think our ability to affect change in people’s lives have been tenfold. And the interesting thing, this is the craziest thing about it. As I have tried to push away significance and focus on love and connection, I have become more relevant and it’s weird.

I’ve gotten significance by not going after it. It’s weird. This person I’m dealing with, this person, despite the fact that they’re brilliant, they’re no longer relevant in our market, which is insane based on who they are, what they’ve accomplished and done, there’s no relevancy. They’ve been driving and chasing after significance for so long, they’ve completely just destroyed all their relationships. Their market knows that it’s all about them. They’ve destroyed what they sought after. They have lost all significance, because they’ve been seeking after it. It’s so weird. Whereas if you don’t, you seek love and connection, you seek that change in other people, you seek that, you will get the significance you are trying to get as a byproduct of it. It’s so fascinating.

So I hope that helps somebody out there. It’s definitely helping me in being more aware of it as I’m watching it unfolding before me. If you want those things, that’s kind of the work around. Hope that helps you guys. I’m at the office working, I will talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.

Jan 13, 2017

A trick that my kids use to dominate the world.

On this episode Russell talks about his kids using “Yolo” to do things they otherwise wouldn’t do and how we can use that same mantra in our businesses to get rid of self doubt.

Here are some fun things in this episode:

  • Russell talks about his kids’ motivation to get out of the hot tub and run through feet of snow being just one word, “Yolo.”
  • Why Russell thinks that when you have inspiration you should use the phrase mantra to motivate you before the self doubt sets in.
  • And you’ll get to hear in their own words, what Russell’s kids’ think Yolo means to them.

So listen below to hear how Russell’s kids taught him about not letting self doubt ruin inspiration.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson, welcome back to Marketing In Your Car. Today I am actually sitting in my kitchen. The kitchen that all the wood is completely warped from our flood. All my wife and kids are out in the hot tub except for Norah who decided she didn’t want to hot tub. So we are standing here and I’m supposed to be feeding her dinner because she’s hungry, but instead she’s eating a popsicle. That is called good parenting, because it’s the only way to get her to stop crying. So yes, I should teach a parenting course someday. If your kids are crying, just give them a popsicle. Oh man, some days it’s really hard to be a parent. But those days you just give them a popsicle and it becomes easy again. Just kidding.

Parenting advice aside, because nobody wants that right now. But I do want to talk about something really super cool. Because we’re in the hot tub, it’s been snowing, Boise has been Boise Snowpocolypse, or whatever you want to call it. The last week we’ve had 3 or 4 feet of snow and then it rained another foot and everything was soaked, and my house was flooding. Oh and today we were filming a testimonial video in my front room and I walked on the carpet and the carpet is soaking wet and I looked at the wall and there’s water seeping behind the paint of our wall. Anyway, it’s a total disaster nightmare. Not gonna lie.

But the one nice thing is that the Hot tub is good no matter what. So we’re out in the hot tub in the snow, and we’ve pretty much hot tubbed everyday. Man, we had 5 snow days in a row, almost 10 days in a row between Christmas break and this and everything, we’ve been hot tubbing a lot. And it’s fun because the hot tub is surrounded by tons and tons and tons of snow. So the first day you hot tub everyone’s like, “Oooh it’s so cold.” And they’ll touch the snow a little bit and try little things. Take little snow balls and throw them at each other and then dive back into the water. Now it’s insane because they do these things, and this is kind of the point of today’s message.

So I was there yesterday with the kids and they’re jumping up and screaming and running around our house, which is a pretty long distance in the snow. First they were doing one lap, then two, then three. Now they’re doing four laps around the house and then they dive back into the water. And then they’re doing snow angels, front and back and then back in the water. And they’re running across the yard, onto the trampoline, doing snow angels on the trampoline and jumping and run back and dive in.

All these crazy things. Stuff that’s super painful and super crazy, and they keep doing them over and over again. And what’s interesting and this is the point, before they go, every single time, they’re like, “Hey, let’s do it.“ and they’re all like, “But it’s so cold.” And then Dallin, I think Dallin who started this, he’s the one, he always says, “Yolo.” And he jumps up and takes off.

So it’s like everyone’s freezing. No one wants to get in the cold snow, but then Dallin goes “Yolo.” jumps up, steps in the snow and sprints probably I don’t know 500 yards in the snow in around our house a bunch of times and then dives back in. I was like, “What are you, when you’re yelling, what are you yelling out?” he said, “Yolo.” I was like, “What does yolo mean?” “You only live once.” And then he goes, “Yolo.” And jumps up and takes off and runs out in the snow again.

I was kind of laughing, actually he said, “You only live once so spend it or live it stupidly.” I don’t know what it was, and then he takes off. So all the kids, every time they’re about to do something crazy that they normally wouldn’t do, they look at that challenge, run across the snow, do a snow angel, a front snow angel and back, three somersaults in the snow and run back and dive in. They sit there and you know when you want to do something cool, there’s that moment of like, “Huh, I can’t do that.” And the second that moment comes to them, they yell out “Yolo” and boom, they just go.

And I was like, how cool is that? This is way harder, what they’re doing, than what we’re trying to do in business every day. Yet, we come up with plan and this idea and this obstacle and we’re like, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do.” And all the sudden your brain starts talking to you and your brains like, “You can’t do that. You’re Russell Brunson, you barely graduated high school. You’re super awkward, when you talk people won’t know why you came to talk to people.” All these things start flooding into your mind.

What happens to most of us is we sit there like, “Man, you’re right. I am just Russell Brunson. I’m really not that good. I barely graduated from school. Yeah when I get in a group and I talk one on one with people I have no idea. I feel awkward, I don’t know what to say most of the time.” And all these thoughts keep flooding your head and if you listen to them long enough, you start believing them and you have so much fear and anxiety when there are things there, you just don’t take that action.

And I think what’s interesting, is that they’re flooding their mind with, as soon as those things start coming up, “Yolo.” Boom, they just take off and they go. I think for all of us, if we start doing that think how powerful that would be. If just every time something comes to us, like an idea, when we have that idea, that inspiration, and I think those inspirations aren’t just from our brain. I wish that I was that smart, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s coming from on high. I think that you can call it whatever you want, for me it’s my Heavenly Father. I think we are inspirations we get from him. “Hey you should try this thing. Hey you should take this leap of faith. Hey you should go talk to this person. Hey you should create this. Hey you should test…..” Whatever those things are.

Those are gifts that we’re getting and it’s like, okay go do it and all the fear and self doubt comes in and stops it most of the time. If we start becoming like my insane kids are, and the second you have the idea and you know it’s right, because you know it pretty quick. Should I do this, yes I should. Oh but…..as soon as that, right before that but comes off, yell out at the top of your lungs, if you’re in a spot where you can, if not say it in your head as loud as you can, “Yolo.” Y O L O, you only live once. “Yolo.” And just go, just run, just sprint, don’t even think because once that inspirations coming to you, it’s there and if you believe like I do, it was given to you from a higher power, whatever that might be for you, then you’re hesitation to that is, and I believe in an adversary. There’s God and there’s the opposite side of that, there’s Satan or whatever you want to call it, that tries to take things from us.

So as soon as you have this inspiration, “This is what I need to do.” The adversary is going to come and start self doubt and try to keep you from doing that thing that could change your life and change other people’s lives. So I think one of the most powerful things we can do is yell out, “Yolo.” The second we get inspiration and start running, just sprint.

Ellie just walked in, I’m going to ask her. Hey Ellie, what does Yolo mean to you guys when you say “Yolo” and start running in the snow?

Ellie: I don’t know.

Russell: You don’t know? What does it stand for?

Ellie: I can’t remember.

Russell: You don’t….

Ellie: Wait….you only live once or something like that.

Russell: You only live once. Then tell us some of the crazy stuff you guys are doing after you yell Yolo.

Ellie:  we were walking in the snow.

Russell: She’s being all shy now. Let me ask Bowen. Bowen just came in. Hey Bowen, what does Yolo mean to you?

Bowen: You only live once.

Russell:  So what are the things you do when you yell Yolo, what do you do?

Bowen: Dallin says spend it, you only have one life so spend it stupidly. He actually told me what it says and I’m like, oh that makes sense. (kind of inaudible, this is a guess.)

Russell: Then what do you do, you say Yolo, then what kind of crazy things do you do?

Bowen: Jump in the snow, ankles hurt to death.

Ellie: It’s fun.

Russell: It’s fun? How many times did you run around the house?

Bowen: 5 times.

Russell: 5 times.

Ellie: When our cousins were here I went two times around the house.

Russell: Does Yolo help you to not freak out when it gets cold? What does it help you do?

Bowen: It kills you.

Russell: Oh it kills you. So Yolo is the challenge. There it is from the mouths of kids. So that’s what I want to recommend, start thinking about that, think Yolo. When you get that inspiration that you know what’s right, before the self doubt, the adversary, whatever it is that you think, whatever it is, I don’t care. But things start popping into your head about why you can’t or shouldn’t or you’re probably not worthy to do it. Whatever those things pop up, just shout Yolo at the top of your lungs and start running. That’s the key.

And it hurts right? Did you hear that. Tell them, it hurts right.

Kids: I get tons of scratches. It was before the acid rains….

Russell: it was before the acid rains. But was it worth it?

Kids: running around the house before was softer.

Russell: Before the snow hardened it was more worth it?

Kid: Yeah.

Russell: Ellie says it was worth it though, right? You only live once, you might as well do it. Otherwise, think if you didn’t do it, would you regret it?

Kid: Yeah

Russell: You would regret it?

Kid: I’d still be running around the house if the snow wasn’t that hard. I mean, it would be a lot more fun.

Russell: Would you regret it if you yelled Yolo and sat in the hot tub, would you regret it?

Kid: yeah, because I’d be burning to death.

Russell: Because the hot tub’s too hot. Plus your life would be boring. Would your life be boring if you did nothing and just sat there the whole time?

Kid: inaudible.

Russell: Alright, they’re being goofy now. Alright, so Yolo, you guys. That is the message for today. Tattoo it on your forehead, on your hand, on your t-shirt. No tattoos though. Temporary tattoos?

Kid: yeah.

Russell: K you can do temporary tattoos. Anyway…

Ellie: Or permanent marker.

Russell: or Ellie says permanent marker, not permanent marker. Just a marker you can do it with. I don’t know if you heard Ellie, if you take a shower it will wash off. Anyway, the key though is, when the self doubt comes, after the inspiration comes and the self doubt comes, Yolo. Run, get out of the hot tub and start running before your brain can talk you out of it. Because it will if you’re not careful. So Yolo. Appreciate you guys. Have a great day and we’ll talk to you soon.

Jan 11, 2017

A quick glimpse behind the scenes of what I'm really doing to build and launch my funnels.

On this episode Russell talks about being the contractor of your business and finding awesome people to do the work you need to get done. He also talks about failing and why you should expect to fail many times before you find something that works.

Here are some of the informative things you will hear in today's episode:

  • How Russell realized that his role in his company is similar to that of the contractor building his new office.
  • Why on average it takes 12 failures before millionaires are successful and it's not based on luck.
  • And what the concept "You're just one funnel away" really means.

So listen below to find out why finding good people and failing is actually really important in building a successful business.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to Marketing In Your Car. Sorry, I just get excited. Anyway, it’s crazy here. We’ve had 5 snow days in a row, but today the kids finally, finally got to go back to school, which is nice. But everything is soaking wet. It’s been raining and flooding. Our house flooded. We have a lot of damage. So that’s kind of a nightmare.

But the good news is we just went to the new office and it’s getting close to done. We’re about two weeks away from moving into it, which is the most exciting thing in the world. And as we’re sitting here in the office, and I thought about it last night. Last night I finished, I finished! What? I finished the Expert Secrets book. At least this round of it. This is the most painful round of edits thought. It took a lot of time. I have one more round of edits after this, but it’ll go away faster.

So I’m pretty much, for all intents and purposes done with the Expert Secrets book, I’m so proud of it. The crazy thing is it’s almost, its within like 100 words of the Dotcom Secrets book, which is weird. That was not planned, but it’s kind of cool too.

So when I got done with that it was 1 in the morning, so I started looking at all the cool projects we have. We use Trello, some of you guys know. James Friel got us set up on Trello, so I was thinking of the projects. So I sat down and I’m like, “Who are all the people involved in getting this project done? What are all the talks?” So I sat down last night and just busted out a whole bunch of Trello cards. Assigning people, getting them doing what they’re supposed to be doing. All the pieces. Then it was done and I went to bed and passed out and it was awesome.

Anyway, I was thinking about that versus how some of you are running your business and I want to just liken this also to the new office. I’m in a new office and the contractor dude is there, and he’s kind of showing us everything and what’s interesting as I look at this, is that the contractor didn’t actually do anything really. If you think about it, right? He was sitting there and he got paid by me, I think, I don’t know how much contractors take, 10, 20, 30% or whatever, they get paid a bunch of money.

So we pay him and he’s like, “Cool.” So then he goes and is like, “Alright, we need a designer.” And hires a designer. And he’s like “Oh, we need someone to do this part.” And he hires someone. And all the contractor’s really good at doing is just knowing what are all the pieces that need to go into launching, or to completing and building, and then hopefully he’s put in time to find really good sub-contractors to do each of those pieces. And that’s it. And he gets paid the lion’s share of the project. And all he’s doing is he’s just figured out what are all the pieces that go into building an office, or house or whatever the project is. And then who are all the people I need to hire to do those pieces.

I was thinking about that, for me with our funnels and stuff, that’s all it is. Because I’ve done it so many times, I’ve done this now I think I’m on my thirteenth year or so of this business. Some people are funny, “How come all the things you do are successful.” The reason why is because I built up a really good team of people over the last 12 years. I look at myself almost like the contractor in my business. I know all the pieces that go into us successfully launching something. I don’t have to rethink that, I just know it. It’s second nature now because I’ve done it so many times.

There was a time and a season of my life where we were literally launching something at least once a month and if that once a month thing would fail, we would do one every single week until one didn’t fail because that’s how we had to pay payroll. It was a nightmare, but we launched things all the time. Because of that, I know the process. I know that to get something launched here all the things. I know everything inside of my head. And because I’ve been doing it so long, every single time I’m finding, initially it was me doing everything. But then I realized I’m not very good at design, so I hired a designer. Then I realized this and I hired…..I probably hired a hundred designers in the last 12 years. Now I know 3 or 4 that I really liked and I now I just work with those 3 or 4 people.

I probably hired a hundred website builders. I hired a hundred programmers, probably a thousand programmers. I’ve done all these things over the years, and from that I’ve got my hands full of 4 or 5 favorites. So when I know I have a project done, I know Rob’s going to do this, so and so’s going to do this, boom, boom, boom. I task the whole thing out and everyone starts working on it. And what’s cool for me, as the contractor, this isn’t true in all cases, but in the building, the people can’t frame the building until the person is finished doing the foundation. There’s things that have to go in order.

With what we do in our business, most people can do their thing independent of everyone else. The video guy can do videos independent of everyone else. The designers can do that. The copywriters, everyone do the thing indepently. The goal is getting everyone to start on all the pieces as soon as humanly possible. Everyone is doing the pieces and they start coming in and then the last step, which for me as a person is my favorite part, so I do it now. But I could have outsourced the part. For me it’s like, here’s all the pieces now, these are all the things I needed to get this funnel done, now I just need to plug them all in. Because of Clickfunnels, I just plug them in. And obviously I work with Steven Larsen on my team.

We plug all the pieces in and it’s ready to launch. But if you look at all the projects I have, what’s interesting is I’ve got the next probably 10 funnels completely done. Front end project is done, everything is done. I just have to, all the assets are sitting in Trello boards finished just waiting for me to say, “Okay, I’m ready to launch this one.” Then I login, spend a day and plug all the pieces in and boom it’s ready to go.

In fact, yesterday we were working on the Funnel University Newsletter, if you’re not a member of Funnel University yet, by the way, you’re insane. Go to funnelu.com. Anyway, we were…. I got a……are you kidding me? Road closure. Dangit. There’s some huge pot holes up here. Okay, so now I’m on a road closure and I’m going through a neighborhood and I have no idea. Dang, I’m really bad at these kind of things. I’m so bad at directions. I’m just going to follow the headlights in front of me and pray they’re going the same direction I’m going.

Anyway, where did I leave off? So yesterday we were doing January’s Funnel University Newsletter and in the newsletter I was showing the Marketing In Your Car funnel, which we reacently launched and you have all seen. The strategy behind it, the marketing in your car funnel was a couple of reasons. One was to get you guys all indoctrinated listening to Marketinginyourcar.com every single day. That was number one, number two is to get more subscribers. Number three, this was actually our core reason, is I’m trying to get people to join Funnel University. You probably saw that in the upsell sequence.

Yesterday in the newsletter I was showing how basically if you look at probably the next dozen funnels we roll out, they will be new, cool front ends to help build our cult-ture and get people excited about Clickfunnels. So different swag things, different cool things, but then the upsell sequence is all pushing, the upsell sequence is identical, it does not change. So I literally in 40 minutes, and I record the whole process, all the Funnel U. Members will be able to see it inside the new forum we’re setting up for you guys. I took the Marketing In Your Car funnel and cloned it.

I already had the video done, I already had the graphics. Everything was already done weeks ago, months ago actually. I just drag and drop, boom, boom, in 40 minutes the new funnel is ready to launch and it was done. It came because I knew, whatever, 6 months ago, that I wanted to do a project called Funnel Graffiti. I knew, in fact, it’s been almost a year, because we gave out funnel Graffiti at the last Funnel Hacking Live event, so it’s been a year. So then we filmed the video this summer.

But I tasked all this stuff out a long time ago, so it’s all sitting there done and as soon as I’m ready to launch it, it was done. So it took 45 minutes to launch this funnel because I had all these things done. So that’s the powers, if all of us as marketers start looking more at our business as we’re contractors as opposed to the actual sub-contractor working, and you can sub-contract out to yourself, especially the stuff you like to do, I’m guessing if you’re like me, you like building stuff in Clickfunnels, so sub-contract that out to you or a certified partner or whatever. But look at yourself more as a contractor, and become a master at understanding what are all the pieces that go into launching a funnel.

And the funny thing is that the only way to know all the pieces that go into launching a funnel, is by launching a funnel. In fact, I try to get this through people’s minds all the time. Because everyone thinks their first funnel is going to be a winner, right. So they create this funnel and go through all the pain and heartache and headache that go through making your first funnel. And there’s a lot. You have to figure out how to write copy, to edit pages, and images and videos and orders and products. There’s so much crap that goes into your first one and then it’s horrible.

And most of the time your first one will fail, you will not make any money. In fact, most of the time you will lose money. It’ll be a bucket of money with a hole in the bottom and the cash will be pouring out of it. But you have to be okay with that because the only way for you to learn every single step in the process, for you, is to do it once.

