Are you the type of person who finds problems or are you the type of person who finds answers? Find out who you are on today’s exciting episode!
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Hey, everyone. This is Russell, and I want to welcome you to a very late night “Marketing in Your Car”.
It is currently 1:14 in the morning, and it’s funny. I volunteered at our church to lock up the building this week, and I completely forgot [laughs]. I was about to go to bed, and all of the sudden it popped into my head, so I’m driving to the church to go lock up. I thought I would jump on the phone and leave you guys all a message.
Today was the first day back after being gone for two weeks, which is kind of stressful. I don’t know – our business runs well, but when you get back there’re all of these little fires that are on fire when you come back, and you’ve got to figure out how to put the fires out and what to do, and there’re so many questions. You have this stuff you want to get done. You want to move forward, but all of this reactive stuff keeps pulling you back and pulling you back. I’m sure you guys have felt that.
It’s funny, because I still remember when my wife and I were engaged. I was maybe twenty-one or twenty-two at the time, and I was starting this business. I thought I was so cool. I had my laptop, and I was selling stuff on eBay. I had a website, and I probably had two customers total, maybe [laughs]. I might not even have been that lucky, but I remember on our honeymoon, every day I’d have to turn on my laptop and check my e-mails and make sure customer support had been handled. I didn’t want my business to collapse, and it makes me laugh so hard now. I could have not e-mailed those two customers back for that whole week, and it probably would have been a smart idea.
But I digress, so I’ll come back to what I was talking about. I’m sure most of you guys who own your own business have that. You leave for a little bit, and you come back, and it’s just like you have to spend a day or two putting out all of these fires. Today for us, we specifically had a lot of stuff. I’m outside, and its 1:14 in the morning, so if I get mugged or something, we’re going to catch it live on the podcast [laughs], so all of you faithful marketers in your cars are going to be hanging out. Okay, the first door’s locked.
Anyway, so basically, I came back, and our supplement has been blowing up. I’ve talked about this during the podcasts. It’s literally just going crazy. We can’t even keep up with it. Literally, if we wouldn’t have run out of inventory a little while ago [laughs], we probably would have passed a million dollars in sales this month, which is crazy. It’s just growing and growing, and it’s like a wildfire. We can’t put it down. The immediate buyers, we had to cut them down to a fourth of what they were spending, and they’re still spending like crazy. We’re trying to order new supplements and import the ingredients from all over the country. The growing season’s over, and they don’t have enough in stock of the things we need. It’s just issue after issue after issue, and problem after problem [laughs].
We’re behind on support, and we’ve got two full-time support people and they’re still so far behind, we have to hire another two or three or four more on top of that. We’re putting out ads, and we’re trying to hire people. You have people that are applying for ads. We have an ad out there that’s pretty good, that gets them to want to. In theory, it gets them to. We make them jump through a bunch of hoops and do a bunch of stuff. They have to apply, and we have to get good people.
We ended up getting ten or fifteen good people that actually went through all of the hoops that we put out there and applied. We called them back, and out of everyone, only two people called us back. It’s just amazing how people, humans – disappoint me [laughs] over and over and over again. They just don’t do stuff. Its like, “If you need a job, then return the call, or...” I don’t know – just whatever.
So all of these kinds of things are happening, and then we’ve got our mini call center that we’ve set up, and they need more leads, and these other leads they don’t like. We need a new funnel. Our funnel has been stale because we’ve been driving so much traffic to it. It’s been seen by all of the audiences on Facebook. It’s been worn out. We need new leads for it. It’s just thing after thing.
Click Funnels is almost about to launch. We found out that there’s an error here, and we’ve got this thing here, and the day we were planning on launching, it turns out everyone on our team’s out of town. Literally, just all of these issues today – thing after thing, and by the end of the day, I have this little couch by my desk, and at the end of the day, I laid down on it, and I felt this overwhelming feeling. I was like, “Man, I’ve made more choices in the last eight hours than I typically make in a year,” and all of them are big choices.
I think it was Dan Kennedy who said that every six months or every forty-five days or something, that an entrepreneur’s going to make a decision that will make or break their business. I felt like today, I made enough decisions for our entire years’ worth of stuff [laughs]. I was lying on the couch, and I was overwhelmed. It was like, “Ugh, I’m so far behind.” I’m sure you guys have felt that, right? It made me think about – well not at first. At first I just felt overwhelmed. I had a sick feeling. My wife texted me and she said, “Are you coming home for dinner?” and I was like, “Yes, I need to get out of here. I need to just get away from it.” So I got away from it for a while. I ate some dinner. We may or may not have watched “The Bachelorette” tonight, which may or may not be my favorite show [laughs]. I kind of passed out during it a little bit, because I was pretty beat up and tired, and I fell asleep for a little bit.
