The Russell Brunson Show - Lean In... (Revisited!)

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

Here's a shortened version: Hey everyone, Russell here. I wanted to share a story about leaning in when times get tough. Recently, Steven Larsen and I were discussing the Two Comma Club X coaching program. One member, Marie, was struggling with payments. Instead of quitting, Steven told her to lean in. And she did. Despite the challenges, Marie built a successful business helping people launch podcasts. The lesson is simple: when faced with adversity, lean in. It's about doubling down and going all in, even when it's scary. I've seen this principle work in my life, from sports to business. Leaning in during tough times often leads to greatness on the other side. So, remember to lean in when life throws challenges your way. It could be the key to your success. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Air Transat presents two friends traveling in Europe for the first time and feeling some pretty big emotions. This coffee is so good. How do they make it so rich and tasty? Those paintings we saw today weren't prints. They were the actual paintings. I have never seen tomatoes like this. How are they so red? With flight deals starting at just $589, it's time for you to see what Europe has to offer. Don't worry, you can handle it. Visit airTransat.com for details. Conditions apply. AirTransat. Travel moves us. Good morning, everybody. This is Russell Brunson.

I want to welcome you to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. I just dropped my kids off at school, and now we get to hang out. So the big question is this. How are entrepreneurs like us, who didn't cheat and take on venture capital, who are 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.

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I have this really weird thing where I'll get in the mood and I'll do 10 in a row, and then I'll get out of the mood and I won't do something for a little while and try to be more consistent. We're getting two or three a week. And so I apologize for any inconsistency. Um, but I'm grateful for you guys and for listening in and, and hopefully you get good stuff each time. Um, you know, it's been fun doing this now for, I don't know, 500 plus episodes. And if you haven't gotten the marketing secrets, uh, black book yet yet go to marketingsecrets.com slash black book but some of you guys i know some of you guys know julie story and i went through and um she listened to every episode and then took notes on them all and then rewrote them into like

a book of the top 99 um takeaways from this podcast so shortcut your life a little bit go and get those um print them out as everyone's been doing, printing them out and read them. But, um, it'll catch you up on the marketing secrets, the last five years of the best and most important ahas and things like that. But that's all freebie for you guys. But, um, today I had a specific thing I want to share with you guys. I've been, I've been wanting to talk about this for a little while, but, um, just been, life's a little crazy right now trying to get done some big projects. Uh, this month of October is crazy. Um, speaking all over and flying a bunch of places. Um, we're doing an event with two Comic Club X members and a whole bunch of other things.

Uh, rebuilding the whole company structure. We are, anyway, I could go on and on. It's, but it's, ah, it's so much fun. I love what we do. I love that we get to play this game every day. And, um, anyway, but, um, what I want to share with you guys today is it was kind of fun, actually. Steven Larson was at the office the other day. Some of you guys know we launched the One Funnel Away Challenge, which has been nuts.

We had over 7,500 people sign up for it. It's a $100 challenge. So 7,500 people paid $100 to be part of it. And every day for 30 days, Steven jumps on and yells at everybody and pushes them forward through some curriculum that we're taking people through. And again, it's called the one funnel away challenge. A lot of you guys are part of it. If you're not part of it, then it's because you didn't pay attention to the 30 days.com launch we did recently. But anyway, uh, for all of you guys who are in there, it's been so much fun. And so it's fun though, cause Steven comes in the office every day.

I miss having him there. He used to be there every day. He had to go out and start his own business and all that kind of stuff, which I am proud of him for. I'm not just teasing. It is really cool. I'm grateful to be able to pull him into that because it's fun to see him every day and see him in his element where he's jumping on and training and motivating and pushing and just doing his thing.

It's amazing. It's, it's this new program, the one for my challenge is going to change a ton of people's lives. And I'm excited for all you guys who are going through it. But I digress. The reason why I want to tell the story is because he was in the office and we're talking about a bunch of stuff. And we're actually talking about the two comma club X coaching program, which is something we sold at Last Funnel Hacking Live. And I think we had 650-ish people join it. And it's not a cheap program. It's $18,000 a year or $1,800 a month. And a lot of people came in at $1,800 a month, which obviously is not a cheap investment.

But at the same time, like I talked about when we sold it, I was like, it's less than half the cost of a crappy employee, right? Like, and you're getting access to all these coaches and all these things. And, um, so far we've done three or four events. I'm doing a two day event this month that only them are allowed to come to. And it's, it's, it's expensive, but it's also super cheap. You know what I mean? And, um, and we were talking about some people that dropped out of it for whatever reason. And, and some people have dropped out for legitimate reasons. I totally understand that.

