Russell goes on a deep dive, explaining all the fun things that went on behind the scenes of the first day of this year's Funnel Hacking Live event!

As we got closer to the event, one of my kids got COVID at school and we're like, "Oh no," because I was like, "I don't really care. I'm not too nervous about getting COVID." Other than if I get COVID during the event, like that would be tragic, right? Like everyone's coming to hear me talk about funnels and stuff. And if I'm not there, I can't speak. Or are people can get on stage and get their pictures with me or all the different things. Give their awards on stage and it could have ruined the whole event for so many people who'd put it in life savings for some people to come and travel here and to be part of this thing.

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What's up everybody? This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. It's been a little while since I've talked to you personally. That's not completely true. You guys have been listening to some of the Traffic Secrets episodes over the last few weeks, but right now I'm recording this episode about two weeks after Funnel Hacking Live 2021 is over. And I wanted to share some of the thoughts, some of the behind the scenes, some of the craziness and chaos that happened, and how we pulled off the biggest events since the coronavirus has hit inside of our industry. So with that said, I'll queue up the theme song. When I get back, we'll hang out and talk about the event.

All right. So first off for those who came to Funnel Hacking Live that was so much fun. Thank you for coming, for participating, for playing all out. Folks who weren't able to come, but watched from home, thank you as well for participating. I hope you guys enjoyed it. It was really cool. This is our first year ever doing a hybrid where we were going to have people in person and at home. And honestly, I've never told anybody this, but about 30 days before Funnel Hacking Live actually happened, we had to make the decision if it was going to happen. And it's one of those weird meetings where it's like, "Do we do this? Or do we not?" Because COVID numbers are spiking and all sorts of like just the chaos and just all the things that were happening. And we had to basically put down a down payment on Hogwarts because yes, we rented Hogwarts for the inner circle and two comma club winners. And so that was like the drop dead. We have to write a check right now for, I don't know how much it was, quarter million dollars or whatever it was for Hogwarts.

"Are we do this or not because there's no way to get this money back if we decide to not do Funnel Hacking Live," and I was like, "Wait, we may not be doing Funnel Hacking Live?" And they're like, "Well, this is the last shot to change it." I'm like, "Ah." So there's all the fear behind that. So finally, I was like, "All right, we're doing it. Put the money down. This is happening." As we got closer to the event, one of my kids got COVID at school and we're like, "Oh no," because I was like, "I don't really care. I'm not too nervous about getting COVID." Other than if I get COVID during the event, like that would be tragic, right? Like everyone's coming to hear me talk about funnels and stuff. And if I'm not there, I can't speak. Or are people can get on stage and get their pictures with me or all the different things. Give their awards on stage and it could have ruined the whole event for so many people who'd put it in life savings for some people to come and travel here and to be part of this thing.

I got really, really nervous and so I started doing everything you can dream of to protect myself and my health. I was taking every pill and powder you can dream of. I had my natural path coming and doing I.V. drips throughout the day, so I'm working while I've got bags of stuff, hooked to all my veins and all the chaos to try to make sure that we could stay healthy for the event. We also normally fly commercial there, but I was like, "Anything I can do to minimize my exposure until the event happens the better." So we flew private out there and we got to FHL and we got their day earlier than I normally do, which was actually really nice. A chance to get to see everything and watch things get set up. You could tell there was something about year that was just different. The energy in the hallways. And you saw people was just, you could tell people missed being around each other and missed networking and all that kind of stuff. And so everything started building up towards that.

And I remember the night before, so we did our big party at Hogwarts. We took the inner circle members and two comma cup winners and two comma club X-ers and all of our high-end coaching people to Hogwarts and we rented the whole thing out, which was crazy. So we got to be hanging out in Diagon Alley, and ride a Gringotts ride, and then get butter beer and just hang out and network. It was really a really cool special time for, I think everybody. But for me, I had to like leave a little early cause I was like, "I'm still not done with my slides," as Russell normally does. In fact, we brought our two twins. One of them was just like, "Dad, you're still not done with your slides" like this is crazy." I'm like, "I know I just- there's so many of them to do." Anyways, went back home that night and got everything ready. The next day was Funnel Hacking Live day.

