# A Consulting Call With My Mentor – Part 1 of 2

- Link: https://jarvislegacy.com/podcast/a-consulting-call-with-my-mentor-part-1-of-2/
- Published: 2019-04-29T08:00:00-07:00
- Author: anchorwave

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A Consulting Call With My Mentor - Part 1 of 2

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I had a really rare opportunity to give some feedback to my initial mentor who got
me started on this crazy journey. Listen in for thoughts and insights that should
help you as well.

On this special 2 episode series Russell talks about a recent social media post 
by Mark Joyner, and then he goes on to give him some awesome advice. Here are some
things that Russell tells Mark Joyner, that could be helpful to anyone running a
business.

 * Why having too many upsells/downsells will make your customers turn on you.
 * How removing complexity from software will make customers enjoy it more.
 * And why the more significance you seek, the less you will actually get.

So listen to Russell offer sound advice to his own mentor, Mark Joyner, about how
he can improve his business.

—Transcript—

Alright everyone, so let me give you some context. When I first got in this game
almost 15 years ago, when I jumped in it was kind of the wild, wild west. There 
was a whole bunch of stuff happening with no one really, it was just kind of crazy
out there. It was Google was kind of there. There was a bunch of other search engines
though, no one knew who was going to win you know before then. Before there was 
Myspace, there was a social network coming out called Friendster, some of you guys
may remember that. There was a couple of people talking about marketing and stuff,
but there wasn’t a lot out there.

And when I got on it was kind of like the wild, wild west and I was looking for 
stuff and I found a couple of people talking about things. But there wasn’t a lot
that I could really find. Today I feel like so much of what we do online has been
very defined and there’s clear lines of this is what we do and how we do it. A lot
of the foundational frameworks and things have been figured out and mastered over
the last 15 years.

And a lot of you guys who are jumping in the game now, it’s lucky you can just jump
in and here’s the framework of what to do. But before that, even before I got on,
there were people out there trying to figure this stuff out and one of the early,
early, early pioneers was a guy named Mark Joyner. And Mark is, I mean, he’s got
a military background, he’s written a bunch of books, he’s just an amazing person
for so many reasons.

And I remember as I was starting my search online and trying to figure things out,
I kept hearing his name pop up. And I didn’t know who was who, I didn’t understand
the whole, any of the landscape of who was important and not. But I remember I heard
his name a couple of times and all the sudden Is aw this campaign come out and it
seemed like everybody’s emails who I had joined at that point, were all sending 
emails out saying “Mark Joyner, the godfather of internet marketing is retiring 
and he’s leaving behind everything. And he wants to shift what he’s doing in life
and he’s selling off all the source code to all his sites and projects.”

And I remember it’s probably one of the best hooks I’ve ever heard. I was like, “
What?” I remember going to the sales page and reading this thing called the Mark
Joyner Farewell Package. I remember reading the sales page and I was like, “I have
to have this. If I had this my life would change. I have to have it, I have to have
it.” And I was going crazy because I wanted, I needed to buy it. But the problem
was it was a thousand bucks. I had just married my beautiful wife, we were more 
than broke. I was a wrestler who was making zero dollars an hour. She was a secretary
making 9.50 an hour. And we had a little house we were, I had just read Rich Dad
Poor Dad so we bought this duplex and I was renting out half of it.

I mean, it was as poor as you could get. But at the same time, my wife and I talk
about this, the best time of our life. It was just so much fun. Sometimes we miss
that part of it. But I still remember I’m in this house and I’m reading the farewell
package and I want to buy it but I can’t afford it and I don’t know what to do. 
I don’t have a credit card at the time. My wife had one but she had, you know, before
we got married she had a credit card. So we had someone help us pay it off, and 
we were paying that person back. So we were trying not to get into debt and all 
sorts of stuff.

I remember reading the sales pitch and then all these people promoting it. And this
guy named Mike Chen kept promoting it like crazy and I remember I listened to this
interview with Mike Chen and Mark Joyner talking about how to have success in business
and basically they’re like, “You need $2000 at least to get started. And part of
that’s going to go to buying the farewell package for a thousand bucks, but you 
need some startup capital to actually be able to do something.”

