The Russell Brunson Show

In this podcast, Russell Brunson discusses the power of ClickFunnels and their experience selling it. They also talk about the secret project and their unique culture. They explore the competitive mentality in both wrestling and business and the challenges of selling software after transitioning from the info market space.

Enjoy part two of this classic episode series where Andrew Warner from Mixergy interviews Russell on the ClickFunnels startup story! Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- Alright everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I hope yesterday you enjoyed part one of the Clickfunnels start up story interview at the Dry Bar Comedy Club with Andrew. I love the way he interviews. I hope you’re enjoying it as well. So we are going to dive right into part 2 of 4 from this interview. And again, if you’re liking these interviews please, please, please take a snapshot on your phone, post it on Facebook, Instagram or wherever you do your posting and tag me in it and use hashtag marketing secrets so I can see that you’re talking about it. I’d appreciate it. With that said, we’re going to queue up the theme song, when we come back we’ll start in on part 2 of the interview of the Clickfunnels start up story. Andrew: You know what, I’ve talked to a few of your people because they’re so good, that Dave could really be a leader on his own, start his own company, he’s got his own online reputation, the whole thing. I keep asking him, “Why do you work for Russell? What is it that lets you be second to Russell who’s getting all the attention?” And I’ve got some answers and would you mind coming up here and in a second I’m going to ask you. No, come back here and I’ll just bring you up in a second. Actually, you know what, it looks like you can come pretty fast. I thought that it would be a little bit more, I thought it would be more of a thing to get mics on people. And I realized if Collette can do it…. Okay honestly, dig down deep. Why did you want to stick with him? Brent: Through all that stuff? Andrew: Yeah. Brent: I don’t know. My heart was just racing. As he started telling that story, it just makes me sick to my stomach. As you scroll down and look at all those businesses of, for years, every 30 days it was a new business launch, it was crazy. Always why I stuck with him is, you know, Collette mentioned that spirit. He’s absolutely different than anybody else I’ve ever met in my entire life, a friend…. Andrew: Of what? Give me an example. Let’s be more specific. Back then, not today, he’s got this track record, adoring fans, I asked him to do an interview, everyone wants him on his podcast. Back then when it wasn’t going so well. Give me an example that let you know this is a guy who’s going to figure it out eventually, and I could possibly go down, watch him go to jail, but I believe that it’s going to go up. Brent: Well, at the time when things are crashing, I saw him as the income stopped. And he had started a program that he loves, obviously wrestling, and he brought an Olympic wrestling coach to Boise and he brought all these amazing wrestlers to Boise and he wanted them to be able to train and get to the Olympics, he wanted to help them get there and live their dream. And you know, he was supplementing, at the time the business was paying for these guys to do a little bit of work for us, they weren’t doing very much for us. But I saw him out of his own pocket, be paying for these guys. And I knew how hard he wanted to support them. And there was a day when my wife and I, we were struggling because I just, I was concerned about him financially because he was supplementing and trying to keep this business afloat, and we talked about things and I came into the office one day and I asked if I could talk to him and sat down, and kind of spoke in language that I normally don’t speak in, I might have dropped a bomb or two. It was, I was so concerned I pretty much told him, I can’t keep doing this, I can’t keep watching you every month pulling the money that you saved for your family to try keep jobs for other people. I said, I’ll leave if that helps you. And the fact that he stuck with people, that was the true character of who he is. Andrew: He kept paying your salary, kept sticking with you, and also constantly launching things. Brent: Absolutely. Andrew: That you’ve never seen anyone implement like him. Brent: You know some people call it faith or belief. He has this inherit belief that he can truly change people’s lives. Andrew: That’s it, even when he wasn’t fully in control of his own. Alright thanks. Thanks for, give him a big round of applause, thanks for being up here. I feel like this is the thing that helped get you out of trouble and potentially, and getting out of potential jail. What is this business that you created? Russell: So we, during the time of that and this there was time, probably a year and a half-two years that we were trying all sorts of stuff. And again, marginal success on a lot of them, nothing like….and this was the one, we actually, this is before….I’ve done a lot of webinars and speaking from seminars and stuff like that, but this is right when auto webinars were coming out and Mike Filsaime had just done an auto webinar and a couple of people, and I felt like that was going to be the future thing. So we’re like, what do we do the webinar on? We didn’t know. And we flew out to Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher’s office for two days and picked their brains, went to Rich Schefren’s office for a day. And then on the flight home, I’m just like sick to my stomach. I couldn’t figure out what’s the thing that we could serve people the most right now. And on the flight home I was like, all the internet marketing stuff we do works for internet marketers, but we’re way better at like local business. Like if a chiropractor implements like two things it works. Or if a dentist does it. But I was like, I don’t want to be the guy going to dentists, but we could be the backbone for that. What if we created an opportunity where people could come in, we train them, and we connect them with the right tools and resources, and then they could go and sell to chiropractors and dentists. And that’s what the idea was. We turned it into an offer called Dotcom Secrets Local, it was a thousand dollar offer at the time. Did the auto webinar for it, and it launched and within 90 days it had done over a million dollars, which covered payroll taxes and then got us out of debt to the point now we could stop and dream again, and believe again and try to figure out what we really wanted to do. Andrew: Dotcom Secrets Local to a million dollars within 90 days. And how did you find the people who were going to sign up for this. A lot of us will have landing pages like this, we’ll have these funnels. How did you get people in this funnel? Russell: And this was pre-Facebook too, so it wasn’t just like go turn Facebook ads on. But you know, one thing that happened over all the years prior to this, I’d met a lot of people and go to a lot of events and get to know everybody. And everyone I met, you know, you meet a lot of people who have lists, they have followings, they have different things like that. I just got to know them really, really well. And in the past I’d promote a lot of their products, they’d promote my products. So we had this one and we did it first to my list, and it did really well. So I then I then called them and I’m like, “Okay, I did this webinar to my list, these are the numbers, it did awesome. Do you want to do it to your list as well?” and they’re like, “Oh sure. Sounds like a great offer.” We did that list and it did good for them too. And we told the next person and then, if you have a webinar, it’s kind of like the speaking circuit, if you’re good at speaking then people will put you all over the place. Same thing, if you have a webinar that converts, then it’s easy to get a lot of people to do it. So as soon as that one worked and it converted well, then people lined up and we kept doing it, doing it, and doing it, and it was really quick to get to that spot pretty quick. Andrew: I went on Facebook recently and I saw webinar slides from Russell Brunson, I went to the landing page, Clickfunnels page and I signed up and I’ll talk about it maybe later, but I bought it and I know other people did. And I’ve seen other people say, “Russell’s webinar technique is the thing that just works.” I’m wondering how did you figure it out? How did you come across this and how did you build it and make it work? Russell: Yeah, so rewind back probably ten years prior to this, when I was first learning this whole business. I went to my very first internet marketing seminar ever, it was Armand Morin’s Big Seminar. Did you ever go to Big Seminar? Anyway, I went to it and I had no idea what to expect. I thought it was going to be like, I showed up with my laptop and I was going to like, I thought we were a bunch of geeks going to do computer stuff. And the first person got onstage and started speaking and at the end of it he sold like a two thousand dollar thing. And I’d never seen this before. I saw people jumping up and running to the back of the room to buy it. And I’m like this little 23 year old kid and I was counting the people in the back of the room, doing the math, you know doing the math and I’m like, that guy made 60 thousand dollars in an hour. And the next guy gets up and does his presentation and I watch this for three days and I was like, I’m super shy and introverted, but that skill is worth learning. If someone can walk on a stage and make 100,000 dollars in an hour, I need to learn how to do that. So I started that. And it was really bad for the first probably 8 or 9 months. I tried to do it. I’d go to places and I just, I couldn’t figure it out. And then I started asking the people who were good because you go there and all the speakers kind of talk and hang out, and I’d watch the ones that always had the people in the back of the room. And I’d ask them questions, I’m like, ‘What did I do wrong? I feel like I’m teaching the best stuff possible.’ And they’re like, ‘That’s the problem, it’s not about teaching, it’s about stories, telling stories and breaking beliefs.” So for about the next two years I was about once a month flying somewhere to speak, and then when I would go I would meet all the speakers and find out what they were doing and I’d watch them and I’d take notes on the different things they were saying and how they were saying it. And then I kept taking my presentation and tweaking it, and tweaking it, and tweaking it. And you know, now 12 years later, I’ve done so many webinars, it kind of worked. The process works now. Andrew: You are a really good story teller and I’ve seen you do that. I’ve seen you do it, and I know you’re going to do it even more. What I’m curious about is the belief system that you were saying, breaking people’s…what was it that you said? Russell: False beliefs. Andrew: Breaking people’s false beliefs. How do you understand what, like as you look at this audience, do you understand what some of our false beliefs are? Russell: If I knew what I was selling I could figure out for sure. Andrew: If you knew what you were selling. Alright we’re selling this belief that entrepreneurship does work. And I know we’re all going to go through a period like some of the ones that you had where things just aren’t’ working, other people aren’t believing in us, almost failure, what is at that point, the belief system that we have to work on? What do you recognize in people here? Russell: So usually there’s three core beliefs that people have. The first is about the opportunity itself right. So like with entrepreneurship, the first belief that people have is could I actually be an entrepreneur? And some people who actually believe that, they’re like, I’m in. And that’s an easy one. But for those who don’t there’s a reason and usually it’s like, they saw a parent that tried to do it. And the parent tried to be an entrepreneur and wasn’t able to and they saw that failure. Or they’d tried it in the past and they failed or whatever it is. So it’s showing them that even if you tried in the past and showed different ways, let me tell you a story. And for me, I could show 800 different failures. But eventually you get better and you get better until eventually you have the thing that actually works. So I tell a story to kind of show that, to make them believe that, oh my gosh maybe I just need to try a couple more times. And then the second level of beliefs is like beliefs about themselves like, I’m sure it works for you, Russell or Andrew but not for me because I’m different. It’s helping them figure out their false beliefs, and if you can break that, then the third one is like, then they always want to blame somebody else. “I could lose lots of weight but my wife buys lots of cupcakes and candy. So I could do it, but because of that I can’t.” So then it’s like figuring out how you break the beliefs of the external people that are going to keep them. Andrew: And how would you know what that is? How would you know who the external influencers are, that your potential customers are worried about? Russell: I think for most of us it’s because the thing that we’re selling is something that, one of our, Nick Barely said “Our mess becomes our message.” For most of us, what we’re selling is the thing we struggled with before. So I think back about me as 12 year old Russell, watching Don Lepre, like what would have kept me back? And I would have been like, I can’t afford classified ads. Like if you showed me how I can, if you could tell me a story of, oh my gosh I could afford classified ads. Now that belief’s gone and now I’m going to go give you money. It’s just kind of remembering back to the state that you were in when you were trying to figure this stuff out as well. Andrew: Who was who I met when we were coming in here that said that they were part of Russell’s mastermind and I asked how much did you pay and he said, “I’m not telling you.” I can’t see who that person was. But I know you got a mastermind, people coming in. I’m wondering how much of it comes from that? working with people directly, seeing them in the group share openly, and then saying, ah, this is what my potential customers are feeling? Russell: 100% At this point especially. People always ask me, “Where do you go, Russell, to learn stuff?” and it’s my mastermind, because I bring, all the people come in and they’re all in different industries and you see that. You see the road blocks that hold people back, but then they also share the stuff that they’re doing and it’s like, that’s 100% now where I get most of my intell. Because people ask me, “Why, you’re a software company, why in the world do you have a mastermind group?” And it’s because the reason why our software is good is because we have the mastermind group, where they’re all crowd sourcing, they’re doing all this stuff and bringing back to us, and then we’re able to make shifts and pivots based on that. Andrew: Somehow we just lost Apple, but that’s okay. It’s back, good. There we go. This is the next thing, Rippln. Russell: I forgot I put that one in there. Andrew: I went back and I watched the YouTube video explaining it. It’s a cartoon. I thought it was a professional voice over artist, no it’s you. You’re really comfortable getting on stage and talking. But basically in that video that you guys can see in the top left of your screen, it’s Russell, through this voice over and cartoon explaining, “Look, you guys were around in the early days of Facebook, you told your friends, here’s how many friends you would have had, for the sake of numbers, let’s say you told 7 people and let’s say they told 7 people, and that’s how things spread. And the same thing happened with Pinterest and all these other sites. Don’t you ever wish that instead of making them rich by telling stuff, you made yourself rich? Well here’s how Rippln comes in.” and then you created it. And Rippln was what? Russell: So Rippln was actually one of my friend’s ideas, and he is a network marketing guy so he’s like, “We’re building a network marketing program.” And I’d like dabbled in network marketing, never been involved with it. And he came and was like, “Hey, be part of this.” And I was like, “No.” and then he sold us on the whole pitch of the idea, network marketers are really good at selling you on vision, and I was like, “Okay, that sounds awesome.” And then my role was to write the pitch. So I wrote the pitch, did the voice over, did the video, and then we launched it and we had in six weeks, it was like 1.5 million people signed up for Rippln, and I thought it was like, “This is the thing, I’m done.” My down line was like half of the company. And I was like, when this thing goes live, it’s going to be amazing. And then the tech side of it, what we’re promising people in this video that the main developer ended up dying and he had all the code. So they had to restart building it in the middle of this thing. And it was like thing after thing and by the time it finally got done, everyone had lost interest. It was like 8 months later, and I think the biggest check I got was like $47 for the whole thing. And I was just like, I spent like 6 months of my life. It was like a penny a day. It was horrible. Andrew: I’m just wondering whether I should ask this or not. Russell: Go for it. Andrew: So I stopped asking about religion, but I get the sense that you believe that there’s a spiritual element here that keeps you from seeing, my down line is growing, the whole thing is working. Is any of this, does it feel divinely inspired to you? Be honest. Russell: Business or…? Andrew: Business, life, success, things working out, so much so that when you’re at your lowest, you feel like there’s some divine guidance, some divine hand that says, “Russell, it’s going to work out. Russell, I don’t know if I got you, but I know you got this. Go do it.” I feel that from you and I… Russell: I 100% believe that. Andrew: You do? Russell: Every bit of it. I believe that God gives us talents and gifts and abilities and then watches what we do with it. And if we do good then he increases our capacity to do more. And if we do good with it, increases our capacity… Andrew: if you earn it? If you do good, if you use what God gives you, then you get more. So you think that that is your duty to do that and if you don’t do more, if you don’t pick yourself up after Rippln, you’ve let down God. Do you believe that? Is that it? Or that you haven’t lived up to… Russell: Yeah, I don’t think I feel that I’ve let down God, but I definitely feel like I haven’t lived up to my potential, you know. But also I feel like a lot of stuff, as I was putting together that document, all the pages, it’s interesting because each one of them, looking in hindsight, each built upon the next thing and the next thing. And there’s twice we tried to build Clickfunnels and each one was like the next level, and each one was a stepping stone. Like Rippln, if I wouldn’t have done Rippln, that was my very first viral video we ever created. I learned how to pitch things and when we did the Clickfunnels initial sales video, because I had done this one, I knew how to do this one. So for me, it’s less of like I let down God, as much as like, it’s just like the piece, what are you going to do with this? Are you going to do something with it? It doesn’t mean it’s going to be successful, but it means, if you do well with this, then we’re going to increase your capacity for the next step, and the next thing. But we definitely, especially in times at the office, we talk about this a lot. We definitely feel that what we do is a spiritual mission. Andrew: You do? Russell: 100% yeah. I don’t think that it’s just like, we’re lucky. I think the way that the people have come, the partnerships, how it was created is super inspired. Andrew: You know what, a lot of us are selling things that are software, PDF guide, this, that, it’s really hard to find the bigger mission in it. You’re finding the bigger mission in Funnels. What is that bigger mission? Really, how do you connect with it? Because you’re right, if you can find that bigger meaning then the work becomes more meaningful and you’re working with become, it’s more exciting to work with them, more meaningful to do it. How did you find it in funnels? What is the meaning? Russell: So for us, and I’m thinking about members in my inner circle, so right now as of today I think we had 68,000 members in Clickfunnels, which is the big number we all brag about. But for me, that’s 68,000 entrepreneurs, each one has a gift. So I think about, one member I’ll mention his name’s Chris Wark, he runs chrisbeatcancer.com and Chris was someone who came down with cancer and was given a death sentence, and instead of going through chemo therapy he decided, ‘I’m going to see if I can heal myself.” And he did. Cleared himself of cancer. And then instead of just being like, ‘cool, I’m going to go back into work.’ He was like, ‘Man I need to help other people.’ So he started a blog and started doing some things, and now he’s got this thing where he’s helped thousands and thousands of people to naturally cure themselves of cancer. And that’s one of our 68,000 people. Andrew: See, you’re focusing on him where I think a lot of us would focus on, here’s one person who’s just a smarmy marketer, and here’s who’s creating….but you don’t. That’s not who you are. Look, I see it in your eyes and you’re shaking your head. That’s not it at all, it’s not even a put on. Russell: It’s funny because for me it’s like, I understand because I get it all the time from people all the time, “Oh he’s this slimy marketer.” The first time people meet me, all the time, the first time their introduced, that’s a lot of times the first impression. And they get closer and they feel the heart and it’s just like, “oh my gosh, I had you wrong.” I get that all the time from people. Andrew: Brian, sorry Ryan and Brad, are either of them here? Would one of you come up here? Yeah, come on up. Because they felt that way, right? Russell: I don’t know about them. I know who you’re thinking about. Audience member: I think it’s Theron. {Crosstalk} Andrew: No, no stay up here, as long as you’re here. Theron come on up. Audience member: If it wasn’t me, then I’m going to sit back in the seats. Andrew: Are you nervous? Audience member: A little bit. Is there another Ryan and Brad? Russell: Different story, another story. Do you want to come up? Theron had no idea we were bringing him onstage. Andrew: Come on over here. Let’s stand in the center so we can get you on camera. Does this help? Russell: Do you want me to introduce Theron real quick? Andrew: Yeah, please. Russell: So Theron is one of the Harmon Brothers, they’re the ones who did the viral video for us. Andrew: I heard that you felt that he was a scam. What was the situation and how did you honestly feel? Theron: I don’t know that it…well… Russell: Be honest. Theron: I know, I don’t think that I felt that Clickfunnels itself was a scam, Russell: Just Russell. Theron: But that it just felt like so many of the ways that the funnels were built and the types of language they were using, it felt like it was that side of the internet. So I became very, well basically we were kind of in a desperate situation, where we had a video that had not performed and not worked out the way we wanted it to work out. Andrew: The video that you created for Russell? Theron: No, another client. Andrew: Another client, okay. Theron: And so our CEO had used Clickfunnels product to help drive, I think it was attendance to a big video event. And so he had some familiarity with the product, so he goes to Russell and at the same time Russell’s like, “I’m a big fan of you guys.” So he’s coming to us and these things are happening. Yeah, it was almost the same day. So we’re thinking like this and we’re like, “Well, they seem to really know how to drive traffic, to really know how to drive conversion. And we feellike we know how to drive conversion as well, but for some reason we missed it on this one.” So we’re like, “Well, let’s do a deal.” Andrew: What do you mean missed it? Okay, go ahead, go through to the end. Theron: We were failing our client. We were failing on our client. We weren’t giving them and ROI. So we said, let’s do a deal with Russell and we’ll have our internal team compete with his team, and we’re humble enough to say we’re failing our client. We want our client to succeed, let’s bring in their team and see if they can make a funnel that can bring down the cost for acquisition, bring up the return on investment for our client, and they were able to do it.  And then we said, what we’ll do is we’ll write a script, we’ll take you through our script writing process, but we don’t want to do the video because we don’t want to be affiliated with you. Russell: The contract said, “You can’t tell anyone ever that the Harmon Brothers wrote the script for you.” Andrew: Wow, because you didn’t want to be associated with something that you thought was a little too scammy for… Theron: Yeah, we just didn’t want our brand kind of brought down to their brand, which is super arrogant and really wrong headed. And in any case, so we go into this script writing training, and I wasn’t following his podcast, I wasn’t listening to enough. I mean, read Dotcom Secrets, those kinds of things are like, well, there’s some really valuable stuff there, this is really interesting. A nd then as we got to know each other and really start to connect, like you said, heart to heart. And to feel what he’s really about, and the types of team, the people that he surrounds himself with, I was like, wow, these are really, really good people. And they have a mission here that they feel, just like we feel that about our own group. And in any case, by the end of that 2 day retreat we’re like, all off in private saying, “First of all we like what we’ve written and second of all, we’d really like to work with these guys and I think we’re plenty happy being connected to them and associated with them.” So it’s been a ride and a blessing ever since. Russell: We’re about to start video number two with them. Andrew: You what? Russell: We’re about to start video number two with them right now. Theron: Anyway, we love them. Andrew: Alright, give him a big round, yeah. Thanks. This was pivotal for you guys. Lead Pages, there’s an article about how Lead Pages raised $5 million, and you saw that and you thought… Russell: Well, what happened was Todd, so Todd’s the cofounder of Clickfunnels, and he was working with us at the time and he would fly to Boise about once a quarter and we’d work on the next project, the new idea. And that morning he woke up and he saw that, and then he forwarded me the article. And he’s Atlanta, so it’s east coast, so I’m still in bed. And he’s got a 4 hour flight to Boise and he’s just getting angry, because Todd is, Todd’s like a genius. He literally, when he landed in Boise and he saw me and he’s like, “We can build Lead Pages tonight. I will clone, I will beat it. We’re going to launch this, this week while we’re here.” He’s that good of a developer. He, I’ve never seen someone code as fast and as good as him. He’s amazing. So he comes in, he’s mad because he’s like, “This is the stupidest site in the world. We could literally clone this. Let’s just do it.” And I’m like, “Yes, let’s clone it.” And we’re all excited and then he’s like, “Do you want me to add any other features while I’m doing it.” And I’m like, ‘Oh, yes. We should do this, and we should do this.” And then the scope creep from the marketer comes, and we ended up spending an entire week in front of a whiteboard mapping out all my dreams, “If we could do this and this and what kind of shopping cart, and we could do upsells, and what if we could actually move things on the page instead of just having it sit there. And what if…” and Todd’s just taking notes and everything. And then he’s like, “Okay, I think I could do this.” And he told me though, “If I do this, I don’t want to do this as an employee. I want to do this as a partner.” And at first I was like, ugh, because I didn’t want to do the partnership thing. And then the best decision I’ve ever made in my life, outside of marrying my wife was saying yes to Todd. Said, “Let’s do it.” And then he flew home and built Clickfunnels. Andrew: Wow. And this is after trying software so much. I have screenshots of all the different, it’s not even worth going into it, of all the different products you created, there was one about, it was digital repo, right? Russell: That was a good idea. Andrew: Digital Repo, man. What was…. Russell: So I used to sell ebooks and stuff, and people would steal it and email it to their friends and I’d get angry. Andrew: Can I read this? How to protect every type of lowlife and other form of human scum from cheating you from the profits you should be making by hijacking, stealing, and illegally prostituting….your online digital products. Russell: Theron, why did you think we were…..Just kidding. So no, it was this really cool product where you take an ebook and it would protect it, and if somebody gave it to their friend, you could push a button and it would take back access. It was like the coolest thing in the world, we thought. Andrew: And there was software that was going to attach your ad to any other software that was out there. There was software that was going to, what are some of the other ones? It’s going to hit me later on. But we’re talking about a dozen different pieces of software, a dozen different attempts at software. What’s one? I thought somebody remembered one of them. They’re just the kind of stuff you’d never think of. There was one that was kind of like Clickfunnels, an early version of Clickfunnels for landing pages. Why did you want to get into software when you were teaching, creating membership sites? What was software, what was drawing you to it? Russell: I think honestly, when I first learned this internet marketing game, the first mentor I had, the first person I saw was a guy name Armand Morin and Armand had all these little software products. Ecover generator, sales letter generator, everything generator, so that’s what I kept seeing. I was like, I need to create software because he made software. In fact, I even shifted my major from, I can’t remember what it was before, to computer information systems, because I was like, I’m going to learn how to code, because I couldn’t afford programmers. And then that’s just kind of what I’d seen. And then I was trying to think of ideas for software. And every time I would get stuck, instead of trying to find something to do, I’d be like let me just, let me just hire a guy to go build that, and then I can sell it somebody else as well. So that’s kind of how it started. Andrew: And it was a lot of different tools, a lot of different attempts, and then this one was the one that you went with. I think this is an early version of the home page, basically saying, “Coming soon, sign up.” The first one didn’t work out. And then you saw someone else on a forum who had a version that was better. What was his name? This is I think Dylan Jones. Russell: Oh you’re talking about the editor, yes. Okay, so the story was, Todd built the first version of Clickfunnels and Dylan who became one of our cofounders, I’d been working with Dylan as a designer for about 6 years prior. And he his hands, and we talked about this earlier, he is the best designer I’ve ever seen in my life, he is amazing. He would, but he’s also, this is the pros and cons of Dylan. He, I’ve talked about this onstage at Funnel Hacking Live, so I have no problem saying this. He would agree. But I would give him a project, and I couldn’t hear, he wouldn’t respond back to me, and I wouldn’t hear from him for 2 or 3 months, and then one day in the middle of the night he messaged me, “Hey, rent’s due tomorrow. Do you have any projects for me?” and I’d be so mad at him, and I look back at every project we’d done in the last 3 or 4 months that other designers had done, and I’d just resend him all the lists, just boom, give him 12 sites and I’d go to bed. I’d wake up 5 or 6 hours later and all of them were done, perfectly, amazing, some of the best designs ever, and then he’d send me a bill for whatever, and then I’d send him money and he’d disappear again for like 5 months. And I could never get a hold of him. I’d be like, “I need you to tweak something.” And he was just gone. And that was my pattern for 6 years with him. And then fast forward to when Todd and I were building Clickfunnels, we were at Traffic Conversion and we were up in the hotel room at like 3 in the morning trying to, we were on dribble.com trying to find a UI designer to help us, and we couldn’t get a hold of all these people, and all the sudden on Skype Dylan popped in, I saw his thing pop up. I was like, “Todd, Dylan just showed up.” And he’s like, “Do you think he needs some money?” I’m like, “I guarantee he needs money.” So I’m like, “Hey man!” And Dylan messaged back. He’s like, “Hey.” I’m like, “Do you need some money?” and he’s like, “Yeah, you got any projects?” I’m like, “Yes, I do.” I’m like, “We built this cool thing, it’s called Clickfunnels, but the UI is horrible and the editor is horrible and there’s any way we could hire you for a week to fly to Boise and just do all the UI for every single page of the app?” and he kind of said no at first because, “I’m developing my own website builder. I might have spent 6 years on it, so I can’t do it.” Andrew: It was this, he had something that was essentially Clickfunnels, right? Russell: No, no. It was just pages though, so it’d just do pages, there was no funnels. Andrew: Right, closer to Lead Pages. Russell: Lead Pages, but amazing. You could move things around. But he did tell me that, “I’m working on something.” So eventually we got him to come, flew to Boise, spent a week, did all of our UI, and then we went and launched our beta to my list. So we launched the beta, got some signups, and then a week before the launch, launch was supposed to happen, all the affiliates were lined up, everything was supposed to happen. He sends me, I don’t know if he sent you the video, but he sends me this little video that’s like a 30 second video of him demoing the editor he’d built. And I probably watched that video, I don’t know, at least a hundred times. And I was just sick to my stomach because I was like, “I hate Clickfunnels right now. I can’t move things on my pages, I can’t do anything.” I was just, and I sent it to Todd and then I didn’t hear from him for like an hour, and he messaged me back and he’s like, “I’m pissed.” I’m like, “Me too.” And I’m like, “What do we do?” and I was like, “We have to have his editor or I don’t even want to sell this thing.” And I called Dylan and I’m like, “Would you be willing to sell?” and he’s like, “No, I’m selling it and we’re going to sell it for $100.” It was like $100 this one time for this editor that designed all the websites. I was like, “Dude, it is worth so much more than that. Please?” and we spent all night going back and forth negotiating. And finally, we came to like, “I will give you this editor if I can be a cofounder and be a partner.” And Todd and I sat there, brainstorming and figured out if we could do it and finally said yes. And then him and Dylan and Todd flew back to Boise and for the next week just sat in a room with a whole bunch of caffeine and figured out how to smush Dylan’s editor into Clickfunnels to get the editor to be the editor that you guys know today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Enjoy part one of this classic episode series where Andrew Warner from Mixergy interviews Russell on the ClickFunnels startup story! Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- Good morning everybody, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. And you guys are in for a very special treat over the next four episodes. So let me give you some context on what’s going to happen, and why you should be so excited. Alright so, my favorite podcast, other than mine of course, that all of you guys should be subscribed to is called Mixergy. Andrew Warner is the guy who runs Mixergy podcast and I love that podcast because of Andrew. He is my favorite interviewer. If you look at how a lot of people do interview podcasts, they ask questions and I don’t know, I’ve suffered from this in the past as well. I’m not a good interviewer, at least not now. I’d like to learn how to do that skill, but I’m not a great interviewer. And most people who do podcasts with interviews aren’t like great interviewers, but Andrew is like the best interviewer I’ve ever seen. The way he asks questions, how deep he goes and the research he does before the interviews, and all sorts of stuff. Anyway, I love his style, love how he does it so what’s cool, I’ve actually been on the show twice in the past. And the first time, I don’t even, sorry, the second time, he totally caught me off guard. I remember he asked me some questions and I didn’t really know and I responded and he told me after, he told me live on the interview that he doesn’t edit his interviews. He was like, “Well, that was the worst answer you’ve ever given.” I was like, “Oh, thanks.” Anyway, it just totally caught me off guard, but it was cool the way that he just like kind of holds your feet to the fire. So a little while ago I thought, I want to tell the Clickfunnels startup story. But I didn’t want me to just to tell it, I wanted someone who would tell it from a different angle, who would ask the questions that I think people would want to know and do it in a really cool way. So I called Andrew and I’m like, “Hey, I’ve been wanting to do this thing, and I want to do an event around it. Would you be interested.” And he was like, luckily he said yes. So it’s funny, Andrew’s famous, I think I might have talked about this in the interview too, but he’s famous for these scotch nights he does, and as a Mormon I don’t drink so I can’t go to his scotch nights. So when we planned this interview, we planned it in Provo, Utah at this place called the Dry Bar Comedy Club. So a dry bar is a bar with no alcohol. So it was kind of a funny thing. We brought those two things, my world and his world together in this one spot to a dry bar, and told the Clickfunnels startup story. And it was cool, ahead of time he did so much research. He interviewed people who love me, people who hated me, he interviewed our old business partners who are no longer part of the business. He did everything and then he came and I told him, “Everything’s, you can ask me any question you want. Nothing, no holds barred, feel free to do whatever you want.” So we did the interview and it was about two hours long, and I loved it. I think it turned out amazing. And I hope you guys like it too. So I’ll tell you some of the details about the Clickfunnels startup story. How we built what we did, what happened, the ups, the downs, the negatives, the positives. He brings a couple of people up onstage to tell their parts of the story. Anyway, I really hope you enjoy it. So what we’re going to do, I’m going to have each episode over the next four episodes be about thirty minutes long so you can listen to them in pieces. I hope iyou enjoy them, I hope you love them. And if you do, please, please, please take a screen shot of your phone when you’re listening to it, and go post it on Instagram or Facebook and tag me. And then do hashtag marketing secrets and hopefully that will get more people to listen to the podcast. And then please, if you haven’t yet, go rate and review, which would be amazing. So with that said, I’m going to queue up the theme song and when we come back we will start immediately into part one of four of the Dry Bar Comedy Club Interview. Keith Yacky: Clickfunnels has changed a lot of our lives. We all have an origin story. Mine was something similar to, I set up my website on GoDaddy and things were going great. And then Dave Woodward was like, “Dude, you need Clickfunnels.” I’m like, “I don’t need a Clickfunnel. I don’t even know what a Clickfunnel is.” And he’s like, “No, seriously man. This is going to totally change your business.” I’m like, “Bro, I have GoDaddy. They have a commercial on the Super Bowl, Clickfunnels doesn’t. But when they do, I’ll do it.” Well, boy was I wrong. I changed over and it absolutely changed our business and changed our lives. So thank you for that, Dave. But here’s the thing, in every industry there’s somebody that comes along that really disrupts the industry, that really changes it, and that really does something amazing for that industry. And as we all, why we’re here, we know that person is Russell Brunson. And he has changed a lot of our lives. So before I bring him up here, they have asked me to ask you to make sure you don’t do any live recording of this next interview, because the gloves are coming off and they want to be able to present it to the world. You can do little Instagram clips if you’d like, like 15 second ones and tag them. My understanding is the best hashtag and the best clip, gets a date with Drew. I don’t know, that’s just what they told me. So blame them. But with that, again, no videoing, and let us just absolutely take the roof off this place as we bring up our beloved Russell Brunson. Give it up guys. Russell: Alright, well thanks for coming you guys. This is so cool. I’m excited to be here. So a couple of real quick things before we get started. For all of you guys who know, who came to be part of this, we had you all donate a little bit of money towards Operation Underground Railroad, and I’m really excited because Melanie told me right before I got here the total of how much money we raised from this little event for them. So I think the final number was a little over $13,000 was raised for Operation Underground Railroad. So thank you guys for your continued support with them. Just to put that in perspective, that’s enough money to save about 5 children from sex slavery. So it’s a big deal and a life changing thing, so it’s pretty special. So I’m grateful for you guys donating money to come here. And hopefully you’ve had a good time so far. Has it been fun? I really want to tuck my shirt in now, I’m feeling kind of awkward. No it’s been awesome. Okay so what we’re going to do now, I want to introduce the person who’s going to be doing the interview tonight. And it’s somebody I’m really excited to have here. In fact, I met him for the first time like an hour ago, in person. But I want to tell kind of the reason why I wanted him to do this, and why we’re all here. And I’m grateful he said yes, and was willing to come out here and kind of do this. So Andrew runs a podcast called Mixergy. How many of you guys in here are Mixergy listeners? Mixergy is my favorite podcast, I love it. He’s interviewed thousands of people about their startup stories and about how they started their businesses. And it’s really cool because he brings in entrepreneurs and he tells, gets them to tell their stories. But what’s unique about what Andrew does that’s fascinating, the way he interviews people is completely different, it’s unique. