Secret #24: How To Grow From 10 To 100 Employees

Hey, everyone, this is Russell Brunson. I'm here today with Branco Peters on the Marketing Secrets podcast. So the big question is, how are entrepreneurs like us who didn't cheat and take on venture capital, were spending money from our own pockets? How do we market in a way that lets us get our products and our services and the things that we believe in out to the world and yet still remain profitable? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Russell Brunson, and welcome to Marketing Secrets. So, everyone, I got a really special podcast for you today. I'm so excited for right now. We are where we at?

Kauai.

Kauai, Hawaii. Kauai, Hawaii. This has been our backyard for the last week, and we're heading home tomorrow, which is kind of sad. But I wanted to get Brent in here to help you guys out because obviously in the Marketing Secrets podcast, I talk a lot about the marketing stuff, and Bren's been with me now for over a decade. How long exactly?

11 years, end of July.

11 years.

Dang.

That's crazy. So that's when we started, man. Because we did. Anyone else was here when you first got started, officially.

Anybody who's here now?

Brittany.

Was she here after you? Brittany came in after. I don't think anybody else who was here before I started is still here.

Okay, so Brett's been the longest long term person. Doral, maybe.

Long term. Doral.

Doral. In Romania, we got a Romanian, and our backlight's kind of lit, so it's hard to see us. But Brent's been around for forever and done tons of different roles. And right now he runs entire operations of click funnels. And so I wanted to kind of have him talk about some of the stuff because it's a big part of growing and scaling a company that we don't talk about a lot. But first, do you want to talk about your backstory as far as, like, getting into this whole thing? It's kind of a funny story.

How much of a backstory do you.

Want we should move over here to the couch so we can see it a little better. So it'll be a little lit up, but. So I met Brent at church initially. That's how planned these things are. And just I want to get first impressions about, like, what? We like this whole business that when you got introduced to it, because I know a lot of people go through that, especially with spouses or friends or potential employees or partners who they don't know this world at all. It's Kind of weird at first.

Yeah. I had no idea. I was at. Met Russell coming through a church function and. And didn't really know what he did. When I kind of found out he made money on the Internet, I thought. I was like. I mean, I initially thought, like, ebay, he saw stuff on ebay, or, you know, I had no idea. I really couldn't understand. And so he had some other business partners and friends who were kind of working with him at the time. And I kind of pulled those guys apart. And I was, like, asking those guys, so what does he really do? And one of our friends. Mutual friends, you know, he knew that I didn't understand, and so I talked to my wife. I said, I don't know what this Russell Brunson guy's doing, but it is freaking crazy. Like, I knew, like, our friend was sharing kind of some of the numbers that Russell's doing. He was still in university. I was going to school as well. And he was making more money than my parents combined income was and more money than they'd ever made. So I was like, I gotta find out what this guy's doing. So, like, any friend, we invited him and his wife over for dinner on a Sunday afternoon. And I just kind of started asking him really carefully, what are you doing? What exactly is this? And he just kind of started sharing kind of what he was up to, what he was doing. And obviously, he doesn't brag about what he was doing, the success he was having, but he was having tremendous success. And so after they left, we had a good dinner and visited, and then they left. And I couldn't sleep for three days. My head was just, like, spinning.

I ruined him.

He did. He did. I was screwed at that point. After. After that happened, I could not. I couldn't fathom the success. But what was most important there is the value that he's providing the world.

That's cool. And was that before. After all of our kids were. So we had twins, made their first son, like, week before. Yeah, I heard this. Before, After.

Yeah, so we met you before. We've been friends for a little while, and then I think that. Yeah, I think we had our kids. And then you guys moved kind of fairly soon after that.

All I remember is, so when we had our twins, we were in NICU for, like, two weeks, basically. So we just rented a hotel room in the hospital and just hung out there and just goofed off. And I remember he was coming and, like, do we have to go to work or. Why are you not doing he thought.

I was gonna go. Yeah. I told my wife, I'm like, we gotta take dinners over there or something. We gotta help him because they're in the hospital with these twins and they can't leave and he can't work because he's in the hospital.

And just little did he know the Internet was working.

Had no clue.

Anyway, so that was fun. So then a little while later, then Brent started coming working for us. Initially, it was affiliate management for the first. How many years you did that for a long time?

Yeah.

Really?

For like, eight, nine years. I mean, rough. Well, the hats were always kind of.

Being moved, but small company did a lot of everything.

