Learn These Strategies to Avoid Financial Pitfalls Feat. Keith Cunningham

So what is the road less stupid? How would you describe it?

If I gave you the opportunity to unwind any three financial decisions you've ever made in your whole life, how much money would you have? And there's not a person in this room that if I gave them the ability to unwind, any one of three financial decisions, wouldn't have more money. It turns out that the key to making more money is to doing fewer stupid things. That's true. I don't need more good ideas. I need fewer ideas that I think are good, that I've executed on. And so I've had the experience over the last 47, 48 years of being in business of having done some smart things where actually it wasn't that smart. But in reality, I was lucky. I happened to catch a big wave. And I mistook catching a big wave with being a good swimmer. And it's what Warren Buffett is very famous for saying. Most of you have heard it. You never know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out. And so the key is not can I make it? The key is can I make it and keep it? Those are two entirely different skill sets, and in fact, they are almost diametrically opposed. What it takes to make money is very different than what it takes to keep it. And most people are so obsessed with making it that as they become more successful, they do stupid things, which winds up sabotaging their overall success. And I know this story firsthand because this is one of the reasons I appreciated you so much, Paul, and your presentation is because I've had the experience of losing a lot of money, $100 million of my money that I made. I didn't inherit it, I made it. You were better off than me because you cut the bleeding at plus 600,000. I didn't cut the bleeding until I was minus 50 million. So I went from plus 100 million to minus 50 million in a matter of 24 months. And when you do that, it takes your breath away. I mean, that's a major, major event, not only because of the size of the money, but also because it's. The loss is so devastating. And I had so much of my net worth. I have my self worth entwined with my net worth, which is a deadly combination.

How old were you during that time?

40.

40. And that was during the. In real estate.

Real estate, Yeah, a lot of. And what led to the loss? Look at your losses. It's not necessarily pleasant to think back on, but everybody's had some kind of loss that they've sustained as a result of a bad decision or excessive optimism. Unexamined assumptions, unexamined assumptions, faulty expectations, excessive optimism are killers. Arrogance is killers. Hubris is a killer for creating and sustaining wealth. So the goal to me is not to get it. The goal is to get it and keep it. You can get lucky and make it. And I know lots of people who got lucky. But the problem is they weren't able to keep it because they didn't have skills that would allow them to sustain. So the truth is, to me, sustainability of wealth is the holy grail. Making it. I can catch a big wave, I can get lucky. I can happen to hit a crease in the market at exactly the right point, and, you know, we can wind up being, you know, affiliate associated with you or Tony Robbins or any number of other people. And there's a degree of luck in all that, and there's a skill set in all of that. And so I'm very much about, let's make sure that if we're going to all this effort in order to create the success, and people do stupid things in the creation mode as well. People oftentimes think that if I just improve my product, that that would somehow allow me to create business or financial success. And yet the truth is, it doesn't require a great product in order to make a lot of money. If I ask you to think about your favorite restaurant, the place you would go to have a huge celebration, you're thinking about it, you know where it would be. There's not one person in this room that's thinking about McDonald's. Not one. And yet nobody has made more money in the history of mankind in the restaurant business than McDonald's. How did it happen? Is it because their cheeseburgers are so good? No, their cheeseburgers are horrible. Right? They are. Their French fries, on the other hand, are really good, but the cheeseburgers are horrible. What allowed McDonald's to make a lot of money was not an obsession with the product. It's never, write this down. This will be a takeaway. It's never what you do. It's how you do it. It's never what you do. It's how you do it. Southwest Airlines, their whole business model is put butts in seats and fly those butts from point A to point B safely. No mention of your luggage, Right? Your luggage is immaterial to the airlines. Whether it makes it or not, we don't care. Let's just make sure the person gets from point A to point B doesn't even have to be on time. Southwest Airlines has made more money in the last 10 years in the airline business than the rest of the airline industry cumulatively since Orville and Wilbur Wright. Now you think about that One airline has made more money than everybody else since Orville and Wilbur. How'd that happen? Is it because their planes are so good? Is it because their first class section is so roomy? Is it because the food is so outstanding? Is it because the hostesses and stewards and stewardesses. Is it because they're so good looking? No. I can't tell which is older, the stewardesses or the airplanes. Right. It's never what you. Southwest Airlines success is not based on what they did in, it's how they did it. You name me any product or service. I don't care what it is. Give me one week. You could say chewing gum, shoelaces, seminars, pins, socks. Name me any product or Service. Give me one week, and in one week I'll come back and name you one person who's made millions and 100 people that have gone broke with the exact same idea. The problem is, as entrepreneurs, we become obsessed with the product. We become obsessed with either the quality. And I'm not opposed to great products. That's not the message. The message is, what is it? As a business person, what is it that we're focused on? The artist side of me wants to focus on the product and making it better and longer lasting and prettier and more robust. And I'm good with that. We need artists. The operator side of me wants to get busy and get a bunch of stuff done. I just, I got so much to do and holy cow, if it's going to get done, I'm going to have to do it myself because I don't know how to hire a team or keep a team or have a players or create a culture. I don't know any of that. I just got a lot to do. That's the operator side. The business person side says, wait a minute. The job is not to react to the problem du jour. What I need to do is leverage and structure. Write those two words down. That's the difference between a solopreneur and one person army. A solopreneur and a business owner. A business owner has mastered two things, structure and leverage. And without structure and leverage, there is not a way to create a sustainably successful business. I'm going to say the structure part a different way before I talk about leverage.

Yeah.

