How Mr. Trello Just Saved My Business…Again

Welcome to Marketing in Your Car, the podcast for funnel hackers everywhere. You're now part of a small group of underground entrepreneurs who are trying to change the world through the products and the services that we believe in. But because we don't rely on venture capitalists, we don't have financial safety nets. So we have to do things differently. We have to do things smarter. We do that through an art and a science we call funnel hacking. This podcast will give you a glimpse at the daily life of a funnel hacker. So let's get started. Good morning everybody! Welcome back, all my funnel hackers. Glad to have you guys here. Alright, so what do we talk about today? I got something cool for you guys. So, this is the end of the year right now. It's getting close to Christmas and normally people do all their planning and stuff in January, right? For like, how am I gonna take over the world next year? But I kinda wanna be prepared so when January 1st hits we can be like off on the, out and running and sprinting. And so because of that, this week became a planning week, which is hard for me to do. I don't normally plan things. Usually I have a whole bunch of ideas in my head and then we just start running and everyone kind of learns about all the ideas as we're moving forward, which is a horrible way to manage people, by the way. I think it drives everybody crazy. In fact, Todd, Todd, I think you guys all know Todd by now hopefully. If not, he is the dude who built ClickFunnels. He told me the only way he knows what's happening in the business is by listening to the podcast. You guys hearing things as everybody else is. Anyway, so I'm trying to get better at that. And it's fun, one of the guys that joined our inner circle last year, his name's James Frill. Super cool guy, he came in and one of his nicknames is like the contract CEO where people hire him to become a CEO and go in their company and like fix things and make it all work right. And we were trying to figure out like how to make a sexy thing for him to sell and it was kind of hard at first 'cause his first headline was something like, you know, how to become more predictable and sustainable or something like that. And I was like, ugh, no one's gonna give you money for that, man, that's horrible. Like, we gotta make this sexy. And so we worked with him last year, like turning what he does into this like sexy, exciting thing. And so to do it initially, he was like, well, he was showing me all the cool things he does, which there's a lot of stuff, he's crazy talented. But one of them was his project management system and how he does it with Trello and Slack and Gantt charts and this whole like thing. And I was like, oh, I use Trello, man, I got it figured out, I don't need your help. And he was like, dude, I think you need my help more than anybody. And in fact, this is funny, 'cause I'll tell the rest of the story, but I'll give you the punchline right now. He's been in our office the last day working on this, and he told me last night at dinner that of all the companies he's ever worked with, mine was the most messed up. He's like, it is amazing you guys have done as well as you have. I'm like, yes, good selling can make up for a lot of bad systems. Anyway, so stepping back. So this is in January last year. He's like, well, I'm coming to Inner Circle meetings, let me come in a day early and I'll take you guys through the process that I would normally charge people, you know, like $20,000 or $30,000 or whatever it is to do and I was like, alright cool. So he came in, showed me this whole Trello system and blew my mind. I was like, holy crap, no wonder I've never got anything done ever. I need to change everything. So we changed it all around and I implemented, I'd say probably 75% of what he said because the rest, you know, I was too smart to listen to, right? So 75%, which is basically I started using Trello for myself, my own systems, like just personally. I tried to get my team on it but then that lasted like 8 seconds and then nobody did it again. Myself and then things became better because at least I had my thoughts out in a way. It's not just like, if you used Trello before, it's free. Like you can't even give them money if you want to, I don't think. They're like the worst marketing company of all time, but their software is awesome. But the problem is their software is so awesome, you can do pretty much anything you want with it. And so because of that, people like me just screw it up. And so James built this like the system that makes it very simple, very easy, very, it pulls out like the human error and pulls out all these issues, right? And it's awesome. So I started using it and changed like, dramatically transform my productivity and my ability to get things done, which is probably why we had a lot of success this year. In fact, this is crazy. So last year was awesome, right? And this year we're trying to 3x what we did last year, and we're within, we're within like a few hundred thousand dollars of hitting it. So anyway, we're on a march through the end of the year to hit, to hit this certain number. If we hit that number, then we'll have tripled what we did last year, which is crazy. And then our goal is to triple again next year, which if we do that, like, they're gonna have to write a book about it. I'm not writing it because I'm tired of writing books. If somebody's got to write a book I should write a book about it, 'cause it's amazing. Anyway, stepping back. So it was awesome, but I only implemented about 75%, 'cause I couldn't get my team on board and everything, it was just, ugh, it was hard. So then fast forward, at