S. 2 Ep. 45 – The Rule Of 26: Three Steps To Doubling Website Revenue

Taylorr: Welcome to another episode of Technically Speaking, we’re your host, Taylorr and Austin; and in today’s episode, we’re talking about how to get your website to perform like a full-time sales team. Now, have you ever felt like your website, really, wasn’t hitting the mark; that it wasn’t performing like a full-time sales team, and it wasn’t generating the leads that you were hoping for and, kind of, feels more like a brochure than anything else. 

Chances are, you’re familiar with this, and this is the most of people, now, if your website is just running and gunning for you and it’s generating all the business you could possibly imagine, I congratulate you, but I would be willing to bet that’s maybe 1% of everybody that will ever listen to this episode. So, to help bring some light on to help make our websites better and make our marketing efforts perform better, we’ve brought on a true expert and veteran in the digital marketing space, Michael Buzinsky. 

Now, Buzz, as most people call him, has simplified digital marketing success with The Rule of 26 to help business owners avoid the drain and the frustration of running unprofitable marketing campaigns. His mission is to help all of us eliminate entrepreneurial poverty. And we know what this is, we spend a bunch of money on things that we’re hoping transforms our business, or hoping delivers the ROI that we’re looking for, and, ultimately, it misses the mark. 

And that can lead to us feeling frustrated and spending way more hours in our business than we should be and feeling like we’ve created this business to try and have a lifestyle for ourselves and have that lifestyle go away simply because we’re putting too many hours into our business and not generating enough revenue. And so, Buzz has a personal mission to help every business owner eliminate that through digital marketing. He’s an awesome guy, I learned a ton about The Rule of 26 and these three simple things can make a 100% increase in your website performance. 

So, as always, we hope you enjoy this one, stick around until the end for some awesome resources, and we’ll see you in there. And we are live. Michael, welcome to Technically Speaking, it is awesome to have you here today.

Michael: Hey, it’s good to meet you, Taylorr.

Taylorr: Yeah, you have to roll the Rs, actually, Michael,

Michael: You have to close it, Taylorr.

Taylorr: Yeah, thank you. Yes. That is how it’s done. For everybody listening, you’ve been messing up this entire time.

Austin: Taylorr tells that joke when he gets the opportunity to, as I would as well, and people have two reactions to that. Either first of all, they roll and laugh and it’s funny. And the other time they go, oh, are you serious? I’m so sorry. And every single time I just have to shake my head like, oh, no.

Michael: I had to tee it up and see what was going to happen, come on, dude.

Taylorr: That’s right. Well, fun story, actually. When I was in college, I had a local Starbucks, still do to this day, but it was in a different state. But, anyway, I’d go in and there was this new hire and everyone there knew me because I was there every single day for many hours throughout the day. So, I had a new hire, and so I told her she had to roll her Rs and she went the second path that Austin illustrated there and for a month straight and still terrible at rolling her Rs, always did her best to pronounce my name rolling her Rs, mind you, I can’t do this myself, so I never had to tell her. Until one day, a month later, one of the staff members is like, he’s just fucking with you, you don’t need to do that, so, anyway.

Michael: I love it.

Taylorr: I’m not the nicest human being, I guess, but something you can take away from that.

Austin: That is awesome, though, it’s a good story.

Taylorr: All right. So, Michael, this is going to be a fun episode, we are super excited to unpack your expertise. I think this is an area where it can be daunting for our listeners to tackle marketing and websites, how to get things to perform well, and, as you know, being in the world, there are a lot of tactics and magic wands and shiny objects, there we go, out there.

Michael: Just shiny new objects every day.

Taylorr: Shiny squirrels.

Michael: Somebody has the new snake oils.

Taylorr: Yep, new snake oils. That’s right. So, we’re, really, excited to unpack this, although, before we do any episode, we like to do a little bit of research. So, we, kind of, noticed this term, kind of, laced throughout some of your copy. It was entrepreneurial poverty.

Michael: Yes.

Taylorr: And those things seem almost like juxtaposing, for a lot of people, because you wouldn’t expect the poverty piece to being entrepreneurial, but, as we all know, that can happen. So, I’m just curious, what does that mean to you? How’d you come up with it, fill us in?

Michael: So, I didn’t come up with it, a guy named Michael Michalowicz, who wrote, ‘Profit First,’ ‘Clockwork,’ ‘The Plan.’

