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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 secrets
Aug 31, 2017

Behind the scenes call with Myron Golden and Russell Brunson.

On this episode you will hear Myron Golden talk about the reason’s people make a lot of money versus a little money. He goes through the four levels of value for creating income and explains each level. Here are some of the insightful things in this episode:

  • What each level of value is and what resource is used.
  • Why each level of value is where it is, even though it may not seem fair.
  • And why there are actually two resources in the highest level of value.

So listen here to find out what the four levels of value are and how much money each level is worth.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to a very special impromptu Marketing Secrets podcast. I just got off of an inner circle call and it was so awesome I wanted to share it with you.

So I’m on an inner circle call, and the inner circle are my 25k members and there’s 100 of them and we have a group closed at 100 people. Once a month I do consult calls with all of them and one of them today was with Myron Golden, who is one of the coolest people in the world. And in the middle of this thing he dropped, I don’t know 10-12 minutes of the coolest thing about how income and the different levels of income, it was so good I wanted to share.

After he ripped on it for like 15 minutes I was like, “Can I put that on the podcast?” and he was like, “Sure man.” So I’m doing this really quick before I jump on the next call. I’m going to plug this clip in here. This will help you understand the levels of income and if you’re stuck where you need to shift and what those changes are for you to get to where you want to be from an income and finance standpoint. It’s awesome. So listen right now and I hope you enjoy this episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Myron: There’s a reason people who make a lot of money, make a lot of money. There’s a reason people who make a little money, make a little money and it’s because income is the result of value created and offered in the marketplace. So value is what creates income and there are four levels of value and if you’re operating on one of the lower levels, you can only make so much money. I will just tell what the four levels of value are so you can just kind of wrap around that.

There are four levels but there are five resources. The top level of value, you have two resources you can use. So every level has one resource, the top level has two resources. The lowest level of value is implementation. That’s the lowest level of value. That is the people who do the thing. So if you do the thing, you’re the person who does the thing, you make the least amount of money. I basically tell people in the presentation if you’re an implementer, I know how much money you make. You make somewhere between minimum wage and $80,000 a year. You make minimum wage if you’re working as housekeeping staff at a hotel, or McDonalds. You make $80,000 a year if you’re like a mechanic that works on Rolls Royce or Bentley’s or something. That’s your income window.

And then the next level of value, and by the way, the resource you use at that level is your muscles. You use your muscles to make money. By the way, I shouldn’t show that on camera, but it’s here to protect, not to harm you. Anyway, pardon my corny, I’m a corny dude. What can I say? So the resource you use, your muscle to make money. The whole premise of the concept is that money is spiritual in nature, it is not materialistic in nature. So if you’re using a physical resource, like your muscles to make money, then your income is going to be limited. If you want to make more money then you have to operate at a higher spiritual level. Does that make sense so far?

The next level of value, which is the second to the lowest…

Russell: The two resources there were muscle and what was the other resource?

Myron: There’s only one resource at that level, that’s your muscle. The top level has multiple resources, the bottom levels only have one. Does that make sense? So the lowest level is implementation. The second to the lowest level is called unification. That is you use, your resource is your management skills. You use your management skills to make money. You don’t do the thing, but you manage the people who do the thing. So you make more money than the people who do the thing, but you still have a limited income. You’re going to make somewhere on the low end, between $40,000 a year, on the high end a quarter of a million. $40,000 if you’re a manager at Taco Bell, high end, quarter of a million, you’re a middle manager,  vice president or something at Lock Heed Martin.

That’s your income window. If you want to make more money than that, like working harder in the same level doesn’t make you more money. So the next level is called communication. It’s the second to the highest level of value. Communicators are some of the highest paid people in the world. I’m not talking about people who communicate a message from their head to somebody else’s head, but people who communicate a message from their heart to somebody else’s heart. They can make, they use their words to make people feel something. You know exactly what that looks like because you do it all the time.

So you’re communicating a message. When you use your mouth to make money, on the low end you’re going to make $100 grand, on the high end you might make 100 million. Low end, 100 grand you sell cars. You make $100,000 a year. High end, 100 million, You’re an actor. You’re an A-list actor, you might make a $100 million dollars a year. You’re Robert Downy Jr. You’re a Denzel Washington. You’re an A-list actor, you’re a singer. You’re an A-list singer, you produce albums. You’re a Jay-z, Usher, Beyonce. You are communicating. You’re either an author, a speaker, an actor, a songwriter, a playwrite, or a sales person.

You launch this business called Clickfunnels even though you don’t know how to program, but you do know how to communicate the message. #justsayin. So communication is the second highest level of value and people who get really good at communicating can make a lot of money. People who resist communicating, and if I quote a friend of mine who lives out in Boise, Idaho, they just hate money.

So communication is the second highest level of value and you use your mouth to make money. That’s the resource, you use your mouth. And it almost doesn’t even seem fair, because fair is not a real concept. It doesn’t seem fair that people who talk make more money than people who move things, who have a hammer and nails, or dig holes. But they do.

I have these guys come out here and look at my roof today and the guy told me he’s working for this roofing company for 40 something years and his skin was all leathery and he had sores on his hand. I was like, oh my goodness. It’s so painful. He uses his muscle to make money and he’d been doing it for 40 years. I just thought about that just now. Sometimes people will be physically diligent so they can maintain a state of mental laziness. They won’t work hard at learning a new thing, but they’ll work hard at doing what’s already not working. That’s the kind of progression I’m taking people through.

And the highest level of value, are you ready? Drum roll please. Highest level of value is imagination. You use your mind to make money. That’s one of the resources, you use your mind. The other resource with your imagination to make money, is money. So those are the two resources you use your mind to make money with. Are there people who make money trading stocks and options and commodities and all that stuff? Are there people who do that? Absolutely.

Are there people who lose money doing the same thing? What’s the difference? The difference is how they use their mind. So your mind is your greatest resource for creating wealth. But most people, we’ve been programmed our whole life not to think. Most people don’t think. They think they think. They just think they think, but what they really do is they’re really regurgitating pre-programmed responses that were programmed to them while they were plugged into the matrix and they think they’re having a thought.

So Mind Over Money Mastery is a program where I teach you how to use the three highest level resources and the two highest levels of value and teach you how to use your mouth, mouth mastery. I teach you mind mastery and I teach you money mastery. That’s why it’s called Mind Over Money Mastery. Thank you.

Aug 30, 2017

It's amazing that marketers don't discuss this simple and lucrative funnel fix more often...

On this episode of Marketing Secrets, we have the last bit of knowledge Russell wants to share from the affiliate mastermind. This time it is a tip from Trevor Chapman. Here are some of the super informative things you will hear in today’s episode:

  • Why knowing that 68% of people leave a website before it’s finished loading is significant.
  • How you can increase conversion just by making your page load faster.
  • And how Clickfunnels can help you decrease your page loading times.

So listen here to find out how making your page load faster could significantly improve your conversion rates.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to the last of the secrets I want to share with you from the affiliate mastermind. This one has to do with page load times.

Okay, so I hope you have enjoyed some of the recaps we’ve shared this week. There’s one more cool thing I wanted to share with you. I’m not going to actually show you the video clip of it. But I do want to explain the concept because I think it’s pretty valid and I think it’s interesting and it’s something I’m going to be testing and it’s worth it for all you guys as well.

So this actually came from Trevor Chapman, and Trevor is one of my inner circle members who was there. It’s interesting, he was talking about doing all sorts of stuff with his funnels trying to figure things out and he ended up starting to put Google analytics on stuff to look deeper at everything. And as he was looking at analytics he was trying to figure it out and he couldn’t find someone, so he’s like, “I gotta dig deep in this and try to figure some stuff out.”

And a couple of things he found that were interesting and I think it’s worth listening to. So number one, he said that basically 68% of visitors, I don’t know if it was his page or if it was an industry stat from Google analytics, but 68% of people leave the page before it finishes loading. So they see your ad, they click on it, come over to the page, the page starts loading and 68% of them leave before the page finishes loading, which is interesting.

So he started going back in and started saying, “My page is loading too slow. I need to increase my page load speed. If I’m losing 68% of people before the page even loads, that’s 2/3rds of my traffic or whatever the fraction is on that, never even see my ad.” So he started doing stuff to lower things. Lowering the image size, lowering page size, page structure, a bunch of stuff like that and increasing how fast the page loaded. And he got his, I can’t remember how much he decreased the load time, but from 25-30 seconds down to 10 seconds, down to 5 seconds. And as he did that he 2-3x’d his income. Not by changing the page or ad or anything, just by reducing, increasing the page load time, which was super fascinating.

In fact, he kind of mocked, he teased me because the clickfunnels.com homepage right now, I don’t think I ever optimized those images, but it takes almost 30 full seconds to load the entire page, and he’s like I bet you 68% of people never see that thing. I’m like, “That sucks.” So that was kind of interesting.

Then he made another observation that for me was super fascinating. He talked about how people like me say ugly pages convert better, or your page….a webinar registration page without a video on it increase conversation rates and all sorts of stuff. He’s like, “I always thought it was because ugly pages convert better. No, the problem is a lot of times pretty pages take way longer to load.” You’ve got beautiful background images and a video file and all that kind of stuff just takes longer to load. That’s why people are leaving.

Where with the ugly ones, it’s just html code, there’s text and some stuff, they load faster and therefore instead of 68% of people leaving, it maybe drops down to 23%. You’re getting twice as much traffic just by increasing the load speed time. I thought that was fascinating and interesting. So I’m going to be doing some more testing, but I wanted to share with you guys, with everyone as your doing it, because I don’t know 100%, I take everything with a grain of salt, but I do think he’s onto something. I do think the page load time is interesting.

I do know on the Clickfunnels side, this is something that should be comforting to you guys, Todd spends time every single month trying to decrease page load speed on our side, doing stuff to optimize the pages, get the code out faster, all those kind of things so that page load is happening faster. In fact, I’ve seen over the last probably year, I’ve seen him shave across network wide, tens of millions of pages  that people view every single day on ours, shaving time off by multiple seconds.

So we’re always optimizing on our side. But you guys as you’re building pages in Clickfunnels, just know that. Know that, man if I have a background image, how big is that file? If it’s 3 megs and I got 3 of those things, that’s 9 megs just in background images. That’s not good, especially when you’re pulling it on your phone or mobile. It gets really, really bad. In fact, we just created a new tool inside Funnel University, for those of you who are Funnel U members, it should be there by the time you’re here. But it’s an image re-sizer. I had Dorel on my team build a little software app where basically you take a background image, throw it in this thing and what it’ll do is take an image that’s like 3 or 4 megs, you’ll click a button and it’ll pop the image back out, it looks exactly the same but it decreases the image size from 3 or 4 megs to like 300 megabytes or whatever, 1/10th the size.

So I’m going  back to all my old images, my e-cover image, my picture image, any image I upload in Clickfunnels, I have on a page, I’m putting back through that thing and shrinking the size of it to increase page load time. Just know, those are things you should be looking at because, man, if you can increase your conversion by 10%, 20% 30% just by images loading faster, that’s a lot of money without having to write better copy or any of those kinds of things. Just page load time.

So Trevor Chapman, thanks for bringing that top of mind to me. And hopefully everyone who’s listening on the podcast, it’s something definitely worth doing. And it’s something you should all look at.

With that said, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode of Marketing Secrets podcast. If you loved this episode, a couple of things. Number one, please go and share with those who you love. Tell them to go subscribe and listen. Number two, please read a comment. I do read the comments over at itunes.com, leave a comment and let me know. Number three, the best thing you can do to increase us, right now, last I checked we’re number 5 in the business category, if we want to be number one, it’s all about listen time. The more you listen the higher we get ranked.

So go and binge listen. Go back to episode number one, click play and let’s catch up on the last 5 years together. Basically since we started launching Clickfunnels is about the time I launched this podcast and you get to hear the ups and downs, behind the scenes. Everything we did to go from zero to over 100 million dollars in sales and it’s all free here on the podcast. You just gotta go binge listen at the very beginning. So come back to episode one, let’s have some fun and I hope you enjoy the podcast. I appreciate you guys being on here and we’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye.

Aug 29, 2017

Your supporters might be secretly mad at you if you're neglecting to do this simple thing.

On this episode Russell talks about validation and why it’s important to validate people when they have done a great job. You’ll also hear from Julie Stoian at the mastermind event talking about how validation motivated her into working harder. Here are some of the cool things you will hear in today’s episode:

  • How Julie helped Russell realize that he needs to be better about validating people when they do things well.
  • Why Russell and Dave validating Julie motivated her to keep going and to work harder in the affiliate contest.
  • And why validation is important in all aspects of life, not just business.

Listen here for that and more on this episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to another episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast. This one, we’re staying in the affiliate event. I’ve got so many more cool things to share with you guys. I want to talk about a concept that was brought to my attention again called validation.

Alright so at this affiliate mastermind group we had again, our top 20 affiliates were there. And one of the people who came was an unlikely person on our leader board, I say unlikely because I didn’t know much about her prior to this, but now that I know her, it’s very likely. There’s a reason why she’s successful and I hope she knows that if she’s listening to this. But it’s Julie and if you guys watched the affiliate contest you saw it, she did awesome throughout the contest and she came in and ended up being on the top ten leader board, ended up being number 4 I believe in this contest.

She has become the first Clickfunnels affiliate to win a car, Julie Stoian and a whole bunch of other awesome stuff. What’s interesting is she joined this contest, I didn’t know these things, it was in the middle of her moving, she was in the middle of her own product launch, a bunch of stuff and she started going and she started trying to be part of this launch and help support us. Throughout the launch, first off I guess and I didn’t know this, a bunch of people were doing Facebook Live’s with me and she wanted to do a Facebook Live and I guess she reached out to Dave and asked, and Dave was like, “We can’t, Russell’s got 30 a day and we just can’t do it.”

And rightfully so, she was kind of upset about that. A little while later, other things happened and she kind of blew up and it was funny, it was the first time she’d really been brought to my attention. I was watching her videos and I was just like, man, she’s killing herself trying to help support us and I was so grateful for that. And she was upset, which always adds a little layer of whatever. I saw her video and I was just like, at first I was kind of hurt, oh man. Then I started comments and the more I started reading I was like, she said something that she kind of dropped in a comment, “He won’t even let me do an interview with him.”

I was like, “She just wanted to do an interview?” So I just posted, “Do you just want to do an interview. We can do that.” And she wrote back, “Yes, I’d love to.”  I’m like, “Okay, if that’s it, let’s just do an interview, that’d be fine.” And we ended up doing the interview and she sold a bunch of books and she kept doing it and she ended up being number 4.

And she came to this event and she was talking about the top 10 or 15 things she’d learned through this affiliate contest, which were really, really cool. I’m not going to share all of them, because obviously a lot of the stuff that was shared at the event is private for those who were there. But one of the things that was interesting is she talked about is just validation. How me and Dave Woodward on our team, how us validating her, is what got her to keep moving forward. And I’m going to show that clip really quick so you guys can kind of just hear her say in her own words why that was so important, because it’s interesting and I want you guys to hear that. And then when we come I wanted to kind of talk about that because it’s important to so many aspects of our lives. So let’s watch that clip right now.

Julie: At one point in the contest, I was angry. I was really angry because I had asked for an interview and I didn’t get one, and then I saw other people getting one that were further down the list than me and I was just, I was mad and I felt like I was missing out and my feelings were hurt, but I was angry. So I posted on Facebook that I was mad about the $20 bid, and I also didn’t understand the context of the whole Dream 100 because I’d never gotten any of the other packages because I wasn’t part of Russell’s Dream 100.

So I felt like I was in this ridiculous game where the rules were changing and I wanted their attention and I wasn’t getting it. Well Dave and Russell both validated me and from that moment on I went from “I don’t know if I want to do this. Maybe I’m going to quit.” To “I’m yours forever.” The validation that happened at that moment of being able to reach out and say, “I see you. I see what you’re doing, I’m appreciative. Do you want an interview?” I had all kinds of motivation I never had before.

So in my own business, when I see my customers or my clients floundering but they’re really trying, and I’m not talking about the trolls and the thugs and the people who are just the complainers, but the people who are really trying and they’re just drowning. That one seed of “hey, I hear you.” Can change everything and that’s what it did for me. Because I was ready to quit and then Russell and Dave reached out and I was like, I’m not quitting. It completely changed it for me when you guys reached out. I was done. So in business that matters to me, and I think that’s how I’ve created customers for life in my own business. And why I got as far as I did.

Russell: It’s interesting huh, how us validating her got her to go and do these things and to do stuff. I started thinking back about my life, in fact Brandon Fisher who’s one of our main video guys, he talked about this too as well. When I validate, or when someone validates his work or whatever it might be, how powerful that is. And a lot of time, and I forget this and I wish I was better at it. But a lot of times your employees or your spouse or your kids, a lot of times they’re doing stuff because they love you and appreciate you and want you to be happy and I think sometimes, especially in the business world we get caught up in, “What do they want? They want a raise.” And we think about that because it’s the monetary side.

But a lot of times it’s, a lot of people that’s important obviously, but what’s more important sometimes is validation, saying “Thank you.” Saying, “You did a great job.” And I’m not perfect at that. I struggle with that. I wish I was better at that. But it kind of brought it back to my attention and I feel like the team we’ve built at Clickfunnels is second to none. And I feel like one of my roles that I need to become better at is validating people and just thanking them for what they do and telling them they did a good job and things like that.

So I’m making more of a conscious effort of that, to do it more often. Because it’s been interesting, as I’ve built this company with my team, even when I said the word “I” right there, I said “I’ve been building..” I felt like that’s not true. Is that weird. I was like that wasn’t true. So let me step back, as we’ve been building Clickfunnels, because it has not been me. It’s been a team, an army of the most amazing people on earth who have built that together.

A lot of times people think it’s me because I’m the bouncing monkey, “Oh get Clickfunnels.” But I’m just one little piece of this machine that’s been growing. A lot of times I get validation from the market, which makes me feel good. People like my comments, or they comment or share or whatever and I get the pat on the back for a job well done but for the rest of the team, they don’t necessarily get that. It’s just coming from me or coming from somebody else. So I think sometimes I forget that because I get the ego boost. I mean that’s why.

Honestly though, why do I share so many videos? Why do I do podcasts? Why do I do so much stuff?  I like the validation. I like when I put something cool out there and people are like, “Dude, that was awesome.” I get that validation and I think too often I don’t give it to the people who are the rest of the army behind what we’re doing. And a lot of times my family, my kids, my wife….It was a good reminder for me, it was humbling. I hope it’s a good reminder for you too.

With that said, thanks again for listening to this episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast. If you loved this episode, if you love anything you’ve learned so far, please share this. Let other people know about it. Last I checked we were number 5 in the business category. We’ve been beating out some of the legends and we’ve been there for a long time now. And the way we get to number one is you guys sharing, telling other people about it, binge listening. In fact, the best thing to increase the ratings of the podcast for all of us is for you guys to binge listen.

So if you like this one, go back to episode number one and go through these things together this weekend and let’s binge listen together, it’ll be kind of fun. Appreciate you guys. We’ll see you guys on the next episode. Bye.

Aug 28, 2017

Do you say "yes" to too many opportunities? If so, this episode is for you.

On today’s episode of Marketing Secrets, we hear another excerpt from the affiliate mastermind. We hear Garrett Pearson go over the rules he must follow in order to see a project through. Here are some of the awesome things to look for in this episode:

  • Each of Garrett’s rules to follow to take on a new project, and why.
  • And how the rules may vary in different businesses, but why it is important to figure out your own rules.

So listen here to find out what rules a project must fall into for Garrett to take it on, and why you should be doing something similar with your own business.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell. I want to welcome you back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. This episode I’m going to be talking about some of the rules you need to setup before you say yes to any project.

So for today’s podcast, again this is another cool thing that we got from the affiliate mastermind group. One of my friends, his name is Garrett Pearson, he runs a bunch of cool companies, and we’re actually launching a company soon together, which I’m really excited for. I won’t ruin the surprise yet, but it is amazing and you’re going to go crazy. Should I tell you more? After you see the webinar you will want to create a software program inside of your company. That’s all I’m giving you.

With that said, Garrett came and showed the business we’re building together, kind of presented it to all the affiliates, because again, I think that every affiliate, I think every business should have a software component to it. I think you’re kind of crazy if you don’t. Of all the businesses I’ve been in, I’ve been supplements, info products, ecommerce, everything, by far my favorite business ever is software, which is probably why I love software, as you can tell.

But one thing that Garrett talked about, they have a list of rules that they, before they see a project, he’s like, “I have a new idea for a new software product every hour. If we didn’t have a filter…” and at first when he started his business, he didn’t. He’d just create everything. He said, “We created this filter.” So I asked him if he’d share that filter with everyone during the mastermind event. So I’m going to have him share that filter, I’m going to show you guys that clip right now.

His filter may be different than your filter, but listen to this because you need to create your own filter. And I struggle with it as well. So many opportunities come by and I’m like, “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, I gotta say yes.” And it’s like, no you have to create a filter otherwise it will consume your whole business and life. It’s something that I’m working on and so it was a good reminder for me. So I want you guys to hear Garrett’s filter, the thing he runs things through before he jumps in and says yes to a project. So let me show you that clip right now.

Garrett: We had to come up with a way to stop us from doing too much. Because you have to focus, like Russell said, you have to focus. So here’s how we stay grounded. We don’t do a software if it doesn’t pass all of these things, okay.

So is it sexy, does your product fill a need or want in a desirable, attractive way? That’s pretty obvious right? You’ve got to find something that people want. More importantly in the software world, is it sticky? So in the software world, if you want recurring billing, you want recurring revenue, you need somebody that’s going to pay you over and over again, month after month, or year after year. So is it sticky? Is it going to be difficult or painful for a client to stop using our software.

So Clickfunnels is a good example. I don’t know what Russell’s churn rate is, and that’s people that stop using it, but with the amount of users he has, that’s just part of doing business in the software world. But it’s super sticky, because if you’ve got ten funnels you’re not going to leave.

Russell: Even if you hate me.

Garrett: Exactly! You’re not going to leave, right?  So our shopper approved software, it’s a rating and review software for ecommerce companies. They start using us, they get even 50 reviews, they’re going to stay with us forever and keep paying us and paying us. So is it sticky? That’s really, really important. For example, with Allison’s, it’s definitely sexy, it’s definitely sticky because you’re going to keep using it over and over again, hopefully. So people are going to keep paying her month after month.

Can you charge recurring billing? We don’t do anything unless we can charge recurring billing. So it’s very, very important because the recurring billing is where software, as we’ve already talked about today, why it’s the 9th wonder of the world. Can you sell it via call center? Now this is for us, these can be different for you guys. We love to sell our products in a call center. So for us, if we can’t sell it in a call center…for example, where something wouldn’t work for us, if it’s $47 a month. Because we can’t sell that in a call center because our guys won’t make enough money, our sales team won’t make enough money. So if we can’t sell it in a call center, we generally don’t do it.

Can you promote it to your existing customers target market? Now this is for us, because we already have software in certain niches right. So we try to build stuff that we can sell to our existing customers, or that market. Now this software funnel is an exception, but sometimes you gotta make exceptions, right.

Is it programming excessive? If it takes us more than 6 to 8 months to develop with one or two programmers, generally we won’t do it. Is it customer service friendly? It’s gotta be customer service friendly or it’s going to be a nightmare to work with over time. So those are the things that we go through and if it doesn’t pass those, we don’t do it.

Russell: Alright to recap what Garrett said. Is it sexy? Is it sticky? Can you charge recurrent? Can you sell it through a call center? Can you promote it to existing customers? Is it programming excessive and support friendly? For them those are the filters they need to have. You don’t have to have the same filters for you. Sometimes you don’t want a call center. Maybe that’s the opposite filter, like it cannot be sold in a call center, it’s gotta be sold online. But you gotta pick your rules. These are the rules of what I’m willing to do and not willing to do.

Otherwise, as I’ve found in my life, and I still struggle with it like I said. If you’re not careful, you’ll commit to too much stuff. If you suffer from over commitment, that’s the problem. I would definitely say that I fall in this trap. In fact, it’s been interesting, in the last two weeks, two people have been placed in my life. One I haven’t seen in 16 or 17 years, a spiritual leader who I have so much respect for, but I haven’t heard from him in 16 or 17 years, and I hear from him and a couple of weeks later he’s in my office, sitting there talking to me, and then he’s gone.

And then, just today it happened again. Again, someone I respect a ton. And both of them basically said, almost word for word, said the same thing. “Russell, you gotta slow down. You need to be in this for the long haul.” I think God is telling me something consistently and I’m hearing it loud and clear and now I’m trying to figure out for myself, I’ve got to create my filters, I’ve got to create these rules for myself because as you guys can probably see, I’m running faster now. We’re doing a lot of stuff, which is good, it’s fun, I love it. But at the same time, if I’m not careful I’m going to burn out. I need to be in the for the long haul for myself to keep me happy in the long term in my life, for my customers, for my partners, for our employees, for everyone.

So just a good reminder for me and hopefully for you as well. Thanks again for listening to the Marketing Secrets podcast, I hope you appreciate it, if you do, if you learn anything please share this with your friends. Please come into iTunes, please comment, let us know. We’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye everybody.

Aug 25, 2017

The harder you try to get it, the more success escapes you.

On today’s episode we hear another clip of John Lee Dumas talking about a quote from Albert Einstein that taught him not to chase success. Here are some of the cool things you will hear on this episode:

  • Why being a person of value is more important than being a person of success.
  • How being a person of value will lead to success.
  • And what JLD’s 3 special ingredients for success are.

Listen hear to hear John Lee Dumas explain how being a person of value led to being a person of success.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson and the Marketing Secrets podcast. I’ve got another really cool thing to share with you from our recent affiliate mastermind.

Alright everybody, this is one that I thought was really powerful. This was also a really cool strategy shared by JLD, John Lee Dumas of EO on Fire and he talked about when he was growing up he wanted to be successful. So he was doing things to make him successful. He was going to school, getting jobs, trying to become successful and somewhere in this journey he said that he heard a quote from Albert Einstein and the quote, I’m probably going to mess this up. Let’s do this, I’m going to cut to the clip so you can hear him actually say it and tell the story, because he’ll say it more articulate than I can. So let’s listen to that clip right now and we’ll come right back.

JLD: So at 32 Years old I kind of had this realization when I read this quote by Albert Einstein, which was, “Try not to become a person of success, but rather a person of value.” And I was like, I’ve been trying to become a person of success my whole life and it hasn’t really worked. So what is this value thing?

So I started really doing some research on what it meant to be a person of value and that’s when I started looking around my world saying what people are adding value into my life? And those people, really in 2012, were podcasters. I was like, these people are adding free value to my life and they’re amazing. Maybe this is something I can look at. So this is something that led me down the path of launching my own podcast so that I could then create free, valuable, and consistent content. That’s my 3 special ingredients for success. Because I deliver free, valuable and consistent content, I was able to grow an audience.

Russell: So I thought that was such a key because I know that for most of us, for me, I want to be successful and if we’re running towards success, a lot of times we don’t realize that that’s not what makes you successful. It’s figuring out how to provide value, how to be a person of value. That is the key. And when you do that you’ll get the success that you want.

There’s so many things in life that we have that problem where there’s a direct path to success, but instead of going and getting it, we go and do things on these huge loops to try to get the success we want. One of the funny ones, when I first started working with Tony Robbins, started learning all his 6 human needs and things like that, it was interesting because prior to that my wife and I had a conversation. I was out there trying to build this business, trying to do all these cool things and trying to impress her so that we would have more love and connection between me and her. And I was going on this huge route trying to get more love and connection.

I remember one day I came home and I was all excited about this stuff and my wife you could tell that she missed me and she was like, “I just wish you’d come home.” And I was like, “What? I’m doing all these things for us.” As sometimes we say. And as I thought more about it I was like, I’m doing these things for myself. I’m trying to feel more significant, more of all these kind of things so that I can impress her so that we can have love and connection. I’m going on this huge route to get love and connection where I could have just come home and gotten the same love and connection.

It’s just interesting sometimes as humans we go on this route. And I think this is one of the things I got out of the affiliate mastermind. It was just like, if you want to be a person of success, don’t pursue success, pursue being a person of value and the person the provides the most value to the audience, to the people, to become successful. If you understand that, the game changes. Hope that helps, hope you guys enjoyed this podcast. Thanks again for listening to Marketing Secrets. Please, if you like this episode or any of the episodes, share it, comment on it, love to hear it. I appreciate you guys listening and I’ll see you guys on the next episode. Bye.

Aug 24, 2017

In my 15 years of doing business, I've never heard this critical business concept explained so perfectly.

On this episode of Marketing Secrets Russell lets you listen to how John Lee Dumas describes his ideal and perfect customer. Here are some cool things you will hear:

  • Why you need to be able to describe your ideal customer in detail in order to appeal to them.
  • Why it’s a good idea to make decisions based on what your ideal customer would like.
  • And why creating a few calls to action based on your customers needs will be beneficial.

So listen here to find out what John Lee Dumas’s perfect customer is like, and how you can nail yours down as well.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today I’ll take you behind the scenes of our recent affiliate mastermind talking about building out your customer avatar.

Alright everyone, so this last week we did an affiliate event for my top 20 affiliates for the Expert Secrets book, which was really cool. We had them all fly out here to Boise, we hung out, shared ideas, talked and it was really, really cool. In fact, the next few episodes of the podcast, I’m actually going to do right here in my home office. I’m here right now and I’ve got my notebook with a whole bunch of cool stuff and there are a whole bunch of really good takeaways that I think were valuable enough to share with you.

We also happened to film the event, so I’m going to get Brandon on my team to grab some of those clips and plug them into here so you can actually see some of the footage and some of the ideas and concepts, I think are really, really important. I know the last few podcasts I’ve done have been some long ones. Some an hour long, 90 minutes, so I’m going to get back to a shorter form to share some of the really cool things.

So first I want to talk about JLD, John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneur On Fire, who is I think the number one Clickfunnels affiliate right now. He’s going to be the first affiliate in Clickfunnels to make a million dollars himself, that’s his goal and he’s killing it. He’s also probably one of the lowest maintenance, if not the lowest maintenance affiliates I’ve ever had and partners. He’s just an awesome dude, and I love him and love working with him and it’s awesome.

So he was at the event and what was cool was that we had him do some Q&A with the group and somebody asked him, “I’m building a podcast,” and the first thing JLD asked was “Who’s it for?” and they’re like, “It’s for this kind of person, this kind of person, and this kind of person.” He’s like, “There’s your problem, you need to be able to identify exactly who your person is.” And then he went into this state where he shared exactly who his dream customer, his dream client was. I’ve never in the history of me doing this business, which is now 14 or 15 years heard someone more perfectly explain their customer avatar than JLD did in that moment. And I’m so glad we got it on film. I’m going to play that clip for you right now so you can see exactly what he said.

And as you’re listening to this I want you thinking through that because that is how clear you have to be on exactly who your customer is, and that way you create your product, your podcast, whatever it is you’re doing, you match it to your customer and that is the secret. So let me show you that clip right now.

JLD: So who’s you’re perfect listener?

Audience member: Our perfect listener would be a business owner, or an entrepreneur, or a real estate investor.

JLD: So that’s really vague. Perfect listener should just be that one individual that you see as that perfect, ideal client. Because once you’ve made that step and that decision as a podcast host, everything changes. So for me, when I was trying to figure out what I wanted Entrepreneur On Fire to be I was overwhelmed because it was hard for me to find what the path that I wanted to take my listeners on.

When I really sat down and said okay, my listener, or my avatar is Jimmy. He’s 37 years old, he has a wife and two kids ages three to five. He drives by himself to work every single day, it’s a 25 minute commute to work. He gets to a cubical at a job he hates for 9 hours. He gets done with his job, drives home, it’s a 35 minute commute home. He gets stuck in a little bit of traffic. He gets home and hangs out with his kids, has dinner with his family, puts his kids to bed, hangs out with his wife and then he has a little Jimmy pity party at the end of every single night because he’s sitting on the couch saying ‘Why do I spend 90% of my waking hours doing things that I don’t enjoy doing? Commuting to a job I don’t like, being at a job I don’t like, commuting home and only 10% of my waking hours doing things that I love. Like spending time with my kids and my family.’

Jimmy is my avatar, he’s the person that, as he’s driving to work, should be listening to Entrepreneur On Fire so that when my guest is sharing their worst entrepreneurial moments he can understand that it’s okay to fail. That you can learn lessons from failure. And that when he’s driving home and my guest talks about their aha moment, he can talk about how you take an aha moment and turn it into success. And then instead of having that pity party at night by himself on a couch, he can listen to the lightning round where my guest is sharing their best advice they’ve ever had, their favorite book, their favorite resource, so he can start to put together the pieces of the puzzle.

So for me, whenever I come up to any question I have above the direction of my podcast, I go to my avatar and I say, “WWJD, what would Jimmy do?”  And I know from that one answer that that’s the way I gotta go. So if you sit down and really say hey, this really is the one perfect listener of my podcast, then you’re going to know that person inside and out. You’re going to know where  that person hangs out, what Facebook groups they’re in, what LinkedIn groups they’re in. How to advertize to them, what lead or ad is going to be appealing to them on Facebook, that’s going to get them to download it and be promoted to your show.

And again, this is you ideal, perfect client. You can probably picture right now, this person that whenever he sits down in front of you, you’re just like, “Dude, you’re like my favorite client.” And he’s like, “I know I’m your favorite client.” That’s the person that you want to be drawing in. So if you sit down and really just figure out who your perfect one ideal listener is, everything changes from that point forward and all the decisions you make are based off of that. So every piece of content you make for your podcast is speaking to that avatar, that one person. Every call to action you give, every intro, and every call to action, and every outro is for a specific purpose.

So for instance, in my podcast, Entrepreneur On Fire, you’ll hear me, I have seven rotating calls to action on my intro’s and outro’s. One’s going to say, “Hey this John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneur On Fire where I interview the world’s most successful entrepreneurs 7 days a week. By the way if you’re struggling with a goal right now, you should check out the Freedom Journal, because I teach you how to accomplish your number one goal in 100 days, so visit thefreedomjournal.com” And that will be one call to action that will bring people down one specific funnel that will result in them purchasing my journal, the Freedom Journal, for $39.

And then I have the call to action in my outro that says, “Hey guys, I hope you enjoyed the chat with Russell today. He rocked the mic as always. Oh, by the way, if you’re thinking about creating your own course, your own podcast, I have a free course called Free Podcast course, it’ll teach you how to create, grow and monetize your own podcast in 15 days.

So then they’ll go to that URL, they’ll sign up for the free podcasting course, which lead them to my free master class, which I do every two weeks live. And then the master class will lead to me pitching them Podcaster’s Paradise, which is what we have for our premium podcasting community. So every single call to action I have is for Jimmy to take him into one of my 7 or 8 functioning funnels that I have to result in some kind of revenue being generated at the end.

So I think the steps you can and should take is really nail your avatar, understand who that person is as an individual, and then start creating one, two, three calls to action that you’re using in your intros and your outros that are getting them into a beginning part of a funnel, that’s going to result in your ideal action, which might be a phone call. Which might be, whatever, you know, investigating their first dollar with your company. Whatever that result is, that’s the funnel you’re taking them in. Does that make sense?

 I hope you guys loved that. As he was talking I was trying to take notes. I’m like, oh good we got a video. It’s pretty powerful and I want to make sure you guys all know your customer avatar that clear as well. If not, it’s time to do your homework, stop the podcast and go think through that. Because as soon as it becomes that tangible, where you know who they, everything else becomes easier. With that said, thanks you guys so much for listening and we’ll see you on next week’s episode of the Marketing Secret’s podcast.

Aug 15, 2017

If you’re not as successful yet as you’d like to be… I know why. This episode I went off on a 96 minute rant that’ll get you back on track.

On today’s special road trip edition of the podcast Russell talks about some exciting events coming up, some personal development rules he follows, and why it’s okay for people to outgrow Clickfunnels. Here are some of the cool things to look forward to in this episode:

  • The viral video by the Harmon Brothers and the kind of party that is planned for it.
  • Why Russell thinks studying, learning and geeking out on the marketing of your product is the key to success.
  • Why it’s okay to be greedy in the initial stages of your business.
  • How building and growing a business is similar to making, being pregnant with, and birthing a baby.
  • What the 3 steps toward personal development that Russell follows are.
  • Why you need to be willing to take risks.
  • What some Clickfunnels clients are doing that they shouldn’t and why Russell is a little pissed off about it.
  • And much, much more.

So listen here to hear this extra long, extra informative and extra exciting episode of Marketing Secrets.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to a special edition, a road trip version, edition, whatever you want to call it of Marketing Secrets podcast. I feel like we’re going old school, for our long time friends and followers, this is like a Marketing In Your Car.  But I’ve got a long drive ahead and I want to welcome you guys to the podcast.

Alright, alright everybody. I just started a super long road trip heading to Burley, Idaho. It is my wife’s grandma’s 100th birthday. So we’re heading down to the big birthday party. Isn’t that crazy, 100 years old! It’s really, really fun. My wife and kids actually left a day and a half ago. I had to get some stuff done, so now I’m heading down for the big party.

So basically I have a two hour road trip and was heading out the door, super excited and I’m totally unprepared. I forgot my camera to record podcasts, I forgot my little ear buds, I forgot my sunglasses. Oh well, what can you do? I forgot my battery charger for my phone, oh well I’m still excited.

So I’m heading down and I’ve got some time to talk to you guys. So I wanted to share some cool things. First off, one thing we’re working on is, as you’ve probably heard, we’re about to launch our viral video with the Harmon Brothers. They’re the guys that did Squatty Potty and Poopourri and all the other awesome things. What’s funny, everyone asks me, “Oh I want to hire them too, their stuff is awesome. How much does it cost?” and I think people think the quote is going to be like 10 or 15 grand or something, but it’s actually half a million dollars to hire them to do a 3 minute video for you. It’s not cheap.

So we paid a lot of money to get this video created and then I was like man, most people do a video and then they launch it and it kind of just, you hope it goes well and sometimes it does, but I’m like, if we’re going to launch it, I want as much oompf behind it as humanly possible. So I was like, we need to do a launch party. So that was kind of the first thought, but how do we do a launch party? I’ve never done one before but it’s gotta be just kind of like a regular party. Well maybe we should get some cool speakers, some cool influencers and affiliates out here, so who would be cool to have? Oh Gary Vaynerchuk would be cool. He’s not speaking at Funnel Hacking Live, but he’d be a really cool fit for this event.

So we called him up, he said yes. We had to pay him about 100 grand to get him to come to Boise to speak. But we’re like where in Boise is actually cool enough to host an event like this? There’s not a lot of cool hotels. So the Boise State football stadium, the big Skybox there, is kind of cool and hold 3 or 400 people.

So we’re like, cool we’ll do this. We rent the Skybox, but who are we going to invite. We need to make this really, really cool. I think it was Alex Charfen told me this, it might not have been him, but I think it was. Basically said that entrepreneurs like to create events out of everything to make it memorable for them and for everybody else. So I was like, we need to make a big event.

So anyway, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. We can invite our affiliates, that’ll be kind of fun, we’ll invite a bunch of them. But who else can we invite that can share this video? We can invite people that aren’t necessarily our affiliates, just other influencers that if they share the video it would dramatically boost it. So okay, let’s do that.

So we set up this event, I was going to speak, Harmon Brothers were going to speak, Gary was going to speak, then we start reaching out to influencers and they’re like, “We don’t really care about people speaking. We want a party.” And we’re like, it’s going to be kind of a fun party. We’re all fun people. They’re like, “No we need a real party.” So we’re like, how do we throw a real party?

So we started just kind of brainstorming and what came out of the brainstorm was what if we rented out the actual football stadium and tried to play bubble soccer, that’d be kind of fun. What if instead of playing bubble soccer, what if we tried to play the biggest game of bubble soccer ever? What if we had the Guinness Book of World Records come and….

