Jeremy Weisz 10:30
What’s the criteria, where it makes sense in your mind for someone to do a magazine or and when it doesn’t make sense?
Andy Buyting 10:40
Well, it’s like anything, any other kind of investment, it needs to be worth its while. In a magazine program or newsletter program, you are printing a physical magazine and sending it out there through US post. So there is an investment there. Usually, when we look at it in the way that I put it, needs to be worth the return the ROI in positioning. The investment is worth it for you to position yourself as an expert in your area of knowledge, in your area of expertise, to become, to invest in your positioning as the authority. And when we look at the investment level, a newsletter is a little bit less. But most people come to us for the magazines. The magazines are just something truly unique. And a magazine, like a 16-page magazine, the very first one that rolls off the press is about $9,000 right? Every other one you’re just paying for paper, ink, a couple of staples and a stamp.
So every other one is pennies, but the very first one off the press is quite a bit. If you’re doing a 32-page magazine, that number is closer to 12, $13,000 so if you’re doing a quarterly program, and let’s say, you’re investing 15,000 a quarter for, magazines, whether it’s 3000 5000 magazines, you need to look at and say, Okay, does it make sense for me to invest $60,000 a year? In most of our programs, we always say, if you’re not willing to invest at least 25,000 it’s just too much, and I would suggest going other routes. But if it makes sense to invest that level of money, to be able to have your positioning such that you want to be that authority in your marketplace, you want to be the first people that your prospects will call when they need your services, and if you’re willing to invest that, to own the ink in your industry, as Verne would say, then it’s absolutely worth looking at. And you will stand out, and you will set yourself apart, like Mike Michalowicz, you have up right now.
Jeremy Weisz 13:00
Yeah. I mean, I imagine B2B, if someone has a high client lifetime value and they get one client, it can pay for it. Or if it’s like a high volume B2C, I know people who have supplement companies who probably, they should watch this. And I know a lot of them, they’re just doing online only. I bet they kill it with a digital-like magazine, selling their products actually.
Andy Buyting 13:26
Well, even if you did a small program and sent it out with your purchases. We have clients that have done that. You think of Costco magazine, right? You know, it works for them. And I mean, they’re a different beast. I understand that. But even if you sent, if you print it out enough to send out with every order that you ship out, if you’re a B2C mail order business or something like that, or you have, we have retail stores. We have retail services like, healthcare services, spas and so on, that we work with. And even if you just send it home with the people that come in through your front door, and you do, maybe you don’t do quarterly, but you do two issues per year. And every six months you have a stack of new magazines that you hand out. I mean, Jack Dailey, you saw his on there. Jack likes to have a new magazine at least once a year so that he can hand them out to people that come out to his conferences, and come out to hear him speak.
Jeremy Weisz 14:37
Yeah. I mean, someone could just do a run of, like, 30,000 of them, and just use them to send out to their through with their customers. I love this one. I want you know on this page, Andy a way for, I don’t know if you’re allowed to do this or not, but people subscribe to some of these magazines right here. Maybe they only want certain people on their list, but the Mike Michalowicz on the podcast, I definitely would subscribe to his magazine here. They love this one, this one, Joe Polish, that’s just, I love the headline there, which is his Genius Network, a scam. It definitely draws it in. What’s the minimum size like pages wise that you recommend?
Andy Buyting 15:27
We recommend 16 pages minimum. Yeah, 16 pages gives, if you’re doing larger quantities. And look like I said, minimum quantities, we do anything from 300 and up. So you don’t need a lot, right? Most of our client buyers are probably in that three to 5000 range, to be honest with you. But the minimum size 16 page, you get smaller than that, then it doesn’t at 16 pages, it’s getting a little more substantial, 32 pages nice. And if you’re doing larger quantities, like you’re doing a few 1000 the production process, they literally send a sheet through that has 16 pages are printed at a time. So it’s the most efficient for production. It’s very efficient for distribution, through us, post and so on. So that’s why, yeah, 16 pages are a nice starting point.