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I don’t like a lot of interview shows because a lot of them are just kind of high level. Everyone you listen to with Andrew, he gets really, really deep. The other fun thing is he doesn’t edit his interviews. So there was one interview, I’ll tease him about this right now. But I was listening to it on my headphones, and him and the guest got in kind of an argument and a fight and then it just ended and they aired it. I was like, “I can’t believe you aired that, it was amazing.” And then I was on his podcast a little while later, and he asked me some questions that I couldn’t quite understand perfectly, so I was trying to respond the best I could and kind of fumbled through it. And instead of letting me off the hook, his response was, “Man Russell, that was probably the worst answer I’ve ever heard you give in any interview ever.” And I was like, “Oh my gosh.” So I’m excited for tonight because I told it was like no holds barred and he could ask me anything he wants about the ups of Clickfunnels, the downs of Clickfunnels and anything else, and it’s going to be a lot of fun. So I’m excited to have him here. So with that said, let’s put our hands together for Mr. Andrew Warner. Andrew Warner: I think my mic is right over here. Thank you everyone, thanks Russell for having me here. Most people will contact me after I interview them and say, “Could you please not air the interview?” And you actually had me back here to do it in person. And you were so nice, you even got us this room here. Check this out, they set us up, they’re so nice at Clickfunnels. They said, “Andrew, you’re staying here, we’re going to put you and your family up the night before in a room.” My wife was so good, look that’s her journaling. My kids were playing around, sleeping in the same, sleeping together, enjoying themselves. And then I went to call somebody who was basically let go from Clickfunnels. And my wife goes, “Andrew, why do you have to do that? That’s not why they invited you here.” And I said, “I do know Russell. I know the team. They actually did invite me to really help get to the story of how Clickfunnels started, how it built up.” And the reason I was up calling people, understanding the story is because I want to make it meaningful for you. I’ve talked to a lot of you as you were coming in here, you want to know how they got here, what worked for Clickfunnels, what would work for us. So that’s my goal here, to spend the time understanding by interviewing you about how you did it. So I want to go way back to a guy a few of you might recognize, and I know you would, and ask you what drew you to this guy when you were younger? Russell: Don Lepre Clip: “One tiny classified ad in the newspaper that makes just 30-40 dollars profit in a week, it could make you a fortune, because the secret is learning how to take that one tiny classified that just made 30-40 dollars profit in a week, and to realize that you could now take that same exact ad and place it in up to 3,000 other newspapers around the country….” Russell: I’m having nostalgia right now. So this is the story of that, I was 12, 13 years old, something like that, and I was watching the news with my dad. And usually he’s like, “Go to bed Russell.” And he didn’t that night and then the news got over and I think he thought I was asleep and Mash came on. So Mash started playing and then it got over, and then this infomercial showed up. And I’m laying there on the couch watching Don Lepre talk about tiny classified ads, I was totally freaking out and I jumped up and begged my dad to buy it and he said no. And I was like, “Are you kidding? Did you not listen to what he said?” Did you guys just hear that? That was a good pitch huh? It’s really good. I love a good pitch. It is so good. So I went and asked my dad if I could earn the money. So I went and mowed lawns and earned the money and ordered the kit and I still have the original books to this day. Andrew: Were you disappointed? I bought it too. It was the dream of being able to do it. Russell: That’s why I like you so much, that’s amazing. Andrew: And it’s just, all he sent you was a bunch of paper guides with how to buy ads, right. Were you disappointed when you got that? Russell: No, I was excited. I think for me because the vision was cast, it was like, he said right there word for word, you make 40 dollars a newspaper, and if you’re disappointed, but he put that same ad in 3,000 newspapers, imagine that. So I had the vision of that, I think the only thing I was disappointed in, I didn’t have any money to actually buy an ad. And that was more like, I can’t actually do it now. Andrew: You are a champion wrestler and then you got here. Is your wife here? Russell: My beautiful wife right here, Collette. Andrew: Hey Collette. And your dad had a conversation with you about money, what did he say? Russell: So up to that point my dad had supported me, and I figured he would the rest of my life, I think. I don’t know. So I was 21 almost 22 at this time, I was wrestling so I couldn’t get a job because I was wrestling all the time. Then I met Collette, fell in love with her and then I called my parents and I was like, “Hey, I’m going to marry her. I’m going propose to her and everything.” Expecting them to be like, “Sweet, that’ll be awesome.” And my mom was all excited, I’m not going to lie. But then my dad was like, “Just so you know if you get married, you have to be a man now. You have to support yourself.” And I was like, “I don’t know how to do that, I’m wrestling.” And he’s like, “Well, I’m not going to keep paying for you to do it.” I’m like, “But I literally got the ring. I have, I can’t not propose now.” So that was kind of the thing. So it was interesting because about that time there was another infomercial, there’s the pattern, about I can’t remember exactly the name of the company, but they were doing an event at the local Holiday inn that was like, “Hey, you’re going to build websites and make money.” And it was like the night or two days after I told my dad this and he was like, “you’re in trouble.” And all the sudden I saw that, so I was like, there’s the answer. So I’m at the holiday in two days later, sitting in the room, hearing the pitch, signing up for stuff I shouldn’t have bought. There’s the pattern. Andrew: Did you feel like a loser getting married at 22 and still counting on your dad for money? Did you feel like you were marrying a loser? Russell: Actually, this is a sad story because she actually, my roommate at the time, she actually asked him, “Do you think he’s going to be able to support me in the future?” and he was like, “Yeah, I think so.” I’m like, I didn’t know this until later. I don’t think I felt like a loser, but I definitely was nervous, like oh my gosh. Because my whole identity at that point in my life was I was a wrestler and if that was to disappear…I couldn’t have that disappear. So I was like, I have to figure out something. There’s gotta be some way to do both. Andrew: To both what? To be a wrestler and make money from some infomercial? Russell: I didn’t know that was going to be the path, but yeah. Andrew: But you knew you were going to do something. What did you think that was going to be? Russell: I wasn’t sure. When I went to the event, they were selling these time share books and you could buy resale rights to them, so I was like, oh. And I remember back, because I remembered the Don Lepre stuff, so I was like, maybe I could buy classified ads and sell these things. And then I was at the event and they were talking about websites, and that was the first thing I’d heard about websites. And they’re talking about Google and the beginnings of this whole internet thing. So I was like, I can do that. It made all logical sense to me, I just didn’t know how to do it. I just knew that that was going to be the only path because if I had to get a job I wouldn’t be able to wrestle. So I was like, I have to figure out something that’s not going to be a 40 hour thing because I’m spending that time wrestling and going to school. So I had to figure out the best of how to do both. Andrew: And you obviously found it. My goal today is to go through this process of finding it. But let me skip ahead a little bit. What is this website? Russell: Oh man, alright. This is actually, the back story behind this is there was a guy named Vince James who wrote a book called the Twelve Month Millionaire. And if anybody’s got that book, it’s fat like a phone book. It’s a huge book. I read and I was like, this book’s amazing. And at the time I was an affiliate marketer, so I had a little bit, maybe a thousand people on my list. So I called up Vince and I was like, “Hey, can I interview you about the book and then I’ll use that as a tool to sell more copies of your book?” and he was like, “Sure.” So he jumped on the phone with me on a Saturday and he spent 3 hours letting me interview with any questions I had. And I got to the end of it and I still had a ton of questions and he’s like, “Well come back next week and do it again.” So I interviewed him for 6 hours about it. And then we used that to sell some copies of his book and then it just sat there, probably for 2 or 3 years as I was trying different ideas, different businesses and things like that. But every time I would talk to people I would tell them about this interview. I’m like, “I interviewed this guy who made a hundred million dollars through direct mail.” And everyone wanted to hear the interview, everybody asked me for it. So one day I was like, “Let’s just make that the product.” And we put it up here and this was the very first funnel we had that did over a million dollars, my first Two Comma Club funnel. Andrew: A million dollars. Do you remember what that felt like? Russell: It was amazing because it was funny back then. There were people, a few people who were making a lot of money online that I was watching and just idolizing everything they’d do. I was trying to model what they were doing. And I’d had little wins, you know $10,000 here, $15,000 here, but this was by far the first one that just hit. Everyone was so excited. Andrew: How’d you celebrate? Russell: I don’t even remember how we celebrated. Andrew: You married a winner after all. I mean really. Do you remember what you guys did to celebrate? No. Russell: I don’t even remember. (audience responding, inaudible) It was in my list. That’s a good question. Andrew: It’ll come up, that list is going to come up in a second too. You ended up creating Clickfunnels. How much revenue are you guys doing now, 2018? Russell: 2018 we’ll pass over a hundred million dollars, this year. Andrew:  A hundred million dollars, wowee. How far have you come? Russell: Like when did we start? Andrew: Today revenue, as of today, October 2018? Russell: Oh this year? Oh from the beginning of time until now? Andrew: No, no I mean I want to know, you’re going to do a hundred million dollars, are you at 10 and you’re hoping to get…. Russell: These guys know better than me, do you know exactly where we’re at right now? 83 million for the year. Andrew: 83! I love that Dave knows that right, so I want to know how you got to that. I went through your site, pages and pages that look like this. It’s like long form sales letters. I asked my assistant to take pictures, she said, “This is, I can’t do it, it’s too many.” Look at this guys. I asked him to help me figure out what he did. He created this list, this is not the full list, look at this. Every blue line is him finding an old archive of a page he created. It goes on and on like this. How long did it take you to put that together? Russell: It was probably 5 or 6 hours just to find all the pages. Andrew: 5 or 6 hours you spent to find these images to help me tell the story. Years and years of doing this, a lot of failure, what amazes me is you didn’t feel jaded and let down after Don Lepre sold you that stuff. You didn’t feel jaded and let down and say, ‘This whole make money thing is a failure.’ After, and we’re going to talk about some of your failures, you just kept going with that same smile, the same eagerness. Alright, let’s start with the very first business. What’s this one? This is called… Russell: Sublime Net. How many of you guys remember Sublime Net out there? Andrew: You guys remember this? Anyone remember it. You do? Russell: John does. So actually this is the first business for the first website I bought. I was so proud of it, and I spent, I don’t know, I wanted to sell software so I was like, ‘what could I name my company?” So I figured out Exciting Software. So I went to buy Exciteware.com, but it wasn’t for sale. So I bought Exciteware.net and Collette was working at the time and she came home and I was so excited, I’m like, “We got our first website. We’re going to be rich.”  And I told her the name, I was like, “It’s Exciteware.net.” and she looked at me with this look like, she’s like, “Are you selling underwear, what is the…lingerie?” I’m like, “No, it’s software.” And she’s like, “You can’t, I’m not going to tell my mom that you bought that. You gotta think of another name.” I’m like, “Crap.” So that was the next best name I came up with was Sublime Net. Like the band Sublime. That was it. Andrew: And I was going to ask you what it was, but it was lots of different things. Every screenshot on there is a whole other business under the same name. What are the businesses? Do you remember? Russell: There was website hosting, there was affiliates sites, there were, I can’t even remember now, trying to remember. Everything I could think of, resell rights…. Andrew: Lots of different things. How did you do, how well did you do? Russell: Never anything, very little. I remember the first thing I ever sold was an affiliate product, I made $20 on it through my Paypal account, because I remember that night, I do remember I celebrated. We went out to dinner and I had a Paypal credit card, and we bought dinner with $20 and then the guy refunded the next day. It was so sad. But I was proud that I had made money. Andrew: How did you support yourself while this was not working? Russell: I didn’t. My beautiful wife did, she had 2 jobs at the time to support me while I was wrestling and doing these things. She was the one who made it possible to gamble and risk and try crazy things. Andrew: Can I put you on the spot and ask you to just come over here and just tell me about this period and what you felt at the time? Is that, I know you don’t love being onstage, Russell is good with it, but I know you don’t love it. If you don’t mind, I’m just going to go with one more story and then I’ll come back to you. You cool with it? Good, she seems a little nervous. Actually, wait. Let’s see if we can get her right now. Oh you are, okay. Russell: Everyone, this is Collette, my beautiful wife. Andrew: Do you want to use his mic? Collette: Sure. Russell: She’s so mad at me right now. Collette: I wanted to come to this, who knew? Andrew: You are like his, he’s so proud that he had no venture funding. But you are like his first investor. Russell: That is true. Collette: Yes, I’ll be his first investor. Andrew: Can you hold the mic a little closer. How did you know he wasn’t a loser? No job, he’s wrestling, he’s buying infomercial stuff that doesn’t go anywhere. We know he did well, so we’re not insulting him now, but what did you see in him back then that let you say, ‘I’m going to work extra hard and pay for what he’s not doing?’ Collette: What did I see in him? It was actually his energy, his spirit, because I’m not going to lie, it was kind of not love at first site, we had, we were geeko’s, do you know what I mean? Shopped at the Goodwill, in baggy pants and tshirts, I don’t know. But it was the person who just was always positive and we had the same goals. Andrew: That’s the thing I noticed too, the positivity. When these businesses fail, we’re showing the few on the screen, it’s easy to look back and go, ‘ha ha, I did this and it was interesting.’ But at the time, what was the bounce back like when things didn’t work out? When the world basically said, you know what as sales people, when they don’t buy your stuff it’s like they don’t buy you. When the world basically said, ‘we don’t like you. We don’t like what you’ve created.’ What was the bounce back like? Hard? Collette: No, because I come from a hard working family. So I work hard. So you just work hard to make it work. Andrew: And he’s just an eternal optimistic, and you’re an eternal optimist too, like genuinely, really? Collette: Yeah, I guess. It works. Andrew: His dad said, ‘No more money. You had to cut up your credit cards too.’ Collette: Yeah. Andrew: What was, how did you cut up your credit cards. What was that day like? Collette: Hard. Yeah hard. Those that don’t know, I’m a little bit older than Russell. So I’ve always had this little bit of independency to go do and buy and do these things, and then all the sudden I’m like, step back sista! You gotta take care of this young man, so we can get to where we’re at. Anyway, but now… Andrew: Now things are good? Collette: Now things are amazing. Andrew: Alright, give her a big round of applause. Thanks for coming up here. These businesses did okay, and then you started something that I never heard about, but look at this. I’m going to zoom in on a section of the Google doc you sent me. This is the call center. The call center got to how many employees? 100? Russell: We had about 60 full time sales people, 20 full time coaches, and about 20 people doing the marketing and sales, so about 100 people in the whole company, yeah. Andrew: 100 people doing what kind of call center, what kind of work? Russell: So what we would do, we would sell free CDs and things like that online, free CDs, free books, free whatever, and then when someone would buy it we’d call them on the phone, and then we’d offer them high end coaching. Andrew: And this was you getting customers, how? Russell: Man, back then it was pre-facebook. So a lot of it was Google, it was email lists, it was anything we could figure out to drive traffic, all sorts of weird stuff. Andrew: And then people come in, get a free CD, sign up for coaching, and then you had to hire people and teach them how to coach? How did you do that. Russell: Yeah, that was the hard thing. When we first started doing it, I was just doing the coaching. People would come in and we had a little, Brent and some of you guys remember the little offices we had, and we’d bring people in and we were so proud of our little office. And they’d come in and we’d teach them for 2 or 3 days, teach an event for them, and then as it got bigger it was harder and harder for me to do that. So eventually, and a lot of people didn’t want to come to Boise. I love Boise, but it’s really hard to get to. So people would sign up for coaching, and then they’d never show up to Boise and then a year later they’d want their money back. So we’re like, we have to get something where they’re getting fulfilled whether they showed up to Boise or now. So we started doing phone coaching, and at first it was me, and then it was me and a couple other people, and then we started training more coaches, and that’s kind of how it started. It was one of those things though, at  first it was just like 5 or 6 of us in a room doing it, and it worked and so then the next logical thing is, we should go from 5 people to 10 to 20 and next thing you know, we wake up with 100 people. I’m like, what are we doing? We’re little kids, it scares me that I’m in charge of all these people’s livelihood, but that’s kind of where it was at and it got kind of scary for me. Andrew: Sometimes I wonder if I’m hiding behind interviewing because I’m afraid to stand up and say, ‘here’s what I want. Here’s what I think we need to do. Here’s how the world should be.’ So I’m amazed that even back then, after having a few businesses that didn’t really work out, you were comfortable enough to say, ‘Come to my office, I’m going to teach you. I’ve got it figured out.’ When you hadn’t.  How did you get yourself comfortable, and what made you feel comfortable about being able to say, ‘I could teach these people. Come to my office.’ Who call up, who then become my coaches, who then have to teach other people? Russell: I think for me it was like, when I first started learning the online stuff and entrepreneurship, I think most people feel this, it’s so exciting you want to tell everybody about it. So I’m telling my friends and my family and nobody cares at first. And you’re like, I have to share this gift I’ve figured out, it’s amazing. And nobody cares. And then the first time somebody cares, and you just dump on them, you want to show it to them. So I hadn’t made tons of money, but I had a lot of these little websites that had done, $30 grand, $50 grand, $100 grand. So for me it was like, if I can show these people, I know what that did for me, it gave me the spark to want to do the next one and the next one. So for me it was like I want to share this because I feel like I figured it out. So that was the thing coming in. We weren’t teaching people how to build a hundred million dollar company, but we’re like, “Hey, you can quit your job. You can make 2 or 3 thousand dollars a month, you can quit your job, and this is how I did it. This is the process.” So that’s what we were showing people. Just the foundation of how we did it, and we showed other people, because they cared and it was exciting to share it with other people. Andrew: Is Whitney here? There she is. I met her as she was coming in. I wanted to get to know why people were coming to watch this, what they wanted to hear from you. And Whitney was asking about the difficult period, the why. I’m wondering the same thing that she and I were talking about, which is why put yourself through this? You could have gotten a job, you could have done okay, why put yourself through the risk of hiring people, the eventual as we’ll see, closing of the company, what was your motivation? What was the goal? Why did you want to do it? Russell: I think it shifts throughout time. I think most entrepreneurs when they first get started, it’s because of money. They’re like, ‘I want to make money.’ And then you get that and then really quick, that doesn’t last very long. And then it’s like, then for me it was like, I want to share that with other people. And then when other people get it, there’s something about that aha moment where you’re like, oh my gosh they got it. They got what I was saying. And that for me was like the next level, the next high. It was just like, ah, I love that. And back then we had some success stories coming through, but now days, it’s like the bigger success stories come through and that’s what drives it on. That is the fascinating part. That’s why we keep, because most software company owners don’t keep creating books, and courses and inter….but when people have the aha, oh my gosh, that’s the best for me. Andrew: That’s the thing, you get the high of the thing that you wanted when you were growing up, that you wanted someone to show it to you, and if you could then genuinely give it them, not like Don Lepre. But Don Lepre plus actual results, that’s what fires you up. Russell: That does fire me up. That’s amazing. Andrew: What happened? Why did that close down? Russell: Oh man, a lot of things. A lot of bad mistakes, a lot of first time growing a company stuff that I didn’t, again, we just woke up one day it felt like, and we were in this huge office, huge overhead, and about that time, it was 99, 2000 something like that, and there was the merchant account that me and most of the people doing internet marketing at the time, we all used the same merchant account, and they got hit by Visa and Mastercard, so they freaked out and shut down. I think it ended up being 4 or 5 merchant accounts overnight, and we had 9 different merchant accounts with that company, and all of them got shut down instantly. I remember because everything was fine, we were going through the day and it was like 1:00 in the afternoon on a Friday. They came in like, “None of the, the cards won’t process.” And I’m like, couldn’t figure out why they weren’t processing. We tried to call the company and no one’s answering at the company. Finally we get someone on the phone and they’re like, “Yep, you got shut down along with all the other scammers.” And then she hung up on me. And I was like, I don’t know what to do right now. I’ve got 100+ people and payroll is not small, and we didn’t have a ton of cash in the bank, it was more of a cash flow business. And Collette actually just left town that night, and she was gone. I remember Avatar just came out, and everyone was going to the movie Avatar that night, and I remember sitting there during the longest movie of all time, and I don’t remember anything other than the sick feeling in my stomach. I was texting everyone I know, trying to see if anyone knew what to do. And everyone was like, “We got shut down too.” “We got shut down.” Everyone got shut down. And we couldn’t figure out anything. So we came back the next day and I called everyone up, and actually kind of a funny side story, I had just met Tony Robbins a little prior, earlier to this. So that night I was laying in bed, it was like 4 in the morning, and my phone rings and I look at it and it was Tony Robbins’ assistant. And I pick it up and he’s like, “Hey, is there any way you can be in Vegas in three hours? There’s a plane from Boise to Vegas and Tony wants you to speak at this event. It’s starting in three hours. You need to be on stage in three hours.” I’m sitting here like, my whole world just collapsed, I’m laying in bed sick to my stomach and I’m like, “I don’t think I can. I have to figure this thing out.” And then he tells Tony, and they call me back. “Tony says if your business is…if you can’t make it, don’t show up. You’re fine.” So I didn’t go and then the next morning I woke up and there was a message on my phone that I’d missed. I passed out and I woke up and it was a message from Tony. And he was like, “Hey man, I know that you care about your customers, you care about things. I don’t know the whole situation, but worst case scenario, if you need help let me know, and we can absorb you into Robbins research or whatever and you can be one of my companies, and that way if you want, we can protect you.” And I heard that and I was like, “Okay, that’s the worst case scenario, I get to work with Tony Robbins? That’s the worst case scenario.” So then I called up everyone on my team and I was like, “Okay guys, we gotta try to figure out how to save this.” And Brent and John and everyone, we came back to my house and I was like, “Okay, what ideas do we got?” And we just sat there for the next 5 or 6 hours trying to figure stuff out. And then we went to work, and I wish I could say that everything turned around, but it was the next probably 2 or 3 years of us firing 30 people, firing 20 people, closing things down, moving down offices. Just shrinking for a long, long time, until the peak of it, it was about a year after that moment, and we were in an event in Vegas trying to figure out how to save stuff, and I got an email from my dad who was helping with the books at the time, and he said, “Hey, I got really bad news for you. I looked through the books and it turns out your assistant who is supposed to be doing payroll taxes, hadn’t paid payroll in over a year. You owe the IRS $170,000 and if you don’t pay this, you’re probably going to go to jail.” And I was like, every penny I’d earned to that point was gone. Everything was done and we’d lost everything and I was just like, I don’t know how to fight this battle, but if I don’t fight it I go to jail apparently. And I remember that’s a really crappy feeling. Brent, some of you guys are reliving this with me right now, I know. I remember going back that night, laying in bed and I was just like, “I wish I had a boss that could fire me, because I don’t know what to do, how to do it.” And that was kind of, that was definitely the lowest spot for me. Andrew: And you stuck with him? Wow, yeah. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let me take you behind the scenes of what we’re doing to sell out Funnel Hacking Live once again. Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- What's up everybody. This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back the Marketing Secrets Podcast. Today, I want to tell you guys a secret about how to fill live events. All right everybody, as you guys know, we are coming down to the final stretch of Funnel Hacking Live. I think we're less than 60 days. Dang, two months. Less than two months away. Whew. It makes me nervous just saying that, from Funnel Hacking Live happening, which is exciting. It's been almost 18 months since the last Funnel Hacking Live. I hope you're excited. I think most of you guys are going to be there, which is exciting. If you aren't going to be there, literally, do you hate money? Do you hate growth? Do you hate relationships with amazing people? Do you hate hearing me talk? Those are the only logical explanations that I can think of. I say that with making sure that you need to be there. If you don't have your tickets yet, go to funnelhackinglive.com. The show is on. Right now we're in the final stretch. Tickets are almost sold out, and we sell out every year, but this year we're selling out earlier, because the venue's smaller. We only have 3,500 seats versus last year, we had 5,000 people in the event. We pre-sold more tickets the last Funnel Hacking Live than ever before either. Anyway, we're almost sold out. If you don't have a ticket yet, now is the time to go. The other interesting thing is, this is the first and hopefully the only year we're doing a virtual as well, just because a lot of countries, people actually can't get to here, which is frustrating. Other than that, I've always been anti virtual, but we had to, this time around. If you aren't able to come, you're locked out of the country, or whatever, or you're nervous about people, which is understandable as well, there's a virtual option this year, but that one is also almost sold out. If you're getting tickets, now's the time, but anyway, I digress, as we're getting towards the final stretch. We're like, "Okay. Well, I just want to get done selling tickets," because selling tickets is a grind. If anyone who has ever done a live event or a virtual event, it's a lot of work to continually sell tickets. Right? That's the place that we're in now. I was like, "I just want to get it done with. How do we just sell the last batch?" Like, "Let's get it over with." It's funny, because every year we try to reinvent the wheel. Like, "How did we sell these last year? What campaigns work the best?" We went back through, and we looked at ticket sales. We saw there was a week or two, where we sold hundreds of tickets a day, right? We're like, "What did we do during that week?" We went back and found the emails. It was funny, because of course, here's me reinventing the wheel. Hopefully in a year from now, someone can remind me, "Russell, don't forget, this is what we did last year," but I'm sharing this with you guys, because the thing that we'd done in the past that sold more tickets than anything else, outside of at the last year live event, we sell tickets to next year's, that sells the best. Number two, when we do the kickoff Webinar this year, that sold a ton of them this year for us, which we'd never done that in the past, so kickoff Webinar. Then the third biggest thing to sell tickets has always been taking things away, right? Taking away a bonus or increasing the price, things like that, and usually throughout the promotional campaign, we always are doing little things like that. Right? We're increasing the price. We're taking away a bonus. We're doing this. Last year, we had this great idea, which I forgot about until just recently. We had each speaker jump on a Facebook Live with me, just for a quick 10, 15 minutes. I jump on, I talk about who they are, what they're talking about. We do that tease, like "This is what we're going to talk about." It's really exciting to get people pumped about being there, talk about that speaker's experience at FHL. It's just a really fun thing. Then at the end of it, I said, "Hey, for those who were coming to FHL, do you want to give them a bonus to make sure they show up?" Each speaker then gives a bonus. It's crazy. Some speakers are like, "Here's my three-day live event. Here's my $2,000 course. Here's my..." People are giving crazy stuff. Right? Each speaker gives away a bonus. Today, depending when you're listening to this, I've probably done five or six at this point, but I did the first one today. It was with Peng Joon. Peng Joon giveaway is literally a $3,000 event, a three-day live event, the virtual recordings of it, in a member's area and everything, which is crazy for everyone who got their ticket from Funnel Hacking Live. What we do is, we start doing the speaker offer stack. Today Peng Joon gave his bonus. We send emails with a list. Say, "Hey. Go watch Peng Joon's Facebook Live. By the way, he gave everyone this bonus, if you guys get your tickets this weekend." Right? Then next week I think I have three or four Facebook Lives. Each one with two speakers, jumping on, and we're doing this thing. Then each of those speakers, I'm asking them the same thing. Like, "Hey, what bonus do you have?" Then, they'll give us a bonus, and they'll give us a bonus. These bonuses will keep stacking, keep stacking, keep stacking. Then each email goes out like, "Hey, don't forget. Here's Russell's bonus. Here's Peng Joon's. Here's so, and so's. Here's so, and so's, and here's three new bonuses added today." It keeps getting bigger and bigger, and offer stack gets bigger and bigger. What happens during this week or two weeks of these interviews, the sales come in slow, and they get bigger and they get bigger, because the offer keeps getting more and more insane, til eventually, it's like, "I would literally be insane to not get my tickets." Like, "Do I, even if I don't show up to the event?" Like, "I still need to get the thing, because this bonus has gotten so good." It gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger. We do that as we go through all the speakers, and at the very end, now that the offer stack is insane, if you show up to Funnel Hacking Live, you're getting all the speakers, these amazing products. You get to know the speakers ahead of time, plus you get to come to the event, plus all the other bonuses, and all the other things. Then after we built that up, then we take all those bonuses away. We do a three-day cart close, where it's like, "Hey, you can still get tickets, but you'll miss out on this." Like, "Here's the offer stack of all the things," and we pull that away. That pull away, those three days is when we were selling 200 or 300 tickets a day, every single day. It's crazy. We don't have that many tickets to sell this year. I don't know how far we'll get into it, but again, I found the campaign. I was like, "Oh my gosh, of course." We've restructured it, and we're doing it again right now, but for any of you guys who were trying to sell tickets, this is a powerful way to do it. Then what else is cool is that today, Peng Joon, he Instagrammed his audience. Like, "Hey. Check out this Facebook Live I was on." Now he's selling tickets for us as well. Right? Then, yeah. It's just really interesting, because all of this. You're getting the speakers to promote it. You're promoting it. You're increasing the offer, and you're able to pull the offer away. It's just a powerful, unique strategy we're using to sell a ton of tickets. Anyway, I hope that helps. I've tried a lot of things to sell tickets, and like I said, looking at this, is the thing that's worked the best. Make sure you're watching us, if you're not, go make sure you follow me on Facebook. That's where these are all streaming too. Actually, I think it streams to Facebook, LinkedIn, a whole bunch of other places as well, but go and watch that. You'll see the campaign. You'll see what we're doing. You watch, as the offer gets more and more insane. Then when we pull the offer away, that's when the huge ticket sales come through. Anyway, I love this game. I hope you guys can see that. I hope you can feel it. It's so much fun, and I love sharing with you guys behind the scenes, what we're doing. Hopefully you guys can model it for your events. It worked for virtual events, worked for live events, worked for all sorts of things. That said, thanks, you guys for listening. Appreciate you all, and we will talk to you all again soon. Definitely the next podcast episode, but hopefully more importantly, at Funnel Hacking Live. If you don't have your tickets yet, now is the time. You don't want to miss it. The only logical reason to not go is, if you hate money or you hate me. If you hate me, you probably shouldn't be listening to this podcast anyway. If you hate money, you probably aren't listening to this podcast. That means you. Yes, if you're listening right now, you need to go. Pull over the side of the car, pause this thing, open up a new browser window, go to funnelhackinglive.com, and get your tickets. If you're not sure if you want tickets, go watch the video at the top of funnelhackinglive.com, then go get your tickets. It's that good. All right, guys. Appreciate you all. Thanks for listening, and I hope you guys have an amazing day. Talk soon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A little behind the scenes on the thought process of what we did and why. Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- What's up everybody. This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the marketing secrets podcast. So today I'm excited because we officially just purchased our first company, which is crazy. And so I will talk to you about that today, what I learned and some things that might help you along your journey as well. All right. So I can't tell you all the details yet because we're still... I don't know, we'll officially announce it to the world, what it is, why and all that kind of stuff later. But we finished signing all the paperwork today, which is crazy because two days ago I had to sign 96 signatures and there was like another like 20, and then there was a couple more. So it's like over a hundred and something signatures I had to sign to officially get this company. And it's exciting. It's our first ever acquisition. Now I bought a lot of things in the past. Right. I bought traffic secrets. We bought mastermind.com, I bought bootstrap, salesfunnels.com. Like we bought really expensive domains, but not like full, active acting businesses. Right? This is the first time where it's a business that we purchased that has huge cashflows and all sorts of crazy stuff. And I wanted to share with you guys just because hopefully it gives you guys just a different way to look at business. It's definitely given me a different way to look at business, which is one of the reasons why we did this. And a lot of you guys know my philosophies and principles on business, right? That's what we talk about all the time, that's what my books are about. This is what my podcast is about and there're different ways to grow a business, one way is that the more traditional where you get an idea, you get a bunch of investors, you raise money and then you go and you create something cool. I hate that way, as you know. So we are the bootstrapped way, which is like create something amazing and then create fronted offers that self liquidate to bring customers in. And that's the bootstrap model we've been doing that, I love. But there're other ways to grow a business as well. And this one I wanted to talk about, because this has been something really, really interesting to us, and I'm not going to share all the stats, the numbers and all that kind of stuff. Partially because I don't know if I'm legally allowed to partially because I don't know the numbers I wasn't involved with all of the day-to-day because I'm no longer the CEO, Dave did all the work. I've just had to sign a million times. So I wanted to give you like some structural concepts to think through that were really, really cool for me. So part of my understanding of this dates back to about a decade ago, I was actually at a mastermind meeting in Mexico and sitting next to this dude and he is different kind of business person than me, right? Like I'm like startup guy, start a business, grow it, scale it, launch it all that kind of stuff where he was like, he told me, he's like, I'm not an entrepreneur, you're an entrepreneur, you start stuff, it's amazing. I'm in mergers and acquisitions. And I think he had bought like 60 or 70 businesses and bought and sold and made a ton of money. And so I was trying to understand them. I'm like, so you never started a business? He's like, no, you guys do that, that's way too hard. He's like, what I do instead, is I find entrepreneurs like you, and he's like, what you have to understand... And I'm probably going to mess up these numbers but this is just illustration purposes. Right? He said if you look at your businesses, right, he's like at a certain level, let's say you're at like $3 million. He's like, you're only going to sell for like a three X multiple. Right. So maybe you'll get 9 million for it. He's like, but at $10 million you'll sell for a five X or 10 X, multiple or whatever it is. Right? I don't know. But like this was what he was explaining to me, okay. He's like, so right now, let’s say your company's making $3 million, like best case you're going to get three X and it's probably closer to three X net. But anyway regardless, he said, so what I do is like I find three or four companies that are each doing $3 million a year. And they're each valued at three X, let's say. He's like, and I buy all four of them or all three of them. Let's say it's four companies at 3 million each bundled together. He said, now because the revenue of this new company is now $12 million. He's like, I can sell that. So I bought it for three X, but I can sell now for six X, for 10 X or whatever it is. It's like, that's all I do. I just find a market. I want to be in, I find three companies that are selling it three X. I buy all three of them. I bundle them together and now they're worth five X or six X or whatever it is. And I flip them and he's like that's my business. He's like, so I have these entrepreneurs like you guys who are geniuses, who will start launch these businesses. And I just come in as the acquisition guy acquire three or four of you bundle you together and then your value goes up because of how much more you're worth. And that was his business. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is crazy. And so it's been interesting over the last 12 months, with click funnels I try to understand, what are our evaluations, how do things work? What are we actually worth? In my head we're worth like 10 billion, but we're probably not in real life. And so it's interesting because... The evaluation game is annoying me because there're tons of ways. Like some companies evaluate off top line, some are just off EBITDA, somewhere are off whatever. But let's just say for example, let's just say click funnels is worth 10 X, our EBITDA. Right? And I don't even know what that is. Let's say it's $50 million. So that means 50 million times 10 would be worth half a billion. Right? And so by us acquiring this company, let's say that company has, I don't know, $20 million EBITDA. Right? I'm messing these numbers in my head, but regardless, let's say we spend, I don't know, 20, 30, 40, $50 million in this company, we buy it. Right? And we plug it in. But then the EBITDA, let's say the EBITDA they had is worth $20 million. Right? We plug that into our thing it increases our EBITDA $20 million times of 10 X valuation is 200 million. So maybe we spend, you know, whatever 40, $50 million buying this thing. But the value instantly adds for our company is a hundred million or 200 million or whatever it is. Right? So instantly just by bundling the two companies together, our value goes up way more than what we actually spend for it. So that's like the first thing that's really, really interesting that I had never considered until we started doing this deal. Right? It's like, oh my gosh, even if like we never make our money back the value of our company dramatically goes up because we're adding all their revenues and their profits to our bottom line, which is like fascinating. And then from there we also get the customer flow and the lead flow and the cash flow and like all the other things that come with building a company or buying a company as well. And it's just, the synergy is really, really interesting. And so anyway, that was again, our first acquisition, and now we're finishing the process. We literally finished it today, which was crazy. It got me excited to start thinking like, okay, what other deals like this are there where we can buy company for X amount dollars. We plug it into our, our beast, our machine and it instantly, whatever X is the value of our company, but then also get lead flow, customer flow, cash flow, all other things as well kind of come in. And it's really interesting and fascinating. So anyway, just a different way to look at business that I wanted to kind of share with you guys because I've already had a lot of people, like, why are you buying a business? Why would you do that? All the things that kind of come with that. And I want to share that because it's just a different perspective I hadn't thought a lot about prior to 10 years ago when I met my merger and acquisition guy. And so I would look at that for you guys' own businesses as well. Like think about is there a business that in your market that you could acquire that you could bundle together. All of a sudden now you get more customers, you get more traffic, but also you're adding to your cashflow, right? Like you buy the company, doubles your cashflow and now it increases the value of your company because now you're in a different bracket of what businesses are selling for and trading for, that number. And then it kind of goes from there. So anyway, it's an interesting game. It's a different game than I'm used to playing. I'm much more comfortable in the whole, like let's build a company and grow it and scale it through paid ads and organically without taking on any VC money. That's the world I understand. And this new one of like mergers and acquisitions is fascinating to me because it's going to get us to our goals way faster. My goal we've talked about a lot. My goal is a billion dollar evaluation. My goal is take over the world, change the world, all these different things. Right? And it's just getting us there faster. Hopefully. I mean, honestly, I'm like 30 minutes into owning this new company and I have no idea. Maybe it'll actually turn out really bad. Maybe things fall apart. I don't know we're going to find out, but I'm hopeful. I'm excited. I think it's going to be a really cool opportunity. And so as we move forward, I will share with you guys in the podcast here, behind the scenes of what we're doing. When I'm able to, I'll talk more about the companies and how they're synergistic and how we're using their lead flow and how we're using their funnels that we're acquiring and how we're using us in the backend and how we're... Just all the other fun things. Honestly, in my head, a lot of it's, not vague. Like I know a vision of where I'm going with things, but we're going to be actually executing on it and I'll be sharing the vision with my team and with everybody over the next little bit. And it's exciting. So anyway, it's a fun time to be alive. So many fun things happening. I hope this episode just gets you thinking a little bit differently. Who could you acquire? And if not acquiring, there's also like licensing, there's three or four deals right now where we're going to existing companies that have really good content or software things. And instead of acquiring them full out, because maybe they don't have the customers or maybe they don't have the lead flow or maybe whatever, there's a million reasons why instead we're just doing licensing deals where we're licensing the technology and plugging it in and then we can start selling it or licensing their intellectual property, licensing things like there's a lot more fun ways to grow businesses than just the traditional stuff. So, anyway, I'm curious if you guys are interested, would you want to know more information about us buying companies, would you like more information about licensing? Like what would be the things that you guys would want me to go deeper on? I'd love to hear it, let me know. The best way to do that is actually take a snapshot of this podcast episode, post it on Instagram or Facebook and tag me in it and then post in the comments. Like what else you'd like to know? Like what would be other things that you'd love to hear more about? So anyway, I hope that helps. I'm going to go bounce and have some lunch and celebrate the acquisition of our new company. I'm so excited. I just wanted to celebrate that with you guys right now and help you understand a little bit reasons why. And like I said, over the next few months, now that you have context I can share more the insights, details, and other cool stuff as well. So that's it, thanks so much, and we'll talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Enjoy this classic episode from the vault. Russell explains that the day you became an entrepreneur is the day you took personal responsibility for a problem that wasn’t your own. Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- What’s up everybody, this is Russell. Welcome to a late night episode of Marketing Secrets. Hey everyone, I’m about to head to bed but I listened to a podcast this week from Ryan Moran, from capitalism.com and he’s got the Freedom Fast Lane show podcast, which is pretty awesome. I love it a lot and he goes deep into the ecommerce side and also business investing and other things that I don’t typically focus on, which has been fun for me to kind of listen to him and world. But he said something in one of his presentations, it was a stage event somewhere,  I don’t even know, a few episodes back. And I don’t remember how he said or what he said but it sparked a thought in my mind. So I’m probably going to slaughter how he said it. He said it probably much better than me, but the concept was so cool. What he basically said is the difference between entrepreneurs and the rest of the world, yes we are different folk if you haven’t noticed. But what he said was interesting, he said, entrepreneurs are the people who see a problem and then take responsibility for it. Isn’t that weird?  I think about the world we live in today. The problem is most people don’t responsibility for anything. Even though they do things that are really bad or wrong or whatever, they won’t take responsibility. They want to blame it on their mom, or their brother, or their sister, or whoever. The world is all about blaming someone else for all the issues that it has. What makes us entrepreneurs weird is we see a problem and instead of blaming somebody else, we look at it and say, “I’m going to take responsibility for that problem, I’m going to figure out an answer.” And when I heard that I was just like, oh my gosh, that is so interesting. Because most people don’t do that. Most people don’t see an issue, a problem and then be like, “I’m going to take responsibility for that.” I was thinking about this with Clickfunnels for example. For a decade we tried to build funnels and it was frustrating. And yeah, we could have blamed everybody else, I’m sure we did. Everyone else did that, it’s the tech designers, the developers, programming is hard, all the things. It wasn’t for us until we said, you know what it does suck and I’m going to take responsibility for it, this is my issue now. And then we figure out a way to solve it. And that’s when everything changed. That’s so fascinating. For you, as an entrepreneur, or someone who wants to be an entrepreneur, I think if we all make conscious decision of what we are doing is consciously saying, “That problem right there, I’m taking on myself, I’m taking responsibility for that.” Instead of doing what most of us do, what’s our human nature. “Oh it’s them. Oh it’s her.” I didn’t fix anything because of this, because of this. We just want to pass the blame, pass the buck so often, but that’s what makes us weird.  That’s what makes us different. It makes entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs. We see those problems, we see those issues and we take a personal responsibility for it. I was thinking about this as I was looking at the Inner circle meetings over the last couple of weeks. I could go through all 100 of my entrepreneurs and share this, but just a couple of them off my head. Pamela Weibold for example, she was a doctor and she started seeing all of her friends who were doctors committing suicide. Person after person after person. And she could have sat there and blamed this, blamed that, but instead she stopped and said, “I’m going to take personal responsibility for this issue and I’m going to save doctors lives.” And she’s gone out there and done that. She’s created a platform. She’s one of the most amazing people I’ve ever seen. She’s literally spent every penny she’s ever made to go and save doctors lives. She’s like, “I can live on 20 grand a year, I’m good. Every penny I make goes back into helping save doctors from committing suicide.” Because she took that as her own personal responsibility. That’s not her responsibility, it’s not her fault. Yet, she looked at it and said, this is my responsibility. That day she became an entrepreneur. You think about another one, Annie Grace, who is so cool. She’s someone who her whole life drank socially. It got to a point where she kept drinking and drinking and she couldn’t break away from it. And she started looking around and it wasn’t just her, it was other people and she went on this mission and started saying….and again, drinking is not her responsibility. People struggling and trying to give up alcohol addiction, that’s not her responsibility, she’s got better things to do with her life. But she looked at it and said, “This problem, I’m going to take responsibility for it.” And she’s gone out and changed thousands of people’s lives. Thousands of people she has helped break away from this addiction that’s robbing them of their freedom, their happiness. She took that personal. She didn’t have to, she didn’t need to but she decided to and that day she became an entrepreneur. I could go through person after person after person after person, the day that they looked at this thing, this problem that wasn’t even supposed to be their own, but they saw it. And whatever it was, I don’t know if tuition, if it’s God, if it’s a spark, if it’s your brain. Whatever it is, you see it and there’s that spark saying, “That one’s mine. That is the problem I’m going to fix and I’m going to take personal responsibility. It may not be my fault, but I am the one who’s going to fix this and change it.” And that’s what makes you different as an entrepreneur, and it’s fascinating and exciting. And if you wondered, how do I become an entrepreneur, how do I do that? It’s time to start looking at that and saying, “Instead of pushing responsibility on different places, different things, different people, different whatever, look at a problem and take on that responsibility yourself. And that’s the game plan, that’s how it works. Anyway, I heard that three or four days ago and it’s been ringing through my head over and over. I keep thinking about person after person after person in my inner circle, and entrepreneurs I work with, and inner circle members, and Two Comma Club members, and I look at the people around me who are serving and doing stuff. Every single time I could link back to, that is the problem they took personal responsibility for. They didn’t have to, they didn’t need to, but they did. And that’s the magic. So I hope that helps you guys. I hope that rings through your head and makes you start looking and being more aware of the stuff around you that’s happening and trying to figure out what it is that you’re going to take personal responsibility for. Because when you do that, that’s the day you’ll become an entrepreneur, and that’s the day you will literally change the world. Thanks you guys, so much for everything. Thanks for your support, thanks for your effort. Thanks for your contribution to the world. We love you guys, we appreciate you guys, we enjoy serving you guys. And we’re so grateful that you listen to this podcast. If you like this podcast and learn anything from it, please go to iTunes and subscribe and share it with another entrepreneur who could help. Thanks so much you guys. Talk to you soon. 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On this episode we answer a question from one of our listeners. Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- What's up everybody. This is Russell Brunson, welcome back to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. Tonight, I'm going to have a special episode, actually. Someone on Instagram, who I've become friends with recently, been talking back and forth, asked me a really good question about feeling uninspired, and low confidence publishing and wondered what I do to keep myself confident and motivated. And I think the answer may surprise you. So, I wanted to do this as an episode instead of just responding back to him directly, and hopefully it'll help a lot of you guys out as well. All right everyone, so like I said, one of my new friends Alex, he had posted on Instagram or he actually sent me a DM, a question, and I thought it was really good question. I think it's something that I know I personally deal with way more often than I'd like to admit, and I'm sure a lot of you guys do as well. And so I thought I would, instead of just responding to him personally, respond through a podcast and hopefully it'll give you guys some value as well. So this is what he wrote. He said, "Hey man, question for you. If you ever find yourself feeling uninspired, low in confidence to publish every day or put yourself out there, what are some of your go-to activities to create lasting peak state again, where you feel full of fire, belief and vision. I'm in a spot that haven't been in a long time. I'm committed to breaking out of it, and I have faith that I will. I have a feeling that finding the right catalyst to help spark the fire again is the key." Anyway, so I thought it was really good question. And again, I think my answer may be different than him, or even probably most people think. And so to put it in context, I'm going to give you a quick glimpse at my life recently. It's summertime here at the time that I'm recording this, and I've got five amazing kids, three teenagers and two younger kids. And my teenagers have a party every night, something planned with friends and everything. And there's no school. And they're like, "Well there's no school tomorrow." I'm like, "Yeah, but I still have to get up tomorrow at six. I still have things to do. I still have all this stuff." My poor wife and I, usually during school time we put them to bed at nine and we've got two hours by ourselves before we pass out. Where now they're getting home from friend's houses around 11, and then we're trying to put them to bed. And then it's midnight, and then one, and then one thirty and then we're so tired. And right now is a really busy season, we are like 60 days away from Funnel Hacking Live. P.S. if you don’t have your tickets yet go to funnelhackinglive.com. And I find myself now every morning, literally waking up and I am feeling, I think exactly what Alex is feeling. I wake up and I'm tired, I'm uninspired, I have low confidence. I don't want to publish. I don't want to talk. I don't want to get a bed. I don't want to work out. It's tough. Today, I set my alarm for six and I snoozed it for an hour and a half. I kept pushing it over and over and over again. And I actually, this morning as I was going to the office. I was like, "Why am I struggling so much?" And I start thinking back, and I think in my mind, I think in most of our minds, we assume that we're always like, there are seasons and times when we're on fire and full belief and vision, all these kind of things. But when I started like really looking back, I started thinking about different parts of my life, especially some of my favorite parts of my life. And if I really remembered, I try to... I think most of the times our memories remember the good things and we fade out the bad, right? It's like, when you have a baby. Five minutes after my wife gave birth, if I was like, "Let's have another baby," she would probably strangle me. But then, a day goes by, then a week and then a month. And within three or four months, you forget the pain. All you remember is this cute little baby and you're like, "Oh, we should have kids again. It was so much fun." And then all of a sudden you're pregnant. You're like, "What was I thinking? Why didn't somebody tell me about this?" I think it's the same thing in life. Like if I honestly think back, I think back about wrestling. That was my first passion, my first love. I remember winning the state title. I remember these big things that are amazing, but if I'm really honest, I try to remember the practices. I remember cutting weight. I remember not eating for four or five days in a row, every single week for my entire high school career. And cutting weight, and not having energy, and being tired in class and like cutting weight. Those who've cut weight know what I'm talking about, but I was doing that. And I don't think that there was a time when I was really... It didn't feel good, I didn't enjoy it. It was hard. It was miserable. But then the thing at the end happened, and it was amazing. And because I had this desire, and this belief and this hope in the thing at the end, that's why I kept doing it. Cause I was like, "Ah, someday I want to win a state title. Someday I want to be an All-American, someday." And I had these things, so I put myself through these things. And then afterwards I hit the goals. You don't hit the goals and you remember the positives, and you remember these things and you kind of fade out the negative. But the reality is that a lot of times going through the stuff, like the day by, day by day, you don't come into it super inspired, and tons of energy, and high confidence and all those things that we think we are, or we're looking for, we're thinking it's going to happen. At least not that I remember, as I'm trying to be completely honest with myself, I'm remembering the practices and leading up to them, and most days I didn't want to go to practice. Like I did because when I got into it, I enjoyed it. But going to practice, I would dread. And then fast forward, most of you guys I think know, I had a chance to serve a mission for my church for two years. And so for two years I was on this mission, and I'm knocking doors, and I'm teaching about Jesus, and doing these things and had a great experience. Looking back now, it's one of the greatest highlights of my life. If I remember, every morning waking up, and we'd wake up super early, and study scriptures and do these things, and we were tired. And those who haven't been on a mission, or have never seen like the Mormon missionaries before, like you don't get to go on dates, you don't get to call home, you don't get to... You're with a companion and you don't go to movies, you don't have a TV, so it's tough. I remember every morning waking up, and knowing I had to go knock on doors, knowing I had to go do these things and dreading it. Like, ah it was hard consistently. And then we're going out and knocking door, and usually within doing it for a little while, it'd become fun. And we'd talk to people, like I enjoyed it. And as I'm enjoying it, I'm like, "Why was I so complaining? Like why was I so tired this morning? Why was I so miserable? I actually enjoy this stuff," but I still did. And if I look back on my mission now, it was two years I was out there. Like I would wage, I would bet that most mornings I woke up dreading having to do the work I actually had to do. And now I started thinking about this, about my entrepreneurial career. And again, I think back about all the highs and the big wins and all these kinds of things. But if I'm completely honest with myself, throughout the day by day, and the week by week, it was not sunshine and roses. I didn't wake up inspired, and excited and have tons of confidence and wanting to publish. Like it came... Usually me waking up and dreading it, and then going and doing it. And then as I started doing it, it was like, "Oh, I actually do enjoy this. This is kind of fun." It was weird to me because two days ago I was working on this webinar, and all day at the office I was having fun, I was doing it and I got home. And then first I was excited, "Tomorrow's going to be fun to work on it." But then again, my evening happened and it was crazy, and kids get to bed at midnight and I'm asleep at 1:00, and my alarm is going off at six in the morning and I'm just dreading going the office. Like, "I don't want to open the slides. I'm too tired. I don't want to work on it." And like, I'm miserable. Right? Uninspired, low confidence, like all these things. But I woke up, I did the thing, got out there, got to the office and started working on it. And then as I got back into it again, it became fun and I enjoyed it. And then eventually I'm going to do this webinar and I'm going to be stressed out. I'll probably pull all-nighters ahead of time, and then do the webinar and it's going to make a bunch of money. Then I'll be able to celebrate and all I'm going to remember is the celebration. Right? The baby came out, we made a bunch of money. Someone got baptized. Whatever the result was that I was working towards. And I'll Remember that, and it's all I remember is like how great it was. I mean, we did this event, the Funnel Hackathon event. It was interesting because, I was teaching a webinar model. I was like, we launched ClickFunnels... I always tell them they should do a webinar a week, every single week for a year. And I was like, "I tell people that, but that's not what I did." I was like, "I was doing at least a webinar a day, some days two or three webinars a day." And if you've ever done a webinar, like a two hour webinar, it's