Russell: Yes.

John: Yes! Russell is the founder of Clients on Demand, a company that helps coaches, experts, and service providers attract the right clients at the right price any time they want. Russell, take a minute, fill in some gaps from that intro, and give us a little glimpse of your persona life.

Russell: Sure, yeah. So [inaudible] [0:00:17], I am married to beautiful wife named Sarah, we just had our first son. He is six months old, and he is a joy every day, so I gotta talk about him first, because he’s the greatest. And as far as the company and what we do, like you said, the company’s called Clients on Demand, and we have a process that enables coaches, consultants, professional service providers, to get new clients and enroll them at premium prices on a consistent basis. So not just any clients, but really the right people, the kind of people that you’ve been dying to work with. How do you get them and enroll them into your programs and your offers at a premium price. That’s our specialty.

John: Alright, you this is an audio only show, but I can already see and tell that 27 percent of Fire Nation just raised their hand. They’re like, “Yes! That is for me.” I mean, it sounds pretty awesome. It almost sounds too good to be true. I mean, let’s get a little deeper here. What are the ways that you are actually able to do such a great match making service?

Russell: That’s great. So, we teach people how to do this, and essentially our process is really, really simple. We take people from browsing around on Facebook and on Twitter and on social media, and we run ads on those platforms, so people go and they click our ads. They register for an automated webinar or a live webinar, either way. They watch the webinar, and at the end of the webinar, we give a really, really soft pitch. Like, “Hey, if you liked what we’ve shared with you and you’re interested in applying some of these ideas to your business and your life, click here, fill out a form, and let’s talk.”

Then we get them on the phone, and if it’s a fit, we enroll them into one of our high ticket programs. So the process is very simple, it’s ad to webinar to phone call to high ticket sale. Four steps. So every day we take people from browsing around on Facebook who have never heard of us, and within 24 hour, we’re enrolling them in a high-ticket program at $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 whatever, even if they’ve never heard of us before. And that’s the same thing that we empower our clients to do with their offers.

John: Is Facebook the only way you bring in lead generation via ads, or are there some other methods like I know Instagram, and even Snap Chat is starting to get into the game. Have you experimented in any other areas?

Russell: We’ve messed around with Instagram a little bit. Not enough to make it work. But we also use Twitter. We get great results from Twitter. And we’ve used YouTube as well and gotten good results there. So we’re just getting every day, John, in our business, we have 20, 25 people a day reaching out to work with us and be a part of our programs, so we really haven’t had to branch out into too many other traffic sources. But we’re always experimenting, because I don’t like to have all my eggs in one basket. But right now it’s Facebook is killing it for us, and Twitter’s killing it for us.

John: Great feedback. So let’s talk about dollars and sense now, because it’s all good to get these clients that are enrolling in high-ticket items, etc. How do you actually bring dollars in the door? What are the different streams of revenue?

Russell: I like to keep our business really, really streamlined. We basically, up until maybe a week ago, actually, had one main offer. And that main offer is our eight-week program. It’s called Clients on Demand. And in that workshop, we teach people how to do this stuff. And it’s definitely based on transformation more than it is information. So it’s definitely not one of those programs where we just kind of show you how to do it and leave you to your own devices to figure it out. It’s really hands on. I’m helping them edit their webinars. I’m helping them craft what they’re gonna say on the phone when they talk to people. My traffic people are working with them on their traffic and their advertising, so it’s really hands on.

And all we really have is that one, main offer. And that’s it, and that’s all we’ve had for the last two and a half years. And then at the end of the eight weeks, you can upgrade to work with us in a one-year mastermind that we have that’s really exclusive. We only have 30 spots available in that. But with just the eight-week program and the one-year program, that’s basically been the foundation of my entire business. And in any given month, we’ll enroll usually between 25 and 30 people into that eight week program, and we’ll bring in 300, $400,000 a month. I think in February we actually did $700,000 in sales that month. So it’s a very, very simple business. It’s a very streamlined business. We don’t have a bunch of different offers. We’re not doing launches. We’re not doing any of that stuff. It’s just a steady clockwork type business. We get new clients in the door at a premium price, basically anytime we want, and that’s what we help our clients do, too.