And I listened to this thing all night in my bed, over and over and over again. 
And Finally I was like, “I have to invest in this thing.” And it’s funny now, looking
back at how scared I was, but how grateful I am that Mark was willing to be a marketer
and to sell a product that he believed in, that he had created, and that he had 
given me urgency and scarcity and desires for this thing. Because that next morning
I woke up and I told Collette, “I think this is the thing.” And she’s like, “You’ve
tried a ton of stuff. You really think this is it?” and I’m like, “I feel like this
is the thing I need.” And she said, “Okay, I trust you.”

So we called the bank, we upped the credit card limit a little bit and I went and
bought the farewell package. And I remember a week or two later it showed up, right
when my wife and I were leaving, it was our one year anniversary and my parents 
were flying to Hawaii and they were taking us with them. So I had my little

So I had my little CD walkman player and on the flight I’m listening to the CD’s
in the air from this farewell package and it’s Mark telling the war stories. How
they built his companies back then. Again, pre-everything, he was building search
engines and getting them indexed and building huge email lists with that. He was
doing…I would love to actually go back, maybe I’ll do that. I should go back and
re-listen to that whole course because he had so many of these brilliant ideas. 
Like when you can’t run FAcebook ads, how do you build a list? When there are no
pay-per-click search engines besides the one you built, by the way. He was one of
the first pay-per-click search engines. You’re like, how do you do it?

So he ahd to be super creative and he had all these amazing ideas and ways and he
had some websites that blew up to be in the top 30 or 40 websites in the world, 
highest traffic websites, just all these amazing things that he developed.

So I remember listening to these CDs and just getting so many ideas about what to
do and how to do it. It was really foundational from me. And I think of all the 
lessons I learned from Mark, and I learned a ton of them, but the one that was the
most impactful was the focus point of building an email list. You have to build 
a list, you have to build a list.

And that season of the internet marketing game is when adsense sites became this
thing and everyone is cranking out these ads and sites and making insane amounts
of money and I kept wanting to shift my focus to that. I just kept hearing his voice
in my head. I didn’t know him yet personally but from listening to his course so
many times, “Focus on building a list, focus on building a list. That’s what you
gotta do.” So I went back to those fundamentals and I was annoyed as everyone else
was making millions of dollars around me doing nothing, building garbage sites. 
And then when that dried up and disappeared overnight I was so grateful for him 
as a mentor who stuck me to the fundamentals.

And you know, after Mark did his farewell package, he sold off all his source code
stuff, he disappeared for like a year, I have no idea where he went, and then a 
year later he came back and was just kind of helping some people. And I jumped in
and was like, “Dude, you have no idea how much you’ve helped me.” And we had a chance
to connect a little bit there and talk a few times and I had a chance to interview
him. And it was such a cool, it was cool of him to do that. It meant the world to
someone like me, who he was everything to me. And it was so cool he was willing 
to come back and to share.

And then about a year later or so he launched a new company and it was in more of
the personal development space, it was called Simplology. And I remember when he
came back there was all the, you know, all the naysayers have to come in like, “
Oh, I thought you were retiring from the internet, Mark.” And he’s like, “I was 
retiring from teaching internet marketing, I wasn’t retiring from using the internet.
I’m not an idiot. I’ve heard this internet thing is probably going to last a little
while.”

And he created this site called Simplology and he launched it, it grew really big
really fast, and then you know, honestly I don’t know what happened. I have my assumptions,
I think he had had so much success in earlier things, then when this started happening,
I don’t know. Maybe it was a relationship thing, maybe it was family things, I don’t
know. But I don’t feel like he was really engaged in the game for a long time. I
think that Simpleology was working, he made a bunch of money, built a big list, 
but he didn’t really tend after if for, who knows, a decade or so. It’s there, it’s
been doing it’s thing it just hasn’t you know, I don’t know. It hasn’t had his attention,
his focus.

