Welcome to The Boomer Business Owner. My guest today is Russ Ruffino. Russ is an honorary Baby Boomer, and the founder of Clients on Demand, where he helps experts build reliable marketing and sales processes that attract 5 to 10 new potential clients per day, and a business scaling to six figures per month. He is a true lifestyle entrepreneur, who enjoys travelling and helping others create the freedom they want. Hey, Russ. Welcome to the show. Hey. How are you doing, Charlie? A little behind-the-scenes for all of our listeners: This is our second go around. We tried this a week or two ago, and just Skype wasn t cooperating with us, so hopefully we ll have a nice, good convo today. Definitely. Clients on Demand. Tell us a little more about that. Basically it s just what it sounds like. We take businesses that depend on a steady flow of, not just any clients, but really good, high-quality, high-paying clients. If you re a coach, consultant, if you re a service provider, an attorney, an SEO guy, a graphic designer, PR anything like that where your business really depends on a good flow of the right clients coming in the door, we help our clients do that. We have a proprietary process that gets 5, 10, 15, 20, as many as you want potential clients reaching out to work with you every single day. We show you how to enroll them into whatever your offer is at a premium price, and we also work with our clients to help them then serve those new customers, without becoming a slave to their business or sacrificing their freedom. Page 1 of 14
Is your customer, the customer that you re serving and working with, is it somebody who is charging a generally higher-ticket price for their product that they re selling? What they re charging right now doesn t matter. What matters is the fact that their business solves a major life or business problem. Those are the people that we really like to work with. What we find is a lot of those people who are solving a major life or business problem, what they re doing is they re actually undercharging. Very, very frequently, we get clients coming to us who have been selling their time, their workshops, or whatever it might be for $500-$600, and very, very quickly using the marketing that we give them, they re able to command prices of $5,000, $6,000, $8,000, $10,000; a much, much higher price, usually about 10 times higher. Can you give me an example of a major life problem that one of your clients would solve? That s a great question. Let s say that you are a relationship coach where you work with people maybe who are married, and for whatever reason the marriage isn t working out. You have skills and communication skills, and relationship coaching where you can come in there and you can get them talking again, and you can actually turn that situation around. The question is: What is that worth? I put myself in that situation. I ve never been in that situation. I ve been married for just over a year now, and we re very happy, but if I was in that situation where I was with my wife and things weren t working out, and I m looking at giving up half of everything I own, losing the love of my life, going through a protracted custody battle for our son and there s a coach that can spare me from all that, and actually fix my marriage? To me, that s something that s priceless. Right? Page 2 of 14
If that s you, if you re that relationship coach why the hell are you charging $120 an hour, when you could be charging $5,000, $6,000, $7,000, $8,000? Does that make sense? It totally makes sense. It seems like there s a couple different things that you do. Let s use me as the example. Say I m the relationship coach. One of the things you re going to do is you re going to consult with me about my worth, what I should be charging, what you think the market will bear. Then the second part is you re going to then help me find new clients at that new price point. Is that a fair comment? That s correct, yeah. Actually, a better way to say it is we re going to put a process in place that those clients find you. Where every single day, you ve got 5 people, 10 people, really however many you want reaching out to work with you every single day. So you have a true pipeline where potential clients are coming in the door, they re filling out something on your website, whatever you want them to do, booking a phone call, an appointment with you, whatever it is you ve got them doing that every single day. So they find you, we establish your authority, we establish that you re the best in the world at what you do, that nobody does it quite like you do it, and then we show them how to reach out. We get those clients coming in the door, and then we consult with you about the real price that you should be charging, and show you then how to enroll clients into whatever it is at the price that you want. Is this a B2C service? Are you working with people who have individuals as clients, or can it also work for someone who has other businesses as their clients? It can really work for both, yeah. The approach is a little bit different, whether your business is B2C or B2B, but in either case, it can work for both and it does work for both. Page 3 of 14
At a high level, I intellectually understand what you do, so on a more practical level, I say: Great, Russ. It sounds great. Sign me up. What am I signing up for? Is it a done-for-you service, is it a course you re giving me? What am I getting from you? From me. There s a few different ways that we do it. We re not really doing done-for-you right now unless somebody wants to work with us as a strategic partner, where we will basically functionally become your marketing department. We ll take all the marketing off your plate, all the advertising off your plate, maybe even all the sales off your plate if you don t even want to talk to potential clients, and set you free to just focus on serving those clients. That s one thing that we offer, but we re very, very picky about who we offer that to. For the lion s share of people who come to us, our main offer is an eight-week workshop where we show you exactly how to do this stuff. How do you implement this process in your business? How do you build it? And we do it with you. I m looking at all your marketing materials, I m helping you rewrite them, I m making sure they re compelling, making sure they re persuasive. If you re doing advertising, like most of our clients use Facebook for their advertising because it s just amazing if you really know how to use it are you targeting the right people? Is your message the way it should be? Are you using the right bidding strategy? When I explain it to you, it sounds really simple, but there s a lot that goes into it. The way that we do that is in this eight-week program. We walk you through the process step by step by step, so you get it, you understand it, and when the workshop is over you ve got this pipeline in place where new clients are coming to you every single day. I, Charlie, like your sales pitch or like the marketing materials about this eight-week program. I get in, and I Page 4 of 14
