06 Feb February 6, 2020 – Clients on Demand Russ Ruffino and Belonging Shawn Murphy
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Russ Ruffino – Founder and CEO of Clients on Demand – Read interview highlights here
People get it wrong in client attraction when they build all this content,
write a bunch of blogs, make videos, post 3 or 4 times on Instagram,
and then somehow magically, you will build a big audience. I call this
Cross Your Fingers Marketing. You are just hoping the clients show up.
Russ Ruffino is the founder and CEO of Clients on Demand, LLC, an Inc. 500 company. Russ began his business career with affiliate marketing. He quickly discovered that he had a natural knack for marketing and selling products when he made @250,000 in his first year alone. He went on to write and publish books to help others share in his success, but was disappointed when too many people read but failed to act on his advice. Now he runs Clients on Demand, a company that affords him the luxury of choosing his own clients and teaching them the skills, mindset, and decision-making acumen they’ll need to drive their business into a massively successful entity. Russ is passionate about helping people enact real change and transform their businesses into an effective and successful forces for solving the world’s problems.
Shawn Murphy – Director of Organizational Development and Workplace Trends at Bluescape Software – Author of Work Tribes: The Surprising Secret to Breakthrough Performance, Astonishing Results and Keeping Teams Together
Belonging is contagious. My emotions are contagious. If I am
not seeing value, that is contagious.
Shawn Murphy has honed his craft of helping companies change their workplace culture and their business for over 25 years. From designing and leading change programs linked to large IT implementations, to organizational redesigns, to reimagining the workplace culture, he’s been through the joys and maddening frustrations that are part of helping guide company, division, and even team transformations. In that timeframe, he’s worked with CEOs, executives, and middle managers helping them refine, learn, and personally grow as a more relatable, effective people-leader. He leads workshops showing managers what it takes to shift their culture and workplace climate. According to Shawn, a truly great leader is self-aware and self-managed. These serve as a foundation for the action-based workshops he designs and leads for companies and their leaders. He’s always meeting with industry experts, reading the latest research, and conducting his own research to help him write relevant, thought-provoking, and actionable articles and books. Shawn is the author of two books: The Optimistic Workplace and Work Tribes: The Surprising Secret to Breakthrough Performance, Astonishing Results and Keeping Teams Together.
Highlights from Russ’ Interview
Who we work with most is people who solve a major life or business challenges. That’s your coaches, consultants, thought leaders, experts, authors, speakers, the people who really focus on solving some major, major problems. That’s doctors, chiropractors, health coaches, relationship coaches, marketing coaches, anybody in that vein, when you’ve got some unique expertise to share, and you use it to solve some big problems for your clients, that’s who this system is for.
Let’s just say that we’re gonna design a marketing plan for this business. The first thing that we would do is get you in touch with what that is really worth. The biggest problem that we see in the space is so many people are undercharging. I don’t care whether you’re teaching how to get in shape, or how to have your baby sleep through the night, or how to do handstands. What we see is most people in any marketplace are charging way less than what they really should be. Let’s just say that you’ve got this offer where you’re helping a baby sleep through the night. As a new parent, I can tell you that for someone to come in and do that for my child would be absolutely priceless, because if I’m staying up all night, it affects my work performance, affects my marriage, affects my relationship, affects my health, affects everything. So, if you can come in and fix that problem for me, what is that worth? Well, it’s priceless. And if it’s priceless to you, why aren’t you charging $5,000 or $8,000 or $10,000 for every single client? That’s what we help our clients do first and foremost, is massively raise their prices. And that’s before we even get into the client attraction stuff.
It’s not about what clients expect. It’s about what they want. Look, if I’ve got a major problem in my life, whether it’s my marriage isn’t working, or I’m not in great shape, or my business is failing, my marketing sucks, or whatever that problem is, I need to have that problem solved. And if I believe because your marketing is so powerful, that you’re the one that can fix that problem for me, I’m going to be willing to step up and spend what it takes to fix that problem. When you raise your prices, it just makes life easier across the board. You can work with fewer clients, you can make more money, but you can also provide each client with a true VIP experience. Let’s just say you’re charging $5,000 per client.
What’s great about this is that it doesn’t matter how you deliver your magic. You could be selling a three day seminar, you could be selling a one-on-one mentoring, you could do what most of our clients do, which is to have some sort of online group workshop, whether that’s six weeks or eight weeks or ten weeks or whatever. It’s all delivered online. That’s what most of our clients do. If you’ve got something like that, it doesn’t really matter how you deliver it, what they’re paying for is the outcome. In other words, I work with you. I don’t care if I work with you for two days or three days or ten days for six weeks, however long it takes to get my kid to sleep through the night. I don’t care. I just want the baby to sleep through the night. If you can do that for me, I will gladly fork over $5k or $6k or whatever it costs, because if I’m up all night, I’m not functioning well, and that’s not going to work for me.