And you know, I was lucky enough 2 or 3 years ago he came out and we spent a day
or two together and I helped him build a funnel, which was really fun and just super
cool to go back and do that with my original mentor. In fact, we launched that funnel,
and it’s funny, we filmed the whole Funnel Hacker TV episode, but we haven’t got
that live yet. I’m going to have to go back and yell at Brandon on my team to see
if we can get that thing live, because it was really cool that whole thing. I had
so much fun having him hear in Boise.

In fact, one of the things I remember, one of his original books was called Mind
Control Marketing, which was the book we actually did the funnel for. And I remember
he opened it up and he signed his name in it and I looked at it that night, and 
it said something like, “To my number one student.” And I was like, “Oh my gosh,
that is so cool.”

Anyway, so there’s enough of me fanboying. So let me talk about what the point of
this podcast is. So it’s been interesting, I feel like when Mark came out to Boise
and we spent the day or two together, I feel like we you know, kind of caught him
on fire, got him re-excited about stuff. I think he saw how much excitement we were
having with Clickfunnels and like the team and everything. And I think he was kind
of getting excited to get back into it. And I’ve seen him do more and more stuff
over the last year or two since he came out here. And I can feel like, I don’t know,
it’s like the Phoenix rising from the ashes, this rebirth of excitement from him.
And I feel like right now he’s in this momentum where he’s like, “Okay,  I want 
to do this thing.”

So the other night, he posted something on Facebook. It was, what was that about?
Almost a month ago right now. So he posted this thing and I’m going to read you 
what he posted. He posted:

“Marketing guru’s, this is your chance to humiliate me. Number one, I’ve been stepping
up my game lately. Number two, this is just the beginning. Number three, I want 
your advice on how to step it up even more. Better PR, better offers, better social,
broader reach, better copywriting, better public speaking, better whatever the ‘
eff’. Number four, be brutally honest. Skin is thick AF, ego in check, mind wide
open, and then just be a….just don’t be a jerk about it. Bonus, I think this post
will get some wide attention, see this as a free advertising opportunity for yourself
and also as a deposit into Mark Joyner Favor Bank. I’m not a lannister, but I always
pay my debts.”

So that’s kind of what he posted. I remember reading that and I was like, “Oh man.”
It’s so interesting. And then I kind of sat back and I watched and I saw as comments
started flooding in. And as of today there’s 167 comments and tons of people gave
him good advice, tons of people gave him some bad advice. But of all the advice 
that was in there, there was one from actually my first, one of the first people
I mentored. It was Justin Brooke, and I think his was the closest to what I would
say, in short form, and then if I had more time with Mark, I would sit back and 
have a long form of bigger strategy things that I would talk about with him.

So what I want to do, I’m actually going to read Justin’s, I’m going to share a 
couple of quick thoughts I had, based on that. And then I want to sit, I basically
want to record this as if I was sitting down with Mark. I told him ahead of time
that I was going to record this. I said, “Look, I would love to do some more long
form, where I act like this is a consultation. I’m going to go through 6 or 7 things
I would really look at if I was you, and I would love if I could record this and
I’ll send you the audio, and then you can basically have it. But I want to publish
it as a podcast too, because I think this is going to help so many people who are
kind of in a similar situation.”

And he said, “Yes.” And then he came back and said, “What if we do that, and then
I go and implement a bunch of stuff you said, then we do an update podcast later,
kind of showing the results.” And I was like, “Dude, that’d be awesome.” So I’m 
totally into that.

So this is the first podcast of a two part series probably, which would be cool.
Alright, so let me read you what Justin Brooke said, Justin said:

“Said with the utmost respect and love, I am your raving fan, but I do see some 
things that could be improved. Number one, you seem to be falling into the trap 
for all great marketers of doing too much high level advance stuff, and not enough
of the basics. Maybe your goals are different, maybe you don’t want the attention,
but your profiles, sales pages, even the UI of simpleology is very dated. It’s not
keeping up with what’s currently popular or best practices. Number two, it’s confusing
who you are today. Are you in the fitness niche? Are you marketing? Are you personal
development? I know you as the godfather of internet marketing, what happened to
that messaging? Where’s that story on your profile pictures, bio, cover photo, website,
youtube channel? If it’s not that anymore, then what? How do you want me to brag
about you to my friends? (which is a cool line). And then number three, Simpleology
is the great productivity software on the market, but it looks like the oldest productivity
software on the market. It should be an app on my phone, it should look like Trello,
it should be easy and intuitive like workflow, and it should have comparison pages
to Asana to To-do list, Trello, workflow. I love you dude. You can do no wrong in
my mind, but since you asked.”

