Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses and I do it for an audience of real entrepreneurs who often are building their companies as they listen to these interviews. And I know about it because they’ll do things like come back here, do an interview and tell me how long they’ve been listening, or they’ll do things like my new friend Russell Brunson has done, which is just text me messages and go, “I can’t believe you asked that question. I love that question.”
All right. Speaking of Russell Brunson, he is the founder of ClickFunnels. And one of the most amazing things that happened to me last year was that he flew me out to do an interview of him on stage in front of his audience. And usually, interviews are not that amazing for me. I love them. I’ll do them all day long. Meeting entrepreneurs is not that amazing. I do it all day long. They’re in my house. They’re here at the office. But there’s something about Russell Brunson and this freaking ClickFunnels that just electrified me.
And I brought it up in kind of a jokey way to the audience, and I kind of even made fun of the audience for being so bought into this, almost like he’s got some kind of a cult. And once I was done, Russell gets off stage and he goes to the back, he’s ushered a way to go do other things because it’s his event and they said, “Do you want to hang out with Russell in the back?” I go, “No. I want to meet every person who is in here in the audience.” And I did. I think I met every single person and spent time with them, and this one guy who you’re about to meet, Jeffrey Banek, he comes up to me and says, “You know how you said that people really love ClickFunnels.” I said, “Yeah, I do.” He says, “Well, look at this.” And can you show the people who are watching? This my first Facebook Live. A little bit more towards the center. Look at that. So he’s got Click Hacker logo on his arm.
Jeff: A Funnel Hacker.
Andrew: A Funnel Hacker, excuse me. And then the other one is Two Comma Club on his other arm. Tattoos from ClickFunnels and ClickFunnels’ mission, I go, “What is this?” And then he started telling me his story how he had this really rough situation, which you’re going to hear about in a moment, and how he crawled out of it by creating funnels and then he grew his business. And I said, “Hang on, stop right there. I’m going to set you up with an appointment with one of our producers so that we can research you, pre-interview you and get you ready.” And that’s what we did.
I’ve got his story in front of me. It’s more amazing than I realized when he and I talked. You’re about to meet Jeff Banek. He is the founder of FunnelDoc. They are a consulting company that builds funnels, bots, and emails that lead to sales. This interview is sponsored by two phenomenal companies. The first will host your website right. It’s called HostGator. And the second will help you hire phenomenal developers. It’s called Toptal. I’ll tell you more about those later.
Jeff, good to have you here.
Jeff: Thanks, Andrew. I appreciate it, man. This is amazing.
Andrew: Most people are going to be listening to this on the podcast so they won’t see those two framed gold records behind you. What do they represent for people who don’t know?
Jeff: These are funnels that I created, whole ecosystems that I created that when the funnel generates $1 million in sales or more through ClickFunnels’ funnel, through one funnel, you’re awarded the Two Comma Award, which is $1 million in sales.
Andrew: So you’ve done that now twice.
Jeff: Correct, yes, with two different products. Yes.
Andrew: Two different funnels, sales pages, and that continue taking a stranger through a process of getting them to buy and you did over a million in sales in both cases. We’re going to find out how you did that. What I’m curious about is what’s your cut of all that as someone who does it for his clients?
Jeff: Well, initially it was very, very small because as you know when you’re first starting out if you don’t have a resume behind you, if you’re just bootstrapping and getting everything you can to make ends meet, you take what you can and it was very little in comparative to what I charge now. It was $5,000, $6,000 per funnel.
Andrew: What’s your revenue now?
Jeff: Total revenue or like what we charge or . . . ?
Andrew: Overall annual revenue 2018, how much?
Jeff: Just over half a million dollars.
Andrew: Get out.
Jeff: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew: And so your profits are how close to that?
Jeff: Probably about 75% to 80% because originally I was doing a majority of everything. We’ve contracted out and stuff now so it’s dropped a little bit, but we’re looking at probably with the contractors another 10% to 20%.
Andrew: Hang on. Hang on. $300,000 . . .
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: . . . going through your pocket last year?
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: Dude.
Jeff: I know. Right?
Andrew: You know what? I was a little concerned that this was going to be “I made everyone else rich, but I’m in trouble” type of story. It’s not.
Jeff: No.
Andrew: So you started out in business at 18 selling knives door to door. What type of knives?
Jeff: Yeah, I did. I’ve been . . . Back then you didn’t call it an entrepreneur. You’re just a hustler. You just . . . Like, we’re trying to find your own business . . .
Andrew: It’s almost like you are a loser. Imagine if people who went to school with you saw that you were selling knives door to door, it’s like, “What happened to this guy?” Back then being an entrepreneur meant you didn’t have a job. You sold Cutco knives door to door. I’ve been so fascinated by how many entrepreneurs I interviewed who went and sold Cutco knives then I said, “Who’s the best salesman?” It turned out it was Hal Elrod for a period there. I had him on to talk about how he sold Cutco knives. I freaking love it. Tell me about what you did to help you sell Cutco knives. And if you weren’t good at it, tell me a failure story. If you had a good experience, tell me a positive story. I want to learn from it.
Jeff: I’ve been very blessed because I’ve always understood the customer journey as far as like how someone had to move to be able to want a product or to be shifted from one thought process to another. So it was always easy for me to be able to like, “Oh, this is your objection? Let me overcome that. This is your objection? Let me overcome that.” And as silly as it sounds, that’s one reason why I translated in the funnel so easy because it’s all sales, like, really, that’s what it boils down to.
Andrew: Did you have a list of objections written down so if someone brought one up you’d know exactly what to say?
Jeff: No. Originally it would just getting beaten up a bunch. You hear it enough, you start keying in on it, you’re like, “Oh, well, I need to ask my spouse. Well, Mrs. Jones obviously you probably do most of cooking, right? Well, of course, so you’re the one that makes the decisions when it comes to [inaudible 00:06:22]. You don’t really need to talk to your husband about this.” Just as something simple as that.