Jeremy Weisz 16:28
MSP success, talk about what you did there, and maybe some of the items that you include in here, like how you include calls to action and other elements that people should make sure that are in their direct response, physical mail.
Andy Buyting 16:46
Yeah. So we do a lot of work with Robin Robbins and her company, technology, Marketing Toolkit and Big RED Media she has as well. But MSP, success is one of their magazines, and with them. It’s interesting because we do a number of different programs. One is this magazine that you’re looking at their MSP Success Magazine, that’s their primary vehicle for standing apart and standing out in a crowded marketplace. This they produce every other month. So they do six issues per year. It’s a lot. It is a lot, but we make, like I said, we make it super easy. Now they’re, they’re a content-generating engine themselves, correct? You know what I mean? And so we often do have to create some new content for them, but not a lot. A lot of it comes through with what they have on the go already. Now with them, they’re great to work with because they understand marketing. They understand the value and the power of marketing, of good marketing.
And as you can see, there’s a lot of call to actions with QR codes used throughout the magazine. We are integrating some new technologies onto the online version that you’ll be seeing coming out in the coming year, but so they do like to start the conversation in print and continue it online, and engage with people online. And one thing that’s interesting that most people don’t realize is that most, a lot of the Google searches that people look up, they start or they come from something that a person read, either read in print, either in a magazine or in a book, that kind of thing. Because oftentimes we’ll read an article, be interested in what it says, or piqued your interest on one topic or another. And you go online and search that up. And most people don’t realize how many searches originate because somebody read something in print. So these folks, Robin and her entire team, they leverage this very heavily, and they love the magazine.
They’ve been doing it for years as a way to set themselves apart as a way, there’s no other, there’s no bigger authority in the MSP space than Robin Robbins and her team at Technology Marketing Toolkit. And they recognize that, and then they use the magazines for enhancing that, and to engage with QR codes and surveys, and all kinds of different tactics.
Jeremy Weisz 19:03
Andy, looks beautiful. And what kind of team does it take to put all these together and to run this?
Andy Buyting 19:46
Well, we make it super easy, like I said, one of our brand promises is making it easy and we have one of our core values is around, we’re relentless about quality, ease and ROI. And, we’re always looking for ways to make it as easy as possible for client partners, for us, for the team, like anytime we work with a client like TMT, any new client partner is given a dedicated production manager who manages the whole project. They are kind of the puppet master behind everything. The Product Production Manager. Will team them up. We have a team of ghost writers that are all we have a process where we match up clients with the right writer that will understand their voice. We’ll get the client involved in choosing the writer. So we work with a team of contract ghostwriters.
We have probably 12, 14, different writers. So when we sign on a client partner, what we want to do is make it as easy as possible for them to put out their own magazine. It’s all about them. It has their look and feel. We’ll make sure that it’s designed to their specs, their brand specs and so on, and their voice. But where we can, we’ll take the writing off their plate. We still need them to be involved. But instead of writing articles, what we always tell folks is that, look, jump on a phone call with a writer in 10 minutes and let them write it. And same with me, I don’t write anything that I put out there. I have a ghostwriter. And what I do is I rant into a recording app on my smartphone, send the recording off.
The writer writes it. I do a round of edit because they don’t always drive the points home that I want to drive home, and then they do another round of editing based on my feedback. And then it goes to a proofer. And so we have a whole process, it gets written and edited. Then it’s reviewed by the client. Goes back it’s further edits, then it goes through a proofreader, then it gets laid out in the magazine itself, then it goes to a copy editor, and then it goes back to the client for final approval. And once that’s done for at least four sets of eyes have read every single article in that magazine for proofing purposes and so on.
So we’re very diligent about that, and ideally the client only spends maybe 20 minutes on an article, because if I work with a ghostwriter, I’m not a writer, by the way, Jeremy. I’ll confess English was not my strong point in school. So if I were to sit down write an article, it would take me two hours and or maybe longer, maybe three hours. Or I can rant for 10 minutes and a cell phone, and a writer will write an article that is far better than anything I could do, and I can just edit it, and it takes me 20 minutes instead of three hours, and it’s a whole lot better. So we have a whole process, and there’s a whole team that goes behind that. And we take care of all the printing logistics. We take care of the distribution logistics. There’s a lot of work around that, so that at the end the day, there’s a few phone calls or a few recordings that are done, some proofing editing.