So three really, really good things. Number one is he launched into what Mark does,
and Mark is brilliant, which is the curse of most geniuses. He speaks at a very 
high level, and for people who are seeking improvement, we love that. We plug into
it. The problem is that most people don’t seek for improvement, people are looking
for new opportunities, as I’m going to talk about here in a minute, and the new 
opportunists need things at a more basic level.

Number two, I think there’s confusion of where he fits in the market. And number
three is that Simpleology, like he said, it looks very outdated. So it’s come to
those three things.

Now, a couple of things. I had some fast things that I wanted to just throw out 
there. Like if I was to write a post to follow up Justin’s, I’d have like a quick
thing, before I’d dive into the longer, more fun, detailed geeking out on strategy
and principle stuff. So I’m going to go through some of the core things really, 
really quickly.

To Justin’s three, the things I would probably add, the first one I’m going to go
with Simpleology, kind of what he talked about with the, he said, “Simpleology is
the great productivity software on the market, but it looks like the oldest productivity
software on the market.” And I would say something similar. Mark, after you came
out, (I’m going to speak to Mark, just directly for the rest of this probably. I
hope that’s okay.)

So Mark, when you came to Boise and we were geeking out showing you all the Clickfunnels
stuff, and you kind of did the same thing with Simpleology, you logged us in and
created accounts for me and my team and we were all excited to kind of use it because
we started doing it. And the word, the root word is simple, Simpleology, and it 
by default isn’t very simple. It was by far one of the most complex project management,
task management things that I had used.  And because of that, we didn’t get traction.

Me and Stephen Larsen, as you know, we were geeking out like, “We’re going to do
this.” And we tried it for a week, two weeks, I was going through all the black 
belt, white belt, all the training stuff. And by the time, 2 or 3 weeks in, literally
the phrase we said was, “This is not simple at all, this is very complex. We’re 
going to go back to Trello because it’s simple.” So that’s what we did, we shifted
back to the system that was actually very simple.

So that was one big piece of feedback, why we didn’t get traction, why we didn’t
stick, is because the simplicity wasn’t actually there. Especially for a product
that has simplicity, the word simple in the name. It’s like, we had to make it more
simple. And you know, I say that looking at Clickfunnels, which once again, is very
similar. It’s like the most complex software on the planet. And my biggest hurdle
that I have in Clickfunnels is getting people to consume the software to the point
where they can actually use it.

So I totally understand that. And it’s funny, we’re trying to do more of this now,
but it’s hard this deep in the game for us, is instead of giving people all the 
complexity, if I could build Clickfunnels from the ground up again…Like let’s say
I sold it for a billion dollars, I had a 5 year non-compete or whatever, I was starting
over in 5 years from now. I would make Clickfunnels so simple and I would force 
people to opt into complexity.

So I would basically make Clickfunnels look like LeadPages, where it’s like, you
can create a page and that’s it. And they would go int here and drag and drop and
move things around, like, “Oh this is easy.” And I’m like, “Oh, you have a page,
would you like to do a funnel?” And they’re like, “yeah, that’d be awesome.” And
they’d click a button and then it’s like, “Okay, let me coach you on what a funnel
is first.” So we explain the concept behind it, and then they click a button to 
unlock that complexity, to add it to it.

So that way we have a basic software, that way all we have to do for my onboarding,
to get people to stick with the software is get them to come  into the very simplest,
easiest thing, just convince them of that. And they use that and get a quick way
and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, that’s easy.” And then for them to add the next thing,
it’s not just like, click the button and go into it. They have to watch a video 
and get trained on it. And then when they opt into that complexity, it’s not complex
because they just went through a training cycle to understand that.