Always tell people that the first funnel, you’re going to spend so much time and effort, and it might fail. In fact, you’re probably going to fail but you gotta be okay with that. Because it’s not about you launching this funnel and making a bunch of money, its about you as a new contractor, a new funnel builder learning a new process, all the pieces that go into that. Because after you do it once you’re like, “Dang, well now I know I need this and this. I hired these people, this guy sucked and this one was awesome. I’m not going to hire him again, I’m going to hire a new person.” And you keep doing that over and over again and eventually after you launch three, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty funnels, whatever that is, you will have your dream team of people that are working with you. You will know exactly who to go to every single time.

And if you fast forward six months to a year from now, you’re going to be in the same situation I am. I don’t fail anymore because I know our team. I know what our market wants. I know who is going to do each piece of it, so I can quickly create something and just have it work really, really quickly. For you guys that’s the goal.

I had two interviews yesterday from people that were asking about the whole “You’re just one funnel away” concept, that’s the theme of this year’s Funnel Hacking Live event. And I wanted, during those interviews I explained, “Look, you’re just one funnel away, you don’t know which funnel that is. I wish I could show you guys the landscape of failed funnels that I’ve had in my 12 years in this business.” I’ve got more failed funnels that I could show you, than I guarantee most of you guys have ever even dreamt of attempting. But because of that, that’s how I built my team. How I figured out what didn’t work. I’ve mastered the process. All the pieces that go in there like the back of my hand. I don’t have to think anymore, it just happens.

So today, excuse me, last night I was like, “here’s the project, here are all the pieces.” I tasked them all out and now everyone’s working on them. I’m not sure when we’ll launch that project, but I do know that the second I’m ready for it, all the pieces will be there and I don’t have to think about it at that point. I’m digging my well before I’m thirsty. I’m getting all the things in place.

So think about that you guys. Again, this whole concept, “You’re one funnel away” Is so powerful. You don’t know which funnel it’s gonna be. You’ve gotta keep building, walking, trying, failing, moving forward. A really cool, I might have shared this with you guys before so forgive me if I have, but it’s worth repeating. Probably almost ten years ago now, maybe even more, I got this Jay Abraham course and I was listening to it. And one of the speakers was Brian Tracey. I had never heard Brian Tracey speak before and he was on stage, and it was just, I loved what he was saying.

I remember what he talked about; he said that one day he was watching this TV show with a bunch of millionaires. It was like a news talk show or whatever. There’s like twelve millionaires on stage and they were interviewing them and asking a bunch of questions. And the host asks a question, “How many times did you guys have to fail on average before you had success?” and they didn’t know off the top of their heads, so they cut to commercial. During the commercial break they did all the math and figured it out. They came back, and this panel of people, they said that they figured on average, they’d each failed about 12 times before they had success.

Brian Tracey said something interesting, he said, “Do you think that they just tried something and failed, tried something and failed. And on average the 12th time they got lucky and it finally worked? Or do you think that the first time they did it, they didn’t have the resources or the connections, or people, or idea or whatever, but they did it and it failed. The second one, they did it and it failed. The third, they did it and it failed. Each time they failed they learned something. And they figured something out and literally by the 12th time, they had failed every way possible.” By the 12th time they knew how this process worked and there was no way they can fail at that point.

It’s like Thomas Edison, he said when he, every time he failed the light bulb, he was like I figured out a new way to not build a light bulb. He had a thousand ways he tried and didn’t work, but he didn’t look at those as failures. That way didn’t work, that way didn’t work. Cool, this way it worked. We gotta look at things that way as well, you guys. So many of us are getting into this like, ”I want a million dollar webinar.” And I’m like, dude that’s awesome, but you gotta put in the work man. Let me tell you how many decades of effort. I guess just one. But I mean, for me to be able to do what I do now, we can do a webinar and make half a million bucks, it didn’t just come magically. It came on the back of ten years of failing and failing and trying and failing and building a team, and learning and growing and learning and growing and coming to that.

Obviously, we’ve tried to give you guys a lot of short cuts. Perfect Webinar is a short cut. Clickfunnels is a short cut. Honestly, Facebook’s a short cut. Facebook’s the greatest gift to marketers right now, in the world. And I don’t think it will be here forever, but it’s here now and it’s amazing. All these short cuts, so hopefully you guys don’t have to spend ten years, but do know you are going to have to spend some time. And do know you are going to fail, but if you keep it in your mind that you’re just one funnel away….I don’t know if that funnel is today, tomorrow, a month from now, six months from now, but if you have that in your mind knowing with absolute certainty that one of these funnels is going to be the one, it’s going to be the freedom maker for you. You have absolute certainty of it, you keep building, moving forward, pushing, I promise you will hit that. But you have to have absolute certainty that it’s going to happen.

One of the interviews yesterday, someone asked me, “What was the “why” behind what got you into this thing and why you push yourself so hard?” I said, “When I got started, I was watching these people online who were having success. Back then in was Armand Morin, Alex Mandossian, Marlin Sanders, my mentors. Mark Joyner. All I know is I looked at these guys and I believed them. I believed that what they were doing was making them money and because I saw them doing it, I had 100% absolute certainty that it worked and that I could make it work. I didn’t know how, but I was positive that I could and it would. Because of that I didn’t stop. Because I had perfect that it was going to work, so I just started running and running and running.”

 I think a lot of problems that some of us have is that we don’t have faith. “I think this can work. I think this can work for me.” And because of that you try and dabble and try and dabble and doing quite go all in, but if you know with absolute certainty that there’s no way this is going to fail, it’s going to take you a bunch of times, but you know that’s it’s gonna work. It’ll push you through the hard nights, the failures, the funnel flops. But it’ll be worth it. I promise you guys it’s worth it. It’s not only worth it for you and your family, because the money that comes from it is amazing, but it’s worth it for the people you are serving with the products and service you are creating.

You will touch their lives in a way that doesn’t make sense to you now, but when you see it and you see the fruits of that, it’s pretty amazing. So I want to leave that with you guys today. I hope that helps. I’m at the office now. I’m going from the new amazing office to the old crappy office. In the old crappy office two more weeks or so, then we’re out of here.

Appreciate you all, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, or any of them, please go to iTunes and rate and review us, I’d appreciate that. Please become an affiliate for Marketing In Your Car, free MP3 player, let people know about it because that’d be cool. Thanks you guys. Appreciate you all, have an awesome day. Bye everybody.

Jan 10, 2017

Some cool stuff I learned during day #1 of Snowpocalypse.

On this episode Russell talks about how he is preparing for the predicted upcoming Snowpocalypse in Boise. He also tells some of the things he has learned while driving around and listening to marketing courses.

Here are some fun things you will hear in today's episode:

  • Why Russell had to get up early to prepare for a crazy storm coming to Boise, and hear some of the interesting things he bought.
  • What courses he listened to while he drove around preparing for the storm.
  • And what he learned by listening to those courses along with some things he learned from his own experience.

So listen below to find out how Russell is preparing for severe weather in Boise, but still learning about marketing at the same time.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell again, hope you guys are doing awesome. It is Snowpocalypse here in Boise, so they told us last night. At 1:30 I got an email from Brent, on my team. It was a video from Vin Crosby, the local news dude, it was a ten minute long thing talking about why the next 5 to 7 days is going to be insane. He talked about basically getting a foot of snow that should be starting in about 15 minutes from right now. Then after the snow comes, the next day it’s supposed to rain ice, so it’s going to rain like an inch of worth of water that will instantly turn to ice. Which he said will probably break tons of trees and power lines, which means we got no power, which means basically there’s a good shot there’ll be no power for the next 4 or 5 days. I’m like, “What?”

That was at 1:30 in the morning last night. So I’m like, crap I’m probably the last person to know about this. I don’t watch the news. So I was going to go race to the store last night, but then I woke up my wife and she’s like, “Everything is closed right now.” So we set my alarm for 6am this morning. The alarm goes off, I jump into the car and head on this journey to save my family from snowpocalypse, which is really fun.

I first went to Walmart because they opened earliest. Got tons, like 5 pallets of water and toilet paper, those kind of necessities. Then I went to Fred Meyer and bought food and, it’s funny, Brent was there. I bumped into Brent. It was so funny. I’m like, “Hey, what are you doing? How funny that you’re here.”  He had these two space heaters. I’m like, “Oh I’ve got 5 space heaters in my house.” And he’s like, “But you plug them in, right?” I’m like, “Oh crap, yes.” And he’s like, “Well these are ones that run on propane, you need to get one of those.” So I got a propane thing. That was at Walmart. So Walmart was out of propane, so that’s why I went to Fred Meyer.

At Fred Meyer I bought 20 canisters of propane. Each propane thing will keep the heater going for 3 to 6 hours. So I got enough to keep me warm in a tiny room warm for 5 days if we need it. And then we got food and stuff so that was awesome. Then Brent was like, “I went over here and I got a generator.” I was like, “Oh!” So I run over here to get a generator, they were all sold out. So I went to another place, they were sold out. But then luckily Dave found generators not sold out.

And then I went to Dicks Sporting Goods, trying to find a generator, but instead I bought a whole bunch of stuff for the wrestling room. So the wrestling room is all prepped out as well. They canceled church tomorrow, which if you know anything about Mormon’s, we don’t cancel church. So something crazy is about to happen. So we’re all ready for it. The kids are all excited, they’re getting their little tents sent up and everything, and likely nothing is really going to happen. But if it does, we’re prepared.

So I’ve been Snapchatting my whole preppers journey. But while I was doing this whole thing, it’s been probably 4 or 5 hours that I’ve been on the road going back and forth from my house to the store, from my house to the store, I’ve been listening to a whole bunch of cool stuff. In fact, I’ve gone through about a day and a half of the 5 thousand dollar seminar while I was here. While I’ve been doing this.

It’s amazing you can learn so much. So what I want to share with you guys today, is some internet marketing math. Some numbers for you all. This is a little different than, I’ve done math episodes in the past but here’s some key metrics for you guys to look at. Maybe we’ll call it the KPI episode. So here’s some KPI’s-Key Performance Indicators for your business. Hopefully these will help.

Some of these I’ve had in my business for a long time, some of these I picked up today, which were kind of cool. So we’ll start at the very beginning. The first thing is you should know that on average you will make about $1 per name for each person on your list. Honestly, it should be higher than that, but that should be the baseline. You should make at least that if you are emailing your list and actually communicating with them. So that means if you have a thousand people on your list you should be making at least $1000 a month. Ten thousand people on your list, 10 grand a month. Thirty thousand people on your list, 30 grand a month and so on and so forth.

The first time I ever heard that, I set a goal. I said, “Crap, I want a hundred thousand people on my list.” And that became my focus. And sure enough, just like I was told and I heard, my income stayed very similar to that for a long time. And by the time I passed a hundred thousand people on my list, I was making a hundred grand a month. So for you guys that are setting goals, make that the first goal. Goal number one is that.

Again, $1 per month, per name is on the lower end of the spectrum. Right now I look at our company and we are almost $8 per name on our list. We got a big list. So yes, that’s on the low end. Just to kind of have the metric to shoot towards. So there’s number one.

Number two metric is, and this is kind of cool, I learned today. On the continuity program, so if you have someone one a print newsletter or a membership site or whatever it is, there was this test they were talking about. They said that for the test on average, for every dollar someone spends with you for continuity, they will spend $3 more with you throughout the year. So if they’re paying $40 a month, they’re going to average, whatever that is. So every dollar in continuity, they’re going to spend $3 more with you. So that’s kind of cool.

Dan Kennedy used to tell me that for thousand people you have in a continuity program, it’s an extra million dollars in revenue you will make that year. And I started looking, after that I launched a print newsletter and sure enough, just like he said, for every thousand people I had on my continuity program, we were making a million dollars a year in revenue. It didn’t come directly from the continuity program, but it came from, because they’re members of your continuity they will start buying other things. So they will buy, who knows, coaching programs, upsells, other products, things like that. Because they are getting it, they will spend three times as much money with you when they’re a continuity member than they will when they are not.

So that’s the second thing. If I were looking at your business I would be looking at how many subscribers do I have? How many people are on continuity right now paying me monthly? So that’s the next metric. And then the third one I want to share with you that’s kind of cool. Matt Furey is on this course I’m listening to from probably ten years ago, so it’s older. One thing he said that was awesome, he said, “You should try to get at least 500 people to buy from you a month.” Obviously first off you have to try to get one person to buy from you. But after you got customers, it’s happening; people need to make at least 500 transactions a month with you.

I started thinking about that, it goes back to the RFMS thing that we talked about 2 or 3 episodes ago. Recency, Frequency, things like that. But if you think about that, you need to be getting your customers buying at least 500 purchases, need to be happening per month. Obviously for me, we’re way past that. But it’s still a good metric, a good number to look at.

So there’s some new metrics for you guys. Hope that helps a little bit. Because for me, when I look at things, it’s funny whatever we measure grows. If you look at sports, without changing anything else, your lifting routine, your eating, anything, as soon as you start measuring stuff, it grows. It’s like a magic trick. So those are the three things you can start measuring. First off, how many people are on my list. That should be something you look at daily. When I first started doing this I was like man, I wanted a big list. So I start looking, I’m like oh I’m adding twenty people a day. I started looking and I started growing 20 to 30. 30 to 50, 50 to 100, 100 to 200, 200 to 500, 500 to 1000. You already know, we’re trying to get 1000 people a day on our list. That metric grew because we looked at it. So looking at subscribers.

Number two looking at your continuity members. I don’t know about you guys but we’re obsessed with Clickfunnels. Looking at our metrics on that. And Funnel University, the same thing, I got a goal, we are just shy of 30 thousand active members in Clickfunnels, as of today and our goal is 100 thousand by the end of next year. So we’ve got to look at that number a lot, because we have to add a lot of people to get that number. But it’s definitely attainable, we can get it.

In Funnel University, our goal is to have 10 thousand members in Funnel University, but I gotta look at that number and consistently have it in front of me. So my CPA’s gotta email me that every single day so I know what’s the number. Because if I’m looking at it, then it’s gonna grow.

Then the third metric for you guys to look at is frequency of purchasing. Trying to get, make sure there’s at least 500 transactions a month going through your merchant account. If not, you need to be doing fire sales, you need to be doing cool things, you need to be doing free plus shipping, whatever it is to get your people to buy more consistently. So that should be another metric.

So there you go, there’s three metrics for you. A dollar per name per month. A thousand people paying continuity is worth a million dollars a year to you. And you need to be getting 500 transactions a month coming into your merchant account. And if you do those things, you’ll have a very healthy business. So there’s three cool numbers to look at and measure. I hope that helps. I’m home, I’m going to unload firewood I bought today and all the other toys and food and if I don’t survive the snowpocalypse, tell my parents and everyone else who’s not here in Boise that I love them. We will talk to you guys all again soon. Thanks everybody.

Jan 9, 2017

The process of going from hot to warm to cold traffic.

On today's episode Russell talks about re-launching the Marketing In Your Car podcast and how that is going. He also talks about building a Dream 100 list and how that helps you grab big piles of cash before trying to market to a cold audience.

Here are some cool things in this episode:

  • The exciting new things happening with the Marketing In Your Car podcast.
  • Why Russell tells people in his Inner Circle to grab the piles of cash in front of them before doing extra work to market to a cold audience.
  • Find out what is happening with Russellbrunson.com and how you'll be able to watch him go from 0 to a million of his books sold.
  • And how you can watch the each process by subscribing to the podcast, following Russell's blog, and by watching Funnel Hacker TV.

So listen below to hear Russell's thoughts on the podcast, and his Dream 100 list.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to a freezing cold Marketing In Your Car. Boise has been covered in feet of snow, not foot, feet. Many feet of snow. Everything has been frozen. We’ve had three snow days in a row, back to back to back. But I had to get to the office today because we were doing a webinar, and I don’t trust my home internet connection as much as the office. Plus I miss everybody, I wanted to see them all again. I’ve been working from home the last few days.

I still haven’t finished the book, it’s killing me. But we did get launched the Marketing In Your Car free MP3 player. So if you haven’t got yours yet go to marketinginyourcar.com. I’m guessing though if you’re listening right now, you’re probably on. We had to do a couple of things, I think I told you. Our old RSS feed, I totally screwed up on so we retired that podcast. So it’s, that one’s kind of paused. It says archived image there. And then if you come to the new one, that’s the one you’re listening to right now. And we’re all hanging out and having fun over here.

And what’s been fun, by kind of restarting the thing and launching the free MP3 player, we were able to do a new launch around it, which is fun. So we’ve got over a thousand people in the first 24 hours have gotten a free MP3 player. So hopefully a thousand of you guys are listening to this, or more, that are new. And hopefully we’ll keep growing. I just appreciate all of you guys sharing and all the good feedback for the podcast. Makes me happy.

In fact, today was really, really cool. One of my friends, he’s the Clickfunnels member and someone I met, I think at the first Funnel Hacking event, anyway, his name is Travis Cody. He sent me, I got this box in the mail today and I opened it up and there’s a video playing on the screen of this box, talking and it’s Travis talking. And then I looked down and inside of the box there’s these two huge books, and I pull them out and a lot of you guys know I’m Mormon, so there’s a Book of Mormon. It looks like a special font on it, different color and everything. And it looks like two Book of Mormons, but it’s the Book of Brunson. I’m like, what? I open it up and it’s all of my podcasts put in this book. It was the coolest gift I’ve ever gotten.

I don’t know, he says he’s got an idea, so maybe we’re going to start selling these as an actual product, but it was super cool. So I got the Book of Brunson now. So if I start quoting scripture, I’m like, “The Book of Brunson, Chapter 2, Verse 16.” You’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s all coming from this podcast. It was a super cool gift from him. So thank you Travis if you’re listening. Appreciate that, it was really fun. It’s just been fun re-getting excited about this podcast. I’ve been doing it for so long now and at first, I don’t think anyone listened for a long time. But I was doing it because I thought it was fun.

And the cool thing is that, because of the way I set up the RSS feed, I had no way to check if people are actually listening. Which is actually helpful because then I didn’t know if anyone was listening, so I didn’t assume people were listening. Now,  a few years later, I know we’ve got a lot of listeners. Now that we’re moving things over I’ll actually be able to see how many people are listening and downloads and all that kind of stuff. So that will be kind of fun. But regardless, it’s something I enjoy and it’s been hugely beneficial for me, just to get out my thoughts and ideas and what I’m thinking.

And you guys have obviously have been a huge sounding board for me as we’ve gone from near bankruptcy when I started this podcast, to where we’re at today. And I just appreciate you guys listening and sharing and commenting. So if you guys are listening, please I love for you to come and comment on the new feed because we switched over, obviously there were zero stars, I think we’re like 35 or 40 stars now, so that’s good. But the more you guys can come and comment, let me know. Right now, especially for the next week or two, I’m really intently reading comments. So feel free to drop a comment. I’m sure I’ll read it, which will be kind of fun.

