Fire Your B Players And Surround Yourself With The A's

Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing in Your Car. Welcome to the Marketing in Your Car podcast where you can increase your traffic, conversions, and sales in just 10 minutes a day. And now here's your host, Russell Brunson. Alright everybody, welcome to Marketing in Your Car. I'm already halfway to the office today so this one might be short, but nevertheless this is part of a new series I've started between the marketingquickieshow.com and marketinginyourcar.com. These are my two content things. So if you're not on both of them, you're missing out because we're going back and forth on the storyline. So yesterday, my Marketing Quickie show— well, actually, Mike Stanczyk, some of you guys may know Mike— he asked me, he's like, I want to know more about how you're so productive and how you get stuff done and your work ethic. And so I was like, cool, I'll talk about some of those things. So yesterday I talked about on the live Periscope, I talked about a concept called Letter Gold. It kind of goes into the core foundational mindset of how to get a lot of crap done. And so if you go to Marketing Quickie www.jamesfortunyshow.com and then click on the one that says— I think it says, "How to Get a Lot of Crap Done." That's kind of the foundational piece to what I'm talking about today. My goal for the next probably week or so is to share a bunch of different ideas of how we get a lot of things done. That is the first one was that. Go listen to that to be number 1. Today, what I want to talk about kind of shifts over to the side of delegation and outsourcing and things like that. I remember when I first got into this business, like, I think most people do, like, I can always tell like in the life cycle where a new entrepreneur is because as soon as they've outsourced for the first time, they all want to create a course on outsourcing because it's like you can pay people a little bit of money and they'll do stuff that's way better than how you do it. It's like this big huge aha. And so initially that's what I think a lot of entrepreneurs do. They hire their first outsourcer and they get someone, you know, for me it was someone in Romania who I paid $20 and he built a software product that I ended up selling for $67 and I made tens of thousands of dollars selling this thing and I paid a guy $20 to build. I remember just having that aha, just like, "Wow, I cannot believe that that was even possible." I think a lot of us start down that journey. Then the problem is that as we start outsourcing some things, I think where most entrepreneurs get stuck is we start like— it's hard to let go of the reins. I'm sure you guys have had that before where you're like, You give someone something and then they don't do as good a job as you. And then you're like, you try to get them to do it again, they don't. And then after like 2 or 3 times, you just take it back. You're like, screw that, I'll just do it myself, right? And I still struggle with that. I'm sure you guys do as well, which is why I do so much stuff. And so a couple things I wanna speak to on that that have allowed me to get so many things done. And this isn't something that's happened overnight, but I've been doing this business now for over 12 years. And so I've hired literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people to do different tasks. And I've hired people that are the cheapest and I've hired people that are the most expensive and I've hired people all in between. And what I've found, and I wish I had the link to the article, there's an article that Todd, one of my partners in ClickFunnels, sent me that talked about like the difference between A players and B players. And it showed that like A players get, it was like were 3,200 times more productive than a B player. And so a lot of us are trying to get B and C players 'cause it's cheaper, but the reality is it's way more expensive. And a lot of times you can find one person who can do the work of 10 or 15 or 20 people. And it may seem hard to believe, but it's true. Todd's a good example of that. For example, we, you know, in the past we had 6 full-time programmers in Boise trying to build the shopping cart software. We spent 3 years and probably $300,000 or $400,000 trying to do it, and we never got to the point where anybody could even use it. Todd came in, looked at shopping cart software that we were thinking about using, spent the next 2 days and rebuilt it from the ground up and it worked. And so it took him 2 days what took our team of 6 people 3 years that we never got live. And that's what I'm talking about, finding A players. And so I think the biggest thing is you're gonna go through, it's kind of like, what's the, you gotta kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince, right? Like I remember people saying that back when I was dating before finding my beautiful amazing wife. And I think it's the same kind of thing like with this is you gotta, You got to hire a lot of people until you find the rock stars. So like what I do a lot of times now, let's say I have a project, I'll go to— I think it's Upwork now. It used to be ScriptLance, then it was oDesk, and I think it's Upwork. So I go to Upwork and I'll post a project, but I'll hire 3 people to do the same project. People are like, Russell, why would you do that? It's going to cost you 3 times as much money. And the reality is it doesn't. It costs me less money because what happens is I have 3 people build the same thing. One person usually sucks at it, one person does something kinda weird, and one person is like a rock star. But you don't know until you get 3 people and you have something to compare them against. So I have 3 people do a product. And usually it's not like my big idea, it's not like here's this huge thing, but I'll post and get 3 people to do like a smaller project. Something that still is gonna test all their skill set, but it's not something that's super, you know, something I'm gonna pay tens of thousands of dollars for, but I do that. To find an A player. Excuse me. And then after I find an A player, then I go back to that person and I'm like, okay, here's the actual project I want you to do, and hire them to do a bigger project. And that way I only have A players on our team. And that's a big part of it. And when you do find A players, like