Last updated on May 18th, 2026 at 03:19 am
Stephen Diaz had 120 employees when everything fell apart.
He’d built The Rainmaker Family into an Inc 5000 company, hit number 148 on the list, and won multiple ClickFunnels awards. Over the years, they’d helped thousands of moms launch Amazon businesses using the same playbook Russell Brunson teaches in Expert Secrets.
Then three massive hits came in a row and the business almost didn’t survive. Stephen laid off 100 people, burned through cash reserves, and was weeks away from bankruptcy. AI became the only thing standing between him and closing the doors permanently.
But AI didn’t just save the business. It became the business.
Today, Stephen runs a leaner operation with 20 people, teaching family-first founders how to use AI to reclaim their time. He’s building it using the same funnel frameworks that worked the first time, just in a different market.
And this is how he did it.
From Wedding Photography to Inc 5000
Stephen and his wife Chelsey started as wedding photographers right out of college. A friend needed someone to shoot their wedding, they said yes, and before long they had a business. One wedding led to another, then another. Eventually they were doing 40 weddings a year, making multiple six figures.
But the ceiling was obvious. They were trading time for money at a higher rate than most people, sure, but there were still only so many Saturdays in a year. Every wedding meant driving three hours, shooting all day, and staying up late to edit.
Stephen started looking for a way out. He was on every webinar he could find, buying every program, trying to figure out how to make money online. They ran seven or eight side hustles at once, and Amazon was one of them. They were selling little fidget toys called Japanese kendamas, and one day at a wedding, Stephen pulled out his phone during the brief dinner break.
“Babe, look,” he told Chelsey. The Amazon business had made more money that day than they were making at the wedding they were currently shooting.
That’s when it clicked for her. This thing they’d been building on the side could replace the wedding income entirely. And it did. The next year they took on fewer weddings. Then fewer. And the ones they did take were dream clients only, because they could finally be picky.
Following the Playbook
Stephen found Expert Secrets around this time. He read the webinar script and realized he’d been sitting in the audience of that exact structure for months, buying products, watching other people run the play. But now he had the playbook.
He ran his first webinar using Russell’s script. He literally had the book on his desk, reading off the frameworks. Thirty people enrolled at $2,000 each. That’s $60,000 in 90 minutes, just inviting friends and Facebook acquaintances to a Zoom call.
It would have taken them half a year to make that much shooting weddings.
The webinar felt like magic, but Stephen didn’t know the difference between warm and cold traffic yet. He took that $60,000, hired a Facebook ads agency, and burned through most of it trying to scale to strangers who didn’t know him.
He did take some of that money and bought into Two Comma Club X, one of ClickFunnels’ higher-level programs. That’s where he met the people who told him what to do next.
Two things, specifically: run a challenge instead of a webinar, and niche it down.
At the time, The Rainmaker Family wasn’t focused on moms. They were teaching anyone who wanted to sell physical products on Amazon. But when Stephen looked at who was actually winning with the program, it was moms. So they rebranded the entire thing around that audience.
The first challenge did about $60,000. The next one did $100,000. The third challenge did $1.4 million.
After that they were doing seven-figure challenges every four months. They evergreened it eventually and hit $3 million in a single month. Between 2020 and 2023, they scaled to 120 employees, helped over 30,000 people, and hit number 148 on the Inc 5000 list.
When it Stopped Working
Three things went wrong in a row, and together they almost killed the business.
The first hit came from some external noise. An ex-employee who’d left in 2022 wasn’t happy with how things ended, and it turned into a public thing online. What started as venting turned into weekly newsletters encouraging past clients to request refunds or contact lawyers. Stephen’s team ended up spending hundreds of thousands on legal fees while dealing with the fallout.
The second punch was their Instagram account getting shut down which was their main customer acquisition channel. People kept reporting the account, and one day it was just gone. Revenue dropped in half almost immediately, and Stephen still had a six-figure monthly payroll to cover.
The third punch came in early 2025. Tariffs hit the news. It didn’t actually affect Amazon sellers that much in practice, most people selling were fine, but it affected how the general public felt about selling on Amazon. Fear took over, and sales calls that used to close easily started flopping one after another.
Stephen tried everything. Different angles, ads, and messaging, and nothing moved the needle. The business was bleeding cash, and he knew it couldn’t last.
The Hardest Zoom Calls He’s Ever Done
Stephen started with layoffs in January 2025. The team went from 120 people down to 70. But even after letting 50 people go, the numbers still didn’t work.
