[Top Agency Series] Transform Your Marketing With Print Publications With Andy Buyting

Andy Buyting is the Founder and CEO of Tulip Media Group, an agency providing custom print and digital marketing strategies that generate leads and grow your business. He is a two-time international bestselling author, a serial entrepreneur, and a keynote speaker passionate about business development and strategic advising. Andy has a track record of scaling businesses, including growing a family business into a multi-million-dollar enterprise. He is known for his innovative marketing approach, particularly in leveraging print media and authority positioning to drive business growth.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:49] Andy Buyting talks about the inspiration behind Tulip Media Group
• [05:38] How print media can drive customer engagement in a digital age
• [10:40] Criteria for when to invest in a magazine as a marketing tool
• [15:27] Factors that determine the right size and impact of a magazine or print newsletter
• [16:46] Andy shares the process of content coordination and publication for client magazines
• [24:51] How to effectively manage the article approval process in publishing
• [30:28] How Tulip Media Group acquired initial clients and its expansion into various business sectors
• [36:33] Crucial strategies for boosting sales without a traditional sales team
• [43:32] Tips for winning clients and influencing people

In this episode…

Have you ever flipped through a gorgeously laid-out magazine and felt compelled to know more about the brand behind it? This tangible source of information catalyzes business growth, distinguishing a company as the leader in its field. But how can you strategically craft content, whether in print or digital forms, to elevate your market position and amplify your voice in an industry?

Scaling coach Andy Buyting delves into his journey of revolutionizing business marketing. With a keen eye for leveraging printed media’s potential, he discloses how he uses custom magazines to bolster clients’ industry authority. He draws on his experiences to demonstrate how a well-orchestrated mix of digital and printed content can attract and retain customer attention. Additionally, Andy shares tactics from his first-hand experience driving sales growth without a traditional sales team.

In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Andy Buyting, Founder and CEO of Tulip Media Group, about the transformative power of marketing through customized print media. Andy discusses who Tulip Media Group does, how print media can drive customer engagement in a digital age, the process of content coordination and publication for client magazines, and strategies for boosting sales without a traditional sales team.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Andy Buyting Website | LinkedIn
• Tulip Media Group
• Double Sales / Zero Salespeople: Optimize Your Sales And Marketing Into One Business Development Strategy That Works! by Andy Buyting and Jessica Embree
• How to Win Clients & Influence People: Create Instant Credibility and Gain an Unfair Advantage Over Your Competition by Andy Buyting

Special Mention(s):

• Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It…and Why the Rest Don’t by Verne Harnish
• 10x Is Easier Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy
• The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers’ Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy 
• Who Not How: The Formula to Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy
• All In: How Great Leaders Build Unstoppable Teams by Mike Michalowicz
• How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Related episode(s):

• “How to Have Your Business Run Without You with Mike Michalowicz, Author Fix This Next” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “How to Craft a Compensation Plan that Attracts and Motivates the Right People For Your Company With Verne Harnish, Owner Scaling Up” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Growth Through Acquisitions – What is Your KPI and Northstar? With Jason Swenk” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Building a Great Team and More Helpful Insights with Jason Swenk Host of The Smart Agency Master Class Podcast” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Sweet Process Series] How to Save Hundreds of Hours a Month Using Top Productivity Tools with Adi Klevit of Business Success Consulting Group” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “Whatever your customers are reading, have it come from you.”
• “If you want to be the authority, you need to invest in positioning yourself as the leading industry expert.”
• “We don’t just create content; we create a consistent and confidence-building sales experience.”
• “It’s better to engage a production person in sales, someone who is passionate about the product — than a salesperson looking for their next commission check.” 
• “Growing 10 times is actually easier than growing two times because it challenges you to reinvent everything.”

Action Steps:

1. Think like an industry authority: Position yourself and your business as the leading authority in your field by sharing your knowledge and expertise through customized content.
2. Leverage print media: Embrace the power of print to bolster your digital marketing efforts, using high-quality publications to enhance your brand’s image.
3. Align your messaging: Ensure that your brand message remains consistent across all channels of marketing, from online content to face-to-face interactions.
4. Streamline your sales process: Consider shifting from traditional salespeople to passionate advocates from within your production team.
5. Innovate with technology: Stay informed on emerging AI solutions that can optimize your marketing processes, ranging from content creation to customer service.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Andy Buyting of Tulip Media Group. Andy, before I formally introduce you, I like to point out other episodes people should check out of the podcast. A really good one was Verne Harnish, I know that you’re a big scaling up Verne Harnish fan as well. You’ve been trained in his methodologies. That was a really interesting episode. He started so many companies, including he founded EO, which I know you’re a member of, and I’m a member of a great organization. Check that episode out. And a lot of people even recommend his book Scaling Up on the podcast, another one was with Jason Swank.

Jason Swank, since this is part of the top agency series, Jason Swank talked about how he built up his agency to over eight figures and sold it, and then he started buying up agencies. So he talked about, you know, the valuation of the agency space and just business in general. M&A, so that was a really interesting episode. Another good one was Adi Klevit, who she specializes in done-for-you SOPs for companies. So we geeked out on our favorite productivity tools, efficiency and the stuff that makes things work. Andy like the processes behind everything. So check those out. More on inspiredinsider.com This episode is brought to you by Rise25.

At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the accountability, the strategy and the full execution. Andy, we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host, so they can create amazing content and amazing relationships, and most importantly, just focus on running their business.

For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships, and I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. And I found no better way, over the past decade to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you thought about podcasting, you should give questions. You can go to rise25.com to learn more, or email support@rise25 and a big shout out to Janice Porter for introducing today’s guest. Who does she does LinkedIn training, marketing, and is really, I think, cut from the same cloth, was a relationship-first approach, and that’s what I appreciate about her.

