Transcript
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Welcome to today's episode.
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Our guest today is Michael Bozinski.
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Welcome to the show.
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Hey, thanks for having me, Eric.
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So why don't we start by you sharing just a little bit about who you are and what you do before we jump into your story?
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My name is Michael Bozinski.
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Everybody calls me Buzz, and so if you ever run into me on the street, you can just say Buzz.
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If you say Michael, I won't even know that you're talking to me.
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But I've been in marketing now for over 40 years.
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No, just no, just under 40 years.
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I've been in my own business now for 18 years.
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We started out as a production house and grew into a creative agency, and about five years ago we transitioned into a marketing, a virtual marketing firm, and so we primarily work with B2B service-based businesses and we act as a fractional CMO for established small businesses.
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Awesome.
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So let's jump right in.
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Why don't you share a story about some of the marketing you've done, that you're most proud of, the best marketing you've done?
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I would say my favorite recent, and we've done a lot.
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I've marketed for over 1200 companies over the last 18 years, so picking just one is hard, but I always go back to what was my last favorite project.
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And my last favorite project was a fractional CMO project that I did with a fractional CFO.
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So it was a fractional helping a fractional, which was a beautiful thing, and he so.
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If you're not familiar with CFO, so it was a fractional helping a fractional, which was a beautiful thing, and he so.
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If you're not familiar with CFO, a fractional fractionals are executive level or C-suite people who work as a basically part-time C-suite executive in a business.
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So that's where the fractional comes in.
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So he was going into, specifically, construction companies that were doing anywhere between 10 and $50 million.
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Okay, he was an accountant at heart.
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Marketing wasn't his strong suit, so he understood that and he wanted to scale.
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He wanted to grow what he had started.
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He had a couple of clients and when we started working together, he was charging $1,500 a month for his fractional CFO services.
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I was like I feel like you're going to grow broke if you do that, because pricing is part of marketing, right?
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There's people that do price strategies and revenue officers who talk about that all that good stuff.
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But how you price something actually affects how you market things, and so our first thing was to find the actual value that service actually brings to people.
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At 10 million to 50 million, that 1,500 sounds cheap to me if I'm running an eight-figure business, right.
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And so how much value am I actually going to get out of this person if I'm only paying $1,500?
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My time is valuable if I'm a CEO of a $20 million contracting company, so am I going to waste my time Because the money is not a problem, my time is the problem.
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So we had to build up his value.
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Problem was is that if you talk to any fractional, it takes them about between three and 15 minutes to tell you what they do.
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They don't.
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They have no elevator pitch and even if they do, it's so technical that you lose even your best prospects.
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It goes right over their head.
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Right?
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Help this accountant have a three second ear like a little soundbite that would draw these types of people in to say I want to know more.
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So what we did is we created a framework out of what he did and a lot of our initial like months to almost two months worth of work was really synthesizing and then simplifying what he did down to the lowest common denominator and coming out the end he had five, five phases of what he did as a fractional CFO, and I'm like nobody's going to listen to past the second one.
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So don't worry about telling him what you do.
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And so we finally just called it, we gave the framework a name and it was called financial resource optimization.
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We were able to take that and then build all of his messaging around this, because then he's in there and he's in the right room with the right people, right, he's going to qualify somebody.
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Oh, what do you do?
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Oh, I'm the owner of such and such contracting, blah, blah, blah.
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He's been in business for 20 years.
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Oh, really, where's your revenue at Blah, blah, blah?
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Now they're qualified, right, oh yeah.
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Oh, what do you do?
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Oh, I'm a fractional CFO and I help CEOs, just like you, with their financial resource optimization.
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What's that?
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Oh, so we create this hook of what they do, right?
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So now you're giving them the opportunity to ask.
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Now you can tell them the five phases, because they all they need to remember is the fro, right?
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So you gave them the mental hook.
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All the rest of that stuff is just added value to them that they're not going to understand until they pay for it and they see the results period.
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End of story.
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So we went from taking that and we built out his whole website.
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We built all of his things out, even had T-shirts that had his German Shepherd as a logo, and they put a fro on him and it says got fro on the back of the shirt with a QR code.
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So we went to like builders, conventions and stuff like that.
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People would come up to him and scan the back of their shirts to find out what it was.
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And People would come up to him and scan the back of their shirts to find out what it was.
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And it was just a little landing page and it was talking about their pain points.
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Right, and it's hey, do you know what your work in progress is costing you right now?
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Do you know what your actual cash flow is?
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Do you know how profitable you are?
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Maybe you don't have financial resources optimization.
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Click here and get a free talk, whatever it was.
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We had a couple of different offers.
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You know, testing all that good stuff.
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So this guy went from charging $1,500 a month to being able to then frame this to where people were paying him $50,000 upfront for the first 90 days worth of work and then another $5,000 a month for the following 12 months.
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So every client right off the bat was worth $90,000.
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He closed.
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He had a sales coach on top of this Remember, he's an accountant so we got the marketing to get them into the sales call.
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He was actually able to close I want to say two in the first 60 days of us actually doing the marketing For him.
