Behind the scenes look at how I create 8 presentations in less than two weeks. On this episode Russell shares how he prepares for Funnel Hacking Live, and what kind of work goes into each presentation, including:

-- How he organizes each presentation inside Google Drive.

-- How he makes each slide, and who makes it look so pretty.

-- And how he gets it all done in just 2 weeks time.

So listen now to find out all that goes into each of the 8 FHL presentations that Russell will be doing this year.

So I have 2 weeks to do all my presentations. And people are like, “Russell, why didn’t you prepare ahead and do the presentations over the last few months?” Do you not remember? I wrote the Traffic Secrets book and rewrote the other 2 books. I think we were adding it up and it was it, not quite, but almost a quarter of a million words I wrote in the last 6 months, which is insane. Most books are like 50 to 60 thousand words, so it’s the equivalent of writing 5 or 6 books, that’s how bad it got.

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Hey what’s up, everybody? This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I’m driving home from dropping my kids off in the snow, and everybody’s driving so slow I thought we should talk. So with that said, let’s queue up the theme song, and we will be right back.

Alright, so last week we were on the Two Comma Club cruise, which was so much fun. You should come next year if you didn’t come for some reason. Everyone should be there. But it was amazing, we had like 350 funnel hackers out on the sea for a week, locked in a boat, so I was locked on a boat with a whole bunch of people, and we had so much fun. I tried to put on my extraverted hat and go out and do stuff, which was actually really, really fun. I had a good time.

But I’m not going to lie, they say the difference between extravert and introvert is not that you like to hide or not, it’s that, it’s how you recharge. Extraverts recharge by going out with a whole bunch of people hanging out, that’s how they recharge, whereas introverts have to go hide by themselves. So by that definition, threw on my extravert hat, went out there, went out there and partied like it was 1979 to 1999, what’s the Prince song, the artist formerly known as Prince? Anyway, I partied, and my battery got completely empty and I kept going and kept going, and kept going. And then we’d go back, Collette and I would go back to the room and just be like, (deep breath).

In fact, one night it was like, we uh, it was like an intense day of networking and stuff, and we got back on the boat and we were going to go to dinner with everybody and she was like, “I can’t do it.” And I’m like, “Neither can I.” So we back to the room and ordered room service and we watched the bachelor on our laptop while we had room service, and then we passed out. It was amazing.

Anyway, even us introverted nerds can party like the best of you, if we need to. So we did that on the cruise and it was really fun. It’s funny because every year we’re like, ‘We’ll never do this cruise again.” Then after the cruise everyone’s like, “Please do a cruise again.” So we may or may not do it next year, but if we do you should totally come. So you gotta be part of the Two Comma Club coaching program, though. So there you go, that’s the only way to get in and participate and hang out with all the cool kids.

Anyway, so that was last week. Then we got home, two days ago to Boise, and it’s snowing. We went from cruise weather to snow weather, so now I just dropped the kids off at school, there’s snow everywhere which means everyone’s driving like a half a mile an hour, so we’ve got some time to hang out and talk. So that’s my game plan right now.

Anyway, we are like 14 days away from Funnel Hacking Live, which is crazy. So by the time you guys listen to this, we’ll be even closer. Tickets are sold out for the sixth year, fifth year, sixth year in a row, which is amazing. And I’m grateful for all you guys for getting your tickets, I’m grateful to hang out with you guys in 2 weeks, and to serve you. And people always tell me, “Funnel Hacking Live’s coming up, are you so excited, the tickets are sold out and you get to relax now?” and I’m like, “Ha ha, I don’t get to relax now. You don’t understand what goes into the actual event.”

Funnel Hacking Live, there’s a lot of other speakers, but I am a big fan of me speaking a lot. Maybe it’s just I like to hear my own voice, maybe I’m just conceited, I don’t know. I just know that there was an event I always used to go to and I loved it. I’ll just say the name, it doesn’t really matter, it’s the Traffic Conversion event. So I missed the very first T&C ever, and the next like 3 I went to and it was amazing. And I remember my favorite part was that Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher would be onstage and they would teach the entire thing.

And those guys are brilliant, I love hearing Perry tell stories, and just I loved it. And the second year they started bringing more guest speakers and it was like, ‘Oh we got less Perry and Ryan, but the other speakers are cool.” And the next year they brought in, I don’t know, like 100 speakers and Perry and Ryan spoke once and they were off stage, and the rest was all these other speakers. And after that, I stopped going. I went because I loved hearing from the attractive character of the business, people who, that’s who I enjoyed.

