Podcasts about how russell

If you’re like most people, you know how it feels to be so busy that you don’t have time for yourself. Still, at the end of a busy day, you could find yourself questioning how much you got done.Anytime in your life when you’re hitting a ceiling of achievement, you’re in need of a trusted person: to delegate work to, or a mentor or coach who can help you shatter that ceiling and go even higher. This isn’t a decision to rush, though. The journey to finding the person that’s right for you and your work, while simple, is not easy.Russell Gray, like most business owners, struggled with letting go. He didn’t want to delegate out of fear that others wouldn’t complete the work as well as he did  — until life forced him to release that hold. When he lost a loved one, he had to find a way to narrow his focus and increase his income while also working less. He had to find the one person who could allow him to achieve even more, in less time, with less stress. You’re going to hear about how he kept asking what ONE Thing would make everything else easier or unnecessary, and how, once he identified it, he went after it.How can you begin the journey to having your calendar reflect your priorities? If you’d like to learn more about going on that journey, head over to the1thing.com/training.To learn more, and for the complete show notes, visit: the1thing.com/podcast.In this episode, you will learn...[05:11] What happened when Russell first picked up the book[07:12] Beginning the search for investing your time[13:11] How Russell discovered his ONE Thing[19:35] What to do when you don’t want to let goLinks & Tools From This Episoderealestateguysradio.com--Getting things done is a challenge everyone struggles with.One way to tackle that is to make sure you have the right tools for you and your computer. That means having the right apps. The problem is, not all apps do what they promise. It’s easy to install a bunch of apps, sign up for accounts, and then leave them unused. Setapp is on a mission to help users get more done by curating and recommending the right apps for you so that you can focus on your work.Go to setapp.com to try it free for a week. Plans start at as low as $9.99/mo.--Do you run a small business?Small business owners wear a lot of hats. Some of those hats feel incredible to wear. However, filing taxes and running payroll... well, for most of us, they don’t feel great and they’re not our ONE thing. That’s where Gusto comes in to help you make payroll, taxes, and HR easy. So ask yourself, is it time to take off some of your hats?You can get three FREE months when you run your first payroll at Gusto.com/ONE

Qualifying for the Olympics is an interesting and complicated process that sees pro racers adjust their training and race calendars in unique ways that us amateur cyclists can learn from. This week we talk to Clif Pro Team’s Sofía Gomez Villafañe and Russell Finsterwald about how they have worked through their roles in the olympic qualification process as well how they prepared for an early season race in the heat of Puerto Rico, why and how power data from off road races can be so low, and how to level up technical skill. Sofía's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sofithevilla Russell's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/finsty Russell's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM7R4JQRjE14X1uIBt9ExRw Clif Pro Team's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clifproteam ------------------------------------------------------------------ TOPICS COVERED IN THIS EPISODE 0:00​ Intro 2:20​ The complicated process of how to qualify for the Olympics 7:04​ How Russell adjusted his season to collect Olympic points for his country 15:56​ Russell’s heat adaptation protocol for Puerto Rico 22:45​ How Russell managed expectations and his race plan at Pan-American Games 25:19​ How Sofía adjusted her expectations after sub-par sensations mid-race How Sofía has been building toward the Olympics over 4 years Sofía’s journey from Cat 1 to Olympic hopeful 34:02​ Why is power so low from MTB and off-road races, and why it still feels so hard 42:14​ How to raise your power in an MTB race How to increase efficiency in cross-country racing 50:30​ How to build MTB skills quickly 56:36​ How to mentally approach technical terrain   ------------------------------------------------------------------ LEARN MORE ABOUT ADAPTIVE TRAINING Adaptive Training Video: https://youtu.be/gE2yPYZ15ew Adaptive Training: What it is, how to use it: https://bit.ly/3dIRClW How Adaptive Training Makes You Faster: https://bit.ly/2ZNfWLq Request priority access for here: https://bit.ly/3g7rkuZ ------------------------------------------------------------------ ABOUT TRAINERROAD — CYCLING’S MOST EFFECTIVE TRAINING SYSTEM TrainerRoad makes cyclists faster. Athletes get structured indoor workouts, science-backed training plans, and easy-to-use performance analysis tools to reach their goals. Build Your Custom Plan: https://bit.ly/3g8Affx Train Together with Group Workouts: https://bit.ly/3abSM71 Get Started: https://bit.ly/3wZbSXY ------------------------------------------------------------------ SUCCESSFUL ATHLETES PODCAST Listen to the Successful Athletes Podcast now!: https://www.TrainerRoad.com/SAP ------------------------------------------------------------------ SUCCESSFUL ATHLETES PODCAST Listen to the Science of Getting Faster Podcast now!: https://www.TrainerRoad.com/SOGF ------------------------------------------------------------------ STAY IN TOUCH Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TrainerRd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/trainerroad/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TrainerRoad Strava Club: https://www.strava.com/clubs/trainerroad

In this episode I speak with architect Tik Tok superstar Russell Henderson @Architect Russell about his career working abroad in countries such as Australia, Thailand and Tanzania. Russell graduated from the University of Huddersfield, with BA (Hons) Architecture, Post Grad Diploma Architecture, and then Master of Architecture in 2009 which earned him registration on the Architect Registration Board (ARB) and a Chartered Member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in the UK. Russell then took an international study pathways and spent time studying and designing buildings during his time at The University of Jordan, Middle East and The University of Arizona, USA. More recently Russell passed a LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) Green Associate accreditation exam in Los Angeles, this ensures green building sustainability is always paramount on any design. With over 15 years professional experience spanning over 4 continents, Russell has had global and broad design exposure and has been employed by companies in Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa, including working at some of the largest architecture design firms, such as Atkins and Aedas. Working and studying in different cultural environments and situations can give an original and deep understanding of global architectural design. In this episode you will discover - How Russell crafted an international career on 4 continents - How he has used Tik Tok to build a personal brand - How Russell uses Youtube and Tik Tok to deepen and share understanding about the architecture industry THIS WEEK'S RESOURCES Discovery Call with Rion https://www.businessofarchitecture.co.uk/discoverycall Russell M Henderson https://www.architectrussell.com IG @architectrussell TIK TOK @architectrussell

Russell Ham was born in Southern California about 10 minutes from Disneyland. He is the youngest of four boys all born in the 60's. After graduating high school, he began coaching high school boy's basketball. He continued to coach for 30 years until last year. Russell is a high school PE teacher and is married to his beautiful wife, Emily, and they have two children. Lacie, who's 17 years old and Jesse, who's 14 years old.They also have two dogs, Ella and Willow. Russell started with SREC in April of 2019. Russell was looking for a real estate niche (i.e. fix & flip, buy & hold, BRRRR) and came across Chris' Youtube channel. Instantly Russell got hooked for two reasons: One, how open Chris, Zach, and Nick were with showing you how to do real estate on terms through the YouTube channel and two, the Wicked Smart community is second to none. They show you the way to be successful and are with you coaching/mentoring you side by side. What you will learn in this episode: How Russell had very little real estate investing experience before he connected with the Wicked Smart community How Russell spent 30 years coaching high school boys basketball, and how he balances coaching, being a father, and working on his real estate investing What life was like for Russell before the global pandemic hit, and how things have changed over the last year What key lessons, disciplines and habits Russell needed to develop to achieve his goals in real estate Why Russell believes that success, either in basketball or real estate, requires discipline, dedication, preparation and commitment How Russell has developed his confidence since starting with the Smart Real Estate Coach, ahd how he has made nearly $90,000 in his first two deals just on payday one What goals Russell has set for his investments and deals in the upcoming year, and how he plans to achieve those goals Why becoming a part of the Wicked Smart community has been life-changing for Russell and has even helped him lose weight and get in shape What's next for Russell, and why his five-year goal is to stop teaching and transition to real estate full time What advice Russell would offer to brand new investors and people approaching the terms niche for the first time Additional resources: SmartRealEstateCoachPodcast.com/webinar SmartRealEstateCoachPodcast.com/termsbook SmartRealEstateCoachPodcast.com/ebook SmartRealEstateCoach.com/QLS  

In this episode Mark interviews Russell Nohelty about writing scripts, comics, novels, editing, publishing, and his work optimizing Kickstarter campaigns to raise revenue and connect with fans. Prior to the interview, Mark shares a word about this episode's sponsor, Findaway Voices. You can learn more about how you can get your work distributed to retailers and library systems around the world at starkreflections.ca/Findaway. Mark then shares comments from recent episodes and a personal update.   In their conversation, Mark and Russell talk about: How Russell got into writing because he was never told he couldn't pursue the things he was interested in doing Russell's high school work in theatre, writing and working on plays; taking broadcast journalism in college, and his experiences writing and shooting his own short films How getting into a car accident and being unable to do the full film production tasks (except for writing), that funneled Russell into focusing on writing - one of the only things he could do while recovering Being re-introduced to comics after a long hiatus of not reading them How writing and creating comics led to novels and Russell's production company The difference between writing a movie script and a comic script The difference between writing comics and writing novels How comic writers and comic artists connect and collaborate The significant cost involved in indie comic publishing (especially when compared to indie novel publishing) The long term sales Russell has seen selling indie comics - ie, with strong and ongoing backlist sales How Russell's production company started because he wasn't impressed with some of the other companies he'd been working with The origin of the name Wannabe Press Two of the main "norms" in indie comic publishing: Doing Comic-Cons and doing Kickstaters How it's a lot easier to make the couple of thousand dollars needed to ensure a novel pays off on Kickstarter (with the average spend being between $25 and $30 for about 100 people) - which leads to $3000. As opposed to having to sell 1000 copies of a low priced eBook to earn the same amount. One of the great things about Kickstarter is the access you have, after a campaign funds, to the community that supported you How, in a little over 6 months, Russell has raised over $50,000 from three different Kickstarter campaigns with no advertising spend Messaging daily about his Kickstarter campaigns, and how Russell has never received complaints from people who are actually supporting him and buying his books - he only receives complaints from those who AREN'T buying. The importance of building and leveraging a community before you launch a Kickstarter campaign The fact that many thousands of people buy Russell's books, but a much smaller number of people actually help him create those books in the first place How, on Kickstarter, people aren't just buying your book, they are investing in you as a creator and artist they believe in The most common and blatant errors that people make on Kickstarter The importance of starting with the WHY in your Kickstarter campaigns Why you should always have something that people can download immediately The value of always having something that people can offer just a single dollar And more . . . After the interview, Mark reflects on Russell's comment that earning $500 on a Kickstarter might look like a failure, but it's actually a huge success, especially when compared to the typical results of the average book selling on the major retail platforms. Links of Interest: Russell Nohelty's Website The Complete Creative: Kickstarter Russell's Forthcoming Kickstarter Wide for the Win Submission Form Mark's Feed The Obsession Kickstarter EP 148 - AI Voice Double Conversation with Joanna Penn EP 139 - Dreaming, Singing, and Moving People with Ashley Joanisse EP 116 - Taking the Short Tack with Matty Dalrymple Spirits Untapped Mark Parody Videos Stuck in This House Here with You Mark's Tavern (Cheers Parody) K-Tel Parody: Isolation Hits You Call Me Fever (Parody of "Fever" in mispronunciation of Lefebvre) Mark's Canadian Werewolf Series This Time Around (Book 0) A Canadian Werewolf in New York (Book 1) Stowe Away (Book 1.5) Fear and Longing in Los Angeles (Book 2) Findaway Voices Patreon for Stark Reflections   Russell Nohelty is a USA Today Bestselling author and publisher at Wannabe Press. He's written comic books like Katrina Hates the Dead, Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter, and Pixie Dust, along with more than a dozen novels, including his Godsverse Chronicles. He also edits the Cthulhu is Hard to Spell anthology series. He has raised over $180,000 on Kickstarter across 12 projects, and has a very entertaining newsletter, which you can join at www.russellnohelty.com/mail and get a few of his books for free. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and dogs. The introductory, end, and bumper music for this podcast (“Laser Groove”) was composed and produced by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com and is Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

Megastar comedian Russell Peters joins me on this episode of Make Noise, with a cameo from rapper, DJ and producer Lord Finesse. Episode highlights: (2:22) - The first joke Russell wrote at aged 12 (4:08) - Russell's parents reacting to him becoming a comedian (9:08) - How Russell deals with hecklers (11:52) - Russell's writing techniques (17:00) - What are the differences in racism between Canada and the US? (20:05) - Russell's story of a run in with the police (21:18) - Working on the Netflix documentary, Hip Hop Evolution Make Noise with Fatman Scoop is produced by Fatman Scoop, Raj Kotecha and the team at https://www.creativecoery antentagency.com. To get in touch with the show email podcast@fatmanscoop.com or send a DM to https://www.instagram.com/fatmanscoop/

In this week’s episode, I'll be joined by an entrepreneur, trainer and property investor, Russell Leeds (@russellleeds).Russell co-runs Leeds Group Holdings, and with a team of 15, they turn over £5 million a year.In our wide-ranging conversation, we delve into:Powerful property investing strategies you can implement, even if you have very little money; How lease option agreements & HMOs can create win-win situations; How Russell and Sam are helping hundreds of people become financially free; Donkey Kong goal-setting; And so, SO much more!Be sure to join the party this Wednesday! You can find me on Instagram @entrepreneurscanpartySubscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast or wherever you listen to your favourite podcasts!If you haven't already, please rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts!** Want to make this your best year yet? Claim your FREE Annual Blueprint & Strategic Life Plan, packed full of 96 thought-provoking, mind-shifting questions! Visit my website – scottstockdale.co.uk – for details **

In this episode of the Rise Up & Live Free podcast Ryan had the pleasure of interviewing an inspiration and mentor of Cashflow Tactics, Russell Brunson. Like most businesses, Ryan and Brad had trouble launching in the early days of their company. They were proud of their framework and knew that their mission was an important one but they struggled to get it off the ground. After sinking money into various marketing agencies that offered little results, Ryan knew they would need to try a different approach. He discovered Russell’s book, DotCom Secrets, and decided on a whim to fly out to the Funnel Hacking Live event. Ryan and Brad were introduced to a whole new way to approach marketing. For the past five years the guys have been a part of Russell’s Inner Circle and in that time have watched their business grow exponentially. Today, Russell is sharing some secrets he has learned along the way. With his new book, Traffic Secrets, find out why garnering traffic is the key to wealth building and how you can use the same ideology in your investment strategy. And stay tuned to learn why the best investment you will ever make is in yourself! Key Takeaways:How Russell discovered he was an entrepreneur (8:54)How to blend being purpose driven and making money (11:44)Beyond chasing wealth (14:01)How Russell’s strategy helped shape CashFlow Tactics (19:32)The Problem (17:03)How do you get more traffic (22:00)Advice to those looking to create a second income stream  (27:51)What financial freedom means to Russell Brunson (31:56)--Additional Resources:Join our Cashflow Tactics GroupTake our FREE 5-day Cashflow Tactics ChallengeSign up for our Freedom Fast Track training courseGet a copy of Russell Brunson’s new book, Traffic Secrets.Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode!If you enjoy listening to the Rise Up Live Free podcast, leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcast!

Russell Brunson is the founder of ClickFunnels and the author of three books: Dot Com Secrets, Expert Secrets, and his most recent book, Traffic Secrets. He was also a guest on episode three, where he talked about how to outline a book. To date, Russell has sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his books. Today we are going into how Russell is conducting his launch for book three of his trilogy. As ClickFunnels grew, his business became less challenging and less exciting. For Russell, “Selling books extend my message more than anything else I’ve ever done.” Although never planning to write a trilogy, however, when he was offered to purchase Traffic Secrets from another offer, he realized he could easily create a trilogy series. Russell brings us through his journey of writing, rewriting and republishing his books in hardcover. He tells how he revised his first two books while publishing the third in his series. Then, with his first advance from his new publisher, he realized he had to buckle down and write the third book by the deadline. Although COVID has affected his book launch, his click funnel is sending thousands of people to his site, which is converting at a rate of 20,000 books per month sold for his latest edition. His book launch includes three phases, which involve social media, interviews on podcasts, and long-form content. Listen in to find out how COVID affected his book launch, how he is using his click funnels, and the types of ads he is using for his funnel. Learn how Russell is using the content of his book to drive traffic to his book, the short term and long term strategies you can use to promote your book, and Russell’s plan to add radio, infomercials and social media buys into his three-phase book launch. Show Notes [02:37] Why books are the hardest project for Russell to make happen. [03:46] Did Russell plan to have a trilogy from the very first book? [06:06] Each book has its own stand alone funnel and how he manages his book funnels. [08:25] How he manages so much content in a very short amount of time. [11:12] Russell’s team and how they assisted him in writing his book.  [13:48] The launch plan for his new book Traffic Secrets.  [15:49] Phase II of his book launch and how COVID affected his launch, focusing on email traffic. [17:29] Phase III of his book launch, which includes interviews on podcasts and social media. [18:49] Short term and long term strategies for promoting your book. [20:50] How to buy ads to target your market on other channels and platforms. [25:43] Email marketing and click funnels. [26:42] Russell’s thank you pages and how they lead into more sales. [27:39] How Russell and his team have designed click funnels to be mobile-friendly. [30:12] Lessons he has learned from writing his three books in his trilogy. Links and Resources Self-publishingschool.com Spsfreetraining.com Circle of Profit Recorder Plus Self Publishing School Episode 003 Video Expert Secrets Russell Brunson on the Web Russell’s podcast Marketing Secrets His three book trilogy and web classes

In today's show, Pancham interviews Russell Gray, co-host, The Real Estate Guys Radio Show.  We start this show with Russell giving his views on Wall Street investing. Has the coronavirus pandemic simply highlighted the flaws in our financial system? Will the financial system ever go back to what it was in the Pre-COVID era? Russell shares some interesting insights on this topic. As the pandemic wreaks havoc in our credit-based financial system, investors need to take a long-hard look at their portfolios and determine the best approach going forward. Russell shares how a low-interest regime can open up some excellent investment opportunities in precious metal and of course, real estate.  If you are worried about your finances due to the ongoing situations, tuning in today's show will give you some great insights. Timestamped Shownotes: 01:34 – Russell's background information 02:00 – Why is Russell dead against investing in Wall Street? 02:55 – How did Russell's first real estate investment pan out? 03:28 – Russell's father loses $12 million (his entire life savings) on the Wall Street in 1987! 05:22 – How Russell lost his mortgage business due to a Wall Street crash 07:11 – Financial system vs. Economy – Understanding the difference in simple terms 10:00 – Will the financial system ever recover from the impact of the coronavirus? 10:57 – Are there any business opportunities that have sprung up due to the current situation? 13:35 – Understanding the nuances of a credit-based financial system 15:29 – Russell shares how zero passive income wiped him out 17:22 – What is the fallout a low-interest rate regime? 18:11 – Do gold and silver prices follow similar price trends? 20:09 – The Gold Collar Investor Book Recommendation: The Creature From Jekyll Island 21:45 – Russell questions the traditional approach of investing in stocks, bonds and cash; he explain real estate is your best option 24:00 – How leveraging can help you generate excellent returns in real estate 26:28 – Can you generate passive income from real estate? 29:46 – How can you protect your net-worth in the wake of the coronavirus? 30:55 – Is it worth investing in silver right now? 34:00 – Should you get loans and take advantage of low interest rates? 35:20 – Importance of understanding the difference between a failing asset and distressed assets 39:46 - Taking the Leap Round 39:46 - When was the first time you invested outside of Wall Street? 41:32 - What fears did you have to overcome when you first invested outside Wall Street? 43:02 - What was one investment that did not go as expected? 46:03 - What is one piece of advice that you would give to people who are thinking of investing in the Main Street?  48:42 - Russell shares his contact information 3 Key Points: Financial system vs. Economy – Understanding the difference in simple terms How to spot business and investment opportunities in the wake of the coronavirus Why the traditional approach of investing in stocks, bonds and cash is a flawed one Get in Touch: Pancham's Email The Gold Collar Investor The Gold Collar Investor Facebook Page Real Estate Guys Radio Show

Russell Brunson is the Co-founder of ClickFunnels which helps tens of thousands of entrepreneurs get their message out into the marketplace. He’s built a huge Entrepreneurial following and has written several books, including a new release, ‘Traffic Secrets.’  Listen today if you’re looking at alternative ways to get traffic to your business (other than Facebook)! To dig in further with Russell, you can get his NEW book here. Listen Today For, The importance of really getting a deep understanding of who your dream customer is and where they are ‘congregating.’ How Russell shifted the classic ‘Dream 100’ approach to a strategy that had a more exponential impact.  His ‘Hook, Story, Offer’ Framework that you need to weave into every step of your sales funnels.  A clue that can fix any funnel that isn’t performing. “The goal of the story is to increase the perceived value of the thing we’re going to offer them next.” Russell Brunson. Plus, • How Russell ‘digs for hidden treasure’ and his favorite tools for reverse engineering Ad campaigns. • How Brunson reaches out to Influencers and builds a relationship with them for future marketing partnerships.  • Russells take on what’s best - organic or paid traffic? “I love paid as opposed to organic because you can see instant results…but organic (as a long term plan) is the best kind of traffic because it’s free”. Russell Brunson. • What Russell is working on now and what challenges he’s taking on. • The affiliate link ‘afterthought’ that now brings in over a million dollars a month.  Click to find us on Apple Podcasts and other podcast players. 

Want FULL ACCESS to your dream customers? What if you didn't need permission from Facebook or Google to talk to your dream customers? On this episode, you'll learn... Why your email list should be your NUMBER ONE growth metric. How Russell made his first $70 by building an email list illegally. How to convert ANY website visitor into traffic that you OWN and never have to pay for again. Listen in to learn more! Also, go get your FREE copy of Traffic Secrets here!

On this episode, Russell will show you how finding your ‘Dream 100’ can help you attract your dream customers!  You’ll learn: How Russell gets BIG influencers to spend thousands of dollars promoting his own products. Where to find YOUR ‘Dream 100’. How to get 4 FREE videos from FunnelFlix! Listen in to learn more! Also, go get your FREE copy of Traffic Secrets here!

If you really want to be successful, you need to learn how to be coached. On this episode Russell speaks directly to those of us who were a little hurt by his last episode about extreme ownership. He tells us why we feel the way we do, and what we need to do in order to become coachable. Here are some of the insightful things to listen for in this episode: Why Russell thinks if you were hurt by the previous episode, you need to hear this message most. How Russell learned to be coachable. And why you need to become coachable in order to be successful. So listen here to find out if you are coachable, and what you need to do to become that way. ---Transcript--- Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today this is going to be kind of a continuation of last episode. I did a little bit of a rant, but today I want to talk about how to be coached. Alright so, I know that when I stepped into this role of marketing nerd, I don’t know, chief marketing nerd at Clickfunnels, the person who is coaching other entrepreneurs in how to market, I forget sometimes that I grew up being coached a lot like in wrestling and other sports, and so many aspects of my life. When I got in this business and started hiring coaches, I hired relationship coaches for Collette and I, I hired business coaches, I hired personality coaches, personal development coaches. I’m just a little obsessive compulsive when it comes to hiring coaches, because I’ve seen the value of having a coach. And I forgot about the pattern that most people go through. I’m sure I went through it as well, but what happens is, and again, because I think we come in this world sometimes and I try to coach people and it’s interesting because they’ve never been coached before, or not to the level where they thrive off it, and obsess about it, and desire. Most of the people that I know that are really, really successful, have coaches and they love it, and they thrive off of the feedback, and they get some feedback and they’re like, “Yes!”  and they just run with it because they’re so excited that, “I paid for this feedback, I got it from this person I trust and I just run with it.” I think a lot of times people that haven’t been obsessed about it, or they haven’t been in a super high level coaching before, they kind of go through a pattern. So I’m going to talk about that pattern because I think a lot of people get this, and I saw just over the last couple of days from the podcast that I did put out. And first off, I just want to say with any podcast I’m putting out, the only reason why I publish something, it’s because I know it’s not one person struggling with it, because there’s a lot of people struggling. If it was one person I wouldn’t publish a whole episode about it. When it’s a pattern that a lot of people are struggling with, that’s when I make an episode. I don’t want to just serve one person, I want to serve a thousand or 5 thousand, or ten thousand, however many I can reach with my voice. So you know, the lesson from the last podcast episode about extreme ownership, and about publishing and being consistent, it wasn’t advice for one person, that was advice for thousands of people who are struggling. So I want to kind of put that out there. Number two, same thing with this. This is specifically because I saw the reaction from one person, but this coaching for everybody, otherwise I wouldn’t put it out there. I wouldn’t waste my time, or your time, or anybody’s time. Anyway, so what typically happens when somebody is newer to being coached or whatever, the first thing the coach says, “Hey you need to change this.” The first, what do they call that? I know with, what is it? First there’s denial, and grief, and like grief suffering, or whatever, there’s the different layers of what happens. First you grieve and then you get angry, there’s this whole process. It’s kind of the same thing with coaching, I’ve noticed. When I first start working with entrepreneurs, or somebody I’m like, ‘This is what you gotta do.” And I give them harsh feedback, like it’s not working right, this is how to change. The very first thing is people get their feelings hurt. “Oh you’re attacking me.” Like, “No, no, no you don’t understand. You hired me to be your coach. This is, literally you paid me to do this thing for you. There’s nothing personal here. There’s no personal. You paid me to look at you, find the flaws, and try to fix them. I’m doing that.” I think the first phase of someone who’s knew to coaching, “Oh my gosh, you’re attacking me.” No, no, no I’m not attacking. You paid me for this. You asked me to look at your problems and to fix them. That’s at the first phase and I think a lot of people go through that, where they’re like, “Oh my gosh you kind of personally attacked me.” In fact, my guess is for any of you guys who listened to this podcast or any of mine when I say something that kind of irks you, where you’re just like, ugh, and you get angry or frustrated or whatever, that’s why. It’s because you’re out of alignment with what you’re supposed to be doing. And you hear it, it’s like, “Oh.” I’ve said that before on other episodes, like, “If you’re upset with this episode, it’s probably for you.” Because that’s the first phase of it, that. So that’s the first phase, then the second phase is people come back and start trying to rationalize what they did, “No, no, no, I kind of did it. I’m doing this.” Then they come back with this rationalization of, “I’m doing, it’s just not working.” And come back to that, trying to again, take the blame off of them, which comes back to the whole extreme ownership thing I talked about in the last podcast episode. They’re trying to take the blame off themselves because it doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t feel good when someone’s coaching you and telling you, and pointing out, “You did this wrong. This is the step, this is where you need to tweak, and where you need to change.” So they try to take the ownership off themselves and come back and be like, “No, I did that, there’s just some other external thing besides me that’s causing this problem. So that’s the second phase of this, of people being coached. And then from there it usually splits off in one or two directions. One direction is that people end up saying, “Screw you, coach.” And then they just walk away and that’s where the relationship ends. And the second side is they humble themselves and be like, “Oh my gosh, I did pay you for this advice. You are my coach, I do trust you, therefore I will succumb to your ideas and do what you said. And that’s kind of the other tier. So that’s kind of the process I see people as they go through coaching. Number one, it’s embarrassing for them, so they take it personal. Number two, then they get defensive, “No, no I am doing it kind of, just not right. I’m doing my best.” And then number three is one of two directions, one is “Screw you coach, I hope you die.” Or number two, succumbing to the advice and saying, “You know what, I did pay you for this, you’re probably right, let me just go and do it.” And that’s when they take extreme ownership and actually do the thing. So that’s kind of the path, and I forget because, you know, right now I’m coaching my boys on the wrestling team and I see it right now with the kids. Where they come out there and do a move and I’m like, “Uh, you did it wrong.” And they’re like, “Coach, why…you told me I did it wrong in front of everybody.” I’m like, “Yeah, because I’m not trying to just teach you, I’m trying to teach everyone on the team, because you weren’t the only person that was wrong, I just spotted you and I pointed it out. I’m showing it so the entire team can learn this process together.” So that’s the first thing. Then we come back and the second phase from the kids is like, “No, I did do it coach. I did it right here. Here’s the move. I did it.” I’m like, “Technically you did it, but you did it wrong. That’s why I’m pointing this out. Your elbows were in the wrong position, your footwork was off. You did the move, you just did it wrong. You didn’t pay attention. That’s why we’re breaking it down.” Then the third phase is like, “Screw you coach. I’m going to do it this way because that’s the way I did.” Or “Okay coach, how did that work? Walk me through it again, so my elbow was up? My feet were in the wrong position, right?” and that person is coachable, that’s a person that takes extreme ownership and they’re coachable. And I can help them, they become a better wrestler, right. And the same thing is true in business, the same process. So as I posted that episode a couple of days ago, I saw the pattern. They came back and said, you know, feelings were hurt, then defensive, and then now that person who is listening is probably at the crossroads of “Screw you, Russell. I hope you die.” Or “Oh my gosh, I’m going to take extreme ownership and figure out how to listen with 100% accuracy.” And it’s up to that person to decide what they want to do, and it’s up to you, honestly. Like I said, the more you get coached, and the more you’re open to it, and the more willing you are, the faster you skip through the other phases. I’m at a spot now when I hire someone to coach me, I want that pain. I’m paying for this pain. I’m not going to get defensive, I’m not trying to show, “I did do that.” I’m just going to stop, shut up, and listen and be like, “Okay, how can I be coached? What did I do wrong? This person obviously knows something different, they’re looking at it from an outside perspective, they care about me, I put their, I put my trust in them, therefore I’m going to trust them, and I’m going to listen.” So for you the faster you can get to that point and skip the other ones, the faster you’re going to be successful. It’s coming back and saying, look this is not personal so I’m not going to get defensive about it. I’m not going to try to justify how I kind of did it. Instead I’m going to listen and be like, “You know what? I’m paying for this person. This person has gone down this path, maybe from this outside perspective they’re seeing something different than I am, because I’m so close to it.” And then obviously not saying, “Screw you. I’m just going to walk away.” But saying, “Okay, I’m going to listen with exactness, I’m going to cut everything else I’m doing and just focus on the words you said, and not take it personal, and I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do it perfectly, just like you said.” When I got better and better at wrestling, my dad and I would go seek out coaches. We’d drive all around the state of Utah to where we found out there were good coaches. We found out, “Hey there’s a good coach up in this city, this area.” And we would drive there, and I would wrestle with the coach and they would watch me, I’d show them film of me, stuff like that, and then they would just rip me apart. And I remember at first it was hard. I’d be like, “No, blah, blah, blah.” But eventually I was like, “I’m paying this. We came this way to learn from this dude. I’m just going to shut up and listen and I’m going to take every word of advice, and we’re going to go back and practice it. Even if I don’t agree with it necessarily, doesn’t mean I’m right.” Even if I disagree with something, I can disagree with something and be completely wrong, and I’m paying this person for their advice, therefore, I will listen to it, I will be grateful for it, I’m just going to do it. And I remember it was probably junior year in high school, which was the year I won my state title. And I remember my coach, his name was Greg Williams, he was my freestyle Greco coach at the time, he’s now the coach at UVU. But anyway, I remember I came off a match and I won, but I didn’t wrestle, I mean I thought I wrestled great because I won, so you know in my head it’s like, “I’m the greatest person in the world.” And he pulled me aside and said, “Russell, you suck at level changing.” I’m like, “What do you mean?” He’s like, “You need to do this.” And he kind of showed me this thing. I was like, ,”Okay.” So once again, I didn’t take it personal I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to try it. So the next match I went out there and he told me to do these level change things, so I started doing level changings. And I did, I beat the next guy and I came off, and I just remember Greg looking at me and he said, “You know what? You are not the best athlete on this team.” Like, “What? Screw you coach, yes I am.” No, but he’s like, “You are not the best athlete on the team, but you know what you’ve got that most of these other people don’t?” and I’m like, “No, what?” He’s like, ‘You’re coachable. I tell you to do something and then you do it.” That’s it. That’s the big secret you guys. That’s why for the last decade and a half I’ve been in this business, and the prior decade I was an athlete, I sought out coaching, and when the coaches said something, I shut up and I listened and did what they said. I put my own ego aside, I put away everything else, and if I wasn’t successful, again, it was me taking extreme ownership like, “Okay, I lost, or I won but I didn’t do as well as I wanted to. This is my fault, what does the coach have to say?” and I’d listen, and then I would do it. That’s the big secret. The people that struggle are the ones who, they seek for coaching, they get it, and they go through these phases of like, defensiveness, and embarrassment. “Oh the coach called me out in front of everyone.” No, you’re paying the person to do that. What an honor. How lucky are you that of all the people that could have been there, you were the one that got the direct coaching. You’re the one that got the customized, personalized coaching. In a wrestling room when there’s 50 or 100 athletes in the room, the coach calls you out and stops everybody and shows, calls you in like, “Look at Brunson’s shot, what did he do wrong? What’s the reason? Where’s his…” Yeah, it can be embarrassing, but at the same time it’s like, “Oh my gosh, I got personal attention from this person. I figured out exactly…everyone else is learning in generalities, I’m learning specifically this is the mistake I made. And here’s how to fix it and the angles I need to shift to make it.” So anyway, I just want put this out there for all you guys because you’re all here. If you’re listening to this podcast, or if you’re following me in any aspect, you’re getting coached by me, right, directly or indirectly. And as you hear things, there are going to be some things that cut a little bit, they’re like, ‘Oh, that sucks.” But again, if it hurts, that means I’m probably speaking directly to you. That’s number one. Number two, the faster you can get to just saying, ‘you know what? I’m going to go and do that thing.” Again, the more coachable you can become, which my definition of coach-ability is just getting past those 2 or 3 tiers and just listening, and with exactness doing what the coach says. That’s when you have success. That’s when I went from being an okay wrestler to being a state champ, to being an all American, to these things. Business was the same thing. When I had my pride on the line, and I was seeking for coaching in my business, people would tell me, “Oh, oh no I do it this way. I do it this way.” I always have my own way to do things, but when I shut up and started listening and said, “You know what maybe this person knows more, maybe they care about me. Maybe I’m paying them to be my coach. I’m just going to do the exact way that they said.” That’s when I started having success. So especially for you guys who haven’t been through intense coaching through athletics and other things, and you’re not used to that, become coachable. Get through it, get past the ego that’s going to be painful. Get past the defensiveness, get past the “Screw you, I hope you die.” coach, and get as quick as possible to “Okay, this is a learning lesson. This person cares about me, they’re doing this because they want me to be successful. What can I get from them? All these other feelings that are getting in the way of my success, let me get rid of these feelings and focus on the message at hand. What do they say? How can I do it?”  Coach tells me to do a level change, all I do is I level change in the next match, that’s it. And then what does my coach say, “Man Russell, you are so coachable.” because I just listened and I’d do what they say. So that’s the lesson. I hope this is for, I hope everybody who needed this right now is listening, I hope this is good in any aspect of your life. And the other thing I would say on top of that is, seek out coaching. Collette and I hired Stacy and Paul Martino and went to their relationship event, why? We have an amazing marriage, but we want it better, so we sought coaching and we’re going out there, and we went together. And then Collette went last week by herself for 3 days for more. We’re seeking after coaching still in every aspect of life, even the aspects we’re doing good, because good is the enemy to great. Anyway, I hope that helps. I just want you guys to be successful. Seriously, I don’t need to keep doing this. I’m set. The only reason I keep talking, the only reason I keep showing up, the only reason I wake up in the morning and go into the office is because I actually care about you guys. I’m not doing this to be a jerk, I’m doing this because I want you to be successful. So I keep sharing the things that I’ve found to be successful. And sometimes it’s not going to be comfortable, and that’s okay. It’s not supposed to be. If it was comfortable, everybody would be millionaires walking down the street having a good time. It’s supposed to be hard, supposed to be painful. That’s how you earn this stuff. You go through the process, you go through the pain, and the reward when you stick through it, when you humble yourself, when you listen, when you follow the process, you have success in the business. So get past the ego and the feelings and those things as quick as possible and become coachable. Listen, follow with exactness, do what your coach says, trust them, believe in them, because you already asked them for their help. So when you get it, don’t shy away from it, don’t run from it. Embrace it with both hands and run with it, and be grateful that you had the opportunity to get the personalized stuff. Most people don’t get that all the time. Anyway, I hope that helps. I appreciate you all, thanks for listening and go out there and have success. That’s all I really want in life. Go crush it. Go get the Two Comma Club award. I want to hand you an award onstage at Funnel Hacking Live, which by the way, if you don’t have your tickets yet, they are selling fast as we’re announcing speakers. We’ve sold out 5 years in a row and we will sell out again this year. So go get your tickets if you haven’t yet, at FunnelHackingLive.com. Get around some of the most amazing entrepreneurs in the world.  We all want to coach you, we’re there for you, we want you to be successful, and we’re dedicating tons of our time, effort and money. This even will cost me over 3 million dollars out of my own pocket to put it on for you, and you’ve got to pay $1000 for a ticket to show up. So I’m putting my money where my mouth is, I want to make sure you are successful. And I am investing a lot in you, so now you’ve got to invest a little back in yourself to show up, get to the event, where we can change your life. So if you don’t have your ticket yet, go to FunnelHackingLive.com. With that said, appreciate you all, thank you, and listen to your coaches. They care about you, they’re not here for their health, they’re here for yours so pay attention, do what they say, and if you do, you’ll be successful. Thanks so much for everything you guys, and we’ll talk soon. Bye everybody.