But, um, the story I want to tell you today was interesting was about Steven's sister, uh, Marie, and she joined the program and she was, she's like a group of a bunch of people that joined that probably shouldn't have joined, right? Like it's like, I think for some people, like it was as much money as they were making at the time and they still just jumped in cause they're like, they saw the vision, they wanted the thing and they jumped in. And so, um, what's interesting is Steven told me the story is that, um, like two months of the program, I think it was the second or the third month, the next $1,800 a month

payment came up and she was freaking out and, um, and had kind of a thing of just like, oh my gosh, I'm not making enough money for this. Like, I can't do this. I need to drop out. And she told Steven, like, I can't do this. I need to be out of it. And Steven listened to her talk about like, you know, all the reasons why she needed to drop out. And he's like, he listened to it. And after, after she got done saying all the reasons why she should drop out, then he said, or you should lean in. And that is the message for today.

He said, or you should lean in. What does that mean? She said, you should lean into it. Instead of like freaking out, oh, I can't handle this, she said, let's lean into this, let's double down, let's go all in. And when you do, that's when amazing things happen. And to Marie's credit, she did, she leaned in

during that time, got through the scary bumpiness and launched her business. And right now her business is doing somewhere between $8,000 and $10,000 a month, which is amazing and insane and so cool. She's helping people launch podcasts. And like you're, if it's like my podcast, if I was working, I would record this, I'd

send it to her. And then she was somehow magically show up on iTunes. Right. My brother does that for me. Um, but that's what she does for people now and she's killing it. But it's because during the, you know, the, the, the turbulent times that like, ah, run backing out, running away, she leaned in, right?

And I want to think about everything great that's ever happened in your life, right? For those who were into sports, think about the hardest times, the times, and I only know wrestling. Whoa, I only know wrestling because that's my world, right? But the times where I needed to cut weight or I had to go against someone who was really, really tough

or I lost a match or whatever, those were the times you want to quit, right? You're like, I'm out. I'm back in this back out and walk away from it. But it was in those times when instead of backing out, I leaned in that I had success. Um, yesterday it was kind of fun. We were working on a video and I was like, I need all my old wrestling matches from back in the day. And so my, my brother Scott, he, um, had them all on his hard drive. And so he dumped them all into Google Drive. And so I was looking at all these old videos of me through high school and through college wrestling. And so I was kind of going down this jaunt down memory lane, right?

And I saw in there the match my junior year where I lost to this guy named Nick Fresquez, very first match of the season. And I remember this because we recorded it, but I think my mom accidentally recorded over it or something like that. But we had like a 22 second clip of that match. And it was when Nick did this move on me that was a move that he beat me with. And I remember my dad used to watch that 22 second clip over and over and over and over. And I'd come up during the season.

I wake up in the mornings and he'd be upstairs watching it. And he's like, Russell, come here. And he's sitting down during the season. I wake up in the mornings and he'd be upstairs watching it. He'd say, Russell, come here. He'd sit me down on the carpet. He'd be like, can I show me how to move work? We would drill it and go to the wrestling arena. We'd drill the move. I'm like, man, we must watch that 22-second clip of my loss like a thousand times or more during the next four months of the wrestling season.

We would practice it and practice it and practice it. Yesterday, I found the match of me winning the state title. I remember watching it and seeing as I did that move, the same move he did on me to beat me the first season is the same move I use on him to beat him, um, in the state finals. And I was thinking of that as like in context of this whole concept, Steven shared with me about leaning in. I was just like, man, if I wouldn't have leaned in to that, if I'd been like, oh my gosh, I lost him, had fear and all these things, then I never would have been a state champ, which man, the, the, you know, life circumstances since that moment that brought me to where I am today, you know, all hinged upon that moment.

Like, it's kind of crazy if we were to go back in time that far. Right. So in sports, like, like the times it was the most painful and the scary and the thing that freaked out about the most is when I leaned in is when greatness came. I think about my marriage. I love my wife. I love my kids. But marriage isn't easy.

I thought it was going to be. I'm not going to lie. If I was to go back to Russell 20 years ago, I was struggling through life, just waiting to be married. Then everything will be good. My marriage has been amazing. But man, it's been hard. And I think my wife would agree with that. Um, my marriage has been amazing. Um, uh, but man, it's been hard. And I think my wife would agree that it was way harder than we thought. Like, and it's those times where it's like hard or it's like, man, it'd be so easy. Just like,

huh? Like, like back out. Like I can't afford them on the payment, boom and back out. Right. But instead I leaned in and was like, I love her. I love, like I've committed to this. I'm doing it. And because of that, that's how we've made a marriage that wasn't just good, but a marriage that's great. Right. Um, I think about in business, like how many times, oh, how many times I could tell you the stories of me going, you know, building a company and crashing it and building and crashing it. Um, I'm working on, uh, we're doing, uh, this, uh, event in Utah to drive our comedy club

in two weeks. I guess it's a week and a half now. And I want to make an outline of like the history of my business, right? So I went to the good old Wayback Machine. I tried to find every single funnel that I've ever built. And I forgot how much stuff I've done, how many software products we launched, how many info products, how many courses, how many viral sites, how many list building sites, how many...