But our whole thing is that inside of just a few hours, every quarter, you get your magazine done, delivered through the mail, the postal system, and the only thing you touch physically are, let’s say you want 200 copies sent to your office for your own use. That’s all you touch physically.
Jeremy Weisz 23:47
Yeah. I mean, each one of those pieces could be a lot, even this distribution piece. I’m curious in that process, it’s pretty thorough. How do you manage the approval process? Because I imagine different clients has different levels of engagement with it. And some are like, whatever it is, Andy, I’m sure it’s good. That’s how I am. I’m just like, it’s probably fine. But some people, it will hold up the process, obviously, if people want changes, and we’ve all experienced as agencies, they bring it back. One person likes it, approves it, and then someone else is like, actually, I want this change. How do you manage the, and you have a lot of content that you’re putting out at once, as we saw with the magazine, when you scroll through this, it’s at least 16 pages, right? And this one’s 28 or yeah, 32. Oh, yeah 32 pages. There’s a lot to if someone’s pickier, like, there could be a lot of possible changes. How do you manage that approval process?
Andy Buyting 24:51
Well, it starts with, we spend a little bit more time on the front end. So, you know when we kick off a new publication, new production. We start with, we call it the, you know, it’s the planning meeting. So we start by doing what we call a flat plan. It’s all laid out on just every page, 32 pages are laid out on the screen and, okay, what’s going to go, where? What’s the strategy? What’s the overall theme of this issue? What’s the strategy with each different article? Who’s going to be the contributor, and then we’ll get to work on it. And sometimes all we need is that email introduction to who’s going to be the contributor for this article or that article, and then we’ll reach out to that person, pair them up with the ghostwriter that we’ve already paired up with for that client, and the ghostwriter gets to know the voice of the client. So the very first one, there’s always a little bit more work involved. But after that, it’s just quarterbacking everything. What I find, one of our client partners is Andy Bay with Petra Coach.
And I was on his I know Andy personally, so I was on his launch call a couple weeks ago, and we, basically, we decided on the theme. I wanted to give some suggestions myself, so we decided on the theme. We made our plan for the content, and then that’s what Andy wanted to be involved in. He wanted to be involved in the strategy, really understanding that. We now, he knows that, the writer knows his voice and is good there. I think there’s only one article that Andy’s putting in the rest of it is shared among people inside of his organization, as well as, yeah, there’s one of his Petro Coach post. You know, Andy does the welcome letter, and usually one article inside the rest of it is done by other people on his team or their guest contributors that we coordinate. And we put it all together, his 16 page, and we put it all together.
So he gets involved in the strategy call, he gets involved in his one article, and then he reviews it all at the end. But we’ve now, when you get into a rhythm, we’ve got the look and feel that he’s looking for. We’ve got the, he’s comfortable with his writer, he’s comfortable with the process. And it doesn’t take much time, the very first one always takes a little bit extra time, but then they become pretty, pretty easy. And like any agency, you’re right that some people go through it with a fine tooth comb at the end. And we have another client, partner that I can think of in Wisconsin. Every time we send him a proof, the ladies the team kind of jokingly say that, oh yeah, five minutes later, he sends an email back and says, looks good. I think he looks at the front cover and that’s yep, it’s all good. If you’ve done the proofing and you’ve made sure there’s no spelling mistakes or anything like, it’s the content. He was involved in the content. But that’s all he needs to know.
Jeremy Weisz 27:59
Yeah. I’ve always curious how other people handle that process, because they’re, especially you’re printing something. So it’s not like you can go back and edit it afterwards, like, print it. Obviously it’s online. You can go, okay, here it is, and you can edit it. But when you’re printing 10,000 of these things, like, that’s it.
