Michael Buzinski, or Buzz as he's known online, is no stranger to the virtual world. In fact, he's made the transition from brick-and-mortar to 100% virtual himself.
The advantages of transitioning from a brick-and-mortar to a virtual environment are many. One advantage is that a virtual environment allows for more flexibility in how employees can work. In a brick and mortar, employees are tethered to their desks, but in a virtual world, they can move about more freely. This increased flexibility allows for more creativity and productivity. In a virtual world, there is less of a need for physical space. A final advantage of transitioning to a virtual world is that it allows employees to connect with people from all over the globe, increasing collaboration and innovation.
Michael Buzinski, from the Build Your Team show, is going to share his story of how he transitioned from a brick-and-mortar company to a company that is 100% virtual. He has learned a lot in the process and is excited to share his insights with you!
Listen to the Episode
Atiba de Souza: Hey everybody today on the Build Your Team show, I'd like to introduce you to Michael Buzinski. Now we call him Buzz. Right? Buzz and I had a lot of fun over the years together. We actually do a lot of going out and hanging out together and going to toga parties and all sorts of different things.
But Buzz is going to share with you today, his transition from being a brick and mortar. Big building, lots of square feet and everybody coming into work to 100% virtual environment and some of the lessons that he's learned and why he made that transition. Now, as always, we are brought to you by Client Attraction Pros.
If you are an expert in your field, but not a recognized expert in your field, it's time to change that, my friends. It is time for you to become the thought leader that your business and your field needs you to be. And we at Client Attraction Pros can help you do just that.
Atiba de Souza: Hey everybody! I've got my friend Michael Buzinski of buzzworthy.biz with me today. And today on Build Your Team we're going to have a really great conversation because he has done what so many of us are trying to do. He's built massive teams for a massive business and then taking all of that virtual. Now, his team is 100% virtual. So, if transition is a question that you've been asking about. If fully remote versus hybrid is a question you've been asking about. Yeah, we're going to tackle some of those today, while we also learn how he is literally helping people double their revenue. So you're going to learn about how to get better staff and double your revenue. Michael, welcome to the show. How are you?
Michael Buzinski: That was a wonderful introduction. Love it!
Atiba de Souza: You are worth it because you are Buzzworthy, my friend.
Michael Buzinski: I love it!
Atiba de Souza: So, don't take his low key. Thank you. To me, any kind of way he is full of energy, full of life. One of the things that, first and foremost, one of the places where Michael and I really kind of bonded was at a toga party.
Dressed up as a in a togas and having fun. I don't even know, there has been an occasion. Right?
Michael Buzinski: Here at TNC, I think.
Atiba de Souza: We were at TNC but there has been to be wearing togas, other than just the fact that we decided to theme the party, Toga. So whoever, Dave who was throwing the party that told us.
Michael Buzinski: I think that was his idea, yes. He decided...
Atiba de Souza: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Michael Buzinski: ...everybody is in San Diego therefore we should be Sparta.
Atiba de Souza: There it is. Just tell us a bit of your history. Tell us about buzzworthy.biz. And what your transition has kind of been?
Michael Buzinski: Sure, actually that's a great way of going through it. So I was actually in service for 10 years. I have to run it up a couple of corporate ladders in sales and marketing. They wanted degrees for me to get where I wanted or I ended up just running a lot of politics that I didn't enjoy at the corporate level. And so I joined services, third generation Air Corps. I flew on a plane called AWACS, airborne warning and control system 707 with a radome on top. I was a computer tech there for almost 10 years and all the while I was also trying to be a rockstar. I was a professional jazz trombonist at age 13.
Atiba de Souza: Is that right?
Michael Buzinski: But band broke up when everybody went to high school 'cause that was, we were all in junior high when that band got together. Our conductor tried to keep us together but high school got in the way for most. I picked up a guitar at age of 15 taught myself how to play, taught other people how to play other instruments. So I have people to play with and over the years had gigging bands and aspirations of rock stardom but not quite tall enough, dark enough or talented enough for that gig, so I started a recording studio and about a year into that I got out in 2005 started Buzzbiz Studios. And it was a recording studio.
I had a horrible experience with recording studios as a musician and working musician so I wanted a working musician studio. At the time I had just gotten into forces up in Alaska where I opened studio. Lots of things I didn't think about but I just dove in. I literally had no safety net. January 29 is the last time I got paid by the United States Air Force and I had two rents to pay. One for the apartment I was living in and one for the studio which the studio had one and a half times more lease payment then the apartment I was sleeping in. And after doing that for just 12 months I've realized that surving of a starting musicians was a horrible business plan. Not that I had written one out.