Andrew: You know what? This is my first time ever publishing one of my interviews on Facebook Live and I put it into the ClickFunnels’ group, people are saying, “Is this okay?” I hope it’s okay. Guys, if it’s not okay, please boot me off. I’m totally fine with that. One of my challenges with ClickFunnels is, these freaking guys are always constantly smiling and they’re always okay helping you out. I don’t want to take advantage of their generosity beyond where . . .
Jeff: Yeah. I don’t want to promote myself or anything [inaudible 00:06:52]
Andrew: I want to promote you.
Jeff: . . . talk about Russell Brunson, dude.
Andrew: You were a personal trainer.
Jeff: Yes.
Andrew: How rip did you get? I never got ripped.
Jeff: I was actually . . . I think I have a picture. Actually, this is funny you ask this. Here’s me at a volleyball . . . Oh, you can’t see it. I was . . .
Andrew: It’s hard to see because of the reflection. You were shredded.
Jeff: I was shredded. I got down to about 6% to 7% body fat. I had every personal training certification that there is. I learned and that’s where I learned the sales too was it just is always my whole life is had to do with sales.
Andrew: And so when you were a personal trainer was the goal to own your own gym or was the goal to just get by or what were you trying to do?
Jeff: That was the funny thing, like, in that world I never pictured or imagined me anything . . . That was like the pinnacle was to maybe own my own business or gym. I was running gyms, I was doing personal training, but my top of the tier I couldn’t imagine doing anything more than like, $100,000 or maybe $200,000 in a year and owning my own business. That was what I thought would be the most elite thing, my dream, and since then the whole paradigm shifted completely. It’s been amazing.
Andrew: You got “DotCom Secrets” the book. And what happened? Who gave it to you?
Jeff: This gentleman who I was studying under . . . that I was learning sales from [Badros Cullien 00:08:21]. Awesome man. Incredible man. And again, sort of like Russell dove in everything he said and one day he held up the book “DotCom Secrets” and was like, “You got to read it. You got to find out more about this guy, Russell.” So it was a free plus shipping offer, so you only had to cover the shipping, so it made sense no matter what I ordered the book. I’ll never forget the first time I ever read it. It literally like changed my life. Everything that I learned with sales now made sense and transferred online. It was literally like a light shined down and it all made sense to me at that point.
Andrew: You know what? I had a situation with that book that I talked about when I interviewed Russell on Mixergy. I thought “DotCom Secrets” was going to be a junkie-lead magnet with no substance to it because of the name or something. I don’t . . . Or maybe because he was giving it away for free. Then I read it and it was so good. It was actually substantive and it was full of the type of things that you don’t want to say publicly, that you shouldn’t say publicly and attach your name to it, that you might say privately when you’ve found a hustle online, you’ve found the way to make things work. Anyway, so you saw that and you said, “I think I’ve got to get into this.” You told our producer, “I didn’t have a lot of money but I spent every penny on any product Russell released.”
Jeff: Yeah. I literally like . . . At this time my wife’s like supporting me because I’m trying to go down this entrepreneurial journey and figure out where my path was going to be, but I knew Russell was a part of it and I knew that ClickFunnels was the future and that’s why I’ve got this tattoo because I knew that this was going to be something great and I wanted to be a part of it, so I dove all in everything he bought, Funnel Hacking, I got the Funnel Hacker Secrets, I got the . . . At this time it was like you could get . . . It was the . . . I’m trying to think what it was called. It was like Funnel . . . It was like, Funnel Emerging I believe at the time that I came in, but literally, like every product he started putting out, every book he did, I bought everything and it made all the difference because I literally went to sleep watching Russell Brunson and woke up watching Russell Brunson. I couldn’t get enough.
Andrew: What do you think it is about him?
Jeff: He cares.
Andrew: I don’t care about people caring. For some reason when people care I feel a little uncomfortable. I think . . . I have my own ideas. What else is it? Because . . . Were you in a place where you felt like you needed somebody to care about you? Is that why that mattered?
Jeff: No. No. He’s just real too, like, he shares everything. You feel . . . Whether actually know Russell or not or ever spoke to him, you feel he’s like one of your best friends and you trust him.
Andrew: All right. Here’s my theory about . . . Here’s the thing that I like. What he does is . . . You know like Gary Vaynerchuk will pump you up with, like, motivation and a little bit of direction, but then you go, “Okay. Gary said I should publish a lot of content. How? Where do I go? What am I exactly supposed to do with it? Now you fired me up. Now what?” They never does it.
Well, Russell will go, “Okay. Now I fired you up, here’s a step by step. Almost a little too much is going to scare away some people of what you could do and if you want, I’ve got software that does it too. And if anything, I know I’m not supposed to tell you to go start your own cult but here’s how I started my cult and what we need to do is have a goal for people to have.” And like all that stuff and then you go, “This actually is inspiring, it makes sense, and now you’ve given me something to do with it.”
Jeff: I think too the way Russell speaks, he tells everything in parables and stories.
Andrew: Right.
Jeff: One of the greatest books is the Bible because it’s all stories whether you believe it or not, it’s all stories and because of that it resonates with so many people and that’s one of the things Russell always does is he speaks with stories and because of that people are able to understand and resonate with what he’s got to say.
Andrew: So look at this. Joanne Miller is watching us live, she’s saying, “He is real. He found a way to make money and he’s sharing it.” I guess I like that you care that way. For some reason I don’t have that type of feeling in my body, the ability to like, care that someone wants to . . . Maybe I do. I don’t know.
Jeff: Well, here’s the thing about Russell too. He believes and I’m sure he’s right that this is like a divine mission to help lead all of us to be able to be successful in life.
Andrew: All right. So you saw him, you bought all of his stuff. Now you said, “I see the way the world works. I’m committed.” The first tattoo was for what purpose?
Jeff: To either be some weirdo with a ClickFunnels’ tattoo or to do something great in the ClickFunnels’ community.