I made an announcement last Friday about why I'm pausing the Inner Circle. This episode will explain why... On this episode Russell talks about the history of his inner circle group in the wake of deciding to pause it for a season. Here are some of the awesome things you will hear on this episode: How Russell got started with Mastermind groups and what lead to him starting his own. Hear about the evolution of the inner circle group from it's beginnings as the Ignite program. And see where the inner circle group is now, just as Russell decides to take a pause from it. So listen here to find out how the inner circle began six years ago, and be sure to listen to the next episode to find out why Russell will be pausing it for a little while. ---Transcript--- Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson and I welcome you back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I’ve got a special episode for you today. I’m not going to lie, I’m a little nervous to do this one. But there’s been a bunch of questions I’ve been getting over the last 24 hours, and this is probably the best format for me to kind of talk about it. So I’m going to be talking during today’s episode about why I am pausing my inner circle. Alright everybody, so yes, that is the news. As you’ve probably seen in the Clickfunnels community there’s been a lot of changes and announcements happening. On the Clickfunnels five year birthday, we did some big announcements talking about how we’re simplifying the software, getting rid of some of the features, and just focusing on being the category king of sales funnels. We then talked about how we launched Funnel Flix which is a training platform for people in funnels, and it basically has all the courses we used to sell for anywhere from a couple hundred bucks to a couple thousand bucks for free, for anyone who’s at the $297 a month level of Clickfunnels. And since then we’ve had thousands of people upgrade to that level, which is really, really cool. So now we’re able to do more training. That was the first big announcement. And there’s another big announcement happening at Funnel Hacking Live, which you guys are going to freak out about. If you don’t have your tickets yet, go to FunnelHackingLive.com and get them. And then on my 40th birthday there’s another big announcement. So those are three big things happening, but there’s a lot of little announcements happening as well. And one of them I made last Friday, and it was more silent because it wasn’t to everybody, it was just to a small group in our market. A lot of you guys know I’ve had an inner circle coaching program now for over six years, since before Clickfunnels launched. And it’s funny, I shared this with inner circle group, we had a group here on Monday and Tuesday, and today’s Wednesday. And I kind of took today off and spent time with Norah, went to the pumpkin patch with her. Then tomorrow, Thursday and Friday I have my last inner circle meeting. And honestly, it’s been so far I’m only halfway through the week, but it’s been one of the most emotional weeks of my life. So I kind of want to just talk about that, because I know a lot of people who listen to this podcast specifically, this has been a thing that they’ve been striving for. “I want to be in your inner circle. I want to get there. This is my plan, someday I wanted to do it.” And I just wanted to tell you the story behind it, and then from there talk about why I’m pausing it for a while. And hopefully it’ll be good for you and inspire you and help you to make some decisions that are tough as well. So that’s kind of the game plan. I’m going to go back in time a little bit. So when this whole thing started for me, I had joined a mastermind group, it was Bill Glazer’s mastermind group, Bill Glazer and Dan Kennedy, way back, over ten years ago now. And I was in that group for six years. And when Bill Glazer sold the company I kind of dropped out and I was like, “I need another mastermind group.” And I had tried to launch my own group a couple of times with varied success. I had it once and I had like 5 or 6 people sign up, and then I did it for a year or two and it was kind of hard, and I cancelled it. Anyway, while we were building Clickfunnels and I was writing the Dotcom Secrets book, both the things were happening at the same time, I started having this, I don’t even know what the word is, this desire, this need for a mastermind group. And I tried to join a couple other people’s and just never got what I needed out of them. And finally I kind of felt the pull, which I’m sure you guys have felt that pull, that calling, whatever you want to call it, that need of just like, “I feel like I should start a group” And I remember looking at a bunch of people who had groups online and that were doing really well, and I was like, “That would be so cool.” And they were charging $25,000 for these things. And I was just like, there’s no way that’s going to be possible, but I want to try. So I went out there and I tried to launch this thing. And at first I launched a program that was $10,000, it was called our Ignite program, and we started selling that and it was doing well, and it grew to the point where it was too big. And I was like, I want to do an inner circle. I want to have my own group that I work even closer with. So we launched a $25,000 inner circle program. And at first nobody would sign up for it. I kept trying thing after thing, and nobody, like people would sign up for the $10,000 thing, but nobody would sign up for $25,000. I was just like, other people are selling things for that much, why can’t I? What’s wrong with me? And you know, again, we’re building Clickfunnels at the time, I’m writing the Dotcom Secrets book, and I remember finally, we sold one. And the crazy thing to me, the person that bought it paid $25,000 and then they never showed up to any of the meetings, to any of the things. The first person who signed up never, never asked for a refund either, just never, we couldn’t get this person to ever contact us, it was the weirdest thing. We got one person to sign up, they won’t even show up. I don’t, it doesn’t make any sense to me. And then we sold another one and another, and we started selling a few, and it wasn’t a ton, I think we had 5 or 6 probably at the first meeting. So I had my Ignite event which had maybe 100 people that came to that. And then we did the Inner Circle right afterwards that had like 5 or 6 people in it. And it was the first little mastermind group, and it was so awesome. In fact, I want to take a step back. I shared this yesterday with the inner circle members, but it was funny because this whole thing, the writing the Dotcom Secrets book and the building of Clickfunnels and stuff, came on the backside of a big business failure where I had to fire 80 people and I didn’t like the business I was in, and if you’ve read the Dotcom Secrets book, the intro section I talk about how I woke up one day and I didn’t love my customers and I said, I wished I would have had a boss, so that person could fire me, because I didn’t want to go in. And about that time I heard Evan Pagan talk about how you need to build out a customer avatar and I thought it was the cheesiest advice ever. But I was like, alright fine. I’m going to do this customer avatar exercise, and I talk about it in the Dotcom Secrets book. So I sat down and said, “Who, what’s my dream customer look like?” At first I thought from a male, a man standpoint. So I gave it a name, I’m going to call him Mike. What are some things about Mike? He’s successful, he used to be an athlete, and I kind of list all these different things that my dream customer would have. And I took that to Google images and I typed in Mike, and I set up all the phrases, and a whole bunch of pictures popped up and I picked a dude who looked like someone who I’d want to hang out with, who I thought would be cool. And I took that picture and printed it out and taped it on my wall. And I was like, I don’t want to just serve men. I want to serve women as well, I think women are amazing and a lot of times have more power to change and impact than men, not all the time, but a lot of times. So I was just like, man if I could help serve women as well. And prior to that, the reason why that was a big deal to me at the time is prior to that, when I was doing coaching and stuff like that, I never had very many women who came into our groups, a few but it was just definitely more male dominant. And I was like, I want to work with women too, they’re so amazing and I’ve seen the impact that successful women can have on people. And I was like, I want that as well. So I wrote out a customer avatar on the female side and I called her Julie, and I listed all these different names and I went to Google images and I found a picture that was like my dream Julie. And I printed that out and printed it on my wall. And I had these two pictures and they became my, that was my dream. I want to build a mastermind and those two people are there and I can hang out with them. So that’s when this whole journey started. We started getting some people in and had the group and it was 5 or 6 people at this first mastermind group, and it was the beginning. And we kept pushing it, and kept pushing it. And eventually we got to 8 and to 10 people, and it slowly grew and I would do meetings two or three times a year with them. It was some of the most rewarding work I ever had a chance to do in these mastermind groups. And then I started talking about it. In fact, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for the last 5 or 6 years, I started talking about inner circle members, because I was closest with them. As they would have successes I would talk about it on the podcast. And the more I talked about the inner circle members, the more people who would say, “I want to be in the inner circle.” And then we started getting more traction and more growth and more people started coming into it, to the point where we had a full group of like 18 people, which in my mind my max said 18 people. And I was like, oh my gosh this is crazy. And then we did, I think we did Funnel Hacking Live about that time and we signed up like 10 more people. And then we had like 30 and I was like, I can’t do 30, I think I tried once to do 30 in a group and it was like really, really hard. So I’m like, I’m going to break it into two groups. Then we had two groups of 15 or something like that. And then one day, I had this idea. I was like, what would it look like if I made this perfect? We could have, if I did 4 groups of 25, that’d be 100 people. I could facilitate that, it wouldn’t crush too much of my time, I’d be able to still spend time doing CLickfunnels and everything else I’m doing. So I said, I can handle 100 people in this inner circle and I’d be maxed out at that point. So then, I think I did a podcast about it. I’m sure I sent some emails out and I said, again, we had maybe 35 people at the time. And I said, “Just so you know, we’re capping at 100 people. When we hit 100 I’m shutting it down.” Again, I didn’t think that was ever going to happen. And within like 2 months we hit 100 people. And it was crazy and intense and insane. And we’d do these events where basically people would come and it’s 2 days times 4 groups. 2, 4, 6, 8 days over 2 to 3 weeks, and it was basically a month of my life 2 to 3 times a year was focused on inner circle members. Then I did these things called Decade in a day where they jump on a call on Friday and I spend Fridays consulting with different people in the group. And it was just, again, so fulfilling, so rewarding and gave me a chance to have my hands on 100 people’s businesses at a time in all sorts of industries. It really for me was the training ground, it was the thing that gave me the ability to understand what works in this business, and what’s different. Like what are the intricacies and the differences between an info business versus a supplement business versus a local business. I had this rare, unique opportunity for many years to work with so many companies and see, and be on the front lines and be able to talk through voxer’s with all these entrepreneurs and to figure things out, and it was amazing. So again, we hit the 100 people and then we capped it down, and for like a year no one could come in. And we started getting the normal trips that would happen and after a year we were down to like 70 or, I don’t know how many people were in there. I was like, we need to kind of re- get it back up to 100. So we did a campaign, got it back to 100 and then I had this idea, I said, you know what I don’t want to keep filling this up with new people. I want to make this where it’s like, this is the group of people I’m going to work with, and I just wanted to every single year come back to the same group of people and together, collectively as a whole, I want us all growing together. How are we going to do that when we have people coming and going and things like that? It’s really, really difficult. So we did a campaign with everybody and I said, “We’re starting a program, we’re calling this Inner Circle for Life now. We’re changing the name, it’s called Inner Circle for Life, and when you’re in, you’re in. And if you leave, that’s fine, you can leave, but if you leave you can never come back in.” Because a lot of people said, “I’m going to leave, I’ll come back next year, I’m just going to take a year off.” I was like, I hated that. So we made it inner circle for life where you’re in, you’re in, and if you’re out, we’re still friends but you can never come back in. And what happened next was insane, nobody, for the most part, nobody left. And inner circle was closed for the next 2 ½ years or so. And that brought me to where I’m at now. You know what, I’m going to share that on the next episode. I’m going to drag this story on, because usually my episodes are 10 minutes long, and we’re already 12 minutes and I want to share the rest of the story on the next one. So there’s the build up of where inner circle’s come from in the last 6 years and why we did it, and how we did it, and some of the amazing things, and some of the experiences. So that’s it for this episode. On the next episode I’m going to talk to you about the transitions in my personal life, and family and everything, and why I’m pausing inner circle for now. I’m not pausing it forever, not indefinitely, but for a season I’m going to be pausing it, and I’ll tell you more about that on the next episode here at the Marketing Secrets show. Thanks again everybody, and I will see you on the next episode.

Why these things can and should move you forward as opposed to pulling you backwards. On this special replay episode of Marketing Secrets podcast, Russell talks about the inner battle entrepreneurs face with past regrets. Russell shares his own experiences and observations, including: Why the founding fathers gave us the gift of bankruptcy Why Russell spent an hour and a half on stage talking about his failures How Russell’s “failures” qualified him to work with one of the world’s top business consultants If you’ve ever gone through bankruptcy or messed up and done something stupid in your business, today’s episode is for you. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. And today’s episode is actually going to be a little different because it’s going to be a reboot. I’m actually not going to record a new podcast episode because I’ve been here with my inner circle members for the last couple of days, I’ve been celebrating a lot of their successes. And it’s been interesting though, it feels like there’s been a theme over, recently with a couple of entrepreneurs that I worked close with, who have been struggling and things like that. And for all of them I was like, “Have you listened to the Entrepreneurial Scars podcast?” And they’re like, “No, what’s that?” and I’m like, “How have you not heard this?” And I think it’s been almost two years or so since I published that episode. But I wanted to bring it to the top because I know it’s something that so many people are struggling with and there’s so much fear and anxiety, and I wish it was something I could make everybody listen to once a week or once a month. So because of that, what I’m going to do is just do a reboot and when we come back from the theme song, I’m going to replay that episode of the podcast to hopefully help any of you guys who are in a season of struggling right now with your business, with your life, and hopefully give you guys permission that you need to move forward and to feel comfortable and be able to go back and get back to changing the world. So with that said, I’m going to queue up the theme song, and when we come back you’re going to listen to a podcast called entrepreneurial scars. Hey everyone, so I wanted to, honestly, this podcast I just wanted to hang out with you guys and talk because it’s been interesting. I’ve been working with so many entrepreneurs and recently just as I’ve been working with some people and watching people who had insane amounts of success at one time and then who had something happen. A failure, a bankruptcy, whatever, just fill in the blank. The second time around, a lot of times, they really, really struggle. I start looking and I’m like, why are they struggling? They had this huge success and it’s almost like they have fear and embarrassment like, “I failed in the past.” As I kept talking about this with some of the guys on our team it was like, it’s almost like they have entrepreneurial scars. It’s interesting, us as a person who went through the process, a failure, a lot of times there’s ups and the downs it hard. We have scars, emotional scars, but I think sometimes we feel like those scars are on our faces and other people can see them. What’s interesting is that people don’t. Those are just things that are inside of yourself. But because they’re there and you feel like they’re there and other people can see it, it keeps you from having success the next time. Because there’s so much fear around these scars, these things. And as I was talking about this, this morning, I shared a story and this will hopefully kind of tie these things together a little bit better for you. I’m not going to name names or anything. But there was a guy I know and he was a successful politician. At the top of his game, doing everything amazing and people loved him. And when you saw him in that spot, and it’s not like national politics, I don’t know anybody in national politics. I don’t follow politics at all. But it was a local person. And you saw him on the news and all this other stuff and he was dynamic, charismatic and everything was awesome. And then he got caught up in this political scandal or whatever and it’s funny because, again, I don’t follow politics, and I don’t care that much. But I was aware of the things that happened, and he’s no longer in there and there was someone else. Then fast forward 3 or 4 years later, I met him. What’s funny, it was in a different situation, and he wanted to talk about business stuff. And I was really excited because I was like, “I know who this person is. How cool. I want to meet him and talk to him.” And as I talked to him, it was funny, not funny I shouldn’t say that, it was interesting to see the scars that he’d gotten from this thing were so deep, he was struggling to progress in other parts of his life. Business and all these other things because of the scars he got from this thing that didn’t work out right. You look at the thing, it wasn’t good, but 3 years later, I’m almost surprised that I knew about it, but I did. But he was carrying those scars in his conversations with you. If he would have come in the way that I’d seen him before, confident and all sorts of things, I probably would have done the business deal with him, but because he had these scars and just the way he approached me, he didn’t have the certainty or all these things. They were gone and I could feel it. And that uncertainty kept me from doing the deal with him. And I remember thinking after I finished, I could tell he was still carrying around the fear and embarrassment and shame of that thing. I don’t care about that thing. I couldn’t care less. Move on with your life and come back. That person I saw on TV, if you would have approached me that way, I would have done this deal. The same thing is true with entrepreneurs, there’s someone I know who is super successful, knew how to funnel, blew up and made a ton of money and then it went away and now they’re kind of struggling. And what’s interesting is I know that back story because I know the person and things like that. Even with that, I look at the person like, this person is a rock star. They’re awesome. They’re amazing. But as I see them interact with other people, I see these scars that this person has are keeping them from taking over the next thing. And it’s funny because I don’t think 99,9% of every single person in the world has any idea, their little scars are there for this person, but because he knows that they’re there, because he knows he failed. He knows that things disappear and didn’t work out the way he wanted. He has this fear and has these approaching the next situations, he’s struggling because of that. Because of these scars. And I think it’s interesting that these entrepreneurial scars that we have, first off they’re invisible. Nobody sees them.  Some people may be aware of them, but nobody sees them except for you. So because you are so aware of these things, it keeps you from having the confidence and success you need to move forward. It’s funny, I was talking to an entrepreneur who was about to go through bankruptcy and they were freaking out and so scared. And I kind of asked them why and they didn’t say, “Because I don’t want those scars.” But what they said afterwards was, If I get out of bankruptcy, what’s my wife going to think and my in-laws and family?” all these things and I was like, “You have to understand, bankruptcy, think about this, failure for entrepreneurs, the founding fathers of this country gave us bankruptcy as a gift, so that entrepreneurs like us would risk and try and move forward and roll the dice and hope for something. And if it wasn’t for that gift, and you may think it’s a gift for the founding fathers, but I think it’s a gift from god. But if it wasn’t for that thing, America wouldn’t have succeeded as a nation. Everything that’s amazing wouldn’t have happened if entrepreneurs didn’t have that risk. If it was like, if you go bankrupt you go to jail until you pay off all your debts. Not a lot of people would have taken the risk, I don’t know if I would have taken the risks. But because the worst case scenario is bankruptcy, you clear off your balance sheets and start over. That’s the worst case scenario and that’s the greatest gift we have. So if we hit that and we go through it and all the sudden we have these scars, I went through bankruptcy and have all this fear. Then you go through the next thing, it’s like, no, that shouldn’t be a negative thing. That means you tried, you attempted. Even after you attempted and had success and it went away, you had success. I remember I was doing a deal with this guy who was super successful. In fact, he did these consulting things where it was 500 grand a day with a minimum of ten sessions, so it’s like half a million bucks to get this guy to work with you. And I had a chance to hang out with him and I was talking to him and talking strategy and he was asking about my story. I tell him my story and I’m pretty open with things now. I have realized that my scars are what actually draws people to me. That’s why at Funnel Hacking Live I spend an hour and a half on stage talking about all my failures, it draws people toward me, which is kind of making the point at the end of this podcast. But I’ve had my share of ups and downs. And as I told him the whole thing he’s like, “Oh good.” And I’m like, “What do you mean, good?’. And he’s like, “you cycled.” I’m like, “what do you mean cycled?” And he’s like, “Entrepreneurs who haven’t cycled at least once, I refuse to work with them.” I’m like, “What does that mean?” “Cycled means you build something up and then you crash. If you haven’t cycled yet, then guess what? You’re still drinking your own kool-aid. You still believe that you are the most amazing human being on Earth. You don’t realize until after you cycled, that it’s not just you. You aren’t the greatest thing to walk this planet. There’s market conditions, there’s people, opportunities, luck and all these amazing things that happen that make you possible. That make you as an entrepreneur successful.” And as he said that, first off I was like, that feels better. Cycling sounds way better than failure, than bankruptcy. But I thought it was interesting that he wouldn’t work with entrepreneur unless they’d cycled once. And I was like, Man, how many people go out there and do their big risk and have some success which gives you all t his pride and confidence and stuff. And then you lose it and because of that failure you never try again. Or you try it but halfway because you feel like you  have these scars and you feel like other people are judging you or you are judging yourself for all these kind of things. Where the reality is that we don’t se those things. Nobody knows about the failures until you tell them about it. But if they do know about it, it doesn’t really matter. In fact, as I found as I share my scars, it’s draws people closer, like I mentioned earlier. I think the reason people will do business with me a lot of times is because I’m vulnerable, I share those things. So for you guys, I wanted to talk about it today because first off, it’s okay to have those scars, but don’t hide them. Share those things. When my kids get injured and they’re super cute and do it all the time, I tell my boys, “Chicks dig scars. That’s a good thing. That’s awesome. Black eyes are awesome.” I remember one of my black eyes I got in wrestling; I don’t know if you guys are watching the video, you can still see the scars over both of my eyes. I had this one where I hit my buddies knee and my eye had swollen shut and I had 15 stitches and couldn’t see out of my eye for 4 or 5 days. I was at school and I was all embarrassed because of the scar and as I was walking around people were like, “Dude your eye looks awesome. You’re a wrestler.” People connected with that more than me looking good and my hair being, worrying about what I look like. So I think the moral of this podcast and I want you guys to understand, is that we all have entrepreneurial scars. If you don’t have them yet, you’re going to have them. But don’t let those keep you from the next success. My friend who is a politician, I don’t care what happened. He could go and do and be successful, but because he’s carrying these scars, he’s not. You have to be willing to get rid of those, or not get rid of them, embrace them and share those things. Look, I screwed up, this is what happened. But this is what I’m doing now and this is what I learned from it, how I’m changing. If I look back on my career, there’s a lot of things I’m embarrassed about. Things I messed up on big time. Maybe I should do a podcast someday about my biggest regrets. I have regrets in my business. There’s things I did that I’m embarrassed about, I wish I wouldn’t have done. Looking back now, I would have consulted myself, “Do not do that.” But I wouldn’t have known the path unless I’d gone down some of these paths and realized what things weren’t right. I’ve always tried to be fair to my customers and my employees and stuff, but I’ve made mistakes, and I’ve sold things that I thought were really good and found out later they weren’t. There’s things I’m not proud of, but if I let those scars keep me, how many people’s lives that we’re touching and effecting now that wouldn’t have been touched had I not embraced those scars and told people, “Look I messed up in the past.” And I have, and we all do and it’s okay. But I don’t want you guys to not progress because of that. Hopefully this gives you some comfort. Look, if you’ve gone through bankruptcy that’s okay. If you messed up and did something stupid, that’s okay. That’s what this life is about. About making those mistakes and owning it, and if you do it’s almost like plastic surgery. It makes these scars disappear. But they don’t need to disappear. Like I said, embrace it. Because that’s what’s going to draw people to you. So I hope that helps. It was on my mind today, I though it just want to share it. I hope that that was good for you guys. Again, as entrepreneurs, we’re risking stuff every day. We’re risking our name, money, other people. I wake up in the morning scared with 119 employees as of today. If I screw up, how many people lives have I let down because of that. Those things are real to me and I understand that. But I’ve got to risk those things because how many people’s lives can we effect because of those things. And if you’ve gone through bankruptcy, don’t let that stress you out. It’s a gift from the founding fathers, from God. It’s given us the ability so that we can risk and not lose everything. We can risk……..and if it wasn’t for that, again, progress would stop if entrepreneurs weren’t risking. So it’s not a bad thing. If you…. Anyway, I just wanted to give you guys that as a gift. And if you any of you guys are struggling, some of you probably are. Some of you guys are going through bankruptcy or gone through bankruptcy. Maybe it’s not bankruptcy but you failed. You launched something that didn’t work. You built a team of people and the product didn’t work and you had to fire people or let them go. All the ups and downs and disappointment. As entrepreneurs you have so many things on your shoulders and I get that. I hope this message helps relieve some of that pressure for some of you guys. Because if you don’t keep risking, trying, keep getting those scars, where is the world going to be? Where are you going to be? Where’s your family going to be? Where are the people you’re serving going to be? They need you and it’s worth the risk, worth the sacrifice, worth the fears. Because if you’re going to affect those people, when you deliver on what you know you have and you change their lives, it makes it all worth it. It’s interesting, just to kind of close this down. I looked at where our company has come to where we are today. And I looked back during my last cycle. 7 years ago when everything collapsed around me and I thought the world was coming to an end and I was depressed and sad and scared and all those kind of things happened. Looking at it now, if I didn’t go through that, Clickfunnels and this process never would have happened. I never would have met Todd, I never would have met who built Clickfunnels. I never would have built this team. I never would have had the opportunity. I wouldn’t have known the things I know to be able to execute on this. A lot of things we’re steering clear from today are because of the mistakes that happened back then. And if I would have made those mistakes today, some of them would have been catastrophic. Way more people’s lives would have been effected. Whereas, I had a chance to suffer those things, get those scars on a smaller scale, so I don’t have to have those things now. Hopefully, if I learned my lesson which I’m trying to do. So look at those things as gifts, embrace them, share them, and don’t hide from them. Because those scars will draw people to you and we all have them. Don’t let that keep you from your mission. Hope that helps. Thanks again for everything guys and I will talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.

Something I did this week to get two days worth of writing done in less than two hours. On this episode Russell talks about writing his upcoming Traffic Secrets book and how he’s been doubling his productivity levels the last week. Here are some awesome things to look for in today’s episode: Why writing a book is painful and people gravitate toward pleasure rather than pain. How Russell has managed to change the way he sits down to write and double his productivity. And how you can use Russell’s technique in your own life to get crap done. So listen here to find out about Russell’s sneaky hack to help get stuff done faster. ---Transcript--- What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I am once again cruising in my Tesla to go pick up Dave from the airport and I wanted to share with you some of my thoughts. Alright everybody, I hope you guys are doing awesome today. So I have been working over the last couple of days really, really hard on writing the Traffic Secrets book, which has been fun. And I’ve kind of talked to you guys a little bit about the process of some of the stuff I’ve been doing, but I’ve been also using instagram to tell stories and show behind the scenes of me writing the book, and where I’m doing it and how I’m doing it. And it’s crazy because last week we were in an RV driving down 10 hours to Lake Powell and my wife was driving and I was in the RV typing the book away, right. And then on the way home she was driving I was kind of in the back seat making sure the kids don’t kill each other while writing the book. And then it’s funny because, if anyone’s every written a book, you know how hard it is, and I was listening to a podcast that Rachel and Dave Hollis did and they were talking about writing, I think Rachel was talking about writing her book and how the biggest key to writing a book is word count, word count. Getting the words in and getting the words in. And it’s hard for me because I don’t know, I’m probably different than some people, how they write their books, but it’s not just sit down and write like crazy. It’s like for me, sometimes I sit there and for a day I’m just daydreaming. I’m a visionary type person. Like I can see it first, I’m looking, I’m doodling, I’m trying to figure out the concept and the framework and I’m trying to put all these pieces together. And when I see it I’m like, ‘Okay, now I have the framework.” And one of the stories is synced to each part of the framework, and how do I do it? And it comes back and then I actually start writing it. But that thought keeps going through my head that I heard from Rachel was word count, word count. So I’m like, ‘How do I increase my word count each day?” Because my deadline is looming. It is getting close. My publisher wants the book to them in about two months, which would be awesome except for there’s two, three things. Number one, I still run a hundred and something million a year company, which is like you know, not a tiny task. Number two, I’ve got an amazing family that I love and I want them to continue to love me. So I’ve got to be present with them, especially now that it’s summertime and they’re you know, not in school anymore. So I’m trying to take less hours and trying to work out in the morning with them and try to weave my kids into as much as humanly possible. And then the other thing is that in less than two months from now we have a big event, which is the unlock the secrets event, which is an event for our coaching program, coaching members, which is a big thing as well. So it’s like, there’s a lot of stuff happening. Also that event is a three day long event, and I’m teaching all the sessions except for I think, 90 minutes of being taught by other people. But the rest of it is 100% me, which means I have three days worth of presentations that I’m doing. And they’re not tiny presentations, in fact, I might do a podcast just talking about how I’m preparing for the event and just all the stuff I’m doing for it. But it’s a big ordeal too. And on top of that, I have to write the book. Anyway, so it’s just like if I don’t keep it moving, I’m going to get into a lot of trouble and have to pull 22 all nighters in a row from the time the event’s done till the book is actually due, which I don’t want to do. So word counts been this thing. So I’ve been trying a bunch of things. I’ve been trying to get up early. I’ve been trying to stay up late. I’ve been trying different things. But this week, what’s been really, really good is one of my buddies John Parkes, he gave me this gift a couple of years ago, it’s been sitting on my desk. It looks like a big dice and there’s different numbers like, 5, 25, 30, 50, 60 all these different times. And what you do is you sit down and you turn that to, if you want 60 minutes you put the 60 up, if you want 10 minutes you put 10 minutes up. But it starts a timer and then you just do the task for a little while right. Because there’s something, Ican’t even remember off the top of my head, there’s a whole bunch of studies that I remember reading about this probably a decade ago, but basically the human mind can focus for like an hour at a time. I think it was like 57 or 58 minutes or something like that. So the whole concept of this is like sit down, flip the thing over for an hour and then just focus for an hour. And then as soon as it beeps you have to stop, jump up, run around and reset, then come back down and do it again. So I was like, “I’m going to try that this week.” And so I did that. I totally got the, and I think if you go to Amazon and type in like Cube Dot Timer, or Dice Timer, you’ll see one for like a buck or two, they’re not expensive. But I did that and I flipped my phone upside down, I turned off all my instant messenger, Skype, Facebook, everything that somebody could possibly contact me on, and then I flipped it to 60 minutes and I was like, “Go time. Word count. Go.” And I just focused on writing during that 60 minutes. And it was cool because I made a rule for myself, like during the 60 minutes I can’t deviate. I can’t go and flip my phone over, I can’t all these different things. Our human minds, we always want to go towards the, wherever the least resistance is. We want to move towards pleasure and away from pain. And writing for me and for a lot people I’ve talked about who write as well, is very much pain. So it’s like you’re moving towards pain. It’s like, ugh. There’s all this pleasure around and you want to jump to all these other things. But I basically made it where all those things are shut off now and all I have is the book. And pleasure is in 60 minutes when I’m done writing. And I’m going to be angry if I get to the end of 60 minutes and I haven’t done writing. There’s a lot of pain there. So it’s like, I gotta write to get the pleasure. And it forced me to write. And what I found is that it compounds the attention. Like normally I’m writing for 5 or 6 minutes and then I’m checking my phone. Every 5 or 6 minutes checking it and my mind is jumping. Whereas when I focus for an hour and everything else is done, I just got an hour, but I know in an hour I get freedom. Man it was like writing for 3 or 4 hours in that hour. And then as soon I heard that thing beep I jumped up, I checked my phone, checked my Facebook, checked my everything, ran around the office and said hi to everybody, went and got a drink of water, went to the bathroom and just move my body and like smile, and have some fun, then went back in, sat down, turned everything off, flipped the thing, boom, another hour. And in those two one hour sessions I got more done than I typically get probably in two days worth of writing. But then after that I was beat up. I was like, “Well, I’m good. I’m not writing anymore today.” But it was okay because I got two days worth of writing done in two hours. Anyway, just a thought because I know that, you know, you may not be writing a book, but I do know that whenever you’re moving forward in any project in business, you’re building a funnel, you’re writing a sales letter, you’re trying to create a product, like all the things, our brains are always running toward a path of least resistance. It’s always moving away from pain towards pleasure. And it’s tough because the creation of the thing usually we all associate a lot of pain with it in our minds, so our brains are always looking for other things. So this is just a really simple, easy, $3 way to make it simple. And you wouldn’t even have to use a dice, you could literally set an alarm on your phone and flip the phone over, which maybe is an even easier thing to do, but just the concept of blocking out that time. I don’t remember exactly, oh I remember. When we were first launching clickfunnels, I was trying to convince Todd and everybody to move to Boise because I want all my friends in Boise and that makes total logical sense. And about that time there was a book that came out called the re-work and it was all about Base Camp, how they all work remote. Anyway, it was really interesting. And I remember we were at that and we kind of made the decision like, “Let’s actually make this a remote team.” So we did that and that was kind of the decision. And it’s been good but I remember it was interesting in the book Re-work, and then I also, oh, excuse me, not Re-work, it was Remote. Those are both their books and both of them are amazing, so read both Re-Work and Remote. Remote was the one about working remote. But anyway, when I read that, and I also watched, he did a Ted Talk about Remote as well. It was interesting, he talked about how when you have to get something done, where do you go? No one says, “I go to work.” They say, “I come in earlier” or “I stay late.” Or “I work from home.” Or whatever, to get something done. It’s like, work doesn’t actually happen at work most times because there’s so many distractions and things happening. And you know, I was looking at that, if everyone on my team, I mean, just for me, I wrote for 2 solid hours, and I got more done than I did in two days because I forced myself to block everything off. If everyone on my team, we all sat down and just blocked out 2 hours of dedicated time with nothing else, I wonder what would get done? How much faster things would move? Anyway, I thought it was kind of interesting and fascinating all wrapped into one. Anyway, I wanted to share that with you guys and hopefully that gives you some ideas and some ways to get some stuff done. It’s one of my new productivity hacks. I’ve done it two days in a row and this book is going to get done on time and it’s going to be amazing because of it. So all I want from you guys is a commitment right now that the second Traffic Secrets goes live, you go buy a billion copies, or at least one. And that way you can support all the work, because I am killing myself and it’s going to cost you a couple of bucks to get all this stuff that I’m doing. And hopefully it will be a good exchange and value for you. Alright, that’s all I got guys. Have an amazing day; I’m almost to the airport with Dave. I might record another episode with you guys before I go see him. So with that said, appreciate you all, have a great day and we’ll talk to you all soon.

