This one was hard for me to share, but I’m so glad I did…
On this episode Russell talks from his hotel room in London about what happened with Clickfunnels over the last few days and how it almost all fell apart. He also talks about why being honest about your mistakes is important.
Here are 3 interesting things to listen for in today’s episode:
So listen below to find out why being honest about your mistakes can be a good thing.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing in Your Hotel Room.
Hey everyone, yes, I am in my hotel room here in London, looking out over the whole city, which we’ve got a beautiful view from where we’re at right now. Just did a periscope, saying hi to everybody, but I wanted to kind of come in here and shoot an audio for you guys as well because I haven’t talked in a while. I’ve been on the road and we didn’t get to do marketing in an airplane or marketing in the Uber, or anything like that, so we’re doing it from the hotel room. I just want to share with you guys something that was kind of cool this week, a good lesson, hopefully can benefit you guys as well. As you know, in business unfortunately everything isn’t always sunshine and roses. I wish it was.
We try to make it that way and we try to make it outwardly look that way to everybody because that’s human nature. We don’t like people seeing the mistakes or seeing the holes in our armor or things like that. We try to put on a straight face and show that part, which is understandable. That’s what leaders, at least in my mind, leaders do. Tony Robins always says “Leaders see things as they are but not worse than they are,” and then, “Leaders see things better than they are and leaders work to achieve that.” That’s the three steps of leadership from Tony Robins and I’ve always believed that. I’ve tried to always have that, I try to see things better than they are, I try to work as if we’re there already and then we get there.
This week is … Any of our faithful Click Funnels members know, and if you’re not a faithful Click Funnel member, come on now. You’re listening to Marketing in Your Car everyday and you’re not in Click Funnels, this is insane. If I haven’t sold you at this point, you’re hopeless. When I landed here in the UK, I obviously checked everything to make sure life’s good and that there’s no issues, and it’s blowing up from everyone wanting to kill me, and everything’s down. Todd, who’s my partner and main developer in Click Funnels texted me saying that we’re down and it’s not good and said something like, “If we survive this, then blah blah blah blah blah.” I’m just like, whoa, I’m checking my bags off and reading this which is not what you want after a 20-hour flight or whatever we’d been on. I had all my kids with us and we had a huge, long ride to get to our hotel, it was just crazy.
I get on here and we’re trying to figure out things and it was bad. Our database server we were using is called ClearDB, they’ve been kind of handcuffing us. Been trying to move off them, they wouldn’t allow us to, they were kind of holding our data, they would have given it to us but we would have had to have been down for 24-hours which obviously was unacceptable. We just couldn’t do it. There was an easy way where we could have transferred over to these Amazon servers but they wouldn’t allow us to do it. It was thing we’ve been struggling with and most of our issues we’ve had over the last month or so had been because of ClearDB because their service couldn’t handle what we were doing and they wouldn’t allow us to move over to Amazon which we needed to. Anyway, that was a whole issue, so Todd basically messaged me and says, “Hey, everything’s down. We’re trying to restore from backup but it’s going really, really, really slow. It’s been 48-hours or so and it’s still not restored on ClearDB which is crazy.”
He messaged me and says, “Hey, we’re going to call an audible, basically we’re going to rebuild the whole thing on Amazon and we’re going to race. ClearDB’s reboot versus us on this new Amazon thing and whichever one wins is who we’ll keep running with.” Which is not a small task. I know for me and you, we probably don’t understand any of that, I didn’t, but it’s basically rebuilding this whole huge structure and huge new infrastructure and doing that within an hour. My guys did it. It was amazing. I was thinking about this, if I was to go to war with someone, who would I bring with me? I can tell you who, their names. People like this who just figure it out, I’m just so grateful for them. During this process Todd messaged me, “Okay, it’s working. It’s already past how far ClearDB is. We’re just looking at four, five, or six hours before it’s live.” I’m like, oh man, it’s not something I can hide from, and again, here’s the leadership in me saying look at things better than they are and move towards that.
We’re trying to do that but people on Facebook are blowing up and finally I said, “I just need to tell everyone what’s happening.” It was hard and it was embarrassing, it was frustrating, it was like all these emotions, but I said, “That’s what people need right now. They need some certainty that we know what we’re doing and that we’re not just goofing off.” So I made a video in the hotel room, maybe you saw that. I was upset and frustrated and as you could tell in the video, but I just told the story. This is what’s happening, I’m more-so upset than you are, I promise you that and kind of shared that with them and told them what sucks and the goods coming out of it. Just asked everyone to wait and hopefully we’ll be back soon and posted that. As I’m looking at that post, 161 people have commented on that, 360 people liked it, and of the 161 comments, all of them were positive.
People saying ‘We’re with you, we love you, we care about you, we’re here for the long haul, whatever happens we’re here we’re not leaving,” and just gave me that assurance I needed to keep moving forward. It was kind of crazy, on my side it’s like leadership isn’t showing weakness or showing the issues. I can tell you I probably got 20 private messages on Facebook saying “Thank you for being a leader like this,” it was backwards from what I thought but it was cool. Yeah, luckily my guys are amazing, they got everything back up and since then, the last two days things have been even faster and better. I just made a video talking about the good news and posted it but what I learned from this and I wanted to share with you guys is when things aren’t all sunshine and roses in your business, I think for most of us, our common sense is to hide it, not to share it. To kind of keep it away from people, but my experience from this is the opposite.
It’s share with your community, let people know and people will respect your transparency, they will respect that you’re on the front lines fighting with them and they’ll rally with you. It was really, really cool. We were nervous that we were going to see a huge spike in cancellations and refunds and all these things, we didn’t. Pretty amazing actually. It was just a good learning experience. So for you guys, I would say, the more open of a dialogue you can open to your community, the better, and I’m going to start doing…in the message thing I said, “How many of you guys want me to do these fireside chats once a week and just tell you guys the status of where things are in Click Funnels?” I posted that video a few minutes ago and we’ve already got ten comments, people saying they love the fireside chats and they want to keep them.
That is what we are going to do and I’m going to build a better communication and bond with our audience and I think that nothing bad can happen from that. It was a good learning experience for me and I hope that’s something you guys can learn from as well, so when you do make mistakes or something screws up or whatever, instead of trying to hide it and show a flawless exterior, just tell people the truth. That’s what they want, that’s what they need, and it was awesome for us. Hope that helps, I am going to get some sleep … I’m not getting sleep, who am I kidding? I’ve got a project I’m working on, I’m really excited, so I told people on Periscope I’m going to bed too, but I’m not.
I got about two or three hours in me, I’ve been working on a book called The Three Funnels. It’s not a book, it’s like a booklet, it’s going to be a free-plus-shipping offer we come out with in December or January that you’re going to want. That’s what I’m working on tonight, so that’s my plan. I’m getting back to work, you guys should too, or get some sleep wherever you are in the world. Appreciate you guys, thanks for listening, thanks for being part of our community and my world. You are a community worth serving, I’m grateful to be in a spot where I can help and grateful for you guys for listening and we will talk to you guys all soon, thanks.