Andy Buyting 28:18
One thing we do is we get them involved, like the article is written and edited, and then it’s sent to them for a review, and we always tell there’s going to be edits the first time through, because the writer, they don’t know. They know how to write. They’re really good at writing, but they don’t know, they’re not the expert in your area of expertise and your subject matter expertise, so you need to review it. So they’re involved, and they approve the article before it ever gets laid out, and then they approve the final product. But by then they’ve seen every article. After the first issue, we do, we’re good at understanding the look and feel that they’re going after. So typically, when it’s finally laid out, and we give everybody one week to review the final product, we have a very effective production schedule that they stay on, they get updates, and the final product, they do have a week to review that get any edits in.
And one thing we do, because I’m sure a lot of agencies run into this, we certainly have as well, is we’ve learned over the years that there can only be one coordinator on their end, and we like it if it’s not the boss, right? If it’s not the CEO, that there’s a marketing coordinator or the CMO, or somebody that is accountable on their end to be the conduit. So if there is feedback, it all comes through one person, and it comes through once, as opposed to, yeah, I approved it, but Johnny hasn’t approved yet, yet, and Jane still hasn’t looked at it. Well, why don’t you all get together and look at it. Get all your thoughts in one sitting, and then let’s go through it together.
Jeremy Weisz 30:06
I’d love to hear some of the milestones from a client perspective. I can see in the beginning, it kind of grew out of the home and garden business, and you had a bunch of clients from there. What was when you think of the next kind of phase in the B2B phase, what was a milestone there, as far as how you got that first client?
Andy Buyting 30:28
Well, I already shared how we got our first B2B client with the insurance agency who was looking to grow his commercial insurance business. And then for the longest time, we focus, we had a lot of growth insurance in the insurance space. It’s a big industry. One of the things that we always do as well as we offer to create a media kit for them, so they would actually have some of their providers, of the insurance companies, carriers, sponsor their magazine in part. So we grew very quickly, and still, insurance is one of our larger sectors of the business. Probably makes up about 30% of our business now their insurance agencies. So that was a big one. But I remember, at the time we were focusing on, okay, we knew Home and Garden, we knew insurance, and we stuck with that. We didn’t do we said no to everybody else. But then we were at, actually one of Verne Harnishes events, at Scaling Up event, we had a sponsor.
We had a table there. And one of the attendees was in the medical spa business. They said, we actually have it on our one-year plan this year to start our own publications, start our own magazine, and I’ve been tasked with it was the owner, the founder. It was one that I want to push forward. And I’ve been tasked with trying to figure out how we’re going to do this. So, can you guys do this? And we, at the time, we said, well, we don’t right now, so the answer is no. But you know what, I want to think about it. I told my I want to think about it. So I talked with the team that evening, we’re in Atlanta, and I talked with the team that evening, and I said, why couldn’t we do this? Why couldn’t we make this happen? And it’s the same process, and that’s the milestone when we recognize that, you know what, it’s the same process. It’s a 32-page magazine. It’s the same process.
We got to coordinate content. It’s just about different topics, so we need to find different writers that have some background knowledge in it and that we can do. We know how to do that. And that’s when it was kind of an aha moment, when we said yes to Him, and all of a sudden, that magazine was a great success, and that just spurred on. Then, when the fire truck manufacturer came to us, or when Robbins came to us with MSP, or…
Jeremy Weisz 32:50
How does a fire truck manufacturer find you? Maybe you were to say they got your magazine.
Andy Buyting 33:00
Actually they did. They got our own, so we do our own magazine, and he actually saw it, and we have Tulip Media Marketing magazine. And so the owner, his name is Gordon Green, great guy. He actually called me up because he saw a copy of the magazine. And actually they came to us, it was kind of a unique situation, but they came to us at the beginning of Covid, when he said, our only business development strategy are trade shows and conferences, and they’re all taken away from us. So we started doing we didn’t do a magazine, because we thought there with their positioning that they wanted to take, they’re selling million dollar fire trucks to fire chiefs.
