hey everyone its Russell again welcome to the next episode of marketing secrets this is part 2 the one funnel way presentation so the big question is this how we're entrepreneurs like us you didn't you take on venture capital we're spending money from our own pocket how do we market in a way the left-half see our products and our services and the things we believe in out of the world and yet still remain profitable that is the question in this podcast we'll give you the answers my name is Russell Brunson and welcome to marketing speaker alright
guys so I hope you enjoyed yesterday's episode if you did like it I hope that you have shared a toilet people go listen to it it's basically the exciting conclusion of Russell's bankruptcy and failure story so I hope you guys enjoy it it should be a lot of fun listen to it if your online marketing seekers calm you can watch it there's a video there we can share and see the actual presentation as well but I hope this helps you it helps give you fate and hope and what you're doing where you're creating and where
you're trying to go with your business and people's lives you're going to serve so with that said enjoy my failures I hope you could type it and I'll see you guys soon now the pros and the cons of this the pros is this was really awesome and I was like is getting good entrepreneur on mic hey what's the book nail up and scale it we nailed it right Kay let's scale this thing and so then like I published and then some of this stuff but we got excited I was like well this worked here we
should hire more people and we started growing this we went from this little thing with five or six of us to two years later we had about a hundred people operation where this is the model we were doing CDs calling them on the phone selling coaching having continuity and it grew really really big and during the time there were some really positive things that came from it some negative things some ups ups and downs and I'll share kind of a lot of those things one cool thing is that while this was happening and it was
going really well my name kind of got out there so I got a chance to go speak a lot which was cool and I've seen other people speaking from stage this is where I told you guys a story gone anyone's gone through the perfect webinar like I spent about two and a half three years on the road going to seminars standing for much of this talking trying to sell something and then nothing happening it's really horrible feeling anyone ever done that before my first presentation I was on stage light has probably had 300 people in
a room I did a presentation I tried to like do what speakers do and like close and then hopefully every runs the back and like nobody budged and then the guy forgot to turn the music on it was just like crickets and I was just like awkwardly like walking off the stage I was locker than running you know and then I remember the first I was so embarrassed because usually we have like those events were all like multi-speaker events and all the speakers are selling everyone's bragging about their numbers and like and I knew that
I don't want the nasan in my number so I totally didn't like not one person signed up so I hid in my hotel room and I remember ordering coconut shrimp and haagen-dazs ice cream for every meal for the next two days while I hid in the room eating it watching movies coming I'm going to act downstairs and I just it was really bad and awesome at the same time because coconut shrimp and haagen-dazs is awesome but I did that and I learned like how not to sell and then I started learning from some amazing speakers
and people and I started learning the process how it worked and all the stuff we talked about the perfect webinar all this stuff we talked about day one about creating belief and breaking belief pattern all those kind of things I learned like on the road in front of people on state like it was it was scary but it's such a good time for me to learn and understand that part of the process as we started to grow and make sure I cover all the cool things we had a bunch of different offers we came out
with one of the ones that was more successful for us was um was a friend and off like this called micro continuity how many guys remember micro continuity yeah that is awesome so this is one we had probably how do you know eight years ago now we put it on an mp3 player from Hong Kong it has like six hours of this training and that was the funnel we put through and we kept creating new front and funnels to get people into this this program it worked awesome and we grew the company from nothing to
three or four million dollars a year and doing awesome and then at a time I started looking at other people in my industry this is hopefully will help one of you guys is going to get a good idea for this one but I had this funnel we talked about the value-added right like I had this really cool value out of happening here and and I was I was sending people up and I realized that I was the only person in the market that had a real value out of everyone else is kind of doing stuff
down here and that was it and I was the only person selling really expensive stuff I started calling my friends I call it like my Stillson Mikey then like so all of our customers recall them we sound like these $5,000 things on lots of people buy that like you should do that he's like I don't want to call senator that I'm like well do you want us to call your customers and sell it he's like yeah so we hooked up with Michael we became Mike's back in I call it franker and same thing we came