Opportunity without structure is chaos. The Achilles tendon of Most entrepreneurs is structure. They hate it. That's why they started their own business, is because they hate the idea of having structure. And yet structure is critical for scaling. I hear a lot of people in here talking about scaling or scaling is just a Silicon Valley word for growth. That's all it is. How do I grow this thing? Okay, well, if I'm going to grow this thing, I need structure in order to be able to do it. Otherwise I got kind of a fire drill working with a bunch of people doing a bunch of stuff and it's not necessarily the most productive thing that needs to happen. Leverage, one of the highest forms. When I talk about leverage, most people think, oh, he's talking about debt. In reality, I'm not. I mean, debt is a financial instrument, it's leverage. But the more powerful form of leverage is who's on your team. So I'm going to ask you a question. If I gave you an opportunity to build a world class team of A players, and the only people on your team were A players, I mean, seven footers, these are the Kevin Durant's, they can do it all. If you only had a team of A players, how many of your existing problems that you have right now would go away, disappear? It turns out the problems that most of us are dealing with are not even really the problem. Unison where I need a little whiteboard if I can get one.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and it's. If you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description or you can wait until the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Joe just handed you a piece of paper a second ago and said thank you and said write down one of your biggest problems. So I'm going to ask you right now to write down on your piece of paper one of your three biggest problems. Maybe you just did that. Maybe you can refer back to that piece of paper. Maybe you're not going to have to share this. We're not going to talk about it. It's not going to be anything. So you may want to write really, really small so that nobody else can see. Write it really small and just write down or revisit one of your three biggest problems that you think you have with your business. Let me give you a thought. The exercise is over. You don't have to complete writing it down. The exercise is over. Every person here has an is line. This is reality. This is the way it looks. This is point A. Point A. And the problem that most people have, in my experience, I know I have this problem, is that I'm not particularly honest with myself about the reality of my situation. I sugarcoat it. When I was at the University of Texas, every day I'd walk past a. A little message etched in granite over the doors of a building. And the message was, you shall know the truth, and the truth will set you. See, you know this, right? And every day for four or five years, I walked past this saying. And I went, I don't know what this means. What does that mean? You should know the truth, or the truth will set you free. Well, the reality is, it dawned on me later, is that as long as I'm lying to myself or not telling the truth, I have no opportunity to make a change. So it's why addicts don't stop using is because they say, well, I don't really have a problem. I can stop anytime I want. Yeah, I know it's a little. I know it's a little bit. But, you know, the reality is I'm functioning right. It's why alcoholics or poor people pick a topic. People don't tend to tell themselves the truth. This is point A. We also have point B. Point B is ought. This is the way I'd like for it to look. This is point B. And it turns out that most of us are experts on point B. We have massive clarity on the way we would like for it to look, because we've done all this visualization, We've done all this goal setting where you make a goal and then you make it vibrant, and then you turn it into black and white, and then you bring it closer and farther away, and then you put music around it. And so we're really good at visualizing what ought to. We tend to suck at what is. And when asked what our problem is, we describe the gap. The gap between where you are and what you want is what you typically describe as the problem, when in reality, this gap is not the problem. This gap is the symptom. I just asked you. Joe just asked you the last exercise you did. Write down one of your three biggest problems. And everybody got busy real quick. We knew what the problem was because we were visualizing the gap between where we are and what we want, when in reality, that's not the problem. That's the symptom. The gap sits right here. This is Sorry. The problem sits right here. This is the problem. This is the obstacle that I need to overcome in order to move the needle on my is line. In order to move the needle on my is line, I need to get clarity on what it is that's truly blocking my forward progress. What's blocking my forward progress has nothing to do with where I am versus what I want. What's blocking my forward progress is the obstacle that sits right here. And it turns out, Joe, that the hardest part of thinking time is getting clarity on the problem, that is, if you don't have clarity on the problem, that is, you'll be tactical instead of strategic. So I say I'm 10 pounds overweight. What do I want to do about it? Well, as long as I view the problem as being 10 pounds overweight, which is not the problem, that's the symptom. Hello. Hello. Are you with me that? Being 10 pounds overweight is not the problem, that's the symptom. But as long as I identify being 10 pounds overweight as being the problem, then what I will lurch to is, okay, should I buy a jump rope or should I join a gym? Should I buy Oprah's latest diet book, or should I get a personal training? Oh, I know what I'll do. I'll get a piece of home exercise equipment. That's what I'll do. If I just had a peloton bike in my house, then I would get in shape, which is why most home exercise equipment and most diet books don't work, because it's a tactical response to a tactical question. As long as I'm dealing with the symptom, I'm going to be dealing in tactical. And once I say it's not a tactical issue, I need to be strategic and think strategic and identify the problem it is. So here it is, and then I'll stop, Joe, if I don't have clarity on the problem that is, I'll build a machine for the problem that isn't, which is what we do 99% of the time. We identify the gap, call it the problem, when in reality it's a symptom. And we're highly tactical in our response because we have a tactical question that we've asked which winds up sabotaging our results. If you tell me your sales aren't high enough, I'm going to say that's a symptom, not a problem. If you tell me you don't have enough profits. If you tell me you have a crummy culture. If you Tell me you have weak employees. If you tell me your balance sheet is screwed up, I'm going to look at you and say, all those are symptoms. What's the problem? So if I gave you an opportunity to rethink the problem that you identified a minute ago, is that really the problem? Really? Is that the problem? Is that the core root underlying problem that's blocking your forward progress? Or is there something below that, something buried where you got to get busy and figure out what in the world is going on? So business, to me, is an intellectual sport. It's chess. Money. And business does not respond well to emotions. Warren Buffet said it. Optimism is the enemy of the rational investor. It turns out in business, optimism is your enemy, which is why one of the pieces of advice that you gave is so good, Paul, which was, we all need a board. We need advisors. We need people that we will listen to. The higher you go or the higher you want to go, the greater the requirement to have somebody around you who will tell you the truth. Because I can't smell my own breath. I can smell your breath, but I can't smell mine. I can't see my own swing. I can see the shot. I can't see the swing. I need people around me, watching me swing, who will give me advice. And then I got to be willing to hear that advice. As long as I'm arrogant. Right. Unwilling to listen, it does no good to ask. So business is an intellectual sport, and the people that win the game sustainably have got skills and tools, which is why I wrote the book Let the Road Less Stupid.

Let me talk about that. Because one thing. You live in Barcelona.

Yes.

You've. I mean, you've had all kinds of roller coasters, I'm sure, in your career, and you live very far away. You have a routine. You said earlier that routines create freedom. And your emphasis is so much about getting the right person. I remember a conversation I had with Richard Branson on Necker Island. I've done six trips to Necker island, and I was in his kitchen with him, and I just said to him, I go, when's the last time you went to a grocery store, Richard? And he's like, I don't think I've ever went to a grocery store. And I'm like, what do you mean you never. You bought beer for Sid Vicious or Johnny Rotten or something. He's like, I don't think I've ever been in a grocery store. And I'm sitting there like, how is that possible? He's lying. There's like, no way. And so I said, I go, when's the last time you did your laundry? And he looks up and he's like, really thinking. He goes, I've never done laundry. I'm like, what about when you were a kid? He goes, no, my mom did my laundry. He goes, joe, you don't do those things. You hire other people to do it. Then he went on to say, he goes, one hire, one great hire will save you thousands of hours in your life. And of course, Richard doesn't do a very good job explaining what he does and how he does it. I've interviewed him a lot, but that one piece of advice about hiring other people was huge. Now, most entrepreneurs don't get the importance of that, but you are constantly, you know, instilling, finding, putting the right people on the bus. You're buddies with Jim Collins. I mean, you really understand this talk about that and then how you actually run a company, living in Barcelona and some of your routines. But I think it's so key to get into the minds of people, how critical of a decision, getting other people that are talented and skilled to assist you in whatever your enterprise or business or career is.

Yeah, well, and you just pointed out what is the other key constraint to entrepreneurs startups being able to scale up. The reality is 76% of the companies in the United States are home based. 96% never get to a million in revenue. And the fundamental reason is the entrepreneur knows they're the best at doing things and doing everything. And it is impossible for many of them to let go and trust that somebody else can do even a piece of that as well as they can. What's even worse is they try to get somebody else to do something for them and they didn't choose that person correctly and that person screws it up and now they've been burnt. And once you've been burnt, you don't want to go back again. And so you're stuck having to do everything. And you only have 168 hours in a week. We don't get any more. And so, you know, Jim Collins said you got to get the right butts and the right seats. But we thought we ought to put together a list of seats. And so we built a tool called our face tool, the function accountability chart. And it lists what are all the functions that have to exist in any business. You know, who's going to run it? Sales, marketing, operations, accounting. And you know, when you're a startup, it's your name next to all of us. Me Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me is figuring out which box you can delegate next. And it's this ability to delegate that none of us were taught how to do. I didn't take a course in my MBA called delegation, and there's a real art and science to doing that correctly. And most people think delegation is here. You do that, but that's called abdication delegation. My best analogy is that thermostat I got stuck in the H vac business, and we got this complex air conditioning system in here. But if you didn't have that thermostat, Joe, right over there on the wall that was constantly monitoring what's going on here and giving feedback to that system, we'd either be freezing to death or burning up here in Phoenix, Arizona, on a day it's 102 outside. So you've got to put in thermostats within the organization to make sure that you close that loop on the activities that you've got people working on. And then, like Richard said, you've got to then say, all right, what are the things? And Marcus Buckingham helped us here. Marcus, he helped me more than almost any thought leader when he said, when he properly defined what is a strength and what is a weakness. Because let me tell you what gets entrepreneurs in trouble. They're too good at too many darn things. That's what got them into business, because they are wicked talent, talented. But that becomes their weakness. And when Marcus said, look, a strength is not just because you're good at it, but it gives you strength, it gives you energy. A weakness, even if you're good at it, is a weakness if it makes you tired. And for me, I know how to run a company. I know how to do all the stuff that we do.

But.

But it wears me out. And I had to decide that, you know what? I love teaching. I don't love to do any of this other stuff. I need to find people who love what it is that makes me tired. Be more specific. I've put PowerPoints together for my presentations. It absolutely wears me out. And so I went out to a crowd sourcing site. 99 designers. I've never met her. She's worked now with me for seven years. I found this woman, Jun Yee. She's part Korean, so highly creative, part German. So it gets delivered now, and I just send her, I need a slide that shows a bus that has a bunch of people coming on it. And I send her the idea and magically in my in basket, within hours, it shows back up. And so that's what entrepreneurs have to do is get a piece of paper out, make a list. And you know what, if you like to shop, and I know guys who do, it's almost a meditation, relaxation thing, then keep doing it. But if that wears you out, if that makes you tired, find somebody else to do it and just continue to keep removing. There's this key word again, constraints that are draining the life and energy out of you and make sure that you spend your time on the stuff that gives you energy and then you're going to be jazzed.