Taylorr: Oh, right. Yes, sure.

Michael: He, actually, has it part of his vision, and as I got to know him, got permission to carry that into my vision, because for 15 years, as I was growing a multimillion-dollar creative agency, I experienced firsthand entrepreneurial poverty. Entrepreneurial poverty is when we are willing to give more time than we pay ourselves money. And we’re unable to leverage our time in a way that we have a business working for us rather than us working for a business. So, when I tore my creative agency apart, at the end of 2018; that was the number one thing that was going into the new company was, Buzz first; this is Buzz’s company, not a company Buzz works for. 

Because I was a CEO of a very large corporation, if you will, it’s a small company, blip on the radar for most, but when you’re the one responsible for 22 employees in a 13,000 square foot facility, it’s daunting and it just trains you. And so, now I’m on a vision to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty and join that fight with guys like Mike Michalowicz and others.

Austin: Wow.

Taylorr: Heck, yeah.

Austin: Man, I love what you’re out there doing, Taylorr and I definitely understand what this is like; this has been a huge focus for us for the last couple of quarters, is how can we better make the business an asset for us and not something that we have to drag along, and it’s an intentional thing that has to be done. So, anyway, I like the mission, how does marketing tie into that for you?

Michael: Well, without marketing, you, really, don’t have a lot of revenue going on, because if you’re a business owner who doesn’t understand how to leverage their marketing, you are now in the vicious cycle of entrepreneurial poverty, because you are either producing or marketing, producing or marketing, because you can’t do both at the same time. It’s impossible. You cannot do two things, a hundred percent of the time; you are splitting your time. 

And so, if you don’t have elements in place that either automate some of your marketing, as a website can, and then, have people who can do the things that computers can’t do or shouldn’t do, then you are stuck in that sign wave of just sitting still, you’re treading water, at that point, because you’re never able to get ahead of that curve.

Taylorr: Yeah.

Austin: Man.

Taylorr: What a great illustration.

Austin: Seriously. It’s something that doesn’t, I feel, get talked about quite enough either. And you come at this from the perspective of websites, maybe more than some of the other agency owners and operators that we’ve talked to, so why the focus on websites for you?

Michael: Well, a website is one of your most important assets when it comes to marketing; studies show that 68% of all of your prospects will check your website before contacting you. No matter how they learn about you, 68%, so two thirds will go to your website. On top of that, in search world, 68% of all purchases start with a search query; so that means two thirds of all consumers are either going to hear about you outside of Google, but they’re still going to go to your website to check you out, or they’re going to not know who you are and they’re going to find you on search, and if they don’t find you, they’re going to find your competitor. 

And the great thing about a website, when you set it up properly, it’s the one salesperson that does exactly what they’re supposed to do a hundred percent of the time. And they work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 12 months out of the year, right? They don’t ask for raises, they don’t ask for vacation, they don’t take sick days and they don’t complain. So, why wouldn’t you push everything to a converting website?

Austin: I think a lot of people get stuck feeling like it’s impossible to have a producing website, it’s so abstract, you know?

Taylorr: Yeah.

Austin: There are all these moving parts and it’s multidisciplinary and how are you supposed to manage it, and where are you supposed to start to get some momentum behind you? It’s just a black box for people. And then, we’re also, and I say this coming from the perspective of somebody who is a marketer, as is Taylorr; marketers don’t have, maybe, the most trusted reputation because there are so many people that are snake oil salesmen; that promise the world and don’t deliver it. 

And so, it’s a very abstract concept, and then, it has to be accomplished by people that may not be very easily trusted given the state of the world, so I think it’s a tough thing for people. And so, when you say it the way that you’re saying it, obviously, the data tells us that a website is a critical asset for your business.

Taylorr: Real estate.

Austin: Exactly, yes. But, man, it’s a challenging, scary thing for a lot of people, it seems like.

Michael: It’s unfortunate, so COVID, actually, pushed a huge amount; there are two things that, really, pushed what you’re talking about. Back in 2011, when Facebook’s algorithms and Google’s algorithms allowed people to, really, hyperfocus their ads; we created this whole regime of lazy digital marketers, and we made millionaires out of people, right? Problem is anybody who came into digital marketing past say 2009, 2010, all they know is Facebook ads or Google ads or maybe streaming or some type of new media, but now that third-party data has been shut down by Apple and Google, all these people, the one tool they had, they’re a one trick pony. 