figuring out ways to lock them up and keep them close to you because, again, one A player is worth hundreds of B players. A really good example of that is when we launched ClickFunnels, initially it was Todd and Dylan who built the whole thing, and then as we started scaling, we knew we needed to bring other people in to kind of help. And one of the guys we brought in was this guy named Ryan. And prior to Ryan, we'd hired a couple other people who were just B and C, maybe even D level people. And it was just horrible, like, not only did they not progress things, like everything digressed, I think that's the right word, everything moved backwards. And we found Ryan, first off, he was culturally a right fit, like he was our same age, he was cool, he was like, same timeline in his life, and he was just a great cultural fit. But then he came in and he brought a whole nother level of things, and anyway, just came in and brought to ClickFunnels this thing that we needed, that we didn't have, and he's been amazing. And then after a while, you know, the demand on ClickFunnels is really high, and it was getting to him and his family, and you know, he's got, he had a side website making a bunch of money, and it got to a point where he was either gonna leave so he could pursue that, or you know, find a job where he got paid the same for a lot less stress. And we knew that if we lost him, it would be painful. So we came back and said, he is an A, maybe an A+ player. Like, we need him, we need to lock him up. And so we came back and did what it took, you know, paying him more, giving him equity, giving him profit share, whatever, whatever it takes. Because again, one person like him is worth dozens of other people. And, and if you lose someone like that, man, it can, it can cripple you, and it can just, it can destroy you. So what I would say is, looking at, at your company through a different lens where it's less, let me hire the cheapest labor possible and shifting that to let me find the A-player rock stars and incentivize them in a way where everybody wins. And I look at my company now and we have A-players, a whole bunch of A-players. So Russell, how are you able to get so much amazing stuff done? Because we only have A-players. The B-players we get rid of, they're gone. Part of our organization always has A players. And they say, how Russell, how in the world are you competing with companies like, and Leadpages is a good example, right? Leadpages has like, I don't know, 100 or 200 employees. We've got 25. How are you able to compete and dominate those guys? It's 'cause we have A players. Okay, you bring in VC money, guess who you hire? A bunch of B players, right? 'Cause that's what they want you to do. They want you to spend their money and build out a team and you need directors and managers and all this crap and all these people who don't actually do anything. And so yeah, you can spend their budget, but you got a bunch of B players, okay?. And that's the difference. I look at any VC-backed company, and there's a bunch of B-players getting funded by some dudes who have money, and it shows. And so that's kind of my next step. So again, if you listened to the Periscope before, and if you haven't, go to marketingquickish.com. Talk about the foundational mindset you need to get crap done, right? The whole letter gold concept that I learned from Gary Halbert. That's what I talked about there. Today it's all about delegation. But don't delegate to people that are worse than you. Delegate to rock stars. 'Cause now, like yesterday for example, I had to get done a sales letter for the new ClickFunnels process we're doing. So I sat down and I locked myself in. I had to get it done, I had no choice, like let her go. And I got this thing done. And normally it would be me now designing the sales letter, but Dylan, who's my partner at ClickFunnels, he is a rock star. He's the best designer I've ever seen in my life. So I gave it to Dylan, and now I'm not nervous 'cause he will make it better than I ever could. The biggest problem a lot of us entrepreneurs have is we're delegating people who are worse than us. When you do that, that's where this back and forth and struggle and headaches and everything come from. Start the process today of finding your A-players and surrounding them. A-players have different motivations. Some it's cash, some it's partnership, some it's they want a cool project. There's different motivations. It doesn't mean you have to pay them a lot of money up front a lot of times. A lot of times A-level people are motivated by different things. A good example is Todd. When Todd started working for me, I feel bad about it now, but he worked for free for an entire year. He had different motivations. It wasn't to get money. His motivation was to be part of something bigger. After a year, I realized I hadn't paid him anything. I was like, "Man, this guy is really useful. We should pay him something." I'm like, "Hey man, can I pay you?" He's like, "Yeah, whatever." I started paying him. Then after another year, one day I was hanging out with him and he was showing me these job offers. He was getting like 3 or 4 job offers a week for like 4 times what I was paying him. I'm like, "Dude, why don't you take those?" He's like, 'Cause I'm working, I want to be part of something bigger.' I was like, 'Crap, I need to pay more because I'm going to lose them.' So I'm like, 'Hey, can I pay you some more?' He's like, 'Yeah, sure, whatever.' Right? So the A players typically have different motivations, and it's figuring out what those motivations are and aligning with them, with you. But if you've got vision and you know where you want to go, finding the A players and getting them aligned with you isn't necessarily a hard thing because most of the people I found that are A players are less money motivated and more mission and vision motivated. And that's what drives them. And so find your passion, your mission, your vision, and sell them on it. And that's how you get the rock stars. Okay, if you want to go for the cheapest, you can go to oDesk, Upwork, and find those kind of people, but it's going to cost you more in the long run. So there you go, that's the strategy for today. Hope that helps. With that said, I'm out of here. I'm at the office, I'm going to get some stuff done, and I'll talk to you guys all again soon. Thanks, everybody.