Gary Henderson: 0:00

My name is Gary Henderson, and I built the creator studio to show you what's possible. Today we have a really special guest. So about 10 years ago. I met Russ Ruffino with Kevin nations in a mastermind. So I was part of the family, which was Kevin nations mastermind and Russ Ruffino was part of the family. And I got to know Russ a little bit and I got to watch his business grow. Now rest has gone on to be like Inc 500, 5,000. He's gone on to do over a million dollars a month. Like, I mean, consistently. Like million dollar month after million dollar month after million dollar month. Selling a high ticket coaching package. So our goal here in the creator studio is to show you what's possible. And my goal was to bring you as many opportunities into the many ideas and as many introductions as possible for you. So you can find the path to monetize your passions. What you love. Make money ever, how you want to. So go ahead and follow the show you don't want to miss any of our episodes and let's jump right into the studio with Russ Ruffino in. Um, Creators. I'm really excited to have Russ here. I met Russ years ago with Kevin nations and just watched from a distance. I watched Russ Rufino just crush high ticket coaching, kind of figure out a plan that worked, put a system in place. And just rinse and repeat it for Just success after success after success and I would talk to people and they would say oh, yeah I'm using the clients on demand system. And oh, yeah, i'm using this and oh, yeah, it's cod this and It was just an absolute insane run What rust was able to do you hit I don't know like way up there on the inc 500 5000 list I think like number 186 On that a couple years ago just absolutely crushing it. So rust welcome to the studio

Russ Ruffino: 1:50

Thanks, man. It's great to be here. I

Gary Henderson: 1:53

Yeah. So tell me what got you started in high ticket coaching. What led you there?

Russ Ruffino: 2:00

started out doing low ticket stuff, right? So, and this is like... I don't know, 10 years ago now, probably. It started out, because I was a bartender. And so my original goal was like, I just want to make some money online. I was, I turned 30, and I looked around and I thought to myself, there's no way I'm going to be a 40 year old bartender. Like, there's just no way. So I have to, I have to figure out another way to get cash in the door. So that led me to just kind of dabbling online, doing a little bit of affiliate marketing, that kind of thing. But enough to sort of, Oh, man, I kind of have a talent for this, you know, and I'd never done marketing, no background in sales, no background in any of that stuff. And, uh, I could just do it. It was the damnedest thing. I could, I could write copy. I could, uh, speak on video. I could, I could, I could just do stuff. And, um, first year. Ended up doing 250, 000 and it was all low ticket. So it changed my life, but after a while, you know, I would do these low ticket launches and I would sell thousands of copies of something and the reviews were always good and the feedback was always good. Reach out to people. They'd be like, Hey Russ, you know, I loved your video course. And I'd say, okay, cool, man. Well, what did you do? Did you put into practice? Did you get results? And they'd be like, Oh, well, you know, I got a couple other products I got to get there first and yeah, no, eventually I'll get around to it. So I started realizing that like, okay. Yeah, I'm making money. The reviews are good. People are happy, but nobody's taking action. Like nobody's doing anything. And that kind of started to bother me. And so I thought to myself, well, look, what would happen if, flip this model on its head. Instead of trying to sell thousands of copies of something at 27 or 47 or 97, I charged 5 or 8 for my work. Worked with fewer people and I really went to bat to make them take action and actually get them to the result And so I didn't know I had no idea how to do that And so I shut down all my low ticket offers. This was in I think 2013 I made absolutely no money like in I think July and August of 2013 then eventually I cracked the code. I got the funnel working And I believe December of 2013 was my first 200, 000 month. And then since then, I've been all about high ticket and I've never looked back.

Gary Henderson: 4:20

That's really, you know, I think it's when you took those two months and you took that break, how did you, I think that's interesting because I think a lot of people need to do that. I think they're going down a path that they're not happy going down, they need to stop, they need to take some time, they need to figure that out. Whatever that next path is for them. And they need to give themselves the space to do that. How'd you have the confidence that you could figure that