Anyway, that was kind of the initial crazy thought and then Dave was like, “I’m going to figure out how to make this work.” So Dave spent the next two weeks on the phone getting the Guinness Book of World Records, and then getting Boise State to let us come, and all the licensing fees and it’s been this insane project. So we got all that done. We don’t have any influencers who have kind of, we’re in this thing with a lot of money. We have no influencers actually coming. So then I was like, okay, I have to go old school. Practice what I preach.

So the last two days I’ve sat in this car and recorded almost 200 videos, personalized videos for all these influencers, which was a lot of work. We made a page, 200 pages for 200 different influencers and now Monday, we’re in the process of contacting all of them and inviting them to this huge party. Anyway, it’s been crazy and none of them may come, but hopefully they will. But regardless it’ll be a fun party. We’re going to set a world record, we’re going to launch a viral video and that’s one of the many things we’re doing.

We also have 12 events in the next 43 days happening in Boise. One of them just got done so it’s actually down to 11. Monday we have a design-a-thon where we’ve got 30 designers coming out and we’re busting out a whole bunch of new templates for the Marketplace that’s launching during the new onboarding, everything’s going live in Clickfunnels when the viral videos hits and about a billion other things. It’s crazy. The next 45 days will probably be the most stressful, crazy days of my life. But if we can pull it off, it’s going to be nuts.

I keep saying that, I did the same thing with the book launch. I think there’s something about me, I think something’s wrong, the wiring in my head where I always think that after this life will get normal again. But then I just keep stacking things on. I think part of it is just momentum, it’s hard to get momentum for a lot of people. But when you have momentum you don’t want to slow down, you want to keep riding the wave. So I feel like I’m 14 minutes into my 15 minutes of fame and I’m enjoying the ride and I don’t want to slow down, so I’m like, we just keep rolling stuff out.

We’re launching a new book, the Funnel Hacker Cookbook, this month. It’s crazy. If you guys could see what’s actually happening behind the scenes, I don’t think you’d actually believe it. Funnel Hacker TV, we started filming that because we wanted to show people, but that’s still just a glimpse, it doesn’t come close to everything that’s actually happening. It’s nuts.

Alright, so for you guys I wanted to share, because I’ve been thinking a lot about this last night as I was working super late. I was like, why am I here? It’s been two nights that I’ve been here until like 2:30 in the morning and I’m loving it. Outside of hanging out with my kids, there’s nothing else I would rather do than that. And I’m like, how do I get people to where they’re this passionate about what they do and their business and what they’re selling?

I did a podcast a little while ago talking about the number one trait I found between entrepreneurs who are successful and those who aren’t and the biggest trait is that the ones who are super successful, they’re the ones who are extremely passionate, not just about their product but about the marketing of their product.  They start geeking out on the marketing. That’s the key. Those who obsess with the marketing are the ones who have the most success, which is why for me it’s been a big deal, that’s why I wrote the Dotcom Secrets book and the Expert Secrets book, and why I do the events. All the stuff I do is because my goal is to get you guys, I want to make marketing and sales fun. If this is something that you guys, if I could make this the entertainment. To study and learn and geek out on the marketing, then that’s been my mission on this earth.

Because when I was learning this stuff, it was exciting for me but honestly it was kind of boring. The people teaching and talking about marketing, yawn, they were boring and I had to wade through a lot of boring crap and now I’m trying to make it exciting. I’m trying to bring my raw passion to you guys and I hope I’m doing my job. I’m doing my best. Because if you get pumped up and fired up about the marketing of your thing, then that’s how you get the ability to make money, free yourself, and give you the ability to not just make the money but impact more people and serve more people and that’s the goal.

So I’m thinking, outside of me just everyday trying to get you guys pumped and excited and fired up about how much fun the marketing of your thing can be, I was thinking about this last night, how do I just take that part of my brain out and shove it into your brain so you’re fired up. I started thinking about it and I think the key for someone to be truly passionate about the marketing and the selling of their thing, they first have to be truly passionate about their thing.

Because you think about that, I talked a little bit about this in the Expert Secrets book, initially you don’t wake up, well I did, but I think most people don’t, maybe that was my gift of whatever. But most people don’t wake up excited, “I’m going to learn how to do marketing!” It’s not the thing that pumps people up. But there’s something else that happens, there’s something that you got excited about in your life. It could a book you read, it could be audio, could be video, could be just a weird thing, I don’t know. Whatever it is that your thing is. Everyone has their thing, your thing is something.

So your thing that got you pumped up, whatever that was, I want you to think about that because that’s the key that unlocks everything. First you get excited about that thing because it’s exciting to you. You go through this time of growth. You start studying it and you learn and geek out and start growing and growing and growing and growing and at first it’s honestly kind of a selfish thing. There’s nothing wrong with that. What’s the dude from Wallstreet say? Greed is good. Initially it is, I think. Not long term, but short term greed is good. Greed is what gets you to unbalance your life in a way initially, not long term but initially. Initially you have unbalance your life to focus on a thing to have greatness come.

When I met my beautiful wife and I wanted to fall in love with her, for me to be successful in that I had to be greedy. I had to shift all my time and all the other stuff I was doing and other people and other things. I had to unbalance my life to focus everything on that relationship so that we could fall in love and get married. The same thing happened with business. The same thing happened with wrestling. When I started wrestling, I had to be greedy about that thing. I had to get so unbalanced in every other thing in my life and just focus on that thing, because that’s what it takes to be great at anything, right. That raw passion.

So first, the greed of that thing, of you desiring that thing is what initially starts. Some of you guys it was weight loss, some of you guys it was Biohacking, some of you guys it was finance, some of you guys it was history. It doesn’t matter, whatever it is that you geek out about. So the greed of the excitement that you feel initially for that thing is what makes it so you can completely unbalance your life and absorb and go into that thing. That’s the first key because to be an expert, to be able to share your message, all those things we talk about and to actually care about the marketing about your thing, you’ve got to be ridiculously passionate about the thing first. Otherwise you’re not going to wade into this territory, you’re going to go through all the pain of being an entrepreneur and getting that thing out into the world.

Because I know a lot of us paint this beautiful picture of entrepreneurship and it is eventually, but initially it’s not. Initially it sucks. Initially you have to go through so much. It’s like giving birth. My wife has given birth to 5 kids, 4 times, one time was twins. Giving birth is not pleasurable. The initial thought of it, that creates the baby. That’s pleasurable just like your business, the thought of it is exciting. You’re romantic about the thing you’re going to create. Sorry, my jeep is super loud when I go into overdrive.

Anyway, that’s pleasurable, we all enjoy that. I enjoyed what it took to get my wife pregnant, that’s awesome I enjoyed what it took to create the seed of Clickfunnels and the business, right. That part’s fun, and then after the romantic side happens, for pregnancy there’s nine months of pain for the woman. My wife, I watched her go through this 4 times. She gained weight, she felt horrible, she felt sick, she was throwing up. Business is the same way, after you go through the romantic part, now it’s painful. You have to work hard and you can’t sleep and you have to deprive yourself of friends and family and life and all the pleasures in life to birth this thing that you have. And most people give up during the birthing process, because it sucks.

With a baby you got no option, the baby’s coming whether you want it to or not, but the birthing of a business and to be an entrepreneur, it’s so painful most people don’t make it through it. They always say that 1 out of 100 businesses succeed, but the reality, 1 out of a million businesses never even get to fruition because the idea is planted, but the birthing of the thing never happens because it’s so painful.

So if you’re not obsessively, insanely passionate about your thing, I’ve got to break it to you, it’s going to be hard to birth it. Those hard times come and it sucks. So I think that not only do you have to become passionate about the market, because I’m trying to make that part fun, so the birthing process is actually fun. Maybe I’m the equivalent of the hypno-birthing class. My wife and I did hypno-birthing for the last kid, which was actually really cool. We did classes and they tried to make it really, really fun. So maybe I’m the hypno-birthing coach. Trying to make the process of birth fun for you even though you know it’s still going to suck. But maybe you can have a good time along the way, you should, it is really fun.

But I was like, if you’re going to go through that birth process, you have to be so excited about the baby, that’s the key. My wife and I were so excited about the twins, we were so excited for the other kids and that’s why she was willing to endure that pain because we were so passionate and excited about the kids.

So for you, it starts with before you can be an entrepreneur, before you can birth this thing, you have to be insanely passionate about your thing. And there are people who will tell you otherwise. “No, it’s math…blah blah.” I don’t know, I think you can make money without passion, but you can’t leave a legacy, you can’t do what’s really important without it.

So my next phase of this, we got a long road trip, you guys. I hope you don’t mind. But the next phase of this is how you become passionate about this thing? You’re like, Russell I see you. You’re jumping around, excited, screaming every single day, but I wake up in the morning and I’m tired. I wake up in the morning and I don’t always feel that passion. And I get that. I want to share some stuff, this is maybe personal development, according to Russell. I don’t teach personal development, I probably never will, but I have my thoughts on it, I have my feelings. So I do a lot of it myself. So I’m going to give you, during our road trip together, some of my thoughts and the personal development stuff that I had to go through and we have to go through and hopefully some of these things will help.

So number one, the first thing is all of you guys, you’ve got to quit being so bleh. That’s the official term for it, bleh. My daughter, she puts on this little monster mask, it’s so cute and then she’ll go “bleh.” That’s what most of you guys are doing. If I ask you what you’re working on, you’re like, “Bleh.” You’ve got to be excited, if you’ve listened to the podcast, probably three hundred episodes ago I did one talking about being awesome. People always ask you, “How are you doing?” and everyone goes, “I’m alright. I’m doing okay.” First off, if you’re doing okay, it means your life sucks. You need to stop it. “I’m doing okay.” My kids, I told them, when somebody asks you how you’re doing, you never say I’m doing okay. I’m doing good. Good is the enemy to great. If you’re doing good, that’s not a good thing. If you’re going to change the world you can’t be like, “I’m doing good. It’s alright.”

Notice this, everyone will ask how you’re doing and you’ll always say doing good. First thing to change, you are no longer doing good. You are doing awesome, all the time. My kids, if you ask them, “How you doing?” “Awesome.” If you ask me, “How you doing?” “Awesome.” You need to reprogram your brain from “I’m doing alright.” To being awesome. When people ask you that from now on, this is rule number one, you have to say you’re doing awesome. It may seem like a dumb thing, but you will see how it changes people around you. “How you doing?” “I’m doing awesome.” They’re like, “Really. Huh, nobody ever says that.” If you say you’re doing good, bleh. You just did that, bleh. You pulled an Ellie, a monster Ellie. Ellie’s my daughter that does that, bleh. So no more bleh’s. You’re doing awesome. And if you don’t feel awesome, guess what the first step to feeling awesome is? Saying that you’re feeling awesome. Okay, that’s number one.

Number two, stay in control. If you ever go to a Tony Robbins event, which you should, if you don’t you’re insane. I’m not allowed to say yet, but he may be hanging out with us at our next Funnel Hacking Live event. But regardless, you should go to at least UPW. You get to walk on fire and hopefully have a chance to go to Date with Destiny as well. If you really want to have a shift in your life, Tony is the person that will take you and shift you. That’s why I don’t teach personal development because Tony is the best in the world and I couldn’t do better, even remotely close, so I’m not even going to try. If I felt like I could I probably would go and try to serve that market, but Tony’s the best, so I’m not going to.

So I leave it to Tony and also Brendon Burchard, Brendon’s the man. Tony and Brendon, those dudes will shift yourself, personal development wise, so go and study them. Tony especially, because walking on fire is insanely cool. But one of the main things you learn in Date with Destiny is a thing called state control. So state is the thing that you are in as you are doing something. Sometimes you’re in a happy state, and a bleh state. Most of us we live our lives in a bleh state. You have to learn how to change your state like this. The coolest thing I learned from Tony is that I actually control the state I’m in. I don’t think most people understand that. You control the state you’re in. You can change it, you can be depressed or be happy, you can change it that fast.

When I learned that and became aware of it, it was insanely cool. I would have a long horrible day at the office. I’d be beat up and tired, worn out, come home and as most people do, I could walk through the door and be like, bleh. Be a bleh dad. But I was like, no. I don’t want to be a bleh dad. So I walk in tired, beat up, angry sometimes, frustrated, all the crap you go through sometimes during the day, I get to the door and I say, I could either walk in and be a bleh dad, or I can change my state. What am I going to do? I’m going to freaking change my state.

So I do what Tony Robbins talks about, there’s three things he calls the triad. I make these three shifts in my life, my physiology, my focus, my meaning, I shift those things and boom, that fast I walk in and guess what? I’m not a bleh dad, I’m a freaking awesome dad. I have fun with my kids, I play with my kids, and they’re going to remember that.

When I walk in the office, some days I haven’t slept for more than an hour. I walk into the office and guess what I feel like? I feel like I want to die sometimes, I’m so tired. I walk in and could be like, bleh. But guess what happens if I walk in at state, guess what happens to all the people around me? They will match my state, because I’m the leader. If I walk in like bleh, they will all become bleh. This is the official term by the way, it’s bleh. So if I walk in bleh, they’re all going to be bleh. If I walk in at a freaking ten, they are all going to rise to my level, to my state. State control is huge. You can control your own state, but the other cool thing is that you can control the state of the people that are around you.

People always come to our office and they’re like, “Is it always like this?” the answer is yes. Why is it like this? It’s because I’m freaking setting the pace when I walk in during the day. I walk in knowing that the pace that I set, everyone’s going to match me at that pace. If I come in bleh, they’re going to be bleh. I work with other companies, and partners and friends and people and what’s interesting, we will work with employees of a business owner and whatever the state of the business owner is, and you know that by seeing their videos and all their stuff, the entire company matches that state. It’s insane.

So if I want to dominate the world, I gotta learn to change my state. So understanding state control is huge and so much more simple than you think. Tony Robbins talked about, go to UPW. There’s three things, he calls it a triad, there’s three things that are involved in state control. I’ll kind of go through these, I’ll probably just slaughter them, so go study Tony. Worst case, go to YouTube and type in “Tony Robbins State Control” or something, I’m sure you can get some videos of him teaching it as well.

But the triad, there’s three things you gotta change. The first thing is your physiology. You’re body, this amazing gift that God has given us functions and drives everything. Have you ever notice that depressed people look depressed? Bleh. Sad people what do they do? They look sad. They’re body matches and mirrors how they feel. So a lot of times you think, “I’m sad, that’s why my body’s like this. My shoulders are drooping because I’m bleh.” Sometimes, because your body’s drooping, that’s why you’re sad. Just changing your physiology, changing your state, how you hold your body, will actually change how you feel. It’s insane.

He talked about a group of people who were clinically depressed, not just I’m depressed, I’m sad, clinically depressed. They were in a clinic, they were in rehab because they had such bad depression. They took this group of like 50 clinically depressed people and took them off all their depression medication, which all medication really does is change your state. Changes our physiology, honestly we’ll talk about that in a minute, but it takes them off all their meds and makes them stand in front of a mirror for thirty minutes a day, with their shoulders back, smiling. Even if it’s a fake smile, or angry, makes them smile for thirty minutes. Guess what happened? Just by changing their physiology and forcing themselves to smile for 30 days, every one of the people who had clinical depression were healed. They were miraculously saved from their depression.

Now there are times when, I have friends and family members that deal with depression, so I’m not short changing that, but I promise you that by shifting your physiology you can shift everything. It’s huge. I’ve seen people who are depressed shift their state, shift their body and they get un-depressed. It’s crazy.

So if I want to be in a happy mood, if I want to be in a good state for my kids, my wife, my whatever. If I’m going to a meeting or whatever, the state, how I hold my body has a ton to do, 50% of how I enter a room has to do with the outcome of what’s going to happen. That’s not scientifically proven, that’s just what I’m guestimating based on what happens. That’s a big thing. So figure that out. How do you control your body?

Look at what depressed people look like and if you hold your body in a way that depressed people hold their body, you’re going to be depressed. If you hold your body the way sad people hold it, you’re going to be sad. If you hold it in a way of the happy people, you’re going to be happy. Look right here right now, do I look happy? The reason why I’m doing this, if you watch Funnel Hacker TV, “Why is Russell so excited?” Because when I’m in an excited mood, I feel better, I get more done. I get people around me to raise to my level of vibration and they get excited as well.

There’s this weird thing, and this is scriptural, for those that are the church going folk, and those who aren’t it doesn’t even matter. Light cleaveth to light and dark cleaveth to darkness. One of my coaches, Tara Williams talks about this all the time, vibes, vibrations. People like, “He’s got a good vibe, she’s got a good vibe.” Sense the vibration. And if you think of this like tuning forks. Let’s say you have a tuning fork here and you want to, if you hit two tuning forks next to each other, they will eventually match their vibrations. There’s a high pitched one, a low pitched one, they will meet in the middle because vibrations match. Light cleaveth to light, dark to dark.

The same thing happens with you. If you come in and you’re a tuning fork and your vibration’s high, people are going to suck you down to their level and you’ll be depressed. Or you’re going to come in and freaking just blow your mind with the level of energy and vibration and everybody will rise to you. You have to understand that. They’re either going to suck you down, or you’re going to rise up.

That’s one part of state control, is understanding that your body has so much to do with it. Now that you understand that, how else can you control your body? This is why us nerdy, entrepreneur, biohacking people talk about the importance of our body. Alex Charfen at the Pirates Cove mastermind said that “for any of you entrepreneurs that aren’t treating your body like a professional athlete, you’re insane. You’re doing things that professional athletes aren’t. You’re trying to accomplish things that they can’t even fathom. If you’re not taking care of your body, you’re insane.”

It’s true, what you put into your body effects your physiology. When I eat crap, guess how I feel? Crap. People always ask me why I take so many supplements. Because different supplements I take effect my physiology. I have rules with my supplements. Most of you all know, I’m a Mormon, therefore I don’t do a lot of things. I don’t do alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, any other crazy stuff, I don’t do a lot of these, but there’s some supplements that I do take because they affect my physiology.

I do take some caffeine, because caffeine affects you physiology. You take it, it increases your energy. Your physiology changes, it helps me get into state faster. There’s other supplements I take, I could go days on supplements, but there’s things I take because they affect my physiology. There’s things I don’t eat because they affect my physiology. If you look at how I eat, I usually don’t eat breakfast. The reason why is breakfast typically makes me feel sluggish and tired, my physiology goes down. I usually eat one huge meal a day. When I’m at the office Melanie makes me this huge salad, it’s got high fats, tons of vegetables, I eat it and there’s almost no carbs outside of the carbs inside of vegetables because carbs make me feel sluggish and tired. I don’t want to feel tired. So I just eat the vegetables meats and fats because that keeps my energy, my physiology good.

When I’m at home, if I’m going to eat junk, typically I eat it at the end of the night, when I’m about to go to bed, because at that point I don’t care about my physiology, I’m going to fall asleep. But I don’t eat at dinner, I usually won’t eat all the other nice stuff. I’ll go and pick the veggies, the meat off, whatever my wife makes and I’ll eat that because I know that if I eat the rice and the carbs, stuff like that, guess what happens? My physiology drains and I’m going to be a worse dad for my kids. I know how it works.

So if I want to stay in peak state for my kids, I have to stay in, I gotta keep my physiology going, so I’m very careful of what I eat. Sometimes, I’m not as good as a lot of my biohacking buddies, sometimes I just screw up, and if my physiology…this is probably the bad thing. This is the negative of personal development. But if I eat something and feel like crap, I’m like, “Well, I feel like crap. I’m going to feel like crap no matter what, I might as well make my taste buds feel good.” So then I go all out and if I have a bad day, I have a really bad day. Because I’m physiologically jacked anyway, let’s have some fun. Anyway, there you go. Alright, that’s number one.

Number two side of the pillar of Tony’s triad is shifting what you focus on. Have you noticed that depressed people focus on depressing things? Have you noticed that happy people focus on happy things? But Russell, there’s so much sad things happening in the world. I know there is, but guess what I don’t focus on? The sad things that are happening in the world. Guess what I don’t watch? The freaking news. Want to know why? Because the news focuses on depressing things. I don’t want to be depressed. I don’t listen to depressing things. I try to focus on people and things that get me pumped up.

I listen to podcasts of people that inspire me, that get me excited. I read things that get me excited. I focus on stuff that gets me excited. In business, crappy stuff happens every single day and I tell you what, when you go from a million dollar company to a 10 to 100, the level of crappy crap that comes up everyday exponentially increases. They say, someone told me the other day that every three months an entrepreneur’s focus with decisions could either make or break them.

That’s true when you’re running a million dollar business. When you’re running a hundred million dollar a year business that happens a lot more often. I would say probably every three hours. I’m not kidding. There’s a lot of crap that hits me in the face every single day and if I focus on the negative, I would be in a state of depression right now. I have to look at it and I’m like, “Oh, that sucks. Alright, this is the answer.” And I turn my back and run from it. I do not focus on it for more than 5 seconds, otherwise I will lose my state.

What are you focusing on? A lot of you guys get overwhelmed and get stressed. Do you not think I get overwhelmed? I have 12 events happening in the next 47 days. We’re doing the biggest launch in the history of the freaking internet. We’re re-doing the complete onboarding process, I just wrote a new book in the last 30 days. It’s not a tiny book, it’s a freaking cookbook, it’s a 500 page cookbook. We’re doing a design-a-thon in two days. If you knew how much stress I have on my plate.  I don’t know, I’m pretty sure most people would crack under the pressure. I’m shocked that I haven’t yet, but the reason why is because I keep moving on.

Dan Gable, the greatest wrestler in the history of wrestling. Well maybe not the greatest anymore, but he is the legend. He is the Michael Jordan of wrestling. So Dan Gable, someone asked him one time, because he went through all of college never losing a match. His very last match he lost, he got so pissed off that he went and started training for the Olympics and he actually became an Olympic champion and not a single person scored on him. And what’s crazy is while he was training for the Olympics, it’s so crazy. The Russians actually said, they came out publically and said, “We are going to train an athlete with the only goal to beat Dan Gable from the Americans.” And Dan Gable was like, “No, I’m the greatest wrestler who’s ever lived, no one’s going to beat me.”

So what did Dan do? He would work 7 hours a day, working out 7 hours a day preparing for the Olympics, then he’d go to bed at night. Then as he’d go to bed at night, he laid there in bed saying, “The dude in Russia who is trying to beat me is awake and training right now. And that pisses me off and freaks me out.” So what did Dan Gable do? He woke up at midnight and he’d go running. Because he knew that his opponent was competing, was training and it stressed him out knowing that his opponent was awake while he was sleeping. He did not like that so he got up and kept working out.

Is that obsessive? Heck yes. Did he crack under pressure? No, he went to the Olympics and won. Not a single person scored a point on him. That’s Dan Gable. Now someone asked Dan Gable, I heard this in an interview one time, they said, “Dan don’t…” and afterwards Dan went on to become the head wrestling coach of Iowa Hawkeyes and won more NCAA championships in a row than anyone in any sport, I believe. Anyway, insane. And someone asked Dan Gable, “Don’t you believe in pressure?” and Dan’s like, “Yeah, I believe in pressure, it’s everywhere. The difference is that most people sit underneath the pressure and they sit on it. I believe in it, I just don’t put myself underneath it. I step aside and I focus on what I need to get done.”

And most of us, it’s that same way. I don’t know about you guys, sometimes I have so much stress and so much pressure, I’m about to crack. Then half of that is just in our heads. So I’ll sit down with a pad of paper, especially at night when I can’t sleep, I sit with a pad of paper and write down what I’m stressing on. I write all those things down, when you write it down it’s like, oh that’s actually not as bad as I thought. And then you can fall asleep, get yourself out of the pressure.

Sometimes we’re focusing on all pressure and stress and all this stuff and that’s why we don’t succeed. Don’t do that. Write it all down, prioritize it and be like I can’t control what I can’t control. I’m going to move forward out of the pressure. Go. And sometimes I don’t get crap done. I’m sure that all the stuff I have to get done between now and our viral video launch, most of it is not going to get done.  A lot of it will, most of it will. But sometimes you can’t affect it, so you do whatever you can and as you get closer and closer to deadlines all of the non essentials fall away and then you get the essentials and that’s how the game’s played.

Alright, this is fun, we’ve been going 32 minutes you guys. I hope you’ve been having fun. I don’t know where I left off. Physiology, shift your physiology. Number two, what you’re focusing on and then number three, what’s the meaning. I think number three is meaning. If not I’ve been teaching this wrong, or thinking about it wrong.

Number three is the meaning we’re attaching to things. A lot of times something bad happens to us and we attach these weird meanings to it. And we, it’s really cool, we have this unique ability as humans to attach meanings to things, right. And usually what happens is subconscious; we don’t know that we’re doing something right. If someone punches you in the face, subconsciously our body attaches a meaning to that. So this person is mad at me, we attach the meaning, I need to fight….sorry, let me step back.

Someone punches us, right. Our meaning maker attaches this meaning to the thing. That person is mad at us, we must fight them back. So I go and try to fight someone. Or someone punches us and maybe the meaning is this person is going to kill me, that’s the meaning we attach so then we run away. There’s all sorts of things. Every single day, something is happening and we’re attaching these meanings to it and these meanings direct where we’re going with our thoughts and actions and everything else. But as soon as you’re aware of this, you can actually change the meanings that are coming to you.

I actually don’t know if this is part of the triad, it may not be. I can’t remember now. Go YouTube Tony Robbins. Regardless, I want to talk about meaning, because meaning is a big thing. When you’re aware of this it’s kind of cool because now it gives you the ability to kind of shift meanings. So when somebody, we’ve had some morons, and they are morons, this week that have been attacking Clickfunnels and at first I got so mad I want to kill them and fly to their house and beat them, because that’s the wrestler in me. My body attaches a meaning to what they’re doing.

But then what’s cool is Tony taught me this technique where you stop and say, okay, what if that’s not the meaning they’re attaching, what if it’s actually this meaning? You shift the meaning that maybe they’re attaching and if you shift the meaning associated with an experience, it’ll change your perspective, which changes everything. So we gotta become good at consciously picking the meaning we’re attaching to things. If someone screws us over we can attach a meaning saying “That person is a horrible person trying to screw me over.” But if you attach that meaning, be careful.

Because as soon as you attach that meaning to something, guess what happens? Now the situation you enter, the state you enter is going to be based on that meaning and it can get really bloody and get really bad and things can turn really bad, which is going to increase all these other pressure, noise and other bad stuff. But if you come in and say, “Look, that person is a total douche bag,” I don’t know if I can say that on TV. I apologize if I can’t. Anyway, that person is a horrible person, but maybe their having a bad day today. Maybe they’re struggling, maybe financially, whatever. You attach a different meaning to the situation, then you come and you’re like, man that person screwed me over, but this is probably why he did it. Or why she did.

If you attach that meaning it gives you a different set of tools to deal with the situation. So what happens now in my life, if something happens and instantly a meaning is attached by my brain and what I’ve found is that most of the times that the instant meaning that’s attached, is going to leave me in a really negative path. It’s weird how it works. So too often I run down that negative meaning and bad things happen. So I try to consciously stop and try to take the exact opposite.

I remember Tony at Date with Destiny he does this thing, he says, “Find an experience in your life that pissed you off.” For me it was something with my wife, and my wife was at the event then, sitting separate, so she was sitting four rows ahead of me and there was an experience and they said to write down the experience, so I wrote it down. They said, “Write down all the meanings you attached to that experience.” I was like, “My wife is mad at me, she doesn’t love me.” I wrote down all these different meanings that I had attached to that situation.

And then Tony said, “Write a big line down the side of the paper and next to each of the meanings you attached to that situation, I want you to write the exact opposite of that thing.” So I was like, “My wife is mean to me, but on the other side, she actually loves me. My wife is super selfish, no she is actually so giving that she struggles.” So I wrote the exact opposite of each of the meanings that I had attached to the situation.

But what’s crazy is after handwriting out probably three or four of the things, I started crying. I started crying because I realized, I love my wife and I know her, and I realized the true meaning of what happened in that situation, was actually the exact opposite of the meaning I had attached to it. I instantly realized that I was in the wrong and she wasn’t. I broke down crying because I was like, “Oh my gosh. Where else in my life is this happening? Where I’m attaching these meanings subconsciously to a thing and I’m actually wrong?”

I realized that day that I have to take control of my meaning maker, the meaning I’m attaching to every single situation. So something happens now and instantly I get the negative meaning, it just happens that’s in our brains wiring for some stupid reason. I stop and I’m like, what’s the opposite of that, what’s something that if I could attach a different meaning would make me look at this person through a different angle, a different lens, a different light? I shift the meaning and it shifts everything. It shifts how I feel about the person. It shifts how I approach them, it shifts the response. It changes everything.

I wish I could say I am perfect with this, I am not. If you’ve ever been on the back end of a backlash from me for stuff, I apologize. Because I’m, I can be a prick sometimes. I didn’t realize this until the other day. We have a contractor, he was killing himself for us, and I imagine it’s got to be a pain in the butt working with me sometimes. Because I’m vocal, I’m on TV, I’m on Instagram, I’m ranty and ravy and talking about everything. And without thinking I kind of shared publicly my thoughts and part of it’s because I’m a media personality. If I came out like bleh all the time nobody would listen. So I’m usually on the extremes, I’m extremely happy or extremely upset because that’s what’s interesting.

So I feel bad because I published stuff that was negative towards that person. And the other day it was kind of brought to my attention, “Wow, Russell this person is really working his butt off for you and you’re saying these things.” And I had this moment again where I kind of broke down and I was like I’m a bad person sometimes. And the meaning I was attaching to all these situations was like, they’re lazy, they don’t care, they’re not working hard enough, or whatever. I’m attaching all these meanings and I had this fun little moment where I had this exercise where I was like, okay, if I switch the meaning, what’s actually happening? And I was like, oh man, I’m a jerk.

I realized it again, so I reached out personally and apologized and I don’t know if it’ll make it better or not, but I was wrong. I’ve had other situations this week where again there’s this person who’s honestly, it’s always the people you help the most. It’s someone I helped a lot, to have a lot of success, I bent over backwards for them and now they’re publically attacking me and us. It’s just….it’s funny, the meaning, even now, the meaning I want to attach to it wants to come in there. I’m like, no stop. Get out of my brain. Because I know, I know the reason why this person is being a douche bag. I’m going to use that word, I apologize. I know the true meaning. It’s not the one that makes me feel better about myself, which sucks because that one makes me feel so much better about myself. But it’s the truth.

So I’ve tried to attach that meaning to it, even though every time I think about the situation, my blood’s boiling just thinking about it again. But I gotta go back to the meaning that I attached on purpose. So the more you guys are aware of this the more you can affect. That’s a big part. There’s number two in personal development.

So where have we gone this far? So far we’ve talked about not being bleh. We talked about shifting your state in the circumstance. We talked about shifting the meaning you’re attaching to things. Alright so here’s a couple of things. Yes, we’ve been going for 40 minutes, but I still got another hour and a half drive, so we’re going to keep on talking. It’s like on Wedding Singer, which is one of my favorite movies of all time, do you remember when he’s all depressed after his girlfriend gets married on him and he’s hosting the wedding party and he’s telling all these jokes? And the one guy’s like, “Hey wedding singer, you’re the worst wedding singer I’ve ever heard.” And he looks at him and he’s like, “Well I have the microphone so you will listen to every word I have to say.” One of my favorite lines ever. That’s how I feel right now. I have the microphone so you will listen to every word I have to say.

I guess you can turn me off, hopefully you won’t. Hopefully you can hear me. This is car is so loud when we’re driving. I hope this is coming through because I think there’s some good stuff in here for people.

Alright, next thing. We talked about being not bleh, we talked about getting in state, we talked about meaning, these are pieces to help you function better as a human being. I always tell people how much of an impact Tony Robbins had on me. It’s because he made me aware of these things and there’s so many more. I wish we could go to UPW. Go walk on fire. I think you can get a ticket for $500 to a thousand bucks. If you are broke and don’t have the money, go get a credit card and finance it. If you’re broke, you’re going to become more broke. Who freaking cares? At this point, what’s the worst that could happen? You’re going to go bankrupt? Dude, you’re broke, it doesn’t matter. It always blows my mind when people are like, “I don’t have any money, I can’t invest.” Then you have nothing to lose. Go take out a loan. Go take out five loans, who cares? Worst case scenario is you lose it all. If you have nothing, then you have nothing.

I taught the cub scouts, the 12 year olds, I did an entrepreneurship merit badge and one of the guys asked, “how old do you think these kids should start?” I was like, “They should start now. I got a dozen friends who are teenagers who are making insane amounts of money.” The guy who asked said, “Just so all you kids know, you have nothing. If you lose it all you didn’t lose anything, so who cares?” Anyway, it always makes me laugh because people are like, “you can risk a lot because you have money to risk.” I’m like, “Dude, it’s way easier to risk when you’re broke.” Worst case scenario you lose everything, but everything is like rent on an apartment, but that’s not that big of a deal, you guys.

When you’ve got 150 employees whose lives depend on you, I promise you it is a lot scarier to risk at that point. Nevertheless, I digress. Where was I going? I don’t even remember. Hopefully there was something in there of value.

Okay, what I want to talk about here is you gotta risk. You’re creating this thing, you’re giving birth, you’re going into this thing…..Oh I remember what I was talking about. I was talking about investing in UPW and talking about being broke. Yeah, go to UPW, go to Date with Destiny. Invest in these events because it’ll transform you, it’ll help you to become super aware of yourself and other people. That’s what Tony gave me that was so important to me. Most of us live life on autopilot and we’re just going through the day bumping into things and things are happening and you’re just not aware of how we work. When you’re aware of how you work, it’s like now you can affect things, change things, tweak things. I can change my approach, I can change other people’s approach. For me it’s been huge to understand me and people better. So yeah, go to those things it’s worth it. There you go.

I have a friend down in Australia, his name’s Mal Every, I don’t know why this just popped in my head but he says, “I don’t have a problem with you if you’re broke, but I do have a problem if you stay broke. There’s too many opportunities in this world. If you stay broke, it’s because you’re not trying.” You’re literally not trying. Anyway, I don’t know why I said that, but it popped in my head therefore it must have been important.

Alright, the next thing I want to talk about. If you want to be successful in life the next piece outside of not being bleh, and figuring out state control and attaching meaning to the right things, the next thing is you have to stop dabbling.  Stop freaking dabbling. School has screwed up all of us. School has taught us how to dabble. You sign up for college, you take 20 credits, 20 cool things that you want to learn about. What they do is they spoon feed you and force you to dabble over a semester. So they give you a little bit of information in math, you spend 50 minutes. Then you go to the next class, here’s a little bit of science, a little bit of history. So you dabble in a whole bunch of little crap and you try to remain and retain all this stuff and then you go back the next day and you dabble a whole bunch and you dabble and you dabble and you dabble for like 15 years of our life.

Let there be no mistake. You will never be hyper successful if you are dabbling. Dabbling is the opposite of what you need to do if you want to be successful. If you want to be successful in something, you have to go deep, you have to immerse, you have to be obsessed with that thing. I guarantee you the people I’m competing against right now in our business, the reason why we are kicking the crap out of all of them is because they are dabblers. I promise you, there’s not one of my competitors that spent as much time in the last 48 hours, in the last week, in the last 5 weeks studying marketing and business and growth and personal development as much as I have. And for most of them, we’re already way past them, so why in the world, why are they not…..? I don’t know.

But they’re dabbling and that’s why I’m able to pass them. When you start immersing and you go deep, a couple of really cool things happen. First off, you will start seeing connections that you cannot see when you dabble. I sucked in school because I could never see the connections. I spent an hour in history, an hour in math, then an hour in debate, then an hour in logic, I’m trying to figure out how to make the connections. Unless you go deep in something, you can’t do it.

The reason why I’ve written two books is not, yes I like writing books, yes I like sharing it. When I write a book, I have to go in such deep immersion that I start seeing these connections that you don’t, you can’t see when you dabble. When I started writing the Expert Secrets book, I was doing a whole bunch of things. Some things consciously, some things subconsciously and as I started focusing on this book and trying to make a really, really good book, it forced me to read and study and geek out and immerse myself in a whole bunch of different things and through that process, I was not dabbling, I was immersing. I don’t know if it’s God, if it’s your brain, but when you immerse yourself, I feel like the reward for that, all these connections that you don’t normally see, all the sudden start being open to you.

Howard Berg told me, he’s the world’s fastest reader. He said when he goes to do a topic, most people read a book and they form their opinion based one book they read. He’ll read 30-40 books to get a really clear view of the reality of the situation. This is what 30 authors have said and you get a very clear view of it. And that’s how I feel about immersion. When you immerse yourself and you go and listen, study, read, you really geek out and become obsessed in your thing. I don’t know if it’s your brain, God or the universe, whatever you want to attribute it to, I know who I want to attribute it to. But he opens up pathways, he opens up connections for you and lets you see a whole picture and that’s your reward for immersion.

So that’s the next step in this you guys, you have to stop dabbling. So first off, the first phase in this comes back to you being greedy. The first phase is figure out this thing you want to be obsessed with. Maybe it’s not the marketing yet, and that’s okay. Because phase one is about being greedy and mastering it for yourself and becoming who you need to be to serve the world that you’re trying to serve. So go and now is the time to become unbalanced.

In the bible, well if you listen to this song, I think it was…who was it? A time for every season, there’s a time under heaven for everything. A time and a season for everything, right. This is your season to immerse in your craft and become the best in the freaking world in your craft. Again, there’s a time and a season, this is the time and season right now for you to do that, for you to immerse yourself. So that’s phase number one and that’s going to give you the ability to become who you need to be. And you’re going to become completely unbalanced. Your work life, your social life, your family life is going to become unbalanced during that period of time, but you’re going to be able to immerse yourself, you’re not going to dabble. You’re going to unbalance and become awesome at your thing.

And then there will be a transition phase where you’re going through and becoming so passionate about it, where there will be this weird time where all the sudden, I don’t know what it is, you can’t get filled up anymore. For me, I was doing all this marketing for all of our businesses and companies. We were doing the Neuropathy product, the weight loss, the dating, all these different businesses and we’re doing it and there came a point where I stopped getting fulfilled by just doing the business and I didn’t know what it was. I started going through this slump. I didn’t feel the momentum, didn’t feel the progress.

I was like, ugh. I didn’t feel it and that transition is because eventually you can’t keep growing in that immersion. Because eventually you’ll see the connections, you’ll see everything, you’ll be going through this immersion and then you will…. I don’t know how to say it, not that you’ll become perfect ever, but you’ll become more perfected in that thing. Where it’s hard to squeeze a lot more oranges to get any juice out of it, to really fill you up.

And that’s what I talk about in the Expert Secrets book, that’s where you transition from this growth, to the only way you can keep growing is transition into contribution. And this is where entrepreneurship is born. This is where you realize the only way for me to actually keep sharing this and to keep having that juice is to start contributing and giving back and sharing with other people. And what you find is insane. As soon as you take this path and this gift, this thing you’ve been geeking out on and immersing yourself on and become obsessed with, you start sharing it, that juice starts flowing again. It’s like the next wave and it’s so fulfilling. That’s why I’m doing an hour long podcast instead of focusing on the road and listening.

That’s why for me right now, I started listening to, when I start doing personal development and growth and start learning and studying, as I do that I start shaking because this is good. I’m getting juice, but if I could share this with other people I’d be getting ten times what I’m getting now. That’s why I publish so much, that’s why I share so much. It’s because that contribution will fill you up more than the growth will eventually.

But first you gotta fill up. Again, you gotta become unbalanced so you can become who you need to be. But after you’ve hit that point, and you’ll know it because you can’t get the same thing out of it, until you start contributing. And that’s logically where you start shifting to contribution. That’s when you start becoming obsessed with the marketing. That’s when you start geeking out there. That’s the key you guys, that’s what it’s like. At that point, you don’t care about the money. This is what I talked about a few podcasts ago.

The people who struggle are the people trying to make money. When you’ve been geeking out on a thing and have filled yourself up and now you’re shifting to contribution, you do not care about money. I could not care less about money at this point in my life. It’s fun, it keeps track, it’s how we know that we’re doing well. It’s such not a driving force, you can ask…..I do not have logins to my bank accounts. I have no idea what’s in there. My accountant, I’m always like “Hey can I buy this?” and he’s like, “Yeah.” And I’m like, “Okay, cool. I have no idea.”