John: Fire Nation, there’s a word that we would use in the Army, and that word is KISS – keep it super simple. I mean, I see so many entrepreneurs, they just try to create this megatron, even before they kind of get their feet wet or any kind of forward momentum or any revenue in the door. And I want you to be ambitious and I want you to take action and try new things and get out of your comfort zone, but you can do it in a way where you’re just driving towards one thing until you just crush it. You get that system down, and then you move on to that next thing. And like Russell said, the numbers are working right now. He’s gonna crush it.

Who knows when Facebook’s gonna change their algorithm, get too expensive to do these things, so why not just continue to rock it now while it’s working, but eyes are open, testing new things here and there, but most of the bandwidth is on what works. Love this. But Russell, let’s talk about a time when maybe things weren’t always working. In fact, that would be what I consider your worst entrepreneurial moment. So take us to that worst moment that you’ve experienced thus far as an entrepreneur, and tell us that story.

Russell: Well there’s been a lot of terrible moments, for sure, because that’s just the life of an entrepreneur. You’re constantly dealing with different challenges and whatever else. But basically it’s been smooth sailing for the last two and a half years. And that’s really when we figured out how to do this consistent high-ticket stuff. Before that, I was doing what a lot of marketers are doing or coaches are doing, which is playing sort of the low ticket game, where you have something that deep down you know can make an impact in someone’s life to the tune of a few thousands of dollars at least, if not more so, but you’re selling it for $47 or $97 or whatever it might be because that’s what you see everyone else doing. And it never even occurred to me that I could charge a premium price.

So what happened a few years ago is that I had gotten involved in a launch game and we would do a launch for a low-ticket product and we’d make a bunch of money, and then nothing. And then that was it. The launch was over. And I had to sit there and go, “Okay, now I’d better come up with another thing to sell,” and then I would try to come up with something else and we would do that launch, and then nothing.

So my income was all over the place. It was up, it was down. I had some months where I didn’t make any money at all, and it was really inconsistent. And when you’re in that place, you’re basically living in constant fear. There’s this little buzz, this undercurrent of anxiety running through your life where you have to second guess every financial decision, every financial commitment, from sending your kids to private school to buying a new car. Everything makes you nervous because you have no predictability in your business. And that’s what happens when you’re doing launches a lot of the time. That’s what happens when you’re depending on word of mouth to get new clients in the door. So I made a couple decisions. I said, first of all –

John: Well, before you get into that, Russell –

Russell: Oh go ahead, yeah.

John: What is that worst moment? What was the scariest moment? I wanna be there with you when you were just like, “Honey, we gotta mortgage the house.” What happened?

Russell: Well, the scariest moment is when I opened up my bank account one day and there was $5,000 in there, and I looked at it and to me that was a big, big problem, because my monthly expenses were way more than that. And at that time I had been working really hard to develop a system for making consistent high ticket sales, and it just kicked in like a month later, but in that moment, I was like, “Oh man, I hope I really haven’t made a mistake.” Because what I did, John, was I stopped selling all my low ticket stuff, and I said, “Oh, I’m gonna go out there and I’m gonna sell my stuff for what it’s really worth.”

And I stopped selling all my low ticket stuff. And I didn’t realize that meant I wouldn’t be making any money whatsoever until I figured out how to sell it at the price that it was really worth. So during that moment in time, things got really nervous. I started thinking to myself, “Okay, I might have to get a job. I might have to figure something else.” But I think deep down I knew that it would work out. For me, it’s just sometimes in the nick of time, but I’ve always figured out a way, I’ve always found a way. And that’s what makes me really addicted to being an entrepreneur is that, look, if the ship sinks or if the ship gets me where I want it to go, I’m the captain of the ship, and if something bad happens, it’s my responsibility. If something great happens, it’s because we made the right choices, and we did the right thing.