Andrew: And this was your way of saying to yourself, “If I have this tattoo and I don’t build something great, I am now a failure with an embarrassing tattoo that the world will know I failed.” That’s what it was.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: It was you saying, “I’m going to burn my boats?”
Jeff: Yeah. Oh, for sure. There was . . .
Andrew: What about this? Did you feel like, “Well, I’m a little bit too slavishly connected to this one company. It’s just a company who cares”?
Jeff: I don’t think when I first got it and put it out there that I didn’t get so many people going, “You better hope they never changed their logo.” Things like that. There was . . . But I believed in it and I saw that this is where it needed to go.
Andrew: You said your wife was at that point taking care of you. How did it feel as a man to have to be supported by your . . . Oh, I saw your shoulders dropped as I said that. Talk about that.
Jeff: I mean, it’s hard. I’m older. There’s . . . Everyone from our generation you’re supposed to be the breadwinner from get-go and here I am not sure with what direction or what path I wanted to take. I know where I want to go but I’m not 100% sure how to get there and she’s supporting me 100% and then she loses her job and we wind up going from paycheck to paycheck then to like no check to no check, man. It gets really bad really [quickly 00:14:27].
Andrew: Did you argue?
Jeff: I’ve been . . . I mean, yeah, of course. Nothing’s perfect. To say that we fought would be . . . Again, fight or anything would be a lie because, you know . . .
Andrew: Because of the stress.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: Financially. And meanwhile, you’re continue and continue. I see Myles Clifford from ClickFunnels is watching us live right now.
Jeff: Yeah.
Andrew: Wow. I know you’re super nice. If this is not a good fit, just bump it off. Delete it if you want to. Like, I don’t want it on your group, but people seem to be okay with it, except for a couple which I’m glad are telling me that they’re not happy that I put it in there. I want to know.
Look at this. [Lauren 00:15:04] Smith is watching. It’s his birthday. The dude instead of going and doing something else he’s sitting and watching us. Hey, Lauren.
Jeff: Well, that’s the thing with ClickFunnels. But my wife, yeah, she supported me all and it was rough.
Andrew: Did she feel like you were a loser? Did she say, “Who did I marry? He’s now following this thing. He can’t afford to take care of us.” You’re smiling.
Jeff: Well, because like, man, I’ve golly, I’m so . . . I’m just . . .
Andrew: Go ahead.
Jeff: . . . super blessed, man. Like, she did . . . If she felt that way, she kept inside.
Andrew: Wow.
Jeff: She supported me every bit. Like, no matter how hard it got, she would always have a smile on her face, man. And no matter how much in stuff . . . No matter how . . . Because I’m rough on myself, man. I’m really that guy, it’s like, I’m super rough on myself. She’s always there that . . . and helped carry me and without her I wouldn’t have made it through.
Andrew: Wow. How long have you two been together?
Jeff: Eight years. It will be nine years this coming April. Yeah.
Andrew: So you said, “I need to get customers, but first, I want to help people so that they know what I know so that I stand out.” Is that when you went into the ClickFunnels’ group and started to jump in and help people?
Jeff: Yeah. I need to learn it and sometimes the best way to learn it is to teach. So I literally jumped in the group, it was at like 35,000 people at this time and just started giving as much value as I can just telling everything I could. If I didn’t know the answer, I would find it and then get back to the person. And because of that, my knowledge just grew and grew and grew to where I’m going to take the challenge in the group to say that, “I probably know not more than sales by any means, but more about ClickFunnels itself than probably Russell Brunson.”
Andrew: Really? More about the software than Russell Brunson does, the founder of ClickFunnels?
Jeff: I mean . . .
Andrew: It’s possible.
Jeff: I want to say . . . Don’t get me wrong. Russell’s the man, like, he knows everything about marketing. Now if you ask Todd Dickerson who made it, I’m sure he knows way more about Click . . . but like I know every nuance of . . . Hey, here’s the thing too. We realize Russell doesn’t make funnels on a daily basis with ClickFunnels anymore. He’s a CEO of a massive company, so for him to not . . . it makes sense that he wouldn’t know everything. But yes, I think I probably know more about the actual software than Russell.
Andrew: As a result of that what you ended up doing was becoming one . . . This is part of what makes them . . . This is part of what I love about the way they work. See, the fact that they care about me, the fact that Myles is like, really nice and helps me, I appreciate it. What they did to get you to keep like supporting the group is brilliant and what I love about them. They have this top 10 contributors award. What is this?
Jeff: It was amazing. So out of nowhere . . . This is the first time they’ve ever done anything like this. They’ve done it since then, but it was the first time. It was roughly, the group . . . it was like, about six months later. It was about like, July, August, they put out the top 10 contributors to the group. It had grown up to 78,000 and I was the second highest contributor of the group because I just been in there giving so much value and just trying to learn everything I could.
Andrew: And so what do you get out of that?
Jeff: Good feelings, like, warm fuzzies.
Andrew: But the fact that they made it . . . Oh, they don’t give you a t-shirt for that, huh?
Jeff: No, no. I don’t even know that it was because of me by any means. I think they were just . . .
Andrew: But here’s what I love about that. Everyone who has a Facebook group has this analytics inside of Facebook that tells you who the top contributors are. What we did was we said, “Let’s just start highlighting it.” So we take a screenshot of it, we post it in the group and we thank them. What ClickFunnels does is they make it into a thing. Now you are a top 10 contributor. I almost expected them to hand you award, put a plaque behind the wall, but this is one of the things that they do really well. They find the thing and they reward it.
Are you listening to yourself on Facebook? Is that why we’re hearing an echo? No. Okay. Weird. All right. Let me take a moment to talk about my first sponsor and then we’re going to continue with this story and see what happened that led you to get your first customer.
My sponsor is a company called HostGator. And I had this idea, I’m going to run a marathon on every continent on the planet . . . In the planet, not on every planet. I was going to say in every planet. All seven continents, seven marathons within one year. And a friend of mine said, “That’s pretty good. How are people going to know about it?” and I immediately, “I’m going to go to HostGator and I’m going to create a one-pager so that I can show people this is what I’m doing because now if there’s a web page that I could send people to, they feel like this is the bigger mission than just like some kind of side hobby that disappears.” I don’t know why, but when you give something a web page it feels more real and official.
