EW 032 – How To Go From Entrepreneurial Poverty To Focused Profitability with Michael Buzinski, CEO of Buzzworthy Marketing

Gordon Sheppard (00:00.888)
Buzz, welcome to the show.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (00:03.285)
Thanks for having me. How are you?

Gordon Sheppard (00:05.238)
Well, really, really good and really, really lucky that you're here because we're gonna hear about some lived entrepreneur experience that you might get the next guy to not sort of have to fall on his own sword based on, you know, kind of watching what we're about to learn from you about some of, you know, what you've been through. But there's a lot of people here on the show that maybe haven't met you just yet. So if you're at a party or some fun thing and you had to introduce yourself, what would you say?

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (00:29.685)
wouldn't need an introduction. They would already know. I'm just kidding. My name is Michael Buzinski. I fix random acts of marketing for B2B service based firms.

Gordon Sheppard (00:38.484)
I fix random acts of marketing. what is a random act of marketing? Is it a good use of time or not a good use of time?

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (00:46.429)
Usually random things in business are very bad. Anywhere I don't care where you're what segment of business you're talking about.

Gordon Sheppard (00:50.327)
and you're the one.

You're taking the random out of random and you're putting something in there that's a lot better. And the marketing thing where a lot of dollars can get pretty flushed, I think, right? You're the one maybe that's gonna help get those dollars, go pound for pound and be better used in the work that you do at your buzzworthy marketing scenario. Also, maybe just a bit about yourself just while we're there, just sort of like family, that kind of thing, where you live and that kind of stuff.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (01:11.659)
Yeah.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (01:15.317)
Sure.

Sure, yeah. I live in Virginia now. I have lived in eight states over the last 51 years. I am a third generation Air Force Air Corps veteran. And I love to golf now.

I live on a golf course. The first time I've ever done that. Never thought that would ever happen, but that's happening now. And that's an interesting thing. Love music. I'm a 15 year. I was a part time professional musician for 15 years from 13 to 28. So did that. I owned a recording studio is actually how I got started with my business after 10 years of being in the Air Force. Married. No kids. Two fur babies.

Gordon Sheppard (02:02.775)
So all these different wonderful things that come together to make it up and so unfair in a sense to get you to describe it all. The funny, the golf thing, my son's a golf instructor. The voice in my backswing, he works at Golf Tech here. I'm an eminent.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (02:11.934)
really? That's awesome.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (02:16.427)
My instructor works at golf tech here in Richmond. That's funny.

Gordon Sheppard (02:19.507)
Right, so my son's actually a golf, golf, and so the voice in my backswing is my son's, and I never would have thought my 24 year old kid would be the one that would be in my head for that.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (02:24.961)
Yeah, there you go.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (02:30.687)
but is it helping your handicap?

Gordon Sheppard (02:33.663)
It made a huge difference. mean, there's, sort of just, I'm like two pool noodles away from, you know, getting the flight path on my swing to, right?

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (02:35.637)
There you go.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (02:40.649)
I love the poodle. You know, you're out on the course and you're like, why did that? Why couldn't I get my clubface clothes? And you're like, that's right. I got a pullback. Where's my noodle?

Gordon Sheppard (02:53.217)
Well, when you're thinking about it too, it's funny with the golf tech experience, because they put you on video. So you're like, no, my head wasn't moving. He's like, let's look at the evidence like four seconds ago.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (03:02.219)
Let me show you. Let me draw the line and see it. Yeah. No, I finally have my hips moving. I never had my hips. Everything was up her body. So which I have a stronger body.

Gordon Sheppard (03:09.453)
random, random acts of golf is another, another podcast. I think that we could get in there, how they're fixing our random acts of our swing. So there you go. yeah, that's it. So in the meantime, you've got, I always like to get in here. And so we know a little bit about you now. We know the core of your business is to get strategy into marketing and make it work in a structured way. what, in terms of your business, what would you describe as one of the biggest wins you've had over the years?