Fire Chiefs don’t go out and buy fire trucks every day, right? So on average, and they specialize in rural fire stations where a fire chief has maybe two trucks, they last for 20 years. So in essence, they’re buying a new truck every 10 years. It’s every 10 years they need to re-educate themselves on how to buy a truck, because that’s a big purchase. So we position them as we took the strategy that we’re going to be the resource for fire chiefs that need to reeducate themselves on even how to write an RFP, right? So with them, we’re doing their digital and their print and with their digital everything, we position themselves as you know, if you want to avoid the five biggest mistakes that fire chiefs make when buying a fire truck, here’s how you do it. If you want templates for an RFP, we will be the resource. So we did a whole digital strategy around that, but then we sent a printed newsletter, because a magazine is informative, but 50% of a strategy of a magazine is the content you put in. The other 50% is the visual, because it’s part informative. It’s part entertainment.
And when it comes to building a fire truck or buying a fire truck, we don’t need the entertainment, right? We want to be a little bit more businessy. We want to be a little bit more serious, because this is a big decision that these fire chiefs make. So for them, we do a newsletter, and we call it the apparatus, and it goes out to fire stations. They’re on the East Coast, so it goes to fire stations up and down the East Coast, up and down New England states and so on. And that’s where they focus. And it’s been very successful. It set them apart, for the fire chiefs who need to educate themselves every 10 years when they’re buying a new truck. These are the guys you want to go to, because everybody else is going to sell me a truck. These guys are going to inform me how to buy a truck. And that’s the position we took. And the newsletter was really well done. It serves that well.
Jeremy Weisz 36:01
I love it. And I know with the family business, I know you helped grow it. And I mean, everyone there helped grow up, but it went from 800,000 to over $5 million and so, the old business, right? Yeah. And so you know a thing or two, and then you brought that in the Tulip Media, when you start growing that business, and I know you have a book, Double Sales, Zero Sales People. So what’s a favorite story that will teach us a lesson in that book?
Andy Buyting 36:33
I got a story for you. So the very first opening chapter in this I talk about a day in 2019, we had started Tulip Media, and I did it the way that I thought needed to be done, and I hired some salespeople. And we were smiling and dialing, and we built the sales team up to seven people, a sales manager, and six sales people doing logging hundreds of phone calls a day and emails, and we had the dashboards up with Salesforce track and everything and all this stuff, and it was incredibly expensive to run this sales department, and the interesting thing was that it wasn’t working. We were never hitting our quota every quarter. We’d miss our quota quarter after quarter, and then I heard a good friend of mine talk about this experience, and it inspired me. I have two main partners in the business, and inspired me. I brought it to them, and I said, here, I want to talk to you about something.
What if we didn’t have a sales department at all? And anyway, I open up the book, and that’s where part of the title came from, is I opened up the book with a story of us making that tough decision and driving back after lunch to the office, and one by one, I brought everyone from the sales team in, and we let the entire team go in about two hours, every single one of them gone. Then I brought the rest of the company together, and I told them what I just done, and said that, the timing was good, because we were going into quarterly planning right afterwards. And I told them what we had done, and that we have a plan. And they said, okay, let’s see what this is. So we get into our planning sessions. And I really stress that I wanted, now is the time we’re going to at the time. I called it our automated sales process. What it was I had tactics and strategies that I wanted to release online and through our print, between print and online, to go from being an outbound sales organization to be in an inbound sales organization.
And yeah, one afternoon we left the entire sales team go, we go into planning session, and I said, okay, what’s the sales quota for this quarter, we’re going to keep it the same. And I remember my right-hand person slammed her hand on the table. She said, don’t set us up for failure. We haven’t hit this in our quote in 18 months as a company, don’t set us up for failure. I said, no, no, trust me. And I had an intern that was fearless, a marketing intern that was fearless, and I really liked and we ended up hiring him, but I said, just, here’s my vision, and we just, we got our heads down, and we strategize, and we started doing these online tactics, and we revamped the website. We started by building a website that would convert, right? If the right person gets onto your website, if they don’t convert, they’re not worth anything, right? So we got really good at website conversion.