I mean so much of performance and happiness and results creation is just literally the proper allocation of your energy in the right places.

That's correct.

I was talking to Dan Sullivan a while back and he says that there's no such thing as bad work in the world. There's this bad work for certain people. Someone can look at someone like a gardener and say, I would never want to do that or I wouldn't never want to be a janitor. The reality is that's great work for people that get energy from it and are really skilled at it and love it. Part of it is just realizing what makes you tick doesn't make the rest of the world tick. And there's tons of people that you can hire that have enormous skills.

But I think we need to come back to when you get down to the nitty gritty, what entrepreneurs and most people know how to do is how do I source those people? You know, we're very clear. If you need to hire someone to do something, you need to get at least 20 high quality applicants. It's a pure numbers game versus just hiring. The first person comes along and fogs the mirror. And then once you've got those applicants, how do you choose the right person? And the feel good interview is actually terrible. You'd be better off letting a dart choose than us doing the standard interview most of us fall trap to. And so you know, we're big fans of top grading. It's the only formal mechanism, methodology that guarantees at least 90% plus if you do it right, you've chosen the right person. And if you choose the right person, your life is golden. You choose the wrong person and your life is miserable. And so that's what we detail in the book, is how you do those.

Two things well and see. So what I want to point out again, for people that don't know who you are have never been introduced to your work, this will be their first introduction. What are all of the things that scaling up Teaches and what are all the things that gazelles does that helps? Because I want you to actually talk about the resources that you have because it's one thing for someone to hear this. What I hope is that when someone watches one of my interviews or listens to it and I'm talking to a bright person and the person actually can help solve problems, help them get to their bigger future, where they want to go, that they have some pain. Because usually if they don't feel some pain and some hurt, they're not going to do shit about it. I mean, there has to be either some great inspiration or there has to be some frustration and annoyance. And you're like, I'm kind of sick of it. You know, Dan Sullivan has this line where he says, irritated oysters make pearls. And, you know, I want people to be in a pissed off state, but also not just letting them know, what do you do with it? Okay, yeah, I don't know what to do. But you have literally created just so much solutions for entrepreneurs. So what are some of the things that people will get out of scaling up? And also what does gazelles really offer people?

Yeah, well, and what we wanted to focus on, what Geoffrey Moore says is provide a hundred percent solution. There's so many parts and pieces out there that's frustrating for business owners to kind of pull it all together. So we thought, look, let's give business owners a hundred percent solution. Let's get them the coaching support, let's get him the education, let's get him the technology tools, literally tools we've got in the cloud that you can run on your mobile devices so that we can help them kind of automate these components that are necessary to manage the chaos that comes with trying to scale up the business. Now, we do that in how we started the interview in these four areas. And let me give you the test. First thing, why would you look at the people side of the business? Well, there it's purely your gut feel about, are you happy? Because our happiness is really tied to the people we work with. And I can tell you when you're not happy because you're having an issue with your partner. You've got a salesperson who's mucking up the attitudes of the rest of the salespeople. You got a customer who's got too big a piece of. You got a supplier that has you constrained. You've got a bank that is in your way of being able to scale up. You've got issues at home, you got a sick child and challenges with Your spouse, if you don't get or you just can't hire enough talent to keep up with the growth that you're able to handle. If you got one of those, you better focus your energy on getting that fixed. And we built tools, whether it's your personal plan, your face tool, the processes in the organization, we help you source employees, how do you manage them, how do you retain them, These are all the nitty gritty things around people. Now, if generally you're happy with the relationships in the business, then we look at strategy. And strategy is very simple. Are you growing top line and gross revenue dollars as fast as you would like? And by the way, you can grow too fast. As Andy Grove said, more companies die from indigestion than starvation. But for a lot of companies, that's not a problem. You're not growing fast enough. That tells me your strategy is wrong. You don't have enough of what people want that they literally are beating your door down and standing 10 million in line on a Monday to want to buy your phone. So then we have tools to help you really figure out this industry dominating competition crushing strategy that allows you to have a monopoly because that's what businesses want. Government doesn't want you to have it, businesses want it. And there's the essential tension of capitalism. So we help you figure that out. Now, if revenue's growing as fast as you'd like, then we look at your profitability and how much just raw time you're having to put in the business. Let me tell you what's sad, Joe. I've had so many friends like double, triple the size of their company over 2, 3, 4, 5 years, yet the bottom line didn't come with it. They're actually making less money, absolute money, let alone a percentage, and working more hours. And at some point you wake up and say, what am I doing all of this for? And most of them, rightfully so, fire everybody, get rid of their fancy offices and go back when it was them and assistant working out of a spare bedroom and they were having more fun and making more money. And that usually is because they're sloppy in execution. And I gotta say, most entrepreneur companies are sloppy. And by the way, we know one simple metric, revenue per employee. It's crazy predictive. But I ask people today, how many employees do you have? Multiply it times 100,000 and you pretty well have guessed the revenue. Large companies, these big bloated bureaucratic machines that we make fun of, generate two and a half times more revenue per employee than most of Us mere mortals do. And that's simply because we have sloppy process within the organization. And if you come back then to what frustrates people you hire is they join your company and they have to both work with idiots. You didn't hire the other people, right? Or I got stupid process. Things are frustrating. We can't even get an invoice out the door. We can't even get our product or service out the door or without us having to work 18 hours, days, eight days a week to make up for this slop that's around here. And so we really help companies tighten up that execution. And then, look, you can get by with decent people, decent strategy, decent execution, but not a day without cash. And we're not talking about making payroll. That's important. But do you have the kind of financial muscle necessary to do some of the stuff we talked about today? You need to lock up that constraint. You need to get, you know, you need to buy one of your key suppliers. There are a couple of key acquisitions you need to make. You've got the cash to bring on that chief marketing officer. That's necessary if you're constrained by those cash resources to do what you absolutely need to do. Man, you age so much faster. And so we look at those four areas, we got tools in every one of those areas to minimize the pain that entrepreneurs feel when they're trying to scale up.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, I remember the first time I interviewed you, which I don't know how many years ago it was, it might have been a decade ago, I asked you about deadlines and you said that there's this misnomer that entrepreneurs work well under pressure, but under pressure, they just work. Do you still believe that to be the case? I mean, do you have any thoughts? Because a lot of entrepreneurs put themselves on the firing line way more than they need to to. Because they don't prepare in their just, you know. And look, I'm speaking from a guy who has gone through enormous amounts of, you know, add, distractible shiny object pursuits taking on. I've become better than I ever have been. I think meditation has done more to help me than many things. But what are your thoughts about the behavior of these crazed entrepreneurs that are driven like crazy, but their drivenness is causing them enormous pain, broken relationships, poor health, all that sort of stuff.

You know, my thoughts are just what you said. And it's recognizing that this is both the source of our strength and the thing that gets in our way that the entrepreneur has to sort out. And Joe, we don't have enough time in this interview to unpack all of that kind of stuff that we just described. But I want to come back to this thing on the deadline. Take this big hairy, audacious goal, this 10 year goal. Jim never meant for that to have a deadline. You don't have to get it done in 10 years. It's just like a North Star that you've put out there that you head towards. And a lot of entrepreneurs beat the deadline and others take longer. It's just the fact that you know what the finish line is and some folks run the 100 meter, you know, sub 9 seconds and some take a little bit longer. But hey, we got at least get across the finish line and that's why you got to set those, those finish lines.