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (03:18.751)
Random acts of golfing. Yes, definitely.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (03:36.651)
So been in business for 20 years now. And seven years ago, the biggest win I had was deciding to close a 13,000 square foot creative marketing agency. Had dozens of employees, multimillion dollar enterprise, a whole many yards. The problem was that I wasn't keeping enough of the money that we were bringing in.

And so for 13 years, I lived in entrepreneurial poverty. And in 2018, I decided to make the choice to go a completely opposite direction. So I told everybody, you can still work for me, but we're just not doing it out of this building anymore because I recognized that was the biggest anchor to my job satisfaction, to my profitability, all the things, right? And so reinvented how we did business.

But over the last seven years, I mean, that was the catalyst in my big win, which is now seven years later. We are seven times more profitable. I have time to go on multi week vacations with my wife to great places all around the world. I can go visit my clients whenever I want. This weekend, I'm going to be going up to Chicago and seeing a baseball game at Wrigley Field for the first time and spending a day.

before that golfing with my client. I live in Virginia. We met when I lived in Illinois. And so just having that mobility and the freedom to be able to do that with clients and with my family and with my loved ones, that right there is the biggest win. There's so many other layers that build up to that win, but that's the biggest win.

Gordon Sheppard (05:24.181)
You're talking, there's a psychology to the moment that you described. My win was shutting that business in a sense, or shutting that format of that business. And that's hard to do, because you were in it. You're in the middle of all, you know, you're on the beach head or whatever, you're doing your thing and you're making it work and you're making it work. But you talked about margin success. What was your margin when you're in the middle of that 13 years and what's your margin now percentage wise?

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (05:30.09)
Mm-mm.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (05:34.354)
It's 100 % how to do it. Paid all the bills for 13 years.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (05:44.778)
Mm-hmm.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (05:51.317)
Percentage wise we were sitting at about 3 % net, not including my salary, which was still not even six figures. So I still had a five figure salary.

Gordon Sheppard (06:05.303)
So, right? And so, but you were an entrepreneur and you had a 13,000 square foot space and you had an agency and you were bringing in millions of dollars of revenue. Isn't that insightful that the millions, the amount, the total amount of revenue doesn't mean anything at the end of the day if you can't sort of pull out some basic level of, you know, sustainability and you were able to, and probably enough, was it enough to keep you under the drip or were you tired? Was there an incident? Like what led to actually the closing for you?

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (06:08.84)
Yeah.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (06:34.502)
It was it had to do with it was burnt burnout. I mean, it was like I was having panic attacks and I was not happy and I was just getting into a relationship that was. She was smart enough, she had the emotional EQ to tell me this is not normal.

Right. And I went into business in 2005 and that's like a dot com era. The dot com explosion and collapse and everything around that time. If you started a business, it was all about your top line revenue, how many employees you had and how big your facility was. That were the three. Those were the three monikers to success today. 20 years later, most folks who are starting their business are looking at how much money am I going to keep?

Net profit is more important. They don't care how many employees they have. They care how much time do they have to spend for themselves, their loved ones, family and friends. Those are two.

Gordon Sheppard (07:37.262)
Remarkable. And you were able to dig out because when you're in the middle of that and I've met and actually I work as an executive coach and advisor and I've been in the middle of the room with the two brothers with the 50-50 partnership that are burning $8 million a year to the ground, don't know what their net profit is. And supply chain issue, a boat gets stuck in a canal somewhere that suddenly they're out of business. Like it's literally that sort of razor's edge and then just the complexity of that in terms of what it is. so I've been in multiple different rooms where

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (07:48.618)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jeez.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (07:57.887)
Yeah. Right.

Gordon Sheppard (08:06.509)
people don't get off the drip. They can't, don't have the self-awareness. They don't have a loved one like you had to say, hey, here's a mirror. Take a look, right? And get that kind of figured out. That's, so I'm glad you got that win. Congratulations. And we hear all the good stuff that came from it. So what a nice time for you to be in from your lived experience. When I look at wins, I always like to break down the win with what I call the anatomy of a win, where we look at the strategy, the work plan, people, operations, and results behind the win.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (08:13.704)
Yeah. Yeah.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (08:19.987)
Thank

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (08:32.616)
Right? Right.