And I’m excited to introduce Andy Buyting. He’s a two-time International Best Selling Author, serial entrepreneur, strategic advisor. He wrote, Double Sales, Zero Sales People, How to Win clients and Influence People. I’m gonna have to check that one out Andy, because one of my favorites is How to Win Friends and Influence People. And he’s founder and CEO of Tulip Media Group. They started back in 2014 and they focus on business development and marketing, and they’ve helped businesses all over North America grow. They do a lot of different things, from digital marketing to print magazines and print newsletters, so direct mail and physical mail is not dead. So Andy, thanks for joining me.

Andy Buyting 3:33 

I’m excited to be here.

Jeremy Weisz 3:35 

So let’s start off, and for people listening, there is a video version. I’m going to share Tulip Media’s website for a second, but just start off talking about Tulip Media Group and what you do.

Andy Buyting 3:49 

Sure you mentioned Verne Harnish. Verne Harnish was actually an inspiration for the whole concept, actually. So one thing I learned from Verne is the concept of, I went through a program called Birth of giants, and he always said, you need to own the ink in your industry, whatever your customers are reading, have it come from you. And that at the time we were in a family business, I was doing retail. We had been doing a printed newsletter for probably 20 years. And I was talking to him one evening. I said, you know, so how should I do this? He said, Well, you should publish your own gardening magazines. We’re in the home and garden space, or put out your own magazine. And that magazine idea, kind of stock. I came home, we talked about it internally.

We decided to change, evolve our printed newsletters to printed magazines. And we were actually, we were the garden center chain that printed and published our own Home and Garden magazine four times a year. And that’s where the idea came from, that the other garden centers want to do the same thing. And I literally pitched it to a group of garden centers, not expecting anything. And a whole bunch of them bit on the program. We actually spun out a whole other business, which is Tulip Media Group now, so that’s where the whole Verne was…

Jeremy Weisz 5:16 

Were they all over the country, like those businesses, because obviously, if it’s one like next door to you, you’re not going to help your competitor necessarily. Where were the locations that you were helping?

Andy Buyting 5:30 

They were in other parts of the country? Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Weisz 5:32 

So you had obviously a case study in yourself of what you were doing. So it was easy to show them.

Andy Buyting 5:38 

Exactly. And we had been sharing what we were doing for a couple of years, and other garden centers in our buying group, they’re all non-competing. A lot of them said, that’s amazing, can you do that for me? And I thought, No, this is my thing. I don’t want to share this idea with anybody. But then it came to the point where I think it was, or it was 2012 or 2013 when I thought I’m going to throw this out there and see if people are interested. And yeah, a whole bunch of them wanted to sign on. So we started doing this Home and Garden magazine and I was recounting this story not long ago, our very first Home and Garden magazine, the largest distributed magazine I’m located in Canada, is Canadian Home and Garden magazine, or Canadian gardening magazine.

And every time it goes to print, it has a distribution of about 100,000 and our very first issue, because we were doing custom magazines for other people, leveraging other people’s mailing lists, we weren’t growing by one subscriber at a time. We were growing by 10,000 at a time, or 15,000 at a time. And our very first inaugural issue went out with a distribution, a print and distribution around 450,000. So we thought this is interesting. We have something here. So this became a whole other business that overtook my life for a number of years, and we’ve grown it. We’ve grown it ever since.

Jeremy Weisz 5:41 

We’ll talk about the transition from the family business to this business. And sounds like kind of was an offshoot of the family business, a bit, but you’re looking at the screen, you can see some beautiful magazine covers here. And you mentioned distribution. And people may be thinking, at what point, does it make sense? And are you, who are you sending it to? You people start only sending it to their clients and partners, or are they getting a distribution list. I can kind of see the home and garden maybe, is different from like, a B2B business and a B2C business. But I know you help a lot of B2B businesses as well.

Andy Buyting 7:51 

Yes, our focus over the years has transitioned to, it’s mostly B2B businesses, actually now, but with the retail, we would have it distributed so we would handle, you know, sending it out to, we’d select a certain criteria, but sending it out to mass, distribution in the marketplace. But as we evolved, you see, some of the ones that are entitled risk of business that that was, was some of our original concepts that when I was doing the home garden magazine was actually my insurance agency, the owner of the agency said, you know that Gardening magazine that you’re doing, could you do a business magazine for us? And I said, I know enough about business, sure I can. We can coordinate some content and put this together. And we started doing that with one insurance agency locally, and then that grew, and that took off. And now we’re doing them for insurance agencies from Hawaii to Florida, all corners of the continent, to Alaska and all across Canada as well.

And so then we started branching out and doing and what we found out is, over the first few years, doing the home and garden and the risk in business, we became really good at coordinating content and creating these custom magazines in a way that’s super we have a brand promise that our three E’s brand promise. We’re easy, we’re effective and we’re enjoyable, we’re going to make the process enjoyable. So we found that we got really good at developing custom print magazines and newsletters in a way that was just easy and really effective for our client partners. So we thought, well, there’s no different. We want to do a magazine on fashion, or a magazine on health and wellness area, or a magazine for law firms or a magazine for manufacturing companies. It’s all the same process, just different content and different strategy with the content, but the process to develop it is the same. So that’s how it branched out.

And now we tend to, we tend to focus on B2B, and with B2B client partners, we always say, start with your current clients and people in your pipeline, right prospects. And then you always want to have a handful for your office as well. So we have client partners that print 300 at a time, we have client partners that print 50,000 at a time and everywhere in between.

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