So when we started Funnel Hacking Live, I was very conscious of that. I remembered what stopped me going to T&C, and it was the fact that they brought in so many speakers that I didn’t get to hear from people I wanted to. So every year we have amazing speakers come in, but I always have this thing where, I know some of you guys will, I don’t know, some of you guys come because you want to hear me speak. So I don’t want to let you down, so I put a lot into that.

So every year I have a lot of speaking slots. So I think 2 years ago I had 7 speaking slots, last year I did 6…no sorry. 2 years ago was 6 speaking slots, last year I did 5, and this year I’m doing, up to 7. I wanted to do more stuff. I’m doing a late night session that I’ve never done before, and a couple of other things. But I just, I don’t know, I love it. But the problem is there’s so much prep work that goes into it. I have so much work to do.

So I have 2 weeks to do all my presentations. And people are like, “Russell, why didn’t you prepare ahead and do the presentations over the last few months?” Do you not remember? I wrote the Traffic Secrets book and rewrote the other 2 books. I think we were adding it up and it was it, not quite, but almost a quarter of a million words I wrote in the last 6 months, which is insane. Most books are like 50 to 60 thousand words, so it’s the equivalent of writing 5 or 6 books, that’s how bad it got.

So that happened and then when that got done, I did that during the kids wrestling season. And then I had church callings and all these things. And that’s why I didn’t do my slides yet. And then as soon as I got done, I had a week off from Christmas and I was just trying to catch my breath, and then we had the Two Comma Club cruise and now we’re here and I’ve got 14 days to do all the presentations. So there’s a ton that goes into it.

So I’m going to kind of walk you guys through how I do it, because maybe that will help you guys who are doing events or things like that. So what I do is I go into Google drive, I have become obsessed with Google drive in the last year and a half. I always hated it prior to that, and now it’s my obsession. So I create a new folder, I have a PowerPoint folder with all my PowerPoint slides from every event I’ve ever done, which is kind of nice to have. Then I have a folder that says Funnel Hacking Live folder and it has 2015, 2016, 2017, so all the slides from past presentations are in there.

So first thing I did yesterday was create a new folder called FHL2020 and then you open that and inside there I created a folder for every presentation. So I know my intro presentation, which is my most important one to me, I talk about Funnel Frameworks. So I titled the very first one, first folder, “Number 1-Funnel Frameworks” and my second presentation is on Funnel Hacking. So “Number 2-Funnel Hacking” and my third presentation is story workshops, so “Number 3- Story Workshop”. Then number four is my presentation on emotion, logic, fear. So I did “Number 4-Emotion, Logic, Fear” and “Number 5-Funnelology” “Number 6 –Traffic Secrets” “Number 7-Unlock the Secrets of Two Comma Club” and “Number 8 –“ I can’t remember the title of the 8th presentation. I don’t think I have a title yet. Oh, “30 Days” So I have 8 presentations.

Anyway, so I made 8 folders and inside each folder I create a new Google slides, and I’m obsessed with Google slides. Google slides is great because I can go and I can build slides and then I can have amazing designers, Leon on my team is an amazing designer and he helps me with my slides. So what then happens is I go to all 8 of these presentations and the first thing I need is the title slide, which is like the logo and looks awesome. So I have that, and the second slide I need is a headline. So it's usually a headline and usually has a picture of me on the headline slide, so I do that. And on the third we have a slide template. So what that means is like the bottom 1/10th of the slide we’ll have my logo and the branding, and then the background slide will have some cool thing.

So right now, yesterday, that’s what we’re working on. Okay, here’s my 8 presentations, what’s the branding for each one of them, so Leon’s been killing himself making the branding and it’s looking so good. And then I go through and write, “Okay, I need 8 headlines. What’s the headline for each presentation?’ So I give him the headlines. I didn’t get through all those yesterday, but I got a bunch of those done. Then he’ll design the tile slide with the headline, and then he’s designing the branding for all those. So he’s in the process now that I’ve kind of dumped those on him, he’s going through and designing each of the frameworks, excuse me, each of the slide structure for each of the 8 presentations.

So he’s doing that right now, and then as soon as the first one is done, which I think I saw the first one last night, he got done. So then I go in and I start taking my outline, and I’ll start building out the slides. And in the past I would have to do all of the slide design myself. So if you think about it, there’s our right brain and our left brain right. So right brain I think is the creative side, and the left brain is analytical. It might be the opposite of that. But you get the gist. And the problem that most of us have is you create something, your smart brain that’s doing the content and creating it, then the other side of the brain is like, “Wait it looks ugly. Hold on, let’s make it pretty.” And so you’re designing and trying to make it pretty and you go back and forth.