Then I went to this freaking [You Talk 00:20:10] thing. It’s like a conversion moment. And Russell is basically . . . I get into his world and as I researched him and so on, and I keep hearing Russell say, “A web page is nothing but a brochure. If somebody walked into your store you wouldn’t just hand them a brochure. What you would do is kind of answer some questions, walk them through some process that would help them understand why they should become customers.”
I said, “All right, I need to do that.” And sure enough, of course, my webpage on HostGator is with WordPress, of course, there’s a ClickFunnels’ plugin that turns HostGator pages into ClickFunnels funnels. I immediately do that. And at first I felt like, “What kind of a douche am I that now I’ve got like, a funnel for this that what I’m actually even selling at some point in this . . . ” And then let me show you something. Let me see if I could stand up here. If I get hurt and I can’t run, this is going to be embarrassing. But let me see if I could take this table down. Watch this. Hold on a second. I got to climb up here. There we go. Can you read that?
Jeff: I love those. Why do you hate money?
Andrew: What does it say?
Jeff: Yeah. I love it.
Andrew: Why do you hate money? Russell Brunson sent me this socks that says, “Why do you hate money?” It’s like, “Dude, don’t punk out. Charge.” So I think, “You know what? I do want people who are into running to pay attention or into a mission to pay attention of the mission and I should get their email address. I could tell them when . . . ” I’ve got Devon Meadows, is brilliant videographer. He’s going to be flying around the world with me. I want to be able to email people when I have a new video instead of waiting for them to come to YouTube. Why don’t I do that? I should be selling stuff at some point. Why don’t I do?
So anyway, HostGator, ClickFunnels work beautifully together and I’m so glad that I did it. Hostgator.com/mixergy if you want to set up an account with them and they’ll give you a super low price and they’ll take great care because they’ll know you came from Mixergy. Hostgator.com/mixergy. All right. First customer. How did you get your first customer?
Jeff: Everything’s been pretty much word of mouth. I’ve never run paid traffic or anything like that. And I’d had a couple of people that I’d done small funnels for before Kevin but like, Kevin was one of my first real big actual clients.
Andrew: And this is Kevin David. What did Kevin David have?
Jeff: He did Amazon course for fulfillment on Amazon or how to sell on Amazon, Amazon FBA.
Andrew: Okay. And so for people who don’t know what a funnel is or don’t know what . . . I don’t know what Kevin’s funnel was. What was it? Walk me through the pages.
Jeff: Yeah. It was a webinar funnel where we took someone to a training where he broke down basically the perfect webinar that Russell Brunson teaches to overcome or to move them from one vehicle to another so that they knew that this is a new way that they could go about selling on Amazon. It knocked down internal belief, external belief and then . . .
Andrew: Oh, wait, wait. So he was doing a webinar to help people who were selling on Amazon use webinars to sell on Amazon.
Jeff: No, no. We were using the webinar . . . I’m sorry. We were using the webinar to move people from cold traffic to warm traffic so they could buy his course on how to sell products on Amazon.
Andrew: Got it.
Jeff: But the system we were using was Russell Brunson’s perfect webinar . . .
Andrew: Perfect webinar for letting people know about it. Got it. Okay. And so first page, sign up for the webinar, second page was what?
Jeff: That was a confirmation page where at that point they’d watch a video that would help to warm them up so they’d start to learn more about Kevin and start to know like and trust it more as like a pre-frame before the actual webinar happen, and then that way you’re already warm so you’re starting to learn secrets, you’re start learning, you’re like, “This guy is cool,” then the webinar or the actual training starts which is not only training you but it’s also selling you on the necessity for having this course as part of your life.
Andrew: You know, the part that I didn’t know about or I had never heard of, is that part where you want people up so that they know about Kevin. How did they get to the page where you do that?
Jeff: Well, what you do . . . A lot of people don’t do this. This is something that I’ve done because, like, if you’re doing . . . It’s an automated webinar so every 15 minutes a new webinar is starting on the 0, 15, 30, etc. And what we did is I found it roughly the average person was on that page for about 8 to 10 minutes. The problem is, is your kids could scream, Aunt Rose could post something on . . .
Andrew: Because they . . . Wait. They come from an ad to a page that says, “Do you want to sign up for the webinar?” They sign up for the webinar, the webinar starts right away. They didn’t set aside time in their day to watch an hour-long webinar. You’re noticing in the stats, 15 minutes they leave. Okay. So what do you do?
Jeff: No, no, no. Because it’s automated so it goes off every 15 minutes. So they sign up at like 5 after they have a 10-minute window before the next one starts. So what we need to do is keep them occupied during that 10 minutes so they don’t leave.
Andrew: Oh, got it. And so in that 10 minutes, that’s when you do the thing that when you show the page it tells people who he and helps them get to know him, get to like him. Got it. Got it. Got it. You know what? I should just acknowledge a few people who are in here watching live. [Reekita Gala 00:25:17] and Joanne Miller. Joanne, thanks so much for all the support as we’re going through this. Lauren Smith, I mentioned earlier.
Rebecca Lay is the woman who creates our funnels at ClickFunnels. I’ve got to tell you, I didn’t sign up for ClickFunnels. I was signed up for a competitor’s product. This dude who I was working with, I hired him, he said, “I built this on ClickFunnels.” I said, “I already paid for a competitor software. I’m happy with it.” He goes, “Yeah, but you hired me to do this for you so I’m going to build it on ClickFunnels.” I go, “All right. Okay. Do whatever you want and then we’ll take it out. We’ll just go switch to something else.”