The name of this talk is there's a gold mine in your pocket. And the goal for today is to help you to extract some of that gold from the mine. So you guys have probably seen now if you look at the feed, some 300, 500 thousands, you know, thousands of contacts in some cases. And we're typically in touch with anywhere from maybe 5 to 10% of those people. So now I want you to look at your CRM, which is your contact relationship manager, through that same lens. However, you know, and that's, that's going to be your database, right? Infusionsoft, constant contact, whatever you use. However, these CRMs typically have a lot more people, right? Like 5,000, 10,000, 50,000 probably in this room. Some of you have 500,000 people just sitting there. So we do a better job with our CRMs, we know that, but it's usually maybe 25%, 40% and with good automation, up to 50%. So the question really for you is how many of those people are you in contact with now? Or maybe a better question is how many of those people fell through the cracks?

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

So Dean Jackson calls these people the unconverted leads. I like to call them the gold mine opportunities. Because there's hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars just sitting there waiting to be extracted. So the next question is, McKenna, how many of you now use your phone to make sales calls and if you're using it all the time. Put a 10 in the chat. And if you ever. If you never do it, use a one and then anything in between. Okay. And then. McKenna, let me know when you have a number, an average. So the purpose of today is really to help you to close more sales by reconnecting with some of these people. You know, and I understand some of you may or may not be taking on new business, which is fine, because you'll create some other opportunities by reconnecting with these people.

David, the average is seven.

Okay, so this is a pretty strong group, but we still have some opportunities, so that's excellent. So for everybody else, there's a great opportunity now to go reconnect with some of those people. And I know we all have systems in place. You know, systems like the nine word email, which is. Which is. I use it. It's fantastic. We also use Facebook ads. Same thing. I use them both. The challenge with these tools is they work great until they don't work, and then you get nothing. See, what we're trying to do is get into a conversation, and then we get in a conversation, we know we can control that conversation. And the next thing we're going to get is feedback. Right? When you have feedback, now we have a way we can handle objections. We can move forward, we can move backwards. We can make suggestions. You know, Bright Local did a study on Google Pages a few years back.

And.

And they showed 60% of people preferred to be in contact with their service providers over the phone, over other communication sources like email, chat, or text. So my goal today is. Listen, I'm not saying stop doing what you're doing. The purpose of this is to enhance what you're currently doing. A few years back, worked with a real estate group. They were doing about 17 million a year in volume by simply helping them hire an isa, which is an inside salesperson. This is a person professionally trained to make calls and having their top three agents just spend 45 minutes a day on the phones. They took their business the next year to 28 million. That's a 35% increase in sales. Let me ask you this. Who would like a 35% increase in sales? Okay. Like one person. Okay, well. Okay. Excellent.

Well, great.

So now that you are thinking about this and you're probably getting excited about it, a little thing called call reluctance is going to kick in. And that's that little voice in your head that's going to start saying weird things. Right.

We've been trying to reach you concerning.

Your call that's the little voice right there. He's trying to reach us right now. So the little voice, because we all have one, right? And how do I know that it's exactly what Tim said? Because I've been doing this for 35 years. So what I want to do is I want to give you a gift. Okay? The gift is a copy of the sales playbook.

And.

And I'm going to ask you right now if you could take out a pen, and I want you to write these pages down, pages 34 to 39. Because there's going to be an exercise that's going to help us through call reluctance. And there's really five types. Okay, there's five different types of call reluctance. I'm going to touch briefly on each one. The first one is fear of rejection. By far the most common. No one likes rejection. No one likes being told no, we all want to look good. We want to be right. The key to this one really is just to take your ego out of it and make the conversation about the other person. The next one is lack of role acceptance. Right? So here you're actually making calls, but in your mind, you're like, man, these calls are kind of below me. Or maybe your parents said things like, wow, you know, when you're a little kid, you heard them say things like, those damn telemarketers just won't stop calling the house. So there's an incongruency here. There's. The next one is not knowing what to say, right? This will take a fearless salesperson. Turn them into a deer in headlights. The good news is this is an easy one to fix. The next one is over analysis, Right? This is the one that actually tells you you're doing your job. You're getting ready to get ready to get ready. You know, you're getting ready so much, nothing ever gets done. It's a form of procrastination. And then the fifth one is what we call fear of success. It's a tricky one. So let's say you had success in an area, but it was way harder than you expected. Now you don't do that again. So you can see these are all mindset tricks. So my tip for you today is to come from contribution, because when you're coming from contribution, you can't lose. So I'm going to share two simple reconnection scripts. The first one is the apology script. So we start the conversation with people by simply apologizing for not following up sooner. It's great for people. We had conversations with it's for people. We had relationships and we did not do a good job staying in touch and they fell through the cracks. What it does is gets people to put their guard down. I've even had people say, no, no, I apologize to you. This sounds like, hi John, this is David giving you a quick call from abc. You know, I know it's been a few years and I want to start off by apologizing. You stop there, let them respond and then get right into it. You want the response. The next one is the closing the loop. Very similar to the apology. We start the conversation by getting right into it, being clear and concise. It's great for people we had conversations with. And again, we didn't do a good job of staying in touch or maybe they didn't return our calls.

Right.

It gets people to put their guard down and then we get to ask great questions like have you bought yet? When do you plan to buy? And we can set up a follow up plan. Sounds like this. Hi Mary, this is David from abc. You had requested info on our site last year and we wanted to close the loop. Have you Whatever, right. Like magic. People are going to tell you what they plan to do next. I've even had people thank me for calling and closing the loop with them. So there's two call to action today. I already gave you the first one. It's to read pages 34 to 39 in the sales playbook and do the exercise. The second one is a challenge. I want to challenge you to make 20. I want to not make content. I want you to have 25 conversations over the next 30 days. Okay. Even if you're planning to hire somebody to make these calls, it's important for you to experience the value of these calls for yourself. And you're going to see the opportunity that's in making these calls. You know, this is a normal challenge I put out and we get great results. This is not a normal group though, right? This is not an ordinary group. This is an extraordinary group. So here's what I'm going to do for you. I'm going to say I want you to make five. That's it. Have five simple conversations over the next five days with people. And if you do that, I would. I think it's virtually impossible that you won't find at least one piece of business. So the most important thing I want to leave you with today is come from contribution. Because when you come in from contribution, you just can't lose with these calls.

So if there was one takeaway action step that would produce a 10 times result for the audience from each of you. What would it be?

I think I already gave mine, but it's really that 15 minutes in the morning, you know, get up, do not pass go, do not collect $200 until you've sat down at your kitchen table without the electronics, pen and paper. Sit there and if you have a problem in your life, solve it. If you have an opportunity, take advantage of it. And you can write 500 words in 15 minutes. If you're writing a book and in 10 weeks, that's 30,000 words, 15 minutes at a time. I've done it. I've built businesses doing this. And it's so simple because most people's entire day is reactive. But that's proactive and that's how you're going to get ahead in life.

You know, I know the word vision has come up several times so far in the last two days, and allow me to bring it up for the 20th time now, but oftentimes when you make a vision for your, for your life, for your business, you're making it based on what everyone else around you is doing versus what values you have or what values you, you think you should have for you, your family, your personal goals. And for me, I learned very quickly. I don't know if I told you, I spent 16 months in therapy about three years ago and I didn't know.

The time period, but I. Yeah, you spent the last decade in therapy.

Yeah, you would think it should have been the last decade. But the irony there is that towards the end of that, at one of the meetings you talked about the book the Body Keeps the Score.

Great book. Bessel van de Kolt.

