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"About 10 years ago my Dad told me one of the secrets to wealth regardless of your job or business..."
What's going on, everyone? This is Steve Larsen, and you're listening to Sales Funnel Radio.
Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio, where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels, and now, here's your host, Steve Larsen.
All right, all right, all right. Hey. I'm in a car by my phone. I am obsessed with music, so I love sound quality, which is why I usually use a $200 mic to record my podcast. Hope you guys will forgive me.
I actually just went to Russell's this morning. We are lifting together with the crew, and I'm hurting actually. I'm in a lot of pain. We're doing squats and I didn't warm up, so I'm feeling all those pops in my hamstrings. That was stupid.
Anyway, hey, I hope you guys are doing awesome. I have got just a ton of messages lately. I want to thank you, but I also want to apologize. I'm 300 emails behind, real emails from you and 60 Voxes, another 30 Skype messages. People are somehow finding my phone number, calling me.
I appreciate it, but I just physically am unable to answer all that stuff right now, but anyway...
Russell and I were talking this morning. We didn't talk about this, but something popped into my mind. I remember growing up, I did a whole lot of construction. You guys probably didn't know that. I actually worked at Discount Tire for a little while during the winter months. It was totally freezing.
We would work 12 hours a day, no breaks. They'd give us hamburgers for lunch, and we'd grab ... It was so cold. Oh my gosh. You'd feel it down in your core, the kind of cold ... I grew up in Colorado, and it was the kind of cold where you breathe and it hurt your lungs to breathe just because the air was so freezing.
You know what I'm talking about?...
Anyway, super crazy. I ended up getting really deathly sick because of it, because our hands would be all greasy. They'd come in, they'd give us this food. It's not like we'd wash our hands. I'm sure I ate car grease and oil a couple times. There's no doubt that I did.
Then after that I went and I did construction doing residential swimming pools. We built a lot of swimming pools for the Denver Bronco players. Pretty cool stuff. I got to meet a lot of their players and stuff like that. We'd go around and we'd build these sweet, just awesome, high end swimming pools.
Sometimes I was part of the build crew and sometimes I was part of the cleaning crew. I'd come up later on and we'd do all the pool maintenance on them and stuff like that. A couple times ... Is it Moreno? I can't remember his first name, but on the Broncos player, Moreno. He almost shot me because I walked into his house or I walked into his backyard, which is usually what we did. We didn't knock. We just did it. He's like, "What? Oh, bro, I almost shot you." Anyway, kind of funny.
Then I worked other ... All I'm saying is I actually worked at a plastic factory for a while, and we made M16 buttstocks and syringes. It was injection molding. It was really interesting. I did so many construction jobs and it taught me how to work.
It taught me how to do hard stuff, stuff that sucked, which is good. You want to know how to do those things. I love what I do, but there are elements of it that are work, stuff that is really, really ... Let's see if I can shift. I'm driving my car. I drive a stick shift. Here we go.
If you can't do the crappy part of the business, then you're going to fail because it's the crappy part, so I'm having a crappy part of it. Obviously, a good side and bad side.
Anyways, one day, my dad brought me aside. My dad was an executive at IBM. He's a genius, man. He's the man. I'm working on his ... He does extremely well in the financial markets, just personally and so I'm helping him build a webinar right now, but anyway, I'm getting sidetracked.
Anyway, he brought me aside. This is several years ago, a long time ago, maybe almost 10 now. That's crazy. I'm 28. What? He brought me aside and he said, "Hey, you know what?" I was doing all these construction jobs and I was learning how to work and it was great stuff and it was good for a teenager. I went on a mission for my church. I came back, and he was like ... Here's one of the biggest lessons he ever taught me besides how to work hard.
He brought me aside and he said, "You know what? If you want to make a lot of money, you have to got to stay on the revenue side of business." I didn't understand what he was saying at first. He's like, "Do not reside on the cost side of business."
I was like, "Okay, you know, I don't, what are you talking, what are you talking about?" He said, "Think about it. When you go into work, does your position produce revenue or is your position a cost to the business?"
I was like, "Interesting." He's like, "Any time that you are standing on the revenue side of business, you're going to make a lot more money." That's why sales guys get paid so much money. That's why people who do HR and people who do support, that's why they don't get paid a lot of money. They are a cost to keeping the business running.
He's like, "If you want to ever ... If you want to keep on ..." He's like, "That's why I've done so well in my career is because I have stayed on the revenue generating side of business." His job was to go, to fly to clients all over the world. He's been to I don't even know how many countries, well over 50, tons of ... My dad traveled like crazy growing up.
He'd go out and he'd go to these clients and he'd figure out what they needed to built. Then he would come back and he'd orchestrate the team and they would build this crazy software solution for these high-end people, anything from watches to NASA and to the military. He did a lot of stuff software wise. The software in your car that you're driving right now, he's touched that stuff. He's created industry standards that's touched all of it.
All I'm saying is he knows what he's talking about on this stuff. Take what he's saying and take what I'm saying to you right now as real. Just think about it. Any time your business, any time your position, which is why it's so great to be the entrepreneur, you are directly in charge of making money for the company.
People are like, "It's not fair that that guy comes in and he owns it and he makes all this money." He's like, "Well, he is solely responsible for making your paycheck happen, so, yeah, why wouldn't he be, you know?"