My wife, I don’t have access to my bank accounts, personal, business, anything. I do not know what’s in there. I don’t want to know. It means zero to me at this point in my life. The only thing that means anything to me now is contribution. That’s what fires me up. That’s the state you gotta enter business and entrepreneurship in. Those are the people who are successful. The come in like, “This thing that I have, this gift, this thing. I’m so passionate about it, I have to figure out how to share it with other people.” Then guess what’s going to happen? Then it’s going to be easy to become obsessed with the marketing because the marketing is the means for you to get your message out, for you to get your product and your service out.

All the sudden it becomes exciting. I think that’s why I struggled in school so much. I would learn and read a book and it didn’t matter to me. If you’re going into marketing and you’re struggling, this marketing, I’m learning this stuff. I learned about squeeze pages, traffic and conversion but you don’t care. It’s because it’s like school. I study a thing and I write a paper but I don’t care about this paper, there’s no point to it. If you’re struggling studying the marketing it’s because there’s no point to it. But as soon as you find your thing and you obsess with it and you’ve grown and filled yourself up and shift to contribution, now when you start studying it, the marketing becomes alive. It lights up and becomes alive again.

I remember, I always thought I was dumb. I hated reading, I hated studying, I hated school, I hated all those things and honestly, I thought I was a dumb kid. I started my business and started selling these little things, it was crazy because I was selling some stuff and I was not doing that well. I remember it was pre-podcasts, but everyone used to do tele-seminars back when I got started. I would download all these tele-seminars and I would listen to them. Guys like Arman Morin, Alex Mandossian, those are the guys I listened to. Marlon Sanders, these are the guys I listened to initially. And I would listen to them on my headphones. I would burn these tele-seminars onto cd’s and put the cd’s in and listen to them while I was on my wrestling trips and I would learn stuff.

They would say stuff and I’m like, “That’s so cool. I’m going to go try that.” And I’d try it and the craziest thing would happen, I would try something. I was making a little bit of money and then I’d try something and make more money. I was like, are you kidding me, that freaking worked. I gotta try something else. I listened to another tele-seminar and I would try it and are you kidding me, that freaking worked! And then another one and I was like, that guy wrote a book. I’d read his book and I’m like, I’m going to try it. And then guess what happened? I’d make more money.  My thing would go out to more people and I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” And all the sudden reading became alive for me, studying became alive for me, marketing became alive for me.

I remember copywriting I was like, one of my first websites I set up and I didn’t have a sales letter and someone’s telling me about this copywriting thing and I was like, are you kidding me? That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. I’m not going to write words, I don’t want to learn that. I remember just being angry because I didn’t want to learn copy. It sounded so boring and stupid.

Anyway, I tried to hire a copywriter, and the copywriter, it was actually Michael Thornton was the first copywriter I tried to hire and his quote for me at the time was 8 or 10 grand or something and I was like, “Whoa! I haven’t made that much money in my entire life combined at this point.” So then I tried to read a book on copy and again, it was horrible. I read it and I was like this sucks. I had to write my very first little sales letter. So I wrote it and then it was crazy because it made money.

So then I started listening to some copywriters and the guys like, I remember it was Michael Thornton actually, I was listening to this presentation he gave at this big seminar and he was like, “We tested this thing and it turns out that a red headline out converted a blue one.” So I changed my headline to red and sure enough it out converted. I was like, what the crap? Okay, what else does this guy got? I remember he tested a brown background, it did better in this thing. So I’m going to do a brown background. So I did a brown background and sure enough it out converted. I’m like are you kidding me?

Then he said to try a new headline, his headline swipe file had all his headlines. So I tried four or five headlines and one of them dramatically beat the other one. I was like, what? I changed the headline and I doubled my income. Normal humans, if they want to double their income, guess what they gotta do? A doctor would have to go back to like 16 more years in medical school to specialize and double their income, work another 15 years and then maybe they would. I changed 13 words on a headline and all the sudden guess what? Copywriting became alive for me. It got exciting and all the sudden I want to read every freaking copywriting book I can find, because I’d read through and most of it was garbage or rehashing stuff but I’d read one sentence that was like, “Oh, you should end each line with a dot, dot, dot. Because it keeps the readers mind open and doesn’t close out the thought and they’re more likely to keep reading.” I was like, what?

So now to every single email and every single thing I’ve ever written, I add a dot, dot, dot, you’ve probably noticed that before. Guess what happened? Everything increased. And I started going to marketing seminars. I’d go to a five day seminar and listen for five days and every single speaker who is talking, I knew everything. I’ve done that, knew that, heard that, rehash, rehash and then one speaker on  day 6 would say one thing where he’s like, “Oh yeah, this one time I added an exit pop where I gave a discount and 20% of the people took the exit pop.” I was like, wait, what? So I go back to my thing and add an exit pop and my income would increase by like $100,000 a month. From that one little thing.

I remember I was like, I sat through 5 days of crap and got that one thing and it was so huge for me that it made the whole thing worth while. Or I would be at an event, got nothing and I’d go out to eat with everybody and I’m the Mormon dude, everyone goes to the bar and I’m like, I don’t want to go to the bar, I don’t want people to think I’m drinking. So I’d go to the bar, and I’m not joking, I’d order milk because I didn’t want people to think…..if I ordered a sprite people might think I’m drinking and I’m like I don’t want people to think I’m drinking, so I ordered a milk.

So I’m holding a milk and I’m at the bar and everyone’s drinking and they’re like, “Why do you got a milk?” I’m like, “Oh, I’m a Mormon, Mormon’s don’t drink so I’m drinking milk.” They’re like, “that’s weird.” And then they’re kind of drunk and the coolest thing about drunk people, drunk people don’t have any filters. They lose the inhibition to filter stuff or whatever. So I’m drinking milk, totally sober, they’re completely drunk and I’m like, “Hey so, what’s the biggest thing you’ve figured out?” and they’re like, “Oh man, okay so we did this thing on our squeeze page where we did blah blah blah.” I’m like, what? He just told me that. I would spend four or five hours in the bar drinking milk, asking people questions and getting nugget, after nugget, after nugget. I’d go back and add it and sure enough I’d add this little thing and it’s like Russell, you gave yourself a three thousand dollar a day raise by doing this one little thing. That’s a million dollar a year raise.

How do average humans get a million dollar a year raise? They don’t, they can’t. It’s physically impossible to do that. How did I do it? Some dude at a bar who is drunk off his butt told me this little thing and then I did it. Where do you guys think I got the Perfect Webinar from? I am not a genius, but guess what? I went to all of these events and saw speaker, after speaker, after speaker pitching and maybe what they said sucked, but I heard how they did a close, I heard how they did a trial. That guy said that thing. All of the differences…it’s funny because Stephen’s always like, he always talks about the Russellisms, the things Russell says that are so cool in my presentations. I didn’t make most of those things up, most things I heard another speaker say it and I’m like, that’s amazing, wrote it down and it was worth everything.

It would make me laugh, I’d go to an event and I would get one or two little nuggets like that and I’d come back and it would give me a two to three, maybe four thousand dollar a year raise and I hear someone online complain, “It was a pitch fest. All they do is sales stuff.” I’m like, “You went to that event to try to learn how to sell things. Why do you hate money so bad? I saw the same thing you did. I gave myself a four thousand dollar a day raise.” I don’t know what else to do.

It’s because they haven’t figured it out yet. It’s like they’re going to school and they’re pissed because the professor bored them to death. It’s like, when you go with this different lens, when you’ve got something you are so insanely passionate about, that all you care about, you don’t care about making money, spending money. All you care about is figuring out how you can get this to more people and when you get one little nugget after five days of information and that one thing does this huge thing, that’s worth it.

I hear people complain, they go to forums, “That event sucked, it was a pitch fest. I heard that stuff before, they didn’t teach me anything new.” It’s because they’re not real entrepreneurs. They haven’t fall in love with the marketing of the thing. If you’ve fallen in love, this is how you know you’ve fallen in love with the marketing of your thing, it’s when you literally stop watching TV for the shows and you watch for the commercials. That’s how you know. It’s when you’re listening to the radio and you’re waiting for the songs to end so you can hopefully hear a really good direct response radio ad. It’s when you’re scrolling through your Facebook feed looking for ads. It’s when you’re like weird crap that you know you don’t care about, but you’re praying that they will start re-targeting you with their ads.

It’s when you log into your wife’s Facebook account, not because you give a crap about what she’s doing, or care what she’s talking about, but you know that she is seeing different ads than you are and you want to see what those ads look like. That’s when you know that you’re passionate about marketing. That’s when you know that you’re so obsessed with getting your message out that it’s become, that’s the level you gotta be at.

But I think I’ve come to grips now, I think it used to piss me off when people weren’t obsessed about marketing, but now I think I get it. It’s like, I don’t think you can be obsessed about marketing at first, until you have first gone through the growth phase for yourself. You’ve got to become ridiculously obsessed initially with your thing, because that’s the first phase. You’ve got to immerse yourself there and after you’ve done that, then when you start shifting the entrepreneurship side, the growth, to the contribution and sharing it. That’s when you will become obsessed with the marketing. That’s when copywriting became alive for me. That’s when split testing became alive. That’s when all the geeky crap that I shouldn’t care about, none of us should care about, that’s when I started caring about it, that’s when it became alive.

Does that make sense you guys? That’s when I can sit there for five days and watch sales pitch after sales pitch after sales pitch and hear a single word about what they said, but just watch their hands, their hand motions, how they’re anchoring the stage, what they’re pointing to, why, when and how and be excited.

One of my buddies, Darin Stevens, he literally went to a Tony Robbins event, he went to the entire thing. I can’t remember if he told me if he watched the recordings of it or if he did when he was there, but he watched an entire week long Tony Robbins event with no audio on. No audio. Why would somebody do that? Because Darin wants to be the best person in the world at controlling the stage. Understanding how your physiology and stage presence and how you’re anchoring the stage, what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, how you’re doing it, why it works. What did he do? He took the best person in the world, Tony Robbins, and he watched him and took out all of the audio because the audio distracts you from he’s actually doing.

I can’t tell you guys this enough. Funnel hacking is not just about looking at the outside, it’s about really understanding what people are doing and why they’re doing it. Yes, I’m selling products and services to you guys, but at the same time watch how I’m doing it. So Darin went and watched Tony Robbins because he wanted to see Tony’s hand motions, what he’s doing, why he’s doing it, how he’s doing it, and he wrote this huge write-up for me, he sent me, it’s insane. It’s about all the stuff that Tony is doing, the reason why Tony’s pounding his chest at times, why he’s going like this, why he’s doing the ‘whoa, yes!’, why he’s pointing to different directions while he’s anchoring and seating and all those things are not accidental. They’re real and they’re purposely done.

When I’m on stage and talking about stuff, when I’m walking on different parts of the stage, sometimes its accidental. But for the most part, I’m doing things on purpose. I’m anchoring the stage, I’m taking you on timelines, I’m trying to bring you back to different places so you get emotionally impacted based on things that are happening. Same things happening in a webinar, tele-seminar, not podcasts because I’m just driving and talking, but maybe I am, who knows.

But I want you guys to understand, all of these things are there for you. I spent 14 hours yesterday, 14 hours going through every email I have ever sent with swipe files, squeeze pages, templates. I found every template I ever had paid for, designed because every template I designed I went and had all these people, the examples, a decade of funnel hacking. I went through yesterday and archived all of it into trello boards based on page type, based on funnel type, based on all sorts of stuff. And I’ll probably never use those pages again, but I wanted to be able see them and categorize and be like, the reason why that page was awesome was because of this.

There’s actually this one little block, there’s a dude that figured it out, on these squeeze pages, I’m not going to ruin the surprise for you, but if you type in squeeze page warning, those who are in the know will know that there’s this dude who had a squeeze page and at the very top he had this warning block that says, “Warning: Blah, blah, blah” That increased conversions on squeeze pages by insane amounts and most people never knew about it. Then  he mentioned it, I think he’s in the dating market, he mentioned it at a mastermind and then dozens and dozens of people have done it, but most people have never seen it before. If you were to do it on your pages right now, it’s insane.

I totally forgot about it until I’m looking at my swipe files right now and I’m like, oh yeah. There’s so many things. I think so many people get bogged down in this other stuff that they forget about that. Become obsessed with the marketing. Go through all this stuff and legitimately do and it’s going to make it so much fun, it’s going to make it alive for you guys and I want to give you that gift. But that’s the transition.

So anyway you guys, this has been a long one. I hope you got a lot out of it. I just want you guys, I know that you have something inside of you. I know that you have the ability to change people’s lives. I believe that, probably more so than you do at this period in your life. If I didn’t believe that I would not be doing this stuff. I make plenty of money running a software company.  I don’t have to do all this stuff. I don’t have to talk or write books, but I’m in a spot in my life now where my contribution is to get you off your butt so you contribute as well.

I am trying my best to touch as many people’s lives as possible through the things that I do, but I just know that the clearest path for me to have impact on the world is to touch you as an entrepreneur because you have the ability to affect more people. You may not, some of you guys know this. Some of you guys know that we have people that literally have hundreds and thousands, if not millions of people a year that they are touching and affecting. If I could magnify what you’re doing just a little bit, it amplifies that. If I can show you something that gets you to convert more people and gives you more money so you can actually serve people at a higher level, that’s huge.

And some of you guys are at the beginning of this journey now and you’re like, “I don’t have anything Russell. I’m not that passionate yet. Or I don’t have a voice, I’m nervous, I’m awkward.” Whatever, I promise you, I wish I would have been podcasting and blogging 12, 13, 14 years when I got started. The Russell you see today was the most awkward, nervous, weird person on planet earth 14 years ago. I couldn’t carry on a conversation with a human being, let alone with a camera for an hour and 8 minutes now. That comes with a lot of practice.

It’s kind of what we talked about at the beginning. Unbalancing your life and becoming obsessed with something. I don’t care what that is for you. But you need to do it, find something that fires you up. Right now if you’re not that passionate about anything, that’s okay. Find something that gives you a little spark, because initially it’s a spark. I wasn’t that passionate about marketing at first, but there was a spark. Once you have a spark it’s like, okay now let’s throw some kindling on the fire. There’s a spark of something, go find other people who are obsessed. You have a lower vibration right now, they have a higher vibration, we talked about this earlier. Go find people who are obsessed and get around them. Listen to their podcast, read their book, if they have an event, finance your house if you have to, finance that event and plug into their vibrations so they will bring you to the excitement level that they are at.

I am trying to do that every day with my marketing, if you have not noticed. Most of you guys, when you came into this world, you did not know about marketing, you didn’t care about marketing. You didn’t care about funnels, that was not, you didn’t get into this world saying, I’m going to build funnels. You either had a spark saying I want to make money, or you had a spark saying I want to share something. You had a spark and for some reason you bumped into me because I’m so loud and obnoxious and annoying and everywhere.

You probably saw a YouTube video and you’re like, “Stop targeting me on YouTube, Russell.” But I’m trying to take your spark and ignite it. I’m trying to give you as much waves of excitement and passion and vibration as I can muster up, so that your vibration will rise to my level.

So for you, where do you have a spark? Find that spark and then find the people around you in that market who are on fire and plug into them. Give them any amount of money that they need. I’m serious about this. If you’re broke it does not matter, you’re going to be more broke. I don’t know how to get that, I was at Grant Cardone’s event, I think there were like 2500 people in this long room and you were seated based on how much money you spent. People in the front spent 15 grand to be there and in the back they spent like 500 bucks. The further back you got, the less money you spent.

What’s crazy to me, is when I pitched my product, the people in the front ran to the side of the room and bought. And the further back you went, the less and less people ran to the back. You may say, “Russell, it’s because the people in the back didn’t have as much money, therefore they did not run to the side.” I would argue with you that you are wrong. The people in the front have money because they have invested money. They’re used to spending money in investing and then they have more success. The people in the back are broke because they’ve never invested in themselves. That’s it. That’s honestly it.

They’re already broke. Grant Cardone said this to me backstage, he’s like, “Don’t the people in the back understand, if you’re already broke it doesn’t hurt you to be more broke.” It doesn’t. I don’t know if that’s financially irresponsible. But I did a whole podcast on this called entrepreneurial scars, our founding fathers who I believe were inspired from God, who created the constitution of the United States, they gave us this thing. Because in this country we needed to give the entrepreneurs the ability to risk everything and be okay with that.

If entrepreneurs didn’t have that ability, this country would have stagnated and died. I am a huge believer in that. Capitalism 101. If entrepreneurs don’t have the ability to risk everything, everything stops growing. But if entrepreneurs have an out, then guess what? They can risk everything.

So it’s scary at first, but I promise you it’s a lot less scary to risk everything now, then it is when you have a whole bunch of stuff. So now is the time for you guys to risk everything because you don’t have that much. I don’t want to be a jerk, but it’s true. Now is the time to risk things. It gets harder and scarier when you have people and money and all these kind of things.

I always tell people, for you, you have to figure out what is the worst case scenario if you fail? It gets people to look at that thing straight in the eyes and say, I’m okay with that. That is the key to be able to risk stuff. Because a lot of times there’s this fear of, the worst case scenario, something bad is going to happen and they can’t be successful. You gotta stop and write down for you right now, if you were to fail, if you were to go and get a bunch of credit cards and blow it on mastering your craft and getting around the best people in the world and raising your vibration, everything, what’s the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario, you go bankrupt.

You go bankrupt, what happens? You can’t get a credit card for like a day or two maybe. You can’t get a home loan. Okay, well you’re going to have to rent. Can you rent? I don’t know, hopefully. There’s programs, the country….I know I’ve rented to people who, there are things. Anyway, maybe it’s financially responsible. I’m not a financial planner, don’t listen to me. I’m just saying that if I was in that same situation and I was starting all over again, I wouldn’t worry about that. I would not worry about that.

I have built and lost everything twice now, and guess what? It was alright. It’s okay, but the biggest thing is if you don’t build something, you don’t try something, if you don’t go deep on something, then you’ll never know, you’ll never know. Anyway, make sure you clear it with your spouse first to get their buy in, I’m just saying. Those people in the back of the room at Grant Cardone, if they had run to the back and invested I think it was $2,000, that’s not that much. If they would have invested $2,000 they would have gotten the exact same thing that Brandon and Kaelin got.

Those of you who listen to the podcast, you’ve heard me talk about them. Brandon and Kaelin were down to their last money. The network marketing company they were in ended up kind of falling apart, they stepped away from it. They had zero dollars left in their account. They had a credit card and a couple of other things and they saw my pitch for funnel hacks, it was $1,000. They watched it and they were like, “We have to buy it, we have to buy it. We don’t have a thousand bucks.” They were freaking out and finally decided, “We’re going to buy it.” I wish they were on here right now to tell this story because it’s awesome.

So they said they were going to buy it and then Brandon was going to buy it, and going to buy it and then he wussed out. He’s like, “I’m not going to do it.” So he didn’t buy it. Instead he went to Clickfunnels.com and paid $100 for Clickfunnels. He went back to Kaelin and said, “I didn’t do it. I just bought the $100 thing.” And she’s like, “We said we were going to buy it.” And he’s like, “I know. We don’t have any money.” And she’s like, “It doesn’t matter. We don’t have any money anyway. Who cares if we buy something with it. We don’t have any money.” Zero and negative $1000 is pretty much the same thing. It’s not changing the quality of your life.

So they went back and ended up buying the $1000 thing and she was pissed because now they were $1100 in debt as opposed to $100 and then guess what they did? They had something they were really passionate about. She had lost, I don’t know, 60 pounds. She was in weight, she was already passionate about something, she’d already gone through the growth. She had already filled that. Now she was transitioning, they were transitioning to need to share this with other people.

So what did they do? They did similar to what I did. For them, they did it a little different, this is what I recommend for you guys though. They bought the Funnel Hacks training and then they watched video number one. They started watching it and as soon as they got into it, they paused it and they did that thing. They pushed play again, they started doing, they did that thing. They implemented what I said. Paused it. Did that thing. Pushed play, pause, play, pause. And for two or three months or weeks, I can’t remember how long it was. That’s all they did.

They put it all in place and when it was done, they launched their business. They’re initial launch, I think it was Thanksgiving or Christmas, they were driving to their families and they told me that they had enough gas money to get there, but no gas money to get back. So they filled the gas in their car, started driving, they got down to their families house, they were staying in a room and they started going through it and they launched this thing and luckily for them they rolled it out and made $20,000, that paid for gas money to get back.

And then they started geeking out, started plugging in, they started doing what I did. Again, I didn’t want to learn copywriting, but when I found out you change a headline you change 13 words and you give yourself a thousand dollar a day raise, it suddenly becomes really interesting. So they plugged in the podcast and I watched these guys over the next year, over the next two years and it was crazy.

I would do something, I remember I did a podcast where I was on a webinar with Jason Flatlien, who is one of the best webinar performers on this planet, at the end of the webinar Jason did this weird thing for 90 minutes. I was so pissed at him because I thought he was going to kill webinar sales. Turns out he doubled our webinar sales, on the drive home I was doing the podcast and I’m like, “Holy crap! Flatlien pulled this thing out of his butt. He did this thing, I never even heard of it, doubled, literally 2x’d our sales.” The podcast went live the next day.

Brandon and Kaelin listened to the podcast, they said, “Freaking Russell Brunson.” Which is the same thing I used to say when I’d be like, “Freaking Dan Kennedy. Freaking Michael Thornton. Freaking John Carl.” All the guys I studied. They’d some little nugget and I’d try it.

So they said that, they went back and added the same thing to the end of their webinar and they messaged me back, they said, “Freaking Russell Brunson. We did it to our webinar. Doubled sales.” I was like are you kidding me? And every single thing, they listened to my podcast and they’d tell me every time I’d say something, they’d take it and try it and Brandon said, “We’re like a week behind you on your implementation. You do it, we implement it a week later and we’re doing it, and doing it.”

And I want you guys to understand, that’s when this game becomes fun. It’s when you realize that man, listening to Russell rant about this stupid thing, if I add this one little piece, all the sudden I go from helping 100 people a day to 120 people a day, that’s pretty cool. My bank account goes from $1200 a day to $1300 a day. You gave yourself a $100 raise today, are you kidding me? People don’t do that.

We used to have a big mantra in our old office, we’d always say, we’d come in and be like, “How can we give ourselves a raise today? How can we give ourselves a raise today?” And it was like looking for that gold nugget. Looking for that little thing. Looking for that headline, split test, that tweak that I did, that little nugget. What could we do that’d different? That’s how the 108 split tests book was born.

I was able to do a lot more split testing before Todd Dickerson, my partner in crime in CLickfunnels, we used to build the best sales funnel we could, we’d get it out there live, pre-clickfunnels, it was a pain in the butt. We’d build the whole thing out, and get it live. Todd would login, he’d use visual website optimizer, it was our split test tool at the time, he’d split up like a thousand different tests and try to beat my control. And he always did, pretty much every time.

And that was the goal, I made the best version we can, Todd let’s see if you can beat it? And he would test, test, test, test and he beat it, beat it, beat it again, beat it again. And it was like every day, how do we give ourselves a raise today? That was the game we played and that’s how the 108 split tests book was born. That’s how half of what I know about funnels was born at that time. We were just testing every funnel variation idea, planning pages, template, idea, everything we could we dream of for a 2 ½ 3 year period of time, it’s how I became who I am today. It’s how I became the dude who probably knows more about funnels than any human being on earth because I hacked more funnels, tested more funnels, we did more than anybody.

And during that time of growth, that was the growth time for us, we were doing it on 12 companies we owned. We were doing it for a whole bunch of other people, which by the way, that’s a story for another podcast, don’t do 12 companies at once. But that’s what we were doing, that’s how we mastered this craft. That’s how I know more about funnel psychology, I believe, than anyone on earth. Because I did it. I did more of it. We tested so many thing. I was like, holy crap. I thought for sure this would have won. But this won, and this didn’t win. This helped on page one, but it made page three conversion go down. I got my gift because of the insane amounts of work that Todd and I did during that time.

Todd and I and my entire team, by the way. We didn’t have it nice like you guys have now days. I went on a little rant to someone on my team the other day, we get people now to come to Clickfunnels who first off, they don’t use Clickfunnels the way it’s made. So those of you guys who are having bugs, I want you to hear this. Because if you have bugs, it’s because you’re trying to do crap that Clickfunnels is not made to do. You’re hacking things and you’re doing stuff. If you use Clickfunnels the way it works, there’s not bugs. I don’t have bugs in my funnels. I don’t know why everyone’s got these bugs.

It’s because you’re trying to do things that you think are going to be better and they’re not. It’s because you’ve been listening to the Confusion Soft guru’s explaining why you need 55,000 different variations of funnels. If you just learn how to sell, all that crap would go away. Every time people say, “There’s all these bugs in Clickfunnels.” I’m like, “I’m not seeing them man, because I build funnels on it every single freaking day and I’m not seeing the bugs.”

There are little things here and there and we fix them as they pop up. But for the most part, you are creating bugs by trying to do stuff that does not matter. So that’s number one. Number two, you’re paying between $100-300 a month for the software. We had a really, really bad competitor come out, which we’ve had I’d say probably at least 30-40 Clickfunnels killers who have come out in the last 3 years since we launched Clickfunnels. They all come and go and they all try to undercut us in pricing.

I always get all these people like, “So and so cut you out.” And maybe someday we’ll have a big competitor, I mean who knows. I’m excited for that day, I actually enjoy competition. Some of you may probably have noticed. I got no problems with that. When I was wrestling, all I tried to do was fly around the country to find the best in the world so I could learn to beat them so I’m game. Anyone wants to step up legitimately, please do. But please don’t come in here disguised like, “We’re going to beat them by undercutting their price” Everyone’s coming out like, “You’re losing all your customers because they’re undercutting your price.”

I’m like, “Are you kidding me? The people who complain about spending $100 a month to run their entire company, I don’t want them as customers.” In fact, we’re honestly thinking about doubling or tripling our prices just to show, to give the virtual finger to everyone who’s trying to undercut us. We don’t want those customers. You can go there. If you can’t spend $100 to run your company, you should not be running a business at this point and time. Honestly, that’s how I feel.

I want to walk you through a walk down memory lane at how we used to build funnels because this is the reality of how it used to work. We would have an idea, I would then have to go funnel hack dozens of people to see what would be the best thing, so I’d probably spend 2 or 3 thousand dollars funnel hacking a bunch of people’s things. Because I didn’t have a way to mock up templates. So I’d funnel hack and take tons of screen shots of all these templates of all these different pages and then I’d have to go to one of my designers, I had a bunch through the years. I’d show them, “This is the process I think would be best. I think I want a landing page here, and this, this, this. I want this from this guys funnel. I like this over from this one. I want this from here.”

So I’d map out the funnel process I wanted to test. But I want this guys design but this over here…..it was a nightmare. So our designers would go and try to create a page but I’d be like, “No, but this and that…” and it would literally be 6-8 weeks of us going back and forth just getting the design and the funnel structure right. They’d have to hand code everything. So we’d get all this done. Then we’d have to go and after we got all the pages done, so it looked good, we’d go back to our developers and say, “okay, here are all the pages, here’s the order forms, here’s everything. Now you gotta actually make this work.” So they’d have to go and custom and go into PHP and coding and sequel database to build up so the order form would actually work. We actually went to a database, they’d have to set up the security certificates, they’d have to set up all the API’s to go to the 20 or 30 different things that we would need.

And it would take the developers on average, probably another 30 days to hook up all of those things. So my cost just in salaries at that point and time were probably at $15, maybe $20 grand in salaries just to get all these things done to that point. Then we still had to write the copy, which eventually I started liking copy, so I did a lot more of that myself. But prior, I started having a lot of copywriters. I would spend on average between 10-15 grand for every sales letter we would write. Whether it was somebody else, or it would be my own time, which would take me probably 6 weeks or so to write all the copy for a funnel.

We would then plug all those things in, and we’d be 3 months, conservatively 3 months and usually a little more than that, and conservatively about $30 grand per funnel in. Before we could test it. Before we could test it.

So for you guys to be like, “That’s $100 and I could only build 30 funnels. I still have to get an SMTP mailer to send my emails out.” I have no empathy for that. None, zero. I want you to leave us and go to the competitors. Please, for the love. Leave us, go for the $37 option. I want you to be their nightmare clients, I do not want you to be using Clickfunnels. I don’t have any empathy. Zero. Not one iota of empathy for you if you cannot pay $100 or even $300…..if you cannot pay $300 to run your company, you are not an entrepreneur, you should leave this business. Honestly, you should just stay as an artist and go to the beach and do your thing and have a hat out there to get tips. That is your level of being an entrepreneur. I don’t know what else to tell you. Please leave. You can go, you have my permission. I don’t not want or need your money.

But if you were trying to freaking change the world and sell stuff and make a business, that’s what we’ve given you. If you wanted super insane, complex stuff, you may have outgrown Clickfunnels. That’s fine, if you’ve outgrown Clickfunnels, go hire people to custom code stuff, I’m okay with that. You’re going to be like, “Oh your software’s buggy.” It’s like you’re trying to customize crap that your should be spending 20 or 30 grand on, like we used to. You can do that. Go for it. You have my permission to leave. I do not need your $297 that bad. I promise you that.

The headaches that go to some people who are trying to, who are complaining to me about the bug they find when they try to add the 47th upsell on the 13th email sequence if somebody clicks yes versus no, twice instead of once. That’s not what we’re made to do. And the reason why, after freaking testing a million things when you go back and do it the way I had to do it, those three months and that $30 grand was for the initial test. Then Todd would have to go split test a whole bunch of things and then guess what we found out? Half the time we’d get the pages to convert but the funnel wasn’t profitable.

So then we’d have to come back and say okay, this entire funnel didn’t work so we have to rebuild the upsell, downsell sequence. I had to go back to the drawing board and it’s not me spending 15 minutes in Clickfunnels, cloning the page and doing a split test. No. It was me hiring another copywriter to write a new version of the video sales letter. It was me figuring out new layouts and designs and functionality and trying to re-custom freaking code all that crap from the ground up, then we’d have to go re-build the entire funnel, then re-launch it, drive new traffic. If the funnel didn’t work we’re into another $10-15 grand in for the second test. “Oh my. $300 costs so much. I can only do 400 split tests at once.” I’ve got no mercy for you okay.

Sorry for the rant, but this freaking important. Alright, so the reason why my funnels are simple, and I want you guys to understand this, is because your funnels need to be simple. I learned this from having to custom code stuff. If I made these complex freaking funnels that everyone thinks are so cool now days, because of Confusion Soft and others, they draw these little diagrams and they try to impress their clients by how complex their funnels can be, that’s not going to serve you at all.

I want you to understand this, that will not serve you. It will screw you up and you’ll be finding bugs in Clickfunnels because it’s not build to do what you’re trying to do. With the design hack-a-thon happening next week, we are building out 30 types of funnels. These are the funnel structures you should use. You should work to plug the crap you are selling into these funnel structures, not the other way around. You should not try to say, “oh I got this good idea, I’m going to do 14 upsells and then I’m going to have a mini survey on upsell number two and then I’ll sell them this.” No, just plug the crap you have into the existing stuff.

The tiny potential maybe incremental sales you could get by tweaking this thing, is not worth….I promise you that if you put the same effort and same time and money and energy into hiring a better copywriter or mastering….there’s a dude who I pay $100 to write each headline for me. When we have an offer I’ll give him a thousand bucks and say, “Write me ten headlines.” That’s a better investment of your time than trying to have 16 different upsells. Because having a different headline can change your conversion. That will do more for you than the complexity that you’re trying to do.

My rant is over. I think it’s over. Should it be over? I just want you guys to understand that. Clickfunnels is built for customers like me, who want to get a message out quickly. They want to take the best proven practices, and they want to focus on the stuff they can control. If you want a cheaper option because you feel like $100 is too much to invest in the entire background and infrastructure of your business, you have my permission to go. I hope you enjoy it. And when your business makes enough money that you can switch, we will gladly welcome you back. Or you can do what the wise man did and built his foundation on a rock.

I don’t know if you guys remember that song from Sunday school but the wise man built his house upon the rock, and the foolish man built his house upon the sand. And when the rains came tumbling down, the rains came down and the floods came up, the rains came down and the floods came up, the rains came down and the floods came up and the man on the sand washed. And the man on the rocks stood still. This is primary songs 101, guys.

So if you want to build your house upon the sand, go the cheap option you should. You definitely should. And if and when you want to get super complex, if there’s reasons and cases, Clickfunnels wasn’t built for, don’t feel bad you guys. I’m okay with that. You can outgrow us. Clickfunnels is a company that’s built for businesses in this certain range and I understand that and I respect that. That’s who we want to serve. If we try to serve everybody, we will not succeed either.

So a lot of times if you guys come to us and you’re like, “Oh, this is a bug, this is a bug.” A lot of times we’ll hear that and say, “It’s not a bug. It’s the limitation that we have put on our software because that’s not something that we want our users doing.” Because if we open that to everybody then it adds a whole other level of complexity. Clickfunnels is already complex, I don’t want to add more complexity. I want to make more simplicity.

I honestly, if I wouldn’t have uproarings and riots in the streets right now, I would take away some of our features. I would pull things out, I would simplify a lot of stuff. And you will notice over the next year or so, we have a bunch of new UI people and new teams coming in and our goal is simplification. Trying to make things more simple and easier, not more complex. Like, “Russell, what’s the newest feature coming to Clickfunnels?”  There are some cool new things coming out, but at the same time a lot of its simplification.

At Funnel Hacking Live we opened up Actionetics and someone messaged me the other day, “you had this cool feature in Actionetics, it was the best thing you have and then you guys pulled it away two weeks later. Why did you guys do that?” I’m like, “Two reasons, number one: What people were doing was making smart lists that have literally 800 different things in there. I understand you guys want to be segmented, but I promise you that level of segmentation, it hurts you more than it will ever help you. And number two: It destroys our database. It’s not good. If you want that kind of complexity, please go and build that on your own. But this is for, Clickfunnels is built for entrepreneurs to move quickly.” The opportunity, you being able to launch two funnels instead of one is the difference. That’s the goal of it.

I’ve been going for a long time you guys. I don’t even know where I’m at. I hope I haven’t passed where I’m going. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this podcast, it’s been a lot of fun. I hope you guys actually listened to the whole thing. There were a lot of really, really cool stuff that I really wanted to share with you guys in here. I hope you got a lot of value out of it.

To recap, don’t be a bleh, build your empire, become unbalanced and focus on becoming who you need to be, and then after you’ve done that and you’re ready to transition to contribution then shift your balance and be obsessed with the marketing of it, have fun with it. This game is fun you guys. Every day I wake up and I’m like, I can’t believe I get to do this. I can’t believe I had a two hour drive today and I can’t believe I get to hang out with you guys and share and talk and based on my stats, between YouTube and our podcasts, we’ll have between 15 and 20,000 people who will listen to this whole entire thing. It’s crazy.

20,000 people and if each of you got one little nugget out of that thing and I gave 20,000 of you guys the ability to affect an extra 10 people, that’s 200,000 people that we affected. And if you’re able to get an extra 100 people, that’s 2 million people I was able to affect. If you get an extra thousand that’s 20 million people. It’s insane the ripple effect.  I hope that I didn’t waste any of your time and you guys got something, one or two or three little nuggets.

But look at these things that way. Go into this, go into everything, go into your study time, go into your podcast, I’m putting out a lot of content and I’m hopefully making it entertaining and fun for you guys, but you’re always looking for that one little thing, “oh, that’s how Russell….” I had probably a dozen people message me when they saw how I do my….One of the Funnel Hacker TV episodes I had my Expert Secrets board and I finished the Expert Secrets book and I closed the board and they saw that. That’s how you manage your projects. Now I see how you get so much stuff done. Everything’s compartmentalized. You have your teams, different projects, and trello’s the way you do it. That little thing was huge for people. One little nugget, and you never know where they’re going to be picked up. You never know when gold’s going to be dropped and you can grab it.

So plug in, immerse yourself in this stuff you guys. My goal is to get your vibration up to mine so you can be as passionate as I am, because if you are, that’s how you’re going to change the world. That’s how I’m going to change the world. I can’t do it without you. So I need you guys there. So step in, plug in, have fun, enjoy the process, simplify your funnels, and build your company upon a rock. With that said you guys, I appreciate you all and I will see you guys soon. Bye everybody.

Aug 10, 2017

Behind the scenes of how we were able to profitably grow our company without taking on any capital.

On this special episode with Brent Coppieters from Russell’s team, they talk about some behind the scenes things that need to be figured out while you are growing and scaling your company. Here are some of the cool things you will hear in this episode:

  • How Brent has figured out how to structure teams with leads to make everything as efficient and smooth as possible.
  • Why they hire Clickfunnels users to work on support teams in Clickfunnels.
  • And why Russell wants everyone near him to max out their tax brackets.

So listen here to find out some important behind the scenes things you have to think about when you’re in the process of growing your business.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. I’m here today with Brent Coppieters on the Marketing Secrets podcast.

So everyone, I got a really special podcast for you today, I’m so excited for. Right now, where are we at?

Brent: Kauai

Russell: Kauai, Hawaii. This has been our backyard for the last week, and we’re heading home tomorrow, which is kind of sad. But I wanted to get Brent in here to help you guys out. Because obviously in the Marketing Secrets podcast I talk a lot about the marketing stuff, and Brent has been with me now for over a decade. How long is it actually?

Brent: Eleven years at the end of July.

Russell: Eleven years, dang that’s crazy. So that’s when you started? Was anyone else here when you first got started officially?

Brent: Anyone who’s here now?

Russell: Brittany? Was she here?

Brent: Brittany came in after. I don’t think anybody else who was here before I started is still here.

Russell: So Brent’s been the longest, long term person, except Doral maybe. Doral in Romania. We got a Romanian. Our backlight is kind of lit, it’s hard to see us. Brent’s been around for forever and done tons of different roles. Right now he runs the entire operations of Clickfunnels so I wanted to have him kind of talk about the stuff because it’s a big part of growing and scaling a company that we don’t talk about a lot.

But first do you want to talk about your back story, as far as getting into this whole thing. It’s kind of a funny story.

Brent: How much back story do you want?

Russell: We should move over here to the couch so you can see a little better. So I met Brent at church initially. Do you want a pillow?

Brent: Yeah.

Russell: That’s how planned these things are. What was one of the first impressions, about this whole business, when you got introduced to it? Because I know a lot of people got through that, especially spouses or friends or potential employees or partners that don’t know this world at all, it’s kind of weird at first.

Brent: Yeah, I had no idea. I was at, met Russell through a church function and didn’t really know what he did. When I kind of thought he made money on the internet, I initially thought eBay, he sold stuff on eBay or you know, I had no idea.  I really couldn’t understand. So he had some of the business partners and friends that he kind of worked with at the time and I kind of pulled those guys apart and was kind of asking those guys, “What does he really do?” and one of our mutual friends, he knew that I didn’t understand so I talked to my wife who said, “I don’t know what this Russell Brunson guy’s doing, but it is freaking crazy.” Our friend was sharing the numbers that Russell was doing.

He was going to University, I was going to school as well. He was making more money than my parents combined income was, more money than they had ever made. So I was like, I gotta find out what this guy’s doing. So, like any friend, we invited him and wife over for dinner on a Sunday afternoon. So I just started asking him really carefully, “What are you doing? What exactly is this?” And he just kind of started sharing what he was up to, what he was doing. Obviously he doesn’t brag about what he’s doing, the success he was having and he was having tremendous success.

After they left, we had a good dinner and visited and then they left. I couldn’t sleep for three days. My head was spinning.

Russell: I ruined him.

Brent: You did, I was screwed at that point. After that happened I couldn’t fathom the success. But what was more important there was the value he was providing the world.

Russell: Was that before or after all our kids, we had twins and they had their first son the week before. I can’t remember if it was before or after.

Brent: We had met you before, we’d been friends for a little while. I think that we had our kids and you guys moved right after that.