So in the past I was doing all my own slides, so I would have to spend so much time on the pretty side and the other side, so I’d be in focus mode of where is the story line going? And then stopping to go over and make the slide pretty, and back and forth, and you get out of state, in state, out of state, in state, out of state and it was really, really hard. So what’s nice now is having a slide designer. I go in the slides and I stay just in my left brain the whole time, like, “Okay, what’s the story?” slide number 1, slide number 2, and I start dumping content on it. And I know my slides are all simple. It’s usually a headline thing, an image, and like a little blurb. So what I do is write headline, the blurb to help me remember the story. Then I find an image, so I don’t put the image, don’t edit, I just link to the image, boom, next slide, next slide. I go through as fast as I can.

So what’s happening is I’m doing that right now, that’ll be my big project for today, going through the slides and trying to take the process, the storyline that I’m going through in the slide, and I’ll start dumping those things in there.

Some of you guys may wonder, how do you structure the storyline? If you listen to my, I did a podcast episode on how to teach your frameworks, if you go through there it kind of goes through it. But basically what I do is I tell a story about how I learned or I earned this concept, step number 1. Step number 2 then is I walk through the overarching strategy of it, here’s the step by step process. Step number 3 I go into the tactics of like, here’s how you actually implement it and how you’re going to actually do it. And step number 4 I show case studies of other people doing it.

So that’s kind of the storyline, and I go through and I build that out, those 4 phases. And sometimes one slide presentation might have that 5 times, you know, where I’m teaching a concept, here’s the story, here’s the strategy, here’s the tactic, here’s the case study. Boom, boom, boom, I kind of go through that over and over and over again. So I’ll be doing that for probably the next 2 days, 3 days on my first presentation. And then by the time I’m done, Leon will probably be done with all the 8 slide designs. Then he’ll jump back on slide number one, and he’ll start going behind me and start cleaning them up, making them look nice, making the images look awesome, and going through like that. And I’ll go to presentation number 2 and he’ll follow behind me, and 3 and 4 and we’ll kind of go through the process like that.

And hopefully by this time 2 weeks from now, all 8 presentations will be done and perfect and beautiful. And then I’ll go through them a thousand times and hopefully when I get onstage I will remember all the stories. So that’s how I do it. So hopefully that helps. You know, most people, it’s funny, when we teach the perfect webinar and people are working on presentations on people who work on their presentations for 6 or 8 months, I’m like, ‘You gotta move faster.”

You know, I’ve got to 8 presentations in 2 weeks. You can do 1 in 2 weeks, but you have to get back to this process of fixing the left brain/right brain, where you’re going back and forth in your perfection, trying to make it look perfect, and you have to figure out where you’re at again, and remember what you’re talking about and all those things. It’s like no, you gotta move faster and stay in your, even if you’re doing all the design, that’s fine, don’t design the slides right away. Focus on your creative brain, or whichever side of the brain that’s telling the stories and map those things out, and fill in the slides as fast as you can, then come back later and design them. Or find someone that can login to your slides and do it.

That’s the most amazing thing about Google slides is that you can 3 or 4 or 5 or 10 people all in the slides with you. So I can be in there dumping things in, I can have an editor behind me cleaning things up, making sure my words make sense, have the designer go in behind that and make sure it’s clean as well. It’s really powerful, really simple, and really awesome.

So anywho, I hope that helps. I’m back home now and that’s what I’m going to be doing for the next 2 weeks. So if you’re wondering what’s Russell doing? That’s what I’m doing. And if you want to see me do it, I highly, highly recommend following me on instagram if you don’t right now. If you just go to Instagram.com/RussellBrunson, there’s my instagram profile and you can follow me and I’m always showing on my stories, behind the scenes of me doing the slides, and working on things, pulling late nighters, and early mornings, and all the insanity that will be ensuing from now until after the event. Plus everything happening in the event. I document the whole event on insta-stories. So if you want to see what’s happening make sure you follow me on instagram, and follow my stories because you’ll see behind the scenes of what’s actually happening.

Alright everybody, with that said, I gotta get to work. Appreciate you all, thanks for listening, thanks for your support, and we’ll talk to you guys all again soon. Bye everybody.