It's crazy. I haven't finished the list yet. I'm already at 10 pages of links to funnels that I built. And these aren't just like every page in the funnel. Cause I can't, the way back machine way back shows you like snapshots of your websites back as far back as since way back machine was created. Right. If you've never used a way back machine, by the way, you should go, go to archive.org. In fact, do this for fun. Go to archive.org. That's way back machine type in.com secrets.com like my, and go look at the history of my site. You'll see every variation of Russell over the last 10 years on that site.

Every blog I launched on there, everything. Anyway, it's funny to see the history of these things. So I went to Wayback Machine and was trying to find all these things. And you can't see upsells, downsells. So I could just find the landing page of every funnel I've ever created in my life. And it's 10 pages now funnels, right? I'm going through this. I'm laughing at some, some of the worst ideas ever. Some that were like completely bombed. Some that I spent literally millions of dollars on that never went live. Um, in fact, there were two or three I found. I was just like sick to my stomach. I was like, I spent four years of my life.

I had six full-time developers. I was paying a million and a half, two million a year for these guys. And none of these ever saw the light of day. Like, oh, some of them were the precursors to ClickFunnels. I remember click.com.com was the precursor to ClickFunnels. And I saw this thing. Like that was one we were literally spent. I'd say conservatively at least a million, probably closer to two or three million we spent on that thing. And I found all the screenshots, all the everything, but it never went live. Nobody ever saw it.

But had I not have leaned into that and tried to build that, we wouldn't be at ClickFunnels today, right? I think there are five different software programs recreated. They're all precursors to ClickFunnels. One was an RSS autoresponder. One was a desktop autoresponder. One was a funnel building software. One was a shopping cart. Like all these things I tried to build that failed, right? I found the site Champion Sound.

This is like, oh, I was in the brinks of bankruptcy, right? Literally, like I had just had to fire like 80 of my employees, moved from a 20,000 square foot office to 2,000. I had $150,000 in IRS back taxes I owe. And I was trying to figure out how in the world to save the company and save myself from bankruptcy. And if I would've gone bankrupt, I still had all this outstanding coaching liability.

So I would've like destroyed my reputation. So I was like on this thing where if I would've given up, I would've gone to jail and destroyed my reputation. So I was like, I can't give up. I have to lean in. I'm being forced to. And I remember I was on flippa.com trying to buy a website

trying to figure out my future and like two o'clock in the morning i saw this site called championsound.com which is plug that in the web app machine you'll see what it is anyway but it was an email text message autoresponder for bands and i was like oh my gosh this would be the greatest thing in the world i could start this thing we sell to bands but i was like i could read i could like remark or um launch you know like clone the site and launch an email text message autoresponder for dentists and for chiropractors and i was like this is the future of my business so i leaned in took twenty thousand dollars i didn't have bought the website and then what's crazy is when we tried to make it go live um uh or like when

after i bought it they tried to transfer it to me to me they're like um i gave them access to my server and like oh, I need a server that can run Ruby on rails. I was like, what's Ruby on rails? And they're like, oh, it's like a different language. I'm like, what? And I didn't know, I'd never even heard that word before. And I remember then the development guys I had on top of my team at the time knew Ruby

on rails. I tried to hire people on Odesk to do Ruby on rails and I couldn't find anyone that could do it. And, um, and after three or four months of trying to find somebody who could edit the software because like after they installed it and they left and then like all these things were broken, it wasn't working. All the customers were like angry and it was horrible. So I literally, um, after about three months that I was like, I just wasted $20,000 we didn't have. I'm like, just shut it down. The servers were like a thousand bucks a month too. They're super expensive.