And then Rebecca takes over and she goes, “Yeah, it’s already working on ClickFunnels. I’m going to keep going with it.” I go, “Do I pay for both software?” “Yeah, it’s already working.” So we stuck with it. I didn’t know how well we were doing with ClickFunnels until recently it turns out we were like, in the Two Comma Club too. We’ve got this funnel that we created. It actually generated over $1 million. I never even thought of myself as a Two Comma Club person or even a ClickFunnels person. I thought of Rebecca as a ClickFunnels person.
Jeff: Well, here’s the thing about ClickFunnels. If you generate leads or need new customers or you sell something, then you can basically do it in ClickFunnels. There’s really not anything that you can’t sell in ClickFunnels.
Andrew: So I’m experimenting with that. I don’t believe it because I feel like if you want to sell you have to sell on Shopify. But I’ve got these beads that I want to give out for free for people who just pay whatever the shipping costs are and turns out I think you can. What I did was I shipped them to ShipBob. I used . . . I forget whatever software that I need to connect anyone who buys from ClickFunnels and send them over.
So I see what you were doing. Next step was, you got Kevin David, you created the funnel for him, right? What did you do to help set up? Were you buying ads or you just leave it there?
Jeff: No, we created these forms on his emails and his bots for him. The thing is, he already had a great following on YouTube so is basically just coming in and setting up all the ecosystem so that it all fed upon itself and then just pouring gas on what he was doing already, you know, running paid ads to it on both YouTube and then moving into Facebook. And it was . . . I mean, like, I can only take so much credit. He had a great following. I just came in and just threw gasoline on everything he already had as far as like, his [followers 00:27:35].
Andrew: You said he made how much money within 57 days?
Jeff: 1.2 million in 57 days.
Andrew: Wow. And you made how much money from that?
Jeff: Six thousand.
Andrew: Okay. You know what? What do you think about that?
Jeff: Okay. So, people talk about that. They’re like . . . Well, it’s funny. Okay. When you have a funnel made for you, how much do you expect to make out of it? $100,000? $1 million?
Andrew: I don’t know. It’s true. Different funnels, different amounts, right.
Jeff: If you’re looking at a funnel that’s going to make $1 million, if you could pay someone even 100,000 and they can make you $1 million funnel, is that a 10 to 1? That’s a pretty good investment.
Andrew: I get it. I feel like it was your first client, $6,000 is respectable for setting it up for showing that you could do it. And I feel also that . . . I don’t know how much of it was you in your funnel and how much of it was the ad buys, the relationships that he had. To me, I get that you’re seeing, “Hey, this is a start. I think I could do better.” I think you did pretty well. Six thousand dollars for a start? Not bad at all. What do you think?
Jeff: I think when we got paid 6,000, then I thought that it was the greatest day of my life.
Andrew: I get it.
Jeff: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Are you kidding me? We were broke, man. We were so broke.
Andrew: And now you had proof. Did you get to keep the . . . did you get to keep the Two Comma Club Gold record for setting somebody else’s funnel?
Jeff: Yes.
Andrew: You get it, not Kevin.
Jeff: Well, Kevin gets it because it’s his product.
Andrew: You get it and Kevin.
Jeff: Right.
Andrew: Got it. So perfect. So now you’ve got clear proof that your funnel can generate real sales, you’ve got a client who you delivered the goods for and you can go and get more clients. How did you get client number two?
Jeff: Client number two, they just came up and said that, “We wanted to have us do your funnel.”
Andrew: Okay. Just because they knew you from where?
Jeff: Through ClickFunnels’ community, through different . . . Maybe they’re following me on my page. I’ve had different people approach from different areas.
Andrew: And that’s the benefit of going into the group and being so active that there’s so many people who get to know you as the guy who can build on this software that you don’t have to know where people come from, you’re not doing direct targeted ads, you’re just raising your profile. That’s the benefit and also it’s the part that’s painful for me. I love to know where things came from so that I know what to do more of. All right. So you had that. You then went to Viral Launch. What’s the Viral Launch event, Viral Launch?
Jeff: Oh, that was the event where they actually did the score . . . they did the gold digger and the nude squirrel paintings where they’re doing the viral video launch.
Andrew: Tell me. I’m not that deep in the world that I would know it. What does that mean? What’s the gold digger?
Jeff: Right. So what they did is the Harmon brothers which actually did . . . Are you familiar with the Squatty Potty video with the unicorn?
Andrew: Yes. Yeah, yeah.
Jeff: So they were responsible for doing that. So Russell then hired them to do his viral video to help for his launch for the new direction that ClickFunnels was going as far as like he was redirecting.
Andrew: Okay.
Jeff: What they did at that point is they got Gary Vaynerchuk and a lot of other the top level influencers from all over the world, flew them to Boise at Boise State with the Blue Smurf Turf. Gary Vaynerchuk did a presentation and did a speech and then they set the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest ever human bubble soccer game which I was blessed to be [a part of 00:31:12].
Andrew: Got it. All right. And so you were part of that. And again, you’re just getting to know people and sitting next to people like Gary Vaynerchuk, you’re getting to know other people in this space, they’re getting to know you. This is what’s starting to lead to more and more clients. Am I right?
Jeff: Yes, exactly. At that point, people weren’t even aware that I was really even responsible for Kevin’s ecosystem.
Andrew: All right. Let me take a moment to talk about my second sponsor and then we’ll continue with the story. The second sponsor is a company called Toptal. You were there watching me live interview, Russell. You saw I think maybe 10% of the web pages that he’d created over the years. I had this deck with way too many pages. Some of them kind of sucked I think. The text was not very good. Some of them were really good and you couldn’t believe that they failed, but they were just like business idea after business idea. Each one had its own web page and so on and so forth, and then at one point he said, “I’m going to shift to software.” And he then went out and he got whatever developers he could in order to create software and then it became this big thing.
Now ClickFunnels is a revenue powerhouse. I think he said he did $100 million in 2018 from selling this software and also he also has educational products which you buy a bunch of and I want to ask you about. The point that I’m making is, I think that there are many people who are selling things like their services, selling things like one little piece of software, selling things like education the way that he did at one point in his life, who really if they put a little bit more firepower behind their software could be selling software the way that Russell did. The problem is, it’s really hard to find great developers, they’re super expensive, and you don’t know that they’re great until you spent hours, days, weeks, months interviewing them.