Russell: All I remember is we had our twins we were in the NSU for two weeks basically. So we rented a hotel room in the hospital and just hung out there and goofed off, and I remember he was coming. “Don’t you have to go to work, or what are you doing?” He thought I was going to go…

Brent: Yeah, I told my wife, “We gotta take dinners over there or something, we gotta help them because they’re in the hospital with these twins because they can’t leave and he can’t work because he’s in the hospital.”

Russell: Little did they know the internet was working.

Brent: I had no clue.

Russell: So that was fun, so then a little while later, Brent started working for us. Initially it was affiliate management for how many years? You did that for a long time.

Brent: Yeah, like 8,9 years, roughly. The hats were always being moved but…

Russell: It’s a small company, you do a lot of everything.

Brent: Yeah, so probably 8 years to really focus on business development, affiliate management and partners and stuff like that.

Russell: And, just so everyone knows, I recently on the podcast had the presentation I gave from Funnel Hacking Live, the One Funnel Away, about the stories, and I talked about Brent in that and it made me cry in the middle of my presentation, it was kind of embarrassing. But you were here for the good and bad. When we went from 5 employees up to 100 and back down to 5 and all the stress up and down. I’m curious, honestly why you didn’t leave when everything collapsed and crashed.

Brent: That’s a good question.

Russell: I don’t know the answer either.

Brent: You’re going to get me vulnerable. Working with an entrepreneur, especially Russell, you know where their heart is and there came a point where he was trying to help too many people. He was employing a lot of friends and family and people that he wanted to provide opportunities for and that was great to a certain point. But there was a point there where the business changed a little bit, evolved and we were needing to make some changes with it. And those changes wouldn’t allow him to support everyone he was supporting.

That was very difficult for him. My wife and I, we cared and loved Russell and Collette and their family. We came to a point where I didn’t want to be a burden, I knew he was stressed and worried about taking care of people. I had a conversation with my wife, where I said I would rather keep our friendship, than have him feel stressed about supporting, having an opportunity for me to keep working there.

So one day I kind of came into your office, and had a real chat. I probably said some things that, I wanted him to understand how important what he was doing was, and also I wanted him to understand that I was okay to leave. I didn’t want him to feel like he needed to provide for me. I would be fine to figure things out. I just wanted to make sure he was okay. Because it was at the point where you were helping so many people, really one hiccup you could have lost everything. All your savings was going back into the company and at some point you just can’t keep doing that.

Russell: Yeah, I got really scared, but somehow we pulled it around.

Brent: Pulled it around and obviously you had to make some tough phone calls and decisions that changed the company at that point.

Russell: Basically we had to, we had 100 and some odd employees, we had all these wrestlers working for me, we had let go the whole wrestling team. We had to downsize. We shrunk from a 20,000 square foot building to 2000. It was rocky and scary but it gave us the ability to refocus and figure things out. Remember we went on a couple trips where we were trying to figure out who were the people still having success in our market. We jumped in a plane traveling to different people’s offices. We spent time with Ryan Dyson and Perry Belcher, trying to figure out what they were doing. With Alex Chafren, what they were doing. People who were our friends, just kind of used this time to figure out what’s actually working today and how do we shift our business model and change everything.

It’s funny how much pain there was during that time. We flew to London. How important it was for the transition for what became Clickfunnels and everything else.

Anyway, so many fun stories we could talk about forever. But we don’t have time for all those things. What I want to talk about a little today is, probably a year into the business when we first started growing, it’s funny I got a message today from Alex Chafren, he’s like, “You sound so calm.” Probably because we’re here in Hawaii but he was like, “I don’t know any other person running a hundred million dollar company that’s as relaxed and able to respond to people.”

Anyway, when we first started, we didn’t know what we were doing. It was just kind of like, we know how to sell stuff. Started selling Clickfunnels, it started growing and all the sudden all sorts of new headaches came up with that. From a software standpoint with Todd and we brought in Ryan and they had to deal with infrastructure, ups and downs. I think based on ranking we’re the 700th most visited website in the world. But that’s not counting anyone’s custom domains. If you take away custom domains, we’re probably in the top 500 websites in the world.

There’s not many humans on earth that have ever dealt with that kind of scaling and infrastructure. Todd had never done it, Ryan had never done it. They’re figuring this stuff along the way and we’re hiring consultants. On the marketing side we’re trying to grow and then all these things and as everything was growing one thing we didn’t have in place was any of the internal company business stuff. We were good sales people, good coders but we had to do that.

It was funny because, you’d never had experience with that either though.

Brent: Not really, no.

Russell: We had this time where internally there were, everything was shaking and we said basically “Brent, we’re going to take you from affiliate management and you’re going to run this role.” And didn’t know what to expect, if it was going to work or not going to work. He was able to step into this thing and turned it really simplified. I’ve had zero stress about that part of the business since you took it over. From that time we went from 20 employees to I don’t even know where we’re at now.

Brent: 135 or something. Employees and contractors, we got a few different folks.

Russell: Lots of people. So I’d love to talk, first you step in that role and it was probably disorganized and stuff. What were your thoughts? What did you have to go and figure out? What’d you have to learn to be able to turn it into what it is now?

Brent: I think the big thing is Russell’s vision for the company. We’d worked together long enough that I knew where he wanted to go. Even inherently just kind of knew. The big thing about Russell is his ability to surround himself with good people. That was the first part, evaluating who we have currently. Are they on the right seat on the bus, is a big part of that too. So we tested different things, and some things worked and some things didn’t work very well.

We brought people and we started the phone stuff a little bit with the clickstart program and some of those guys were better than others and we’ve evolved that program. But the big thing about it is obviously support. We had, when you guys initially started hiring support team members, those guys were rock stars, and a lot of those guys are still with us today. They have evolved in their positions in the company because of their commitment and their love of Clickfunnels. I love when I get to interview and talk to people and when those individuals say, “I love Clickfunnels.”  That is the coolest compliment that we can get. When get people that raise their hand, they want to work with us because they love Clickfunnels, they love the mission, they love the ability to help people.

I think the biggest challenge was how do we grow with it? Because the marketing side, was growing so fast, it’s important that we’re providing and helping our users and helping them have the best experience possible. Also, Clickfunnels isn’t just some easy push button software. It is easy to use once you understand it, but there’s a lot of different parts of it and understanding marketing is a big part of it.

So we needed to bring on people who could understand Clickfunnels, who understood marketing and also understood Russell’s style, the way you were taking everything.

Russell: It’s crazy because I think when you took over the role of that, it wasn’t just support but that was a big piece of it, obviously. There’s probably what, a dozen support people at the time?

Brent: Yeah, there was probably about 6 to 10. Well, probably 10.

Russell: 10 at the time. You found a way to take that….it’s funny because one of the criticism sometimes of Clickfunnels is “Support’s not live all the time. Awebber’s live.” Awebber’s been growing for 20 years. They probably get 4 new signups a day. Clickfunnels right now, it’s been a while since I looked at the stats, but it’s anywhere from 500 to a thousand sign ups a day, every single day. Coming to Clickfunnels and trying to learn this huge platform that runs your entire company. How do we stay in front of that.

Our goal eventually is to get to the point where it’s real time support or as close to that as possible. But there’s no one else in our space that’s ever had to deal with that. That have grown companies that fast. Most big companies like Strive don’t have any support at all because they’re like, we can’t therefore we don’t. We still need to have that support and education and stuff like that in place.

I think what you did initially, I know that Ryan was a part of this. Ryan Montgomery helped set this up initially too. But just for those that don’t have support teams or maybe have three or four people and are starting to scale something, you kind of broke people into teams. Do you want to talk about some of that initial stuff that you guys did there to make the scaling side of support easier?

Brent: Yeah, so we moved over to Intercom, that allowed us to do like live support. It wasn’t right live, but people could submit conversations and we’d respond to them and that’s what we used to start. We’ve grown, our response time, that’s how we kind of gauge our success, our response time. There’s a lot of software companies that offer live support, from 8-5. Ours is essentially turned on 24 hours, we’ve got team members all around the world. When we initially started we actually had an international team and we had more domestic teams, but as we realized, and continued to scale and grow, we had more and more people international. We’ve got international folks on every team. We’ve got domestic folks on every team. So they can kind of work that schedule out as needed.

But as we came in we saw the amount of conversations we had, these guys are answering 8-9 thousand conversations a week, our support team. It is crazy. Our billing support is unreal. We’ve got a team of billing support team members and most of them are in our office. We’ve got a few individuals who aren’t. But the big part of it is having leadership being in those positions. So every support team we have has a team lead who is the person we reach out to and help with training and they now can pass the messages and training on to the other team members.

Russell: So how many teams do we have right now?

Brent: So technical support teams, we have 8 technical support teams.  We have one billing support team. We’ve got one team that focuses on some other different partners we have and worked with in the past. We’ve got a team that helps with our Quickstart program, that’s a program people can signup with and it allows them to get some help on the initial setup and we’ve got a team lead that helps run that team.

Russell: The thing that’s cool about this, for any of you guys who are scaling, in fact this is what happened at first when we were scaling. There was one person in charge and had 10 people underneath them and we were trying to grow and everything was growing and that person couldn’t handle any more growth. Because it’s hard to have more than 8 to 10 people you report to. You get bigger than that, it gets stressful and it’s really, really hard. So what Brent did, he came in and said, “Okay, the people we have that are rock stars, make each of those a team lead. And let’s put employees underneath each of those and the team lead can train the employees and make sure they’re doing good. And he’s only got to deal with the 8 or 10 team leads, deal with them and then they are dealing with the individual people. It gives us a communication channel to get through and now he’s not having 90 direct reports back to him. He just has the 8.

Another cool thing we did recently, because the other big thing we have and some of you guys will have something similar with your businesses is, there was a competitor that has software that has pages that generate leads. Their software does one thing, there’s one button you can click and that’s it. It’s very, very simple. Clickfunnels is like, we’re building a landing page, your funnel, your shopping cart, your affiliate platform, your auto-responders, there’s 8 thousand things. For us, we can’t just hire someone in Boise, Idaho and be like, “Hey, now you’re a support person for Clickfunnels.” There’s such a learning curve they have to understand to be able to do that.

So a couple of things, number one is that most of our hires come from people that are members of our software, which is a big thing for you guys to think through. In inner circle this comes up all the time. Where do I find rock stars? I guarantee the rock star you’re dreaming for is already a customer of your product right now. Look at your internal customer base for your rock stars, because they’re going to know your product, be passionate, they’re going to care more than someone you pull off the street. That’s number one.

Number two is we needed, how do we train these people? I think initially each team lead just trained their people, and they were getting bogged down in the training and not being able to support and manage and stuff like that. So we talked about a new team that’s the training team, right?

Brent: Well a big part of this that helped, Mark came up and helping work, he does a lot more direct work with the team leads.

Russell: You guys know Mark Bangerter, he’s killing it, he’s awesome.

Brent: You know he still kind of balances customer education and he helps with support management. So Mark came in and we had the idea, we brought new people on and initially they would slow down the rest of the team. So we pulled another team lead out, we pulled out Andrew Newman, and now his focus is just training. So as we bring new team members on, he’s focusing on those guys. As we look at, he doesn’t have anybody currently to teach, he’s reaching out to people who have been on the team and maybe lack knowledge about Backpack or Actionetics, and then he’s pulling those guys out and he’s doing training with those guys so that we can get everybody up to the same level.

Russell: That’s cool. We did something like that back when we had our big call center before the big crash of what year was that? Crash or 08, crash of 09. Because we had 60 sales guys and the problem is the same thing. We’d hire sales guys off the street and someone’s gotta train them, so we had a training team. So every sales guy would come in and go through a two week training with Robbie Summers was the one that managed that and then the ones that were good we’d then put them on the floor under another team. And the ones that sucked, we’d just get rid of them.

And that’s kind of the same thought here. Let’s bring people in and have someone who’s dedicated to training them and when they’re ready, then put them on a team so they can start running with it. Everybody’s opposed to pulling people back.

It’s just crazy all these, these are all the things we’re learning as we’re growing and scaling. Someday we’re going to write a book about this whole journey and this whole experience, because I think a lot of times companies are built like, there’s a dude with an idea, they hire venture capitalists and bring in a management team, all this stuff and build a company. Whereas with us it was like raw passion and that’s what’s grown this whole thing and kept it afloat. It’s been a fun ride so far.

Brent: It’s been an unbelievable ride.

Russell: So I appreciate all your work and help and everything you do. Hopefully this gives some of you guys ideas as your growing your support teams or development team or management or whatever those things are. If you look at also, I had someone, it was Andrew Warner from Mixer the other day, he interviewed me, he’s like, “How are you able to write books and run a software company and do coaching and all these different things?” And the same thing is kind of what Brent mentioned earlier, I’ve gotten really good at surrounding myself with amazing people. Where I feel like it’s almost like there’s parts of the company that people are running. You’re running all the operational stuff, I don’t have to worry about that, the hiring and firing, the finding other people. Brent does that. So I just talk to Brent and then all the people stuff is taken care of.

Todd and Ryan run the development team, Todd’s running it. I talk to Todd all the time, but it’s just happening and I don’t have to stress about that. I’m kind of running the marketing team. Dave’s running, there’s john, there’s probably 5 or 6 people that I deal with directly inside the company and I’m able to do the parts that I love the most, that I’m the best at. And I think a lot of us entrepreneurs and most of the people in those positions all get profit share and equity in the company and I think one of the big mistakes I made when I first got started was I was so protective, this is my, I wanted so much control over everything that I stifled everything. Whereas when I was able to give up control and bring in rock stars and people that have skill sets that I don’t and now, because they have a stake in the game, I don’t have to worry about everything, every decision, every single thing.

I trust Brent. He makes a thousand decisions a day that I never even questioned or think about because I trust him. Same thing with Todd, they know they do that because they’re willing and able to do that. So I think a lot of you guys, if you’re struggling with growth, you don’t have the ideas, you’re not going to bring on venture capitalists and destroy your soul and you want to grow something. The opposite of that is bring on really smart people and give them a stake in the game.

It’s kind of like Chet Holmes used to tell me, he said that in his company, everyone was based on a percentage of sales, there was no salary based people. He said what’s cool about that is that big months everyone gets big checks, small months everyone gets small checks but everyone’s in it together. I think that building teams that way is better than bringing in a bunch of money and hiring the right people, or hiring the best people. It’s hiring the right people and giving them incentive to where they can grow and do whatever they want.

In fact, I’m going to share one thing. This is cool. Am I allowed to share this, I probably can. This was, we had these accountants, most marketers don’t like accountants, but we had these accountants and every year I’d have to go the accounting meeting and then they would always talk about all the stuff to do to try to lower your, anyway, it was super annoying. It was the worst meeting of my year, I would lose all motivation and momentum for an entire week because I was so stressed out. I remember driving home from one of those so pissed off at the accountants for trying to ruin my happiness in life. And I remember in this podcast, I have to go find it, but I was like, “My goal is I want, not only am I going to max out my tax bracket but I’m going to have everyone I know around me, all my partners, all the people that are pushing this, I want to max out their tax bracket as well.”

We were talking about this earlier on this trip here in Hawaii, there’s probably half a dozen people or so on our team now, that have maxed out their tax bracket because of this whole concept that we’re talking about. That is the coolest feeling in the entire world.

Brent: It’s pretty awesome.

Russell: It’s pretty amazing. So there you go, Uncle Sam, there you go. Anyway, that’s all I got. You have anything else you want to add?

Brent: No, I just think, you said unbelievable, it truly is every day. How cool is it to be able to come and work with friends and good people that, it’s just a positive place. Our company culture is a big deal and you drive that and it’s been really fun to see people come into our office or just come into our business, our space and feel that, and even those who just work remote, we’ve got a lot of team members that work remote, most of them are. And it can be kind of a lonely road out there, but we do things to try to help them feel the love. Russell will send swag to people and just unexpected things that make people feel the love and help them know we appreciate them and that’s a big deal.

Russell: So here’s a question, for those who may want to join Clickfunnels team, how do they?

Brent: We have a link on Clickfunnels, at the bottom of Clickfunnels under Careers, but we’re always looking. If someone out there is passionate, you want to be able to find a place with us, hit me up. You can hit me up on Facebook, email, brent@clickfunnels.com, send me an email. I can direct you where to go, we have application up.

Russell: That’s awesome. Thanks man. So that’s a little behind the scenes of how the HR, the growth, the internal stuff, what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. Again, we’re just learning all this stuff along the way. Someday we’re going to write a book about it when it’s all done. Because the lessons we’ve learned along the way have been cool. So hopefully this gave you guys a couple of ideas and things as you’re growing and scaling your teams, and that’s all I got. Thanks everybody. Thanks Brent.

Brent: Absolutely. Thanks guys.

Russell: Bye.

Aug 8, 2017

There’s no school like the old school…

On today’s episode Russell talks about plans to use what he has learned from TJ Rholeder while on an anniversary trip in Hawaii, in his business once he arrives home. Here are a few interesting things you will learn in this episode:

  • How Russell is able to still learn while on an anniversary trip with his wife, and make plans for business once he’s home.
  • How Russell plans to use the 50,000 letters a week rule in his own business.
  • And how he plans to add urgency and scarcity to his core products.

So listen here to hear Russell’s upcoming plans for his business, or watch the video version so you don’t miss out on the beautiful scenery of Kauai.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell. Welcome to today’s episode of Marketing Secrets, that is in the rain here in Kauai.

Alright everybody, I want to welcome to today’s episode of Marketing Secrets, it is raining on me right now. I don’t know if you can see that over here, if you’re watching the video version.  But it’s beautiful here and I wanted to do an episode, this is going to be really good, I’m going to come and hide under the bush or something. I’m just going to sit here and get wet, it’ll be more fun this way.

Anyway, we’ve been in Hawaii almost a week now on my 15th anniversary, which is amazing being married to my beautiful wife, Collette for this long. I’m trying to get to do an episode with you guys, hopefully on the flight home or something, on what it’s like living with and being married to an entrepreneur. We’re trying to pick our keynote speaker for this year’s Funnel Hacking Live, and it’s funny because we got tons of people voting for everybody. Somebody posted Oprah, and someone put Russell’s wife and my wife got more votes than Oprah, which is pretty exciting. So we’re trying to get her at least to jump on the podcast. So that’s the goal and the game plan.

What I want to share with you guys today, the rain’s gone that fast, but there’s birds right behind me. Let me clean my phone off real quick. So what I wanted to share with you guys, I’ve been listening to a whole bunch of cool marketing stuff between the long drives around the island, all the cool stuff we’re doing. The course I was listening to was TJ Rohleder and if you don’t know TJ, he’s one of the legends in our business. He is one of the direct mail kings in the Bizop world, and he’s become a friend. We had him speak at one of our events a while ago, which was amazing.

What’s interesting, the course I was listening to was How To Become Super Rich in the Opportunity Market. He teaches people how to  make money in the teach people how to get rich market. What’s interesting, as I was listening to it, if you read the Expert Secrets book, I talked about three core things you gotta do to build a mass movement. Number one you gotta have the attractive character, the attractive leader. Number two you have to have a future based cause. Number three you have to have a new opportunity.

What’s interesting is as I was listening to this, he’s talking about how to sell opportunities but basically if you’re doing a mass movement the way we’re talking about, it’s always a new opportunity. Everything he’s talking about, the opportunity is the way he positions it is how to get rich, how to make money, here’s the opportunity market as he calls it. But in my mind every market is the opportunity market. So I’m going to see if I can interview TJ and dig deeper in that because his stuff was brilliant, it was all targeted towards selling people stuff, how to make money. But if you look at it from the lens of the Expert Secrets book then it kind of works for all of them. Because every single opportunity, everything you’re selling should be a new opportunity. So I’m going to try to see if I can do that.

Plus, TJ launched his company, he lives out in Kansas and he actually bought a hospital and renovated the whole thing and that’s where he runs his company out of, an old hospital, which is kind of cool. I kind of want to go down there and see his whole operation. It may come to an episode of Funnel Hacker TV soon. Where I go down there and tour his hospital and see his whole organization. In the last ten years they’ve sent out 9500 different direct mail campaigns, which is crazy.

Some people will get on his list and they might get between 2 or 300 letters in the mail per year, depending on what sequence they take, what offers they say yes to and no to and all sorts of stuff. Super inspiring.

But what I want to talk about is a couple of core things I learned from him that I think are really good for all of you guys. The first one is not from TJ it’s actually from a Bill Glazier thing I was listening to. So Bill was partners with Dan Kennedy at Glazier Kennedy and he was my marketing dad for five or six year that I was in his inner circle. And one of the things that was cool that I was studying from Bill this week, he was talking about how at the very beginning of the year they have their big thing. So they do two events a year, they did InfoSummit and Super Conference. For me, I do Funnel Hacking Live, that’s my big thing.

They said they categorized all their promotions based on the importance. So number were their two events, number two was this, number three…they had it all mapped out and mapped out the entire year, the promotional schedule at the beginning of the year to make sure they fill the events and all these other things fit in there.

I was thinking about that, and I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not super good at mapping out my promotional calendar and schedule and things like that. I kind of just go week by week, month by month and do stuff. And what Bill does in this course, and it’s an old course, but he maps it out and then they do everything. So It started thinking about this and at one of our inner circle meetings, Justin Williams was talking about with his stuff now, as you guys know if you’ve been listening to our podcast for any length of time, the two magic things that marketers have are urgency and scarcity.

So he started doing with his is, he re-launched courses throughout the year and he’d open and close them. So he’d have the urgency and scarcity close. That’s where most of the sales always come in, during the closing of the thing. Also if you listened to when Stu launched Tribe, he’s talking about Michael Hyatt when he launched his membership site, the big secret they had was opening and closing. So twice a year they’d open up the membership site and then it was closed. I started thinking about that and I’m like, right now most of our programs are open all the time, which is good. But the urgency and scarcity is not there. So I think what I’m going to do is start calendaring it out where twice a year our things are available.

So twice a year people can buy our certification program, twice a year people can join Funnel University, twice a year they can get Fill Your Funnel, twice a year….all of our core offers are only open twice during the year, and they’re closed down other than that, which is kind of fun. It gives us the ability to have urgency and scarcity and build up the hype and the buzz, and it gives me each month, something to focus on. This month is Funnel U month and we’re going to open and close it. The next month is this, we’re going to open it and close it and all content and all things can be related back to that one thing.

So that was the first thing I kind of started re –thinking through when I was listening to Bill Glazier talk about how they structured their promotions around their events. That’s the first cool thing. Now with TJ, a couple of cool things that he does, I think it was good for me to hear again, it’s good for all of you guys to hear again.

So TJ is in the business opportunity market, mostly through direct mail. He has 50,000 letters he mails every single week. Week in and week out consistently, they know 50,000 letters will go out every single week all for new customer acquisition. New customer acquisition, 50,000 letters every single week. And that’s just the schedule. I think for a lot of us we get in this thing where we have these front end funnels, these break even funnels where we bring people in, then we have our monetization funnel. So I think a lot of us, we create a really good webinar funnel let’s say, and then that becomes our focus. And then that’s it, we’re driving traffic and that’s the business.

TJ if you look at this again, he’s got his frontend lead gen offers and he’s mailing 50,000 pieces a week. He said at his peak, he was selling a $50 course from his frontend lead gen stuff, and he said he would spend up to $500 to sell a $50 course.  From there you go into all the backend funnels and the backend things he was selling. But he had this consistency of 50,000 pieces every single week.

I started thinking about that. He’s mailing 50,000 new names every single week, what’s the equivalent of that for my business? I need to make sure I have something consistently doing that every single week to one frontend offer. He talked about one of the big things also is he’s not mailing 2 things or 3 things to that 50,000. They have one offer, the hottest converting one and that’s where they drive all their energy, all their money, everything.

And for us, I think all of us, we have our hot offer, we need to be spending as much as we can to get people into that thing consistently every single week. Just knowing I spend 50 grand a week, or 10 grand a week or a thousand bucks a week, whatever it is for you, into that frontend thing. If you break, if you think about this, break it down, there’s kind of two sides to this, or three sides depending on how deep you want to get. We talk about this at this upcoming Funnel Hacking Live, but there’s a process.

There’s basically three types of funnels. There’s acquisition funnels, getting people in. There’s ascension funnels, ascending up within your membership. Then there’s monetization funnels. But for this argument today, I’m just going to talk about the two. So there’s an acquisition funnels, so what is your one acquisition funnel that you can consistently do X with? For me it might be I need to sell at least a thousand books a week, or I need to spend 10 grand a week, or whatever that thing is for you. You just know that and you have to do it consistently. We have to sell a thousand books a week and we should build a whole team of people whose entire goal is to sell a thousand books a week, or 5 thousand, or whatever that number is for you.

Back when I had a call center, that’s how it was. We had free plus shipping leads and we had to get 8 thousand leads a month to get enough leads for our sales floor and that became the focus of the business. For you it’s like, think about TJ, what is the frontend offer that’s consistently bring people in? And then from TJ, it’s so crazy. I’m hoping I can go down there and film his whole operation for you guys because I want to see it to. But like I said, as soon as someone gets through the frontend then he’s got all these direct mail campaigns that go out offering these two step things.

So he’ll send out a letter for a free cd about whatever to the existing customers. So he’s only sending it to people that already bought his $50 thing, then he’ll put them onto a sequence that gets a free cd. Then if they respond to the free cd he puts them in a sequence to sell the thing that that cd upsells to. Then he puts out the next offer and the next offer and he keeps putting out all these frontend lead gen, I guess their acquisition and monetization letters to the buyers of his 50,000 a week thing. So 50,000 a week bringing people in. And after they come in and bought the $50 thing, then he starts sending them letters trying to get them to raise their hand about specific opportunities that he’s going to sell them. If they respond to those then they go into a whole other sequence. They might get 10, 15, 20 letters to sell a 2 or 3 or 5 thousand dollar course on the backend.

And that’s kind of the process that he does over and over and over again. So for me, what I’m looking at, what I want my focus to be, is somebody comes into my world, and again I’m focusing way more effort consistently on this, I’m going to call it 50,000 letters a week, but for us we’re not doing direct mail right now, so it’s not that, but that’s the concept. The frontend lead acquisition. Then if they come in, we’re taking our core courses and we’re opening them and closing them, opening them and closing, opening and closing them, opening and closing them throughout the year. So those are our monetization funnels after people come in.

So that’s kind of the game, and I’m really excited for it. So that’s the game I’m going to be playing and I hope you guys model that. The other cool thing I’m going to be doing, and I’ve been thinking a lot about this for probably two weeks. It started at Scout camp and it’s been in my mind even here as we’ve been in this beach house. Having one really good follow up funnel sequence that takes people through my offers in a very strategic way. So we have igniteyourfunnel.com, which is right now, we’re using it for something completely different, but I’m going to be changing that to where this is an opt in form where we get people to opt into and then it’s going to take them through a sequence. I haven’t quite mapped the whole thing out, but first thing I want someone to buy is what?

For my business the first thing I want someone to buy is Expert Secrets, so I’m going to be like, have a video of me explaining why they need Expert Secrets and why it’s step number one. Actually, let me step back, step number one is not going to be the book. Step number one is going to be, on the podcast you guys heard a little while ago, the two episodes on You’re one Funnel Away, I’m going to show that video to build connection with people immediately after they opt in, from there I’ll tell them to get the Expert Secrets book and then from there, what do they need next? I’ll logically build out a really long sequence that’s going to be this ascension funnel that takes them up through our core offers in the middle.

And then the big thing that our team is going to be focusing on is RKPI’s how many opt in’s a day are we getting inside the Ignite Your Funnel funnel, the Ignite your Funnel ascension funnel, ascending them through all of our offers. I’m trying to think how this whole thing works together. It might be when someone opt’s in the first time they go through this ascension funnel, that all those offers will be open to them, open and close, like in Evergreen format. And after that they’ll bump over to a monetization funnel. Our longer term email sequences that then they’ll be on when we open and close them each month. I’m not positive on that, still figuring out the details. But it’s fun to think through it. Anyway, that’s the game plan.

So those are some of the fun things I’ve learned and been thinking about while I’ve been here having some fun in Kauai on my 15 year anniversary. I hope that gives you guys some ideas and things to think about. So kind of to recap the important things.

Number one is focusing on consistently bringing new blood into your business. 50,000 letters a week rule, should we call it that? 50,000 letters a week rule, consistently bringing new blood in. I remember Garret White at the last Funnel Hacking Live talked about people that make it rain, the rainmakers are the ones who dominate this world and this business. You gotta be focusing on making it rain. If you want to learn how to make it rain, right now the program is closed, but depending on when you’re listening it might be open, is our Fill Your Funnel course. Fill Your Funnel is all about how to make it rain, how to get new customers into your funnels. So that’s number one.

Number is then after they come in, what’s the monetization?  So maybe number two is the ascension funnel, which is for me it’s ignite your funnel, which takes them through our offers in chronological order of when I want them to see things, opening and closing them in Evergreen format. And at the end of that, then put them into our monetization team, monetization funnels, which then would be taking our core six offers and opening and closing them twice a year. That’s going to be the business. That gets me really excited. Really, really excited.

So anyway, that’s the game plan guys. I’m glad I had a chance to talk this out with you guys, it’s making it clearer and clearer in my mind. I hope you guys something of value out of that too. But like I said, I don’t just talk about this stuff, I practice what I preach so you will see me implementing these things in the very near future. Hopefully you guys will see them and enjoy them and model and funnel hack them for what you guys are doing because I know this stuff is going to be amazing.

So that’s all I got you guys. Anyway, here’s one last view. Here’s the beach house we’ve been staying in. It’s an AirBNB, we were going to get a hotel and we looked at AirBNB and we found this. AirBNB or BRB, I can’t remember which one. It’s like 5000 square feet, my wife and I are up here and Brent and Amber are over here. There’s all this open space and there’s even like huge guest house over here that we got massages in the other day. It’s crazy.

We’re literally, this is our beach. It’s just ours. And it’s crazy. I was flying the quad copter today, I learned how to finally fly the quad copter. I took it out over everything. So if you’re watching Funnel Hacker TV, which hopefully you are, you’ll have a chance to see above this place and beyond, it’s insane. It’s probably a little expensive, but for your 15th anniversary you go all out. Look at that, that’s our beach. We rented these paddle boards too, I guess if you’re listening on the podcast you can’t see this.

But a couple of cool things also, just so you guys know. This is obviously on the audio podcast, which right now as of today, we’re number 5 in the business category, which is awesome. We’re still killing it there, we just also released this as a video podcast, if you go to iTunes at the very top there’s audio podcasts, you can switch to video podcast. We also have Marketing Secrets as a video podcast now too. So if you want to watch the videos, or if you want to watch the videos you can go to marketingsecrets.com and they’re all listed there along with the transcripts, see if you want to listen to what I’m saying and read along. The transcripts are at marketingsecrets.com as well.

With that said, I would love it if you guys would give me a review and a rating over on iTunes. Like I said, we’re number 5 in the business category, the other guys above me still have more ratings, it’s not fair. I’m killing myself giving you guys the best stuff I got, I need some more ratings. So if you can take 5 seconds out of your busy day, stop everything, go over there, leave a rating and review, tell me what you think about Marketing Secrets, let the world know, that’d be awesome.

And then the other thing is please subscribe to the video podcast as well. Feel free to watch the videos there if you want, that way you can see some of the beautiful scenery behind me. Yeah, that’s all I got you guys. Thanks again for listening, have an amazing day and we’ll see you guys soon. We’ll be back in Boise next week, back to a normal schedule. I got some cool stuff I want to publish and share with you guys. I gotta finish my anniversary and then get back to you guys soon. Appreciate you all, see you guys soon. Bye.

Aug 7, 2017

These two things are probably keeping you from charging what you want and selling what you want.

On this episode Russell talks about people pushing their own purchasing decisions on you, and why you shouldn’t do that. Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in today’s episode:

  • Why you shouldn’t push your own buying decisions on your customers, because people spend money differently.
  • And why you need to be willing to spend the amount you are asking others to pay for your product. Hint, it all has to do with karma.

So listen here to why you gotta spend money to make money and why you should never force others to spend money the same way you do.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell. Welcome to a special Hawaii edition of Marketing Secrets podcast.

Hey everyone, my wife and I are in Hawaii right now, Kauai, actually, on our 15 year wedding anniversary. Well next week is technically our anniversary, but it’s been 15 years so we’re here with some of our friends who it’s also their 15 year. It’s been really great. We didn’t do a hotel this time, we actually AirBNB’d it, so I don’t know if you can see back here. I’ll show the AirBNB for those who are watching on Marketingsecrets.com you can see the video. If you’re on the podcast you can’t see this, but it’s crazy. This is the AirBNB we rented. It’s 5 or 6 thousand square feet on this private beach.

We have our own beach and we’re here right now hanging out. My wife just got soaked by a wave, we just got done getting massages. I’ve been kind of MIA for a little bit. I’ve got some content going out while I’m gone. Last week I had scout camp so I was gone for scout camp all week and little access to anything. And then this week I’ve been in Hawaii. I should have done, I was going to do some more stuff but you know, trips, it’s really difficult for me to unplug, and now that I’m unplugged it’s really difficult for me to plug back in, to be completely honest.

Anyway, it’s definitely interesting, but having a good time here. There’s dudes out kite boarding, I don’t know if you guys ever kite boarded before, but I’ve always wanted to kite board, so I may try that. It would be kind of fun actually.

I hope it’s not too windy for you guys to hear me. I was trying to figure out what I should share with you guys here to kind of give some inspiration or some thought or an idea for how you can better market your business with the things you’re doing. So I was thinking about that, what’s something that would be the biggest value for you guys and I think one of the biggest problems we have, and I’ve seen this ten times since we’ve been here in Hawaii, is that they place their own ability, the way they make their purchasing decisions on other people.

For example one of the things, I had a GoPro here, and I brought the GoPro and I had the little handle, but I forgot the little screw thing that screws the GoPro to the handle, so we go to the store. I was like, “Hey, I need to buy one of those screws.” And they’re like, “Oh, we don’t sell the screws.” I was like, “You have those handles right? Give me a handle then.” And he’s like, “But you just need a screw?” I’m like, “Yeah, but just give me the handle, I’ll just do that.” And he’s like, “Dude, it’s $47 for the handle, if you go down the road, two or three streets down there’s a place and they might sell screws there.” and I’m like, “No dude, just give me the handle.” And he’s like, “But it’s $47.” I was like, “I don’t care, I don’t want to drive two or three streets down the road to find a place that might sell a screw.” For me, the $47 is so much cheaper than the opportunity cost for me to go do that thing.

It was kind of funny and so many things happened like that. We tried to buy something, or do something and people are putting their purchasing decisions on, they would never do that, they’d never spend an extra $47 just to get a screw, because for them they’d do all these other things. I think a lot of times we get caught up that way with our customers. In fact, I’ve had people before be like, “They’ll never buy that.” I teach them in Expert Secrets and they’re creating the course and they’re like, “No one would ever pay $997 for that. No one would ever pay $400 for that or $500 for that.” Don’t put your purchasing decisions, the way you’d logically do things on somebody else. It has nothing to do with it.

You have to look at what your customer wants. If you create something they really, really want where what you’re creating is worth more than what it is you’re getting in return, the money, then they’ll buy it. If you create something that sucks, it’s not going to happen. It’s got to be something that’s amazing.

So many I think that people don’t sell stuff, or they don’t sell stuff for what it’s worth because in their mind they’re like, “I don’t think I would want to pay for that.” Which is another problem, it’s a mental thing you gotta get over as well. You’ve got to be willing to buy stuff too. But it’s just interesting how that’s such a barrier.

I remember when Justin and Tara, in our inner circle and Two Comma Club winners, when they came to inner circle, they had their real estate program, they were selling for $2000 and they paid $25 grand to join my inner circle and the first meeting all I basically told them is they should sell a $25,000 thing and they’re like, “My people won’t pay that.” And I’m like, “you paid it.” And they’re like, “Huh, we did pay you $25,000.” They valued that, they didn’t value the real estate education much because they already know it, they already do it. But the education they wanted they were willing to pay for that. And because they were willing to pay for it, they were able to ask for it.  So they sent an email off to their list and sold 18 people at $25k the next week, it was crazy.

But it was just a little mindset shift. It’s interesting, I have a lot of people I know who will try to sell a thousand or a ten thousand, or a twenty five thousand dollar thing, but then they’re not willing to buy that from somebody else, and I think there’s a lot of incongruency. It’s really difficult to sell a $25,000 thing unless you’ve bought one before.

A big reason why I joined Dean Graziosi’s and Joe Polish’s group is because I know in the future I’m going to have a 100k group and I wanted to make sure I’d be willing to invest in myself that much before I ever asked somebody else to. It’s the same for you. It’s this weird karma thing, if you’re not willing to invest in yourself and your business, it makes it a lot harder for people to invest in your business. I think the reason why it’s easy for me to sell books is because I buy a lot of books. I love buying books, so it’s easy selling books. People who struggle with that, they’re like, “I never bought that in the past.” Well if you’re not going to buy it, then you’re not going to love it.

I buy, I probably shouldn’t say this on camera, but I spend 2 or 3 thousand dollars a month on supplements, depending on the month and if I’m refilling and stuff. So for me it’s easy to sell supplements because I buy a lot of supplements. There’s congruency and a lot of things that people don’t have.

So make sure that you’re buying stuff. Make sure that you’re not putting your buying beliefs on other people. These are all such important things. Check out this little swing from our tree here. But, these are just things that I think are important. There were probably 5 times while I’m here in Hawaii, where I just wanted to strangle people who are trying to place their buying decisions on me and I’m like, “Let me give you money. I just want this thing. Quit trying to talk me out of it.” It’s crazy.

So that’s what’s happening here in Kauai, Hawaii on our anniversary. We’ll be heading home next week, so by the time you watch this I’ll probably be home and back at it, which is exciting. We’ve got a lot of things coming up. The viral video we created with the Harmon Brothers is launching on September 15th. We are throwing an epic party which we are streaming everywhere, so you guys will be able to go see it. But we’re really going to try to set the Guinness world record at the launch party, with a whole bunch of influencers and other stuff. It’s going to be so crazy.

It was funny, we were planning this and Dave Woodward had all these crazy ideas that we’re really logical or possible, and that’s where greatness usually starts from, an idea that’s not logical or possible. And then he went and figured out a way to get it done and now we’re going to be doing it. So it’s crazy. I’ll share more details as it gets closer. But that’s kind of what I got for you guys today. So beware of putting your purchasing decisions on other people. Number two is beware of asking people to purchase things that you aren’t willing to purchase.

And again, if you’re a real estate coach you’re probably not going to buy real estate coaching, you might if you’re like me, I buy every marketing coaching program on earth. I’m obsessed with it. But I also invest in other things with those types of dollar amounts, it’s not incongruent for me to ask people for those things as well. Because not investing yourself is really painful and hard and annoying to try to get people to invest in your stuff. The money universe doesn’t work that way very well for whatever reason. So anyway, that’s what I got you guys. I hope you’re enjoying your day as much as I am, and we’ll talk to you guys all again soon. Bye everybody.

Aug 1, 2017

I got a whole bunch of questions this weekend about this topic and I want to give you my two cents.

On this episode Russell talks about listening to John Reese’s new podcast and people thinking he was talking trash about Expert Secrets. Here are some things you will hear in this episode:

  • Why despite a difference in opinion, Russell thinks that he and John Reese are both right about having (or not having) a personality on the front end of your business.
  • How having a personality in your business can 10x your sales.
  • And why an Amazon business is a good choice for someone that doesn’t want to be the personality at the front of a business.

So listen here to find out why Russell doesn’t believe that John was talking trash, and how can both be right.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets Podcast, this is a short one you’re going to get in the jeep while I’m going to grab my kids from the last day of scout camp.

Alright everyone, I wanted to shoot you guys a quick message because I have been up in the mountains for the last almost week now. I got a sweet beard. So those that can see my beard line, this is why I can’t invest in a beard oil company, or grow a beard for that matter. I don’t know why, I’ve never been able to. My brother’s got a beard that’s thicker than the hair on my head, so this is the best beard you are getting from Russell.

I wonder if I were to buy Rogaine and rub it on my beard parts. Sorry, I’m going back and forth in this little cab in the road with cars everywhere. Anyway, if it would actually grow in thick, I should try it someday, but I won’t because I don’t really want a beard to be completely honest.