I was like, just shut it down. Like, and I was packing my bags for them. I was walking out. And, um, as I walked away from my desk, I stopped for a second. I was like, wait a minute. I wonder if there's anyone on my list who knows Ruby on Rails, which is a stupid thing to say. Cause at the time my list was a bunch of like business opportunity seekers and, and they weren't programmers or developers, but I had that thought in my head. So I walked back into my desk, I leaned in, right? Send an email to my list saying, if you know Ruby on Rails, I'm looking for a partner. And that email happened to land in the inbox of somebody who had bought in my micro continuity product like five years earlier, happened to be on my email list. But because my subject line said Ruby on Rails and partner, he saw that and he said, I'm looking for a partnership with some,

you know, with the marketer. I know Ruby on Rails and it was Todd Dickerson who responded back. Anyone who knows my story knows that Todd is my co-founder at ClickFunnels. He's the one who built it. Had I not bought in Champion Sound, had I not leaned in with the last bit of money we had, had I not tried to get it to work, if I had not given up, if I had not sent an email to my list, if I hadn't done all these little things, that email would never land in Todd Dickerson's inbox and ClickFunnels wouldn't be here today. And so my message for you guys today is I know that in all areas of your life, there's

ups and there's downs. And typically when everything's up in business, something's going to be down somewhere else. Sorry, the guy's blown least behind me. You know, when, when you're up in business, you're gonna be down in your, in your spiritual life. When you're up in your spiritual life, your business is uh you know when when you're up in business you're gonna be down in your in your spiritual life when you're up in your spiritual life your business is gonna go down or you're up in your personal health your business will you know your marriage will collapse it's always gonna be ups and downs and i don't think anyone's ever had it where everything's perfect all the time so life would be too easy um and so it kind of kind of cycles like that i say you know whatever season of your life you're in, where you're in that hard time, instead of like running away from that hard thing, do what Marie said or what Stephen

said to Marie and be like, lean in. Like, yeah, you could, you could walk away. Yeah. There's a million reasons why you shouldn't do this, but you know, it's right. You know, it's good. You've committed to it. Let's lean in instead of step away. And if you do that, I promise your greatness is on just on the other side of that.

If Marie wouldn't have leaned in, where would she be today? Would that company ever be there? Would all the people she's serving now, would she be able to serve them? Probably not, right? If I wouldn't have leaned into sports, would I ever become a state champ and an All-American and wrestle in college and end up in Boise where I needed to be to be able to create click funnels, right? In my marriage, all the hard times I wouldn't have leaned in, would I be where I am today

with my amazing wife and amazing kids. Oh, I got the coolest kids in the world. We were, um, last night we were downstairs cause we're redoing our bedroom. So we're sleeping down in the basement right now. And on the big screen, I wanted to show my wife a video. So show the video. And then we started looking at all the videos in our camera roll. And then, um, somehow I'm, I don't even know how this works, but somehow on iTunes, on

my, on the big screen TV, they had all these clips from way back in the day. So somehow it got saved to iTunes or iCloud or I don't know, something. So we're watching these videos of our kids back from like Aiden, who's eight years old now. These videos of him when he was like a newborn. And there's this one, he was probably like maybe three years old. And he had on Ellie's swimsuit. So it's like pink and purple swimsuit. And he's dancing. and we're like crying, laughing. I was like watching him dancing and in the video, Colette's like, Aiden, someday we're gonna send this to your wife. And he's like,

Mom, why don't you send it to her right now? We're just laughing in his little stick legs, dancing in her swimsuit. And like, oh, and we're sitting there just laughing our faces off. And I was like, man, there were so many times in this marriage where either of us could have walked away, right? So many times in our relationship. And it's like sitting here and just laughing at that and realizing how happy we are and like how grateful we are for each other and how grateful we are for our amazing kids. Right? But that didn't come, you know, from, from stepping away from the challenge. It came from, from leaning in. So there's a message for today. Thank you,

Steven Larson for sharing that with me the other day. He said it kind of in passing, but had big impact on me and want to share with you guys. And hopefully that will help someone in your moment of struggle in any area of your life. Just remember to lean in. Thanks so much. And we'll talk to you soon. Hey everybody, this is Russell again. And really quick, I just opened up a texting community, which means you can text me your questions. And right now I'm spending anywhere between 10 and 30 minutes every single day answering questions through text message

to people who are on the podcast. And so I wanted you to stop everything you're doing, pull your phone out and actually text me a message, okay? Now the phone number you need to text is 208-231-3797. Once again, it's 208-231-3797. When you text me, just say hello. And then what's going to happen is I'll add you to my phone and then they'll send you back a message where you can add me to your phone. And then we can start having conversations. On top of that, through this texting community, is where I'm gonna be giving out free swag, giving away free copies of my book,

let you know about book signings, about times I'm coming to your local area, and a whole bunch more. So I wanna make sure you are on this list. On top of that, every single day, I'm sending out my favorite quotes, my favorite frameworks, and things you can get for free, only through my texting platform.

So what you need to do right now is pull out your phone and text me at area code 208-231-3797. One more time, that's 208-231-3797. I can't wait to hear from you right now.