Episode Transcript
Adam O'Leary (00:00.986)
If you're business owner struggling to break through to your ideal customer and scale your business without burning out, then our guest, Buzz, is about to give you a simple win you can implement today. Michael Buzz Buszynski, a decorated US Air Force veteran, serial entrepreneur, host of US Top 12 Marketing Podcasts, best-selling author, and dubbed a visionary marketer by the American Marketing Association. Buzz is most called him as is on a mission.
to create 17 million jobs in America by 2040 in an effort to rebuild its middle class and enrich entrepreneurs with financial independence. Buzz, so excited to have you here. Really looking forward to this episode.
Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (00:42.924)
Yeah, it's great to have me. Thank you very much.
Adam O'Leary (00:45.808)
Absolutely. So I know we were just talking about this behind the scenes and I'm so curious to hear your concept on this. So a lot of business owners, they're trying all sorts of different marketing in order to grow. But what is the real problem? Like what is the real root of the problem? Let's say if we're trying all these different types of things, how are we going to go ahead and actually focus it in to get one major result?
Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (01:11.502)
That's a great question. you you kind of nail it ahead is like you have these random acts of marketing, right? And most and founder led firms, it's due to marketers, marketers have broken marketing by marketing their wares. Because, you know, ever since about 2007, 2008, when the kind of the real birth of digital marketing came around, everybody had their tactic that they were selling. So they were either a social media person or a Google ads person or a digital ads person or a website developer.
own SEO person. Like each one of these are tactics amongst an overarching strategy, right? And so people get stuck in this 50-50 marketing paradox where 50 % of what they're doing is working. They just don't know which one. So they have to hold on to everything because they're afraid they're going to lose what's working. And so what we find is what's broken is the lack of strategy.
the why, the how, and which way are we going, right? And so when we don't, I always say that blind tactics is smashed by sound strategy every single time. And you know, talk to people all the time, like, yeah, I tried cold email, it didn't work. Or man, I tried those Facebook ads and they sucked and like PPC is just so expensive. And it's because they're trying to use a tactic.
or a tool to leverage their whole marketing in a silo and nothing is interconnected. And so to be successful, we have to create an ecosystem or what we call a marketing operating system. And when you get that established and you have a good flow, you are now paying attention to the client success path. And there's six stages to the client success path, which we call the
a honeycomb client flywheel because it feeds upon itself. Right. And so we won't get all into all of that right now. But if you understand the client success path, you can understand where each of those tactics you have been using may or may not fit. And then that informs your strategy and your strategy will then change so that it will tell you which
Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (03:36.779)
of those tools you want to be using at any given time depending on the stage you're focused on.
Adam O'Leary (03:44.091)
Buzz, we're getting into it. What is the honeycomb flywheel? I need to know this now.
Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (03:49.453)
All right. So the honeycomb flywheel. So let's start with why there's a flywheel. Like why did I create a new what we some people will call a funnel. Right. And so you have the traditional funnel. Right. You have the top of the funnel, the middle of the funnel, the bottom of funnel. And there are about a gajillion ways that people slice up the sales funnel. Right. But, you know, basically we're working at the top where people are problem unaware.
and brand unaware all the way down to I'm buying and most marketing stops there. Actually, most marketers stop at lead and once it becomes a market qualified lead is now the sales team's job to make it a sales qualified lead or complain that it's not and then now you have the dichotomy of the sales team and the marketing team always yelling and screaming at each other.
Back in the 90s, used to be the department was sales and marketing. Now we have the sales team and the marketing team. And that the problem is, and this is why a lot of businesses start struggling when they're hitting that seven figure mark. And even like some folks can get up into the mid to high sevens, but breaking into the eight with that mentality is it's a struggle because what got them there will not get them to where they want to be.
And that's because they don't have marketing and sales working together. Right. And so there's the six stages or the attract stage, which is the typical top of funnel stuff. Right. We need people to understand that once we exist, we need them to understand that they have a pain and that we have a solution to it. Right. Those are the three ingredients there. Right. And then we have approve. Now that is the sales side of the marketing. Right.
And that's in. And when we see a prove, we don't say all business is good business. Money is not all green. Some of it is poop brown. We call them PETA's pain in the ass clients. OK, because they're a bad fit. And so we look at the fact that you might have a client who's saying yes that you're saying no to. And that's a good thing for the company, because when you bring in bad clients, the friction costs you money both on losing the client.
Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (06:07.758)
losing the reputation because they're going to go talk smack about you losing your own employees because they get burnt out dealing with the poop that you bring into the company. OK, now that would be enough for most people, right? They're like, all right, we got good people coming into the company, but no, we got to anchor them. We don't want them moving around. There's a lot of opportunities out there. And so those first 90 days, a lot of people called the onboarding.
We I'm a sucker for alliteration. So we have the six A's of the client flywheel. So they're all starting with a an anchor is the next one. And so this is the quick wins that you have to make sure happen in those first 30 days to anchor them in. then once they're anchored and you have some quick wins now, you have solved problems. And for every problem you solve, you can ask to solve the next problem, which is usually a bigger problem. The bigger the problem, the more you get to build.
That's called advance or maybe expand as some people might call it. Okay, so now you're advancing your relationship with them. And as you advance that you continue to grow that trust and that feeds you right into the last piece, which is advocate. And that is where we're going to get case studies. We're going to get reviews. We're going to get testimonials and best of all, we're going to get referrals.
And all four of those feed right back into the attract stage. And it goes back and then it starts feeding itself over and over again. And that's the honeycomb client fight.
