Find out what really happened this year, behind the scenes of the 10x growth con. On this episode Russell recaps his experience of preparing for the 10x event, along with what happened with his presentation on day one. Here are some of the awesome things you will here on this episode:

-- Find out what kind of stress Russell was under in order to prepare for the 10x event.

-- Hear the things that went right at the event, along with the things that went totally wrong.

-- And see how much money he made from his first presentation at the event, despite the problems.

So listen here to find out how day one of the 10x event went, and tune in next time to hear day two.

I wish I could tell you the anxiety I was feeling. It was crazy. And then they came and grabbed me and said, “Okay, you’re almost up.” And they pulled me up onto the stage and started getting ready, getting ready, but I can’t hear anything. And all the sudden the wall starts going up, there’s this huge wall of monitors that starts going up, which I know is my queue. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, does this mean I’m up?” And the guy’s like, “I think so.” And this fog starts coming in and the thing goes up, and then it gets past my head and I just walk out. I’m like, I hope this is for me.

-- ClickFunnels: Everything you need to start market, sell, and deliver your products and services online (without having to hire or rely on a tech team!)

-- DotComSecrets: Get a free copy of the "Underground Playbook For Growing Your Company Online With Sales Funnels."

​-- Expert Secrets: Get a free copy of the "Underground Playbook For Converting Your Online Visitors Into Lifelong Customers."

-- ​Traffic Secrets: Get a free copy of the "Underground Playbook For Filling Your Websites And Funnels With Your Dream Customers.

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I am back from the 10x event, I have completely lost my voice. This episode I want to give you a rundown of everything that happened, the good, the bad, the ugly, and I’m excited to share it all with you.

Alright everyone, so I’ve been getting blown up everywhere from everybody asking me, “How’d you do at 10x? What happened? Tell me the stories. I saw the pictures on Instagram and all the stuff looked amazing. How did it go?” and I know a lot of it came because last year’s 10x event we set a goal to do 3 million dollars in sales, and we did 3.2 in 90 minutes and it was amazing.

And obviously we launched 10x secrets, the product, kind of talking about it, so everyone is expecting big things, which caused insane amounts of stress on my side, in case anybody’s wondering. It’s like, imagine winning an Olympic Gold medal and then going back four years later and trying to do it again, and everyone’s just expecting you to win.

Ugh, it’s a horrible feeling. It’s way better to be the underdog. But anyway, we were excited, and there was a huge opportunity. Some of you guys probably heard it was in the Marlin Stadium and there was going to be 35,000 people at it. And we were so excited. So to prepare for this whole crazy event we started, a long time ago, started to prepare for it.

What’s interesting, if you look at the very first 10x event we ever went to 3 years ago, we showed up there and we were trying to do my normal presentation and sell, and Grant and his team didn’t know a lot about events and how to choreograph them and stuff. So when we got there we’re like, “Okay, we need a table and sales people.” And they’re like, “No, we don’t really have that.”

And so we kind of had to do it on our own, and unfortunately it was Dave there with a box full of order forms and some pens. And I did my pitch and they all ran to Dave, and luckily Alex and Layla Hermosi were also in the audience and they came and helped and those three sat there on the side of the room with no tables, handing out order forms and pens.

And somehow they closed just shy of a million dollars from that. Then fast forward, you know, 12 months later, we did the 10x that was in Vegas, and obviously if you guys bought the 10x secrets product, you heard me talk about that whole choreography, there’s a lot that went into that. And we did the 3.2 million. So this year we thought, with 35,000 it’s going to be bigger, we gotta do even more. So we had over 40 of our team members that we flew out, and prior to that they spent so much time and so much effort coordinating where people are going to stand, how are they going to do it, how are we going to order click order forms, and deliver the pens?

There’s a ton that goes into it. So for weeks and weeks prior they were planning and meeting and making sure everything was choreographed just perfectly on our side. The other side of then is I had to figure out my presentations as well. Though obviously, I have a presentation that I give that I’m selling Clickfunnels. It’s my Funnel Builder Secrets presentation. And I’ve given that presentation live probably 150+ times or more.

