What I learned from WWF, Disney, and Marvel about creating your own universe, so you can better serve your customers.
On this episode Russell talks about legends in marketing and wrestling that he has surpassed. He also explains why it is important to create a universe inside your company. Here are some super cool things you will hear in today’s episode:
So listen here to find out how Russell has surpassed a few legends and how he’s been able to build his own universe inside of Clickfunnels.
---Transcript---
Hey, what’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, tonight on the Marketing Secrets podcast I want to talk to you about creating your very own universe.
Hey everyone, I’m not sure if you listened to yesterday’s podcast but I recorded that like 5 minutes ago, and I’m still walking around the track and I just got excited about another idea that I want to share with you. So here we are.
So today when I was at my kid’s field day, all day, boiling in the sun I was listening to Dan Kennedy and man, I just love listening to Dan Kennedy’s stuff. Of all the marketing, of all the people I study, he’s the one I most consistently go back to. So take that for what it’s worth, I don’t know why. I think he is the most entertaining, he always stimulates my brain with these new ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and patterns, it’s really cool.
One thing that was interesting, this is kind of a tangent, hope you don’t mind. It’s funny, you know when you learn about legends, and there’s this legend and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, this person is amazing.” After I gave Dan Kennedy, this huge, talked about how great he is, now I’m going to kind of tear him down accidentally. I don’t mean to, he’s still the man.
But it’s so funny, for example in the wrestling world, the greatest wrestler, the legend is Dan Gable. He’s like the Michael Jordan of our sport. He went through high school and college and didn’t lose any match. And his last match his senior in college, he lost it. And then he became so obsessed with that he started training again and ended up three years later winning a gold medal in the Olympics, and what’s crazy about it is not a single person scored on him in the Olympics. In fact, before going to the Olympics the Russians were like, “We’re going to create an athlete specifically designed to beat Dan Gable.” They just wanted to beat the American’s so bad.
That was the whole goal of the Russian team, “Let’s beat Dan Gable.” Which was crazy. And they, as legend goes Dan would work out for about 7 hours a day here in the states and then he’d have to go to bed at night. And then he knew as he was going to bed at night that the sun was rising in the Soviet Union, that the Russians were training and he couldn’t handle that, so he’d wake up at night and he’d go out and run at night because he didn’t want to be laying on his back sleeping while the Russians were training, which is so many cool metaphors.
So Dan is the man, he is the legend, he is wrestling. But what’s interesting now, you fast forward, and I’m actually going to give Dan credit for this. So Dan brought his style of wrestling to Iowa, the Hawkeyes, made the Hawkeyes the dominant team forever and everyone rose up to the Hawkeye level. And I look at wrestling today, it was built off the shoulders of Dan Gable. It’s pretty cool to watch.
But the other day I went back and I watched some of Dan Gable’s wrestling matches, because now we have YouTube and everything is archived, it’s so cool. I’m watching Dan Gable’s wrestling match, again, the legend, the Michael Jordan of wrestling, the greatest of all time. I’m watching these matches, in fact, I watched the match he lost his senior year in college. I’m watching this match and I’m like, this feels like a high school JV wrestling match. The level that we compete at today as a country is insane. It’s way better.
Most people nowadays could go back and would have competed against Gable and they would have destroyed him in his prime. But he was the legend and he pushed the sport forward and now you look at you know, fast forward however many, 40 years later and because of his influence this whole things has grown. But if you look at him pound for pound versus the dudes who win the NCA pound for pound, they would destroy Gable. It wouldn’t even be close.
So I tell you this story because I had this funny thing. When I was learning the public speaking world, I studied Kennedy. Kennedy would tell these stories, him going to these Peter Lowe events, there’d be 20 thousand people in the stadium, they’d be selling stuff, and that’s where I got my inspiration. That’s where I started studying and learning and where I mastered stage presenting because I wanted to be like Dan Kennedy, which is insane.
I studied him forever, and I studied all the people he trained. That’s my whole foundation of where Perfect Webinar and Expert Secrets book and all this stuff that I teach comes from. Fast forward to 3 or 4 months ago and I’m speaking at Grant Cardone’s 10x event and there’s 9 thousand people in the room. I remember thinking, I bet this is what it was like when Kennedy spoke at the old Peter Lowe events when there was 20 or 30 thousand people in the stadium. Can you imagine, they would do that once a month around different parts of the country. They were on these circuits and they were speaking and I was like, he must have made so much money.