Then, I pivoted to an immediate production house for small businesses. I saw that gap there. I wanted to help those folks. That eventually grew into a creative agency and we had 13,000 square foot facility, multimillion dollar sales years, staff of 22 plus contractors. You name it, we had it. We were going up against the folks, the institutional ad agencies in Alaska. were starting to encroach on their clients because they will hear about us and they were coming to us and we're like yeah, sure, we'll do that. You're not going to charge us all these other things and back then I didn't realize what we were worth. And so, we were always a less expensive than the competitors. And I had no idea, I was just basically growing my business.
And so in 2018, I decided that it was time to do something about my life because I had a job. I was CEO and I was sick and tired of it. I wasn't playing with clients. I wasn't getting to do creative stuff. I was just always dealing with the building and employees and blah blah blah. I wasn't getting paid what I was worth compared to what revenue we were bringing in. And so, I told everybody to go home at the end of 2019. We launched, what is now called Buzzworthy Integrated Marketing. I went from 20 or 13,000 square feet down to 1300 square feet, and I had a hybrid and one assistant in the room. It was actually a three room office area. Within six months of that I actually downsized that and went to the VA and staff and everybody was remote at that point and went down to 500 square feet. And then from there within a year of launching . By October 2019, when me and my wife moved from Alaska down to Illinois. We went to, I went to a coworking space and that was our address. So technically I don't have any office space, right?
And so we've been here in Springfield Illinois since October, 2019. Of course COVID hit, and I was already about a year and three months in. And I was like, yeah. So the only thing I really had to worry about is my clients and we were on lack in staffs. So we got really lucky with our client list, lost one to COVID. Think at the time we were at 25 on retainer plus the hundreds that we serve through the legacy media company. That's all on autopilot with an account manager, that's all they do, is just taking requests for the old graphic design and printing. And then, the new team just does website development and website marketing. And we work specifically with service centric businesses.
Atiba de Souza: Now that's a history. So first I do want to say, on behalf of everyone listening. Thank you for your service. Okay. We do want to definitely honor you for that 'cause that takes a special person, so thank you! We're going to talk about staffing, but you said something that I think so many business owners run into that I'd be remiss if I let this go. You didn't realize what you were worth. You were grossly undercharging and you weren't paying yourself commensurate with the amount that the company was bringing. Give me a favor, just take two minutes dive into that. In terms of, what was the point in time when you realized that? And then what was the shift that had to happen to make that change?
Michael Buzinski: So what made me realize, it made me stop and just understand where I was at as a business owner. We took on a feature length documentary and so we went on tour in Italy with a local concert choir . It I was only an 11 day trip. One day into it, one part of the building, this building was so big it had three different meters for electricity. And for some reason my office manager never could keep track of this one, and it was in this small part of the building that didn't get used all the time, but it powered our print shop that we had in house. And so, I get this message saying, "Hey, power went out in the building. We got a notice that the bill wasn't paid.", this is just weird. I said "okay". So, I messaged the manager and I said, "Hey, make sure that bill gets paid. Get the power on.". We have . Power on by the end of the day. Didn't think much of it. But then, it just, all these little swirls of rumors were going around and like people were starting to think that we were going bankrupt and all also other things. And I'm like, "holy cow".
So I'm working 18 hour days, you know, on the road shooting a video all day from the time I get up at the time I to bed. And I'm doing this for 10 days and I've got this on top of me. So by the time I got back, there's a little coup d'état that had happened. And basically, I had a little sect of millennials that they had their complaints. And then at that point I was looking at it I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to lose about a third of my staff.". In Alaska, you don't have all those people. Like, you can't just go "Okay, I just need seven more of those people.". So then, I'm like, "Okay, so now I'm going to spend the next six months rebuilding this team.". It's going to take me another year and a half to get them back up to where we want it. We had our culture down, we had everything. Everybody was like super stoked to be there, had people that were like, "Hey, I don't really like Alaska but I love what we're doing here, so that's why I'm staying.". Like, literally in front of me, in my desk, same people, four months later going, "You're a bleed, but this is bull crap.". And I'm like, "What is going on here?", and I just could not win for losing. And I'm like, "Okay, so I keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. Aright, what do we have to do to change this?