Russ Ruffino: 4:46

Honestly, it was really stupid. What I should have done is kept my low ticket offers going. So I could have cash flow coming in. But at that point, man, I was just so fed up. Everything. That I was like, let me just burn my ships. It's honestly the same thing I did when I started this. You know, when I quit my bartending job, I was maybe making 500 a month online. So nowhere near enough to cover my expenses. I told myself, look, man, if I'm, I've got proof of concepts, I'm making, you know, four or 500 bucks a month. I bet, I bet you that if I could quit my bartending job and just dive in with both feet, that I could make, that I would make enough to succeed. Again, that probably wasn't a smart thing to do either, but I did it and it worked and it changed the rest of my life. So when we made the switch from low ticket to high ticket, I just did the same thing again. And what's interesting, Gary, is like, I didn't actually take a break during those two months. I literally just shut down all my low ticket stuff to force myself. To find a way to make high ticket work, I burned my ships and you know, for those two months, man, I was not, I had my back to the wall. Like, I mean, I was waking up five in the morning every day, testing different funnels, testing different ad stuff, like just burning my credit card, trying to like really, you know, scale this thing up and crack the code on something that at that point I don't think anyone else had done. Right? So you had people that were doing high ticket. Most of the people that were doing high ticket were doing it from their warm network. Nobody had really cracked the code on how do you run traffic to a cold audience or run ads to a cold audience, get them clicking on your ad, get them enrolling at five or eight or 10, 000 within 24 to 48 hours. When I told people that I was going to try to do that, they thought that was insane. Um, and I, and for all I know, it's not possible. I figured, look, let me just give it a shot and see if I can make it work. And then, you know, thank God it did.

Gary Henderson: 6:40

You know, you say it wasn't smart, but I had a friend of mine, and we ended up being business partners on a couple businesses, Greg Harrelson, and he looked at me one time and he said, Hey Gary, He said, I need you to want this so bad that if you don't make money today, your kids don't get to eat

Russ Ruffino: 6:55

There you go.

Gary Henderson: 6:56

And that's a different level of want and a different level of grit. Like when you, you know, burn the ships, burn the boats and went and started over. If you would have kept your offers, I don't know that you would have had that same drive. I don't know that you would have

Russ Ruffino: 7:08

probably right. And I, and I remember having a, um, conversation with my business partner at the time because I had a dude that we were launching a lot of stuff together. And I remember telling him this idea, like, dude, what if I could do 5, 000 or what if I could do 6, 000 for a workshop? And he was like, no, dude, that's crazy. Uh, that's totally not, you know, that's totally not going to work. And, uh. Well, we'll give it a shot and uh, yeah, and it ended up working and working great. And then, you know, since then we scaled that business to 1. 5 million a month. And, and we've got clients now that we've taken to eight figures a month and, uh, seven figures a month rather. And, uh, it's just been amazing.

Gary Henderson: 7:50

So that is amazing. And just like absolutely amazing. And you've done something that I don't think many have done. But how, how do you get. Pay traffic to work to a cold audience and get them to buy like that's that's hard. I've ran a lot of traffic I've worked with a lot of clients and it's really difficult to get somebody to go from cold Just swiping a credit card or paying in 24 to 48 hours Like I mean, it's really difficult to get him to pay anything but let alone like five eight

Russ Ruffino: 8:22

So the secret to doing it. Really, I mean, there's a bunch of principles, but I'll give you some of the main ones. The main thing is to build all of your communication around the outcome. This is different than the way that people usually operate. There's a time when you have a coach that's trying to sell you on something. They talk about themselves in those terms. They say, I'm a relationship coach, I'm a dating coach, I'm a fitness coach. Some of them will say, oh, I got certified by guru so and so, or I got certified in such and such methodology. The target audience doesn't care about that at all. They don't care about you at all. The only thing they care about is the outcome. What is that outcome? That result that you can help them achieve. And so, we started out by building all of our communication around that. The outcome that we're going to get you to. The problem that you have right now. This is why it sucks so much to have that problem. This is the other stuff that you've tried and why it hasn't worked. This is the way that does work. And if you want to talk to us about how we can apply that to your business or your life or your marriage or whatever it is. Uh, you know, book a call. And then we have them book a call. We get on the phone with them. And then on that first conversation. And We enroll them into a five or eight or 10, 000 program. What's really cool, Gary, is that we've proven that this works over and over and over again in just about every niche you can imagine. I mean, we have, so we have a mastermind, right, that we call Millionaire Alliance. When we first started it, there weren't any millionaires in it. It was just me and, uh, you know, and some of our clients, but now literally everyone in there is doing seven figures or eight figures and all of them were doing basically zero when they first came to work with us. So there's other masterminds out there that have, you know, like a lot of eight figure business owners or nine figure business owners, but they were eight figure business owners when they got there. Um, we are one of the only masterminds out there where we've got just about everyone in there are people that we took from a dead start millionaires. And so this process, as difficult as it seems, really does work in just about any niche or market. The only caveat is that you must be able to solve a major life or business challenge. Like, can you get somebody to pay you 8, 000 if you, I don't know, teach people how to play the accordion? Maybe, but probably not. So most of the clients we have are doing big things like saving people's marriages or helping people find the love of their life. Helping people get their business dialed in helping people get their fitness their nutrition dialed in those sorts of big high stakes problems are Foundation for having a high ticket offer.