I did my pitch, made $3 million dollars in 90 minutes and I’m just like, I am experiencing a little bit of what Dan Kennedy experienced. And then what’s crazy, it’s so crazy. So I’m listening to him today in his training course and he’s talking about Peter Lowe events again, and I’m boom, pulled back a decade ago when I was first learning about stage presenting and all this stuff, and what was crazy, as he’s telling these stories and he’s talking about how much money he would make at a Peter Lowe event, he said, “We’d have 20 thousand people in the room, I knew exactly how much money I would make. I would average from a typical stage presentation in that room, I would walk away with $100,000 in my pocket.”
I was like, “Wait, what?” which means he would make $250,000 or so, he’d get half of it, that’s the way the speaking world works. He’d walk away with 100,000 and take that home every single time. He’s like, “I’d speak twice a week, sometimes. But at least once a month, but I was making over a million bucks a year as a speaker.” I was like, “What?” This comes back to my Dan Gable. I’m like, “Dan Gable, if I would have lived when you lived and I was as good as I was today, I could have beat you at a wrestling match. I could have beat Dan Gable, the legend. How crazy is that.”
Now I’m looking at this and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I’ve literally beat the Dan Gable of the marketing world. I beat Dan Kennedy. I did more in 90 minutes than he did in an entire year at the Peter Lowe events, speaking at 20 thousand plus persons multiple times throughout the year.” Anyway, it just blew my mind.
So that’s one of those weird things, but if you look at it like, if it wasn’t for Dan Kennedy’s influence on me and his influence on other speakers that I learned from, this whole thing, he evolved the entire thing to put it where it’s at today. But I bet you right now, especially after going back and looking at, recently Dan’s old presentations and old pitches, my guess is any of you guys that master the perfect webinar could out sell Dan without even blinking. In fact, I would bet a lot of money on that.
So it’s fascinating. I don’t know why I went on that rant for the last 6 ½ minutes, but I thought it was interesting. So there you go. So let me praise Dan again now, because he is the man. I’m talking about both Dan Gable, in case he listens to this someday, and he’s like, “Russell, you’re a punk.” No Dan, you are the man. So please, all bow to the legend Dan Gable, you are the man, I love you. Same with Dan Kennedy, so I’m going to talk about Kennedy though. Like I just said, of all the guys that I study, it always comes back to him, he’s the one I study and learn from, I love it.
In the course I was going through today, which is crazy, 5 hours of being out in the sun on 1 ½ times speed, which means I got like 8 hours of Kennedy smushed in my brain today, which was really, really fun. And a bunch of cool things wrapped around that I could share. I could do days worth of podcasts on the cool stuff I learned, but this is the one that was really, really fascinating.
So he was talking about companies, and he spent a lot of time talking about Disney and about their enterprise and how Disney works. How it was created, how it was crafted, how they built these universes and inside there’s characters and there’s storylines and there’s all these things happening inside the context of this universe that Disney’s created. Then he started talking about Jim McMahon, the WWF, talking about this universe. There’s opponents and people and fans and merchandise, he built this entire universe. There’s good guys, there’s bad guys, and people want to live in and experience this universe.
Then I started thinking about WWF, excuse me not WWF, the MMA. Looking at that whole world that Dana White created. It’s this whole universe. He started talking about other ones, he talked about Playboy and Penthouse, and Hustler. Anyway, from all sorts of aspects of life, from Disney to pornography and filth and everything in between.
But he talked about these companies that are so big. He started talking about the net worth of these individuals. He talked about, I can’t remember exactly, the WWF dude, Jim McMahon, or whatever his name is. I think WWF does like 2 or 3 billion dollars a year and McMahon’s net worth is 500 million dollars or something crazy like that. He said the reason why he’s had so much success, the reason why these things live on beyond a product or anything is they created an entire universe.
Inside that universe there’s all these things. There’s characters, there’s heroes, there’s villains, there’s storylines, there’s all this stuff, there’s merchandise, there’s all these things that have been created. Then he said, “You know, I’ve tried to create some portion of that here inside of GKIC.” and I started, again, started flashing back to a decade ago when I first got into GKIC world, which is Glazier Kennedy Inner Circle, and I joined Bill Glazier’s mastermind and I started going to Dan Kennedy events.