Gordon Sheppard (08:33.589)
So there's a moment where strategically there's something about values, vision, mission, goals, where you're in the middle of that 13 years or somewhere in there where there's strategically, you've got to make a shift in there. So how would you describe the strategy highlight that got you to the win?

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (08:38.89)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (08:46.122)
Mm-hmm.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (08:50.996)
So it's crazy because culture was my biggest strategy of keeping. So we were in Anchorage, Alaska. And there's only so much talent up there. And I was the new kid on the block when I started my firm. Okay. And it's fun. So I had to do a lot of.

Recruiting from the lower what we call the lower 48. So the contiguous nice that the contiguous 90s the contiguous United States Let me say that time ten times real fast. Okay, so with that a 50 % of those people those kids are out of college right out of college, right? Because most folks weren't able to say okay. You have a small firm boutique firm at that point, right? we only had a couple dozen employees and

So I had to hire them young. 50 % of them couldn't handle a one winter.

Right. So it had to be culture. So I had people who absolutely I mean, they came from like Florida and South Carolina and it's like, what's this snow thing? Right. And they see the snow for the first time. The only I had employees who would come into my office. The only reason I'm staying here is because of BuzzBiz Creative. That's what the name of that creative agency was. And and so when that right there wasn't able to sustain because they didn't have the right people on the bus.

I couldn't get the middle management, the strategy fell apart when middle management had to get more robust. But because I was running on such razor thin margins, I couldn't afford to bring on the generals, the colonels and the people to run that. I had maybe one or two that were in the department level. That's great. But I didn't have like a number two and a number three to run up overall operations and finance and those types of things. And so eventually,

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (10:40.105)
That became such a stress point for me because now i'm spinning those plates i'm trying to figure out how to get get profitable And the you know when I looked at strategy and going, okay How do I dig myself out of this hole right because it really was a hole? And I basically said it's gonna take me five years to dig myself out of this hole And I says well, is it a good strategy to sit there and be miserable for another five years? I mean you already did for 13 or and be in my mid 40s by then, right?

No, my late 40s almost 50 by then or do I burn into the ground? find the Phoenix and rise from the ashes and I didn't have a strategy on when I decided when I decided that I did not have a strategy the only strategy was get out of this damn building and I went from 13,000 square feet to 1300 square feet I went from 24 26 people in the building to one person in the building everybody else worked remotely and

And less than a year later and we had 300 clients that I had to then dwindle down to 15. It took over a year to get down to that 15 that I actually wanted to hold on to. Right. So you went through all of that. But it was strategy on the go. Right. And for the last seven years it has been continuing Lee B strategy on the go because now you have you have a rebrand. OK. Now you have to restructure.

Now I'm working remotely versus brick and mortar. Now I have to build a culture on people I have never met in person that have worked with me for years, right? All of these things are there. And right now, as the recording of this interview, we are less than 10 weeks away from the second rebrand in the last seven years and renaming the company from buzzworthy marketing down to buzzworthy strategies.

and I'm getting rid of the last remnants of the creative agency that I've been trying to shake for seven years.

Gordon Sheppard (12:38.958)
And you understand the margin, uh, betterness of strategies versus marketing. You've lived the marketing thing. What a tough time for marketers through the stretch that you talked about, especially that agency format. I've seen, I remember being in a meeting just maybe say about 10 years ago and someone who had, uh, hung on from the nineties and their marketing agency was in a meeting with a startup and, uh, they were going to charge the startup $30,000 for a logo.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (13:03.082)
Hmm.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (13:07.434)
Mmm.

Gordon Sheppard (13:07.918)
And I remember watching that happen, I was like, wow, you've got 90s numbers in your head when money just wasn't an issue for people. And you're about to give zero value to someone who has a need for a logo in five years. They don't need a logo right now. They need some customers come in the door. That's all they need. But it was shocking to me the misalignment that occurred there. you were on that, you spun up the machine, you had all the people, you had all that thing going. But in the meantime,

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (13:14.078)
Yeah.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (13:31.591)
Mm-hmm.

