Being an entrepreneur requires a truly unique skill set that many are unable to capture. Russ Ruffino, Founder and Owner of Clients on Demand, has defied the odds. Starting out as a bartender, Russ is now one of the most respected business coaches in the industry. Russ as helped countless business owners and consultants expand their clientele and take their monthly sales to an entirely new level.
Through Clients on Demand, Russ helped one consultant go from $10k per month, to an amazing $140k per month. We sat down with Russ to learn more about his compelling journey as an entrepreneur, and how he reached incredible success as a business owner and coach.
Q: Tell us about yourself and how the idea for Clients on Demand came about?
A: Clients on Demand came about because l noticed there is a tremendous need in the marketplace. There so many people in business right now who are experts, coaches, thought leaders, consultants, service professionals, etc, who make a living using their expertise to help people create amazing outcomes. The problem is that while all these people may be outstanding at getting results for their clients, they’re just not that great at marketing. As l look around the marketplace, l noticed that there is almost no one who has a real system for bringing new clients through the door on a consistent basis.
So that’s how Clients on Demand started. We recognized a need in the marketplace and created a system for helping coaches, consultants and professional service providers bring on the right clients at the right price anytime they want. The right clients, meaning our system gives you the power to be very very picky and choose who you want to work. At the right price, meaning that most of our clients are selling their services for $3,000 - $10,000 or even more, even they were selling it for much less than that before they started working with us. Any time you want, meaning our system works like clockwork 24 hours a day.
The system that we use is very simple. We run ads on Facebook or Youtube, people click those ads, they attend our webinar, watch it, the webinar blows their mind, and then at the end, attendees can reach out to book a conversation with us if they want to talk about becoming a client. On that phone call, we enroll them into one of our programs.
We are doing about half a million dollars a month with that model, which is the same model that we teach to our clients. Whether they’re in relationship coaching, financial advising, business coaching or pay-per-click marketing, that's what we teach them to do as well.
It been a fantastic business. It’s a fantastic company and the results that we get for our clients are just absolutely stunning.
Q: What are the top 3 skills you believe are needed to be a successful entrepreneur?
A:
1) You need to be able to think from your goals, not of your goals. You need to think as if your goals, or what you want to achieve, are an already established fact, and make decisions accordingly so there you're not making decisions from a place of fear, but from a place of confidence and power.
2) Empathy.
You need great empathy to be a successful entrepreneur. Your target audience is in pain.They're dealing with some kind of a problem, and the better that you understand that problem, the more powerfully you're going to be able to market those people. Ask yourself, “How does this problem affect my customer on a daily basis? What is their day like every single day?” When you truly understand that, it makes your marketing very powerful. When someone can describe our problems better that we can, we automatically assume that they know the answer.
3) Perseverance.
You need the ability to set a goal, to deal with challenges that come with that goal, and need to rapidly adapt to and overcome those challenges. Anytime you set a worth while goal, or a big goal for yourself, you're going to be confronted with some serious challenges. One of the greatest things you can do for yourself is to be able to deal with those challenges, and adapt very quickly without getting emotional.
Q: How do you generate new ideas?
A: l generate new ideas just by looking and seeing what's going on the marketplace. I ask myself “Where are people getting stuck? What are the frustrations and problems that they have?” I try to understand how these problems show up every day, and and what I can do to help. I try to figure out what processes l can create to solve those challenges not just once or twice, but permanently.
Q: How do you define success?
A: I define success as positive forward momentum and daily evolution. If you set a big goal for yourself, whether it’s to reach your first hundred thousand a month, or even your first million a month (which is our current goal for Clients on Demand), you understand that in order to achieve that goal, you're going to have to really evolve. You’re going to have to make some big changes, including the way you think, the way you operate every day, the way that you look at the world, the way that you look at yourself, etc.
Success is when you're achieving your goals, but everyday you are getting a little faster, a little smarter, and a little tougher. What l’ve found that's really incredible is that the journey of being a business owner isn't as much a journey about making money, but a journey about personal evolution. The harder that you work to serve your clients and serve the market place in a more powerful way, the better, stronger, smarter, and faster a person you become.
Q: To what do you attribute your success?
A: I attribute my success to my clients. Our clients show up coachable, decisive, and resourceful. They do phenomenal work, they do pretty much everything that we tell them to do. When they do that, they get phenomenal results and come back to tell everyone, “These guys were the real deal.” We get amazing results for them and it's a fantastic thing.
Q: What is your favorite part about being an entrepreneur?
A: My favorite aspect of being an entrepreneur is that daily conscious evolution where you're taking control of how you show up in the world. You’re setting goals that seem totally out of reach for you, for example getting to that million a month. For me, that's a huge goal, but you set that goal knowing that in order to get there, you have to overcome tremendous challenges. When you hit the first challenge or road block, you think your way through it. When you hit the second one, again you think your way through it. By doing that, you are constantly adapting to become more powerful.
Q: What piece of advice would you give to those that are just starting out?
A: If you have a goal that you want to accomplish, whether it’s hitting a certain income level, or attracting a certain number of clients, find someone who is getting that outcome not just for themselves, but for their clients as well on a consistent basis. When you see someone that's achieving the outcome, and is helping other people achieve that outcome, go out and hire that person and pay them whatever it takes to learn from them. It’s always faster and easier to model something that it's already working, than it is to reinvent it all from scratch.
Russ Ruffino is a tremendous example of an entrepreneur who had a vision, and has overcome challenges to build it up to be the most successful client attraction system in the world. For more information on Russ Ruffino and Clients on Demand, visit clientsondemand.com/webinar to view their upcoming webinars, and you can check out their Facebook group here: clientsondemand.com/facebook.