And I’d totally, again if I was to do Clickfunnels from scratch today, that’s what
I would do, I would make it simple. And then every time they want to add complexity,
they have to opt into it, they watch the training and then it unlocks. And I wouldn’t
sell them for each upsell, I would just opt them in at complexity. And they keep
getting those things as they do it.

So for you, I know you said you have a new version coming out. So I would just look
at that. Right now it’s just super complex for something that’s called simple. And
I would at that and be like, “Let’s actually make it simple.” And then unlock the
complexity as they go deeper. That’s number one.

Number two, I logged in tonight to Simpleology because I haven’t used it for a while.
So I logged in and it put me immediately into an upsell flow, which as I respect
as a marketer, but as a consumer it drove me crazy. It went to three upsells and
with the third upsell was a sales video with comments down below and I couldn’t 
even get into the software.

So then I logged out, and I re-logged in and then it took me to the software. I’m
like, I can’t even log into the software because it’s putting me through upsells.
And as someone who loves upsells and downsells more than anyone on human earth, 
on planet earth, I also know that my lifetime value of my customers, if I’m not 
careful, upsells and downsells will destroy the lifetime value.

Back in a pre-clickfunnels life, when we were, before I really understood….in fact,
I can tell you the story behind this. Every one of my funnels back in the day would
always havce 3 upsells and 3 downsells. So if you said no to everything you went
through 6 things every single time. And we were pulling out tons of money, so I 
thought it was right. And what’s interesting, one of my friends came out with this
new software, it was Garrett Peirson and Scott Brandley, they came out with this
new software called Shopware Proved, and they were like, “Hey, put this on your 
thank you page. This is when people are most happy. They just bought something, 
they’re so excited. And then they review you and you get really good reviews.”

I was like, “Cool.” So I put this thing on my thank you page for one of our funnels
during a launch. And then all the sudden the reviews start coming in and I was like,“
This is awesome.” So I let it run for you know, 4 or 5 hours in the middle of the
launch, then I logged in to see what my stars looked like. I think my overall rating
was like 2 ½ stars. I was like, “What? These are my best buyers, these guys should
love me right now.”

And I started reading the comments and people were like, “If I see one more upsell
I’m going to kill you. I don’t even want your product anymore.” All these things.
I was like, “Oh my gosh, my customers hate me.” It’s because we took them through
a so complex upsell process.

So for me, I always look at, how do I…I want as many upsells as possible without
making the person angry. So if you look at like evolution of funnels for me, especially
funnels that have upsells and downsells, I’m very, very careful. That’s why we kind
of pioneered the whole order form bump thing, because someone would buy a product,
you know in the 2 step order form, they’d put in their shipping address and then
right before the submit button we’d have an order form bump and we start putting
those things in because it would increase our cart value, but people didn’t look
at it as an upsell. So it didn’t decrease customer happiness. So we had those bumps
that we plugged in there.

And then I used to go all the way from having 6 upsell/downsells to the max, I have
an internal rule, the most we can have is 2. And if it’s upsell/downsell, that’s
it. If it’s an upsell/upsell, that’s it. For me, we never go more than 2. That’s
like an internal rule, everyone in my company knows. We do 2 and that’s it. And 
from that point, our happiness level and our lifetime value of our customers have
dramatically gone up because they’re not sick of us by the time it’s over. So that’s
kind of a thing to look at.

For me to login, I went through three upsells and I then I couldn’t even get to 
the software. And this is me logging in, I’m sure it’s similar after signing up 
for the first time. I would just look at when someone’s creating an account on my
software, it’s more important for me to get them using the software than for me 
to make revenue immediately. That’s not always true. In the 6th thing I have here
for you, there are frontend funnels with a goal and a focus of upsell/downselling,
but then from there I push them into my software. And Clickfunnels is very light
on any kind of upselling through the signup process, because I just want them to
have a good experience and get them to stick.