Frank turns back in through the wall we start calling up whole bunch of people then we start becoming the back end so all these people now had front-end funnels we became the backend for a lot of them and that's how we took company from three or four million dollars to ten million dollars and it came really big and I was going to say big and fun but week I would say that at all it became really big we had a hundred employees and we had 60 people on phones and Vicky's call center we had 20
people doing coaching for all the things we're selling and then we had about 20 people who were driving leads and customers so by that and it got really big and I don't think you guys noticed this but like I'm really good at like selling and those things grew that like the management of stuff and I was not good at managing all these people and it just it kind of started just getting too big and this is about the time that was telling you guys 50 brother comm seekers book that I I started waking up and
I was just like god I did not like what I created I got so excited that I started building this thing and one day woke up and I was like huh I really want to do this I think half of the conversations have inner circle members when I first come in is this like you really want to build that business yes that would work but sometimes it's horrible when you get there like thinking - like what do I actually want to do what I really want to become what who I want to be when I
grow up and and luckily ER during that time it was probably one of those painful times in my life but looking back now is probably one of the most important times in my life we had this huge operation everything was working and then one day was in January literally 11:30 in the morning one of my cell guys came in said hey I'm trying to run a credit card but it's not working I'm not sure what's wrong I'm like oh that's weird well you know try with the other merchant accounts maybe that maybe there's something there
and then some elf came in hey all the continuity orders are failing I'm not sure why and then the three or four people kid me I'm Mike what's happening I walked in the back end system and they not at 11:37 or so my that every cell stop just stop no sales I was like what is happening and some kind of freaking out so I call our merchant account company there's a busy signal or calling in busy calling and busy and like I can't get over anybody else in hearing from friends like do everything I shut
down like you sleep a process like know like what what's happening and everyone started I don't know I don't know and and sooner I found out that it wasn't me it was like and eventually found it's like three or four hundred people at the same time all anybody who was doing any kind of like continuity based stuff the merchant count space came in and said look we think that what you're doing might be illegal and so we're shutting all of you guys down and your basic guilty till proven innocent I was like what I've got
a hundred people are in feeding a hundred people on their families like it turns into like hundreds of people I was like you can't stop processing finally after like an hour I get through somebody and this lady on the phone says yep we shut you down good luck ever getting a merchant count again I got to go woman hung up on me I was like what you know the time I thought I was I thought I had diversity like I I had a we had nine merchant accounts all through one company and so I thought
that meant but they were also different the different merchants were altered one bank and I found out that the equipment having one which is why I'm very big believer now having multiple merchant accounts in multiple different banks which is the lesson hopefully for everybody on you don't know Alex Roy yet I know Alex is in here but meet Alex and he's the man to me he hooked up with lots of merchant accounts like he's done that for us yes he's amazing but uh but it was bad and so finally got to hold these guys and
I'm trying to figure some things out and basically said okay we got to prove that you are a good guy I was okay so we went through took us two weeks them to go through all our stuff look at our documentation look all our stuff it's two weeks they came back so kay you're right you're doing everything clean everything's aboveboard will turn your merchant counts back on and you're good to go I'm like sweet so we turn back on and that time when there's that kind of instability excels guys are freaking out they can't handle
any kind of instability they're leaving like crazy people walked out the door and was like and I was like freaking out and we then we had all this payroll but no money coming in and so Ike I'm paying it out of my own pocket like everything just like keep things afloat and as I'm going through this process like it's getting scary or scary and finally taking things Murph's counts back on your you're a good guy Mike sweet so hey guys we got to do a launch real quick make a bunch of money so we do
this put together this huge launch thing we push it out to our customer list in a weekend we made $250,000 and I was like thank you so great cuz I Monday we should get the money we can pay payroll I'm telling if I'm like just you know tell your wives your kids will have money soon like it's coming I promise like in the bank it's going to be here any day now and mines income money think on Monday - income Tuesday then come Wednesday and come by Thursday I might call in more like like where's