There was a great book that I read...
I was just thinking about all this again, how interesting that is because that's one of my roles for current job in ClickFunnels. I'm very much on the revenue side of business. Sales funnels and my skill set is very much directly related to the revenue side of all these other people's businesses when they hire me to do their funnels.
I'll charge 15, 20 grand for a sales funnel, but I know it'll make them 10 times that in a year. You know what I mean? It's dumb, easy decisions on that. The reason why I can do that is because it's on the revenue side of business. Just think about that as you go through.
Are your activities, what you're doing right now in your day, are your activities keeping you in the revenue side of what you need to be doing in your business to grow it or are you standing on the cost side?
That stuff started hitting me because I've been doing some extra stuff to just push further and push harder as I work with Russell, and it's brought more money in. It's more brought more value. It's brought more stuff in. It's cool to see what happens when you start to do that.
Whether or not you are an entrepreneur who's solely on your own, you can start thinking about this. Are my activities right now revenue producing or are they cost producing? Am I actually pulling in money? It's such an interesting way to look at.
There's a great book that I read once. I got to be honest with you. I'm saying this to you, but I cannot remember the name of it. The whole point of the book though was he was saying, "Okay, there's really four different areas of work that you can go in." This isn't Robert Kiyosaki's ESBI thing. It was another guy who had four different quadrants, also, and he was saying that your ... Let's say you want to get a job. Let's say you don't want to be an entrepreneur. I know a lot of ... 99% of the people who listen to this podcast, you guys are all trying to be entrepreneurs.
You are entrepreneurs. You're going out. You're changing the world. You're doing great things. Just take this as a grain of salt just with the lesson.
He basically said that if you want security, you will not make a lot of money unless you become this high-end entrepreneur. Eventually you get to this place of great security. If you want to make a lot of money, you have to stay in high-risk job opportunities.
You have to stay in these positions where you actually go out and you have to ... It ties in exactly what I'm saying. You have to be on the spot where revenue is created. There were four different quadrants and he was saying, "Look, the places ..." Think about a doctor. That's more high risk. You are playing with people's lives. It's no wonder they get paid a lot of money. Society has said, "Okay, let's let this guy get paid a lot so that he is motivated to know his stuff." You know what I mean?
Remember that thing about sales funnels? 50% of the time, on the first launch, they don't work. They're high risk. Then you turn around and we make three tweaks to them and they're actually not high risk at all. They'll turn around to make a butt load of money. It's just figuring out the right model on certain things.
Anyway, funnels are not high risk though for that reason...
I was just thinking about all this stuff this morning while we were lifting. I was like, "It's so fascinating how true that lesson is that my dad told me, like, 10 years ago. Stay on the revenue side of business. You know, do things that are going to bring extra income in." If you're working somewhere right now and they're not willing to see the money that you're pulling in, should be worth a raise or whatever, second guess what you're doing.
I'm not going to sugarcoat it. That sucks...
If you can go in and you can create a butt load of extra value, if you can go in and you just ... Anyway, I think you guys get the idea. What ended up happening is I was doing all, just to come full circle, I was doing all these construction jobs and I was tiling. I was actually steel tying.
We'd get these huge things of rebar. We'd take these machines and we'd bend the rebar. We'd build these pools inside of these backyards. It's cool. I helped maintain and do some of the pool for the singer from One Republic, which is cool. The guy's got a sweet pool, man. It's underground, under his house. It's so crazy.
I was a pool cleaner and I did that for a long time. I'd go and I'd clean the pools. I had a route that I'd go on. It's the cost side of business. It wasn't directly ... I was a service guy.
My position didn't really make money. I was just fulfillment for what they were selling...
I remember I was sick of it, that there was this moment of time. I was 22. That was 6 years ago. Wow, almost 7. What? It's my birthday coming up. Woo hoo. I remember walking out of the big warehouse where we had all of our stuff. I was covered in cement powder and all this stuff. I was dirty and it was freezing out.
It was a good experience, but I remember it was time for me to go back to college and finish that semester, to pick back up. I was almost done with school at that time. I remember there was this little piece of tile on the ground. This might sound cheesy, but I remember I picked up this piece of tile and I realized, I was like, "I'm going to take this and I'm going to keep it with me because I want to remind me to never do a job like this again.
Not that it's below me, but just because I want to never have to be in a position where I have to do this again, and there were times in the future during college where I hadn't quite figured out how to make enough money yet. I went and I ... We're about to start Funnel Fridays.
I got to run, and it's in three minutes...
Instead of taking the construction job, that's when I decided I was going to go try and do real estate, which eventually led me to funnels.
Anyway, all I'm saying is decide what position you're going to stay in and then stick to it. I know a lot of you guys have already done that, but anyway, I just hope that stays motivating to you guys. Stay on the revenue side of business and stay doing only the tasks that are going to bring revenue to what you're doing. Outsource the rest of them.
Anyways, guys, I got to run. If you guys want to, check out Funnel Fridays or Funnel Feast. That's where I do kind of what we do on Funnel Fridays, but more in depth usually on Saturdays. Check out FunnelFeast.com if you want.
All right, guys. Talk to you later. Bye.
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