Bonus: The Secret to Getting Clients with Russell Brunson

You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo and Russell Brunson.

Welcome to The Life Coach School Podcast, where it’s all about real clients, real problems and real coaching. And now your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brooke Castillo.

Brooke: What’s up everyone? I am so excited to bring you this bonus podcast. I asked my good friend and my teacher Russell Brunson to come on the podcast because I want him to teach you all everything he taught me about business. And he said yes, and he’s very busy, so I’m stoked. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Russell.

Russell: Heck yeah, I’m so excited to be here.

Brooke: That’s awesome. So, let me give you a little bit of background from my experience with meeting Russell, and I hope it’s okay with you. I want to break it down to basic, basic, basics. Because there’s a lot of people, a lot of listeners to the podcast, that aren’t in business and I feel like sometimes they’ve come to the podcast to maybe be introduced to life coaching and how to feel their feelings and thoughts.

We talk about business a lot and entrepreneurship, but they think, “Oh, that part doesn’t apply to me,” so I want to introduce all of our world to them and let them know this could apply to you, this really could be it. So Russell, actually, I started working with Frank Kern who was one of my coaches for a while and he told me about Russell and told me how amazing you were and how I needed to study all of your things, which I did immediately, and was so excited to find you.

Originally, he had told me that I had to sign up for this thing, this company you owned. I had to sign up for this software product you have called ClickFunnels and I had no idea what that meant or why it even mattered, and now it’s such a huge part of my business and such a huge part of my life. So why don’t you just give us a brief intro to what ClickFunnels is and who you are.

Russell: Yeah. So I am someone who just - I was never a life coach but I wanted to coach people on what I was good at. Initially it was wrestling, other things I wanted to do, so I started learning this whole internet marketing game about 20 years ago now.

And back then, this is before we had any kind of website builders or before Facebook, before Myspace. It was the very beginning of this whole thing. And so we were trying a whole bunch of different things and eventually, we found something that started working. We didn’t have a name for it back then, we called it sales processes, or things like that.

Eventually, it got coined the term sales funnels, which is just a really simple way to generate leads and to close sales online. And I think it was kind of created for introverts like me and Frank who were scared of talking to people. It was like, we don’t want to talk to people, let’s build a website that does all the talking for us. And we structured these different sales processes.

Someone would land on a page and there would be a video and we’d talk to them, then we’d click on a button or take them to another page, and we ask them - we take them through a process. And that’s when I got started 20 years ago, when I started selling all sorts of things from DVDs to books to coaching to all sorts of stuff, and had a lot of success with it.

And then about 10 years ago I started trying to teach people how to do this stuff and they could conceptually understand like, “Oh cool, it makes a lot of sense.” And then they’re like, “How do I do it?” And I was like, “I don’t know, you hire somebody in the Philippines or India to go make you this thing that you learned about,” and no one can ever do it.

And I met this guy who’s a genius, his name is Todd Dickerson, he’s my business partner now and he started looking at all the stuff I was teaching and he’s like, “I could build software that would do this.” And initially, it was funny because I’m not a technical person and he was building these things for me for a while.

And he’s like, “I want to build something so simple that you never have to ask me to build a funnel for you again.” And so he built the software and made it really simple where you could put up a page and then someone like me who’s not technical could go and I could change the headline, or I could drag an image in, I could build these pages really simple.

And it was fun because it was him and my other partner Dylan, they were building the software, they would build it, they said it to me, they’re like - and I learned later it was the joke. If Russell can do it then anybody in the world can do this. So they’d send me, “Russell, go build a page,” and they’d make me record myself and I’d try to do it and I’d mess up.

It was funny because I’d watched them watching the video of me afterwards and they’re like, “Your mouse is two inches away from the button, you moron.” They were teasing me like crazy, but they knew if I can’t see it - nobody can see it. So they changed the color of the button or they’d move it or whatever, and so we did that back and forth for five or six months to the point where I was actually launching my very first book.

And I remember the very first book, I was like, “I’m going to build this funnel myself.” And I remember logging in to ClickFunnels and I built the entire book funnel by myself with nobody else’s help, and that was about the same time ClickFunnels launched and I was like, this is the way, this is what we need to teach everyone.

So we started sharing the software with people and it’s just a really simple way for anybody to build these things. You learn the strategy, specifically, if you want to get leads as a life coach, or if you want to sell someone high-end coaching or whatever it is, there’s a strategy to each one of them. But then after you understand the strategies, it’s really simple.

What are the pages you need to create? In what order? What words are up on each page? And then from there, that’s kind of how it works. So the software just makes it really, really simple for people like me to be able to build cool funnels.

Brooke: Yeah. And you know, when I first started out, I was building all my own funnels myself.

Russell: You were the funnel builder.

Brooke: Yeah, so I was like, in ClickFunnels, figuring it out myself. But what I realized just recently is because you and I have been in this world for so long, we use a lot of this terminology and we talk about business in a way that a lot of people cannot understand. I think they nod and pretend like they understand but I met someone that was so dumbfounded by The Life Coach School and how much money I make and how I don’t have any debt and how I just do everything online.

