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:
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.