The Secret To Attracting Your Ideal, High-Ticket Clients

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes, packed with practical advice from world-class marketers and behavioral scientists. And it’s not always about marketing. Great episode. Recently you learned the surprising truths about and tips for beating, stress and anxiety. Sounds like a great program, doesn’t it? Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Russ Ruffino. He’s the founder of Clients on Demand and Inc. 500 company that helps coaches, experts, and service providers attract the right clients at the right price anytime they want. So, Russ, welcome to the show.

Russ Ruffino (01:07): Thank you. It’s great to be here.

John Jantsch (01:09): So, listeners, this is the Construction Zone episode that you might be hearing some background noise, but hey, you know, the show must go on. We’re professionals here. We can work through this. So, so Russ, tell me a little bit about your, I told in the bio, I told you what you do now. Sure. I’d love to hear a little bit of your story. Like everybody has a great story of how they got here, .

Russ Ruffino (01:30): Yeah, my, I mean, my story’s all right. It’s, I should probably just make up something more exciting. But basically I, I was a bartender in Los Angeles from age 21 to age 31. I was there in LA because I wanted to do acting. And when you’re, you wanna do acting, you’re waiting tables, you’re giving massages your personal training, you’re bartending, you’re doing something right. And I turned 30 and things just were not going my way in terms of my career. And I, you know, I just had no idea what I was gonna do. So one day I was on break at work and I walked into Barnes and Noble and right there sitting on the shelf was before hour work week by Tim Ferris. And I originally thought, what the hell is that four hour work week? That sounds like nonsense, but I’m interested enough that I’ll pick it up and read it.

(02:12): And that book really introduced me to this idea of, um, making an online income, making a passive income online. I didn’t even know that was possible until I read that book. And so I said to myself, look man, I, you know, come hell or high water, I’m gonna figure out a way to make this work. I’m gonna figure out how to do this. So I started doing just a little bit of online marketing, a little bit of affiliate marketing here and there. Started making a little bit of money doing it. I think I was making maybe like $500 a month maybe. And then one day at work I got, I really got into it with my manager and, and I wanted to tell ’em off. And I, I didn’t have the guts to do it. And I went home and I told my, my, my girlfriend, who’s now my wife, I said, David, you know, I got in a big fight with my boss and I really wanted to tell him off.

(02:48): I didn’t do it. And I just, I feel like I’m being a worse to myself. And she looks at me dead in the eye and she goes, you gotta quit. And I was like, okay. And she had just lost her job two weeks before. And it’s not like, again, I wasn’t making a fortune online. I was making $500 a month, maybe, which is certainly not enough to live on when you’re in la. I think my rent was like two grand or $2,400. Crazy. Yeah, I’m crazy like that. But I said to myself, look man, I bet that if I try to do this full-time that I, I can make it work. So I walked in there, equipment bartending job, woke up the next morning, you know, I went to bed feeling incredible and proud of myself. Woke up the next morning, terrified in terror cuz I didn’t have enough to cover rent, literally the next month.

(03:28): But, you know, long story short, I went to work making money online and I could just do it. I could write copy, I could do sales letters, I could do sales videos, I could do. And I had never done any of these things before. There was an actor and a bartender. I had no idea about marketing. But I ended up doing $250,000 my very first year and, um, changed my life. So then I went on to create my own low ticket products. And the problem then I realized in doing launches, and I realized the problem with low ticket and launches is it generally speaking, people don’t do anything, right. They’ll buy your $27 program, your $97 program, they’ll watch it. They’ll say, oh John, that program was awesome. I’ll rush. That program was awesome. And you’ll say, did you do anything? You know, did you take action?

(04:04): No, not really. I’ll get around to it. . So I asked myself, look, you know, what would happen if I flipped this model on its head? And instead of trying to work with thousands of people to low ticket price, what if I started charging five or eight or $10,000 to work with me? And I started working with fewer people. And uh, that’s what I did. And I guessed that if I did that I would probably be able to work with a lot fewer clients that I’d be able to make more money, that those clients would be more committed and they’d give better result. And that’s exactly what happened. So when I first switched from low ticket to high ticket, I did $200,000 that first month. And then I haven’t looked back since. And today the business is doing, you know, well into the eight figures. And it’s just amazing. You know, the was, people are now, they’re getting results, now they’re taking action, now they’re doing the work. And it’s, it’s just unlocked a whole new level of joy in this work because now I can see the difference it’s making in people’s lives. And that’s really what gets you outta bed in the morning.

John Jantsch (04:52): Yeah. So you like a lot of people, I mean, you figured out how to do something and then all of a sudden it’s like, hey, there’s a lot of people that need this. I can teach this to other people as well. So that’s really become your business hasn’t, is teaching other people how to do what you discovered how to do. Right,

Russ Ruffino (05:06): Exactly. Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:08): So talk a little bit about some of the, like when people come to you, you’re probably seeing the same mistakes over and over again. They clearly you’re, you know, set up to fix mm-hmm. Scroll back to top