And I was trying to break it down for them and here’s what I realized. They have no idea what a funnel even means. They don’t understand that. So I was thinking about this interview with you and I was thinking about bringing you on and how we could really teach the basics of it. So I want to kind of go back even further just for a minute and talk to people about what direct response marketing even means.

Because I get a lot of people, they come to me like, “I understand marketing, I understand business, I understand sales.” But to me, I always feel like we have this secret. We have this secret knowledge that other people don't have, and it’s direct response marketing.

So could you just explain in third-grade language to brand new people, what is direct response marketing and why does it matter? And then we’ll talk about how we utilize that for funnels.

Russell: Yeah. So what most people think about when they think about marketing, because this is what they teach in marketing classes in school and stuff, is more like branding. I need to create a brand and a logo and a…

Brooke: A logo, yeah, exactly.

Russell: Yeah. And so people start a business online and they think that’s what it is. They create a big brand and they put it out there and they’re like, “Why is nobody giving me money?” What direct response is, it’s almost like direct response can build a brand but it’s not branding.

You put a message out into the marketplace, out into the world, and you’re trying to get somebody to respond back. Hence the name, direct response. So I put something out there, I put an ad out there, let’s say it’s my book. I put an ad out there, I say, “Hey, get a free copy of my book. Click this link or call this phone number,” or whatever.

And what’s cool about it is when you start doing this, you can see, say I spend $100 on this ad and I got five phone calls and it costs me $20 for each of these calls. Do I make at least $20 per call? And if you did, you have a profitable business. If you didn’t, you’re like, okay, I did something wrong, how can I change the messaging or the headline?

And what’s crazy - and I didn’t believe this when I first got started, but I can have a sales message and just change the headline and it’ll double how many people will call the number or click on the thing. So I can double how much money I make just by changing a headline, or sometimes a button color.

A button color, taking it from blue to green, can increase clickthroughs by 30%, and I make 30% more money by changing the color of my button. But the direct response is powerful because everything you do, you put it out there, you see what happens, people respond back, and then you can decide, did I actually make money or not? If you didn’t, you make a change, then you do it again, and you do it again until eventually it starts working, and then you can put more money. You can scale it.

For example, when I launched my book funnel, first it wasn’t working. We got tweaking it and eventually it started working. I was like, okay, now it’s working, I’m profitable. Every time I spend money on Facebook, I get more money back. Then it was like, okay, I want to sell a million copies of my book and we just started spending more money. It’s learning how to get the numbers to work where every dollar I put in advertising I get at least a dollar back. And as soon as you get that, then the game gets crazy.

That’s how you make insane amounts of money because you know for every dollar you put in, you get three back. Okay, just put in more dollars. But you don’t know that unless you know that direct response.

Brooke: Yeah, I want to be really clear. This is something brand new coaches, those of you who are just learning our work, you’re just being exposed to this world of direct response and funnels and online marketing, it’s different when you post something on social media and you get a lot of people to comment on it and you get a lot of views and you get a lot of interaction with it.

That is not direct response. And it’s really interesting to me, for the first 10 years of my business, I didn’t even really interact on social media at all. I didn’t even really have a presence at all, and people were like, ”How are you doing this?” And this is why direct response is so powerful.

You have to get a response, this is the point of your customer where they’re actually paying you in some way. Either they’re paying you by giving you their email address, their time, their energy, it’s costing them something. So the difference between putting an ad out there where you get a direct response versus putting a post where you get lots of interaction is the biggest difference.

I want to shake people sometimes. The biggest difference of anything. You can build up a huge presence and not make any money. There’s no response that is going to be meaningful to you as a business owner. There’s a lot of response in terms of commentary and likes and whatever the things are, follows. But there’s not a lot of response.

So when I first learned this idea that the way to build a business is to create marketing that gets someone to respond right away, then you’ll know if your marketing is working. It seems so basic when we break it down like that but it’s so important. So if I put an ad out there, people will say, “I think it’s a good ad.” No, you either know it’s a good ad or you don’t by the response that you’re getting, period. So that’s the first concept that I think people have to really understand. We are looking for a response.

Russell: It breaks the paradigm because for example, we just had the Super Bowl recently and you watch all the Super Bowl, 99% of the ads are all just branding, branding, branding, branding. People are so proud of how cool their ads are. But you ask the company, how much money did they make you? They don’t know.

Brooke: They don’t have any idea.

Russell: 0.1% of people who actually responded to actually have a direct response. So they’d have an ad, they’d say go to this website, or scan this QR code, or something, so they saw, did people actually react to this? To what we were trying to do? And those were the only companies that had any kind of direct response. Everyone else is like, “Oh, we did branding, hopefully people come and buy from us,” but they were probably so drunk watching the Super Bowl they’re not going to know it.

Versus these people, the few that knew direct response actually got leads or money back and they know, I spent this much money, and I made it back or I didn’t.

Brooke: Right.

Russell: That’s the problem is most of us only see the branding stuff, so we think that’s good marketing, and it’s not.

Brooke: It’s not. It’s not. So when I learned that, I’m like, we need to get a response. And this is good for your customers too, right? Because if they want to respond, it’s like they’re raising their hand, they’re saying I want more. And then that’s what a funnel can do.