And I just sat right in front of this gorgeous foyer that we just built. I was only in this building for three years. It was the biggest pain in the butt. But anyway, I digress. I sit in there going, if I don't do something different now I will always be in this position. So, how do I changed it? Where's my biggest pain point? This building. What's my second biggest pain point? All these employees that I can't seem to keep happy, regardless of who I put over them, regardless who manages them, regardless of all the things we try to do for them. I didn't have any of those cool golden handcuffs or whatever you want to call them to incentivize these young kids to be around. I'm just going to go, we're going to go remote. There's no reason to have $15,000 hanging over me every month for a building. Just wasn't there, right? That was the big shift. And once I went that direction, I'll keep the Buzzbiz Media, legacy name for the legacy stuff that we're were eventually putting on autopilot with a team, but not looking to grow it. Just looking that, make sure those people been taking...
Atiba de Souza: Just to maintain...
Michael Buzinski:...care of. And we're going to go forward with this new business because it's going to be virtual. That means the culture is going to be different. That means everything about how we do business is different. 15 years in business, all of that documentation, now crap. Worthless. Gosh, start over. By the way, there are no manuals for this. So it's like, "You gotta be kidding me."
Atiba de Souza: Yeah, that's honestly, a lot of why we've created this channel because there are no manuals for this transition to remote first. There is no playbook. You've got some people like Liam Martin who I had on the channel a few weeks ago who is trying, but he's like, one guy in the whole world. We need to as business owners support each other. Because I think, so many of us can relate to the story that you just told, in terms of there is something in your business that's an albatross. If you can get rid of this one thing, the business can actually take off and be different. But that thing is holding you back in some way, shape and form. And your case, the big thing was the building. The secondary thing was the employees.
Michael Buzinski: Put a structure in market where you can't just have that kind of turnover. You can't afford it. It takes so much energy bring somebody up from the lower 48. And then you got to hope they like Alaska. So they don't like Alaska and they kinda like you or even if they really like you, " Hey man I really liked you, but I go.". I'm like "Okay, where are you going back to?", "Minnesota.". I'm like "wait, what?".
You just want to be close to their families. I had much younger staff back then. And when we went remote, it took me about a year and a half to realize that my new demo for employees was closer to 35 plus. People who had already been there, done that, already been in the agencies, cut their teeth, already had all this experience because I didn't have the ability to handhold people virtually. What we did know is that documentation was everything. We used to document a lot, but there was a lot of things that weren't documented as far as the day-to-day goes because digital moves so fast. It seemed like it was worthless to do it 'cause by the time you wrote it, it was out of date. But now you have to. If you're virtual you must have that.
And so we adopted a program called Trainual. I love it! It's a knowledge base. We can use it for clients as well, if we wanted to. But right now, we're just using it for the employees and it's training. Onboarding, our PSA , how we do certain things, lots of SLPs, those types of things. All of our policies are in there, vision statements, mission, values. All of that stuff's documented. And so when people come onboard, they go through that first. There's like two hours of onboard training that they go through and we pay for it. I have no problem with that, but I'm not spending four to six hours bringing somebody through all that stuff over and over again. Because it's not like, I hired this person and now, they'll always be here. No, it's when they move on. We just had an account manager who out of the blue is like two weeks notice, just had a big corporate job that is going to give me everything I need. There is nothing I can say, that's going to keep you here and nothing I will say disparagingly about you leaving. That is just, you got to go. This is your thing, this is where your life's taking you, go. And then as business owners, we have to make sure that we understand that people's lives will intersect with us. But that doesn't mean that once we connected, that they'll always be in parallel with our vision and our mission and where they need to be in their lives.
Atiba de Souza: And that's a huge point and the keyword there is intersect, right? All intersections eventually...
Michael Buzinski: Got to go. Yep.
Atiba de Souza: ...and they have to. It's one of the things that we're really big too with our staff is, look you're here for a period. I don't know how long that season is, but I insist that when your time is up, you have received more from us in terms of personal and professional development than I can even pay you. Like, when you look back at your time, the money is secondary to how much you grew. Because that's just great business for everybody. It helps everybody.