With that said, welcome to the podcast, those of you guys who are new. So for those who are new, the way this works is as I’m driving to the office and back I just share cool ideas and things we are working on and stuff that I think would be helpful for you. I’m heading home from the office right now. I had a webinar today with JLD, John Lee Dumas, which was fun and worked awesomely. We helped serve his people well. We sold a bunch of Clickfunnels, which is the key to happiness for me and for them as entrepreneurs, as you know, which is really cool.

And then afterwards we had a Dream 100 meeting. What is a Dream 100? As you listen and you guys catch up on my podcast, I talk about this a lot, but this is the foundation of promotion of business for me. So go back and find some of those calls where we go deeper. Basically Dream 100, who are the 100 people in your market that have your dream customers on their list right now, and how can you get them to promote you to their audience?

When we launched the Dotcom Secrets book, we built the dream 100 list, and we started sending people Dream 100 gifts in the mail. We sent them copies of the new book that was coming out, we sent Ferrari key chains because we were giving away a Ferrari.  We did all these cool things, we kept sending them out. And we did that to get people to promote. And it’s funny because from that Dream 100 campaign, we got a whole bunch of people promoting the book that I didn’t have relationships with at all.

We found who were all the top business podcasters that are out there. So I had a bunch of them and we started sending them the book and stuff. John Lee Dumas was one of them, I never met him at the time. A couple of days later I get an email saying, “Russell, your book is awesome. I want to promote it.” And now we’ve done 3 funnel hack webinars, he’s sold a few thousand copies of my book and we’ve made a bunch of money together. And it came from the Dream 100 concept. John was just one of the many people we did it with. But I built lists of 100 people, and honestly my Dream 100 list keeps growing and growing.

And that’s what today’s meeting was about, kind of trimming that down. Who’s our Dream 100 for my next book launch coming up in April? And we’re putting those things together and kind of mapping out a strategy. And a couple of things I want to know. One thing, the book launch is at the end of April, so we’re like almost 3 1/2 months away. And we’re doing this now. A big part of this is digging the well before you’re thirsty.

A lot of you will launch a product and then start going and bugging JV partners and stuff and it’s like no, do that work ahead of time. So we’re planning out now, we’ll be contacting everyone and getting people information so they can get it on the calendar,  and we’ll be sending copies of the book as soon as they come out.

We’re trying to prepare for that and get it ready and build a good relationship with everybody before that. Just to kind of get people excited for the book. But it’s the foundation. So what’s cool is we have our new reality show that’s close to done called Funnel Hacker TV as well. So we filmed the Dream 100 process today so you guys will be able to see it soon. You’ll see how this is the foundation for everything we do in our business, building that list of partners. And initially…..my biggest goal of the Dream 100, if I can get them to promote my book or whatever the thing is that we’re selling, that’s the best. If I can get them to promote on a podcast, or through their blog or email, that’s number one. So we try that initially, but a lot of people can’t or won’t.

So after that is done, we try the first phase, which is let’s get them to promote it, that’s a warm audience, excuse me that’s the hot. We got the hot and transition down to warm. The warm audience may not know me but I can market to Toni Robbins’ followers, or Tim Farris’ followers, or things like that on Facebook, so that’s a warm audience. People may know Toni and not me, but I can create a bridge page that bridges that gap between Toni and me, and then get them to buy the book or whatever the thing is, register for the webinar.

So we start building bridge pages to our warm audience to bring them from there over. So that’s the second thing, taking the Dream 100 list we have and then going after them as a warm audience. We’re advertising directly to them as opposed to Toni or someone directly marketing to his people. So that’s phase number two in our Dream 100.

And then phase number three is to go into cold traffic and stuff like that. So one cool thing we’re doing that’s not live yet, but may be live by the time you guys get this. Changing up Russellbrunson.com. So again, depending on when you go there. If you go there and see a picture of me standing there with a bunch of links around the sides of me, that’s the new one. I’m doing this blog and the blog I’m going to be documenting this journey of how we’re doing this whole thing from the dream 100 to the book launch and trying to take you on a journey from how we went from 0 to selling hopefully a million copies of my book. So that’s kind of cool.

So you’ll see the transitions we go from hot traffic, our own existing lists, then our partners lists, then shifting and transforming down to a warm audience. From there trying to saturate that, and from there transition down to a cold audience. And what’s the differences between going after warm traffic versus cold. Because it’s different. The way I position hot, if you’ve read the Dotcom Secrets book you know about hot traffic, warm traffic, cold traffic, but it’s different the way I sell to each of them.

So we start with the hot, it’s funny in my Inner Circle, everyone’s trying to convert cold traffic. I’m like, “Wait, there’s a huge pile of cash sitting right in front of you. Grab the big pile of cash first. That’s your warm market, grab them first. That’s the hot market, excuse me. Then there’s the warm market, which is one step back, that’s the next big pile of cash, so grab that before you go for the cold.” Make all the money you can out of the hot market, then go to the warm market, then you go to the cold. And each level of that process, moving from hot to warm to cold, the sales process, the funnels, the messaging, the language patterns, all those things change.

I’ll be sharing those and documenting them on the new Russell Brunson blog. How we went from 0 to a million copies of my book here over the next, I mean who knows how long it takes to get me a million bucks, probably a couple of years, which will be kind of cool.

We’re going to be doing all sorts of stuff. We already have in the works, plans to do infomercial, radio campaigns, mass market, PR. It’s going to be a ride. It’s going to be a fun journey. So hopefully you guys will come along on the journey with me. But just know that that’s kind of what we’re doing. The goal is to show the strategy. How we roll out a book and how we take that book and help it to, the Dotcom Secrets book, when we launched that, it was the foundation that got us, to now we’re almost 30 thousand active customers inside of Clickfunnels. So that’s the goal, how do we do that and how do we leverage a book or any kind of front end product, to build the back end of your company.

So that’s the journey that I’ll be taking you guys on. I hope you can join me for the ride. With that said, I’m home. In a day or two or whatever check out russellbrunson.com, check out the blog and we’ll start the first post. I already wrote the first post, and we’re going to start doing that once a week. Sharing the journey and showing you how many books we sold from each of the things and that’ll be the game plan. With that said, I’m home. Appreciate you guys, thanks for listening, thanks for subscribing. Please come comment and share, let me know what you’re thinking. I’m excited to be on this journey with you guys. Talk to you all again soon. Bye.

Jan 3, 2017

Something I'm testing to stimulate and increase the quality of our customers.

*****SPOILER ALERT****** In this episode of Marketing In Your Car, Russell spills the beans on the ending of Star Wars: Rogue One, so if you haven't seen it, skip ahead to 1:20. After that, he also talks about learning all about RFM (Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Value) from some old school guys and why he will be spending 2017 focusing on the frequency that his customers buy.

Here are some other cool things in this episode:

  • What Russell plans to do to increase the frequency at which his customers are purchasing.
  • Why it's important to keep your customers "Warm".
  • And find out what some of the cool things are that will be happening this year.

So listen below to learn what RFM is and why it's important for your business.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody! I hope you guys are doing awesome, it is New Year’s Eve morning. It’s the morning of the eve. I don’t know if that makes any sense. But I’m heading to the grocery store real quick to get some stuff for the party tonight. I’m really, really excited for it. Some cool things happening, just real quick.

For those of you guys who want a timeline for when, if you’re listening to this in the future, last night Rhonda Rousey fought what’s her name Nunez. The fight lasted less than 48 seconds, it was insane. I got home last night and seriously tried to find a pirated copy online because I had a hot date with my beautiful wife last night. It was crazy. I can’t even…I felt so bad for her. So that happened last night.

And last night I went and saw Star Wars Rouge One. I gotta tell you what, people are like, “Star Wars sucks. The new Star Wars is lame.” All these things, right.  It was amazing. I don’t know. The fact that, I don’t want to spoil it for you, but the fact that everybody dies at the end was amazing. That was actually, I mean it’s sad, but that was so cool for the story line. And then the fact that the very end that Darth Vader has his fight scene and going through thrashing everyone. How could someone not think that movie was not amazing? I don’t know, anyway, it was amazing.

It’s funny because I get done, and not that I’m easily amused, but if you listened to my podcast a while ago, I don’t know how much money they invested in that, but I paid $12 for the ticket. Insane, they entertained me for that long and it was amazing.  I loved it, it was really fun.

But I digress, because today I’ve been wanting to do a podcast because I have something that I’ve wanted to talk about for three days and I keep forgetting to talk to you guys about it. So I’m stopping everything, I almost did it last night at like two in the morning because I’m so excited but I was kind of tired. So I’m talking about it now. This is a cool thing I wanted to share with you guys because it was a big epiphany for me. In fact, let me catch up the last podcast. We told you about my goal, what we’re doing, trying to 3x the company. In one night we had three hundred thousand dollars in new money we had to make, it was insane. So we launched funnelimmersion.com, some of you saw that. Plus we went and hit all of our other Hail Mary passes. Of the five Hail Mary passes we threw up, almost all of them hit.

It was crazy, within 24 hours of me doing that podcast, we made over 500 thousand dollars and smashed our goal. It’s crazy. The last two days we didn’t even need to do anything. But then the next two days, because of the momentum of that first initial push, it was insane. So we did, well we’ll see what happens today, in the last 3 days we needed an extra 300 thousand dollars in money, and we made almost a million.

In fact, it’s crazy, for us to triple the company, and I didn’t know this until after we did it. I’m glad our accountant didn’t tell me, because I would have thought it was impossible if he would have told me. I’m so glad that sometimes people don’t tell you stuff. Belief is such a funny thing. But he told me after we had smashed the record he was like, “Just to put this in perspective, for you guys to beat your record, in December, the worst month in the industry, you would have had to make 40% of the money that you had actually made all of the last year.” I was like, “What?” It’s just crazy. We ended up doing, we made, actually hit 50% of last year’s revenue in December, which is crazy because last year was an 8 figure year. So 50% of our revenue. We basically got half of our money last year, in December. And way more than 3x’d our company from the year before, which is crazy.

So I feel bad for the morons in 2017 who are running this company, because they gotta 3x that again. Oh crap, that’s me. Dangit. I was like, “The more we do now, the more we have to do next year.” So it’ll just keep raising the bar.

Alright, so I’m going to step back. There’s so many other cool things I want to share with you guys. Funnel Hacker TV episode one is finished and it’s amazing. All the other ones are in production. The two comma club video and award thing is in process and almost done. There’s so many, I can’t even tell you guys how many cool things are happening right now. The new Marketing In Your Car mp3/funnel/element in the editor are all going to be live next week, next Thursday. I’ve been going for four and a half minutes and I didn’t talk about what I’m talking about because I’m so excited. There’s so many cool things happening

you guys. It’s just blowing my mind.

With all that kind of cool stuff happening. I want to share with you guys the gold nugget that I think is huge. That I can’t even, it’s going to be exciting. So here it is. For those of you guys, I feel fortunate that I got started, learning this game, back when the internet was just kind of getting new. So the only people to learn from, Corey Riddle was there. He was the pioneer, Corey Riddle. And then outside of him there was nobody that, there wasn’t a lot of people teaching. Then Armand Morin, there was a couple guys that came out, but there wasn’t a lot of stuff.

For me to learn this whole marketing game I had to go back to the old school. There’s no school like the old school. So I was learning from Gary Halpert and Dan Kennedy and Jay Abraham. So most of my foundation actually came from those guys. And then how do you actually apply it to internet marketing? And I feel bad because most of you guys who are listening now came in a day and age where there’s a million internet coaches and you miss a lot of this cool foundational stuff that I was blessed enough to get by studying these old legends.

So when I was learning from those guys, it was back, everything they were doing was direct mail. And I was always trying to figure out how to relate that back to what we’re doing. One of the big things, the way that direct mail would work is that you’d have an offer, you’d write a sales letter and you’d rent a list of people that are likely to buy your product. When you buy a list, how do you know if I’m getting a good list or a bad list. So these guys, I don’t know who it was that came up with it. But they came up a form to find out how good a list it actually is. So the formula was based on three letters. RFM. So RFM is like if you’re direct person this is second nature to you, if you’re not let me talk about what it is.

So RFM stands for Recency, Frequency, and then Monetary value. So RFM. So if I’m running a list, I want a list of people that have bought a business opportunity product. Let’s say I’m selling supplements, I want a list of people who have bought health supplements, or nerve supplements, whatever it is. So the first thing I want is Recency. Somebody who has purchased something recently. You might think that if someone bought something recently they’re not going to want my thing. No, it’s not true. One thing we know about buyers in heat, when somebody buys something, they buy a lot of things right around that period of time.

So if I’m selling a business opportunity, I want to sell somebody who’s recently bought a business opportunity. It kind of doesn’t make logical sense, but it makes perfect sense when you understand how buyers work. Think about when you first got into this business and you started learning about how to make money online, or whatever that thing was for you. You didn’t buy one thing. You were a buyer in heat and you bought a lot. So I want to sell to people who have bought things recently.

Second thing, is frequency. I want people who are buying things frequently. They didn’t just buy something once and you never hear from them again. I want someone who has bought five business opportunities in the last year. They’re frequently buying.

And the last one is M, Monetary value, people who are spending a lot of money. The more money they spend, the more they are likely to spend. People like me, I buy things recently, I buy things frequently, and I spend a lot of money. I’m like the dream buyer in the markets that I’m interested in. So RFM, that was the thing. So when I’m getting direct mail lists, the higher the RFM score is the more, the better that list is for me. What’s cool is in Clickfunnels, in Actionetics, those of you guys who’ve used the Actionetics, we haven’t started training hard core on this yet. That’ll be one of the big things for next year. But  we have an RFM score. In fact, we have an RFMS score.

So if you look at the action score in contacts. So if you’re in Actionetics, click on contact, and you’ll see a little circle in the top right hand corner, it looks really cool and it’s their RFMS score, it stands for Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value, and then the S stands for Social. Because one cool thing that the internet has brought to us is the ability to watch people socially and stuff like that. One of my buddies, Jeremy Shoemoney, he found out, he did some tests and he said that….he owned an auto-responder company for a while so he was doing all sorts of cool tests and monetizations and stuff. And one of the magic things he brought to my world, he found out that somebody who joined his list who used their actual Facebook email address, or social media email address that’s hooked to a real social account, is worth 80 times more money than somebody who uses a throw-away email address. 80 times.

In fact, if people opted in and they didn’t use their Facebook email address, he would just delete them as a record. He wouldn’t even use them because it was such a waste of energy to market to them. For us, we have social as well, so RFMS. So you get the score on each of your clients that comes and you say, “Oh wow. RFMS.” How valuable is this person to you.

So you’ll see in Actionetics in the future, RFMS is going to be a big thing we’ll be talking more about. But I digress, let me come back to what I’m talking about. So for me, I had this big epiphany this weekend. As we were doing this launch and people were buying stuff and getting in. There’s something about people buying and new excitement and new energy. We’re doing this Funnel Immersion sale, and we sold a lot of them and people were going crazy. And everyone on the Facebook group was trying to convince everyone else to buy. I felt bad, some people in the Facebook group were like, “So what’s actually in this? Russell never mentioned it. So why am I giving Russell money?” and they’re like, “Who cares? Just do it. Russell says buy it, just buy it.” And everybody in our group is just jumping in, it was awesome. It was the coolest thing ever.

So anyway, I started thinking about this. And this is the pro and the con of what we’ve been doing over the last two years. My audience, especially my inner circle members and hopefully you guys listening as well. We’ve gotten really good at doing a webinar a week and bringing new blood into your business. Everybody’s doing that. So they’re getting people to purchase but then it’s kind of stopping there. We’re not getting people to purchase more often and that’s why a lot of people’s businesses are struggling. They’re getting really good at selling the first product, but then they have nothing else to offer to our audience to monetize the list that we’ve built.

So I started thinking about this and I was like, so next week on Marketinginyourcar.com actually, it’s funny, you guys have been hearing this in the intro and the outro for a while. But we’re finally launching the mp3 player, and it’s amazing. So next Thursday we’re going to have a big launch around it, and we’re going to try to sell, I think I bought 7500 mp3 players. I think we’ll sell those in a week or so and then just go from there. I’m going to do a free plus shipping thing. And there’s not really, people are going to look at me like, “Russell this funnel is no good. You didn’t really monetize that well.” And it will, there’s actually, I think it’s a really cool funnel.

But you’re going to notice from me, I’m going to be putting out a lot of things, there just little front ends that are cool. T-shirts, just a lot of front end things, and the reason why, and I had this thing, if what we want our people doing. If someone wanted to rent a list and they’re looking for Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value, how do we stimulate those in our own lists? How do we stimulate?

So there’s different things, but I was looking at frequency. How do we stimulate frequency? No one’s ever talked about that, I’ve never thought about that before. The health of my customer list is going to be based on how frequently they’ve purchased from me. So if I don’t have very many opportunities for them to buy from me, they’re less likely to buy from me. And it’s hard to keep selling new info products. You’ve got to have a new hook, new angle. But I want people to keep buying from me. Because the act of buying is going to keep them warm.

In fact, I remember TJ Rohleder, he’s a bus op direct mail guy. I was talking to him one day and he was like, “Hey, you want to rent my list of buyers?” I was like, “What? Why would you do that?” and he was like, “The more they buy from you, the more they’re going to buy from me. I need to keep these guys frequently buying.” I was like, wow. How interesting. I never thought, it’s just such a different mindset from what I’ve always thought. Only sell them things every once in a while and build up the hype and make it this big thing. So for me, I think one of my big focuses for this year, I want to create frequency in my buying, in my customers buying habits. In your guys’. So I’m talking about you.

I want you buying from me often. In fact, I told my team that I want our customers buying something from us at least once a week minimum. I want that frequency up, because if they are buying once a week, they’re going to stay customers and they’re going to keep…..that’s the health of our list. If we want to increase the health of our list, we want to get them buying often. And I think my goal is at least once a week. So what I’m going to be doing, I’m going to try to create something cool once a week. Not like a new training program, or info product, those things are hard. But just a new thing, once a week, that you guys can buy from me.

So you’re going to see a couple of things. One, It’s going to be pulling out little pieces of like funnel Immersion. Funnel Immersion ended up with over a hundred hours of content, which is awesome. So I’m going to be pulling out little pieces of that, low ticket things, just to get people like, “Go buy this training on Tripwire.” Just pulling out little pieces. You’re going to see a lot more physical products, free plus shipping t-shirts. Free plus shipping shoes. Free plus shipping Clickfunnels bottles. Tons of little swag things that aren’t, I’m not going to make any money on them. But I’m just going to be stimulating frequency in my customers. Frequency in purchasing from my customers to increase the health of my list.

These aren’t going to become front end offers, we’re driving big Facebook ads to it, trying to optimize the campaign and all that stuff. No. I’m talking about the only goal of these things, is to increase the frequency of the buying patterns of my customers and then build a cult-ture. Because they’re going to have all these cool t-shirts and socks and shoes, and playing cards, and stickers. As many cool things as I can come up with. But that’s the thought.