And a funnel basically is if you picture a funnel, like a kitchen funnel, I’m using my hands. We are on video if you want to come look. But it’s really wide at the top and really narrow at the bottom. So the first part of your funnel is you’re kind of reaching a huge niche of people that you’re going after. And then you’re bringing them through and narrowing them down to people who are actually genuinely interested in signing up for your programs and paying you money.

So a funnel, and what ClickFunnels does, what Russell’s company does is it sets you up so you can reach a customer, but then also take them through a process of learning about you and your product and what you do in a way that is so meaningful. But not only meaningful for the customer, but measurable for you.

And that is one of the biggest differences between just having a website, having social media presence, and having ClickFunnels, which is your website, which is basically all of the pages of your website that you can actually measure.

So you listen to Russell talked about earlier, he’s like, if you’re going to pay a dollar, let’s say you’re going to put Facebook ads up, you’re going to pay a dollar for every person that sees the ad or clicks on the ad. You have to know, am I going to make that money back later? And I want to kind of break that down in more detail, but I had a friend one time just say to me, “I don’t like funnels.”

To me, it’s like, you might as well say I don’t like money. I don’t like ATM machines. Because I feel like the funnel is kind of you measuring what your customer wants, what’s important to them, and what is effective for your customer. It’s actually a service to your customer as well as to your business. So can you just talk in basic terms, maybe a very basic funnel, what it would include and how you would measure?

Russell: Yeah. And I was thinking about a funnel, a funnel is what you would do if you could talk to each person one on one. But ideally, we’re trying to talk - I’m putting a Facebook out to 10,000 people. So I can’t talk to all 10,000 people one on one. So I put an ad out to 10,000 people and they click on it and they come to a page, and there’s going to be a video of me saying, “Hey, you clicked on my ad, this is so cool, you must be interested in the topic I was talking about.”

So you have a chance to interact with that person and so let’s say 10,000 people saw the ad and then from that, 1000 people clicked. Now I’m having a direct communication with 1000 people.

They’re landing on a page, there’s a video of me talking to them, and I can be like, “Hey, this is cool, you’re interested in more information on how to start your own life coach school, I’ve helped so many people do this, it’s exciting. In fact, I want to send you more information about it. If you’re interested, put your email address in the form down below, I’m going to send you an email with a PDF, it’s going to explain some cool things. And the next page, I got a video, I’m going to show you the next cool thing.”

Brooke: Okay wait, stop, pause for a second. So on that page, if I land on a ClickFunnel page or I have one as a business owner, how will I know that 10,000 people went there and that 1000 people - how do I see that in the ClickFunnel?

Russell: So it’s cool because in ClickFunnels there’s a dashboard that shows you all the stats. It looks like a funnel. So it’s like, 10,000 people saw the ad; from that, 1000 people clicked on the ad and landed on the landing page. From that, 300 people actually gave you their email address, got added to your email list, and then it went to the next page in the funnel.

So every page, there’s breakage every page. So each page there’s less and less people, that’s why we call it a funnel because it gets smaller and smaller towards the bottom. What happens is let’s say the next page, then you have a video selling your school or your coaching or whatever it is, people land on that page and then they buy or don’t buy, then maybe you have an upsell.

So you’re taking them down this path and the dashboard will show you exactly - okay, you spent $1000 in ads. On page one, you made zero dollars but you got 300 people who gave you their email address. Page two, you made $2000, page three, you made $1000, page four, you made $500. Whatever the thing might be that you see. From this ad that I spent, I ended up making $2500, I spent $1000, so this was a good ad, I should keep running that ad, or I should stop the ad if it didn’t work.

Brooke: I will tell you that this was the most magical thing to watch happen in my own business, is to be able to spend $1000 on ads, which at the time when it was new, that seemed like so much money. And somebody I think once asked me, they’re like, “How much money would you be willing to spend to ads?” I’m like, “I don’t know, $1000?”

And it’s like, no, it depends on how much money that will get you. So I spend $1000 on ads, and I make $10,000. And then I realized, how much money am I willing to spend on ads? All of it. If I can spend $1000 on ads and get $10,000 back, I’m going to do that all day every day.

And so one of the things that - so if you have three basic pages that you’re taking someone through in a funnel, one of the things that ClickFunnels does, and this is why I wanted to talk to you all about Russell’s product but also the concept of split testing and improving your funnel. Because I think a lot of times we spend $1000 and make $10,000, we’re like, I’m done, this is the greatest thing that could ever happen in the world.

And then I got introduced to this concept of split testing that sounds really complicated, but with ClickFunnels it makes it so easy. Can you talk a little bit about what that is and why it matters?

Russell: It’s the simplest way to give yourself a raise every day. In fact, I used to have a mantra, it was like, how do I give myself a raise every day? Which sounds like a Brooke thing to say, right? How do I give myself a raise every day?

So right now let’s say you have a funnel and you have 10,000 people who see the ad, 1000 hit the landing page, 300 give you their email, and 20 buy. So we know this is the funnel. So the question is like, can I make this better? Is there something I could do to make this so more people come through each step?

So what you can do is, let’s say, you could set up a split test. What happens is 10,000 people see the ad, they click, 1000 people hit the landing page. I can take that landing page and I can make two versions of it. So I can have one that’s got a headline that says, “Free video about how to start your own life coach school.” The other we can have a headline that says, “Free case study: how one of my students made a million dollars a day with a life coach school,” whatever.