Gary Henderson: 10:58

It makes sense. You know, you, you run some paid traffic to talk about the outcome that they're desiring. You focus on what sucks so bad. You talk to them about maybe some stuff that they've tried in the past that hasn't worked. Then you share with them what does work. Maybe show them a success story or two, get them on the phone and then have a conversation with them. What are you selling them in that first package? You say it's 5K, 8K and it's going to solve a major life or business challenge. But what does the package

Russ Ruffino: 11:28

reason that you couldn't Sell a live event you could sell a virtual event. You could sell a three day retreat You could say you could even sell like a package of one mentoring sessions if you wanted to but most of our clients do Enroll people into an eight week online group coaching program. So that has a lot of advantages to it. First advantage is that it's delivered online and what that means is that you can Go anywhere and do anything. So you can run your entire business from anywhere in the world with just a laptop and internet connection. So that right there is pretty cool because a lot of our clients are, you know, therapists or doctors or whatever and they're seeing patients in the office all day every day. They have no freedom, they have no time to spend with their families, none of that stuff. And when they take their business online, they can go where they want to go and do what they want to do. So they finally have that freedom piece that they've never had. The thing is that those workshops are delivered in groups. So you're not doing one on one anymore. It's all group coaching. You can serve most of your clients in about four to five hours a week in total. So most of our clients, again, the people that are working in an office that are therapists, that are doctors, whatever, and they have an offline business. When we take their business online, their workload drops from like 40 hours a week serving clients to like four hours a week serving clients. And what's really cool is that these workshops tend to get even better results. For the client and even one on one mentoring because these group programs can be set up in a way that they really create an incredible outcome for people. So it's like, that's what most of our clients are selling. And, um, and as long as it's designed to fix the problem in a step by step manner, it's something you can charge a five or eight or 10, 000 price for because the price is not based care. There's another important principle. The price is not based on the deliverables, right? So. In a low ticket situation, if you're selling something for 27 or 97, you're selling something on a webinar or whatever, you want to have like, oh, there's 50 different bonuses and 25 different little things you get and there's 80 modules, and you want to have something called thud factor, where they believe that if I invest 97 or whatever, I'm getting all of this stuff, all this information. Well, when it comes to high ticket, The opposite is true. You want to eliminate as much as you possibly can. Because nobody cares about the extra bonuses, the extra information, the extra this, the extra that. The only thing they care about is getting to the outcome. And the more stuff I give them, the longer it's going to take them to get to the result. Sounds good?

Gary Henderson: 14:02

It makes total sense. They want their results as

Russ Ruffino: 14:04

the more you slow down in that process.

Gary Henderson: 14:08

Yeah, it's, it's a simple concept, right? An eight week group coaching program helped them solve a major issue. It could be getting through divorce. It could be launching a new business. It could be losing weight. It could be anything like that. Like something that they greatly desire, help them do that. And then I would imagine once you take. A couple of groups through this, you have testimonials, um, really that just sell

Russ Ruffino: 14:30

that most of the people who come into Clients Online, they don't have any. The ones they have are not that great. So that was a challenge that we had to solve. How do you create authority and credibility without having case studies, without having testimonials? How do you do this if you're just starting out? And what we found, Gary, is that the most effective way to do it, because I don't know who the original person who said this was, whether that's, it might have been Dan Kennedy or something, but he's probably the first person I heard say it, but I'm not sure if it's his quote, but But basically, the quote is this, You can describe someone's problems better than they can. Automatically assume that you know the answer. So part of the magic of the approach that we do, vividly and richly and powerfully describe how it feels to be where they're at right now. And if you do this right, it's all about empathy and connection, where I'm telling you exactly what you're going through. I'm telling you exactly how you're feeling. And these might be feelings that you haven't even told your wife about, or your best friend. But now you're listening to a webinar with someone, and that person is breaking down exactly how you feel, exactly what's wrong, exactly what you've tried to do to fix it, and exactly why that stuff hasn't worked. If you do that well, You don't need testimonials or case studies or letters after name or certification because those things are like external credibility indicators. You see a diploma on someone's wall, a certain percentage of the population will think, Oh, that guy, that must mean that guy knows what he's talking about. He went to Harvard. And another certain percentage of the population doesn't care at all. So, at best, those kinds of credibility indicators are only going to be, meaningful to a small percentage of the population, but Describing your problems better than you can and you have that moment of like, oh my god, that's exactly how i'm feeling You have come to the conclusion that i'm an authority And and I don't have to tell you that I have to talk you into that because that's your idea. You came to that conclusion on your own if that makes sense

Gary Henderson: 16:31

It makes total sense. So, I'm imagining when you start working with your clients, you focus heavily on their niche and who their ideal audience is to make sure that when you're in these conversations, you're actually, you know the story. Because if you've got Sally and she's 80 and she wants to go do something and then you've got John and he's 22 and he's something else, you're never going to know everybody's problems.