Anyway, I want to throw it to you guys. I know I went really long winded on this one because I’m so excited. But think about that. How can you increase the frequency your customers are buying from you? Because that’s how we judge how good the health of a list is. It’s probably how we should judge how good the health of our customer base is. How often are they buying from you? And how do you now, now that you know that’s something that’s important, how do you stimulate that? How do you create cool crap that they’re going to want to buy?

It’s not going to be like, because it’s hard if you’re selling thousand dollar courses, you can’t do that every single week. People aren’t going to keep buying it. That’s not sustainable. So if you have a whole bunch of super low ticket things that you’re going to get from me. I’m not going to make any money on my free plus shipping things, but it stimulates the frequency of buying in my customers, which makes them better customers when I do come out with the big things. They’re used to buying weekly from me, they’re enjoying it. There’s an addiction that comes with that. I don’t know about you, but I’m addicted to buying things. I love buying things. I want to feed that addiction through frequency.

So that’s my thought for you, just think about that. How do you stimulate frequency in your customers? Doesn’t have to be weekly like me, because that’s going to be kind of crazy for most people, even for me. I don’t know how I’m going to keep up with that. But for you, think about that. Maybe it’s once a month, how do you get them, how do you increase frequency of buying?

So anyway, there you go. And I’m going to leave it there for today, but hopefully this stimulates some thoughts in your mind. How do you know this? How do you increase the R, the F, the M? How do you increase all those across the board? So if you start thinking about that and stimulating it. I need people who buy recently so, that comes back to frequency too. If I’m going to get people to buy something each week, they’re recent, and they’re frequent. So I kind of kill two birds with one stone. Two things are increased in my list of customer health. Next is monetary value, obviously free plus shipping is not, but if you sprinkle it every six weeks or every quarter with a high ticket thing, boom, it increases monetary value and keeps this thing going. And it increases the health base of your customer list.

So that’s what I’m thinking about this New Year’s.  Hope it gives you guys some ideas as well. There’s some magic to this you guys. I looking right now at our, in fact I got a video from John on our team the other day. He’s like, “Look, our cult is way better than their cult.” I’m like, “What?” and I look at this video and he’s showing our social stuff versus Lead Pages, versus InfusionSoft, and if you look at it, our social profile is like, boom, trending up. People talking about us, trending up. All these things are trending up. Then you look at  Lead Pages, trending down. Then you look at InfusionSoft, trending down. No one’s talking about them. Nobody care about them. What’s the difference? Boom, we’re stimulating growth, stimulating conversations, making things exciting, building a culture. Now we’re going to start increasing the frequency of this stuff and it’s going to be insane. I’m so excited.

Anyway, appreciate you all. I gotta go get some groceries or my wife’s going to kill me. So I will talk to you guys all again soon. Have an amazing New Years. You’re probably going to hear this after New Years, so I hope you had an amazing New Years. If you’re listening to this after Thursday go get your free MP3 player at marketinginyourcar.com. Thanks everybody, talk to you guys soon.

Dec 29, 2016

A little trick to help you crush your goals…

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

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

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

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

---Transcript---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dec 28, 2016

Some interesting things I learned from Dan Kennedy.

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

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

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

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

---Transcript---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dec 27, 2016

A powerful tool to use in your storytelling.

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

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

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

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

---Transcript---

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

Dallin: Good.

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

Dallin: Snow balls. Rocks snow balls.

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

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

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

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

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

Dallin: I’m really good at it.

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

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

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

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

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

Dallin: Now I know how to drive a car.

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

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

Dallin: With a lot of good candy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dallin: And cars, and hot tubs.

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

Dallin: That’s compare and contrast. Boom.

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

Dallin: No, not really.

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

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

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

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

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

Dallin: Wrong.

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

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

Russell: What other contrasts you got?

Dallin:  Ellie and school.

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

Dallin: They’re really far contrasts.

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

Dallin: Billy Bob Joe.

Russell: What?

Dallin: Billy Bob Joe.

Russell: Who’s Billy Bob Joe?

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

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

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

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

Dallin: Yeah, sure.

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

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

Russell: A big salad bowl.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dallin:  I wish I did it this morning too.

Russell:  You can do it, I got leftovers.

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

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

Dallin: Unless we accidently eat one.

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

Dallin: What the…?

Russell: Yep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dallin: Oh, hi Norah. Or Aiden.

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

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

Dallin: And funniness.

Russell: And funniness, it builds your relationships.

Dallin: And Billy Bob Joe.

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

Dallin: And cars.

Russell: Helps you eat better.

Dallin: And hot tubs. And Lucky Charms.

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

Dallin: And microphones.

Russell: What? Bye.

Dallin: And everything. And snow. And Norah.

Dec 23, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

---Transcript---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dec 22, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

---Transcript---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dec 19, 2016

Amazing stories from three of our inner circle members.

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

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

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

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

---Transcript---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dec 13, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

---Transcript---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dec 13, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

---Transcript---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dec 9, 2016

Part two of the podcast I started earlier today.

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

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

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

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

---Transcript---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dec 9, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

---Transcript---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dec 8, 2016

Final Clickfunnels webinar?

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

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

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

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

---Transcript---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nov 28, 2016

Important insights on developing your future based mission.

In this episode Russell talks about starting a supplement business with a friend and some of the challenges he faced with naming it. He also talks about what inspired him to name it what he did and how he will achieve a cult following.

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

  • Why Russell decided to get into the supplement business again.
  • Who Russell plans to sell supplements to and how he came up with a name.
  • And What Steve Jobs quote helped inspire his vision for the business.

So listen below to hear how Russell plans to build a community with his new supplement business.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, good morning and welcome back to Marketing In Your Car, I’m so glad to have you guys here today. It’s been a little while. We just got done with our Thanksgiving vacation, instead of doing what normal, sane people do and stay home and make turkey we decided to take our kids on a Disney Cruise, which was a lot of fun. other than more than half of my kids throwing up on the boat, which is a story for another day. But it was awesome, we had a good time.  Glad to be back now, getting back to work.

Pretty much, last night after spending a week off, I plotted out world domination and I have a blueprint and game plan and it is insanely exciting, so I’m excited to get to the office and executing on said blueprint. Because it’s going to be amazing. And my goal is to get all of them before the live event, which is 3 months away. By the way, last year we were pushing tickets all the way to the last week or two. I think we’re going to sell out today. Today we raise the price, because it’s black Friday today, and so we’re raising the price at midnight and I do not think we’ll have enough tickets to keep selling after the price raise, so it may just sell out today, which is insane because it’s getting bigger every year. So I’m excited for that.

But today, what I want to talk to you guys about, excuse me. I almost did a podcast on the boat two or three times but between puking kids and everything else it just never happened. Been working on my book as you know, we’ve talked a lot about this, I cannot wait for you guys to read this, it’s going to be awesome. But in the book, one of the things I mention a lot is how to build a mass following, and there’s three things. The charismatic leader or attractive character, then there’s the future based vision of where things are going, and then there is the new opportunity. I’ve talked a lot about new opportunity, but today I want to talk about the second piece there which is the future vision and stuff like that.

Because, this is one of the things….I didn’t craft any of things for me initially, but they’ve been crafted as we’ve been growing and it’s been fuel for the fire. So the big part I want to talk about today is, first off, identifying exactly who your market is and from there creating something that calls them out When we first launched Clickfunnels, funnel hackers is what we became. The community became funnel hackers, they identified with that. They got t-shirts that say, “I am a funnel hacker, I funnel hack.” And it became a part of this mass movement, which is kind of cool.

As we launched the funnel hacking event this year we came up with the headline, and not a headline, it’s more like a rallying call that became the headline. It’s funny because the headline initially, I don’t know if I told you this story or not. It was like, “You’re one funnel away from becoming rich.” “You’re one funnel away from quitting your job.” “You’re one funnel away from growing your business to the next level.” And every time we…..every variation of that headline was lame because that’s true for a small percentage of people, but everyone’s different. Then finally I deleted everything, I was about to start writing again, so I deleted everything. It just said, “You’re one funnel away” I looked at it like, that’s it. That’s the rallying call. That’s it.

So I shifted my emails, every email comes now says, “Ps, don’t forget you’re just one funnel away.” The headline from the event, “You’re one funnel away.” I started doing these Facebook Live’s where it’s like the state of the union address and I sign off all of those, “Don’t forget you’re just one funnel away.” Drew Canoli, my buddy who owns Oganify and Life TV, I initially saw him do this with his movement and I thought it was so cool and I was jealous that I didn’t have one, so I got one and I want you all to have one too.

So his was, he always says, “Don’t forget guys, we’re all in this together.” So he gets everyone to be like, we’re all in this together. We’re all losing weight together. We’re all juicing together. We’re all…….it becomes more of a community. We’re all part of this thing. That’s how Drew did his.

So mine now, with the whole, “Don’t forget you’re just one funnel away.” It gives hope and vision. It’s so inspiring, because you hear that and you’re like, even if you failed ten times, “Man, I may have failed ten times, but I’m one funnel away. The next funnel’s going to be the one.” It gives you a reason to keep moving forward and keep driving.

In Clickfunnels side, it’s been fun but recently, one of my buddies, Darin Stevens, who will be speaking at Funnel Hacking Live. A year ago actually, he came to me, “I want to start to do this supplement company.” I was like,” I sold my supplement company. I’m not really interested. Unless it’s a new tropic company, I’m totally obsessed with new tropics, and it would be cool to make supplements for entrepreneurs. I would be totally interested in that.” And I did have some other stipulations like, I don’t actually want to own the company. But I do want royalties on it and stuff like that. He was cool enough to work, it worked out good. We’re basically, I do the cool parts that I like to do, but he gets to do the cool stuff he likes to do. We’re working through some stuff.

One of the very first supplements we’re going to do is, it’s interesting, a supplement I created in the past called Ignite, it was actually based on a supplement one of my buddies did a while ago called Fighter Fuel. It was energy for MMA fighters, which is kind of cool. We found out Fighter Fuel, after he had sold a whole bunch of them, was trademarked, as good entrepreneurs do, we don’t check that out ahead of time, so we had to change the whole thing. So we changed it to Ignite. It was called MMA Ignite. So we went off in the MMA world, but we found out that, I thought MMA would Ignite all the different martial arts, but turns out it pushes all your markets away. So I’m like, crap.

So then we were going to do, maybe we’ll call it Gamer Ignite and go after gamers.  Or call it CrossFit Ignite, go after CrossFitters. So we re-branded again, called it just Ignite, so we could leave it kind of open. But then it was kind of this vague thing. We never sold any. I have a whole warehouse of it. But Clickfunnels was literally built on Ignite. Everyone, that’s how we pulled as many all nighters as we did. If you go back about two years in the podcast when we were launching this puppy, you’ll remember my late nights coming home at 4 in the morning every single night. Ignite is what we used to get through.

So with Darin, I said, “How about Ignite. I love that supplement. It tastes good, people love it, we just never sold it.” At my live events I give it to people all the time, people are trying to order it. I’m like, “We don’t sell it.” They’re like, “But I need it. I’m addicted.” So it’s always a good problem when people are trying to buy something you’re not selling.

So anyway, we decided for the first supplement for our new company we were going to sell Ignite. What’s kind of cool about it, we were trying to go for a long time with a name. I wanted a cool name that would be cool. We couldn’t name, we tried a whole bunch of names that were good names, but nothing that was amazing. Then one night, I was watching Limitless, the TV show. It was actually the pilot and on there he talked about how “when you take NZT it unlocks your mind and you have unlimited potential.” I was like what? Unlimited potential, U P, Up. I was like we should call it UP Brain. So I ran upstairs and bought Up Brain, bought every variation of that domain. So the supplement company is going to be called UP Brain, unlocking the limited potential of your mind, which is kind of cool.

So that’s like the overarching theme of the company but then each supplement is kind of different. We had this Ignite thing, before the cruise we were kind of finishing the boxing. It’s called ignite, but I’m like, “What is this, an energy drink. Who’s it for? Everyone?” That’s the problem with most energy drinks, they’re for everyone. Pre-workouts are for body builders, there’s all sorts of energy drinks, but they’re kind of for everybody. I was like, if we need to carve out our segment, we need to call out our people. This comes back to the cult building 101. We need to call out our people and get them to come to us.

So we’re like, who are our people? Initially I was like, its entrepreneurs. Let’s call it Ignite: Energy for Entrepreneurs. But it’s not entrepreneurs that take this, in my world it’s the entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. The people inside the company who are helping us drive this vision and mission. I’m like, who are our people? If I can’t call them out, then how am I supposed to advertise to them?

All the sudden, like a bolt of lightning, I had this inspiration. It was a quote from Steve Jobs popped into my head. I’m going to try to read this quote while I’m driving. I’m at a stop sign right now, hopefully this won’t kill my recording. Let me see if I can record this. Hopefully it will work.

The quote says, “Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

I think that was Steve Jobs. It said Steve Jobs before but I was searching for it when I was driving and some other guy’s name came up. But I think it’s Steve Jobs, so I’m quoting Steve Jobs. I said, that’s my rally call. That’s my people. That’s people I want to market to, it’s not body builders or fitness anything, it’s the people who are……what we came up with was people who see things differently. So the supplement is Ignite: Energy for people who see things differently. Then we’ve got Steve Jobs quote on the side. Boom. And then every single packet has Steve Jobs quote on it.

People say, yes that’s me. I see things differently, I’m the rebel. Or whatever, that’s my people. It’s the entrepreneurs, the intrepraneurs, the people who are trying to change the world. That’s who this supplement is going for. So that’s what we came up with. Then it comes back to, how can I make a t-shirt out of this? I need them to be able to self identify with the movement. So the t-shirt says, “ I see things differently.” Boom. How cool is that? I cannot wait to have that shirt and wear it and drink the supplement and have all those pieces come together.

We still want to have the rallying call, the “You’re one funnel away” or “We’re all in this together”. That’s the next step here in the building of a future vision of this new supplement company. I’m excited by it. I hope that you guys are excited to. Just thinking about the things in your business, because they’re the same right. How do we build a movement that’s bigger than us? If you’re thinking your business is a product, you’re going to become transactional and it’s tough. It’s something where you’re constantly looking for the next kill, the next thing.

I have a lot of friends who, that’s their businesses and I love them, but man they’re going……Eat what you kill. And they live off of that and they die off of that. I’ve seen businesses grow and collapse because of that. You really shift your thinking from I’m selling products, transactional things to I’m building a community, a culture, whatever you want to call it. These are some of these elements that come into it, where people self identify with the brand.

I told people with Clickfunnels, I don’t want people thinking Clickfunnels is Russell’s business. I want people thinking Clickfunnels is our company. This is us. I want them to be part of it. And that’s what makes it cool. I want the same thing with the supplements. Yes, I see things differently, that’s why I take these supplements. Because I’m different. I want people to identify with that.

Sorry I’m at four-way stop with tons of construction. That’s why I was able to sit there for so long and read my stuff because…Now I’m going and trying to figure out the route I’m taking a bunch of weird streets.

Anyway, hope that helps you kind of start thinking through those things for your business because with Clickfunnels a lot of things I didn’t think of, luckily we stumbled upon them and as they happened we saw the impact of them, so we tried to engineer those more now that we’re thinking through it. And now, especially with new companies to work with, and people in my inner circle, those are the things we’re talking about. How do we create those things? Because the better you create those things, the more powerful it will be for you and your community. It will take your business from a transactional thing, where you’re hustling for each deal to something where it’s more than that and it become part of people’s lives.

When that happens, that’s when life gets really fun. Think about the products and services that you interact with every single day, they’re not a product to you, they’re part of your life. For me, Clickfunnels is definitely a part of my life. There’s supplements I take that are part of my life. My phone is part of my life. There’s those things that aren’t products for you anymore. My iPhone, and I don’t know if you have this same issue, iPhones have been crapping out lately. I thought it was just mine. Mine would hit 30% and then it just dies. I’m like, Oh, my phone’s dead.

Then someone on Facebook posted and 800 other people were like, it’s happened to me too. So apparently its global. I was telling my wife, “Man, I’m so pissed, my phone keeps collapsing, every time it’s 30% it dies and I have to reboot and recharge it. It’s a huge nightmare.” She’s like, “Oh, we should get Samsung’s.” I’m like, “No. That doesn’t make any sense.” She’s like, “But your phone doesn’t work.” I’m like, “Yeah, but I’m part of this really cool cult. And we all have these phones and it’s cool. I don’t know, it’s different. It’s not transactional at this point.”

So there you go. Hope you guys get some benefit from this, I’m almost to the office, I’m going to bounce. I will talk to you all again soon. Have a great day and remember you’re just one funnel away. Thanks everybody.

Nov 15, 2016

My reasoning behind my recent investment.

On today’s episode Russell talks about being in Scottsdale, Arizona for a $100k Mastermind group. He talks about how he can justify spending so much money and how he believes it will help his business.

Here are a few things you should listen for in this episode:

  • What $100k Mastermind group Russell joined and why he thinks he needs to invest that kind of money in others, so that people will invest in him.
  • How he thinks this Mastermind group will teach him to think differently and how that will help Clickfunnels grow.
  • And what Clickfunnels goal for growth is this year and next year and why it’s so ambitious.

So listen below to find out why Russell is spending $100k to be a part of this Mastermind Group.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Hotel Room. There’s a weird echo. That is why…..I think yesterday I did one from my house. We’re not even in a car anymore, we should change the title of this thing if we’re going to keep this pattern down. Just kidding.

I’m here tonight because I am actually in Scottsdale, Arizona and I’ve had a bunch of people asking me why I’m here, second off, more specifically why am I here? Because I recently joined a part of…..I mean, I’ve been in mastermind groups a lot for ten years now. And I joined Bill Glazer’s back when my business was floundering and I didn’t realize how much it cost to join the mastermind group, all I knew was that I’d gotten some Dan Kennedy cd’s in the mail that were Dan Kennedy talking about his platinum group and I listened to them and it was the most amazing conversation I’d ever heard. So I was like “Holy cow I just wanna be in that room.”

So I called up GKIC the company at the time, I said, “Hey I want to be in Dan’s platinum group. I heard about it and I wanna be in it.” They’re like, “Sorry, it’s sold out for three years.” I’m like, “No I need to be in it.” They’re like, “Sorry.” We keep going back and forth and finally after I bugged them enough, I had a friend on the inside who got me in. And they said, “You’re accepted fine. Here’s the money.” And they sent me the order form and I didn’t realize it, I thought maybe it was 5 grand or something but it was $25 thousand. I was like, “Goll!” So I didn’t have that money, but I didn’t want to tell that after I bragged about how cool I was to get into the group that I couldn’t afford. So I just did it.

