Marketing From An Airplane

A bunch of the cool stuff I got from my day with Brendon Burchard.

On today’s special Marketing From An Airplane, Russell talks about a meeting he had with Brendon Burchard and why he is taking a private jet back home to Boise.

Here are some of the cool things you will get to hear in this episode:

• What cool ninja tricks Russell learned from Brendon and what ninja tricks Russell was able to give to him.
• How Brendon is able to take 17 weeks of vacation a year and why Russell wants to be able to do something similar.
• And the different approaches Russell and Brendon have when it comes to people recognizing them in public.

So listen below to hear about the awesome things Russell learned from Brendon and find out why you should never use the bathroom on a private jet.

---Transcript---

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you guys to, actually Marketing in Your Airplane. Hopefully you guys can hear me, it’s kind of loud in here. I’m literally in my own private airplane right now.

Let me tell you the back story. So earlier yesterday, actually it goes back a couple of weeks ago. A couple of weeks ago I went to a Mastermind meeting at Dean Graziosi’s office and a bunch of cool people were there. And one of the cool people was Brendon Burchard. Brendon and I met probably ten years ago. I always respected him, and we kind of talked a few times, but we never really got to know each other. That was the first mastermind we sat together for the whole day. Towards the end I was just like, man, if you look at our industry and then the personal development industry, we’re on the outside obviously because there’s no other options but in our world, me and him are definitely have the biggest companies.

We never hung out, we never shared notes or talked about what worked or what didn’t work, things like that. So I messaged him a couple days later, “Hey, we should get together and just hang out, and share notes on what we’re both doing and hopefully get some ideas.” And he was like, he gave me three days, “I got this day and this day and this day.” In different parts of the country, and I was like, “Vegas sounds perfect.” because it’s an easy flight out of Boise. So I booked the thing and then yesterday morning I woke up at 4 o’clock in the morning, flew out to hang out with him. We hung out all day and then I’ll talk about what we talked about here in a minute.

But then at the end of the day I get a message from Melanie, my assistant, actually voxed me and said, “Your flight got delayed, and it was a connecting flight, so that one you’re going to miss. I’m trying to find another flight, everything direct is sold out.” And all sorts of stuff. She couldn’t get me out that day. And then Brendon is like, “Oh don’t worry man. I’ll take care of you.” I’m like, “What’s that mean?” He’s like, “Hold on.” And he called a couple of numbers and he’s like, “Okay, there’s a jet picking you up in the morning and they’ll fly you back to Boise.” I’m like, “are you kidding me?”

Dang, look at that. Oh you guys can’t see it. I’m looking out the window and there’s a jet flying past this jet. There’s jet streams. What? That was cool.

Anyway, he’s got an account with JetSuite. He just called them up and then they flew to Vegas, and they picked me up this morning and now we’re flying back to Boise. And I’m literally the only person on this plane. There’s 4 seats, 2 pilots. And it’s the coolest thing in the world.

Also, by the way, we’re starting a vlog, so I’m recording this, so if you guys in the future can see our vlog, it’ll be episode three and we’ll show the whole story. Behind the scenes, show you the flight, if you guys want to see the visuals. You should probably see what I just saw, that’s where you go to check it out. Anyway, so that’s what’s happening right now. I’m flying back home and again, I was trying to fly in the morning and out at night, so I could get back home for Ellie’s soccer game tomorrow, but I missed it unfortunately.  Instead I’m flying in a private plane home, which is insane.

So I’m doing that right now. So while I’m flying home I’ve been kind of taking notes on the cool stuff that Brendon and I talked about. And I obviously can’t share with you, something I just can’t share because they were things he shared with me in confidence. But there are some things I definitely can share.

The number one cool thing, is this cool thing called JetSuite, which is the thing I’m on right now, literally. They pick you up, they fly you, they….I don’t know if it’s possible to get in Boise, but it’s definitely, at first gotta figure out. Honestly I walked right up, jumped in a plane. There’s no waiting and it’s funny because I bill my time, if someone wants to hire me for an hour, I don’t even know what it would be right now. Last time I did, it was 5 grand an hour. Since then I’ve had like five people try to do it, and I turned it down because I didn’t have time for it. Let’s just say it’s 5 grand an hour.