Russ Ruffino: 16:53

want to connect with Sort of the niche within the niche. So if, um, you help people find the love of their life, let's say, and you've got an offer where you help. Some women in their 20s find the right guy and then let's say there's another person that works with women in their late 40s to find true love. Oh, some of those pain points are going to be the same, but some of them are going to be different. And so those probably ought to be two different offers or two different funnels because the way of being lonely, let's say, and not, not, not, not finding love, the way that affects Someone who's 22 versus someone who's like 42, uh, are very different. So we do help them dial in a niche so that it's emotionally specific. So that when I talk to you about the problems you're dealing with, I'm hitting the nail right on the head every single time. Because that's what allows someone with no credibility and no authority and no diploma and no certifications to come in there and start selling a program for 10, 000 right out of the gate.

Gary Henderson: 17:59

It makes total sense. Um, I talk about something called right message, right audience, right time. And that's exactly what

Russ Ruffino: 18:04

about the stuff that they

Gary Henderson: 18:05

Let's put the right message for the right audience at the right time.

Russ Ruffino: 18:07

everyone say, oh, you've got to tell your story. You've got to tell your story, and I'm like, okay, that's fine. But honestly, no one gives a shit about my story and no one should. Like, like, what do you care about my story? Like, like, if I'm watching a webinar, I want to hear how you're gonna help me, you know what I mean? And I remember I really had this vividly because I was on a webinar with Brandon Burchard one time and I was just watching it and he was like telling the story of like, How he became a coach and it was like, I don't remember man, it was a long time ago, but you guys might have heard this story. He's like, he's like in Columbia or something and he got in a car accident and his blood was on the windshield and he saw the, the moonlight reflected in the blood and it was at that moment that he realized I have to make a difference in my life. And I'm like, okay, that's cool. But I'm sitting there watching this going like, what the hell does this have to do with me? Like, you know, it's a great story, but what does this have to do with me? How are you going to help me get where I want to go? And so we don't really talk about that stuff at all. Like, if you want to know my story, we'll sit down, we can have a drink, I'll tell you all about it. But it's like on a webinar with someone, I'm, I'm talking about you, I'm not talking about me at all. I'm just talking about you and what you're going through. And the more you do that and the more powerfully you can do that, the more your audience is going to immediately feel understood and the more they're just going to come to the conclusion that you're a real expert with real expertise, you're not going to have to tell them that.

Gary Henderson: 19:16

yeah, it makes, it makes absolute sense. I, you know, every now and then you go on one of those trainings and they are speaking to you and you know, there's a bunch of other people there that they're not speaking to, but it does speak to you and it lands. Um, I remember back like when we worked with Lewis and I mean, most of my clients, in all honesty, we would know who their buyers were, but we would have to bring in a bunch of non buyers because they would have to feel good when they showed up for their webinar because they wanted a packed house. You know, we, if we knew we needed 80 buyers, we could put probably a hundred people there and get 80 buyers. We knew the buyers, but we needed to put a thousand people there because they wanted to see a full audience.

Russ Ruffino: 19:52

yeah,

Gary Henderson: 19:53

it sounds like you just focus on getting those

Russ Ruffino: 19:55

the webinars are automated. It's like I, I barely ever do a live webinar, so whether it's a webinar or it's A V S L, which we're experimenting, experimenting with a lot more now it's all automated. So the webinar, the v vsl, it's like wanted to act as a filter. The opportunity cost is not getting the wrong people clicking your ads and signing up and watching a webinar. I mean, that just is what it is. The opportunity cost happens when you have the wrong people booking a phone call with you. Because then if you get on the phone with those people and they're totally not the right fit, then you're wasting your time or the salesperson's time, whoever's taking that call. So it's important to, from the very beginning of the funnel, be filtering. for who your exact target audience is. And this can cause problems for people when they do high ticket. Because if you go and hire a media buying agency that doesn't specialize in how to do high ticket, they're probably going to do things the wrong way. So like if, like the way that you do advertising for e commerce or something like that is totally different from the way that you do it for high ticket coaching. Because for e commerce, if I'm selling a backpack or something, it's like, I want a really, really, really big audience. I want really broad targeting. And if you're doing high ticket coaching, that's kind of the kiss of

Gary Henderson: 21:12

Yeah, it makes absolute sense. So let me, I want to make sure I follow you so far. We run an ad on Facebook or Twitter or some social platform online. We take them to an automated webinar, which speaks directly to them, has the conversation directly with them. They, we feel their pain. We're highly empathetic. Um, then the pitch there, the offer is schedule a call. And they schedule a call with you, the team, um, depending on what you're building and how big you are. And then from there they're sold a five to 10 K offer, which is most commonly an eight week online group coaching program.