Yeah. So, yeah, probably eight years specifically, really, to kind of focus on the business development and affiliate management and partners and.

Stuff like that, and just never knows. I recently on the podcast had the presentation I gave from Funnel Hacking Live. I gave one funnel away about stories and I talked about Brent in that made me cry in the middle of my presentation. It's kind of embarrassing, but you were here for, like, the goods and the bads, like, when it went from five employees up to, like, 100 and then back down to, like, five and, like, all the stress up and down. I'm curious, honestly, why you didn't leave when everything collapsed and crashed.

Yeah, it's a good question. You know, I don't know the answer either. Yeah, you get me really vulnerable. So, you know, working with, you know, an entrepreneur, especially with Russell, I mean, you know, where the heart is. And there came a point where he was trying to help too many people. And, you know, he was employing a lot of friends and family and people that he wanted to provide opportunities for. And that was great to a certain point. But there was a point there where business changed a little bit, evolved, and we were needing to make some changes with it. And those changes wouldn't allow him to continue supporting everybody he was supporting. And that was very difficult for him and my wife and I because we cared and loved Russell Flett and their family. And we came to a point where I didn't want to be a burden. I didn't want to be. I knew that he was stressed and worried about taking care of people. And I had a conversation with my wife. I just said, I'd rather keep our friendship than have him feel stressed about supporting, you know, having opportunity for me to continue working there. So one day I kind of came into your office, and we just kind of had a real chat, and I probably said some things that just. I just. I was. I want him to understand, you know, how important what he was doing was. And also I want him to understand that I was okay to leave. Like, I don't want him to feel like he needed to provide for me, like I would be fine, figure things out. I just wanted to make sure he was okay because it was at the point where you were helping so many people that, you know, really one hiccup, you could have lost everything. You were, you were refunding every. All your savings is going back into the company. And at some point you just can't keep doing that.

Yeah, I got really scared. But somehow we pulled it around.

Pulled around. I mean, obviously you, you had to make some. You had to make some tough, tough, you know, phone calls and decisions there that, I mean, absolutely changed the company at that point.

And you know, basically like we had 100 some odd employees. We had all these wrestlers working for me. So we let go the whole wrestling team. We had to downsize and fire. Yeah, it was. And we shrunk from like 20,000 square foot building to 2,000 and then anyway, it was rocky and scary, but it gave us the ability to refocus and refigure things out. Remember, we went on a couple trips where I try to figure out who are the people that are solving success in our market. We jumped in a plane, we were traveling to different people's offices. We spent time with Ryan Dice and Perry Belcher trying to figure out what they were doing. Flo Rich Shefford, figure out what they were doing. And just people who are friends and just kind of had this time to figure out like what's actually working today and how do we shift our business model and change everything. And it's funny how much pain that was during that time. But then we flew to London, but how important it was for the transition that what became Clickfunnels and everything else. So anyway. So anyway, so many fun stories we talk about forever, but we don't have time for all those things. So what, What I want to talk about today though is so probably about two years ago, probably a year into the business when we first started growing like we're. It's funny, I got a message today from Alex Charfen. He's like. I messaged him something. He was like, you sound so calm. Half because we're here in Hawaii probably. But he was like, he's like, I don't know any other person running $100 million, your company that's as relaxed and like, is able to respond to people and like. Anyway, but we first Started, we didn't know what we were doing. It was just kind of like, we know how to sell stuff. You start selling, click funnels start growing. Then all of a sudden, like all sorts of new headaches came up with that, like from a software standpoint with Todd, and then we brought in Ryan and like they had to deal with infrastructure ups and downs. And like right now, I think if you were. Excuse me, I think based on like electron number 700th most visited website in the world, but that's not counting anybody's custom domain take. With custom domains, we're probably in the top 500 websites in the world. There's not many humans on earth that have ever dealt with that kind of scaling and infrastructure. And Todd never done it, Ryan never done. They're figuring this stuff along the way and we're hiring consultants. Then on the marketing side, we're trying to grow and then all these things. And as everything's growing, one thing that we didn't have in place was any of the internal company business stuff. We were getting salespeople and good coders, but we had to do that. And it was funny because you never had experience that either, though.

Not really, no.

And we had this time where internally they were like that. Everything was shaking. And then he said, basically, Brent, we're going to take you from affiliate management. You're going to run this role. And didn't know what to expect. If it was going to work, it.

Was not going to work.