So I saved an hour being in airports. Probably two if you look at landing and coming. So that’s two hours. That’s 10 grand right there I just saved. And then on the flight, there’s wifi, there’s nobody here coughing on me, or sneezing on me. If I had business partners, and my wife and kids, I could get some cool connection time on the plane as opposed to sitting in a normal plane cramped and miserable. So that right there is awesome. So I’m going to be looking for that.

Let’s see, another thing, what’s interesting is Brendon and I were talking, we have different super powers that are different. I think what I’m really good at is building out amazing front end funnels that are profitable from day one. I look at every one of the funnels that we built, especially free plus shipping funnels, all those ones are optimally designed so that when we put a dollar into advertizing, it puts $50 back out immediately into sales. You guys have seen us talk about that, all our break even funnels and stuff like that. I’m really good at that.

And then I look at Brendon, and Brendon’s not quite as good at the front end funnels, but what he’s really good at, when someone comes into his funnels, for the next 400 days there’s a sequence he goes through and takes them through the 16 or whatever different courses he sells, he pushes people to different events, everything. He does 9 events a year and never promotes any of them outside of the follow up sequence that happens.  He brings someone in the funnel and then the sequence goes for 400+ days, fills 9 events a year. So with all the info products, all the courses, I’m not really looking to share his revenue, but you know, well over 8 figures, multiple 8 figures in this process.

So for him, he’s got these front end funnels that aren’t profitable up front. He drives insane amounts of traffic, and by day 60 he breaks even. It takes 60 days to break even and he knows that. So because of that he goes and spends tons of money of Facebook ads, YouTube ads and radio, those are his three big traffic sources right now, which is cool. I’m going to try radio with my book, which I cannot even wait to do.

And then I look at my business, I’m really good at break even, being profitable right out of the gate, but my long term funnels aren’t that long. I think it’s because, and I talked about this with the inner circle members. I think I had a podcast that talked about this too. But my creativity in our business for a long time was creating new offers, new businesses. That made 3 or 4 million dollars a year, and then we transitioned into having one focus, Clickfunnels, and created offers to get people into Clickfunnels. We went from 3 million to 30 million.

Then my goal to go from 30 to 100 is focusing on new traffic sources. And I look at Brendon, that’s what he’s done. He has these funnels and he’s focusing on traffic sources that he can bring in and then they break even after, hopefully within 60 days of bringing people in. So that’s been kind of my biggest takeaway, is that. He does typically someone comes in his funnel and there’ll be two or three weeks promoting one of his courses, and then he’ll have a two week buffer time. Which is two weeks of him sending amazing videos that tell stories, build relationships and doesn’t sell anything.

Then after two weeks of buffer, he sends people back into another two or three week period where he’s selling the next course. Then he’s got a two week buffer. Back and forth for 400 and something days, which is insanely cool. And I think that my problem, why I haven’t done that in the past is because I’m so excited about the new offer I’m creating all the time, I don’t want people in the long sequences, and I don’t know how to promote the next offer. And he was like, “Why do you keep creating offers.” He’s like, “That’s my problem, I have 16 courses. Why don’t you stop creating courses, and just plug them into this sequence and then you can just focus on driving traffic. That becomes your focal point.”

And the interesting thing about traffic, traffic is the one part of my business that doesn’t require me, which is interesting. The funnel part requires me, because it’s all my creativity, my voice, my videos, but on traffic, it’s like I can step back, and it’s John on my team and his team underneath him who drive the ads, that becomes the focal point. And it’s interesting because I love and I get so good at creating lots of funnels over and over again that I spend insane amounts of time, way too much time.

Brendon told me, I think he takes, I think he said, 17 weeks off a year. I think that’s what he said. 17! 17 weeks. That’s like 4 months, that’s more than 4 months. Over 4 months a year he takes off. I can’t do that, I don’t do that. I’m always in hustle mode, and I think that’s because I’m always creating the next funnels, push all the ads into that funnel and sell it as opposed to all these amazing funnels we’ve created and just put them into a killer, long sequence and then focus on the traffic. Which even the traffic part does not take my whole time. That was the big takeaway for me, that was the huge aha.

So I just kind of look at Brendon, imagine if you took your funnels, you broke even, you 3x’d on day one like we do with all of our funnels. Then instead of break even on day 60 you tripled on day one, and then from there you kept doing what you’re doing. So he was excited about that. I was showing him all our ninja hacks to 3x on day one. And he was showing all the ninja hacks where he can basically not work, because he’s got all the courses lined up sequentially. And it’s interesting, the logical sequential order of things, I always thought that Experts Academy was his biggest business, but it’s not.  In fact, High Performance Academy is his thing, his biggest, that’s his mission, that’s his “date with destiny”.