Gordon Sheppard (13:34.631)
but you recognized it and good for you because again, I think so many people simply go down with that burning ship rather than make that change. So we heard that the strategy was really reactive in a sense because you knew you needed to make a change, you made the, there's something strong about the leadership decision in that moment because you've been bumping along a certain way for more than a decade, but something in you was able to get that leadership gumption and then to wind down those clients, go through those 250 plus conversations with all those people.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (13:40.202)
Right.

Mm-hmm.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (13:51.944)
Right.

Gordon Sheppard (14:00.91)
right, that you had on board but they weren't aligned with, but then you got down to the right 15 and got this into a purpose-driven scenario, which now is getting even better 10 weeks from now as you get to that strategy thing, which is probably where you might've been from the first place, but what a, you know, that's your learning curve and good on you. You kind of lived it and you got as far as you went.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (14:16.124)
yeah, mean, you know, Tigers are, it's very hard to change the Tiger stripes, right? And, and you, know what works and as an entrepreneur, we take risks, but we take calculated risks and we always ground our risk with something that we're a little from one piece of it. It's gotta be something familiar, right? It's very foolish to just jump into something that you have no grounding in.

Right and you can make big risks and little risk but at least you have a toe on some of the water that you've you've been in before right type of thing and that's a whole nother conversation But I think that it comes down to always learning i've probably read over 300 books in the last seven years And I don't read fiction So everyone every book that I read is more knowledge now knowledge is worthless without wisdom because wisdom

Is knowledge and experience right? And so these last seven years have you know, i've have Re i've reworked my org org chart and my strategy At least five times like every year it gets tweaked. It gets tweaked. It gets tweaked It gets tweaked right this this one is a year and a half in the making of like, okay If we're to go down this road, we got to take our own advice and get everything aligned So our message has to align with what we want. Otherwise, we're not going to get

what we need. And so I, I'm like, you know what? This is not a big departure. And it actually is a retro grade of our, our branding to when we went from Buzz Biz to Buzzworthy. And, and, but so, and we're blending a little bit of the new that we had four years ago when we did it, just it was a brand update and we didn't change our name or anything like that. We just simplified it, made it more modern dot dot dot.

But now we're coming back because the old logo actually had the structure that I was looking for originally. And so sometimes you just you lose your way because the way is always getting clouded, foggy times like when iOS 14 changed digital marketing for forever. AI comes on the market and you have people now thinking that Grok understands you better than your marketing consultant does. And all of the things that are disrupting

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (16:35.674)
marketing industry over the last 20 years has been amazing. I mean, I went through the great recession of 2008. I was only three years old. He was like, how are we going to get through this? Right. But I think that that's that grit and intuitiveness that get people to the 20 year mark. And I remember when I was just starting out, I'm like seeing some of my vendors with their 20 years established, you know, and now what was that 19

85 right and I'm like wow 85 I was in grade school and it was like I wish I hope I can I can be one of those guys and put the 20-year mark on there and this funny thing is this I'm in 20-year mark right now right I haven't put anything like that in any my branding because I feel like the business gets reinvented every day you come to work your strategy

Gordon Sheppard (17:24.75)
And that's the nature of the marketing and the area that you're practicing in, right? That is just the disruptions. It's just madness right now. And it's funny, I'm on the business advisor side. People are talking to ChatGPT. yeah, no, I put my personality profiles in there and now it answers me. And I'm like, wow. Like when I think about craft and the practice and the MBA and whatever I back up my sort of world with and what it's taken to think now the perception would be that that would be way better. I'll argue myself up against that.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (17:28.574)
Yeah.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (17:45.406)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Gordon Sheppard (17:53.903)
But maybe it's going to be like Big Blue that beat the chess players. You beat them one year and then Blue just gets better and better. Who knows? We'll see how that goes.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (18:01.214)
Well, I'll tell you right now what I told you know, we used to you were part you and I are not too far off in generational. We're in the same generation. We used to hear that knowledge is power, right? So we get our MBAs. We do all the things right? Well, knowledge is now commoditized. Okay, you can get any knowledge you want. Now what's most important is wisdom. And wisdom is like I said, just a minute ago, where knowledge meets expert experience.

