The Calling of Entrepreneurship: Serving Others and Achieving Success with Tom Bilyeu

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What's up, everybody?

This is Russell Brunson.

Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. I found a really cool interview I did at the very beginning of COVID I was also at that time launching the Traffic Secrets book, which went on to become a New York Times bestseller. Thank you for all the guys who bought it. If you haven't bought it yet, do you want traffic to your websites? Go to trafficsecrets.com and get your free copy of the book. Anyway, blatant pitch.

There you go.

Anyway, this is a really cool interview. During the book launch, I had interviews with tons of people lined up. One of my favorite ones was this interview with Tom Bilyeu. And Tom Bilyeu runs Impact Theory. He was the, the guy who started Quest Nutrition. So if you ever had a Quest Bar, Tom was the one who invented those and built that company up. And anyway, just a really cool guy. He's spoken at Funnel Hacking Live a few times, someone who I have a ton of respect for. And anyway, so I recently went back and found this YouTube video from back in the day, and I was like, oh, I want to share this with our audience. Obviously the timing is a little different. We're not in the middle of the pandemic, but at the same time we're going into, you know, scariest economic times. I think it's very timely as well, and I hope you enjoy it. Tom's a great interviewer. It's fun. He kicked off the interview asking me questions about wrestling and being an athlete before we ever talked about entrepreneurship, so I thought it was a lot of fun. I think you guys will get a ton of value from it. So with that said, here's my interview with Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, and I hope you enjoy it.

In the last decade, I went from being a startup entrepreneur to selling over $1 billion of my own products and services online. This show is going to show you how to start, grow, and scale scale of business online. My name is Russell Brunson, and welcome to the Marketing Secrets Podcast.

Hey everybody, welcome to Impact Theory. Today's guest is Russell Brunson. He's the CEO and co-founder of ClickFunnels, which is now the fastest-growing non-venture-backed software company in the world with a following of roughly 2 million entrepreneurs. Along with his partner, he took ClickFunnels from zero to roughly $100 million in revenue in just 3 short years. And on top of all of that business success, he's also an accomplished author and an extraordinary state champion All-American wrestler who finished his college career as one of the top 10 wrestlers in the country. Russell.

Thank you for having me. I'm so excited.

It's really cool to have you here. Obviously we've gotten to know each other from our trips to Puerto Rico. And I have to say I'm very impressed with what you've accomplished. And given what everybody is going through right now, I wanted to start with some of the lessons that you actually learned in wrestling You've talked a lot about hard work and what you learned through the process. One, what makes you good at wrestling? I think that's where I want to start.

So, it's funny because I don't— I know that I wasn't ever the best athlete, but I am super grateful for a dad who was really good at like, like watching what I would do and how like mistakes I'd made and sitting down with me and like figuring out how to fix things. I was never like the guy who was undefeated. I was never the guy who who won every match, I was the guy who would lose a match and come back and we'd sit down and we'd figure out what were the mistakes, what adjustments we needed to make, and we'd practice and we'd practice and we'd practice, and next time we'd go out, we'd win. I think that's kind of what made me a great wrestler.

That is awesome, dude. I love that story. I love the way that if somebody wins just from the jump, they're sort of naturally gifted. One of the things about Bo Jackson that I always found sort of heartbreaking is when you ask him, "What made you so good?" He's always like, "I'm just naturally talented." And I always found that crushing because it's like, I'm not naturally talented. So for me, everything has sort of been the scramble of trying to learn. But I went through that period you talk about of this sort of devastation where you expected to kill it and then you lose and you're like, oh shit. I went through that in film school where, dude, I thought I was just going to dominate. I thought that I was a natural born filmmaker. And look, I had my fears that maybe I wasn't, but like I was, sort of cruising on this, you know, I'm good at this, I have natural talent, and then I really got faced with the fact that I wasn't naturally talented. And in fact, at the time, I didn't have really any talent for this thing that I loved at all. And so my life, one, I went through a really dark period because this is all before mindset and stuff like that. That, that word had not entered my vocabulary at all at the time. And so I had no sense of, oh, I can build myself up, I can get better. So it's rad that your dad really helped you, you know, focus on improvement and getting better. Talk to me a little bit about— because talk to me about discipline is where I was headed, because I think that what we're going to see in through COVID-19 and the crisis and what I think is going to happen to the economy, which is, is going to be less than ideal, it's going to be somewhere between less than ideal and catastrophic. And so I think what the people who are going to win are the people that are going to be able to start over. And one thing that you've talked a lot about, you certainly talk about in your newest book, Traffic Secrets, is understanding that, look, some things could just go away overnight. And how you respond to that is going to be really, really essential. So what's the role of discipline in your life? How can people get more of it in their own lives?

Yeah, I think, man, I've been thinking a lot about it because I have, you know, obviously I help work with a huge entrepreneur or community of entrepreneurs and like a lot of them are freaking out right now for, you know, all the normal reasons. And what's been interesting is watching a lot of them who just have like frozen up right now where it's like, ah, I don't know what to do. And as I work them and talk through with a whole bunch of them, it's like understanding that so many of them are so scared of like failure or so scared of whatever the next thing is that they never— they're not willing to like to take the step. And so they're just frozen, which is like the worst possible thing. And I think one of the most valuable things I got out of wrestling that ties back to this was like when you're wrestling, you step on the mat and when you lose, it's like, I lost this match. But no one ever says like, I'm a loser. They're like, I lost this match. Let me go figure out what I need to do to win next time. Whereas it seems like with business, so many people have it tied to their identity and to everything that when they lose, they say, I'm a loser. And it's because of that, like they're scared to lose. They don't want to feel like a loser. They're scared of They have a dream or a vision. They're scared that if they try and it fails, that the dream will disappear. I think the biggest thing that's helped me throughout this, I think most people need to have, is just going in with the expectation of like, it's okay if I lose. It's okay if I fail. It doesn't mean I'm a failure. It means like the situation failed. But then when you detach yourself from that, then it's so much easier to be like, okay, what was wrong? What do I need to tweak and go out and try it again and try it again and try it again? Because so many people are just so frozen right now. That's the biggest thing with mindset is just helping people to detach the consequences of the failure being their own as opposed to failure being like a match, like a thing that just failed that you can go back and fix and figure out the next step with. Does that make sense?

