Here’s something I’m trying this week, to help get my vision better understood by my team so we can continue to take over the world.
Recently over the last 12 months, I've brought in a couple people who are really good managing operations and they've been awesome, so good, infinity time's better than I could ever dream of or hope to be. But then the downside is then there's me as this visionary who has a vision, and I keep bumping into them trying to manage things... I'm always trying to get people to do this and this, and I'm messing up the whole system in the process, and it's just chaos.
Hey. Good morning, everybody. This is Russell. It's like 6:00 AM, and I'm driving to the office, and wanted to talk to you about what I'm doing today, why, and hopefully can help you visionaries out there who are not good at project managing to help your teams out a little bit more.
All right. So, how many of you guys are like me? You are the visionary. You are the person who has the ideas. You're the person who knows what to do and how to do it, and when you started your business, it was probably you doing all the things. Right? So, you had to become good at coming up with ideas, and figuring out a logo, and brainstorming the offer, and basic design, and then copywriting, and how to sell it, the ads. Then you ran the ads, and you did all the things, right? And it was just you. You didn't have any money to hire people at the beginning, so you have to get good at all the different things.
Then you start hiring people and the first thing you find out is like, "These people can't do the thing the right way," or "They need more coaching," or "They need more help." It's confusing to us because you, as the founder, you loved your things so much that you went out there, and gathered, and learned every skillset necessary to be successful. And you hired someone to do one piece of it, whatever, and they struggle and they don't do it as good as you, or maybe they do and you find a rock star, which is even better, but there's all sorts of different things. Right?
I've gone through that. I'm now, I think, in my 20th year in business, which is crazy. It's crazy that I'm at this spot where my wife and I have our 20-year anniversary this year, which means I've been with my wife longer than I lived with my parents. It's that weird time in someone's life where I've been in business for almost 20 years now or maybe 20, whatever it is, and it's just interesting. I've been doing this for a long, long time. I wrestled for a long time, but I've been doing this business now longer than I did wrestling.
Anyway, just an interesting thing, but I've been doing this a long time and it's interesting because I've obviously become good at marketing. I've become good at figuring out products, and creating info, and training, and those kind of things. But the piece that, man, no matter how hard I've tried that I'm not intuitively good at is operations and management, things like that. Man, it's just my brain does not compute. I think I got more gift on one side and less on the other side. Right?
The good Lord is like, "I'm going to bless Russell with the ability to, whatever. But because of that, I'm going to take away his ability to manage people." I don't know how that works, but it's what it's felt like. So, I always struggle with that, and there's been times in our business when we've had really good managers and things get done really well. Other times when we haven't, and it falls back on my shoulders, and it morphs back to chaos over time.
Anyway, it's interesting, but I'm in this spot now where this is almost ClickFunnels 2.0. I mean, Todd's created everything. I don't understand. Those who know Todd Dickerson, he's my co-founder ClickFunnels. Smartest dude I've ever met, but he's good at everything. Right? He's a good marketer, and he's good at coding, and programming, and managing, and leading. Anyway, so the development side and the ClickFunnels product side is insane.
Recently over the last 12 months, I've brought in a couple people who are really good managing operations and they've been awesome, so good, infinity time's better than I could ever dream of or hope to be. But then the downside is then there's me as this visionary who has a vision, and I keep bumping into them trying to manage things. Right? And most... Not most. A lot of the parts of the team I've worked in the past, so I'm always trying to get people to do this and this, and I'm messing up the whole system in the process, and it's just chaos.
Even this week, it came to a head where it's just like, "I don't know what to do." Part of me is I feel like I'm messing the system up, but I feel like they need me because there's this part that I'm good at, which is the overall vision of the thing. But then there's other things that, man, I'm just messing up the process and getting in people's ways. So, after a lot of really good meetings with some really smart people, what we came down to is what I need to do is really sit down and do a deep dive brain dump on every project we're doing because my unique ability is like, "What's my vision on this? Why are we creating this? Why did I buy that company? Why did I buy that? What's the funnel supposed to look like?" Those kind of things.
I just kind of went through yesterday. I got really excited. I'm like, "Oh my gosh. This is actually going to be really, really fun." So, I had mapped out all the major projects that we're either working on or the offers and the funnels we had, they're driving a lot of traffic to us. Things like that, and I put them all on a Trello board, and I couldn't sleep last night. I got four hours and one minute of sleep, according to my Oura Ring. I don't know if it's because I'm excited or whatever, but wasn't able to sleep. So I got here early today. It's 6:00 right now. 6:077 actually, and I got to the office.
I'm going to go, and basically each project I'm going to go through it and I'm going to go do a deep dive funnel, hack, visionary, whatever like, "Here's the project. Here's why we're doing it." The reason and just making a video of me going through everything, casting the vision as deep as I can, showing people the examples, and case studies, and all this stuff that I love. Then I'm going to do all that, and then that's my role at this point, and I stop, and then I hand it to the people now who are running the projects.
So, this is happening on both sides. I kind of split my time between two sides, the funnel side that also the content creation courses, books, memberships, sites, things like that. I'm doing that for about a dozen or so different projects today, and then I leave today with my wife to go boating on a couples date. Anyway, so I came in early today to go bust this thing out, and I'm actually really, really excited.
Anyway, that's what I'm doing today. For you guys who are visionaries, who struggle, and you struggle managing in your team, figuring things out and all that kind of stuff, I want to challenge you to do what I'm doing. Steven Larsen's actually really, really good at this as well. In fact, I hired him one time just to do this part where he sat down and brainstormed out this entire funnel launch strategy, planned everything. He whiteboarded it out, found all the case studies, did everything and then gave it to my team. My team was like, "Oh, we know what to do now." And broke out like, "Here's all the tasks and everything."
So, what I'm realizing, and this could change in a week from now, but what I'm excited for today is I'm going to sit down. I'm going to just cast the vision on every project, making videos, showing, again, in a Trello board I have checklist of, "Here's every funnel I've swipe file or that I've funnel-hacked that I want you guys to look at. Here's the other examples. Here's other ways, the hooks, the angles, and the ads, and here's the thing." Then make a video of me just explaining the vision, and the funnel, and the process, and the offer, the hooks and the angles, and all that kind of stuff.
Then when I'm done with that, give the video to one person, and that person will go and chop it up to, "Here's all the million tasks, who's assigned to each task," and then people all have the vision. So, when they get stuck, won't be texting Russell or calling Russell. They'll be going back to the video, going back to the vision like, "What was the vision? All right. Let's sync to that and follow that." Anyway, so I'm excited. That's what I'm doing this morning.
Hopefully that... This is 20 years now that I'm starting to figure out what I do or how to do better. This may not be the end-all, be-all solution, but I think this is getting me one step a lot closer to what I want to do because I don't want to stop. I love this game. I want to be part of it, but when I try to dip my hands in the management side of things, like I said, it all... What's the chaos theory? From my understanding, all things return back to chaos over time. I feel like every time I jump back in that part, it turns back to chaos.
It was like, "Okay, I'm going to do the initial creation, all that kind of piece, and then let the amazing people on our team go and run with the rest." Anyway, that's the thought. That's the plan. All right. I hope you guys are doing great. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you as well soon.
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