And it's the experience and the wisdom that creates that wisdom that people are going to pay for now. It's your structure.

Gordon Sheppard (18:37.399)
And people haven't lived a 13 year business and burnt it to the ground and reinvented the leadership. Do you know what mean? Like when I look into your bundle and how any leader would benefit from that, because it doesn't matter what scale the business is, you'd be able to bring that lived experience to the given situation that you're in. Sorry, I just need to pick on you for just a second. It'll still be an unfair question. Favorite quote from a book, just, make it really concise. Like, do you have a favorite sort of saying or quote from one of those books that you've read?

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (18:43.754)
Yeah.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (18:52.521)
Mm-hmm.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (19:04.254)
Zig Ziglar says if you give if you get enough people what they want you will always have everything you need I'm paraphrasing it, but that's

Gordon Sheppard (19:15.353)
That's perfect. I'll just let that sit there. We talked about the strategy. There's a work plan of sorts that we described, a timeline. There's a moment where you're in there. You're like, I'm gonna turn to get in my mid-40s. I've got to kind of make this work. You've described the timeline as we've gone along here. That process from sort of, I've got to get out of here to now. How long did that, when was the spark of the idea and how long did it take?

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (19:32.734)
Mm-hmm.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (19:38.031)
Seven years. I mean it's it was from the day that I sat in the foyer of this place that I had just built two years prior We had gone from a 3,500 square foot facility with 13,000 square foot facility Just two years prior spent over a quarter million dollars retrofitting it to us and You know, it's so iterative like you

I think there's so many people think and I, and when I was younger, I thought this like you plan it out, right? And you create the linear and you, you know, plan for, the, the bumps and roads and knowing that you're going to have to be agile, but like you plan out 10 years. And somebody says, where were you going to be in 10 years? I was like, I'll probably be some type of retired in 15.

But I have no idea what that's going to look like because I'm an entrepreneur. was just talking to another entrepreneur friend of mine yesterday and it's like you're talking about retirement. I was like we're entrepreneurs. We never retire. We're always creating. Now are we going to be the office every day? No. Our idea of retiring versus my parents idea of retiring where it's like hey I don't have to go to work anymore and they're proud of it. And I'm just going go and I don't want to be I mean in 15 years I'll be 65, 66. I'm like that.

Like I don't want to be sitting at home not doing anything. I don't want the only thing that is part of my day that I feel is a bent or that I've accomplished is that I got through another 18 holes of golf and I got a little bit better. Like that is a byproduct that I had the time to do that, but I'm always going to be creating. I'm always going to be writing. I'm always going to be learning because when you stop doing that, you start dying inside and I've watched.

Gordon Sheppard (21:15.663)
I'm right with you. funny, my wife and I are in the same mindset. we have this, we've had this conversation of like, cause there's a friend of mine who's good at retirement and he's 50, he's my age, 58 years old. And he's been retired for like three or four years now. And I'm listening, he's like, yeah, I golfed 80 rounds last year in the summer. And I did, you know, I curl and I do this. And I'm like, I just, it's not for me. And I had a guy hire me one time, a guy who was retiring as a lawyer because he went over to his buddy's house.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (21:24.712)
You

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (21:30.461)
Mmm.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (21:34.186)
Mm-hmm.