Tony Robbins has Date with Destiny, which is his pinnacle. For him High Performance Academy is his pinnacle event he’s trying to get people to. And so all of his funnels are focused on getting people, he has no sales people, no nothing. He also has a 30 thousand a year mastermind and a 60 thousand dollar a year mastermind, and a 250 thousand dollar a year, and all those masterminds he doesn’t have any sales people to sell them. They all just come through funnels, which is insane.

I’m like, “But with a sales person it’s really easy, it converts just as many people.” He’s like, “yeah, I don’t worry about that. I just put it out there and some people buy. I just jam enough traffic into it that if one out of every 10 thousand people buy, it all works.” I’m like, “Crazy.” It’s fun to see this whole business through a different lens than my own, which is really cool. So that was one of my biggest takeaways.

So for you guys, if you’re all like me and you work too hard, I think that’s the key. Quit creating tons of new funnels, which I know we all love, it’s so exciting. But focus on, it comes back to follow up funnels, action funnels, like we talked about at Funnel Hacking Live. It’s interesting, I think I did a presentation in December that showed how every dollar made in our break even funnels made $60.73 in our follow up funnels. That was with it in a short, 30 day follow up window, as opposed to what Brendon’s doing where it’s like 400 days.

So anyway, that’s something that I was literally sketching out in my notes from on my private plane. So crazy.  On the plane, trying to figure out how I’m going to do that and what is the sequential order of my products. If someone comes in, my first thing I want to have is Expert Secrets, from there Dotcom Secrets, from there what is the sequential order? What’s the pieces they need and the order they need them? How can I do it the cool way where I spend a couple of weeks getting people into the program, a couple of weeks telling stories, building value to now they love us, and a couple of weeks transitioning back and forth, back and forth.

I think my biggest fear when I look at this is how am I going to create 400 days follow up sequence? And I look at Brendon and he didn’t do a 400 day follow up sequence. He would build one and then another one. I think what I’m going to do is, here’s my thought, and I may change it, but I’ll share with you guys and maybe it’ll give you guys some ideas on your own. I’m going to spend the next 30 days building out a 30 day follow up funnel. So if someone buys the book or anything, whatever they buy, what’s the first thing I want to introduce them to? They buy the book and the book is the initial sequence or whatever. Then all those people, from all my front end offers, so I’m looking at I think 10 or 11 front end offers to bring people into it, all my break even funnels that I love.

So I have a break even funnel, they go to the initial sequence there, after they do then we dump them from there into, and I’ll probably call to action funnel and call it the first 30 days, and then the first 30 days will be like, here’s the process for the first 30 days. Our number one goal for the first 30 days is to get them to buy Clickfunnels. So boom, I’ll take them through the sequence process and they’ll buy Clickfunnels, they’ll watch the webinar, we’ll indoctrinate and tell stories and all that kind of stuff. From there, we’ll share a bunch of content, maybe some Funnel Hacking Live videos to give value.

Then number two, now we got that. What’s the next thing we want to take? So then I’ll probably call it the second 30 days and then the third 30 days. I’ll probably create an action funnel for each one. And at the end of the first 30 days after I build that second 30 days, I’ll go back to the end of the first 30 days and I’ll add in a step in the action sequence that says, “When they finish day 30 move them to the second 30 day sequence.” Then everyone will be past that, then it will be automatically into the second sequence and that way I can just build out 30 days at a time and not stress out about how I’m going to build 400 days. No I’m just going to build 30 days at a time.

And then everyone that buys will be dumped in the first 30 days, here’s the sequence they go through. Everyone will go through the same sequence, same everything. Then at the end of that I’ll start building the next 30 days. Whenever I get it done, then I’ll dump all leads into the second 30 days and then I’ll hook it up so that everyone new coming in past day 30 si on the automatically shifted to the next action funnel. So it could be kind of cool. So maybe after I do this, this is actually a cool product.

That reminded me of something else. Okay, this might be a cool product I do. After I get the first 365, here’s the first 365 day follow up sequence, I may just want to buy that book. Here’s every email for the first 365 days when someone comes into our funnels. So maybe I’ll do that. Yeah, that’d be a cool product. So in a year, I’ll sell that to you guys if you want it. Yeah, that’d be kind of cool.