Those who haven't been to our event before, we don't start till like noon on day one, which gives us the morning to keep getting people registered and just gives me the morning to kind of prepare and make sure that I'm ready. It's scary when you start at nine. That means you have to be up by like six, preparing. Day one, we start at noon, which is really, really nice. And this day one was going to be interesting for a lot of reasons. Number one, it was the first time we had a virtual audience at home plus our normal people in the audience. And so there's kind of that dynamic that we had to kind of figure out at first, but also this year was our Click Funnel seven year birthday.

And so I got up of very beginning and talked about entrepreneurship. Excuse me, I have a cough right now. I'm kind of recovering from, from Funnel Hacking Live, honestly. Anyway, and so I did my initial presentation and then I brought Todd out because we had something that we've been secretive and kept secret for the last, over a year now, which is, which is crazy that I kept a secret that long. You guys should be so proud of me. I'm not, I'm not very good at keeping secrets, but we announced that we are about to launch Click Funnels 2.0 and people went crazy. We kind of talked about it a little bit and I said, "You guys want to see a video of people who've actually seen Click Funnels 2.0?" and everyone went crazy as we watched this reveal video of just everybody watching it and freaking out. And it ended. And I was like, "Who here wants to see Click Funnels 2.0?" And they all went crazy and I was like, "Cool, tomorrow's our birthday. And tomorrow we're going to show you all inside everything." And it just like got quietly, just dead, quiet, awkwardly, quiet. I was like, "Oh crap, what do we, what do we do now?"

And then I didn't know how to transition. That's when Todd is going to transition off stage and I was going to start the keynote presentation that I was going to give. It was just this weird thing. And I was like, "Okay, well, thanks, Todd." He kind of walks off. I totally messed that part up. And then I turned around and looked the audience and they were all just like, "You're really not going to show it to us right now?" I was like, "No, if I went to my first presentation," excuse me, which was one I was really excited for, it's called advanced funnel audibles. But because of the weird energy, I feel like the energy kind of dropped with my not giving them any info on 2.0 and do that next presentation. And it was the more advanced one.

And I was so excited for that one, but I didn't feel like that one nailed it. I don't know when you're on stage. You can, you can feel like which one's like, "This crushed it," and which one's kind of you're like, "That didn't quite go perfect." And so I did the presentation. I think again, it was great, but it just didn't land. The energy wasn't what I wanted when I was sharing that. I wanted that to be my kickoff. So that was kind of one of those things where it's like, I think people understood what I was talking about. Blown away, but the energy just kind of wasn't... Anyway, this is me re-second guessing everything. I want to go back and redo day number one. But after that, then Anthony Trucks came and spoke on identity shifts and he was amazing.

I've known him for quite a few years, but it's the first time I'd ever seen him speak in person and he just brought the level of energy and excitement that he brought was amazing. And just talking about his life and how many times he had these identity shifts in his life and how it affected everything and how to actually be able to take your identity and consciously change it, to be able to get the outcome that you're looking for in life. It was really, really cool. So Anthony spoke. After that Kaylin Poland came and spoke, which is exciting, because I wanted her to show how a lot of times people aren't in our industry, in our Click Funnels world, they think, "Oh, why sell physical products?" Or "I sell info products." Or they have a thing that they do. And I was trying to have Caitlin show that, no, you have a customer and you serve that customer. Right? And you do it through all means possible. You can sell them information, or physical products, or supplements, or coaching, or clothing, or whatever, your job is to serve those people. And that's the focal point.

So she showed how they'd done that, Lady Boss, and how they've grown this huge company because of it. And that was really, really cool. After that, then we brought Stu McLaren on stage and we were able to give him a check for him and his wife's charity called Village Impact. And that's the group that I go to Kenya with every... Man, almost every year seems like. We're going in March, I believe, as long as it doesn't get canceled. But when we first launched Click Funnels, we set up where every time somebody builds a funnel, we donate a dollar towards the Village Impact and so this year's check was crazy. It's over $200,000, which was so cool and it's going to help so many amazing kids over in Africa. That was really fun.

And then we also had a chance to launch a new site we'd built for Operation Underground Railroad called the Save a Child Challenge. And so we launched that at Funnel Hacking Live, which was really, really cool as well. And that was kind of everything before dinner. And then we fed everyone dinner there, because we wanted to keep people close around. And then that night we did workshops. Typically, if you've been to Funnel Hacking Live, in the past we do these round tables and everyone has a chance to be around the round tables, but because of COVID restrictions and stuff, we thought it'd be better to just do breakout rooms kind of.