And so, you took their trick away, now, they’re this mule, he-hawing around going, what the heck am I supposed to do now? And now, the people who have been around for 30 years are going, I haven’t been affected.

Taylorr: Right.

Michael: The tactics might have changed, but the fundamentals of marketing have not changed; by no means. The way we market to people today is absolutely no different than we did 200 years ago.

Austin: Ooh.

Michael: When people thought we had invented everything that was going to be invented.

Taylorr: Yeah. Can you unpack some of those foundational elements to marketing for our listeners? What do you think doesn’t change?

Michael: What doesn’t change is the consumer is a selfish beam, okay. It is, but that’s the whole point of being a consumer.

Taylorr: Yeah, that’s right, you get them too.

Michael: You have a selfish need and you’re looking to fill that need, okay.

Taylorr: Yeah.

Michael: You have a problem; you want to solve it, right? And Vanilla Ice is going to be there, right? Because, anyway, anybody who’s old enough to know that song. We’re good. Sorry, I had to throw it in there. So, when we talk about, okay, let’s just talk about the fundamentals of a website because fundamentals of marketing is a big question.

Taylorr: Yeah, it’s a big topic; we could be here for years.

Michael: So, let’s go with just the website.

Austin: All of the Encyclopedia, boys.

Michael: Here it comes, in the next 20 minutes, Michael Buzinski unpacks marketing. Here we go. So, if you’re a service-centric business, so if you’re a consultant, a coach, any of those types of things, doctors, dentists, chiropractors, you remodel houses, anybody who is taking their abilities and bestowing it upon somebody else or something somebody else owns, they’re a service-based business, okay. So, there are two things you can do as a service-based business; you can solve the consumer’s problem, or you can help them obtain a dream, prove me wrong. You can’t, because you can’t. 

Those are the only two things you can do, okay. And so, when we go to a website, we’ve been taught that they should look like brochures, from back in the 19 hundreds, right? And so, it’s all about me, me, me, I, we, us, and so if you go to most coaches and consultants and doctors are, really, bad at this, sorry, if you’re a doctor. It’s about ‘me,’ ‘I,’ what I can do, what my credentials are, my history, my case studies, ‘my,’ ‘me,’ ‘us,’ instead of, ‘you’ and ‘your’. We have to identify the problem that we solve and show the consumer right off the bat that they’re in the right place, because you have to identify that you even understand the pain they’re going through or understand the problem they have or understand the dream they’re trying to achieve. 

If you can’t do that, you’re worthless to the consumer, and so it doesn’t matter what you know, because they don’t care what you know, until they know how much you care.

Taylorr: Yeah.

Michael: And so, when we look at our websites, the fundamentals are all about talking to our client and their needs. And once we’ve done that, we can then, give them opportunities to give permission to us, to talk about themselves about the team, about us, and even then, everything that we talk about us has to revolve around the problem we solve or the dreams that we help attain.

Taylorr: Oh, man.

Austin: That was great.

Taylorr: Honestly. Yeah, seriously, guys, go take some notes here, go look at your websites after this episode. Holy crap, because I guarantee you, three quarters of you are saying I and me throughout the entire thing, Austin and I see this all the time on websites and it’s not like we even, particularly, make adjustments to websites, that’s not our wheelhouse, our wheelhouse is the operations end of things. But people will have questions like, why am I not getting leads from my website? And why doesn’t anyone hit me up from it? Well, it’s largely because we’re talking about you the entire time rather than their clients. 

And why do you think that’s the default, by the way? Why has it been lost that we need to talk to our clients, instead of talk about us? And, maybe, this is because Austin and I are close to this, we’ve had our fair share of marketing in our lives, so it seems second nature to talk more in the ‘you’ fashion rather than the ‘I’ fashion, but why do you think it defaults to it being about themselves?

Michael: There are two reasons that I’ve seen. One is arrogance.

Taylorr: Okay.

Michael: Just the way it is, right?

Taylorr: Yeah.

Michael: I know better, that’s why I’m charging a premium. And so, to work with me to, and we were taught, and somewhere along the line, consultants and people who have had enough experience to just be consultants and not be service providers, have been told that if you’re going to charge a premium, you have to build all of this value, and so consultants see their value in themselves. And so, they have to talk about themselves because that’s where the value comes from, without them, there is no value, right? The other side of that is that we’ve been told about competitive advantage. 

