The fastest way to knock off 12-18 months of your company’s growth in less than 7 days. On today’s episode Russell talks about having Brandon and Kaelin Poulin trade consulting with him, and how that turned into a CEO swap. Here are some of the amazing things to look forward to in this episode:

-- Find out why swapping consulting turned into swapping CEO’s and how it’s beneficial for both companies.

-- Find out why a CEO swap could actually work for your business as well.

-- And hear how the CEO swap made it possible to quickly implement things that would have taken months to implement without it.

So listen here to find out how a CEO swap could be beneficial for your business.

I did an episode here probably three or four months ago where it talked about, it’s the “who”, not the “how.” What I learned from Dan Sullivan, and his biggest thing if you listened to that podcast, the biggest problem with entrepreneurs, we see our vision, what we want to accomplish. We start moving towards it, but as soon as we get stuck in “how do I do something?” Then we instantly…if it’s not our super power, if we don’t know how to do it, then we will start procrastinating because we don’t know how to do it. And his goal in how to get out of the procrastination, is not to go learn the how, it’s to go find who already knows the how and get that who to do the thing for you.

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Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about the CEO swap. Alright everybody, so it’s a beautiful Sunday, I’m walking home from church today by myself. It’s kind of a long walk so I thought, what better could I possibly do than to jump on and hang out with you guys for a few minutes, so I hope that’s okay.

Anyway, this last week was kind of cool. I think I told you guys before that Brandon and Kaelin from Lady Boss, and I decided to do a swapping consulting days, right. So what I wanted to work with them on, they’ve done a really good job structuring their company, their meetings, their employees, just their whole everything. They learned a lot of it initially from Alex Charfin and then they went and as Brandon typically does, went and perfected and added to the system, made a bunch of stuff and then has been beating on it for the last year and really fine tuning the process.

It’s amazing what they’re doing. What I found out is that they only have like 5 funnels and they don’t do any new funnels, and they want to go cold traffic, they want to do funnels, so I was going to swap consulting, I was going to walk them through what I would do in the funnel stuff. So it was cool, so Thursday, we spent the whole day going through all our stuff, and I’m not going to lie, this is the part of business that I don’t love.

If anyone is wondering how Clickfunnels has grown so big, it’s two reasons. Number one, actually three reasons, number one, we have an amazing product, number two, we have an insane team who is super talented, and super passionate, and love what we do, and number three, we’re really good at marketing and selling stuff. So we’ve done that in spite of our flaws, and that’s how we’ve grown to over a hundred million dollars a year in sales.

But the down side, we’ve never been good at the business structuring and planning and meeting, all those kind of things we just haven’t been as good at. Mostly because as the CEO or leader or whatever you want to call it, the head dancing monkey, I don’t necessarily like those things or I’m not good at them, and because of that the whole culture doesn’t have them. So it’s just been a lacking thing.

So as Brandon was going through it all, at first I’m getting really excited, then I’m getting all depressed and stressed because I’m like, “I would rather die than do all those things he’s telling me to do. I know they’re essential, but I’d rather just go sell something else.” So I’m kind of feeling the pressure and the stress. First I felt like a little bit of hope, followed by despair I guess is probably the best word. You mean I have to stop building funnels for like two months to get this thing to work?

Anyway, fast forward to the next day. So Friday we come in and we start going into funnels, I start geeking out, I start freaking out and jumping around and having so much fun. And I feel like Brandon was feeling something similar, like, “Man, how am I going to get my team to understand all this? I get it conceptually, but how do I get them to do it?”

Anyway, so we’re going forward on our consulting/swapping days, and then it’s probably like 3:00 in the afternoon, almost as a joke I was like, “You know what we should do? We should just do a CEO swap, where you become the CEO of Clickfunnels for a week, I become the CEO of Lady Boss for a week, and then we just switch roles, implement all this crap, then we’ll switch back?”

And then we’re like, “Wait, what if we actually switched roles for a week…” and then we started going crazy about it, and I was just like, “Wait, that means you could come in and literally just do all this stuff for me, all t he stuff that you love to do anyway, and build it in, build the structure, run the meetings, all that stuff, until we have the process in, and I could just go and work with my funnel builders and build an amazing funnel, which is all we really want to do.

And at the end of it, you end up with the funnel done, I end up with the structure and the meeting all done, and we both end up a million times better.” So instead of just swapping ideas and consulting, swapping our super powers. So we called it the CEO swap. So Brandon and Kaelin they bumped out their flight a little later, yesterday was Saturday, we went in and worked, I was there until 2:00 last night working on their funnels, they were there with my entire team working on other stuff, and it’s insane how much we got done in such a short period of time.