So my message for you today, I’ve wanted to throw this in. So I was just in my buddy’s cabin and I tapped in the internet for a few minutes and got all these messages flying in and seeing what I missed in the last week. It’s funny, I got a bunch of people who messaged me about my man, John Reese’s podcast. So hopefully you guys are listening to it, if not go to iTunes and search the Wacky Minded John Reese. He is the dude who is the first guy to make a million dollars in our market. He is the one that inspired the Two Comma Club Award, and he has inspired so much of what I do and is someone who I appreciate. He has become a friend and he’s been a mentor and he’s just pretty much the man, so it’s worth it. Go search the Wacky Minded John Reese and plug in. He’s posted two podcasts as of today. I listened to both of them yesterday and they’re awesome, I love it.

But I got a bunch of people messaging me saying, “Did you listen to John’s podcast, at the very end he was totally talking trash about Expert Secrets.” I was laughing because I listened to the whole thing and at the end I was listening how he was talking about how he doesn’t believe people should need to be a personality and things like that to be successful in their business.

It’s funny because at that same moment, I Facebooked John and said how much I appreciate him and his podcast is amazing and stuff. Obviously, I look at things from a different angle than John does, it doesn’t mean anyone is right or wrong. That is what is so cool aobut this business. Marketing is, I always tell people this, it’s an art and a science. The science is the structure, like pages and all that kind of stuff that we talk about and geek out in our funnel world. And then the art is the stuff on top and people do it different ways and different business models require more or less of those types of things.  So it kind of depends on what you’re trying to do and what you’re creating and things like that.

So the reason why I wrote Expert Secrets and why I’m so obsessed with the Market is because I believe in it so much. I believe that personality and connection with the audience are what people are craving. I think you can add an expert front end to any business and dramatically scale it, and we’ve proven it over and over and over again.  And it’s awesome.

John was basically saying you don’t have to have that, and I think his message is right because a lot of people struggle because they’re not that person, they don’t want to be the personality, they don’t want to blog and Facebook and podcast and do the dog and pony show that I do every day. And I totally understand that and respect that. But what I am saying and proposing from an Expert Secrets standpoint is that if you do, you will take what you have and blow it up and catch it on fire.

I believe that I can go into any company that is a product based company focusing on traditional stuff and add an expert front end and at least 10x those companies. In fact, that’s a challenge, I want somebody to take me up on that. So I would say first off, John is right. Second off, I’m also right. So it’s just different ways to look at it.

John’s background is not, he talked about the podcast, he didn’t like being in the front and being all those kind of things, which I totally respect that. But when he did, he made a million dollars in a day, just saying. So there’s something to that, there’s power, the connection you can get with somebody blows things up, right. The connection is what gets people to share videos and gets people to talk about it, gets things to grow and all those things. Without that connection it’s harder to get, not impossible. In fact, I told someone, a peer wanted to start a business and asked me what I would recommend for them and just because of their personality, I told them they should start an Amazon business, that makes more sense for them in this spot in their life and personality. In an Amazon business you don’t have to have all those personality things, right. Just get a good product, a good price, a good description, images and doing the stuff to get it ranked.

If you want to take that and blow it up then I would find someone, if you’re not that person partner with somebody who could become the personality and use that person’s personality to blow it up. Because I could take any Amazon product off the shelf, tie it to a personality and 10x it overnight. That’s the power, so we’re both right.

I just wanted you guys to know that I still love John, even though he probably wasn’t talking about me specifically but people as a whole. So with that said, these guys all think I’m weird because I’m the one guy out here podcasting while they’re all scouting it up.  Anyway, take that for what it’s worth.  Alright, so I love John, love his advice and those of you guys who are nervous about the expert stuff, you can start a business that way, just know that this is how you amplify and scale and build a mass movement of people who buy over and over and over again. People connect more with people than brands.

I hope that helps and that’s all I got for today guys. See you all later, bye everybody.

Jul 31, 2017

You’re just one funnel away…

On this special two part episode you will hear the second part of Russell’s “One Funnel Away” presentation from Funnel Hacking Live. In this episode you’ll hear:

  • How Russell nearly lost everything when his merchant accounts closed.
  • Why Russell didn’t know he hadn’t paid Payroll taxes in a year and could have gone to jail.
  • And how Russell turned it all around and along with Todd created Clickfunnels.

So listen here to find out how Russell went from nearly bankrupt to amazing success with Clickfunnels within just a few years.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone this is Russell again. Welcome to the next episode of Marketing Secrets. This is part two of the One Funnel Away presentation.

I hope you enjoyed yesterday’s episode. If you did like it I hope you have shared it and told people to go listen to it. Today is going to be the exciting conclusion of Russell’s bankruptcy and failure stories. I hope you enjoy it, it should be a lot of fun. Listen to it online at marketingsecrets.com, you can watch it, there’s a video there, you can share and see the actual presentation there as well. I hope this helps you, hope it gives you faith and hope in what you’re doing, what you’re creating and where you are trying to go with your business and people’s lives you are going to serve. With that said, enjoy my failures, I hope you guys have a good time with it, see you guys soon. Bye.

Now the pros and the cons of this. The pros, this is really, really awesome. As a beginning entrepreneur I was like, we nailed, lets scale this thing. I probably shouldn’t have done some of this stuff, but we got excited. If this worked here, we should hire more people. We started this and we went from this little thing with 5 or 6 of us to 2 years later we had about a 100 people operation, where this is the model we were doing. Cd’s calling them on the phone, selling coaching, having continuity and it grew really big.

During that time there were some really positive things that came from it, some negative things, some ups and downs, and I’ll share a lot of those things. One cool thing is that while this was happening and it was going really well, my name got out there, so I got a chance to go speak a lot, which is cool. I’d seen a lot of other people speak from stage, and this is where I’ve told you guys this story, anyone who’s gone from Perfect Webinar, I spent about 2 1/2 , 3 years on the road going to seminars, standing in front of a bunch of people like this, talking and trying to sell something and nothing happening, it’s a really horrible feeling. Has anyone done that before?

My first presentation was on a stage like this, probably had 300 people in the room. I did the presentation and tried to do what speakers do and close, hope everyone runs to the back. Nobody budged and then the guy forgot to turn the music on and it was crickets and I was just awkwardly walking off the stage, and then running. I was so embarrassed, when you have those events that are multi-speaker events and all the speakers are selling and everyone is bragging about their numbers, I knew that I didn’t want them to ask me my numbers, because not one person signed up, so I hid in my hotel room. I remember ordering coconut shrimp and Haagen Dazs Ice cream for every meal for the next two days, while I hid in the room eating it and watching movies because I didn’t want to go back downstairs. It was really bad and awesome at the same time, because coconut shrimp and Haagen Dazs is awesome.

But I did that and learned how not to sell and then I started learning from some amazing speakers and people, learning the process and how it works. All the stuff we talk about in the Perfect webinar, all the stuff we talked about day one, about creating belief and breaking belief patterns. All those things I learned on the road in front of people on stage. It was scary, but it was such a good time for me to learn it and understand that part of the process.

As we started to grow, I wanna make sure I cover all the cool things, we had a bunch of different offers we came out with. One of the ones that was more successful for us was a front end offer like this, called Micro Continuity. How many of you guys remember Micro Continuity? This is awesome. So this is the one, it’s probably 8 years ago now. We put it on an MP3 player from Hong Kong, it had 6 hours of this training and that was the funnel we put through.

We kept creating front end funnels to get people into this program and it worked awesome. We grew the company from nothing to 3 or 4 million dollars a year and it was doing awesome. At the time I started looking at other people in my industry. Hopefully one of you guys will get a good idea from this one. I had this funnel, we talk about the value ladder, I had this really cool value ladder here and I was ascending people up and I realized that I was the only person in the market that had a real value ladder. Everyone else was kind of doing stuff down here and that was it. I was the only person selling really expensive stuff.

So I started calling my friends. I called Mike Filsame, “Hey man, all of our customers, we call them and sell them these $5000 things, and lots of people buy that. You should do that.” And he’s like, “I don’t want a call center.” And I was like, “Do you want us to call your customers and sell it?” and he’s like, “Yeah.” So we hooked up with Mike and became his backend. I called up Frank Kern and same thing, we became his backend for a little while. We started calling up a whole bunch of people and then we started becoming the backend. So all these people had frontend funnels and we became the backend for a lot of them. That’s how we took the company from 3 or 4 million dollars to 10 million dollars and it became really big.

I was going to say big and fun, but I don’t think it became that at all. It became really big. We had 100 employees, we had 60 people on phones in a big, huge call center. We had 20 people doing coaching for all the things we were selling and then had about 20 people driving leads and customers and stuff like that. It got really big, and I don’t know if you guys notice this, but I’m really good and selling and stuff, but really bad at the management of stuff. I was not good at managing all these people and it kind of started getting too big.

This is about the time, I was telling you guys, if you read the Dotcom Secrets book, I started waking up and was like, “I do not like what I created.” I got so excited that I started building this thing and then one day I woke up and was like, huh, do I really want to do this?

I think half the conversations I have with inner circle members when they first come in is this, “Do you really want to build this business? Yes, that would work, but sometimes it’s horrible when you get there. Think it through. What do I actually want to do? Who do I want to become? Who do I want to be when I grow up?”

Luckily during that time, it was probably one of the most painful times in my life, but looking back now, it was probably one of the most important times in my life. We had this huge operation and everything was working and then one day in January, literally 11:30 in the morning, one of my sales guys came in and said, “I’m trying to run a credit card and it’s not working. I’m not sure what’s wrong.” I’m like, “That’s weird. Try one of the other merchant accounts, maybe there’s something there.” then someone else came in, “Hey all the continuity orders are failing, I’m not sure why.” Three or four people came in and I’m like, “What’s happening?” I logged into the backend system and not….at 11:37 or something like that, every sale stopped. No sales.

I was like, what is happening. I was freaking out so I called our merchant account company and there’s a busy signal. I call again, busy. Call again, busy. I can’t get a hold of anybody and all the sudden I start hearing from friends. “Dude, everything got shut down. Are you still able to process?” I’m like, “No, what’s happening.” “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

And soon I found out that it wasn’t me, I eventually found out that it was 3 or 400 people at the same time. Anyone who was doing any kind of continuity stuff, the merchant accounts basically came in and said, “Look, we think what you guys are doing might be illegal and we’re shutting all of you guys down and you’re guilty until proven innocent.” I was like, “What? I’ve got 100 people that I’m feeding. 100 people and their families, it turns into 100’s of people. You can’t just stop processing.” Finally after an hour I get through to somebody and the lady on the phone says, “Yep, we shut you down. Good luck ever getting another merchant account ever again. I gotta go.” Boom and hung up on me.

I was like, “What?” at the time I thought I had diversity. We had 9 merchant accounts, all through one company, different merchant accounts but all through one bank. I found out that is the equivalent of having one. Which is why I’m a big believer now in having multiple merchant accounts in multiple different banks, which is a lesson hopefully for everybody. If you don’t know Alex Rowe yet, I don’t know if Alex is in here. But meet Alex, he’s the man who can get you hooked up with lots of merchant accounts. He’s done that for us, he’s amazing.

But it was bad, finally we got a hold of these guys and I’m trying to figure some things out. Basically they said, “You’ve got to prove that you are a good guy.” So we went through, it took us two weeks for them to go through all our stuff, look at our documentation, look at all of our stuff. Two weeks, and they came back and said, “You’re right. You’re doing everything clean, everything is above board. We’ll turn your merchant accounts back on and you’re good to go.” I’m like, “Sweet.” And during that time, when there’s that kind of instability, sales guys are freaking out, they can’t handle any kind of instability, they’re leaving like crazy. People are walking out the door.

I was freaking out, we had all this payroll and no money coming in, so I’m paying it out of my own pocket, everything to just keep things afloat. Going through this process it’s getting scarier and scarier and finally the merchant accounts are back on, you’re a good guy. So you guys, we gotta do a launch really quick to make a bunch of money. So we put together this huge launch and push it out to our customer list and in a weekend we made $250,000, and I was like, “Thank you.” That’s so great. Monday we should get the money, we can pay payroll, I’m telling everyone, “Tell your wives and kids we’ll have money soon. It’s coming I promise. It’s in the bank, going to be here any day now.” And the money didn’t come. Monday it didn’t come, Tuesday it didn’t come, Wednesday it didn’t come. By Thursday I’m calling, “Where’s our money? We need this money.”

The guy looks at the account, “It’s definitely in there.” I’m like, “When’s it coming to our bank?” He’s like, “Well it’s not going to come to your bank.” And I’m like, “Why not?” and he’s like, “You’re on 100% reserve so we keep 100% of your money.” I was like, “What? That’s not good for me or for anybody. How am I supposed to be in business? I got people to pay.” He’s like, “That’s just how it works. The good news is that it looks like you are a legitimate company. No one’s charging back or refunding this money that we’ve collected so far, so what we’ll do is drop you down to 10% reserve.” I’m like, “Ah, thank heavens.” He’s like, “But the $250,000 you collected in the last week, we’re keeping that for the next 6 months as collateral to make sure nothing bad happens.”

I’m like, are you kidding me. We gotta create another funnel. So we make another thing, push it out there, make some money. We start paying payroll for whatever we can but everything’s collapsing around me. That started in January and that started happening at the same time we’re trying to find other merchant accounts at other banks. And all these other banks are like, “Oh yeah, we’re cool. Come in, we’ll give you a merchant account. This is how it works, you gotta make $100,000 a month.” I’m like, “Cool, we’re going to do that in like 2 days. I’m going to need 4 merchant accounts. We can make money. We just need you to give it to us after we make it.”

They’re like, “We’re cool, we’re good at that, don’t worry.” So okay, cool. We get a merchant account, get it all setup, drove a bunch of traffic, and twice we made over the $100,000 a month we were allowed within a day, day and a half, and they froze our accounts and said, “You made too much money too fast. We’re freezing your accounts. We’ll give this money back to you in 6 months.” I’m like, “6 months? Please stop doing this to me.” We ended up with 4 or 500,000 dollars locked up in merchant accounts and it kept getting worse and worse throughout this whole year. It was the hardest year of my life. It kept going down.

Every single day I’m laying off friends and family members and people who I loved and cared about and I’m coming in, “I don’t know what to do man. I’m so sorry. I gotta let you go.” It was such a dark time in my life with thing after thing after thing. I wish I could say from there it got better. That was an entire year, the next January started and one of our friends was doing an event in Vegas, I’m like, “I’m going to go out there and see what everyone…. I gotta re figure out my whole business. Everything’s completely collapsed.”

At the time, by the way, we were in this big, huge office we had rented, that we were leasing. I think it was 20,000 square feet because we all the call center and stuff. I went to the landlord and I’m like, “Hey man, I can’t afford to pay you anymore.” And he’s like, “Okay, well we’ve got a 3 year contract. If you don’t pay me, I’m going to sue you and you’re probably going to end up in jail.” Are you kidding me dude, I’m trying. He would not work with me at all, I had all this fear behind that.

So I’m in Vegas a year later, trying to ask friends what’s happening, what they’re doing in their business, and they’re trying to tell me their stories. I’m like, this is, I don’t even know what to do. That night I got an email on my phone from my dad, I opened the email and it was a shot in a gut. Probably the worst second in my life, that I read that. The email said, “Hey Russell. I’m so sorry.” My dad was doing my books at the time, but we had a bookkeeper in the office, and the bookkeeper was trying her best, but she didn’t know. She knew we were struggling and she didn’t want to stress me out, so she didn’t tell me how much we were struggling. It turns out what she had been doing is she had been paying the bills she could, and the one’s she couldn’t she was trying to not pay them and delay them. And to hide it from my dad and everyone else she was saying in Quickbooks that she paid bills, but then not actually paying them. So it looked like it was clear.

But he had gone through and audited it and found out that she hadn’t paid payroll taxes in almost a year. In the email my dad said, “Just so you know payroll taxes aren’t something where they fine you. If you don’t pay payroll taxes you’re going to go to jail. It’s over $150,000 you owe in payroll taxes.” I was like, that’s the end. It had been an entire year. Every penny I had ever earned was gone. All my people in my teams, it had all fallen apart. I’m sitting there like, “I don’t know what to do.”

The next morning I got on a flight from Vegas back to Boise. I get there and walk in and the call center is empty, all the guys are gone. There’s two people that are left and they said, “Just so you know, the call center across the road just recruited us and we all left. We’re out, see ya.” They walked out. I was like, “I owe the government $150,000, I have no one to help me sell. I don’t know what to do.” I want to quit, so bad I want to quit. But if I quit I go to jail. I also sold coaching to a lot of people I cared about, if I quit all these people that bought coaching from me, I can’t help them. That’s not right. That’s not the right thing to do. I don’t know what to do.

So I went to a bankruptcy lawyer, “How does this work man? I don’t know what to do. I gotta figure this out.” I kind of explained the whole process, told him about my lease. “The landlord says he’ll come after me, the government’s going to come after me. I don’t know what to do.” And he’s like, “The best thing to do is, I should come with you to your landlord and explain that you’re going into bankruptcy and maybe they’ll be nice to you.” So I’m like, “Alright.” He’s like, “Do you have any money?” I’m like, “No.” and he’s like, “What do you got in your pocket?” I was like, “100 bucks.” And he’s like, “Cool, give me $100 and I’ll come and I’ll tell the landlord you’re going bankrupt.” I’m like, “Alright man, here you go.”

So he comes with me, which is actually the best $100 I ever spent. He comes with me to the landlord and he’s like, “Russell’s screwed man, he’s going through bankruptcy. He just hired me. He can’t pay you. You can come after him, but he’s done.” It was this old man, he’s like, “He’s done. The Government’s coming after him. You’re screwed, don’t even try.” And basically convinced our landlord that it was a useless cause. So the landlord was like, “Alright, be out by Friday.”

And we had a big space with office cubicles and phones and craziness. So I’m like, “Okay, we’ll be out by Friday.” But 90% of my team was gone at this point. From 100 employees down to about 7 or 8. The few people that stuck by me, people like Brent Coppieters, love that guy to death. Brent and John and some of the people back then, Brent had taken a pay cut, a 50% pay cut and never…..amazing people.

So the few of us that were left, we were packing up stuff, we put up ads on Craiglist, we got tons of computer and crap, things we’d spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for, we were selling for hundreds of dollars just to get out of it. We made I don’t know, maybe 5 or 6 grand on all of our crap, getting rid of it. We had a huge dumpster, just throwing away everything we had ever created because we had to downsize. Trying to figure out how to get into a smaller building and how do we keep the people we have to have to be able to fulfill on coaching. We have to cut everything else that we have.

So we were downsizing everything, going out and the night we were moving, that Friday we were supposed to be out at midnight or whatever it was, I was sitting in the office, the desks were gone, everything was gone, all I had left was my laptop. I was sitting there, I had my socks on, I had some levi’s and I had no money. I was like, “We have to make some money or else we can’t even move into…I don’t know how to do anything.”

So I sent out an email to my list I had at the time, got a bunch of people to register for a webinar. I was sitting there in a chair with my laptop on my lap, doing a webinar, praying that something would happen. And that webinar saved us. That webinar made $150,000 in sales over the next 3 or 4 days, which gave me the money I needed to pay everyone to not leave, get a new office, get us moved in and get us stability so we could actually breath for a few minutes and figure out the next step, what do we want to be when we grow up.

So we downsized from 20,000 square feet to 2,000 square feet. And we had this really cool moment where we’re like, “What do we want to do when we grow up? What do we want to be?” And as painful as that process was, it was one of the coolest things ever because we didn’t have to keep going on this path. We could pick anything. That’s when I started thinking about, who’s our dream customer? Who do we really want to serve? What fires us up? What gets us excited?

And we started thinking through that and during this process, we started creating again and having fun. What should we do? I had a friend at the time who he had this website that was making him 2 or 3 thousand dollars a month and he got in some trouble, and I had a couple things making a little money at the time and he’s like, “I need to get rid of this site. Can you pay me some money?” So I paid him $20,000, he gave me this little website. This little machine that you zap and it gets rid of cold sores, and on autopilot it was making 2 or 4 thousand dollars a month and I was like, “Oh this is so cool.” So we had this little thing and I was like, “That little business just kind of runs. What if we had another one.”

So we started creating other ones. We had one in the couponing market, we set it up and had a guru in there, it started running and making money. Then we’re like, “What’s another one?” we did one with weight loss, and another. And in a year’s time we launched 12 different companies, each making different amounts of money. During that time is when we launched Neurocel, our supplement company, all these things were happening and it was starting to get exciting again. We were creating we were doing, doing the business instead of teaching the business, which was so much fun for us to do, to learn and see why this stuff works in this market, but not this market.

One of the things that would drive me crazy about teachers in my industry is that they come in and act like the marketing techniques that work in one space work everywhere. And I learned during that two or three period of time that that’s not true. Everything’s different. There’s intricacies in couponing versus business versus weight loss versus diet versus supplements. There’s differences and I came to respect that because we had a chance to do it in so many different businesses and different things.

We spent the next two or three years creating stuff and during that process, one of the really cool things is I go to Flipa.com all the time and try to find cool websites we could buy and turn to businesses. And there’s a website called championsound.com that was for sale. And it was this cool little email, text message auto responder for bands. I was like, “I’m going to buy that and we’re going to take it and niche it for every market. We’ll make email auto responders and text message auto responders for dentists, or chiropractors.” I was so excited.

It was 20 grand, we didn’t have that much money but I was like this is the future of our company. We have to do it. So we ended up buying this website from these guys off Flipa. We get the website and we’re trying to transfer it to our servers after we paid them the 20 thousand dollars. And as they’re trying to transfer it, they’re like, “You can’t have the Linux server, you need the Ruby server.” I’m like, “What does that mean?” They’re like, “It means that this is not coded in PHP, it’s coded in Ruby on Rails. You have to have a different kind of server.”I’m like, “What does that mean?” “It means you have to go over here and pay $800 a month for a new server.”

Are you kidding me, I don’t have $800 a month for a server. But we bought this thing, so we did and they installed it. Then it didn’t really work. I didn’t know what to do. None of my tech guys had ever used Ruby on Rails so I went to Odesk to hire some guys and they couldn’t fix it. I tried 5 or 6 guys and finally I was like, I wasted 20 grand. I was so upset and frustrated because I didn’t have that money.

On the way out of the office one day I was like, “I wonder if anyone on my list knows Ruby on Rails?” shot in the dark, I have no idea. So I send the email out to my little list at the time. Subject line was like, “Ruby on Rails, looking for a partner. If you know Ruby on Rails, I’m looking for a partner.” I said basically the story I just told you guys, “bought this thing, can’t make it work, if you know Ruby on Rails, become my partner, we’ll make a bunch of money with this thing together.” Sent the email out.

About an hour later I get an email from this guy in Georgia named Todd Dickerson, and Todd’s like, “Hey man, I know Ruby.” I’m like, “You do?” I looked at his picture and I was like, “You don’t look like a nerd. I don’t think you do.” And then I went to Facebook and I Facebook friended him, it was actually six years ago last week. I Facebook Friended him and he’s got a beautiful wife, he’s got a daughter. I’m like I don’t think he’s a coder. I don’t know if I believe that. He’s like, “Yeah man, shoot me the login, I’ll fix it.” I was like, “Whatever I have had 8 guys try to fix it for the last 4 or 5 months and nobody can do it. Whatever, here’s the login.” So he logs in and an hour later he’s like, “Okay, done. It’s fixed.” I was like, “What?” and he’s like, “Yeah, I got it fixed. I just did blah blah blah. And it worked.”

I’m like, “Dude, how did you do that?” and he’s like, “I just love Ruby on Rails. I’m amazing.” He didn’t say that, he’s super humble. But I was like, this guy’s amazing. I’m like, “I have all these other things. Want to help me with these other things?” So Todd came and we started working on this other project. We had an idea for an auto webinar, Todd built out the software behind the scenes, which was Clickfunnels verson 0.0, pre-everything. He built this auto webinar software because Mike Filsame had been talking about auto webinars. Rick Shephard had put in a webinar report. A couple of guys had started talking about auto webinars but nobody had done one. No one was really doing them.

So Todd custom built this whole platform so we could do them, we launched an auto webinar through that and in that auto webinar we made a million dollars in 90 days. The first thing I did from that million dollars is took the money and paid off the IRS and I was like, I’m free. I’m not going to jail. The IRS is paid off, the fines are paid off. That auto webinar literally saved me, literally gave me freedom. Up to that point every night when I went to bed at night I was like they could come knock on my door. I have not paid payroll tax in that long. And that webinar freed us.

We kept doing thing after thing, and what’s funny with Todd and Dylan used to design half of these things, just the contract, he’d design these pages and Todd would take them and code them up and make these funnels. He did funnel after funnel after funnel. We probably had 15 different companies, within those company 2 or 3 funnels. We probably had 40 funnels we built over, thing after thing after thing. And the last funnel we actually built the old school way was the Neurocel funnel. That’s one of the ones that blew up big and made tons of sales, we were having a bunch of fun with it and about that time is when Todd was like, “We should really create something so I don’t have to keep creating websites for you every single day.”

And that was where the idea came for Clickfunnels. So we started that project in front of a whiteboard, like we talked about yesterday. We mapped this whole thing, and Todd went to work to build Clickfunnels and we partnered with Dylan to build the editor and the UI. And then fast forward 7 or 8 months later, we came and we were like this thing is going to change the world. I was so excited. I was like, “We’re going to do a free trial.” And I think the very first month our goal was to get 10,000 members the first month. I’m like, this is going to be the greatest thing in the world.

So we put it out there we created the first funnel, had all the stuff in there, there was a free trial, we had a bunch of people lined up to promote it, we launched it, there were crickets. People came and then left. I was like, “Dude, do you not understand what I’m giving you? I made that page you’re looking at, it’s really good.” Nobody got it, why don’t they get it? There’s something wrong with my messaging. So we changed the funnel again, launched it again, a few of you guys signed up and that was it. They hit it and then they left. We tried again and again. We rebuilt that funnel not once or twice or three times or four times or five times. It was six times it took us before the Clickfunnels funnel worked.

The sixth time was because one of my friends, Mike Filsame invited me out to his event and he’s like, “Hey Russell, I want you to come and sell Clickfunnels, I think it’s awesome.” I was like, “Dude, Mike, nobody’s buying Clickfunnels. We gotta figure out our next deal or figure out something because it’s not working.” He’s like, “No, my people need it, you need to come speak on it. You gotta sell it for $1000.” I’m like, “It’s a free trial and nobody even wants it.”

So Mike’s event was happening that weekend, I was literally sitting in my office watching the event streaming and as I was sitting there I started writing my webinar and I had my slides open, I was following the Perfect Webinar script that I had been working on for ten years. I started filling in the blanks, started making this webinar, true to the Perfect Webinar Script. I literally was watching it, adding the things in while watching Mike’s event happen. That day I finished the slides, next morning I jumped in a plane and flew there. Got to California, put the slides up on the thing, okay here we go.

I started it and the title slide was “My weirdness funnel is currently make $17,947 per day”, talking about the Neurocel funnel and how you can knock it off in less than ten minutes. Showed the first slide, started going through and when we got to the end, got to the stack and the close, we did it and 30% of the room jumped up and ran to the back, jumping over the tables, fighting to get back there. I was like, we did it. That was the message, that was the key. Now I know how to sell Clickfunnels.

We took that message, went back and as a lot of you guys know, especially inner circle members, we started doing webinars every single day, sometimes two a day. One time I did three in a day, which was really hard. Over and over again, I did that webinar live over 70 times over the next year and a half and we went from being a startup with no members to after the end of last year we had over 10,000 members, after this year we have over 30,000 members and it’s continued to grow and grow and grow. And it was that one funnel that changed everything for me.

So this process, for all of us you guys, is an up and a down. It’s always happening and all of you guys are somewhere in this wave right now. Some of you guys are at the top riding it, some of you guys are at the bottom going to crash. Some of you guys are somewhere in between. Always going up and down, but if nothing else at this event, I want you guys to all understand that no matter where you are, there’s hope. It might not be this funnel. I can’t tell you how many funnels flopped. I guarantee I have failed at more funnels than anyone else in this room because we tried over and over and over again. Because of that we found out what worked. The only way to do that is to do it over and over and over again.

It’s a lot easier now, I promise you it’s a lot easier than what we used to do. Poor Todd and Dylan had to custom code every single thing, every single time. Now you can test things really fast. The first time I met Trey, first call he said, “Russell, I’m going to launch a funnel a week, every single week.” And I watched as he launched a funnel, and another funnel and another funnel, he had some marginal success, a little success, more success, more success. I saw him launch a funnel last year, one funnel and within 90 days became the biggest selling funnel in the history of the world.

I was talking to some of the guys at affiliate summit. They said there’s never been a funnel that’s made more money in a shorter period of time than one of Trey’s funnels. I’m not privy to share all his numbers and stats, but it was insane. And it came from doing a funnel a week until he hits the one that just explodes. You don’t know what that’s going to be. It’s important, that’s why this tool is so important. Because you can do that, you can test and try over and over and over again.

Jul 29, 2017

You’re just one funnel away…

On this special two part episode you will hear the first part of Russell’s “One Funnel Away” presentation from Funnel Hacking Live. In this episode you’ll hear:

  • What the first product was that ever made Russell any money and how he only had to pay $20 for someone to write the software.
  • How Russell first hired employees and what he learned about having to actually pay them.
  • How Russell and his first team were able to make $55K in a two week period just in time to save Christmas.

So listen to this first portion of Russell’s story, and don’t forget to come back for the second half.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone this is Russell Brunson, welcome to a special Marketing Secrets episode where I’m going to let you guys see behind the scenes at one of our presentations at last year’s Funnel Hacking Live.

So this presentation is one that I was really nervous at giving, it was called “One Funnel Away” which is the whole theme of the last Funnel Hacking Live event. It’s something that I wanted to share my failures, my bankruptcy stories, the ups and the downs. Everyone here talks about the highlight reel; I wanted to share the other side of it. I don’t typically release sessions from  Funnel Hacking anywhere but this one had such a big impact on our audience and let people know that everyone, including me, especially me, has big ups and big downs, yet we’re just one funnel away from success each time. So as we’re preparing for the next Funnel Hacking Live, which will be coming live soon at Funnelhackinglive.com, I was re-watching some of the presentations and saw this one and wanted more people to have this.

So I’m going to break this up into two episodes. This is episode number one, go check it out. Leave me a comment if you like it, subscribe, tell other people about it and hopefully it will give you some hope and faith that the path you are on is right and this process is going to get you what you want and desire and let you serve other people. So that’s the game plan, check out this episode and I will see you on part two tomorrow.

Okay, so what I want to do is go on a journey with you guys, my journey, which started way back over here on my timeline, in my back story. So those who know me or have heard about me or know anything about this, initially I started learning about business when I was a 12 or 13 year old kid, sitting there with my dad watching the news and I was like, “I can’t believe he hasn’t told me to go to bed yet. This is the coolest thing in world.” And the news was on and when it ended Mash came on and I was like, “He must think I’m asleep or something. He hasn’t told me to go to bed.” I’m sitting there trying not to move, I didn’t want to let him know. I’m sitting there watching Mash with my dad, I thought it was the coolest thing in the whole world.

Then when Mash got done, he still didn’t say anything, I was like, “He’s gotta be convinced I’m asleep, this is whole cool.” Then the next thing came one and it was an infomercial, a late night infomercial with Don Lepre. How many of you guys remember Don Lepre? Yes, just an amazing person, he had an infomercial and I was so grateful for his passion and excitement, talking about what he was doing.  The infomercial was about how to place tiny little classified ads and you can make a fortune. And it was it was the coolest thing. I remember sitting there listening to him and I was like, “This makes so much sense.” I’m looking at my dad like, are you paying attention to what’s happening? The whole thing made so much sense to me.

He said, “I took a classified ad, put it in the newspaper and I made 30 dollars and told my friends and family, ‘I made $30. I started a business this weekend,’ and they all laughed at me. So then I took that same ad and ran it in a thousand newspapers the next month and made 30 thousand dollars.” And I was like, mind blown. I’ve been ruined from that day on when it comes to the world. I can’t not do something like this. I was so excited, saved a bunch of money mowing lawns and everything and eventually I bought Don Lepre’s kit on the infomercial and I read it all and learned it and wasn’t able to actually do anything though because I didn’t have the money to direct mail and things like that.

But that’s how I first heard about the direct response market. I remember after I got Don Lepre’s kit I was so excited I was at the grocery store with my mom and after we were walking out, on the checkout stand there was a magazine called “Small Business Opportunity Magazine” that a whole bunch of cartoon people on the front of it. How many of you guys have seen that magazine before? That’s it? This is the greatest swipe file of direct response ads ever.

So I didn’t know it at the time, but there were thirty things, how to get rich quick. I’m like, sweet, I want to get rich quick. That’d be awesome. So I had my mom buy this magazine and I went home. If you look at it, it’s 140 pages of ads and four pages of articles, it’s pretty awesome. I was looking at every single ad, “Oh my gosh. I can sell gold chains at the mall and make money.” So I called this number for a free info kit. Free info kit gets sent to my house. And the next page it’s like something else. Page after page, all 140 pages I called every single 800 number to request the free info kit.

And about a week later, I started getting these gifts in the mail. At first it was 2 or 3 letters, then it was 10 or 15, then it was 60 or 70 letters. And I think those companies started selling my name to other mailing lists, because soon it was hundreds of letters. And the mailman could not physically shove the junk mail in the mailbox anymore because there was so much coming in. So I get home from junior high. I’d come home and walk in the house and see it on the bar. I’d see two or three letters for my parents and Russell’s stack of junk mail. They’re like, “There’s your junk mail.” And I’d take it my room and open it and read these things like, this is so cool. And all these money making ideas.

So that happened at a young age. Unfortunately I couldn’t do anything, well I tried once. This one person convinced me that direct mail was the key and all you do is get a list of buyers who bought similar products and write a sales letter and you mail it to those people and a percentage will buy. I’m like, “Awesome.” The only problem is I can’t afford a mailing list, I don’t have any stamps or envelopes or anything. So I’d done something, I made a little money doing some chores. So I asked my mom to take that money and instead buy stamps and bring me home stamps. So she brought me home 38 stamps. That’s how much money I’d made.

I had 38 stamps and I’m like, “This is so awesome.” I used to tell my brothers and sister and parents, my parents didn’t tease me, but my brothers and sisters did. I was like, “I’m going to be a millionaire any minute now. This is going to work.” And they’d be like, “Oh, are you a millionaire yet?” and totally make fun of me. So I had these 38 stamps and I’m like, “If I can get 10% of these people to buy, that’s 3 people. If I sell a $50 product that’s $150. I’ll be rich.” I didn’t know what to do, they talked about sales letters so I was like, “I’ll write a sales letter.” So I printed it out on blue paper because blue paper they’d be more likely to read. So I put it on my parents computer, wrote a sales letter, printed out 38 copies of it. I couldn’t afford an envelope so I just folded it and stapled it.

I didn’t actually have a mailing list, so I opened up the white pages and flipped through and randomly picked 38 names, I’m like, “This is going to be huge.” So I wrote it, put my stamp on it, and all my savings and put it in the mailbox and I was like, “I’m going to be rich. This is going to be amazing.”  I sent it out, told everybody, “When this gets out, it’ll be over. I’ll be able to move out, get my own house.  It’s going to be amazing.” Unfortunately nobody responded. That was the only time I was able to invest. I didn’t have the money to buy a classified ad in the newspaper so I just kind of kept reading all this junk mail and learning from all these people.

A couple of years later I got into wrestling and forgot about making money. But there was this seed that had been planted. I wrestled through high school, had a lot of fun, got a college scholarship, wrestled through college. When I was going to college I met my insanely beautiful wife, that most of you guys….if not she’s here hiding. I met her and fell in love really quick and spent the next 3 or 4 months trying to convince her, in fact that was probably the hardest sale I ever had, to convince her I was the right one. Did you see that picture? I was kind of a geek, not going to lie. Anyway, I convinced her to marry me and it was amazing. About the time we got engaged, I realized my dad said, “When you get married, I’m not going to keep supporting you. That’s when you become a real man.”

I’m like, “What? But dad I’m wrestling.” And he’d always send me money to pay for food and stuff but he’s like, “No, if you get married, you’re on your own.” I was like, “Crap, I want to get married but I don’t want to grow up yet.” And my wife, fiancé at the time, she was working and making money and got a second job to support us and I was wrestling and didn’t have any money. I’m like, “I gotta do something.” And luckily the greatest thing in the world happened, that happens to a lot of us. I was up late at night stressing out about this and then this little thing popped up on TV, it was an infomercial.

It was this guy talking about how people are making money with these little websites and that they were doing an event at Holiday Inn the next day and you come and get tickets. I’m like, “Oh! This is it.” So I called the number and get my tickets to Holiday Inn and show up and it’s a little, tiny room with 50 really desperate people sitting there. I get there and there’s a dude onstage all in a suit and tie and I’m like, “Whoa, that guy looks rich.” And then he started doing this thing and within 5 minutes he closed me on this $50 thing. I ran in the back and had my one credit card with a $300 credit limit, that’s all I had earned so far. So I bought my $50 dollar thing and I’m like, “I’m going to make so much money with this.”

And then he pitched on a website and it was $3 grand and everybody’s running back buying websites and I’m like, “I can’t afford a website. Dangit.” And then he pitched website hosting at $80 a month and all these things. They’re teaching, “If you call your bank you can get your credit extended.” I’m like, “Oh, sweet. I didn’t know that.” So I’m calling the bank like, “Hey can you make my credit line a thousand dollars.” I’m learning all these things, getting my credit card bigger, which was kind of cool. The I bought everything he told me. I needed the whole thing, so I buy it all. He convinced me, he’s like, “Paypal is evil. You have to have a merchant account. And it’s $6000 for a merchant account.” I’m like, “I don’t have $6000 yet.” And he’s like, “Well you can’t make money online without a merchant account. $6 grand.”

But I couldn’t afford that, but I had everything else. I went home and I was like, “cool, I have a domain name, I got hosting, a thousand dollars worth of internet web stuff.” I jumped online and I’m like, “I’m going to have a website.” I was getting excited. I started Googling things and eventually within 15 minutes I realized website hosting is not $80 a month, I realized a domain name is not $1000. I was like, crap I got taken. I was freaked out.

So I ended up calling the next day, I was like, “My son is a minor and he was at your event last night and he charged all his credit cards and he needs to be out of this contract.” And they got me out of the contract and gave me my money back.  That’s one trick, if you ever need to get out of a contract, it’s worked almost every time. So those are the real Dotcom Secrets.

So at that point I was in, I was like, “Oh my gosh. I need to sell stuff on the internet. That started this thing about the time my wife and I were getting married and I was trying to sell stuff. I was selling all sorts of things. I remember initially thought it was eBay. Maybe people make money on eBay. I remember driving to the thrift store buying everything I could find that I thought was worth value. On my bike, with grocery sacks full of crap, riding my bike back home. I bought a Michael Jackson record. I was like, “Records are so old, this has got to be worth hundreds of dollars.” I ended up selling it for 13 cents on eBay. I was so depressed. I was boxing and shipping things out and when all was said and done I made $40 or $50 but my costs were $150-200. I was going and trying to find boxes for all of these weird things I had bought. It was just horrible.

I was sitting at the post office with 18 different boxes of weird things, records and all these things. And there’s this dude standing there with a big box full of cd’s. hundreds and hundreds of cd’s, and I’m here with a wheel barrel full of odd boxes and I’m like, “Dude, what are you selling?” and he’s like, “Oh I sell information products.” I was like, “What does that mean?” and he’s like, “All these cd’s have info burned on them and people pay me and I ship them a cd.” I’m like, “Is it the same cd?” and he’s like, “Yeah, I have a cd burner. I just burn them. Then I put them in these things and send them out.”

I was like, “Are you kidding me?” They’re all the same size. I could just buy one box, it would be so much easier. So that’s when we started talking about information products. I was like, “I didn’t know that was even a thing.” I got all excited about information products and started Googling stuff and started learning about information products.