It does. One thing, so I wrestled exactly one time in my life. It was for, I want to say, what's a normal round? 3 minutes?

In high school it's like 2, 2, 2, yeah, 2 minutes.

Okay, so probably 2 minutes then. And it was, I'm not joking, it was the single most physically exhausting thing I've ever done in my life. It felt like I was fighting to survive. I ended up, so this was back in middle school. This is before MMA. I end up putting the guy in a headlock and basically just trying to choke him because I was so fucking tired. I was like, dude, I have to do something. Like, I'm dying over here. And so in that I realized, yo, people that get good at this, This shit is inhuman. So what I wanna know is, how do you, like, pain. So there's an awesome quote, I wish I remember who said it, but fatigue makes cowards of us all. And I think that people are gonna face fatigue in this, like the having to get up and try and try and try again. If they've lost their job, the thought of rebuilding, imagine somebody in their 50s losing their job now, and they're like, yo, I've gotta rebuild, like I'm fucking tired. The thought of having to start from scratch is, is bordering on unbearable. What did you discover about yourself, about the human animal, in building up that kind of conditioning where it's all on the line, dude? Everybody is watching you. You're there in the middle of a ring. You were literally in a skin-tight outfit, dude. There is nowhere to hide, and you've got to pull it out. One thing that, to me, the ability to suffer is one of the most powerful things that an entrepreneur can build. Translate that for me from the physical to the business world.

Yeah. Man, the story that popped in my head when you started saying that was I remember it was in high school. I can't remember which year it was, but I remember every single week we had to cut weight. We come in. I weigh like 160 on Monday morning and I got to be 130 by Thursday. It's like every week you come in, you're like, "Oh." You put the plastics on and the sweats on and all this stuff and you start running and cutting weight. I remember it was after a really, really hard practice. I hadn't eaten or drinking much that whole week and just beat up. I remember our coach pulled us all out into this dark hallway kind of behind the gym. And he had this conversation with us about attitude. And I remember, I don't remember the whole conversation. I just remember him saying that like, no matter what happens, you're going to make weight. No matter what happens, it's going to suck. No matter what happens, you have to go through this process. So the only thing you can really affect is your attitude. So you can have a good attitude or a bad attitude. I remember that night laying there in bed just thinking like, oh, I have been like having the worst attitude ever. I'm hungry, I'm thirsty, I'm tired. I'm worn out. I remember the next day I came in, I put my sweats on, put my plastics on, put everything on, and before everyone showed up, I was out there jump roping. I decided I'm going to have a smile on my face, like the biggest smile I possibly can have. I started to smile. Also, my teammates start coming in and they're all like just how I felt, but I was smiling. I'm jumping rope. They're like, "Brunson, why are you so happy? Why are you smiling?" I remember all I said, the thing popped in my head, I was like, "I don't know, but I've never seen someone lose with a smile on their face, so I'm going to smile from now on." And I just kept going.

Wow, you just gave me the chills.

And so that became a thing and my other teammates started doing that where we come out there and we would like, the more pain it was, we would put the smile on like, just keep doing because I've never seen someone lose a smile on their face. And so that's something that, you know, because I mean I've been in business now, I think this is my 17th year and there has been like the ups and the downs. There's been, you know, we built a company with 100-some employees and then like one day coming in and laying off 80 people overnight. The same thing, the cycles have happened multiple times. And I remember that feeling coming in where it's just like, you've gotta lay off 30 people today and then you gotta convince the other 50 that like they gotta keep working and there's a vision and there's a mission. And like, remember thinking that a couple times, I'm just like, oh, like I don't know if I even believe it anymore. I'm so tired and beat down and everything seems so heavy. And then it was like, but if I don't come in with a smile, like that's it, right? And you can't lose with a smile on your face. So we come in and we regroup and we talk about it again, then we get back to work. And keep going.

That's like an obsession of mine. So it's what I call physiological hooks. So there are things in your physiology that allow you to manipulate your physiology. So one of the most famous is the smiling thing. So I tend not to get angry, but when I get angry, I stay angry. And so I had actually early in my marriage that ended up being like a lot of wasted time. I would get angry with something Lisa did that she would even agree that I was justified in being angry, but at the end of the day, I just thought it doesn't serve me. I just wasted all this time being pissed off. Like you said, you control your attitude. So I wrote this letter to myself and I said, hey me, it's me, you have no ulterior motive, but you know what the studies say. If you force yourself right now to laugh out loud, it will change your neurochemistry. And this is something that I think people in this time are really gonna have to be thoughtful about is, all right, I've gotta take control of my neurochemistry. I've gotta take control of the way that I feel Because if I feel terribly like your friends coming into practice and they're just moping about, they're exhausted, then that practice is going to be worse than it could have been if they had forced themselves into a positive mental state. And then the performance is going to be worse because the practice was worse. And like that, to me, that's not about wrestling. That's about life. That's about being the human animal. Why do you think like you were able to translate— like, this is something I see a lot. You look at Arnold Schwarzenegger and all the success he had in bodybuilding, he was able to translate into other areas of his life. The success that you had early in wrestling, you've obviously been able to translate. What, what's sort of the secret for you to, to the level of success you've had?