Remember those days, what’s your competitive advantage, which is still extremely important, but way down on the page, right? This is not the first thing; your first thing is them. Make them understand that they’re in the right place, then, we can start talking about the solution and how you go about that. What is your methodology, right? What’s your framework, right? I have a few framers, have The Rule of 26, I have digital engagement optimization, we have fractional chief marketing officers’ services and stuff like that, right? We have DIY platforms, these are all frameworks to solve, particular, problems in people’s marketing, okay. But we first start with what’s the pain, right? 

Now, I’m a little wordy on my websites, and some people don’t like that, which is fine. But I feel that if you’re, really, close to wanting to get the right thing, you want to understand it more than just a couple of gitchy copy lines to get me excited about something, right? So, I paint the picture and some of my friends that are marketing, they’re like, you’re a little wordy, Buzz. I’m like, I’m okay with that. Because the people who call me and they’ve read through everything,

Taylorr: They read it; they know.

Michael: They’ve read it.

Taylorr: That’s right.

Michael: They’ve either read the book or they’ve read the website and they’ve read a section of the website to the problem that they’re trying to solve, and they already understand the solution. So, now, we’re just trying to find out, is this the right fit? Not about understanding anything else, because they already understand their problem, and they’ve already identified a solution within my frameworks, they just want to understand how that works. And then, that’s all I have to connect, now, we can find out if there’s a lot less time it will take for us to figure out whether that’s a good fit or not.

Taylorr: Yeah.

Michael: 35 pages my website is, deep.

Austin: 35 pages?

Michael: 35 pages deep.

Austin: That’s a lot of content.

Michael: And we don’t have a blog

Taylorr: Surprising.

Austin: That’s a lot of content. Yep.

Michael: When you put enough information on the website, Google doesn’t need a blog, for me, to be considered important.

Taylorr: Sure.

Austin: I think that one of the reasons that there are so many misconceptions around the website, is that people forget that we’re not trying to, necessarily; make a purchase decision by giving people the website. We’re not expecting somebody lands on the website and goes, great, let me swipe the card.

Taylorr: Especially, if you’re service.

Austin: Sometimes, that’s the case. And it depends on what you’re selling, products and services act differently.

Michael: most products are that way all the time.

Austin: Yeah. But I think if we’re looking at most service businesses and, especially, for our listeners, people that are in high-ticket service businesses, the buying cycle is much longer than a stop on a website. And so, if the website can get the person to know, like, and trust you, get through that initial barrier of entry, where now a conversation is possible, then, you have a much better chance of making the sale and your website will be much more effective than if you’re trying to push a sale on somebody right out of the gates. Would you agree with that?

Michael: A hundred percent. The one-page sales, click funnels, Advanta or whatever, there are a bunch of them out there, Kajabi, you name it; we’ve been taught as consultants and coaches and speakers and webinar gurus that we need to get the money right off the bat. But really, what happens is that you’re just telling people you’re selling stuff versus solving problems. If you can solve a problem, it doesn’t matter how much it costs. You do not need to put a price on your website. 

Now, I put prices on my DIY, my DWI, because it’s not profitable enough for me or any of my team members to sit around and tell people what it costs, because they’re so affordable that if that’s not within your budget, then, it’s just not going to be within your budget, sorry. And if you can find it somewhere else cheaper, go for it. Features and all that other stuff, they’re all laid out there; if you think that you can get better features somewhere else, please go ahead. We’ve done our homework and our clients like our features the best, and so anybody who clicks on our stuff, they’re a good fit and people who don’t, are not; I’m not worried about it. I don’t need all of the business, I need the people I can help the most, that’s all I care about.

Taylorr: Man.

Austin: Oh, yeah.

Taylorr: It’s a golden nugget right there, I think people can lose sight of that. You don’t need the broad brushstrokes and marketing and website language, you have to, really, not only know who your market is, of course, but of that market, who do you, actually, want to be working with? Because you don’t need the whole market, as you said, you just need a portion of that market, and those are going to be the people that you enjoy working with the most, who understand your value, who aren’t going to be a pain to work with. All of those things.

Michael: You’re still going to have people who are going to be a source in your supply, right?

Taylorr: Sure, as a client, that’s good to know.