Part 3 of 3 from my presentation from Funnel Hacking Live 2018 where I talked about this new concept called “Conversation Domination”. On this exciting conclusion of the Conversation Domination Presentation Russell talks about some of the platforms you can use to get people excited about your business. Here are some of the awesome things in this episode: How Facebook is a talk show, YouTube a sitcom, and podcasts are radio shows. How Russell utilizes each of these channels for his business, and how you could use them for yours. And why it’s important to master these channels one at a time, before moving on to the next one.  So listen here to final portion of Russell’s awesome Conversation Domination Presentation from Funnel Hacking Live 2018. ---Transcript--- Alright everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. This is episode 3 of 3 of the conversation domination presentation. I hope you’ve been enjoying this. I hope that it’s getting the wheels in your head spinning and turning and thinking about what’s possible. If you have enjoyed this at all please take a screen shot of this episode and post it on social, on all your different channels and platforms, tag me on it and use #marketingsecrets, I’d love to see it and love to hear your thoughts about this episode. It means the world to me when you guys share this, and if you haven’t rated or reviewed, please log into iTunes and go rate and review these. That way, I always read those and it makes me feel good about myself, which makes me want to do more podcast episodes for you guys for free. Literally this is the kind of stuff we normally sell and I’m giving it to you for free because I love you. So in exchange for all this cool stuff I’m giving you for free, if you could go rate and review, that’d be sweet. So like I said, in the very near future we’re going to be coming out with a deeper dive training program into this whole concept of conversation domination, but for today, I just wanted to give you guys this three part series from one of our Funnel Hacking Live events. I hope you enjoyed it. With that said, I’m going to queue up the theme song and we will come back with part 3 of 3, the exciting conclusion of the conversation domination presentation. Next is Dream 100. Dana Derricks is going to be talking about dream 100 I think tomorrow or the next day. Dream 100 is the key to all sorts of traffic, and I cannot wait to unlock this for you guys. But dream 100, these are the people that already have your audience. So how do you get those people’s audiences to follow you? There’s a lot of different ways. Partnerships, paying people, we pay people to post stuff and say, “Hey Russell Brunson is awesome, follow him here.” And we pay and all the sudden we get a whole bunch of their followers. We doubled our followers in the last month and a half by just doing these paid ads like that. It’s really, really cool and not that expensive. So the last one I’m going to go through really quickly is how you post. So there’s the whole science to this as well, that I’m not going to go too deep into. But instagram is based on hashtags. Hashtags work like this, Instagram is like a filing cabinet of everything that’s happening in the world, hashtags are like the folders, here’s all the stuff that’s interesting, and then your posts are the papers. So the way it works here is, like if you’re posting something, there’s going to be people on Instagram like, “What’s happening in Disney World today?” and if you tag Disney world, it’s going to pop up like, “Oh Russell’s here. What’s happening?” and people can watch your thing, people can find you that way. So you can do it based on location, on events, on the brands, on the community, and on trending stuff. So if I was to do a video here, if you guys did a video on Instagram you could be like, “Hey I’m here at Funnel Hacking Live, it’s amazing.” Then be like, #disneyworld #cornoadosprings #funnelhacker # clickfunnels and if you do that, when someone searches clickfunnels because they’re here at the event, or when someone searches cornado resort, like, “What’s happening here in cornado resort? Oh here’s five cool people posting stuff.” People can find you really, really quick. So it’s all about figuring out where these conversations are happening and kind of plugging in. And I got one other trick I want to show you guys on Instagram, then we’re going to move on to the next platform. This is a trick I started using that literally 3x’d how many people watched my reality show every single day. Every once in a while, and I did this yesterday and this morning as well, I go and do a video. I was on the plane like, “Hey everyone,” this is in my Instagram feed, “Hey everyone, we’re going to Funnel Hacking Live, it’s going to be amazing. If you want to see behind the scenes of what we’re doing, click on the link, you’ll see the whole reality show. I’m going to show you guys behind the scenes of everything. I’ll show you meeting all the cool people, it’s going to be really, really fun.” And all the sudden the amount of views I got, or I will get over the next week, I will more than 3x. So I’m publishing in my Instagram channel telling people to go up and do it. Same thing on Facebook. I go to Facebook like, “Hey guys, come see behind the scenes.” And I push people back, let them know something amazing is happening this week, make sure you watch my reality show, and if they do it for 2 or 3 days they’ll be connected and hooked and they’ll keep watching it for forever. So that’s Instagram. So the next channel that we want to move into. The next channel we want to move into in this process, again, if you look at the framework, we’ve got our ads that build distribution, distribution builds the channels, a special focus on Instagram, Instagram promotes the episodes, and now I want to start focusing on these other channels as well. Now one thing I want to stress, I don’t want you guys trying to go build all channels at once. I want you guys to find one channel to focus on and become really, really good at it. Remember zero to a million, a million to ten, ten to a hundred. Zero to a million is all about one channel. Most of the guys and gals in inner circle got to two comma club just doing facebook. That’s it. Now they’re starting to scale and grow and that’s when they start adding in more platforms. So don’t think you have to do all of them tonight. Just pick the one. I’m going to kind of walk you through all of them, just so you understand them. So this one, I look at Facebook more like a talk show. The way it works, my goals in this is if you look at how Facebook’s algorithm works, they want interaction, they want stuff happening, they want engagements, they want comments. That’s what they’re rewarding people for right now, that’s why Facebook lives are doing so well. So I look at these the same way. If I was like Jimmy Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon or Jay Leno, this is how they do their shows for the last however many years right. Same process. The first thing they do in their show is always an opening monologue, then they talk about the industry, they do interviews etc. So if I’m doing  a FAcebook live it’s the same thing. Here’s my opening monologue, let me tell my story. Let me do Q and A’s, let me get engagement, get people talking, that becomes how we do a Facebook live talk show. The other goal is to build rapport. A couple of things about Instagram, the pros and the cons. The pros are really, really fast. You do a Facebook live and instantly there’s 20, 30, 50, 100, 500, 1000 people that fast. So it’s very fast, very targeted. The negatives are Facebook is the newsfeed platform. So it happens, it’s there and then it goes down, down, down and eventually just disappears. It’s kind of like email. If you send an email to someone, they don’t go back 5 years later to find the email, it kind of disappears. The same thing happens with Facebook, it’s there, it’s exciting, and then it’s kind of in the newsfeed and it ends up disappearing. Think about this, it’s the same thing with talk shows. How many of you guys ever go back and watch reruns of Jay Leno? You don’t watch reruns of talk shows. And when a talk show is showing a rerun because they’re not live, you just turn the TV off. People who watch reruns are not going to watch reruns typically of Facebook Live, so it’s short lived. But it’s powerful because you’re talking in the moment, right then, what’s happening, so that’s kind of the pros and cons of it. You have the show, distribution to go and build your facebook channel, then you use instagram to post all the episodes, to push up to, “Hey, I’m about to go live on Facebook, it’s going to be amazing. I’m talking about this, and talking this. Swipe up to watch to watch it. I’m going live in 5 minutes.” “Going live in 2 minutes.” “I’m about to go live, come watch it.” “I just went live, you guys, if you missed it here’s the link, go check it out.” Pushing people to that thing, then I do the episode. So that’s how Facebook kind of works in this format. The next channel I want to talk about is my sitcom, which is YouTube. Now YouTube is obviously a little bit different. Our YouTube channel is YouTube.com/funnelhacker and we spent a lot of time over the last year trying to figure out YouTube. I think, my belief is Facebook is shifting a lot and we’re going to see a lot of changes over the next twelve months. I think that a lot of you guys start putting more energy and more effort into YouTube, it’s gonna be a really good longer term play, just because I think Facebook is doing some weird stuff and it just makes me more nervous. So we’ve been trying to diversify very heavily into YouTube, which is why we invested so much time and energy and it’s a really good platform for a couple of reasons, and I’ll walk through those. So one thing nice about sitcoms is people will rewatch them. Awesome. How many of you guys have watched Seinfeld at least 100 times every episode? How many of you guys could quote any episode that I gave you, pretty much verbatim? Soup Nazi, yes. So people will watch reruns, watch refunds too. Number two, the cool thing about this video is you post it on YouTube and you post it there, and then the video, unlike Facebook that disappears, you post it on YouTube and it grows. It just keeps growing and growing and growing and growing. It’s the craziest thing in the world. I don’t see that on Facebook. When I post a video on Facebook it disappears, I post it on YouTube and it grows and it grows and it grows. So you can spend more time and effort creating a YouTube video because the longevity is huge. I would not spend a ton of time and energy on a Facebook Live because it’s going to die in a couple of days. So jump on Facebook live, do your talk show, Jimmy Fallon, do the whole fun thing, but YouTube spend some time and create something amazing because after its posted there it will continue to grow and to grow and to grow. And that’s the magic of YouTube. People watch things over and over and over again. Now there’s two types of videos we create in YouTube, and I’m going to kind of go through both of those so you understand. Number one is what we call discoverable videos and number two are engagement videos. So my goal is each week I’m trying to put out at least one discoverable video, and then one engagement style video, does that make sense. Okay so this is kind of how they work. A discoverable video, the goal of that, is to get people to discover who I am. This is the other power of YouTube, because even if I have no following, for example, I don’t know if Joe Marvolo is here, but Joe, yeah, I love Joe. Give him a round of applause, he’s awesome.  So Joe’s the dude who is helping me with my YouTube stuff, so you should all give him all your money. So when I first met Joe 6 or 7 years ago, when we had a product we were selling called How to Overcome Pornography, and he saw it and he was like, “Hey man, if you want I can make you a video on YouTube to promote this thing.”I’m like, “Okay, go for it. I have no idea if that will even work. Do you have a following of people who should overcome pornography?” he’s like, “No, but the cool thing is I can create this video and people who are struggling with pornography, those people will find it.” So we made two little videos talking about pornography addiction, added a link going back to our funnel, and he posted them on YouTube, and between these two videos, what’s the view count up to between the two now, do you know? Almost two million views, two million people have searched for how to overcome pornography addiction, saw Joe’s videos, clicked on the link and came into our funnels. Two million people, that’s without any kind of distribution. All because it’s discoverable. Okay, so what Joe’s been teaching me, what we’re trying to do more and more of, is on these videos that are discoverable, as you’re trying to get people to subscribe to your channel, and you’re focusing each video on an actual keyword phrase. I’m not going to get super deep into the weeds on this, but that’s the thing. You make a video and it’s like, “Hey, my name is Russell Brunson, this channel we’re talking about how to build funnels and it’s really cool, how to grow your online business. If you want to subscribe, click the button and subscribe down below.” And then it’s like, ‘Now today I’m going to talk about, (what’s my keyword phrase) sales funnels for real estate agents.” Let’s say that’s my keyword phrase, and I talk about it and get them all excited and that’s the thing, and in the end I give a call to action like, “Go to Clickfunnels.com to get a free sales funnel.” Or whatever it is. That becomes the video. Now I can get that video ranked for the actual keyword phrase, people who don’t even know who I am are going to discover that and they’re going to join my channel and that’s kind of the magic behind it, focusing on the keywords. Alright, number two then, there’s discoverable videos where you’re getting people to discover and find you, and the second one is where you create videos that are going to build a rapport with people. People will get to know who you are. Oh excuse me, I’m jumping ahead. Okay, sorry, I’m going to come back. So this is back to discoverable. This is a really cool tool that Joe showed me called vid IQ, which is awesome. Vid IQ is like a free plugin you plug into Chrome and then when you go to YouTube your YouTube starts looking way different. If you look at this, it shows you all sorts of stats. So if you want to funnel hack people, you go to, let’s say I want to be ranked for sales funnels, I could use this plug in, go to YouTube, type in sales funnels and it says, “The number one dude, this is what he did. This is all the key words he focused on, what his video looks like, how many subscribers he gets, how much money he makes.” It gives you all the detail. So as funnel hackers, what do we do if we know everything our competitors are doing? We win. We reverse engineer that with your videos. You say, “Okay, I need a video that’s this long, I need to make sure I focus on these keyword, this targeting.” and you go back reverse engineer, go back and create it. Vid IQ is an amazing tool that gives the ability to go and reverse engineer videos so you can go and do the same process. Alright,  so that’s number one that’s the discoverable videos. And the second one  are the engagement videos. People who are on my channel, people who are following me, how do I build more of rapport with them? And it’s by creating these other videos. How many of you guys watch our Funnel Hacker TV episodes? How many of you guys have ever seen our behind the scenes show? These are all videos. Funnel Hacker TV, our behind the scenes show. These are videos we’re creating to cause connection with our actual audience, so they like us and actually care about us. And what’s cool about these, this is like Seinfeld, people will find their favorite episodes and share them and watch them over and over again, and a bunch of things like that. Here’s an example of one of the videos we created a little while ago, that’s done really, really well for us. It’s just, I was on vacation and I was like, “I’m going to spend a little bit of time and we’re going to make a really cool video that’s going to speak to my people. I want to connect with them at a different level.” So after you guys see this video I’m going to ask you guys, I’m curious how many of you guys actually connect with this video, because that was the goal of people on my channel to actually connect with it. “Why are vacations so hard for entrepreneurs like us? Do you ever have any of your friends or family members or people you care about, maybe a wife or a spouse, tell you something like this, ‘you need a break. You need to stop or else you’re going to get burned out.’ How many times do we have people who we love and we care about tell us things like that? They think that a break is what we need to be happy, to have a balanced life. What they don’t understand is that us entrepreneurs actually get stressed out by vacations. Why? “Right now I’m in Kawai, Hawaii with my wife celebrating our 15 year anniversary and this beach house right here, we’re spending over $2500 a night to stay here. We’ve flown in helicopters, we’ve gone on boat tours, we’ve floated down irrigation canals, we’ve had an amazing vacation. But I’m actually more stressed out now than I was at home running my entire company. Why? Because entrepreneurs don’t need vacations, but the people around us that we love, they do. “What our loved ones don’t understand is that us entrepreneurs, we don’t get happy and sad like normal people, we only feel momentum. We’re either moving forward or we’re moving backward. When we’re moving forward we’re happy, when we’re not, we feel sad, we feel upset and we feel stressed. It’s kind of like when the coach pulls you out of the big game and sets you on the bench to catch your breath. As you’re watching the game from the sidelines, you’re seeing your teammates, seeing other players all move towards the goal line, you want to do everything in your power to get back into the game. Being in the game is why you do what you do. “What they don’t understand is that what we do, it is our hobby, it is our vacation, and when we’re moving forward that’s all the fuel that we need. When we have to stop for vacation or for sleep, so does our momentum. So if you’re watching this and you care about an entrepreneur, don’t worry about us. We’re not going to burn out. We don’t need a break, we just need to keep moving forward. “So if our mind is wondering while we’re on vacation or it seems like we’re struggling, it’s not because we don’t love you. We do, in fact, that’s the reason why we’re on this vacation, it’s because we do love you. We’re just trying to figure out how to keep moving forward without ruining the vacation for others around us. And for my entrepreneurs who are watching this, first is tag and share this video with those around you who love you, so they’ll understand you better and they’ll stop trying to get you to relax. “And second, the secret to a happy vacation for you and for the people you love is to figure out ways to keep momentum happening even while you’re on vacation. For me it’s reading a book or listening to an audio course, or something I can learn that doesn’t interrupt the vacation for others. For them, it seems like I’m relaxing, so the people I love don’t stress out and think I’m going to burn out. But inside my mind I can continue to plot and scheme and figure out how to keep things moving forward. You’re an entrepreneur and this game we play, it isn’t a job, it’s your life and that’s okay.” That’s how you all feel too, right? I just want to make sure I’m not…cool. That’s the fun thing, you create stuff like that and people watch it over and over and over again. I have people all the time like, “Hey, I sent that to my wife. I sent that to my parents. Sent it to my kids, now they understand why I’m this way.” You create cool stuff like that, it’s like, it’s like Seinfeld, they watch it over and over. They watch it and they share it and it’s amazing. So that’s kind of the fun stuff. So again, the goal of the distribution that we’re building is to build the channels. So you build your instagram channel, your facebook channel and your YouTube channel. Then you go use Instagram now, swipe up to watch your episode. So I was in Hawaii, excuse me, we back from Hawaii I’m like, “I’m back from Hawaii, making this video and it’s going to be amazing, you guys.” And I talk about it, talk about it, talk about it and when it’s finally ready, “Swipe up to watch it.” And everyone’s excited because they are part of the process. Alright the next channel I want to focus on, and this is, I say they’re all my favorite, I love all of them I’m not going to lie. But this is one of my favorite, the radio show. The radio show is your podcast. How many of you guys have a podcast right now, that are in this room? That is amazing, I love it. I am a big believer in podcasts. So this is your radio show. The reason why I like podcasts, one of my favorite channels, is because it’s the most intimate. The reality show is intimate, it’s nice, but this is the most intimate. When people listen to your podcast, it’s usually when they’re unplugging from everything else. They’re putting it in and they’re working out, or they’re driving, or they’re separated and it’s you in their head talking to them. You hear Natalie up here, she’s like, “Everyday I work out I listen to Russell and Alex.” We have this distribution channel into the minds of our dream customers to tell them what we think, what we believe, what we’re doing, why they should care. And it’s powerful. There’s just something magical. I think people are insane if you don’t, I think everybody on earth should have their own podcast. When Alex Charfen and I were hanging out this summer we were talking, I’m like, “Why don’t you make a podcast about your entrepreneur personality type?’ He’s like, “People told me it was a bad idea.” I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me? I would love to plug in and just have you bring up ideas into my head all day long.” And he did it. Is Alex, where you at? Are you in here? Yeah. How’s it been for you, I don’t have a microphone, but how’s it been for you so far? Has it been amazing for your business? He did over 200,000 downloads without any paid advertising, is that amazing? It’s amazing. 200,000 people or times people have downloaded a message that he created and put it into their minds. Do you know the power of that? How many of you guys think differently because you’ve heard me talking in your ear for the last year, two years, five years? I think about the podcasts I listen to and it’s transformed me. It’s one of the most powerful media’s we have. It’s intimate. Podcast listeners will also become your best buyers. This is proven. People who listen to podcasts are worth more money to you. If you look at, in fact, if you look at people that listen to the radio in their car versus people who listen to podcasts, it’s, I don’t remember the exact number, like the average person who listens to the radio all day makes like 30-50 thousand dollars a year, podcasts it starts at like 150 thousand dollars a year. It’s crazy the separation. If you get people actually listening to you during their drive time, they’re worth more to you. Plus you’ll be found on a platform by people who are actually looking for your stuff as well. My big suggestion, don’t just do a question and answer show. It’s okay to do question and answer stuff, but the biggest problem I have with Q and A shows is that people won’t get to know you as well. I  like listening to a podcast because I want to hear the host and what their thoughts and their ideas are. So you could do Q and A but I recommend do a lot of them where it’s just you talking and telling your stories. The next thing is try to record them how people are actually listening to them. The first five years of my podcast was me driving in my car on my way to work while I was talking. And most people started listening while they were driving in their car to where they worked at. If I was in the fitness market I would be working out on my treadmill doing my podcast, knowing that my audience is probably working out on the treadmill while they’re listening to me. I like creating it the way that they’re going to be consuming it. If I had a marriage thing I’d be doing it, laying in bed with my wife, telling my podcast there because that’s where they might be listening to it right. I’d be looking at creating it the same way they’re going to be consuming it. This is a really good place that’s, because of the format you can have longer shows that people will actually listen to you. You can share your beliefs, share your observations, talk about what you’re learning. And the cool thing about this is I feel like, with my podcasts, everyone who’s been following me, it’s like you’re always on the edge of discovery with me. I launched the podcast right after my company collapsed, before we launched Clickfunnels. And I’ve been publishing it 3 or 4 times a week since then, and those who have binge listened to the whole thing, you’ve been a part of this journey with me while I’m discovering new things. I’m not trying to be all postured all the time, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, today we learned this.” I’m sharing everything we’re discovering, as we’re discovering it and it’s just really powerful because people are following you on this journey and it gives you the ability to talk about your why in a way that you can’t do typically. The other cool thing about podcasts is that people will actually binge listen to you. What I found is people come and listen to one or two episodes and if they like you they’ll go back, and I’m curious, how many of you guys have found out about my podcast, listened to a couple of episodes and then started at the very beginning and binge listened to every single episode from the beginning of time until now? That’s powerful. Do you guys see that? Iv’e been trying to consciously do this more often with my podcast. If kyou like this, go to the beginning and binge listen from the beginning. If you listen to all of them, we actually put them on mp3 players, it’s like 2 or 3 days of constant audio. It’s like 40 to 70 hours, it means people have listened to me, all of you guys who raised your hands, that’s almost a week of uninterrupted time listening to me. How does that change our relationship? How does that change everything that I’m able to do for and with you? It’s huge and that’s why I love podcasts. People will get them and binge listen.  I like publishing at least three times a week, and that’s some of the things. Once again, we come back to the beginning, we use email, messenger to build our channels. You build your Instagram channel, Facebook, YouTube, and you build your podcast with that, and then you can use your instagram reality shows to promote each of the individual episodes on there. And then the last question now, what other channels? And again, for all of you guys it’s going to be different depending on what kind of business you’re in. Some of you guys Twitter is a good channel, some it’s Linked In, some it’s Pinterest, some Twitch, some is your blog. There’s different channels, pick the channels that make the most sense for your business and master that channel before you move on to the other one. So again, this is the framework for conversation domination. Is that helpful you guys? Is that cool?

Part 1 of 3 from my presentation from Funnel Hacking Live 2018 where I talked about this new concept called “Conversation Domination”. On today’s episode Russell shares a presentation he did at Funnel Hacking Live 2018 about conversation domination. Here are some of the incredible things you’ll hear in this episode: Why platforms like Facebook and Instagram are similar to TV channels in the 1960s. How Russell has been able to dominate on multiple social media platforms. And what the three types of traffic are, and how they work.  So listen here to find out how Russell dominates the conversation, and how you can too. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Alright I got a special treat for you guys over the next three episodes. So at not the most recent Funnel Hacking Live, but two Funnel Hacking Lives ago, I did a presentation I was really excited about. It was called conversation Domination. And where kind of the back story behind this, one of my friends had a course about a decade ago called conversation domination. His name is Howie Schwartz, and it was all about Google SEO and the concept back then was basically you’d got to Google and type in your, you know, “Boise Dentist’ and all the listings, all ten would be you, all paid ads would be you, you would dominate the conversation. You’d be everything all over Google. And it was awesome, he had a big company and a brand teaching that for a long time. Then he went off and you know, he’s got a ton of other companies and he kind of shut down his training company. But I always loved that concept of conversation domination. I want to dominate the conversation. And a lot of you guys know I’m not a huge SEO dude anymore. I dabbled in the dark arts of SEO for a long time, we still do it. But conversation domination for me became bigger, especially as social movements started happening and we have all these amazing channels. We have Facebook, we have Instagram, we have YouTube, we have Pinterest, we have all these things that are popping up. And it’s funny because I always used to hear, back a decade ago, Howie talking about conversation domination. You want to make sure you’re every, omnipresent, everywhere you look you are there and you’re entertaining and educating, you’re there. And he was talking about from a Google standpoint, but as I was building Clickfunnels, I’m like, I want to be omnipresent everywhere, on socials. So when you pull out your cell phone, if you open it up, it doesn’t matter if you’re going to the Facebook app, the Instagram app, or the YouTube app, you are seeing me and my message and all that kind of stuff. So I did this initial presentation kind of going through the initial principles of that. Now I’m sharing this with you because I’m working secretly behind the scenes, nobody knows about this yet on my team, so don’t tell them. But I’m actually working on more of a training, not a training course, that’s not the right word. But kind of a training course going deeper into these concepts, and actually showing you, if you want to dominate the conversations, here’s how you do it specifically, and going deep dive on how to dominate the podcast channel. How to dominate Instagram, and Facebook and all that kind of stuff. So I’m working on that right now, so as I’m working on that project, I just want to kind of bring this up into your minds and get you guys to start thinking about it again, because I’m sure sometime in the next couple of months we’ll come out with that project, and you guys will have a chance to kind of tap into that, and see it all. So I just wanted to re-bring this up. So what I’m going to do over the next three episodes, I’m going to let you guys listen to that presentation from Funnel Hacking Live, so that’s kind of the game plan. So with that said, I’m going to queue up the theme song and we’re going to dive into the first part of this presentation. I hope you enjoy it. If you’re liking, if you like this episode and this little series we’re giving you right now, please go and take a screen shot of it, and post it on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, any of the social channels you’re in, tag me and use #marketingsecrets, that way I’ll be able to see it. It means a ton to me. Also at the same time, if you are liking this podcast please go to iTunes, rate and review me, that means the world to me as well. And with that said, let’s queue up the theme song and then we will jump right into session one of the conversation domination presentation. Alright, so I want to share a presentation with you guys. This is, I have so many fun presentations at this event, this is one I’m really excited for. So the title of this presentation is called Conversation Domination: How to get your dream clients addictively binge watching you on every platform that they live on. There’s one kind of caveat here. This isn’t for people who are just dabbling. This is for people who believe so much in their message, (hopefully you can read my handwriting) it’s only for people who are so passionate about their message, they’re willing to go out there and try to be everywhere to all people. That’s what we’re going to be talking about today. Now, a couple of things as, with most of my presentations, most of what I’m going to talk about today, there’s going to be different levels of this. So those who are beginning, there’s going to be pieces where you’re like, “Sweet, I can go and start this, implementing it immediately.” And for some of you guys who are further along, there’s going to be more and more of it. But the end picture, the end goal of this entire thing is to get to the point where you are dominating the conversation in your market. Right now, since we’ve launched Clickfunnels, that I’m aware of, there have been 37 Clickfunnels killers that have come out. 37! Guess how I know that? Every time one comes out I get every person on planet earth messaging me, forwarding me all the emails, everything. 37 people have come to try to take down Clickfunnels since we started. But I’ve done something strategically in the middle of it. I’ve tried to make so much noise constantly and consistently that nobody can hear anything else besides us, and it’s done pretty well so far, right? There will be more competitors and we’ll continue to have fun with this process, but this is the big part for all of you guys. You want your message everywhere so that people are seeing you all the time, everywhere you’re going. So that’s what we’re going to talk about. Now to begin the, to kick this presentation off, I want you to show you a really quick video clip from Gary Vaynerchuk, this is going to kind of set up this whole presentation. “I think this is the television in 1965. If you, I’d actually like, I know a lot of you are like, ‘whatever’ just really pay attention to this because this might be one of the better things I say. This is the television in 1965, and the TVs, they’re the radio. So people, and if you go and, so what I do well for somebody who’s a {Expletive} student, the one thing I do study is history because history loves to repeat it’s {Expletive} self. “So if you go look at the brands, the beer brands, that were romantic about staying on the radio because that’s how they did it, and didn’t shift to television while things like Miller Lite, that nobody’s ever heard of, went TV only and became the brands. If you look at TV 1965, that’s what I think this is. And I think YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook are ABC, NBC, and CBS. “So do I think, then I think I within it, is Mash and Happy Days. Got it? So that’s the system. So do I think over time ESPN comes around and HBO comes? I do. There will be more channels built on this platform, and there’ll be more competition. “That’s what’s happening. So what you need to do is for your business, figure out the channels where you could be the star of that network.” There’s the context for what we’re talking about for the next hour. Now, ten years ago when I first had the chance to meet Tony Robbins for the very first time, he invited me out to his event, I had a chance to sit with him, and he told me, he said, “Look Russell, I’m looking for help.” I’m like, “You’re Tony Robbins, what do you need help with?” And he told me a really interesting story. He said, “If you look back, the way I got my start, I was on TV and we ran infomercials. When I got started though, there were three channels, CBS, ABC, and NBC. I was everywhere on every single channel because there were three. You couldn’t get away from me no matter how hard you tried.” How many of you guys remember that? This was before my time, but how many of you guys remember on every channel all you saw was Tony all the day long. Because there were three channels and he dominated all of them. I actually found an infomercial from him, back in the 80s. “The Anthony Robbins Live! Author of the international bestsellers Unlimited Power and Awaken the Giant Within. You’ve seen him on national television, now is your chance to see him live, Monday January 11th at the Auto Conference Center. During this full day seminar, you’ll learn techniques used by top business leaders, fortune 500 companies and Olympic athletes alike. Thousands have enjoyed and benefitted from the dynamic and powerful presentation style of Anthony Robbins. Take action now, call 224-3037, this event will sell out. Call 224-3037 now.” Alright. Is that amazing? Look at his hair! I’m going to tease him about that on Saturday. Just kidding, I won’t. It’s Tony Robbins, whatever he wants. No, but it was interesting, when I met Tony though, I was in a hotel with him eating dinner and we’re talking and he said, h e told me this, he said, “Look, when I got started three channels, we dominated, and I built the biggest brand on earth. What happen though, is then cable came out. All the sudden there was this splintering where all the sudden there was ten, twenty, thirty, fifty channels. I’ve been trying to buy ads on all these channels and now I can no longer do it profitably.” And Tony’s business was in trouble at the time. And that’s why he reached out to a bunch of us internet nerds and he was like, “What should I be doing you guys.” And we gave him some strategies and over the next ten years Tony has blown up. His empire now is bigger than it was ever. But he was intelligent enough to know, “Look, channels, the media is splitting, I gotta figure out how to play this game.” So when I saw this clip from Gary Vaynerchuk I was like, that’s amazing. We have this really rare, really unique opportunity where literally these phones right here, that Gary said, these are the TVs from the 1960s. So all of know better, if I was to go back to the 1960s and go on TV, I would be on every channel like Tony. I’d build the biggest brand possible. We can do the same thing today, that’s the whole goal. So I’m going to walk you through my model, because this is what we’re doing. We’re trying to dominate the entire conversation in our marketplace, and I’m going to kind of walk you guys through what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. And hopefully with some of the presentations you heard earlier about vulnerability and building your tribe, if you weave those types of things into this, and getting your message out to people, it’s going to change the game for you. Alright so I want to kind of go over a brief history of TV. So step number one with TV is we had to get distribution into people’s homes. People had to build TVs and actually get them into people’s houses. That must have been a horrible process. But eventually there was TVs in everybody’s houses. Then the next step is there was channels. So on each TV there was ABC, CBS, and NBC, three channels was all there was. And then each channel had individual shows, and that’s how TV worked. So distribution, channels, and then shows within channels. Today the game’s a little bit different. But it’s similar. So how we play today, number one, people already have the TVs. Everyone already has a phone in their pocket. Is there anyone in this room right now that doesn’t have a phone in their pocket? Not one hand. Okay, distribution is done. That’s nice. That’s taken care of for you guys. Step number two then, they already have a channel. How many of you guys have the Facebook app on your phone? YouTube app? Instagram? The channels are already there as well. So our step now is we need to create shows on their channels, and then promote those shows. That’s it. That’s the game, it’s really, really fun. So here’s how we played it. This is the framework on the right hand side that we’re going to be walking through for the next 45 minutes or so of this presentation, so I’ll kind of go through every step. But that’s the framework of what we’re going to be talking about during this presentation. So step number one in this framework is we have to get distribution for our shows. How do we get an audience that’s actually going to watch our show? Step number two then, we need to grow our channels. A lot of people that are on the channels. And Step number three, we’re going to promote the actual shows that are happening, and if you do that (went too far), if you do that you can literally become the Tony Robbins of your market. So that’s what we’re going to be going through over here right now. Does that sound like fun? How many of you guys want to be the Tony Robbins in your market? Me too. That’d be so fun. Alright, step number one, this is the secret I need everyone to understand about business as a whole. I wish somebody would have explained, grabbed me by the ears and explained this to me ten years ago. It took me a while to figure this out. The secret to winning in this business and any business at all is distribution. The person who will win, is always the person with the best distribution. The ability to get their message to people, distribution is the key. How many of you guys watch Shark Tank? I want you to understand as you watch Shark Tank, you’ll see something interesting. Each of the people on the Shark Tank have a different distribution channel. Have you noticed this? Damon John hasn’t gotten really good at distribution in retail. So he sits back and all the different people in there and he’s like, “I’m out. I’m out. I’m out.” And someone’s like, “The clothing line.” And he’s like, “I know distribution. I’m in.” Gives them some money, connects them in the distribution channel and he makes money. That’s it. Laurie Graneer, she’s on there and all these things come back and she’s like, ‘Ah, I can’t do an infomercial. Can’t do an infomercial. Can’t do an infomercial. That’s an infomercial product.” She bids on it, plugs it into the distribution channel, boom it explodes. That’s the key. Every shark on Shark Tank has a distribution channel they understand. That’s it. So they sit and wait for an offer they know they can plug into a distribution channel and then they win. So the big secret in this whole game is building your own distribution channels. When you have it you can sell whatever it is you want. You can sell seminars, you can sell events, you can sell supplements, you can sell, whatever you want to sell you can sell. But you have to have distribution channel. Now the internet, most distributions happen a couple ways. One is our email lists. How many of you guys have an email list right now? Good, that’s your distribution channel. My email list has saved me over a decade of stupid choices. How many of you guys have been saved by your email list at least once? It’s a distribution channel. You create a product, create a service, send the email out to that list, and then make you some money. I remember when I first got this, this was probably 13-14 years ago now. Someone was explaining to me this concept of the email list and they said, “Look, if you have an email list of 100,000 people and you send an email out selling a $30 or $40 product, .001% buy, that’s like $8,000.” And I was like, “Holy crap. I need one of those list things. That sounds awesome.” And that was kind of the key. Now if you look at the metrics and math, this is a number people would say, and I think it’s low, but if you have an email list you should average, on average at least one dollar per name, per month, on your email list. And that’s on the low, low end, if you’re really bad at this. If you understand that, what’s my goal? My goal is to make a hundred thousand dollars a year. My goal is to make a million dollars a year, whatever that is, you just have to reverse engineer it. “Okay I need, if I have 10,000 people on my list, that’s $10 grand a month, that’s $120,000 a year.’  Boom, that’s where you focus, how do I build that distribution? If you want a million dollars a year you say, “Okay I need 100,000 people on my list, that’s $100,000 a month, times 12 months, 1.2 million.” That’s the key to the distribution channel. You’re building a list. Again, this is, one dollar per name, per month, is on the lower end. Especially now days when all the stuff we’re tying in with social media and connection and vulnerability, I’ve seen those numbers go up. I’ve seen people 10, 15, 20 dollars per month, per name. So this is like the low end, if you’re really, really bad at it. Is that exciting? It should get you guys pumped. Number two now, which is growing rapidly and almost probably bigger is social lists. Messenger is one of the biggest. How many of you guys have been using messengers in your business? Yes, this is a gift from the marketing gods. I’m grateful for messenger lists. So the question is, should I build an email list? Or should I build a messenger list? Which one’s better? And the answer is you need both. Do not rely on one distribution channel in anything. I promise you guys, Mark Zuckerberg does not like your business and someday he will screw you over, promise. How many of you guys has Zuckerberg already kicked you once or twice? I learned this the hard way back, 15 years ago when Larry and Sergei at Google, I thought they were my friends, and I found out they don’t actually need my money, no matter how much I give them. They kicked us. One is like the scariest number. If you build nothing but a social list, you can be in trouble. If you build nothing but an email list you can be in trouble. So I like to have a blend of both. I’m going to show you guys the strategy we’re using now, where everyone who joins our list is being put on both instead of just one. I’m going to show you some really cool stuff. So step one is how do you build your distribution? If you’ve read the Dotcom Secrets book, I talk about a concept that’s very important. Did my mike just go out? I’m close and my mike dies. Alright, there are basically three types of traffic online. Who remembers this from Dotcom Secrets 101? Three people? We’re in study hall. Three types of traffic. The first type of traffic is traffic you control. I don’t own this traffic, but I control it. Zuckerberg owns traffic, so I can go to him and be like, “Hey man, can I write you a check for some of your traffic?” and he’s like, ‘Sure. Where do you want to send it to?” and I’m like, okay, I control this traffic. I’m going to send it over here. And I can send it somewhere. That’s traffic I control. Any kind of ad you are paying for, you are controlling traffic. You do not own that, but you are controlling it. The second type of traffic is traffic that you don’t control. The traffic you don’t control is like people just show up on your site. How many of you guys have a blog and somehow people show up? You don’t really know how, but they’re there. You guys have some of that? That stuff is really nice, but I don’t control it so it’s like, they show up and they’re there and that’s awesome. But I don’t control it. A lot of times SEO, or PR or things like that, people are just showing up because of stuff you’re doing, and it shows up. I see a lot of people talk about, “This is your business, buying ads.” Or people are like, “This is your business, free search and PR.” For me it’s like, neither of these. These are two really bad distribution channels. I want to build my own distribution channel. So all the traffic I control and all the traffic I don’t control, all gets pushed into one thing, that becomes traffic that I own. The only reason I give Zuckerberg money is so I can take clients off his platform and turn them into something that I own, so now I can own that distribution. Does that make sense? When I own the list, it’s really cool, I can wake up one morning and be like, “Hey I think we should do an event. Let’s call it Funnel Hacking Live. Do you think anyone will show up? I don’t know, I own some traffic. Let’s throw some traffic.” We throw some traffic and all the sudden we find out if people want it or not. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. If I did a good what and how then they buy it and they’re like, “Sweet, let’s do more of this.” But when you own traffic, you can make them offers, you can make up ideas, it becomes, this game becomes really, really easy. So if you shift your mindset from, “I’m going to buy ads. I’m going to do research or whatever.” All the traffic that I can, I’m going to try to get traffic I control and traffic I don’t control and turn it into traffic that I own. Because after you own it, you can do anything you want with it. So that’s my goal every time we’re building up our companies. That’s my goal. Converting traffic you control and don’t control into traffic that you own. Okay, so a couple of ways. Number one, traffic you control, traffic you don’t control, and traffic you own. So I’m going to show you guys how we do this. So the first is traffic you control. So I control this, I’m buying it from wherever I’m buying ads from, I’m sending it somewhere. Typically I’m sending that to some type of a funnel. They come to the funnel, they fill out a form, and usually when they fill out the form I get their email address. We’ve got a new feature coming out in Clickfunnels, that I will be showing you guys off tomorrow, called opt in bumps, where no longer do we just get their email, we get their email and their messenger. This is one we’re doing on our two step order forms, and this is one we’re doing on all of our opt ins now. It’s really exciting. So all the traffic I control, if I’m buying any kind of ad, I’m not sending it random, I’m sending it to a funnel and on that funnel I’m trying to get email and messenger. Now I’ve got two distribution channels. So if one of them breaks off, I still have a business, I’ve got both. So for us, now everything we’re pushing through, we’re trying to get both of those things at the exact same time. Like I said, tomorrow we’ll show you guys all the new, I think are 25 new things to show you in Clickfunnels, and that’s one of them you’re going to love. Traffic I don’t control now, is some of these other ads and stuff I’m running. So this is, I want to show you guys something cool that we learned recently that is like a big aha for us. So this is an ad we created, I’m just going to show you like 5 seconds of it, because I don’t want to show you the whole thing. “Hey my name is Russell Brunson and this book, my new book is literally on fire….” So I lit another book on fire, it was awesome. Then I pushed people to like, “Go to expertsecrets.com to buy the book.” And that was working but I was like, is there a better way? And I was listening to the radio and my man Brendon Burchard, I heard a radio ad and all the sudden I had this light bulb moment that was insane. How many of you guys have heard Brendon’s radio ad? How many of you guys, when you heard that, you started freaking out and jumping like a little girl like I did? Only you, and you. A couple of you guys were excited like me. So listen to this ad, this is the older one, so the 1800 number doesn’t work anymore, but listen to the concept. When you listen to it, I’m going to explain why this is such a huge break through for me. Listen to this. “Hi, I’m Brendon Burchard, some people call me the world’s highest paid motivational trainer. And some people call me crazy because I’ve just authorized a nationwide giveaway of my recent New York Times bestseller, The Motivation Manifesto. In the next 24 hours I want to give away as many free books as possible. To get your hardcover copy, text book10 to 99000 or go to MotivationBook.com. If you want to reach your true potential personally, professionally, or financially you need this book. “You’ll discover how to stop feeling tired and overwhelmed, identify the major enemies keeping your from living your dreams, and learn the secrets to defeating them. I’ll teach you my proven strategies to start obtaining the levels of drive and personal success you’re craving, financial freedom, emotional freedom, time freedom. “Due to high demand, I can only offer one free book per household. To get your free book, while supplies last, text book10 to 99000. That’s book, the number 10, to 99000, or go to MotivationBook.com. Message and data rates may apply.” Alright, so check this out, when you text that to the number, and again, I think this phone number is dead, this is an older ad, but you text it to it, all it did was it took and shot you a link to this funnel. Now the reason why this is exciting, prior to Brendon doing this, guess how radio ads ran? You’d have a radio ad run, then you had a whole team of sales people, hundreds of people who have to answer the calls as fast as you can, trying to do orders, trying to do sales like crazy. Literally he let go of a hundred plus people, you text them a link to the funnel. The next night after I saw this, I was online watching infomercials because that’s what nerds do, and I’m watching infomercials and I see this supplement offer. The guy does a little supplement offer and instead of saying, “call this number to talk to a sales rep to buy a supplement.” It says, “Text this number to whatever.” I’m like, I texted it, boom, shoots me a link to his funnel. I was like, “We just took humans out of this whole sales process all together.” How magic is that? I’m like, “How can we use that with what we’re doing?” So we started shifting our ads to this same concept where basically, instead of me saying, “Here’s my free book, go to expertsecrets.com to get a free copy.” I say, if it’s Facebook, “Here’s my free book, if you want a free copy of it, message me on Facebook and I’ll send you a link to it.” So they message me on Facebook and now this new feature, you’ll see inside of Clickfunnels tomorrow, it comes back and says, “Sweet, you won a free copy of the book, what address should I send it to?” I type in my email address, and then boom now I’m on Facebook, and my email list.  I got them both. So now all my ads turn into something that is building both of my things as opposed to just one. So these are some of the things that we’re doing that are insane.

Russell Barkley joins me for the third time as a guest on my podcast.  He is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Virginia Treatment Center for Children and Virginia Commonwealth Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia. Board certified in three disciplines: clinical psychology, clinical child and adolescent psychology, and clinical neuropsychology. Russell is a clinical scientist, educator, and practitioner with 23 published books and 41 editions, more than 290 scientific articles and chapters related to the nature, assessment, and treatment of ADHD and related disorders. He is the founder and editor of the newsletter “The ADHD Report”. He has spoken at over 800 events and has been recognized for his contributions. ADHD and Russell’s work has sometimes been considered “over pathologizing”, however, his message is to get the science out for those with ADHD so these individuals can get proper treatment and lead healthy lives. Russell has learned how ADHD is a bigger factor in life expectancy than the big five killers put together. His goal is to get people to take ADHD more seriously to avoid negative outcomes which are correlated with not treating ADHD. Genes related to nicotine addiction and smoking, which are identified as ADHD genes, in and of themselves reduce life expectancy. Your lifestyle habits with ADHD are modifiable and, with positive changes, can expand your life expectancy. The higher the level of conscientiousness, the better lifestyle choices, and higher life expectancy. Your Resources | Dr. Barkley’s website | How you can make a difference on outcomes | Russell’s book for those who live with adults who have ADHD You’ll Learn: [04:02] Russell is welcomed to the show and explains his “why”. [05:45] Why ADHD is considered the “diabetes of psychology”. [07:15] How Russell conducted research for his book “ADHD for Adults” and why this led to his research on life expectancy and ADHD. [10:35] Reduction in life expectancy based on time of diagnosis. [12:41] Putting reduction in life expectancy in focus related to other health care factors. [14:48] How ADHD genes reduce your life expectancy, outside of the other factors studied. [23:30] Conscientiousness is stopping to contemplate the outcomes of your actions to effect and self-regulation as a factor of a healthy lifestyle. [26:36] The best predictor of your lifespan is conscientiousness. [27:38] Self-regulation and executive functioning measures and how this affects life expectancy. [29:10] Creating cues in your environment for self-talk, self-imagery which creates self-regulation. [31:12] Addressing the underlying problems of self-regulation and self-control to create the basis for change. [32:22] Develop self-compassion in order to move forward and obtain your goals. [33:33] Message which resulted from Dr. Barkley’s research. [35:12] Primary care physicians need to understand the underlying problem and take a different approach to changing behavior. [38:16] How you can bring this information to your primary care physician’s office. [40:10] It’s OK to be vulnerable in disclosure and have the courage to talk to others about ADHD. Use my Audible.com affiliate link for your favorite titles: ADHD reWired Coaching and Accountability Group Early registration for ADHD reWired’s Spring season of our online, video-based coaching and accountability group has ended, and the groups are full. Our next registration signups begin May 10th.  To sign up on the email list, which allows you to register on May 7th, visit . ADHD Women’s Palooza Encore packages of this amazing conference are available for only $97!  That includes audio and video downloads, as well as abridged transcripts. Learn more at Support the podcast on Patreon Patreon allows listeners like you to support content creators like me.  With a monthly contribution, you can get access to different levels of perks.  One perk example is our Patreon-only Adult Study Hall. Learn more at ADHD reWired Facebook Group: If you would like to join the ADHD reWired secret Facebook group, go to and fill out an application. Productivity Q&A Get your ADHD questions answered live!  These Q&A sessions take place on the 2nd Tuesday of every month at 12:30 pm.  Go to . Want to be a guest? Hey, What about you?  Do you have a story? Are you a Coach?  Are you an ADHD Clinician? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions and you’d like to be a guest, schedule a pre-interview call .