You know, it's interesting how similar, uh, my wrestling mindset and business is, and it's not the same as a lot of people. In fact, I've had a lot of people in the last few years I've kind of rubbed the wrong way because of it. But I look at it as a sport. So, like when I started my business, I was looking around. The first thing I looked at was like, who do I have to beat? I remember when we came in, there was a software company. It was like, oh yeah, that's our competitor. And it was like, I wasn't quiet about it. I made it known to myself, to my team, to my entire community, like we're going to beat them. And then we went after them aggressively and aggressively. And just like I would if I was going to be wrestling or competing against them. And I like, I reverse engineered everything they did. I figured out what they were doing, why they're doing it. I listened to every podcast interview the founder was on. To understand his mindset and what he was doing. And we just relentlessly pursued them until we caught them and then we passed them. And after we passed them, then I was like, it's funny 'cause I was like, I need something new to go after. And then there was another company that was bigger than them. And I was like, okay, that's the next company. We started going after them and same thing, I pursued them and looked at them, reverse engineered what they were doing and how they were doing it, why they were doing it and trying to figure it out. And I remember as we started getting closer and closer to them, the CEO of that company called me one day and he was like, He's like, "Why are you so upset at, like, why do you hate me and hate our company so much?" It kind of caught me off guard. I was like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "You were out there always like trying to like, you know, do all these things to beat us." And I was like, "Oh, I don't hate you guys at all. I got so much respect. Like, I know more about you than I think you do. Like, I understand what you do and why you do it at a level I don't believe you do. Like, I don't hate you at all, but you're my competitor. Like, you're who I chose and I have to beat you. Like, that's how it works." And he was like, I remember he came back and he was like, "I wasn't really an athlete, so I'm not used to that." He's like, "It's interesting. I always thought you were mad at us, you hated us." I was like, "No." It reminded me of the scene in my favorite movie, The Dark Knight, where at the very end when the Joker's falling off the cliff and Batman asks him, he's like, "Why are you trying to kill me?" And the Joker starts laughing. He's like, "I'm not trying to kill you. Without you, there's no me. I can't do what I do without you." I feel like that's been such my mindset. In fact, now we passed that company and it's like, "Hey, who's the next people?" We found who they are and I'm studying them and understanding them at a deeper level. And so for me, I don't think I could be in business where it's just the business just to grow or I don't know, without a goal or purpose or something to strive towards and to move forward. I remember reading, I think it was Napoleon Bonaparte said something about what man will do for a scrap of ribbon. I feel like maybe that's like in wrestling, that's what it was for me. Like I had to go and I went to it as a state champ and then I was an All-American. Like I kept going for the whatever the next scrap of ribbon I had to get it. And I feel like in business it's the same thing for me. It's just like, It's a game. There's competitors and we're trying to figure out the landscape where we fit in and how we pursue and how we go after them.

Dude, I think that is genius. As somebody, I didn't like being competitive when I was younger because I was afraid I was going to lose. Of course, I didn't want to say that, so I was just saying— or I may not even have understood it if I'm completely honest. It triggered something in me which I would now recognize as insecurity, which I can now articulate as I had this fear of having proof, empirical data that I wasn't good enough, which of course is my biggest fear when I was a kid. And now getting into business and realizing, yo, motherfucker, like, you've got to be going hard. And this is like, look, I, like you, I would be shocked if somebody was interpreting my competitiveness, my desire to win as hate. But it is what I call the dark side. It is a dark energy, right? There's the light side, which is the beautiful things I want to create, and the gratitude I have for what I have in my life and all of that, and it's amazing. But then there's also the competitive side of wanting to win, of saying, look, I'm going after that person. And the people who— so I'm not a sports guy, but like, because of my mentality, I constantly find myself drawn to athletes. So I'll use that language, but please don't mistake me for an athlete. But, you know, when you talk to the guys that are really, really great and you look at the amount of tape they watch, like how they study their competitors, they study themselves, they stare nakedly at their inadequacies. It, dude, there's something there. And the fact that people don't put in that time and energy to learn what is going on is crazy. The amount of insights you'll get are extraordinary. And that to me is the power.

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So as we go into, um, this, which probably is going to be a recession, might be a depression. How do you think about overcoming the obstacles that are going to come your way? How do you avoid falling into the trap of thinking that you know everything already? Like, how do you stay nimble?

Um, that's a good question, especially when, you know, at this point our company's so big that you have a lot of friends who are solo entrepreneurs and they're able to be nimble because like it's just them and they can, you know. But now we've got 400+ employees and it's a— it's harder to be, to be nimble. I think It's been interesting because I've been trying to figure that out. One of our mutual friends, Dean Graziosi, I talked to him about this a lot as everything started hitting and things started shifting. I remember watching him because I, again, I'm kind of a marketing nerd. I remember when I was in high school, I used to sit back and I would watch info. I remember I watched Dean on infomercials back when I was a kid. I would take notes. I'm like, "Whoa, I like the way he said things." I remember watching as it came up to the last big recession. Watching all Dean's infomercials. And at the time, there was probably, I don't know, 30 different get-rich-in-real-estate infomercials on TV. Like, anyone who ever flipped a house in their life were like, I'm an infomercial guru, and teaching people how to do it, right? And, uh, and then the recession hit and the housing market crashed, and it went from like 50 infomercial gurus to like 3, down to 1, and then there was just Dean. And Dean continued to run infomercials the entire thing, and then, uh, and then, and then beyond. And I remember, I didn't know him at the time, but I remember watching it and just being interested how like He was the only one still on. I asked him later, "How in the world did you survive when everyone else got crushed?" He said something super profound. He's like, "I didn't shift my product." I mean, the product was still the same. He's like, "I shifted how I marketed my product." He said everyone else was speaking very aspirational, like how do we create these things? How do we get rich? How do we make money? Things like that. He's like, "I shifted from being aspirational to looking at my business more as like a life preserver." How do you protect yourself and how this product can protect you? So, as we started coming into this thing, I realized the same thing. In fact, I talk a little bit about in Traffic Secrets, I talk about the fact that when any customer's coming to you, they're either moving towards you, they're moving towards you in one of two directions. Either they're moving towards pleasure or they're moving away from pain, right? It's like they're coming to me because they want to start a business, they want to get rich, or they want to make money, or they want to whatever. Or they're coming to me because like, "I hate my boss. I need to get out of this pain. It's just a miserable," I need to get out of pain. If you look at the economy over the last 7 or 8 years, because for most people it's been pretty good, most people that are buying any product or service, whether it be fitness, health, business, anything for that matter, it's like they're buying it because they're trying to move towards pleasure. A couple weeks ago everything shifted where people are all in pain now. I think the companies that are going to survive and be nimble are the ones that understand how to shift their messaging where it's like, how can the product or service I sell, how does it get somebody out of pain? And that's the marketing, the messaging people need and they want right now. It's funny because as I was launching the traffic, I literally launched the book the same day that President Trump told everyone to go home. If you look at my marketing campaign ahead of time, it was like, "How we built this $100 million a year company and how much traffic we get," all these things, and then I was like, "That is the wrong message right now." We literally, my team, I'm like, "All right, everything, every ad we've written, every presale, every video, just delete them all. We're redoing everything and this is the messaging." The messaging is, and we started talking about, I got a buddy down the street who owns a local waffle place, the best waffles in the world. If you ever come to Boise, I'll take you there. He opened the same day that the whole recession happened and it was crazy because you look at like, he's got his business, he opens the doors and it's the same day that literally traffic, usually restaurants, you have cars, like physical traffic driving by and people come and they eat. He's like, "The traffic stopped." What happens to all companies? They just, they die. Traffic is the lifeblood of a company. The whole messaging shifted to like, "Look, if you want to survive during these times and thrive on the other side of this, you have to master traffic and customers and getting people in. This is literally your company's life preserver during these uncertain times." All the messaging shifted. The ads shifted. Everything shifted. The book launch has done insanely well and everything's kind of come from that, but it all came from shifting the message from towards pleasure Understanding that we're in a time of moving people away from pain. I think that companies understand that and understand that shift in messaging are the ones that are going to really win during this time.