Yes, by the way. And he goes on to say that one out of every four people have had some kind of sexual trauma in their life, assault whatever whatever. And one out of every three have had some emotional trauma in their life. So when you look out here in the audience, what are we really doing? And as I sit there with my therapist, and I went to my therapist, by the way, for my anxiety attacks, he taught me four words or four letters. Halt, hungry, angry, lonely, tired. And as it turns out, when you're hungry, angry, lonely, tired, I'm going to go into an anxiety attack. The alcoholic is more likely to go and hit the bottle. The drug fiend is more likely to go and do the drugs. And so I remember. And you've done this before where you're typing, I'm not going to go pee until I clear out my inbox box or have you done this? Raise your hand if you've done this, right? As though it's some magical, virtuous thing, like it's a badge of honor because I'm a badass entrepreneur. What does that really mean, man? All that means is that's making me angry. And the anger, right? Halt, hungry, angry, long and tired. The anger is about to make me go into an essential tremor or some kind of anxiety attack. And so after working with him for four weeks on that, he goes, hey, is there any other problems we need to work on? I'm like, now I got to. He goes, well, how was it with your family growing up? I'm like, look, I come from a communist country. English is a second language for me, you know, so big deal. My dad slapped me around a little bit growing up. I go, but what happened to me before that? Being slapped around is nothing. He goes, what happened? And I just broke down crying, and I'd never. And this is just three years ago, this happened with my therapist, and I broke down crying, and he literally walked me through it. And we basically spent the next 16 months overcoming the trauma that I had dealt with between the ages of 4 and 6 of being molested by two older boys in Armenia. And the reality of that is that I had created business upon business upon business. And even in the book the Body Keeps the Score, the author talks about how men who have been sexually traumatized will begin to disassociate, inject steroids to get bigger. And the whole idea is, I'm telling myself I want to get bigger and stronger because I like to power lift. In reality, it's to create insulation, to be big and strong so this never happens to me again. I create business upon business upon business to insulate myself from the world. And all I had to do was really deal with the shame, rage, and confusion. And we spent 16 months working on the shame, rage, confusion, confusion. I became a better human, a better husband, a better father, a more effective leader in my business, started focusing on my health more because we are oftentimes have our head in the sand. Think about it. There's what, 300 of us here and, I don't know, another hundred in that room. What percentage of us have dealt with traumas, have experienced traumas, but you haven't processed through that shit. Just like I told Kevin, my therapist, as I'm snotting up and crying and looking out his window because I couldn't even look at him, I said, what happened there, Kevin? I've dealt with that I've dealt with that little boy. He goes, wait, you dealt with who? I said, I've dealt with that little boy. He goes, bedros, can you look at me? And I looked at him and he goes, you do realize that's called disassociation. That's the first step into creating multiple personalities. Dude, I had no idea, right? I said, oh, my gosh, Kevin, this is scary. Let's take me through the journey. So I don't know what shit has happened to you, but we've all grown up with some level of trauma likely, especially if you're an entrepreneur and you're, yeah, we want impact, yeah, we want income, influence, but you also have some.

Shit to deal with.

And trying to insulate yourself with money and muscles and power, just deal with this shit, and then the money is greener. I told Kevin, I said, kevin, the color now is in Technicolor. Sounds are better. Like, I go to concerts and I jump up and down on fist pump. I'd go to a concert and you wouldn't tell if I like the concert or not. I'm just bobbing my head. In fact, Jay Farouja, a dear friend of ours, he took me to a Jay Z concert. He goes, I thought you like Jay Z. I'm like, I do. But I was numb my whole life. And I always found reasons to insulate myself. And I'm pleading with you, work on yourself. That's the biggest thing you can do. Do your 15 minutes, but work on yourself. You've got the money. Find the therapist, find the trusted person, do the fucking work, and come out on the other side as a winner. It changed my life, man. It really did.

What's your. What is your business? Model and model for living as successful of a life that you can. And what's the most critical single element you focus on within it?

Having fun by far. And I've gotten to that place in my life where it is, and many people in this room, they say, well, you know, you have enough money to have to have fun what you're doing. But I really look back to the days and even when I started fubu, when I started fubu, even due to the frustration of the fact that we felt nobody wanted to support this community. Most of my friends where I grew up were drug dealers and things of that nature. And at that time, to be a designer in 1989, 1990, the perception of a designer was they either Italian, older, white, Caucasian individuals, or they were gay. And. And I have no, no issue with anybody's sexual Preference.

So.

But I decided that I love to dress and I wanted to do it, and I had fun doing it. So now, even when I'm at this stage, stage of my life of having fun, I'm excited about people I work with and people I have fun with. It's not because I have the wealth, because once I stopped chasing my friends and hanging out and wanting to be cool and make the money and get the girls, and I just stopped and told some, tell a bunch of rough guys, hey, I want to make a couple of little hats. It wasn't easy, but when I did that, when I did that, I found success and I found peace. And then, you know, and that's just why I operate business. And hopefully that answered it. And I'm sure everybody up here has said the same thing.

What are the biggest dark sides of success and fame? I mean, you have people that write scathing things about you if you become famous. You know that criticism.

I think the darkest side of success and fame is, number one, you don't change. But the people around you say that you've changed. And they, they, you know, they. Certain people around you have said you change and you can't be yourself no longer with your friends and some of your family. I think that the challenge of knowing that you haven't watched your daughters grow or you're, you know, you weren't there for your wife when something happened and you weren't physically there due to the lack of time. You never know what that costs you. Now, I do know individuals who are making minimum wage who still are not home, like, I'm not home. So it all is the balance of, I'm not there, but I can afford the finest doctors and the things for you in life. I think also the other challenge of success and fame is if you're a true entrepreneur and you're a business person, when you get home, can you cut it off no matter what? Are you about talking, talking to your husband or wife like they are somebody who's employed by you and your children and can you get that soft side of you back? And I think that those. And again, that becomes a time management situation. Time's the only thing that we can't change.

So thank you. And so I got a question for everybody in the audience in Phoenix. I wish I was there. Hopefully next year. And everybody online. It's a simple question, but it's a big question. And the question is, what is most important for you? And an even bigger question is, does this actually align with your actions and your Behavior. So what usually most important for us is, for example, our family or our relationship or our parents or our business or our health or friends, and obviously ourselves as well. However, if I look, for example, at my own case, my natural tendencies, they're different compared to what's most important for me. So for example, for me, I like to wake up and listen or watch anything business or personal development. I like to think about my business, I like to work, I like to walk, I like to spend my days in hotel lounges, I love to travel, I really love to be by myself, I like to read books, I love to grow, etc. Etc. So in all honesty, if you noticed, my natural tendency is not to spend most of my time on what's most important for me, and more importantly, who is most important to me. It does not come natural to me to wake up and spend a lot of time with my children, to spend a lot of time with my parents, to go and have a lot of fun with my friends, or have a lot of quality time with my wife. There's a discrepancy, discrepancy between what's most important for me and my natural tendencies. So what's most important to me is not easy for me. And chances are, as an entrepreneur, it's not easy for you either. So what's most important? We actually we supposed to have to give it our quality time, but we don't. A lot of, a lot of times we give it our leftover time and because of this discrepancy, there's a disconnect. Life can feel a little bit off. You can have this nagging feeling of guilt, of shame, and it feeds the feeling of not being or doing enough. And this is not easy and is actually a big problem for a lot of entrepreneurs. Thankfully, there's a simple solution. And I call this the Freedom Framework. And this is a big fancy title for deciding for you what's most important for you and also who is most important for you. And then schedule it and make it non negotiable so you don't need to think about it and it becomes automatic. If you prioritize what's most important for you, you make it non negotiable, then you can lose yourself in whatever comes natural to you. For example, my mom obviously is definitely most important to me. We live 100 miles apart and family is everything for my mom as well. When my mom was 10 years old, her mother died and her father wasn't in the picture anymore. She, she was raised by her 11 brothers and sisters. Fast forward 50 years later, she had 11 brothers and sisters, and there's only one sister left. So family is everything for her. And my family, me, my children, my wife is everything for her as well. So five years ago, in all honesty, if you would ask me who's most important to you, obviously I would say my parents are most important for me. But if you would look at my actions, I would actually rate myself maybe a 5 out of 10. I always felt that I wanted to spend more time with my parents. I always had thoughts like, I gotta call my mom, or how long haven't we seen them? Or it hasn't been that long. Right. But this was the reality. I gave them my leftover time instead of my quality time. It just didn't happen that often. And the worst part, for no real reason, I have plenty of time and I have plenty of freedom. It's just not my natural tendency. I'm in my own world. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm in this world.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link. Link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to Joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