And I jumped right in and went to my first event and I thought it was Dan Kennedy’s mastermind group, and I got there and Dan Kennedy was nowhere to be seen. There was this old guy in the back, who later became one of my first real mentor. His name was Bill Glazer and he’s someone I love and respect a ton. He’s like my marketing dad. And he was in the room and I didn’t know what to expect when I sat down, and it was my first mastermind. The experience at first it confused me and then it transformed me.

For the next six years I was in that mastermind group and it went from having a tiny business to making a million dollars a year to making ten million dollars a year to losing it all and then growing it back up. Kind of this huge cycle of my life, it was awesome. Then Bill sold the company and I decided to not keep going to it. I was looking for other mastermind groups, and I joined a couple other ones. I won’t mention their names because none of them were that awesome. I plugged in and there were pieces that were good and people that were good, but it was just never home for me. So I tried a couple of times and just didn’t have any luck.

Finally I was like, “you know what? If I’m going to do this, I need to create it. I don’t think there’s anyone who’s created what I wanted. So that’s when I created my Inner Circle which has become amazing. As you know, last month, or this month, we did 8 days of meetings that were a hundred people in the Inner Circle. We have 4 groups of 25 and it’s just amazing. I facilitate mine very similar to how Bill Glazer used to facilitate his. Although at this meeting, the last meeting we had, Garrett White came and added some really cool things, we’re going to start adding to our meetings. So it was really awesome.

So it’s been really, really good but at the same time it’s really hard. When it’s your event you have to be on the whole time. You don’t get to sit back and just be there. So I kind of miss that. And I was hoping and looking and joined a couple other programs, and I even…..and I’ll say this now. I joined Joe Polishes 25k group, and if I’m completely honest the networking was amazing. I would say the networking is second to none. But I didn’t get what I…..what I want a mastermind for is different. Networking is good, but that’s not why I’m there.

I’m there because I’m trying to learn in a different plane, different level, different vibration, whatever you want to call it. Learn on a different level and I never got that in 25k. So I wasn’t planning on renewing and then I was there, they offered this 100 thousand dollar thing, so I thought about it for 5 seconds and I said I’m in.

A couple reasons why and I want to share them with you because hopefully it will help you understand why I’m here and hopefully it will give you guys permission to invest back into yourselves. The first reason is Joe Polish is running it with Dean Graziosi. Dean has been on more successful infomercials, has done more successful infomercials than anyone I have ever met. And he’s done it with books in the financial space, which is “hey, by the way, I have a book coming out in financial” or the how to make money space. Similar.

Part of me wants to do an infomercial or a radio deal and he’s been crazy successful in infomercials and radio and events and a bunch of things that is in the avenue of business I’m a part of, so that gets me excited. Second Joe Polish is one of the best network connectors I have ever met in my life. And I didn’t want to lose….I wasn’t planning on rejoining 25k because I didn’t get what I was looking for out of it. But I didn’t want to lose that relationship with Joe because there’s a lot of value there. He’s super cool, and super connected to everybody on planet Earth.

So I was like, I don’t want to lose that relationship and this could be the ability to have that at a higher level. Third thing is that, you know ever since me and other people have 25 thousand dollar group, a lot of people have them and a lot of people get into them. Joe’s is, I know other people have done it, but he was one of the first pones that’s done 100k group. And I thought the people signed up to do a 100k is typically a different caliber of people. Those that can write a check for 100k is a different caliber of person. So it’s going to get me the ability to be in the room with people at a higher level and hopefully plug in and find out the next two days what we get. Hopefully they have some different ideas and different things that are thinking different levels that I typically do. That’s what I’m really excited for, that piece of it.

Then I’m trying to think of the reasons. I know the last one. The last one is one that hopefully will be good for you guys. The last one is because I’ve thought about doing a 100k group before. I don’t know if I will or wont, I have no idea. I’ve thought about it but I was like I can’t ask somebody to give me 100 thousand dollars, if I haven’t given somebody 100 thousand dollars. There’s something about that. After Bill Glazier took my 25 thousand dollars happily I decided I wanted a mastermind group and I sent out an email while I was at the first mastermind group and I got 30 applications and I launched my first mastermind.

Because I’d spent 25 thousand dollars I felt like I had permission to do that. Justin and Tara Williams, when they joined my Inner Circle the first time, they had a $2,000 product, and I think the very first meeting, we were all like,  “You should launch a $25 thousand program.” And I think it was partly because they had done it, they had paid 25 grand, second off, they got permission from all of us and they went and did it. I think they said, I can’t remember the number, but it was like 18 people paid them $25k off the first promotion. They didn’t even have a sales team in place. They just sent some emails and took credit cards, which is nuts. It’s so cool.

But it gave them, the best part, we gave them permission. I think it’s funny how sometimes we’re not congruent with ourselves. We want to ask people to buy stuff, but then we don’t buy things. I have friends who pirate everything. They don’t pay for videos or movies or games or anything. So they’re basically stealing everything and then they’re trying to sell people their products. There’s some kind of incongruence there that, I don’t think it’s possible. I’m sure it’s possible for some people.

I have a friend, there’s this pirating website, and I don’t know the call but, where you can get basically every internet marketing course known to man is on it. You have to have a secret login and then you can download…kind of like Napster back in the day, but it’s kind of like internet marketing Napster. Every product ever is on there.

I had a friend that was on that site and he was downloading everybody’s products and courses and going through them. And he told me that for 5 or 6 years he never made money online, despite the fact he had every course known to man. Then one day he woke up he realized that, “If I’m going to ask people for money, and I’m not willing to pay money then I’m a bad person and I’m not going to be successful. I canceled my membership to the account, deleted the account  and then started buying people’s things. And just by the nature of me no longer stealing and actually investing, people were more willing to invest in me. I grew a company and business because of it.”

So another big part for me is just that. I should be able to invest something like this so that when if I ever someone for 100 thousand dollars, I’m not going to be freaking out because I’ll know, was it worth it for me? I’m going to create something that will be worth it for them. Those are the best couple of reasons. So that is why I joined the 100k group, that’s why I’m here. I’m going to be here the next two days and I’m excited to see what I get, what I learn, if I get any big aha takeaways, I’ll come back and report and share with you the good stuff.

But it’s also good to just step away, I’m so much in the heat of business for a long time, it’ll be nice to sit back and be able to think. That’s what’s happening. That’s why I’m in Scottsdale and that’s why I invested that much money. Hopefully the fruits of this will be good. I’m going to be speaking to the group actually tomorrow about some ninja funnel stuff, which will be really cool.

My real goal of this, some of you guys know, Clickfunnels we just passed 23 thousand active customers, maybe more than that now. We’re trying to get to 30 thousand by the end of the year. We’re getting close. We’re pressing a little. We got a big campaign in December, those things should hit it. And then next year we’re trying to get to 100 thousand. It’s a more than 3x leap, which companies don’t do that. Especially now with DC capital. We did, we set a goal, a big hairy audacious goal.

Anyway, we set the big goal and that’s what we’re trying to do next year. If I’m going to do that I gotta think different. I gotta look at things differently and have a strategy going into it. Some of the people in this room I think are going to be key to that strategy actually  working. We will find out what I will know soon. That’s the game plan. Appreciate you guys, I’m going to go to bed, because I’ll be busy tomorrow and I need to get some rest. Appreciate you all. Thanks for listening and now it’s time for you to go join a 100k group, or 25k group, or 10k or whatever it is for you. Because that investment will somehow magically give you the ability to let people invest in you too. I don’t know how it works, but it does. There you go. Alright you guys, appreciate you all. Have a good night, talk to you all tomorrow.

Nov 14, 2016

What I learned tonight while writing my book.

On this episode Russell talks about editing his upcoming book Expert Secrets, and having a breakthrough by discovering there are only two types of new opportunities.

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

  • Why improvement opportunities don’t work, and you need to position things as a new opportunity.
  • What the difference is between the opportunity switch and the opportunity stack.
  • And why you can’t have the opportunity stack without first having the opportunity switch.

Listen below to see why this breakthrough is game changing stuff.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing At Your Desk. I am not in the car right now but I just gotta share this with somebody and everyone’s asleep so you guys get it.

So I’m working on a book and it’s funny writing a book, it’s so cool. I recommend everyone writing a book at least once in your life. Because it looks at what you do through so many different lenses and angles. So just write a good book, some people just write a book. The entire time writing a book, for me, when I’m writing this book I want it to go down in the histories of time, Dotcom Secrets book the same way. I want them to be evergreen. When I die I want people to read it and be like, “Dang.”

I was telling my kids the other day, “How cool will it be when I’m dead and you actually read my book. Who knows if you’ll be marketing guys or not. But you’ll read it and be like my dad was actually awesome.” That’s the goal. So I’m working on this book and it’s supposed to have the final draft by today. I’m going back through so deep. I’m on page 50, I have 250. Not getting it done today. No way on earth. But it’s okay because…..in fact, Bowen just came up and said, “Dad you’re only on page 50, supposed to be done today. Are you scared?” I was like, “No, it’s more important that the book is amazing than it’s done on time.” So there you go.

Okay, you guys ready, this is so exciting. Some of this is going to be out of context for some of you guys who haven’t been geeking out with me the whole time on this journey recently. Some of you guys this will be the next step, the next layer. One of the things I’ve been talking a lot about in the Inner Circle, I think I’ve talked about it a bunch on this podcast as well, the difference between an improvement offer and a new opportunity. If we build a mass movement you cannot……not only a mass movement, but if you want to make money, flat out. Improvement offers are horrible.

The analogy I keep using in the book. If you have a Volvo, there’s two things you can do. One is you can sell people how to make this Volvo better. Lets paint it, get the dents out, make the engine run better. Or…do you think people want that? No, they want a new car. That’s the new opportunity. Don’t offer people ways to make them better. If they admit that they’re……If you’re selling, “I’m going to show you how to make yourself better.” The nature of them giving you money, they’re admitting they’ve failed. So it’s a huge hurdle.

Then it’s never inspiring, exciting. They’re just like, “Yeah, this is a little bit better.” So the goal is to always to position what we do as a new opportunity. So I’ve been geeking out talking about a new opportunity. Everyone’s in a different aspect. How do I position my sell as a new opportunity? And I’m like, “That’s a good question.”

Inner Circle, the last two or three weeks, we talked a lot about this in a lot depth and details with everyone. Iv’e been thinking about it and writing about it. In fact, I spent three hours the other day trying to explain this and in three hours I got one page written, which is why this book’s never going to be done. But if  it ever does get done that page is going to be amazing.

So tonight I had another big breakthrough. I’m trying to think, how do you position your new opportunity? And initially I had ten different ways and I started widdling and I’m like, these two are the same and these are the same. Finally when it all broke down to it, there were only two ways to position your new opportunity. So this where it gets good. You guys ready?

So the first way, what I’ve written down here, I’m calling it an opportunity switch, and the second way is called an opportunity stack. I’m just gonna read a couple of paragraphs.

“While there are a lot of ways to start your improvement offers, there are only two ways we can position a new opportunity. There’s an opportunity switch or an opportunity stack. The first thing you need to understand is that when anyone runs into your new opportunity for the very first time, they’re either looking to change from whatever opportunity they are currently using to try to get what they want. Or they are looking at ways to get more from their current opportunity.”

Says opportunity like ten times, I might clean that up a little bit, but regardless, the gist of it is when they come to you, you know the first time they’ve been trying to lose weight, lets say that’s the vehicle they’re going into, “I need to lose weight.” They’re looking around, they’ve tried other things. You’re not the first typically. Or they’re trying to be more happy or make more money, whatever their thing is, you’re not the first.

They’re currently in an opportunity. They’re in a vehicle driving around doing something and they see yours. So when they see they do either one of two things. They’re like, “my car is awesome and I need, I want more from this.” Or they’re like, “I hate my car, I need a new car.”

So it says, “Regardless which of these people you’re talking to the answer for them is your new opportunity. But you need to present differently based on if they’re looking for change or if they’re looking for the same.” So the first opportunity switch. Opportunity switch is like, hey you’re currently doing this, but I’m going to shift and do this instead. O this comes back to, “you’re driving a Volvo and your Volvo sucks. So do present an improvement offer, which is new paint or whatever.

You shift them over and say, “Look your Volvo sucks. We’re selling you a new car. We’re selling you a Ferrari.” Or whatever that new opportunity is. So that’s the opportunity switch. So if your in the weight loss market, you’re like, “you’re on the Atkins diet? The Atkins diet sucks. We’re switching you over here to the Bulletproof diet.” Or whatever that is. You’re shifting the opportunity of whatever they’re doing currently to get their end result to whatever it is you want them to do.

The second thing is an opportunity stack. They already have an opportunity and loving it. You’re saying, “I’m not trying to get rid of this opportunity, I’m trying to stack on top of it.” So let’s just say, you’re an internet marketer, and you’re loving internet marketing but you’re like “I was to invest my wealth.” So I’m stacking. Keep your internet marketing, but we’re going to take some of your money and put it into real estate, stacking opportunity. So that’s kind of an example.

It’s me like, if you got a Volvo I’m like “Cool, I like your Volvo. Keep driving it to your office every single day, but on the weekends you need a Ferrari.” So we sell you a Ferrari.  So it’s stacking opportunities. So I’m doing those and I just wrote that whole section of the book and I’m like cool that breaks them down for you to think through. My position is an opportunity switch or an opportunity stack. And almost every offer, it’s really easy to see how this is an opportunity switch, that’s easy. But the opportunity stacks are harder.

Some things, I feel like everything can be positioned as an opportunity switch, almost. Some things can’t be a stack, if that makes sense. It’s harder. So I started thinking, what should people do? All the sudden I realized, holy crap, so I actually wrote this paragraph and be completely transparent. This book is an opportunity switch. I’m bringing people in, read this book and my goal of the book is to give you an opportunity switch. I want to switch you to my book, if you don’t know it’s called Expert Secrets. I’m shifting you, trying to give you this opportunity switch from whatever you’re doing, you’re in network marketing, real estate, you’re an employee. Whatever it is you’re doing, I want to switch you to have the opportunity to this expert career. I want to make you an expert.

So there’s the switch. Then after they’ve switched and I’ve got them, then I start doing the bolt on opportunity stacks. Now you say I’m an expert, cool. The next opportunity for you is Clickfunnels. I’m going to stack that. You get Clickfunnels and I’m like, the next thing you need is called Funnel Scripts, I’m going to stack that. Then there’s fill your funnel, I’m going to stack that. Then there’s Clickfunnels certify, I’m stacking. This becomes the value ladder.

I’m looking at, if you guys could see my image here, it’ll be in the book I just sketched it out. It’ll be in the book, don’t worry. The front says opportunity…. it’s kind of a value ladder, the front says opportunity switch, it’s got the picture of the expert secrets book. The side says opportunity stack and it’s got a little value ladder. And it’s taking people up and each rung in my value ladder is a stack. So I’m stacking, stacking, stacking all the way up. Isn’t that crazy.

People always ask me, “Russell I’m building my value ladder. Where should I start? Front, back, middle?” Now I know the answer, I never knew the answer before. But the answer is you start your value ladder wherever the opportunity switch happens. Someone come to you initially that’s your first job, is the switch. Now that I’ve switched them, they’re in your value ladder, and you do opportunity stacks. You’re stacking on these opportunities. Holy crap, I don’t know if that made any sense to you guys, but I am freaking out right now.

This is like, it just opened my mind to so much coolness that I didn’t even know was there. So I hope that you got a little bit out of that, if not read the book. But that’s the key you guys. You lead with an opportunity switch, and after they’ve switched then the rest of your value ladder becomes the opportunity stacks. That’s why a lot of people will build 4 or 5 webinars and they’re like “Only one webinar works.” And that’s the reason why.  For the most part, a whole different marketing efforts, depending on paid efforts, should be focusing on one thing, switch.

After they switch and then all the other things will all into that current audience. that’s the transition from cold market, to warm to hot. They come in cold, they get switched, they get warm. And then from the switch they get hot and then you send them up the value ladder. Holy crap this is so cool. So freaking cool, so exciting.

I cannot wait for this book to be done you guys. You are all going to love it. So awesome. So that’s all I got. So what’s your opportunity switch. Think about it, people are coming to you, they’re already driving some vehicle, they’re already doing something to try to get the end goal they want. But they’re probably not happy, so you gotta come in and say, “You’re Volvo is driving you where you want to go, but you’re miserable. Time to get out and go over here. I’ve got a Ferrari.” Or I’ve got a Lambo or a…..whatever, a jeep. Whatever your opportunity is, bring in the opportunity, opportunity switch. Now they’ve switched you can focus on opportunity stacking. Holy crap, game changing stuff.

This books literally going to re-change how selling is done, I think. At least for the people that read it, the rest of the people won’t even know. All of you guys and me, who all geek out on this, we’ll just take over the world. Appreciate you all, thank you for listening, I’m going to get back to work. I will talk to you guys all again soon. Bye everybody.

Nov 9, 2016

When you look at their intentions, it changes your perspective.

On today’s episode Russell talks about people having good intentions in the aftermath of the US election. He discusses a story he heard at a Tony Robbins event that illustrates why he feels people always have the best intentions in mind, even when they do horrible things.

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

  • How overhearing a phone call made Russell realize that even someone who was voting for the opposite political party, still had good intentions.
  • Why Russell believes that people don’t inherently have bad intentions.
  • And how that has given Russell an invitation to continue to love friends and family even when he disagrees with their religious and political choices.

So listen below to hear Russell’s thoughts on the election and good intentions.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. I hope that you all had a good election night last night. Some probably good, some probably bad, some just confused in the middle. Totally understand that. You know what, this morning I woke up, the sun is shining. My little daughter, Norah did not want me to leave today, so she was crying when I left, she was sad. I drove around to the front of the house she was there and gave me a kiss. So that was….It made the whole day good.

So yesterday was kind of an interesting day. I don’t know if you follow Snapchat, or all the other channels were publishing stuff so you see kind of behind the scenes of what we’re doing. Part of Funnel Hacker TV, one of our episodes with this guy named Robert Jones, who’s super talented man in the beauty space. He was in town and we were filming some videos with him and it was just really cool day.

We werer working on his software and overall a really good day. It was the last free day I have until my book is done. I’m going in the office to lock myself down and do nothing but write my book. It was a fun day and then we came home and the election stuff was, we were eating dinner. And then the kids were all into the election because at school they’d been talking about it. They all had maps out and they were coloring the states as they went to red and blue. It was kind of a fun experience.

Robert and Bart and Sunny were all at our house, then they left and we just sat on the couch with the kids and watched the news. Just watching as the day unfolded. Obviously now at this point, we all know what happened, but it was kind of crazy. We were watching it and we all passed out on the couch. I woke up at about 1:00 or 1:30 in the morning, whenever it was that Trump was giving his speech talking about the fact that he’d won.