I ended up buying this cd and it was a cd that 8000 coloring book pages for kids and the guy was selling it, I emailed him and said, “This cd is cool. Can I buy the rights to this cd, I want to sell it?” and he was like, “I’ve never done that before, but sure for $200 I’ll sell you the rights and you can sell it too.” I’m like, “Sweet.” So I gave him $200 that I didn’t have and he gave me the rights and I had the cd and basically all I had to do was burn it on a cd burner and I could mail it out as many times as I wanted. And he had a big long sales letter he let me use, so I put his sales letter up and started trying things.

What was cool, I started making sales. Not a lot, every other week it would make a sale for $20. I would burn the cd and ship it out and I was like, “This is so cool.” Information products became the thing and I was trying to figure out how that whole thing worked and I started bumping into people like Yanik Silver and all these different internet marketing guru’s and watching what they were doing, selling information products and I was just hooked at that point.

About that time I started watching what they were doing and I started learning and creating different things. In fact, one of my very first products ever, does anybody in this room remember the product Zip Brander? Three people. I had all these info products and I was buying resell rights to other people’s products and I’m selling these things. And I was like, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a way if when I sent this digital file to somebody, when they first opened it, instead of just getting the file they see an ad for my product and then they see the file? That was my first light bulb. It’s like zipping a file, but when you zip it would be branded and when they open it, they see your ad first. I was like this is it. I thought this was it. That was my idea, I thought it was going to change the world as we know it.

So I bought zipbrander.com and I remember Arman Morin at the time was one of the guys I was studying. I was like Arman is so cool. Every one of his sites were so similar and I’m looking and Arman always had a big header graphic with his picture with his arms folded with a suit coat on. I was like, that’s what I need. So I got a picture of me folding my arms in a suit coat. And he had a header, so I had a header that looked just like his. His were always Ecover Generator so I was like Zipbrander, looked identical. This is where my funnel hacking started. He had this big long sales letter. I was like, this looks weird, but Arman’s doing it so I’m going to do it.

So I looked at his sales letter and wrote my own based on that. Then I was like how do I create this, I didn’t know that. My first thought is I should just become a computer engineer. That would be the coolest thing. I want to make software. So I switched my major to Computer Information Systems so I could learn how to code. It was about the time the semester was changing. So I get to class the first day and the teacher gets up there and starts talking about code and databases and all these things and structures and I was sitting there like, “oh crap. I have no idea what he’s talking about. Not even a little bit.” Within about 15 seconds I realized I am not a coder and never will be a coder. I couldn’t even understand. I thought it was a Spanish class or something. I was like I don’t even know what he’s saying.

But I didn’t know how to change my major again, so I just kind of stayed in it. I kind of got depressed, that was my one idea. I guess I can’t do it. And then I remember I was listening to a tele-seminar. I was at a wrestling tournament and we were driving to California, it was a 16 hour drive. I downloaded on my, it was pre-iPod’s, it was this tape player thing, a whole bunch of tele-seminar’s that Arman had done. I’m listening to these things in the back of the car where all these other wrestlers are partying and having fun and listening to music and I’m listening to these seminars. They were totally making fun of me the whole time, if you meet any of my wrestling buddies, they relentlessly made fun of me the entire trip. “You’re such a nerd. You’re never going to be able make money.” I’m like, “I swear I will.”

So I’m listening to these the whole way and on one of these things like 22 hours into this thing Arman says, “I don’t code software. I go to Scriptlance and I pay guys in Romania and India hardly anything to build stuff.” And I was like, Arman’s not a programmer? I thought he was a programmer. There are people in India who can do this? So literally that night I jumped on Scriptlance and actually prior to that I had tried to hire a company to do it and they had quoted me $5 thousand. I was like, “Okay, I don’t have that.”

So I took the same description I had given these guys and posted it on Scriptlance and instantly I got, all these people started bidding on it. One guy was like, “I’ll do it for $5000.” “I’ll do it for $2000.” “For $1000.” “For $500” and it came all the way down to this guy in India who was like, “I’ll do it for $20” I was like, “I got $20”  So I picked him.

He was like, “So this is how I’m going to do it.” I was like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Just do it.” He spent 2 or 3 days and sent it back, “Here it is.” I tried it. Zipped a file and opened it and my ad showed up and I was like, “you did it. Oh my gosh.” And he’s like, “yeah, thanks for the $20.” And I was like, “No, this is going to be huge. I’m going to make millions of dollars and I feel guilty giving you $20, can I give you an extra hundred?” and he’s like, “Yeah.” So I gave him $100 and I felt good about it.

That was my very first software product that I ever did and it didn’t make me millions. I probably made 10-20 grand with that product. But it was the first one that I had a sales letter, started driving traffic, doing Google ads, I was finding JV, all these things and I started selling it and that was the first thing that made me any money. Isn’t that exciting? How many of you guys want Zipbrander? The first 30 people in the back….just kidding. It doesn’t work anymore.  The coding stopped working 10 internets ago. So it’s done.

But that was my first software product, it was so cool. About that time was when I started learning more about info products. That when the Potato gun came out, the potato gun DVD. All these things, doing all these little businesses and none of them were huge smashing, million dollar successes. I didn’t pull a Dan Henrie and read a book and 5 months later made a million bucks. I was like, “Hey I made 5 grand here. Oh I made 200 dollars here.”

These little things kept happening, it was so cool. And every project did a little better. It was like slow momentum, every one did a little better than the last one because I got more customers coming in and more people. I kept making things in different markets, potato guns and all these sorts of different things and every one of them got a little better and it was fun. I remember back then I started doing tele-seminars and I’d get 30 people online and I’d talk about something and sell it at the end and some people would buy it and it was so exciting. That was the start of this whole thing for me.

Then one of my friends, BJ, he’s sitting over here. He was a wrestler in Nebraska, I wrestled at Boise State, it was my senior year, I’d made pretty good money. Probably $150-200,000, somewhere in there my senior year. He’d heard about and Boise State was wrestling Nebraska and we’re sitting there wrestling and we’re glaring at each other because we’re opposite teams and afterwards he’s like, “Hey man, someone told me you’re making money. Is that true?” I was like, “Yeah.” And he’s like, “How are you doing it?” So we talked about it a little bit.

We flew back to our places to finish out college and we kind of talked back and forth for a little while. Then after college got done he’s like, “Hey man, I want to do what you’re doing. Can I get a job?” I was like, “You want a job?” and he’s like, “Yeah.” I’m like, “What would you do all day?” and he’s like, “I don’t know. I’ll do what you’re doing.” I’m like, “okay, can we talk about marketing stuff.” He’s like, “I love talking about that.” I’m like, “This will be so cool. I have no one to talk about this stuff.” I thought it was just me.

I’m like, “So you’re actually into this stuff.” He’s like, “Yeah man.” I’m like, “Okay, yeah I’ll give you a job. Come on out.” So he jumps on a plane, flies to Boise and literally moves into our office. Slept in our office for 6 months. He’s like, “so how does this work?” I’d never had an employee before. “I don’t really know either. I’ll pay you, we can talk about marketing and sell stuff and it’ll be awesome.” Me as an entrepreneur, I was in this mode of eat what you kill. I’d sell something, make a bunch of money and I was like, sweet. Then we wouldn’t do anything for 4 or 5 months, then create something, sell it, make a bunch of money and that’s the model I was on for a long time.

Then BJ came and wanted to be an employee and I was so excited. I’m like, “sure.” He’s an employee and the weirdest thing happened. Every two weeks he wanted to get paid whether we made money or not. I had never heard that. I was like, “Okay, here’s some more money.” And then two weeks later, more money. I was like, oh crap we haven’t sold anything for a long time. Then he had some other friends who came along like, “This is cool. I want to work for you too.” I’m like, “Alright come on over. Let’s get jobs.” So I gave them jobs, his buddies and his wife and some other people. I got all these friends that want to talk about marketing with me, this is so fun.

So we had all these people coming over but the problem was that every two weeks they wanted to get paid, but we weren’t selling anything. So I’d go lock myself in the back room and be like, “Don’t bug me guys, I gotta make money so we can all hang out again.” So I’d close the door and start working and selling stuff. They’d be like, “Dude can we help you?” I’d be like, “Shut up! If you talk to me I can’t make money to pay you, so go away.” They’re like, “We feel bad, we want to help you Russell.” So I’m like, “I don’t have time to train you, otherwise we can’t make money to pay payroll.” That was this thing.

What’s interesting is, this is one of my first lessons as an entrepreneur, that was tough. We had 5 or 6 people at the time. We hired this video guy that was….there’s so many side stories, I can’t tell you all of them. He was an Indian guy who had shorts up to here and had a braid that went past his shorts. Because he told me in the interview, “Yeah, I’m a video guy.” I’m like, “Are you kidding me? We could do videos!” and he’s like, “Yeah, I got all sorts of video stuff.” So we hired him and it turned out he didn’t know anything about video at all.

But I didn’t dare to fire him because I had never fired anyone and I was so scared. Everyday we’re like, “I wish he would just quit. I don’t dare to fire him.” I don’t know what to do. All these weird learning things. This went on for a while. I was launching something every week trying to make money to cover payroll and it was this huge thing and became horribly not fun for a long time. It kept getting worse and worse to the point where it was December, it was the beginning of December, it was freezing cold and I was looking at everything and every penny I’d ever made was gone. Every idea I had how I could hustle and sell to different markets was gone. I was just drained, I didn’t know what to do.

It was Christmas time, I was outside and I went to go hang up lights around my house, and someone had sent me an iPod Nano and Stu MacLarin had done an event, I don’t even know if he knows this, he sent me the links, so I downloaded the links to his event on this iPod, plug it into my ears and start hanging up Christmas lights, which I had never done before, it was a horrible job. Turns out you can hire people for really cheap to do that and the lights look really straight. Mine were like, they looked really bad. I kept stapling through the wires and kill the lights. It was bad. And my fingers were so numb. I had this little light coat on and my fingers were so numb and I had to have my gloves off to squeeze the thing and I’d put them back in to get warm and I’d go back and I didn’t want to go back inside and get warm because I was so depressed.

I knew that the next payroll was coming up in a week or so and I was like, I don’t have money. I don’t know what to do. Tomorrow I need to go in and tell these guys or it’s going to be really awkward when payroll does come and I’m like sorry guys. So I have to tell everyone this. So I stayed outside in the cold because I didn’t want to go in and I was trying to think. So I’m stapling these Christmas lights around the house as I’m listening to this audio. In the audio there’s two different speakers talking about different business models. Back then no one was calling these things funnels, but they talked about these different business models that they were doing.

One of them was an offline guy, his name is John Olmos, some of you guys have heard about him, he’s the guy that taught me about the attractive character. He said, “I have this thing I’ve been doing where I create these cd’s and tell everyone it’s so controversial that I can’t put it on the internet.” Which is the funniest thing ever. “Because of that you have to pay me $5 and I’ll ship you this cd.” He said, “What happens is I ship them this cd but then that customer financed me sending them a sales letter.” I was like, that is brilliant, we gotta do that. I remember I filmed this cd like two years earlier, or a DVD. I was like, we could do that. We could burn that DVD and we could start sending that out.

So that was the first presentation, John Olmos. The next presentation was this guy named Matt Bacak, who’s become a close friend since then. Matt was talking about his business model, he said, “What I do is send out cd’s and people who bought cd’s, I call them on the phone and we sell them coaching.” And I was like, “You can call people on the phone.” I’m an internet nerd but I was like, “Wait..” and I was super scared but I knew there was a guy that worked for me at the time, one of my 5 or 6 friends, who had sold things on the phone before

All the sudden I was like, “Oh my gosh. What if we figured out something we could do where we could save this thing. It might actually be possible.” I’m started getting more excited. I’m hanging up Christmas lights and I’m just like, this funnel was going through my head and I’m like okay I think I’ve figured out a blend of what these two guys are saying, it could actually work.

So by the time I got done hanging up Christmas lights I texted all of them, “Guys, you don’t know this yet, we’re about to go bankrupt, but I got an idea that I think can save it. Let’s meet tomorrow morning early, I’m going to walk you guys through what I think could actually save this business.” Send.

They’re all texting back, “What? We’re going through bankruptcy.” And I’m like, “Yeah, we’re about to.” Luckily they all came in the next day and I’m like, “Okay you guys, I got a model. This is what we’re going to do. Remember that DVD I did like two years ago? We’re going to take that, it’s going to be a free DVD, it’s going to be so controversial we can’t sell it on the internet. We’ll charge $4.95 shipping and handling. We’ll send this DVD out to them and inside the DVD we’re going to have a sales letter where we’re going to sell $5500.” I don’t know why we said that price, but they’re like, “cool, what are we going to sell for $5500?” And I’m like, “I don’t know. What do you guys want to sell?”

So we had our white board and we’re like, “If someone is going to give us $5500, it would have to be something amazing.” And we made this huge list for 2 hours of all the amazingness. I was like, “That would be awesome, but I’m not willing to do half of that stuff.” We’re not going to have them sleep at my house, we’re not going to…we crossed out all these things. I’m like, “I’m actually willing to sell this. I think people would actually buy that. That would be insane.”

So we took that and at the same time we added a newsletter. So if somebody bought the cd they joined a newsletter that was $37 a month. So they came here, joined the newsletter, $37 a month. And that was the funnel. Back then we didn’t have Clickfunnels so luckily we had one or two nerds still working for us that were able to put these pieces together and we had this really rudimentary, horrible looking funnel and it was live within a day and we’re like, “Okay let’s try it.” At the time I had a little tiny email list, this is pre-Facebook, this is Myspace days. So we push some traffic to this and we end up selling a couple hundred of these cd’s. In the cd we shipped out to them came a sales letter talking about this and it put people in a continuity program and then we called everybody about the cd, “Hey you bought the cd, how would you like to come to Boise and we’re going to give you this.” This was our hail mary pass. Please let this work.

We did that, we focused on it. We drove traffic to it, and when all was said and done, over the next two week period of time we got 800 people to get our free cd. From that, the way we used to do it is everybody was on continuity. So we had 800 people that were on this $37 continuity, but it was free for a month, so we weren’t making any money here. But we had 800 people’s phone numbers who we were able to call.

So we started calling them, and we didn’t know anything about phone sales or anything. We were like, “Hey man, you bought this cd, you want to come hang out with Russell?” They were like, “Yeah.” And in that two week period of time we sold 10 people at $5500 a piece, which ended up being $55k and that funnel saved Christmas. Is that awesome? It’s awesome.

I was able to pay all of our payroll. We had some money left over, it was awesome. And the cool thing is 30 days later, this thing started and all these people were on continuity and suddenly we had a business. This is when I learned the power of continuity. David Frye, who’s one of my favorite people in the whole world, he’s here in the audience I think, he used to always say, “Until you have continuity you don’t have a business.” And I never understood that until this. There’s David smiling over there. I love that guy. Now I found out, I had all these people.

So what happened, I don’t know the math, 800 times $37 a month, it’s like $25 k a month and we knew we have continuity now. Every single month we have $25k, that means I can pay for employees. I realized, you don’t hire employees before you have continuity. Now we had continuity. Now we actually had people covered and we could actually focus and think and that was the first funnel that saved things and turned it around for us.

Jul 26, 2017

Pretend this message was for you and take it to heart.

On today’s episode Russell and Steven talk about how they and others have been able to find their voice, figure out what they’re good at and be successful. Here are some of the cool things you will hear in this episode:

  • Why no one is really successful overnight, you just don’t see the previous work put into their craft.
  • Why you need to figure out what part of the game you are good at and focus on that, then find others who are good at the other pieces.
  • And also hear about some of Russell’s inner circle members who have found success and why.

So listen hear to find out what you need to do to make your business successful.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell. Welcome to the camping edition of Marketing Secrets Podcast. Hey you guys, I wanted to do a really special podcast today because I think for some reason that a lot of people thought this whole entrepreneurship business was going to be easy and they’re going to get rich quick and all these types of things and the reality is, it’s hard. It’s really hard, especially the first two or three years.

You’ve got to find your voice, create your brand, build a movement, create products people actually want, figure out what you’re selling and how you’re selling it. There’s a lot that goes into it initially and I think that sometimes we get seduced by how quick and easy it is. Because overnight success stories of people making a million dollars in five months, come on the back of three or four years of work and effort and time.

Recently one of our coaching clients, they’d been struggling, and I saw they were doing the motions and weren’t having success and I realized that the reason was they hadn’t put the time in ahead of time. I sent them a voxer, about a 15 minute vox message that went over this. I edited out from that message all the stuff that related to them, because it doesn’t matter who they are, but it was a message that I think everybody needs to hear and should hear. Because you have to realize there’s a lot that goes into it. Maybe there’s another business you can start, maybe you can go start an Amazon business or things like that where you just need to buy a product and post it and that’s how it is, but if you want to be a leader, expert, change the world, it takes time.

People go to school for 12 years to try to get a job that pays them 50-100 grand a year. If you’re trying to become a multi-millionaire, you think that’s going to happen overnight. It takes energy. So I want you guys to listen to this voxer, hopefully it’s a coaching call for you. Think about the effort you’ve got to put into it, the team you need to build, who you need to become to have those huge successes. Another thing I talk about, a couple of people I mention. Anthony, I’m talking about Anthony DiClementi from Biohacking Secrets. I talk about Kaelin, if you look up lady boss weight loss, you’ll see Kaelin. I mention a couple of other inner circle members by name, I may not have said their full name, but that’s who they are, so you have some context. But listen to this voxer, use it as a personal coaching call for yourself and I hope that it gets you excited and fired up to put in the effort you need to take over the world and change people’s lives, so there you go, talk to you soon.

Steve Larsen:  Hey what’s going on everyone, this is Steve Larsen and I work for Russell, I am his assistant and he’s asked me to go and clean up a lot of this podcast. So as you listen to this episode, just know that Russell is answering the question, “Really, if I’m just one funnel away, then how much farther away is that funnel?”

Russell:  Yeah, I don’t know all the answers ever, but from my experience, I think you’re seeing people’s highlight reels and you’re not seeing the rest of it. Things can be short-cutted, they can speed up, but Anthony for example, if you knew Anthony’s whole story, it wasn’t like he became this Biohacking kid. Anthony was my coaching partner for three years and he was barely scraping by for three years in the weight loss market going hard and heavy targeting weight loss and women.

Weight loss is by far the most competitive market on planet earth. So it’s like to be successful there you have to be super, a very unique angle, or have an amazing story, or deal with the best sales people, or best copywriters, or whatever to dominate. Anthony tried weight loss for the 3 ½ , 4 years that I knew him and struggled, struggled and for him to have success we had to shift from weight loss into a completely different angle, blue ocean, biohacking thing, and that’s where he’s finding success.

But in that time, if you look at his story, he came down with Lyme disease. He spent two years biohacking himself on his deathbed trying to figure out how to survive. After he figured it out he went on this mission where he literally, I love Anthony because his heart is so big, I would say conservatively he probably coached a thousand people in three years, most of them for free because he couldn’t afford it because he just loved people so much and cared so much about them. And that’s how he found his voice, how he has so much certainty. When you talk to Anthony, it’s just absolute certainty. So people plug into that. Abosolute certainty.

When people follow me, with this thing that I’m good at, I have absolute certainty. I have no wavering doubt. They plug in because Russell is certain, so I need to follow that. But that certainty doesn’t come by positioning or posturing it, it’s by putting in that work ahead of time and just mastering it to the point where you just know. That’s Anthony’s journey.

Kaelin’s is different. Kaelin has such an amazing story, how much weight she gained, lost, and she happened to become one of the best sales people ever. I don’t think there’s any, there’s very few humans on earth that have become a better sales person than Kaelin, which is why they’re dominating that market. She’s so good, clear on her messaging. She’s one of the best I’ve ever seen, she’s dominating there.

Caleb’s got, he’s not an overnight success story either, he’s young but that dude grinds more than anyone I’ve ever met. Insane amounts of hours and time and effort and by the time he was 13 years old he’d read more books than I had. He had done hundreds and hundreds of Facebook Lives before anything started hitting. That kid’s put in 10,000 hours plus before he’s 15 years old. That’s not what you’re seeing. You’re seeing, he’s a 13 year old kid, he’s successful. He didn’t just step into that. Some people do, some people are insanely talented, it doesn’t make any sense. It does happen, but for most of us, it’s not that way.

I didn’t make a penny online for 2 plus years, and the next 5 years were hardly anything, it took 7 or 8 years before I found my voice to be able to be in this market and have certainty where I felt that. So how do you get that absolute certainty? It’s by putting in the time, by doing that.

Steven: I actually am the coach for the Two Comma Club Coaching program, and I love it, it’s so much fun. It’s fun to see because I’ve been doing this game now for about 4 years now, and for the first several years, I actually made no money with it at all. I was with anything about funnels, business entrepreneurship in general, and all I knew was I wanted to be an entrepreneur and I started putting my head down and working and did everything from stalks and options, real estate, commercial and residential, I went and did ebooks, door to door sales, I did telemarketing. I did everything and it was all with the back drop of wanting to be an entrepreneur and provide value in the marketplace and go do this stuff.

And I failed my face off. It was one of the most humiliating things in my entire life. My wife and I were living on loans and college. And because my wife was basically the spouse of the suffering entrepreneur, and I didn’t want to be that story and it turned into this really painful experience. But I literally was listening to Russell’s podcast, I was listening to these other entrepreneurs and their podcast. It was honestly them and YouTube motivation videos and all this stuff that just kept me going with it. And just the sheer belief that it would work and mad obsession over the topic.

If I could turn around and tell myself some things now, it would certainly be that I really wish I would have spent more time crafting my voice early on. I like what Russell’s mentioning inside of this podcast right here, telling that you’ve got to figure out the voice. And the way I did early on was by regularly publishing. I would get out there and I would just speak. There was a time, after I read Dotcom Secrets, I went and I was like, “Hey I know enough to at least teach someone else.” And I literally held a 3 hour, free class inside of a stranger’s home. They had all these people there, friends and family, and I recorded the whole thing and that became my first info product.

I didn’t know that’s what it would become. It was just pure obsession over the task, over the topic that kept me going with it. So number one, one of the biggest things everyone struggles with when they start doing this thing is they have to find their voice and if they can’t find the voice, where do they draw the line in the sand? Where does the polarity come from? Where’s the passion? Where’s the stories and the background? And if you’ve never spoken before or put yourself out there before, you’re never going to know how those things actually fit together. It’s awkward for a lot of people who are just starting out inside Two Comma Club Coaching because they have never figured those things out, they don’t know what that’s like.

So not only are they trying to create a brand new product, number one. Not only are they trying to create the sales message, which they’ve never done before either. Number three, they’re trying to find their voice. They’re trying to do three things at the exact same time. And you can do it, but when people are going out and expecting, “I’ve been doing it for two months.” But they’ve never actually been successful with it, when you look at it from that angle it’s humorous. Of course you’re not successful right off the bat. You’re trying to figure out your voice, your product and your message all at the exact same time and it’s been two months and you’re not happy with it.

So you’ve got to think of it from the other side. These guys that have been publishing for a super long time are people who have been giants inside the marketplace. You look behind every one of the success stories, and every single one of them has got these amazing stories, usually they’re rags to riches stories, or stories where there was so much failure at the beginning, but they kept their heads down and kept pushing forward on the whole thing.

So those are the three things. As you start moving forward, you’ll learn more about this in Two Comma Club Coaching, really that piece right there will put so many of the things in place for you to keep going forward. Find your voice, find your voice. And I was really against finding my voice. It sounds stupid. I didn’t want to listen to Russell, I didn’t want to listen to what he was saying. It was before I worked for him, or before anything else. But I’d be listening to his podcast and he kept saying, “Hey, you gotta get out there and you gotta find your voice, start publishing.

I was actively against that. I was like, “There’s no way I’m going to podcast, there’s no way I’m going to start Youtubing. There’s no way I want to do any of that crap. I don’t want to do any of that.” And it was at his event in 2016, I had no money and was literally building funnels and trading funnels for a ticket. And trading funnels for a plane ticket, and a hotel nights stay. I had no money, I just knew I had to be there. I’d been hustling for several years by that point.

I got there and sat down and listened to Russell and I was like, “Okay, I’ve worked my butt off to get here, I have no money, I don’t know how I’m going to make it. But what I’m going to do, is whatever he says, I’m just going to do it. Because I’ve put in the time, I just want to make this work and I know it will. I just need to keep working it and working it.”

So what I did is went and I sat down and started taking notes and all the sudden Russell stands up and goes, “Every single one of you guys needs to get up there  and you gotta start publishing.” And I was like, “Crap he said it. I gotta do it.” And I went out and started publishing regularly and the first 20 episodes that I did were really awkward, they were bad. But something happened, something clicked. My voice changed, something happened, my confidence changed. I got stronger polarity. What I believed started coming out stronger.

As I went out and started interviewing the people and started talking to those in the industry, I figured out the place for me to exist in the ecosystem without being competitive with everyone else. That way I could collaborate and not compete as hard in my own little blue ocean niche. Amazingly, when I started doing that, just like those in Two Comma Club, I know a lot of you guys listen to this podcast, so that’s a little shout out to you guys. But I know a lot of you guys, what I say to you is if you go and start regularly publishing, you’ll number one, find your voice. But number two, the place for your offer to exist, where you need to create your new opportunity, your new niche, that place will bubble up and emerge out of the red ocean, the red submarket ocean.

It’s amazing what will start to happen. You’ll start to figure out the message. The market will start to tell you everything that you need to know. You don’t know enough to actually be successful on your own, you don’t. The market will tell you everything always. Don’t try to come up with it on your own. If you do that, fantastic way to fail, fantastic way to lose money. I did it for years, I could tell you all about it. Really, what this game is, is go funnel hack, which does not mean pages. If the offer is online, yes that means pages. But go funnel hack an individual. Funnel hack their voice, their offer, their message.

What you do, you start to see this picture that emerges out of the sand. “Oh my gosh. That’s what I have to go make.” Here’s the formula, here it is. That’s your best shot, you take your best shot at launching that thing and then you step back and wait. And what ends up happening is all these people will start to give you feedback. “I wish it had this.” They’ll come in the form of complaints. “I wish it had this. Your product sucks at this.” Don’t push that stuff away. Those are the things that let you know you’re doing well. They let you know what to create and do next. You take the aggregate voice, aggregate complaint about your product, the aggregate feedback and those are the things, that’s the market telling you what to go make. Then you go make that thing.

And what’s nice, when you do that, take those pieces of feedback, you number one, take your best shot. Number two get feedback. Number three you turn around and tweak it and relaunch it. Now you’re in this cool adoration cycle, but the pressure is not on you anymore. You’ve already launched the thing, it’s already up, it’s already rocking and you’re getting feedback. That’s what I’d say. That’s just my commentary on this piece right now. I completely stand by and behind everything that he’s saying with this. In order to gain confidence, you gotta live it and you gotta live in it every day. You gotta be the expert, the go-to person inside the industry itself.

Russell:  It’s harder when you don’t have a story. Even the one that I’ve watched, and I know a lot about the weight loss market, I’ve struggled with weight throughout my life and coached a lot of people in that market. So I was watching it, not to critique certain things, but the one thing I know from the weight loss market, and people I worked through it is that people and weight loss are very skeptical. If somebody doesn’t have a story where they were overweight, they don’t understand what it’s like to be me. That’s their belief.

In the video you talked about how to target certain areas, how to reduce fat. I was like, cool this is a good topic. It’s something people are concerned about because people have love handles, they have this and they do want to target spots. And then the advice is kind of like, “Don’t target a spot, lose all your weight.” And I felt like that message was not, most overweight people that I know would have, that message was not sharable, but the opposite. Would have pushed them away like, “You have no idea, you’ve never had love handles.” That’s how they would have reacted.

I know that because I’ve worked with so many overweight people. And you guys should know that, you should know if you told somebody that, “Don’t worry about your love handles, you gotta lose this.” Because you told someone that face to face, you should have known that, that this was your market. You should know that would have repelled those people, because the number one concern that people in the market has when they start working with a trainer is this person has no idea how I feel because they’re not overweight.

That’s why Kaelin’s story is so central to her success, because that’s their biggest belief. That is the biggest limiting belief in that market that people have. In my market it’s different. In my market it’s like, “If this stuff works so good, why don’t you give it me for free?” That’s my market of beliefs. That’s what I’m fighting all the time. You gotta know that in your market. And that comes from doing this over and over again. Doing it, getting people offended and then doing it again, the next time they don’t get as offended. It’s kind of like the movie Groundhog Day. Every time Bill Murray comes back he relives the life, he does it wrong, tweaks it, comes back, does it again, does it wrong. Tweaks it, comes back, does it again, does it wrong. Eventually he has a good life. But how many years he was in that Groundhog Day experience.

When you do that in volume, a lot, but I also thing, defining your message better. Because where can the money be made right now? It’s not in traditional weight loss, it’s in the fads, or blue oceans, keto diets. That’s the hot thing. When we launched ProveIt we were kind of the first people coming out there and now there’s been this huge swell of thousands of different keto brands, products, things like that. Some are succeeding, some are failing but it’s the ones that are diving into this market that’s hot.

If you look at, again Expert Secrets 101, find a hot market, ask them what they want and give it to them. What they want and what they need. You gotta find out exactly what they want and sell them that and then fulfill and give them what they need. That’s the big thing, you gotta understand the market super well and the only way you do that is by putting in the time and effort. So that’s being completely honest. You have to differentiate completely how this sub-market that you’re in right now, Dave Woodwork works for us and his wife is in that market, she tried for four or five years to succeed in the weight loss market, and she’s got amazing stories.

She’s been a personal trainer forever. She’s struggled because she’s stepping to play against the best of the best. So finally she’s made the shift, her program is called Have It All Moms, it’s focusing on moms and how weight loss helps moms. It’s not just weight loss but these other parts of personal development. She’s carved out this ocean and now she’s finally getting traction, but it’s four or five years in the big leagues and she’s a great sales person, she’s all these things and she’s struggled.

So again, for you guys, you gotta find your market, you gotta find the market of what people actually want, what they’re looking for, not what they need, we fulfill what they need, but we’ve got to sell them what they want. So that’s that. There’s the art and science of this game, hopefully you’ve heard me talk about that. And I think most people that struggle as entrepreneurs are typically the A students. I’m guessing you’re an A student, by default. Because they’re really good at the science, but the art is something you feel. It’s different.

So people who are really good students struggle with that because it doesn’t come naturally. When the C students are the ones really good at the art of it, but they struggle with the science. So for most businesses I recommend for people, if you’re in that spot, figure out who you are. When I got started in this business, one of my mentors told me, “Look, in every business there needs to be a starter and a finisher. You gotta figure out who you are, then surround yourself with the other people.” And at that time in my business I was like, “I’m a starter, really good at starting, really bad at finishing.” I needed to surround myself with finishers, so I started hiring people that were really good finishers.

That’s why people always ask me, “Russell, how do you get so much stuff done?” its because I have the ability to start a thousand things, but I have a team behind me who finishes them all. But I know what my strengths are, I know what my weaknesses are. If you go to Tony Robins Business Master, he talks about every company has three types of personality types. You gotta have, an artist, an entrepreneur and a manager. The artist is the person obsessed with that thing. One of them has got to be obsessed. That’s the artist.

The next person is the entrepreneur, the person out there risking and going crazy. Going out there and doing stuff. Then there’s the manager who’s in the management roles. So I’m looking at that, inherently what are you best at? Are you best at managing? Are you obsessed with the art of this thing? Or are you the entrepreneur who wants to go out and sell the crap out of it? I think at Funnel Hacking Live, one of the presentations they talked about that concept, they called it a hustler, a hacker and a designer. In Clickfunnels, I was the hustler, Todd was the hacker,  and Dylan was the designer, that was the three pieces.

And not that you can’t learn the other stuff, you can, but that’s not how businesses grow, by us figuring out our weaknesses and focusing on it. In business it’s the opposite. Find your strengths and quadruple down on them and abandon your weaknesses and plugging other people into those spots. So it’s backwards. Yes, you’re capable of learning those things, but don’t because it’s so much better to find those people and plug them in.

Even Brandon and Kaelin, you look at them and the reason they are successful is you have Kaelin who is the artist, she’s obsessed with her art and she’s also one of the best sales people ever. So you have that, but her by herself would fail. She has her husband who is the manager, entrepreneur, risking, that kind of thing. Because they have both halves, is why they’ve blown up. For me, I don’t have a spouse that’s out of the house so I brought in team members and partners and that’s why we were able to blow up.

Let’s take our strengths, I know what they are. I’m really good at this piece, let’s find somebody that that’s their strength, let’s team up and now it’s like you can have way more impact with people. Whatever that is, really understanding the market, and being obsessed with that. Whoever it is that’s the artist in your business needs to be obsessed with that. Reading 400 blog posts a day, listening…I listened today, I’m a marketing guy and there’s probably few people on earth that know more about marketing right now, than me. Not to be cocky, but I’m kind of obsessed with it. Today I think I’ve listened to 8 or 9 marketing podcasts, I bought three products, I recorded 23 videos, actually 29 videos recorded on the topic, I got done at 6, came home to eat dinner with my kids and I’m actually going back in  because I’m so excited about this thing that I gotta keep going back in.

So that was today for me, because I’m obsessed with the art of it. There’s got to be someone there that’s that obsessed with it, or else it’s going to be really hard to drive it. I got the messages back, the first message was like, “Oh hey, I just did some Facebook Lives and nobody showed up. It was just crickets.” That shouldn’t bug you, if you’re an artist you should not care. You love to hear your voice and you just want to talk, study, share and learn and give and share and talk. Whether people are listening or not, it should not matter.

Whoever the artist is in the business, that’s the level of obsession they need to have to be able to succeed. So it’s understanding that, and if that’s not you it’s cool, find someone that that’s how obsessed there are and then plug in yourself where you’re obsessed, put those two things together and now you’ve got a force of nature to be reckoned with. But there’s got to be….that’s the pieces. Any business, you have to get it into orbit and you can’t do that by being a normal human, and just waking up and doing your thing. It takes raw obsession. That’s why it takes an entrepreneur to launch a business and get it into the stratosphere. Hire a bunch of MBA’s and people to plug it in and just keep it moving, but it’s obsession that get it into orbit. A rocket can’t get into orbit unless it’s got these huge boosters that just blow the crap out of it and push it off the ground.

But again, it’s tripling, quadrupling down on your strengths and backing off your weaknesses and finding people who your weakness is their strengths, that’s how you build a company and blow it up fast.

Jul 21, 2017

If you missed Russell’s LIVE Q&A from www.dropthemicshow.com, you can hear this weeks questions on this episode.

Today we have another bonus episode of Marketing Secrets where Russell answers questions about marketing from other funnel hackers, including:

  • How do you calculate how much to pay for a customer if you don’t know your lifetime value?
  • During Russell's Clickfunnels journey, what was his main source of inspiration?
  • Is it always best to start at the backend of your funnel and build your highest value offer first?

So listen to Russell answer these questions and drop the mic.

Jul 20, 2017

If you missed Russell’s LIVE Q&A from www.dropthemicshow.com, you can hear this weeks questions on this episode.

Today we have another bonus episode of Marketing Secrets where Russell answers questions about marketing from other funnel hackers, including:

  • How to make a product more scalable when it's embarrassing for people to talk about.
  • How Russell gets in the zone for a successful hack-a-thon.
  • What Russell does to prepare to have a successful mindset.
  • Ideas on how to warm up leads and have a conversation with a potential client.
  • What the number one mistake is that people make with Clickfunnels and how to avoid it.
  • Where to place an upsell on a call to action video.
  • How Russell gets focused enough to get things done when he's a hyper buyer.
  • How Russell manages giving back to good causes while also running his business.
  • How Russell decides between making recorded content versus live content.
  • How to target people on social media to buy your products when using a white labeling service.

So listen to Russell drop the mic as he answers these questions.

Jul 19, 2017

A personal message to a friend who is struggling.

On this extra long episode Russell talks to a friend from elementary school about how to go from being a technician and having a cap on his income to being a rainmaker and having an unlimited ceiling on his income. Here are some cool things you will hear on this episode:

  • What the roles of the Entrepreneur, the technician, and the rainmakers are in the business hierarchy.
  • Why getting really good at being a technician is not the way to have unlimited earning potential.
  • How you can use your technician skills and apply them into being a rainmaker.

So listen to Russell explain how to go from being technician to making it rain!

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to an insanely late night Marketing Secrets podcast. I am here, for those watching on tv, I’m in the car. Over there you can see Norah. It is late, insanely late. In one minute it will be midnight here and we’re about to take you guys on a very special Marketing Secrets Podcast.

Alright, I hope you guys are doing amazing. Right now my little baby Norah and I are on a mission. It’s a secret mission to get her to hopefully fall asleep. We started weaning her off the bottle about a week ago before our family vacation because we thought it would be so much nicer to not have bottles on this trip. That was a good idea, huh Norah.

But what we didn’t think about was the fact that she’s insane and now she won’t go to bed at all. She won’t take naps, since her naps happen when she finally passes on. We got back from the lake, we’re on a family vacation, we went to the lake and had a really good time, and then she wouldn’t fall asleep and we were driving back and forth and finally when I went to the store to buy something for dinner tonight. When we were coming back she passed out and she slept for 3 hours. She was so beat. Then she woke up and now she won’t go back to bed.

So this is the second night in a row. Last night I was also out driving until about midnight, 12:30 she fell asleep last night. It’s 12:00 right now, hopefully in less than 30 minutes she will be asleep. But I am on vacation having a good time. If you listen to my last Marketing Secrets podcast it talked about how vacations can be really tough for entrepreneurs. I feel like we’re not moving, there’s no momentum. We’re stuck in a spot. That’s somewhere that I definitely feel.

As much fun as vacation is it’s also hard for me, I got stuff to do, people to see, places to go. Actually, it’s interesting as I was packing the car up as I was about to leave, between hiking stuff in and out to the car and everything I was checking Facebook and it’s interesting. There was a friend who I don’t think I’ve seen him, I think the last time we talked was in elementary school. I remember 6th grade, it’s kind of a funny story. In 6th grade we were moving these big boxes and he had this big box and he dropped it. I don’t know why I remember this, but I remember him saying it was super embarrassing to drop this box of stuff and he was saying, “Someday this is going to be one of those things that people remember me by. Remember that day you dropped this huge box.” I remember thinking that was really interesting.

And now, it’s 30 years later and I remember that day, it’s kind of funny. But anyway, I remember he was in junior high and high school with me but he was a basketball player and I was a wrestler so we didn’t really cross paths a lot. But I knew who he was and grew up in elementary school and I always had respect for him. When the book of faces came out, Zuckerberg, it was kind of fun because you can go back and remember high school, junior high, and elementary school friends. And people from wrestling and different aspects of your life and you start adding them on Facebook. So he was one of the names that popped up years ago, I added him and hadn’t thought much more about it.

Every once in a while I saw posts from him, so I kind of knew what he was doing, but not a lot. He shifted his job or his business or career a couple of times and didn’t seem like he was having a lot of success. I remember it seems like last Christmas or something, he posted something really negative and I felt bad for him. But it’s also one of those things that when I first started my business and started learning about entrepreneurship and learning how to sell things and all this world became open to me, I remember at first I wanted to share with everybody. I tried to share with friends, family members, people at church, everyone I bumped into.

I was so excited to tell this thing that I had learned. I was so excited I would share with every single person. It was so mind blowing to me that most people just “Oh, cool. Nice.” I’m like you don’t understand it’s not just nice. It was so frustrating to me. But it’s funny because that was, I always tried to change everybody and save them and help them because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. After a couple of years of that I realized that none of the people I tried to help ever did anything with it. It was really depressing me, so that’s when I shifted back and started doing the business for a long time.

 

I think I got into coaching because I wanted to share it, and it was cool when I started coaching. It was people who would come, people who it was their idea first and came to me to learn how to do it. Those people I could mold, help and change because they had the desire first. It’s because of that I’ve been very cautious the last decade of my life going out of my way to talk to people about this stuff unless they raised their hand first.