Adam O'Leary (07:43.493)
I love that. And so how are we gonna go ahead and actually visualize this, right? It's one thing to say it, but I think it's an harder thing to really be able to look at it and say, okay, you know what, this this numbers here are the ones that need to be focused on like, how do you set this up?
Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (07:57.238)
Yeah.
That's a good another great question. we we do it we call it the honeycomb flywheel because we it's since six stages and it's a circular motion. So we're like, hey, a honeycomb or a hexagon feeding itself. Right. And so if you think about each of those stages as a side of the honeycomb and an arrow that's pointing in a clockwise manner, that's how you're going in there. OK. Now, if you flattened the honeycomb,
Right. And just understanding that it then feeds back to itself from the beginning to the end. OK, your your KPIs should be simple in each one of those six. So a lot of people get I wrote a book called The Rule of Twenty Six. And so in the attract stage, a lot of lot of us are using our website to grow our businesses. Right. So I wrote the book Rule of Twenty Six to boil that down to three KPIs. You need traffic because if you don't have ad baths, you're not going to have any home runs.
And you have to have a conversion rate. So those at bats need to become home runs. But then also how many people are on base on that home run or the quality of that client? So the average revenue per client that is in the attract face, right? In sales, we're starting to look at numbers like, your time, your speed to lead. How long is it taking you to get back to a lead once they've raised their hands and said, Hey, I want to know more. Right.
Another one is your close rate. For every appointment that you for if you have a single call close or you might have a multiple call sales cycle, you need to measure how many people come into the become a sales qualified lead, right? You're like, OK, they meet all of our wickets to say, yes, we'll talk to them. Right. So usually your appointment setters figuring that stuff out for you or you as the owner is the bottleneck usually on that. Right. And then you have the second call.
Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (09:57.679)
Right. Which is usually truly the discovery call. Like a lot of people call like the SDR, the scheduler is the discovery call. Really, they're the qualifying call. Right. But some people, they'll merge all of that in there and they'll spend a half an hour with somebody. But if you ever see like the 15 minute call, they're just qualifying you. They're not going to really give you anything. Right. And so you need to measure each piece of your sales cycle in that approve. Then the rest of the cycle, the rest of the next three stages
are all about how many people come into a stage and into the next stage. So for every client we onboard, how long are they staying to get to the, so anchoring, right? So if they anchor past the first engagement, do they go to the next engagement? If they've gone to the next engagement, now they're back into the, or they've moved on into the advanced stage. Does that make sense?
Okay, so you're always progressing. all it is is how many are in versus how many out. And then as you're getting to the advanced stage, you're also looking to look at what is the lifetime value of that client? Are they spending more over time? How long are they staying? Those types of things. And then how many of them have positive case studies? So how often are you winning for them? How many...
Adam O'Leary (10:52.582)
Absolutely.
Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (11:17.038)
testimonials are you getting? How many reviews are you getting? How many referrals are you getting from your own clients? And so if you wrote that down in a list, you only have about 18 KPIs that I have mentioned in the entire cycle of a client. But yet if you go to a CRM, like a popular CRM, like HubSpot or Salesforce, they'll give you something like 140 to track.
Who's tracking 140 numbers? Nobody. Right? Your technicians might, you know, individually, like your Google Ads person is looking at numbers, but you shouldn't be looking at anything except the in and out numbers and the velocity for each of those stages.
Adam O'Leary (12:04.624)
That's amazing. And what's the biggest type of case study or what's a typical case study that you see at your clients are getting when they come work with you?
Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (12:12.258)
Well, our goal is to double their revenue in 12 months. I mean, plenty of simple. Let's go in the end, you know, and we put it right there at the top of our website, like double your revenue to to extra revenue in 12 months. Now, is everybody ready for that? No. Right. Some people would come to us and they're just not ready to do hyper growth or what we would call scaling. Right. Very buzzy word out there. Very cliche word. But.
Adam O'Leary (12:19.215)
Let's go!
Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (12:41.102)
It is what it is, right? And scaling a service-based business is the hardest thing to do, especially in the B2B world. Okay. But that's what we set people up for. So sometimes we might spend the first few months getting the basics down, getting the operating systems in place so that we do, when we do start feeding the machine or we call the revenue engine, it's actually going through the process in a predictable and measurable way.
If you don't have that, you can't double up profitably. You can double up, but you might not be making money. I know because I did it. I doubled my sales from a million to two million back when we, let's see, this was probably 10 years ago when we were, you know, hitting our first time in the seven figures and it took us 11 years to get to $1.1 million annual revenue. 18 months later, we were over 2 million, but my margins were at 3%.
Adam O'Leary (13:45.318)
Holy smokes, that's insane!
Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (13:46.337)
3%. I just talked to a gentleman went from 40 million. He had 6 million in net. Last year this year, he'll close at 80 million. He will net 6. That's what we don't want to happen. Okay. And so it's really not about how big we make you, it's how profitable we make you. So if you're not, if you're in a service based business and you're not pulling in at least 20 % profitability.
There's something broken in the system or you have a lack of system so you don't even know where you're bleeding.
Adam O'Leary (14:25.126)
That's amazing. Well, Buzz, where can people go to learn more about you? What is your website?
Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (14:29.699)
Just go to buzzworthy.biz and everything is right there.
Adam O'Leary (14:34.298)
Let's go. That's awesome. Well, Buzz, thank you so much. This was such a great episode. I really loved it.
Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (14:41.452)
No, thank you very much for having me.
Adam O'Leary (14:44.473)
Absolutely. Well guys, thank you so much for listening and I will see you on the next episode.