And I was watching it and I was like, “Wow.” It’s just kind of crazy. Two days ago the media convinced everyone that there was no way that he would win and then he wins. It was crazy. I was sitting there and I looked at Facebook because I wanted to see everyone’s responses. Honestly it was kind of sad. I saw friends on both sides, yelling at each other and fighting. I just felt kind of a sick feeling. And what was interesting a few hours earlier I had an experience that kind of put this whole crazy thing into perspective for me.

So I opened up Facebook live, and clicked play. I didn’t know what I was going to talk about, but I started talking. Some of you guys may have seen that. I want to kind of go back to that conversation because I think it’s important. I think I was half asleep, so I was watching it this morning and some of the stuff I said, didn’t make sense, wasn’t very concise. So this is my shot to make it permanent on the podcast and hopefully it’ll help some of you guys who are……wherever you may be in your journey right now, with this and with other things.

And basically what I talked about, a few hours earlier that night, Robert Jones and I got in my car and we driving from the office back to my home. And he came over for dinner along with Bart and Sunny. Robert is someone I have so much love and respect for. What he does, how he serves, the value he provides this world. And we obviously do not see eye to eye on some things.

If you look at me, as most of you know at this point, I’m a very devout Mormon on this side. And he’s got very different beliefs and things on the other side. Which is totally cool and it doesn’t bother me. I’ve got friends and family members and partners and things that they completely disagree with me on many things, I completely disagree with them on other things. And that’s why I think it was so important for me.

As we get in the car, we’re driving, he calls his significant other and they were talking, and they were obviously rooting for a different person than I was. I kind of overheard ten seconds of the conversation. They said basically, “Hopefully it will go good, say a prayer and pray for the best.” or something like that. And as I was driving there I was thinking, “Wow.” Because in my mind, I don’t know, I think we get into the heat and the marketing of the elections, which by the way has been really fun. We should do a whole marketing podcast on the election stuff later, could be really fun.

But we get into that and it’s funny because you start perceiving people, I’m thinking candidates specifically as evil. This person is evil because of this and this. And then the other side, this person is evil because……it’s almost how we start perceiving these people. I was thinking about that last night as I was saying prayers with my kids, and praying for what I thought was right for the country and looking at what Robert was praying for and it was completely different. The polar opposite of me. And that’s okay, because Robert’s not evil; the person he’s voting for is not evil. I’m not evil. We’re all acting out of what we think are the best intentions for us, our families, and the country.

And I started thinking more and more about that last night at 1 or 2 in the morning. It got kind of fuzzy after a while. But as I’m thinking this I’m like, you know what, all of us, and I would argue in every situation that we make our choices based on good intent. What we think is best is for us or for our family. Things like that. I don’t think people act out of malice or hate or spite. They do it sometimes, but not because they’re hateful, because they believe that that is the right intent.

Sorry the construction guy I drove past, and he’s giving me thumbs up for my car.

Anyway, they believe that that’s the right intent. I was thinking back, and I’m probably going to slaughter this story and I wish I knew the details better, but the principle’s the same. I was at a Tony Robins event and he was telling this story about one of the Day of destiny’s he was at. Day of destiny has 3 or 4 thousand people in the room and usually have partners and your working through things and you have workbooks.

I guess one of the attendees had written down that his plan was after the event he was going to go home and murder his wife and kids and then commit suicide. The guys partner was looking at his book and was like, “Wow, my partner is an evil person who’s trying to kill his wife and kids and I have to stop him. This guy’s got evil intentions.”

So he goes and finds some of the tony Robin’s staff and says, “Look, this guy is a psychopath over here and you guys should fix him.” So they’re going through the event and Tony finds out about it, and I don’t know the exact details, but Tony does interventions at his events. So he does an intervention because he knows that this guy is going to go home and slaughter his family. If you look at that from the outside, what do you think? How do you feel when I say that? That this man’s intent is to go home and slaughter his family and kill himself?

You think that this guy is a psychopath, this guy is evil, the worst of the worst. So Tony does this intervention with this guy and finding out why. What’s the purpose behind why he’s doing this? What is the underlying issue? Comes and works through the whole thing and finds out when this guy was young, and I can’t remember if his dad died or left or something. But this man’s father had left him and when his father left him, his whole life collapsed.

His mom, it was horrible for his mom, the kids, the family. So much so that he associated his dad leaving as worse than death. He wished he would have died because his life after his dad left was so painful and so horrible, that death for him would have been a release. So this man was in a situation now where he was in a marriage or family that he was not happy with and he knew that he needed to leave.

Whatever that looked like, I don’t know the details. But as he was looking at that he was thinking about his kids that he loved so much. I love my kids, I love my wife, but I have to leave. But if I leave it would be better for them to be dead than for me to leave. Because if I leave it will destroy their life; but I have to leave. So because I love my kids and wife so much, I have to kill them so they don’t go through the pain that I went through. That was his perception of the world.

When you hear it from that lens you’re like, “Wow, this guy, yes, the method and the process were wrong, but the intentions were good.” He honestly thought this is what he needed to do to save his wife and kids.

I think about that with all of us. I don’t think people inherently have bad intentions. I look at history. And I don’t know these people; let’s say the worst of the worst. I think about Hitler and I think about any of these people, what they did was horrifically bad. No excuse, wrong and evil. But in their minds, their intentions were probably not bad. This is what we need to do. The lens that I’m viewing this world through, this is how I’m going to make the world a better place. Yes, the lens and direction were wrong. I’m not excusing that because it’s horrible what happened. But their intention was probably good. And maybe there’s situations where people just really do have bad intentions, it’s probably there, but I think that for the majority, 99.999999% we have good intentions and that’s why we make the decisions we do. What we think is best for us.

I think about, for me, I have close friends and family members who’ve left the church that I love. There’s times that I get sad and angry and frustrated, all those kinds of things, but I look at them and I love them and I love their families. I look at that and I’m like, despite the fact that I don’t feel the direction they’re going is right, I can love them because they have good intentions. They’re not doing this out of malice or hate or anything. It’s because they feel like for them, this is the right direction. So I have to respect that even though I disagree with it because it’s their good intentions. They’re trying to do what’s best with the information they have.

It’s the same with politics, religion. It’s the same with, I think most things. So I hope that as this political hailstorm has ended, that as we’re looking around at our candidates and our friends and family members and people around us who disagree with what we’ve picked, that we remember that. They didn’t pick it because they’re evil, they didn’t pick it because they hate things. They picked it because for them, that was……the intentions were right. They honestly felt that that is the best thing for them.

And I think if we look at that through there, hopefully it will not divide us but make it have more love and respect for each other. But it’s hard. I get that, I understand that, especially when you feel people are doing things that don’t make sense and you don’t agree with it. And sometimes it makes you cry because it’s so painful. We can still love them because we know that they have pure intentions. That’s the key.

I hope that helps. It helped me yesterday. Like I said, when Robert made that comment when he was in my car and I heard it, it gave me a change of heart and more love and respect for him and just for everyone around me. And I hope that this helps you and all of us as well. That’s what I got.

Anyway, now the elections are done, it’s time for us all to get back to work. Because despite the fact that we all voted, no offense, none of your votes really even matter. There was no election, it came down to two people.  Anyway, just joking. The only thing that really matters is what we do, what we give, how we serve. So I recommend all you guys focus on that and continue to have good intentions and continue to try and change the world in the way that you see as right. And as you do that, good things will happen. With that said, appreciate you all. Have an amazing day and I’ll talk to you guys all again, hopefully tomorrow. Bye everybody.

Nov 8, 2016

If I could sum up the theme of the last eight days, it would be this…

On today’s episode Russell talks about the two biggest take-away’s he got from the Inner Circle.

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

  • Why entrepreneurs, including Russell, should focus on just one thing at a time, rather than a thousand things, as they tend to do.
  • Why it’s important to open yourself up and be vulnerable to your audience.
  • And what some of the things you can do to be able to achieve both of those goals.

So listen below to hear about the two most important things Russell learned from this Mastermind Group.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to a late, late night. I guess it’s not that late. You guys have hung out with me when it’s like 4 in the morning. So a kind of late night of Marketing In Your Car. Alright, it’s 10:15 I’m driving home from Barbacoa. If you guys ever come to Boise Barbacoa is by far the best restaurant here. We had a group of some of the people in our...anyway, they came to dinner with us. Sorry my brain is so fried.

It’s been insane the last, and you guys heard me talk about this, but over the last two weeks, we’ve done four mastermind groups of 25 entrepreneurs in each group so we’ve had a hundred entrepreneurs come through. And what’s amazing, compressing decades into days is literally happening. It’s insane. I was able to get insights from a hundred different business owners on what’s working right now and get feedback on ideas. There’s so much gold and so many little tangible takeaway’s that I wish we had 8 days and I could share them all with you guys.

But I thought you might be interested in, “Russell, what’s the core thing?” People always ask me, “Where do you think internet marketing is going? What’s on your mind right now?” But it’s crazy because there were two definite things over the last 8 days. What’s cool is the last two days Garrett White and his wife attended the inner circle the last two days and so for those of you who know Garrett, he’s pretty intense and it was just cool because a lot of stuff we’ve been talking about everyday were dramatically amplified in this last two days. He brought a bunch of cool tools and things that we’re going to be adding into Inner Circle meetings from now because it had a huge impact.

Anyway, there were two core things that if I was to give you the most important pieces of this, and I feel bad because no matter how cool I try to make these sound you are going to be like, “Oh cool. Awesome. That sounds great.” But it’s like when you see it happening in the room, when you see an entrepreneur who’s trying to so hard to not only change the world but to change themselves. And there’s this pressure and this stuff we’re hitting against and you see when this is given to them, it’s this release and I can’t tell you how many people broke down in tears, myself included over the last 8 days, which was unique. That’s never happened in my groups before, to be honest. But it happened consistently, a lot of times because of these two things.

And again, when I share these two things they’re almost going to seem to simple and I don’t want you to dismiss them because of the simplicity. Because they are probably, my guess, are the two issues that most of us, me included, in this have the biggest problem with. So you ready for them? Drum roll please.

In all seriousness, I just wanted to make sure you, I try to build up the drama so that you pay attention, but please pay attention because these are important. The first thing is focusing on one thing. Sounds so simple, we’ve heard it a million times. But all of us entrepreneurs are doing more than one thing. How many things are you doing right now in your business? If it’s more than one, you need to stop. I’m talking to myself right now, and you included. What’s the one thing you’re trying to do?

And it’s kind of a sub-thing from that, I can’t tell you how many people have things that are successful that they stop doing. Whatever’s working, keep doing that. We keep looking for what’s the next thing. It’s just the nature of entrepreneurs. What’s next? We’re adding things we’re layering things, we’re doing things. One of the pro’s and cons of the Dotcom Secrets book, I talk about a concept called the value ladder, which is vitally important to the long term growth of a company, but it’s also one of the things that stifles someone from immediate growth because they’re looking at what’s next. So some of those things, it’s important to understand and to know where you’re going, but not to get caught up in this value ladder of, “Whatever is working, I made a thousand bucks last week, gotta build a high ticket item.”

No. just do one thing on the value ladder and master that. Make a million dollars on that and then you can go and layer stuff, but don’t do that now. Look at what’s working and do more of that. Just do one thing, focus on one business, one core part of your business and have people on your team focusing on one thing. There’s a million different angles that that matters and is important, but it’s all coming back to what’s the one thing. And if you focus that, you can call it the 80/20 if you want. What’s the 20% that gives you 80% of the results and focus there.

Because for some reason we get caught up in all these things that don’t actually impact or do anything. So that’s number one, focusing on the one thing. And the second thing, and this one’s hard. It’ something I’ve struggled for a long time. Years and years and years. I still struggle with it. It’s something that I don’t think was essential even ten years ago, but now the world we live in today, it’s the only thing that matter. It’s the most important thing. And it is being vulnerable with your audience in all situations. Not just selling, but definitely in selling.

We had people in our group who I’ve known for a long time and for whatever reason, because of the environment and the people and the situation and whatever, were finally willing to get vulnerable and share things with the group that they normally wouldn’t or have never shared before. And because they were vulnerable people connected and it opened up so many things.

Because they opened up and they were vulnerable with me and other people, it was just great. I wish I could share stories but some of them are……they’re all way to personal of stories for me to tell. They’re not my story to tell, so I can’t. But because they shared those stories, they were able to have the breakthroughs that they needed.

And the same thing is in your selling. It’s hard, especially when we’re communicating with our audience, the front that we have, you guys know. Here’s Russell on stage, he’s got stage presence or whatever. There’s this thing, but the reason people connect with me is not because onstage I seem like whatever, it’s because I’m vulnerable, it’s because I share things like this through my podcast and through Snapchat. I share things like that through videos. I’m vulnerable, I open things up. As embarrassing as it is, I’ve cried on video. But that vulnerability is what causes connection, which lets people in and let’s people trust me, which is the reason why I’ve got so many great connections to so many great people, is because of that.

And I think about areas of my life that I’m not happy, it’s primarily tied to me not being willing to be vulnerable. Because I’m afraid of fear or rejection or fill in the blank, whatever fear it is for you. So this isn’t just a business lesson, this is a everything lesson. Being vulnerable, because as soon as you are it softens the people to whatever it is. If you’re trying to build a relationship, or you’re trying to sell something, whatever it is. Trying to build a connection, it’s you opening yourself up and being vulnerable that allows people in.

It’s scary because sometimes people are bad people and when you open things up, they say bad things, do bad things, I get that. But I feel like putting your barriers down and opening yourself up is what allows amazing things to happen. and those two things, it was really coming back down and saying, “Look, focus on one thing, number one. And number two, be open, be vulnerable, share your story and then don’t do it once or twice, but do it consistently.”

It was funny, in the last group, again I wish I could share the stories, but they’re too personal. But someone was talking and it was just Garrett kind of came back and said, “Look, for me to learn my message this is what I had to do. I did a podcast everyday for 600 days. I did warrior weeks, every month for 76 months. I did video on Facebook three times a day for 5 years. I did this and this and this and consistently.” And when he said that I said, “How many Marketing In Your Cars have I done? I’ve probably done, I don’t even know what episode we’re on. 3 or 400. I’ve podcast, I’ve blogged. I’ve done this so many times.” And Garrett asked me, “Why do you keep doing them.” I said, “I’m still trying to learn my message.”

And he’s like, “Do you hear that. Russell’s been doing this for 12 years and is still trying to figure out his message.” So for people that come in and try it once and to dabble and…..”I did a podcast and it didn’t work. I tried a webinar and it didn’t work. I did whatever and it didn’t work.”  The difference between me and them, I didn’t stop. Garrett didn’t stop. The successful people don’t stop. How many webinars did I have to do to learn to discover, to create, whatever you want to call it, the perfect webinar. It was a lot, it’s in the hundreds and hundreds.

The Clickfunnels webinar alone I’ve done at least fifty times. Over and over and over and over again to learn my message, to learn how I tell my stories, to learn all these kinds of things. So if you want to be in this game, you want to succeed in this game and you want to change yourself. You want to change other people. You want to change the world. It’s a commitment, a sacrifice. And again, the two things.  Number one, focus on the one thing, focus on that thing. Number two, focus on consistently doing it over and over and over and over again. And open yourself up and being vulnerable. That’s how you cause those changes.

I hope that helps you guys. Again there’s, laced inside of that, probably a hundred pages of notes for myself and action items and to do’s. Those are definitely the overarching things that I think everybody can gain value from. I wish and hope that someday each of you guys will have a chance to experience our inner circle, not because I want or need money, that’s not the point of this group. But because of the transformation that comes from it. It’s a group I love, I care about all the people in it. I’ve built some friendships and relationships that will last the rest of my life.

I care more than you have known about, about all your businesses. But these ones I have a chance to really affect and be a part of. With that said, someday I hope to have you in our group so you can be part of it, you can experience it at that level. Because that’s where I feel the best transformation I can provide people comes from.

With that said, I’m getting close to home. I’m really tired and kind of thirsty. So I will talk to you guys all again here, very soon. Probably a few days. I need a couple days to chillax. Next week though, next week’s crazy because I have got to finish the Expert Secrets book. I found out for me to have the printed copies in time to give them out to all of the attendees at our live event, funnelhacking.com, I have to have the final draft to the editor by the end of next week. So I am spending next week in a hard core editing, rewriting, book focusing thing that’s going to be crazy intense, but will be good. So that’s what I’m doing next week, so I’m sure I ‘ll be sharing some of the ups and downs of the immersion week I’ve got next week to finish my book. Appreciate you all, talk to you again soon.

Nov 3, 2016

Holy crap, this works for email too!

On this episode Russell talks about the Perfect Webinar and an epiphany he had involving it while at a recent Inner Circle meeting.

Here are some of the interesting things you should listen for in today’s episode:

  • A quick recap of what The Perfect Webinar is, and what you can get out of it.
  • What one Inner Circle member did with The Perfect Webinar Script and how it inspired Russell.
  • And How Russell plans to use The Perfect Webinar Script in an email sequence.

So listen below to find out why The Perfect Webinar in so perfect, and why it’s not just for webinars.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, good morning, this is Russell Brunson and welcome back to Marketing In Your Car. I’m heading in to day 7 of 8 of our Inner Circle, Mastermind meetings. We got a new group coming through today, which is going to be so awesome. Not gonna lie, I’m a little bit worn out and tired, but I get so fired up by hanging out with these people that it’s all worth it and amazing.

Each new group, it’s interesting there’s such a different dynamic for each group that comes. I get so much different value from each one. Everyone’s like, “Which group is your favorite?” I’m like, “Each one is so unique, there’s so many different reasons. It’s just amazing how it all just works.” Anyway, I don’t know. I’m just grateful and blessed to have a chance to be part of this, and be able to facilitate it. It’s insane. I gotta pinch myself. I can’t believe this is my life right now. I get to hang out with all these amazing people.

So that’s awesome. I’m heading in, so I wanted to give you guys, I’m driving right in the sun, I literally can’t see anything. The car in front of me, I’m just looking at his tires, hoping that he doesn’t slam on his brakes, because I cannot see his brake lights. Anyway if I die, if I crash, that is why. I’m driving into the sun.

Alright, so I got a big insight that I got yesterday that I thought was kind of cool. The Perfect Webinar, as you guys all know, it’s perfect. The only time it doesn’t work is when people screw it up. Because it’s perfect, you don’t mess with the Perfect Webinar. It’s perfect. In fact, if you don’t have a copy of the script yet, got to perfectwebinarsecrets.com, I actually owned perfectwebinar.com but it expired somehow and some dude bought it and wanted to sell it back to me for like 20 grand. I’m like, you know what? I’m going to buy perfectwebinarsecrets. Take that, $10.