We got really good at Pay-per-click advertising. We got really good at SEO and understanding what the core customers are looking for, and then got really good at engaging with them online. But also getting them into our ecosystem. So they’d received the print magazine, which helped us with our branding and positioning. And it was interesting, two weeks before the quarter ended, we hit our quota for the first time in 18 months with no salespeople. Oh, and then the question was, who’s going to take the sales call? So you’re going to generate these sales calls.
Jeremy Weisz 40:21
Yeah, that’s my next question. Yeah.
Andy Buyting 40:23
I said, who is most passionate about the work that we do? And it was the production people. I said, think about it. If you’re buying a car, who would you rather talk to a salesperson, who you get the sense and feeling that you’re their next commission check, or car enthusiast who actually comes across, because that person loves cars, and they’re taught, they’re underneath the hood with you. Take a look at this, and, oh, look, listen to how the doors close. Like, isn’t that amazing? I said it’s the production people. It’s the people that know our programs inside and out, and that are excited about it. You talk to a graphic designer, and they could talk about the color schemes and this is how we can lay out the pages, and we can have this done this way. Oh, let me do I got an idea for you. And people will get excited. Say, yeah, yeah, I want that. And then what we always used to do is we’d send them back to the salesperson, where that sale would die because the salesperson is not passionate about the product. They’re passionate about their commission check. So the production people, and then I remember one the young lady said, I’m not a salesperson. I said, you don’t have to be.
All you have to do, get them excited. Get them excited about their project. Talk to them about their magazine, about their newsletter, and just say, here’s your closing line is that we would love to help you out with this. And as soon as they give a positive affirmation, great, I’m gonna have somebody send you a contract. You got to sign the bottom line, and we’re gonna get started just like we had talked about. And they started taking these calls, and sometimes I would come in because I’m a good closer, so I would come in later. So they would have them excited and say, hey, look, our CEO, Andy, would really like to meet you. Can I bring him in on a call tomorrow, and I would help close, but I’d say, 50% of the time they would come to me and say, we get to send out a contract, and we have their launch meeting booked for next Thursday, so they’re already talking production. They’re on to the next thing, the contract stuff, is stuff they don’t want to do.
So our accounting, the young lady in accounting would prep that and send that out but that’s the way it happened is we, we did it without salespeople. Because as soon as you talk to a salesperson, you become defensive, yeah, it’s human nature. But you talk to a production person, or somebody who is an enthusiast about what you’re doing, then you’ll get excited as well.
Jeremy Weisz 40:38
There were people doing sales. There wasn’t salespeople. The definite how you define salespeople.
Andy Buyting 43:09
And when we got over stretched in capacity, we hired another production manager to also take phone calls, right? Instead of hiring a salesperson.
Jeremy Weisz 43:22
Love it, so check it out. Double Sales, Zero Sales People, that the other one I wanted to hear a favorite story from How to Win clients and Influence People.
Andy Buyting 43:32
Yeah, How To Win Clients and Influence People was the first book that I had published under the Tulip Media banner. And it was a lot of that my opening story there is the one that I shared earlier about Verne and how you want to influence people, is through positioning yourself as the leading authority, owning the ink in your industry. And in that book, where I focus a lot on the three pillars of marketing, being print, digital and interactive marketing and how you need to have a strategy for all three. They need to work synonymously.
They need to work together and not be at odds, so that you truly do position yourself as an authority and people have confidence when they’re talking to you. And in there, I share the story, you know, a hypothetical story, you know, let’s say you want to buy a new car, and your sister owns a BMW, and you’re thinking, wow, I never thought of myself as a BMW person, but she really likes it. Then, so you start to do some research online. You’re looking you’re doing some reading online. Maybe you’re reading a blog post, or maybe you’re reading some content on the BMW website, you go into a local dealership, they hand you some print marketing where, really high-end, nice, beautiful magazine that really instills their brand, like really solidifies their brand, and it’s similar content to what you see online, you talk to a salesperson there, or ideally a car enthusiast.