our money dude like we need this money and the guy looks like an O a it's definitely in there I'm like hey when to come into our bank he's like well it's not going to come to your bank like why not he said oh well you're on a hundred percent reserve so we keep a hundred spent your money just like what like that's not good for me or for anybody how much does it mean business I got people to pay he's like yeah well that's just how it works I think but the good news is
that it looks like you are legitimate company know was charging back or refunding this money we've collected so far so what we'll do is would drop you down or temperature reserve Mike I think heavens and they said but the 250,000 RG collected last week we're keeping that for next six months just as collateral make sure nothing bad happens like are you kidding me like cool so I'm like okay okay to the funnel quick so we're putting anything push it out there make some money and we start you know paying payroll for whatever we can but
it's like everything's collapsing around me and so I start in January and that start happening and same time we're trying to find other merchants counsel at our banks and other banks are like oh yeah we're cool come in we'll give you a merchant account and then I cookie this how it works like you make $100,000 a month and make cool okay we're going to in like two days so I need that for merchant accounts because this is like we can make money we just need to be able to like give it to us after we
make it and like oh yeah we're cold we're good at that don't worry cool so again emergency can't get all set up drill a bunch of traffic and twice we made over the hundred thousand dollars a month we were we're allowed within like a day day and a half and then they froze our accounts and they said up you've made too much money too fast we're freezing your accounts we'll get this money back to you in six months I'm like six months like please stop terrific huh we end up like four or five hundred thousand
dollars lockup the merchant accounts and it's getting worse and worse worse how this whole this whole year was like like the hardest year of my life and it just kept going down and like every single day I'm like laying off friends and family members some people whose families I like people I his love and I care about I'm coming on Mike I don't do man I'm so sorry I gotta let you go I'm just letting and there was just such a dark time of my life I'm just over a thing after thing after thing and
and I wish that I can stay from there got better so that was the entire year the next January started and one of my friends was doin event in Vegas and I was like go out there and just whew whatever I kind of refigure out my whole business completely collapsed at the time we by the way we were in this big huge office we had rented and yeah that we were leasing and he was like 20,000 square feet we had all the call center and stuff and I went to the landlord on Mikey mailing I
can't I can't afford to pay you anymore he's like okay well we got a 3-year contract if you don't pay me I'm gonna sue you and you're probably getting up in jail like you kidding me do like I'm trying like would not work with me at all I'd always fear behind that so I'm in Vegas the year later trying to ask friends like what's happening what are you guys doing your business and their time tell me their stories and it's like ah this is what to do and then that Matt I got email on my
phone for my dad and open his email it was like a shot in the gut like like probably the worst second of my life as I read that and the email said hey Russell I'm so sorry my dad was helping the books of time but we had a bookkeeper in the office they said um and the bookkeeper I mean she was she tried her best but she didn't know um she knew we were struggling and she didn't want to stress me out so she didn't tell me how much we were struggling and it turns out
what she's been doing is she had been paying the bills she could and and the one she couldn't she was rying to like not pay him and you know delay him and and to hide it for my for my dad and from everybody else she was she was saying in QuickBooks they just paid bills but then like not actually paying them so look like it was cleared he'd gone through and actually audit and found out that she hadn't paid payroll taxes in almost a year and the email my dad said hey just you know payroll
taxes are like something where they find you like if you don't pay payroll taxes you're gonna go to jail and it was over $150,000 you on payroll taxes and I was like at the end it had been entire year every penny had ever earned was gone all my people my teams like it just had all fallen apart and I'm sitting there like I want to do and so next morning gonna fly it from Vegas back to boys your five active boys I get two boys and I walk in and the call center is empty all
the guys are gone and there are two people that are left they said hey you know the call center crossed the road just recruited us and we all just left and we're out see ya and they walked out oh I would government a hundred fifty thousand dollars I have nobody to help me sell I guess I got a little to do and I want to quit like so bad I want to quit but if I quit I go to jail I'd also sold a lot of coaching the people I cared about if I quit always