So if you haven’t got the script go get it. We over the last two and a half years here in the Inner Circle stuff; we’ve gone deep with people. I can’t even tell you how many millionaires have been created from the Perfect Webinar Script, which is so cool. In fact, Expert Secrets, the whole book, is basically focused on building out the perfect webinar, but it goes insane deep. Perfectwebinarsecrets.com gives you the script and the psychology behind it. When Expert Secrets comes out it’ll give you how to build your cult based on the perfect webinar. So cool. I mean culture. I can’t even wait.

One of the big insights I had yesterday, which was interesting and I’m excited to test and I hope some of you guys will as well. If you look at the Perfect Webinar Structure, it’s based off convincing somebody of one big idea. What’s the one big domino that if I can convince them of this one thing, then they have to give me their money. For example, if I can convince you that you have to have a sales funnel to make money online and that Clickfunnels is the only sales funnel software on earth. If I can convince you of that, then you have to give me money. There’s no other alternatives.

So that’s the goal, every business. How do you create that one belief. If I can get them to believe this, then they have no choice but to join my cult-ture. They have to. So that’d be the first part of Perfect Webinar, and again I talk about it in the original script, I know that. It took two years of working with hundreds and hundreds of people on their webinars to figure that out. That’s number one, figuring out that. What’s the one big domino that if you knock down that domino everything else becomes irrelevant? It either knocks down every domino or they become irrelevant. So that’s the number one thing to figure out for your perfect webinar pitch, or any pitch. I say webinar, because I always talk about webinars. This is actually the point of this podcast that this works outside of webinars. But I digress.

Let me step back, so that second thing after the big domino, I gotta get someone to believe that. So there’s a lot of things we do to cause that belief. Seriously the guy in front of me just stopped in the middle of the road. Come on.

So there’s a lot of things to do. We talked about the epiphany bridge story. We talked about how we tell the stories to get people on the same state that we’re in when we had that epiphany. These are all things I’ve talked about tin the podcast in the past. If you look there are typically 3 core beliefs that keep somebody from believing whatever your big domino is you’re trying to knock over. The first thing is they have to believe in the vehicle you’re trying to convince them. So I had to get people to believe in funnels. Then I had to get them to believe in ketosis. You had to get them to believe in membership sites, whatever it is that have. You have to convince them of the vehicle, the right vehicle. So that’s secret number one, tied to their false belief pattern around the vehicle and convince them the vehicle is right.

After you convince them, yes the vehicle is correct, I do need funnels. Ketosis is a way for me to lose weight, whatever that thing is. Then the second thing that happens, people are like, “That’s cool but I don’t know how to use a funnel.” or “that’s cool but I can’t not eat candy.” So the second one is that you’ve got to break down their false believes about their internal believes. What do they believe about themselves? “I can’t do this because I’m not technical.” Or because, “I don’t have willpower. You gotta convince them, it’s so easy, you can do it. Let me show you why and how.

So the second secret is always tied to a belief in the internal self. Third secret is typically tied to some external thing. Well I believe funnels is the way, I believe I could use Clickfunnels, but I don’t know how to get traffic, so even if I did it wouldn’t matter.

Okay, I believe that ketosis is the way for me to lose weight, I finally believe that I have the will power to do it. The problem is my spouse. My wife makes me chocolate ice cream for breakfast everyday and there’s no way she’s going to stop. Or whatever, what’s the external things you’re going to blame it on? Because after a while people are like, “Well I could do it, but this thing over here is causing me to not have success.” So you gotta figure out what’s the external belief and smash that one too.

And then you transition to the stack, the pitch, the close, all that stuff. There’s like a five minute run-down of the perfect webinar that is hopefully, if it’s the first time you heard it, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. If you’ve gone through a little bit, you’re just like, “oh Russell, just went another level deep.” So I hope that helps. If it didn’t help go get perfectwebinarsecrets.com, watch the video and then come back and listen to this and this is just the next layer on top of that.

And again, when the book comes out, it’ll go deep. Deep in a cool way, not like a nerdy deep when you’re so lost and confused where you’re just confused. But deep like, you’re like, “This just gets cooler and cooler every page.” Hopefully. That’s the goal.

So I digress, once again. Sorry ADD coming back. Alright so the whole point of today’s podcast is during Inner Circle I had some epiphany. Obviously I perfected the perfect webinar standing on stages in front of a big audience trying to sell them stuff. Which is the best way to master a skill because what happens when you’re in front of a thousand people trying to sell something? Either they stand up and run to the back of the room and give you money or they don’t. There’s no way to fake that. Everybody can see.

So after being humiliated on stage multiple times, not selling anything. I thought I have to master this. So I spent about two years of my life on this circuit. On the road speaking and perfecting this thing and it’s still always evolved, as you can tell from today, it keeps evolving. But initially it came from me onstage speaking and selling. So that’s kind of where it started and then it transitioned over to tele-seminars, which was awesome and then it transitioned over to webinars.

So I call it Perfect Webinar, but I almost feel like I’m cheapening it by calling it that. In fact, in the book I’m trying a different name for it. It’ll still have the word perfect in it though, because it is perfect. Don’t screw it up. The Perfect Webinar, we’ve done it on stage, teleseminars, webinars. So a little while ago I wanted to see, “I wonder if this work in sales videos?” so I did a couple of sales videos. We did one in our market. We did Funnel University, we did it as a sales video. I just created one for Have It All Moms, which is a weight loss product we’re part of. A couple of other places, and guess what? It worked as a sales video script. In fact, I think it’s superior to any other script ever.

In the DotCom Secrets book I call it, star, story, solution, but it’s not as good as Perfect Webinar. I gotta think of a name because you don’t want to be like, “Here’s my VSL webinar.” No. so obviously VSL is truncated, it’s shorter, stories are faster, but it’s the same pitch. Identical, in fact you’ll be able to see those soon. The Funnel University one’s a longer one. It’s almost like a real webinar. But I’ve done ones on Facebook Live that are shorter. I’ve done ones, Have It All Moms is about a 25 minute video I think. It’s compressed but it’s the same process.

You take them through, what’s the one big domino? What’s the vehicle? What’s the internal believe? What’s the external belief? Move them through the stack and create an irresistible offer. So that’s kind of how it works.

Yesterday, one of the guys showed me that he did a whole product launch, kind of like a product launch but not really. He didn’t want to go create a whole webinar because he’s like, “If I do a webinar and it’s 2 hours long, and I do it and people don’t buy, I don’t know what spot kept them from buying. I didn’t know, so I didn’t want to do a webinar until I figured it out.” So what he did, it’s John Hutchinson by the way, he’s a super cool dude in the financial market. So he went and recorded a video of each thing, so the intro and a video of secret one, secret two, secret three stack, and then close. Then he made it, I’d say a product launch, but it’s not really a product launch.

But he drove people to the first video and they watched it and then on the video it’s like, “click here to go to the next page.” Or “see video number two”. Clicks there, boom takes them now to secret number one, then click to secret two and secret three and then click to close. So what he did, he was watching what happens between video one and video two. Video two and video three. So he could see, where’s the drop off point? What is not inspireing people to go to the next step?

What’s interesting is the transition from video one to video two and video two to video three sucked and three to four, four to five and five to close were amazing. So he’s like, I know the last two thirds of my webinar is flawless but the first third is boring people because they are not progressing at a high enough rate. So he’s going back now and tweaking those things. He’ll keep testing it and eventually turn it into a webinar.

But I thought that was really smart, really intelligent way to think about things and look at things. And while he’s doing that, all the sudden I had this thought. Some of you guys may know this, some of my emails recently have been super long. I hired this dude named Levi and what we’re doing is, when I write emails and I write them out, I don’t know why I hate writing email copy. And I had these cool storied, but I get annoyed writing copy so I just truncate them so they’re not cool. So I hired this guy Levi and I vox him an email. So I’ll send him a ten or fifteen minute vox, he transcribes it, tweaks it, cleans it up and turns into an email, throws it in the auto responder, I read it, make a couple of tweaks, re-read it and click send, which is why I’ve had a whole bunch of these 2,000, 3,000 word emails that are converting like crazy.

Just telling stories, the way I would tell a story if I was talking in person. I thought what if, what if I did the Perfect Webinar as an email sequence? Email number one is addressing the big domino and telling my first epiphany bridge story. Email number two was secret one. Email three, secret two. Blah, blah, blah. Like that. And I was like, “Holy crap this is the perfect webinar in a five day email sequence. This could be as good, if not better than even actually doing the actual webinar.” How insane is that?

So what I’m going to do, I’m going to test this either next week, or the week after. I’m not sure when. I will try to return and report my results to you, but basically I’m going to vox Levi all of the emails in a five email sequence that goes through the perfect webinar and send them out and we’re going to see what happens. My thought is it’s going to be amazing. So I’ll find out, and I’ll report back to you.

The moral of this story is that this perfect webinar script, as perfect as it is for webinars, is the perfect selling script. The perfect selling system, the best way to create and present a pitch or an offer since the history of mankind. I don’t want to take the credit for rediscovering how sales should work, but I’m going to take credit for it right now. Just kidding.

It’s funny, I was trying to hire all these researchers to go and figure out who was the fastest growing non-VC backed SASS platform in the history of the world, and I realized there’s no way to test that because if they’re not VC backed they don’t have to report the numbers so there’s no way to know. I have to realize that I think I am the number one and if I’m not, someone should come challenge me. But I’m going to just tell everyone that I am from now until the rest of time. So if you guys wonder what Clickfunnels is, it’s the fastest growing non-VC backed SASS company in the history of the world. And I’m sticking to that until somebody proves me wrong, because I’m pretty dang sure I’m right.

Same thing with this. I’m going to call this the greatest sales something, something……..nothing cool yet. I’m going to think on that. If any of you guys have an idea, shoot it over to me because I honestly wouldn’t……when I was putting this together, Steven Larsen on our team was like, “this redefines how sales as a whole should be done forever.” I was like, “holy crap, it is.” It’s so amazing. I’m excited for it. I’m proud of it.

I cannot wait for you guys to have the Expert Secrets book, but until then go to perfectwebinarsecrets.com, go get the script. It’s $4.95 shipping and handling. It’s free. I think we order form bump the power point slides, which I know that 47% of you will take that, because it’s the greatest up-sell order form bump I’ve ever had. So thanks for that. But you’ll get the power point keynote slides, so you can just rebuild your webinar quickly.

Then there’s an up-sell where we did a three day event on a perfect webinar. I’d recommend getting that too because in that course, at one of our Ignite events I had 100 people in the room and I actually did the perfect webinar live on stage with an audience. We made like $30 grand and everyone watched me do it live and it was super, kind of intimidating and scary. But that whole video’s in there of me doing it. So you can see not only me doing the pitch, but see from how I stand, how I actually deliver it. All that kind of stuff. I hope it helps.

Anyway, I’m at the event center. I gotta bounce. I am one minute early. That’s actually not too shabby. Appreciate you all and we will talk to you guys all again soon.

Nov 2, 2016

You wouldn’t outsource your love making, why would you outsource this?

On today’s episode Russell talks about how the marketing part of running a business is comparable to the sex part of a marriage. He also talks about the upcoming US election and why it will only suck for 5 minutes.

Here are some cool things that you will hear in this episode:

  • Why marketing is so important and why you should never outsource it, much like the love making portion of a marriage.
  • Why outsourcing marketing should only happen once a company has already been well established by a hard working entrepreneur.
  • And how Russell’s experience cutting weight in college when the rules changed is similar to how entrepreneurs will be resilient after the US election.

So listen below to find out why you should never outsource your love making, or your marketing!

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody, I hope you’re doing amazing today. I’m feeling a lot better. I gave you guys a podcast yesterday while I was a little bit stressing out. Today’s a new day, it’s beautiful outside. Halloween was amazing, I’m feeling good. So no one will stress about me, pressure is gone and I’m back to a million percent. So I’m really, really excited.

I’m going to be heading out to go hang out with the inner circle members and I can’t wait. The next four days are going to be amazing.  I pinch myself knowing that this is my life. I get to wake up, go hang out with entrepreneurs from around the world who are changing the world in their own little way and they paid me to be here, which is crazy. I would pay to be in this room and I’m hanging out with these rock stars, it’s awesome and I’m loving it.

I’m driving in right now to go hang out with those guys. It’s interesting, I gotta something to share with you guys. I hope that’s alright, I hope you don’t mind. I’ve never really done client work before, until just recently on a couple of projects. Mostly because I’m using my super power, ninja funnel building skills to win friends and influence people. I look at Tony Robins, I built him a funnel. We built Dave Asprey a funnel. We built Milt Strauss a funnel. We built five of Marcus Lemonis’ companies funnels, we built the Flex Watch funnel. With Funnel Hacker TV we’ve been building funnels for people.

Anyway it’s the first time in my life where I’ve done other people’s stuff. Not going to lie, it’s not my most favorite thing on planet earth. I would rather just do my own stuff all day long. But because of circumstances, that’s been happening and I’ve done a bunch. It’s interesting, very, very interesting. In fact, I think I mentioned, I did a rant last week about people wanting me to do their funnels for them and stuff like that.

Yesterday one of my friends, they have a really successful ecommerce business and they lead a blog and did that. Someone on their team is trying to figure out Clickfunnels and that person is frustrated. They started to email us and the subject line was “Clickfunnels limitations.” I thought it was so funny. “The limitations in Clickfunnels is, we can’t up-sell people into our Shopify store.” I can’t even…..It just made me laugh.

Because we built Clickfunnels because of limitations of a traditional shopping cart. You can’t do anything important. All you can do is have a random store with a bunch of crap in it. And this girl is complaining to them and it just got back to me. “Clickfunnels is too limited.” Are you kidding me? The only thing that’s limited…I told them, “This girl sounds awesome, but she’s all concerned about a couple of pennies over here, but if she would just turn her head there’s tens of thousands of dollars over there. And she’s tripping on these pennies because she’s getting all caught up on that. But if you look at it from a different perspective, turn your head a little bit you’re like, ‘Holy crap, wait. Screw those little pennies. There’s a crap ton of money right there. Let’s run that direction instead.”

So I’m trying to explain that to them. And then one thing while I was talking to him, I sent them an email and then I recorded an audio to explain to him a little more. I said something to him, just the top of my head that all the sudden was a big aha moment for me. What I told him, “So you guys have this company that’s doing well and you want to grow it. The problem is you’re outsourcing the marketing.” I understand outsourcing the fulfillment of the marketing, but outsourcing this strategy of the marketing to somebody that doesn’t understand it. If you look at the marketing and the sales, that piece of it, that is the sex of business. It’s the most pleasurable, most fun, best thing in the world. That’s how you get customers. That’s the best part.

Then afterwards you’ve got customers, now you’re going to soccer games, you’re doing homework and all the other stuff, and if your kids are awesome like mine then it’s amazing. But the reality is the best part of business is not the fulfillment of the products, or anything else, it’s the selling. That’s the best part. And I was like, “Literally, right now you are outsourcing your love making. Why on earth would you ever do that? That’s the best, most important part of the entire business. Everything else is just the stuff you have to do so you can go and have sex again.

I apologize for those listening like, “Russell, you’re my nice Mormon friend. Why are you saying these things?” But it’s true. Think about this you guys. That’s what that is, and if you are outsourcing the strategy for your marketing, you are literally outsourcing your love life. How well do you think your marriage is going to be if you are outsourcing that piece? It can’t be good. It doesn’t matter, it cannot be good.

What I’ve found with all these people I’ve built funnels for, not all but for the most part, the one commonality is the entrepreneur is the artist who’s good at doing the thing. So their trying to outsource their love making and they want their company to grow. You cannot do that. You can’t. If you outsource that in your marriage it would not grow. And this is the exact same thing in business.

Again, you could hire people to do that actual fulfillment, but you as the entrepreneur, has to be able to think through the strategy because that’s the key. That’s the most important part of this entire business. People always laugh. “Russell, I’ve got this kind of business, I don’t know if what you do would even work for me.” Are you kidding me? What I do works for every business. It’s the strategy behind it. You can give me any product off the street and I can plug it into one of our strategies and it would work.

I’m driving down the street and I can a payday loan place, a cigar walk-in place, there’s a cabinetry place, an ink place. What else we got? Home furniture, the DMV. For every business there I drove past except for the DMV, their screwed because they’re run by the government, which is a whole other story for a whole other day. Every other business, I don’t care which one, you could hand it to me and I’d plug it into one of our strategies and it would work. Because I understand that piece of it and it’s the most important part.

So I told my friend, I said, “Look the people I like working with are companies that the entrepreneur still runs the business and the entrepreneur is obsessed with the marketing of the business.” And I started thinking about that. Hey tomorrow I get to see the Inner Circle members and guess what? The one commonality with every single person in our Inner Circle is that the entrepreneur still runs the company and the entrepreneur is obsessed with the marketing of the business. And guess what the commonalities between all those companies are? Holy crap, they’re successful.

I don’t care what it is you do right now. You could be selling fish, you could be selling McDonalds, whatever it is does not matter. Until you become obsessed with the marketing of that thing, you’re going to struggle. You will hit plateau’s you will not be able to grow because you’re outsourcing your love making. And until you take that back in and take the responsibility and the own-ness on your shoulders, you are going to struggle consistently until you do that.

So that’s my message for you guys today. If you are an entrepreneur listening to this and you run your company and you’re obsessed with the marketing, which I’m guessing if you’re hanging out and listening to me you probably are a little bit into that. And if not you’re going to be getting more and more into it.

I would say become obsessed with it. That is the only thing that actually matters in a business. So crazy is the fact that in 2008, the economy’s crashing and everything, and my friend works for the marketing department of some company and the economy started collapsing so what do these morons do? They went and they fired the marketing department because it was too expensive.

Do you guys see any problems with that? That’s like driving a car and it’s about to run out of gas, and you’re like, ”Crap, I can’t afford gas.” So you stop putting gas in it. And what happens? The car stops running. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. It’s insane. They fired the marketing team because they were tight on money and the whole company, bankrupt. How do you not see that one coming?

I remember there was a Dennis Leary stand-up comedy thing one time. He was talking about different deaths. He was like, “Did you ever hear of Lou Gehrig? He died of Lou Gehrig’s disease. How did he not see that one coming?” That’s how I feel. Oh crap, our company’s struggling, lets fire marketing and sales. They cost the most. They’re the only ones that actually matter. That’s what gets customers to give you money, which makes everything else work. Everything else is fulfillment. And obviously your fulfillment has got to be good or the customers will not come back to you. You can sell something amazing once, but if the support and fulfillment is not awesome, that’s the other side.

There is value in that, just like after you……in your marriage, then you have kids and your kids are amazing and there’s so much value and blessings that come from that. But if it wasn’t from that act. You cannot have a family unless you have sex, it’s impossible. Look around, there’s a whole bunch of people around. They all got here the exact same process, without any exception. There’s only one way it comes in. Same thing, the only way cash comes into a business, is through this one thing. If you are outsourcing that piece to somebody else then your marriage, your business is in trouble.