like working a nine hour or eight hour workday. Right? So you're doing three back-to-back-to-back, six hours of straight webinars. Like in my head, I remember this amazing thing in me, closing sales and like how amazing it was. But if I'm honest with myself, It was horrible. I couldn't talk, I was tired. I had no energy. I didn't want to be there. I didn't want to do the second let alone the third webinar that day, knowing that tomorrow I'd wake up and do it again. And it's just interesting because I think our brain blocks out so much those things. So I'm not saying that we can't be inspired, have high confidence in those kinds of things. But my bet is in most situations, most mornings you're going to wake up and you're going to be uninspired, you're going to have low confidence. You're not going to want to publish. You're going to want to go out there. You're not going to want to do a webinar, you're not going to want to publish your podcast, you're not going to want to knock doors. You're not going to want to go read a book, you're not going to want to write a book. You're not going to want to... Whatever the thing is. Because that's the reality of life, at least as far as I've experienced it. I try to think back like, when were the mornings I woke up super excited? And there have been some, I can tell you there have been, but they are few and far between. The thing that gets me moving in the morning is not the feeling of inspiration or confidence or anything in the morning. It is the vision of the thing at the end. It was me knowing I wanted to win a state title. Not just knowing I want to be a state champ, but knowing like in my heart and my soul and my gut, that's all I wanted. That's all I wanted in life was that, I wanted to get my hand raised. And it's because of that I was willing to go through anything. My coach has said, "You got to lose 30 pounds this week." Which happened every single week. I was like, "Okay." They're like, "Hey, you've got to go run four miles right now. You got to do this." Like I just said yes to everything, because that was the goal. That was the... Like, whatever it took to get there, I was okay with it. So the vision, the goal is the thing, but it doesn't mean you're going to feel the things I think we want to feel. I want to feel like, wake up in the morning, I want to go run. I want to go do these things. I want to go... But I don't think I ever feel those things. And maybe I'm the one that's messed up, I don't know. But if I'm honest with myself, I don't remember really feeling those things. I don't remember any morning when my alarm went off and I woke up feeling like I wanted to go run, feeling like I want to go lift weights again. Maybe every once in a while, but it was rare. The thing that was a constant was like this North Star, it was the vision. And again in high school, it was winning a state title and it was being an All-American, that's all I could dream about. Like I'd sit there without any food or water in my stomach for weeks... For not weeks, but days at a time, miserable, cutting 25, 30 pounds a week, every single week, week in and week out, over and over and over again. Being thirsty beyond any kind of anything you can imagine. For those who have never cut weight before, you think that that being hungry is hard. Like people who skip a meal and they're like, "I'm so hungry." Like hunger pains are easy. Thirst pains are bad. Like you skip water for a day, your hunger pains disappear and you can not eat for a week. Fine. But that those thirst pains like keep you up at night. But again, like what was the thing? It was the vision and it was doing it when you're not inspired, doing it when you don't feel like it, because you're normally not going to feel like it. Like right now, we're 60 days away from Funnel Hacking Live, I have so much work to do. We are rebuilding three different coaching programs and I'm tired. I've got six core presentations, nine total presentations that I haven't started on. I'm rewriting a core webinar that I have to do. We've got film dates. We've got events. We've got... If you guys saw my schedule for the next 60 days, you'd probably laugh or cry or a little bit of both. And I tell you what, I don't want to do most of it. But guess what I do want to do? I want Funnel Hacking Live to happen. I want... When it's over, the night Funnel Hacking Live ends, when I go to bed at night, there's this feeling that I don't know. It's not as good as getting my hand raised and wrestling. I'm not going to lie, but it's this feeling. And I felt it before, I feel like when the whole thing's done, and you see people and you see their change, and you see them leave and you get to go home and be in your room for a minute and just be like, "We did it," that feeling, that vision and seeing like the ripple effect that will come from that room, from the 3,500 people who will be in the room, that ripple effect that will come out from there around the world. That vision of that. Like for me, it's a tangible visually. It's like, I can see... For me, it's like I see the audience, I see this huge rock going boom, and hitting it. And the ripple effect goes to 3,500 people in the room. Then from there, it goes out to millions and millions of people around the world. That vision of that is what gets me moving and going. And for some reason, I wish... I keep thinking or wishing that vision would make it so I woke up every morning inspired, excited, with energy, but it doesn't. Because the reality is, if that's all it was, was the vision. I think we'd be able to... If the vision affected us, so we felt so good that was easy, then it would be easier. But for me at least it doesn't. So anyway, if any of you guys got a secret, let me know. But for me, it's just waking up thinking about, this is the thing. This is what I'm working towards, I want it, I'm going for it. And then start the process. And like I said, after I start the process, usually it feels good, but it's that initial momentum that's not fun, right? Like the initial waking up and going to the gym is not fun, but then when you start lifting. It's like, "Oh, I actually enjoy this." Getting up, getting dressed, getting to the office, not fun. Start working your slides, you're like, "Oh I actually enjoy this." This podcast episode for example, my brother who does my podcast is going out of town. He's been asking me for a week and a half for three episodes. And right now it is 11:27 at night, and I've been dreading this podcast all day long. I've been thinking about it and like talking myself out of it, like dreading it. Literally, I don't want to do this podcast. I don't want to do it. I'm tired, I just want to go to bed, I got so much stuff. Like I finally got my kids to bed. Now, last thing in the world I want to do is publish my podcast, the last thing I want to do. But now I'm 14 minutes and 25 seconds into it, and I'm actually really enjoying this. I could go for the two hours. Like I'm feeling the energy now, right? But initially you don't have it. And so I think that's the biggest thing is just, understanding that it's the initial momentum. That's the hardest part. In the morning you wake up and you're out of momentum, like getting back into momentum. That's a hard thing. And so most people, most humans on this planet never get back into momentum. They're just like, ugh. They just stop, right? So the thing that's going to get you from this stagnated stop spot is like, either the memory of the vision or the dream of the vision. When I was wrestling, it was the dream of being a state champ. Right now it's the memory of last years Funnel Hacking Live and the experience that I felt afterwards. Like, that's the thing that gets me out of bed into momentum, and with the momentum I start feeling more inspired, I start feeling more confident. I start listening, they start happening, but they don't happen right out of the gate. Most mornings, you're going to wake up not wanting to do with the thing you got to do. You're not going to feel good. You're not going to feel inspired, have confidence, any of those kinds of things. So it's like, you got to have this vision that pulls you into momentum, and then momentum picks up and that's when you start feeling good and start having fun. And right now, I want to go film 12 more podcast episodes, which is good because my brother told me I need to give him three by tomorrow. So, this is the first one, I've got two more tonight and I'm really excited about one of them, so I'll probably do that one next because now I'm in momentum. I'm feeling good. And anyway, so I hope that helps. I think the biggest thing that I want to share is just that if you're struggling every morning, for any of you guys, like that's okay. So do I, every morning, Very, very, very rare do I wake up and like, "Yes, let's go. Like, this is the thing." It's unfortunately not there and I don't think it's there for most people. And if it is there for you, that's amazing. Like run. That means you're waking up already in momentum, start running. Don't stop. But for most of us it's, man, making that vision. It's like what we talked about for wrestling, so clear, so vivid, so real, that you would go through anything to get it. First time I saw someone win a state title and I was like, "That's what I want more than air," literally, like more than food, more than water, more than friends, more than anything. And it became that real, that tangible that vivid where I could feel it, taste it, touch it, like smell, I could envision it. Like that's when I was willing to do anything and I did do anything, like literally. Insane things we did to get that goal. And same thing rings true in business. Right? Like when we started building ClickFunnels and I started seeing... At first it was hard for me, because I didn't know it was going to become what it was. Like I'd tried to build ClickFunnels three times before and every time we'd fail. So Todd's like, "I'm going to build ClickFunnels." I'm like, "Cool," so we started building it. But as soon as I saw it and I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is really good. Okay. Like, all right." And I saw the vision what it could be, then it was like crazy. But again if I remember back, we used to do these hackathons. Todd would fly out before we launched ClickFunnels and spend three weeks in Boise. And we would go all day, all night and like sleep for three or four hours, get back up and keep going. And I don't think it was fun. Like looking back now, the nostalgia of it's amazing. Like, oh these were like the greatest times of our life. Like times I'll never forget, but in the moment they were horrible. I did not enjoy them. I was tired. I was miserable. I missed my family, missed my kids, missed my things. We didn't know if this was actually going to work. Like, there's all these things, but we did it because I'd seen the vision. Todd had seen the vision. We knew that there was something there. And so we pushed, and we pushed, and we pushed, and we grind through it. And now looking back, those are some of the best times. So, you got to do it in spite of the uninspired, in spite of not feeling worthy, or ready or whatever. Get yourself momentum, like hook to the vision, hook to the thing you have and it start running. So anyway, I hope that helps. It gives probably not the answer you're looking for. I wish I had a better secret magic button, but it's just understanding and realizing every morning, like, "All right, I don't want to move, but I got to. Let's go." So, I hope that helps. Thanks so much everyone for listening, and have a great night and we'll talk to you all again soon. Bye everybody. 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This is when you’ll know your offer will actually start converting. Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- What's up, everybody? This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I am at Lake Powell. If you've been listening to some of these past episodes you know that I'm on family vacation right now. I'm unplugged, and so I am stuck to my thoughts, which has been really fun, and just thinking through a lot of things, and hopefully... In the past, people told me that Lake Powell episodes are some of the best ones. Hopefully this gives you some ideas, some ahas, some insights in you, your life, your business, and a bunch of other really cool things. Okay. So what I want to talk you guys about today is actually something that happened right before we left for Lake Powell. So obviously I've been playing this marketing game for a long, long, long, long time. Right? I love building funnels. I love creating offers. I've been doing it for as long as anyone I know. I've been doing it... I think I'm on, like, my 20th year or so. I've been playing this game. I love it and I think I'm pretty good at it. I'm not the best at all areas of it, but I think as a whole, I'd say I'm in the top 1% of people who play this game and I enjoy it. Hopefully you enjoy it as well. And I enjoy talking about it, hopefully as you enjoy listening to me talk about it. But I had little things that happened right before I left that was really, really cool. So we brought in a couple of new people on our team, some really, really good copywriters, conversion analytics people. And we're looking at some of our old funnels that have done well traditionally. In fact, specifically looking at our book funnels. We have three really good book funnels, my Dotcom Secrets, Expert Secrets, and Traffic secrets books, which have a lot of traffic to those funnels. Traditionally have done really, really well. And the question was, could we make these better? And one of the reasons why we had to do it is be one of our offers, upsell number two, we had to change out because it was a partnership with someone and we had to change it out. And so it got us kind of thinking like, well, how do we change this? And as long as we're changing it, let's brainstorm again. And so it was nice because I had a whole bunch of people who weren't me, who weren't there initially when we brainstormed the book funnel and we sat down and said, "Okay, let's kind of talk about this. What can we do? What does it look like?" And specifically there's someone new on our team. Her name is Sabah and she's awesome. And that's all I'm going to tell you because I don't want you guys hiring her away from me. She's really, really cool. But she went through all of the offers and the upsells and everything, and I made kind of a pallet. Here's like all the stuff we have. We have basically unlimited... I've created a billion products. I'm like, "We have unlimited content. We do whatever we want. Well, what should we create?" And so I kind of gave her the pallet. She spent a couple of days and came back. We started looking at this upsell flow and it was really cool for a couple of reasons. One is it's interesting, things that you kind of forget. Like at my events, when we teach upsell flows, I always talk about the importance of the strategic flow of your upsell flow, right? That people always ask me, "What's the first price point? What's the second price point?" And price point is not the important thing. It's the flow. Like if someone buys this, say they bu the Dotcom Secrets book. So it solved the problem for them. Now they have this book that's going to show them how to funnel. So next upsell has to solve a new problem. So that by buying this first product, what is the new problem it created, right? So if you bought Dotcom Secrets book, for example, now you know how to make funnels, but now you're like, "I don't know how to get traffic to my funnels," or, "I don't know how to write, copy for my funnels." Or whatever the next problem is. Or, "I know how to build a funnel now, but I need help. I need someone to hold my hand. I want coaching. I want accountability. I want..." Whatever. There's a million things it could be, but it's very strategic. And what I realized, interestingly enough, is that, and I wonder if you guys do this too, or if it's just me, but sometimes my ego gets in the way. And so my book funnels were, I literally built the book funnels because I wanted my first upsell to be Dotcom Secrets or the secrets chosen, my box set of all my books. Which is cool because it's like now everyone has a chance to buy my books. And I forced that as the upsell on all three of my funnels, but looking at the actual data and numbers, they didn't... I mean, they convert good, but not amazing. I didn't change it because I was like, "Well, that's what I want to sell, that's what I want to sell," as opposed to me asking the question, "Well, what do people actually want to buy?" And so what was cool was when Saba came back and said, "Okay, let's look at all these different offers." She kind of restructured things. And she took like my book offer where right now, you buy the books and you get this one book for free. And it's really, really cool. She's like, 'What if we did that, plus we gave them this?" I think it was One Funnel Away Challenge. "Plus we gave them this software over here, and plus we give them...". It was like five or six things. And I remember like, as she's going through, I was like kind of sick to my stomach, like, ugh. But I didn't say anything, because I'm trying to be cool, you know? And I don't want to... I hate when you're brainstorming, someone comes in and has all the negative things to say about it. So I felt this like sick feeling in my stomach where, I was like, oh, okay. And then she talked about upsell number two and then proposed upsell number three. And upsell number two was like, we can give them this, and this, and this. I'm like, "You can't do that because this one's like a thousand dollars, and this one's this over here." And I was kind of freaking out. And the next upsell, she's going through it, and in my head, I'm just stressing out because I'm like, "We can't sell these things for that cheap. This is insanity." I'm just like this feeling of just like uneasiness because of this. And then we sat there, we were talking about it and we're looking at, and I was drawing it out on a whiteboard trying to map it out in my head so I could come to grips with this whole thing. And all of a sudden, I stopped for a moment, and I was like, "Oh my gosh. Look at this internal anxiety I have going through this process." And I started thinking about that. And I was like, oh my gosh. I am struggling because this offer is so good that I don't want to do it. Now what do you think about an offer that's so good that you feel sick to your stomach actually giving it somebody because it's such a good deal? That's probably the right offer, right, if you're trying to make an irresistible, one-time offer. You're like, "I sell of this course for $97. I'll sell it to you for 97 bucks." That's an offer, but it's not an irresistible, insane offer. When you are sick to your stomach because you're like, there's no way we can do this. I can't give people this and this and all these things for this price because it's not worth it to me. You're sick to your stomach? That's when you're close. That's when you probably have the right offer. And for me it was this big aha of just like, oh my gosh, I've been stingy. I've been trying to feed my ego and trying to make sure that the offers are the things that I want to sell, not what people actually want. And then looking at it from, okay, I'm not just making an offer, I got to make something irresistible. If I want to go from like a 15, 20% conversion rate on an upsell rate to a 40, 50%, it has to be irresistible. We're in the process right now of purchasing a company. I can't talk about it yet. As soon as we finalize it... In fact, the deal might be finalized when I get back from Lake Powell. So I'm sure you will hear me shouting it from the roofs. But the funnel, we're literally buying this thing because the funnels are so good. Like when someone buys a product through the funnel, the average cart value is like $180, which means, I can spend $180 to sell this front end product, which is crazy. It's so good. But you look at the upsell flow and it's the same thing. It's the most insane, irresistible offer where you... I'm sure when the person we're buying the company from was first putting it together, he was sick to his stomach, like, "Oh, I could easily sell this for a thousand bucks or $2000 or more." And he's like, "I'm just going to do it for $97." Like, wait, wait, what? You can't do that. This is insane. "I'm sick to my stomach. We spent $50,000 creating this thing. I can't sell it you for $97." And when you get that internal dialogue in your head where you're fighting it because this doesn't make any logical sense, that's when you probably have an actual irresistible offer. That's the key. And that was my big humbling this weekend, or this week before I came out to Lake Powell, was that. And I've been thinking a lot about it, like sitting on the boat. As I'm sitting here I'm thinking like, "Man, I felt so much anxiety and frustration." Is kind of like how many of you guys have ever seen the greatest show of all time, 24? If not, you should pause this right now, go watch all the eight or nine seasons of it and then come back and finish the episode. Otherwise you're going to... It's more important than anything else you could be doing right now is watching every episode of 24. But I digress. So there's this bad guy in 24 and he's the president. President Logan? I can't remember exactly. It's been a while since I've watched it, but he's the president. And I remember that at first I thought that the guy who played the president, I was like, I hate this character. I hate him. And every single episode, it got worse. I was like, I hate him. I remember being so angry, upset watching, episode, after episode, after episode. This president was such a horrible person and so angry. And I was like, I hate him. Why did they pick him to be the actor? Why these things? And being so frustrated and angry and I couldn't