Yeah. One thing that I think people need to be very aware of is where they're at in their life. Are you moving towards something or away from something? I've always said that people fall into two categories. I think you're right. It changes actually depending on where you're at in your life, what's going on in the world. By nature, I would say that people are motivated by one of two things. Either they're moving towards a goal or they're moving away from a problem. I don't want to be broke. I don't want to be homeless. And then there's other people that are like, I want to achieve this goal. I want to win this. I want to be the best. And knowing where you come from will help you navigate the world in a much more sane-inducing way. Because if you're being sort of true to what aligns with you, like for me, moving away from something is never very interesting. It takes me into like a very uncertain, a very uneasy place, whereas even if I'm in the middle of massive uncertainty and I have fears, for me to shift my energy, I need to pick a goal, something that I'm excited about, so that when I'm pursuing it, even though the outcome is gonna be that I outrun this thing, right? I've been broke, I've had crazy debt, I've been in a place emotionally where I'm laying on my carpet and I just, fucking, I don't have any idea how I'm going to create momentum in my life. So I know what that's like. But the things that got me up and moving were to believe that I could change, to believe that I could grow, to set a goal, to set a goal that I was excited about, and then wake up every day and pursue that. And that was the thing that it— I think a big thing people have to do is like, what, where are you at as a baseline reference point? If you're in looking at seeing all the problems and all the things that are wrong, you're not in problem-solving mode. If you can shift over into problem-solving mode, so I've heard you talk about that waffle restaurant before, and you gave the guys some brilliant ideas about what to do. Like, hey, are you sending people text messages? And it's like, yeah, to be top of mind, to remind people, you know, to incept them. But you have to be in that problem-solving mode.

Yeah.

Is that something that you think about intentionally? Is that something you try to train your team to do? Is that— that to me seems like going back to what you were saying at the very beginning with your dad, of like, all right, you can look at you at the fact that you lost, or you can solve this problem.

Yeah. I think it's interesting too because I look at most business owners and like, and I know for me, I did it backwards the first way. Like a lot of times we come up with our products or our services, like we have an idea like, oh, I want to create this thing and we create it. And then after it's done, like now we got to figure out how to sell it and you figure out like a sales message and create that. And then it's like, now I got to go find people to sell it to. And then we're like trying to find people and it's like backwards. Like if you look at the way that the most successful businesses grow, I look at the way that we grew ClickFunnels is when I had this realization of like, I don't want to go and create something and find somebody to sell to. I want to go find the people that I'm passionate about serving and then just listen really, really carefully. I always tell people the more money you make is— the money you make will be in direct relation to how simple you make somebody else's process. For me, it's like I help people build funnels to sell their products and services. When I taught people the strategies, here's how you do it, I made good money. When we made software that made it simpler, I made more money. We had like done-for-you things, making it simpler to make more money. And it's always like, how do I simplify this process for whoever the customer is? How do I make it easier? And so like the mindset that we're always having here at ClickFunnels, and me and my team, is like we're sitting there and listening to our audience. Like, what is it they're looking for? What do they want? Where are they struggling? And it's like, hey, how do we make this process simpler? And every good product, every good idea, everything that's been a winner came from that, like listening, and then like figuring out how to solve the problem. All the ones where it was like, Russell had this great idea at 2 in the morning, let's go create it, and our whole team gets together and then we like try to give it to people. Those are the ones that don't typically do very well. No matter how much like, you know, how much push, force, and money we put into it to try to get adoption, it's always harder than the opposite way where we're just listening to what people want and then figuring out how's the best way to solve that for them. And anyway, that's like the simplest thing is just listening and then how do we simplify this for them? How do we simplify it? And you'll get paid more the better you become at it. Simplifying processes and things for people.

I love that idea of simplification. That's something— so do you know Noah Kagan?

Yes, yeah, I do.

Alright, super interesting guy and I think one of the things that makes him so effective, he said his superpower is making money and what he means by that is his superpower is in simplifying. It's in breaking the process down into immediate action. And those two things, simplifying it and then taking immediate action, to me are the exact things people need to be obsessively focused with right now. Because right now, like, first and foremost, if you're in a dire situation, take care of your basic needs, man. Like, don't worry about launching the next Facebook. Like, make sure that you've got a roof over your head, you can put food on the table, right? And that's where a lot of people are gonna crash and burn, is, yo, Maslow's hierarchy of needs has stood the test of time for a reason. Like, there are just certain things— safety, security, like get those taken care of. And you may have to do a job that you didn't want to do, or you may have to call people up and be banging the phones if you're trying— if you've got a product that really has value and fuck, like you don't know how to get it out, like you've got to think like a direct marketer. And this is like where I think my own story confuses people because like I'm so intense and, you know, I've got like that rah-rah spirit. But the reality is I'm not a burn the ships at the shore guy. Like I'm a yo, keep your day job, man. Like when we launched Quest, we had a software company. So during the day I was running a software company and nights and weekends I was making protein bars because I wanted to see if this would work. Like you're saying, make sure there's an audience before you go. Like, we didn't get a warehouse and start buying equipment until we were selling protein bars. I, I don't even think we bought the equipment until we were already profitable. So we were making the bars by hand, which was pure insanity, making the bars by hand ourselves nights and weekends to make sure that there was something real there. What advice do you have for somebody who's like, "Yo, I just lost my job and I feel totally out of control." What can they do as a solopreneur to get that first audience, to get that first sale?