I remember because I’d listen to all the CD’s ahead of time, and I would hear these stories about these people. The Ron LeGrand’s of the world, and Rory Fatt and I’m blanking off the top of my head all of these guys. John Alanis and all these people who are using Dan Kennedy style marketing. I remember listening to his tapes and I remember going to these events, this universe and I remember seeing these people I’d heard about. I heard them on CD’s and tapes and Dan talking about them. I remember meeting them and shaking their hands and being so awkward and so nervous and wanting to get autographs.
I remember going there and buying Dan Kennedy t-shirts and courses. I was in this marketing, nerdy universe. I started thinking about that and I was like, “Oh my gosh.” Without really knowing pieces of it, and obviously I’ve known pieces of it, you’ve read Expert Secrets, I talked about creating a mass movement and trying to take people. But I was like, if you really look at this, I feel like inside of the Funnel Hacker movement, inside Clickfunnels. We’ve created a universe.
And it’s not just, it’s multifaceted. I remember when Todd and I were first brainstorming on Clickfunnels, one thing he said, “I want to build something that creates a whole ecosystem of other companies around it. We kind of saw this a little bit with InfusionSoft, they didn’t really capitalize on it that well. But I want people who’s full time jobs are using Clickfunnels to help businesses.”
It’s funny, we were, I was speaking at this government thing, you guys probably heard the episode a couple of podcasts back. But before that, I was trying to figure out, how many jobs have been created inside the Clickfunnels universe? I was like, you know what, as of today we’re at 64 or 65 thousand members, let’s just say each of those entrepreneurs are using Clickfunnels, it becomes a job. So 65 thousand jobs right there. But the average company has anywhere from 3 to 30 employees, so let’s say 3, so it’s conservative. So 60 thousand turns into 100 thousand.
And then you think about the other businesses that have popped up. The agencies, the designers and the freelancers, and the copywriters, and the customer support. All these other sub-jobs that come. And then you look at when somebody, when we sell t-shirts, there’s the entire t-shirt company, there’s all those jobs that are created. When we’re selling physical products, books, CD’s….When I do a bestselling book, it’s not just me that makes money on that. There are the publishers, the printers.
We were trying to do the math and we got to about half a million jobs conservatively created because Clickfunnels is a thing. Half a million jobs and probably more than that, but that’s what we were able to draw a line to as we were doing our low case estimates. So it’s probably more than that.
So in this universe it’s created half a million jobs. Inside of it there are heroes. I look at, you know, people I talk about all the time, speakers at Funnel Hacking Live, the stories I tell on my podcasts, and my Facebook Lives and my different places. These people become heroes, and then besides heroes there’s villains.
I remember, if you guys watched the book launch last year, we had Julie Stoian who is like the hero and Dan Henry who is like the villain, and there’s fighting back and forth and there’s things happening. It’s just crazy.
You come to our events and we’ve literally done two comic book animated videos at the events. We’ve got t-shirts that everybody buys, we have people right now who will only where Clickfunnels clothes. We have our swag store coming out where we have socks and watches and hats and coats and merchandise.
Anyway, it’s fascinating because, I always tell people this and you’ve probably heard me talk about this, the hardest part is seeing the pattern, but as soon as you see the pattern and you’re aware of it, then it’s like, “Oh my gosh, now I see the pattern, now I can amplify it.” So now that I’m aware that my job is to create this universe, it’s like, wow how do I actually create this universe? How do I create super heroes?
If you’re at the Funnel Hacking Live event when Kaelin Poulin got onstage she talked about how you have to give your customers an identity shift. You’re shifting their identity and you’re bringing them into your universe. They’re coming to this universe to have a whole new identity. And then what she said was so cool. They make millions of dollars of their swag drops. Twice a month they do swag drops, they sell clothing, and they said the swag drops, the clothing is like giving a cape to a super hero. They’ve had an identity shift and now you’re giving them a super hero cape and now they are a part of this person.
I was like, oh my gosh. That’s what we’re doing, we’re bringing people in this universe to give them an identity shift. We’re giving them a cape in clothing, we’re giving them a name, a place to belong, and it’s just excited.