You have two versions. The pages are almost identical but just two different headlines. So what happens is the first person hits page number one, second person hits page two, third person it’s page one, then page two. It goes back and forth and back and forth. What happens is you watch that over the 1000 clicks, 500 went to each page, and you see, wow, page number one, 30% of people gave me their email address but page number two, 60% did.

So the page is almost identical. Just a change in headline, but you get twice as many people that go through. And I’ll see, okay, now I got twice as many people who see the sales video, which means twice as many sales. So you double your income right there.

So after you run some traffic through that, you say this is the winner, that becomes your new winner. Then you come back the next day like, how do I give myself a raise today? What else could I test? Maybe a pink headline versus a blue headline, maybe I’m going to try - you just go back and forth and every day you make a little test in just seeing which one will win. And over time, you can literally double your business.

If you think about any - if you’re a doctor and you’re like, I want to double my income, what’s that? You have to go another eight years of medical school to specialize in the thing so you can double your income. But in marketing, if I split test two pages and one gets twice the conversion than the other one, I doubled my income.

Brooke: And then you keep doing that.

Russell: It compounds and compounds and compounds to the point where you’re making what Brooke’s making.

Brooke: What’s so cool about it, first of all, it makes you have the best product you have because you keep testing it again, so you keep trying to improve it. But it also makes the experience so much better for the customer. The customer - people who go through my funnels love it because it’s designed to the highest desire of each person coming through.

So if most people like this thing, then that’s what I’m going to show everyone. So it makes the quality of what you’re creating so much better because you're testing it against itself really. And one of the things I love about ClickFunnels is that sounds so complicated.

It sounds like, okay, how do I send half the people to this page and then half the people to that page from the same ad? Because you don’t want to have all these different variables. And ClickFunnels just makes it so easy. If I’m in ClickFunnels doing that, how do I make it so that happens?

Russell: Yeah, you look at the page you have and there’s a button that says split test page. You click it and it makes a clone of the page and now you got both of them, and then you just log into one and change the headline and that’s it. You sit back and just watch and see what happens as the traffic goes through. And when one of them wins, you hover over, you say pick winner, and it says this one is now the winner and it hides the other page and now that’s the winner. And then you can start split testing again. So fun.

Brooke: Cool. So cool. And one of the things, for those of you who are already in business, one of the things that’s so challenging for so many of us is to make sure our stats are correct and to make sure we understand what’s actually happening in each page on each thing. Because a lot of times, if you don’t have all your measurable results, you’re just like, “Oh, I’m making money. It’s fine.” Or, I’ve had students come to me and this is what they’ll say, and respond for someone that’s in ClickFunnels, if I say to you, “This isn’t working.”

Russell: What’s not working?

Brooke: What’s not working? Which page isn’t working?

Russell: People I coach will come back, “It’s not working.” I’m like, “What’s not working?" And they’re like, “It just didn’t work.” What’s cool about it is you can look like, okay, was it the ad? Was it the first page? Because we see the numbers. Oh, well, the ad actually worked really good, a lot of people clicked on it. And then the first page went good, a lot of people gave their email, but then the third page, nobody bought.

It’s like, oh, well then something is wrong on the third page. It didn’t work - just that page. And then we come back like, how do we fix the page? And I have a really simple framework that I teach people because if something’s not working in your marketing it’s always one of three things.

This is true if it’s the ad, if it’s the email, if it’s the landing page, it’s either the hook, the story, or the offer. So the hook is the thing that grabs their attention. So that’s the headline, it could be what you’re wearing, it could be - I’ve seen some of the ads you and Christine Morrell were making, the hook of you guys with your crazy - the hook grabs their attention, right?

And the second thing is the story, where you’re telling them your story. The goal of the story is to increase the perceived value of whatever it is you’re going to offer them later. And then the third step is you make an offer, which is like, hey, you give me money, I’ll give you this thing.

So if something’s not working, it’s always one of those three things. So I’ll look at the page, I’m like, page three is not working, so it’s either your hook, your story, or your offer. And I’ll ask the person, which one is it? And they’re like, “Well, the hook’s really cool but I don’t really tell my story that good, or I don’t have a story on there.” Or, “Hook’s good, the story’s good, but maybe my offer is too expensive.” Yeah, let’s try a different offer.

Instead of offering five coaching sessions for $10,000, offer five coaching sessions for $500. Change the offer and tweak it and you just make a couple tweaks and changes until it works, and then you’re like, okay, now it starts working. It’s just playing that game like a scientist almost of what’s working, what’s not working, what can I tweak and change until it starts working?

Brooke: Yeah, and I think that’s one of the most important things, that messaging that I could give to any of our students is your first funnel probably won’t work. And you won’t know why it’s not working if you don’t have all the stats like ClickFunnels gives you so beautifully.

Because if you look at, okay, I spent $1000 on ads, nobody bought, but you don’t know why. If you go back and look at all your stats, you’d be like, well, the ad was terrible, or the landing page was terrible, or the offer was terrible. Then you’re able to know what exactly to fix, instead of - when you first approach a business, especially brand new business owners, your brain is freaked out and it wants to convince you that this is a terrible idea.