So five years ago, I got a phone call from my mom, and this was actually a real conversation. She opened up and I opened up. And this conversation was very, very painful. Because deep down inside, I knew. I knew that she wanted to spend more time with my family, and I wanted to spend more time with them. I rated myself 5 out of 10. And this is not the level that I want to play at. This is average. I want to play with my most important relationship at a dream come true level for the people that we love the most. Because why would we settle? So I listened and I felt her pain. And this pain was also my pain. Because this can hurt when you know that you're wrong. And I was 100% responsible for this. My mom, she is everything for me. And after this conversation, I had one thought. And the thought was the following. She had 11 brothers and sisters. She has one sister left. All the other brothers and sisters, they all passed. If something would happen to my mom, that would be my number one fear. And it is my number one fear. And if something would happen, I would have a hard time forgiving myself. And worst of all, it would have been completely unnecessary. So so average. We don't go for average. We want to go for a dream come true level. And then I got a big personal breakthrough. And this is the birth of the Freedom framework. What's most important to me and who is most important to me. I want to make it non negotiable. So what I did, I make, I made a plan and scheduled it for a full year and made it a dream come true. So for example, with my parents, I don't want to visit my parents for a couple of hours. I, I want to sleep at my parents place. This is my home. This is where the place where my parents raised me. So I made the decision every month for years to come, I will put on my calendar every month one Saturday where I will stay at my parents place and sleep at my parents place with one or two or three of my children. And this changed everything for us. So here's the magic trick. If you want to make this work, if you really want to make big steps in this, this is the magic trick. And this is super, super complex. This is genius level. And I hope that you can understand this because this is super, super deep. Because once you figured out how and how often you want to see the people that you love the most. So you think for yourself, who are the people that I love the most? Then you go to your calendar and you figure out like how often do I want to see them? You put it on the calendar and again like what I'm going to share with you right now, your mind will be blown. This is the magic trick. If you do this, everything can change for you. This is what you do. You send a text. So in this case I decided that this was most important for me. Regardless of what my wife wants or regardless of what my kids wants, I want to spend the time with my parents. So I go to the calendar, put 12 Saturdays on my calendar, and I made the commitment to my mom that I will come every month for a full night. I stay over with one or two or three of my children, or all of us if my wife wants to join. And if you know my mom, after I send that text, it's a hundred percent non negotiable. And here's the great part, I don't need to think about it anymore. This is guaranteed guilt free peace of mind. And this resulted in instead of going to see my parents or visiting my parents, I am home. I sleep at my parents place. Instead of going there and sitting in a chair, I just lay on the couch because it's my home. I'm relaxed, I am home. Instead of catching up with my parents, I just relax and I have fun. And this completely transformed a relationship with my mother, both of my parents, me, both of my parents, my kids and my parents, and my wife and my parents. And this has been a total blessing. And you can do this with anything or anybody that's most important to you. So not just anybody, also anything. So, for example, health is important for a lot of us. For me, it's most important. My health is most important. But going to the gym doesn't come natural to me. AKA I just won't go. So what I do, I put it on the calendar. I have no discipline, so I need a trainer. And my trainer, he just left like 15 minutes ago or 30 minutes ago. This is a great rep truck. Check it out, check it out. Yeah. Okay, good, good. It's easy. I don't need to do anything because he's there. Four times a week he shows up here in my man cave and we just train him. Most of the time I don't feel like it, but I'm getting stronger and stronger and stronger. It's non negotiable. It's a commitment to somebody else. So what else? One more example. My children. Obviously my children are most important to me. So what's a dream come true level here? A dream come true here is make their dreams come true. So every two months I go on a one night trip with one of my three children. So I go six times per year. A one night trip, a dream come true. For example, for my daughter, she wanted to build a bear. She wanted to go to London with me and build a bear. So we built a bear, we went to London and we built a bear. And these are memories for life. What else? For example, my wife, we've been together for 25 years last month and we have an amazing relationship. And how come? It's very simple. Every two weeks we book a hotel and we leave our kids. I mean, I love our kids, but I love to be, I love to be with my wife without my kids. And again for this as well. Last week we went to Germany, in a month we go to Miami and Jamaica. These are memories for life and we make it non negotiable. So the concept of the freedom framework is very simple. You decide what's most important to you and who is most most important to you and how often and what would be a dream come true level for you. You decide what's your perfect frequency. You grab your calendar and then you decide like how often you want to see who you put it on the calendar and then you commit this way you don't need to think it and think about it anymore. And this is very peaceful actually. So chances are, freedom is your core value. For me, it's my core value. And in a way this might look like it's limiting our freedom because you put all these things on your calendar and in a way it is, it is sort of limiting. But what you do is you invest your quality time in what and who's most important to you. And this is not always easy. Oftentimes when you do these things, when I do that trips or go to my parents or whatever, it feels like the time isn't right. I'm busy, I got deadlines, I'm stressed out. But most of the time it ends up being very joyful, rejuvenating and fun. And there's a guaranteed connection, guaranteed love and guaranteed happiness. And we need this as entrepreneurs. So knowing that you got what's most important to you covered, this frees up your mental bandwidth and actually increases the feeling of freedom. And because of your freedom framework, you can actually go all in on your natural tendencies. Could be your business, could be your mission, could be your purpose, whatever it is for you, guilt free. And you can actually enjoy your natural tendencies and you can enjoy what's most important to you. And this is when life starts flowing again, and this is when life starts working for you. So January 1st of this year, I was on Curacao, which is a Dutch Caribbean island, and we're just enjoying my time. And then I got a text from my wife and she was like, can you please come to the room? So I come to the room and she tells me like, okay, you better sit down. And she never told me before that you better sit down. So I got another phone call from my mom and my biggest fear came true. She was diagnosed on January 1, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. And this was a big shock for all of us and, and obviously we were very sad. My heart felt broken. But after we digested this information, strangely, in a way, I felt at peace simply because I have no regrets. When I used to rate my relationship with my parents at 5 out of 10, now it's an 8 out of 10 or maybe a 9 out of 10. And it's all simply because I made the decision five years ago to make it non negotiable to go see my parents and stay at my parents every month. I did not. When we got the news, I did not feel the need to catch up. I did not feel the need to spend more time with my parents. So in a way there was peace. And obviously I was worried and there were a lot of concerns. And then I remembered this great quote from Joe Polish. Any problem can be solved with the right Genius Network. I don't ask for help easily, but I go to the Facebook group of Genius Network and I just ask for support, whatever it is. And we got so many great videos, all videos of a lot of Genius Network member, all for my mom. And this was very, very amazing for my mom. And she was like, who are all these people? But she received all the blessings and all the prayers. And then we got this guy, we just saw him on stage, Andre. He didn't send one video or two videos or three videos. He just kept on sending videos. And he didn't just only send videos. He started sending flowers and more flowers and then he started sending more flowers. And then every day he started sending flowers and flowers and flowers and flowers and flowers and flowers and flowers and more flowers. And he just kept sending flowers. And my mom was like, wow, this is amazing. My mom met Andrew. We spent time with my parents at their place when Andre was in Amsterdam. But my mom actually created a video for Andre, like, Andre, please stop sending flowers because it's too much. And Andre was like, okay, I'll stop sending flowers every day. I'll start sending flowers every week. And literally two days ago, my mom got flowers from Andre, all from January up until now. So that's amazing. So this is a 10 minute talk and I decided to sneak in some extra seconds to say thank you to all of you. I mean, I'll take some extra seconds. Joe is not here anyway, so it doesn't matter. Timothy is going to retire and I'm not going to make any jokes about Joel, but a big, big thank you to everybody that, that, that helped us. My mom felt carried and I did too. So Fast forward to July 7th of this year. This is my mom celebrating her birthday and she is happy, she's healthy and she is cancer free. And yesterday I was on the phone with my mom and this was her response when I told her that we canceled the trip to the Caribbean with Christmas and we'll spend Christmas together as a family. So in closing, most of us are achievers. You know, we want more, we want to grow, we want to expand, we want to go 10x and I think that's amazing. I mean, this is an amazing group. But what we truly desire oftentimes is what we already have, it's already there. What's most important for us, it's already available. And more important, who is most important to us is already available for us to enjoy. If you want to live a life in flow, then what we should do is prioritize what's most important for us and who is most important for us. And so we can enjoy our natural tendencies, we should do who we are. So this is my wish for you. And also this is a little bit of a challenge for you, and it's very, very simple. What I would suggest you to do after this event is take some time and decide for yourself who is most important for you. How often would you like to be with them? So think about the perfect frequency, then make it non negotiable by scheduling it on your calendar and make it truly non negotiable. So whoever you made that commitment to write it out as a text and then send that text. Timothy.