feels about coaching from me like I can't help them that's not right that's not the right thing to do say I don't see - I'm so into bankruptcy lawyer Mike how does this work man like Cain I got to do like I got to figure this out and he's like well kind of explain the whole process and I told not my leaf am I getting the the landlord so they're coming after me like the government's going to come after me like I don't know what to do and he's like well the best thing to do
is I should come with you to your landlord just explained you're going bang Christie maybe they'll be nice to you so I'm like all right he's like Jimmy money like no he's like what do you got your pocket I was like I like a hundred bucks he's like cool give me hundred bucks I'll come and I'll tell the landlord you're going bankrupt quick all right man here you go so he comes with me it was actually the best hundred bucks I ever spent so he comes with me to the landlord and he's like Russell screwed
man he's going through bankruptcy he just hired me he's like he can't pay you like you come after but he is like and it guys it was like this old man he's like yeah he's done like oh so bad like so much money government's coming after my call you're screwed don't even try it and basically convinced our landlord that like who's a useless cause slamming was like all right be out by Friday and we had big space with office the cubicles and phones all sorts of craziness right so I okay we got by Friday but
91 my team was gone this point for 100 poise down to about seven or eight a few people that stuck by me people like Brent Cole Peters who like love that guy to death yeah bread and John and some people back then on when Brent had taken a pay cut at 50% pay cut and never amazing people [Applause] so the few of us were left we went and we packing up stuff we put ads on Craigslist coming by and things we've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for we're selling for hundreds of dollars and just
to get out of it we made I know maybe five or six grand of all of our crap getting rid of we had huge dumpsters just throwing away everything we ever created because way to downsize and trying to figure out how do we get into a smaller building and how do we keep the people we have to have to be able to fulfill in coaching but we have to move we have to just cut everything else that we have and so we were downsizing everything going out and the night we were moving it was like
that Friday which was bad at midnight or whatever you know whatever it was I was sitting in the office and the deaths were gone everything was gone all I had left was my laptop and I was sitting there I remember I had my socks on had some Levi's I had no money and I was like I have to make some money or else oh we can't even like move into it I don't know how to do anything and so I sent an email to my list ahead of time had a bunch of you register for
webinar and I was sitting there in a chair with my laptop on my on my lap doing a webinar praying that something would happen and that webinar saved us like that webinar we did made $150,000 in sales or the next three or four days from that webinar which gave me the money I needed to pay everyone to like not leave get a no office moved in and give us like to stability so we could actually breathe for a few minutes and figure out Kate what's the next step I wouldn't want to be when I grow
up if we downsize from 20,000 square feet to like 2,000 square feet and and we had this really cool moment where was like what do we what do we want to do when we grow up I would we want to be and as painful as that process was like it was one of the coolest things ever because we didn't have to keep going on this path we could we could pick anything this restaurant thing like who is our dream customer Mike who do we really want to survive what fires us up what gets us excited
and we started thinking through that and during this process like we started just creating again and start having some fun right well what should we do I had a friend of the time who he had this little website making him like two or three thousand dollars a month and he got in some trouble and and I had a couple things making little bit money at a time and he's like I need to go to the site can he keep paying me some money so I came $20,000 a game into a website there's a little machine
that use a pie gets for the cold sores and auto pilot making two or three thousand dollars a month I was like oh this is so cool we have this little thing I'm like little business kind of runs like what if we had another one so we started creating other ones we did one in the couponing market we set it up we got a guru in there in certain run now started making money the right clear with no we didn't run the weight-loss another in a year period of time we launched 12 different companies these
were making different amounts of money and during that times when we launched neuro cell our supplement companies all these things were happening and it was starting to get exciting again like we were creating we were doing we're like doing the business and said teaching the business again which was like so much fun for us to do and to learn and see like why does this stuff work in this market but not this market one of things that drive me crazy about teachers my industry is that they come in and act like the the marketing techniques