And he was able to step into this thing and just has turned. This has really like simplified. Like, I've had zero stress about that part of the business since you took it over. And from that time went from like 20 employees to now even work to now 135.

Whoa. Employees and contractors. We got a few different folks, but lots of people.

And so I'd love to talk just, I mean, first you stepped in that role and it was probably disorganized and stuff. Like, what were your thoughts? What did you have to go and figure out and what'd you have to learn to be able to turn it.

Into what it is now? I think the big thing, you know, is Russell's vision for the company. We worked together long enough that I, I knew where he wanted to go. I mean, we even just inherently just kind of knew. The big thing about Russell is his ability to surround himself with good people. And so that was the first part, is evaluating who do we have currently. You know, are they in the right seat on the bus is a big part of that too. And some of that, you know, we kind of tested different things and some things work and something didn't work very well. We brought people in, we started, you know, the phone stuff a little bit there with the clickstart program and some of those guys were better than others. And then we've evolved that program. But the big thing about it was obviously support we had. I mean, when you guys initially started hiring some support team members, those guys were rock stars. And a lot of those guys are still with us today and they've evolved even in their positions with the company because of their commitment and their love of clickfunnels. I love when I get to interview and talk to people and when those individuals say I love clickfunnels, like that is the coolest compliment that we can get is when we've got people who want to raise their hand. They want to work with us because they love click funnels, they love the mission, they love the ability to help people. And so I think the biggest challenge was how do we grow with it. Because the marketing side, sales side was growing so fast. And it's important that we're providing, we're taking care of our users and helping them have the best experience possible. And also, ClickFunnels isn't just some easy push button software. I mean, it is easy to use once you understand it, but there's a lot of different parts of it and understand marketing is a big part of it. So we needed to bring on people who could understand clickfunnels who understood marketing and also understood Russell's style and the way you were taking everything.

Yeah, it's crazy because I think when.

You took over the role of that.

It wasn't just the support, but that was a big piece of it, honestly, because probably what, a dozen support people at the time.

Yeah, there's probably six to 10. Well, probably about 10 or so at a time.

Yeah, nobody take that. It's been funny because like one of the criticisms we hear sometimes about clickfunnels is like, oh, support's not live, live all the time. And it's, it's funny. They're like, you know, Aweber's live. And say, yeah, Aweber has been growing for 20 years. They probably get four new signups a day like clickfunnels right now. It's been a while since I looked at the stats, but it's anywhere between like 500 to 1,000 signups a day every single day that are coming to ClickFunnels trying to learn this huge platform that runs Your entire company. And it's like, how do we stay in front of that? Like, you know, and like our goal is eventually to get the point where it's real time supporters close to that as possible. But like, there's no one else in our space that's ever had to deal with that. They've grown companies that fast. Most big companies like Stripe that don't have any support at all because they're.

Like, we, we can't.

So therefore we don't. Yeah, it's just like. But we still need to have that support and education and stuff like that in place. And I think what you did initially, I know that Ryan was part of this. Ryan Montgomery helped set stuff initially too. But like, just for those who have support teams who maybe have three or four people, and you're starting to scale something like you kind of broke people into teams. You want to talk about some of that initial stuff that you guys did there, make the scaling side of support easier?

Yeah. So we moved over. So we were, we moved over to Intercom and so that allowed us to do, you know, like, live support. So it wasn't necessarily right live, but people could submit conversations, we respond to them. And that's. We used to start and we've grown and then that. Our response time, that's how we kind of gauge our success, our response time. Now there's a lot of software companies who offer like live support or they'll offer support from like 8 to 5 or something. Our succession has turned out to be really 24 hours. We've got team members all around the world. And so we initially started, we actually had kind of international team and then we had more domestic teams. But as we realized, as we continue to scale and grow and we get more and more people international, we've got international folks on every team. We've got domestic folks on every team. So they can kind of work that schedule out as needed. But, you know, as we came in and we saw the amount of conversations that we had, I mean, these guys are answering like 8 to 9,000 conversations a week. You know, our support team, it is crazy. I mean, our billing support is like unreal. You know, we've got a team of billing support team members and most of them are in our office. We have a few individuals who aren't. But, you know, the big part of it is again, having leadership in those positions. So every support team we have has a team lead who is the person that we reach out to that we help with training. And they now can pass the message. And all the training onto their other team members.

How many teams do we have right now?