Michael Buzinski: Good point on that. I brought a VA and happens to be a sister of mine. She has fibromyalgia. She hadn't worked for 20 years. She was finally getting into a place where she can but she can't work all the time. I was like, I don't need you all the time. We only take a couple of phone calls a day because everybody's emails us. We're digital marketing, it's not telephone marketing. I wanted her to do more. I'm like, I want you to start working on my books. And when I was training her how to do the books, I realized that she doesn't have the training behind the process. So I can teach you a process but you got to understand the basics. And so, over the last year, we got to her certified bookkeeper and now she's certified QuickBooks online user. When my business ends up not being a good fit for her, I have set her up on her resume with two certifications and few years of experience that she can go get this type of job with another entrepreneur that was where I was, years ago.
Atiba de Souza: That's so . Vitally important. I think that's probably why you and I gravitated to each other as well, because ultimately we share those values. That's one of the big things that we talk about here, on this channel, is that you got to hire for fit before you hire for skill. Hiring for fit starts with understanding the values, your values and their values and making sure that they align. There's so many people who just ignore that and then they wonder, why you have culture issues.
The question I'm getting to here, because you talked about when you had the big staff and the big building and the fantastic culture that you had. And then you talked about how it transitioned to the virtual first model and a lot of those changes. What I'd like for you to do is, let's talk culture. And I want to talk culture on really two sides of culture. One, the culture of hiring. How is it different between in-person versus virtual? And then, the culture of management which you've already started to touch on a bit. But, how do you build culture in management? How is it different in person versus virtual?
Michael Buzinski: All right, so hiring is interesting cause I had a business that was kind of remote to the rest of the United States. So the lowers about a third of all of our employees were brand new to Alaska. So immense a third of our interviews or if not more were virtual already when we were a brick and mortar. A lot of couldn't afford and we couldn't afford at the time either to fly them up and do all those things. I would say that, the big difference is who I'm looking for because the jobs haven't changed. How we do the jobs, the mentality that it takes to do the jobs the way we need them done. I need self-starters, like we used to do a lot of interns, right? Like all agencies do. It's like "Hey, if you got 10% of your staff on internship that's awesome. Like, you're saving money to then pay for some leads. For us now, it's I can't take on somebody who is brand new. So we just hired a new account coordinator. Now, I was looking for somebody with three to five years. Problem is, I can't get an account coordinator with three to five years experience 'cause all the acount coordinators were three to five years experience, we're looking to be account managers. I don't need one of those.
So these people are coming in and going, "Hey I want 45, 50 bucks an hour.", I'm like, "No. This job is not one of those.". This is a $20 to $30 an hour job. I don't want that and I figured so. The thing that I found, so I got lucky this time. I found a kid and I say, he's an adult but he's still in college. But he's like second generation marketer, like his dad owns an agency. It just doesn't want to work for his dad's agency. I totally get it. He's like, but this is what I want to do, this is what I'm going to school. And I'm like okay great! I need you for this many, I don't need you full-time. He's like, "Well, I don't have full-time for another two years. I still got two years of college?". So what do you wanna do after that? I want to go work for a company like yours. Okay! That gives me two years to figure out how we utilize you now, and by then maybe you'll be account manager because you'll have two years of doing what we need you to do. If you're creative, and you have that background 'cause he's already done work for his dad over the year. Man, that's great! Am I going to be able to find five more of those? Probably not. That means I have to go back to my SLPs and go okay, "How can we train somebody younger that doesn't need as high a pay but that we don't have to then babysit all the way through as well?". So we're still figuring some of those things out. On the flip side my account managers and my webmasters and my developers and stuff like that. They're quick conversations like you either you get it or you don't.
And so, I actually do skills now before culture. Because before we were bringing people in and cultivating them, I don't have time to cultivate you, so I need to know that you know you're stuff first. So usually they'll talk to a department manager before they talk to me. By the time they talked to me, their first conversation is about culture. It's about fit. But only after the department heads go, "yes", this person knows what they're talking about. We can work with them on a technical level. Okay, great. Now let's make sure, we can work with them on a cultural level. If those both hit, we bring them through.
But even then now, we don't hire people. We test them, they're virtual. Most of my folks have more than one things, they're in the gig economy, anyway. So right now I say, "Hey, listen. Would you be open to doing a project together on a test basis? So instead of spending all this time getting somebody up loaded and onboarded and trained up on the system, only to find out, the first thing that they were full of crap all the way through the interview process. You say, you know what you're doing. You say you can communicate the way we like to communicate. You say you're passionate about this. Let me pay you to show me how good you are. Boom! Done. And then, they do one. Okay, great! Now you're in the queue. Every time you do a great job you, get higher in the queue. The more efficient you are, the more cues you're in. The easier you work with, the higher in the queues you are. And now, we're more a meritocracy where your actions speak louder than any words or review or anything like that. I have found that people are great until they're not. There's no way for you to tell, when an awesome person will stop being awesome. I had seven out of 22, doing all at the same time. People who bled Buzzbiz, blue and white and silver, they were all in, four months later, my worst critic. No clue how it happened, but it just did. And I can't beat myself up about that. I can only understand that people will be great until they're not.