But because I’m speaking at 10x each time, I try to change it enough that it seems different and new, but then it’s gotta be the same. You know, what works, works. And I don’t want to deviate from that either. So if you look at the very first 10x, I just gave my presentation the way I did on every webinar for a year prior, you know. For the second one I really changed a lot of the introduction and how I began the presentation. I talked about the four minute mile, I shared stories about John Reese, and it was a really quick way to impact people. So this year I wanted to change that as well.

So my intro, I’m really proud of it. I started with the Winston Churchill quote where he says, “To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.”

So I led with that quote and started telling stories about some people in our community. I told Jaime Cross’ story, I told Chad Wolner’s story and then I related it back to their story. And I take people through that where most of entrepreneurs, we hear this calling where we need to come and we need to do this thing. And then unfortunately for us, we’re not, when we hear the calling it doesn’t mean that we’re ready for it.

So then we have to go on this journey to become who we need to be to be worthy and able to actually fulfill on that calling. So we go on this huge journey and after you go on the journey and you’ve figured out how to do the thing it’s like, “Well, how do I get the impact? How do I get out to more people?” So I kind of told the story while weaving in all these different stories. And I was really proud of it and I think it turned out really good. Then from there I did my normal presentation. So I spent tons of time preparing that.

Probably, conservatively probably 30-40 hours retweaking the original presentation to make it fit. And then also at this event Grant and his team agreed to let us speak twice. So once I get to sell Funnel Builder Secrets, and second time they wanted me to sell a public speaking training, teaching people how to sell from stage. So I had to create a whole new presentation that I’ve never done before. And I’ll talk more about this, I’m so proud of how this presentation turned out. It was legitimately amazing.

Alright so, that was kind of all the prep work. Going into this, last year we made 3.2 million dollars with 9,000 people. So we’re thinking, 35,000 we should do at least 10 million. You know, some people were guessing 25 or 100 million and it was just kind of fun. But we always try to guess ahead of time. And I was so scared. I just hate going into it with those kind of expectations, because if you don’t hit them then you feel disappointed.

I didn’t want everyone on my team to be disappointed. I didn’t care so much for me. I’ve already experienced all this stuff, you know what I mean? But my team was all huddling around us and everyone wanted to go do this thing and hit these big goals, so I had a lot of fear going into it. Like, “What if I don’t hit this and then disappoint them?” that kind of fear.

Alright so then the night before came, where we’re getting everything prepared and ready and we were leaving in the morning. And one of my friends, Brian Underwood, he’s the founder of Prove It, a lot of you guys have heard me talk a lot about Prove It. He messaged me a little while ago and wanted to hang out and I was like, “Well if you want to hang out, I’m speaking at this 10x event, you should come pick me up in your private plane and fly us out there.” and he’s like, “Okay.” So he literally flew his plane and picked up me and my wife and a couple, Dave and his wife, and Melanie and Blake and we all jumped in this plane with him.

So he flew in the night before and we kind of hung out in the office and talked for a while. And then the next morning we woke up and headed to the airport and we jumped in his private plane and he flew us all the way from Boise to Miami, which was amazing. Every time I fly private it makes me never want to go commercial again. So for any of you guys who fly commercial, never fly private, it will ruin you forever.

I was telling Stephen Larsen this, I was like, “Don’t fly first class because it will ruin you forever. Just stay in coach as long as you can, because it’s nice. Coach is fine until you fly first class and you’re like, ‘oh crap.’ And first class is great until you fly private and then it’s like, just ruined forever.” Anyway, so we flew in four hours to Miami, which is nice because the flying home from Miami took us, we were in the air for 7 hours on two planes and we had like 3 or 4 hour layover.

So it goes from like a 4 hour trip to a full day trip. Commercial versus private. Anyway, so thankful for Brian picking us up. He paid for everything, paid for the gas, the flight, everything. He just, it was super classy of him. So he flew us out there, we hung out and then we got to Miami. When we got there I was kind of freaking out because I get super nervous. So we headed over to the stadium, they got us in and we had a chance to see the whole venue and it was crazy walking in there.