learn a ton, Russ. I just say: You know what? I ve learned an awful lot, however, I don t feel I m a master, for example, at Facebook advertising. Then it s the issue of time and doing it. How do you address those kind of comments from people who have successfully completed your course, and feel like they ve gotten a lot of great information? We don t do information. We do transformation, so that s the difference. We re very, very selective about who we let into the program. If we are on the phone with a potential client and we feel like that person is in information-gathering mode, where they re just like: Oh, I m going to dip my toes in the water and then kind of check this out, we don t even make them an offer. We really want people coming in the program who are dedicated, who absolutely want to create Clients on Demand; getting them in the door, closing them at the price they want, and then serving them in a very leveraged way. At every stage of our process, from the way we craft our advertising to the way we do our sign up pages, the way we run our webinars, the way we do our phone calls to enroll new clients we re constantly trying our best to filter out the people that are in information-gathering mode. A lot of other coaches, frankly, that s who they specialize in. They want those people who are in information-gathering mode. They want you to come in, spend $1,000, come to their event, get all pumped up, feel really great, and then go home and not do anything. Our program is very action-oriented, so when someone comes into our program, if they don t want to do anything, they don t want to take action we will really kick your ass until you get results. Sometimes if there s someone in the program who s just Page 5 of 14
dragging their feet and not doing anything, we ll actually ask them to leave. Even if I, Charlie, come to you and I m really interested in doing this, but I m at the formative stages, like I haven t maybe started my coaching program or something like that, is it fair to say you re probably not inclined to work with people that are early on in the process, but more inclined to work with somebody who has, by all means, a successful business, but you re just going to help them blow the doors off? There s two things that we look for, Charlie. Number one: Does this person have real value to deliver? So: Can you solve that major life or business challenge? Number two: How dedicated are you to doing it? If you re somebody who comes to me and says: Russ, I ve done some really amazing things in my life, I ve built and sold multiple seven-figure businesses or eight-figure businesses, and I m a total business expert, but I ve never done coaching before, but I know if I did I could really help people, I would probably work with that person because even though they don t have coaching experience, per se, they ve really got some valuable experience to deliver. That s what we re looking for, is: Do they have something valuable to deliver? And number two: Are they totally dedicated to making this happen? If they are, we can make it work. I m Charlie, and I do know a lot about something. I have bought and sold lots and lots of businesses, but I haven t ever really thought about sharing that information, doing coaching, or high-ticket programs, and things like that. How might you come across me, or how might I come across you, just through the advertising and things that you do? Page 6 of 14
By using the process that we use for our clients. The process is really simple. I ll tell you what the process is. We take people from browsing around on Facebook or Twitter We like to use social media for advertising, and the reason why is because you can get very laser-targeted about who you want to go after. If you come to me and you re like: Russ, I want to do this business coaching program, but guess what? I want to work with moms who live in Beverly Hills, who drive a Lexus, who have an American Express card, and are really into yoga, you can target that person on Facebook. It s an amazing thing. We do all of our advertising on Facebook and Twitter. We take people from browsing around on Facebook, they see one of our ads, they click one of our ads. We take them to a sign up page for a webinar, they sign up for the webinar, they come to the webinar, and they watch it. On the webinar, we re establishing authority, we re giving them some great content, some amazing value, and we re also getting them really clear on the problem that we solve and why it s so important to solving it. Then we invite them, just a really low-key invitation: Hey, listen, if some of the stuff we ve said has resonated with you, if you re like, Yeah, this is making a lot of sense, here s how you reach out if you d like to work with us. It s that simple. They fill out a simple application, we get on the phone with them, and if we feel that they are a fit, we enroll them as a client or we don t. That s the process that we use. If you came into my program, that is the process that you would go through. It sounds like a simple process I mean, obviously, I m really, really, really simplifying it for the purposes of the podcast, but we take people from clicking an ad on Facebook to making a high-ticket purchase to the tune of $6,000, $8,000, $10,000, sometimes $15,000 within the space of 24-48 hours. It s really a powerful sales cycle, and it sets you free from having to do a lot of the stuff people think you have to do to run an online business. Page 7 of 14