So technical support teams, we have eight technical support teams. We have one building support team. We've got one team that focuses on some different other partners we have that we worked with in the past. We've got a team that helps with our clickstart program. So that's a program people can sign up with, and it allows them to be able to get some help on the initial setup. And we've got a team lead who helps run that team. Cool.

I think what's cool about this for you guys who are scaling, like, what would have been like. In fact, this is what happened first, is we were scaling. There's one person in charge, and they'd like 10 people underneath them. And then we're trying to grow, and everything's growing. And like, that person couldn't handle, like, any more growth. It's hard to have more than, like, eight to 10 people you report to. You get bigger than that. It gets stressful, and it's really hard. So Brendan came in and said, okay, the people that we have that are rock stars, make each of those a team lead, and let's put employees underneath each of those things. And the team lead can train the employees, make sure they're doing good. And he's the one who got to deal with the eight or 10 team leads, deal with them, and then they are working with the individual people and gives us, like, a communication channel to get through. And now he's not having 90 direct reports back to him. He just has the eight and things like that. Another cool thing we did recently is training, because the other big thing that we have, and some of you guys have something similar with your businesses, is someone was saying about, if I say competitors, there's a competitor who has software that has pages that generates leads. And their software is one thing. It's one button you can click, and that's it. And it's very, very simple. Click funnels. It's like we're building your landing pages, your funnels, your shopping cart, your affiliate platform, your autoresponders. There's 8,000 things. And so for us, we can't just hire someone in Boise, Idaho, and be like, hey, now you're a support person for clickfunnels. Like, there's such a learning curve. They have to understand, even be able to do that. So a couple things. Number one is that most of our hires come from people that are members of our software, which is a big thing for you guys to Think through in inner circle. This comes up all the time like where do I find rock stars? I'm like, I guarantee your rock star you're dreaming for is already a customer of your product. Right now I look to your internal customer base for your rock stars because they're going to know your product, they're going to be passionate, they're going to care more than just someone you pull off the street. That's like number one. Number two then is we needed. How do we train these people? I think initially each team leader was just trained their people.

Right.

They were getting bogged down in the training, not being able to support and manage stuff like that. So talk about the, the new team. That's the training team, right?

Yeah. Well, you know a big part of those help Mark. Mark came up and Mark, you know, is helping work. He does a lot more work directly with the team leads.

There's no Mark banger. He's killing.

He's awesome. Yeah. You know, he still kind of bounces customer education and helps with support management. So Mark came in and then we had the idea of recognizing as we brought new people on, they'd kind of initially they would slow down the rest of the team. And so we pulled another team lead out. We pulled Andrew out, Andrew Newman and he now his focus is just training. So as we bring new team members on, he's focusing on those guys. As we look at, he doesn't have maybe anybody currently to teach. He's reaching out to people who've been on the team who maybe lack, you know, knowledge about backpack or actionetics. And then he's, he's. We're pulling those guys out. He's doing training with those guys so we can get everybody up to this. The same level, same tier. Yeah, that's cool.

We did some of that back when we had our big call center before the big crash of what year? The crash of 08. Crash of 09. Because we had 60 sales guys and problems any higher sales guys off the street, someone's got to train them. So we had a training team. So every sales guy come in, they go through a two week training where Robbie Summers was one that managed that. And then the ones that were good, we then put them on the floor under another team. The ones that sucked, we would just.

Get rid of them.

That's kind of the same thought here. Let's bring people and have someone who's dedicated to training them when they're ready, then put them onto a team so they can start running with everybody as opposed to pulling people back. So anyway, it's just crazy. Like all these. Anyway, these are all the things that we're learning as we're growing and scaling along the way. Someday we're going to write a book about this whole journey, this whole experience. Because a lot of times companies are built where like there's dude an idea. The hire venture capitalists, they bring in a management team, they bring all stuff and then like they build a company where us was like raw passion and that's what's like grown this whole thing and kept it, kept it afloat. So anyway, it's been a fun ride so far.

It's been, it's been an unbelievable ride.

Yeah, it's been so much fun. So I appreciate all your work and help and everything you do. And hopefully this gives some of you guys ideas as you're growing. Your support teams or development team, your management or whatever those things are. If you look at also I had someone, it was Andrew Warner from Mixergy the other day interview me and he was like, how are you able to write books and run a software company and do coaching and all these different things? And the same thing is kind of what Brent mentioned earlier. I've gotten really good at surrounding myself with amazing people where I feel like it's almost like there's parts of the company that people are running. You're running all the operational stuff. So I don't have to worry about that like hiring, the firing, the finding the right people. Brent does that. So I just talked to Brent and then all the people stuff's taken care of. Todd and Ryan run the whole development team like and so like they like Todd's run. I talk to Todd all the time but like it's just happening and I don't have to stress about that. And then I'm kind of running the marketing team and you know, Dave's running.