to work in one space work everywhere and I learned during that two or three year period time that's not true like everything's different there's intricacies that are different in couponing versus business versus weight loss versus diet versus supplements like there's differences and and I came to respect that because we had a chance to do it so many different businesses and so many different different things and we spent the next two or three years creating stuff and during that process one of the really cool things is I used to go to flippa.com all the time and
try to find my cool websites we could buy and like turn to businesses and there's website called champion sound comm that was for sale and it was this little like email text message autoresponder for for for bands I was like I'm going to buy that and then we're going to take it in like niches for every market we'll make email autoresponders and text message our responders for dentist for Cairo I was so excited it was 20 grand we didn't have that much money I was like this is the future of our company we have to
do it so we end up buying this this website from these guys I'll flip but we get the website and then trying to transfer it over to our servers after we paid them the $20,000 and as they're trying to transfer to Mike well you can't have this is the nerd talk you can't have a Linux server you need a Ruby server I'm like what that mean they're like it means this is not coded in PHP is coded in Ruby on Rails you have to have a different kind of server I'm like what does that mean
means you have to go over here and pay like 800 bucks months for a new server I'm like you kidding me like let me hear bucks a month per server but we just bought this thing so we did they installed it then they didn't really work I don't know what to do and none of my tech guys would ever use Ruby on Rails and so like I went to oDesk to hire some guys and they couldn't fix it and tried like five or six guys and fine I was like wasted 20 grand I was like
so upset and so frustrated because like I didn't have that money and and on the way out the office one day I was like I wonder what if anybody on my list knows Ruby on Rails like shot in the dark I have no idea so I send email to my little list of the time I was like subject I was like Ruby on Rails looking for a partner if you know Ruby on Rails I'm looking for a partner and I said basically the story has told you guys bought the thing can't make it work if
you know Ruby I welcome my partner will make much money this thing together sent the email out have an hour later I get an email from this guy in Georgia named Todd Dickerson [Applause] it Todd's like hey man I know Ruby like you do and I look at his picture I was like you don't look like a nerd I don't think you do and then I went to like Facebook and I Facebook friends was actually six years ago last week or something a facebook friend I'm like is that a beautiful wife he's got a daughter
I'm like I don't think he's a coder like I don't know if I believe that he's like yeah man I should be the log and I'll fix it I was like whatever I had like eight guys trying to fix it the last like four or five months so we can do it like whatever here's the login so he logs it in and then like an hour later he's like Kay done it's fixed as I was you think I got a fix I just did blah blah blah at work Mikey - how did you do that
is I just loved Ruby on Rails I'm amazing a to say that but he's super humble but I was like dude this guy's amazing and I was like okay well I think these other things and so Todd came and we start working another project we ended up we had a different auto webinar Todd built out the software behind the scenes which is like clickfunnels version Ooi pre-everything and he built this webinar our webinar software because mike filsaime had been talking about auto webinar Scheffer to put a webinar report a couple guys who tried talking to
other webinars nobody had done when like nobody was really doing them so Todd custom built his whole platforms we could do him launched an auto webinar through that and in that in that auto webinar we made a million dollars in 90 days and the first thing I did not I need yeah first hand if not million dollars I took the money and we paid off the IRS and I was like free oh I'm free I'm not going to jail hi Harris has paid off all the fines are paid off and that auto webinar funnel literally
saved me literally gave me freedom like up to that point every night when I went to bed and I was just like they could come knock on my door like I have not paid payroll tax that long and in that webinar Freitas and in the Kepner thing after thing and what was fun is with with Todd Dillon used to design half these things just says that contract you design these pages then Todd were take him and code him up make these funnels he did funnel after fun after fun we probably had we had fifteen different
companies but then those companies two or three files like forty funnels would go over after thing after thing after thing after thing in the last tunnel we actually built the old-school way was the the nerve cell funnel that's when the ones that blew up really really biggest are making tons of sales we have a bunch of fun with it and about that time is when Todd was like hey we should really create something so I'm keep making websites for you every single day and and that was where the idea came for click funnels and so