And then the third thing would say, and again this is my quick feedback, my facebook
post that I would have made, is the concept of significance. And I share this, this
is one I’ve been kind of nervous to share, but I think it’s really, really important.
I don’t want to name names because these podcasts are public and things like that,
but it’s been interesting in my journey. I’ve had a lot of chance to work with people
who, in fact, the first time I ever heard about this I was in a car ride with Tony
Robbins and Tony was talking about doing a partnership with somebody asking my opinions
on it. I was like, “I like that person, I think they’re pretty good.” He said, “
yeah, the problem is that person is significance driven, therefore I’m not going
to do the deal with them.”

I was like, “Oh my gosh. Am I significance driven?” and I was freaking out. And 
I’m having Tony Robbins look at my soul and I’m like, “am I significance driven?”
and it made me really, really nervous. And I’ve always been cautious of that since.
I don’t want to be significance driven. I want to be driven by other needs, other
things.

All of us have significance, it’s part of what we do. It’s what drives us, especially
entrepreneurs, it’s significance. But what I’ve found is a lot of people, especially
from the older time, the foundational time, and these are offline guru’s who I respect
and I love, and some of the early online guys, is that they got a lot of significance
when they did, and I know that you specifically kind of told me this before when
I think I had an event that I wanted you to speak at. And this is before Clickfunnels
came out, but you said, “You know, I can only do it if I’m the keynote speaker, 
because I need to maintain my branding, and my positioning.”

And I was like, “I understand that, but the problem is if you’re not careful with
that it ruins opportunities.” It’s funny I was talking to Dave Woodward on my team
about this, pretty in depth. I said, “It’s interesting how much significance I have
right now in my life. More than I could ever even hope for and the less I try to
be significant, the more significance I get. The more I push it away the more I 
get.” And it’s funny because I see a lot of people who hold onto significance, and
they want to be significant, feel significant, and because of that, they disappear
from the public face.

So for me, the biggest thing I would say is, and I feel like you’re doing it now,
in fact, this post is a great example of it, is being willing to be vulnerable and
coming off of that, breaking posture is what draws people toward you. And in the
early days of the internet it was different because it wasn’t social media right,
it was ads and it was emails and it was clicks, so it didn’t matter as much. But
in today’s world where everything is social, significance actually repels people,
it’s like a magnet that pushes people away. Whereas vulnerability is what draws 
people in. And you can see that from this post right here alone.

So for me it’s like, when I talk about my significance and my achievements and my
accomplishments, stuff like that, it never draws people towards me. When I talk 
about my failures, and the things I struggle with, things like that, it draws people
towards me.

So there’s a point in your stories to have that significance, where it’s like, ‘
hey, I did blah, blah, blah.” But if you look at any of my webinars or my stories
or my videos, I touch upon significance, I say things so that people know that I’m
significant, but I jump off that as fast as I possibly can. Like it may something
like, ‘Here’s, I had a chance to build a funnel for Tony Robbins when he launched
his new book.” Boom, there’s a huge significance hit, but then I jump back and I’m
like, ‘Oh my gosh, it was the most stressful thing in the world so I was scared.”
And I go into that and then all the sudden they’re like, “Oh my gosh, he’s human.
He was scared just like I would have been scared.” And that’s what draws them in.

Me doing something with Tony does not, it gives me the credibility but the significance
actually pushes things away. So for you it’s like the more vulnerable you get, the
more your audience is going to connect with you and they’re going to build with 
you, and the more you kind of put significance away. And again, I feel like you’re
doing that now anyway, which is awesome. But it’s something that when you were in
Boise I wanted to say to you, but I didn’t know how to say it to you.

Because I look at you and I’m like, ‘Man, I have so much respect for you. Why do
most people in our world not know who Mark Joyner is right now?” it’s because, partially
its obviously by design. That wasn’t your goal, that wasn’t your mission at the 
time. But part of it is you were trying to maintain a certain positioning, which
made you lose your positioning.

I always tell people now, by trying to be significant, you’ll lose your significance.
By giving it away, is when you become significant. It’s kind of a hard thing to 
explain but I hope that kind of makes sense.