one of the inner, at the next Inner Circle meeting in the summer, he came and everyone basically in Inner Circle I found was kinda like me, like we're really talented entrepreneurs who are really good at selling stuff, and we have no idea how to manage ourself or our processes or anything else. Sound familiar? If that sounds like you, you're probably an entrepreneur. Welcome to the cool kids club. Anyway, so, I had him stay and give a presentation to the Inner Circle group on how he does his trellis system. And I was like, I saw it again, I was like, oh, there's the other 25% I'm not doing. Why am I not doing it? I should just do it. And so then I got all excited to go do it and then embarrassingly to myself and to everybody else, I didn't. And then I had him train our whole Inner Circle as a whole online and everybody got excited again, I got excited again, then we didn't do it. And finally, the end of this year, I was like, you know what? We're not doing it. So, James, what would it cost to get you to fly to Boise for 2 days and just sit here and make us do it? And so that's what he did. So like yesterday he was here all day So like, even like as much as I've been using Trello over the last year, we still cleaned it up, simplified it, like, ugh, made it way better. And then we got everyone on the team doing it, and now there's this one key piece that I would like, I was fighting doing, 'cause it requires a person to be in charge of the whole system. And now we've got Michelle McPherson who's gonna be running that piece of the system. She's amazing, and now like the whole 100% is gonna work. And so day 1 yesterday was all getting it implemented, and day 2 is we're focusing on now moving it forward, getting everyone using it, which is cool. And then basically James every week for the next 8 weeks is gonna be meeting with, like doing company meets. 'Cause I don't need to, we don't even do company meetings. Like, we do meetings in different departments, like the programming team meets and then the support team meets, but like the marketing side, I'm kind of in charge of it. We don't, when we do meet it's just like we get online and we all just talk about the cool stuff we're doing. There's no like point or focus or anything. And so, what's cool about the new system is that there's meetings built in that are all tied around Trello and the goals and the projects and the dates and everything inside of that, which is cool. And so he's gonna be teaching us how to do the meetings the right way and then moving forward for the next 8 weeks, once a week he'll be jumping on our meetings with us and getting us all in this groove. So we can hit, by January we can hit and we can scale things a lot more rapidly. You know, they always say like, what got you here probably won't get you there. And I feel like there's different levels of skillset, right? There's a skillset that gets you from zero to a million dollars. I feel like there's a different skillset that gets you from a million to 3. At least these were my barriers. There's a different skillset from 3 to 10. There's a different skill set from 10 to 30. And I feel like the skill set from 30 to 100 is different. And it's not necessarily my strengths, my ninja skills. It's something different. It's this piece of it. It's the organization. It's the structure. It's the systems. In fact, we were building systems out in Trello. We were like, what's all the things you do every single month consistently, the exact same thing? So we made these systems for it. And I'm like, holy crap, this just made my life so much easier. Like Funnel University, for example, is a good example, right? There's like, We do the exact same things every single month. And every month we're like, okay, now what do we do next? What's the next thing? And then, oh yeah, we got to, you know, it's just like we rethink through every single time. And now it's like, there's a system. It's just a Trello card. We just copy it every January. It's a recurring thing, or every first of the month it pops in, automatically, recurrently pops into the thing, and then we just know what we gotta do, and we do it. And it's amazing. And now the way the system works too, because there's someone in charge of it and running it, like everyone's got due dates, everyone has things there, and then they're held accountable to somebody, which is awesome. Including me, like I'm held accountable. Like, hey Russell, why didn't you get that get this crap done. Like, oh, I don't know. I need to get it done. And like, I'm held accountable too, which is awesome. And everybody's held accountable. And there's somebody who knows what's happening. Like right now, I kinda know what's happening, at least on the marketing side of all the projects. But like, but I'm like the worst person to, like me as the entrepreneur is the worst person to know everything because then people have to come to me for every single thing and then like nothing ever gets done. And so now the way that the system's built out, I'm not tied into it. It's like Michelle will be that person that knows everything and then I'll just have to know my pieces of the things, which is so cool. So, anywho, so that's what's just happening. And so it's been awesome. We hung out at dinner with them last night and talked about over the last year. So a year ago is when I kind of, I was the one telling James like, this is awesome, you should be selling this. And so he's been doing this for a bunch of companies. He's had people hire him who they've come in and he's done like, actually become the CEO of their company to implement this system and spent 3 or 4 or 5 months with them in this last year. He's also worked with probably, I