So now it is time you guys, to take it back upon yourself and say, “Look, I’ve been trying to outsource this, but I care enough about my business, customers, and the fact that hopefully I want future customers someday, that I’m going to make this my priority.” So the next question, “How do I do that? How do I geek out on this?”

First off, hopefully keep doing what you’re doing. Listening to my podcast, reading my book. There’s other great marketers out there as well that you can geek out on. I’m not saying that I’m the only one, because I’m definitely not. There are people way cooler than me. But plug in somewhere and study and learn and become obsessed and think about it. If you sit there and just think for a while, it’ll be amazing all the ideas that kind of pop into your head. And that’s the core piece you guys. Nothing else really matters. So whatever business you are in, realize that the only business you are really in is the marketing of that thing. It’s the only business that actually matters because the other business of the thing that ou actually do, will not survive long, will not get into the hands of people. Will not change people’s lives or the world unless you become obsessed with the marketing of that thing. That is the commonality among everyone successful that I work with.

It’s funny, I was talking to one of my buddies., BJ Wright, he was talking about how in business there is the is initial lift off time where it takes an entrepreneur with pigheaded disciple who doesn’t have any logic or reasoning to go and to push this thing into orbit. And it’s hard for those of you guys who have done it or are doing it right now, you know it is not easy to lift one of these puppies off the ground. It’s just like there’s a rocket on it. A rocket goes off and you look at the space shuttle, there’s this spaceship and there’s all these huge rockets and so much force and momentum and inertia to get it out of the atmosphere and eventually you get it out into where it’s in orbit. Where it’s not being sucked back down by the gravity of it all. It’s in orbit, hanging out and floating around the world.

At that point you can go plug in the Harvard MBA’s and all the professional people and that kind of stuff. What’s funny is at that point unless they totally screw it up, you’ve got enough momentum, you’ve got enough critical mass that it’s going to survive. I’ve got, I’m going to pick on some companies, one really good example of a company here in Boise. I have so much respect for the people who began it and some of the people who run it. They’re in kind of this boat and it’s Clickbank. Clickbank, there was a time when it took a lot of initial inertia to get it off the ground and get it into orbit. And now it’s up there floating around the world and the moon like a satellite. It’s out there.

It’s amazing how many things that these Harvard MBA’s to bring in to run it, how many things they have done to try to destroy this thing. For those who have used Clickbank over the last 5 or 6 years, you’ve seen it. They’ve done so many things, it’s almost like when Trump gets up and starts talking and says something. You’re just shaking your head like, “Are you serious? You said that? Why don’t you think for 5 seconds before you start talking? It would save everybody a whole bunch of headaches.”

And it’s kind of the same thing. Clickbank does thing after thing and it’s just like, wow. If it wasn’t for the fact that they were already in orbit this whole thing would be crashing into the earth and it would be done. It would be dead. But they have so much critical mass, some entrepreneur’s worked their butts of to get into orbit, no matter what these people do, it’s really hard to break a business. And that’s when you outsource your love making. When it’s in that spot and it’s gonna be alright.

But everything prior to that, it’s got to be you. You are the only one who cares enough to be like the 3 huge rocket things that with the jet that push it into orbit. That’s the hardest part. You can’t pay somebody to do that because they don’t care enough. It’s not just something like……I think that’s why…..you know how anti-VC money I am, but that’s what screws up most businesses. You get this person with an idea, they then get someone to come in and give them, here’s $5 million. They strap on these rocket engines and it shoots into orbit. Now plug in all the MBA’s and the MBA’s freaking screw it up and it’s not really in orbit because there was no foundation built by an entrepreneur to shove that thing up into the atmosphere. And these companies collapse.

That’s the Dotcom Secrets bubble over and over and over again. Nobody freaking pushed that thing into the atmosphere. Someone just cheated and bought their way in and because of that, these companies collapse. It’s rare that you get companies that survive that.

I got a long ride this morning, you guys. You have to bear with me, we’re at 14 minutes, that’s like twice the length of a normal podcast. I hope that that makes sense. And I hope that it inspires you as the entrepreneur to get your mind back into the marketing of your thing. Because you are the few that will get into orbit and someday it will be up there and you can plug in some MBA’s and they’ll screw it up for you but it won’t matter because you did such a good job getting it off the ground that at that point it doesn’t matter.

But today’s the time for you to become obsessed with the marketing of that thing that you do. And that’s the most important thing you can do. There you go guys. I hope that that helps. I got eleven minutes til Inner Circle starts and I’m stuck in freeway traffic not moving. So my friends in the Inner Circle, if you hear this and I’m not there yet, I apologize, but I’m hustling and I will be there soon.

With that said, you guys, I appreciate you all. Thank you for being entrepreneurs. Thank you for focusing on your marketing. Thank you for caring about your customers because if it wasn’t for people like you, the world would not keep spinning. It would keep spinning literally,  but…..it would be in trouble.

I’m looking as we’ve got this whole election thing happening in the next week or so, how messed up we really are. There’s no hope. No matter what happens, its bad news blues either way. The only thing we can control is what we do and ho we market our business and how we change people’s lives. So quit focusing on the election, it doesn’t matter, your vote doesn’t count. Just kidding it kind of does. I’m going to vote, don’t worry. Don’t stress about that, it’s so far out of our control. Focus on what is in your control.

The government is going to jack it up. They’re going to give us new rules, a new set to play. It’s like you’re a kid and you’re playing a game with your sister and you’re thrashing her, and she’s like, “Oh wait, the rules just changed.” And she’s changing them and then for a while she starts thrashing you and then you figure out the rules again and then you win.

Wrestling is the same way. When I was in high school, we used to cut a lot of weight. I was cutting about 30 pounds a week. I would weigh in on Monday at 160 and I would wrestle on Friday at 130, so I was cutting tons of weight. Then my senior year two kids actually died. Two or three kids in a month period of time at the college level died cutting weight. So they changed all the rules, which they should. It was great, and it’s been a thing that’s been good for wrestling.

But they had these new set of rules of how to make weight and they were ridiculous at first. I would have had to wrestle heavy weight based on their rules. I was no, I got to be a 165 pounder. So I’m in college and the first year everyone is freaking out because no one can make weight and it’s all jacked up. But then within a couple of months we figured out the system and how to beat it. And even with us beating the system it was still better for wrestling, first off. Don’t say that……..it’s awesome. We figured out how to bend the rules. What we found out, so the way that……..sorry it’s a long commute, you guys get all the stories in full detail.

So the way that the new rules would work is that basically you come at the beginning of the season and they test your body fat percentage and then you had, they test your body fat percentage, and you had to wait, and then you had to do a hydration test at the same time. And based on that they give you a calculation of what you’re able to cut your weight down to. The problem was, you come in and they take your body fat percentage and that’s first thing. The wrestlers were skinny. I was like 7 percent body fat back then. The more your body fat percentage was, the more weight you are able to cut, because they figure if you’re a 5 percent body fat, what would you be at? And that’s how they figured out the ratio. So what we learned is someone does a pinch test and they have to pinch you, if you flex your muscles, it pops you up about 3 or 4 percent body fat. So we figured out one way to try to tweak the system.

Number two is if any of you right now were to go take a hydration test like the test we had to take, you would fail. It’s literally impossible to pass hydration tests. Unless you sit there and you drink four or five gallons of water right before. So what’s the problem, a gallon of water is 8 pounds. So just to pass hydration test, you basically have to gain 8 pounds, which is all sorts of messed up. So we’d fail our hydration test, but we had so much weight that we couldn’t hit the metrics.

So finally one day, I don’t know who the genius was that figured it out, but somebody figured out, “Hey what if we get super hydrated, drink a whole bunch the night before, come in the next morning, don’t pee, hold all that hydrated pee inside your bladder and then go put on your plastics and cut weight for 12 hours, lose 15,20 pounds, then when you go to do your hydration test you”……because you had to do all three of these things at the same time, body fat, hydration and the pinch test. So then you got this hydrated pee in your body, even though your body is completely dehydrated, but your bladder is full. So basically for 12 hours, you’d have to pee so bad, you were going to die because you just drank a gallon of water the night before. You’re like, I’m going to die literally.

But you have plastics on, weight cutting. 12 hours your cutting weight and you’re trying to hold this pee in, and then you go and you do your hydration first, so you pee and all the pee in your bladder’s completely hydrated because it’s from the night before, and then you pee out 8 gallons, so you lose 8 more pounds and then you lost the other 15 pounds through cutting weight that day, and then you flex on pinch test and move between those three metrics, now you’re able to hit the weight you need to hit.

So it’s like, the rules are going to come out and they’re going to suck, but as soon as we think through we’re going to find a way. And as entrepreneurs that’s what we do, right? I mean, the wrestlers figured it out, and I love my fellow wrestlers, but we’re not the sharpest group of males in the bucket, you know what I mean. So we figured that out, I just know the entrepreneurs, the government is going to jack things up. Raise taxes or change things or do stupid things that only make sense to people that aren’t us, and it’s going to suck for 5 minutes. We’ll figure out a work around and be back to normal. So don’t stress about it, just stress about learning how to market your thing better because that’s the only things that’s really going to matter.

So there you go guys. We are twenty minutes in and I am right close to the hotel. So I’m going to leave for today. Hopefully you got your money’s worth and a whole lot more. Now if you guys ever need to cut weight you know the secret, which is pretty awesome. I hope that helps. Alright guys, I will talk to you soon. See you guys later, bye everybody.

Nov 1, 2016

Intimate, behind-the-scenes, message from Russell to Russell.

On this episode Russell talks about being under a lot of pressure and tries to coach himself through it before turning off “Business Russell mode” and turning on “Dad mode” for his kids’ Halloween activities.

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

  • What are some of the things Russell has committed to that are making him feel the pressure.
  • How Russell coaches himself through the pressure and what some of things he can do that will relieve it.
  • And why it’s important to remember that no matter how busy he is, that he should always make time for family.

So listen below to hear how Russell plans to relieve some of the pressure he’s currently under.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone this is Russell Brunson and I’m excited to have you here for Marketing In Your Car. It is Halloween, which is my favorite holiday and it’s one day that I look forward to most in the year. It’s funny because so far today has been a tough one. It’s 2:17 and I’m heading to the kids school for the Halloween parade that I’m really looking forward to, and then the Halloween stuff tonight.

I’m just curious, people always ask me all the time, “Russell, how do you get so much stuff done.” And I usually pride myself, I can usually handle a lot of weight on my shoulders, but today collapsed a little bit underneath that weight. I know we don’t normally talk about those kind of things, but I just want to kind of talk through it because it’ll make me feel better probably.

But on the other side, hopefully it helps you guys somehow. Who knows? It’s funny, Dan Gable, he’s the Michael Jordan of wrestling. I was watching a thing one time when he was coaching, you know he was one of the best wrestlers of all time, but also one of the best coaches of all time, of any sport. He won like 20 or 30 NCA championships in a row. Someone asked him I f he believes in pressure. He said, “Well I believe that pressure is there, I just don’t believe in putting myself underneath it.” I think for the most part, I try to take that approach. I’m not putting myself under pressure. Its there, but I’m dodging it. I’m getting around and we just keep moving forward. But today was one of those days where I thought I could get all just hit on my shoulders, and I just couldn’t handle it all. It’s actually good that I’m leaving.

It’s kind of crazy. We had the Inner Circle last week for 4 days, which is so much fun and I love it. It’s hard though at the same time, because it’s four day, pretty much 5, pretty much a whole week that you’re not in the office moving things forward, so there’s stuff happening, especially when you’re running a big company there’s a lot of stuff. And usually we have a couple of weeks between each mastermind, but this time, because the timing sucked, they had to be back to back. In fact, mastermind starts tomorrow. So basically I had one day today, well part of a day, til 2 to get it done, all of last week and all next week.

So basically after that I’m kind of out of commission again. I had a whole bunch of stuff I’m trying to get done. Today was like, “Hey Russell, you’re here.” And the brunt of everything is all falling and its tough because…..oh and then this weekend, we’re trying to get the Expert Secrets book done in time for the live event. And they told me to do that we’d have to have it all done in the next two weeks. Which means I have to have it all done this weeks, which means, we don’t have this week to do it. So I spent all day this weekend editing the book. I spent all day yesterday, and I spent half of today and so far I got the introduction and part of chapter one done. So I’m totally stressing about that because if I don’t have the book for the event, it throws off this huge timeline sequence of events around that, so that’s kind of crazy.

And then for my church, I’ve got two callings. I am the eleven year old scout master, and I’m also the secretary for a group called the Elders Quorum, so that’s two assignments. And then we called yesterday, they called us and asked if my wife and I would take on the ward Christmas party, which means basically you’re in charge of throwing a party for 500 people. Plus my wife also has the company Christmas party a week after that. So it’s like, there’s new pressure there.

If I told you all the things I’m doing, most people wouldn’t believe me. There’s a whole bunch of stuff on the Clickfunnels side. There’s a whole bunch of stuff on the sales side. I’ve got tons of Inner Circle members messaging me questions. It’s fun, I love going back and forth but sometimes it adds up. Right now I’ve got probably 30 messages from Inner circle members on Voxer that I’m behind. Half of them will be here tomorrow so I’m stressing, trying to catch up on those.

And then the Funnel Hacker TV episodes we’ve been filming, it feels like a lot of the entrepreneurs we’re doing stuff for coming back needing help and getting stuck and can’t move through the process and need me to rewrite webinars or review things or check things. And then I got, I feel bad, one of the guys on my team, he wrote a book and wanted me to write the forward for, and I’ve been telling him for two or three months I was going to, but I haven’t had time. So today he was asking me about that, and to meet about something else. All these things and it was just like, all these things just came to a point today where I was like, “I don’t know what to do.”

So yes, I feel pressure. Yes, some day’s it’s tough. Some day’s it’s really, today was really tough. Not gonna lie. It’s funny because I’m so excited to go see my kids in the parade, but I’m feeling guilty because of that. I have so much to do, but what’s the point of doing any of it if I can’t go to my kids Halloween play? That’s kind of where I’m at right now. But I don’t want anyone to be concerned about me.

It’s funny, any time I do a podcast where I kind of rant a little bit, seems like I always get people messaging me trying to help. It’s not that I need that; I just need a place to vent. And hopefully it gives you guys whatever it is you need. Because I know all you guys go through that as well. We all do it, where there’s so many things happening. I’m the king of over committing. I get so excited by things so I say, “Yes, I’ll do this.” And it gets to a point where I can’t handle it all.

Anyway, so before I left the office, there’s a couple of things. I tried to buy myself an extra two weeks on the book, which is relieving pressure. I haven’t heard back, but I just kind of trying to go back to all these commitments that I have and place more realistic timelines, and cutting some things out and do things like that. And it’ll be good. By the time we’ve got mastermind this week, which again, I’m so excited. Two groups are coming, it’s going to be nice. For me to just unplug and stop stressing about everything and just hang out with some amazing entrepreneurs.

It’s funny, I don’t normally care about politics too much, even the stress of this election. Because I’m stressed out if either side wins. I don’t want either of those, the election’s coming. I’m really excited to hang out with entrepreneurs who are trying to change the world, for the next four days. I’m looking forward to that, and it’s going to be good.

I’m just going to kind of…..I think one of the problems that I have, one of the things that make me good at what I do, it also becomes one of the constraints, is I’m really good at placing…I’ve talked about this a lot in different trainings. Lead or Gold. I set deadlines for myself of when things have to happen. Sometimes I forget in my mind that I set those deadlines, and they’re not actual deadlines. So I think it’s me coming back to a lot of my lead or gold deadlines for things I have and re-shifting them, which is against what I tell you guys to do. It’s like, set a lead or gold deadline and don’t deviate from it unless you’re going to kill yourself. I tell you guys that because it’s true for me. When I set a deadline, this has to happen this day. It HAS to happen that day.

It becomes so real for me, that I put myself in insane amounts of pressure because of that. For me, things come back and I just got to tonight, hopefully get some extensions like on the book and a couple of things like that. And then kind of reset some timelines. I gotta get better at telling people no. I get so excited about opportunities and everything that I just say yes to things way too easy. So I gotta get better at the magic word no.

I feel like I’m coaching myself. If one of my Inner Circle members voxed me the last 7 minutes, I know exactly how I’d coach them. So I’m kind of coaching myself as if I’m me. “So Russell, the first thing I would do is, you gotta set realistic expectations. I know you think you’re the man, but you’re not. You can’t survive everything. The second thing I would do is, you gotta go back to the people you made commitments to and you gotta tell some people no, and it’s going to be hard, and it’s going to hurt their feelings sometimes. But it’s not personal, and you know it’s not. You just have to tell them it’s not and you love them. It’s just not possible. You’re going to crack and everything will fall apart for you and for everybody if you don’t. So that’s the second thing I would do.

The third thing, Russell, that you should do is, you need to get your book extension. If you’ve got to pay more money, whatever it takes to just tell them that you gotta make the extension and that you will pay whatever it takes to make that work. And that money will hopefully help solve that problem, get that out of the way. With these other people, you’re working with in Funnel Hacker TV. Remember these are businesses you’re helping with; you’re not doing those businesses, so you need to put the owners back on them. Get them to work harder, get them to think through things. You can’t answer every question for them. And they need to understand that. Let them kind of run with it and just do it. And that’s going to help them grow more. You’re so stressed about them making money that you forget that it’s not about money, it’s about growth for them. And if they don’t grow, every time you take your eye off the focus, it’s all going to collapse on them again. Help them understand that.

Leverage people on your team, everyone wants to help you, and sometimes you’re scared to ask for help because you know that everyone is doing so much anyway and you just think you can add it to your plate and not worry about it, but they’re there to support you and help you so make sure you leverage them. Because again, if you’re not able to handle this, it’s really bad for all of them. They’ve put their lives, and hearts and soul into it as well and it’s important that they do what they need to do and you do what you need to do. And they want you to be there. So those are the things I’d recommend Russell. I hope that helps. We’ll talk soon.”

So that’s how I’d vox myself. So there’s my advice for myself. Hopefully take it for yourself as well. I actually feel a lot better just saying that out loud. So thank you guys for bearing with me. The other things that’s interesting, we talk about hiring consultants all the time and it’s funny, we’re always like, “Well if we’re going to hire a sales consultant, what would we tell ourselves?” And usually we know all the answers. You guys just saw me do it here live, I just consulted myself. You should try consulting yourself the next time you have an issue and you’ll probably solve all your problems.

So with that said, I’m at school. I’m about to run in and go see my kids dressed up  as Halloween costumes, which is going to amazing and a ton of fun. And everything else is going to fade away and I’m going to get into a state and be with my kids and family right now. Business Russell is turning off because none of that stuff actually matters, and Dad is turning on because that’s what matters.

With that said, you guys don’t forget the famous quote from David O McKay. “No success can compensate for failure in the home.” So go to your kids Halloween parties, have some fun. Talk to you guys all again soon.

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