The realities of isolation as an entrepreneur and what you can do to protect yourself. On this episode Russell talks about the different phases in entrepreneurship, and the isolation they bring. Here are some of the insightful things to listen for in today’s episode: Why the loneliness that plagued Russell when he first got started being an entrepreneur has returned in recent months. How Russell is trying to combat the loneliness he feels as CEO of his company. And why it’s so important to find a community that can support you in your journey as an entrepreneur. So listen here to find out why entrepreneurship brings isolation and how you can fight it. ---Transcript--- What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I’m taking a quick break during my lunch at the inner circle meetings to share something really cool with you guys today, and I hope you enjoy it. So with that said let’s queue up the theme song, and I’ll be right back. Hey everyone, this last two weeks have been, it’s been crazy. As you probably know, we have a lot of different coaching programs here at Clickfunnels. We have obviously, the free stuff, which is the podcast like you’re on right now and a whole bunch of other things. From there, we try to get people into the one funnel away challenge, and hopefully all of you guys have done that. If you haven’t gone through that process yet, go to OneFunnelAway.com, and after one funnel away challenge I try to get you to come to Funnel Hacking Live, where you get to experience this whole funnel hacking movement. And if you haven’t come to that yet, come to our next event, we’re going to do it once a year and it’s amazing. Go to FunnelHackingLive.com to get access to the event. And then after Funnel Hacking Live, we try to get people into our Two Comma Club X coaching program. We help people to be able to win their own Two comma club award. And then after somebody has been in that program and they’ve been there for a while, they got to the point where their funnels made at least half a million dollars, then they get into our Two Comma Club X platinum group, which means they get to come to Boise and do masterminding with some of our coaches. And then from that group, out Two Comma Club X platinum group, is where we start picking out people for my inner circle. My Inner circle has 100 people that are allowed to be in it at any given time. And then we’re also developing one more tier of our value ladder and it’s called the Category King Council. And it’s not live or launched yet, but it will be a really high end thing where people who are category kings in their market, have a chance to become part of that. And that my friends, is the Clickfunnels value ladder. In case anyone is wondering, where are we taking you? What’s the purpose, what’s the point? So that’s it. So my goal for you guys is to get tons of value from this podcast, from all the free stuff we put out there. So much so that you’re like, “I gotta dive deeper.” And hopefully you read a book or something. And then from there you go to the one funnel away challenge, and if we keep serving you, you’ll keep moving up our value ladder. And that’s how business should be. If you read the Dotcom Secrets book, that’s what I talk about at the very beginning with the value ladder and how it works. And for me, I love it. I love it because higher on the value ladder people get, the more I have a chance to work directly with them. So this last two weeks has been inner circle meeting. So basically I break the group down into three groups and they each come to Boise and we spend time in groups of 25-30 of us at a time, at 2 days each. So we did a group last week, last Monday, Tuesday, and then this Monday, Tuesday we did a group, and right now it’s Thursday, Friday and it’s my last group. So I had a chance to spend time with all these entrepreneurs and we get together and have a chance to look at each other’s businesses and our lives and what we’re doing and anyway, it’s one of my most fulfilling parts of the business for sure. It’s interesting, people always ask me, “Russell, why are you still coaching? You make so much money off of Clickfunnels. Why are you still doing this other stuff?” And it’s funny because I told all the other groups on the last day, and I’ll tell these guys, this group, after lunch when we finish, the same thing. I tell them that for me, the mastermind group puts meaning to the numbers. I’m looking at the Clickfunnels scoreboard right now, and as of today we have 89,014 active users, which is insane, right. But it’s just a scoreboard, and the people and the groups is what gives meaning to those numbers. Because while I can’t personally coach all 89,014 people, I would love to, I can try. So again, this podcast I try to give to all of them, and more for free. And then from there we get people into the challenge and then funnel hacking live, and then coaching program, two comma club coaching program, then two comma club x platinum, then inner circle. So because I can’t work with all 89,000, the one’s I do have a chance to work one on one with, like the inner circle, they give meaning to those numbers. And I see each of their lives and the people that they’re effecting through their businesses and their products and their services, and it gives meaning for me and for our entire team. So it’s been a lot of fun the last couple of weeks. So I’m excited for it to be done because I’m tired and it’s been a lot of work. But I’m also sad because I’m going to be losing all my friends and my connections and all these amazing entrepreneurs that I have a chance to serve and to work with. Anyway, I’m leading that up because it’s been interesting in my business. I always tell people that entrepreneurship is the loneliest job in the world right. Because when you first get started it’s just you and your brain and usually the people around you are not supportive or they’re confused or they don’t understand it. Then as you go deeper into it, usually there’s even more lonely times because at first you’re not making money, you’re broke, you’re losing money. Then there’s the fear which causes more loneliness. And some people never make it out of that trap. And it’s sad for me, that’s why I’ve spent so much time over the last decade and a half to build a community. We call ourselves funnel hackers, but I’m trying to build a community so that entrepreneurs who are trying to brave this journey alone don’t feel alone, which I know a lot of us do at times. So there’s that, but then there’s this next phase, which is weird, where you start bringing on a team and it’s exciting at first because all the sudden there’s other people to talk to about what you’re doing and learning and they’re excited by it too. And they’re growing and it’s the startup phase. And for me, that’s my favorite phase in the business, the startup phase, because everything is so new and excited. That phase is so much fun. And all the sudden you start getting connection with these other people you’re working with and that phase is so much fun because now you’re not as lonely because you have these other people and the company’s growing. And then it gets to the point where there’s weird stress. Where something happens and the company starts collapsing, or employees aren’t working hard or you have fire someone or whatever that is. And really quickly, you as the founder and CEO, as soon as you have to stop being everybody’s friends and start becoming their boss, it causes this new weird isolation where you know, it wasn’t the same as it was at first. At the very first it was me and my buddies and we were, it’s funny looking back on. I remember I had this little house, apartment that we had as our office and two or three of the guys who were working for me lived in it. So I’d come from my house over to the office, which was just a house. And I walk in, and it would smell like lil smokies, the little hot dogs. They were cooking lil smokies and I walk in and it stinks and they were all in their jammies hanging out and watching TV and goofing off playing video games. I’m like, “Alright guys, now this is an office, let’s get back to work.” And we’d get to work and try to be a real business. And that was the beginning, just a bunch of friends hanging out. And like I said, as you start growing into more than that, either you have to fire someone or you have to let people go, and you have to be their boss and not their friends and it causes this separation or isolation. Or the business starts struggling. For me, these people all needed to get paid every two weeks whether we made money or not, so it caused isolation for me, because I was like, I gotta figure out how to make money because I had all the stress of making sure I could pay them. And that was the next phase. And it was kind of weird because I feel like, again, I’m lonely at first. Then I get some friends, and then it becomes loneliness again. And it’s been interesting in just my role here at CLickfunnels, for a long time I was CEO, whatever that means, but I was more running the funnel team, we were building funnels and it was so much fun. At first it was just me, then Steven came and it was me and Steven. And then Steven left and we brought in Jake and Nick and Karen and these other people. And it became this team and it was so much fun. And then as Clickfunnels became bigger and bigger you know I wasn’t able to keep doing my role. I had to be the CEO and the content developer, and this and that, all these different things. So for the last almost, not quite a year yet, but I’ve been making this transition. And if you guys listen to the podcast you remember some of the podcast episodes, me talking about this scary change from being the all star to being the coach. And I’ve had to try and make those transitions, which have not been, they’re hard transitions. You’ve got to find the right people to replace what you’re doing. Luckily we had Julie Stoian come in and really take over my role in marketing. She’s done an amazing job in building a team and managing the team. And that whole thing has been amazing, watching that, but now she gets to be friends with all my friends and I’m in this office by myself, all by myself. And its weird because it’s put me back in this weird phase of the business where I’m back to the isolation of it, and it’s just interesting how the cycles go. So I’ve noticed that over the last couple of months, as I’ve been doing my thing, I’ve been doing the roles I was supposed to be doing and producing content and doing the CEO thing. But I definitely have felt more isolation and loneliness. So a couple of things, number one, don’t feel bad for me. I’m fine. The last two weeks has been fun to kind of get around entrepreneurs again and get the stimulus from that, and the brains firing and the excitement and that’s been really, really fun. But the second thing, and I’m going to tell you this because this si the big takeaway hopefully for you. I had the realization that if I don’t have the connection from it, then it’s not worth it to me. I have to figure out how to do that. And I didn’t know how to do it for a long time, I just felt stuck and lost a little bit. So for me, what I was starting to do, and this is actually starting next week, which I’m excited for, is I’m looking at those things I used to miss the most and I’m trying to bring parts of those back. And obviously I can’t go 100% back to that because there’s other people doing the roles, plus you know, I’m in charge of the stuff that I’m in charge of. But I’m basically, every Monday when I get to the office working, I’m going to be working in the section where the funnel team is. So I can be out there, I can feel the energy, I can talk, I can share, I can train, I can get my ideas, I can be around that while I’m doing my stuff. As opposed to my little Russell office. And then the days when I’m supposed to be locked down writing or whatever, instead of just me locking down in isolation and not knowing who to share my thoughts with, I’m literally trying to find people to come work with me. So I talk to Dave like, “Hey Dave, this day I’m going to be working in the office, just come work in there at the same time as me. Just do your same thing, but be around me so that when I have ideas I can bounce them off you.” Or Steven Larsen, I was talking to Steven like, “Steven I want to recruit you to come hang out with me one day a week at work, at the same time I’m working.” And he was like, “That’d be awesome.” You know, those kinds of things. So just for all of you guys, because I know this journey. I’ve been on it for 15 years now, as entrepreneurs I know that there is definitely that loneliness. So what I recommend for you, because some people get caught in that loneliness and they never recover, is try to find people. Again, I’ve tried to build this amazing funnel hacker community for myself and for you guys to be able to tap into people. But I would look at that, and look for people in your local area. Find funnel hackers close to you. Find people that are doing the same thing and make sure to connect with them. Even if you’re not working together on the same business, just work in the same spot. Or maybe once a week you all go to a coffee shop or whatever, and you just work together so you can rebuild that connection. Because the isolation is real and it can cripple you from moving forward. The worst thing that could possibly happen for you and for the people you’ve been called to serve is for you to feel isolated and not get your message out because of that. Anyway, I hope that helps. I hope that helps any of you guys who are struggling with that to know that you’re not alone. I felt that multiple times throughout this journey as well. And recently, like I said, I’ve been feeling it as well. And this inner circle has helped re-ignite my excitement and my passion. And to not lose that I’m building structure around it. I’m trying to build structure to get people to be around me as I’m working, just so I can keep the connection and joy from that part of what we do. So I hope that helps. With that said, I’m going to go hang out with my friends for the last 4 or 5 hours before they leave me, and they all go back to their homes for 6 months. And yeah, I’m excited. I’m feeling really good right now. Hopefully you are as well. If not, go plug in. The community is here, I built it for you. There’s hundreds of thousands of funnel hackers that will support you and work with you. Just go to the Facebook group or wherever and connect with them, meet up with them, and hopefully you guys will come join me on this journey on my value ladder. I’m going to keep trying to provide as much value as possible, and whenever you’re ready to take that step. The first step from this free stuff is to go into the challenge, go to onefunnelaway.com, jump into the challenge, then come to Funnel Hacking Live, and just keep progressing, and me and this community are here to keep serving you and protect you. We’re grateful for you and your contribution and your willingness to go and do these crazy things and make no logical sense in the real world. But you’ve been called and you know it, and I know it. And if I can help serve you on that mission to help serve the people that you have been called to serve, then that means the calling that I’ve got will be fulfilled as well. It’s a win/win all around. Alright, with that said, I appreciate you, have an amazing day and we’ll talk to you soon. Bye.

Let's connect! Go to advanceyourreach.com and like us on Facebook. Over the past 10 years, Russell has built a following of over a million entrepreneurs, sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his books, popularized the concept of sales funnels, and co-founded a software company called ClickFunnels that helps tens of thousands of entrepreneurs quickly get their message out to the marketplace. That’s amazing. But not why we are talking to him today. Russell is the world’s highest-paid speaker – generating over $3.2 million from one 90-minute talk. He’s not a former president or a celebrity – he’s the founder of a tech company. Today he shares how he made that happen. This interview is full of actionable tips for you! Enjoy! PLUS: How he grew his own events from 0 - 5,000 people in the last 5 years. What lights him up and gets him out of bed every day & the people that inspire him the most. Human Connection: Why events are the most powerful superconductor in a digital world How he evolved as a speaker, and exactly how to apply this to your own speaking! Why Building a brand culture is important and the secret to creating a culture at your events And so much more… Quick Episode Summary: 0:08 Welcome Russell   1:28 Click Funnels hits a milestone 1:41 What Happens in the green room 2:21 How Russell created the Clickfunnels culter 4:02 What Russell learn from Tony Robenson events 4:59 My AHA moment 6:40 Making swag an experience 7:53 Russell’s secrets for packing out events 10:31 Why events are the hardest thing to sell 13:11 What you can learn from Russell mistakes 15:00 Russell's advice to first-time event planners 17:03 Russell’s first experience with public speaking 21:12 The power of the “speak to sell stage” 25:39 What Tom Ziglar taught me about commitment    26:11 How to get on the Clickfunnels Stage 30:13 Do the stuff, don’t just each it 30:30 The biggest mistakes you can make on stage 32:34 Serve first 33:22 The most influential speakers for Russell 35:25 Russell’s prediction for the best up-and-comer 40:33 Russell’s most mind-blowing green room moment 43:31 How to get Clickfunnels for free 44:00 Russell’s final piece of advice for you 48:03 My takeaways LINKS: russellbrunson.com  clickfunnels.com Russell on Facebook The Tipping Point Book Learn more about Pete Click Here to get Clickfunnels for FREE

I recently caught up with Mr Russell Morris, a living legend of the Australian music scene this week while we were on tour for his new album 'Black n Blue Heart'. We just had the most 'out there' conversations talking all about the origins of the universe, near death experiences, songwriting, Astro physics and Quantum physics. These are the type of conversations I love to have! Here's what we chatted about: How Russell writes so he can connect with people rather than just seeing it as a performanceSong Writing: ‘Thinking up’ a song vs ‘allowing’ a songRussells two processes for songwriting The hard working culture of Australians Having a life that is based around work instead of living Russell’s belief in Science and the Universe Russells obsession with Astro Physics Dream states and memories hidden in our DNAQuantum Physics and particle transportation How to change patterns of behaviourHow to embrace being a ‘failure’ and still maintain your enthusiasm for lifeSome of our favourite quotes from this episode. “I think songwriting is an emotional connection to our very beings”“Just ask the questions, who cares. If you agree great. if you don’t agree ask other questions and find other answers that you can pursue what you think life is about”“It’s a very human attachment that we write songs, and it’s trying to express ourselves, trying to connect to other humans...wanting to belong in a way and have people feel good’“If I just used those words it would be like eating porridge without milk”“To fail in life is really important, and boy I’ve failed so many times but you have to keep your enthusiasm up for life” “We are all part of this universe and we are all part of each other...imagine the generations that have gone into you!” “Life at a quantum level is magical”“We are children of the super nova’s” “We are the universe that has come out of minerals and rocks, standing up and looking at itself”“Your molecular body is just distributed back into the universe” LinksRussell Morris Websitehttp://russellmorris.com.au/Black and Blue Heart tourhttp://smarturl.it/blackandblueheartFollow Russell on Instagram herehttps://www.instagram.com/realthingrussellmorris/Quote Ash refers to by Charles Bukowskihttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Oj3__6qomo&feature=youtu.be“Born of a system that elevates fools ot Rich Hero’s”Follow Ash Grunwald on Instagram herehttps://www.instagram.com/ashgrunwald/?hl=enAsh Grunwald Website/Show Dateshttps://www.ashgrunwald.com/Earth Bottles - use promo code ASHLOVESMEhttps://earthbottles.com.au/Listen to Ash's album 'NOW' hereNOW by Ash GrunwaldThis was such an uplifting soulful conversation! Hope you enjoy it and would love for you to reach out and start a conversation with us on Instagram here. And as always if you love this chat take a photo or screenshot and share it on socials with yo

My favorite quote from Harriet Tubman and how it relates to you and your mission. On this episode Russell talks about a famous quote by Harriet Tubman and how he relates to it in the world of marketing. Here are some of the insightful things on today’s episode: How Russell was able to relate a quote about slaves to his own life as an internet marketer. And how you can be like Harriet Tubman and Russell in your business by giving freedom to your customers. So listen here to find out how you can use your business to help free people who don’t realize that they are enslaved. ---Transcript--- What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today I need to share with you guys something very powerful from my friend, she’s not really my friend yet, but someday I hope so, but her name is Harriet Tubman. Some of you guys may know her and her story. I was just looking at a picture on my wall and she is in it. And there’s something really cool I learned from her this weekend that I want to share with you guys. Alright everybody, welcome back. And yes I am still going to give you all the podcasts, I promise. Do not worry. I will be getting to those, I just gotta do a little more prep on them. But I wanted to share something that I heard at church this week, it was so, so powerful. A lot of you guys know how heavily involved we are with an organization called Operation Underground Railroad, which is an organization that helps save children from sex slavery. And what’s interesting as I’ve been getting deeper and deeper in this organization and helping them, Tim Ballard, who is the man who started the thing, he’s written 5 or 6 books on ancient American history, not ancient, but American history. And I asked him, I was like, “Why are you so obsessed with this?” and he’s like, “You know, when we were trying to start this thing, no one had ever done it before. CIA asked us to go help these children, so we tried to help these children from slavery. We didn’t have a blueprint or a game plan, we had to figure these things out. So I started looking at, who has done the closest thing to what we’re trying to do? And it was the early abolitionists who were trying to free the slaves, that’s the people we studied.” So there’s a picture on my wall, it’s amazing. It’s got this railroad down the middle and Tim is walking, holding a child and he’s walking towards it, towards me looking at the picture. And then on the left hand side there’s all the early abolitionists. You see Harriet Tubman, you see George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, you see all these amazing people that were the early abolitionists. And then on the right hand side you see all the modern abolitionists, all these amazing people that have been part of the OUR mission. Anyway, I have it framed on my desk here in the office, it’s one of my favorite pictures. But on the left hand side there’s Harriet Tubman. And at church on Sunday, somebody was talking about her and about slavery and stuff like that and shared a quote that was so cool. And this is the quote she said. She said, “I freed a thousand slaves, but I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew that they were slaves.” Let me read that again. “I freed a thousand slaves, but I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew that they were slaves.” So why did I want to share that with you guys? Well, number one how powerful is that on so many different levels? You know for me, it’s been interesting, when I first started learning about this whole business, direct response, internet marketing, and the fact that you can sell information and you can, all these things that I talk about with you guys all the time now. When I first learned all those things, I remember how freeing it was for me. I was like, oh my gosh I don’t have to be a wrestling coach. Not that I don’t want to be, I want to be a wrestling coach, but I don’t have to be a wrestling coach making whatever wrestling coaches make a year. I can do more, I can be more. And the awareness of this thing gave me freedom. When I first started trying to teach this stuff, you know, a decade ago, at first nobody seemed to care. And I remember being so frustrated. I’m like, “Do people not understand what I’m sharing with them? This is this huge thing, I’m trying to give people freedom. Freedom to be able choose and be able to create and be able to do what they want to do.” And I kept trying to share this thing with people. But it was interesting, at the time especially, this Harriet Tubman quote really strikes home to me. I was trying to free them, but they didn’t know they were enslaved. And I fast forward now to a decade later and I think it’s been interesting. A couple of things, number one, I’ve gotten better at my message. Therefore I’ve been better able to capture people and get their attention and be able to show them, “Look, you are literally in the bonds of slavery. It could be your work, could be your job, how much money you’re making, all these things.” I’ve told you guys before on this podcast, my mission is to help you guys be able to make more money because I feel like it gives you freedom to actually do what you’re supposed to do with life. My mission, I couldn’t care less if you guys make more money. But when all is said and done that does not matter to me, it shouldn’t matter to you. But I know that if I can, it’s like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, if I can make it where you’re making enough money that you’re good, then you can stop looking inwardly, like how do I make money, how do I support myself? All the sudden you start looking outwardly. When you look outwardly at other people, now it’s like, oh my gosh I can serve, I can do things. I know for me, I was able to have such a bigger impact on people when I wasn’t stressed about my own finances. When I was making good money, then I could go and help organizations like Village Impact and build schools in Africa, Operation Underground Railroad, save children from sex slavery. All these things were opened up to me when I wasn’t looking internally at how am I gonna eat next week? How am I gonna make money? So a big mission I have is that. If I can give you that freedom where you’re not living paycheck to paycheck, but where you have freedom, time freedom, energy freedom, money freedom where now you can look outwardly and now you have the ability to serve and change people’s lives. The first life we always change is our own by giving ourselves freedom, and then it’s like, now that I’m free, I want to free other people. Again, for me this Harriet Tubman quote was so powerful because for me, I could free so many more people if only they knew they were slaves. And that gives me motivation to come out and be like, “Okay, I need to be louder in my message. I need to be more aggressive in my marketing. I gotta figure out other hooks and angles and things I need to do because I need to convince people and help them understand that they’re in slavery.” Because if I can do that, and I can get their attention long enough, or I can make a presentation and help them see the future and see the vision, help them understand what’s happening and cause enough pain, but then show them the picture that creates enough pleasure for them to actually make that movement, then I can help free them. So I share that with you because that’s my mission. That’s my thing. But for whatever it is you do, it’s the same thing. You have a mission with whatever product or service you sell. And it’s different for everyone. Some of you guys, you’re helping people lose weight. Some people you’re helping them in the stock markets. Some of you guys are helping people, you know whatever it is. I could spend, you know, with 80,000+ Clickfunnels members now, there’s 80,000 different missions that are out there. I gave a couple broad, generic ones, but your mission is different right, and you know what it is. And I know that you’ve helped some people, that’s why it lit you up, it’s why you do what you do. You’re like, “Man, I helped this person here. Someone bought my product and they had this success.” And that lights you up. And I wonder how many of you guys feel the same way I am? I freed that person, I freed this group of people, I could free so many more if only they knew they were enslaved. For me that is a battle cry, for me just to be like, “Yes, okay. These people are enslaved. I gotta do more. I gotta convince them that they are slaves, because when I do, I can free them.” And I think about my life. How many things enslave me right now? I typically eat pretty healthy, but this weekend I didn’t. I think I was a little depressed because of my torn out neck from wrestling and I was like, “oh.” So I ate a lot of garbage I shouldn’t. I was enslaved to this food and I couldn’t stop. It’s like, if that’s your business where you’re helping people overcome weight game or body image or health or whatever it is, tons of people are enslaved by that and they don’t even know it. But if you are aggressive enough, if you believe enough in your message that you go out there and you market it consistently, day in and day out, day in and day out to where you get better, your voice becomes better, your ads become better, your hooks, your stories, your offers, all the things you’re putting out there to where you’re able to start capturing people that don’t know they’re enslaved and then help them and give them that freedom, that is the message for today. So I wanted to share this with you guys because when I heard that message it was so powerful hearing that from Harriet Tubman, but all the sudden it resonated with me, like, “Oh my gosh, I feel that same way. I could free so many more people if only they knew they were enslaved.” And I hope that you hear that as well for your product, your service, your message, whatever it is you do. I want you to think, “Man, I freed these slaves, I freed these people from the thing that’s holding them back, but I could free so many more if only they knew they were enslaved.” And then when you hear that, that’s your battle cry. That’s you coming out and saying, “Okay, I gotta make them aware that they are enslaved so that I can free them.” And now it’s time to go out there and refine your message. Be more aggressive, put out more ads, throw out more hooks, more stories, more offers, do your thing, get excited because you are literally freeing somebody from the slavery that’s holding them back, in whatever area of their life that you’re trying to serve them at. So yeah, I make take that quote and blow it up on my wall, because when I heard it, it was a battle cry to me, and I hope it’s a battle cry to you. So with that said, I appreciate you guys. Keep doing what you’re doing, keep serving your audience, they need it. They’re waiting for you to come and become a leader and to take them and be able to help free them. And that’s your calling, that’s your gift. Now it’s something that you gotta go and you gotta do. So with that said, I appreciate you guys for listening. If you’ve enjoyed this episode please take a screen shot on your phone and tag me on Instagram or Facebook and use #marketingsecrets that way we can see it. And I appreciate you guys all, thanks so much and I will talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.

On today’s episode you will hear part two of three of Russell first presentation from Funnel Hacking Live 2018. Here are some of the awesome things you will hear today: How Russell went from having 12 businesses and always making only 3 million dollars, to figuring out that he needed to focus on just one. Why you need to focus on the “what” and the “how” to get from zero to a million dollars. And hear some stories of how a few other people were able to make it to Two Comma Club by focusing on the “what” and the “how”, and having only one funnel. So listen hear to find out why the “What” and the “How” are so important. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell again. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. We’re going to continue with day two of my initial presentation from last year’s Funnel Hacking Live event. I hope you’ve enjoyed it so far. If you are enjoying these, please take snap shots on your phone and then post them on Instagram and Facebook and tag me. I’d love to see them. And also use the hashtag Marketing Secrets. And with that said, let’s jump right into the intro music, and then we’ll pick up on the next part of my presentation. Inside of Clickfunnels and Funnel Hacking Live and all sorts of stuff, there are basically a couple of phases we’re going to be taking you guys through. The first phase in your Clickfunnels experience, is we want to give you guys all the tools you need to free yourself. Now, that’s Clickfunnels but we also have tomorrow afternoon, we’re going to be showing you guys some new features and tools and things that are coming out inside of Clickfunnels. It will continue to free yourself as an entrepreneur so you can focus on getting your message out to people, without all the techie stuff behind it. Let Todd and Ryan and the geniuses focus on the tech stuff, and you can just focus on selling what it is that you sell. So that’s coming out. Number two, we want to give you guys the education you need to create your future. That’s what these events are for, the books, everything is create an education. And then the third thing is to help give you guys a vision to impact the world. So the first phase is freeing yourself, the second phase is creating your future, and the third phase is impacting yourself. Now, during my first presentation I’m going to be walking you guys through what I call the Funnel Hacker’s Vision. I want everyone here to see where you guys are going. One of the biggest things I find with entrepreneurs is that they don’t really know where they’re going. They’re excited, they’re passionate, they start running and then they start doing some stuff, and they have some success and then everything starts falling apart and they get stressed out and then it’s all over the place. How many of you guys have felt that a little bit before? You’re my people, yes. I understand this. And it’s interesting, when I was growing my companies over the last ten years or so. I remember we got to a million dollars in sales and I started trying to decide, “How do you go from a million to ten? And ten to a hundred?” I wanted to understand that process. What are the tools, what are the things that I need to know as an entrepreneur? And I remember buying all sorts of books and courses and things, and they were great. But what they basically said, the goal of the entrepreneur, the entrepreneur is amazing at the beginning, but then you’re kind of a nuisance and you need to step away and let other people run the company.  And all the books about management and hiring people and plugging people in……and I agree with that, but I’m the entrepreneur, what am I supposed to do? If I go from zero to a million, and I want to go from a million to ten, and ten to a hundred, what’s my role? Where am I supposed to fit in? The interesting thing here is that the problem with entrepreneurs is that the thing that makes us awesome, happens to also be the thing that makes us terrible. The same thing. You’re like, how is that? That’s confusing right. So I have a question for you guys, how many of you guys in here have more than one business? Who here has more than 2 businesses? Three? Four? Five? Six? Holy cow. Seven? This is like that thing of like, who travels from the furthest away. Who’s got more than nine? Holy cow, you guys are worse than I thought. This first presentation is to help free yourself from this. I understand this more than you will ever know. So my business, this is what happened. And I want to know if your journey has been similar to this at all. This is what happened. I got excited, I started learning all this marketing stuff. I was on fire, I had all this passion, I was like, ‘I’m going to do this.’ And I started creating my first business and the cool thing about an entrepreneur, the thing that makes us amazing, is the hardest part of a business, getting it from an idea phase and getting it into orbit. You look at big companies, and what do they do? They bring in these amazing entrepreneurs, put it into orbit, and then they go hire MBA’s and all these people to come in and they’re like, “Just don’t crash my baby.” And then it just kind of stays in orbit. But getting it off the ground is the hardest part. So as an entrepreneur I get excited, I get the idea, the vision, I start creating like crazy and I get to a million dollars or so in sales and then I’m like, I don’t know what to do now. I’m going to…..and you look at it, you’ve got a million dollar business, it’s great. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to create another one and then I’ll have two million dollars coming in. That’s the first thought. How many of you guys, that’s the first thing your mind went to as well? You’re like, “I’m going two businesses. I got one business and I need to start creating the second one.” And then what happens? The second one starts creating, and it’s going and you’re all excited and you’re like, “Boom, we got to a million dollars.” And you look back and this baby you had before, what happened to it? It died. And you’re like, “Crap, okay. That one’s dead. I’m going to make another one. This is at a million bucks, I’ll make the next one.” So you go create the next business, you put it all together, and you’re ready for it, it makes a million bucks and this one dies. And you start on this path and you keep doing it over and over and over and over again. How many of you guys can relate to that? Okay, this was my life, for ten years of my life. Just so everyone is super clear with that. So I understand this more than anyone. I remember the first time I got a business, my first business I got to about 3 million dollars a year. I’m like, “This is awesome.” And I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna…” and I got stuck at that point. I couldn’t figure out how to scale it. It was at 3 million, I’m like, “Okay, if I launch a second business and I get that to three million, I’ll make six.” And I launched the second one, that’s what happened. And this one died and this one got to three million and it was like, ugh. We did all the work for the whole year, end of the year I got my taxes back from the accounting guys, looked at it and I’m like, “Crap, we did three million dollars. That’s what we did last year. Dang it, we need another business. Let’s do another one.” So we did another business, put the whole thing together, launched it, going up, everything. The tax returns come at the end of the year, I look at the thing and I’m like, “Three million dollars? We have three businesses now, how are we still at 3 million dollars?” So I did the smartest thing any entrepreneur can do, and that next year, you can ask, this is a real thing. You can ask Brent or Dave or a lot of people who were there. I had this idea in January after we did tax returns, I’m like, “Okay, we keep launching a business a year and we’re stuck at three. How about we launch 12 this year.” And we did. Pre-Clickfunnels by the way, so this was like hand coding, it was horrible. We launched that one, launched the twelve, and one or two of them does okay and it’s like, ‘Oh it’s going awesome.” And these other ones all crash. And then tax time comes and we get this thing and I was like, “We have 12 companies, how did we do 3 million dollars again?” And all the sudden I realized that the problem was me. If you look at great companies, look at Apple. There is a time when the entrepreneur is the most amazing thing in the world. Steve Jobs came in, took Apple and blew it up, and then guess what happened. He started screwing everything up. They had to fire him, they had to kick him out. So they kicked him out and then they figured things, got systems in place, everything structured, and then they’re like, “We need someone to innovate because now we’re just stuck.” And they had to bring the entrepreneur back to blow this thing up. So I’m looking at my thing as we started launching Clickfunnels, one of the big concerns a lot of people had around me, on my team, but also people in our community, they’re like, “Russell, this is awesome, but I know you. You’re going to launch this thing and then you’re going to go to the next thing.” How many of you guys didn’t use Clickfunnels for a more than a year because you thought I was going walk away from it and move onto the next thing? That’s a real thing. I got that from a lot of my friends like, “This is awesome, but I’m not going to use it because I think you’re going to move on to the next thing.” So I consciously talked to Todd and Dylan as we were starting this, I said, “Okay, I’m going to focus all my effort and it’s going to be hard. But I need to focus or else, this can be something great, but only if I focus. And it’s going to hard for me, so I need your guys’ help. I need to be able to put my creativity into something.” So we did that, and we launched CLickfunnels. Now, I’m going to walk you through the different phases, but what I realized is that the skill set that entrepreneurs have to go from zero to a million dollars is one thing, and about a million- two million, about in that range, we have to shift where we focus our creativity. At the very bottom here we call it the creativity switch, because I knew what was going to happen. And this is, again, if you read any business books they’re going to say, “as soon as you get to this point, now you gotta hire a manager and teams and people and all this stuff.” And it’s awesome, you do need that. But I guarantee that most of us creatives, if that’s our job and that’s our role, we’re going to wake up in the morning and we’re going to dread going to the office. How many of you guys wake up and you’re like, “I’m going to go hire someone today. Yay.” No, I cry when I hear that. I don’t want to do that. I want to? How do I focus that? So what I learned from going zero to a million, and a million to ten, and ten to a hundred is I had to shift where I focusing my creativity. Shift it from launching a business, launching a business, launching a business, to launching a business and then how do I grow that business? How do I drive more traffic? What are the offers I creates? So I’m going to show you through this presentation, where did I shift my focus? Where does it have to be? Because I want you guys to understand that, because a lot of you guys, and I see it….How many of you guys got your first Two Comma Club Award and then the second one came really, really fast afterwards? A bunch of them. Usually the first one’s the hardest and then it’s like, “Oh crap, that was easy.” And the next one comes and the next one comes, the next one… We have someone in two days that’s getting 7. Because it’s easy, after you learn the process it’s easy. So for us, our minds going to go to like, do it, launch the next business, launch the next business. It’s like, if we just shift our creativity from business, business, business to business and then shift it to offers and front end offers, back end offers, shift it to traffic, then all the sudden everything we’re doing is compounding and our businesses grow bigger and bigger and bigger. So that’s where we talk about that creativity shift we have to take as entrepreneurs. Now one thing I want to stress with this presentation, over the next four days that we’re here you guys, we’re going to be talking at different levels of this. Some of you guys are in the phase where you’re, like from startup to a million dollars. How many of you guys are in that phase where you’re somewhere between zero and a million dollars right now in your business? Awesome. Some of you guys are in the middle phase. How many of you guys are at a million to ten? How many of you guys in that phase of your business? Awesome. How many of you guys are from ten to a hundred? How many are in that phase of business? Okay, so one thing I want to talk about, because I don’t want you guys feeling overwhelmed as we’re going through a bunch of stuff. When we talk about stuff, I want, some of you guys will be like, “This is a cool strategy, but I’m not ready for it yet. This is something when I’m like this big, that’s what I’m going to do.” So don’t stress about it. Be like, “I remember when I get to ten million dollars I’m going to focus on this strategy, but not right now.” Or “When I get passed a million dollars I’m going to focus on this strategy.” So as you go through the next four days just understand that. Every presenter, every speaker is going to speaking to different parts of this. Now, I’ll try to reference so you guys know, “this is like where you’re focusing at for zero to a million.” “This is where you’re focusing for a million to ten.” “This is where you’re focusing at over here.” Okay, so some things you’re not ready for, don’t stress out just be like, “Cool, I’m going to come back and watch the recordings or whatever when I’m ready, when I’m going from ten to a hundred, or from one to ten.” Things are going to be broken down through here. So I’m going to kind of go through this journey with you guys on what to expect from zero to a million, a million to ten, and ten to a hundred. Does that sound like fun? Yeah. Alright, so number one going from zero to a million dollars. This is what I call the what and the how. This is where you as the entrepreneur has to figure out what in the world am I selling? And how do I actually sell it. This is the only thing that matters in this phase. If you were hiring employees in this phase and you are buying desks and getting big fancy computer systems and stuff, you did this wrong. The only job going from zero to a million dollars is this, figuring out what it is you’re selling. What does the market actually want? Not what do you want to create? What does the market want? The what. And then what is the system I’m going to use to actually sell it? So the what is what you’re selling, the offer. And then how is how are you going to sell it. The question then is, “Russell, how do I know if what I’m selling is the right thing, or I’m selling it the right way?” And the reality is, when you get the right what and you get the right how, you will know because you will go from zero to a million dollars really, really fast. The market will tell you. The market will say, “That’s awesome. I want to buy that stuff.” If you’ve been stuck in a range below a million dollars for a while, it means you haven’t figured this out yet. You’re selling the wrong product, it’s not what people want. Or you haven’t figured out the right way to sell it. Because as soon as you figure out the what and the how, your business explodes. Our 258 Two Comma Club members, I’ve watched them. I’ve been watching people try, try, try, try and all the sudden, as soon as they figure out the what and the how, boom, going from zero to a million dollars is fast. That’s how you know that market wants what you’re selling. If you’re stuck at 6 figures, 150-200 thousand dollars, in that range, you’re not selling the right thing. People aren’t excited about it enough, or you’re not selling it the right way. So the what and the how. What am I selling and how am I selling it? We have a lot of presentations during this week about how do you create your offer. How do you actually make something that’s sexy and amazing that people are going to want to buy? And then what kind of funnel should I use to sell it? We some of our amazing funnel hackers, going to be sharing the different funnels. We have a whole bunch of different types of funnels. I wanted you guys to see this. If you look at all the presentation line ups, each funnel, each presenter has a different type of way that they do their how. A different type of funnel. Some people are doing a webinar, some people are doing high ticket, some people are doing trip wire, some people…everyone’s got different things and I’m not going to tell you, “This is the best funnel for your business.” I want you guys to look at all the different options and be like, “That’s the one for my business. That’s the one that’s going to work for me.” And then use that one. Pick it, and that’s going to be the how. So figuring out the what and the how. The market will tell you and you’ll know because you’ll go from zero to a million dollars fast. But that’s it. That’s what’s happening in this phase, the what and the how. Now, how many of you guys have read the Expert Secrets book? Who hasn’t? Alright, nobody….If you look at this book, the whole point of me writing this book was to help people understand the what and the how. What are you selling? We talk about creating offers, finding your market. This is the what. Then how do I sell it? Using stories, using funnels, this book is the what and the how. So if you’re stuck, you should read this book over and over and over. I spent ten years of my life bleeding to bring this to you, so you could understand the what and the how. That’s what’s going to help you understand. So that’s, if you’re stuck, that’s the book to start studying and learn over and over and over again. It’s going to give you the what and the how. There’s a lot of presentations over the next four days that are going to be going deep in this as well. The first thing we’re always going to be selling is the opportunity switch, and we’ll get into that a little bit more later, but that’s what we’re going to help you figure out. Alright, the other thing is going from zero to a million, I want you guys focusing on just one core funnel. How many of you guys, that stresses you out? We get people all the time like, “Russell, I’ve got 800 funnels in my account, I need to upgrade.” I’m like, “800? Are you doing well?” They’re like, “No, I haven’t started making money.” I’m like, “You should just do one and just make that one work.” 800? This is a real thing we get in our office sometimes. “Russell, I can’t afford the $97 a month payment. I need more funnels.” What? Delete the other ones, they’re horrible. There’s no way, if you’re struggling with the $97 a month payment, that you got a what and a how that’s right. The biggest focus, at the very beginning, you gotta be focused on one core funnel. When we launched Clickfunnels, it took me six different variations of the funnel. I tried one what and how and it failed. I tried the second one, third on, fourth one, fifth one, sixth one, boom. That one hit. We went from zero to a million dollars in about a week. I was like, “Oh man, this is it.” Guess what I didn’t do, luckily, because most of think when we launch this funnel it’s going to be amazing, and then what’s going to happen is you’re going to get bored with it before the market does. All my Two Comma Club members, by the way, just really quick, if you just keep focusing on that first one, it’ll grow to ten. Most of you are like, “Oh sweet. What’s the next one?” That’s what we do as entrepreneurs. We’re insane. I don’t why we do that, but we do that. We understand, your ability to get 7 figures, there’s a direct correlation between that and your ability to focus on one funnel. One. So don’t stress out about 20-30. Focus on one funnel. Focus on that. How many of you guys here read the Dotcom Secrets book. Yeah, thanks. So in the Dotcom Secrets book I talked about a concept called the Value Ladder. People come into your world and they start, typically they’re not going to write you a check for a 100 thousand dollars day one. Maybe they will if you’re amazing. But most people it’s not, you have to build value to people. So you come in with something usually lower ticket in the bottom and you send people up and they get more value, and then they trust you more and they’re willing to invest more money. So I almost feel bad, I shared that in Dotcom Secrets, and what happened is everyone was like, “Okay I need to create…” the come to me like, “Here’s my value ladder. I’m going to go from here to here to here.” And then explain like 30 different steps of the value ladder and they’re trying to create all of them at once and everything. I’m like, “No, the value ladder is where you’re going, not where you’re starting.” Understand that someday I’m going to probably go here. But I’m not creating 18 funnels to start, I just need to know where I’m taking people. So this is the Clickfunnels value ladder. Oh, now you guys know what we do.  That’s it. This is the Clickfunnels value ladder. Now a couple of things that I want you guys to understand about this. When we launched Clickfunnels we didn’t start at the bottom of the value ladder. A lot of people try that, it’s more difficult. So what we do is we start in the middle of the value ladder. The middle of the value ladder is, the reason why I like is because it’s typically more expensive, which it gives you the ability to spend more money to acquire customers. That’s why I try to get people so often to do webinars, because webinars are such great middle of the value ladder things because there’s so much profit in them. So typically you can spend a lot of money to generate leads. That’s the core, that’s what we’re driving to people. So all you guys should be looking, what’s the core thing I want to sell? A couple of things about my core offer I like to do, I like something that’s infinitely scalable. Where the more I sell, the more I don’t get stressed out. Some of you guys have businesses where you stop selling stuff because you’re like, “The more people we sell, the harder it gets.” I want to try to figure out something that’s infinitely scalable as your core thing. And that’s typically where you start. When people come in and join my inner circle, or my other coaching programs, my goal with them is figuring out like, just do one webinar. My inner circle members know that I have a rule that I’ve yelled at almost all of them at least twice. Anyone want to tell them the rule? Who remembers what it is? Wanna say it loud? You have to get to at least a million dollars before I will allow you to create your second funnel. Because this is what happens, “Russell, I’m working my webinar. Russell, I’m doing this thing. Russell, I launched it. Russell, it blew up, it’s going crazy.” I’m like, “That’s awesome.” They’re like, “So my next offer…” I’m like, “No, no, no, stop. Please stop. You just created this baby, you gave birth to it. I know you’re tired of it, but there’s so much value to that. If you would just focus on it for the next 12 months it will make you a million dollars, probably 3, probably 5, probably 10. But you gotta focus.” I tell them all, “As soon as you make a million dollars, then I will allow you to create your second funnel.” I want that in your guys’ mind set because so many of you guys are creating a funnel and make $10 grand and then you’re creating the second funnel, you’re making $5 grand, you’re creating the third..you’re in this thing forever where your wheels are just spinning. It’s crazy. I did that for ten years. It’s hard, it’s painful. It’s so much easier to double down on one thing. So focus on one funnel, right. So for us when we launched Clickfunnels, this was the one that worked, we focused on it, and again you can start comma two after you make the Two Comma Club. Now the second thing, after this funnel is working and customers are coming, you’re making money, we’re at about a million dollars, what’s happening is we’re building up pressure. I want to build up a bunch of pressure so that when I release funnel number two people will go crazy for it. If I would have launched Funnel Hacking Live before I launched Clickfunnels, guess how many people would have showed up? No one. Nobody would have come. I know, I did events before and nobody ever came, it was really stressful. True story, the first Funnel Hacking Live we had 600 people signed up, and I was so scared the day of, I was hiding in the back and I’m like, “No one’s gonna…” because I had done events before where very few people showed up, and I’m hiding in the back and I remember peaking through the curtains, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, they came.” I was so excited, because this happened before. So what happens, when the focus is, you’re focusing on your core offer, you’re building customers, getting people to love you, fall in love with you, all that kind of stuff and then you can release, now here’s my second funnel. For a lot of people, then it’s like you released your backend funnel. It’s like, “Hey, now we have a high ticket thing.” But you’ve got all this pressure built up and they just go crazy. That’s where we get a lot of people here and they go and after they’ve been running their webinar or whatever it is for their funnel for a long time, then they launch the next thing and they’re like, “My first funnel took my like 6 months to get to the two comma club. Second one I did in a weekend.” Yeah, you built up a bunch of pressure because people wanted to give you more money, you released it and then boom, it’s really easy the second time. And it keeps getting easier and easier and easier. So I want to kind of walk through some stories of people who figured out the what and the how and I want to show you how fast they blew up. The first one, some of you guys may know him, this is Dan Henrie. Is Dan in the room? He must…How is that so quiet? So Dan, I know his story really well. The reason why I know this really well, is one night after he moved into the new Dan mansion, he was drinking a lot and then he made me this video. I’m going to show you guys a little clip from it. “I know. Russell, listen I’m drunk. It’s cool. Listen, I have to tell you something man. Look, I’m good at what I do. I am. I’m good at what I do. I hope I’m in the right group because I’m flippin’..I said “flippin” Am I in the Dotcom Secrets Inner Cirlce group? Bradley can you tell me? Please tell me if I am? Hold on, because I’m a little drunk. I think I am, yeah. Listen Russell, I’m good at what I do. I’m good at Facebook ads, I’m good at all that. But your perfect webinar, thank God Bradley. Can I say something about your perfect webinar, my friend? Listen, I get it, hold on, you know I gotta say this. You know I want to speak at Funnel Hacking Live, but I get it if you don’t want me to do that because I’m whatever, I cuss a lot, and I’m a loose cannon. I get it, though I would never do that, but I understand. I do get it okay. “So forget all that crap. I just want to give an honest thank you. Because look at this stuff, God, I can’t believe I’m actually censoring myself while I’m drinking. Hold on, look at this. Look at this right now. One webinar, one mother effin’ webinar, okay. One mother effin’ webinar, look at this crap right now. That right there, and the third floor is not even lit up, bro. The third floor, that’s the…you can’t even see it because it’s not lit up because all the lights are off. But bro, that’s one webinar okay! This right here is a fish light.” Alright, I’m going to stop here. Okay, so Dan, he struggled and he struggled and he struggled and guess what happened, he figured out his what and his how and he went from zero to a million dollars in how fast? In five months. That’s what we’re talking about. You guys want to hear the other cool part of this story. I’m sitting at my house and my phone blings saying that someone is streaming into our group and I look and it’s Dan drunk, and I’m watching at first and I’m like, “oh man.” And then I’m like, “Oh man, this is awesome.” So I’m like, I jump on my computer and the second it ends, I download it and we turn it into a video ad, selling my book, post it back up and check this out, right now it’s got 3.7 million views. This video has sold thousands and thousands of books for me, so thank you Dan, I appreciate that. That was amazing. Alright, so there’s Dan’s story. Jamie Cross, where’s Jamie at? Over here, this is Jamie. She didn’t know I was going to talk about her today. Jamie was, last year came to Funnel Hacking Live, the first time you came, right? And she was creating a business and she was trying to figure out the what and the how and she was struggling. She is a herbalist, herbal…yes, that. She makes herb stuff, and she makes her own soaps, her own lotions and a whole bunch of amazing things in her home. And she was trying to figure out, “how do I sell this?” and she figured out an amazing product, she figured out the what. She has an amazing product, you guys should all give her money because it’s legitimately amazing. She has an amazing product, she couldn’t figure out the how. She came to Funnel Hacking Live to try to figure it out. We talked about Perfect Webinar. And what’s funny about her is she’s like, “How do I sell, I’m selling soap and lotion. I can’t do a webinar.” How many of you are ecomm people are like, “Russell, your webinar sucks. I’m selling physical products.” A couple of you guys are saying that to me, I get it. So she didn’t say that. She’s like, “I gotta figure this out. I know the what, but how am I going to sell this.” So she tried doing webinars and all sorts of stuff and eventually she made a four and a half minute perfect webinar facebook live, and in the first 90 days went from zero to 90,000 dollars in sales and has been blowing up ever since. Isn’t that amazing? Yeah. So figure out the what and the how. This is the first phase you guys, if you’re not there. This is the, all you should be thinking about every single day, “What am I selling, how am I selling it? What am I selling, how am I selling it?” And you put it out there, and then the market will tell you if you guessed right. If you didn’t come back, back to the drawing board. What and how, what and how. What am I selling, how am I selling it? What am I selling, how am I selling it? Put it out there and the market will tell you if you’ve failed or not. That’s the game. As soon as you know, then you can blow it up. Next one, Liz Benney. Unfortunately Liz isn’t able to be here this time. Same thing with Liz. I started working with her, she called me up, she joined one of our coaching programs. The very first call I had with her she’s like, “Russell, my goal is to make $50,000 in the next 30 days.” I was like, “That’s a horrible goal.” She’s like, “What?” I’m like, “This is the deal. We have to figure out your what and your how. It’s going to take a little while and it’s probably not going to happen in 30 days, but we’re going to try some stuff and figure it out. And as soon as you figure it out, then you can make 50,000 dollars really, that’s really actually small thinking. But it’s going to take more than 30 days to figure out this initial thing.” So I kind of set her expectations, and she went out there and spent the next four or five months figuring out the what and the how. She figured out what to sell, she created the product, figured out how to sell, created a webinar, and as soon as it worked went from zero to Two Comma Club almost overnight. Next one is Natalie Hodson, is Natalie in the room. Yeah Natalie. Give her a huge round of applause. You’re going to have a chance to hear from Natalie here in about an hour or so, which I’m very excited for, to hear her presentation. I don’t want to spoil the whole thing. But last February she came to an event, and afterwards she launched a book that went from zero to Two Comma Club in like four books. Crazy. An ebook, a $37 ebook, amazing. She figured out the what and the how. And there’s over 258 other stories just like that in this room you guys. I want you to understand, that’s the first phase. Zero to a million is figuring out the what and the how, the what and the how. And you gotta figure that out. Are you guys committed to that, figuring out the what and the how? And if it doesn’t work, don’t get stressed out. Some people launch something, it doesn’t work and they’re like, “Ahh. This doesn’t work. Funnels are a scam. Russell is a scam. I tried the thing and it didn’t work.” No, you gotta, Clickfunnels I had to do six, and I’m pretty good at this game, six funnels before we got one that worked. Was it worth it? Yeah. I don’t want to be that annoying guy that talks about money and stuff, but it was worth it. Six funnels! Holy crap, yes. You will make more when one funnel hits than you will make in a lifetime of hard work otherwise. So is it worth it? Yes, it’s worth it. Figuring out the what and the how, the what and the how. And the market will tell you. And as soon as it lets you know, then you take off and you explode.