And so that’s where Toptal comes in. Toptal said, “We’re going to actually change this whole model. Instead of helping you place better ads online, which a lot of software companies do today, or instead of helping you cull all the different resumes that you get and figure out which is the best one,” they said, “Why don’t we do away with the whole thing? We’re going to reverse this whole process. First, we’re going to go search for the best developers and put them in our network. That’s number one. And then, number two, when someone comes to us and says, ‘We want to hire a great developer,’ we just talked to that company, we can understand what they’re looking for and then quickly match them with one of the developers that we have and that developer can go and work with them.”
So if you’re out there and you need more developers, if you need people who are the best of the best, you should go check out toptal.com/mixergy. When you add the /mixergy to the end you’re going to get 80 hours of Toptal developer credit when you pay for your first 80 hours in addition to a no-risk trial period. Look, go for all the details toptal.com/mixergy, top as in top of your head, tal as in talent, T-O-P-T-A-L.com/mixergy.
So you started building up these clients. Is there . . . How many clients would you say you have now? To get to 400,000 in revenue last year, how many clients did you need?
Jeff: Well, we’ve had probably about 20. We realize a lot of it too is reoccurring in revenue because we have ads and things that are running so there’s reoccurring for that. So we probably had about between 15 to 20 clients throughout last year.
Andrew: Fifteen to 20 clients. Okay. That’s a pretty considerable number of clients. When you charge, what do you charge now for setup and what’s your reoccurring fee?
Jeff: Well, actually, I’m not . . . I have like, five clients that we still work with now because I’ve see them as really good potential Two Commas, and so we’re moving towards a direction, some of them already had enough sales that they’re on their way. But the crazy thing is even though we’ve done as well as we have, I should have sort of shut down my agency. I have very few . . .
Andrew: Because?
Jeff: I wasn’t . . . It’s not as easy to build a team sometimes as you think.
Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff: And to be honest with you, as much as I love funnels and everything I do, getting up from 8:00 in the morning to 8:00 at night, grinding away on other people’s dreams isn’t necessarily what I want to do. It wasn’t the fulfillment. Like I said I’ve been working on coaching and some of the people I’ve talked to in just a short amount of time has led to way more fulfillment than making $1 million funnels as crazy as that might sound. I mean, it’s . . . I’ve got other people down the pipe and I’m going to get great results for them but to be happy and do my own thing I am really moving more into like just consulting and showing people the way on what I do.
Andrew: So you’re not building the funnel, you’re just showing them how they could build their own funnels with the exception of a handful of customers that you’re building funnels for.
Jeff: Right.
Andrew: So now if someone goes to funneldoc.com, what are they getting?
Jeff: Right now probably nothing because I’ve turned down $75,000 in the last 30 days in funnels. Just real quick . . .
Andrew: Let me mute your tap. Sorry. I actually went to the page and it started playing.
Jeff: Oh, yeah.
Andrew: Yeah. You don’t have a funnel on this page. It’s just telling people a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Jeff: Yeah, I’m not really trying to sell anything right now, man. I’m just trying to help people and find fulfillment of myself so that I can . . . I want to make a difference, man. I want to . . .
Andrew: Like what? What difference do you want to make?
Jeff: I want to be able to empower people to be able to take this awesome ClickFunnels’ software and be able to use it to be able to have their own business and be able to do great things with it. I mean . . .
Andrew: Just by teaching them what this is, your goal is now, you’re going to teach people to do what you did, not necessarily even as a consultant, you’re thinking, “I can create a course. If this guy can create a course selling Amazon stuff, I could create one on funnels. He has proof that he’s done well, but I’ve got even more proof and it’s sitting right there in these gold records over my shoulder that represent million dollar plus funnels. I could teach this.” Got it. And that’s the next step of your business.
Jeff: That’s how I feel I’ve evolved because even like, say we’re getting four new clients a month, like 48 people, I mean, this way you could touch thousands of people. And for a lot of people just going from getting $3,000 a month to $5,000 or $10,000 a month, that will change their lives. It did for me initially. I mean, and to be able to do that. That’s what it’s about, man.
Andrew: Okay. How did you . . . How are you selling it now? Have you created some kind of program that you’re selling?
Jeff: Yeah. I mean . . . Yeah. I mean, I have a course that I’m working on right now.
Andrew: Got it. So it’s not public yet. You haven’t created it. You started and dabbled a little bit but you’re not fully there.
Jeff: We have some people in my beta testing right now. Actually, we’re beta-testing it out.
Andrew: Tell me what . . . Tell me about some of the difficulty in hiring people in an agency. So you were doing this well, we would think, “This guy, Jeff, is good at getting the word out about his work. He’ll go out there and help people. They’ll come in and sign up. Jeff will start setting the vision for it and then other people will do the work.” That seems like a good model. What are some of the difficulties that you had?
Jeff: Multiple. Sometimes it’s hard to find help. And to be honest, this is hard to say, but I’m probably not the best boss. I mean, like . . .
Andrew: Because?
Jeff: This is . . . Gosh. This is really embarrassing but like, I’m probably not the best boss overall. Like, I can build the heck out of funnels and bots and emails but that doesn’t necessarily . . .
Andrew: Tell me where you suck as a boss.
Jeff: Direction, probably.
Andrew: You don’t give people enough direction.
Jeff: [inaudible 00:38:43] I wouldn’t be saying this if I didn’t know exactly what it was. It’s putting . . . One of the things that I’ve learned and I can tell anyone now that’s bringing a team on, you need to set definitive goals for the people you’re bringing on and be able to set exactly what’s required of them. Don’t be ambiguous or like leave it up to, “We’re going to build it later add on,” because that sets them up to fail.
Andrew: You know what? I’m really bad about giving other people goals too. So how did that play out in your business?