Yeah. I want to first off agree with you. People message me all the time like, "I read your book. I'm going to quit my job and do this thing." I'm like, "No, don't quit your job and do the thing. Keep your job." As you know as well as I do that when you have that the uncertainty and it makes the pressure so much higher and it makes it so much harder to get creative and figure things out. When those needs are met, it's so much easier to go figure things out. But someone like— it's funny because I've had this conversation with some close friends who've lost their jobs who are freaking out right now and I try to explain to them, you have to understand that the money didn't just disappear. We're in this great wealth transfer where things are shifting around. I don't know if you know Perry Belcher, but he's one of my friends who owns survivalife.com. You look at Survival Life, in the last 30 days has made more money than the last 10 years combined. Money is shifting over there. You look at— it's not that it's disappeared. People still have money. They're just not going to the movie theaters and the restaurants. They're spending it other places. It's understanding that. If your whole world just got pulled away from you, it's not that the money just evaporated. It just got transferred somewhere. The first thing I'm doing is looking like where is this getting transferred? What are the companies and the businesses that are making more money right now? They can't handle it. They're looking for more help because because, man, all of a sudden because of these new circumstances, everything is just growing like crazy. That's the first thing. The second thing I look at is like, what is the skill set that is the most valuable inside of a company? I've got a friend who's a dentist. I tease him all the time because most dentists, like, they're the dentist. That's the most important person in the business. I'm the person who does the thing on people's teeth. I had this whole conversation. I'm like, you're not the most important person in your business. He's like, yeah, I am. Without me, they can't clean teeth. I was like, I was like, "The most important person in your business is the person who can get customers to come in the front door. Because if that person can't bring customers in the front door, you have no teeth to clean, therefore your skill set is useless." I'm like, "The most valuable person in any company is the person who we call rainmakers, who can make it rain, who can bring people in." And so, that's what it comes down to. This book Traffic Secrets is like the person who can drive traffic, who can bring the customers in, becomes the most valuable person in any company. I have friends who are so good at driving traffic that they literally will find a company that's struggling or maybe on the downside and they'll come in and say, hey, look, I can bring you the thing that you're missing. It's the holy grail for your business and all businesses. It's customers. And I can bring you as many as you want, as often as you want. The only thing is like I don't work for money. I work for equity. So, if you want me to do this, I want 30% of your company. And people are like just handing them the company. Here you go because you can make it rain. You can bring me customers. You can bring leads. And so, like I start shifting like if I got to figure out a skill set in this market, it's like the most valuable thing I can learn is how do I make it rain? For a company. And then I can go plug into companies I like, find a company, like whatever that is. But now you're so valuable that like when, when, you know, things start going down, like I figure like the dental office, the two last people standing is the dentist and the dude who brings in customers. Like they'll fire the receptionist, they'll fire the, the, the girl who does your teeth, like all that stuff gone except for the person who brings the customer in and the person doing the actual fulfillment of the service. And so like it makes you so valuable. I think that I'd be aligning with that, figuring out the, the markets, the industries, the businesses that are like are booming right now, and then how can I go plug into those and become the rainmaker? Because then you can write your own paycheck from this point forward. That's really the stability I think that all of us want is to be able to have that. If you have a skill set like that, you become invaluable.

All right, so let's talk about making it rain. One of the cool things about Traffic Secrets is you took an evergreen approach. Anybody else writes this book, and I promise you, it's going to be something that goes out of vogue. I mean, honestly, with what just happened, it would have gone out of vogue before it even hit shelves. Um, so the fact that you stopped— you said one of the key things you did here was you spent the beginning just stopping and thinking about how do I make sure that this is something that lasts no matter what the season, no matter what's going on, no matter what. You said TikTok didn't even exist when you started writing this, and by the time it came out, obviously TikTok is huge, but the principles all apply regardless of the platform. So what are some evergreen principles to being a rainmaker?