So I saw him last December say something and I didn’t see my spot to say something, so I didn’t say anything. Then as I was leaving, I was going through Facebook, again we’re packing the cars and I’m sneaking out to do what you do with the phones. So I see this post, this long post and it was again a negative thing and he was talking about how much he was struggling and trying to make money and all these things, and I think he said that this last year he made $25,000, and that was what he made in an entire year. He was really struggling and trying to make things better for his family, life and wife and he couldn’t figure it out and was just frustrating and was just kind of venting.

How you doing Norah? She’s so cute back there. I hope she falls asleep soon.

Anyway, I felt for him. I was just like, do I say something or not. For whatever reason I decided to just reach out to him. I was like “Hey man, the problem..We haven’t talked in 20+ years, I don’t know if you know who I am. The problem is you’re not focusing on the right thing. I can help you but I don’t want to intrude, it’s not my business. I can help you, I know what’s wrong, it’s an easy fix. In the last year and a half, few years we’ve helped. I’ve been a coach to almost 200 people now to become a millionaire. Tens of thousands of people to make 100 thousand or more in year. I know the game, I know what it takes and what it doesn’t take.” I said something like that and my next post was, I wish I could read it right now. “I’m not trying to pitch you on some MLM. I honestly, if you want help I can help you because I know what’s wrong.”

He was like, “Really? Yeah, I want to know.” So I told him a couple of things and I said, “If you do those things, I’ll record a podcast for you while I’m on my trip and kind of go into more detail.” So this last 3 days I keep thinking about that and I’m excited so that’s what I’m actually doing right now and I hope it benefits all of you guys. Because I think for most people who are stuck, it’s not something that unique to you, it’s not. A lot of times we think our situation’s unique, but it’s not. It’s a pattern that happens over and over again. The key to breaking patterns is recognizing it and realizing what the correct pattern is and replacing it. It’s not hard, it’s just hard because it’s the first time most people have gone through it personally.

So that’s kind of the context. I just wanted to share this message, it’s really for him, I’m not going to go super specific, but I think it’ll be helpful for everybody. I know that typical people I talk to in this podcast are people who are entrepreneurs already and this is kind of I guess for someone who’s on that line between the job maybe and the entrepreneur. That line where it’s like, you’re not fully an entrepreneur running this way, but you’re struggling at the job thing and you’re in between. That’s what this podcast is for and I hope it kind of helps.

With that said, I’m going to jump into this. So the first thing that I kind of told him in the message, the first thing is you’re focusing on the wrong thing. And he’s like, “I’ve been focusing on perfecting my craft.” And just kind of some perspective, the industry he’s going into is film. So he’s trying to do movies and videos and all that kind of stuff. So he’s like, “I’m focusing on getting better at my craft and I’m also doing a lot of networking.” So I go, “okay, yes. You are completely focusing on the wrong two things. You are focusing on things to help you get better at your thing, but you have to shift your focus to making money.” That’s a weird concept because it’s something that I remember the first time I had that epiphany. I need to learn how to make money. I was in school learning all this crap and I’m looking at this stuff and studying and I was like, I’m not actually learning how to make money. I still remember one of my biggest gripes with college is I took two semesters of accounting and two semesters of finance and they never once taught you how to do your own taxes, which is insane. School sucks.

Just throwing that out there for those who are wondering my thoughts on the whole thing. But it’s crazy the fact that they don’t teach you that thing. And I realized I’m not learning how to make money here in school. And I started studying how to make money. It was interesting how different it was. It’s not what you’re learning in school. And now fast forward, I think it’s been, let’s see…it’ll be my 15th anniversary in a month from now and we got married with a year left in school. So 14 years I’ve been graduated from school. Looking back on it now from this sign. Sorry I’m waiting for a stop light, but there’s no stop light, there’s a stop sign. Little Norah’s still awake.

Anyway, as I look at it now from this lens looking back, it’s interesting, a lot of times we want something. I remember growing up, you always hear your parents and people say you gotta go to school to get a good education so you can make good money. We all heard that. That’s a thing that parents say a lot. So we assume that those two things coincide. Good job, good education equals more money. But not necessarily. Now I look at again from my perspective, 14 years later, it’s interesting.

I was thinking about this a lot over the last two or three days especially. If you want to look at the structure of how people make money, because there’s definitely, there’s you make money and there’s places you don’t. And most places you’re focusing on, like when he said he was focusing on getting better at his skills in networking. He’s focusing on something that’s good, but it’s not making money. So I’m going to start at the top.

The top is a pure entrepreneur, so the top of a business, the hierarchy chart, so the top is the entrepreneur who starts the business. Typically, at least the entrepreneurs that I like to work with, the entrepreneurs are passionate about something, but their mostly passionate, not just about that thing, but getting that thing out to people. That’s what defines an entrepreneur. If any of you guys have read the Emyth, by Michael Gerber, he talks about what happens with a lot people is they think they’re entrepreneurs, and they get a job at the bakery shop and start baking cakes. They see the owner of a bakery shop and they’re like, “This guy is an idiot and I could do better than him.” And then what Michael Gerber says is that they have an entrepreneurial seizure.

They think they’re smarter so they start their own bakery. The problem is that they’re not an actual entrepreneur, they’re a technician. They’re somebody who is in the business who is doing it. They’re making the bread, the cakes, the stuff but they look at the entrepreneur who they think is an idiot, so they have the entrepreneurial seizure and say they want be the entrepreneur and start their own business and say, “I can make bread better than anyone else. I can make cakes.” And they’re passionate about the thing and create the business and what happens to the business? It fails.

It has a 90+% failure rate. Because it’s technicians, it’s people who think that the key is the thing. They think that the cake is what runs the business. It’s their passion about the cake, the creation of the cake, they don’t understand that that’s not the business. In the business the entrepreneur’s job is being passionate about getting the cake out to as many people as possible. That’s where the money’s at. That’s why most businesses fail. Because it’s not the entrepreneur running it, it’s someone who had an entrepreneurial seizure and is a technician and is trying to do that thing and thinks they should start a business because of it.

My first question for everyone listening to this, are you the entrepreneur? The good news is we go deeper into this…….holy cow, a deer just crossed the path……There are ways to make money, not as an entrepreneur in a business. But it’s not where you probably think that they are. I’m just thinking for example, a doctor. Doctors make good money. How many times did you hear that you have to become a doctor to make good money, or a dentist to make good money. So those people make good money, but not there’s no limit to your income money. Because a doctor is a technician. They are just highly paid technician because a lot of school goes into it. But they’re still a technician. They’re not an entrepreneur, they have a definite cap on their income growth, always.

So just depending on what technician you pick. Let’s say you’re going into a company to get a job, you’re capped by the earning potential of that role you take on. If you’re a doctor, a dentist, a baker, support person. You’re capped at whatever that thing is, which is fine, it’s just knowing that’s where you’re capped at.

If you want no cap, the first spot you have to look at is entrepreneur. But to be an entrepreneur you have to understand that it’s not being passionate about the creation of the thing, it’s being passionate about the selling of the thing. There’s a big reason why I wrote the Expert Secrets book. It’s because typically Experts who are really passionate about their topic are also passionate about getting their topic out. By definition they are entrepreneur’s because they are trying to get the message out about that thing. They own the bakery, they make the cake, but they’re more excited aobut telling people about the cake. That’s what makes them successful about entrepreneurs. That’s why I love working with entrepreneurs.

So there’s the top of the….let me flip the car around, I’m getting out to no man’s land now. So that’s the top of this pyramid scheme of business. I don’t know if you want to call it that. But the entrepreneurs are at the top. And that’s what most people look at. The entrepreneur is the person that makes all the money. But they’re all the person who risk everything. Entrepreneurship is a scary thing because you have no earning potential at the top, but you’re also the one with all the risk on your back. For a lot of people you can’t just go out and become an entrepreneur immediately, especially if you have a wife and kids. Because you have to have security. There’s this huge draw with people who have entrepreneurial desires, but they also have security needs between your family.

So that’s a hard thing to just gamble and jump and say “I’m going to become an entrepreneur.” And I understand that. So a lot of times the entrepreneur is not the first place for people. I feel super blessed. I started my entrepreneurial journey about the time I met my wife and I was able to do a lot of things because she supported me, I was going to school and we didn’t have kids. We didn’t have this need for security at this point when I was getting started, which I’m so grateful for. I have so much respect for those that step into the entrepreneurial role when they have those things because it’s so much harder.

So it’s always easier to start being an entrepreneur and risking everything when you don’t have a wife and kids and things. So that’s kind of one thing. That’s one spot. Again, there’s different places to make money in companies, so there’s the best spot, maybe not the best spot, but one spot. The entrepreneur at the top, that’s number one.

Then underneath the entrepreneur inside the organization there’s gotta be technicians, doing the things, baking the cakes, cleaning the teeth, cutting people open, the technicians. This is what schooling is actually…the only reason school is actually good is because it creates technicians. If you want to be a doctor you have to go to school. If you want to be able to drill teeth, you gotta go to school. If you want to become a baker or a butcher, baker, candlestick maker, any profession.

Another deer just ran by. I don’t want to hit a deer. That would be scary.

But any profession, that’s what schooling is for. So when you’re going into school you are thinking about that. Any major you decide to go after, there’s a kind of associated salary range you’re going to fit into. Sometimes it’s big, like doctors make good money. But you’re always capped. A technician will always be capped, by definition of what they are. You just are. If you’re coming into a business and You’re a technician looking at this, you’re capped. Your salary is capped.

So my friend who is doing video stuff, he’s looking for jobs in a business where he’s the technician. Again, he was saying in his post that he made $25,000 last year, because the need you are filling inside whatever company you are trying to plug into. That’s what they have budgeted for that. That’s what you’re able to make. You’re capped. You can’t go above that, unless you work more hours, more days. Sometimes you find another company that has a bigger budget. That’s another thing, and again there’s nothing wrong with a technician, it’s understanding that there’s a salary that’s set for that thing. There’s a budget set and that’s what happens.

The goal of a business is not to make the technician rich. I had a finance teacher at Boise State, tell you what, most teachers I had at school were always like, “What’s the job of a business?” “To create jobs, stimulate the economy.” They always had this happy go lucky, tree hugging attitude about business. I had this one finance teacher that said the only goal of a business is to make the owners money. That’s it. If the entrepreneur, the owner is not making money, the board of directors, whoever is running it, if they’re not making money, the business dies. That’s the only purpose and only point of a business is to make the entrepreneur money. Everybody’s got to understand that.

If you’re a technician there is no desire for anybody for you to make more money than what your set salary is. You’re going to find entrepreneurs, in my company I’m very compassionate towards people and I love what they do. I love creating things for people and having incentive plans, but for the most part, as a technician you’re in that range. You have to understand if you’re going to school, that’s the earning range you’re going to be in. Are you okay with that? If you are, cool. Go for it. That’s awesome.

But don’t complain later when you come back and say I’m not making what I want. You picked a profession, you picked being a technician, you picked this piece and that’s all it’s worth. It doesn’t matter how much school you went to or how much time and effort  you put into it, that’s what that task is worth to the entrepreneur. You have to understand that, technicians are essential to a business, they need to be there. That’s what colleges, universities, programs were all created for, to create those people. Those people are important.  But again, that’s the pros and cons of that.

Check it out guys, look at this. Pan over. She’s asleep. 12:19, it’s a good sign. This podcast might not be three hours long now that she’s asleep. Otherwise, it could have been a really long one.

Alright, there you go. Entrepreneur, unlimited potential, tons of risk and the role, the reason why an entrepreneur’s successful is because they’re passionate about the selling of the thing. Getting the message out, not just the message. Not just passionate about making cakes, but passionate about getting the cakes in as many people’s mouths as possible because they’re obsessed with the end product. That’s the difference. There’s entrepreneurs.

Number two level down in this pyramid is the technicians, who are the one’s doing the jobs to make this whole thing happen. Super essential but have huge earning caps, depending on what technician role you picked makes your earning cap. There’s one spot, and this is the spot that I want everybody to understand because this is the other spot inside of a company where you have no earning potential. Excuse me, I said it wrong. You have no earning ceiling, you have unlimited earning potential. Scratch that, that could have been really bad and messed up the whole thing. You have unlimited earning potential, literally the sky is the limit.

That last piece, so we have entrepreneurs, we have technicians, and the third are the rain makers. They’re people that make it rain. They’re people that bring leads and money into the business. They’re the rain makers. Now entrepreneurs love rain makers, why? Because they make it rain. Do you guys understand that? That’s the secret sauce. Most technicians don’t understand that.  Because all they know is I went to school to learn this thing to do this task, so they do it and do it. But the person that gets rewarded the most, outside the entrepreneur of the company, are the rain makers.

Typically in most, not most, but a lot of businesses that I own, that I’m involved with, the rain makers a lot of times are entrepreneurs who maybe if they would have started their entrepreneur journey ten years earlier, they would be the entrepreneur of the business. But for whatever reason they’re not. So they came, they can have, a lot of times we call them intrapreneurs. In their role in the company, they have the ability to grow and expand as much as they want. They’re rain makers. What do they do? They make it rain. They bring in customers and make money. They bring money into the company.

So if you look at this from an outside perspective, if you selling this stuff in college terms. It’s marketing and sales. Marketing brings people in, sales takes their money. That’s kind of what it is. And it’s funny because, I don’t know what it was, even like most technicians, if you go to school and you tell someone you want to be a sales person, the viewpoint, or even marketing, I’m in marketing, or I’m in sales, the technicians are the ones who are always looking down on you. “oh, I’m a doctor.” They look down on the rain makers because they think it’s a sub….I don’t know. They think it’s not as good, not as dignified.

What they don’t understand is that the rainmakers make the money. It is the most dignified, most important position in the entire company. Without the rain maker’s the technician has no job. Without someone bringing people into your business and then getting the money from those people, there’s nobody to be a technician to. You make as many cakes as you want, but if some dude didn’t bring those people into the store and take their money, they’re not going to buy a cake. It’s the most important role in the business, outside the entrepreneur who sets the initial risk to get it going.

So even though the technicians talk down on us marketing and sales people, it happens to be the most important role in every single business. You can tell when businesses are stupid, when recessions come and they cut their marketing teams and they cut their sales teams. It’s insane to me. I had a chance in my life to live through one of the recessions, 2008. I had a bunch of friends who were in marketing jobs and they were making it rain for the company and the company started struggling so they cut the marketing. I’m like, you’re insane. Cut the technicians, they don’t do anything. Don’t cut the blood coming into your company. Marketing and sales is the blood, it is the rain. The rain makers are the key.

So rain makers. They don’t have a ceiling, in most businesses now days. Especially if you become good at it and not a little bit good, but really good. You can come to a company and say, “I can bring in unlimited leads for you.” Guess what they will do? They will give you anything you want. All company need leads. The other thing they need, sales. They take those leads and turn them into cash, turn them into money. That’s how the entrepreneur gets paid, that’s how the technicians get paid. It’s by the rain makers. Bringing people in and taking their money. That’s it. We can try to be romantic about it, but that is it.

You have to understand, if you want to be wealthy, and I’m not talking about making good money as a technician, because you can do that. You gotta go to school, that sucks. If you want to become wealthy, become rich, make a lot of money. You have to shift your focus from becoming good at being a technician, to understanding how to make it rain. If you can make it rain in a business, you are infinitely valuable. As a technician you are only valuable as that task is to the person, to the company. They know, they got a budget for it. There you go.

So if you’re working for a company saying, I do video. Guess what? They have a budget for that. We pay video guys $3 an hour, $12 an hour, whatever that is, $20 an hour.

For my friend, the company you are working for, they budget $25 grand so that’s all the money you are able to get. Because you’re a video person, you’re a commodity. That’s the other thing about technicians is they’re commodities. It’s funny, I was talking to my sister the other day here at our family vacation or whatever, and she teaches piano lessons. I love my sister, she’s honestly in my top 3 favorite people on planet earth. She’s teaches piano and she’s like, “I’m so busy, I can’t keep up with anything.” And I said, “you should double your prices.” And she’s like, “I can’t double my prices.” And I’m like, “Why not?” and she’s like, “If I double my prices I will lose half my people.” I’m like, “okay, well you lose half your people but you double the money, that means you get double the free time for the same amount of money.” And she’s like, “I can’t do that because that’s the set price for what people charge for piano lessons where I live. So if I raise my prices, they’ll just go to somebody else.” I’m like, “Because you’re a commodity. Guess how much people pay for marketing consulting advice?” She’s like, “I don’t know.” And I’m like, “Neither do I, but I don’t look what everybody else charges and charge the same thing, I charge the most I possibly can.”

For example we had somebody contact our office and they wanted to do a one day consult with me and I was like, “I don’t have time for a one day consult.” And they’re like, “Well, how much would it cost?” and I told Brent to tell them it’s $100 grand and they can do 8 hours and they have to come to Boise and I’m going home at 5:00 to be with my kids. He kind of laughed because he knew they wouldn’t say yes to that. He went and pitched it to them and came back 5 minutes later. He’s like, “They said yes.” And I was like, “There you go.”

Want to know why? Because I’m not a commodity. When you’re a video person you’re a commodity. When you are any kind of technician you are a commodity. When you’re a doctor, you’re still a commodity because guess why? Another doctor comes along and he’s better than you or less expensive than you, whatever. They can replace you with the other person because you are a commodity. The rain makers are not commodities. That’s what you have to understand.

The rain makers are unique. They understand something that they can’t just learn in school. They know how to get, especially in school because there’s no school that I know of yet, that teaches a marketing program that is actually good. So there you go. So if you’re in school trying to become a rain maker, you should drop out today. If you want to be a technician stick to school. If you want to be a rain maker, it’s time to leave.

If you’re in school, honestly if you’re trying to do a sport. That’s why I was in school. Do that. If you’re trying to find a beautiful spouse, school is agreat place to meet great looking women and probably good looking men, I have no idea. But that’s a great spot to be in school, but just til you find your spouse and then leave. It’s time to go. If you want to make it rain, it’s time to go.

The rain makers are the ones that are not a commodity. There’s no cost associated, people don’t budget that out. Because they are like, I don’t know. If I came to a company and was like, “I’m going to build you guys a sales funnel and this funnel has potential to bring you unlimited leads for forever and make you unlimited amounts of money.” They’re like, “How much does that cost?” I’m like, “However much I want to charge you for it.” They can’t price shop. How are you going to price that? Russell Brunson charges 100 grand for a day. How do you price shop that? Go to somebody else? Ask Gary V. “What do you cost?” and he’ll give you his price but he’s going to teach way differently than I would. If you want what I got, I’m the only one that’s got it. You gotta pay me what I want to charge you for it. I’m not a commodity.

If you’re a great sales person, you’re not a commodity. Great sales people are rare. If you’re an amazing sales person you can walk into any organization and say, “hand me your leads. I just want 20% of everything. I eat what I kill. I’m going to 20% of what I kill.” There’s no business on earth that I know of, that if you walked in and said “Look don’t pay me, just give me all your leads. I want 20% of what I kill.” Almost all of them will say yes to that. Because you’re a rain maker. You have no ceiling. Just kill a whole bunch of stuff and you get your cut.

Same thing with the person who is making it rain, bringing the leads in the door. A lot of times you’re like, “Russell, I’m a video guy, I’m whatever. I don’t know how to make it rain. Right now I’m basically a technician. I’m plugged into this technician thing.” You gotta start studying, not how to become a technician, you’ve got to become good at your craft, I agree with that. You have to become obsessed with it, but you have to become good at understanding how to make money.

The study of making money is the key. So how do I make money? It’s understanding if you’re a video person, doing video is a commodity. But if I can understand how to use video to bring in the leads, it changes things because now I’m not a commodity. I’ve got a friend who charges 100,000 to make you a video, plus 10% of any money that video ever makes you. Technically he’s no better than anybody else. In fact, some would argue he’s a lot worse at video than most people, but he knows how to take that video and have it turned into cash and bring in customers. He knows how to use it to make it rain.

So for those of you guys who are in my world, I’ve got some tools to help you learn how to take whatever technicians skills you have and learn how to make it rain. So I told my friend, I gave him some advice, “I’ll record this podcast but you have to do some things for me first. First thing you need to do is go back to this podcast, Marketing In Your Car, first hundred episodes there’s a cheesy jingle. Next 200 episodes there’s a less cheesy jingle, still cheesy. And then recently we transformed it into the Marketing Secrets podcast, which I really like the name and the new jingle is freaking amazing.” Don’t you guys agree? So we’ve got that.

I said, “Go and listen to every episode, start at episode one and go through all of them. What’s going to happen is you’re going to immerse yourself in how to become a rain maker. You’ll learn a bunch of random crap and none of it’s going to tie together, but it’s going to get your mind immersed in this mindset. And if you don’t like me or my voice, you can go find someone else. But find someone who is obsessed with marketing and sales. And he ranks the stuff that people pay unlimited money for and start immersing yourself. Listening to it all day every single day so your mind is just wrapped into the concepts. With geeking out and going deep with my podcast, your mind is going to get into it but you’re not going to have a blueprint, but you’re going to have all these thoughts going through your head  all over the place. It won’t be a path, but it will be immersion. Immersion is the key.”

Tony Robins talks about this a lot and I’m a big believer in pretty much everything tony says because he’s a giant and he’s got stage presence like nobody else and he’s amazing and a billion other reasons. Tony’s the man. He taught me about immersion. If you want to learn something, don’t dabble. There’s dabblers out there all over the place, who dabble. My guess is things in your life that you struggle with are things you have dabbled in and things you excel at are things you immersed yourself in. That’s just how it works.

If you want to learn how to make it rain, you’ve got to immerse yourself in the concepts of people who are making it rain. So number two what I told my friend. I said, “There’s two books you’ve got to read.” And I shipped them out to him. First book is Expert Secrets. In this business there’s two sides of the business, there’s the art and the science. The art really is the selling and messaging and positioning, all those kind of things. Storytelling and that kind of thing, that’s the art. So I said, “Read the Expert Secrets book first because that’s the art. Second read the DotCom Secrets book, because that’s the science. It’s the art and the science to making it rain.”

When you read both those books, there’s two different perspectives that you’ll feel in the books. One is very much like the structure, the science, the Dotcom Secrets, the science to how the game is played and the Expert Secrets is the art. A lot of people think they have to master all of this, and you don’t. Especially if you are someone who would love to be an entrepreneur, but for whatever reason you’re not able to. You want to be an intrapreneur in a company. Go into a company and be an intrapreneur for a company. Look at that and say, “I don’t need to know all this stuff. But I gotta understand it all. I need to understand the art and science and figure out where my skill set fits into that.”

So my friend that’s doing video stuff, you have a skill set that in the right hands is worth a lot of money. In the wrong hands its worth 25 grand a year. If you find a company that’s growing, the right company, the right person to plug into and come and say, “I want to make it rain for you.” Brandon Fischer who started doing video stuff for us 2 ½, 3 years ago. He came in and I met him and my brother does video stuff for me, we didn’t really need another video person, but he came to me and was like, “Hey, I want to learn what you’re doing. I’ll do video stuff for free for you.” I was like, alright and he started doing it for free. He did some amazing stuff and started capturing stories for me. He captured Liz Benney’s story of her telling her experience with Inner Circle.

Basically he didn’t come to me as a video guy, he came to me as, “I can capture the story that will make your company look a million times better to make it rain.” So he captured the story of Liz Benney, so we took that video and put it on a website, started driving traffic to it. That Liz Benney video, I couldn’t track it today, but that video has probably made me at least 2 million dollars if not more. That video helped me make it rain. That video asset to me wasn’t worth 25 k a year, it was worth a heck of a lot more. Because it helped me make customers, convert those customers, and get money from those customers.

But he didn’t come to me as “I’m going to be a video guy.” He came to me like, “Let me serve you first.” The best thing about rain makers, if you’re good at what you do, which is why it’s important to be really good at your craft. That is important. Become obsessed, literally become so obsessed with what you do you become the best in the world at it. Or at least the best that person’s ever met. Become obsessed with it. That’s important.

The second thing is figuring out how to use your skill to make it rain and becoming obsessed with that. That’s the missing key. Because then you become an intrapraneur, you come into a company….Don’t come in and try to negotiate a huge fee, because number one if you negotiate a huge fee, the first thing you’re going to do is lock yourself in as a technician. Technicians get paid a salary. As soon as you negotiate you lock yourself in and then you’re there.

If you come in the other way and say, “I’m going to work for free and make it rain and then I just want a piece of what I bring to you.” If you bring it that way and come in and help make it rain, it’s completely different. Jay Abraham, one of the great marketing, strategic minds of all time, his whole thing is he would come to a company and say, “I’m going to come and work for free I just want 20% of the increase.” He’d come to a company and add 40, 50, 60, 100 million dollars to a company and just took 20% of the increase. That’s what rain makers do. That’s what sales people do. You are creating opportunity. You’re creating money for them and taking a percentage of what you create. That’s the key you guys. That’s the key how to be an entrepreneur inside of an organization and have no limit.

Guess who they don’t fire in a company? The person who makes it rain. If you go into a company and you make it rain, that’s it. You write your own paycheck from that point forward. So how do you do that? Number one, immerse yourself in this stuff, in the marketing and sales. Immerse yourself. I would recommend doing it with the podcast. Because I think I’m obsessed with podcasts. It’s the best way to have it ring through your mind all the time. Start at episode one of my podcast, click play and go until you’re done. A lot of you guys, start over.

This is not for my own ego, partially for my own ego, but mostly for you guys. And again, if for some reason I talk to fast or I’m annoying or whatever, I don’t care. Plug into somebody, plug into Grant Cardone, Gary Vaynerchuk, or plug into John Lee Dumas, I don’t care. Whoever you resonate with, plug in and go. Don’t unplug. Every single day, all of your free time, you’re driving, you’re walking, your bathroom breaks, be listening to podcasts constantly. That’s going to give you the immersion, because immersion is the only way for you to get the connections. This connects to this; you’re going to start seeing the big picture.

Number two is you need a strategy and a blueprint. For each of you guys, there’s two books that I’ve written. I’ve put my heart and my soul. I’ve read thousands of books, sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stuff, to be able to figure out what actually works and put it into a book you could read in a day. So read the Expert Secrets book, number one, and then read the Dotcom Secrets book. Expert Secrets will teach you the art, Dotcom Secrets will teach you the science.

Then you’ve got to look at what your skill set is and where does that plug into the art and science. Again, you don’t have to do everything, but figure out what you are good at. What I would recommend doing, this is kind of the next step, is those who have gone through my certified partner program, we certify people to build sales funnels, the ones that are the most successful, the ones that bit, realize they’re not the best at everything. Henry Kaminski, one of my buddies was in the inner circle for last year, he talked about when he first came in, he was a graphic designer. He’s like, he didn’t say it this way, but similar. He understood the art and the science. “I’m really good at graphic design but I don’t know this other stuff.” So he started studying and learning it. He realized there’s pieces to this.

If you read Dotcom Secrets and Expert Secrets you will realize there’s pieces and you become an expert in all of it or what he said he did, “I built a voltron team.” Some of you guys, if you’re and you don’t know who Voltron is you can go Google it. Or you might remember Power Rangers, might be a better one for you guys. There are different versions. But Voltron is basically, there were these five, same with Power Rangers, same story, probably the same everything. But there’s five people who had their own super power, they went out there and they were really good. But there was a big bad guy who would always come and they couldn’t defeat him individually. They had to group together and become Voltron and all five pieces came together and they’d fight and they could win.

So Henry said, “I realized I was a good designer, but I’m bad at strategy so I had to find this strategy person to partner with.” So he partnered with his strategy guy, Dave Arsonal. Then he’s like, “I need someone good at selling.” So he partnered with a salesman. He partnered with three or four people and built this Voltron team and he went out there and in less than a year he made a million dollars with his little company.

Because he understood, “We’re rainmakers and I’m good at this piece but I need a couple of people together and we can make it rain. We need someone who can drive traffic, someone to do sales, and I’ll do the art.” He did that.

So for you guys and for my friend, after you understand the art and science, you’ve immersed yourselves, you’re learning all these kind of things, you buy the expert Secrets and Dotcom Secrets book, read both of those and understand the art and science of how to make it rain. Now you’re looking back to say, “How do I fit in this? What am I passionate about? Am I good at the story telling part, am I good at funnels?” Figure out those pieces and then you can go to companies and look at that and say, “I’m really good at this piece. I can bring this thing to you.” Or find a partner, find people and come in and say, “We can do this thing.”

A good example of this you guys, I don’t normally share these kind of numbers, but I wanted to just kind of help. Some of you guys have seen the Harmon Brother’s videos, some of you guys know that we are about to launch our Harmon Brother’s video, which I’m really excited for. They did Squatty Potty, Poo-Pourri, Chatbooks, Fiber Fix, a whole bunch of great videos. They make these videos and they’re good, really good. They go viral and they’re amazing.

I wanted to hire them to do a video for me so I messaged them two days after they’d actually messaged me, which is kind of funnel. They had this funnel, the Fiber Fix funnel, they said the video went viral but the funnel isn’t converting and they wanted my help.  I was like, “Funny. I just wanted to email you to see if you’d do a video for us.” We got on the phone and tried to talk through it and both of us are rain makers. Our videos make it rain, we know what they’re worth. I was like, “How much does it cost to create a video?” I was thinking maybe $50, 60 grand or whatever. With a very straight face he was like, “We charge $500 thousand up front plus 20% of ads spent.” I was like, “What?!” and he looks at me straight, he didn’t say this in so many words but, in the words of this episode he said, “We know how to make it rain, so that’s what we’re worth and that’s what we charge.” A few months later I wrote them a check and now they’re going to make it rain for us.

Same thing, they came to me with the Fiber Fix funnel, “We want you to fix this funnel, how much does it cost?” I’m like, “you can hire someone fix the funnel it will be 10 grand, but for me it will be a quarter of a million bucks.” And he’s like, “Whoa, why are you so expensive?” and I was like, “Because I know how to make it rain.” So then they did their deal, because it worked.

As I went with the Harmon Brothers and we did the video, it’s been the most amazing experience, I can’t wait to show you the whole behind the scenes video. There’s some on Funnel Hacker TV, you see bits here and there. But it’s amazing, it’s not 2 brothers who do this whole thing. It’s these guys who started a business and then their process is really cool. When we hired them, basically they said, “We’re going to do a writing retreat.” And they found three amzing writers to write three different scripts for us. So we go to this cabin and they have three writers come and read their script. Each script was insanely amazing, but three different comedic scripts.

And these guys again, are writers that they hired, they’re sketch comedy writers. They each wrote three and came back and said, “Which of the three do you like the best?” we picked what we liked the best and then all three guys took those, in this cabin, we went back and all three of them went and took the best script and they took all the jokes, the best jokes, wrote a new script and came back and showed it to us again. It was even more funny. We went back and forth for two days until we had the script.

Then after we had the script, they went and said, “Okay, for this script to happen we have to have props.” So they hired someone to build stages, and they needed videos and hired video people. They hired all these people to make this amazing thing. Last weekend we went and filmed it and hopefully we’re about a little ways away from launching it.

Again, with them, it wasn’t just them. They had built a Voltron team of people that could go and execute to make it rain. You have to start understanding that. Come back to where we started, the hierarchy of business. There’s the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur is there and they are obsessed with getting the message out about their thing. Not about the thing, about getting the thing into other people’s hands. That’s why I love entrepreneurs, because they’re tied into this whole marketing thing. Good entrepreneurs are obsessed with the marketing and selling of the thing. They are the ultimate rain maker.

Number two is the technician who do the thing, which are essential to the business, but again you’ve got a cap, you’re a commodity. Understand that there’s a cap and you’re a commodity, but you’re in there. You’re going to have a good, typically secure financial thing, all those kind of things. You get security but you’re not going to have unlimited income.

Then you’ve got the rain makers. So for you guys looking at understanding what a rain maker does and what it is and how the process works. Figuring out how to take your skill, your super power and uncommoditize yourself and make you unique, make yourself rare. Make it so people pay you half a million dollars if you make them a 3 minute video. Is that crazy?

Someone pays me a quarter of a million bucks right now to make them a funnel. For me, not that it takes me that long, I just know what order the pages need to go and what message in each page. I know how to make it rain. I’ve been obsessed with this thing for over a decade.

For you guys, it’s time to become obsessed. Become obsessed in your own company. And if you’re the entrepreneur in your company listening to this, become obsessed. You’ve got to be the lead rain maker. Find the technicians, plug in the right people, and like I always say, find A players, not B players. A players are 32 times more effective than B players. Find A player technicians and pay them well. Because you don’t want to go find other technicians. Plug in the best technicians you can find, then go find rain makers. And if you try to cap rain makers, they will leave you. Understand that. You, as an entrepreneur, find rain makers and give them the ability to have unlimited ceilings in their income. Because if they do that, again, a rain maker is just an entrepreneur who for whatever reason, life circumstances isn’t able to go out on their own to do it, which is totally cool. There’s nothing wrong with that.

If it weren’t for all the intrapreneurs in our business, our company is 99.9% intrapreneurs. If it was not for my intrapreneurs we would not be where we are today. I try to create our businesses in a way where people can grow and have unlimited earning potential. That’s the key.

For you guys listening who, that’s you and you’re stuck in the technician role or you want more, or you’re in this thing where you want to be an entrepreneur but you can’t or whatever. This is where to focus on. Learning how to make it rain and then building a team around you. Finding people, other pieces and networking, not so much finding jobs, networking to find people to help you to be able to make it rain. As soon as you have a team, as soon as you personally or your team can do that, you can go to any business on planet earth and write your own paycheck.

 Then it comes down to picking the right businesses, and that’s a whole other lecture for a whole other day. Because I’ve seen some funnel consultants who go and they get paid ten thousand dollars to build a funnel, other guys get a hundred grand, the only difference is who they are pitching to. It’s interesting, I’m privy to share the details, but the Harmon Brother campaigns, if you look at the Purple Mattress, its $1000 mattress. Because every sales makes $1000, it’s been one of their most successful campaigns. Chatbooks has been amazing, probably the most viral video they’ve had, but each sale doesn’t bring in, the value of each customer is a lot less, so it’s harder to continue to make that one rain.

Same thing with all you guys, if the customer or the client that you’re working for, if they’re average customer value is $30, if you’re working for a restaurant, making $30 it’s not good. But if you’re working for a customer where each customer is worth 25 thousand dollars, it’s a lot easier to justify what you want to charge people. Stuff like that.

Alright, well it’s late. It’s almost 1:00. I gotta get my 6 hours to go to the water park. I’m going to end today’s podcast, but I hope that helps you look at how business works and understanding that for you to be successful and make money, you have to understand how to make money. You gotta learn how to make money. Don’t just learn your skill because if you do that you’ll become a technician, which is fine if that’s where you’re happy. But if you really want financial freedom and wealth and no limits and no ceiling, you want to be able to grow, it comes down to studying money and understanding how it works and understanding the marketing and the sales, getting people in the door and getting their money from them. It’s the most valuable part of any business. I don’t care what the hoity-toity doctors tell you. I don’t care what all the people in school and colleges, it’s the most dignified, most important role in business.

If it wasn’t for it, business would stop. The economy would stop. So it’s figuring out how to plug in your skill set into that piece of business. Because that’s where the money’s made. When you’re part of people making the money it gives you the ability to have percentage of that. So I hope that helps. So for my friend who’s listening and everyone else listening, once again, immersion. Get the blueprint. Figure out what your unique abilities and talents can plug into that blueprint to make it rain for a company. When you do that, you got what you need and a whole bunch more.

So I hope that helps you guys. I hope that helps my buddy. I won’t say your name because, you know. I appreciate you and hope to hang out with you someday again. Everybody else, have a good night, talk to you guys soon. Bye everybody.

Jul 14, 2017

Here is a bonus interview with Russell Brunson and Dr. Accurso.

Jul 13, 2017

I think I figured out why it's so hard for all of us to go on vacations.

On today's episode of Marketing Secrets Russell talks about why, as an entrepreneur, it is so hard to go on vacation, and how he gets through it. Here are some of the cool things to listen for in this episode:

  • What the difference between entrepreneurs and everyone else in regards to feeling happy or sad is.
  • Why constantly having momentum and feeling like he's moving forward is so important to Russell.
  • And how Russell gets through down time when he feels like he's doing nothing.
So listen here to find out why entrepreneurs don't relate to being happy or sad.

---Transcript---

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

Hey everyone, I hope you’re excited for today. I’ve got this weird thing; I think a lot of entrepreneurs suffer from this. Maybe it’s just me. But today I’m going on vacation for a week. I’m actually looking forward to it, but at the same time it really stresses me out. It’s one of those things that’s funny because everyone always tells me, “Russell, you need to go on vacation. You’re going to burn out if you keep doing the stuff you’re doing at the pace you’re doing it.” All sorts of stuff.

But it’s weird because…..sorry I’m trying to do it with the new camera tripod while I’m driving.

Anyway, it’s weird because when I’m at the office and working and doing my thing I never feel stressed. Everyone’s like, “Are you stressed? Are you overwhelmed?” I’m like, not really. I feel like I’m kind of in my flow, my motion or whatever you want to call it. But then I go on vacation, I get super stressed and anxiety and sitting there and not doing stuff is really hard for me. That’s why reading on vacations, at least I feel like something’s progressing.

It’s interesting, at Pirates Cove mastermind we had Alex Charfen come and help him to kind of figure out how to monetize his entrepreneurial personality type content, which I’m excited for. It’s funny because I told him I first heard him speak 2 or 3 years ago on the entrepreneurial personality type and it was amazing. I felt like I connected with him and I was like, now when I hear something like that I want to give somebody money for something. There’s no way for me to give him money. It’s funny, I asked him if I could buy the entrepreneurial personality type from him and he’s like, “No.” and then he’s like, “Why?” and I’m like, “Because I don’t know exactly what I’d do if I had it, but I could make a crap ton of money with it.” And so he joined the coaching program right afterwards, so I could help him do it.

So it’s kind of fun. We’re helping him go through the process now and he’s going to kill it, it’s exciting. But one thing he talked about that was interesting about entrepreneurs and if you haven’t studied Alex’s stuff, it’s worth it. And it’ll be soon in a format, it’s going to be a podcast, it’s going be a training program, a bunch of stuff. He’s kind of going through the whole Expert Secrets process now to figure out how to take it to something. I’m excited, when it’s done, I’ll be the first customer. And I think that all of you, because you’re all like me, should as well.

But it’s the entrepreneurial personality type, but he’s talking about personality traits of entrepreneurs. And one thing that’s kind of weird, I think I’ve heard him give the presentation three times in his core, main presentation and all three times there’s this one part where he talks about how entrepreneurs don’t identify with happy or sad. I was like, “Whatever, I identify with that.” And then the more he started talking about it, the more I was thinking, when am I happy or sad? People always say I look happy. But I’m just kind of a happy person.

It’s funny, this is probably more personal than you guys want to know, but I went and got my testosterone taken, actually three years ago when we were launching Clickfunnels and it came back at 160. The doctor literally told me, “Your grandma’s got higher testosterone than you right now.” And 6 – 8 months later I did it again and it was like 350. And then I got it done this week and I was 450. But every time I’ve gotten it done, the doctors always told me, “How are you standing here? You should have no energy, no motivation.” And I was like, “No, it’s the opposite. I have so much motivation, so much energy.” He asked me all the symptoms, “Do you feel tired.” And I was like, “Sometimes.” And he’s like, “Do you have memory?” I’m like, “No.” He’s like, “Do you feel depressed.” I’m like, “No.” all these things and at the end of it he’s like, “So why are you here?” I’m like, “My testosterone is really low.” And he’s like, “You have no symptoms of it.” And I’m like, “It’s just because everything’s so exciting right now.”

And I started thinking more about his with Alex’s stuff, that entrepreneurs don’t relate with happy or sad. I started thinking, there’s sadness obviously, when someone dies or things like that. But as a whole, you wake up in the morning and it’s not like I’m happy or sad. So when he was telling me that, I was kind of confused. I wonder how most people view happy and sad, it didn’t really make sense to me, and then the next slide, the next portion he said a word and I got chills. I was like, “Whoa. That’s what I do.” And he said, “Entrepreneurs don’t feel happy or sad, what they feel is either momentum or a lack of momentum. They’re moving towards something or they’re not. They’re moving away from something.”