All right, well, I'm excited to be here. First off. So the concept of funnel stacking in this presentation kind of came from. As many of you guys know, we own a company called Click Funnels. We have almost 15,000 entrepreneurs who have moved their entire businesses over to our platform. And inside that has been over 350,000 sales funnels built. So I have this really cool, unique view to look at what everybody's doing and see what's working and not working. And December this year, I sat down and I wanted to look at what was working in my company. So we ran all of our numbers and I'm like one of those sales funnel strategists who sit for days in front of whiteboards mapping stuff out. And it turned out after looking at all of our numbers, like 98% of our income came from three funnels, not all the other crazy ones we made up. And so that became this process. Like, okay, these are the three funnels that actually matter in our company. And looking across the platform as a whole, almost the majority of the income is made through one of these three funnels. And there's a really cool way they actually work together. So that's what we're talking about today. And the other part here is how I made. I'm going to talk about how I make up to $238 for, for every free book we give away and how you guys can too. Now, the reason why that's actually important, one of my mentors, Dan Kennedy, who looks like the walrus, according to Joe, he told me when I first got into this business, he said, because Money's cool, right? But that's not the reason he said that the person who can spend the most money to acquire a customer always wins. And so for me, this whole sales funnels and everything we're talking about, the goal isn't just to make a whole bunch of money. It's so that I can out market everybody else. I can spend more money to get everybody single customer in the front door so I can serve more people and change more people's lives. And that's the real goal kind of behind it to begin with. I want to explain a concept I like talking about on the side of my team is a concept called the value ladder. At the top of the value ladder is the best thing that we all offer our clients. The thing that we have that can change their lives the most, right? It's the thing that probably would cost a whole bunch of money, right? So I was thinking about Robin yesterday. I met her. She's the green smoothie girl. So, Robin, for you, your dream thing, if you could serve some at the highest level, I'm assuming would be for you to pack up your stuff, fly to their house, go through their cupboards, throw away everything out and teach them how to juice and spend a week there just detoxing them and helping them, right? That would be amazing. I'm sure that every one of us, we have something inside of our company that's similar. It would be the most amazing, most valuable thing you could possibly offer. The problem is that it's hard to go do that, right? You don't have time to fly and spend a week in every single client's house. It doesn't make financial sense most of the time. It's hard, right? For me, the best thing I can do and the thing that I do, people at the top level is they come to me, I sit down with them. I actually build their entire sales funnels. We do all the copy, we do everything. And if I could do that to every single person, it'd be awesome. The problem is we charge 100k just to start the process, plus we take a percentage of their sales, which is usually about 50% or more. And so for me to come up to somebody on the side of the street the first time I meet them, like, hey, my name is Russell Brunson. I know I look like I'm 11 years old, but this is the deal. If you give me $100,000 and half of your company, I'll build you a sales funnel. And most people are going to be like, dude, no, that doesn't make any sense, right? And the reason is because I provided zero value at that point, they have no idea who I am. Can I even execute what I'm talking about? And for a lot of us, that's the thing. We know we can change people's lives, but the thing that would do the best we can't do. Like Joe, if you walked up to a typical business owner like, hey, got this thing, 25k, you come in there room, it's kind of like we're going to talk about addictions and weird things like that. And it's 25,000 people are like, what are you talking about? Right? Like I've known Joe for a long time and it's like I keep always getting value over and over and that's why I ascend up, right? And so for me, our business is all about giving value and ascension. So if you look at this model, the very bottom is less value and the price is lower, right? And so we bring somebody in that world, we give them some value and if they have a great experience, what naturally happens, they want more. That's how humans work, right? We get a little bit of value, like, oh, that was awesome, I need a little bit more. And they get value there and you get a little bit more. Works in relationships, works in business, works in everything. And so my world's always like, I need to get someone down here where I can give them some value. And if they get value, they're going to naturally want to ascend the next level and the next level. And that's kind of how this value ladder and these funnels work.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Alright, so these are the three funnels where the majority of our income and the majority of all the entrepreneurs I know income comes from. One is called the tripwire funnel, one's called the webinar funnel, and one's called the high ticket funnel. And I'll walk through these three funnels and I'll walk through how they all kind of interconnect and they work together. So the first one is again, this is kind of what they look like. So the first one is a tripwire funnel. A tripwire funnel. Is typically a really low ticket thing. So for me, in our company, one of our best tripwires is my book funnel. So this is kind of what if I was sitting on a whiteboard with you, I'd sketch out this is what a tripwire funnel actually looks like. Here's all the pages, and it looks kind of geeky. So let me walk through page by page, what it looks like. Page number one. We're going to be giving away something for free, plus shipping, right? And so for me, last year, when we launched clickfunnels, we launched with a book. So this is my book called Dotcom secrets that we gave away for free plus shipping. And if you look at the actual stats, the campaign, I'm sharing the results, this is over 200,000 people came through this funnel. We sold 27,000 copies of the book during this time. And so these are really big numbers across a whole bunch of traffic sources, but kind of give you an idea of how the whole thing works. All right, so here's the math so far. So, first step, we gave away the book, right? I told my wife initially after I spent a year writing a book, and I was like, I'm giving away for free. She's like, what are you doing? You can't do that. It doesn't make any sense. I'm like, I promise this works. So the first step, we gave away the book, right? So from the shipping cost during this campaign, the initial 30 days, we made $219,000 in shipping, which isn't in my pocket. That's money disappears. That's based on $7.95 a book, times the books we sold. The second step now is after somebody bought the book, it's just like going to, like, if you're at the grocery store and you're walking out and you see the gum and the taste, and you're like, oh. And you start grabbing something. The next step in our funnel is called an order form bump. And it fits right after they put in the credit card but right before they click the submit button. So my order form bump right here is just saying, hey, you're about to buy the book. Do you want the audiobook version for the extra 37 bucks? Really quick, fast thing. Usually, on average, between 20 and 30% of people will take that bump offer. For us, the math, that bump offer added an extra $286,000 to our overall revenue, which right now, total revenue so far in this funnel is $18.31. I made for every free book I gave away at the Point, they finally clicked submit. Okay, the next step in the funnel is our first upsell. Our first upsell, we sell a course, one of our info product courses. This one is $200. The math from that, we made about $506,000 from the first upsell, which now our profit per book is $27.39. Then we take them to upsell number two. From upsell number two, we sold a $300 course and we made $130,000 for that one. So at this point right now, by the time they finished the first initial funnel, we made $31.10 per book. So why is that important? This is why this is so important. That means I can spend right now up to $31.10 on advertising to give away a free book. Right now on Facebook, it averages about $12 to give away free books. I'm actually pro profitable day one. The very second it happens, I can go to affiliates and say, I'll pay you $20 or $30 to give away a free book. And it gives me the ability to get insane amounts of customers coming through our front door every single day for free. And then everything that happens after this is just pure profit. We always talk about lifetime value of a customer. I hate that because it makes us start making stupid decisions. For me personally, if I don't break even on day one, I don't do the campaign or the funnel. So that's how we build a funnel that breaks even on day one and then everything after that is pure profit. Alright, so the last step on the page, typically after someone buys a free book, then we say thanks for buying. We add something called an offer wallet, which has links to our other products. And from there we made a whole bunch of other money that we won't talk about in this presentation. Some of you guys are saying, well, Russell, I don't have a book, what do I do? If you don't have a book, that's fine. In my process, I was talking about, you got to figure out who your customers are and what bait will get them in the door, right? So some of you guys, the book is the bait that will bring your customers in the door. A couple of our clickfunnels members, one of them sells gun membership site, they give away free gun targets. Did $30 million last year giving away free gun targets, bringing them into their world. Perry Belcher and Ryan Deiss, they have a suit company, they give away free cufflinks and then bring people into the world that way. They also have a credit card, knife and we just are working on a funnel right now for Marcus Lemonis, for Camping World, which is a huge thing. And we're doing a free toilet paper funnel to bring people into their world. So it works with any kind of business. You gotta think about what's the bait your customers actually want. Okay, step number two, you got them in, now you've broken even, you made money now. Now we start moving them and sending them to funnel number two, which is the webinar funnel. It looks kind of like this. That's what a perfect webinar funnel looks like. And first page, the registration page. Couple things on registration page. Big secrets. The key to get people opting is curiosity. Do not have a video. I've never seen a video. Increased conversion rates on a webinar page. Curiosity is the key to get people in. Here's kind of the numbers. The first thing is every single person who buys my book, within two weeks, they're introduced to our webinar funnel automatically. We also drive ads directly to it. So we drive cold traffic in the webinar funnels. We average about $3 per registrant for a webinar. Our goal internally, our company is get 3,000 people to register per week. So we spend $3,000. From the 1,000 people, we get about 25% show up rate, 10% people usually close on a webinar. So right now we're at $25,000 in sales. And then typically from the follow up sequence, we'll make another. We'll usually double the webinar sales in the follow up sequence. So we put $3,000 into ads, make $50,000 a week. And that happens week in and week out in our company consistently. And that's how we run the webinars.

