Welcome to this special episode series! Recently I recorded a training video for my 2CCX students and I made them commit to taking on 5 different challenges that would help them strengthen and grow their businesses. On this first episode we discuss challenge #1, Simplify your business. So tune in and see how these challenges can help you and your business get to where you want to be.

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---Transcript---

What's up, everybody? This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to Marketing Secrets Podcast. All right, I want to share with you guys something really cool. So recently I did a training for people who were inside of my Two Comma Club X, high-end coaching program. And the training chat really cool, and I thought it'd be fun to share it with you guys.

So I'm actually going to break it up over the next five episodes. There are five challenges that I gave them to do to be more successful inside their business. So, that's kind of the game plan. So each episode we'll cover one of the five challenges, and this very first challenge is called Simplify Your Business. So we're going to cue up the theme song, we come back, you guys will have a chance to hear and behind the scenes of a private training I was doing with my Two Comma Club X, high-end coaching students, and I hope you love it.

Whenever I would go to bed, I always like trying to do a lot ahead of time, this is my business model, I know what it is, it's like I'm driving traffic to a landing page, and then from here I'm upselling people on the phone, or I'm doing a webinar, or I can have a structure, like what you're doing, right?

And it's all the speakers are coming in that are giving you ideas. The goal is not to be like, "Nevermind, I'm believing that," rip it up and start something new. And the next speaker, you throw it away and something new. Instead, it's like listen to every single speaker and listening to their model and be like, "That's really cool, I love how they're doing that." And then be like, "That piece right there, that one thing that person said, that's something I can take and I can apply to my existing framework, the existing business I'm trying to do." Okay?

Because if you're not careful, you're going to hear all, again, we have so many amazing speakers, all of them had their own take on how to do business. If you're not careful, you're going to rip up and rewrite your business plan 20 times in the next two days, which is not going to help you. It's not going to get you to momentum, it's going to get you out of momentum. Right?

So the goal of this is to keep the frame or keep the business that you're working on, but then looking for what's the piece of gold from each presentation. Right? I'm going to be sharing these five different things. And each of these things, some of you guys might thing, "That one's not for me. That one's not for me," and, "That's the piece of gold I needed, I can add here, and I can apply to the framework that I've already built. It's going to help me to speed up and help me get to that next spot faster." Okay?

And so that's the way I want you guys to start looking at this week, not, "I'm rewriting my business plan 20 times over," it's, "I have 20 amazing people coming, what's the one piece of gold I can take from each speaker that I can apply to the existing thing that I'm already working on to help amplify it and help get me back into momentum?" Does that make sense? So that's kind of the goal.

So with that said, I'm going to jump into five different things I kind of wanted to go through with you guys, and I think they're fun. I'm excited for it. So, all right.

So the first thing, so again, I got a bunch of just things. So my first thing I want to put out there for everybody is the thought process of how can I simplify my business? How can I simplify my funnels? Last year, we did an affiliate retreat, some of our top affiliates came, and they came to Boise, and then Dave and Miles and everyone, took them out to McCall where they did water skiing and everything. Before they went out to have the big party, because I wasn't invited to the party. I'm just kidding, I was probably invited, I just wasn't able to go.

But before they all went, I sat down for like an hour with everybody and kind of asked everyone about their businesses, and everyone asked me some feedback on this stuff. And I remember one of the people who was there, her name is Alex, she asked me the biggest advice. I kind of asked some questions on her business. And really quick, I found out that basically she had like, I don't know, half dozen or more funnels that she had, she was driving traffic to, she was trying to do all these different things. And I said, "Ma'am, my biggest piece of advice for you right now is to simplify everything." I said, "Pick the one funnel that you like the most and delete the rest."

This should not be something where we're driving traffic to six or eight or 10 different offers. If you are, it gets very, very difficult. It's hard to focus all your efforts. I think a lot of people see my business and they're like, "Russell, you got eight offers." I'm like, "Yeah, I have 400 employees." You know what I mean? We're doing 10, $15 million a month. Don't necessarily model me because we've got more staff recently. When you get the point where you're trying to go for the billion dollar company, then look at me. But right now, what most guys are trying to zero to a million, million to ten, and ten to a hundred. So in those windows, the thing that's going to drive you is simplicity, one funnel.

And what's crazy is as I'm doing this book launch, Alex, she interviewed me on her thing, and she said, "Man, the biggest thing that grew my business the last year is when you were in Boise, and you said I need to kill all my funnels but one. She's like, "I left all stressed out because I love all these funnels. I put so much time and energy, but I thought, everyone says, 'Do what Russell says,' so I'm going to do what Russell says." And she's like, "I killed all these babies and I kept one." And she's like, "Because of that, all my focus is on my ad dollars, my promotions, my content, everything's focused on one thing, and because of that, it's grown."