don't know, 20 or 30 other entrepreneurs where he does the whole thing remote and gets their team on for half a day and builds the whole thing out remote where it's a lot less expensive than having him fly to your office like we did. But regardless, if you are an entrepreneur or someone who wants to become an entrepreneur, but especially the entrepreneurs who are out there listening and you guys are like me at all where like because you're good at selling and marketing and because you've kind of figured some things out, like you're able to, like a lot of things, a lot of things that, like good marketing makes up for a lot of things, right? Like Dan Kennedy used to say like there's nothing that a good sales letter can't solve, right? And I kind of believe that, but I also I also think there's a limit. I think that good selling can get you so far, but like, it's the systems and the organization and the structure and all that nerdy stuff that they probably teach in business schools. I don't know, I didn't go, but I'm assuming that's what they teach in business schools that we're not good at. And so if you guys want to be able to expand and grow, I highly, highly, highly recommend figuring that piece out. And there's two ways to figure things out. There's the school of hard knocks where you just do it. I didn't spend like 10 years trying to figure it out, and then you realize one day that you're an entrepreneur and that's not your skill set. Or the second way is you should just give James money and he'll do it for you. So that's what I did. This is someone who, who had him out doing once my office, and then I sat through the presentation twice more, and then I still paid to come out because it's like that important to our, to our growth. And so for any of you guys who, who that's the piece where you feel like you're juggling too many things, or you know, like, I should be systemizing things, I don't know how to, or your team's always confused, like I think it's more so like you as the entrepreneur, if you're confused, 'cause you're like, dude, how do you guys not know what we're doing? I know exactly what's happening, how can you not read my mind? If you ever felt that way before, which I think most of us do, then you should definitely give James money. You should just write him a check and not even ask any questions. Just write it blank and then have him fill it in with whatever it's worth, 'cause it'll be worth it. Anyway, if you wanna work with James, this is not a pitch. Yeah, this is a pitch, it's a blatant pitch, you should. I paid him money, you should pay money too. The link, if you go to cheatsheet.jamespfrill.com, so cheatsheet.james, J-A-M-E-S, P is his middle name apparently, Pfrill, F-R-I-E-L.com, and I think there's an opt-in there, you get a cheat sheet with some cool stuff, and the next page there's a video of me talking about my story. And that was my story from a year ago, so imagine my story would be like even now, like it's even that much better. But if it's something that, that you guys need, like I need, then I would definitely message him and just see if there's a way he can do this for you. Like I said, you don't have to go as intense as I did and hire him and his team to fly out and help you guys set it all up. You can do it remote. He did it for, you know, a dozen plus people over last year remote as well, and it works. And to get your whole team on board, and it'll just, it's one of those things where it's like, you know, I read the E-Myth, I went through the E-Myth course, I've, you know, I understand the value of what this piece is, and I thought I was kinda doing it, But then when you have it right, you're like, oh wow, I don't think we even had a system technically. And that was funny, I was listening to this Dan Kennedy thing from back in the, man, probably 15 years ago. And in there he's talking about, he was like, you know, everyone's trying to figure out how to put a system into their business. He's like, the reality is you already got a system. Everyone's got a system. But your system probably sucks right now. So it's like, you can take the crappy system you're using, or you can try to like strategically plug in the right system. Because the wrong system's gonna hurt you more than no system, impossible to have no system. If you got no system, it means you have to have a really, really bad one. 'Cause something's happening, it's just happening really poorly. So, I don't know if that made any sense, but it sounded cool, right? Just kidding. Alright, I'm at the office. I got day 2 with James and the crew. We're gonna be in Trello and Slack and everything, getting things built out. And so I'm doing today, and that way I take one little step backwards to plan and focus and systemize so I can go 5,000 feet forward and take over the world a little bit more next year. So that's the game plan, guys. Appreciate y'all, have a great time. Go visit James, tell him hi. Give him some money, write him a check. I get nothing for this endorsement other than James is awesome and is helping me and he should help you too. Thanks guys, talk to you soon, bye. Thanks so much for listening. We hope you enjoyed the behind the scenes look at our funnel hacking project. You can also watch the Funnel Hacker online reality show and watch us build and launch funnels live at www.funnelhacker.tv. If you'd like to come hang out with your fellow funnel hackers, come join our Facebook group at www.profunnelhacker.com. ProjectClickFunnels.com. Oh yeah, and don't forget, you can get a free MP3 player with the first 257 episodes preloaded at MarketingInYourCar.com. Join us next time, and remember, you're just one funnel away from your dreams.