As you’re planning your year this year, make sure to spend time focusing on this important aspect as well. On this episode Russell talks about having an end of year goal meeting with his partners and what it means to fortify yourself against your weaknesses. Here are some of the amazing and insightful things to listen for in today’s episode: Find out why Russell started off the end of the year meeting with Clickfunnels partners asking what the things are that could take down Clickfunnels. How Russell has learned from some weaknesses his former businesses have had and how he is fortifying himself against them with Clickfunnels. Why you should fortify yourself in all aspects of your life, including business, your marriage, your relationships, etc. So listen here to find out why it’s so important to look for your own weak spots and to fortify your business against them. ---Transcript--- Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about fortifying your weaknesses so your company can continue to grow long term. Hey everyone, I hope everything’s amazing. We are getting ready for the holidays, in fact, this episode will probably go live during Christmas, maybe even on Christmas, I don’t even know. But last week we had our big partner meeting where all our partners fly out to Boise and we lock ourselves in a room for two days and we discuss the plans and the future and world domination, and what we’re going to do, and trying to figure out the whole process. And what’s crazy is our goal for the last year, last year when we did this, our goal was like, we want to do a hundred million dollars in sales, in the calendar year. Because we’d done it in like 3 years or something, it took us to get to a hundred million. And we’re like, we want to do a hundred million in a calendar year. So that was the big goal. And actually, what’s crazy, as of yesterday when I’m recording this podcast, we did it. We broke a hundred million dollars in one calendar year, which is crazy. Insane, so thank you for all your support, everybody who’s invested in programs, uses the software, who loves what we do, we are grateful for you guys and for making it happen. Now next year it’s like, what’s the next goal, what’s the next phase? So we had the big meeting, got everyone out here and it was a lot of fun. We basically, like I said, lock ourselves in a room and we just have a big list of items we go through and then we try to prioritize and schedule and figure things out. It’s just kind of a cool thing we do every single year. But I wanted to share with you guys how I started the meeting this year, because it’s different than normal. So basically, we started the meeting and I brought everyone together and said, “Okay, we’ve done some amazing things this year, we have some big goals for next year, but before we get into any of that, I want to talk about all the ways that Clickfunnels could fail.” And everyone’s like, “oh, that’s a depressing way to start the meeting.” I’m like, “Not in a depressing way, but if we’re not aware of where our chokepoints, where we could actually get tapped out, if we’re not aware of what our weaknesses are, then it’s almost like, a lot of people, we don’t want to look at those things, so we kind of hold a blind eye.” And not just in business, but in everything, in life.  Like where are my weaknesses in my marriage, and in my family relationships, with my kids, where are the weaknesses? We typically, our brains don’t like to think about the unpleasantness of things, so we kind of block those things and we don’t talk about them or don’t think about them, as opposed to the opposite, which is like being aware of them, acknowledging them and then fortifying yourself around those things so that the problems don’t happen. So that’s what we kind of talked about. So in every business there’s things that can make your business crash. I know because I have crashed multiple businesses in the past. And hopefully I’ve learned each time and I’ve tried to fortify things stronger the next time. For example, last time I had my big business crash, some of you guys may have heard this story before, it was actually right about the time I started this podcast. But we had a hundred and something employees and we had all our merchant accounts, I think we had 14 merchant accounts, but they were all with the same processer, the same bank. So I thought we had diversity because they were different merchant accounts, but apparently because they’re all with the same bank, the bank looks at them as one merchant account, even though there’s like 14 of them. So when that bank decided they didn’t like us anymore, they shut down the merchant account, but that shut down all of our merchant accounts, lost 14 of them. And we had this huge business, it was growing, everything was doing amazing, but that one thing, that chokehold was able to like really quickly, someone just pinched that and the whole company basically went under. I had to let go 80 people in a weekend and it was horrible and it was all because of that one thing. So I started thinking, what are the things inside Clickfunnels, that if they were to go wrong, could destroy this amazing thing that we built? So one of them again, is merchant accounts. Are we diversified? Do we have backups? If Stripe shut us down what would we do? What would be the process? What are other things we can ensure that we don’t? What are our chargeback rates? What are our refund rates, what’s high, what’s low, where do we need to be? Just figuring out all those things because the last thing in the world I want to happen is lose my merchant account and then I lose Clickfunnels, right. And then everybody who we’ve been serving, now we screw them over because they lose that piece. These are the things that keep me up at night, by the way.  So that was the first one. Then we talked about what happens if the FCC doesn’t like how we sold something? Oh my gosh, that could be another chokepoint. If the FCC came in and said, “We don’t like how you sell your stuff.” We could be shut down. So we’re like, what do we do? So it’s like, let’s go and hire an FCC lawyer to go through every single page of every single funnel and give us feedback and we’ll make changes to the copy. Let’s look at our webinar presentation, things that aren’t compliant, let’s change those things. Let’s look at all sorts of things, join the BBB, joining….there’s another organization we’re trying to join. Whatever we can do to protect ourselves from anything bad like that happening. Make sure that we are squeaky clean in all aspects there. And then we’re like, what happens if our servers go down? What happens if….we’re looking at all the possible things that could go wrong and then instead of trying to turn a blind eye to them and not think about them, we try to face them straight on and be like, here’s the weaknesses. What do we need to do? How do we fortify? What are all the things we can do to protect ourselves and protect our customers and the people we’re serving? It’s those things. So I share with you guys because, first off, so you’re aware I’m doing everything in my power to continue a solid foundation for all you guys. I want to make sure you have a place to build your businesses on and your legacy on and we want to make sure we’re here for a thousand years. So hopefully that gives you guys some comfort there. But second off, I think you guys should all be looking at your businesses as well. If you only have one merchant account, that’s scary. If you only have one traffic source, that’s scary. If all your ads come from Facebook, what happens if Zuckerberg decides to change how ads work? Or everything’s coming from Google, what if the algorithm changes again? Just being super aware. What if I have a business partnership I don’t like? What if my partner and I don’t get along? What could happen there? What happens if….all the what if’s and looking at those things and figuring out how do we fortify against this?  The same thing could be true in your marriage. What are the points where something bad could happen in your marriage, what are those things? Be aware of those things, and how do we fortify against that? When Collette and I first got married and first started this business and started hiring people, one of the very first things that we kind of sat down and said is, “Okay, I’m not going to go to lunch with a single female.” That’s just something that I will never do. And that’s just a stronghold. Even if it’s someone I’m not attracted to, or someone way different, it’s just a rule. I don’t go to lunch by myself with a female. You just don’t do it, because who knows what could happen or what people could think could happen or whatever. It doesn’t even matter, it’s just I’m fortifying myself against potential problems. So we set up these fortifications ahead of time and then you won’t have the issues. So now that we’re in this season of planning and preparing and figuring things out, I just challenge you guys to look at your weaknesses and fortify yourselves around them. You know, if I was to go to war against another country, I’d be looking at the same thing. Where are weak at? Are we weak on land? On sea? Where are they strong at? Where are we weak at? How do we fortify ourselves so that when the attacks come there, we’re prepared for them and we can withstand the blows. Anyway, there you go you guys, there’s the lesson for today. It’s not going to be the most fun conversation, but I promise you it’s a lot more fun than the conversation you have afterwards, when your merchant accounts get shut down, or when Zuckerberg shuts down your traffic, or when the FCC finds your funnels not compliant, or when…..whatever your thing might be. And so I just want to encourage all you guys to do what we did and really look at those weaknesses, focus on them, and figure out how to fortify them as you’re making your plans for the upcoming year. Because doubling your company, or tripling your company, or whatever your lofty exciting goals are, which are fun, all that fun disappears quickly if you’re not careful. So I hope that helps somebody out there. I know it’s a big thing for us this year, as we’re trying to figure out how to go from a hundred million to a billion, which I don’t think is a 12 month goal, but I think it is a 10 year goal. How do we make sure we’re fortified so that when we 10x where we’re at now, we can handle it and support it and we’re prepared for it? Yeah, so I hope that helps you guys. With that said, I appreciate you all. Thanks so much for hanging out on the podcast. If you learned anything or if you enjoyed this, please take a screenshot on your phone, just click the buttons, take a screenshot, go to Istagram, Facebook, wherever you’re social at, post and say your number one thing, your biggest takeaway you got from this episode. Please tag me in it, because I love to see that. And then if you use hashtag Marketing Secrets in the post as well, that would be awesome. It’s been fun watching more and more of you guys taking snapshots and posting your big takeaways from the episodes, that means a lot to me and I love it. So please keep doing it, plus it helps other people find out about our podcast, and hopefully I can help serve more people. With that said, thanks you guys, and we’ll talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody. 

You may be doing something that’s holding yourself, and the person you’re trying to serve, back. On today’s special Thanksgiving day episode Russell talks about why it’s okay for people you are coaching to seek out coaches that can help them with things that you cannot. Here are some of the amazing things you will hear from Russell on Thanksgiving. How Russell’s niece seeking a new gymnastic coach relates to marketing coaches. Why as a coach you should allow your students to seek help from others who might be more helpful with certain aspects that you are not. And finally, why seeking significance can actually hinder your ability to achieve it. And only after you make the switch to service and contribution are you able to achieve significance. So listen here to find out why you should always be looking to help your clients, even if that means they need to go to someone else for guidance. ---Transcript--- What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome you to a very special episode of The Marketing Secrets podcast. Alright everybody, today was Thanksgiving and I literally, it’s 10:15 at night and I just dropped my twin boys off at my brother’s house. And what’s crazy is when I’m done recording this podcast, I will then email it to my brother, he will then edit it and somehow magically get it on iTunes, and then his wife, Rochelle will then take it and transcribe it and put the transcript up there for you as well, and she’ll post the transcripts on Marketingsecrets.com, and they do that every single episode for you guys. So I’m grateful for them on this amazing Thanksgiving. So yeah, so I thought I would just share that so you guys know how the process works. People always ask me, “how do you podcast?” and the answer is I don’t know. I literally get my phone out, click record and start sharing what’s on my mind. And I have something that’s on my mind today, I actually had so many things. And part of me wanted to do an episode where I wrote down everything I’m thankful for, and I just haven’t done that yet because there’s a lot of things and I was going to go over them with you guys. Maybe I’ll still do that, I don’t know. And I had other things that I want to talk about, but there’s one message that just came pretty loud tonight and I thought it would be fun to share it with you guys. And the reason why it kind of came to my mind was I was taking my kids back from the hotel, we’re in Utah right now, my parents live here. So we had Thanksgiving with my parents, and now we’re staying in a hotel close to their house. And we  had all the kids over to the hotel swimming, and having fun and I was driving them back, driving some of my kids to my parents house, some of them to my brother’s house, just dropping kids off at cousin’s houses everywhere and I was driving one of my cousins, and she’s a gymnast, she’s an amazing gymnast. And it’s funny because she worked out at gym for most of her whole career, and then she kind of hit a sticking point where she wasn’t getting further than she wanted to get. And she couldn’t get past that sticking point and some of her friends had gone to this other gym and they got some really good coaching, they had a really good coaching staff there. The coaches there had helped them get past these plateaus and it really helped. She went back to her coach and she was like, “Hey, I want to go to this other gym to help me get past these plateaus so I can continue to progress.” And what’s crazy, and this is where the lesson is going to come from, for all of you guys. But what’s crazy is the coach, instead of being like, “Yeah, I care about you as an athlete, you should.” The coach took that personal and started yelling at her and screaming, and kicked her out, and kicked her little sister out, and kicked everyone out of the gym because she wanted to get help from other coaches. It’s crazy to me. Sorry, the moral, the good part of the story is she’s gone to this other gym and all of her numbers and all of her things have gone up because this new coaching staff is able to help her. And it’s funny, the other day on Facebook somebody posted something and they tagged me on it. They were talking about who your favorite marketer is, and they said, “Sorry Russell, unfortunately my favorite marketer now is Steven Larsen.” And they tagged me to apologize to me, and I thought it was so funny. And I remember I messaged back to that person, I was like, “My only goal in this whole game is to get my clients, my students, my people, whatever you want to call them, a result. That’s it.” I don’t care how you get the result right. I think there’s a lot of times when we get stuck in the ego of ourselves and get so worried about, they must have success through my program or the way that I do things. And it’s like, no, no, no. If you actually care about your student, if you actually care about their well-being, if you actually want them to succeed, you’re not going to sit back and only go through your path. And I posted it and I was like, “That’s amazing. I don’t care if you get it through meor through steven. Steven’s amazing. He’s got gifts, he’s got talents, he’s got abilities that I don’t have. And if you can get the result you’re looking for through him, I’m more pumped than you are.” I honestly just want to serve at this point in my life. I don’t care. And if someone else can serve better than me to a certain person or certain audience, that’s amazing. Let them. That’s why I bring amazing people to Funnel Hacking Live, people who can out teach me on certain topics because I just want people to get the result. That’s all that matters to me. And I think that’s how good coaches should be. I remember growing up, I had a really, really good high school coach named Steve Bowdren and I’m super grateful to this day for him, for a couple of reasons. One, he was an amazing coach. But number two, he never cared if I went and got coaching from other places. During the off season I did freestyle at a freestyle club and had coaches there. And then I did Greco at places, I went to other high schools, other places. And he was always okay because he didn’t, he wasn’t tied into his ego of, “I must be Russell’s coach. I must be the only person that instills knowledge into his head.” He was like, “No, Russell wants to be the best. So I’m going to allow him to be the best.” So he allowed me to go out there and be coached by tons of other people. So for that, if nothing else, outside of the fact that he was an amazing coach as well, but his willingness to do that is rare. We have so much ego tied into this thing, of it’s gotta be us, it’s gotta be us. And I Just wanted to share that because I see that happening a lot in the coaching world. We’re all coaching people in different aspects of their life, or helping with health or weight loss or fitness or finance or whatever it is you do. All the different products or services, but sometimes we get too caught up in that piece of it, that you want to be the one that’s instilling all the information and knowledge to your person and I think that that’s a tragedy because none of us are amazing at everything right. It’s interesting, we had Bart Miller, who is a close friend, he’s the guy who makes me look good at all of our events, gets me all dressed. I pay him a bunch of money to take me shopping to look, not in my t-shirt and jeans, like I would have showed up to my events. And Bart has got a successful ecommerce business as well, he’s in my inner circle, pays me to be in my inner circle, stuff like that. And he asked me, “Hey, I’m thinking about getting some help with the ecommerce side of my business, what do you think I should do?” and I was like, “Oh if I was you, I’d hire Ezra Firestone.” And he was like, “Really?” I’m like, ‘Oh, totally.” And he’s like, “Well, okay.” And then he’s like, “Can you introduce me to Ezra?” and I’m like, ‘Heck yeah man, Ezra’s the man.” So I introduced him to Ezra. I’m like, “Ezra, Bart. Bart, Ezra. You guys should work together, I want 10% of everything you make in the future. Just kidding, go do your thing, have some fun, everyone blow up their businesses.” So they went off on that thing and Bart told me later, he said that Ezra was so confused like, “I don’t why Russell told you to sign up for my coaching. You’re his student. Why would he recommend me.” And stuff like that. Because for me, I don’t care. I don’t care how people get results, I just want people to get results. I’ve seen, I’ve had people who are close to me inside my business who are like, because if you look at the Two Comma Club X coaching, I brought in a lot of coaches this year. I brought in Julie Stoian, I brought in Alex Charfin, Steven Larsen, all these amazing coaching, John Parkes, James Friell, people who are legitimately amazing at what they do. And it’s funny because a lot of people have come to the program and gone through it, and I know a lot of people have signed up for Alex Charfin’s high end coaching after my program, after they’ve gone through a lot of our stuff. And they’ve gone through to Alex’s stuff. They’re introduced to him through my program and then they buy his stuff later. And I have people who are like, “You know Alex is just taking people from your program and signing up.” And they’re like freaking out. And I have to stop them and be like, “Look, look, look. I don’t care how they get the result. I just want them to get the result. If they get that through us, that is a huge honor and I’m grateful and glad we can be a little piece of their journey. But if Alex can serve them at this level or this piece of their business different than I can, then why not? I don’t have one coach, I have tons of coaches. It’s funny, I’ve heard people that I’ve got coaching with before tell other people like, “Russell Brunson learned everything that he learned from me.” And I smile because I learned a lot from them, and I’m grateful for them, and I don’t usually say stuff. But I’m like, man, I have tons of coaches. And it’s like every coach has something they’re amazing at. I have some gifts and abilities, there’s things that I can do inside a business that are really, really good. And I’m proud of what I can do and it’s a piece I’m really, really good at. But there’s other pieces of the business that I’m not good at, that I don’t’ want to be good at. I don’t even want to. People ask me those questions and I’m like, “You should hire someone who’s focus is on that.” And they’re like, “But I pay you to coach me.” And I’m like, “You pay me to coach you on this piece that I’m the man at, but someone else is the man at that piece.” Or “Someone else is the woman at that piece and you should find the right people to coach you and mentor you along the way.” The reason why I went on this whole rant, is because I just wanted to share with you guys is, don’t think that your client is your client. That’s the biggest problem that we have, and then we get in this scarcity mindset, like, “Oh it’s my person and if they read anybody else’s books or listen to anything else, they’re going to leave me.” If they leave you, that’s okay. Your job is not to protect them. Your job is to give them your piece, the thing that you’re good at, give them that piece. So people come to me and I give them pieces that I’m really good at and I plug that thing in and I keep trying to develop my piece and get better at it, and share more of it. And I want to keep developing myself as a human, but I am not offended when somebody goes and gets coaching from somebody else. In fact, I’m grateful for it because that piece is going to get them closer and closer to their end result. So stop thinking of your customer as your customer and realize that this is a human who is in the market that I’m in and they’re trying to get a result and I feel like my thing is the best and I’m going to serve them at the highest level that I can, but sometimes serving them at the highest level possible is to allow them to get coaching from different people at the same time. I look at my amazing cousin, I guess she’s my niece. I look at her and she’s an amazing gymnast. And if that coach would have been like, “Yeah, you should get some help from that coach and this coach.” Instead of destroying this relationship with her and her family, instead it could have been this amazing thing where he opens up the door to say, “I know this person and this person. Here’s my rolodex. Here’s other people you could bring into your world that could help you with this piece and this piece.” And they could have all grown together. And then guess what’s fascinating? This is the coolest thing. That original coach, the coach that opened up the door and allowed her to go to other places, would have been the one who got all the credit. That’s what’s interesting to me, I look at a lot of people who I’ve helped in business and then go off to other coaches and get other pieces in other places, and I’m so grateful for this, most of the time they come back and give me credit. “Russell helped me to grow my business.” “Russell gave me this piece. But I got this piece from this coach, and this piece from this coach.” But because I was the one who helped them and served them selflessly and allowed them to go and learn from other people, for whatever reason the credit still comes back to you. It’s crazy because that coach, my nieces coach wants the significance, so because of that he’s trying to hold this in and keep the significance. And because of that he lost his significance. Whereas when you open it up and allow, and try to serve people at your best and don’t be offended if they come or they go and just do your thing, that’s when you get the significance you’re actually seeking for. It’s been funny, Dave Woodward and I have had this conversation four or five times in the last two or three weeks, it’s kind of crazy. About this fascination of like these people I know who at one time in their life were very significant. They had the significance from what they do and then as time has gone by they’ve become less relevant and they’ve lost their significance. So they try and they fight and they cling, trying to get significance, and they do it in this way where they feel like they’re going to feel more significant because of this, and all these things they’re trying to do. And the reality is the more they do it, the more it distances themselves from people and the more they lose their significance. And I look at me, there was a time in my career where I was very significance driven as well and I was seeking after it and trying to get the recognition. I wanted to be on stage and I wanted people cheering my name and all this kind of stuff, and I was fighting for it, tooth and nail and it was hard to get. And I got some of it, which is why I kept, you get that and that fuel that drives you on for a while. But I remember a couple of years into this business I got over it. I was like, that’s not as cool as I thought it was going to be. I was like, I’m not going to worry about significance anymore. And I remember it was a mental shift for me. I was like, I’m stop thinking about me and start thinking about my customer. And for me, that was when I started really transitioning from, “How do I serve Russell’s ego?” to “How do I serve my customer?” and it was this weird shift and I stopped seeking for significance and started seeking as a servant. How can I serve? How can I impact? How can I contribute to other people? And that’s what my shift became. And then the most fascinating thing happened. When I made that shift mentally, I get more significance now than I can handle. Today was Thanksgiving. I probably conservatively would say that between email, text, Voxer, Instagram, Facebook, those are the platforms I see directly on my phone. Between those channels, I’d say conservatively today there was well over a hundred something people thanking me for what I do. So many I can’t even respond. I feel guilty, I can’t even respond back to all of them or I would have missed my whole family on Thanksgiving. And then I open up Facebook and I can’t open up Facebook without seeing like 10 people talking about CLickfunnels and what we’re doing. I go to events and I get asked to do these huge events now and all this craziness that I’m not seeking for, it comes to me now. When I stopped seeking significance I got more significance than I can even handle. So much that I just want to hide sometimes, and I don’t know how to get rid of it, because it just keeps coming. But I can’t stop serving because I get addicted to that. And I just want to tell these people who are seeking after significance, when you stop seeking significance and you start serving, you’ll get more significance than you’ll ever dream of. And it doesn’t seem right, it seems backwards and doesn’t make any logical sense, but it’s happened for me. And the people in my herd, in my tribe, in my influence, who I’m able to communicate with, who listened to that and they believe it and they shift, they find the same thing. And it’s fascinating. Most entrepreneurs, so if you’re in this spot don’t feel bad. Most of us get in this business because we want significance, we’ve a chip on our shoulder. Somebody said something bad about us, somebody didn’t believe in us, we were the dumb kid in school. There’s all these reasons so we get in this business because we’ve got a chip on our shoulder and want significance. And then we start fighting for it and start fighting for it. And initially it’s okay, it’s what gives us that initial drive and motivation that we need to get off or butts and change something. But the problem is that some people get the hit of significance and they keep going after it like a drug. And they go for the next hit and the next hit and then next hit. And it’s, I don’t know, it’s weird.  But you can’t, it’s hard to get that direction. You get little hits of it and it goes away, hit and it goes away, hit and it goes away. It’s almost like it’s face, it’s like a hollow significance. I don’t know. But when you make that shift to service, contribution the significance will come, almost more than you can handle. It’s almost like, it’s tough now sometimes. I love it, I’m not going to lie, it feels amazing. But it’s interesting. So for you, if you’re listening to this, look at the spectrum, are you seeking significance? And if so, don’t feel bad. It’s okay, it’s how all of us got here. But the fastest way to get that significance, is actually not seeking after it. It’s not by positioning and posturing yourself, it’s not by all those things. It’s by finding your people and serving them. And sometimes serving them means letting them go. Sometimes it means helping them find other coaches, sometimes it means being okay if somebody else helps them with something. What is best for the person you’re serving? That should be the thought in your head constantly. What is the best for this person I’m trying to serve? What is the best for them? Not what’s the best for you, what’s the best for them? And if you think about that, it will change everything. Anyway, I hope that helps. I’m back at the hotel, I’m now going to finish this podcast. When I finish it, what I’ll do, I’m going to save the title and I’ll end it. I’ll email it to my brother, and in a week or two it will be live on iTunes. And like I said, his beautiful wife will transcribe it and she’ll post it on Marketing Secrets-the blog, on marketingsecrets.com, and that’s kind of how this whole podcast thing works. It’s a lot of fun. I hope you guys enjoyed tonight and I hope you guys had a great Thanksgiving, no matter where you’re at around the world. Just remember that shifting from significance to contribution will change your life and it will change the lives of the people you have the opportunity to serve. Alright with that said, appreciate you all. I’m getting messages from my wife and my brother and my sister all asking where I am at, so I better go in and see what’s up. Talk to you guys all soon. Bye everybody.

In the times in your life when you win, and the times in your life when you lose; the only real purpose is for you to capture a story to help more people. On this episode Russell talks about his experience at Entrepreneur of the Year, and why he is grateful he didn’t win. Here are some of the insightful things you will hear on today’s episode: How the Entrepreneur of the Year event is similar to a body building competition. How Russell plans to use the story of not winning the award in the future. And why you should look for every opportunity to add to your story, whether your winning or losing. So listen here to find out how The Entrepreneur of the Year Awards compares to body building competitions, and why Russell feels grateful to lose. ---Transcript--- Hey, good morning everybody. This is Russell Brunson and I want to welcome you to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I got so much good stuff to talk to you guys about today. Entrepreneur of the year event, something funny with my kids, and a whole bunch more. Hey everyone, man, I have like 12 podcasts in my head right now that I want to share with you guys, of lessons from this last week. Some of you guys know that this last weekend was the entrepreneur of the year, the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award ceremony. Earlier this year I submitted for the entrepreneur of our region and I won it, which was really cool. And then basically all the regions get together and do a national tournament. So I was all excited to go to this national thing and compete and see if we could win the national entrepreneur of the year award. So I thought, if we’re going to do this we should make an experience out of it right. That way we can do an episode of Funnel Hacker TV, that way it’s not just me going somewhere on an event because I go to a lot of events and it’s just like boring. So how to make this memorable for me and for my wife and for anyone else I want to bring. So I decided, hey, I’m going to bring my parents, because that would be fun to have them come to something like this. And then Dave and his wife Carrie wanted to come to, which was super cool. So the first thing was like, we can just fly there or what if we did it up right and just rented a private plane? So we rented a private plane, flew down, picked my parents up in Salt Lake, which my mom was certain she was going to die on the plane. She’d read a book about someone who got in a plane wreck one time. So because of that she was convinced that certain death was the only possible outcome for this vacation. It was really hard to convince her to go. But she agreed finally. So we flew down and picked them up and went to this event. That night we got there, and they did it right. They had this huge dinner with this amazing buffet. It was amazing. I’ve been to a lot of buffets and this was like four steps past anything I’d ever been to before. They had this dessert bar and they literally had a donut wall, a wall with these pegs coming out of it with thousands of donuts all over them. They had this thing that looked like an ice cream bar with tons of different kinds of ice cream flavors, but it wasn’t ice cream it was cookie dough. It was a cookie dough bar. It was insane. They scoop out tons of cookie dough into the thing and then they had chocolate covered bacon, and they had…the desserts alone were amazing. Anyway, it was amazing. Then there was the Kelly Clarkson concert. So we were like 5 rows away from Kelly Clarkson and she did this huge show for us, a private event for everyone who was at this thing, which was super cool. And that was the first night. The next morning we woke up and if you watched my instagram stories, I made some jokes, but we had a chance to see the winners of last year’s entrepreneur of the year award. And I’m going to kind of tease them, but also I’m grateful for them, so I’ll talk about both sides of it. But they are a venture backed company who’s trying to solve cancer, which is really, really cool and I’m grateful for people and entrepreneurs and companies like that. But the problem, the frustrating thing on my side is that they’ve raised $2 billion dollars in funding in this thing. So I’m like, that’s awesome. I’m grateful that they’ve done that, what they’re doing, that they’re trying to stop cancer. That’s so valuable and helpful. But it’s funny because I don’t know if I would consider that being an entrepreneur. It’s like, the entrepreneur in this business, their full time job is to go sell people on giving them more money. And then they have people they’ve hired to solve cancer. You’re more like a glorified sales person who’s just selling to VC’s. I don’t know, but I don’t think that’s entrepreneurship, but maybe I’m wrong. But I am grateful for what they’re doing. They raised $2 billion, and it’s interesting because most of the companies that were there had all raised money. I think there’s probably half a dozen of us who are boot strapped entrepreneurs and the rest were all like VC backed. And it was funny because I was talking with Dave ahead of time about this, I’m like, you know in the body building world there’s two competitions. There’s one that’s like the body building competition, everybody comes and there’s no rules. They never say, ‘oh yeah, go use steroids.” But they don’t test for it. So because of that, that’s when you get guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferigno and these dudes who are insane. When you look at them you’re like, that can’t be human. It’s because they’re not human, they’re on steroids. So there’s that term, then there’s the natural body building contest where you have to like not be on steroids to qualify. And those guys look way smaller. They look amazing, but standing next to each other you’re like, that dude’s on steroids, that’s the difference. I feel like it’s the same thing here. The entrepreneur of the year award was like all these dudes who are steroids who took venture capitalist…got $2 billion in funding, and then there’s people like me, who are the natural ones. Who showed up and if you look at us by ourselves we look good, but you look standing next to someone who received $2 billion in funding it’s like, how do you compete with that. It’s fascinating. In fact, for those who were, I don’t want to leave you in suspense. We did not win the entrepreneur of the year award. The guy who won it in our space is Thomas Siebold, which if you’ve ever heard of Siebold, he’s a billionaire. He started a new company because he’s a billionaire, he just funded it and had other people fund it. How do you compete with that guy? Come on now, that’s not fair. In fact, Siebold is the dude who Mark Benioff, who owns Sales Force used to work for. So he was Mark Benioff’s mentor. Anyway, so it’s like, that’s who I was competing against, billionaires. So I lost to the billionaire, but the billionaire was all roided out, so I don’t feel too bad. Anyway, and then the dude who won entrepreneur of year overall, of all the categories, was the guy who started Groupon, which actually was really cool. Groupon was his sixth business and then he took it public, and now this is his new business. Again, it was confusing, but they went from zero to $2 billion dollar valuation, excuse me a billion dollar valuation in 2 years. But again, they haven’t sold much stuff, but because of all the money they’ve gotten from funding their value there. So once again, they’re all roided out and they beat me. But it was still kind of fun to see. And again, I want to step back, well in the intro of this podcast I make fun of it. About companies who cheat and take on venture capital. And while I do feel that, I am at the same time grateful that there are companies out there who are trying to cure cancer. There’s companies out there who are trying to do these things, that probably couldn’t be done by a bootstrap entrepreneur, just because of the nature of what it is. It takes $1 billion apparently, in funding to cure cancer before you have the pill and start selling it. You can’t start selling it ahead of time. So I understand it and while I tease and I joke about it I am grateful for those entrepreneurs who are doing that direction. I just don’t believe in it. I think for us bootstrap entrepreneurs there should be an award as well. So we may or may not being working on the Bootstrap Entrepreneur of the Year Award, because I think it’s something that needs to happen. Just like in body building there’s the body building competition, then there’s the natural body building competition. I think that’s more interesting to me and I think to you guys as well, because most of you guys don’t have $2 billion in funding. So it’s like, okay how do we actually, in fact it’s funny, one of the panels, they were doing the interview and they asked the guy, “What’s it like as an entrepreneur taking on the risk?” and the guy was like, “Well, you know the nicest thing about risk, I just go back to my venture capitalists and get them to give us a couple more hundred million dollars, and then the risk fear goes away.” I’m like, what? That’s the worst answer ever. It’s like, what do you do when you hit plateaus? I just take more steroids. Come on. I wanted to be like, that’s when we freaking hustle. We recruit a team of people that believe in our vision. We work our butts off for free and we create something truly remarkable and then we sell it to our customers, and they love it so much they finance it. That’s the answer I wanted, but no. It’s like, we go back and take another hit of roids. Anyway, that’s kind of interesting. But I digress, there were so many other cool things that I wanted to share with you guys. So many cool stories I could share with you. In fact, I’m sure I’ll do separate episodes. Like for example, Jennifer Gardner came and spoke and she is funny, I teased my wife, I think everyone’s allowed to have one celebrity crush right, and she’s totally my celebrity crush. Ever since 13 Going on 30, I was like she is the coolest ever. So she’s been my celebrity crush, and she came and spoke. And she was so amazing, not just from the point that I have a crush on her, but just insanely amazing. I was so impressed with her. Anyway, I’ll tell you some stories about her in another episode. But blown away by her. Just so many cool things that happened. But the biggest thing I wanted to share with you guys, and this is kind of the purpose of this podcast, and then I’ll go deeper on other episodes about some of the specific things I learned. There’s some really cool lessons I learned from watching the Kelly Clarkson Concert. Specific things from Jennifer Gardner, specific things….but for this one, what I wanted to talk about, the natural vs the regular body building contest, how it relates to entrepreneurship. Because I think sometimes some of may look at those guys and be frustrated. And it’s like, no, just understand that they have a role in this world and we’re grateful for them, but it’s not who we are. We’re the natural body builders and it’s something to be proud of, I think, that you bootstrap your company. So that’s number one. But number two is like, I didn’t win the contest. It’s funny because so many people reached out to me, “Oh I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” And it’s funny because I didn’t care. I didn’t go into to it to do it. I’m always going into things looking for the story. What’s the story I’m going to be able to tell because of this experience? I think that’s something that all of us should be looking at because we all go through tough times. And I’m not saying this was a tough time for me, it wasn’t. I was fine not winning. But when I’m going through something I’m looking for what’s the story that’s going to happen in this thing that I can use to inspire somebody or to sell something or to whatever. I’m always talking to you guys about you need to be building up your rolodex of stories. When I do a webinar, the reason I can do webinars so fast, and I can crank them out and I can sell well is because I’ve got this huge rolodex of stories that I’ve been building up for over a decade that I can pull out really quick in a moment’s notice. So I’m like, what are the stories that I can pull out of this experience that I can use in other things? Like when I spoke at the 10x event and I did 3.2 million dollars in sales. And everyone’s like, “Oh my gosh, you made 3.2 million dollars in sales.” I’m like, yeah, that was cool but I’ve got a story now, and that story will make me ten times that 3.2 million. To be able to tell that story about how I’m the highest paid public speaker in the world. How I netted a million dollars an hour. All those things, I will sell way more product from that than I ever did from the money I made at the event. I’m looking for the story. So for me, it’s like this whole thing happened. I didn’t win it, but like for me, the story is this whole thing I kind of shared with you guys today, this natural versus unnatural. And I promise you, we are going to building a Bootstrap Entrepreneur of the Year Award and a thing, and it’s going to be a movement and a big thing, based on this story. The fact that I lost, I’m so grateful that I lost because now I have this story about, “Hey I lost, but I was going up against people who were on steroids.” It’s not really, it’s like bringing a gun to a knife fight. Let’s come back and let’s build the natural body building contest for entrepreneurs. Now I have a story I can share, and a reason and a purpose and a thing that’s going to call to all of my people. It’s going to call out to the bootstrap entrepreneurs. The people I love serving are going to hear that message and be like, “Yes, that’s who I am.” And they’re going to hear my voice and they will come to me. So that’s the magic. In the experience I’m looking for the story because the story is the next phase of the thing. So for you, I want you guys to keep your eyes open more for the stories that are happening. Every day when you have success there’s a story there that’s more valuable than the success. When you fail there’s a story there that’s more valuable than the failure. And most of us just go through it and we’re upset or happy for the thing that just happened. It’s like, no, no, no. That thing that happened was good, but it was not the finish line. It was the story you need to inspire people to sell your next product, to do your next thing, to create your movement, to call a new segment of people into the marketplace. Whatever it is for you, the story is the key. So keep your eyes open for the stories that are happening around you. That’s the magic, that’s what I want to make sure you guys aren’t missing, because if you did, for me that whole weekend could have been a wasted weekend. “I lost, let’s not talk about it.” No, no, no. “I lost, let’s talk about it.” That’s more powerful. Alright, with that said, I’m home. I’m going to go get ready for the day. A lot of fun stuff happening this week. I’ll take you guys on some of the journeys but we are, my kids have….so today’s Monday morning, I’ve got a wrestling match Tuesday with the kids. Wrestling match Thursday and then Friday and Saturday there’s a wrestling tournament. So we got wrestling all week. And I was supposed to fly down Friday and Saturday to go be with the Harmon Brothers, to work on part two of our viral video campaign with them, the problem is that it was booked on Friday/Saturday and I found out later that my boys had a wrestling tournament Friday/Saturday. So I was like, okay my kids are more important than my company. I’m not missing the wrestling tournament. So I had to talk to them and move things around. So what’s happening is Tuesday’s wrestling match ends, after that I jump on a private plane and fly to Provo to get to Sundance, so I can be there for the writing retreat. So I’m there all day Wednesday at the writing retreat, half day Thursday, and then I jump in a plane and fly back and get back just in time for my kids’ wrestling match on Thursday night. So this whole detour is costing me like $16 grand in flights to be able to…. So anyway, someday I’m hoping my kids listen to this episode someday when their father is dead and they’re like, “I wonder if my dad loved me?” and be like, “Yes, he loves you a lot. He rearranged heaven and earth so he wouldn’t miss a wrestling match because that’s how much he loves you.” So I hope they listen to this someday and know how much I love them. They are the coolest little things in the whole world and I cannot wait to watch them wrestle. So that’s my week this week, plus we got a speaker training happening in Boise so Tuesday/Wednesday we are training a team of 20 speakers to go out and do my presentation on the road, which is exciting. So I’m working on presentations today to train them on my stage pitch. That’s happening today and then 10x secrets, we’re in the middle of launch right now, it’s doing really, really well. And I think I’m running a webinar because I think Monday I’m going to be doing a webinar to close out the whole thing. So I got that happening this week plus while I’m in Provo working with the Harmon Brothers, that night we’re all trying to get them all of our new Org Chart business development stuff with the company. It’s going to be an insane week. If I survive this week, then I’ll have earned Thanksgiving next week. So anyway, I appreciate you guys all, thanks for listening. If you learned anything from this, take on your phone, you can click on the buttons and take a screenshot of the screen of this podcast episode, do that and then go to Facebook or instagram, or pinterest, wherever you go and post the video and say, “I just listened to Russell’s story about ‘blah’, check out his podcast.” Tag me so I can see it and also hashtag Marketing Secrets, and let’s get some other people listening to this episode. Appreciate you guys, thanks so much for everything, and we’ll talk soon.