That’s what we relate to. What we relate happiness to is motion forward. And what we relate sadness to is not progressing, not moving forward. I think it’s just fascinating. Momentum, movement, that’s what drives entrepreneurs. It’s not happy or sad, it’s movement, momentum. I was thinking about that today, I’m going on this vacation. It’s funny because I’m leaving today, I was up late last night. I was up early this morning. I’m trying to get stuff done, and I almost enjoy the process right before vacation, getting so much stuff done because I’m freaking out because I gotta leave at this time. I’m running and running, I’m moving, momentum. And then you go on this vacation and you stop.

Everyone wants to just chill out. They want to sit, they want to just sit at the beach. I don’t know what it is, sitting at the beach it doesn’t do anything for me. It’s just weird. For me, I have to have momentum in this experience, this vacation or else I’m going to drive the rest of my family and friends and everyone that’s with us, nuts. They probably don’t even know, they’re like, “Why is Russell twitching over on the side?” And it’s because I need momentum, I need something.

So that’s when I’ll sneak away and I’ll read. Or I’ll be sitting there, they’re all talking and I’m thinking about something. “Oh my gosh, I could do this.” And I’m creating while I’m sitting there thinking because I’m nervous. It’s just funny, my wife will be like, “You’re on vacation, you’re not allowed to talk about business.” And I’m like, “If I don’t talk about business, everything halts and stops progressing in my life.” And the lack of momentum, the lack of movement, the lack of direction is what will then make me depressed and sad and stuck.

It’s a funny line that we have to deal with, especially all of you entrepreneurs who are out there. Because we just see the world a little differently and I think a lot of people think we’re freaks because of it. There’s nothing bad with it. I don’t think it’s something bad. It’s why businesses are created, why there’s momentum in the world. I think it’s because of entrepreneurs who’s entire soul drive is momentum towards moving. We have to have that.

So while we go on vacation because we love our wives and kids and family members, it’s probably the hardest, most stressful part, which is so weird because it’s like, “Go relax. Take some time, you’re going to burn out.” And it’s a little different. Anyway, I’m excited. I’ve been plotting, I have 3 big vacation this summer, I’ve been plotting all of them, what books to read, which order. What courses I’m going to study, what things I’m going to be moving. It’s just funny how that’s been the most exciting thing for me, planning what I’m going to do when I’m not doing anything. I’m such a nerd.

Anyway, there you go, that’s us entrepreneurs. So if you’re an entrepreneur and you don’t relate to happy or sad, and you do relate to momentum and movement and you stress out about vacations, that’s where I’m at and I relate with you. Nothing else on your family vacations is somewhere you’re stressing out because you do nothing, I get you. So while that’s happening think, ponder, vision, dream. At least for me, that’s what keeps me going and lets me function like a normal human being with everybody else. So that’s all I got you guys. Have an amazing day and have a good vacation if you’re going on one too. Talk to you guys soon, bye.

Jul 12, 2017

The secret to get people through the failure gap.

On today's episode Russell talks about disagreeing with a designer on what a customer needs from Clickfunnels and how they were basically saying the complete opposite of each other. Here are some of the interesting things you'll hear in the this episode:

  • Why listening to what customers want is a good idea, but how it can only take you so far.
  • Why giving you're customer little wins on their way to their goal, will help them stick around.
  • And some of the wins are that Russell is giving his customers to help keep them as members of Clickfunnels.
So listen here to find out how to confuse activity with achievement to keep customers from leaving.

---Transcript---

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

Alright everybody, welcome to Marketing Secrets. I’m here today in the Clickfunnels kitchen, the first time I’ve ever filmed in here. I’m excited. You guys want to see a quick view of what the kitchen looks like? Oh, there’s Dave. We’ve got a whole bunch of cool stuff. We actually built this kitchen because for a lot of the products we work with, for some reason we always need kitchen scenes, so we always rented different kitchens. And then we’re like, if we build a kitchen make sure we have a good scene so we can actually film stuff. So we do, but since we’ve had it we’ve never used it for filming.

For today, I want to share with you guys something kind of interesting. And I want to make sure when I say this that it doesn’t come off bad. Because it has a good purpose, but it’s important for you guys to understand. Some of the background behind this, to set it up so it all makes sense to you guys. We had a designer that worked for us for a while to come on and help with user interface, UIUX, those type of things in Clickfunnels, a really smart guy. What he liked to do is call and interview customers.

At first I was really excited. So he’d go and call 40 or 50 customers and interview them, finding out what they want, what they didn’t want. All those kind of things, which I thought was cool. We’ve never done that before. Some of you guys might have actually talked to him, which is cool. Based on that he was trying to build UI and structure based on customer’s feedback.

A couple of things I found with it. One is it was kind of almost a frustration, because I came to him saying, “This is what I want to have done.” And he treated me kind of like if I was a customer, “Hey, cool. These are good ideas.” I’m like, “No, you need to do this because I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. I’m not a survey.” We always kind of went back and forth and in his mind it’s like, we need to find out what the customers want, which I agree with. But also this comes back to Henry Ford’s quote about if I were to ask my customers what they wanted; they would have said they wanted a faster horse. You have to also understand that customers don’t always know the vision where we’re going. That’s why we’re creating stuff, we’re visionaries. We know where we’re trying to go.

So it’s kind of interesting, so he no longer works with the company, still an awesome guy, but that was kind of this frustration I had. I remember for a long time we’ve wanted to update our on-boarding in Clickfunnels, and we wanted to do a whole bunch of cool things we haven’t been able to do. This week is actually fun for me because we’re focusing on that.

Another side story, I was listening to Growth Hacker TV, there was an interview with a guy who bought the Warrior Forum. He also owned Freelancer.com and a bunch of other companies. He was talking about how they grew to a billion dollar evaluation. And one interesting thing he said is that they buy these companies and then they look at the traffic coming through and spend a lot of time optimizing the processes inside the processes to make more money from all the traffic coming, which is kind of the phase we’re in right now.

We have anywhere from 800 – 1000 new people a day that sign up for Clickfunnels, just organically. They’re coming from who knows where. And thank you for coming, I don’t even know where you came from but I’m grateful to have you here. And they’re coming in and we lose a bunch of them the first month, there’s a big drop off. After that it stays really steady, but there’s a big drop immediately. So we’re trying to figure out that process. How do we capture people and keep them in?

There’s a lot of cool stuff we’ve done that decreased our churn rate, which is the number metric we look at. It increased our retention. But right now we’re in a big overhaul, how do we simplify the sign up process? How do we make everything easier? It’s fun, you guys will see some new stuff coming to Clickfunnels here in the next 60 days. A lot of new stuff will be coming live, which just simplifies the process and makes Clickfunnels easier to use. So we’re excited for that.

But I was listening to this guy, and he talked about that’s what he was doing. They just worked on the optimization of the sign up flow and that’s how the companies blew up. They didn’t really focus on the traffic and these other things. And we’re always focused on the traffic. But it’s like, how do we make sure the funnel’s right so we’re not losing people out of the holes in the bucket?

So with that said, there’s a bunch of on-boarding stuff that I wanted to do and I know Todd wanted to do, so we kept trying to get this guy to do that. We want prize, we want to do free t-shirts, we want badges, we want to gamify the process. And he kept coming back saying, “How does gamifying the process help the people get the end result? We need to get people to the end result and this is just keeping people busy in the middle.” And it’s funny, Todd mentioned that this morning to me and I Voxed him back, there’s this quote from Dan Kennedy that I heard back in the day that actually ties this in, but I couldn’t remember exactly what it was. So I ended the Vox and said, “I’m going to go find the quote and come back to you.”

So I ended up finding the quote and I posted it there in Voxer and the quote said, “You’ve got to confuse activity with accomplishment.” Now I’m going to be careful when I say this because some of you guys are going to look at that and it might be frustrating or confusing or whatever. So I posted that and in the thing it said, Dan Kennedy, “You have to get your customers to confuse activity with achievement.” So Todd read that first before my Vox, and he thought I was saying, “Oh the designer was right. That’s just going to get people confused. Focusing on activity as opposed to achievement.” But if you listen to my Voxer, it was actually the exact opposite.

So what’s kind of funny, me and this UI designer both said the identical thing but for the exact opposite side of the argument. He was saying you don’t want to give people activities that keep them from the achievement. And I was saying, you want to give them activities so that they feel achievement, so someday they get to achievement. You want to confuse activity with achievement. Does that make sense?

So Kennedy said that, basically, as a retention strategy. People come in and are going to leave. He said, no you need to give them things to do, so they have activity that’s happening. Because the activity is what keeps them engaged. If we look at our Clickfunnels stats right now and numbers and things like that, the interesting parts are people that stick are people that have a custom domain, they log in at least 2 ½ times per week. There’s all these stats. People that stick are people that are going in and doing stuff consistently. So we know that’s the metric. People logging in and using it are the key. So how do get them to log in and use it?

Well just telling them to build a funnel, you’re going to have achievement, you’re going to achieve a funnel. People will try for a little bit and then they’re going to leave because they didn’t achieve anything. Because the goal is this huge thing. The goal is you’ve got to eat the whole entire cow. That’s the goal. If you’re giving your customer the goal to eat the cow, the problem is they’re going to come in and if they don’t eat the cow really quick, they’re going to leave.

So what you have to do is confuse achievement with activity. Give them activities to do that make them feel like they’re achieving something along the way. So they come in and you set the table, you give them their appetizers, they eat that and they achieve something. For us we’re gamifying the process. You come in, watch the video, build your hero funnel, we send you a t-shirt. So you had activity, so you felt you achievement, even though you didn’t achieve the thing you want yet. You felt achievement, which then drives you forward to do the next thing and the next thing, and the next thing.

All of us want our customers to have the achievement at the end, the problem is that they sign up and then there’s the achievement, there’s this huge gap in the middle that they’re going to fall into, disappear and die. So because of that we have to confuse activity with achievement, because that activity will make them feel micro-achievement which will get them to the big achievement at the end. That’s the goal, that’s the message for you guys.

As you’re creating your training programs, software, ideas, products, services, whatever it is you’re creating and doing, I want you thinking about that. You have to go and create activities that get people to feel small wins, small achievements so that it will drive them through this chasm, this gap, to get to the big goal, the big achievement that you want them to have. If you don’t have those, if you’re not confusing activity with achievement initially, they’re never going to get to the achievement.

So that’s kind of the message for today. I thought it was kind of interesting. I thought it was funny that we both we had the same argument for why we wanted to do this on-boarding process. But he was saying it was a negative thing, but I was saying it was a positive thing. I think it’s very positive, and I think we all can and should be visiting it. So I hope that helps you guys, and with that said, have an amazing day. Go back through your programs, products, services, member’s area and figure out how you can weave those things in, because as you give people little wins along the way, it will give them the momentum they need to get the big wins. That’s all I got for you guys today. Thanks so much for everything, see you guys soon. Bye.

Jul 6, 2017

In our 30th episode of Funnel Friday's Russell and Jim take some time out from building funnels to chat about the Expert Secrets Book Launch and Russell getting his message out to the world.

Jul 5, 2017

If you missed Russell’s LIVE Q&A from www.dropthemicshow.com, you can hear this weeks questions on this episode.

Today we have another bonus episode of Marketing Secrets where Russell answers questions about marketing from other funnel hackers, including:

  • What are the most painful lessons Russell has learned to be able to build the amazing team he has today.
  • How to get a huge Facebook following like Russell.
  • If it's a good idea to try to influence someone in a 9 to 5 job and help them in their journey so that they become successful and quit that job.
  • The process that goes into publishing a book besides actually writing or marketing.
  • How to use a funnel to get people to come to a pre-launch signup event.
So listen to hear Russell Drop the Mic as he answers these questions.
Jul 3, 2017

Who know doughnuts could be so helpful…

On today’s episode Russell and his kids talk about why they like to go to Krispie Kreme doughnuts instead of some of the other doughnut shops. He also shares a story to relate why its good to show your customers behind the scenes of what you do. Here are some of the fun things you will hear in this episode:

  • What it is about Krispie Kreme Doughnuts that stands out from their competitors.
  • Why seeing how beer is made inspired a marketing guy to put it in their commercials.
  • And what Russell does to give his customers a similar experience.

So listen to Russell and his kids talk about this cool way to market your business.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Alright everybody, today we got a special episode. We just got done cleaning the church and then we went and got a prize for the kids. What was the prize we got guys?

Kids: Krispie Kreme Donuts and the hats.

Russell: Krispie Kreme Donuts, and the hats. We’re driving the new Funnel Hacker Jeep, which we have a camera mount in here. So now I can do Marketing In Your Car and Marketing Secrets while we’re driving and not have to worry about getting hit and dying.

Kids: Marketing in Your Jeep.

Russell: Marketing In the Jeep. I don’t know if you’ve seen it yet, if you haven’t go look on Snapchat or Facebook or whatever. It says Funnel Hacker on the side of it, it’s kind of fun. And we had Norah in here yesterday so that’s why Bowen’s sitting in Norah’s baby seat, because that’s the last seatbelt we had. So what should we tell those guys about today? We gotta tell them a marketing principle.

So let’s do this, I want to talk to you about why you like going to Krispie Kreme versus the other place?

Kids: Because they got good donuts.

Russell: Because they got good donuts. Why else?

Kids: It’s not very far away.

Russell: Okay, it’s close proximity. Why else?

Kids: We haven’t had breakfast.

Russell: You haven’t had breakfast yet. Are they healthy?

Kids: They have a good price. No, they’re not healthy. They have a good price, they’re not far away, and when you go in you see them make the donuts.

Russell: Oh, this is the key. This is the key, Ellie, that I want to talk about. So when you go into Krispie Kreme they let you, say it loud so they can hear you. Aiden said it too. So there’s a glass window and you can actually watch them make the donuts. The donuts come through on a conveyer belt, you see the frosting put on them, you see them dunk under the thing. First the dough right, drops them into the cooker thing that cooks them, then the frosting comes on top and they put the sprinkles. You get to watch the process.

Kids: They sometimes, rarely, give you free samples.

Russell: And sometimes they give you free samples for hanging out.

Alright so here’s the marketing lesson for all of you who are listening today. So Krispie Kreme does a really cool thing to make kids want to go to Krispie Kreme versus DK Donuts, Dunkin Donuts, all the donut places.

Kids: Dunkin Donuts is DK Donuts.

Russell: No DK is a small brand, Dunkin is a huge chain. Anyway, what Krispie Kreme does is allow you to watch the process, which is really interesting. Because my guess is most donut shops have the same process, yet……..You guys we gotta stay on point for the show. They’re right, DK has bunch of other options, sizes and varieties and Krispie Kremes are all the same thing. But the moral of this is that they let you watch the process of how it works.

I know I’m going to forget the story because I’m in the car with four kids going crazy. I’m going to forget it right now, but the message I know all my old school marketing buddies are making fun of me because I can’t remember the name and people or which book it was from. But there was a guy, who was actually a beer company and they were selling beer and this marketing guy came in to, I can’t remember now, this is blasphemy. I can’t remember the name of it.

I just hit a squirrel. I missed it. A squirrel went underneath the car. That was close.

Anyway, there was a marketing dude, he comes into the beer company and he’s trying to figure out the hook and angle and big idea of why everyone should give them money versus the other beer companies. And the marketing guy comes in and wants to see the process and how it all works and he goes in and watches these guys. He sees how they make the beer, I don’t know, I’m not a beer drinker. I’ve never drank so I have no idea how it actually works. But they showed how they made it. And the marketing guy was so fascinated. They’re like, “That’s how everybody makes beer.” And he’s like, “Yeah, but nobody else has seen this. Nobody else even knows this is how it all works. So I want to show that process.”

So he made a commercial and he actually showed the process of them making the beer and that became this huge campaign that blew up the company. So Krispie Kreme is the same way, they show the process. There’s a reason I do Funnel Friday every Friday, because I’m showing the process.

Kids:  You didn’t do it this Friday.

Russell: I didn’t do it this Friday. Good point. And Funnel Hacker TV and all these things, why am I doing that? Because I’m showing the process, I’m letting people see how I do it, how I consume the product. And the more they do, the more they see me drinking my own Kool Aid, the more likely they are to also drink said Kool Aid.

So the moral of the story from this Krispie Kreme episode for you guys is to let your audience see the process of how you do whatever you do. We are in the reality show era of the world and your audience wants to view what’s happening. That’s why I’m showing this right now, me and my beard in my car with my kids in their Krispie Kreme hats, and being annoyed at me. Bowen was telling me, “Your mustache is ugly dad, but your beard is cool.” He wants me to shave this.

Dallin: You have a mustache.

Russell: It’s kind of weird huh. I need to shave.

Dallin: I don’t know everything, never mind.

Aiden: I’m free ladies.

Russell: Aiden just said, “I’m free ladies.” You’re the coolest!

Dallin: What did he say?

Russell: He said, “I’m free ladies.” And jumped out of the car.

Dallin: You need to send this to me.

Russell: That was amazing. I love Aiden, that our little six year old, if you’re listening and not watching. If you’re watching on Marketingsecrets.com you just saw Aiden in his Krispie Kreme hat tell you….that was hilarious.

Dallin: Send this to me please.

Russell: The moral of the story, the reason why I’m doing this with my hair messed up and my beard, with my kids and our donuts….

Ellie: You have a beard?

Russell: Isn’t it sweet? You want to feel it, it’s really scruffy. It kind of hurts, I gotta shave it. The reason I’m showing you this stuff behind the scenes because I’m showing you my life. I’m showing you how we do what we do and that’s what draws people. If you read Expert Secrets, you know the goal is to draw people into you and your personality and all those kind of things. So draw them in you guys. Do it, open up your life a little. I know it’s scary sometimes. That’s what Instagram is for, your stories. Facebook Lives, podcasts, etc.

Dallin: The real moral of the story is that Aiden is a ladies’ man.

Russell: Aiden is the ladies man. Anyway, that’s the moral of today’s story. Does that sound good to you guys? With that said, thanks so much for tuning into marketing Secrets. If you have not read the Expert Secrets book go to expertsecrets.com. You should go there and read it because this is just one of those secrets that’s going to help you blow up your message.

Dallin: And if you haven’t read the first book too, read it.

Russell: What’s the first book called?

Dallin: Dot, I forgot what it’s called.

Russell: You’re close, Dotcom…

Dallin: Dotcom Secrets?

Russell: Yes, Dotcom Secrets and Expert Secrets. They should read them both right?

Dallin: Yeah.

Russell: Which one’s your favorite.

Dallin: I didn’t read it.

Russell: Anyway, appreciate you guys, thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you soon. Bye.

Jun 30, 2017

What was going through my mind when tipping at IHOP.

On today’s episode Russell talks about going out to breakfast with his daughter for her birthday and how watching the server work so hard to make a small wage made Russell wonder why he didn’t work somewhere that he could make more money, and how that relates to being an entrepreneur. Here are a few interesting things in this episode:

  • How Russell would increase his ticket sales if he were still a server.
  • How waiters increasing ticket sales relates to being an entrepreneur.
  • And why if you can’t be the cheapest in your industry, you should be the most expensive.

So listen to Russell’s awesome advice on how to increase your ticket sales and make more profit for yourself.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell. Welcome to Marketing Secrets while I’m in my car. This is a flashback from a podcast earlier. I’m doing this right now because, first off, I hung out with Justin Williams last weekend and he yelled at me, “you used to do podcasts every single week, three or four times a week. But now that you’re not in your car, you’re not doing them very often.” I’m like, crap he’s right.

I’m driving to get my haircut today because it’s huge. I figured out how to mount this thing in my car so I can do it while driving, so nobody yells at me. That’s what actually happened, I was doing the podcast with the camera, when I did marketing in your car with my phone nobody ever yelled at me. But when they saw me on video I got yelled at by everybody, so I stopped doing it that way. But now that it’s mounted up I can drive and talk and not even pay attention to you guys. No yelling at me, alright. That’s the deal.

Alright, so with that said, today is a cool day for a couple of reasons. Number one, it’s my daughter’s ten year old birthday, which is insanely cool. So this morning, I’m actually flying out today, so this morning I had a chance to go and take her out to breakfast. Her breakfast of choice was IHop, and I was like, “Come on, we can take you to Waffle Me Up or any of these cool places.” and she was like, “No, I want IHop.” As we’re driving there I’m like, “There’s only two kinds of people that like IHop, Ellie.” And she’s like, “Who are they?” and I was like, “Grandma’s and little kids. Watch when we get there how many grandma’s are there.” So we got in there and we counted and there was 13 or 14 grandmas in there and then me and her. So I was like, that’s it. It was kind of funny.

Anyway, that was really fun, and then she had a birthday party. So I went and raced and got her a bike this morning and took it to the birthday party, and I’m actually heading to get my haircut because I’m flying out to Utah today, two cool things happening in Utah. Number one is the Harmon Brothers are making our viral video. They actually started filming it today, and to be completely honest, it’s kind of killing me. I wish I was there, I want to be watching it. But I couldn’t today, so I’m flying down there tomorrow to catch some behind the scenes footage and all that kind of stuff for our Funnel Hacker TV show.  So I’ll be flying down there, it’s gonna be really cool.

And the second cool thing, is I’m actually going to a meeting with Timothy Ballard, who is the dude who runs Operation Underground Railroad, which is a charity or organization, I don’t know exactly what it is, but they help save kids who have been abducted and put into sex laboring. So we’re going to be  helping build funnels and helping build that whole mission. It’s a passion project I’m really excited for. That’s what’s happening on this trip. So if you’re watching Funnel Hacker TV you’ll see the behind the scenes of that stuff. If not, go to funnelhacker.tv and go hang out with us over there too. There’s a lot of fun stuff happening.

Alright my message for you guys today, and this is something that I don’t know why more people don’t think about this, but it’s important. We went to IHop today, as you know. My daughter ordered the pancake with the fluffies and the sprinkles, there were sprinkles on it, and then bacon and an egg. Her cost is like $3 or something like that, then I go and order scrambled eggs, a side of bacon, a side of avocado, because that fits in my macros for all you healthy nerds. So our bill was like $12. And I look at the server and the server is running around, grabbing our stuff and his and grabbing waters and grabbing A1, because I love putting A1 on eggs, if you haven’t tried it, it’s insanely good. I did it one time because I had steak and eggs, and I put A1 on the steak and some of it spilled on the eggs and I ate it that way. I was like, this is an egg topping, not for steaks. So if you haven’t had A1 on your scrambled eggs yet, you should totally try it. It’s amazing.

Anyway, I digress. Where was I going with this whole thing? So the server is running around frantic, I get the bill at the end of it and I look at it, and it’s  like $12.43 or something. As someone who tips, and I’m a good tipper, so I didn’t tip him that much, I left a lot more money than that. So if I were to say, we’ll give him 10% of that, means he earned $1.25. That’s what he made from me, for all his efforts. Or if I do 15% it’s like what $2, if I do 30% it’s $3. So that’s what most people do. Especially, the grandmas at IHop, they have their little calculators out and figuring out, “Okay, I owe him $1.13.” and give exactly the tip, but if you’re bad they’re going to give you 5%, if you’re okay you get 10, if you’re great you get 15. That’s how it works.

I’m looking at this, and the server was a young dude, and I’m like, “Man, he’s killing himself for this little thing.” And I was just in the office before I headed to get my haircut, which now I’m stuck in traffic and my haircuts in 3 minutes and if I miss it I’m going to go crazy. So I was talking to them, “Look, if that dude instead of getting a job at IHop where the average ticket is $12. If you’re doing the same work but got a job at a steakhouse or a sushi place where the average ticket is like $50-$100, he’d do the exact same amount of work and get way more money.” Because people tip off a percentage. So if my bill is $12, you’re getting 1.20, that’s 10%. If it’s $112, you’re getting $10, or whatever the math is, for the exact same amount of effort.

So the moral of the story is if you’re serving tables, go and sell more expensive stuff, because you are getting paid a percentage of the ticket price. So you gotta sell the most expensive thing. That’s why as a Mormon when I go and I go to restaurants and they always try to sell you alcohol because alcohol has a huge profit margin, it’s big ticket. And they can get you to buy a lot more stuff. So we never buy the alcohol and those other Mormons who are out there know, if you’re at a nice restaurant, and you don’t order alcohol, they don’t treat you as good, because they’re like, “Crap.”

So I always tell people when they ask me, “What do you want to drink?” I’m like, “Oh we don’t drink, but don’t worry, we tip really, really good.” Because I want them to know, I don’t want them to treat me like crap because I didn’t drink because my ticket price is going to be smaller. Good server’s understand that. I warn them ahead of time, I’m a really, really good tipper. I tip 30, 40, 50% sometimes 100%. I’m a really good tipper as long as you treat me good. If you treat me bad, I’m still a good tipper, but I’m a great tipper if you treat me good.

So kind of the thought, if you’re serving tables, you gotta be selling the highest ticket thing, and if I was serving tables again, which is the only job I had for real is serving tables, and I really liked it. It’s all about that, ticket price. If I were a server today, I would have people order dessert first because most of the time at the end of the meal you’re not hungry anymore. If you’re not hungry anymore you’re not going to buy dessert. So then my ticket price went down, so my tip just shrunk.

So I’d be going ahead of time like, “Look, a lot of people at the end of the meal are full, I’m going to give you a 10% discount if you order dessert first.” I would do that because it would increase the ticket price. Everyone wants dessert when you go in, but when you’re offered it, it’s hard to eat it because you’re so full.

Number two, think about Olive Garden. They started doing this a little while ago and it was brilliant. After you’re done eating they say, “Hey, what would you like to order for tomorrow?” And they had a second meal. So you’d order a second meal to take home and eat the next day. Now you just doubled your ticket price because you sold them two meals instead of one. IF I were serving tables today, the first thing I would be doing is offering dessert, take them their meal and at the end of the meal be like, “That was good, huh? I know you guys aren’t going to be coming back tomorrow, but if you want you can order off the menu right now and I’ll go package it up and you can have it tomorrow as well.” And I don’t know what percentage take it, but I know there’s a big percentage that take the second meal and now I just doubled my ticket price. And the tip will be based on the ticket price, not based on what they ate while they were sitting there.

So I’d be thinking, increased value, how can I increase my ticket? So that’s if I was serving tables again. Obviously I’m not serving tables, I’m serving entrepreneurs and a lot of them. But guess what I’m thinking, the same thing. It’s the same stuff. I know I get paid based on a percentage of what our growth is. As the entrepreneur in the company the way that I make my money, I do have a salary, because I think you legally have to do that, however that works, you can do all the W2’s and all that techie, nerdy tax stuff. But then the rest of my payment comes from a percentage of profit share. The more profit, the more I get to share. So I’m always thinking how can I increase my profit share? How can decrease costs? How can I increase the ticket value? How can I sell more expensive stuff? How can I sell more things?

And that’s what my mind said, because I know I get paid a certain percentage of what I get people to consume. So I need to get people to consume. Same way you do it if you’re at a restaurant. And what’s interesting is, a lot of time, speaking to you right now, most of us we undervalue what we do. We try to be the discount leader because that’s what we’re used to doing.

So a lot of times we put our own pricing values on other people. Like I wouldn’t may $1000 for this, so you won’t sell it for $1000. You don’t understand, that’s worth it for somebody else. So don’t try to discount your prices. So a lot of times that’s what we do, we try to discount our prices, lower ticket. We’re trying to go back to IHop and sell even though the money we make as entrepreneurs is based on the ticket price. So the bigger the ticket price, the bigger money you make. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, Dan Kennedy told me this.

“There’s no strategic advantage to being the second lowest price leader in your market.” So if you can’t be Walmart, there’s no strategic advantage of being like, “Walmart’s the cheapest, and we’re the second cheapest.” Because then you look like an idiot. There’s not strategic advantage whatsoever. But there is a huge strategic advantage of being like, “I am the most expensive guy in my market.” So if you can’t be the lowest, then be the most. Don’t be the dude’s in the middle. Because there’s no, it just doesn’t work that way.

So I want you guys to think about that. Because as entrepreneurs, you’re just like the server. You’re serving customers, serving audiences, and you get paid based on the ticket price of what people are spending. That’s why funnels are important. If I just sold people my free book and that was it, guess where I would be right now. I’d be broke. I did a Facebook Live yesterday showing 3 funnels we had inside of our book launch. Now, when all is said and done, when our book launch was over, we did over $3 million dollars in collected revenue. Obviously, that wasn’t net, that was collected gross.

What’s funny, I look at all these people who do these big product launches. $2, $3, $5,000 product launches, most of them are happing making a million to three million dollars. We did the same thing and we were giving away a free book. How? It’s because I’m just like the server. I offer dessert first and I had upsells and I offered a second meal. I did all these kind of things because I’m trying to increase the ticket price. Because that’s how I get fed as an entrepreneur. Plus it gives me the ability to serve that audience better.

The waiter that lets you order dessert ahead of time, so you still get it. The server who lets you order food and take it home, he’s serving you at a higher level. That’s why he gets paid more. He knows how to increase the ticket price, but he’s able to make the restaurant more revenue, but second off gives you a better experience. You get to have a great meal twice. Your wife doesn’t cook tomorrow, or whatever that might be. Maybe it’s you cooking, or whatever. But it all comes down to that.

That’s the moral of today’s story. I hope that helps some of you guys. I’m sure some of you guys are freaking out trying to be the cheapest possible person. And it doesn’t always work that way. Obviously you gotta look at what the market will bear, but like I said, it’s way better to be the most expensive than the cheapest.

So there you go. I’m here, I’m going to get my haircut. I’m only 4 minutes late, hopefully she didn’t cancel my appointment because I gotta get rid of this thing before I hop on a plane or I’m going to be super embarrassed. Thanks everybody for listening. If you would like to see the video version of this, go to marketingsecrets.com and you can watch the video there. Or if you’re watching the video version, go over to iTunes and subscribe to the podcast, we’re at 360 or 70 episodes now. So come hang out with us there. A lot of fun stuff happened and a lot of things you’ve missed that I want to make sure you get. With that said, thanks everybody, we’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye.

Jun 22, 2017

Why having resources will actually hurt you as an entrepreneur and how to become more resourceful.

On today’s episode Russell comes to you from his favorite place on Earth, Pirates Cove. He gives a mini tour of the premises and talks about how he was able to afford the $100,000 that it took to rent it by being resourceful. Here are some of the cool things in this episode:

  • Find out how Russell was introduced to Pirates Cove and what he had to do to be able to afford to initially bring his family and friends there.
  • Find out the difference between having resources and being resourceful. They sound similar, but they are not the same.
  • And hear a rarely told story of how Russell was able to be resourceful early in his career to be able to afford to make his first idea come to fruition.

So listen up and enjoy as Russell talks about how he was able to be resourceful enough to be at Pirates Cove without spending a single penny.

---Transcript---

Hey Everyone, this is Russell. I want to welcome you to the Marketing Secrets podcast happening today from Pirates Cove.

Alright everyone, if you’re watching the video of this, you can see I’m at the most ridiculous place on earth. If you’re listening to this, go to marketingsecrets.com and actually watch the video. I’m right now at a place called Pirates Cove, at a mastermind group. It’s insane.

See behind me, these are my kids swinging on the ropes and having fun in the water and a bunch of other amazing things. This is pretty much the craziest place I’ve ever been. It’s my favorite place on earth. Some of the back story about Pirates Cove. Again, those of you watching can see some of the scenery of this place, but basically, the back story when my twins, which this is Bowen, one of my twins right here, when they were about 6 months old, we were speaking at an event here in Las Vegas, which is where Pirates Cove is at. One of my friends had come to this place and kind of told stories about how amazing it was. He started explaining, and no matter how cool he made it sound, you’re like, “That sounds cool.” He’s like, “No you guys, you have to see it. I’m going to take you and we’re going to try to find it.”

So we started driving around, all over Las Vegas, all over Boulder City, trying to find this place called Pirates Cove, and we couldn’t find it anywhere. So we gave up and went out to eat in Boulder City, and we’re sitting there and all the sudden the owner of Pirates Cove walked out and my buddy’s like, “That’s the owner.” So we walked up to him, “hey you don’t know us, but I’ve been to Pirates Cove, it would be super cool if you could let us see it.” The guy was so cool and was like, “come on up.” And he gave us swimming suits and we swam the entire day. Like I said, Bowen here was only 6 months old, he was in diapers, we had the most amazing time ever.

And if you see this place, it’s basically on the side of this mountain, it’s a private residence, there’s 5 houses on it, there’s waterslides, in fact, I’ll take you guys up on the video so you can see the top. There’s a kid waterslide and a really cool kid pool, and then up at the top there is this huge waterslide that’s for adults, that is crazy. You go down this huge slide and then it enters into the middle of the part, there’s a huge boat, and a pirate mast, you actually jump off it. In fact, on Funnel Hacker TV you can see some video of me jumping off it. It’s pretty crazy.

So I’ll keep showing you as I’m walking around. I want to teach you guys a really cool lesson. So after we came I was like, “I want to rent this.” I want to take my family here and show everybody. So the next year we called the guy up and we were like, “We want to rent Pirates Cove, how much would that cost.” And he was like, “Oh it’s $10,000 a day with a weeklong minimum.” It was $70 or 80 thousand dollars. I was like, what? I didn’t have that kind of money at the time. I was like, “gah. But I really want to rent pirates cove, there’s gotta be a way I can rent this and show my family and my kids and experience this again.”

So the wheels in my head started spinning. And again, this comes down to Robert Kiyosaki 101. Poor people say, “I can’t afford that.” Rich people think, “How can I afford that? What can I do to be able to afford that?” So I’m thinking what do I gotta do to make $70,000 to rent this place, but obviously catering and everything else. I was like for me to do that, it’s going to cost a lot of money. I’m going to need almost a hundred grand to do it. So I was like, okay what if I found a whole bunch of cool people and invited them to come to this thing and I sold tickets to it?

So that was the idea, so what we did is basically. We went and I put out a little page and said, “10 people pay $10,000, and that’s $100,000 and covers the cost of the entire mastermind group and then we can rent it. We’ll just have a really good time.” We’ll have for it half the week for all the mastermind and when the mastermind is over, we’ll still have it for 2 or 3 days at the end, then we’ll invite my family members, at the time a bunch of employees, things like that. And that was kind of the game plan. We did it and it worked and it was amazing.

So that was the first time I had a chance to experience Pirates Cove for a whole week. Since then we’ve done it, I think this is the fourth time we’ve done it. We did it 3 years in a row then we took off 4 or 5 years, because it’s a lot of work as well. And then this year we decided to do it again. So I’m here right now with 10 entrepreneurs and we’re just having the most amazing mastermind meetings during the day when it’s 116 degrees out here. Then at night we’re playing and having fun. Our kids are here and it’s insanely cool. So that’s happening right now at Pirates Cove. Again, if you want to see some visuals of this place, go to Marketingsecrets.com and watch the video.

But the lesson I want to tell you guys is this, and hopefully you kind of got a little piece of the lesson. It comes back to what Robert Kiyosaki said, poor people say, “I can’t afford that.” Where rich people think, “How can I afford that?” So I couldn’t afford this place, I couldn’t afford to rent it, but I wanted to experience it and I wanted other people to experience it. So I had to starts thinking outside the box. What do I need to do to be able to afford that? How do I get other people to help chip in so we can actually experience this and make it an amazing thing?

In fact, a lot of my early joint venture partnerships came from people I invited to Pirates Cove. I say, you take someone to Pirates Cove, they think you’re pretty cool afterwards, which helped. I was trying to build relationships and grow companies and things like that. But for you, what I want you thinking about, a lot of times, as an entrepreneur, I’m not telling you to go rent Pirates Cove and do something crazy like that. But a lot of times the reason why entrepreneurs aren’t successful in business is because they have this weird resource problem. “Ah, Russell I don’t have the resources, the time, the talents.” It’s all I have don’t the resources. You have to understand that entrepreneurship is not about having resources. That’s a fallacy, it’s incorrect.

Entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs not because they have resources, but because they’re resourceful. Sounds very similar, but it’s different. They’re resourceful.  I was resourceful, I had to think outside the box. How can I create this thing? A bunch of you guys have heard my rant many time about venture capitalists. I don’t feel real entrepreneurs take VC, because they’re coming in saying, “ I don’t have the resources, let me go ask somebody to give me money, then I’ll have resources to go and build something.” By definition you doing that, you’re not an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are resourceful, they look at things and say, “how can I afford that?” They look at something and say, “I don’t have the resources, I have to be resourceful, I have to think of other ways to do it.”

My very first thing I ever created, Mark Joyner, who is my first mentor and one of the coolest people I’ve ever met. Here’s my Ellie, she’s here hanging out too. You want to say hi? You having fun? I’m almost done, babe.

Okay, so when he kind of retired from the internet marketing, coaching business, he put out a thing called The Farewell Package, and he sold it and I bought it. And at the time I had no resources, I paid a thousand bucks for this course and it was all the money we had and my credit card was maxed out afterwards, and I had no resources. I was like, okay everything I bought from Mark Joyner, I needed to hire programmers and developers to be able to execute and actually create that thing, but I didn’t have the resources. I’m like, “Crap, what am I going to do? I don’t have the resources to create it.” I’m like, I’m an entrepreneur and entrepreneurs are resourceful. So I gotta be resourceful, what should I do?

I was like, okay, I have ideas. I know if I did have money, what I would do. So I was like, this is what I would create if I did have money. I wrote it out and went, at the time we had this little forum with everyone who had purchased his product. I was like, “Look guys, I bought this thing with the last of my money, I’m completely broke. But I know what I would do if I had the money I would create this thing.” And I pitched everyone on this thing. I was like, “The deal is, I’m broke. I have no resources, but I am very resourceful. And I know a lot of you guys are in the same situation, so my question for you is how many of you guys would like to partner up together and we pool our resources and become resourceful and work together.” And I posted that and said, “I gotta a quote and it costs about $5000 to build this idea I have. I got 0 dollars, so I need 50 of you guys to give me $100 and we can create something from our resources, become resources.”

And I had 120-130 people like, “I’ll do it, I’m in.” all these people saying, “I’ll donate $100 to this thing, to be a part of it.” And I was like, “cool.” So I collected all my, I ended up, I had 120 people say they would and then as it often happens, only 55 or something actually gave the hundred bucks. So it was $5,500 that I suddenly had in my paypal account and everyone bought together this package and then I went and took the money and hired the development team and they started creating it and that’s how I launched my first viral website. A lot of you guys don’t know that story. I don’t tell it very often.

But it was about not the resource, I had 0 resources. All I had was a credit card with a $1000 bill on it, because that’s what I paid to buy his course and 0 dollars. I didn’t have a job, I was wrestling. So I was making exactly 0 dollars a month, 0 dollars a year. And my wife was making $9.50 an hour, so that was our resources and now I have a thousand dollars on my credit card and I was freaking out because I don’t know how to pay a thousand dollars.

So luckily I was resourceful and I found people that allowed the funding from other people who wanted to be a part of this project, we launched it and started building a list, used that to launch the next product and on and on and on and here we are 15 years later at Pirates Cove with 10 of the most amazing entrepreneurs in the world, and I’m here with my family and my friends, a bunch of my employees and my partners are coming and I didn’t pay a penny to be here. Because I was resourceful.

So for you, I want you guys to understand that’s why we’re entrepreneurs, we are resourceful. You are resourceful. All you gotta do is stop trying to ask people for money to fund your idea, and just start creating, being resourceful. What can I do? How can I get other people involved and get other people to believe in my vision. When you start learning how to sell, people will come to you and you can create cool things. So there is my message for tonight. Those of you guys who guys who are watching the visuals behind me, hopefully you had a cool little glimpse of Pirates Cove. We’ve got a couple of Funnel Hacker TV episodes coming out that will show the craziness. But hopefully you guys enjoyed this and you start thinking about that in your business and your life. It’s not just business, it’s all aspects of life. How do you be resourceful? You rarely will have the resources you need to get started. IF you’re resourceful you can do it. So that’s what I got. I’m out of here you guys. I’m going to go get my swimsuit on and I’m going to jump in the water, bye everybody.

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