John: Fire Nation, you’re hearing how Russell is owning it. He’s owning responsibility for the success but also for the failure of the venture that he’s on right now. Russell, what do you want to make sure Fire Nation gets from this moment, when you open up your bank account, there’s $5,000 there, which to be honest, for some people is a lot of money, but to others – I mean, your monthly expenses were even higher than that, so of course you were in, and rightly so, a little bit of a freak out mode. What is your biggest takeaway that you wanna make sure that Fire Nation gets from that difficult time in your life?

Russell: It’s that you have to think from the standpoint of the person that you want to be rather than the standpoint of the person that you are. If I looked at circumstances around me and said, “Oh my god, man, I blew it. I wanted to figure out how to do high-ticket sales, but it’s not working out. I got $5,000 in the bank account. I better figure something out” and I made decisions based on what I was seeing with my eyes, so decisions based on fear, decisions based on anxiety, I would be broke right now. I would have gone in another direction; I would have pursued a different strategy. I would have just gone in the wrong direction.

But in that moment, I said to myself, “Listen, if I were making $100,000 a month, $200,000 a month, a million dollars a month, if I were that guy, that guy that I wanna be, what we he do in this moment? Would he change course or would he stick it out because he knows that he can figure it out?” And I said, “You know what? That’s what I would do.” And I stuck it out and I figured it out. And that’s the big takeaway that I want all of your listeners to get, is that if you can make decisions from the standpoint of the person that you wanna be rather than maybe what you see in your day to day right now, you will be taking bold action, you will be acting with confidence, and you’ll make decisions from a place of power rather than a place of fear and anxiety.

Because when you’re making decisions from fear and anxiety, you’re not really thinking, you’re just reacting. And I want you to be thinking like a confident individual. So think about the person you wanna be, and ask yourself, “What would that guy do?” And then do it.

John: Fire Nation, I think a good quote that sums a lot of this up is “What got you here won’t get you there.” So wherever you are right now, however you go to that point, now you gotta think bigger. You gotta think grander and better to get to there, that next point that you wanna get to. So just think outside of that box. Get outside of your comfort zone because that’s where all the magic is gonna happen. And Russell, you are an epiphany machine. I’m sure you have aha moments for breakfast. What is one of your greatest aha moments to date? Tell us that specific story. Take us to that moment in time.

Russell: The aha moment that changed everything for me was when I looked around. I had just finished a big launch. And there were thousands of people that had bought my product, and the launch had gone by, a couple months later, and I went and I started checking in with people, and I asked them, “Hey, man what did you think of the product? What did you think of it? Have you done anything with it?” And they would say, “Oh, yeah, yeah. This is awesome, man. It was a great product. I really got a lot out of it.” And so I said, “Cool, what are you doing with it?” And they go, “Oh, nothing. I’ll put it in practice next week,” or “I’m just starting to get started on it.”

And I realized something big that day. I realized that when you’re not charging people a premium price, they’re not coming in with a real, real commitment most of the time. And on the other hand, when you charge what you’re really worth, if you have something and you know that it’s worth $5,000 and you’re charging $5,000, your clients are gonna get better results, you’re gonna make more money, they’re gonna show up accountable, they’re gonna show up ready to work, and you’re gonna actually change lives as opposed to just giving people little tidbits of information. And that was a huge revelation for me. And since I made that shift in my business, our clients are just crushing it. But it’s because they show up and make a big financial commitment, but then they show up ready to work. So that was a big, big, big lesson for me.

John: That’s huge. And Fire Nation, it’s like what do you want out of what you’re doing. Do you just want the dollars to come in the door? Or do you really want to make a difference in this world? Do you really wanna have that ripple effect, where somebody comes to you and says, “Man, look what your course or your product or your service did for me. And look at how I now have inspired 10, 100, 1,000 people.” That’s on you. That’s a great thing, Fire Nation, when that happens, and you know that you’re now having this ripple effect on the world. You gotta make it count. Now Russell, what is your biggest weakness as an entrepreneur?