A really cool principle that I’m revisiting as I’m going into a consulting swap day. On this episode Russell talks about why he can’t relate to people with information overload. Here are some of the amazing things you will hear in today’s episode: How Brandon Poulin helped Russell see what he’s been doing all along, by saying something profound. How Russell is able to separate context and content to only use things that apply at that moment, and shelve everything else. And why it’s important to know what context you need in your content in order to avoid information overload. So listen here to find out what strategy Russell uses to be able to retain all information, but only use the stuff within the correct context of what he’s doing. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to a very special episode of Marketing Secrets podcast. Hey everyone, I’m actually laying in bed right now, I’m about to go to bed and I’ve had an amazing last two days. We’ve got our entire development team out here, which is really special. We’ve never had all of thme here before. There’s probably 35-40 people here. It’s just been fun having them in the office. I had a chance to speak to them and talk about the vision of Clickfunnels and kind of behind the scenes of what happened when we first launched it and the ups and downs and all the craziness that kind of ensued during that part of the process. It’s been kind of fun. And then Todd, who is my co-founder in Clickfunnels and partner, he’s actually staying at my house. Normally he stays at a hotel but we were like, back in the day when we were first getting started he would always fly out here to Boise and stay at our house, so we thought it would be fun for him to stay here. So it’s been fun every night staying up late talking with him about the whole process and all the craziness and reflecting on the last four years. Clickfunnels had it’s four year birthday today, and it’s insane to see what has happened since it went live. From zero to 66,000 active members and all the other craziness in between. Anyway it’s been cool and we’ve got a couple more fun days with everyone here. And then tomorrow actually, Brandon and Kaelin from Lady Boss are flying in and we’re doing something really fun. It’s something I think all of you guys should be doing with other people inside your community that you find that are smart as well. So we’re basically swapping consulting days. So they’re doing a lot of cool things in their business operationally, from a traffic side and a couple of other things that I’m curious about and we’re doing a lot of cool stuff that they’re curious about. So I said, “How about we swap consulting days. So let’s do a day and I’ll consult you and you’ll do a day and you’ll consult me and we’ll just you know, not charge our normal fees and we’ll just have some fun.” He was up for it and I was up for it, so that’s what’s happening.  So Thursday and Friday is going to be fun. So Thursday, basically they’re going to be consulting me and my team, a lot into operational stuff as well as the traffic process and just things that they’re doing. And then we’ll flip the table on Friday, I’ll be consulting them and some guys on my team will be consulting people on their team. It’s just going to be really fun. As we were planning this today, trying to figure out what we’re going to talk about, what are the goals we want to accomplish while they’re here? Brandon said something that was super profound that I want to share with you guys because I think a lot of people struggle because of information overload. We’re all getting a lot of information all the time, it’s always coming at us. And a lot of times I think that we think the key is more information. But a lot of times what the problem is that information is what will strangle you and drown you. Too much information keeps you from actually getting the thing that you really desire. So that’s more so the problem than not enough information typically. So what I told Brandon basically, “This is what I’ve been geeking out on for the last three or four months, this topic. This is what I’ve been studying from and everything. So I understand all the content, I don’t need to be retrained on that. But I need to figure out how to plug it into to what we’re doing.” And he Voxed me back and said something cool. He said, “Yeah, we went through the same processes and learned the content, but then you have to figure out how to plug the content into your context. You have your own company, you have a context of what you’re doing, what you’re trying to accomplish, where you’re going, what your goals are, what your motivations, what your team looks like. There’s this whole foundational framework, this context of what you’ve created. So when you look at the content it’s not so much like, I need to take all the content and understand it and memorize it and absorb it all.” Which is what they teach us in school right, which I think is the reason why a lot of us entrepreneurs and people struggle in school because we can’t remember it all. Because we’re looking for, what’s the stuff in the context of what I’m looking for? What I desire? My goal is to blah, blah, blah, and we struggle with school because all this information is coming at us and we’re like, “How does this fit in the context of what I’m trying to accomplish, I’m to….” Whatever your thing is. It doesn’t fit into the context of what you’re trying to accomplish. And that’s why a lot of us struggle there, whereas if you get us outside the school system and we have a context of, I’m trying to grow a company, or I’m trying to become an athlete, or I’m trying to make money. Whatever your thing is. And then when the information comes to you, you’re like, “Oh this is how it fits into the context of what I’m doing.” Then learning becomes fun. That’s when I became obsessed with learning and you know spent, literally over a half a million dollars in 2 ½ years on courses and training products, and programs, and seminars, and masterminds and everything because I have this context. I’m sucking out the best content from everybody and finding the pieces that fit what I’m trying to do. I got really good at absorbing this information and looking at stuff like, “Whoa, that’s amazing.” But I’m not ready for that so I put it on a shelf, plug it over here, plug it over here, and the pieces, the gold I needed I could grab and put it in the context of what I was doing and it would drive it farther, faster. And I think what’s interesting, I think why I’ve become a good coach over the last ten years or so is because I’ve done that so much. I’ve absorbed information and put all these things in my mental shelf. Like, okay that was amazing, but I’m not ready for it. So I’ll put it somewhere. Or that’s amazing, but it doesn’t fit my business. That’s amazing but…. And I’ll kind of shelve them in different places, and it’s cool when I start coaching people, if anyone’s ever coached with me one on one, you’ve seen I’ll be in the process of coaching someone and all the sudden I’m like, “Oh my gosh, okay. Eight years ago I read this course, it was by this guy. It was like this section of the book, this was the topic. I don’t remember all the details but I do remember that the answer you’re looking for is right there.” And people are like, “How do you do that?” and I’m like, “I don’t know, it’s just there because I read it, I learned it, I just stored it away because it didn’t fit in my context but I had it in my reserves to be able to find it again.” Anyway, I digress, that wasn’t the point of this podcast. The point is for you, as you’re learning, you have to first build out your context, your framework. What is it you’re actually trying to accomplish, right? Because you don’t have that, all the content just becomes information overload. There was somebody recently, not recently, a couple of years ago that was in one of my hiring coaching programs, I’m not going to mention their name or business or anything because it doesn’t matter. But what they struggle with is that they would learn this stuff, and then everything coming at them, they were trying to like, they didn’t have the ability to filter it into the context of what they were trying to achieve. So I’d be talking about, “You could do a tripwire funnel or a product launch funnel.” I’d be talking about ten different options of cool stuff you could do, and then they go home and they’re trying to do all ten funnels at once because I had said it. I’m like, no, those are potential options but its not what’s best for you. “What’s best for me?” I’m like, “I don’t know, I don’t know your business. What’s the context of your business?” You gotta look at it through that lens and you realize here’s the context I’m trying to accomplish, then you can take information and be like, “Cool, this is for me. This isn’t yet for me, I’m gonna put it on the shelf. That piece I can immediately apply. I immediately can do that.” I’ll go to mastermind groups or seminars and I’ll sit there for 3, 4, 5, 6 days taking notes on all the stuff that is awesome, but then when I’m looking for I’m like, “Okay, what’s the pieces that tonight I can plug into my machine I’m building, or thing that I have…” That’s the key. So for you guys I want you to understand, your real goal, your real job in this process and learning and being coached is to be able to filter out the content and be able to figure out how to plug things into the context of what you’re creating. And it’s a hard thing at first, because a lot of times you don’t know. And especially at the beginning you’re so excited, there’s so many ideas and concepts and it’s so fun right. But if you chase them all, nothing will ever get done. Anyway, hopefully that helps some of you guys. Some of you that feel information overload. It’s funny, every time someone tells me they have information overload, I’m so confused. I don’t have empathy, I can’t relate to that, it doesn’t make any sense to me. “I have information overload, there’s so much stuff.” I’m like, “What? It’s not that much stuff. There’s a lot but you don’t have to do it all. It’s just, don’t think of it as a school where you have to memorize and regurgitate everything. You don’t. All you have to do is sift through it. Sift and sort and be like, boom, that’s gold today. I’m going tonight and doing that in a hotel room before I come back tomorrow because it’s done. This one’s gold for next week. This one’s gold for next month, and these ones I’m putting on the shelf and when I’m ready for that, they will reappear.” That’s how I look at things. So those of you guys who are struggling with information overload, think about that. Your job is to take the content and then be able to transition it into your specific context. And if you don’t have context yet, that’s the thing you’ve got to be figuring out. That’s the good thing to hire a coach for, hiring a mentor, joining our coaching programs, or hire a consultant or something to give you the context of okay, this is the framework of what you need to do. As soon as you get the framework done, then it’s just fun. You’re trying to implement and improve and add things and tweak things and make it better and even more exciting all the time. But without the framework, without the context there, something you’re running towards, it gets really hard. That’s why school sucked for me, I had nothing I was….I was in school so I could wrestle. I’m learning all this stuff that didn’t help me wrestle, but I had to learn it to be able to wrestle. It was so confusing for me. As long as I got a C I could wrestle. So I was like, I just have to understand enough of this to get a C, and that was my context, which is a horrible way to go through school. Whereas if I was like, hey, I gotta reteach this or relearn, or whatever those things are. For example, a good example is the Book of Mormon podcast. Some of you guys know I launched a podcast about the Book of Mormon, in fact, if you want to see it, go to bookofmormonchallenge.com. So the whole thing is like, I’m using this as a, I’ve tried to read scriptures and stuff my whole life, which they’re typically harder to read books. And when I used to read them and it’s like, “oh.” Even if I have this framework I’m trying to plug things into, this context of how it fits my life, you can find those things. You’re like, “Cool, I need to do this to make my life better.” And you plug things in. But for me it was like, the reason why I started the podcast, I was like if I know that podcast is me digging through this section, these verses, these chapters and I got to find the gold and then find the story that gets people excited by it, now I have this context and this framework where it’s like, cool. Now I’m reading this chapter, but now I’m going to read all the commentary and all these things to find out what’s the most exciting thing I can bring to the table for this verse, this section, this whatever. Now how do I tell this story in a way that fires people up? And now it makes reading the scriptures alive to me again. And it’s exciting, it’s fun. So for me it’s like, one of the things I had to do for that. So yeah, I hope that makes sense. That is the goal, I just wanted to share that with you guys tonight. That’s what I’m going to be doing with Brandon and Kaelin, the last two days of this week, which I’m pumped for. So if you don’t know the context yet, and you’re not sure, go find someone, swap consulting days, have a day with them helping you figure out your context, you spend a day helping them figure out their context, build out a framework of what you’re trying to accomplish, and then go in there and start consuming the content, and then plugging those pieces into your framework. And that’s the magic. Alright, I’m going to bounce, I’m going to bed. It’s 11:30 at night. I appreciate you guys listening, hope you enjoyed this and you got some good ideas, and we’ll talk to you guys soon.

This may seem kind of backwards, but if you’re struggling, you may have one of these problems. On today’s episode Russell talks about what the number one reason is why people aren’t buying your products, and how you can change it. Here are some of the awesome things to listen for in this episode: How Russell knows from experience why not paying for other people’s products makes it hard for you to be successful with your own products. Hear some examples of Russell and others who have struggled because they weren’t willing to spend the money that they expected other people to spend on them. And why until you start paying for the things you were getting for free, the universe or karma won’t allow you to have the success you’re hoping for. So listen here if you want to find out why you need to be willing to spend money to make money. ---Transcript--- What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Alright everybody, I know it’s been a while. I actually started recording a podcast a couple of days ago and then it crashed in the middle of it, and then it’s just been a super busy week and I haven’t had a chance to get back to it. So I apologize, but I am just right now, as we speak, driving home from the Two Comma Club X event and I had an amazing time. Alex Charfen taught for the last two days all about building a team and figuring out with your team what are your hall of fame goals, or your super bowl goals and based on that what are your yearly plans, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily. So much cool stuff, all the things that are so essential to business, you know outside of creating amazing offers and products and marketing and all the stuff I like talking about, it’s the next step if you want to scale. Those are the next pieces. So those who are involved in the Two Comma Club Coaching program, that’s what we do, we bring all the coaches, bring all the pieces so you can get everything in one spot. Some of you may be wondering, how do I get inside the Two Comma Club X coaching, Russell? That sounds amazing. And the answer is you can’t. We only sell it at Funnel Hacking Live. But the good news for you is that the sales page for Funnel Hacking Live literally went live today. So if you want to come and experience the best of what Clickfunnels has, come to Funnel Hacking Live. I’m not going to spoil it by telling you who’s speaking or the special guests, or the private concert or any of the amazing things that are happening, but if you want to see it all, go to FunnelHackingLive.com. And I’m just so excited. This event is going to be, every year we try to take it up two or three notches and I think we did it again this year, and I cannot wait for you guys to be there. So that’s where I’ll kind of leave that, and go from there. Anyway, there’s so many things I want to talk to you about and I have kind of a long drive home, so I may cover a couple of different topics here, and I hope you guys don’t mind. But I thought it would be kind of fun. Just some things that have been on my mind lately. The first one, I’m not going to mention names, because it doesn’t matter and I wouldn’t anyway, but something happened this week that, and I think I’ve even done a podcast on this in the past, but I wanted to bring it to your attention because it’s something that I think a lot of people are missing. It’s funny, I had a friend a little while ago and he told me there’s these internet marketing pirate sites where you can go and basically every course that’s ever been given by any person in all time, you can go and you can download for free. And it’s funny, I was talking to  him and he’s successful now and he said, “You know what’s interesting, I had an account to that site and I used to download eveyr single person’s product, and I used to go through them and learn them and study them, but guess what’s weird, I never actually made money until I felt so guilty that I stopped stealing people’s stuff, and then I actually went and paid money. When I invested money, it shifted. And when it shifted for me, then I started having success. Literally when I was stealing people’s stuff I couldn’t make money. And when I started buying people’s stuff, then people started paying me for my stuff. It’s so weird.” I kind of smiled and said, “Well, it makes a lot of sense.” Something like that happened this week in one of our coaching programs, and I feel bad for the person, anyway I will leave it at that. But they were trying to figure out a way, how can I get all this stuff for free? Maybe I can cancel and I can share my password, stuff like that, all these different things. But at the core of that is the reason why most people struggle to have success. If you’re willing to see someone who created value and you look at that and you’re like, “I’m going to go take that. I’m going to steal. I deserve that without paying for it.” Or whatever that is. You receive value without giving value back. Money is value, right. So you give someone value, money, and they give you value back, that thing they bought. If you go and just take that without ever giving value, I don’t know if it’s karma or the universe or what, but there are definitely forces at large that will be keep you from being successful. If you’re not willing to pay for other people’s value, nobody’s going to be willing to pay for yours. It’s a really weird law that is true in this universe. I remember when we first started our company, we couldn’t afford all these things like, I don’t know, Microsoft Word, I don’t know, all the different things. We had a couple employees, and I couldn’t afford all these things. So I was like, “Let’s just get a download key and we’ll just unlock them.” And we did that for a while and we struggled and we struggled and I remember having that realization in my own mind. I’m like, I’m literally pirating this software and I’m trying to sell software. I’m a bad person. I’m doing this wrong. So I went back and in fact, I had an employee that we fired and it’s funny because he came back afterwards and he’s like,  “I could tell, I could turn you guys in for downloading software illegally and using all these things.” And I remember feeling really bad about that. So we went back later and actually bought the software we already had for free, because I was like, “Dude, we’re out of congruency with the universe, with God, with whatever you want to call it.” When you do that it just doesn’t work. So we shifted that and went back and started paying for those programs that we could barely afford, and guess what happened? Magically after paying for the things we could barely afford, we started making enough money we could afford all the things we needed. So there’s a law there, I don’t know what it’s called. I just wanted to share that with you guys because I think it’s something a lot of people struggle with.  A lot of times I see this too, with people who are creating products. They’re like, “Nobody, I would never pay a thousand dollars for a coaching course.” Or 25000 or whatever it is. One of my favorite stories, Justin and Tara Williams who are some of my favorite people, they came to the first Funnel Hacking Live. They came and they were like, “We are not going to buy coaching.” And they hid their wallets in their hotel room. And during the first break they ran up, grabbed their wallets and came down and signed up for our $25000 thing. I remember the very first meeting they came to, and they were trying to figure this stuff out and how to do it. I basically told them, “You guys should launch a $25000 group.” And they’re like, “People aren’t going to pay that.” And I was like, “You guys just did. You literally paid $25 grand to be here. People will pay you $25 grand to see you and to learn about real estate.” And they’re like, “oh.” So they went home, I don’t know if it was that night or the next week or something, but they sent an email out to their list and they’re like, “Hey, we’re doing this thing, it’s $25 grand.” And literally, I can’t remember the exact numbers, but it was like 16 or 18 people sent them $25000 that fast. But it wasn’t until they had paid $25000 that they had the permission to go ask other people for that. The same thing for me, I couldn’t go sell a 50 thousand or 25 thousand or 10 thousand dollar program until I had bought one. There’s something, like a belief level, until you’re willing to part with that kind of money it’s hard for you to be willing to ask other people for that money for your thing. It’s the weirdest conundrum and a lot of times people get stuck, “I can’t figure this out. I can’t have success.” And I’m like, “well, when was the last time you bought a program similar to yours.” And they’re like, “Oh, I don’t buy stuff like that.” I’m like, “Why not?” “Oh, well I can get it for free on Google or whatever.” I’m like, Okay, those belief patterns in your mind are what are keeping your from having success and keeping you from helping your customers succeed. Because subconsciously, even if you don’t know it consciously as you’re trying to pitch and tell them to give you a thousand bucks, subconsciously you know in your mind that they could probably get this on YouTube or find here or whatever and all those kind of things. It’s not until you go and invest in yourself, you spend a thousand bucks or ten thousand or whatever that is, you buy the thing and then when you’re trying to pitch someone and you have a good experience, you’re like, “Man, I bought that thing and it sped up my success.” Then you come back to someone and you say, “Hey give me ten thousand dollars because I’m going to speed up your success.” In your area of expertise, you don’t feel guilty because you know what that meant to you, because you know how that affected you, how it changed your life, how it sped up your process. So I think it’s just super hyper important and just a thought of something I wanted to share with you guys as I was driving home today. So yeah, I’m not saying you should go and give all your money to everybody, but you should definitely give it to people you trust, and hopefully we’re someone you trust, and if so you should come to Funnel Hacking Live. I promise you that experience will give you the emotional impact, the emotional change you need to set you on the course you need for your future. If you want to go deeper with us, then you should join the Two Comma Club X Coaching program, we only open it up at Funnel Hacking Live and it’s taking you through the next step of the process, which is what this group is going through right now. And it’s amazing, it’s fun seeing the results already coming through it and people already having success. Anyway, that’s what I wanted to share with you guys. I’m going to jump off and make sure this is recording because my phone’s been having all sorts of issues, and if it is, I’m going to come back in a few minutes and record one more episode on my drive home. Thanks so much everybody, and we’ll talk to you soon.

A super short podcast episode that will literally change your life forever. On today’s episode Russell talks about a book that inspired him to change his environment. Here are some of the things he has changed to help him achieve what he wants. How Russell plans to get family scripture reading done, and what he changed to do it. What he changed to get his personal scripture studying done. And how he plans to change the environment at work to make it more conducive to the things he wants to achieve. So listen here to find out how changing your environment could change your life. ---Transcript--- Good Morning everybody, this is Russell Brunson, I’ve got a rushed, but very important Marketing Secrets podcast. Hey everyone, I’m running a little bit behind today, But I wanted to share something in my 3 minute drive to the office because I thought it was very, very important. Recently I read a book by my friend, Ben Hardy, called Willpower Doesn’t Work and it was a fascinating book and you should all read it. In fact, you should stop everything you’re doing right now and go read it. But anyway, one of the core things was no matter how much willpower you try to have, it doesn’t actually affect the end result. He was talking about how he went into his Masters Degree originally to learn and study willpower, and he realized after studying it, willpower doesn’t actually cause the change we want. And he said that the only thing that actually causes the change we want, is changing our environment. There, I summed up the book for you. There’s other amazing stuff in it, so you should go back and read it anyway. But that was kind of it, you’ve got to change your environment. So I’ve been thinking about that a lot, as we were in Kenya and flying home, and the last couple of days getting prepped for this week. And I thought, you know what, there’s some major things I want to do with my life, therefore I must radically shift my environment. So last night, let me tell what I did. Number one, one of the things I’ve been trying to do is read scriptures with my kids every day, and it’s really, really hard. So my wife and I went out and we bought seven brand new Books of Mormon, we got labels with the kids name on each and every one of them, and around our big table in the middle of our front room, we put them out there, along with our reading charts, and now it’s front and center. So it’s like as soon as you get done eating, the first thing you see is all of those, and we’re going to go directly there and read. We changed our environment. Number two, I wanted to read my own scriptures better, so I noticed why do I not read them very well? And it’s like, I don’t have a spot to read, and I like having ten books laid out, and like cross referencing and highlighting and all sorts of stuff, and I didn’t have a place to do that, so I changed my environment, my office, I re-shifted the whole set up, cleared off the desk and made the desk my dedicated study spot, I got all the books out that I wanted to be able to study as I’m reading through the Book of Mormon and had them all out there. Had my highlighters, my pencils, my things to underline, everything in one spot, and this morning I woke up at 5am and I actually studied and it was insanely cool. And I loved it, it was awesome. Then you may notice that I struggle with my weight from time to time. I go up, I go down, I go up, I go down. I’m usually on a 10-15 pound fluctuation from week to week, so you never know which Russell you’re going to get. Every Facebook Live is different. And I was like I need to control this. I need to change my environment. So I went through my house and threw out all the good stuff that I like to eat that’s not good for me, I then hired a trainer and he was at my house this morning at 6am, actually he was there at 5am working out Dave, because Dave is doing the same process. And at 6am I was there working out with him and it was amazing. So at the office today I’m going and shifting my environment around, I’m going to be raising my standing desk, so it’s always standing, I’m going to be bringing in my treadmill desk. I’m shifting my environment everywhere to try to get the thing that I actually want in life, not the thing, the things. So for you, what I recommend doing, number one, go read Ben’s book. Number two, start looking, because willpower is not going to get you there, as we now know. It’s the environment. Start looking around yourself and the environment that you’re in and see if it’s conducive to give you the goal you actually want. If not, then shift your environment radically. That’s what I’m doing right now, it’s a ton of fun. And I’m going to keep doing that for the next week or so until everything is flawless. It never gets flawless, but that’s kind of the goal and the game plan. So alright, there you go. 3:17, I am not late for a meeting, so I gotta bounce. Appreciate you guys all, change your environment, change your life and I’ll talk to you soon. Bye everybody.

Despite the fact that others are saying that videos are dead, I want to show you what we’re doing now that’s actually working better. On today’s episode Russell talks about how Chrome stopped allowing auto play videos and how that has lead to the rebirth of the squeeze page. Here are some of the awesome things you will get to hear on this episode: Why it’s so important to re-focus on the squeeze page to bring people in, when you can no longer rely on auto play videos. How Russell used a couple of squeeze pages to 2x his listeners of the Marketing Secrets podcast. And where you need to put hooks in order to get people progressing through your sequences. So listen here to find out why Russell believes that the rebirth of the squeeze page has begun. ---Transcript--- Good morning everybody, this is Russell Brunson. I am standing in the middle of the Maasai Mara looking at a bunch of zebras and I wanted to bring you a very special episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast. Hey everyone, I hope you guys are doing awesome. We are on the last day of our Kenya trip. We’ve seen, we’ve been, if you’ve been listening long, we’ve spent the first three days with children building schools which was insanely cool. And then we came back and now we’re on a safari. We saw elephants and lions and about a billion zebras and we saw leopards. We saw a leopard that pulled an animal up in a tree and was eating it up in the tree, which is kind of crazy. We saw millions of hippos, it’s crazy. In fact, I’m sitting on my deck right now in this little tent we have and last night when we came to bed there were two huge hippos walking next to our tent eating grass. It’s kind of crazy and amazing. So it’s been a lot of fun, it’s been a really cool mastermind group with all the people that came, and it’s just been really special. But as you know, with most entrepreneurs, when you are off the computer for you know 12 days, your brain is going crazy with ideas. And I just wanted to share with you guys something, and I wanted to actually do a podcast on this before I came to Kenya, but just ran out of time. But it’s been on my mind this whole time. Before I left I got an email from a really cool guy who I respect a lot, and you know people always have an angle because they’re selling something. But he wasn’t talking about how VSL’s…because now Chrome took away auto play, “VSL’s are dead and it’s the end of this era of how we used to do things. Come to my event and I’m going to show you guys how to change things.” It made me start thinking, the VSL’s don’t auto play anymore, what changes? And I want you guys to think strategically through this, right. Because this is how we win this game, by thinking strategically, not running around like chickens with our heads cut off. So I start strategically thinking what’s the power of the video auto playing? If you come to a page and the video starts auto playing, the goal is to try to hook somebody as fast as you can. So if Google takes that away from us, where we can’t auto play a video, it’s like what was the goal of the auto play? The goal of the auto play is to hook. So if the hook can’t now be in the first 5 seconds of the video, how do I hook them? Where’s the hook happening? So now it, it’s so funny, it’s coming back to old school. Everything comes back to the core fundamentals, it’s like having the hook in the headline. So it’s like having a really good headline. The other thing that’s interesting is, and it’s funny the progression of this business and how it shifts back and forth, back and forth. When I first got started the big thing that everyone used was squeeze pages right. You have a really curiosity based squeeze page and someone opts in and you can follow up with them through emails to get them back to the message. So if someone doesn’t buy the first time, they might buy message 3 or 5 or 10 or who knows, right. Now days it’s like people have almost forgotten the core fundamentals and they’ve gone to send somebody to a video and you re-target them, that’s how you fall, is through re-targeting, which is still amazing. Don’t discount re-targeting, but I think we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater. So what my message for you guys today is, I believe that right now we are going through a rebirth of the squeeze page. If you have been listening to the marketing secrets podcast or if you are in a new recent list, or you probably saw a campaign we did last week to get all you all to come subscribe to my podcast. And just getting people to subscribe to a podcast from external source is hard, we’ve tried a ton of different ways. So what we did, that’s working amazingly well, in fact if you want to see the campaign go to marketingsecrets.com/blackbook what we did is basically we took, Julie Stoian on my team, she went through 500 plus episodes of initially the Marketing in Your Car podcast, then it was the Marketing Secrets podcast, and pulled out the biggest 99 secrets and then kind of re-wrote them in really cool 500 word article that you can read really quick to get the gist of the big secret and then it has links back to the different podcast episodes, if you want to go deeper and hear me actually talk about it in the podcast. So we made that ebook, it’s like, I don’t know, we spent a lot of money, probably $10,000 plus on Julie going through creating this book. And then we put up a good old fashioned squeeze page and said, “Hey to get a free copy of the Marketing Secrets Black Book, give me your email address.” And we also have Facebook messenger on there as well, so somebody opts in through email or their messenger, and now we have a list of specifically people who are interested in the Marketing Secrets podcast. It’s been funny, the Marketing Secrets podcast was the number one, excuse me top ten for over a year. A year and a half or so we were in the top ten and then we got iTunes slapped, which is really annoying and some of you guys know that. So we had to create a new feed and I’d say probably 2/3rd of you are now listening to the new feed and 1/3 of you guys are still listening to the old feed, but they don’t let people re-subscribe to the old feed. Anyway, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. But basically we were trying to figure out how do we build that up? So the only way in the past that we had was people that found out about the podcast through other avenues, and that’s how it grew and then we got listed in the top ten, more people found out about it, but it was hard to organically, not organically, what’s the opposite of organically? To grow it through us pushing. So we had this idea for the thing, so we had the squeeze page now, and we did a whole bunch of campaigns through email, through Facebook messenger, through ads, all sorts of stuff. And with the first week we’ve had over 35000 people opt in over at marketingsecrets.com/blackbook to get the black book. So they go and they opt in and from that our downloads have more than 2x’d because now people are, two things, number one is the black book gets them hooked on the story and then it pushes them to the episode, so more people listening to different episodes deeper than they used to. But now they opted in, now we have a whole sequence push them to subscribe to the podcast, and now every time a new episode comes out you will notice that if you subscribed to that, if you’re one of the 35000 people that have subscribed to that, you’ll get an email saying, “Hey, here’s the new podcast, you should and go and listen to it.” So it gives us the ability to push people to go and listen. And it was all through a good old fashioned squeeze page, which is so funny. I haven’t been using squeeze pages for a long time, most other people aren’t either, but the old school works. Now I got 35000 people I can push out every single time a new episode comes out to instantly go and listen, on top of notifications that come from iTunes and things like that. So it actually creates two squeeze pages, one of them is at marketingsecrets.com/blackbook, the other one is at marketingsecrets.com/binge and we actually made a binge guide, where you can go binge listen to all the episodes. So if you go to either of those you’ll see some old school, vintage squeeze pages that I dusted off from an earlier life and they are converting amazingly. The first one’s at 89% conversion rate, it’s insane. And it’s getting tons of people now to subscribe to the podcast, which now gets you guys listening to this. So I think that there’s a big, so let me step back to kind of where I started, with the VSL, the auto play disappearing. It’s like how do we get someone in? The key is becoming better at the hook, but not the hook in the first 10 seconds of the video because people aren’t going to see that. We have to have the hook to get them to click. So that comes down to the headline and the design around the video. What are we doing to hook them and get them to click on the video, to pull them in? So hook starts pre-video. Hook is headline, landing page, what are all the elements to get them hooked, to actually watch the video? But I think on top of that is because, I think going a step back is having a hook on the squeeze page, to get people to opt in, then you push them over to the page. Now you’ve got more abilities to follow up with them to get them to actually click the play button and get into the hook, story, offer of your video. So I’m a big believer, it’s the re-birth of the squeeze page, and it’s the re-focus on the hook and not just the hook in the video, but the hook on the copy of the page. Hook on the squeeze page, hook on the video page, that’s the re-focus we all need to get doing, get better at doing. In fact, I was Bill Glazers event, I met somebody who said that when the whole auto play thing happened they were all freaked out because they thought that their conversions were going to drop, but what actually happened is conversions went up because they had a really good hook above the video that got people to push play. So now people they don’t just come to the page, and it started auto playing, they did nothing. Now they come and they have to click play, and he said just the action of clicking play on the button actually increased conversion overall. So I don’t think it’s the end of anything, I think it’s the rebirth, coming back to the old school. It’s interesting, whenever new platforms, like Facebook or Instagram comes out, there’s always hacks and everyone goes through the hacks for a while, and then the hacks get taken away typically. And then it always comes back to the revisiting of the fundamentals. The same thing in wrestling. When I first started wrestling, I remember there was a guy that lived two doors down from me and he started like 2 or3 weeks before me, and so when I showed up at the first day of practice, he was doing all these fancy throws and all this stuff and I was like, “Oh this is going to be amazing.” And   I wanted to do those things. And my dad told me, “No, you have to do the fundamentals.”  And he forced me to do single legs, double legs, just the basic fundamentals, over and over and over again. And it’s interesting because I remember when I went and I wrestled my buddy probably 4 weeks later, and he’d been working with the more advanced team on the tricks, the tactics, the big secrets, and I was just doing these dumb fundamentals. We went out there to wrestle and he tried to head throw me and I did a double leg and took him down and I ended up beating him. And it’s funny, as I watch kids in junior high wrestle, doing these crazy throws and insane things, and high school is the same thing, and you start getting to college, people start moving back to the fundamentals. You look at the Olympics, you look at the dudes in the Olympics, almost every Olympic match is won by a single leg or a double leg, that’s it. There’s no flashy flare, it’s the core fundamentals. And the same thing is true in marketing. As you get bigger and bigger, the next level, it’s like re-visit back to the core fundamentals. List building, which was, I’ve been preaching out for a decade and I feel like our industry as a whole has gotten away from it, because now they’re like, “Oh, I’m going to build a re-targeting list, I’m going to do these things….” Thos things are good but the core fundamental of list building, list building, list building is key. We’ve been doing list building off of webinar registration pages, and two step order forms, but now I’m coming back one more step and re-visiting the squeeze page with an insanely good hook to get someone to opt in, both through email and through messenger, next page amazing hook to get them to play the video, and then boom, the video moves immediately into hook, story, offer. So it’s pulling people in there. So for you guys I just want you to kind of think through that. If you want to go see some squeeze pages that are doing really well, look at the campaign’s we’re doing. Go to marketingsecrets.com/binge, to go see the binge guide. Or marketingsecrets.com/blackbook to see an old school squeeze page. Again, it’s like 89% conversion rate, we’ve got 35000+ people opt in the last two weeks since it’s gone live. Now I’m able to follow up on every single episode and it’s building, it makes it easier to communicate with everyone that’s interested in this podcast, that’s number one, and then number two you’ll notice moving forward….. Oh man, there’s a monkey chasing a warthog in front of my eyes. That’s that noise if you can hear it. Anyway, if you look at moving forward, you’ll start noticing how we’re using hooks to get people to click play on the videos. If you go to clickfunnels.com homepage, you’ll see it. If you go to, some of the other ones? Some of the other ones we’ve got coming up, you’ll notice the gif on the video is optimized to get people to click, the headline above it, everything on the page around the video is all optimized to get somebody to click on that page. Because I’m not assuming that they’re going to click, so I have to create a good enough hook to get them to have enough desire to actually click on the play button. I can’t leave that to hope. I have to leave that to a really good hook that gets them to want to click play to find out the next thing. So I think we’re at a spot where the rebirth of the squeeze page, I think it’s coming back. I’m going to be doing a lot more of it, as you’ll see here. And I think that a core focus back on amazing hooks for each step, what’s the hook to get them to open the email? That’s your subject line. What’s the hook to get them to click? That’s the email. What’s the hook to get them to opt in? That’s the squeeze page. What’s the hook to get them to click play on the video? That’s the headline. What’s the hook to get them to buy the product? That’s inside the video. Coming back to hook, story, offer. Hook, story, offer. I did a podcast episode a little bit ago about hook, story, offer. Go back and listen to that ten times, twenty times, a hundred times, because that’s the core fundamentals that are going to help you win this game as we keep moving forward. So with that said, I’m going to go actually, we’re going to go finish plotting and scheming, we’ve been working on book three, the traffic secrets book, we’re working on the one comma club challenge, we’re working on 10x secrets stage course, we’re working on a one comma club, two comma club board game, we’re working on some amazing things for you guys out here and I cannot wait to show you. But for now, there’s the tease, there’s the hook, and hopefully we got to keep you guys interested, and keep engaging with this podcast and everything we’re putting gout. Appreciate you guys, thanks for listening. We’ll talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody.