Then I woke back up, and when I woke back up, I had some ideas. I contacted one guy, and I asked him questions. I got a whole bunch of ideas for the supplement, like how to fix that one. My buddy just gave me a bunch of some really good stuff from his experience. And then all of the sudden, I was just lying there, and this other idea just popped in to my head about how we could solve the application problem for our call center, and all of these things started coming, and I’m like, "Hey, Collette, I've got to go back to work. I’ve got to get all of this stuff implemented quickly, before everyone else wakes up in the morning,” and so I went back into the office until about 12:30, and I literally got most of the issues all lined out with all of the stuff I was stressing out about and all of the issues. My brain just needed a little reboot, and then I was ready to go back in and answer the rest of the questions and solve the problems, and now I feel like most of the problems are solved.
Now by tomorrow, I’ll go in, which tomorrow’s the fun day, because I’ve got lifting. I’m lifting weights in probably four hours from now, and I’ll have jiu jitsu practice tomorrow. It should be a lot of fun, but anyway tomorrow I’m going to go in and just do normal stuff, but it made me think tonight about something my dad told me, and I hope I don’t offend anyone with this. That’s not my intention. The sprinklers are on, so hopefully you guys can still hear me. So I don’t want to offend anybody, but my dad told me something when I was a kid, and my dad is an entrepreneur like me, and he had a bunch of his own little businesses and stuff that he did, and I don’t remember the situation when he told me, but I remember it had a big impact on me. He said, “Russell, there’re two kinds of people in this world. There're people who find problems, and there’re people who find the answers. You always want to be the latter.”
That had a big, profound impact on me, and I started thinking about that in all areas of my life, actually. I was thinking about wrestling. I was thinking about my family. I was thinking about business, thinking about our coaching programs, thinking about everything. There are two types of people. People who find the problems, and people who find the answers to the problems, and I was thinking about how, not all of them, but a lot of the employees on my team are people who find problems. They find a problem. If they have a problem, they come to you with it and say, “I found a problem. I found a problem,” and they just don’t find the answer.
There are a couple of guys on my team that are amazing people at finding answers. One of them who I’ll mention is this guy named John Parkes, on my team and one of the neatest people I’ve ever met in my life. I watched him today, because he gets the brunt of the problem people. They go to him first before they come to me. He has the major job of solving most of the problems. People come to him with all sorts of questions, and he finds them answers. He’s able to think about it, and find an answer. He’s a great person at finding answers.
It’s interesting. I’ve done this experiment over the years with people when they ask me questions, just to see. I think I heard Tony Robbins do it the first time. That’s probably where I got it from. People would ask him something. They would ask him a question, and he would say, “Well what do you think?” and they’d go, “Well, I don’t know the answer.” He’d say, “Well if you did know the answer, what do you think it would be?” The person would almost always give the correct answer afterwards, and so I’ve done that sometimes in the past. It’s interesting that most people can solve their own problems just by asking, “Well what do you think the answer would be if this was you?” and magically they can go, and they can answer these problems.
I think all of us have the ability to be the person that finds the answer, but for whatever reason, we’re nervous, or we like that crutch, or we have this thing where we always want to put it on somebody else. The person who’s willing to find the answers becomes the leader in every situation. In wrestling, I became a leader because people brought me problems and I found answers. In business, I’ve become a leader because of that as well. I look at our coaching program, and it’s interesting – a lot of the calls I do with our students – they come, and they’ve got an issue, and most of the time, they know the answer, and they just want me to tell them that they’re right. It’s just interesting how much people need that validation.
I think for you guys that are listening to this, think about yourself. Which kind of person are you right now? Are you the kind of person who finds the problem, or are you the kind of person who finds the answer? If you’re really the person that’s going to find the problem, I think the fastest way you can get a pay raise, or get more friends, or a bigger following, or whatever that thing is, is you’ve got to shift to the other kind of person, and I know that the answer’s there. When I hear some of our support people come and ask John questions, I know they know the answer, but they want the validation. They want him to answer it for them, because they don’t want to mess up. They don’t want to get in trouble, and they want somebody else to blame if something goes wrong, but if you’re willing to step into that role and be that person, and be the one who’s taking the brunt of the responsibility on your shoulders and if it’s wrong then you take it, you will go a lot further in this life.
That’s for sure, so that’s my message for tonight, and those of you who are entrepreneurs who have those days like I had today where it’s hard and you get beat down and you just want to lay down and cry for a while, just know that it’s okay. Lay down. Take a little nap. Watch The Bachelorette or whatever show it is that you need to, but then get back up and get back to work and solve your problems and make it happen. For all of you guys, focus on that. Focus on shifting from being someone who finds problems to somebody who finds the answers, and as soon as you do that, it will change everything around you.
That is it. I’m home. It’s 1:26 in the morning. I am up in four and a half hours to life weights. [laughs] I hope I don’t pass out. Hopefully something I said made a lot of sense. I’m pretty tired, so I’m not really sure, but I appreciate you guys listening in. I hope you enjoyed the podcast, and I will talk to you all again soon. Thanks, guys.