Thank you.

Page of the webinar funnel looks like this. We upsell our continuity program. They have indoctrination pages, the email sequences that go through. And then you actually do the live event, which you guys do events. And then we have replay. Urgency and scarcity. This is the follow up sequence that happens after the webinar's done. And we do a whole bunch of cool things there. If you do the sequence right, you get a whole bunch of sales on webinar day and a whole bunch of sales happening again on the next day. And then the last step. Now, after they've gone through the webinar, which is usually a thousand dollar product, now we're sending them to our highest level, which for us is 25 to $100,000 and beyond, we introduce them now to the high ticket funnel. High ticket funnel looks like this. We lead with a case study success story of somebody. We take them through a desired amplifier, page and homework and connection. I'll go through these really quick. So every single page has a button like this that pushes people to our high ticket. We have email sequences sharing case studies with people in our high ticket program that push them in there as well. And everything now is pushing people and sending them up to our highest level. And the last page here is homework and connection. That's what it looks like. And that is how we make $230 within six weeks for every book we give away.

So your latest book, Mastering The Rockefeller Habits 2.0 skill, scaling up How a Few Companies make it and why the Rest Don't. What's this book about? Because I would recommend people get all your books and even all your Gazelle coaches. I've been to your events. You guys do amazing stuff. You have literally impacted truthfully with your creation with eo. There are millions of people that have been impacted by the seeds that you planted. So this is your latest work. What's it? Who's it for? What's it about? What will people get out of it?

Yeah, well, you know, a lot of companies start up and there's this craze about startups and accelerators and incubators and that kind of stuff, but very few scale up. And it's the scale ups, Joe, that really move economies, really drive innovation. And the problem is because they're not young, they're not cute, they're older, more established companies, they don't get any attention. And so we wrote the book for them. Those that have been kind of toiling away for five or 50 years and have finally figured out what they need to do and are going to take this thing from 10 million to a billion. And what are the key things that are necessary to scale up the company?

Gotcha. Well, I was having a conversation with Dan Sullivan. As you know, he's one of my dear friends and he founded a company, Strategic Coach and he was. We were having this of kind conversation because we have a friend, I won't mention his name, we all know him, who puts a lot of emphasis on trying to help startup entrepreneurs and putting together programs for them. Dan just made this funny comment because, I mean, I want to help anyone that really wants to grow and learn. I mean, that's why I put out my free podcast. It's like this interview. I mean, we're putting it out to the world for free, just so it'll help people that come across it. And dad made this comment. He goes, you know, there's, there's all this emphasis on funding startups. He's like, if you really want to make an impact fund, people who've literally had to borrow the money, go into debt on credit cards, no one was there to help him. He goes, that's what weeds out the ones that can make it and ones that don't. I mean, if you just hand over money to someone that's a startup just because you should give them a reward because they want to start a business. He goes, the ones that are really successful, they've gone through the crap. They've gone through the hell that they've out to. And I just thought it was kind of funny.

No, he's right on. It's one of, I think the problem with the incubators, they baby them too much, and then when they finally set them free, they didn't get some of the basic learnings from failing that are necessary to take the venture to the next level. And then what happens is when they do fail, it's at such a bigger level that it's devastating to their families, to their own net worth. It's a mess.

And so.

So I think you got to be careful helping folks too much in the beginning.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I heard this line, and I say this speaking from ignorance because I'm not a parent. The quote was, don't handicap your children by making their lives too easy.

Yeah, for sure.

Although I think that applies to anyone. I mean, you can really baby someone trying to start a business and you can rob them of the learning that comes from it.

Absolutely.

Well, you've created a lot of tools. What is the, the Buckminster Fuller quote that you gave today? I'd love that quote.

Yeah, I know. I'm a mechanical engineer by training. Got a worthless MBA on top of that. And Bucky had this notion that you can't really change the way people think. All you can do is give them a tool the use of which will change your thinking. And I mean, think about what the phone has done to change our behaviors more than any other change management seminar that you might be able to go through. And so we're tool builders and we wanted to build some tools that help people make those changes.

Well, I got a lap full of stuff here that I've books and everything here. So there's a bunch of growth tools that you have and you're known for the one page strategic plan. Talk about what that is. And where people can get it. Because I want the people that are watching this and listening this to not just have some business insight, but I'd like to send them off to where they can and get access to some of the things that you have literally done with thousands of companies and have created that will make a big impact for them, that will allow them to think more strategically, more creatively. Talk about some of the tools you've created, specifically the onepage plan.

Yeah, it's the thing that we're probably best known for. Today, about 40,000 companies are using this tool. And it was a very simple idea. Everyone sits around and says, man, how do I get everybody on the same page? Well, you got to have the page first for everyone to get on. And we use the analogy of jazz bands. You know, I love jazz because you can bring these players in from all over the world who've never played together, but there's got to be a few things that have in common. And one of them is we're playing the same song. And so we thought, hey, how can we put on a single sheet of paper a way for people to get down from their court values all the way to what is the thing we need to focus on the next quarter in a simple format that they can communicate that to everybody else in the organization. And it's this common set of music that people can all play together. So that's what it does.

So where do people get this? Because I know you make it available online. I'll put a link to all the different places that I put this interview.

So go to scaling up or gazelles.com but scalingup.com and they'll see a thing that says the OnePage tools. And we've got them in multiple languages from Russian to Spanish to French to English, obviously. And so it's there for people to use free of charge. We've had them up there for decades.

Great. So what are some other tools that you've created that have been really helpful to yourself, to other business owners that you've done?

Well, you know, it's a challenge. This whole life side and business side, everyone's talking about the balance. We see it more as a blend. And so we created a one page personal plan to go along with the one page strategic plan. So that if you can kind of, as the entrepreneur get down and the executives in the company, what is I need to do on the personal side and then look at that in relation to what I've got to do on the business side and mesh those up you know, we find people are much more successful in both aspects of their business. And we mirrored the same people, strategy, execution, and cash. But we said, look, let's look at the relationships, let's look at the achievements. Let's take a look at those rituals that we do on a daily basis, our exercise and other things. And then obviously, there's the wealth component that we have to pay attention to. And so that's become a tool that started to really catch hold around the world as well. And then we're known for this Rockefeller Habits checklist. What are these? 10 habits, these routines, Ones that John D. Rockefeller had in place over 100 years ago that made him the wealthiest guy on the planet, wealthier than any of the guys that we have here today, except maybe Putin. And these are things that you can put in place in any company, from startup all the way to the largest companies in the world.

Okay.

I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here.

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They're over here.

Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you.

Watch them.