Gordon Sheppard (21:43.952)
and his buddy's multi-millionaire, had more money, can't spend it in 10 lifetimes. And was a Tuesday morning at 10 o'clock, his buddy answers the door in a robe, hasn't gotten dressed yet, he goes, come on in, come on in, I'm watching The Green Mile. He goes, and this guy says, well, haven't you seen that movie before? He goes, oh yeah, like 10 times, but it's really good. And I'm like, he was like, at that moment he knew that he didn't wanna watch The Green Mile for the 11th time. So he started to work on this very conversation. And when I admire people,

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (21:47.818)
All right.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (22:05.204)
That's what we're

Gordon Sheppard (22:10.541)
like Jimmy Patterson in Canada who started a car dealership and now probably has, I don't know, 80 lines of business that report to him and he's in his mid-90s, still going. it's not that, again, like you said, if retirement and the other typical retirement that you've described is good for you, that's great. And if you can do it well, I think that's good. And you're happy, perfect. But I am right with you in terms of certainly being stimulated for all the different things that you can do and give back. especially when you got those...

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (22:19.495)
mm-hmm.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (22:28.062)
Yeah. All right.

Gordon Sheppard (22:37.135)
Peak skills, like the post 60 peak skills, that 60 to 75 zone is peak, peak skills. So how can you get an hour of somebody's time, you know, to kind of do it? what a great conversation in terms of getting to range into that. But I'll come back to the anatomy of when to say the strategy was this place is on fire. We better get out of here and make this change. We got a work plan that took seven years. can, and we can hear some of those things along the way. There's people involved whenever we get a win. And so how would you describe your attitude?

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (22:41.393)
yeah.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (23:00.508)
Mm-hmm.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (23:06.282)
you

Gordon Sheppard (23:06.955)
in that first moment and then attitude prior and then attitude during and attitude after getting the win.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (23:13.29)
So I joked with my girlfriend at the time back in the day. I said, can I just hire Gen Xers or people who are over 35? And she says, you can't do that. And I says, I really wish I could. I says, I'm tired of babysitting young adults. That was my mindset, okay?

I just hired a 28 year old operations manager.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (23:47.787)
Okay, let that sink in. Now, I hired her because of a culture fit, not her skill fit. She had skills. She didn't have as much experience as some of the people that the top three, there were two that were highly skilled, right? One of them that was highly skilled and had the culture fit, but then she got a job before I could go through my process, because I now hire very slow and fire fast.

before I would hire very fast and fire very slow, unprofitably slow, because for various reasons. So now the struggle is the gap between Gen Z and Gen X, right? Because what...

They think is acceptable and what I think are acceptable are different and I have to bridge the gap and educate them So that they they can meet up to the skill The skill set right which comes with a little bit of shift of mindset But I hired her because she had enough to get the job done enough skills to get the job done But she was a perfect culture fit. She got excited about the culture we were building

Where we were going what our purpose was what my vision was and all that stuff So she started talking about the fact that I needed somebody that was going to be able to take all the operations off eventually take all operations off my plate so that I can be open to create open to Do vision work open to network and and do the things that CEOs and founders do really well, right? I can create frameworks

create systems I can do those I suck at keeping them going she's a system person

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (25:38.346)
So she's like, yes, you give me the system dot dot dot, but I know that I'm going to build. She's getting her master's degree and a couple of different things. Very, very smart person. And and one of the things we're going to upskill her with is the ability to build the systems off of my strategies. So no longer will I need to do a strategy and then build the system. I will show the strategy. We will discuss.

elements of the system and the flow and then they will take over and make that system work.

Gordon Sheppard (26:10.384)
So there's a moment where you wanted to hire everybody just like you with the same work ethic and the same approach. And then that has evolved since then, so that you've been able to adapt the realities of different ages in the workforce. And culture is a through line here though. You know that if culture and vision is shared and what a wise thing to say, you know, terms of, as you know, as you're scaling your business going forward, that's great. So we've got.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (26:14.634)
Right. yeah.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (26:27.826)
yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Gordon Sheppard (26:36.932)
We learned about the win, we learned about the strategy, the work plan, we learned a little bit about the people. Operationally, when we get a win, in this case, shut the doors, there's an operational component to say, well, we've got to wind down these clients, we've got to do that. But there was also a through line, if we think about it like an hourglass of sorts, they've got to wind it all down, but then you had to spin it up again in a different way. What operational highlights would you describe for getting this win?

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (27:02.452)
So originally the strategy was once I found out that only one, I had one taker out of over 25 employees on the remote working.