So this is a cool thing I got from Brendon, which is crazy. This is a couple of years ago, he did his, I can’t remember which course, Expert Academy, one of his products. He ended up selling 2500 of them at $2 grand a piece. A lot of money. Bu then afterwards he was like, “What do I do with all these people?” he was so proud of all the videos and email sequences and all the stuff he had built, so what he did was he took all of the prelaunch videos and burned them on a dvd and then got them all transcribed and then he took all the email swipe files, all that kind of stuff, got them all transcribed, put them in this big book and then he sold, I think for $97 you get the DVD, then the transcripts of the campaign. So anyway, so he sold for $97.

From that he sold over 60 thousand copies, 600 grand, 60 thousand copies at $97 a piece of the marketing material for people to see and model, which is crazy. Insanely crazy. In fact, oh my gosh I got an idea. I’ve got Funnel Hacker Swipe file.com, what if I did that with every campaign we did, start selling the swipe files? That’s interesting. Maybe I do it inside of funnel u? I don’t know, just gives me ideas. But it made an extra $600 grand after just selling the prelaunch materials to the same audience. 3 times bought the marketing material as people who bought the actual product. It’s crazy that people buy the product, the $97 thing he still sells at events everywhere else, people buy that and go through all his marketing material, and then they go back and buy his thousand dollar product now because they want it.

It’s kind of like what Frank Kern does. If you look at Frank Kern business funnel, he creates a product then launches it and after he sells him showing you what he did on that funnel and that’s it. Its like swipe files. Here’s the campaign plus the swipe files and it’s insanely cool. Anywho, so much cool stuff.

Alright, a couple of other cool things I learned from him. He’s obviously, he’s done two products with Oprah, so one of the interesting things he does with every one of his funnels, he has to make sure it’s Oprah proof. Oprah and her people literally go through all his funnels and it has to be clean enough that it’s Oprah proof.  I started thinking about that, are my funnels Oprah proof? Where someone like Oprah came through would they be offended, would they not like it or whatever? Oprah’s obviously not someone I’m going after, but who is the person I’m going after? Who are the people that I want to make sure….thinking about that, is the copy and positioning and all the stuff in your funnel, who is the dream person you want to go after? Would it pass their inspection and be like, this is cool and not scammy or spammy.

In fact, I went to one of my funnels the other day and some weird email came out and I was like, “Ugh.” I remember I hired this guy to write emails and he wrote that email and I’m like, it’s not congruent with me or what I say. So it’s something to think about. The other cool thing he showed me how to do with YouTube ads. So the thing with YouTube ads, there’s a YouTube ad that will be a video of him sharing  3 tips from his book and it pushes people to the book. And the people who watch that will be targeted to watch video number two, which has 3 more tips, and then push the book and then he targets those people to go to video number 3 which is now a recap, “Here’s the 6 tips I talked about before” and pushes them back to the book. And then if they haven’t bought the book after the 3 videos, then he puts them on a “Do not solicit” list. If they haven’t bought from three videos, they will never buy and they have no hope. And you should never follow them or show them ads again.  He puts them on a do not solicit list, which is kind of cool. Kind of a cool strategy as well.

What else, what else? So many cool things. I hope that gives you guys some cool stuff. It was legit amazing, and now I’m sitting in a jet. I have a new love and respect for Brendon. I always said he was cool, but I just didn’t know him or understand him and I think that I had kind of a misconception of him sometimes because, and it was interesting because I always thought he , in his mind he was kind of like me, he sees himself as a marketing dude, teaches marketing stuff. And as I talked to him, it’s completely opposite, he thinks of himself as first off an author, and then his goal, his whole dream in life is personal development and high performance, things like that.

In fact, his next book is called something about high performance as well. He spent two years with a whole research team creating insane stuff, building a test that measures high performance, that’s his huge passion. And he’s like, “I always teach the marketing stuff, you teach marketing better than me. Frank Kern teaches marketing better than me. I’m not the best marketing teacher but you’re all my people who come through all my high performance stuff that want to know how I build this company. So I do Expert Academy once a year just to be like, ‘here’s how I do it. I’m not the best but here’s what I do.’ And it’s become a big thing, but it’s not my focus or main thing. I don’t promote it, I don’t have any front end support. The only way people even know about Expert Academy is on day 200 of the funnel he introduces it to people.”