Michael: But they’re just not going to be a pain in your butt.

Taylorr: Yeah, that’s right.

Michael: It’s okay to be frustrated with people, every once in a while, but if you can identify the traits of the most pleasurable experiences in providing your service, you’re going to be much happier. I now fire clients much more often than I ever did, in the last three and a half years, I, probably, fired more clients than I did in the 15 years before that.

Taylorr: Wow.

Michael: It doesn’t happen often.

Taylorr: Right.

Michael: Well, maybe, one out of 20, right? That’s okay. And it’s not like I sit there and go, oh, you’re fired. Right? It’s just, hey, this doesn’t seem to be working, for me, is it working for you? And, usually, it’s like, yeah, it’s not as cool as I thought it was going to be, yeah. I just don’t think we’re a match. I have somebody who has a lot of the same belief society, who has a different approach, why don’t I introduce you to them? Oh, really? Yes. Now, I’ve just helped two people, right? My friend, who’s a better match for the client and the client, now, has somebody who’s a better match for them. 

My vision and my mission is to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty, not just mine, all entrepreneurs, so it’d be against my vision, for me, to say, well, either you get it from me or you’re going to suck, right? Or whatever, right? It doesn’t make any sense to me, so why not help that person, if they’re not a good fit for you, find somebody that they are a good fit for. So, I have a very large network of marketing friends that when they don’t meet, somebody’s, really, hell-bent on social media and our DIY social media and our done-with-you social media services don’t meet the ticket. 

Then, I find one of my social media marketing agencies, that’s all they do, and that person wants to spend money, energy, and time in that; right here, these people will do that for you, and they do it, really, well.

Taylorr: Heck, yeah.

Michael: And I want you to be very successful, go for it.

Taylorr: Yeah, what comes around goes around, man. So, that’s awesome. So, I, really, want to unpack The Rule of 26. I was poking around on the site and trying to get a grip on what that means, and, of course, our listeners are learning about this for the first time. So, can you unpack The Rule of 26 a bit, and what’s behind the scenes there?

Michael: So, The Rule of 26 states that if you increase your unique traffic by 26%, your conversion rate by 26% and your average revenue per client that’s coming from your website by 26%, your website revenue will have a compounded effect of 100% more revenue.

Taylorr: Wow.

Austin: Wow.

Taylorr: Okay. So, 26% unique traffic, 26% increase in conversion rate, not a 26% conversion rate, I hope.

Michael: No.

Taylorr: Okay.

Michael: Just an increase in each of those.

Taylorr: That would be nice. That would be nice, though.

Michael: That would be, really, nice. I will hire that person, please, thank you.

Taylorr: For sure. All right. And then, a 26% increase in fees.

Michael: Average revenue per client, not just fees.

Taylorr: Okay. So, average revenue per client. Okay, interesting.

Michael: Because a lot of people think, oh, I can raise my prices. Oh, can you?

Taylorr: Yeah.

Michael: Are you serving people who would be willing to do that? What if it is a matter of how often they spend their money with you to increase the average revenue? And we look at average revenue per client at a yearly basis, not a lifetime value.

Taylorr: Okay. Right.

Michael: Okay. Because that way you can then take a look at your marketing at a much shorter snapshot, right? Because when we do our strategies, we work in 90-day sprints, because when we look at a mountain, let’s say we’re trying to climb Denali in Alaska, right? It’s what, 20 something thousand feet tall? Okay. You’re not going to do that in a day, right? So, there are three camps. There’s base camp, camp one and camp two, and then, the summit, right? So, you stop at each one of those, so all of your goals and all of your strategies are to get to each of those camps. 

So, The Rule of 26 allows us to, really, chop down the strategy and objectives that are required to get small increments that create large outcomes, because 26% increase in traffic is not all that much. And a 26% increase in your conversion rate is fractions of a percentage for some people. And you would be surprised how easy it is to increase your average revenue by 26%, I was working with a business consultant who had 10 businesses she was doing a weekend retreat with, and she brought me in to talk about marketing. Within two hours, I increased everybody’s revenue, for the next year, by 26%.

Taylorr: Wow.

Michael: Everybody had a plan in place; I just talked to that consultant a week and a half ago. She said everybody implemented that; they implemented what they had promised that day to do. They fired the clients that were sucking the life out of them, they charged what they were worth, and they created frameworks that would either allow them to elongate their relationships and help their clients better or have their clients paying what they’re actually worth.