Anyway, I shared that with you because today as I was sitting there in the heat listening to him talk about these companies and the universes that have been created, that people were plugging into, that is the new vision, that’s the pattern. Now that I’m aware of it, it’s like, how can I amplify it? What else can I do? What did WWF do to build their universe? What did Marvel do? What has DC done? What has Disneyland done?
Now it’s time to start studying these companies that have built these universes and try to replicate and figure out what they’re doing. So that’s the next thing I’m going to be geeking out on. So I just wanted to share with you guys, so hopefully you guys can start that journey with me. It’s been fun.
One of the cool side benefits or side effects of me being in this role of the chief cheerleader of Clickfunnels is I get to share these thoughts I have and I get to test them out on our community. And then I get to see people who are grabbing onto them and implementing the same stuff. It’s fascinating.
When we started this whole Funnel Hacker movement and I was like, I think I’m onto something. It was like an inner circle meeting where I shared it and Brandon and Kaelin were there, and Kaelin’s company at the time, Brandon and Kaelin’s company, it was Tuelle Time Fitness, which was Kaelin’s maiden name. And after talking about the Funnel Hacker movement, people need to self identify with the cause and the movement. And she was like, “Oh my gosh, no one is ever going to self identify with my last name.”
So on the flight home she sat there, “I gotta change everything.” And they had a million dollar business and they still were like, “We have to change everything, if we’re going to actually take this to the next level we have to shift our branding, our name, everything.” Which is crazy. I guarantee 99% of people, if they would have heard me in that same room they would have been like, “Nope, my brand is good. People know who I am.”
Instead they’re like, “No, if we want to get to the next level, we have to change everything.” So they went and changed, on the flight home she renamed it, she landed and voxed me like, “Russell, it’s Lady Boss Weight Loss, we’re starting our movement.” I’m like, “What? You changed?” “Yep, we’re deleting everything, we’re changing everything. We’re on.” And boom, within weeks the whole thing was moved over and it was launched and it was rocking and rolling, which is just insane.
They’re doing stuff, and they’re pushing the edge, they’re teaching me stuff now. I’m like, oh my gosh. This is so cool. I look at Alison Prince came into our world a little over a year ago. Some of you guys know she spoke at Funnel Hacking Live this year, and same type of thing. We’re talking about these movements and talking about Lady Boss, and she was like, “Well how do I create my own movement, my own universe, my own whatever you want to call it?”
So she created one called The Because I Can Clan. Why do you call it that? Because I can. Why do we do this? Because I can. She’s like, “I want to create people that have the ability to do whatever they want in life because they can. I don’t want people that can’t do that.” So she created this movement called the Because I can Clan. And now she’s doing it and she’s taking this and building a whole community and she’s made millions of dollars now inside of her business, but she’s building a movement and people are having success with it, and it comes back to this whole concept of because I can.
And now she’s doing this and I’m able to watch what she’s doing. I’m like, all these things I’m learning back from her, because she’s taken this idea. So in case you’re wondering, why does Russell share all this random stuff that he’s thinking about? It’s because I love it when I share it and I see you guys implement as well. Because we all have different perspective on it.
When I hear universe, I think of one thing, you hear something else. The way I implement is going to be different than the way you implement. So please take this stuff and implement it, if you’ve got a business. If you don’t have a business yet, listen to yesterday’s episode and let’s get something up and cranking for you so then you can start geeking out and going deeper on these things.
But if you’ve got something happening, start thinking about this. This is a world we create. You think about just the comic books, DC and Marvel. Think about how many movies are in that franchise and what’s happening, it’s been fun to watch. I was never a comic book guy growing up, but man, I’ve been obsessed with the movies because it’s so fun to see what they’ve done inside these universes and how they bring all the characters together. It’s exciting, there’s a lot to learn from it, that we can apply back to our businesses.
Alright guys, with that said, this is one of my longer podcasts. I didn’t know what I was going to talk about and I got excited. There you go. Appreciate you all, you guys. Now it’s time to start crafting and creating your own universes. With that said, appreciate you. If you love this podcast or get anything from it, please go to iTunes and subscribe. We’re going to be doing a lot of new stuff here in the very near future, with the new channel and I’m excited and would love to have your guys’ feedback. Appreciate you all, have an amazing day, night, where you are in the world, and we’ll talk to you soon.