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That's enough to pay off his bills for the entire year in a matter of two months.
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So everything after that was just icing on the cake.
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And now we worked with him for about 18 months and now he has a staff of four I want to say his staff of four.
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When I first started with him, he just had a couple of fractionals wow, that's really remarkable that the positioning, the messaging and the pricing could be aligned in such a way to get that much more value for doing essentially the same thing.
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Right, it's how you don't the same thing, how you explain anything he did.
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There was no change in his service whatsoever.
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If anything, he did less.
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I probably talked him into doing less.
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That's pretty amazing.
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You get what you pay for.
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But it also matters how you explain what you do to people in a way that gets them interested, hooks them what you said and it makes them want to really go all in on it.
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Yes, that's really awesome if, if you, anybody can do this.
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Fractional cmos can do this, like I.
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I just did a uh presentation in dallas to a mastermind full of marketers.
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There's 20 marketers in this room all doing seven figures and above.
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I think I was one of two out of those 20 that had a framework they sold against by 20 minutes later.
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I'm like what, if I showed you how to do this, would be interested?
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50 of their hands went straight up.
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They're like this it make sales a lot easier, right, because how you market things dictates how your sales go.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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So how do you sum up what you do to other people?
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What is your elevator?
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pitch.
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So I am.
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I'm a fractional CMO.
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I help the cashflow of people's marketing.
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See, a lot of people are put a lot into their marketing right, and so my superpower is actually to synthesize, simplify and systemize their marketing in a way that actually doubles their revenue.
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In this case, we did what?
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Was that?
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12x's revenue?
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So, yeah, no, technically it was 5X's revenue, but yeah.
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And so what advice do you give marketers out there who want to come up with this sort of positioning, messaging and packaging for themselves or for their company, and packaging for themselves or for their company?
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So there's a couple of ways you can do it.
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One of the things the quick and easy.
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If you can just do these three things, we're gonna go back to my superpower, the three S's okay, you're gonna go.
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What is my superpower?
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What is the one thing that you do that you do better than most anybody else?
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And every time you do it it provides value to your client and they love you for it.
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That's your superpower.
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Okay, once you've identified that, I want you to simplify that down into the lowest common denominator.
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Just no tech words, no industry jargon, nothing, right.
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Just what is it at its root?
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Okay, and then, from there, what steps do you go through that get you from a to b?
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Okay, from there, that's your systemization.
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So you've now synthesized what your superpower is.
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You've simplified it down to lowest common area.
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You've created a system out of that system.
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Now you got to put your creative hat on and go.
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What from the simplification and the systemization?
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What could I call this that people would understand it in a way that makes them ask the next question, but they know they're like oh yeah, that sounds like something I could use.
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Digital engagement optimization is a framework we created for taking SEO and conversion rate optimization, putting them together back in 2011.
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Okay, back then we were killing it with SEO, but we're losing clients because their websites weren't converting.
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And back then SEOs and CROs were usually not in the same firm, they were two types of firms.
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Okay.
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And so me, I was like what if we put them together in the same firm?
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And then we juggled between the two traffic conversions traffic and conversions, back and forth and that worked for saving clients from leaving us.
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We're like, hey, listen, we got you the traffic, Give us a chance to convert that traffic.
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That was an easy sell, right?
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We've already provided value on the first half.
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Now we're just saying, hey, let's shift gears, boom, boom.
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But when I talked to new clients, new potential clients, they're like what's CRO?
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Nobody was talking about CRO.
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They barely knew what SEO was Right, so it wasn't until I gave it a name digital engagement optimization.
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And people like what's DEO?
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And I'm like, oh, it's SEO on crack.
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What, what?
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What it's?
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So it's better.
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Because they knew what SEO was right, they knew they had to have it, because everybody said I need to have SEO, but they never heard about CRO.
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So I'm just like it's on crack, it's the next level.
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It's better than SEO, because it is.
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It's twice as much stuff that you can do to get your traffic to actually convert, because if you don't convert your traffic, you guys all know you don't have any cash, right?
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So once we did that, we took our firm from $750,000 in annual revenue to $2.3 million in annual revenue in 36 months.
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So that is in the nutshell.
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If you would like, this is my superpower.
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This is what I do for my clients literally what I do for my clients.
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And then all the rest of the stuff is building out the frameworks or building out the system in which we sell it against and for marketers.
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If I gave, if I helped them with their framework, they probably figured the rest of it out, and that's fine, and I want to help as many people out as possible.
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So if they just want to email me at buzz, at buzzworthybiz, and just say framework, eric Eden, I will know exactly what you're talking about.
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I will give you a link to have a one-to-one with me and we'll work through your synthesization, your simplification and then your systemization and I'll help you come up with a name for your framework that you can then make For me.
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I basically went three and a half times my firm size, just by simply having something to sell against.
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That's a great offer.
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Thank you.
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I encourage everyone to take Buzz up on that.
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We appreciate you sharing these stories and these insights with us today.
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There's definitely an art to having the right name for what you do and being able to describe what you do in a very compelling way.
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So thank you very much for sharing these things today, Buzz.
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We appreciate it.