Russ Ruffino: 21:49

So what's great is that

Gary Henderson: 21:50

is it rinse and repeat? Or what happens when they finish that eight week

Russ Ruffino: 21:54

really, really bad to doing pretty good. So let's just say, Gary, that you've got a program about how to save your marriage. Like, our top clients right now, Meg and Alfred, are marriage coaches in Australia. And they're the first clients that we got from a dead start to a million dollars a month. So last year they saved 833 marriages. It brought in, I think it was 10. 9 million dollars. So we're like super proud of that. But let's say it's an offer where you are saving people's marriages. Now, um, you, your front end program. It's about taking them from being on the verge of divorce to like now you're not getting divorced anymore, right? So maybe when they come to you, they're fighting every day. The, the, the wife is completely checked out or the husband's completely checked out. You know, divorce is imminent. You know, one person is going to serve the other person with papers any day now. And you can come in and you can interrupt that and you can turn that situation around. So day one, they're on the verge of divorce. Day 60, when they complete your eight week program, now things are pretty good. They're in love again. They're, like, things are more civil. They're not fighting anymore. They've learned to talk to each other. They've started communicating, right? Well, we both know that there's a whole other level of happiness in a marriage beyond just, Oh, we're not gonna get divorced, right? So your front end programs are usually about taking people from doing Really, really bad to doing now we're stable. It's good. And then your backend programs are about taking people from pretty good to fricking amazing. So for clients on a man, our eight week program is about building out a high ticket foundation for your business. So we do most of that stuff for you, and we build out this foundation, so now you can start enrolling clients at five to ten thousand dollars, which is amazing, it's gonna change your life. But our back end programs are about taking that foundation and now getting you to fifty thousand dollars a month, a hundred thousand dollars a month, a million dollars a month. So, the way you think about it, your front end program is about going from really really bad to like pretty good, and then your back end programs are going from pretty good to freaking incredible. And so most of the people that we work with, you have your eight week front end program and then you enroll people into a 12 month mastermind and those can be very, very high ticket anywhere from 50 to 100, 000 or more.

Gary Henderson: 24:07

It makes sense and you're, you're helping them, right? You get, you're filtering the whole way. You're funneling the whole way through. You're being highly selective in your content. You're trying to weed out as many people as possible because you don't want to waste phone calls. So then when you do get on the phone call, you're getting only qualified people. So the people that buy, I mean, they have to be qualified. They're pulling out their credit card and paying 5, 8, 10 grand. And then when they get to the end of the eight weeks, if they're. If they were successful, if they decided not to get divorced, it's almost like you're letting go of what you're working on if you don't continue the program. It's like, we're not going to get divorced, but what are we going to do now? We

Russ Ruffino: 24:45

of momentum going in the wrong direction. Like they have all of this, you know, maybe they've been fighting and struggling for years. Absolutely. And then, you know, they work with you for eight weeks and you, you turn that around and it's this incredible thing, but most people are going to default back to their old bad habits and they're going to go right back to where they were before. Now, some people won't, you have 1% of clients, maybe 5% where they're just super self motivated and very, very smart and incredibly hardworking and they're going to crush it no matter what, because that's just who they are. But for the other 95% of people, it makes a lot of sense for them to join your mastermind because you've got to take it to the next level. Whereas if they just leave this ecosystem that you've built, chances are they're going to go back to where they were before. So that's the way I like to think about it. I like to think about your programs in terms of like being an ecosystem. You know, if you're, if you're a gazelle or something in Africa and you're in an ecosystem where there's no rain, there's no water, there's no grass, you're in trouble. You gotta get out of there. So it's like that's where we find our clients and then we bring them into this ecosystem where there's grass everywhere, it's beautiful, there's wonderful music playing, there's rain falling, everything's safe, there's no lions, and they're doing great. But if you leave that ecosystem, you're not gonna do great anymore. And that's just true with like everything in life. So it's like you can either go deeper on that journey and, and join a backend program or a mastermind and let's take this stuff to the next level. Or you can, you know, leave that ecosystem and you run the risk of, of backtracking going backwards. And by the way, Gary, what makes all of this high ticket stuff work is a relentless laser like focus on getting every single client to the outcome. So we both have been in this business a long time, man. We both know that most online marketing companies. Like they don't really give a shit whether anybody gets the outcome or not, you know It's like we're gonna do this big launch. Everyone's gonna spend whatever five hundred dollars thousand dollars We're gonna sell a bajillion copies of this thing and then the support after that is basically non existent We just give you a bunch of information and we sort of send you on your way to figure it out Um, the way we do things in the high ticket world is different. It's gotta be about really getting results for the clients. And that means we have to kick your butt a little bit. It means we have to hold you accountable. It means we have to really hold your hand and support you every step of the way. But that's what it takes to really get people to the outcome. So everything has to be built around that or you're sort of building a house of cards. Like if I taught somebody how to do all the sales and all the marketing and everything else, but then people get in their program and the program sucks and they don't get the result, it's all gonna come crashing down at some point.