I was like, that’s really fascinating and interesting. Anyway, I thought that was really, really cool. That’s what I got. So that’s all I wanted to share with you guys I think today. So I’m going to be, I don’t know when I’m landing, but I’m going to keep taking notes and map this thing out. You guys will probably see the fruits of this. My goal, my big takeaways from this whole meeting is to be able to take my amazing funnels and build out an amazing sequence that extends for a long time and putting everything in sequential order and things like that. That’s my number one goal.

And my number two goal to that is from that be able to take more time off. He said he takes 17 weeks off in a year. I don’t know if I could do that, I think I would stress out. Plus, he doesn’t have kids and stuff like that. So he and his wife are able to be like, “Hey lets go to Bali this week.” Or “Hey, let’s go over here.” So they book out, they plan out each month where they’re going and its crazy. I can’t do that, because my kids have school and all these things. But maybe I could be like I’m going to take Friday off, or what if I came home every day at 3 when my kids got home,  or what if I did stuff like once a quarter took a weekend with my wife, or whatever those things are.

So I’m going to start playing with that. That was really inspiring for me. Oh the other cool thing I got from it. I did a podcast the other day how twice in Boise that day I had people come up to me, “Hey Russell.” And ask me questions about me and caught me off guard and I didn’t know how to handle it. It was cool, we were sitting there eating lunch and some guy ran up, “Russell Brunson, I’m a funnel hacker.” And it was kind of awkward for me, and I didn’t really say anything and the guy laughed and an hour later Brendon and I were walking and some guy ran up to Brendon like, “Dude! You’re Brendon Burchard!” It was kind of cool, we both had it happen to us while we were hanging out.

He handled it so much better than I did. It was so cool to see. I was just like, dang. Now I……it wsa cool to see that because he didn’t do what I do. Act like an idiot. He turned around and was like, legitimately excited, “You know who I am? How do you know about my work?” and the guy was like, he wanted to tell him, it was cool Brendon told me he learned that from Paula Abdul. That’s what Paula Abdul did. First off act all excited like, “Whoa.” Then ask them “how do you know my work? How do you know what I do.” And then they’ll be excited to tell the story of how they know you.

He’s also good at, my biggest problem is I think I fear the conversation with people because I don’t know how to end it. I get stuck in these awkward situations and I run away. So what he does is really cool. He asks them that question and then he starts turning his body like I gotta keep going, “That’s really cool. Okay, well we’re in a rush, we have to go but thank you so much for being a follower and a fan. Just so grateful for that.” And something like that. And then we’re able to break away and leave. I even told him after, “Dude, that was so good for me to see. Because I don’t know how to handle it. I don’t know how to take that kind of stuff. I’m not used to that. It just freaks me out and I look like an idiot. That way you handled it was super cool and it was fun to see that in a live version.” So that was pretty cool to see as well.

Anyway, that was the weekend, it was amazing. Now I’m sitting on a private jet and this is crazy. Only weird thing about it is if you look behind me, there’s a little toilet seat, and there’s a little curtain. Luckily I don’t have to go to the bathroom, but if I did that would be the only thing about private jets that’s not cool. There’s not a real bathroom. It’s like one of these seats you lift up the lid and there’s the potty, pooper, whatever you want to call it, the toilet, the crapper, whatever you want to call it. There’s the little curtain that you pull halfway over. And I guarantee it’d stink this place up and the pilots would kill me. I’m grateful I don’t have to go to the bathroom. Other than that, private planes are cool. Note to self, take one and make sure you go before you go.

There’s the practical advice. What’d you learn from Marketing In Your Car? I learned if you ever fly in a private plane, you go to the bathroom before you get on otherwise you stink out the pilots and they’ll hate you. Oh man.

Anyway, alright guys. Appreciate you, I can’t wait to get going with some of this stuff. Hopefully you guys got some cool lessons today like I did. Thank you Brendon, if you’re listening to this, for taking the day with me. That was the real cool thing, he was in the middle of editing his book, he still took the whole day and he was so present and relaxed and if it was me, I’d be stressed out the whole entire time.  Just coming back to he has his life structured to be able to handle this type of stuff and it was really impressive and cool to see. Anyway, I got a ton from it, hopefully you got something as well from listening in. Appreciate you all and I’ll talk to again when we get back on solid ground. Bye.