Jeff: Well, a lot of times like say for instance for ads team I’d have them come on and I’d be like, “Hey, do your thing,” and I’d explain the customer, what our process is, what we’re thinking, but I wouldn’t say, “Okay. We need to get X amount of sales,” or I wouldn’t lay out like specific goals like they should because of that.
Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it. Yeah. And the reason you didn’t set a specific . . . Well, won’t they even need sales goals? Wouldn’t you be the salesperson and they would need to just maintain the funnels you created?
Jeff: Well, see, that’s the thing too is like if you’re trying to go top-down, it’s like how do I direct that? And again, this is all happening in like, a year’s time too, so it’s a lot of growth really fast. So it wasn’t the easiest. And like I said, I’m going to take a lot of responsibility myself, but I probably didn’t convey things like I should have to my team maybe. I don’t . . . Like, it just feels like there wasn’t . . . Now that I look back on it, communication should have been better.
Andrew: One of the other things that you told our producer was a challenge was people would say they knew how to do things, they would put it on their resume, and then they couldn’t do it. Like, what’s an example of something that people came in saying they could do but they couldn’t do?
Jeff: I mean, like Facebook ads were pretty good one that . . . I’ve had people say that they could do ads and then we get to where we need to start having conversions and it wouldn’t start happening.
Andrew: That’s a really big one. A lot of people are selling themselves as Facebook ad buyers and they don’t do a great job because, yes, they know how to buy ads or because they figured out the basic software but they don’t know how to target them right, how to get the right creative and so on. Yeah, that’s a real issue. Okay. What else? What other issues . . . Oh, and you said . . . Oh sorry. What were you going to say? I saw you wag your finger.
Jeff: That’s one of the thing that ClickFunnels recognizes problems like this because Russell’s created what they call the funnel Rolodex which is like a list of people that they recommend to be able to solve these problems. If I’d had that back then, I wouldn’t have had probably a lot of problems I ran into.
Andrew: You mean, you would have gone to their network of people and start hiring from them.
Jeff: Right. And now that’s one of the things ClickFunnels is doing is actually giving people like, a definitive path and a place they can go to find people that have been vetted and that are . . .
Andrew: I do wish other people did that. So Neville Medhora is such a freaking good copywriter. I wanted to work with him really badly, and so we created this chatbot to explain to him why he should work with us and we talked to him . . . Anyway, we ended up signing him up as a consultant and we were paying him . . . And he fires people up really well. He gives them clear direction. And that dude can write creative copy on the fly, which is exciting when someone’s learning how to improve, it’s really, really exciting.
The thing is, he’s got a course on copywriting. I wish that what he would do is say, “Here is access to my best graduates, the ones who just keep amazing me. You want them, I’ll introduce you.” He doesn’t. He has his course, he has his business, he has . . . I think he’s getting like advisor shares for helping other funded companies with their copy and their direction. Boy, I just want like a Neville, a mini Neville, someone who’s been trained by him, someone even who has his basic direction would be great. And so he didn’t do it and I do like that ClickFunnels has done it and a bunch of other companies are doing that. I think it’s really helpful.
Let’s see. Let’s continue down here. And I think I’ve done that in the past where I’ve gone to courses and said, “I need someone who does your thing. I don’t want to take the course. Can I just hire one of your graduates? Can I hire one of your students?” That’s been really helpful for us.
All right. I’m looking to see where the story goes. I do know where it goes. Let me tell you this. We’re going to publish this interview soon, but we’re not now live on Facebook. There is an announcement. Are you at a point where you’re ready to make it? If you’re not, remember I don’t edit, so don’t say it.
Jeff: We’re not on Facebook right now?
Andrew: We’re not on Facebook. We’re not live. Let me just confirm it to make sure that we’re not. Nope. We’re not. As far as I could tell, all best . . . Yes, I can say 99% we’re not on Facebook Live.
Jeff: I just got from the supporter back there that we’re not.
Andrew: Okay. Good. So just to be clear, this will be published soon, so you’re okay with me revealing it.
Jeff: Yeah. What soon? Just to let me know. Like a month?
Andrew: Let’s say a week or so. No, you’re not ready.
Jeff: Well, I just don’t want to step on any toes.
Andrew: I’ll tell you what? I’ll hold it. It’s not that huge of a thing, but I think it’s . . . It’s not that huge of a thing for people outside of the ClickFunnels world. It’s huge for people who know how to create funnels. I’ll hold it for a month if you want me to.
Jeff: Perfect.
Andrew: Did that make sense?
Jeff: Yeah. Oh, 100%.
Andrew: What happened recently? Let’s close it out on a high.
Jeff: Oh, my gosh. So the most amazing thing not only do I get to be on the most amazing podcast in the world and talk to this incredible man, but literally, 30 minutes before this podcast, I found out that my first Two Comma that we did the 1.2 million in 57 days just hit the $10 million mark in about a year and a half.
Andrew: And so now you get the 10X Award.
Jeff: I’m going to get the 10X Award. So now this doesn’t just mean the Two Comma Club group, it actually signifies that I got a 10X as well.
Andrew: Yeah. For the people who are listening to the podcast, he’s holding up the tattoo that has the big X on it. And yeah, wow, congratulations for hitting that level. All right. I also have got to say they’re so freaking smart at ClickFunnels for creating awards for this, right? Who else does that?
Jeff: Their whole purpose too was to make it sort of it’s like the Emmy’s or the Oscar’s for digital marketing.
Andrew: Right. Now there’s a whole big event that people are going to, there’s a . . . Yeah.
Jeff: I literally have had people that told me that they don’t care about the money, they just want the award. Well, we know there’s probably a little bit of untruth in that of course, but it’s that important to people now.
Andrew: I get it because now you’ve shown that you could do it. I think here’s what it helps. If someone’s looking for affiliate programs to partner up with, they say, “Well, here’s one that actually is certified by ClickFunnels to be doing over $1 million. I know it’s not just some wanker with a web page. I can partner up with him.” It makes them feel more confident. It also means if someone built it, if you want to hire them to build your own, it gives you more confidence to hire that person.