And they lasted all of two months because the generation just needed the water cooler. They needed that face to face time. It was not 2025 yet. COVID had not taught us another way of living our lives. And now you have people get out of college and they're like, ain't sitting in a cubicle. You're not gonna catch me dead in that. And so I quickly had to figure out how to expand my subcontractor core.

And so that operationally is a big deal, right? And account management and project management are the two biggest things that we've had to work through for seven years. And I finally, mean, I'm a stubborn SOB. you know, it only took seven years to figure out, you know what? If we had less things we did, we would need less project management. And so really getting, you know, it's like,

We followed our own advice as far as the single point of entry for all clients, but then we didn't learn our, I didn't learn the lesson of like, yes, you can have the expansion of offerings once they're in, but should you?

Right? And how can you keep the expansion within the confines of a core competency? you have, everybody's good at a bunch of stuff, but your core competencies, they don't move very often. And so being honest with ourselves and saying really, really, really, really, really, what are you good at?

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (28:48.84)
You know and getting in there and say you know what strategy you take complex things and you Synthesize them you simplify them and you systemize them So all services should be around synthesizing simplifying and systemizing in marketing for a very specific type of business at a very specific stage of that type of businesses lifestyle People talk

Gordon Sheppard (29:16.73)
And that takes forever. Like you're being very eloquent. That's a lot of, you know what I mean? That's the Mike Tyson, everybody, try it, right? Mike Tyson, everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face, right? Like it's that very thing. And then how nice to get it boiled down. How nice that you actually have pulled that together to then put your operations to right size your operations in a sense. Cause the temptation, and you can hear it if we dug into that 300 client list, the bottom hundred.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (29:20.25)
That's a lot of trial and error.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (29:41.962)
Mmm.

Gordon Sheppard (29:43.824)
were not in your core competencies. They were bringing money in the door. You know what I mean? But they weren't there. They were cashflow.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (29:48.651)
There were cashflow. I know, I would say not even the bottom 100, the only 15 of those clients out of 300 were actually profitable clients that aligned with where I wanted to go with what I wanted to provide.

Right. I went from like, yeah, we can do that, which is agency. That's how creative agencies work. Yeah, we can get that. We can figure that out because that's what agencies do. We figure things out. Right. And I liked problems. New problems were always my favorite. And so it was ever expanding and never established. Right. And so as we as you know, it takes time in the B2B space to understand the cycles, the patterns of cycles, because cycles are longer in the B2B world.

your sales cycles are longer. That means that their sales cycles are longer, which means their results take longer to find. So you can have a great idea and you can try it out on two or three people, but you're still not gonna get some of the actual numbers you really need for another year to two years. So you have to be very strategic on the strategies you decide to test.

Gordon Sheppard (30:55.696)
There's a guy I've been having coffee with for 10 years. We went for coffee recently. He got it. He bought it hook, line and sinker. And within a week I had two referrals. But that's a B2B scenario of like, are, what, and then fit and finding that way. How lucky for you, your team, the clients that you have that you've gotten it down to this laser focus. Cause now you know that the results that you're bringing are higher. They're just better. You can hear it. Strategy, work plan, people, operations, results.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (30:59.785)
huh.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (31:04.746)
There you go.

Gordon Sheppard (31:25.776)
Quantitative and qualitative results. We've heard some of them. Qualitatively, you're going on cool trips. Like you're doing that, you you've freed up some time, you're golfing, you know, you're doing that kind of stuff. Quant... You've actually, the panic attacks, I actually know another entrepreneur, same thing, he had to make the change when he was in the emergency bed.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (31:29.534)
Mm-hmm.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (31:36.746)
resting heart rate is below 60 again.

Gordon Sheppard (31:50.916)
because of the panic attack and that was his moment. mean, that's a real story. It's just unbelievable in terms of how far we can push.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (31:56.683)
I remember going to the doc going, I think my heart's not doing what it is. He said to get heart palpitations. I was like, what? What is that?