Gary Henderson: 27:18

It makes absolute sense. Have you tested not having eight weeks, but having it results driven? Um, I worked with, and I met them through Kevin. You may know them. There's these guys out of Charlotte years ago, and they had a real estate coaching offer. It was a 5K offer on the front end. And what they did is they helped you sell your first or your next house. And we did a lot of upsells into the mastermind. They had a 25K offer to a mastermind. And what they found when we went in and we did the research was, Their first program was great. People paid, they were getting results, but by the time they made the offer, like eight weeks, they hadn't got to the closing table and got the cash back in. So they didn't actually realize the results. They were close. They had a listing. They, you know, they were, they were working it all out, but we didn't realize the results. We made one little switch and we said, you pay 5k and you get our support until. You close your first or your next listing. So we didn't put a timeframe on it and our conversions on the front end and the back end just shot through the roof. Just that one little tweak. Is it in your system? Is it eight weeks or would something like that work as well where you're truly focused on the outcome and saying our outcome is you selling your first or your next house. So you're in this group container until we get there.

Russ Ruffino: 28:34

to so look man Life happens. You know what I mean? If you're in week two of the program and you have some terrible tragedy, like, we're going to give you extra time. But the reason I like the eight week format is because it creates time pressure. So every time we've tested a structure that's longer than, let's say, like, 12 weeks, right? People have this tendency to do what all of us did in school, right? Remember, like, you show up on the first day of class, the teacher's like, yeah, yeah, your term paper's due. Blah blah blah blah blah So get started on it now You know, I don't know about you man, but I was the guy doing that shit the night before You know what I mean? Like, I would wait until the absolute last minute So by telling people that there's a defined time limit It really forces people to focus and take action So if it's a program where, um You know, you're saving your marriage or something. Maybe you've got a little bit more flexibility there, but when you're talking about we're showing them or we're building a high ticket funnel for them, we're getting their coaching business off the ground. Like we need people to show up and hit the ground running and start kicking ass right away. So having that eight week time limit creates a good time pressure. Um, so we find that we get a lot better results when we have that tight time frame. But we also are aware of the fact that like, you know, hey man, life happens. And so we're flexible and we want to take care of people. So our golden rule is like we want to take care of people and get them to the result. What we don't want to do is empower people's laziness. So like if you come into my program and you don't do anything for the first seven and a half weeks and all of a sudden you start scrambling and go, Oh, I need more time. Like we're not going to give it to you. Because you didn't do anything, but what we want to do is show up and get people into action right away And so I find that that time limit really helps doing that Yeah

Gary Henderson: 30:14

Yeah, it makes sense. My note that I wrote down was create time pressure, but be flexible, um, and help the outcome. Yeah, that makes total sense. I see a question here from Camille and she says, What sources do you recommend to find just like to help people find like the description of their problem? Like, how are we? How are we doing research? Where are we going to do research to find out what these problems are? Ideal audience may be having

Russ Ruffino: 30:37

can do all the market research that you want and if you are completely unfamiliar with a market then yeah You should probably do that kind of research, you know read books look at Amazon reviews that sort of thing. I In my mind, there's no substitute for going there in your imagination. So, like, for example, I've, um, you know, I have a fantastic marriage, right? Which is, I'll just, we'll just keep beating this dead horse of, like, the sacred marriage offers, because I really like them. Um, but, like, so, like, I have a, I have a really great marriage with my wife, right? So, I don't know what it feels like to be in a bad marriage. I can sit down and I close my eyes and I can imagine what it would feel like. And if I really go there in my guts, you know, you're going to come up with copy. You're going to say things like, you know, does this sound like you, do you wake up every morning, 12 inches away from the love of your life, but you feel like there's three miles in between you. And every day that gap is getting bigger and bigger. You know, do you wake, does this sound like you, do you wake up every morning wondering if today is the day you're finally going to get served with divorce papers. When she's finally going to tell you that she's had enough. You know what I mean? Like, copy like that is powerful and, and I can do all the market research in the world, but at the end of the day, I got to close my eyes and go there. And uh, my background, man, when I was bartending was in acting. And, and the, the one rule of acting is you've got to go there, you know, like, so let's say you get, you get hired to be in a movie, right? Or you're going to, you're going to audition for a movie. And let's say you're going to audition for Hannibal Lecter, okay? Now, Gary, you don't have a lot in common with Hannibal Lecter, right? You know? Like, I don't know what it feels like to be a weird ass serial killer cannibal, okay? I don't know. But that's not going to help me get the job, right? What's going to help me get the job is to go there in my imagination and say, Okay, what would it be like to be this person? What would motivate him? What would drive him? What made him this way? How does he operate? How does he think? What does he need? What does he crave? And then how can I really imagine what that feels like so that I can embody that? That's what I do before I write copy, right? I think about what is the problem that I'm trying to fix and how awful is it to have that problem. And so it doesn't matter what I'm writing or what I'm working on, I can go there in my imagination and richly and vividly describe how it feels to be in that situation. And again, when you do that, people automatically assume you have the answer.