Step number two is let’s get you some clients. We’ve got this offer, and where people really get it wrong in client attraction is, just like you said, they build everything around content. It’s like you’re going to write a bunch of blog posts or make a bunch of videos, you’re going to post three or four times a day on Instagram. And then somehow, magically, you’re going to build this big audience. And then somehow, magically, some of those people are going to become clients. That’s what I call cross-your-fingers marketing, because you’re doing all this work creating all this content, and crossing your fingers, hoping that the clients show up. But like you said, there’s a better way. The process that we use is much, much simpler. We’ll ad webinar, phone call, that’s it. You run ads on Facebook or social media, you drive those ads into a webinar that’s usually about 45 minutes. The webinar’s usually automated; you don’t even have to do them live. And then on the webinar, you make a really low-key offer. You say, “Hey, if you want to talk about whether we can help you fix this problem, if your baby’s been up all night, and you want to talk about whether we can help you fix that, then here’s how you reach out.” And you give people the chance to get on the phone with you. That’s it. That’s the whole process. If you do that right, you do that properly, then every day you can have 5, 10, 15, 20, whatever you want, that many people reaching out to work with you. And then all you’ve got to do is talk to them and enroll the ones that you want. And the ones that aren’t a fit, you send them on their way.
It’s not about giving content. It’s about putting people in touch with the reality of the problem, and what it’s costing them not to fix it. Most people, when we have big problems, whether it’s our marriage isn’t working, or the kid is staying up all night, or our business isn’t working… It’s more about shifting beliefs. It’s more about getting clear on what this is costing them, and getting them clear on what they’ve tried that hasn’t worked. And the other stuff that maybe they’re thinking about trying and why that’s not going to work and why your solution is better and smarter and a newer way of doing it. And that’s what we help our clients create. And once you’ve shown me that, I have no choice but to reach out and book a call with you and see if this is a fit to fix my problem.
Let’s say that your webinar converts at about 25%. Now, you could get it higher than that. But part of what the webinar does is, it’s not just about attracting the right people. It’s about filtering out the wrong people. On the webinar, you’re going to be really upfront. Hey, here’s who this is for, and here’s who this isn’t for. So when you sort out all the numbers—I’ll just make it really simple—you should be spending, in most markets, between $100 and $200 to get a qualified prospect to book an appointment.
Let’s say you want 10 calls a week and you’re spending 100 bucks each. You’re spending $1,000 a week on advertising. You’re speaking to 10 people now. Those 10 people, how many of those do you think you could get to say yes to your $5800 program? And what we find is that when you’re doing this right, it should be somewhere around 20% or 30%. Now you’ve got the situation where you’re spending, let’s say $1,000. You’re speaking to 10 people, and let’s say you enrolled two of them into your program for, what? $5800? You just spent $1,000 on ads to do $11,600 in revenue. And you can do that week after week after week. And that’s how at Clients on Demand we’re able to so rapidly scale our clients’ businesses to five and six figures a month. Because the truth is, when you have a high price, you don’t need that many people to say yes. Does that make sense?
And I don’t have final numbers for 2019 yet, but I can tell you that in 2018 we spent one point—we’re doing what you’re talking about, but we’re doing it a much bigger scale. In 2018, we spent $1.5 million on ads, and we made $16 million back. We’ve traditionally earned back, like $8 to $12 for every dollar we spent on advertising. It’s not just that it works, it’s incredibly profitable as well.
I’ll give you an example of a client. That’s totally unlikely to—you’re saying that this is catering to the elite. That’s not the truth. We have a client names Toya. Toya is this amazing woman; she helps people get out of debt. I don’t know if you can think of a worse audience for a high-ticket program than people who want to get out of debt, because they’re already having financial problems, not living high on the hog. So, Toya’s got this high-ticket offer to help people get out of debt. She’s gonna clear seven figures this year, because her marketing is so dialed-in, and because these people know that they need help. Once your marketing is properly put together, it doesn’t matter if you’re going after a market that you think doesn’t have the resources. Everybody thinks their market doesn’t have the resources. It doesn’t matter. What matters is do they want to fix the problem or not? And if they do, they will find a way. And like I said, you don’t need that many people to say yes to scale your business to five or six figures a month very, very quickly.