It’s like, this is a terrible - you shouldn’t do this. And if you can have vague problems, your brain will be convinced. But with a program like ClickFunnels, there’s nothing vague about it. It’s all very specific, very detailed, this is working, this isn’t.

Russell: Can I liken to your people? Because I love your frameworks and the Model framework. You go through and I just pulled it up to make sure I don’t mess up. You got circumstances, thoughts, feeling, action, results. If you have a coaching client and you’re working with somebody, the same thing, you’re looking through the process.

Oh, their feelings are messed up, or their circumstance, or whatever the piece is. It’s the same thing with a funnel. Circumstances is my ad, thoughts are my landing page, it’s like I’m looking at where are they actually stuck at and then you address that and you fix that and tweak that. So it’s the same concept. Most of your people, they’re coaching through you, they’re doing that with people all the time.

Same thing, your students are people but you’re doing people at scale. Because you’re having 1000 people go through this process, like what was the piece that wasn’t working, what do we tweak and change to get them to be able to go to the next page, get more people to go through the process.

Brooke: Yeah. The thing that I am the most puzzled by with especially my friends Russell, I don’t know if you had the same thing too. But my closest friends, they’re just like, I don’t like funnels. And I’m like, how? First of all, that hurts my feelings that you even would say that because like I said, it’s like I don’t like ATM machines.

But there’s some resistance to doing it because it feels complicated. And that’s why I think it’s so important, and this is why - we talked about this with some of your students too. It’s like, I think it’s so important for each of us as business owners to truly understand direct response marketing and understand how a funnel works.

And that is something that I learned from you, because not only do you have the software that makes it so easy to do, but you have all the materials to teach us how to utilize the software. The marketing, the ideas, the concepts, writing copy, what to put on all of those pages in order to create the result, which is doing our service in the world. And a funnel really is letting people know that you can actually help them.

Russell: Yeah, it’s interesting because I had a really unique opportunity where we have 100,000 plus customers using our platform so we see what’s working and not working, all sorts of stuff. So that’s kind of one of my things is coming back and making sure this stuff is working in real time today, in today’s market. And things are always evolving, shifting, so we’re always trying to share those things.

But I agree with you, there’s people that for some reason, they have it in their mind, “Oh, I don’t like funnels because of,” blank, and they have a reason. Sometimes it’s because of me like, “Oh, Russell talks too fast,” or, “It’s bro marketing.” There’s always these reasons people throw out there.

But like you said, it all comes down to, do you like money or not? Because this isn’t something we made up. This is literally being tested. ClickFunnels platform processes two to three billion dollars a year of all our customers. So it’s not like, “Oh Russell made this thing and maybe it works.” It’s like, no, I have so much data. I know exactly what works.

I’m not guessing at this point. We know it works. So if you want something that works, you can call something different, call it flowers if you want. I don’t know, call it slippery slides. You don’t like funnels but it’s the thing that makes money. It’s been tested and proven.

When we launched ClickFunnels a decade ago, it wasn’t proven. There were a bunch of underground people like me and Frank Kern and a couple other people who were doing it, but it wasn’t a proven thing. Where today, a decade later, we have more data than anybody. This is the way.

Your audience are coaches, they’re helping people. If you really believe in your message, you really believe in your skillset, you need to give yourself every opportunity to be able to get those people. Because right now, they are fighting against a whole bunch of - so much distraction. There’s so many people hitting them up on socials and emails and all sorts of places.

If you believe in your message, you have a moral obligation to cut through all that to get to them, right? I had someone at church yesterday like, “Hey, I met you the other day at church and I heard your name, and ever since then, I see your ads on every platform every single…”

I’m like, I’m sorry, but I’m like, at the same time, I spend a lot of money on ads because I know that everyone else is competing for their attention as well. I believe in my message. I believe what I’m doing, so I’m going to put forth the effort to make sure I get out there. So funnels are the greatest thing in the world. I’m going to do them.

If you tell me tomorrow that infomercials are out-converting funnels, I will shift infomercials. If you’re like, direct mail is the key, I will do direct - I don’t care about whether I like something or not. I care about does it get me customers that I can serve? Because I care about my calling and my mission and that’s the number one. And so if funnels are the greatest thing since sliced bread, and they are, then I’m just going to do that.

Brooke: They really are. They are the best thing.

Russell: There’s my Russell rant.

Brooke: It’s so important to me and I talk a lot about spending money to invest in your business, and I think it’s important. I think a lot of times people think what I’m saying is spend a bunch of money on ads and see what happens, and that’s one of the things that funnels kind of enables us to do where we don’t have to go into debt and then hope that we make our money back.

Every dollar that we spend, we measure it in real time to see if it’s working. And that’s why when it does work, we just turn that faucet on and we can grow. I had a year where I went from five million to $17 million a year. And that was the year I decided to switch from breakeven acquisition to aggressive acquisition.

And I just want to talk about that briefly because I know a lot of people want to grow their companies, but they’re afraid to spend money, and they should be. Because you don’t want to just go and spend a bunch of money that you’re not measuring the results on. So when I was able to see if I spend a dollar, I can make $10, as long as every dollar I spend I’m making $10, I’m going to spend as much money as I possibly can. And that year I did.