Gary Henderson: 33:04

I love that. And If you're speaking to your ideal audience and you're creating the right message at the front end with the ads and have the right message on your webinar and your emails, you're, if you're not, like, if you're that much in language and you're not talking to them and you're saying things like waking up 12 inches from the love of your life and you're not sure when you're gonna get divorce papers and they're reading that, they're gonna say, that's not me. Who the hell is he talking to? Unsubscribe, spam, and they're gonna leave and you're never gonna deal with them

Russ Ruffino: 33:33

are going to go. Holy shit. That's me. That's

Gary Henderson: 33:36

I love that. It's exactly

Russ Ruffino: 33:38

how I feel. What do I

Gary Henderson: 33:39

right. You don't exactly right. I love that. So Camille also asked, and I've been wondering this as well. I don't run as much on Facebook anymore. I've been absolutely crushing Twitter. It's insane, and I know you have a similar feeling. I'd like to get some thoughts on that in a second, but have like the ads on Facebook and the way they've tightened their restrictions and their targeting and stuff. Is that limited what you're able to do? Are you still able to get your systems to

Russ Ruffino: 34:02

automated placements and automated targeting and things like that. So you just have to adapt. I mean, you just have to change your approach. You know, the way we do ads today is different than the way we did ads back in 2015 or whatever. I'm sure the way we do it in 2025 is probably going to be a little bit different. You just have to adapt to the changing conditions. So yeah, Facebook ads, I mean, are still our best traffic source. Uh, YouTube, we get really great traffic from. And what's cool about Facebook is that when you get Facebook, you get Instagram. So a lot of people say, well, my target audience isn't on Facebook. Okay, fine. But if they're not on Facebook, they're probably on Instagram. So you really can reach just about everyone with those two platforms. And then when you throw in YouTube or a little tick tock, you know, you're, you're good with Twitter. Uh, I think, and I posted this on Facebook the other, I don't know if you saw, but I posted a prediction. I said Twitter is going to be the number one platform for content creators within the next 12 to 24 months, because they are, Innovating and rolling out new features faster than any other social media company and all of the features they're rolling out are going to be extremely attractive to content creators. People are going to reach more people on Twitter, they're not going to have to worry about censorship, they're going to get paid better. And so where the content creators go, everyone else is going to follow. And they're introducing all of those additional features and I think it's just going to be huge. So what's interesting about Twitter though, man, is that... I would say from late 2014 to probably 2016, Twitter was actually our best source of paid traffic. So we would run ads on Twitter and just get laser targeted traffic for our high ticket offers. And then you know what happened, Gary? Right around 2016, around the presidential election, Everything changed on Twitter. It got toxic, it got divisive, it got crazy, ads stopped converting. Like, it was just a mess. And so we left the platform. And then I just tested it again a few months ago with some Twitter ads. And we would get like thousands and thousands of clicks for very cheap. So we were ROI positive. But the traffic was very untargeted. So we were able to turn a profit on it, as I'm sure you probably are. But the traffic wasn't anywhere near as targeted as it was, uh, on Facebook or YouTube. And then I was watching and Elon was tweeting about it. And Elon was like, yeah, we're still getting our targeting dialed in And I was like, okay, great. Well, the CEO of the company says they're still getting their targeting dialed in. I'm going to shut my hats off for a minute and let them work that out. And then I'm sure Twitter is probably going to be pretty awesome. That's

Gary Henderson: 36:25

I agree. I play there a lot. I've had Oh, wow. What is my numbers? So in the last 28 days, I've had 7. 7 million impressions on Twitter and the mass majority of it's insane. Um, I'm running, I'm running some ads that are working really, really well. We had Dennis, you in here to the studio last month, and he has this dollar a day formula, which I've known Dennis for years and played with it. I have Jesse Ecker, which is T Harv's son and Jess now the CMO of Tony Robbins company. Really cool video for me. Um, I coached him a couple years ago and he said that I'm the reason why, um, Tea Harvest Company will go to eight figures the first time. So I took this video, two minute selfie video of Jesse just like raving about how awesome I am. Like complete testimonial. And I'm running it on Twitter. And I'm getting... On average, since I've started the ad, I'm getting 100% video plays of a two minute testimonial for six cents a piece targeting us audience, 25 and older people who like Gary Vaynerchuk and Tony Robbins. It's just insane the audience and the reach that we have there right now. And I think that the opportunity, like you said, is going to be Twitter. I did see that post that you said, and I think that Elon's going to do a really good job at leaning into helping creators and supporting it. I think he's going to figure out the ad platform. He's heavily leaning into, and we were talking about this earlier today with some other friends of mine, He's heavily leaning into paying based on the fact that you're using Twitter blue. Like he's requiring advertisers to use Twitter blue. He's going to pay creators that have Twitter blue. So just imagine if you could serve ads to only people who were paying 8 a month to get onto Twitter, and now you've got a really highly quality audience. That's comfortable to pull out their credit card and pay some money every

Russ Ruffino: 38:13

Blue is a no brainer. Because if I look at TikTok right now, there's about 20 fake Russ Ruffinos that are just taking my content and reposting it and then trying to hit people up and sell them some like weird. Be crypto fake like, you know offer or something like that It's like if I can pay eight bucks a month on twitter, it'd be verified so that doesn't happen Like to me, that's like a no brainer So I did it on I did it on twitter and I did it on facebook now that facebook's copying elon and doing it Um, because seriously, man, if you're a content creator, you know, if you can't verify who you really are, that sucks

Gary Henderson: 38:46

I agree. So what's. If, if you could close your eyes and, and I think you're one of the few in the world that have the knowledge to do this and imagine. Where are we going in the future?

Russ Ruffino: 38:57

Well, there's certain principles that are timeless. And so regardless of how the technology changes, those principles will always be true. People will always need transformation, always need help and support to make a real change in their lives. It's really the difference between high ticket and low ticket is low ticket tends to just be information ticket when it's done right is transformation. So I'm going to coach you and lead you. to get that result. Where things are going to change in the future is AI. I can already get AI to write copy that is about 95% as good as what I could write. And I'm one of the best in the world. So anybody that's telling you that AI is not going to replace human copywriters is coping. They are coping. AI is going to smoke every human copywriter within probably 24 months, if not sooner. That's just the reality. You might need to have special skills to get AI to perform at that level, but it will perform at that level. And the advantage of AI is speed. So if I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna cook up a 40 minute webinar, it's gonna take me at least a day. And that's if you're a master, where you've mastered this structure, and you're one of the best in the world, and you could bang out a whole webinar in less than 24 hours. I can do that. AI will be able to do it in about 10 seconds. So, even if that webinar is not as good as what I could write on my own, the fact that it's been generated within 10 seconds, and now I have something to start from that's 95% there, and I don't have to take it from 0 to 100, I just have to take it from 95 to 100, that makes my life a hell of a lot easier. So I think people really need to get their heads around what AI is going to be. You are going to have a friend, a mentor, an assistant, whatever, that is access to all human knowledge, that is more intelligent than any human, that has been programmed to be very, very, very persuasive, as persuasive as the most persuasive people, but that is always there for you. It doesn't get tired. It doesn't get sick. It doesn't get sick of your questions. Whatever you ask it. It's always there and it's always right. Like, I don't think we understand what that's really going to be like. Um, so I think that for the first few years or for the next couple of years, it's going to basically be the wild west, which is great. Like it is with any new technology. But where this is going to go is it's going to be better than us at just about everything. And then where do we go from there has more to do with like high level strategy and putting the pieces together. But in terms of just its ability to like just straight up right copy, it will be better than every human within two to three years.

Gary Henderson: 42:09

The ability to write copy. Better than every human in two to three years. Look, Russ Ruffino is prediction about AI, I think is right. I think we're going to get there. Let me share a couple more of my key takeaways from the studio session with Russ. I really liked how he, even though he said maybe he shouldn't have he ditched a low ticket offer and went all in on high ticket. I've always found when I keep something. That's working a little bit. I'm not as. I'm not as all in on the next thing. And I think he identified as well, that going all in was kind of what made him win. So while maybe it would have been smarter to keep the low ticket offer for the moment and for the cash. I think the fact that Russell went all in it, it gave him the commitment to actually do it. I really like the fact that he was able to grow up his own winners. You know, a lot of times in business, we think we've got to get this big client, right. This big name and this big success story. But I think what works better in Russ articulated this. Was when we can take a client, that's not doing anything at all and we can help them reach the pinnacle. You know, a million dollar month or something like that. That's the ultimate success. Like it's one thing to take a client that's doing like a half million to take them to a million. It's something else to take a client from zero to a million. If you enjoy today's episode and you want to connect more, go to gary.club/discord. gary.club/discord. Join our community. Say hi, introduce yourself in our introductions channel. I would love to meet you. Have a great day.