Gordon Sheppard (32:04.676)
What? And all given to yourself, what a gift. Took you 13 years to give yourself to the palpitations.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (32:08.467)
Yeah, right!

I will, I said back in the day, I'm like, I don't own a business. own a job and my boss is a jerk.

Gordon Sheppard (32:20.142)
I better talk to my boss. That is so good. man. Any so, in the results, what's the one or two that you like to kind of point out for people from this win?

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (32:30.41)
So it's funny for the last, I'd say three years, last three years, we've been hovering between 25 and 30 reoccurring clients. We service about 100 companies a year, but reoccurring revenue is like the biggest thing, right? And I base everything off of that. And a book I read really early in this transition was called Profit First by Mike McAuliffe.

And that changed my whole world. When I got my degree in small business management and entrepreneurship, I got a C in corporate finance because it absolutely made no sense to me. I'm like, no, money in, money out. How much do you keep? Right? And then private first came and says, money in, you keep money, and then the rest of it you can spend on operations. And I was like, OK, I like this. I understand this. And it's actually permeated into my personal finances, how I budget things now. Like, I need this.

for this and then the rest of it we can work on that's what we live off of right so with that said we are seven times more profitable meaning that the taxes with taxes because you got to your taxes and the whole nine yards we are 21 % is that right yep just around 21 % net profit versus three now if you add my

If you add my salary back in there, which is now is in the six figures, we're talking closer to 36 % profitability. So that's 12 times more profitable. Yeah.

Gordon Sheppard (34:02.673)
Congratulations. mean, that's incredible, right? It's a long story to get to this moment in time. You've been really eloquent about, know, the high points along the way, but the sleepless nights and the heart palpitations and the what it takes, and then the joy that you have on these trips, your appreciation of these trips, that coffee in Italy or wherever you're gonna tell me about where you went the next time, tastes sweeter.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (34:15.242)
Hmm.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (34:20.883)
Mm-hmm.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (34:26.986)
All

Gordon Sheppard (34:28.837)
from the lived and earned experience that you've gotten to get here. If you had a piece of advice, you've described this win of a big sort of life revelation and then becoming a better entrepreneur who now is gonna do huge work with the clients that you have going forward, which you're already doing, but you'll do even more because of the focus that you've brought to things. What's a piece of advice that you would give another entrepreneur maybe who's looking for the type of win that you have?

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (34:48.372)
Mm-hmm.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (34:54.182)
If you're an entrepreneur who has been in business for over 10 years and you don't and you still feel like you own a job You owe it to everyone in your life Number one yourself number two your wife or your your your your better half whatever that is And number three everyone else, right? You owe it to yourself to stop look around and figure out how to reverse course

I don't care what it looks like. If you don't do it now, you'll never will. And you're going to sit on your deathbed going, what could have been if I would have just taken control of the thing that I actually wanted? If we took it entrepreneurialism, there's three things we're looking at that we want as an entrepreneur. We want financial independence. We want entrepreneurial freedom. Entrepreneurial freedom means that you get to go on those vacations and you don't work on those vacations. And then impact.

Having the financial independence and the and the entrepreneurial freedom to then work on things. Maybe it's philanthropic. Maybe it's giving back to the industry, whatever that is, but having that impact because if you sit on your deathbed and you can't quantify the impact you left on this world, you're going to be the saddest person when you take your last breath.

Gordon Sheppard (36:15.665)
Thank you. It is wonderful to hear your whole story. Thank you for summarizing that there and something that people can really take away and spark action from. That's fantastic. Michael, if people need to get in touch with you, what's the best way to do that?

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (36:30.218)
You can check me out on LinkedIn, Michael Buzinski. And then if they want to check out my book, The Rule of 26, which is three steps to doubling your revenue through your website, you go to ruleof26.com. And if you're just interested in what's going on in the buzzworthy world, go to buzzworthy.biz. That ain't changing.

Gordon Sheppard (36:50.705)
Thank you so much for being on the show.

Michael "Buzz" Buzinski (36:53.524)
Thank you for having me, it was a pleasure.