And I think I was supposed to do my mic check and give them my slides and go through them all at a certain time. And we got there and they were way behind. So we hung out there for probably 2 or 3 hours in the stadium. Tai Lopez was there, so he got to do his sound check and a couple of other people were just kind of testing the whole thing out.

What’s crazy though, when you do the sound check, we start talking and the echo was so bad, you couldn’t even hear yourself. I was like, “If this echo is this bad, no one’s going to hear us.” They’re like, “Oh no, no, no. When 35,000 people are here it will absorb all the sound. It will totally be fine. They do stuff like this all the time, so it will be fine.” I’m like, “Okay because if it’s like this I can’t…” because standing on stage, I would talk and I could hear like bounce off the thing and come back to me. I’m like, “I can’t even hear my own voice.” And people sitting in the stands are like, “I can’t hear you either because it’s so echo-y.”

But everyone’s kind of nervous but I said, “you know what, they must have done this before. There’s no way they haven’t. It should be completely fine.” So that’s what kind of happened the night before. And then we went home, went to bed, and I was super anxious and nervous and excited. So we went to bed that night and the next morning woke up, and woke up super early because I was, basically we had to set up. Grant was speaking and I was speaking immediately after him. And Grant was also going to parachute into the stadium.

So we got everything ready, I got dressed in my fancy pants clothes that…oh, that’s the other thing. When we flew into Miami we had to get another shirt. So we literally went from the airport directly to Neiman Marcus I think. And then we had somebody, we found a shirt and then had the tailor, tailor it right there on the spot and then deliver it that night to us, which was crazy. So I had a brand new shirt on, brand new pants, all these fancy clothes.

And we get over there and start waiting. And we walk into the stadium, you know, took us through the dugout and through the green room, which was a batting cage and everything. And we walked in the whole thing. And then I walked into the stadium and looked out and it was just like, oh my gosh. This huge thing, the roof of the baseball stadium was completely open, and I’m looking out and I’m like, “This is amazing.” And I looked back into the stands and the stands were almost empty. I was like, “Oh my gosh.” And I started feeling sick for Grant. I’m like, what if people don’t show up? What are we going to do? I looked at my watch and it was like 20 minutes until 9 and I was like, how are they supposed to get 35,000 people in here in the next 20 minutes.

We knew that Grant was going to sky dive in…. Anyway, all the fears and the nervousness and everything started hitting up again. I was like, ah, you know, I didn’t know what to do. So we’re watching as it’s getting closer and closer and then finally at 9 o’clock, and I assume, man if people aren’t coming they’re going to push it out until 9:30 or 10 or something, but sure enough 9 o’clock you look up and you see Grant’s plane, I think it was Grant’s plane, flying above the stadium. And then all the sudden, boom at 9 o’clock this parachute pops out, this big huge 10x parachute pops out.

And the Grant, I think it was Grant, someone else said it wasn’t, who knows? I don’t know. Maybe the world will never know. But Grant or Grant’s stunt double flew by themselves on a parachute into the stadium. It was like the most epic, amazing thing ever. And then they landed and they put a microphone on him and I guess he twisted his ankle or something, he’s like, “my ankle twisted. Right now we found out that traffic is horrible and bad on whatever thing, and people are waiting.

So we are going to take a 30 minute break so I can get repaired and hopefully give a chance for more people to come in and then we’ll get started.” So then it kind of cut and then, which was kind of crazy because as soon as it cut, everyone kind of ran up the stairs to go the bathroom and it was this big, huge anti-climactic moment. It was so amazing, this entrance, and then it was like, “Okay come back in 30 minutes and we’ll get started.”

But I think they did that mostly to get people in. So then people are coming in and coming, and finally Grant gets up onstage and starts talking, and the echo is really bad. It was really hard to hear him from the stands, and I couldn’t even imagine on his side. So I’m watching him and I’m just like, “oh my gosh. You’re kind of freaking me out.” But I’m like, you know what, I just gotta do what I gotta do. I don’t know any better, let’s just go do it.