And so I want to challenge you guys today. Again, this comes back to this whole over the next 20 speakers, don't try and reinvent 20 different business models. It's simplifying the one you have and figuring out the nuggets of gold you can apply to it. Okay?

So I'm going to show you guys if I was to start over right now, like the most simple model on earth, and this is all I would do, if it was me and I'm trying to make a million to $10 million a year company, I would do this. Okay? And I'm going to show you, it's Ben Settle slide, because Ben is the most consistent, simple business model I've ever seen, and it's exactly what I would do.

So Ben has got one product. Since the last couple years, he's developed a couple of other ones, but the reality, all those other products are... so he publishes a monthly newsletter. It's 97 bucks a month. You get a physical print newsletter in the mail every single month. And that's kind of what his business model is. And if you see, he sells other things, all he's done is over the last 10 years, he's been publishing this newsletter. He'll be like, "What are all the newsletters on this topic?" And he'll take like 30 issues, and he puts them with the others, like, "Here's my new product." And it's literally just his issues that are grouped together based on topics.

So he only has one thing he does. Every month, he writes the newsletter and he sells it. It's 97 bucks a month. And that's it. Right? And then he's got a squeeze page, and a squeeze page is basically, "Come here, give me your email address, and then I'm going to sell you my newsletter." Right? So people come here, they go to bensettle.com, they put their email address in, and then he has his one product he sells.

Basically, what he does is he sends out an email every single day, selling his one product. That's it. That's his business for the 10 years I've known him. I'm on his email list. I get an email every day, sometimes twice a day. And all he does is he promotes one thing and that's his newsletter. That's it. That's the business model, simple, easy, million dollar a year business right there, one product. And he sends an email a day.

So you come in and here it is. I was just pulling this today, I took a screenshot just to show you guys. March 11th, there's email. March 11th, there are two emails. March 10th, there were three emails. March 9th, there were two emails. March 8th, my birthday, there were two emails. March 7th, there was email. And just consistently, consistently, right?

So his whole business model is get people to come to my squeeze page, they give me their email address, I email them every single day to tell them to buy my one product. And you'll go, "Russell, what if they already bought the product, then what do I email them?" The same thing! Okay? Because guess what it does? It gets people to stick.

It's funny, the biggest growth I had in my business was five or six years ago, we decided we were going to focus 100% of our efforts on click funnels. And prior to that, most of you guys probably didn't come into my universe prior to that, but if you would have looked at it before, we had so many different offers, they were all over the place, like something selling this, and this, and this. And so I'm emailing my list, I'm like, "I don't know, I'll promote this today, and then this," and they're all sorts of random things, right? And when we said, "Okay, we're going to sell click funnels," everything's focused on this one thing, one product, one service, then everything grew for us. Right?

And even now, if you look at my business, we have front end funnels, like the books and things like that, but the only goal is if you want to buy the book is that you get into click funnels. Everything leads to this one road.

And so the business model could be as simple as a squeeze page, get somebody email, to opt in, and then a print newsletter, or a webinar, or a membership, just one thing, right? Or my high-end coaching, whatever the one thing is, and then every day email about it. And even if they bought it, you still email them every single day because it increases their likelihood of sticking. Right? They're seeing another promotion. It's like, "I did buy it. I remember buying that, that was a good thing I bought it. It's a good reminder." It's a stick strategy.

Probably three or four times a year, someone on my marketing team will come back and be like, "Russell, we need to use all the Actionetics complex features where people who have already bought this, it pulls down, they don't see any more messages about this and that." And like, "No, stop trying to be so technical and geeky. I don't care some about the book and they get 15 other emails about the book, because guess what? Now they're more likely to actually read the book because I keep selling them." I'm like, "Selling them on buying, it's one thing, but selling them on actually consuming it is another thing. So I'm going to keep telling you about it, and telling you about it, and telling you about it. I don't care if they bought it five times, I want them to keep getting it. If they got it and they've read it, I want them to keep reminding like, 'Yeah, that book was good, I need to go back and read it again, let me reference that thing.'" Right?

So don't think that even though Actionetics and every email autoresponder has all these complex features where you can after someone's done this, pull them out so they never see the emails again, that's not necessarily good. Right? Simplify, keep things simple.

During Funnel Hacking Live, after Garrett White had his presentation, we had this really cool moment backstage. I would love to, in fact, we did record, I just did the recording of it, but he told me, he's like, "A year ago," he's like, "My technical marketing team just convinced us to move off of Actionetics so we can move to, I can't remember what the other one was, something else, because that we could do all these more complex things and more split testing. And if they bought this, then like," he had this huge map. And he's like, "A year ago, they convinced me to do that."