So the first step is really identifying who your dream customer is. At a deep level. Most people are like, "Oh," especially people that only have one traffic stream. Maybe they drive Facebook ads. They know like, "Oh, here's my interest and my targeting," and that's who their customer is. I'm like, "No, you have to go deeper than that. Really understand them at a deep level. Know their likes and their fears and what they're interested in and where they hang out." The better you understand that person, the more powerful step 2 is. Step number 1 is identifying who they are, and step number 2 is understanding that the power of the internet is the fact that it gives us all, all of us crazy humans with the things that we're passionate about, the ability to group together online in different spots. Say we pick health and fitness or biohacking, for example. So there's biohacking. Everyone who's passionate about biohacking, they are hanging out together on certain blogs. There's maybe a dozen or so blogs that all the biohackers go, they read every single day, they're part of, they're in the communities and they're all on these blogs. Then you go to podcasts. What are all the podcasts that the biohackers listen to? There's a passionate, super passionate audience and they're listening to all these 50 different podcasts. Then what are all the Facebook groups they're in? The email newsletters that they subscribe to. And so we start looking at traffic instead of like targeting on Facebook, we start looking at like where are all these pockets of customers, where are they at? And we start looking at like, oh my gosh, there's 300,000 on this blog right here, and there's 2.3 million listen to this podcast every single week, and you start finding these pockets of customers. And then our job as rainmakers, as traffic people, is to come back and say, okay, here's all these pockets of customers, how do I get access to them? Like what's the best way to get and infiltrate these groups? And one of the strategies that we talk about in the book is the strategy called the Dream 100. Basically, what the Dream 100 is, is not figuring out how do I get 100 customers. It's figuring out who are the 100 people that already have access to my dream customers. Who's the person who owns that blog that has 300,000 readers? Who are the podcast hosts that have the followings and the people that they're listening to? One of the exercises I do inside, I think it's page 41 in the book, I have a little graph in there. It says, "Okay, here's Facebook," and make a list of all the people in Facebook who have your dream customers already congregated. What are all the Facebook groups? What are the fan pages? What are the people that already have your dream customers hanging out there? Then you go to Instagram. Who are all the influencers that already have congregated your dream customers? We list out all the influencers. Then we go to podcasts and who's all the podcasters? You make this list and eventually you've got 100, 200, 300 people that have all of your dream customers on it. Now it's like understanding that I can go and I can buy ads to the followings of these people, and you should, but if I can like, If I can get to know and build a relationship with one of these people, like a gatekeeper of this community, they can click a button and open up the access to the entire community, right? For example, right now I'm lucky enough to have you interview me on your podcast and you've got a huge following of people who are going to hear about the book and hopefully someone will come buy the book and it's like it's given me access to this huge thing. It's interesting, like we spend millions of dollars a month on ads. So much we do in the business is building relationships with the people who have access to these huge audiences. Then what's nice is I can spend more time and energy networking and marketing and building relationships and spending money because if I can get one of those people to say yes, it can sell 100 or 1,000 or more of my products. In fact, I don't know if you've gotten this far in the book yet, but I actually quote you in the book from an interview you did where you were talking about when you guys built Quest initially, the first thing you did is you found here's all the influencers and you sent them out Quest bars with handwritten letters and you're like, "Hey, if you hate them, let us know. If you like them, let us know, but I just want to send you some of our stuff." And you did the same thing. You went to all these influencers, sent them your bars, handwritten letters, and then from that, a whole bunch of people loved it, started sharing with their audiences, and boom. I'm assuming that's kind of the ground fire that initially launched Quest, if I'm right.

Yeah, 100%. And that is one of the most powerful strategies, both of those things. So one, are you able to identify your audience? And then two, are you able to put together a relationship? Like are you able to bring value to that person, find some way to connect over time, and that's where I say like people have to take care of their needs first because to play this game right, it's not about the short-term dollars and I've heard you tell similar stories to my own story which is in the beginning of your journey, it was, or I'll speak for myself, though I've heard you say similar things, since the language I'm going to use is maybe derogatory, I'll speak for myself. So I did every get-rich-quick scheme you could imagine. So when I was young, dude, I was about it. I was like, there was this thing for a while where it was typing for money and I was like, yo, they were talking about how much money you can make, like, you know, transcribing things. I was like, I'm about it, let's do it. And I just tried, I tried selling insurance door-to-door, I did pyramid schemes. It didn't, I really believed in the product I was selling, but still not necessarily a good look. And I just, I wanted it to happen fast. Once I broke away from that and I just started thinking about, okay, I didn't obviously say Dream 100, but really identifying like where is my customer base, like the people that I would really be able to serve with this product, where are they, right? Which is something you wrote about in the book, niche out, like you got to pick a niche. Once you're niched out, then it becomes a lot easier to win in that in that space, right? You're not competing against everybody and their dog. They're easy to find online. You can deliver a crushing amount of value. So doing that and then playing the long game and building relationships, not trying to get anything in the short term. Look, I'm not a fool. I get that acting in that way and adding value to somebody else, it ultimately does come back to you some percentage, not all of it, but like one, it feels good in the moment, and then two, you'll be able to weather a storm because there are going to be other people there for you. And it goes back to the story you told about Arsenio Hall, which I think is really powerful.

Powerful.

Tell people that story. One, because I have a follow-up question about it, which is building a platform isn't the only way, and I'm super curious. Tell the story because people need to understand the punchline before I can really ask that question.

Yeah, for sure. What I talk about in the book is one of the most powerful ways to infiltrate your Dream 100 and get to know these people is by having your own platform. What do I have to offer Tony Robbins? What do I have to offer These people that I'd love to be on my Dream 100, a lot of times they have everything. I'm not going to pay them. I'm not going to— what do I have to offer? The thing you have to offer is your platform. I think there's a lot of ways to infiltrate your Dream 100 and get to know people, but one of the most powerful ways for sure is that. The reason why I met Tony Robbins initially, and I did a whole YouTube video, it's like 10 minutes long, showing a 10-year journey I went on with Tony of helping him, serving him, and doing all these things for him before eventually he promoted something for me a decade later, but it was like the only way the door even opened is because I had a platform. I was able to help promote him on top of my platform and open the doors. So many other people I've had a chance to meet all came because I had a platform to be able to offer them, and it opens up doors you can't get otherwise. I'm a huge believer that people should start their own show. It could be a YouTube show. It could be a podcast. It could be a blog. It doesn't really matter what, but something where you can create a platform that you can leverage to get to know people that own your customers.

Alright, well then let's talk about that. So I think we're gonna see the death of an influencer class as advertising revenues dry up. So a lot of people that have been making it their livelihood, it's going to, I think, stop being their livelihood. But anytime where there's massive disruption, there is massive opportunity. And I think there's going to be a whole new crop of influencers that actually figure out how to crack this nut. So what, what are some of the— as the king of something with secret in the title, What are the secrets to building a platform?