we started that project in front of whiteboard like we talked about yesterday we mapped out this whole thing and Todd once worked to build click funnels then we partnered with Dylan to build the editor and the UI and and then fast forward seven eight months later we came and we were like this thing is going to change the world and I'm so excited I was like we're going to do a free trial I think the very first month our goal was get ten thousand members the first month my colleague this is going to gracing the
world to put out there okay the first funnel had all the stuff in there was a free trial we had bunch of people all wild lined up to promote it we launched it it was like crickets people came and they left I was like does not understand what I'm giving you like like I made that page you're looking at like it's really good to write like and like they nobody got it and I said why don't they get out Mike there's something wrong my messaging so we changed the funnel again and we launched again like
like few of you guys signed up but that was it like most of like hit it and they laughed my Colin I tried again we tried again we rebuild that funnel not once or twice or three times or four times or five times six times it took us before click funnels funnel worked and the six time was because one of my friends Mike fils-aime invited me out to his advance and he's like hey Russell why you come and sell click funnels I think it's awesome so I dude Mike nobody's buying click funnels like we got
to figure out a next deal to figure out something cuz it's not working like no do my people meeting you come speak on it the SL for a thousand dollars now it's a free trial nobody even wants it alright and so Mike's defend was happening that weekend I was literally sitting in my office watching a streaming streaming as a seaman arm I started writing my webinar and and I had my slides open I was following the perfect webinar script that I had been working on for like ten years I started filling in the blank started
making this webinar like like true to the perfect webinar script I literally was like watching it adding the things in while I'm watching Mike's have been happen that day I finished the slides next morning I jumped in a plane I flew there we got to California he was California the dome was out got there put the slides up on thing on my okay here we go I started it in the title slide was my weirdness funnel it's currently making seventeen thousand nine hundred forty seven dollars per day talking on a nerve cell funnel and how
you can actually knock it off in less than ten minutes show the first slide started going through and when we got to the end we got to the stack and the clothes we did it and thirty percent of the room jumped up and ran to the back jumping over the tables fighting to get back there that's like we did it that was the message that was the key now I know how to sell quick funnels we took that message went back and a lot of you guys know especially inner circle members of certain webinars every
single day sometimes to day one time I did three in a day which was really hard over and over and over again I did that webinar live over 70 times over the next year and a half and went from being a start-up with no members to your after the end of last year over 10,000 members after this year we have over 30,000 members in ski to grow and grow and grow it was that one funnel that changed everything for me [Applause] so this process for all of us you guys's isn't up and down like it's
it's always happening and all of you guys are somewhere in this wave right now right some of you guys are at the top riding it you guys are at the bottom in the crash means are somewhere in between and they're always going up and down but if nothing else this event like I wanted you guys to all understand like no matter where you are there's hope okay it might not be this funnel my I can't tell you how many funnels flopped at the guarantee I have failed at more funnels than anybody else in this room
because we tried over and over and over and over again because of that we found out what worked the only way to do that is do it over and over and over again and it's a lot easier now I promise you so much easier than what we used to do when poor Todd and Dylan had a custom code every single thing every single time now you guys can test things really fast first time I met Trey first college said Russell I'm going to launch funnel a week every single week and I wash the CD launch
the funnel and another funnel another funnel another funnel and he had some marginal success little success more success more success more success if I saw him launch a funnel last year one funnel boom and within 90 days became the biggest selling funnel in the history of the world I was talking from the guys at affiliates um they said there's never been a funnel that's made more money in a shorter period of time than want to trade funnels I'm not privy to share all his numbers in the stats but it was insane it came from and
doing a funnel a day a funnel week funnel week till he hits the one that just explodes you know that's going to be it's important that's why this tool is so important because you can do that you can test you can try over and over and over again one more marketing secret if so then go get your copies of my two best-selling books book number one is called experts secrets and you get a free copy at expert seekers calm and book number two is called calm secrets and you get your free copy at com secrets
calm inside these two books you'll find my top 35 secrets to leave you to become the fastest-growing non VC back fast startup company in the world