Russell: I would say my biggest weakness as an entrepreneur is that I am not a detail person. I’m a big thinker, I’m a strategic thinker, I get excited about stuff, but I need people on my team to come in and take care of the little details and the little execution and making sure all the little pieces fit together. But I think that when you’re aware of your weaknesses, and when you’re aware of what you don’t do well, you can bring on team members to sort of fix that. But, yeah, that’s my biggest weakness is I’ll say, “Hey, guys. Here’s what we’re gonna do.” And then my team will say, “Okay, wait. What about this, what about this, what about this, what about this.” And I’ll say, “Okay, thank god you guys are here to spot all the little details of everything that needs to happen, because these are things that I would have overlooked or I would have forgotten about or whatever.” But sometimes those little things, those little details, they can have a huge impact on what you’re doing. So that’s definitely my biggest weakness as an entrepreneur.

John: What is your biggest strength?

Russell: I think my biggest strength as an entrepreneur is that I just know that everything is going to be okay. And I had a friend once, and something weird was going on that day. I had a client come in who really wanted a refund, and she happened to be over at my house and I was talking to her. I said, “Oh, yeah, this client’s coming in. They want a refund.” And she’s like, “Okay, well how much is that gonna cost you?” And I was like, “Well, at this point, it’s gonna cost me ten grand.” And she just looked at me and she was like, “You know what, Russ, you know what the thing is about you?” She’s like, “You don’t give an F about anything.” And she meant it, she meant it in a really – it sounds like a dig but she meant it as a compliment, because it’s like I just don’t get rattled.

And the reason I don’t get rattled is because I really, really work hard every single day on my mindset. Every day I’m doing affirmations. Every day I’m thanking God in advance for the things that I want and the life that I have. And I think the more that you can build that positivity and enthusiasm into our mindset, where you just know everything’s gonna be okay, the less things start to bother you. So in my business, when the storm comes and the waves start crashing or whatever it is, I’m able to say, “Guys, here’s how we’re gonna get through it. Here’s exactly what we’re gonna do,” and we just execute, and we just do it.

John: Yeah, and I think a better word than you just don’t care, I mean because you do care.

Russell: Right.

John: You don’t get rattled. I mean that was the word.

Russell: Yeah.

John: You just don’t get rattled when things aren’t perfect. And Fire Nation, when you get rattled, things just start to kind of unravel, unfortunately. And that’s the reality. So get your mindset right. That’s why you gotta own your morning. You gotta journal. You gotta meditate. You gotta have the right mindset of gratefulness and gratitude going into the day, so that when things attack you, not a bad attack, where they just kind of come out and boom, they hit you, you’re ready for it. You have your shields up. You’re ready to deflect, and you’re ready to embrace if you need to. Now, Russell, what’s the one thing that you are most fired up about today?

Russell: The one thing that I’m the most fired up about today is the results that we get for our clients. I mean, every day now, we have a system where I can log into one of our private Facebook groups, which is where we communicate with our clients a lot, and just about every day, people are posting incredible success stories, and that just blows me away. My team is filled with joy and enthusiasm, and there’s zero drama on my team. And we just love each other and we love what we’re doing, and we love the results that we’re seeing for other people.

And this is a point that we’ve come to in our business, just recently, in the last six months, where when I was putting the team together, there were some people on the team that didn’t fit, and there was all this drama. And then maybe we were getting our clients – we didn’t really have the process right for how we were going to onboard a new client, so they hit the ground running and they’re confident and everything. But we’ve just now dialed those things in, and it’s all just sort of clicked in the last six months, and it’s just a joy to run this company. It’s so much fun now.

John: Well, Fire Nation, it’s gonna be a joy in the lightning round, so don't you go anywhere. We’re gonna take a quick minute to thank our sponsors.

Russell, are you prepared for the lightening round?

Russell: Yes I am.

John: What was holding you back from becoming an entrepreneur?