Now the second book came out, and that person using the same talking points, the same messaging, the same kind of verbal, interactive branding that you’ve already seen digitally and in print, then you’ve got a good, solid, very consistent and in a confidence-building sales or buying experience that will really help you make that decision to buy. And in that book I talk, if you’re digital, like most people will get organized around their digital, some people don’t believe in print, so they miss that whole opportunity for that credibility piece that print will provide. But those who do print, they have those two working synonymously and complimentary. But then, when they have their interactive marketing, my big thing was your marketing doesn’t end with the stuff you put online or on paper. It continues when they have those first interactions with your company.
So if they talk to somebody at your showroom, and all of a sudden they’re hearing different things than what they just read about or just consumed in your magazine, they’re going to lose confidence in your business. And that’s branding, and you need to be very smart about that. So winning clients and influencing people is about brand positioning. It’s about owning the ink in your industry. I still love the saying that I heard from Verne back in 2003 when I first met him, which is whatever your customers are reading, have it come from you? And that’s a big part of the strategy, or the theme and the content and How To Win Clients and Influence People.
Jeremy Weisz 46:52
Andy, last question, first of all, thank you. Thanks for sharing the stories lessons. It’s been quite a journey. I want to point people to before I ask it to tulipmediagroup.com, they can learn more if they’ve been watching the video. They can see us poking around and check out some of the work that you’ve done. Last question is, I mean, I could see all the books behind you on the bookshelf. I’m curious your favorite books? It could be just resources in general, favorite books, favorite software. What are some of your favorite resources that we should point out?
Andy Buyting 47:23
This could be a whole other hour. Jeremy. I could go on and on. I do love Scaling Up a couple of the books. I’ll share a couple of the books, especially for the entrepreneurs out there, one book that our company, is big on reading, and we dive into a different book every quarter. And the one that we just finished is 10x Is Easier Than 2x by Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan. And by the way, the two of them, they also wrote The Gap In The Gain and Who, Not How, as well as 10x Is Easier Than 2x and the whole concept there is that if you want to grow 10 times, it’s actually easier than growing two times, because if you grow two times, you’re gonna do a little bit better at this, a little bit better at that, you just got to improve this and that. But if you want to go 10 times, you’ve got to reinvent everything. So I love that love, love, love that book.
Yeah, that’s one of my favorite books recently. And we also actually, that was last quarter’s book. This quarter’s book that’s just ending is we all read Mike Michalowicz is All In his latest book, which is great, especially as our team is growing. It was a great, great content in there, but those are some great books. I could go on and on. As far as software and so on, as a company, we are embracing and your latest strategies, we actually have one of the young ladies who really has a passion around AI and looking at systems and processes. We have her strategically, we hired so that her, she’s a veteran, and we have 40% of her time. So two days a week, she’s tasked with researching new AI, testing new AI, and bringing it into the company.
So we use AI in the accounting. We are starting to use it more and more in content creation, but we still always want to have the human touch, because there’s lots of things are evolving and changing so fast that what I say may not be relevant in a year’s time, but as of now, if you had ChatGPT writing all your content, Google is not going to react well with that, necessarily. And so you still need the human intervention, and you still need to make sure the strategy’s sound. And that comes back to understanding what the business strategy is, what the vision of the founder is, you know where they want to take their business, and that all.
All has to work together so but AI in general, when it comes to graphic design, content creation, things like project management, all the marketing, like, it’s coming into the company Fast and Furious, to the point where we have somebody who’s actually, she’s becoming really, really good at it, devoting two days a week with nothing but that. So that’s a resource that I think we’re all going to be facing in one way, shape or form. We are.
Jeremy Weisz 50:36
Andy, I want to be the first one to thank you. Thanks for sharing. Everyone can check out tulipmediagroup.com to learn more and more episodes of the podcast. And Andy, thanks so much. We’ll see everyone next time.
Andy Buyting 50:46
Yeah, thank you for having me.