You know, it's Dave.

There's probably five or six people that I, that I really deal with directly inside the company and then I'm able to do the part that I love the most and I'm the best at. And I think that I think a lot of us entrepreneurs, most of the people that are in those, those positions all are get profit share and equity in the company. I think one of my big mistakes I made when I first got started was like I was so protective. Like this is my, you know, like I wanted, I wanted so much control over everything that I like stifled everything. Whereas when I was able to give up control as they would bring Rock Stars and people that have skill sets that I don't. And now because they have, they have stake in the game, like, I don't have to worry about every decision, every single thing. Like, I trust Brent. He makes a thousand decisions a day that I never even question or think about because I trust him. Same with Todd. And say, like, they know they do that because I was willing and able to do that. So I think a lot of you guys, if you're struggling at growth, you don't have the ideas, like, you're not gonna bring on venture capitalists and destroy your soul. And you want to grow something the opposite that is like, bring on really smart people and give them a stake in the game. And then it's kind of like Chet Holmes used to tell me. Said that in his company, everyone was based on a percentage of sales. There was no salary based people. He said, what's cool about that is like big months, everyone gets big checks. Small months, everyone gets small checks, but everyone's in it together. I think that building teams that way is better than bringing a bunch of money and hiring the right people or hiring the best people. It's like hiring the right people and giving them incentive to where they can grow and do whatever they want. In fact, I'm gonna share one thing.

This is cool.

I'm allowed to share this. Probably can. Anyway, so this was. We had these accountants. Most marketers or most entrepreneurs are like accountants, but we have these accountants. And every year I have to go to the accounting meeting. And then they would always talk about, like, all the stuff to do to try to lower your. Anyway, super annoying. And it was like the worst meeting of my year. Destroy. Like, I lose all motivation and momentum for an entire week. So I was so stressed out. And I remember driving home from one of those, so pissed off at the accountants for 20, trying to ruin my happiness in life. And I remember in this podcast, I have to go find it. But I was like, my goal is, I want. Not only am I going to max out my tax bracket, I'm going to have everyone I know around me, all my partners, all the people that are pushing this. I want to max out their tax bracket as well. And we're talking about this earlier on this trip here in Hawaii. Like, there's probably half a dozen or so people on our team now who have maxed out their tax bracket because of this whole concept we're talking about. And that is like the coolest feeling in the entire world.

So. So it's pretty awesome. It's pretty Amazing.

So there you go, Uncle Sam.

There you go.

Anyway, that's all I got. You have anything else you want to add?

No, I think it's such a. Again, I said the term unbelievable. It truly is. Every day, how cool is to be able to come and work with friends and good people, that it's just a positive place. Our company culture is a big deal. You drive that. And it's been really fun to see people come into our office or just come into our business, our space, and to feel that sense that even those who work remote. And we've got a lot of team members who work remote. Most of them. Yeah, most of them are. And it can be kind of a lonely road out there, but yet, you know, we do things to try to help them feel the feel love. And Russell will send swag to people and just unexpected things that just make people feel the love and help them know that we appreciate them. That's a big deal.

So here's a question for those who may want to join the Clickfunnels team. What's the have they?

You know what I mean? We got a link on clickfunnels at the bottom Clickfunnels of careers. But we're always looking. If you. I mean, if someone out there is passionate, you want to build it to find a place with us, hit me up. You can hit me up on Facebook and hit me up. Email brentlickfunnels.com Just send me an email. I can direct you where to go. And we have applications that. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome.

Well, thanks, man. So that's a little bit of behind the scenes. How the hr, the growth, the. The internal stuff, kind of what we're doing and how we're doing it. Again, we're just learning all this stuff along the way. Someday we'll write a book about it when it's all done because the lessons that we've learned along the way have been cool. So hopefully this gave you guys a couple ideas and things as you're growing, scaling your teams, and that's all I got. So thanks, everybody.

Thanks, Brent. Absolutely. Thanks, guys. Bye.

Would you like to see behind the scenes of what we're actually doing each day to grow our company? If so, then go subscribe to our free behind the scenes reality TV show at www.funnelhacker.tv.