Yeah, um, a couple things. Like, number one is like you have to realize that first year you are not going to be good. Um, when I, I remember when I started my first podcast, it was called the Marketing Your Car Podcast. I called it that because, um, I had a 5-minute commute from my house to the office, and I was like, at least I know I'll be consistent because I'm just getting my phone out and click record. I'm just gonna talk while I drive. And I did a 5-minute podcast every single day for I don't know, 5 or 6, 7 years now. I mean, I still do. It's been a long, long time. What's crazy is my first setup, I didn't know how to track stats. The first 3 years, I just didn't know. I just set it up and I started recording and my brother published them. I'd ask him if people were listening. He's like, "I don't even know how to check." We didn't even know. I'm so grateful I didn't know because I just kept publishing. I'm like, "I'm driving anyway. I might as well do these things." It was about 300 episodes in when we shifted it from the marketing in your car to Marketing Secrets. That time, we switched the platform. We set up the analytics. My brother's like, "Oh my gosh, we're getting like, I can't remember, like 10,000 people per episode are listening right now." I was like, "Oh, I had no idea, this is amazing." We started looking back at the stats and you look at how little it was for so long. Then I remember one of my, this guy that came into my world who's one of our hyper-successful students now, he was like, "When I came in, I started, I came in on episode 300 and I was like, I'm going to binge listen to everything, so I started at number 1." He's like, "Man, the first 40 or 50 episodes were so bad." He's like, "You were the worst ever." He's like, "But about 45, 46, you started getting in the rhythm, and then it started getting good. Now I love it." The first lesson is you have to publish long enough to find your voice. Most people do 2 episodes, like, "Ah, no one's coming." It's like, no, you have to make this a commitment. You got to do this for a long time, because at first no one's going to be listening, and that's okay, because you're going to be really bad, but it's going to give you the ability to find your voice. That's number 1. Number 2 is, and I have an article here from one of my friends, Nathan Barry. He wrote a blog post called Endure Long Enough to Get Noticed. He talked about, he said, if you look at most good TV shows, usually you don't find out what the good TV shows are until it's like in season 5 or season 6, or movies that are like the third movie, then you're like, "Oh, I'm going to go back and watch all of them now because they've survived." He said that because there's so much content being created all the time, that us as consumers, we wait for the best stuff to rise to the top. The first reason why you're publishing all the time is because you're trying to find your voice. That's step number 1. Step number 2 is you're doing it long enough that your dream customers can find you. It's coming down and saying, "I'm going to be consistent. I'm going to do this." I always tell my people, "Publish something, at least 100 episodes. By the time you've done 100 episodes," and I recommend at least in a year window, so you're doing multiple times a week, "that within a year you'll have found your voice, your people will have found you, and you'll be financially free." So far, anybody who's taken me on that challenge, by the end of a year they have done exactly that. They found their voice. The people have found them. They've been financially free. It's just like one of those things that it's scary, it's weird, and it's feels painful at first because it's not fun when you're really bad, but then you get in your stride and then it just gets really good.

Yeah, I will echo that sentiment. When I first started, this was back at Quest. I started a show called Inside Quest, which would be very recognizable to fans of Impact Theory. When we first started it, even though I would say that if we all have some element of talent where we get just disproportionate wins, mine is for sure verbal ability. So the more I have practiced, the more energy I've put into being able to articulate a message, to be able to speak extemporaneously, I just got disproportionate returns from that. So somebody else might do the same thing. If I'm getting a 1.3x return on my time, maybe they're getting a 0.7, right? So for me, like, that's a pretty big gap. When I started, I was so frustrated. No one was listening. I didn't think I was good at it. And I went to my producer, who I also happen to be married to, and I said, "Yo, look, I'm running a billion-dollar business over here. Like, this doesn't make sense. I'm wasting my fucking time. Like, what are we doing?" And she said, "Over my dead body." And ironically, what the exact amount of time she said was, "You're going to do this for a year." And she said, "If at the end of the year it's still not delivering, like you don't feel that it's delivering enough value to be worth doing it, then we'll stop." But she was like, "I really believe in this. I really think that you can add value to people's lives." just take the time to figure it out, take the time to let the audience find you. And of course now at the time it was just like one thing that we were doing to try, honestly it started as a way to add value to my employees and now it's become my entire business model is predicated on creating content. So the platform as you're saying, I think that's really, really powerful. One thing I would just kick myself in the face if I didn't ask you about that you brought up earlier You've gone through cycles before. You've been in business for a very long time. You've dealt with downturns. I want to know emotionally, you said, you know, you're coming in and you're laying off half your people. You've got to convince the other half to stay and you've got to be tied to the mission and all of that. How have you stayed passionate about what you do? How much do you think about the why of what you're doing? How do you survive those downtimes emotionally?

Yeah, I think anyone who's created something amazing has felt this before. It's funny because when I got into business, like most people I think, I did a lot of the type from home and the selling door-to-door. So I get it. We get in because we want the money and you start going after that. That's what the initial draw a lot of times is, is like, I need to make some money. And after making money really quickly, you realize how unfulfilling that is and you're like, huh, that was not that cool. And then you start seeing the success of the people that you're— whatever you're selling to the people. And then like that becomes this next level of win where you're like, oh my gosh, like because I did something cool, like that person had this big win. And that becomes this drug that's like, at least for me, like it's unquenchable. Like I just keep wanting, I desire it. Like the more it happens, the more I want it and the more— and so for me, like that's this thing. And so when things would struggle, I remember I remember I used Voxer as my mode of communication with most of the world. It's just a little walkie-talkie app. In Voxer, if a message is really cool, you put a little star next to it. My kids said a cute thing, I'll put a star next to it. When people, my friends or clients or customers send testimonials, I put a little star next to it. Then you can go listen to all the stars you want. When times were down, I'd go back and I would just go listen. I click on the star section and listen. I would just listen to 30, 40 minutes of people tell me how it changed your life, what happened, how it worked. And it was just like, all right. And like listening to that got me back to the spot of like, okay, I gotta do this. And then my favorite quote of all time is Churchill, however long and hard the road. And he's talking to Parliament about this war they have to go on and it's gonna be brutal. And all these things are how hard it's gonna be. And then Adarian says like, we're gonna, you know, victory at all costs, victory, however long and hard the road. And so whenever I listen to that, I recenter myself like, this is where we gotta go. And then it's like, all right, we're going, Victory, however long and hard the road. Whatever's gotta go, whatever we gotta do, we're just gonna go and we're gonna go and we're gonna go. And that phrase, like, however long and hard the road, like, rings through my head all the time. Every time I'm tired or I'm frustrated, I think about the people, I hear about success, and then we go after it. And that's kind of the draw for me, the pull.