I spent as much money as I possibly could. I had enough cashflow upfront where I could spend as much money, and we literally couldn’t keep up with the amount of growth. And I think that’s the secret of direct response and measuring your results through a program like ClickFunnels. And that’s our unique advantage over all these other companies. Because a lot of people will say to me, “How do you make $50 million as just a woman life coach?” I’m like, “This is how we do it.”

Russell: This is the way.

Brooke: For sure. And to look at someone like you, and I listened to your podcast for so many years where you talked about not being in debt and not having any venture capital, not having other people come in and support that. That was so unheard of. It was like a whole world I didn’t even know about, and all it took was for me to learn this software program that you make so easy to learn. I had to learn WordPress, which was harder back in the day.

Russell: So much harder.

Brooke: So it's like if you could learn this one thing, how to build a funnel, and then how to measure it, which basically ClickFunnels does for you, and what those numbers mean and how to constantly improve your funnel, there is no amount of growth that you can’t have, which is insane to me.

Russell: It’s so much fun. And I want to walk through the process because it is really simple when you do it the right way. I was the same way when I first got started. I was like, how much do I invest in advertising? I didn’t know and I was scared, and so I didn’t buy ads. I didn’t buy ads for almost a decade of my business because I was in so much anxiety.

And I remember I finally figured out something, and this is the formula I work with. All my new people when they come in, they figure out what is the thing you’re selling, right? So say I could be selling a $1000 course and maybe it’s a $500 coaching package or whatever I’m selling, let’s just say for numbers it’s a $500 coaching package.

So I know I’m going to sell that, so what I’m going to do is I’m going to create a funnel, the best I can possibly do, and then I’m going to spend $500, the same that I’ll make if I can get just one person to buy, I’m going to risk that much money to see if I can get one person to buy.

So I’ll take $500, I’ll put that in ads, and I’ll run it through the funnel, I’ll see what happens and I’ll see how many people click. 10 people gave me their email, how many landed on the page, if I got on the phone with someone, what happened. And when all said and done, if I made one sale from that and that’s the goal, if I make one sale, it’s like, cool, I broke even.

I put $500 in, I made $500, I didn’t lose any money, it worked. From there, I’m going to say, okay, I’m going to make some tweaks and some tests and I’m going to take another $500, I’m going to spend it and see what happens. Maybe the second time you spend $500, you make two sales. Now it’s like, I spent $500, I made $1000, that’s really good, so now I’m going to go spend another $500, see if that happens another week in a row.

I do it next week, I spend $500, made $1000 again, okay, now I’m going to spend $1000 and see what happens. So next week go to $1000, and if it comes back and I made $2000, it’s like, this is still working. And then slowly, incrementally keep growing it that way. When you understand that, what is your risk? Worst-case scenario, you risk $500.

Let’s say you spend that first $500 and nobody bought, it’s like, okay, I lost $500, that’s okay. I’m going to make some tweaks and changes, I’m going to try it again and see if I can get my money back from one sale. And I try that again and then eventually, after two or three times, you’ll get that, and then two or three times, you start getting profitable, and then eventually it’s like, it’s really profitable.

And then you go from - you went from here to here very, very quickly because you knew you were putting it all on ad in, you’re getting 17 back out. Now it’s just math.

Brooke: And if you think about this, everyone, think about how crazy this is. If we were just even 50 years ago, it would be like, the only way we could do this - let’s say we wanted to do a Super Bowl ad. What were they? Seven million dollars. You’re like, “This ad is amazing, I think this is the ad, I think this is so great.”

Russell: “I hope it works.”

Brooke: “I think it’s so good.” And then you put it out there and it flops, you’re out seven million dollars. To test an ad now, to start a business now, the risk is so - and we’re afraid to spend any money. But are you willing to invest enough just to see what works and to be able to split test things and constantly improve them?

I just feel like for me, it feels like I have the secret to the universe. It feels like such a privilege to be able to do that on such a small scale. Or I started very small when I did ads, and now I spend hundreds of thousands a month. People say, “How can you spend $200,000, $300,000 a month on ads?”

People will say that to me. And I’m like, “I make four million from that.” If I could spend $200,000 and make four million, that’s how you have to think about it. And the way that you do that in a calculated way is by using funnels, and by measuring them.

Russell: And you can hundreds of thousands on day one. Again, it’s this progress where you’re not just - again, Super Bowl ad, you’re gambling seven million dollars. Here, you’re gambling $500. Then it works, okay, I’m going to gamble $1000. Can we gamble $1500? And eventually somebody will wake up and you’re spending a million dollars a month but it doesn’t matter because you got it all working along the way, right? And then at that point, that's when the numbers get crazy.

Brooke: That sounds insane. Spending a million dollars a month. But I was just…

Russell: I remember the very first month we did that I was so stressed out but it came back fourfold. We’re like, okay, we should do that again.

Brooke: It’s so crazy. I was just studying this other company, it’s a therapy company where they sell an app for therapy. And they spent $100 million on ads last year. $100 million. None of them direct response. And the company made $400 million so I was like, oh, that’s cool. Obviously a very profitable company, makes so much sense. But I wonder in my mind, if they took that $100 million and it was all direct response.