How this external mission can actually transform your business forever. On today’s episode Russell talks to us all the way from Kenya about the importance of doing good in the world after you have made a lot of money. Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in this episode: How Russell has been able to help the less fortunate by being successful in business. Why after this trip he will be focusing more on his new mantra, to liberate and educate. And why helping serve people who don’t necessarily do anything for you can actually help motivate you to become more successful. So listen here to find out how Russell plans to continue to liberate and educate children and why he’s going to start focusing on that aspect even more. ---Transcript--- What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, I am in the middle of a village in Kenya right now, and I wanted to welcome you to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Hey everyone, so I am about to start packing up my bags after spending three days here in a little community called Ndatho, I’m probably going to pronounce that wrong. This has been a really special trip, this is actually, those who don’t know, this is my third time coming to Kenya. We came the first time in 2012 and it was the first time I’d ever been in a country like Kenya and it was this emotional, crazy experience, and we fell in love with the children and the people here. In fact, we met a little girl here, that first time. Her name was Jane, who became almost like a daughter to us. And as we went home we ended up keeping communication with her, and she was I think 13 years old at the time. And that was the first time we came to Kenya. And two years ago we weren’t really planning on coming back again, but actually Dylan Jones, who was one of the initial cofounders of Clickfunnels, he was supposed to come on the trip and I think he forgot to get his shots or something in time, I don’t know what it was. But we still had our shots from 4 years earlier, raging through our blood, so they let us come back. They needed someone to take the spot that Dylan had paid for. So we with a weeks notice jumped and came back out and just came for three days just to be with the kids. And it was amazing, we got there and Jane had graduated from the school and she was going to secondary school, which is like the high school. So she came back to the village and saw my wife and it was this amazing emotional experience, my wife was bawling her eyes out and crying, and it was an amazing experience. So that was two years ago. And then at Funnel Hacking Live two years ago, we made an offer where we said, “Hey if you guys want to actually come to Kenya with us and build schools with us, you can do it.” So we had about 15 or so people who each paid about 20 thousand dollars to build a classroom in Kenya, and so collectively it was enough to build an entire school, and we were supposed to come out last year, but the trip was set at a time where there turned out to be some political elections and things, so we ended up canceling the trip and moving it to right now. So right now we’re here with a bunch of the donors from Funnel Hacking Live and they all had a chance for the last three days to see their actual school, in fact I’m looking at it right now. If you’ve been following me on Instagram or Facebook, you’ve probably seen videos and pictures of it. But it’s beautiful. So we got to dedicate the school yesterday, we had a big celebration and it was cool. But actually, let me step back. I could tell you guys stories for hours, but I have to start packing in the next 5 minutes. So this will be a little short and condensed, but there’s a couple of messages I wanted to share before I left this beautiful place and forgot. So this time when we came in, Collette and I came in a day early because now Jane, we’ve been funding her to go to college. So she’s actually in college now, so we came a day early to see her. So we had a chance to, she came to our hotel and we met her, and it’s just amazing to see this progression in 6 years of this little girl who had nothing in this little village, who is just getting the ability to learn for the first time because we built this school here. And now six years later, she’s in college and she got a job as a model. And she’s doing this modeling thing, we’re actually helping her to fly to Germany to compete in a modeling competition in Germany later this year. And she took us to her home, which her home is probably 300 square feet, maybe. Maybe 350 if you count the bathrooms and stuff, which the bathroom is literally 2 ft by 2 ft room with a toilet and then there’s a shower above the toilet. It’s crazy. And she was so proud of it, and she wanted to show us and she wanted us to be proud of her, that she had her own little home and she could cook her own food. She took us to her school and we met her principle and saw the classrooms, and it was just so cool to see her and how she just wanted us to be proud of her, which we are. It was just such a cool experience. Alright, so let me fast forward to the last 3 days here. So we’ve been here in this community, and we got to help paint the school and help build these brick paths, doing all this manual labor, but the best part is the kids. There’s about 250 kids that now attend this school we built. So we’re were playing with them, wrestling with them, we were playing soccer with them. I taught them dog pile, which means I run and I bend over and all 250 or so jump on my back at once. I’m so sore today. Anyway, it’s just been an amazing experience. Then yesterday they had this really cool celebration where the government officials came in and the community came in, about 5 or 600 people were here and we got to dedicate the school. It was cool because they asked if Collette and I would actually speak at the dedication, so there was an interpreter there for us and we got to stand up and I told the story of why I’m here. I told the story about how basically ten years ago Stu McLaren and Amy, his wife, had a vision for this thing where they were going to build school in Kenya and he called me up and told me the vision. Six years ago Stu brought me here, and I told him how we fell in love with the Kenyan people and how when we went back home we told our community, the funnel hacking, Clickfunnels community about what was happening here. And for those of you who don’t know, some of you guys know this, but every time you build a funnel inside of Clickfunnels and you set the funnel live, we actually donate a dollar toward World Teacher Aid. So every time you’re building in Clickfunnels, you’re actually helping build schools. And I told them there’s 10s of thousands of entrepreneurs who every single day are trying to grow their own companies and when they do that, they are investing here in this community because they love you guys as well. For example, last year alone at Funnel Hacking Live we gave, it used be called World Teacher Aid, they changed the name to Village Impact. But we gave Village Impact a check for over $120-130 thousand dollars. And that comes from all of you guys building funnels. So we gave them…told them about that and I said there’s some donors who loved you guys so much they wanted to come and I introduced them to the donors that came. Anyway, it was just a really special, special moment. But this is what I wanted to share, actually there’s two more things that I wanted to share. So the first one, as I’m sitting there during the ceremony, I’m thinking about, there’s two charities as you guys know, that I participate in, that I believe in. One is Operation Underground Railroad, which is the charity that we’ve been working with that saves children from human trafficking, sex slavery. And then the other one is Village Impact, which helps to build schools and educate children in these third world countries. And I was sitting there thinking, how do these things tie together? I’m drawn to both of them so strongly, how do these things fit together. And all the sudden the two words that came to my mind were liberation and education. I just remember thinking, that’s what we’re doing. We’re liberating children and then we’re educating children. I thought, what greater mission in the world is there than to liberate children from evil people and then to educate children so they can change their world as they grow up? It just got me excited, I think that moving forward, that’s going to be a big part of my philanthropy or charity or whatever you want to call it side, of me and my businesses, that mantra of liberation and education. Let’s liberate and educate children, because if you can liberate a child and give them a life and then you can educate a child so they can create their own life, what better mission can we have on this earth than that? Anyway, I just wanted to share that with you. Liberate and educate children, that’s what my focus is moving forward, and you’ll see a lot more of that at Funnel Hacking Live and moving forward. In fact, I’m already envisioning a t-shirt that says Liberate on one sleeve and educate on the other sleeve. One with the OUR logo and one with the Village Impact logo, and then it’d be Funnel Hackers in the middle bridging the gap between these two vital, important missions. So excited. Alright, so one more story I’m going to tell you and then I will wrap it up for today because I’m already over my time limit and I’m probably going to miss the bus, the ride home tonight in Nairobi, if I don’t hurry. After the ceremony ended yesterday, I was on Voxer and I was kind of working on a really cool funnel you guys will see soon, so I was kind of giving some feedback to some people. And as I’m doing that, I look up and there’s this man walking toward me and he’s got a backpack on and he’s got a suit on and he’s 33 years old and he’s walking towards me. I look up and just doing my think and I look a little closer and he’s looking right at me and he’s got a kind of smile on his face, and I’m looking and all the sudden I’m like, “Oh my gosh, that’s Leonard.” So I put my phone down and come run and give him a huge hug. Some of the back story on Leonard is, as we were helping Jane in college about two and a half, three years ago, Jane who I mentioned earlier, we asked Irene, who is one of the main people here in Kenya on the ground that runs the whole Village Impact mission. Collette had this impression, “Is there another kid, someone else? We want to help one more person. Is there one more person we could help?” And Irene said, “Well actually, there is this boy. He’s a hard worker, right now he’s in the community, he’s volunteer teaching for free. He’s got a wife and 5 kids and he was studying in school to be a doctor, like microbiology and things like that basically he had done 2 ½ years of his schooling but he had to drop out because they had no more money to keep funding it, and now he was back in the village volunteering and working and trying to help serve the community. He’s a hard worker who got really high grades and would love to go back to school.” So Collette said yes. Then she came to me and said, “Hey, there’s this other kid we’re going to help. It’s like $800 a semester for him to go to school and he’s got, I can’t remember, 5 or 6 semesters left. So I sent the money for him to finish his schooling.” So for us it’s like $2500-3000 bucks or whatever it was. Not something we think about. Just here you go. And we gave the money and it was for this boy Leonard who is an amazing human, 5 kids, just such a cool guy. So I see him and he gives me a huge hug and starts telling me this story from the very beginning. He says, “Okay…” and he starts talking about what was happening and the village he was in and the government moved him out of his village and then he fought to get back in school and he worked all year round to raise funds for school and then he went to a semester and then he had to work for another year to raise funds to go to another semester and all these things. And finally when school got ripped away from him the last time, and he couldn’t raise funds anymore. And he said that one day he was with his family and they were out in the field getting food for their family and he got this phone call from Irene. He said that on the phone call Irene said, “Hey, I found some donors who want to sponsor you for school and they’ve already wired the money and it’s an account and you can start school.” And he said he sat there in this field with his kids just crying that there was somebody on earth that cared enough about him and his family to do this. He said, “I told myself and I told my family that because somebody cared this much I was not going to relax, I’m going to do my best and get the highest grades possible.” So he went back to school and over the next 2 ½ years or so, he got his degree, he got honors, he was the top three, out of all the classes I think he was the second or third highest marks. And what was crazy, he actually yesterday morning had jumped in a motorcycle and driven for 4 hours just to see us. And the streets here aren’t like the streets in America, these are roads with 4 foot potholes, it’s crazy. It’s not an easy drive. He drove 4 hours to get here to come and to tell me this story and then afterwards he opened up his backpack and he pulled out his diploma, and he wanted me to see his diploma because he was so proud of it. And we looked at his diploma and Collette and I both just gave him a hug, we were so proud of him. And then what he said that was so powerful, he said “Every single night my wife and my 5 kids we pray for you in America. We pray for the people who cared enough about our family to help support us.” And it brought tears to my eyes just thinking, you think about everyday struggles we’re dealing with, how powerful to have family or families on the other side of the world who are so clean and so pure and so, such good people who are praying for us to survive and to thrive and to do good because we serve them. We literally changed not just his life, but he told us after he graduated he said he went back to the school, which was a school Village Impact had built, and he said, “I wore all my robes and we had a huge celebration and the government came out and told all the kids that because I was successful, because I got a degree, all of you guys could get degrees. Now there’s an entire community of kids who believe they can get a degree because you believed that I could get a degree.” It was just such a special, special thing. I know this isn’t me teaching you a marketing secret or anything, but I kind of indirectly am. I promise you guys as you start shifting your focus from yourselves to your customers, I think that’s the first level, you will start seeing your businesses grow. What I mean by that is most entrepreneurs start typically from a selfish standpoint, “I want to make money.” Which is not bad, that’s what gets most of us enough desire to get through the pain that it takes to get one of these things running. But the people who grow are the ones who very quickly shift from a me focus, to “Oh my gosh, I’m serving these people and this is amazing.” And that becomes the focus, serving other people. I think the third tier after that, is when you start looking outside of just your customers. You look outside of yourself, outside of your customers to how can you have a greater impact on people who can’t necessarily do anything for you, other than pray for you, which is amazing. I look at my business, I look at the blessings that I receive daily, and I think a huge piece of that is because I’ve been willing to give time and money to people like this and now because I was willing to do that I have an army of people around the world who are praying for our success, who are praying for my family, who are praying for my marriage, who are praying for my business, who are praying that I will continue to be successful because I cared enough to try to change their world. So for you guys, I just want you guys to think about that as you’re looking through your own personal evolution. Initially it’s you, then it’s your customers, then it’s outside of that. How can you help? I always get nervous sharing these kind of things, I don’t know. I like bragging about my customers, I don’t like bragging about charity stuff, and that’s not the point of this. The point is hopefully to inspire you guys to do more of it. Because I promise you having an army of people on the other side of the world praying for you is a powerful force. So again, my new mission after this trip is to liberate and educate children. And I will continue to have ways that you guys can participate in that vision and that mission if you feel like I do. On the OUR side, we have ourfilm.org, you can go watch that and that will help you to learn how to liberate children. And we’re going to be putting out some really cool funnels on the education side with World Teacher Aid as well, so you can, and I’ll announce some of those when we get home, and you can see how to help on the education side as well. But find a mission like that. Stu talked about this yesterday. Anissa who came from our Clickfunnels community here to Kenya as well, she talked about it as well. You know a lot of us feel guilt, internal, subconscious guilt when we start making money that holds us back. And I think when you start realizing the more money you make the bigger impact you can have, that’s when you start getting free. Stu talked about he had all these mental barriers, because subconsciously he felt guilt about making money, making money and he couldn’t get past certain levels. And then he started shifting to helping other people and he realized, the more money I make the more people I can help. Then those subconscious beliefs disappeared and he was able to grow his company to the levels he wanted to and needed to. I think the same thing is true for all of you guys as well. Anyway, I just wanted to share with you guys today. I’m looking at all these kids, probably 100 kids right now watching me, waiting for us to come play. So I have to finish packing my bags so I can come play with the kids. And then we’re headed back to Nairobi and then after that we’re heading to a safari for a couple of days, which will be really neat as well. But nothing is as good as these first three days where we get to play with the kids and be here in the village. So there you go guys, appreciate you all. Thanks for listening. Hopefully this helps shape and helps focus your vision because while it may not seem like it has anything to do with business, it has everything to do with the business. Thanks so much for listening you guys, and we will talk to you soon. Bye.

If there is anything virtuous, lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy, we seek after these things. On today’s episode Russell talks about the teachability index, and why most adults no longer have it after completing school. Here are some of the other awesome things in this episode: Why adults are so unteachable as compared to children. How Russell was able to open his mind and become teachable at a Tony Robbins event. And why having a high teachability index will improve our chances for success in business. So listen here to find out how Russell regained his teachability and has been so successful. ---Transcript--- What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, today is a day that we’re going to have a Marketing Secrets rant. Alright everybody, I’m not going to lie, I don’t rant very often, but when I do, you guys seem to like it. And today I’m feeling a little ranty. So we’re going to talk about this for a little bit, and what I want to talk about, I don’t know, I’ve talked about this in the past, we’ve called it different things. But it recently was just re-brought to my attention. And it drives me absolutely bonkers. So what I want to talk about is a concept I learned a long time ago from a dude who is a total con artist, and scam artist, but he was a really smart guy. Most of the scam artists, and con artists are. But he talked about this concept he called teachability index, which is your ability to learn. And teachability goes up and down throughout our lives, depending on a lot of things. Depending on a lot of it, like how open we are. So for example, when you’re kids you’re very teachable. So your teachability index is very high, because you listen to everything someone says and you soak it up. Then you go to school and your teachability index is high, you listen to everything that’s coming through to you, even if the teachers have no idea what they’re actually talking about, but you believe it because you’re in school, therefore it’s gotta be true. They can’t lie to you in schools. They can’t teach you false doctrine at school can they? But we believe it. And then the second you get the degree, for some reason in our heads, our brains shut off and say, “I now know everything.” And all the sudden our teachability shrinks to almost nothing. And this is where most human beings you bump into in the world are at. Where they think they know everything, therefore they’re not open to anything, therefore they are stagnant and they stop growing. I struggled with this, as most humans do, for a while. In fact, I still remember the first time I went to a Tony Robbins event. And I remember he invited me there, and I was just a marketing and sales guy who thought I was a genius and drank my own kool-aid, and believed my own bio, and I thought I was the stuff. And I’m at this event and trying to get Tony Robbins as a client, and I’m going to close him and all sorts of stuff. And Tony’s got this thing, where if you want to work with him, you’ve got to come to his events first, because he doesn’t want to work with people who haven’t experienced him because you don’t understand him and his culture and what he’s doing. So I went to his event, and I’m sitting there and I walk in with my backpack and my laptop thinking that it was going to be a marketing style event. And anyone who’s been to a Tony Robbins event knows that you’re jumping, you’re screaming, there’s no desk, there’s no table. You’re walking on fire, it’s insane, you’re dancing, you’re giving your neighbors massages and hugs, all things that I do not like to do. And I was just like, “Nope. No, no, no!” and Tony’s up there teaching these things and I was like, “No. Nope, that’s not true. Nope, don’t believe you. Nope.” And I remember for about 5 or 6 hours I kept doing that. And I’m looking around and everyone’s having a good time, everyone’s having fun, they’re all jumping around and I’m like, “No. Tony does not know what he’s talking about, this is not true. This is not true.” And my mind was closed to everything. And I was sitting there listening to all this, I started noticing that every new idea or concept that came my way, I instantly shut it down as, “No. Nope, nope. No, no, no.” and it was an instant shut down. And I remember sitting there realizing that man, my teachabilty index is really, really low. Why am I saying no to all these things. He’s challenging my thoughts and my beliefs and things that I thought I were true, things that I’d been raised my whole life believing and thinking. And I kept saying no, no, no. And I remember that I made this audible switch about 5 or 6 hours into it, I said, “I keep saying no to everything Tony’s saying, and I’m not enjoying my time, I’m not experiencing this, and I feel like I’m missing out on something.” And I remember consciously thinking, you know what? From now on, the rest of the 3 ½ days of this event, instead of saying no to everything I’m going to say, “What if.” I’m just going to experience it and see what happens. And the next thing Tony explained, at first my instincts were like, no, no, no. And I was like, but what if. What if what he’s saying is actually true? And what was interesting is I was like, huh. If this is true, then this is pretty powerful. And then the next thing came and I’m like, what if that’s true? If that is true, then that’s pretty cool. And then what if this is true, what if this is true? I started shifting from no, no, no, to what if. And when I shifted that thought in my head, I can attribute the last decade of my success to me changing my immediate impulse from no to what if. And it’s been interesting because in my world, and those who know my story, I’m a conservative Mormon man who likes to sell things online and I wrestle. That’s my, there’s Russell Brunson in a nutshell. If someone’s like, “Who is Russell Brunson?” That’s it. And even within my religion, there’s a lot of things that happen, where, and I don’t believe that they’re doctrinal, but I believe they’re cultural, but there’s things that happen that people are like, “No, no, no.” And what’s cool is that because of that experience ten years ago, I don’t say no to everything anymore, I say what if. And because of that, my life has been richer, and I don’t mean money. I mean people, people that I would have said no to or would have rejected earlier in my life, because of cultural upbringings and things like that. Instead of saying no I said what if. What if this person actually is a good person? What if they’re struggling just like I am? And I’ve shifted from no’s to what if’s and it’s opened up amazing, deep relationships all over the place. Idea’s have come to me. I went from no, no, no’s to what if, and it’s opened up this whole world that’s been amazing, it’s been life changing for me and for the people around me. So I wanted to share that because, and I’m not going to share the exact story because the person may or may not be listening and it doesn’t really matter, it’s just the concept of someone who is great in their field, who is an amazing person, amazing at what they do, they were at Funnel Hacking Live, And they just heard somebody talking about something that they should have, especially in their field of expertise, they should have said, what if. And if they would have said what if, they would have learned and grown and been able to help their clients so much more. But instead of saying what if, they said no. And because of that, they stopped progressing. And I think that for some reason, and you know it’s funny, there’s a word and it’s not a word I say often because most of the time I look at it like a curse word, which is funny. Some of you guys are going to laugh that this is like the worst curse word for me, but it’s the word damn. Damn is stop, and your stopping yourself. You’re literally damning yourself when you’re saying no to things. There are things you should say no to, but I think that things should come and you should look at them and try to figure things out in your mind. Pray about it, whatever it is, but don’t just throw out everything as no all the time. Open it up and say what if, what if this was true? What if this is something that could help me? What if this crazy person onstage who has helped 300 people naturally cure cancer, what if they know something that I don’t know? What if something I can take from this, what if there’s a piece, what if there’s a nugget I can take back and use in what I do? I look at marketing, I look at the last 15 years of me doing this business, I can count the number of friends who started 10 years ago and are still doing this business now, on one hand. The reason why, most of them, they learned it all. Their teachability index shrunk and they’re like, “I know how this works.” And they were certain, absolutely certain what they were doing, and because of that when things shifted, things changed, they fell apart. I would say the reason I’ve been around, the reason why I have such longevity in this business, why I’m one of the few dinosaurs that have been doing this now for 15 years is because 10 years ago I had this lesson, instead of saying no I said what if. And now when new marketing ideas, new concepts, new social networks, all this stuff that’s always shifting and evolving and changing, instead of saying no I say what if. And it opens up my mind, it opens up the possibilities. And I think for all of us, no matter what sphere of influence you are in, the worst thing you could do is to lose your teachability. To think that what you learned in school, to think that what you learned up to this point, is absolute truth, because it’s not. It’s the absolute truth of what you have right now, but there’s more out there. You may not agree with everything someone says, like I love Tony Robbins, but I don’t agree with everything he says. But because of that, I don’t say no to everything. There’s a, for the Mormons, one of our Articles of Faith, it says, “If there is anything virtuous, lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy we seek after these things.” So for me, it’s like I’m looking for those things. I meet Tony Robbins and I don’t agree with 100% of everything he agrees or believes or says. But if there’s anything virtuous, lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy, I seek after these things. So I’m with Tony, I experience him. I’m like, what if this is true? What if this is true? Does this fit in my view of the world and if not do I need to shift my view of the world? Or is it something that I can disagree with this piece and push it aside, but I can still get all this amazing stuff. I don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, or whatever that expression is. I’m able to look through those things and say what if. What is good, what is virtuous, lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy? Because I’m seeking after those things, I want them, I need them in my life. And there are all sorts of spots. Like all truth for me, is not in the Mormon church. It’s there, but I find truth from, I find so much truth from my friends that are Baptists, that are Muslims, that are Buddists, that are Atheists. I have friends that are gays and lesbians, I learned so much amazing things from. I don’t just shut all those things down, I don’t think anybody should. It doesn’t mean I have to embrace belief’s or doctrines or things that I don’t feel comfortable with. It doesn’t mean that I have to believe everything someone’s teaching me about health or about fitness or about finances. But because I disagree with one little piece, I’m not going to shut down everything, I’m going to say what if. And I’m going to take the good and push out the bad, and from that I’m going to get a more whole picture, a more truthful picture of life in the world and the reality that we live in. So I hope that helps somebody. I hope that helps a lot of you guys. I just hope that, and I know I’m preaching to the choir. Those who listen to this podcast, aren’t the kind of people who shut down their teachability index. You guys still have it open, you’re listening, you’re trying to learn. But maybe you’re super teachable in the marketing sphere but maybe you’re not as teachable in the thing that you actually do, in the business, in the fulfillment of the thing. Maybe there’s other truth out there. And maybe you don’t believe all of it, but maybe there’s some that you could bring back that you could add to what you’re doing, that will make you more special, that will make you more different, that will make you more unique. And those are the things that make you more money. Those are the things that help you have the bigger impact. So look for those things. If there’s anything virtuous, lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy, we seek after these things. Alright with that said, I’m going to bounce, you guys. We are doing a swag drop today, and we are launching the OUR funnel, so a lot of fun stuff happening in the next hour and 14 minutes that I’m looking forward to. So I’m going to head out. I appreciate you guys. If you are enjoying this podcast, please go to iTunes, rate and review it, let me know. With that said, I will talk to you guys all again soon. Bye everybody.

LGBTQ controversy How Russell found CrossFit Gym jones and the black box Affiliate growth and CrossFit business model The future of CrossFit in fitness 

This week, we interview Dr Russell Razzaque. Dr Razzaque currently works as a consultant psychiatrist and associate medical director in east London and, together with colleagues, he is leading a pioneering multi-centre Open Dialogue pilot in the UK National Health Service. In 2014 he released his book ‘Breaking Down Is Waking Up’ in which he explores alternative views of mental distress, their relationship to consciousness and comparisons to forms of spiritual awakening. In this interview, we discuss the relationships between mindfulness, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Open Dialogue and how the UK NHS is approaching the worlds first randomised controlled trial of Open Dialogue interventions for people struggling with emotional or psychological distress. In this episode we discuss: What led Dr. Razzaque to his interest in psychiatry and in particular some of the more unconventional aspects of the profession. How beginning to practice mindfulness nearly 20 years ago led to Russell starting to feel an incongruence between the dominant philosophy in psychiatry and what he was learning from his own mindfulness practices. That the dominant philosophy is one of trying to help people remove their pain and remove them from difficult and uncomfortable experiences, but in his own personal development, he was learning to sit with the pain and finding that valuable. How this led to an interest in novel therapeutic approaches like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, originally pioneered by professor Stephen Hayes. That Russell felt disillusioned with the way that UK mental health services and systems were organised and realised that creating better outcomes for people would require system-wide change. How Russell came to be one of the leading figures in the worlds first multi-centre, fully randomised Open Dialogue Trial which seeks to establish the evidence base for Open Dialogue. That the trial involves eight NHS Trusts across the UK and that several hundred practitioners have already been trained in Open Dialogue therapy. That during the trial there will be randomly selected postcodes receiving Open Dialogue interventions compared with randomly selected postcodes receiving treatment as usual and that the results will be compared after three years. That this trial will allow us to answer questions about the efficacy of Open Dialogue because we will have built a strong evidence base. How colleagues have reacted to the Open Dialogue trial and why some might be threatened by the need to change. That Open Dialogue is a need adapted approach, so it is not fundamentally against any of the conventional interventions, but it encourages people to make their own choices, so medication use tends to significantly reduce. That it is necessary to change the power dynamic in current systems and approaches because the current methods lead to dependency, whereas Open Dialogue is about empowering and liberating the individual. That Russell is encouraged to find that many psychiatrists are willing to open up to new ways of thinking about mental and emotional distress. How spirituality and psychiatry can work hand-in-hand and how accepting spiritual explanations can sometimes lead to better understanding of personal experiences. That, in future, the system needs to change such that interpersonal relationships are put first and are seen as the key to successful outcomes. That we also need to adapt so that clinicians are trained to be present with distress and not just try to remove it.  How people can hear Russell speak at the upcoming Compassionate Mental Heath event in South Wales, being held on April 25th and 26th 2018. Relevant links: Russell Razzaque Breaking Down is Waking Up Open Dialogue trial Developing Open Dialogue Compassionate Mental Health

Russell Harris talks to us about where he gets his inspiration for events from, surviving the 2008 writer's strike and "learning to love himself a little more". Enjoy the show! Show Notes: 3:42 - Russell discusses his volleyball career for a US Club team in Europe. 6:24 - Russell's equestrian hobby and his new horse - Big Business. 8:40 - Why networking is so important.  11:13 - How Russell develops his color muscle.  12:13 - The turning point in Russell's career. 17:45 - "Be able to diversify." 21:43 - "Surround yourself with successful people." 22:45 - The most influential person for Russell growing up.  25:20 - What is T.I.D.? 27:10 - How has being a good listener helped Russell in his career.  28:05 - "Learn to love myself a little more." 30:15 - How meditation helped Russell be a better equestrian rider. 32:23 - What the word phoenix mean to Russell.  How to reach Russell: Website | Facebook | Instagram | Linkedin Book (Magazine) Recommendations: Wallpaper Magazine Interior Design Magazine Architectural Digest

A quick recap of what we learned rolling out our first funnel inside our new mini agency. On this episode Russell talks about how the first week went with his new advertising agency that is dedicated to only Clickfunnels. Here are some of the cool things to listen for in today’s episode: How changing the Expert Secrets book funnel was able to bring the average cart value up by $8 How Russell’s team was able to virtually be in the same room to communicate, even though everyone on the team is remote instead of being located in Boise. And find out what the next step is in the funnel. So listen here to find out how the first week went for Russell’s new Clickfunnels-dedicated advertising agency. ---Transcript--- What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Alright, I’m going to talk kind of quiet. It’s like 1 in the morning and I am literally in my closet right now getting packed for a trip we are heading out on tomorrow. My wife is asleep in the room, we got sick kids, it’s kind of a weird trip to be going on, but we’re really excited to be getting away for a couple of days. We’re going to a wedding for someone we care about, and it’s going to be a lot of fun. So anyway, I wanted to return and report back on our awesome, cool week. So I talked before about some of the new project management stuff we’re doing and the batman meetings and all sorts of stuff. And it’s been fun the last probably 3 or 4 weeks we’ve been getting all the pieces in place and launching little batman meetings, neat stuff happening. But this week was the first funnel we were trying to get live. So it was a different process because the goal is to try to pull me out as much as possible. So we’ve been recruiting people, in fact, a couple of you have joined our team. I’ve been putting out Facebook Lives into our group and recruiting some amazing, amazing talent to start working with us and getting these funnels launched. It’s been really, really cool. So the first part we had James P. Friell, and we’ve hired him for six months to come in our office and help us get this working and consistent and keep reiterating on it and keep making it perfect. So he’s got the whole Trello system systemized. It’s evolving and tweaking, so that’s the first step in the process. Getting everybody on board and getting everybody focusing on their unique abilities and nothing else, which has been a really fun process. So that’s kind of the next phase. And then, like I said, to get projects kicked off we did these batman meetings. So I did a podcast episode 3 or 4 back that kind of talked about it, that worked really cool. So we’re doing those. But then this week, it’s like, okay, this is a funnel we’re getting live. And it was the new Expert Secrets book funnel. We had some updates that we needed to make and some stuff like that, plus a tweak that I’ve been teasing you guys about a little bit, which is the new thank you page webinar concept. There’s so many cool things that I wish we could share with you, but I’ll share more after the tests are done. And I’ll be sharing a lot at Funnel Hacking Live as well. Anyway, we’re getting it done and this week working on it, one thing that’s tough is that 2/3rds of our team right now are remote. They’re not here in Boise, that are working on this funnel. So we’re like, communicating through Trello and Slack, but it was just like, ugh, I miss that feeling of being in the office. So one thing we started doing, we opened up a zoom room and just told everybody, “Hey, jump in here and then mute yourself, and you can just work in here and then if you have questions then just un-mute yourself and ask and whomever can jump on.” So we had, I don’t know 8 or 10 of us in this zoom room for the last 3 or 4 days, which was super cool. So we just have it muted and then someone had a question and they’d un-mute themselves and be like, “Hey Russell, what do you think about this?” or “Check this out.” Or whatever it was. It was just kind of like we were in the same office together. It was cool for so many reasons. But one is just, especially with the remote work force, it made everybody feel way more connected and it gave us the ability to move through things very, very rapidly, which was insanely cool. We got so much stuff done, and the weirdest thing is we got to the launch phase where we have everything getting done and I had this weird feeling. Where normally I’m in the middle of it, pushing and pushing, but like because the way the system’s in place, I wasn’t involved hardly at all. I told James and everyone in our office, “I just feel like I’m not doing anything.” Which is actually a good thing, it’s the goal of this whole thing. To pull me out of it, because I’ve been so deep into everything. Prior to this I’ve been focused on the copy, the email copy and the videos and the funnel structure. I just did a lot. And now we’ve got this team of rock stars who are now taking over different pieces of it and its really, really cool. So today we launched the funnel, so the Expert Secrets Book funnel is live, you probably won’t be able to tell by looking at it from the outside, but if you re-buy the book, you’ll see the process and you’ll see some of the stuff which is awesome. So far our average cart value in the last 12 hours is up 8 dollars from what it used to be, which is huge, really, really good. So that’s exciting. And that’s not counting the thank you page webinar, which I think will increase the average cart value by…who knows. A lot. We’ll find out. It’ll take a day or two to get those stats in. But it’s really cool. At the end of it we do this really cool, we called it a post-mortem meeting, which is basically everyone in the group will now say, “Okay, what worked really good for you and what things struggled in this process?” And what’s cool, watching James who has been building out these systems, taking notes. “This was awesome, but this part got stuck.” Or “We lost momentum here.”Or “This part didn’t work as good.” And then he’s updating the Trello cards, and the checklists and the systems based on all those kind of things, and it’s cool. And then next week we pick the next funnels and next week we’ll do the same thing. We start Monday, we launch on Thursday, post-mortem on Friday, then we start over again the next week. So our goal right now, we are trying to roll out a new front end funnel every single week in this team. And it’s pretty exciting. I’ll report more back to you guys. I just want to share with you because I’m getting excited just because we’re systemizing this. Like I said, for us so far it’s always been, I don’t know it’s the same thing every time, but we focus so much more on the art of it. So it’s like we recreate it from scratch every single time. This time we’re trying to figure out the process every single time, there’ll still be room for the art, which is changing things, tweaking things, calling audibles at the last minute and changing stuff, but for the most part having a systematic thing for each funnel that’s being pumped out. So it’s fun and it’s exciting. I’m really, really enjoying the process, so I’ll keep sharing more with you guys. And who knows, I’ll probably at Funnel Hacking Live start sharing a lot of this part, the Trello process and how it ties into the funnel building and the traffic. It’s exciting. I don’t know how much, I don’t remember how much I told you guys, depending on when you’re jumping in and listening to this, but we basically took part of our company and broke it apart and it became, we started like an advertizing agency where Clickfunnels is the only client of this agency. So there’s two halves, there’s the funnel building team and then there’s the traffic team. So that’s the other cool thing. Now the funnel building team got this funnel done and live and then they pass it off, and then the traffic team is now taking this, and there’s this whole process that goes on the back side with the traffic team. That’s the next fun piece we’re going to be figuring out and building out. So exciting. Anyway, I’m excited. Like I said, we’ve obviously done a lot of stuff in the last few years, but now we’re building the processes and the people and all that kind of things in place. It’s going to be cool to continue to watch this thing grow. Anyway, I’ll keep sharing with you guys. I just wanted to share a big one with you guys because it’s really fun and exciting. It was a good day, a good week. Alright guys, that’s all I got. I’m going to go to bed. I’ll finish packing in the morning. I always procrastinate until the last possible second. Alright, thanks everybody and we’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye.

Be a fly on the wall during the ClickFunnels partner meeting and hear the #1 thing each of us learned on our journey so far. On this episode we get to hear from the entire Clickfunnels partnership team. They all share the big takeaways they have received as they have watched the company soar to over a hundred million dollars a year in revenue. Here are some of the cool things you will hear. How Russell learned that having a great partnership and team was better than being on his own. Why Todd thinks it’s important to have someone who is obsessed with the product you’re selling. Why Dave thinks the Dream 100 is so important. How John prioritizes and delegates to make sure everything is done by the appropriate people. Why Brent thinks it’s important to stay small and nimble as long as possible and why you shouldn’t sweat the small stuff. And why Ryan believes that constraints are not a limiting factor, but what helps you focus and succeed. So listen here to find out what the Clickfunnels partnership team members have learned that have lead the company to surpass their goal of a hundred million dollars in revenue a year. ---Transcript--- What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today is a special episode, we’re here above the ice right here, there’s hockey happening down there. But we’re in our partner planning meeting, here are all the cofounding partners of Clickfunnels, hanging out and plotting world domination. The theme of today’s event and the theme of this podcast is this: It comes from social network, millions of dollars isn’t cool. You know what is cool? A billion dollars. Alright everybody, so welcome back. We’re excited to have you guys here. We’ve been here locked up in this awesome office for the last day and a half planning world domination and how to make Clickfunnels better for you as a user, how to get more of you as users, so we can serve more people, more audiences and more entrepreneurs. It’s been really, really fun. We’ve been going around plotting and scheming and planning and creating and doing and a whole bunch of really fun stuff. So I thought we’d take a quick ten minute break here and I thought it’d be fun because we actually had a call yesterday with, I guess they’re not really competitors, a cool company that we like what they do. We’re potentially interesting in maybe buying them or whatever. It’s funny because they’ve been watching what we’re doing, obviously and he’s like, “You guys are what, 10 million dollars a year in revenue?” and we’re like, “No.” So in case you guys are wondering, we passed $10 million in revenue year one. We’re year three. So I thought it would be kind of fun to maybe look at this, a little bit ago, like 2 months ago we passed a hundred million in revenue. So we went from zero to a hundred million dollars in about 3 years. And I wanted to say what was the biggest aha that each of us individually got, that we’ve learned in that process. So you guys get ideas from everybody inside the team here. So just a really quick intro with everybody, then I’ll share my aha and then move on. So I’m Russell, I’m the nerd who is the dancing monkey who’s talking about Clickfunnels all day long. That’s what I do here. This is Todd Dickerson, he is the genius that built all of the original Clickfunnels and look at that beard, so manly. Over here, this is Dave, he’s all the business development stuff, he’s got the retro Clickfunnels shirt on. Then over here is John, he does all of our ads, and if you see us every day on every platform it’s because of that guy, so blame him. Over here we have Brent Coppieters, he does all our operations stuff and he’s going to be transitioning to a bunch of our new, something we can’t talk about live or publically yet. It’s going to be cool. And this is Ryan, what’s up Ryan. Ryan is the genius who is always coding. So I thought it would be fun to give you different people’s perspective, because obviously we’re all in different parts of the company, lifting different parts, doing different things, so I thought it’d be interesting to hear everybody’s ideas. So I’ll start with mine. So I think the biggest takeaway, I shared this last night with these guys, is as I was growing my business initially, the first 8 or 9 years I was very, I don’t know what the right word is, scarcity mindset or whatever. Where it’s like, I am Russell. I am the leader. I own the company, and all these things. And I think I had one or two deals with partners that went sour because I was like, I will never have a partner, I will only be me. It’s funny, with that mindset and that attitude, we were able to get to this level and we kind of camped out there. And I’m lucky for me, Todd came in. Trojan horsed his way in, where he basically worked for free for an entire year, which was awesome. And then we worked together for a couple of years. I don’t even know how many years it was ahead of time, a couple of years before that, and then we had the idea for Clickfunnels. We were sitting in an office in Boise, we bought the domain, we were going to call it something different and then we finally found Clickfunnels, we bought the domain, then for a whole week we were mapping out on the whiteboard everything. At the end of the week, and this is to kind of take you back, this is on the backend, we had 100 employees, the whole thing collapsed, we had to fire 80 people. I had to go from a 20 thousand square foot building to a 2 thousand and we could barely afford the rent. It was the most humbling, painful time of my life. I think that the Lord or whoever, whatever you want to call it, humbled me to a spot where I was willing to say yes to this. And I am so eternally grateful that I did. But at the end of that week Todd was like, “Okay, I’m going to go back to Atlanta. I’m going to build this thing, the Clickfunnels thing. But I don’t want to do it as an employee, I want to do it as a partner.” And the Russell two or three years earlier than that would have been like, “Um nope. This is the Russell show.” And I would have done something stupid like that. But luckily I was at a point where I was sufficiently humble. I was like, you know what I’m going to do that. And I’m so grateful that I did because then Todd built Clickfunnels. Holy crap, seriously. It’s insane. And then after that, that’s when we brought in these other guys as partners as well. They’re all rockstar people. It wasn’t just like, “I’m going to give you a base salary.” Or whatever. It was like, “Okay, come in and become a partner in this thing.” For me it’s like, as you find the right people and incentivize them….If I were to ever build a company again, I would never build a company where Russell’s the thing. We went and watched Justice League last night, so maybe this is because it’s in my head. Justice League, Avengers, Batman, whatever. I would literally, if I ever build a company again, the initial thought will be, I’m going to build my Avengers team, my Justice League. I’m Batman, there’s Iron Man, everyone’s got their spot. Ryan’s Wonder Woman, I just want to look like Aqua Man, that dude is ripped. But if I ever start a company again, the first thought will not be, what product should I sell? It will be what team should we assemble? And then I would carve out where everyone’s roles were going to be. I’m not going to be CEO next time, so any of you guys can pick that, I’m done after this. But we each pick our different roles and then from there, collectively, be like, “What should we create? What should we build? Who should we serve?” And then we’d go from that. So my biggest takeaway from going from zero to a hundred million dollars is definitely give up control, build your Avenger team ahead of time, because Russell Brunson could have never gotten here. It took these guys and the team we built to create that. Anyway, there’s my number one. So I’m handing it off to Todd now to share the biggest thing he’s learned from going from zero to a hundred million dollars. Todd: What’s funny is that I was actually thinking about saying very similar things. One of the biggest things is the team. Seeing how to build a team around you and actually do things as a team as opposed to by yourself independently. That’s how I’ve always done things in the past, on my own more or less, same type of scenario. But I think something else that stands out to me is having someone who is obsessive about the product itself. We always talk about how marketing is the big thing, and it is. But if you’re focused on the marketing, you still need someone on your team that is obsessed with the actual product. Making sure you’re delivering the best possible thing to people. So when you sell it to them, they actually like it and they come back and want more. So that’s my other big epiphany I think that I’ve had over the past… Russell: Especially in our world. Our world, everybody’s obsessed with marketing, rightfully so. A lot of times if you’re in the marketing and product, if you do them both, it’s really, really hard. I tried to build software companies in the past where I was like the marketing guy, plus trying to convince the developers how to do it. Whereas with this, you were able to run with the product and I could just sell. Todd: Absolutely. That’s why I think that’s worked as a great partnership. Russell focuses on the marketing and I focus on the product. And I think having that really makes a difference. Pass it on to Dave here. Dave: Hey there. So we talk about this all the time and I cannot express the importance of it, and that’s the Dream 100. So I took a look back on everything that’s happened as far as first of all having an amazing product and then amazing leaders, and then Todd and Russell, the two of them are amazing together. I think the part for me, is I look at everything we’ve built over the last three years now, is the importance of the Dream 100. Originally Dream 100, as far as affiliates, and even most recently when we did the book launch, what I really learned a lot from that was the importance of understanding it’s a Dream 100 per platform as well. So as far as your influencers, where are they at? Are they on YouTube, are they on Facebook, are they on Twitter, or are they in Instagram? Wherever they might be. And then as recently, as far as, a new Dream 100, as far as hiring partners that you really want to end up working with long term. So for me, I think the most important thing is when you start looking at building something, is really identifying your Dream 100 and then being very, very consistent in continuing to mail out every single month to them. Establishes and builds that relationship with them, they get used to seeing you. It’s been fascinating as we’ve gone out and traveled and go to these different places and people remember the boxes and things that have been sent. And they’re like, “Oh, how do I get on that list?” And if they’re asking to be on the list, I don’t need them on the list, I don’t need them basically. But the reality basically says that it actually works. So I would say, in building a hundred million dollar company, and any size company I would definitely say Dream 100 is one of the most important things. John, up to you. John: Alright, so a really interesting journey we’ve been on. It’s been so much fun. One of the things that I’ve learned which is just huge, is prioritizing your time and your tasks. I mean, especially when we’re all internet entrepreneurs, we’re on the computer, it’s so easy. The computer is a gateway to anything. So a huge thing for me is to, before even opening the computer, physically write down or use your phone or use something else that’s not your computer, to structure out. We all do this, Russell does this, I do this. We structure out what we’re going to do.What are the next things I need to do? Because if you can get that basically spiritually created, if you can get that thought through before you actually begin, then it changes everything. Then you’re actually getting through stuff instead of just fumbling along. It’s so easy because we’re all bombarded with a million different things, we could be paying attention to a million different things. Only some of which are really going to move the needle. And the other thing is, especially as you grow your team, as you get more people working with you, it’s about….So I build out that list and then the next thing I ask myself as I go through that list is, “Okay, who can do this? Who can I get to do this? Who can I get to do this?” And that specific question, as I go through the list, as who can I get to do this, that allows me to go through and delegate as much as possible to team members, so then I become more of a leader. Because it’s so easy to just be like, I could just do it all. Yeah, you can probably. But maybe you shouldn’t be doing it all. You know, that’s something to think through. So build out that list, really think through it before you start to take action in the day, prioritize it and then go through and glean through the list and be like, “Who can get to do these things.” Assuming you’ll be doing none of them. Of course there will be a handful that you end up doing, but that way it’s just a mindset that will help you get things delegated properly. Here you go Brent. Brent: Awesome. Hey everybody, it’s good to connect with you. I just want to express how much we appreciate you. Everybody who follows us, who’s obviously dedicated listeners of Russell’s program. It’s funny, more and more as we travel with Russell, even locally here in the Boise area, he’s getting like, people recognize him all over the place. They see the jeep, or they see him in the hallway of the hotel and they’re like, “Hey, I’m your neighbor.” Just these random……Albertsons…..it’s just funny. Anyway, a couple of things. I’ve had the privilege of working with Russell for over 11 years and the one thing I think that you just cannot replace, or that’s absolutely needed is hard work. You have to be dedicated in getting this business and be willing to sacrifice what you need to sacrifice to get going. Another thing that I think we’ve learned through this journey is stay nimble and small as much as you can. Don’t go out and try to lease some big office space until you’ve got sales coming in, consistent sales, your business is in good shape that way. Another thing that we’ve kind of followed here in our company is we’ve been slow to hire and quick to fire. Building a team, and Russell’s done a tremendous job of this, obviously we’ve got great partners here. And then that has extended to our team members. Again, we love all our team members. We are essentially a great family of likeminded individuals who are focused on a goal. And the leadership in this company has helped us all work to achieve that goal. So that’s been awesome as well. So stay small as long as you can, be nimble, be humble, but you gotta work hard. Once you do those things, don’t sweat over the small things. We’ve had different variations of an employee handbook, and I’m just finally getting it out here in the next few weeks. And we’ve been in business three years. So don’t stress about the mistakes. We were somewhere, we were at an event in Denver a few weeks ago, it was related to customer support, and that’s very normal. For small startups, that’s very normal. Those things just come, but don’t worry about those little details. They work themselves out. But work hard and you’ll achieve that success. So I will hand this over to my buddy, Ryan. Ryan: So I love talking about this topic, and I think it’s best summarized as, “Worse is better.” You can do a lot more than you think. Gary V told us that when we met with him on the social media side. We’re like, “We already do everything, we already do a ton, we’re on everything.” He’s like, “You can do more.” And I think this is true on everything we do in engineering, everything we do when it comes to product. You’ve heard it in every single answer from everybody to some degree. But I think the killer, underlining subtext to all that, is that constraints are not a limiting factor. They force you to focus, the focus forces you to prioritize, that forces you to do the one thing everyday that’s most valuable so that you can compete with somebody who’s got 40 million dollars in funding and you’ve got three guys in an office trying to figure it out because it makes you laser focus on the thing you have to do every single day. That’s what enables you to compete at a higher level, that’s what enables, and I believe the most important thing we’ve done in our culture is force everybody, from hiring decisions, to business processes, don’t worry about the handbook, don’t over complicate this, simplify this. Because those constraints are what make us as powerful as we are and what enable to be a hundred million dollar company with a hundred people. To grow to a billion dollars with fewer resources and a fraction of the budget and everything else. Everyone else who’s competing with us, they have no idea how we do it. They’re all like, “Wait, how many engineers do you have? How do you do this? How big are you?” it blows their mind and I think that’s the thing they miss. Those constraints are what enable us to do it. Our weaknesses are our strengths and people see them backwards. And we see it the opposite. That’s why everyone’s so blown away and why nobody gets it. I think that’s our secret sauce in many ways. So I love that. That’s our thing. That’s what I learned, that blew my mind. Russell: That’s awesome. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Its fun hanging out and we just want to thank you guys so much for allowing us to serve you and serve your audience. We love what we do. We’re obsessed, we’re passionate, we’ve been up for the last two days going crazy trying to figure out ways to do it better. You know, for us, a lot of people say, “You guys made it to a hundred million. That’s crazy.” That’s step number one for us. We’re just getting started, wait until you see what’s going to be coming out over the next twelve months and beyond. We love you guys, we appreciate you, we’re so grateful for the ability and the right and the gift we have to be able serve you guys in what you guys do. So thanks again so much for everything and we’ll talk to you guys soon, bye everybody.