Austin: Wow.

Taylorr: Wow.

Austin: Okay.

Michael: Austin’s over there with his hand in his face.

Austin: I’m just trying to unpack. I’m trying to unpack. I think people get lost in the tactics, right? Because it sounds awesome, in theory.

Taylorr: Yes.

Austin: It is so simple, in theory, most things are, right? So, where does the rubber meet the road for you here? You have us by the ears, right? We’re like, okay, huh?

Taylorr: Yeah, right, right?

Austin: What does the book mean for a business?

Michael: So, the book talks about all the tactics behind those three objectives, right?

Austin: Nice.

Taylorr: So, we’ve created a strategy of reducing the amount of things we have to look at down to three key performance indicators, right? Unique traffic, conversion rate, average revenue per client, right? So, if you don’t have something that’s moving the revenue needle KPIs, it’s not helping you right now, okay. It’s not until you’re into the seven figures, multi-seven figures trying to push into the eight figures; that you’re worried about other KPIs, as a small business or microbusiness, that’s in the six figures and the single seven figures, those three KPIs can be your life. And that’s great, because there are over a hundred KPIs in marketing you can look at if you go to HubSpot.

Taylorr: Yeah.

Michael: Right. There are 73, I think. I think it’s 73 on Shopify.

Taylorr: Shopify, yeah, that’s right.

Michael: So, as a marketer, I don’t want to look at that many KPIs. I don’t throughout you guys.

Taylorr: No, I don’t want to make that many decisions, I don’t even know what to do with the information.

Michael: No. And the thing is that most KPIs or vanity, unless you’re looking at something that’s an indicator for a specific KPI and you can connect that, directly, to your revenue. No go. So, when we’re working with people with search engine optimization in their authority marketing, okay. Their search engine visibility is the indicator of whether or not the keywords that they’re starting to get ranks for are, actually, creating or going to create traffic, because if the visibility’s not there, we’ll never get traffic. Because you have to be seen on the search engine to get traffic, right? 

So, we know that traffic is the KPI that moves the revenue needle, because if we have a conversion rate that stays still and average revenue per client stays still and we increase that traffic, the output is whatever the increase of that traffic is.

Taylorr: Right.

Michael: Okay. So, if we know that, hey, we’re not getting more traffic, but we know that search engine optimization doesn’t happen overnight, so what are our early indicators? Okay. So, we can take a look at those, but they, directly, correlate to that traffic, right? Because this is visibility, keyword ranking, traffic, boom. There’s a straight line, there are no other things that we can look at, if those aren’t moving, something’s wrong.

Taylorr: Yeah.

Michael: Now, the client doesn’t have to guess, because marketers are, really, good at statistics, because there are lies, there are damn lies, and then, there are statistics.

Taylorr: Yeah. That’s right.

Austin: That’s funny.

Taylorr: So, I have a question on the conversion front. So, when you say converting, you’re talking about turning visitors into dollars, right? And not anything before that, booking meetings, contact form submissions, any of that stuff?

Michael: Well, that depends.

Taylorr: Or it could, probably, correlate, I see.

Michael: That depends on your business, right? Some people sell their services online, right?

Taylorr: Okay. Yeah, sure.

Michael: So, our platforms are sold online, but our signature services are not. So, for me, if I know that for every 10 people who contact me through my website, I get X amount of people to sign up for my services.

Taylorr: Sure.

Michael: That’s my close rate, right?

Taylorr: Yeah.

Michael: So, if I keep my close rate the same, my conversion rate can be based on increase.

Taylorr: Gotcha. Nice.

Michael: As long as the output goes into something, let’s say stable, we’re good. Now, what happens when you have this huge increase in traffic and your conversion rate tanks?

Taylorr: Probably, not qualified traffic.

Michael: And you haven’t done it, they’re bad traffic.

Taylorr: Right. Yeah.

Michael: Not all traffic is good traffic, just as much as not all clients are good clients.

Taylorr: Right.

Michael: Right. And that’s where your average revenue per client, there are strategies in there where you can weed bad clients out by the way you structure your services and how you charge for them. And then, you can further filter them by the copy you use on your website; it makes no sense to waste anybody’s time or your money talking to people who are unqualified or not a good fit for your business.