Atiba de Souza: Until they're not, yeah.
Michael Buzinski: You had 22 people, you lost a person, didn't matter. And I wasn't the one that managed it. I had number twos and number threes and department heads and all that other staff.
Atiba de Souza: It was a seven of 22.
Michael Buzinski: That's when you're having like "kumbaya" meetings and going okay, what's going on? And of course, I'm completely bewildered and so I'm saying all the wrong things. I made it worse. I know I did, that costs me a couple more people in the end of right there. If when you spent 15 years building something that just went the whole wing of that building just collapsed on you, you're just like, "What is going on here?". You have no idea where you're at, in the world. All of a sudden you have nothing figured out. Your brain doesn't trust itself, anymore. Doesn't trust your self-talk. It doesn't even trust what your top people are telling you. You're like, "No that's not right, either". Like none these . Make sense.
Atiba de Souza: It's absolutely tough. I'm glad you made it through. We all have those pivotal moments. Now on this side, on the virtual first side of hiring staff in the remoting world, it is a different life. I think our process is actually, in terms of the way we look at it, are very similar. In that, we hire for fit first. However, you had to have proven your skill too. And we talk a lot here on the channel too about testing people and the task process. So we actually go through a written interview process where if you apply, there is a minimum of 10 email communications back and forth. That's asking all sorts of questions that we need answers back from you, which tells us a ton about what's going on up in here and some of your capabilities. At least, can you communicate your capabilities on paper. For positions, especially creative positions, there's always a test project. Paid test project. And get this, I even do my pay test projects before I ever talked to them.
Michael Buzinski: Here you go.
Atiba de Souza: But then, I bet my time is worth more than the money it costs me to pay you to do a test.
Michael Buzinski: I get that. The complexities of website development, because whatever they mess up I've got to pay somebody else to fix. I will take the 30 minutes. It's up to 30. Your first phone call with me is 30 minutes long. No more. But usually, if it's not a fit, I'll know in the first five and you will not get more than 15 minutes of my time.
That's the end of it.
Atiba de Souza: Agreed. With mine now, I have someone on the team, who reviews all the interviews to see if there's something that I missed. And they know, if I don't talk about the values of our company, this person...
Michael Buzinski: Didn't get that far...
Atiba de Souza: They didn't get that far. It's over.
Michael Buzinski: I don't know what your pay seems to be like, it's the last thing we talk about. And I actually have started pushing that forward. It gives me two things. One, can I afford this person on my team? Because we have a budget. Then number two, what does money mean to this person? Because if it's all about the money, then you're probably not a cultural fit, anyway. So why wait all the way to the end to find out, "Oh, wait you're so awesome I want you so bad. But you're out of my budget. You're out of my price range, and all you care about is money which means, all this stuff you said about culture was all a lie.
Atiba de Souza: That's all Iie. And so, I handle that in this way, and we talk about this here too, that number one, I'll either put it in the job description.
Michael Buzinski: We do.
Atiba de Souza: But here's the thing either in the second or the third email communication back to them, I reiterate. In the job description, I asked them, this is the range and you have to respond. Are you okay with the range? If they don't respond that they're okay with the range, they won't even get a response in email. You're done, if you didn't respond to that. Then, if they do, using the second or third email, then I'll ask again about the range and make sure that they're still happy. And then I asked them, why?
Michael Buzinski: If once they've given to the price, I always ask, "Why do you feel that is regardless of whether it's low or high?". Because some people undervalue themselves. I actually brought on somebody $10 higher than what their last employer was paying them. I even paid them $4 per hour higher than they asked for. She says, "Why did you do that?", I say, "Because this is what we value you at."
Atiba de Souza: Correct! That's another huge point that Buzz just dropped in our lap. It's not about a zero sum or the lowest sum game here, when you're hiring. You need to pay people what they are worth. And so, if you know that you budgeted X and they asked for X minus Y. Don't look at that as an opportunity to say, "I'm saving money". If they're truly worth it.