People think: If you re going to have an online business, you have to have a blog, and you have to crank out eight months worth of blog posts, and you really have to build this big, big audience, and you have to do all these videos and create all this stuff. In my business we ve basically proven that none of that is true. If you really understand marketing and you really have something of value, you can take somebody from click to client in the space of like 24 hours. I love that: Click to client. That ll make it into the show notes, Russ. Watch, now next week on Facebook I m going to see all these Facebook ads: Click to client, from like 20 different people, but that s okay. Is it just as easy to target a business person as opposed to an individual on Facebook or Twitter? For the most part, yes. If you re talking about: Oh, I only want to work with the presidents of Fortune 500 companies, it s like: Okay, there s only 500 of them, there s probably better ways to reach those people than using Facebook advertising. If you re targeting small to midsize businesses, yeah, it s golden. What about your background, Russ? What have you done in the past that got you to what you re doing today? I started out in online marketing, and I started out very much the way that I think a lot of people start out where you know you ve got some good knowledge to deliver, so you start delivering it, and you maybe create like an e-book or a video course, an audio course or something, and then you start selling it. I started doing that and creating those kinds of courses. I don t know how deep in internet marketing your listeners are, but a big part of internet marketing is what s called the launch game. Do you think they know what that is? Page 8 of 14
Why don t you describe it a little bit? Sure, yeah. If you guys have operated in online marketing circles, you ll notice that several times a year people will do a big, big, big launch where it s an event that they only hold a couple times a year or it s a video course that they only release a few times a year, or something like that. Your inbox, if you re on any of these people s email lists, your inbox gets bombarded for like two weeks where everybody is mailing about this launch, this big thing coming up, everyone s excited, everyone is mailing about it, and they do this big launch, and a bunch of people sign up, and that s that. I ll confess: I started out doing things that way, where we would build everybody up, do a big, big launch, and sell 2,000-3,000 copies of whatever it is that we were offering. You make a nice payday, you get 3,000 new customers, and it s pretty cool. People buy 3,000 copies of your e-book or whatever it might be. The problem with that, at least my problem with it was that, over time, I started to realize that of the 3,000 people who just bought my thing, almost nobody would take action; nobody would do anything. They were spending maybe $27 on an e-book or $197 on a video course, and they just didn t care. This is something that s very common in the information marketing world. I think I read someplace that 80-90% of people who brought Tony Robbins Personal Power back in the day remember that CD course he was selling back in the early 80s that put him on the map? 80-90% of people who bought that never even opened it. It was an amazing thing. I started to realize that s what s happening with my stuff. People would buy it, they would go through it, they d go: Oh, this is great, Russ, this is amazing. I d follow up with them two months later, and say: What are you guys doing? Are you taking action on this? and they d say: No. No, not really. Page 9 of 14
Frankly, that started to bother me. I was like: Listen, I m putting out great information, just like everybody else Earlier we talked about information, versus transformation. I m putting out great information, but no one s doing anything with it, nothing s changing, nothing s happening. I asked myself: What would happen if I took this model and I flipped it on its head, where instead of charging $27 or $97 for something, I charge $5,000, $6,000, $8,000, and instead of doing information, I do transformation? I m going to work with a lot fewer people, maybe 20 clients a month, 30 clients a month for a $5,000 price, $10,000 price, whatever it is but I m really going to make sure that they kick some ass and they get results. I tried that as an experiment. Once I made that decision, I didn t know how I was going to do it, so I had to come up with a process for how to attract people at that price point. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of advertising spending, and spending on different tools, tactics, softwares, and all these different things, and just bitter struggle, and trial and error eventually, I cracked the code and figured it out. Now I ve got this thriving business where we work with between 20 and 40 clients a month at a nice premium price, and because we re working with so few people, I can really go to bat for them and really make sure they get results. They re happy, they show up ready to rock and roll, I see the changes in their business, and it s just a lot more fun, frankly. Yeah, and quite frankly, you re not the first person that I have heard make a comment like: You can have the same exact information, and if you re charging $27 for it or $2,700 for it, the person who is paying $2,700 for it is probably going to be more inclined to take some action and be more involved in the process. Page 10 of 14
It s true. Anybody who s ever joined a gym knows it s true. I used to work at a 24-hour fitness in Los Angeles, I think my membership was like $30 a month I never went. Then I joined Equinox, it was like $200, and then I would go sometimes, and then I finally was like: Okay, you know what? I need to spend the money and get a personal trainer, and now I go like five times a week. Having that accountability there is critical. When we made that shift in our business, Charlie My big success story three to four years ago was I d have a client and maybe that client would grow their business to $10,000 a month or something, which is cool, don t get me wrong. But once we started doing it this way, right now the world record champion holder of our eight-week program is we had one client come and do $400,000 in additional business within eight weeks, second place was $210,000 in eight weeks. Those are crazy results, but it s because we re working with fewer clients so I can really focus on them, and because they show up accountable because they re paying a nice, high price. It just works great. Got it. As an aside, I m looking on a bookshelf at the Tony Robbins Personal Power audio tape set. Is it actually tapes? They re audio tapes, yes, and I am not one of those people who has put it on the shelf and not used it, I assure you that. That s great. I had it on CD, so I think I might have bought it a couple years after you. Russ, do you currently or have you ever used a coach to help you build your business? There was really nobody who had done this before, at least that I knew of. There were people that were getting pieces of this right, Page 11 of 14