Where literally for me to implement this process we’re going through, probably conservatively would have taken me from now to the end of the year, and it would have not been fun, it would have been a lot of pain. Now it’s like, it’s going to be, by this time next week it will be completely done, implemented and installed and running.

And their funnel should be done, completely ready and handed off for them to start driving traffic to, which is the coolest thing. So I’m telling this because, you guys should do SEO swaps, not SEO, CEO, CEO swaps. Find somebody who has the opposite of your super power. Let’s say you have a company and you built it off Facebook ads and you’re killing it, find another company who’s killing it and they’ve done everything on SEO. Swap, CEO swap with them, or whatever.

Or marketing department swap with them, or whatever, and figure out the other side of it. OR maybe you’re someone who’s gotta a call center that’s crushing it and another guys got a VSL that’s crushing it, swap. “Hey come build out my call center, I’ll come build out your VSL.” Boom, swap skills and now you just duplicated your super powers inside another person’s business. So powerful. So consulting days, first off, are awesome. You should be doing that anyway.

But if you want to go to the next level, do a consulting day and then if it’s like, this is good, let’s do a CEO swap. Boom, then go deeper and if you have half the experience that we’re having right now, it’ll be amazing. Anyway, I just wanted to share that with you guys because I think a lot of times we get too caught up in how to do the thing, and the biggest problem with the how is you have to learn how to do the how.

I did an episode here probably three or four months ago where it talked about, it’s the “who”, not the “how.” What I learned from Dan Sullivan, and his biggest thing if you listened to that podcast, the biggest problem with entrepreneurs, we see our vision, what we want to accomplish.

We start moving towards it, but as soon as we get stuck in “how do I do something?” Then we instantly…if it’s not our super power, if we don’t know how to do it, then we will start procrastinating because we don’t know how to do it. And his goal in how to get out of the procrastination, is not to go learn the how, it’s to go find who already knows the how and get that who to do the thing for you. So sometimes we’re consulting, and it’s like, that’s awesome, but that’s not my super power. It’s like, cool, who’s the who that can implement it?

So you find the rockstar who can implement it for you, or find a person who can coach you on how to do it, who’s done it a million times, have them actually implement it for you, and you’re going to pay them or swap them. Again, the swapping idea is super cool because if Brandon was to pay me to build a funnel for him like this, I wouldn’t even consider doing it for I don’t know, probably at least 500 grand or so for me to like stop the opportunity costs to go and focus on it.

And now he’s going to have it done and completed within the week, and for him to stop his whole business to come set up my whole structure, meetings, order chart, score cards, all this insanely annoying, boring part of business stuff that we have to do that we’re not doing, how would it charge him, he’d probably charge me half a million bucks to do it.

So it’s not realistic for most people to pay half a million bucks for a funnel, or to pay half a million bucks for someone to set up your meetings, but in this situation, we both value the other person’s super power, so we just swapped. Anyway, I hope that gets you guys pumped as you start looking at that, look at the other businesses around you, look at your friends, look at your colleagues, look at peers, look at all that kind of stuff who have what you want and do a CEO swap and swap for a day or a week or whatever you need to do.

I remember Rand Fishkin, he used to be the owner of moz.com, which was SEO Moz before that, he used to write a book called Lost and Founder, which if you read that book, you will realize that I’m completely right about taking Venture Capitol money, so there’s a story for another day. But the books really good. One of the things he talked about in there, as he was growing his company, he was the owner of this software company to help SEO’s and it helped agencies.

And he had a friend who was running agencies and needed software, so they CEO swapped. And Rand went and actually, they swapped houses. He lived in the dude’s house and that lived at his house. I don’t know how the wives were okay with that, my wife would kill me if I was like…. Anyway, that’s beside the point.

So they did the swap and it was cool because Rand was able to go down into the trenches and see what it was actually like to run an agency again, and see the experience, and try to use all his tools and realize there’s all these gaps. As an actual owner, my people can’t do these things because of the gaps in our product, and he was able to make the product better.

And then the other dude, who was in the agency went back and started, became the CEO for the SEO Moz for a while, first off had empathy for them now, but second off was able to work with the team and be like, “Why are you prioritizing this? We would never actually use this. You should be prioritizing here.’ And the swap changed everything for them.

Anyway, I think it’s valuable and I think it’s worth most of us all doing. So find someone with the super power you want, where you have a super power that they want, and CEO swap them, and you will jump yourself forward, six months, a year, two years in your company, literally overnight which is totally worth it in every case, every scenario. Thanks you guys, appreciate you. I’m home, I’m going to go get something to eat and I’ll talk to you soon.