Think about this. In order to spend $100 million on ads that are untested and non-direct response, you have to have venture capital. You have to have someone that’s willing to just use that money.

Russell: Burn the money and hope for the best.

Brooke: Lose that money because that ad didn’t work, there’s a couple million. It’s insane. So I think this is, for me, one of the most important things just to kind of back up here is to teach women especially that we can make wealth on our own terms, in our own ways if we learn the right skillset. And I think learning how to create and measure funnels is one of the most important skillsets any of us can learn.

In addition to managing your mind, using the Model and managing your mind, learning how to do direct response marketing and to scale direct response marketing, if you have those two things together, the possibilities really are endless. And here’s the other thing that’s so cool, and I talk about strategic byproducts a lot.

I have learned how to grow a life coaching business, which is amazing, but most importantly, I’ve learned how to create funnels. And I can apply that to any business that I want. It makes me feel - I’m curious what you think about this. It makes me feel incredibly powerful.

Russell: Oh, yeah. We were talking before we started recording this. I tried for a long time to focus on one business and I did. ClickFunnels, I focused, focused, and then the last two years, about the time Covid hit, I was like, I have this superpower. I could touch anything, the Midas touch, and turn to gold. So I bought a dozen companies.

And it’s the same thing. You buy a company that’s doing okay but not great, and it’s like, apply a funnel and boom, watch it explode. We just bought a lady’s weight loss business that was going out of business. We bought it, launched a funnel. In fact, today is the day number one where the challenge funnel is going live.

We just applied one funnel to it, we launched it, and it’s growing like crazy. And then in a month from now we’ll launch a second funnel and we just keep slowly adding these funnels on. But when you learn the skillset, you have the Midas touch, you know the story of King Midas, anything you touch turns to gold.

You can do that. You can go into any business and be like, “Hey, I want to do a funnel for you,” and you can do that. Initially when I started ClickFunnels, I built my own book funnel and I was like, I want to get to know all of the people. I want to connect, I want to network with all the best in the world.

So about that time, Tony Robbins was launching his book and I was like, I have something to offer him. I know how to build a book funnel. So I annoyed him until - I was like, “Tony, I’ll build a book funnel for free.” And all of a sudden I got a response back and he’s like, sure. So I built one for him, I built one for Neil Strauss, I built one for Dave Asprey, I started building book funnels for all these people, and I did it for free just to get to know them and it opened up all these doors.

When you learn the skillset, every business needs it. So you can use it for so many different things because you have the ability to go into a business and we call them rainmakers. You know how to make it rain. You could walk in and be like, “Oh, you’ve got a cool coaching business or a cool software company, supplements, let me build a funnel for you and we can scale it and blow it up for you.” So it becomes a huge opportunity when you start learning the skillset.

Brooke: It makes me feel like such a powerful businesswoman to understand this skillset. And I think because you can do it with very little money down. Without having to risk a lot of money. So I’ll say all the time, one of the reasons why I feel so powerful is I know someone could come and take all my money and all my success and I could just rebuild it again because of this skillset.

And so I feel really powerful about teaching this, I’ve signed up for every single thing that you’ve ever done, including $250,000 mastermind. I believe in…

Russell: Brooke is in my highest level mastermind, so yes, she practices what she preaches.

Brooke: Everything you teach has - talk about turn into gold. Everything I’ve learned from you that I’ve applied has made me so much money. And so one of the things I’ve been talking about with my CEO is instead of me trying to teach all this stuff, what if I brought in the pros to teach it to my people, and so I had asked you, will you teach life coaches how to do funnels? And so we decided to do a webinar together. We’re going to do - and I want to invite everyone. We’re going to offer it for free, right?

Russell: Yes.

Brooke: It’s totally for free. We’re going to do it on March 2nd. You can sign up for the webinar. I’m going to let you talk a little bit about the webinar and what we’re going to teach on there, but it’s at www.FunnelsForLifeCoaches.com. You can sign up there for free and Russell is going to teach us, specifically life coaches, but anyone can come and learn.

Any business that you’re in, you can come and learn about funnels. And he’s going to give us our very own template for a life coach funnel in there. But can you talk about what we’ll learn on the webinar? Why we should come?

Russell: Yeah, for sure. I mean, obviously, we could talk about funnels forever but I wanted to make something very specific for your audience where it’s like, I am a life coach, I want to become a life coach, or whatever it is, what would be the funnel to use.

So I’m going to show you a couple of different funnels, but I’ll show you, if I was starting over today and I was in your role and this is what we’re trying to do, this is the exact funnel I would use. And it’s simple. It’s a three-page funnel. We’ll walk through what happens each page, how to do it, and it’s one of the most simple and most profitable funnels in the world.

So I’m going to show you guys that. We’ll give you templates so you can take it. You click a button, it’ll put it inside your account, and you can edit it, throw your video, your picture in. By the time this is done, every single one of you guys, if you come on the webinar, within an hour of being off the webinar, you could literally have your first coaching funnel live and you can post it on Facebook and start getting clients.