so there were people who were doing group coaching programs, sure; there were people who were charging a high price, sure; but there was nobody out there that had a system where that ran like clockwork. For example, some of the people that I saw, they would command $15,000 fees for a client, or they would have a mastermind or something that s like $100,000-$150,000 a year, but they were getting their clients through word of mouth, through referral, and things like that. That s great, but it s not predictable; you can t count on it. There wasn t really anybody who had what I needed, which was the ability to create high-paying coaching clients right from Facebook and Twitter within 24 hours. I really had to create that from scratch. I did work with a few mentors along the way, but what I found is that most of them only had a piece of the puzzle here, another piece of the puzzle there. Really putting the whole thing together coherently, I had to do myself. When I needed coaching, I would hire somebody to come work for me. I wouldn t just have them coach me; I d have them coach my clients, too. For example, running advertising on Facebook is something that I m good at, I m okay at it, but I hate that stuff, I really do. It s a serious pain in the ass, believe me. I had to hire somebody, a full-time Facebook traffic person who loves it. She loves it, she s brilliant at it. Her name is Adrianne. She coaches me on it, she does it for me, she coaches the clients on it. When I have a big gap in my knowledge like that, I tend to find somebody who s an expert and bring them on board, so that not only I can get advantage, but my clients can, too. Do you ever come across clients you work with, or maybe more appropriately, prospective clients that have selfimage issues? They re charging $120 an hour, and they just cannot envision themselves charging $1,000 an hour. Do you run across people like that? Do you usually say: Page 12 of 14
Look, I don t think this is going to be a fit, or is there some mechanism in your eight-week program that helps people through that process of realizing that they can and should be charging a multiple of what they re currently charging? I m really glad you brought that up, actually, because this is a huge thing that a lot of people don t realize. I believe that if you really want to transform your business, you need two things: You need a strategy that makes sense, and then you need the mindset and the accountability piece. Most of the people that I see operating in the marketplace, they have one, but they don t have the other; where they re really, really great at teaching you marketing strategy, but if you have a problem like the one you just said, they can t help you. Then you have your people who are your life coaches and your mindset coaches, where they can shift your limiting beliefs, but they can t tell you how to market your business. I realized that very quickly, Charlie, when I started running this program, that there were a lot of people coming in who had negative beliefs, self-sabotage, and all this other stuff, so I did the same thing that I did with the Facebook ads I found an amazing woman named Jane. She s actually worked with some of the top coaching organizations in the world for 25 years. She s amazing. She s the only person I ve ever seen besides Tony Robbins, actually, who can have a 10-minute conversation with you, and you are a completely different person at the end than you were when you got there. I found her, brought her into the fold, and now she s our full-time mindset and accountability coach, where if you come in and you ve got a problem like that boom, she ll help you solve it. I m really honest with myself about what I m good at and what I suck at. I am not good at having a conversation with somebody and shifting their mindset. I can tell them what to do, sure, just like you would, but it takes a special skillset to really, really shift Page 13 of 14
someone s mindset, so that s why I brought her on, and it s like the best decision I ve ever made. She helps me, she helps the clients, she helps everybody. Gosh, I feel like this could go on for like another hour, and I always like to be respectful of everyone s time. What s the best way for people to reach out, connect with you, and learn more about your services? There s two things. If you want to see our process in action, because I know I ve been talking about Facebook ads, and landing pages, and webinars, and stuff, but a lot of people are like: What are you talking about? What does that mean? If you want to see it in action, you can go to www.clientsondemand.com/webinar. That s www.clientsondemand.com/webinar, and you can watch our webinar process. This is the process that we use to attract clients. You can see what it looks like. The other place I d like to invite your listeners to is I have a private Facebook group, there s about 5,000 people in there, it s totally free, where we talk about this: We talk about high-ticket setting, and client attraction, and all this stuff. There s some seven-figure business owners in there, some eight-figure business owners in there, and it s totally free. If they come in there, they ll learn a lot. If you want to be a part of that, go to www.clientsondemand.com/facebook, and join the program. Excellent. All of the great resources mentioned in today s episode will be available on the show notes page at www.theboomerbusinessowner.com. Russ, thanks so much, on behalf of all of our listeners; we really, really appreciate your help. You got it, Charlie. My pleasure. Page 14 of 14