Jeff: Well, and I don’t know how much you know about the ClickFunnels affiliate program, but that program alone one of my friends Spencer Meacham has done $1 million in revenue through the ClickFunnels affiliate program.
Andrew: Because what they do is they give you 50% of every dollar that gets earned from your affiliate link forever. You know who does that? So I got to meet John Lee Dumas when he was like, just starting out week number one or something. I went in and I did an interview with him, I got on his site, and I got to see how he was doing and I just thought it was . . . I didn’t know what to make of him when I first met him. The more I get to see him, the more I see how much of a hard worker he is. I think a lot of people dismiss him because he’s very process-oriented. But when you see his freaking process internally, it is impressive. Anyway, he’s making a good amount of money just as an affiliate for ClickFunnels. Let me see where. I’m going to go through and see if I could find a quick breakdown that shows how much money he’s making.
Jeff: Yeah. It’s pretty amazing.
Andrew: It’s a very generous affiliate program, 50% for life.
Jeff: Well, and here’s the thing too that people don’t realize. Russell is doing all the selling for you really. You just need to like show why you should relate to the product. You just need to bridge that gap.
Andrew: Twenty-four thousand dollars last month, but maybe he wasn’t doing an affiliate like webinar for them. All right. This is a really interesting world. Here’s my big takeaway. Number one, I love that you’re willing to cry here about how your wife was supportive. I think that we do not talk enough about the outside part of our lives. I remember when Alexis Ohanian was here on Mixergy, I’d known him through Mixergy. He reached out to me to ask to be on.
And then I invited him to this thing in DC and he came out, he was always really open, but when I asked him why he sold Reddit the first time or I guess it’s the only time, he couldn’t fully say it until later on where he said, “There was something going on with my mom’s health that made me decide to sell.” We always think this is the right time to start a business, this is the right time to sell, it’s all about the outside environment, it’s all about the idea, but in reality, I see so much of what we do as entrepreneurs is dependent on the people who are around us.
His mom gets sick, he can’t run the company, he decides to . . . I’m oversimplifying and not getting right. But he has to sell a business. You were in a situation where you could because your wife was willing to work and not say, “Hey, I’m writing this guy off. He’s a loser. He is not supporting me.” Because of that, you were able to continue on with this. So I love that you’re willing to get emotional about that, number one.
Number two, I think the goals that are publicly expressed like the tattoos on your arm could either frankly crush you, I think you could have been walking around feeling like a loser if it didn’t work, or it could force you into action. And what I found in my life is, talking about them publicly almost always forces me into action. And the downside of having people see that I’m not doing it because I’m a failure is nothing. I’ve had situations where I’ve been deep in debt. That was more painful. This is nothing compared to that, you know, having people see that I tried for something and didn’t work out is nothing in the world today. All right. So I like that.
And then finally, my big takeaway from ClickFunnels is they are really good at motivating their group and the way they do it unlike other software vendors is with [the words 00:48:51] and award ceremonies like they do for the Two Comma Club with things like letting everybody know who the top contributors are in their group with things like, frankly, like t-shirts you’re wearing one right now, but their t-shirts aren’t just swag that they send out. Swag means stuff we all get.
It’s not. It’s, when you do this, you’ve earned that t-shirt. This t-shirt is a prize that you get to wear. And maybe when you do this means you sign up for our software, we’re not automatically sending you a t-shirt. You have to take my video course to teach you how to use ClickFunnels, then you’ve earned the right to get a t-shirt, or maybe it’s, you’ve come to this event or hit that milestone. What’s that t-shirt about? Is that a t-shirt for a milestone?
Jeff: This one is from the last Funnel Hacking Live actually. This is the Funnel Hackers and it has the actual motto of the Funnel Hacker on the back.
Andrew: Right. So that’s another thing that I discovered when I went to interview him. The fact that they called their community Funnel Hackers, they picked up on the hacker thing that was really hot and they gave them this name, “We create funnels and we are not the ones who create these like happy go lucky funnels. We’re hackers. We hack the system by studying other people’s funnels, by literally copying the parts that we want and then implementing our own.” And that type of spirit was really big for them.
And finally, I can’t dismiss people have like names of books that seem empty. Right? I thought “DotCom Secrets” was just going to be an empty read. You know who else I thought was going to be an empty read? Was “I Will Teach you to be Rich.” I did not want Ramit on here. I just asked him because he was a friend of Noah Kagan at the time. And then I had him on and the dude blew me away. I asked him questions he wasn’t prepared for and he blew me away with what he was able to do. So names don’t really . . . I shouldn’t judge people by their names as much and I shouldn’t sweat the names for my stuff as much as I sometimes do.
All right. For anyone who wants to go check out Jeff’s website, it is at funneldoc.com, funnel D-O-C like doctor. He’s a PH . . . You’re a PhD?
Jeff: No, no. I was a Special Forces medic, but I don’t . . .
Andrew: Oh, okay, that’s what it is. Funneldoc.com. I want to thank my two sponsors who made this interview happen. The first is hosting my new running website. It’s hostgator.com/mixergy. The second will help you hire phenomenal developers. We’ve hired developers, designers from them. We even hired a finance person who’s been helping me tremendously with regular scheduled calls and he keeps helping me understand where I’m not seeing my business right. You can hire the best of the best when you go to toptal.com/mixergy.
And finally, if you want to follow my adventure as I run around the world, I’ve got my first city picked out. I’m going to continue to keep running and doing interviews on every continent. If you want to follow along and join me for a monthly call where I kind of from wherever I am, I go over what’s been working, where I’m stuck and hear from you guys what’s been working for you in 2019 and where you’re stuck, go check out runwithandrew.com. I’m really proud of the video that we put up at the top of that page and I think you’ll like the spirit of it. Runwithandrew.com. Jeff, thanks so much for being here.
Jeff: Thanks, man. This is an amazing experience.
Andrew: Right on. Thanks. Bye, everyone.