So finally about 15 minutes before I’m up they come and grab me and pull me back and mic me up and take me back to the backstage, and took me in this little black, this little room, curtained off room. I went in there and was so nervous, jumping around and trying to get prepared. And the I sat down to say a prayer and I have so much anxiety and nerves and tiredness and everything. I was saying this prayer and I totally passed out in the middle of the prayer. I woke up a few minutes later and I was like, “Oh my gosh, I’m still here.” But I’m in this curtained off little room, and all I hear is echo. I can’t hear a word that’s happening. There’s no video, there’s no TV’s back there. I have no idea if I’m up or when I’m up or anything. It was just kind of this random noise.

I wish I could tell you the anxiety I was feeling. It was crazy. And then they came and grabbed me and said, “Okay, you’re almost up.” And they pulled me up onto the stage and started getting ready, getting ready, but I can’t hear anything. And all the sudden the wall starts going up, there’s this huge wall of monitors that starts going up, which I know is my queue. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, does this mean I’m up?” And the guy’s like, “I think so.” And this fog starts coming in and the thing goes up, and then it gets past my head and I just walk out. I’m like, I hope this is for me.

And I walk out and I see this huge audience and it’s, it was crazy. Because at the last 10x event there was 9,000 people, but it was dark in the stadium, and the lights are shining in your face, so you walk out and you don’t really feel the people because it seems like you’re kind of, like you’re walking onto a stage and you know there’s people there, but you don’t really see them. This was completely different. It was the middle of the day, it’s all lit up and you walk out and you can see everybody’s faces. And it was like the most breathtaking thing.

I had my first lines all figured out in my head, what I’m going to say and how I’m going to say it. And then the thing opens up and I was like, I forgot everything. I was just like, it kind of caught me off guard. I’m like, “Hey, wow. This is amazing.” What am I supposed to say again? It took me a few minutes to capture myself. The other crazy thing is I had these new shoes on that were super slick.

If you watched my Instagram stories you saw that I was like scuffing them up and trying to make them not slick. But I totally took a step and slipped onstage. I caught myself and I’m like, okay note to self. Tiny steps, tiny steps. I don’t want to slip in front of 35,000 people. It was crazy. And then I started talking and what’s crazy, I start talking and…..actually let me back up, I want to kind of go through some teaching points here because it’s interesting.

If you look at events, and any kind of marketing for that manner, it’s all about choreography. And I feel like Grant’s team has choreographed some things really, really well and some things not so well. And I think we’re going to have a call with them and kind of walk through some of my thoughts and feelings later, after they kind of recover from this craziness.

But just for you guys, who are doing events. One of the big things is after Grant spoke he did a charity pitch, and it was like $67 to get access to this thing they sell for like 10 grand or 20 grand or something crazy, a really good offer. But that’s something we do at our events. A lot of times we’ll make a charity pitch on day one to teach people how the process works to go buy. And I think they were trying to do that same thing. But they did the charity pitched, unbeknownst to me, for $67 for a 20 thousand dollar offer, and people love it.

They start running up and they started running to the sides of the tables, and right then is when the screen went up and I walked out. So I walked out to all these people running to the sides and the back of the room and running up the stairs to try and get this crazy offer that he had made to them, which is kind of a, from a speakers standpoint, the last thing you want is when you’re coming out onstage from a big introduction, and people running to the back of the room buying. If you’re selling there should always be a break afterwards, so people can get back to their seats and be able to focus back on you.

So that was one kind of missed choreographed piece. But they did raise a lot of money for charity so that’s good. So I come out there and I start talking and the echo is really bad. I start talking and it’s bouncing off. I’d say something, and you know how I talk fast anyways, so I’d say one or two things, and so I’m saying it and it bounces off the back wall and come back and hit me. And it caught me off guard. So I’d hear myself again, and I’d try to go again and keep bouncing back and forth. It threw me off for the entire s90 minutes.