By May, the company was nearly a million dollars in debt. Stephen had loaned the business money from his own savings just to keep it alive but they were out of options.
He got on a Zoom call with the remaining team and told them the truth. This paycheck was their last. The company had no money left, and he couldn’t guarantee anything. He didn’t know how they’d keep going, but he’d be there next week trying to serve the people who’d trusted them. If anyone wanted to leave, he understood completely.
He told people to take the week off and think about it. If they came back, it would be with no pay, maybe for six to nine months, and even then he might still have to let them go. If they had any resentment about that, they shouldn’t come back.
Stephen expected maybe three or four people to show up the following Monday.
Forty-four people came back.
“These are employees,” he says, his voice catching slightly on the podcast. “They’re not owners of the company. They had no stake in this. But they loved the people we were serving, and they didn’t want to abandon them.”
Eventually a lawyer friend told him he couldn’t legally have people work for free so they moved everyone to minimum wage. The team built a Slack channel called “miracles” where people shared stories of unexpected provision. Someone’s kid got into a school that would’ve been expensive, but it ended up being free. A vegan employee got donated meals from someone who happened to also be vegan. Small things that kept people going.
The team got tighter during that season than they’d ever been. Stephen showed them the debt thermometer every week so everyone could see exactly where they stood, and when they hit certain milestones, pay would bump up a little.
What Was in His Hand
At this point, Stephen split the team in half. One group kept serving existing Rainmaker customers, finding ways to sell more to the people who already knew and trusted them. The other group, the “pioneer team,” was tasked with figuring out what came next.
Stephen kept coming back to this question: what’s in your hand right now?
It’s a principle he teaches his students, but he had to apply it to himself. When you feel empty-handed, when everything’s gone wrong, you’re not actually empty-handed. You have something. You just have to look at what you’ve already built.
For Stephen, that was AI.
They hadn’t set out to become AI experts, they’d just used it to survive. When you’re down to 20 people doing the work of 120, you automate or you collapse. So Stephen started building AI tools to replace expensive software subscriptions that were costing them $30,000 to $50,000 a year. Things like email platforms, customer support systems, all the infrastructure that keeps a business running.
They used AI to help with hiring decisions, firing decisions, content creation, and customer support. They used it for everything they couldn’t afford to pay a human to do anymore.
And somewhere in the middle of all that survival, Stephen realized they had another product.
“We were like, shoot, I think we have another product here,” he says.
They had a program from the old business, a level-two offer they’d sold for $10,000 to $12,000 that taught Amazon sellers how to mature their businesses off the platform. They took that program, added all the AI tools they’d built to survive, and repackaged it for business owners instead of Amazon sellers.
After everything that had happened with the Rainmaker business, Stephen and his team were a little burned on selling to consumers. Business owners felt like a safer bet. These were people who’d already been through some things, who had an existing offer, who just needed help getting to the next level.
The new product was born out of necessity, not strategy. But necessity builds better products than strategy sometimes.
The New Funnel: Same Playbook, Different Market
Stephen ran a VSL funnel first. It flopped completely. He’d gotten the language wrong, tried to sell the software right out of the gate.
Then he remembered this wasn’t the product. It was the software that was the lead magnet.
He’d seen another marketer, Maria Wendt, running an offer for 25 courses at $25. Stephen borrowed the structure. Twenty-five AI tools for $25, one-time payment, lifetime access.
“No one’s doing that in the software space,” he explains. It brought in really good leads at a really low cost.
The funnel was simple. Opt in, buy the toolkit for $25, get offered an expansion pack for $95 as an upsell. About 25% of people took it at first. Then the thank-you page said, “Book a call and we’ll help you get started with your toolkit.”
Some people hated that. They just wanted the toolkit, no sales call. But it booked a lot of calls. A setter would get on with them, help activate the toolkit and show them how to use it. If it made sense, they’d set an appointment with a closer who’d sell the backend consulting program.
The consulting offer was an eight-week AI Business Accelerator, teaching founders how to implement AI across different departments.
They ran a lean team with two setters and two closers at first. But now just one of each. The margins were healthier than anything they’d run before.
Stephen has a rule now: 30% marketing, 30% labor, 30% overhead and expenses. If marketing’s going over 30%, they get creative, hit the email list, or do organic outreach. Right now they’re running under 20% on both marketing and labor.
“I wish I knew this in the last business,” he says. “We were able to scale really fast and impact a lot of people, but the margins were razor thin. When we took a few hits in a row, it just took us out.”