Taylorr: That’s right.

Austin: So true. So true. Well, what I love about what you’re describing right now is that you’re making intentional decisions in the areas that you know matter the most, and then, you just let the data tell you about what’s working and what’s not working, it’s not rocket science, really. It’s just a matter of being intentional and knowing that you’re making decisions that are moving you in the direction that you want to go, and then, watching what happens and looking at the numbers to see what needs to be tweaked and iterated based on what results you’re getting. 

I think people, myself included, it’s easy to conflate how complex this is, the benefit of working with somebody like you, is that you get to skip the learning curve of what to be looking for, right? So, there’s, obviously, a tremendous amount of value in that, but I want people to feel empowered to be able to understand some of this stuff, because I don’t think at its core it takes a rocket scientist to make sense of this stuff, would you agree?

Michael: My book is 120 pages long.

Taylorr: Heck, yeah.

Austin: Good for you, that’s how it should be.

Michael: It’s tact with tactics. Gorilla marketing tactics, digital marketing tactics, when to ask for help, how to ask for help, all the things, okay. Even at the beginning of the book, I said, you’re not going to hear a bunch of stories about old Buzz, in the back in the day, when I made somebody million dollars, right? That’s just not who I am. I don’t have time for that, you don’t have time for that, we have businesses to run, we have poverty to stricken from the entrepreneurial world, we need to move revenue needles, so everything in this book is about that. 

Does it help you understand that you don’t have to conflate it; it does not have to be a compounding factor in your life, right? And, really, what it comes down to, is something you said, Austin, it’s that simple. It’s simple in its concept, as far as, strategy; what’s hard for people to do, is either spend the money to get it done or stick to spending time to get it done.

Taylorr: Yeah.

Michael: Those are the two main reasons people fail with their marketing. They don’t have the patience it takes. I have a client right now, just launched online exercise videos, okay. He thinks that if he spends about a quarter of a million dollars in the first year that he will be profitable. We looked at the numbers. He could spend about $220,000 and still lose money if we did everything right. Because his average revenue per client in the first year isn’t high enough.

Taylorr: Yeah.

Michael: So, I would have to get him 1600 subscribers. The guy’s in Alaska, right? There’s a lot of competition for what he’s doing; that means we have to then push this into Washington, Oregon, Utah, Idaho, upper Pacific, upper Northwest, right. So, I have to go back to him and say, hey, listen, unless you can tell me that your average lifetime value is higher than $90, you’re not going to make money in the first year to a year and a half.

Taylorr: Yeah.

Michael: Try to explain that to somebody.

Taylorr: Yeah. I expect patience.

Michael: And then, I have to tell him you can’t hire me because you can’t afford it. You can’t afford to spend that much money and lose it. And I tell people all the time, do not spend money on marketing that you can’t afford to lose, because not all marketing works. I can do everything right, with 30 years’ experience and it can fall flat on its face.

Taylorr: That’s right.

Michael: Okay. So, we’re going to have to invest in investments, have good days and bad days.

Taylorr: That’s right.

Austin: Truth. Man, you’re one of the good ones out there, man, you warm my heart.

Taylorr: That’s right, yeah, for sure.

Michael: I appreciate that.

Taylorr: Same here, yeah. It’s just the truth; it’s nothing more than that. It’s all about iteration, there’s no magic here, no smoke and mirrors.

Michael: It’s a science, it’s a creative science, people don’t realize, it’s, literally, a left brain and right brain science.

Taylorr: For sure. Man, what a gem. We so appreciate you coming on the show today, Michael.

Michael: I, really, appreciate you guys having me.

Taylorr: Yeah, for sure, man. So, how do people get their hands on The Rule of 26, where’s the best place to go?

Michael: So, The Rule of 26 is easy to get, just go to ruleof26.com, and that’ll give you the link for the eBook or the paperback.

Taylorr: Okay.

Michael: And then, if you want to learn more about Buzzworthy Integrated Marketing, which is my company, you can go to buzzworthy.biz.

Taylorr: Heck, yeah. Alright, guys. Links are in the show notes, as usual, go check it out. Super awesome content on the website, so you’ll definitely want to take a peek. And look, if you like this episode, don’t forget to rate it, like it, subscribe to it, and if you want more awesome resources like this, go to speakerflow.com/resources.

Austin: Yay. See you later, guys.