Within an hour or two after the thing is done, you can do that for sure. So we’ll walk you guys through the process, we’ll show you how it works, and I’ll show you other funnels that coaches can use because there’s not just one. There’s three or four that work really, really well with anyone who’s coaching or selling information products and things like that. So I’ll walk you through some of them.

And I’ll actually log into ClickFunnels, I’ll show you how simple it is because sometimes we get overwhelmed by the technology. So I’ll show you literally it’s this easy, you just drag and drop and edit and make it really simple and then give you guys a pre-built funnel that’s done.

You just got to swap out with your name, the market that you’re in, the niche that you’re in, plug in a video of you, and then it can literally be generating you leads by the time - within an hour or two after the webinar is done, you can be using it. So it’ll be fun. It’ll be a workshop where we’ll actually get some stuff done and giving you guys the tools you guys need to be successful with funnels.

Brooke: And listen, I already hear some of your objections. And I want to be strong with each of you. So one of you right now is thinking, “Well, I’m not technical. That’s going to be too complicated and too hard for me.” So what would you say to that?

Russell: Two things. Number one is it really is simple. And you doubted it before Brooke, I’ve known it, it’s simple enough you could. But number two is if you’re really not - if you don’t even want to, I understand that. Bring a spouse or a business partner or literally bring one of your teenage kids. My kids, I got five kids, three of them now have built funnels.

One’s 12, I have twins who are 17. They all can build funnels. We have an award - a big award we do every year. I think we’ve had six teenagers win it. So if you don’t want to do it, bring a teenager. If you don’t have a teenager, borrow one from a friend. Bring a teenager and they can be your funnel builder. You pay them a couple hundred bucks and they can do the whole thing for you.

So if you’re not technical, again, number one, it’s so simple you don’t have to be technical. Number two, bring somebody and we can help them. You can be the visionary who’s going to be doing your side of the business and have somebody who can do that part for you if you want it. Again, simple enough that a teenager can do it.

Brooke: I think a lot of times your brain will turn off a little bit. You’re like, I just want to outsource that, I just want to find a company that can do funnels for me. Now listen, Russell certifies people in building funnels. So you can go to his organization and find someone that’s trained to build funnels and have them build funnels for you.

But I still think it is very important for you to understand conceptually what a funnel is and how it works. So even if you have someone else building your funnel, they’re not going to care about it as much. There’s no way they should care about it as much as you do.

So coming to this webinar and just understanding the process and how it works, even if your brain wants to be confused about it for just a minute, that’s fine. It’s one of those things. The more you’re exposed to it, the more you understand it, I think the more successful you can ultimately be, even if you’re not the one - I don’t build funnels myself anymore, but I understand it because I did it that first time. So I want to encourage all of you just to come, even just as an observer I guess.

Russell: And then you know what questions to ask, right? Somebody’s building a funnel, is it working? I don’t know. You can be like, which page? What’s the conversion on page one, page two? So you can ask the right questions so you can tell them what to fix. Otherwise you’re like, it didn’t work, I don’t know. No, you need to know why it didn’t work.

Brooke: The other thing I want to say about this too is I think a lot of people will say, “I’m a life coach, I’m not the marketing person.” And listen, I am a life coach first and foremost, that is my love, that is my art, that’s my passion. But I will tell you, the combination of being a life coach and a marketer is amazing.

And we can do hard things. So if you constantly are telling yourself that’s not for me, that’s complicated, that’s technical, I don’t know how to do that, that will always be true for you. But if you are willing to just expose yourself to this, I feel like Russell is one of the best teachers in the industry to simplify. Make something super complicated, he’s studied all the people, and he simplifies it in such a way that makes it digestible.

But it’s still learning something new, which is good for your brain by the way. So March 2nd, I’m going to be there, Russell’s going to be there, we’re going to teach you about funnels. We’re going to go through funnels for life coaches. I can talk about some of my examples, I’m sure that Russell will tell us what’s working right now because he has visibility on what everyone’s responding to because it all changes, right? It all evolves as we go through it.

Russell: I’m excited. I think you guys are going to love it. Like I said, it’ll be simple, it’ll be easy, and you’ll leave with something that can literally start getting you guys leads the same day. And so it’ll be fun. I just want to address what you just said.

I always tell people, when you become as passionate about marketing the thing the love as you are about the thing you love, then the thing you love will get - it’ll become a big thing, right? I have so many friends who - they’re so passionate, they wrote a book that they love, they put their heart and soul into it, but they don’t know marketing, so the book sits on a shelf. They sell 100 copies in their entire lifetime.

You really love that thing, you’ve got to become obsessed with the marketing of that thing because that’s what gives this thing life. That’s how I can sell a million copies of my book because I’m obsessed with the marketing of the book, just as much as I am with the book.

So when you guys start understanding that and matching that, then it’s like, you learning marketing is like amplifying the thing that you really love the most. So looking through that lens makes it really exciting.

Brooke: I love it. That’s so well said. Russell, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and talking to all the people about business and how to make money and how to serve all the people. And I’m so excited for March 2nd. Go to www.FunnelsForLifeCoaches.com. Sign up for our webinar and we will see you live March 2nd. Thank you, Russell.

Russell: Thanks, Brooke.

Brooke: Bye everyone.

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