Russell: Fear. I think the same thing that holds everybody back. I was a bartender for ten years, and I just lived in constant terror that I was gonna get fired or that the bar was gonna go out of business, and that I would be broke. And I feel like one day I just woke up from that and decided to take the plunge and start a business, and it worked out. It’s just that fear. It’s that fear of failure, that’s what holds you back.

John: What is the best advice you’ve ever received?

Russell: The best advice I’ve ever received in my entire life is to think from my goals, not of my goals, which is kind of what I was talking about before, that I always, every day, try to make decisions as the man that I want to be instead of maybe basing decisions on all the chaos that might be happening in my life.

John: What is a personal habit that contributes to your success?

Russell: Every day I get into the shower, because it’s the only place in my house where I can sit down for a second without having a cat jump on me –

John: Okay, I was wondering how you were gonna finish that sentence, but keep going.

Russell: Yeah, no, no, no. Yeah, it’s the only place in my house where I can actually be alone for half a second. And I go over my goals in my mind. I pray. I’m grateful in advance for things that I want. And having that daily work out, sort of mental work out every day makes all the difference in my life. If I stop doing it, everything goes to hell.

John: So you must not take cold showers.

Russell: No, no, no.

John: Can you share an internet resource, like an Evernote, with Fire Nation?

Russell: Sure. One of the greatest resources that’s made a huge difference in my business is called Stealth Seminar, and it allows us to automate our webinars and do it really, really successfully. They have terrific customer support. It’s not my company or anything, but I just think they do a fantastic job – Stealth Seminar.

John: If you could recommend just one book for our listeners, what would it be and why?

Russell: How To Get Rich, by Felix Dennis. This is one you don’t hear very much about. Felix Dennis is the guy who started Maxim. He owned Dennis Publishing, and he’s a British guy. When he died, he was probably worth about 700 million pounds. And it’s an anti-self-help book in a lot of ways. He basically says, “Yes, you can be rich. You can be a multi-millionaire, but guess what? You’re not going to, because it’s way too freaking hard. But if you really want to, you can.” And it’s one of the only books that is from someone that really did it that just lays it out, what it takes, what it costs, the price that you pay, everything. It’s a fantastic book.

John: Russell, I wanna end today on fire, brother, with a parting piece of guidance from you, the best way that we can connect with you, then we’ll say goodbye.

Russell: So the parting piece of guidance that I would give you is to look at what it is that you’re doing for people, and ask yourself, “What is this really worth? What is the value that you are delivering?” If you’re a relationship coach and you can rescue someone’s relationship, what is that really worth? And if that’s worth at least a few thousand dollars, which I think it is, then why are you charging $47 for your stuff? Or why are you charging $100 an hour? So start to think in terms of what your true value is and charge accordingly.

The resources that I’d like to give you, if you wanna see one of our client acquisition funnels in action, which is kind of the approach that we use, the approach that we have our clients use, you can go to clientsondemand.com/webinar. That’s clientsondemand.com/webinar. And one other resource I’d like to give you, we have a private Facebook group. It’s totally free. It’s called the Art of High Ticket selling, where we just talk about this – how do you get people to enroll in your stuff for $5,000, $8,000, $10,000 and deliver massive value to them so they’re happy, and you’re happy, and they get great results. If you wanna be a part of that, you can go to clientsondemand.com/facebook.

John: Wow, Fire Nation, I hope your mind’s blown. I’m writing down these things feverishly because I’m going to both of these links as soon as the interview’s over. And you know this. You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and you’ve been hanging out with RR and JLD today. So keep up the heat, and head over to EOFire.com. Just type Russell in the search bar. His show notes will pop right up with everything that we’ve been talking about. Everything. Of course all the links. But you can just go directly to clientsondemand.com/webinar for that killer webinar, or of course clientsondemand.com/facebook for that free killer high ticket Facebook group. Jump in. It’s free. Learn from people. I’ve heard great things about it. And Russell, I wanna thank you, brother, for sharing your journey with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you, and we’ll catch you on the flip side.

Russell: Thanks, John.