I couldn’t keep myself, I never felt like I was ever in the rhythm of it because the echo was so, so bad. What’s crazy, and I had no idea, I’m like, maybe out there they can hear me. But it turns out that the echo in the audience is even worse. Especially some of the upper seats, if you sat in the upper decks, which probably 70% of the people sat up there, they couldn’t hear anything.

In fact, after my presentation I found out that tons of people were going to those guys saying, “We can’t hear anything that’s happening, we need a refund.” It was this huge thing. So I’m doing my presentation and you know, 70% of the audience can’t even hear me. The one’s who can hear me, it’s still muffled and echo-y and it’s hard and I’m not on my game because this echo is throwing me off, and it’s confusing. So I did my presentation, I’m like, you know what, I’m just going to do it. Just hope for the best.

About halfway through my presentation they came out and said, “Slow down.” Oh and during my presentation I showed some videos and a bunch of the videos, they worked, but the sound system was set up for like a concert. So in a concert they crank up the bass, and the singer singing on top of it. But with our videos, when the crank up the bass that high, the bass of the video comes through and we can’t hear any of the voices.

So all my testimonial videos, you can’t understand a word. Everyone said, “I didn’t understand a word of any of your videos.” Which is like all the setup for the sell. Ugh, so many things. And then they came up later and said, “We found out it’s the mic on your face that’s the bad thing. So here’s a hand held mic.” So they gave me a hand held mic.

So now I’m holding a mic and holding my clicker and trying not to slip. It was just like, so much chaos. Anyway, when all is said and done, did the pitch, did my sell, and somehow, just by the fact that 35,000 people could not hear me, 690 heard well enough to run to the back of the room and sign up. So if you look at the numbers, that’s 690 people times 3,000, that’s 2 million 67 thousand dollars in sales. So that’s not too bad, especially considering, looking at it now, it’s more than all the other speakers made combined.

So even though it wasn’t 3.2 million, it was less, and it wasn’t the 10 we were hoping for, 2 million 670 thousand dollars is not too shabby, considering all the craziness. But obviously, afterwards I was kind of just upset because I wanted 10, I didn’t want 2. I was stuck in the stadium forever, I had to go pee and I had to take pictures with people and it was just this huge, all this stuff. And I just wanted to get out. I just needed to unplug.

Introverted Russell needed to unplug and go plug in, go hide somewhere and recharge. It seems like it took like an hour and a half, two hours to get out. Get out of the stadium and get back to the hotel. Probably closer to three hours. Got back to the hotel and then I laid on the bed and my wife was talking to me and I was gone, out cold.

And I slept for like 3 hours. I was just like, my body had shut down from all the stress and anxiety and late nights, and preparing and everything that went ahead of it. So three hours later I woke up and I was like, “Oh my gosh, what happened? I have no idea.” I was messaging Dave and Melanie and everybody trying to find out like, how do we run sells and get the numbers back. And they told me and I’m like, first off I was happy that 690 people heard me, but it’s just disappointing.

2 million is amazing, unless you’re expecting 10, then it’s like, it sucks. So that was kind of frustrating. So I got up, ate some dinner, and started working on my presentation for the next day. That night I had a chance to meet with Myron Golden, the man, the myth, the legend.

He came and helped me work on the presentation. And then that night, Stephen came into the room where we working on the presentation in a bathrobe, Stephen Larsen. And then me and him started wrestling and doing Jui Jitsu and fighting, in his bathrobe, which was really fun. And that was the night, and I went to bed. Alright, so that was day number one of 10x. Now, on the next podcast episode I’m going to take you guys into day number two.

And day number two I’m going to talk about what happened on the second presentation. Did we fix the echo? Did we sell the 25 thousand dollar thing we’re trying to do? What happened in the locker room with Garrett White and a bunch of other cool speakers? And a whole bunch more. So thanks so much for listening to episode number one, and I’ll see you guys tomorrow for episode number two of the 10x live event, and we’ll go from there. Thanks everybody, and we will see you soon.