We had four breakout rooms. Jim Edwards went and talked about copywriting and he helped everybody actually build out their customer avatar, which is really cool because it's the foundation of all copy where most people never even do that. So he got them to actually build that out, which was really, really cool. Catherine Jones was back this year again, and she talked about funnels and building funnels and she did an amazing job as well. Rachel Miller came and talked about free traffic, which was really cool. And then Myron Golden talked about sales. And so those four people run these hour long workout workshop rooms. And while I was sitting there, I was supposed to be doing this other presentation that I was really excited for, but I was still kind of bummed about my my earlier presentation. I was like, "I don't want to give this. I just want to go home. I'm so tired. I want to go to bed. It's been such a long, stressful day," and all of a sudden people started filling back in the rooms and I'm like, "Oh man, I got to do this."

And so I got on stage and I did my second presentation for the day, which was called Virtual Real Estate Secrets. And for whatever reason, I never know which ones are going to hit or not hit. But for whatever reason, the energy during that presentation nailed it. People were excited, they were on fire. They were just excited about the possibilities. What I was showing them was, I've talked about before on this podcast, but sometimes we talk about trying to build this huge empire. We're going to have tons of followers and fans and all these kind of things, but the reality is there's other ways to make money online too. And I talked about how in real estate you can buy a house and you can flip it. You can buy it and you can rehab it. You can buy it and you can put renters in it.

There's all these things you do with real estate and I’m like, you can do the same things with virtual real estate, these little websites, these little funnels. And so I had like probably a dozen examples of little businesses that I've built that are just kind of running on autopilot, my little virtual real estate empire. And I kind of showed those things. And anyway, I think it was really cool because I think a lot of people, it opened their mind like, "Oh my gosh, I could do that. I could do that." And I started helping them just have ideas, of ways that they could get started easily without having to stress about, "What's my message going to be and who are my people," and all the things I think a lot of people get nervous about.

So it's like, "Well, don't worry about that right now. Let's just make some small businesses. Make a business cash flows you a hundred bucks or 500 bucks or a thousand bucks." These are really easy to do when you understand the basics, so that was really fun one. And that wrapped up day number one, which was really cool. So anyway, I'm going to do a couple episodes, kind of talking about some of the core things that we did in this event. Throughout I'll also talk about the things we do during the event to help stimulate sales later in the event. Because you guys come to me, you want to learn marketing. So how do we use Funnel Hacking Live? How did we, did we use it to generate well over $10 million from the event? And so I'll talk about some of those things, but it all started on day number one. Day number one, the goal is to blow their minds, get them where like, "Man, if this is all I got this was still worth it." That's the first thing we want people thinking.

And then also is helping them understand that there's a vision bigger than you. So you've ever noticed that Funnel Hacking Live day number one, we always have some kind of charity component where they're watching me give money to charity. And then also we're asking them to give money to charity because it helps train people on how does the room work if you're going to give somebody money, where do you go? Like where's the back of the room, where's the table? But also it shows that me and Todd, who are the ones who run this company, run the event like that. That we don't just say this stuff. We practice what we preach. We're donating money. We're giving money. In fact, you'll notice, we'll talk about this later, but on day four, whatever money people give to the Save a Child Challenge, we matched it. We're trying to show that like, "Hey, we also are doing these things too. I'm not asking you to anything that we're not willing to do as well."

And so it all kind of starts with that day number one is blowing their minds, making them see that you're doing the same things you're asking them to do and just giving them a really good experience. And that's kind of how the very beginning of Funnel Hacking Live went this year, 2021. So those who were there, if you enjoyed it, please, take a picture of this podcast episode and tag me in it and let me know what your biggest favorite thing was from day number one, there's so many cool speakers, so many cool things. For me, my favorite thing I think was my last presentation, when I did the virtual real estate presentation, I can just feel the energy was perfect. And everyone was so excited. That and also the Initial Launch 2.0. I did the whole teasing thing and everyone's energy dropped. It was still cool to be able to finally talk about this thing that we've been talking about for so long. We were so excited to share with the world. So anyway, there's day number one at Funnel Hacking Live.