That's amazing, dude. So that's the third time you've given me the chills in this talk today. That quote from Churchill, I've actually not heard that before. And my all-time favorite quote is also Churchill. I need to just memorize it because whenever I try to paraphrase it, it doesn't have the punch. But it's the one where he's talking about never give in, never give up, not for any reason. Like, you keep going except for, what's he say, good sense or something like that. Like, you just go and go and go. And it reminds me of exactly what you were just saying. And, you know, one thing that's interesting about Churchill that I think is very apropos of the moment that we're in is He, not long after the war, they ousted him. And he was the right man at that time who rose up and was exactly what that country needed. And look, if people are willing to reach within themselves, like, this is a time for people that are willing to step up and shine. This is a huge opportunity. How do you think about that? Like, it would be very easy to see this time as just a time to suffer and get through like when you were cutting weight? Or do you think that there is a way to reframe this as opportunity?

I think this is the greatest. I mean, I turned 40 this year. This is the greatest opportunity in the 4 decades I've been on this earth. Like, I think about right now, people are scared, there's fear, and the people who— everyone's looking to be led. Like, they're like, everyone's just freaked out. Even people who are leaders are like trying to find people to lead them right now. Like, everyone's struggling. I think that the people that are willing to stand up and raise their hands and say, "Look, I'm gonna lead, come follow me." Now is like the time. And I always tell people like my, I have a big belief that like the business isn't just like a way we make money or a way we waste our time. Like I believe the business is a calling from God. And I always tell people like, you've been called to serve a group of people. And like now you've been called. Have you ever felt that tug before? Like my friend Alex Charfen calls it the call of contribution. Like you feel this tug, this pull, like you've been called. And there's a group of people that you have been called to serve that you can change their life. But you've got to be willing to like do the things to like step up. And like, there's so many fears. I think that tons of people are called, but most people don't ever step up to it. They shrink back down. But those who are willing to step up to that calling and say, all right, my job, I got to gather a group of people, and with my gifts and my talents, I'm going to serve these people to the best of my ability. Um, man, on the other side of this, they're going to be ones that have the companies, that have the brands, that have these things. Especially right now, like, man, we're giving— like, it's such a double-edged sword. Like, there's there's all this fear, but there's also this blessing right now. You look at ad costs, like, I don't know what you guys have seen, but our ad costs have dropped dramatically. Like, we went from spending $4 or $5 for webinar registrants, right now we're paying 78 cents. We had 17,000 people register for webinar I have tonight, 17,000. Like, people are so cheap, they're looking, they're begging, they're trying to find things. I saw an article from Facebook saying that they're gonna lose $40 billion over the next couple months because no one's buying ads. And so we're coming in and like, Man, now's the time we can gather people at a cost that's unheard of. Like, I always tell, like, I should go back when Google was easy, back, you know, 17 years ago when I got started. Like, it just happened, like, like 3 or 4 weeks ago. Like, it opened up, the ad costs dropped, and it's like, I can gather people at a cost now I never could before. And so I think, you know, on the other side of this, there's some people who missed this opportunity, others who were like, look, I jumped on and I found a group, I've called to serve them, I'm serving them and doing everything in my ability, and I'm gathering these people together. On the other side of this, man, people are going to remember who is the person that got me through the hard times, who's the person that gave me the hope in a brighter future. Those are the people they connect with and they're going to keep following forever. I think now is such a unique, awesome time and we can get attention from so many people at such a discount. It's a good time for everyone to start stepping up and start publishing and start putting your voice out there.

Yeah, no question, man. Totally, I aggressively agree with that. I'm not sure how familiar people are, but the way that you think, dude, I think is extraordinary. I don't think it's any accident that you've had the kind of success that you've had. So where can people find you? Where can they find Traffic Secrets, the whole Secrets series? What's the best way to connect with you?

Yeah, if they go to trafficsecrets.com, right now we're in the pre-launch, so we have an offer where you can get the book for free, you just cover the shipping and handling. It's hardbound, it's like almost a 400-page book, so it's 18 months worth of writing and you just got to cover the shipping and handling when you get it. That's there. Then obviously my main company is called ClickFunnels, and so that's the other place, clickfunnels.com. Yeah, that's kind of it. I'm all over the place. I'm sure that if you Google my name you'll find me everywhere.

Yes, yes you will. Google will auto-populate this man as you start typing the letters. One final question. What is the impact that you want to have on the world?

It's funny. I talked earlier about how people are gatherers, and I feel like my calling is to gather gatherers and to bring people together and give them tools and resources to be able to serve their audiences better. If you look at everything we do from ClickFunnels, the software we have, from the books I write, to everything, it's giving gatherers the tools to gather the people and to serve them. I look at, as of right now inside of ClickFunnels, we have over 100,000 active members. I look at the number where I was excited as this company, like, "Oh, 100,000 people," but each person is an entrepreneur and each entrepreneur has the ability to change someone's life. I share them with my team all the time. I'm like, "Look, I'm going to tell you about one of our entrepreneurs." I talk about Kaitlyn Polin, for example. She's one of our ClickFunnels members, one of the 100,000. 3 years ago, she decided to start this weight loss business and they launched on ClickFunnels, had no idea what they were doing, read the books. Launched their first funnel. Now 3 years later they have like I think 1.5 million women on the list. Over 100,000 women have gone through their weight loss courses. How many lives and families have been transformed and changed because of that one entrepreneur? Then we got like Chris at ChrisBeatsCancer.com, a guy who goes through cancer and figures out a way to naturally cure himself. Now he publishes on our platform and he's now helped thousands of people who are going through this fear of cancer. Not that he cures everyone, but he helps people and helps them understand all these amazing things. That's one entrepreneur on the platform. I could list off hundreds and hundreds of names, but for me, it's like, man, every entrepreneur we're able to affect has the ability to affect 100 or 1,000 or 1 million people. Anyway, that's the impact that we're trying to have is how do we gather these gatherers, give them the tools and the resources and the knowledge they need to be able to gather their people and serve them at high level. If we can do that, we'll change the world.

I love that, dude. Thank you so much for coming on, man. This was a lot of fun. Again, I just love the way that you think. I love the way that you're crushing it, man. I love that you have optimism for the period that we're in right now. I share that. So, brother, I salute you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Everybody, if you haven't already gone into this man's world, do. It is extraordinary. And if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.