Michael Buzinski: Monetizing the value is very hard when you talk about other people. And so in your SOPs, in your hiring SLPs, you really should line out. Okay, this position has this range and to get to the bottom range, you must have these minimum requirements. To get to the level two, you must have these requirements. So we had somebody who came in and was asking about our account coordinator position. Account coordinator position pays anywhere between $20 and $30. And it maxes out at 20 at 30 bucks. You have to be like on the ball at 30 bucks an hour because you were doing remedial things. But if you can do it twice as fast as somebody else and I'm paying you $30, I'm making money. I'm giving you incentives to do that. She has her own kind of VA thing and she works with agency owners and I get it. But she was like 45, 50 bucks an hour. So this job and looking at your resume, you're overqualified for this. And I wouldn't be able to even come close to what you would be asking for. Out of respect for you and your experience, I'm going to say you're overqualified for this job and I wouldn't offer to you, even if you even ask for. She emailed back through HR and said I loved my conversation. I love the fact that somebody recognized my value and told me I couldn't have the job because it was too valuable. If you guys ever have an account manager position, which she told me I was qualified for, I would love to have that conversation and know when to apply for that.
Atiba de Souza: That is awesome. That's exactly what you want. Now, we can probably, which we've done before, talk forever. Let's do that, but let's do that on another episode because there's still even more questions, we wanted to really dive in here with you. We got off on such a great tandem which was awesome. But one of the things that I want to also let everybody know is that you wrote...
Michael Buzinski: Yes, a best-selling.
Atiba de Souza: A best-selling book and you wrote a book. Why don't you give the lead in to your book and what it says..
Michael Buzinski: All right! So those who have a video, there's the rule of 26. The rule of 26 for service centric businesses is a three-step process of doubling your website revenue.
Atiba de Souza: Say that again doubling or just...
Michael Buzinski: Yes. So I'm...
Atiba de Souza: ...increase about a little bit.
Michael Buzinski: Basically, as COVID hit, we were a "done for you only" agency. So if you didn't want us doing it for you, then we didn't really want to talk to you. But then COVID hit and I'm sitting pretty with all of my clients, nobody's signing up for "done for you". Nobody! Everybody's got purses tight. I need to help entrepreneurs, that's why I'm in business, is to help entrepreneurs out of entrepreneurial poverty, like what I was in for 15 years. What was the one thing that people get in the way of digital marketing, is that they don't know how to make money for it. . Well as agencies, we have all these KPIs. If you go to places like HubSpot where it had 58 KPIs that they track for success. Nobody cares. Business owners don't care about the 58 KPIs. I think it's too much. I don't even care. As a marketer, I've been doing marketing for 30 years, do not care about that many KPIs. No way! I went on a search for the KPIs that directly impact revenue. The three that I came up with that are digestible quickly are unique traffic, conversion rate, average revenue per client. The Rule 26 states that if you increase your unique traffic by 26%, which like you said was not a lot. Then, you increase your conversion rate by 26% and you increase the average revenue per client coming from your website by 26%, you will get a compounded outcome of 100% or double the revenue coming from your website.
Atiba de Souza: Wow! Okay, I caught that.
Michael Buzinski: Okay, go to "ruleof26.com" and you can get a paperback or ebook through Amazon. If your listeners want to get the e-book and the paperback, I will give you a free copy signed, if you email me at buzz@buzzworthy.biz, a copy of your receipt for the ebook.
Atiba de Souza: How about that guys? Get a free signed copy of the book by the author. Best-selling author.
Michael Buzinski: I'm now one of those, yes.
Atiba de Souza: Michael Buzinski. Brother, thank you!
Michael Buzinski: Pleasure man, it's beautiful.
Atiba de Souza: Thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing. This is why we do this, because there are real stories and people need to hear these real stories because we're all going through similar stuff. And so often we feel like we're alone but we're not. It's when we see somebody else who has gone through it, comes through it and thrived through it that we can get our strength to push through our situation. I appreciate you being here. We start off with a list of questions. I don't think we got to one. We just completely went in a different direction but that's the beauty of conversations.
Michael Buzinski: I think it's important that everybody knows that things just happen to you in different flavors. It's my job, my vision is to help eradicate entrepreneur poverty and stuff will make you emotionally broke faster than it'll ever make you broke in the bank account. We have to make sure that we're taking care of ourselves and we have a business that works for us and not the other way around.
Atiba de Souza: Absolutely. Michael, again thank you for being here. We'll have you back real soon. I'll see you later! All right. Bye, everyone!