This is the marketing secret I’m dusting off from the archives of one of the greatest campaigns we ever ran. On this episode Russell talks about going old school with a technique he used to use that worked every single time. He gives all the information you need to be able to do it for your business. Here are some cool things on this episode: How Russell used to use this technique back in the day. How you can use it to build curiosity, which translates into people signing up for a membership site. And why Russell himself hasn’t used this technique in a while, but why he’s going to use it again very soon with Clickfunnels. So listen below to find out what awesome technique Russell used in the past with massive success, that he plans on using again. ---Transcript--- What’s up everybody? This is Russell Brunson, welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I got something exciting I want to share with you right now. Alright everybody, there’s something I talked a lot about in my inner circle recently, it seems like a lot of people are launching membership programs, membership sites. Have you guys ever had something where you did something really successful for a long time and for some reason you stopped doing it and then you don’t know why you did? So that’s one of these ideas that came out, so I shared it with a bunch of them and they’re all going crazy and a bunch of them are all trying it out right . I was like, man, this should be a marketing secret that I share with everyone else. So I’m bringing it to the podcast. So this is what it is. This is a way, if you’ve got a membership site, to stimulate growth really, really rapidly. It can help you get a hundred signups in like a day, or 200 hundred or 1,000 depending on how big your thing is. How to get a whole bunch really, really quick. I haven’t yet done this with Clickfunnels, but I’m going to. Maybe I’ll do it on January 1st….anyway, I don’t know. But I used to do this back in the day on our membership sites and I saw initially, the person I modeled and did this first was a guy name Alex Mendosian and they did it to fill up a whole bunch of people in their software program, which was kind of cool. So I watched them do it, and then I did it four or five times afterwards and it worked amazingly well every single time and then for some reason I stopped doing it. Because that’s what we do, when things work we just stop doing them sometimes. The ADD-ness of an entrepreneurs mind. Anyway, so this is a really important, really cool one. So this is the strategy. I will walk you through all the pieces, and hopefully it gives you guys a tool you can use anytime you want to sell some stuff really, really quick. So what we do, is we would promote it, I did it back in the day of the teleseminars. I think it would still work with teleseminars, in fact, it’s almost….anyway, who knows. It will definitely work with webinars as well, or Facebook Live, or a lot of different ways you could do it. But the big key is you’re promoting an event. The event is to talk about something cool. A new discovery you’ve figured out which is brand new to whatever you do. There’s different ways to position it. If you read the Dotcom Secrets book there’s 5 different curiosity hooks we have in there. But my favorite one for this is, “Oh my gosh, I figured out this thing, I want to show it to you guys live. So you have to be on this thing because I’m going to teach you, show you, walk you behind the scenes of this new thing that just came out.” A new discovery is the hook that I love for this the most. For example, last time we did this, this was back when we had, when we were focusing more on business opportunity seekers as opposed to entrepreneurs, and we had figured out a way to generate leads, it was really cool what we were doing. We were going to CPA networks and there were these offers that were getting a thousand sales a day and the people who had these offers, would actually sell you the leads. It’s not a strategy that I believe in or I would recommend or I don’t think anyone should ever do, but it was a really cool thing. So we were tapping into these CPA networks so that offers, basically when someone would opt in for an offer and then they would buy that person’s product and we would get the lead put into our auto responder, kind of like code reds, but a little different. We were getting a couple thousand leads a day coming in and it was really, really cool. I probably shouldn’t have told you that because now some of you guys will be like, “Teach us that.” But don’t. It’s a horrible idea. It will get your auto responder shut down; people won’t know who you are. It’s not spamming, but it’s as close as you can get without having legal issues. So don’t do it, it’s bad. But back then, it was the new opportunity, the new thing. I was like, oh my gosh this is amazing. So what I did, I did this teleseminar. I was like, “Hey I want you guys to jump on and I’m going to show you this new way that we found out to get an extra three thousand leads a day. And it’s happening every single day, it’s crazy.” People are like, “What?!” They’re going crazy, they want the thing. So they get on, and this is a mini, it’s not a perfect webinar, so don’t think of it as the perfect webinar. This is me talking about a new discovery I just had and I’m going to teach them what it is. I said that with emphasis on purpose. I’m teaching what it is. What is the thing. So it’s the what, not to be confused with the how. There’s a what and there’s a how. So this is the what. This is what this new thing is. So for 45 minutes I told the story about how I figured this thing out and where I met this person and how it worked and I showed them exactly what it was and here are the offers that the CPA offers in there. And here’s how you plug in your auto responder and this is what it was. And from there we’re getting three thousand leads a day, coming in consistently. So I showed the what and people were going nuts. Oh my gosh, I want to do this. But the problem is they know the what, but they don’t understand the how. How you actually do it, how you find the offers, the people, how do you negotiate, how much is it going to cost? All those kind of things. So they know the what, but not the how. So you show them the what in a 45 minute thing and this is basically you telling the story about how you figured out the what. If you tell them the story about how you figured out the what and the result you’re getting from the what, and they’re like, “What the dump?” that’s a Brunsonism I think. “What the dump?” And then at that point you step back and say, it’s a clock, so you start at the top of the hour, spend 45 minutes. And at that point where they’re like, “What the dump? I need this.” You say, “Wait, I actually am not going to show you, I don’t have to show you this right now. But for all of my members over here inside of Clickfunnels, inside of my membership site, inside of whatever my thing is, I’m going to be doing a 90 minute break down and I’m going to show you exactly how to do this. HOW to do this.” “So if you’re a member, congratulations! Log into the members area, the call in number or the login number for the webinar is right there on the dashboard. It’s there, go login, jump on the training. This is a live training, I’m doing live. I’m not recording it, I’m not going to share it ever again. It’s happening one time and one time only. If you want it, now is the time. So go login to the members area, and go login.” “If you’re not a member yet, you’ve got exactly 15 minutes before this training starts. In 15 minutes the clock hits the top of the hour, I pull it off the page, and if you wait to sign up til 5 minutes later, you missed your shot. It is gone forever. The only way to ever understand the how on how to do this, is to be on that live training. In fact, we got 3 other experts, the people you need to meet, the person who’s going to help you get this thing started, whatever it is, is going to be there on the call. But this is a onetime only, not being recorded, and it starts in exactly 14 minutes. So you better hurry now. Go sign up right now for the trial at whatever.com.” You push them into the membership site fast. People freak out. They’ve got this 15 minute window to go signup, get their account, get logged in, get the downloading, so they can get in on this special live training to show them the how. So that’s the marketing secret. That’s the trick you guys, it’s like the coolest thing ever. So again, to kind of recap, you’ve got to have a really cool new discovery. You have a new discovery and you want to show them what it is. You get people to come onto either Facebook Live, the teleseminar, or the webinar, it doesn’t matter the vehicle you’re doing it through, just get it on a live event that’s happening so you build some curiosity, anticipation, getting excited. You get on there and say, “This is the what. I’m going to show it to you.” And you tell the story about how you figured out the what, you show them the big result that you got from this what. And you say, “look, in 15 minutes for all of our paid members, we’re starting the how training. So go login and jump on the how training, we’re going to show you what to do. If you are a member, congratulations, it’s in the members area. If you’re not a member yet, you have 15 minutes before this puppy goes live, so now’s the time to start running. And go.” And you’ll watch your phone with all your stripe notifications, “Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.” I’ve seen times when we’ve signed up 4 or 500 people in 15 minutes for membership sites, which is insane. So it works. Let’s say your list is smaller, you only sign up 100 people. It’s fine, the conversion rates on these, especially if you have a free trial for the membership site, the conversion rates on these things are like 50% of the people who are on your webinar will sign up, it’s crazy. Again, I have not done one for a long time, but I’m going to probably do one for Clickfunnels here maybe in January. That’ll be fun. I’m going to do it, you’ll see me execute on it. But most of you guys should have enough intel to be able to do it faster. So there you go, the what and the how is pretty awesome. I hope you guys love it, I hope you guys use it. Let me know if you do, and if you got any value from this, please share this episode and all episodes with your friends, your family members, other marketers, people you know could benefit from this. Again, this is the Marketing Secrets podcast, thanks so much for everything, and we’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye.

How we’re creating systems so that everyone can focus on their unique abilities. On this episode Russell talks about being worth $100,000 a day in his business, but not being worth anything as an assistant wrestling coaching. He goes on to say why it’s important to focus on unique abilities. Here are some of the amazing things in today’s episode: Why Russell had to tell an old friend that he couldn’t come visit unless he paid him $100,000 a day. How Russell ended up being an assistant wrestling coach for free. And why focusing on our own and our team members unique abilities is a good way to grow your company. So listen here to find out why Russell charges $100,000 a day for business consulting, but is an assistant wrestling coach for free. ---Transcript--- What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to Marketing Secrets podcast. I hope you guys have an amazing day today because I’ve got something cool to share with you. Alright everybody, I’m heading back into the office. It’s been a couple, the last two weeks have been a lot. Some of you guys, if you’ve been watching, last week I re-wrote the webinar from the ground up and it did really well. Over a million dollars in sales in the first week, which is cool. But the coolest thing, now that asset is done and created it will be placed in different places, including the home page of Clickfunnels. And it should, next year generate a lot. Anywhere from 10 – 20 million bucks. So it’s like, you do the work once and it pays you forever. And now I’m writing a webinar this week for our new program called Software Secrets, which is a brand new thing. It’s always, the last webinar I wrote from scratch, but the offer was similar to what I’ve done in the past. So this one, this is a brand new offer, brand new everything. And my kids started wrestling, and I don’t know if I told you guys this already, but the first day of wrestling practice happened and I didn’t know about it. I don’t know, we just got the dates messed up. So my kids went and that night I came home and I was all excited to see them, “How was wrestling?” and they’re all in tears, “We hate wrestling. We never want to go back.” And I was like, “What? No.”  So I had to call the coach and a few minutes later I called to be an assistant wrestling coach. So now everyday at 3:00, I love it, I get to go to wrestling practice with my kids. The only problem is that this week was planned to be the Software Secrets launch week, so I was going to have a whole week to build out the webinar. The problem is that now from 3 til 6 every night I’m at wrestling. So it cuts out, plus like drive times and everything else, it cuts out about 4 ½-5 hours every day. So I really needed to get this webinar, so I’ve been late nights. I was up at the office until 2 last night. I’m going to probably be there til 2 or 3 tonight and then do the webinar tomorrow morning live. But I think conservatively, it’s an amazing offer. It’s really insane. I would be shocked if we don’t do a million dollars during the launch week, or this week, the webinar week, you know. And then that will go on and next year it could do, who knows, anywhere from 5-10 million bucks. So you do the work once and it pays you for the next 5 years, which is cool. That’s what I love about webinars. All that effort you put into it. So it’s worth putting in the effort. It’s funny, as I’ve been doing this and thinking about it, I had an old friend from about 15 years ago call me and to start off, just kind of catching up and then, and I respect him for this, but as a good sales person does, he wanted to sell me something, and he’s like, “yeah, I could fly out to Boise and spend a day or two with you guys and show you all the stuff that we have.” And all this stuff right, and I was just like, how do you tell your friends this. Awkwardly I’m sitting there and I’m like, “Hey man,” I was so uncomfortable, because how do you tell your friend, someone who’s known you when you were just a punk kid? “I don’t know how to tell you this nicely, but just so you know, right now I bill out, if you were to come in for a day of consulting I bill out an 8 hour day at $100,000. So for you to come out for 2 or 3 days, the opportunity cost for me, its 2 or 3 hundred thousand dollars. So it’s really hard for me to just block out that time. I feel like such a jerk telling you that. But if you want to come out and we hang out as friends or something, I would love to see you again as friends, that’s super cool. To take 2 or 3 business days, the opportunity cost is not little.” He was like, “What? Are you serious?” I’m like, “yeah.” It’s kind of awkward right. But that’s what we charge. You know, I saw someone the other day posting in our Facebook group like, “How come the guru’s don’t just charge $150 an hour so they can help everyone?” and it’s like, gall I wish I could. I wish there were more hours in the day. That’d be awesome. But I was like, literally I’m spending 3 days to create this webinar that will make me a million dollars in the first week. And anywhere from 5 to 10 million dollars extra, maybe more. Who knows? So I’m spending 3 days, 3 days of focus time. And in my pocket goes 8 plus figures. $100,000 a day is actually super cheap discounted rate. You know what I mean? So I was trying to explain that, I was like, I don’t know how to say it nicely. I was like, even if you did want to pay me $100,000 a day, the first opening is probably 5 or 6 months away. My calendar is insanely booked. Anyway, so that’s kind of, that was this awkward moment. “I’m so sorry man, I just, I don’t want you to think I’m a jerk or anything, but that’s why I can’t just have you come out for 2 or 3 days to sell me something. I just can’t, I wish I could.” So that was, there’s step one. And then so now I’m at wrestling practice with my kids and I’m sitting there and I’m spending 3 or 4 hours a day, every day, at wrestling practice, which again, I love. It’s so cool. I remember when I was this age, going to practice and my dad coming and watching and working out with me. It’s just cool. It’s been a really unique time with the twins, just such a cool thing to be able to spend time with them. Like I said, they haven’t liked wrestling, so I’m in there trying to make sure they’re liking it. I’m in there wrestling most of the time I’m drilling with them, I’m helping them and just making sure they have a good experience just so that they keep doing it. And for the next two or three years in the beginning programs, that they like it. If they like, I just don’t want them to get hurt, or beat up, so I’m just there to make sure that they like it and teach them some moves so they start beating kids. Because if you start beating kids, then it gets fun. So I’m just like, trying to get them through this initial pain of the beginning. And I’m sitting there, I’m an assistant coach, I’m not getting paid anything obviously. And I was just like, it’s so interesting, in this area of my life, like in business, my time is worth $100,000 a day. But in wrestling my time is not worth anything. I’m not getting paid for the 3 to 4 hours a day that I’m spending, which is, I don’t want to get paid for it. But I had this realization, over here I’m insanely valuable monetarily. Over here, I’m not. Best case scenario, if I was, even the best wrestling coaches in the world maybe, maybe clear 6 figures, probably not. Most of them probably $50-60 grand max. And these are like the best, these are the dudes like the Michael Jordan’s of the world, of the wrestling world. So it’s like, let’s just say I was at that level and I was getting paid that, I’d still be making $20 an hour, $30 an hour maybe. So for three hours it’s worth $60, $80, maybe $100 for my time. Whereas that time spent over here is worth $20 grand an hour. You’re looking at $20, 40, 60 grand for that same time, just where am I focusing at. And as I was thinking through it I was like, that’s so fascinating how valuable I am here and not so much here. So I started thinking about us as entrepreneurs where how often do we spend our time, we have a unique ability that’s worth $100 grand a day right. To our company and to us and the people we’re serving right. But then, we go and start doing these $8 an hour jobs because it’s gotta be done, so I should be the one doing it. But you’re not worth that much there. It’s so expensive to have you spending time on $8, 10, 20 an hour jobs if you’re making $20,000 an hour doing your unique ability. It’s been interesting, I’ve been working with Jeff Woods, from The One Thing, on building things out. One of the big things I’m focusing on, thinking through is we’re trying to re-systemize our business because it’s kind of to the point where we need to re-set and re-do all those things. And as I’m thinking through it I’m just like, I want to create the systems and my goal in these systems is to create the system so that it forces me, and forces everybody on my team to only do their unique ability. Because each of us has a unique ability where we’re worth $100,000 a day, and then we have things we’re good at where we’re worth $20 an hour. It’s like, if I can get everyone focusing on their unique abilities where they’re worth $100 grand a day versus their non unique abilities where they’re worth $100 a day, man how much faster can we grow and can we scale and all those type of things? So that’s been my thought process. So right now, we’re in the re-systemization of our company from now until the end of the year. After the Software Secrets launch I’m going to take, you guys will see me take a little bit of my foot off the gas, so I can recoup, restructure, get systems in place and then in January we’re going to go crazy, so it’s going to be fun. But that’s why, I’m trying to figure out how to get everyone focusing on their unique ability and not focusing on the $100 a day jobs that they can do, and they are doing, but how do we get it so we’re all focusing on unique abilities? So for you guys who are thinking about it, what’s your unique ability? Think through that and then figure out, okay now that I know that, what are the people on my teams unique abilities and how do I create a structure where everyone is focusing 100% of their time on unique abilities? When you do that, you’ll start growing. Dan Sullivan, at strategiccoach.com, if you guys go there he, I just bought every book on his website last week. It showed up in a huge box. Because I’m about to immerse in some Dan Sullivan, so I don’t just buy one book, I buy all of them because I love immersion. But in one of his books, it’s about unique ability, it has like a work book and everything. I haven’t read it yet, but I know it’s awesome, so check it out. You guys, there is Garrett, and there is Scott. Those are our partner’s for Software Secrets, Lindsay, they’ve been up here for the last 2 days camping overnight with me getting everything ready for the launch tomorrow. So if you guys are watching the video you just saw Garrett, Scott and Lindsay. If not, you just saw me point in the air and didn’t see anything, if you’re just listening. So anyway, I’m going to jump in and we’re going to get this thing launched. I got 5 ½ hours before wrestling practice. After wrestling practice I’m going to come back and probably spend another 51/2 hours, so about 10 hours to get this webinar done before my body will shut down. Wish me luck. And then tomorrow will be a million dollar day and then we’ll have an asset that’ll pay us for the rest of our lives. So this is my unique ability. So that’s what I spend my time doing. Spending my time managing, $100 a day job. Spending my time writing webinars, $100 grand a day job. So I’m focusing on my unique ability today, which will be good. So that’s all I got. Alright everybody, appreciate you all, talk to you guys soon. Bye.

Against all traditional investing advice, this should be your number one focus after you launch your company. On this episode Russell talks about paying your house off quickly so you can have the ability to risk more. Here are some of the amazing things you will hear in today’s episode: Why Russell is giving the opposite advice as nearly every investor there is when it comes to paying off your house. How Russell was able to keep his wife in the dark about some of the hardest times in the business. Why having the stability of a paid off house gives entrepreneurs the ability to risk more. So listen here to find out what would happen to Russell, worst case scenario and why he wouldn’t lose his home or family. ---Transcript--- What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to a late night, in the wrestling room edition of Marketing Secrets podcast. Alright, alright everybody. I spent almost 5 or 6 hours today with the kids in my little piece of heaven cleaning today. This is an external garage at our house that I decided to turn into a wrestling room, for those who have never seen it before. It’s awesome. I got wrestling mats, gladiator walls, Bulgarian bags, paintings of my favorite wrestlers back here, throwing dummies, the girl stuff here for the girls. These are actually the wrestling mats I used to wrestle on in high school, they were on my back deck growing up. So there’s a little nostalgia for you, that’s cool. This is the weight room side of it, so this where we do what we do and it’s awesome. And as I was working today, we’re out in the middle of nowhere so there’s lots of spiders and bugs and stuff, so we got all these bugs trappers and stuff. So probably every three or four months I come and do a deep clean where I have to get the vacuum out and throw away all the dead spiders and re-clean it, and it’s kind of a nightmare. But it’s really fun that now it’s clean. It’s so clean right now, I love it. It makes me want to work out. So during all this craziness today of cleaning and having fun like that, I was checking my phone a couple of times throughout and I saw a post from Julie Stoian, and I thought it was interesting because she asked, “Should I pay off my house or should I pull the money out and use that for other investments and things like that.” It’s funny because I gave my answer and it was like, the exact opposite of what I think a lot of people thought I would think. I think it’s good, so I’m going to give you my advice right now. Because I know when I was a little kid, my dad, who is an entrepreneur and has a couple of businesses and is someone who first got me all excited by this whole thing. He used to always tell me, “You gotta pay off your house, you gotta pay off your house. Pay off your house as quick as you can.” I remember because I was like, that’s good advice and then when I got older I remember reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and other investment books and they always talk about how a house is a bad investment and you need to keep the money as low as possible and use that to pay off….you know keep your house just down in the minimum. Pay your monthly payments and then keep that money and go and invest in other things that can produce more money. And logically, that makes sense. If I was an investment dude, teaching people investment I’d be like, “Yes, you should not pay off your house, keep the equity in there as low as possible, strip the cash out because you can use that in other investment vehicles.” So it makes sense as an investor. But I don’t consider myself an investor. Now I am dabbling into crypto currencies, Todd Dickerson, my partner in Clickfunnels is making insane amounts of money so he’s showing me the ways of the crypto world. But I still don’t consider myself an investor. I consider myself an entrepreneur. It’s funny because when I first started reading those books, I started believing that and believing that. And then I talked to my dad and I was like, “Dad why don’t you pull all your money out.” Because my dad’s like, buys house pays them off, cash flow. Buys houses, pays them off, cash flow. And he has his own house. I was like, “Dad, what are you thinking? You’re crazy.” And I remember one night he kept telling me, “Russell, you have to understand, there’s something about knowing your house is paid off, knowing that worst case scenario, your house is there and that gives you the ability as an entrepreneur to go and risk.” And I was like, huh. I don’t think I really got it. You know, I heard him and I’m like, young son thinking he knows everything, but I don’t think I got it at first. I was just like, okay whatever. Then the next decade of my life started happening after that, and in that decade I’ve seen some really big ups and some really big downs, and some really bigger ups and some big downs. And right now I’m on an up cycle. And there may be a time where I go back down and that sucks. That’s scary, and I have a lot of fear and anxiety around that, just because I’ve cycled twice and I know that feeling. I know the fear and all those things. I have a constant, I think part of what drives me so hard, and people always ask “Why don’t you slow down dude, you’re doing pretty well.” And it’s because I have this internal fear. I remember what that was like to cycle and I’m trying to protect myself through the hustle or I don’t know whatever that is. So I think that’s a big driving force for me. But during these cycles, and luckily we recovered from them. But a couple of things that I noted. Things got really bad a couple of times, but at the same time, I never, this is probably wrong, but I never told my wife about a lot that was happening, and she found out later. Actually, she was at the last Funnel Hacking Live where I did the presentation on all my failures, as you guys saw a few episodes back. And she was like, “What? I didn’t realize it was that bad.” I was like, “Well, I didn’t really tell you. I’m supposed to be the man.” But for her, I knew that I had to have security. So I knew how much, there was an amount of money every single month that she got that would cover our house payments and our bills, stuff like that. I just knew that as long as I could make at least that, I was okay risking and trying and doing things. As long as, worst case scenario, my stability, my foundation was set. That was it. During those rocky, scary times, I knew that worst case scenario, I could always produce enough money so that nothing at home was effected. It gave me the ability to risk, to roll the dice and try things. So for entrepreneurs I think sucking the cash out of your house and investing it in other places is the worst advice ever. Because then you’re on this unstable foundation. Sure you have more money to invest and in theory you can make more money and all these sorts of things. But it takes away your ability to risk. Risk is what makes an entrepreneur great. We have to go out there and risk and jump off cliffs all the time. But risk is scary. The only way for us to be able to increase the level of risk tolerance we have, I think is also increase the stability tolerance on the other side. Paying off your house is smart because worst case scenario, if everything, all the crap hits the fan and everything falls apart, if you’ve done that and paid off your house, worst case scenario, you still have the stability of a home for your wife and kids and whatever. That is the key. That gives you the ability to go and do the crazier things. So that’s my advice for all you guys. Pay off your house. Pay it off fast. Pay it off as quick as you can, because as you do that, as the stability, the anchor gets stronger and stronger and stronger on this side, your ability to risk over here, without the fear of losing that, it gives you the ability to risk more and do what you need to do. Because entrepreneurship is a lot of literally rolling the dice. This viral video we’re doing, I keep telling everyone, typically my investments in our business are very strategic, we create a funnel, invest some money, get it converting, then ramp it up really fast. I’m not risking a ton. This is the biggest one, where it’s like, to create the video we had to write a $500,000 check. There’s half a million dollars, right. Put it all in black. With the launch party, with everything we’ve done it’s probably another 3 or 4… I mean it’s close to, when all is said and done, it’ll be close to a million bucks. All on black, okay let’s go and hopefully it will work. But the nice thing is because of the stability on other things we’ve set up, I can take that risk and it’s okay. Because worst case scenario, it’ll be okay. I’ve talked about this on other episodes of the podcast. The thing that so often keeps entrepreneurs from success is the fear of the worst case scenario. You have to be able to look at the worst case scenario and be okay with that. And if you are, then you can jump forward. Some entrepreneurs may never look at the worst case scenario. They’re just always, we don’t want to look at the thing that we’re scared of. So we see the thing we want and we’re kind of going forward, but there’s this nagging thing in the back of your head. Worst case scenario, what if I go bankrupt, what if my wife leaves me, what if my kids think I’m a bad dad. All these fears that are happening and we try to ignore them, but because we’re ignoring them, they’re still buzzing in our ear, in our subconscious mind. So because of that they keep coming and keep coming. I always tell entrepreneurs, if you want to be free and able to risk you have to stop, look back and be like, “What’s the worst case scenario back there? If everything goes to crap, what happens?” and until you’re okay with that, it’s so hard to move forward. So a lot of us we have to stop and say, okay, what’s the worst case scenario? And I remember that. A lot of times I’ve had a couple times the worst case scenario was bankruptcy, worst case scenario was losing my house, and those are scary. At the beginning you have to have that initial risk and you have to be okay. If I lose my house, it’s okay. If I go bankrupt, it’s going to be okay. But as you start rolling up into bigger opportunities, bigger risks, bigger things like that, it’s nice to look back and say worst case scenario, I lose my money on this deal. I still got my house, got my wife, got my kids. That security gives you the ability to risk big. So pay off your house, there’s my advice. It goes against all the famous investing dudes, but I think they’re wrong. I think most of those aren’t entrepreneurs like us. That’s what we do. We’re entrepreneurs, we’re risking, we’re making the world a better place. I mentioned this on the entrepreneurial scholars podcast, the episode a few back. If entrepreneurs don’t risk, the whole world comes to a screeching halt. The government put in bankruptcy and all these laws and things to protect us so we can risk. So that’s why it’s vitally important. It’s awesome. So there you go, here’s the mirror. What? Here you guys are, we’re all talking together. How cool does that look? If you’re listening, you have no idea what I’m doing, but if you’re watching the video at marketingsecrets.com this is what you see. Alright you guys, appreciate you all. I’m going to go back in and put my kids to bed, it’s been a fun day. Doesn’t it look good? It looks clean. Ready for some workout, ready for some people to bleed out of our muscles. It really hurts sometimes. Anyway, appreciate you guys. Pay off your house, it’ll give you the financial stability you need to risk everything and change the world. Thanks everybody, talk to you soon.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Segment recorded from the “Drop The Mic Show” where Russell takes 10 questions from funnel hackers and answers them live. On this bonus episode of Marketing Secrets Russell answers questions about marketing from other funnel hackers, including: How teenagers can use Clickfunnels to become more financially independent. How to find out if there is a market for your product. How Russell keeps his sanity and keeps his family happy while being a busy entrepreneur. How to move your business into higher ticket sales. How and where to put in an upsell in a supplement funnel. Whether or not you should be running multiple businesses or focusing on one core business. What one thing made Russell's business explode. What to do when you launch a funnel that doesn't work out. How to go about raising money for a non-profit organization. How to go from marketing just a product to marketing an awesome experience to be able to charge more. So listen in to hear Russell drop the mic as he answers these questions.

While wrestling at Boise State University, Russell Brunson started his first online company. Within a year of graduating, he had sold over a million dollars worth of products and services all from his basement. For over 12 years now, Russell has been starting and scaling companies online. He owns a software company called ClickFunnels, a supplement company, and a coaching company. He is also one of the top super affiliates in the world. He created his company DotCom Secrets which is also the title of his book to help entrepreneurs around the world to start, promote, and grow their companies online. Russell lives in Boise, ID with his wife Collette and their five children. In this interview, we are going to talk about why someone who owns a company and sold a million dollars worth of products chose to write a book. We are also going to talk about the launch of Russell’s book and the funnel process.  For all this and much more, listen in to this episode of the Self-Publishing School podcast!   You can find Russell here: RussellBrunson.com @RussellBrunsonHQ on Facebook @RussellBrunson on Twitter Russell Brunson on LinkedIn   Show Notes [01:42]How Russell tried to write a book in the past and had false starts. In retrospect, he is glad he waited because he had so much more knowledge when he did start. [04:30] What gave Russell the motivation to finally go all in and complete his book. A conversation with a friend finally prompted him to do the work. [05:39]About the writing process and how it took about a year and how an event forced Russell to record everything chronologically. [06:49] How one of the best things about writing a book is cutting things out that aren't really needed. [07:56]The business purpose of the book was to establish authority and lead generation, plus motivation and education for using ClickFunnels. [10:20] About the marketing presales push and how the goal was to presale as many as possible. Russell gave away a Ferrari to whoever would sell the most books.  [12:14] Using the free book where the buyer only pays for shipping leads to sales. [13:44] Other ways that Russell compensated his affiliates, and how he created a funnel that would sustain all of the cash and incentives to give away the books. [15:41] How about a fifth of the books were sold by Russell and the rest were by affiliates and some of the different affiliate strategies. [16:57] About doing radio and podcast interviews to promote the sale of the book along with direct mail and as many angles as possible. [18:42] How Russell got started on the Internet. Including influences by Bill Glazer and Dan Kennedy. [20:21] The way that Russell got Dan Kennedy to write the foreword of his book. [21:06]How Russell was able to get Tony Robbins to create a blurb for the book. [22:36] The most effective method for promoting his books was probably his own internal list and his affiliate strategy. He would ship gifts to his dream 100 affiliates. [24:59] It's possible to get addresses by contacting people on Facebook and sending them gifts in the mail. [27:56] To get people to promote stuff you need to do cool things. [28:14] Russell's initial goal was 15,000 copies and he did better than he had hoped for. [29:41] What the backend of the book giveaway looks like. 3 core funnels. Book launch funnel. On the order form there was an audiobook offer, an upsell for traffic course, and a webinar sales course. [30:38] Funnel number 2 is an invite to a webinar, which sells one year access to ClickFunnels. [31:53] 2 weeks later, there is an invite to a coaching program. Group, mastermind, or high-end coaching. The funnels lead to the large backend funnel. [34:29] How Russell was able to sell the audio version of his book for $37.00 and trials of getting it recorded. [37:49] He read the audiobook himself, mostly because he was short on time and he wanted it done right. It also helped with the editing. [42:24] Russell has a script that teaches the perfect webinar. Figure out the 3 core things that your prospects think are right that are actually wrong. [46:37] Find out a surprising way that Russell made money on the backend of his book, like a $100,000 coaching gig and t-shirts. [48:56] How Russell's business has improved and benefited from books and readers as customers. [50:43] Don't wait 10 years to write your first book and fill your book with value.   Links and Resources: RussellBrunson.com @RussellBrunsonHQ on Facebook @RussellBrunson on Twitter Russell Brunson on LinkedIn self-publishingschool.com Spsfreetraining.com DotComSecrets.com ClickFunnels.com

Today we have Russell Saks founder of Campus Protein. He started a national supplement company while attending Indiana University and grew it to over 1200 sales reps and he went from zero to 7 figures in revenue. Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: [1:00] Jeremy’s introduction to this episode with Russell Saks. [1:50] How did Russell get his business started? [4:00] Russell talks about the impact of seeing his grandfather as an entrepreneur. [5:50] How Russell started getting involved with supplements. [19:02] What advice did Russell learn from the BEST Competition? [20:30] Facing a crossroads - continue the startup or go with the backup plan? [23:30] Russell talks about starting their own product line. [26:30] How does Russell and his team decide when to launch a new flavor? [31:20] Russell talks about guerilla marketing. [35:00] The benefit of using samples. [36:00] Building a sales rep team. [41:00] How has Russell’s team training process changed over time? [48:00] Russell talks about his difficulties with finding a good platform to use. [50:00] Apps and tools Russell and his team have found effective. [51:45] The biggest challenge for Russell and his team. [53:00] The lowest and proudest moment for Russell. In this episode… Guerrilla Marketing is getting a lot of attention in the business world lately. How do you implement it? What are the best tactics and strategies? Is it even worthwhile to invest in? If you are wondering how guerrilla marketing can help take your business to the next level, this is a great episode for you! On this episode of Inspired Insider, Jeremy sits down with Russell Saks, founder of Campus Protein. Russell and his team have developed some innovative guerrilla marketing tactics that have produced impressive results for their product sales. Learn how Campus Protein harnessed current events and popular slogans to catapult their product to success. You will also hear about the fascinating journey Russell has been on as he led his business from a small college campus startup to become an industry leader. How do you keep your customers coming back for more of your product? Better yet, how do you get your customers to start purchasing additional products you offer? Russell Saks and his team at Campus Protein have found that simply including samples with each order has enticed their customers to expand the products they use. Sure it sounds risky and not everybody who receives a free sample will start regularly buying that product. However, by expanding their experience of your product with the free sample, you communicate to the customer that you care about their interests. Learn more about how Russell and his team consistently improve customer retention on this episode of Inspired Insider. How do you build a large sales representative team, especially one large enough to service multiple college campuses? For Russell Saks and his partners, it took lots of patience and persistence. They went to everyone they knew and encouraged them to join their sales team. They refused to stop until they had enough team members to serve their clients well and keep an eye on expansion. Because of their focus and determination, Russell and his partners were successful in building a team that was in it not only for the money but for the opportunity to help others improve their health. Discover more about what fueled Russell and his team’s success on this episode of Inspired Insider. When business is booming and everything is humming along, why change the formula? As the old adage goes, if it isn't’ broken, don’t fix it! Good luck telling that to an entrepreneur and innovator like Russell Saks. Russell and his team at Campus Protein were doing great selling vitamin and workout supplements on college campuses. But Russell wasn’t satisfied with the level of success they were experiencing. This dissatisfaction caused Russell to lead his business in the direction of developing their own product line. That decision set Campus Protein on a whole new course toward even greater success. Even now, they continue to develop and enhance new products for their customers. To hear more about this process and what led Russell to take this big step, listen to this episode of Inspired Insider. Can you remember when you faced a major crossroads in your life? Was it deciding on whether to move to a new city? Or was it a change in your career path? These big life decisions can end up having huge repercussions for you and those close to you. Russell Saks faced a similar crossroads in his life. He had gathered a team to build a small startup on his college campus selling vitamin and protein supplements to his fellow students. The big question came when he graduated, would he continue to build the business or take another path like many of his peers were doing? The weight of this difficult decision caused Russell to really consider what he wanted to do with his future. What lessons can you learn from Russell’s story? Find out on this episode of Inspired Insider. Resources Mentioned on this episode Campus Protein Instagram: @campusprotein Twitter Page: twitter.com/CampusProtein Facebook Page: facebook.com/CampusProtein/ Shark Tank Mark Cuban The Best Competition Makeamericaswoleagain.com Shopify Yotpo Apple Pay Sponsor for this episode Rise25 is where entrepreneurs of 6,7, and 8 figure businesses come together live and in person every few months to solve their biggest business challenges through this high-level Mastermind group. Each member leaves each week with lifelong friendships and actionable steps to take their business to the next level. Check out Rise25.com - a group run by myself and cofounder John Corcoran. Rise 25 is application only.