And it was funny because I had tried to convince Todd to let us use a more complex email software too, because I was like, "we can get so much more complex and so much better if we did this." And Todd laughed and he's like, " Dude, Russell, you haven't even finished the follow up sequence, like one, like you're trying to get more complex and you only have a simple, basic one right now."

And we told Garrett that year. It's like, "You know what's funny?" He's like, "In the last year, working on this super hyper amazing sequence, it's going to do a million things." He's like, "Because of that, we've never sent an email out to our list during that time, because we bought the complexity, now it was so complex we never actually used it." And he was like, "I'm going home. We're canceling everything, we're moving back, we're just getting back to the simple, send an email every single day."

I don't know, there's so many tools that create complexity, and I think that's what's keeping most of us from where we want to be. So strip complexity. And I don't care if you use the Actionetics, or active campaign, or anyway, it doesn't matter, but just simple. Like Ben's model is simple. He doesn't stress out. Every day he spends 15 minutes writing an email, sends it out, sells his one product and that's it. And once a month he writes print newsletter. That's the business.

And the guy's written like eight zombie novels since I've known him because he's got nothing else to do all day, other than write a 20 minute email, send an email, do the once a month newsletter he publishes, and then he writes zombie novels all day. That's it. So, simplify.

How can we simplify our businesses and quit overcome complexing them. We can do that. Our company now, "Let's pull things back, let's simplify it, simplify." And I think some of you guys may have heard me told this story, I went, this is probably, I don't know, maybe a year ago, I went to John, and obviously I'm obsessed with funnels, right? I'm like, "John, okay, in a perfect world, how many funnels do you want from the funnel team that we can give you, the traffic team, to go to market and drive traffic to?" And I was hoping it was like one a week or two a week, whatever.

And he's like, "Two." I'm like, "Okay, what is that two a week, two a month, two a day? You let me know, we will do it." And he's like, "No, two total. That's all we need. I don't need more funnels." He was like, "In fact, if you stop making funnels, we would be completely fine." He was like, "Well, we're good now. We just need you guys focusing more on getting traffic into the funnels we have." That's what he told me. And I was like, "Oh."

I remember Brandon and Kaelin Poulin came to our office in Boise. And I was showing them everything like, "This is our funnel building team." And there's like four or five people. And he's like, "What do they do all day?" I'm like, "They build funnels." He's like, "You guys still build funnels?" Like, "Yeah, dude, that's what we do." And he's like, "Huh." He's like, "We built a funnel three years ago and we just keep driving more traffic to it." And I was like, "Huh."

There's the aha, right? You guys saw Brandon and Kaelin on stage getting the Two Comma Club C Award with one funnel. So simplicity, simplify things. Don't make them more complex. Okay? So many guys don't want complex things. I'm the same way, because I love creativity of the creating. Focus your creativity on new creative to get people into the one funnel you're focusing on. That's the shift in mindset. Okay?

So, number one, simplify. Look at lead magnet, email daily core offers. Here's Ben's: people opt in, he sells them his newsletter, and he sends an email every single day about the newsletter. Okay? This is kind of something we've been talking a lot over last couple years about, publishing daily. I think some people stress out about it. Like, "I don't know how to do it, I'm not going to be able to do it."

I want to simplify it again. Okay? Look how Ben Settle does it. Okay? He sends out an email every single day. Here's a snapshot of just since February 23rd, like literally, every single day. So he sends an email every day, and then he takes that same email, and he goes to his blog and he posts it, copy and paste it to the blog. Now he's posting a blog post every single day. Email a day, blog post a day, it's the same thing word for word, copy and pasted, but he's publishing every day.

So if you know like, okay, if I'm publishing every day, I've got to send an email to my list every day. I know that. I'm going to log in, send an email to my list, and I'm going to copy the email, and I'm going to post to my blog and boom, now I'm done. Okay?

I think so many times we get so scared about, "The publishing everyday thing, how am I going to do it?" It can and it should be more and more simple. Okay? All right.

So the first challenge I have for you guys, I got five challenges today. Challenge number one, I want you to look at the funnels you are creating, the funnels you're working on, the business model you have, and think, "How can I simplify this? How can I make it where I can do the entire business in one hour in quarantine, then go play with my kids the rest of the day?" Right? How can I simplify my business? That's the first challenge for you guys. Okay? Challenge accepted? Can you guys all do that?

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2CCX Challenge 1: Simplify Your Business...