They also started running a challenge again alongside the toolkit funnel. Same challenge structure Stephen used to scale Rainmaker, just updated with AI content. He runs it live every month because AI changes too fast to evergreen it yet. By the time he records a challenge, half the tools he taught are already outdated.
Since June 2025, about eight or nine months, the new business has done close to a million dollars in sales. Not back to the $20 million-a-year run rate of the old business, but Stephen’s not chasing that number anymore.
The One Principle He Swears By
There’s a concept Stephen teaches now that saved him during the rebuild. He calls it “earlier is better.”
When you’re trying to improve a funnel, most people focus on the back end. They tweak the order form, test new closes, rewrite the sales page. That’s fine, but it’s not where you get the biggest wins.
The biggest wins come from the front end. If you double your opt-in rate, you double everything downstream without touching anything else. It’s a ripple effect.
Stephen tells a story about his old Rainmaker funnel. They had a simple opt-in page, just a headline and a form. Later, when they were trying to optimize, they added one thing: a free PDF that people would get when they opted in.
Opt-in rate went from 10% to 40%.
“It’s like all the other numbers also change,” Stephen explains. “If you double your opt-in rate, you double everything else without changing anything else.”
It sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but most people don’t operate this way. They’re deep in the funnel trying to move a number by 2%, when they could go to the front and move it by 20%.
When Stephen rebuilt the AI business, he put almost all his energy on the front end. The very first thing someone sees, whether it’s the ad or the first piece of the funnel. Get that right and everything else flows.
What He’d Tell Someone Starting Over Tomorrow
The frameworks still work.
Stephen used Expert Secrets twice. First time, he built a $20 million-a-year business teaching moms to sell on Amazon. Second time, he rebuilt from near bankruptcy using the same structures to teach business owners how to use AI.
Webinars, challenges, value ladders, backend offers. The mechanics didn’t change, the market did.
“There’s never ‘I can’t,’ it’s always ‘how can I,'” Stephen says. “There are no walls, just ramps.”
But there’s a flip side to that optimism. Sometimes you have to let something die. Stephen’s a visionary, always hopeful, always believing next month will turn it around. And that kept him holding on longer than he should have.
“For my visionaries in the room,” he says, “I’m such a hopeful golden retriever optimist. I just kept saying, ‘Next month we’re gonna turn this around.’ And I really wasn’t taking the action needed.”
Businesses die when they stop adapting. Sears had catalogs in people’s homes before Amazon existed. They were Amazon before Amazon. But when the internet came, they didn’t pivot. They said, “We’ve got the magazines, we’re good.”
Stephen almost made the same mistake. He kept trying to make the old business work when the market had moved on. Tariffs didn’t kill Amazon sellers, but they killed the perception. People were afraid. And no amount of marketing genius was going to fix that.
So he let it go. Not because the frameworks were broken. Because the vehicle had run its course.
When he opened his hands and asked, “What do I have right now?” the answer was the AI tools he’d built to survive. And those became the new vehicle.
The Lesson You Can Use Today
Here’s what Stephen wants you to know if you’re in a season like this, or if you’re just starting and afraid of ending up here.
You’re never empty-handed.
When everything falls apart, when you’re weeks from bankruptcy, when you’ve laid off most of your team and you’re staring at a debt thermometer trying to figure out how to climb out, you still have something. You just have to look at what you’ve already built.
For Stephen, it was AI. Not because AI was trendy or because he saw it coming. Because it’s what he’d used to keep the lights on.
Maybe it’s a process you built to onboard clients faster, a template you use for every project, or a framework you’ve taught a hundred times but never packaged into a product. Or maybe it’s relationships you’ve built, a skill you’ve sharpened, a problem you’ve solved over and over.
That’s the thing in your hand. That’s the seed of the next thing.
And the frameworks still work. Stephen didn’t reinvent himself. He took what he knew, applied it to what he had, and ran the same playbook in a different market.
Russell Brunson teaches this in Expert Secrets. You offer someone a new opportunity, you guide them up a value ladder, you build a movement by giving them a future-based cause. Stephen did that with Rainmaker and he’s doing it again with AI.
So if you’re building something right now and it feels like you’re starting from scratch, remember you’ve got more than you think. You know things now you didn’t know before.
Look at what’s in your hand, then build the next thing with it.
Stephen rebuilt a business from near bankruptcy using the same frameworks he’d learned years earlier. The playbook worked the first time, and it worked the second time.
If you’re ready to start building your funnel, try ClickFunnels free for 14 days. The strategy’s already proven, you just need to put it to work.