We’re up in that range. I’m not gonna share our exact pricing, because it may change in the new year by the time. By the time your audience hears this show, I don’t want to set anybody up for a different expectation. Let’s just say that everybody, in my opinion, who has an offer that solves a major life or business challenge should be charging somewhere between $5,000 and $15,000 for their work.
The way it works is again, you can set up your offer how you like, but for us, what we do is we help our clients put together this system for their business. In other words, what should your ads look like? Who should you be targeting? What should your ad copy say? What should your webinars say? And we coach you through that entire process. It’s not done for you. It’s more like it’s done with you. And the reason we do it that way is because I want to give you these skills, I don’t want you to be totally dependent on me where it’s like, “Oh God, if you make Russ mad, or you don’t want to work with Russ anymore, all of a sudden you can’t get clients.” What I want to do is give you the skills, to teach you how to do this. My team works with you, and we do it right alongside you, helping you rewrite your webinars, helping you figure out who you’re going to target in your Facebook ads, helping you figure out what you should charge. And we put our heads together. We do all this stuff together.
You have to look at it as an investment. If we’re teaching people—if someone’s charging $200 per client right now, or $100 an hour or something like that, and we’re giving you the skills to command $5,000 or $8,000 or $10,000 per client and enroll people consistently at that price point, that’s going to be life-changing, so cost doesn’t really matter.
You need to be able to solve a major life or business challenge. It doesn’t mean you need a bunch of letters after your name. You don’t need to be a New York Times bestselling author. You don’t even need an audience. Most of our clients are totally unknown. No one knows who they are. But they have the skills and the expertise so that if we get you five clients a month or ten clients a month, those five or ten clients are going to have success. That’s really the standard. You don’t need a big audience. You don’t need a big following. You don’t need to be some Instagram or YouTube mini-celebrity or anything like that. You just need to be able to create real results for people. That’s it.
I was bartending in Los Angeles for 10 years, started dabbling into how to make money online and started researching everything I could about how to do it, because I got to this point where I turned 30 and I was like, “Man, I can’t pour another drink. Forget it.” So I started looking into this. And I started doing just a couple small things, doing a little bit of affiliate marketing, doing a little bit of promoting products that I believed in. And I was just very successful at it. I could just do it. Nobody was more surprised than me. I think in my first my first year online, I think I did about $250,000, which blew my mind. I mean, I was not expecting that at all. But anyway, what I was doing was, I started out promoting other people’s products. Then I started creating my own products. I’m talking about info products, ebooks, video courses, things like that. I was selling those for $27, $97 or whatever. That’s what I did for the first few years, and I would sell thousands and thousands of copies of these things. And people would love them. The reviews were good and everybody was happy.
But when I reached back out to people who bought it, and they would be like, “Hey Russ, you know that video course? I loved it. It was great.” So okay, “What you do with it? Did you take action? What did you do as you put it in practice?” They never do. They never do. And that started to bother me. I was like, “Look, I’m making money. This is cool. But no one’s doing anything.” And it started to bother me. So I said, what would happen if I took this model and flipped it on its head? Instead of selling something for $27 and trying to sell thousands of copies of it, what if I brought my price to $5,000, $8,000, $10,000 and worked with a lot fewer people, but then really did everything I could to push them outside of their comfort zone and mentor them so that they could actually get results?
That was back in about 2013. I made that shift, shut down all my low-ticket stuff, decided to focus just on high-ticket. That’s when I built out this process of ad, webinar, phone call. And my life has never been the same since. I think I went from doing about $20,000 a month to doing about $200,000 a month, and then from there up to a few hundred thousand a month and then a million a month to where we are today, which is about $1,000,000 to $1,500,000 million per month. And I started teaching that system to my clients as well. The results they’ve got just went through the roof too. It’s been this incredibly rewarding experience where I found something that works for me in my business, but it also works for all these different clients in relationships or health or whatever.
It’s funny. I’ve actually had the same girlfriend since back in my bartending days. And we were broke together and then we started being successful together and then we started a family. It’s been great. We’re married, we’ve been married. We have kids now, but she was my girlfriend all the way back at the beginning of the story.
The simplest thing to do is to go to clientsondemand.com. You can see a link right there at the top of that website to check out one of our trainings, and get a really good sense of what this process is and how it can work for you to attract the clients you want, at the price you want, when you want. Then of course, if you’re interested in working with us, there’s an invitation there to book a call. We’d love to get on the phone with you and talk about how we can work together and whether that makes sense.