sleep. And I was so angry at this person, this president, I hated him so bad. And all of a sudden one day I stopped and I was like, oh my gosh. Look how I feel right now. I hated this guy, but I'm realizing now, I don't hate him. He's probably one of the best actors I've ever seen because he's making me have this visceral response to everything he's saying. And all of a sudden I was like, oh my gosh, he's not the worst character of all time. He's the best character. To make me hate him that bad is magical. Same thing when I first met Ben Settle. I joined Ben Settle's email list and I used to get the daily emails. And I remember I kept reading them and kept reading them and they would annoy me so bad, get me so frustrated. And it was probably two or three weeks into this email sequence where I was like... And I don't unsubscribe from anything ever. And I remember the emails were coming in. I read one. I was so upset that I was going to unsubscribe because I was so angry at him and his philosophies, and his thoughts and everything. I was like, oh, and I was about to unsubscribe. I stopped for a second. I was like, oh my gosh, look how I feel. Notice how he's making me feel right now? He's giving me, once again, this visceral response where I'm like angry, and upset, and frustrated. And so much so that I wanted to like, oh, and I was like, oh my gosh. I think prior to that I was like, he's the worst marketer ever. I hate this guy. He's wrong about everything. And all of a sudden I was like, oh, oh my gosh. Look how he's making me feel. He's an amazing marketer. He got me to feel this way. Never in my life I've read every email from a marketer and I'd read every email of his for months because I was so angry and so upset and so frustrated. And I was like, I bought his thing. I bought the other thing even though I hated him and frustrated by it and annoyed by him. In fact, the first time I met Ben, I told him that story. I was like, "Just so you know, like I hated you at first." I was like, 'Every email that would come, I would get so annoyed and so upset and all of a sudden I realized, oh, look at how he made me feel." To cause this kind of feeling in me shows that he's a master, not someone who's bad. And so a lot of times I want you to start noticing how you're feeling as these things are happening to you because a lot of times our brain is pushing us one way and hating this thing where it could be like the greatest thing we could have learned. And so, anyway, I wanted to share that because that's how I felt when we were going through this upsell flow. And so next time you're creating an offer and you're working on your upsells, your down sells or your, whatever your thing is, you're working on, I want you to start thinking about that, like how do I make this offer so good that I literally am sick to my stomach and frustrated and angry and like, oh, I can't do this? Like, there's no way we can give people this much value. We just can't do it. And all of a sudden you're like, that's it. We got there. We finally got to a point where I don't want to do this because I feel like the value is so high. Like they always say in any good offer, but any kind of good business deal or business partnership, both people should feel like they got the better end of the stick. Right? And if not, it means that someone felt like they got a worse end and that's not good. You want both people to feel like they got a better end of the stick. So if I make an offer so good, I'm like, this is insane. I can't do this because it's such a good offer, and honestly feeling that way deep in your gut. And then the customer coming in like, "Oh my gosh. They only want $97 for that?" Or $200, whatever the price is like, oh my gosh. Now both sides feel like they got the better end of the stick. That's how to make irresistible offers. That's how you create raving fans. That's how you create amazing offers. Anyway, I wanted to share it with you guys because it was interesting. It was fascinating. And I hope that helps you guys. Go back to your old offers. Look at the upsell flow and be like, what else could I add? What else could I add? What else could I tweak? How can we make this offer better? How can we make it better? How can I up this offer? How can I increase it even better? And keep thinking through that. And the better you make the offer, the more likely people will be to give you money. A lot of times people are like, "My upsell's not converting. What do I need to do?" I'm like, "Your offer sucks. Make a better offer." "This is the best thing I've got." Well then make something better. Like, what else can you give them? What else can you create? What else can you invent? What else can you put together? You need to make something that is so irresistible that they look at it, they're like, "I have to give them money. I need this thing. This is such a good deal. It's such a good offer. I have to give them money." That's the feeling they have to have or else you missed it. So anyway, with that said, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Hopefully you guys go back and look at all of your old funnels, all your old offers. Look at things you're doing and figure out what else can I bundle? What else can I add to make the software even more irresistible? And keep doing it until you feel sick to your stomach. And that's when you're probably to the spot where your offer's finally going to start converting. Okay, I hope that helps you guys. I appreciate you all. Thanks for listening, for subscribing, for hanging out. If you liked this podcast, please do go to iTunes and leave me a review. That'd be pretty sweet. And with that said, I'll see you guys on the next episode. Bye everybody. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you’re struggling in any area of your life, it’s probably because this equation is out of balance. Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- Hey, what's up everybody. This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to Marketing Secrets podcast. This week, I am at Lake Powell, I'm unplugged and that means I have no internet access. I've got no ability to check email or social media or anything, and all I can do is sit and think and play the water with my kids and my family. It's been really fun. But during that time, I had time to think about some things. And so I want to share with you some of my thoughts today, specifically about how much we produce and how much we consume. All right, everybody. Last year when I was at Lake Powell was the very first time I had a chance to start reading Atlas Shrugged. And to me, as you've heard me, I did a podcast with Josh Forti earlier year. There's like four or five hour-long podcast talking about Atlas Shrugged. I'm not going to get into that today, but as I was preparing for our Lake Powell trip that we do every single year with our kids, would come down here, we get a houseboat and we just have a fun time with some of our family and friends and stuff, I just kind of started craving that book again because I'd read it last time I was on this trip, and I start thinking about it. I was like, oh. I started listening to the audio book again on the drive down. And while I've been here during my free time, I'm listening to the audio book and it's been really fun to hear it a second time. It's interesting, the first time you read a book, especially a book like Atlas Shrugged, which I think it's like 15 or 1600 pages, it's a very intricate story. Ayn Rand wrote it in the 40s or 50s, and it took her, I think, 11 years to write the book. Just the John Galt speech alone took her two years to write, which is crazy. And so in a story like that, people back then... In fact, I got some photocopies of the original manuscripts. It wasn't like on a computer, it was on typewriters, like handwritten. When someone's writing something that complex and spending 11 years on it, there's a lot of things you don't catch the first time through. These storylines are so cool, and these things that are happening in conversations you missed the first time around. I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is so cool." Just been a really fun experience to go back into that book again and really enjoying it. What's interesting to me is, I don't remember where this came up and it's not specifically tied to the book, but the thought that you're reading a book and you have thoughts start popping in your head, and the thought I started thinking about it a lot was about basically our job as entrepreneurs, or people for that matter, is to make sure that we are producing more than we're consuming, right? To truly understand this, I think one of the core lessons or things you have to understand is just how money works, how people make money in this world. Money is a by-product of value, right? The more value you provide somebody or a group of people, the more money you make, right? For example, if someone is an accountant, they may make, I don't know how much accountants make, let's say a hundred grand a year, right? Just make numbers easier. They have one client and that client's paying a hundred grand a year and they're making pretty good money because they're providing value to that one client, right? But they make $100,000 a year, which depending on where you're at, that's either a lot of money or not very much money. But you take that same accountant, instead of them just being account for one client, if they say, "Man, I want to provide more value in the world," that accountant can start their own accounting company. They can, instead of one client, take on 10 or 20 or 30 clients. Maybe they need to hire some associates and hire some other accountants underneath them. Eventually they've got a business where now they're doing accounting for say a hundred people. That little accounting company might make $1 million a year. The accountant who started at might take home, four, five, $600,000 a year. He's still got the same amount of hours in the day as anybody else, but he or she figured out a way to provide more value. Instead of just doing accounting work for one person and making a hundred grand, they do it for 20 people now and they make a million. Even though they have more costs now, more risks, we've got to pay for other employees and they got to pay for these different things, because they're able to provide more value, they end up making more money. Money is a direct correlation to value. That's just a core principle that I didn't understand for a long time. It's the reason why a teacher who works in a school could be super, most talented person in the world, best teacher in the world. But if they're teaching for a classroom and they're getting paid their 50, $60,000 a year as a teacher, and they teach the kids that come through, that's all the money they're able to make because they're not finding any more value. What if that same teacher took their message and started publishing a YouTube channel and started reaching millions of people, they may go from making 50, $60,000 a year to $1 million a year teaching the same stuff, but their getting out to more people. Now instead of 100 kids a year hearing their lessons in a school, now they're getting a million people a year listening to it through a podcast or through YouTube channel, through some other means, and they're providing more value to more people, so that's how they make more money. All these things are tied together. That's one principal for everyone to understand. If you don't know, don't write it off yet. I don't make enough money. Well, how much value are you providing? You're providing to one person. Can you provide that same service to 10 people, to 20 people? The more value you provide, the more money you're going to make. The natural order of things is how it works. The thing that I was thinking about recently was just how important it is that we are providing more value. We're producing more than we're consuming. In all aspects of life. I first start thinking about it from a business standpoint where if you consume more than you produce, what happens? If you consume more than you produce, then you go into debt, and it's not good. Let's say you decided, "Oh, I make $1 million a year, I want to buy a house." But the houseboats cost $3 million. So, you go and you buy a houseboat for $3 million, you're $2 million in debt. You're consuming more than you're producing, therefore you're in trouble. If you want to have something bigger or nicer or whatever it is, you have to learn how to produce more than you consume. That's going to give you more money. In this book Atlas Shrugged, that was one of the big things it talks a lot about, was just the producers. In the book, you've read it, the society is trying to give everyone based on their needs and their wants, not so much their production. The premise of Atlas Shrugged is these producers. They need to go out, they're and producing, and eventually the producers go on strike because it's not worth it for them more because of all the government regulations and social pressures and all these things that make it where it's no longer beneficial for them to actually become producers. In the world we live in today, that's it. If you want to make money, you got to produce more. We have to create more value. If you want to save money, if you want to get nice things, you have to produce more than you can consume. That's like a universal principle. I started thinking about it, just this week since I've been sitting on the boat and eating more than I normally do. I noticed that I am consuming more than I am producing. For our bodies, what do we produce? We produce energy. We go and we work out, we run, we walk, we do things. If my production is more than my consumption, then what happens? I lose weight, right? But if I consume more than I produce, so I'm eating more calories than I'm burning, then I gain weight. As I'm watching my kids running around, it's funny because I feel like I'm active. I'm an active dad, but I watch my kids running around and they're producing so much energy and burning so much that they can eat whatever they want. They stay tiny and skinny. It's crazy because they're producing so much. As we get older, we keep consuming, we consume more and more and more, cause we've got bigger bellies and we can eat more and all these things, but we produce less. We don't exercise much. We don't run. We're not running around. When I look at my daughter, Nora, when she goes from one end of the houseboat to the other, she doesn't walk. She's sprinting the whole time. They're just producing more energy, which makes them lose more weight. Again, if you look at a weight loss or energy management, the goal, again, is to produce more than you consume. I start thinking about universal a principle that is in all aspects of life. In a relationship. I want to make sure that I am producing more value to my spouse than I'm consuming. We're in great relationship. All of us need to be focusing on that, on production, producing, producing energy for your body, producing value for the marketplace, producing happiness for your spouse, for your kids. Bad things happen when that metric gets flipped, where we start consuming more than we produce. You consume more food than energy produced, what happens? We gain a lot of weight and it gets really hard. We consume more stuff than we have money that we've produced. We've consumed more than the value we produced. What happens? We get into debt. We get upside down, we don't have any money in savings, we don't have any money to invest. because we're doing those things. In a relationship, if you are consuming more than you're producing, it's a lopsided relationship. It's not fair to anybody. This becomes a universal value, a universal thing in all aspects of our life. And the more I keep thinking about it, the more use cases I keep finding for this one thing, it's this ratio of production versus consumption. If any of you guys feel like I want to consume more, I want to eat more, cool. You should do it, but you've got to produce more energy so you can burn that way. If you want nicer stuff, you want to consume more, I want a nice house, I want a nice car, I want a nice whatever, cool, do it. That means you've got to produce enough to be able to afford it. You got to create more value, produce more value, and then it's okay. We had a conversation last night with one of the teenagers here. He asked me if I was scared when I bought my house, or something like that. We have kind of a crazy house. I said, no, because if you look at it, based on the average person buys a house and takes some 40 years to pay it off. And so while their house may cost way, way less than mine, I was able to pay my house off in two years. Maybe it's three years. Anyway, whatever it was. But it's because I was producing more. Ratio-wise, it wasn't very much. Because my, because I was producing more value, which made me more money, which now made it so that I could buy this house and it didn't seem like a lot. Just like my kids can go and they can literally sit down at dinner and eat 8,000 calories and they don't gain a stitch of weight. Where if I'm over 1800 calories in a day, I start gaining weight, because I'm only producing 1800 calories worth of energy in a day. If I'm not there, I start gaining weight really, really quickly. It all comes down to this ratio. Anyway, I know it's common sense. We know these things, but it just gave me a different way to kind of look at things because it's a universal principle in so many areas of our life. How much are we producing? How much are we consuming? If we're consuming more than we're producing, we're gaining weight, we're in debt, we're having these problems. If you're in any of these things, any area of your life where you're struggling, look at this ratio? Are you producing more than you're consuming? If so you're probably in a spot where your relationship's great or your energy and your body is great, or your bank account's great, whatever those things are. And if not, I bet you that that ratio is off and becomes a very simply now for us to look at, to diagnose and figure, okay, I want these things. I'm trying to do these things, but there's a math problem here. I am consuming more than I'm producing in this area of my life. I got to double, triple, quadruple down to produce more than I can consume when I want to, because now the ratios make sense. You can go buy a $20 million house. It doesn't matter if your productions side, if now the ratio works and it's not insane. The insanity happens the other way when you're consuming more than you're producing. There's the math problem. There's the metric. There's the thing to start thinking through. As I was thinking about it again, for myself, it just got me excited and started thinking about all the areas of my life that I'm not happy, looking specifically, this one ratio. Am I consuming more than I'm producing? If so, that's probably why I'm not happy. You probably don't have the energy. You probably don't have the money. You probably don't have the relationship because I'm consuming more than producing. There's a lens to look at the world through for all of you guys. I hope you enjoy it. It's been fun for me over the last couple days. I'm sitting here on the boat, looking at different areas of my life and realizing either I'm doing really good or really bad, and it's all coming down to this one ratio of production versus consumption. Hope you enjoy this. Thanks again, guys, I appreciate you. Hopefully you're having great summer vacations as well. Enjoy time with friends and family, and I will see you guys back here on another episode soon. Bye, everybody. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How to take six weeks off without stressing even a little bit. Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- Russell Brunson: What's up everybody. This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back the Marketing Secrets podcast. Right now, I'm at Lake Powell. I've been on the boat, the houseboat and jet-skis, and we did a waterboard, it's a type of Flyboard where you literally feel like Ironman flying through the sky. We just got done wake surfing, our kids have been wake surfing. It's been an insane week and I'm here with my friend, John Jonas. I'll introduce you guys here in a second. And for me, it was a lot to take a week off. I had no cell phone access for a week and John hasn't worked in eight years, 12 years. Just kidding, he's basically taking six weeks off. He is the person in my life who somehow has figured out a systemized entire life. So he can just do whatever he wants whenever he wants. And so that's what we're talking about today is systemizing outsourcing and whole bunch of other stuff when we come back from the theme song. All right, so I'm back here. We're on top of the houseboat and I'm talking to John Jonas. Some of you guys know John, if not, he is the founder of onlinejobs.ph, which... Actually, do you want to tell them what it is and tell them about you? John Jonas: Yeah, thanks man. So when I was early on in my business, I just realized I needed help and finding help sucked. It was so hard. And everybody talked about outsourcing, outsourcing, outsourcing, and I tried India and it sucked. It did. Russell: The entire country. John: Well and then it's like, dude, I have nothing against the country. But outsourcing there was really hard and there's some really big cultural reasons why, and I won't get into it, whatever. And then you have Upwork, which was Elance and oDesk at the time, which is fine, except the whole system is based around 100% turnover. And as a small business owner, 100% turnover guaranteed in your business, that sucks, hiring a contract worker, that's so stinking hard. So one day I'm talking to John Brizzy, the owner of backcountry.com. And he says to me, "When you're ready to start outsourcing some of this stuff, make sure you go to the Philippines with it." And I was like, "Huh, really?" And he gave me some reasons why, and more than just like, "Oh, this is amazing," it gave me hope that maybe I'd find something different than what I had experienced before, because that was really the thing was there's so much loss of hope in outsourcing because it's just a babysitting job and people that you're outsourcing to suck and they can only do menial tasks. And so I hired this guy in the Philippines full-time, which he gave me a reference to hire someone full-time and I didn't know if I could do it. It took me two months to hire someone because I didn't know if I could keep someone busy full-time I didn't know if I could pay them I didn't know if they could do good work. It was the most liberating experience in my life. This dude's full-time job was doing anything I asked him to do. And yeah, dude, that was amazing. I taught him how to systematize this whole system that I had completely failed with on Upwork. It was Elance at the time, but I hired this guy to write articles and he wrote these articles and sent them back to me. And I was like, "Yes, I got these articles done," this was on Elance. And then I realized, "Oh, now the burden falls on me to do the rest of the work." And that's where most stuff breaks down is when it falls on you to do the rest of the work. So when I had this guy in the Philippines, I realized, "Oh no, he can write the article and then he just worked full-time for me. So I can teach him to do the posting and the headers and the resource boxes and the links and I can teach them how SEO works and he can do all the SEO." And this was like 2005. So since then, I've realized oh yeah, you can hire amazing people, programmers, designers, social media people, content writers, data entry people, lead generators, whatever it is, copywriters, you can hire a really good people. And in the Philippines, I was paying the company, this is 2005, I was paying them $750 a month they're paying him $250 a month for full-time work. So today that same person's probably going to be like $450 a month straight from you to them because of what online jobs is. Russell: Because you guys created a platform. Because prior to, so the first time I hired someone from the Philippines, there was a company I hired and they... I can't remember name of it. Agents of Value, yes. Agents of Value, yes. And I was so excited because it was like 700 bucks you get a full-time employee, which I was paying American wages prior to everyone and I was freaking out. And then yeah, like you said, you find that they're only making $250, $300. And so what John built is a really cool, I wouldn't call it a directory, it's more than that, but it's a place you go, you sign up for it, and then there's how many Filipinos are listed there right now? John: There's over a million Filipino profiles there. Yeah, so what I created was what I wanted for myself. So after a couple of years of hiring people through this agency, I went to them and they said, "Well do you want a programmer or a webmaster?" I was like, "I want a content writer." "Well do you want a programmer or a webmaster," was their response. And agencies, generally, this is how they are. They're going to three times mark up the salary and then they're going to give you the same person. They're going to go to online jobs today and try and find the person... They do, I know they do. So I created what I wanted, which was I just want to recruit some people on my own and I want to hire them and I want to pay them directly and there's no markup, so there's no salary markup. And there's no middleman telling me who I need to hire, giving me someone crappy who doesn't know anything, which is what Agents of Value did multiple times. And so now I can go and find someone, find the exact person I want. And it's crazy. I hired a programmer who was working for IBM and he's so dang good. Or I found a copywriter, actually, I hired a copywriter who wrote some ClickFunnels emails. And it's amazing what you can find on onlinejobs.ph. And the crazy thing about the Philippines, I had no idea at the time. This is why this guy's advice was so dang good. And he obviously knew, and I had no idea. So in the Philippines, there's a culture of honesty and loyalty and hard work and make people happy. So my guys in the Philippines have my credit cards, they have access to my email account, they have access to my servers. We've seen hundreds of thousands of people hire people in the Philippines and have seen very, very few people get ripped off. And almost every time when they do, it's because they tried to get the person to do some work and then not pay the person. And obviously, yeah, they're going to try and get paid. And then there's the loyalty thing. So the Philippines, their culture is loyal almost to a fault. So when you hire them, they'll never stop working for you as long as you gain their trust. So the first person I hired in 2005 still works for me today. Yeah, and he's amazing. He can do anything. When I hired him, he knew nothing. Today, he can do anything I want. So the culture makes such a difference of the Philippines versus elsewhere, especially for a small business owner. Russell: All right, so I want to tell a story and I'm not embarrassed, maybe a little bit. So you and I had a chance to go to Australia to speak at Mal Emery's event. Do you remember what year that was? John: 2012. Russell: Dang. So 2012. And for those of you who know me and know I wrote a book about the perfect webinar as my things I'm really good at closing people and selling from the stage and all that kind of stuff. So John and I fly down to Australia, we both speak on stage and you destroyed me. It was really embarrassing. I only sold a handful and John sold everybody in the room literally bought his... It was insane. But I'm telling you this because there was a story you told in there that I'm going to mess with the details, but I want you to share the story with people. Number one, they'll get to know you a little better. But number two, it's also I think a lot of you guys have probably heard me or other people talk about outsourcing and you're like, "Oh yeah," and maybe you hire someone here or there, but for you, there was something in your life that happened that made forced you to do it and then that ended up giving you the freedom that literally we've been here this week, everyone's stressing out. No one's got cell phone access and John's just having the best time ever. And you have six weeks in a row vacation time. What week are we on right now? John: Four. Week five. Russell: Week five of six and I'm like one weekend. I'm like, "Well, I'm good." So anyway, I want you to hear this story because it's powerful, but also I think I'm hoping you guys hear and realize that you don't have to wait for something tragic or scary like this to happen. But if you kind of try to force it in your mind, you can have something like this happen and give yourself freedom earlier. So with that said, here's John. John: So I've worked about 17 hours a week for the last 13, 14 years. And here's what happened. So my wife is seven months pregnant with our third child. This is 2007. We went to the doctor, he's run some tests and he says to my wife, "You have preeclampsia. And if you don't go on strict bed rest for the next three to five weeks, you're going to have a seizure and you're going to lose this baby." And to me, obviously, I was there with her and it was a shock. And on my way home from the doctor's office, I was just thinking, "I'm working full time and I have to two other kids and she has to be on strict bed rest. I'm not about to lose a baby over money." So I was thinking, "What am I going to do?" So when I get home, I sent an email to two of my guys in the Philippines. I had two guys in the Philippines at the time and I sent an email to them. And I just want you to know, as I tell you this, they had been with me for about 18 months. These were not guy. I pulled off the street. You're not going to hire someone new and this is going to work for you. It's going to take some time. But I told them, "Hey guys, here's my situation. I can't work. Here's why. I need you to take over everything I'm currently doing in my business." And so I... Everything, everything. For the next three weeks, I literally worked one hour. And that one hour... So after that day, when I got home, I sent them all the instructions I could, that one hour was just responding to their questions. And they took over my Google AdWords account and they took over my blog and they took over the marketing that I was doing. They took over the SEO that I was doing. They took over customer service. They took over everything I was currently doing. Three weeks later, my wife has the baby, this beautiful little girl Bailey, who just turned 14. And for the next two months, my wife struggled with postpartum depression. And so I just kept not working. It was a little bit more, it was one hour a week because she was allowed to get out of bed now. And so I spent three months not working basically. And it's expected to have a disaster with my business and came back to find my business had grown. And I'm not going to tell you it's because these guys were running the business. That's not the case. But the point here is that I had had the right help and my business didn't crash when I wasn't there. So from there, this is where you'll really recognize I hope what the possibilities of outsourcing are. So after these three months, I was like, "Well there's only so many times in a day you can take your kids to the golf course," and you get bored. Because that's what I was doing. I was taking my kids to the golf course twice a day. And so I started designing a business based around how far can I take this outsourcing thing? Because I had only had these guys doing menial tasks up to that point. And now I realized like, "Whoa, they're way better than I thought they were. And so can I build a business based around them doing all the work and me just being the CEO?" So I started designing this business. I'll tell you what it was. We were going to write reviews about products and post them on our website and then drive traffic to them and put affiliate links on all the reviews. So I record myself talking for 45 minutes explaining this whole thing. And I bought a domain and I sent the domain and my recording to this guy in Philippines. And again, he had been working for me for a while and he takes the domain, sets it up on my hosting account, sets up WordPress and changes the theme according as I've described and sends it back to me a couple days later and it was horrible. And I was like, "Oh crap." So I went back and described it better and better again. And we did this for about a week until we got it right. He got the website how I wanted it. It was amazing. So then he wrote the first review and it was terrible. And I was like, "Oh yeah, this outsourcing thing isn't as good as I thought it was." Russell: You're like, "No, I'll take it all to myself." For me, that's what I've been using. Like, "Well I'm done. I'm just going to myself." I give up usually at that point. John: That's not what I did. And because that's not my personality. I want to see if I can make this thing work really. So I worked with him through the review. I was like, "Okay, we've got to change this and this and this. And we've got to get more data from here. And we've got to do this." So we worked for a couple of weeks, got the review right. And I never wrote another review. So he had already done some SEO, but I start teaching him more SEO and he starts doing SEO and he starts doing some social marketing, even though social media wasn't really a thing. But we started doing Craigslist stuff. And we started doing RSS feeds and we started doing everything that I knew to do at the time, I did. Everything I knew to implement, I did. Which today all the things you know to implement would be build your funnel and start your Dream 100 and run Facebook ads to it and start doing some SEO maybe and get on a podcast or start a podcast. All these things that you know you should be doing I was doing, except I wasn't the one doing them. So that business in the first month made me about $200. Within three months, it was making three to $500 a month. Within six months, it was making a thousand dollars a month, within a year is making me 10 to $15,000 a month. And this dude in the Philippines, who, again, I told you they're super loyal and super honest, he built the whole thing. He joined the affiliate programs. He starts running Google AdWords on it. Because I taught him how to do it. He sends me a report every month. "Here's how much money we spent. Here's how much money we made. Here's what I think I can do to improve the business and make more money." And that was where I realized like, "Oh yeah, these aren't just dummies that can only do menial work. They can only follow exact instructions." No, he read between the lines so many times he figured out so much stuff. And I don't want you to think that he built this whole business for me and I didn't do anything. Because I did. I was the CEO. I knew what was going on. I knew what had to happen. But I never touched it. I don't touch WordPress. I don't write content now. Russell: So let me ask you, so I know that there's people listening right now who are thinking, "Well why doesn't the guy just make his own blog and then just do it himself? And then he'll make the 10 grand a month for himself and not have to just cut you out of it." And I've thought of that as well. I'm curious why specifically Filipinos, why that's not an issue for you. John: So yeah, because in India, that's the first question they ask. And that's our experience with outsourcing is, "Well what's your business model here?" I explained to him the business model. In the Philippines, they're not entrepreneurial. They don't want to steal your business. They don't want to steal your idea. They don't want to do it on their own. That's too risky for them. They are really job oriented and they want a job. They want a long-term stable job that they can take home and reliably take care of their family. And I've seen that so, so many times. I have people that have worked for me since 2005 and 2006 and 2008 and nine and 10. And they also work with me. Russell: Awesome, okay, my last question for you then is I think we had this conversation last year. So John's my Lake Powell buddy. And it's our third time renting house boat together, fourth time on the lake together. But anyway. Last year we had this conversation, I'm not sure if you remember it, but it was impactful to me because for me, those who know me, I'm a perfectionist, especially comes to my funnels and copy and design and everything's going to be reviewed by me because anyway, I'm super annoying that way. But our stuff does really well. And so I'm always thinking it has to be perfect to go live and get shipped out there and actually be a live thing. And last year was talking to you about it. And your philosophy is obviously different than mine. You were more, do you remember this conversation we had? And you were talking about how you're like 80% is it's fine. The extra 20% is... Do you remember this conversation at all? I'd love to get just your mindset on that because it's something I could use, but probably other people as well where it doesn't have to be 100% to make money. It's got to be close. John: So there are some things where it needs to be 100%. But most things, it's more important to get it done than to get it done perfectly. And so for me, my philosophy is ship, get it out there. So just before we left, we're driving down here and I checked my project management and saw that they had completed this big long piece of content that we had. And I said to them, "I'm not going to review this, but publish it because I'm sure it's good enough. You guys are good and publish it." And when I get back, maybe I'll review it. Maybe I won't, I don't know. Maybe the task will be gone and I'll never see it. But to me, just getting it out there and having people see it is more likely to tell you the problems with it than I am to tell the problems by reading it myself and to creating a bottleneck myself to let me give you 16 more things that I don't think are perfect. Even though you guys think it's perfect, there's three other people that have seen it, and I don't think so, but they do, which tells me maybe I'm wrong. I also don't have, and this is a personality thing, I don't have the design eye that you do and I don't care as much. I want people to see it and I want people read it and ship it, get alive. We ship software with bugs all the time because then it's live and then people will instantly tell you, "Oh, this is a problem." "Oh, okay. We'll fix it. Sweet." Russell: As opposed to figuring out all the problems, mistakes on your own. Oh man. Well I hope you guys enjoyed this episode, it's a little different, but I don't normally interview. I don't even know John, you're like the second person to ever be on my podcast besides me. But I think it's good for everyone to understand. So for those who are in some part of their business where they're trying to think of if they can use outsourcing more, join Online Jobs, and this is not a paid ad. I get nothing from this other than as long as online jobs keeps making money off of a boat buddy at Lake Powell, otherwise I've got to pay for this whole thing by myself. But there's no advertising, but let them know how Online Jobs works. Because it's different. It's not like Agents of Value. You're hiring and paying them and could you walk them through how it works and wants to get the count and how to set it all up and everything? John: Yeah, so Online Jobs is kind of like indeed.com, but for the Philippines. So you go on and you post a job and it's free to post a job. And then depending on your job, you'll get a few or hundreds of job applicants. And if you get hundreds of job applicants, that's a problem, you can't go through hundreds of applicants. That sucks. But you'll get a bunch of applicants. And then you can see the applications for free. You can do all that for free. You just can't contact anybody. You don't get anybody's contact information until you pay. And it's $69 for a month and then you get to contact as many people as you want, really. Or you can reply to everybody who sent you a job application, if you want. And then you just interview them, you're going to use their Disk profile. Russell talks about Disk profiles. And I think it's amazing. Almost everybody on there has a Disk profile and you're going to send them emails and ask them tons of questions. And here's a little bit of advice, don't do a Skype interview right off the bat. That's the first thing everyone wants to do is get on the phone with them. And that's the last thing you should be doing when you do interviews with people in the Philippines. They don't want to do it. So do that at last when you've narrowed it down to three. You can give a test task. You're completely on your own. Every application will come to your email inbox if you want. It's your Gmail inbox. They'll also be in your online jobs inbox, but then you interview them and you hire them and you pay them. And we don't take a cut of any of that. If you're interested in more, I have, very similar to Russell's one funnel away, I have the one VA away challenge. So I will walk you through the hiring process and I guarantee you'll find a great person if you go through my process at one VA way. It's my process of how I hire great people. I never think, "I don't know if I'm going to find someone good this time or not." I'm going to find someone good. I know I am because I've done it so many times. Russell: So onevaaway.com? John: onevaaway.com Russell: Awesome, all right. And I'm going to product this. So obviously I have click funnels that whole business and there's support and there's team and everything. But we started building some of these side businesses and some fun projects I was working on and all of them have customers coming in now and customer support and all these things. And I was like, "Aaaa!” and so I asked John, I'm like, "Hey, what would you do if you're me?" He's like, "Dude, you're an idiot. Of course go to Online Jobs." So we did, sent them to the count, we hired three new Filipinos, they're on a Slack channel with us and they have access to our help desk. Our help desk has all these little sub companies we're building and they're cross-training on all the different products and they're awesome. Every morning they check it on Skype, like, "Good morning, we're here." And then they check out at night like, "We're done," and they have questions asked in Slack, and then they're just cross-training all of our products. And so we'll just keep adding more products in there and they're supporting all of them and it's amazing. And we've got three right now. We'll probably have more as we start growing and stuff like that. And I'm getting really excited about bringing in more to do more tasks. Everybody can do funnels. You guys are training now on a lot of them are doing funnels, a lot of them are doing copywriting, a lot of them are doing a lot of other stuff too. So anyway, it's exciting. So go to onlinejobs.ph or onevaaway.com. And with that said, hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Get your mind thinking about outsourcing and the Philippines and a whole bunch of cool things like that. So in fact, one time you gave me... So I've done this four or five times. We build up huge scenes. At one time I had this guy named Mateo we hired from the Philippines and he built a team of like 30 writers for me, back when we were doing SEO really, really hard. We were cranking on it. Anyway, it's fun to do and fun to learn and to get to know some really, really cool people. So anyway, hope that helps you guys appreciate you all and we'll see you guys on the next episode. Bye. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices