SFR 118: Replacing My Income

How can I "remove" my own salary from the biz expenses...

Hey, what's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen. You're listening to Sales Funnel Radio. I've got a sweet lesson for you today.

I've spent the last four years learning from the most brilliant marketers today, and now I've left my nine to five to take the plunge and build my million-dollar business. The real question is, how will I do it without VC funding or debt, completely from scratch? This podcast is here to give you the answer. Join me and follow along as I learn, apply and share marketing strategies to grow my online business using only today's best internet sales funnels. My name is Steve Larsen, and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio.

What's up everyone? I am loving that new intro. Hopefully you're loving the purpose of this show and what I'm doing and what I'm trying to help you guys understand and see. I had a guy reach out to me once and said, "Stephen, I like listening to your stuff because," actually I've had a lot of people say this to me, "because you're not like massive, massive yet." I was like, "Yeah, I plan to be. I appreciate what you're saying."

He's like, "Hopefully it's not offensive." I was like, "No, it's not offensive at all. I totally get it. I know exactly where I am. I'm not lying where I am. I know where I am and I'm owning it and that's fine." He's like, "You're not massive, massive, massive, massive." I was like, "Yeah, awesome, cool." He's like, "But it's cool about that, because I can relate more." I was like, "That's interesting. That's very interesting."

Anyways, hopefully you guys are getting the same kind of value as that guy was saying. I'm trying to be very, very painfully transparent about what it is that I'm doing and why I'm doing what I'm doing.

Hey, I told you guys I've been traveling quite a lot lately. There's an experience that happened as we got to one of the hotels we were staying at. I say we, I'm with my buddy Colton Woods. What's up buddy? Colton and I built, he and I built our first successful sales funnel together.

My very first one in ClickFunnels was with Colton. We built a smartphone insurance funnel back in college and that story, if you guys ever heard the story about me hiding in the box office seats in the basketball stadium on campus, that was with him. I would sit and we'd look and we'd wait for all the security guards to look away and I'd toss my backpack through the window and then I would wait for them to turn again and then I would jump through the window. I would stay up there for literally all day and get homework done within a couple hours, but then spend literally the entire day studying marketing, building the business, building a small little agency, building the funnels for other companies while we were in the middle of college.

First of all for ourselves, and a whole bunch of other people. It was a ton of fun and frankly I did that for about a year and a half, hiding up there.

Anyway, so I was with Colton. Colton, he is taking the role, I'm super excited, the moons aligned, the suns came into align with each other and he and I are, he's moving out here actually and he's going to work with me full time, which I'm super stoked, guys. My little business officially has two employees now. What? We've got a bunch of freelancers, a lot of other people on the side, but as far as in here, with me in my office, I'm sure you guys will all get a chance to see him and meet with him. He's the man. I'm excited to have him.

Anyway, so I was with him. That's why I'm saying we. Colton and I were out and we were walking into the next hotel, we've been traveling like crazy going all over the place, and I walked in and I turned around and I was like, you know, he and I were just, we were sharing a hotel room and keeping cost low as much as we can. There was this ... We walk into the hotel room and I turned around and I was like, "Dude, what can we do to give ourselves a raise right now?" The webinar's going great, we're fixing out the final tweaks.

It's always probably going to be in that stage regardless. It's going well though, okay? We're doing some massive plays on it coming up here soon, and Colton's kind of handling the assistant/support/lots of different hats, running a lot of the business side while I go continue to build stuff and sell stuff. Which is awesome, because I can do the thing that I'm good at and he's extremely good at the other side, which is awesome, and I'm not good at that part.

We complement each other well. I'll tell you guys more about him as we continue to go, but he's the man.

Anyway, so I was like, "Dude, what can we do to give ourselves a raise right now?" He's like, "What do you mean?" I was like, "Well ..." I told him, we were sitting there and I was like, I remember listening to Russell once, I was talking to Russell once and I was like, "How can we do the Inner Circle?"

One of the reasons why is just because the way it helps with the structure of his revenue of where things come in. I'm sure he's okay if I share this. He shares this all over the place. It's not the reason, okay, but one of the benefits for him having an Inner Circle and doing coaching was that he does not have to take ... It pays for his living expenses. I was like, that's clever.

I started looking around at all these other gurus where their coaching platform is what pays for their living expenses while whatever the product makes, they can roll that money directly back on itself, which means they can spend a butt load of money in ads. They don't have to take profit from the product sales for quite some time. I was like, ah, that's very fascinating.

What I've been doing is I was like, and I was telling Colton that story and I was like, "I want to do that. What is it that everyone wants from me right now? What is it that everyone wants from us?" He's like, "Dude, everyone wants you to coach them. Everyone wants you to look at their funnel. Everyone wants you to build them a funnel if you can." I was like, "Yeah. I can't build funnels for people right now. Focus on my own stuff, but coaching." Gosh, I love coaching. I love looking at people's funnels.

What we decided to do, I was like, "What if we built the coaching?" I was speaking in 24 hours and I was like 90% ready. I was like, "What if we built an entire coaching program right now?" What we did, the only reason I'm trying to tell you guys this story is please observe the speed at which we did this. Okay? I went through and we decided like okay, how are we going to do it?

I was like, "You know, I love Voxer Coaching because I'm not always available to talk on the phone, and we're not always going to match up. We might be on different sides of the world or whatever, but people are going to ask me questions over Voxer, and I love it." That's a sweet way to coach, and I love having a cool introductory session with people where I get to dive deep with them with the funnel.

Anyway, so what I did is I said, "I would want like 10." He and I started crafting it together, like how many people are we going to have? I was like, "I only want like 10." I want to keep it small, especially while we kind of figure out the first pieces with i...