Build strong business relationships with gifts, with Steve Buzogany, the Appreciation Advocate

Gary Pageau of the Dead Pixels Society talked with Steve Buzogany, founder and CEO of the Appreciation Advocate. In this interview, Buzogany talks about ways businesses can show appreciation to customers throughout the year, not just at the holidays. He recommends personalized business gifts, not logo’d promotional merchandise. 

Buzogany is the Founder and CEO of The Appreciation Advocate.  Since 2012, he has been a small business owner who focused his business on one thing...building deep and meaningful relationships. By doing so, he could sell nearly $100 million worth of real estate, working 3-4 days a week and taking off 1-2 months per year. Today, Buzogany teaches other small businesses how to quickly stand out among the crowd, build deep and substantive relationships, eliminate burnout and take more time off, generate more referrals, increase income, and have more fun in their career.

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Transcript

Erin Manning  0:02  
Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society Podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau. The dead pixel society podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Advertek Printing, and School Photographers of America.

Gary Pageau  0:18  
Hello again, and welcome to the Dead Pixel Society Podcast. Today we're joined by Steve Buzogany, from Philadelphia, and he has an interesting business called the Appreciation Advocate. So Hi, Steve, how are you today?

Steve Buzogany  0:33  
Hey, what's going on, Gary? Great to be on.

Gary Pageau  0:36  
So Steve, before we get into your current business, let's talk a little bit about your career journey. Because it's very, it sounds to me like it's very entrepreneurial. And you're somewhat of a go-getter.

Steve Buzogany  0:51  
Yeah, for sure. So I actually, I started into I went to college, I was I went as an accounting major. And I thought that was what I wanted to do. It was the safe choice to secure choice that everyone told me to do. So I got into that. I had my first internship and realized I wanted to absolutely not do this. And I like I was saying before I, I tell a lot of people, I went to college to learn what I didn't want to do for a living. And I went to school for accounting, but never touched it. So I went there. And I sat through classes, realizing what can I do, it was basically where's my escape plan, I went to college looking for an escape plan. So I went and I, I finally found out that real estate was a good way to don't require a ton of prerequisites to get into. And you can, but you could also make a good income in your first year. So if you work hard enough, so I was like, alright, Junior year ends, and I get into real estate and start making some decent money before I even graduated. So senior year was, I'm a ghost, I'm literally there in human form, just to get the degree from mom. But I'm outside of that I am, you know, my head is in books, looking for real estate deals and things like that. So scouring the internet. 

Gary Pageau  2:04  
And so you were flipping properties and rehabbing things, and you're a full blown REALTOR at the time.

Steve Buzogany  2:10  
No, I wasn't I was flipping houses buying like these craphole houses and then flipping them with, you know, making them all nice, but I got out of that. Because one, I saw how hard the real estate agents were working. And I said, I can do your job better than you can. So I'm gonna go get my license. And then two, I didn't like to babysit contractors, it was really, really hard to do that, right. And it was a long, long, long payoff. So like, it took like six to eight months to a year to just get paid for one transaction versus if you were a real estate agent. You could sell a house and be done and get paid in a month. Right and a lot quicker than that. So I got into that. And then what happens is, after I, I was I've always been huge on relationships like and I mean, like really into relationships, I feel like a lot of small businesses will say, Yeah, I'm all about the relationships, and they'll give someone like a gift card, which will get lost in a drawer or not spent statistically there every year, I think there's like $4 billion in gift cards that are not spent. So it's not really there's not a whole ton of thought into but like, I really want to I get my customers like, I used to give some of my clients, personalized Cutco scissors, things like like really high-end items and things like that. So like, what I get into is I get into, I start calling these gifting companies to try to like really start automating this gifting process. And it turns out that, you know, some of these companies require 10,000 $20,000, just upfront for the consulting fee. That's before you even buy the gifts before you even buy any kind of shipping or customization and it's like with the boxes. And I'm like, this is off limits to like most small businesses like the normal Mom and Pop average Joe's. So I need to, and I want to build something like that. So that's where I started this company appreciation advocate. I was like, well, we can do this. For the small business owner, we don't cost a five-figure number. I mean, we barely cost the four-figure number to work with us. So it's like, now we can start automating the process and give that up that ability to small business owners everywhere. And that's that's basically the mission and vision there.

Gary Pageau  4:10  
So what type of gifts are you talking about? Because that can like you said, it could range from a lot of different things from a, you know, a custom piece of glassware or a plant or something. What kind of price range I guess or were you talking about

Steve Buzogany  4:27  
the price range, I would tell you that to do to start with, I would say probably try to spend at least $100 A gift at a minimum, but you don't have to go crazy and give people gifts every month, right? Like I would tell you maybe like two to four gifts a year, then really hit home make an impact. Like I have a mentor of mine. He gave me a pair of Cutco scissors seven years ago and here I am 2220 22 talking about these scissors still because I still have them and because they were so good, but like there's a really, really important part to the gifting process and it's this is their The difference between a promotion and a gift, right promotion is a focus on the giver. Like you give somebody something with your logo on it or your brand, it's about you, you're promoting something, the gift is about the recipient, like customer to them. Like if I were like, if I were giving you a gift, I will give you something that's like something really cool says like, dead pixel society on it. Like it wouldn't be about appreciation advocate like that really would like you wouldn't want like, t-shirt with appreciation advocate across the back, right? Like that would you would probably say something about you. So that's a very important difference that a lot of businesses fail to make distinction, and there's like six or seven other criteria there. But I, you know, purposes that time, I'll save you on on that?

Gary Pageau  5:42  
Well, you know, that's a very interesting point. Because like, like I said, a lot of the promotional materials you see, like you say, you know, they're, they're a pen, with the real estate company's name on it, or something like that. And they're basically expecting you to promote their business for them. Basically, you're basically using your customers for that purpose, as opposed to, you know, showing appreciation for their business.

Steve Buzogany  6:04  
Yeah. And that's, that drives me up a wall to watch that. And even you even as a real estate agent, I mean, I was in an office once that had 400 agents and and I used to watch settlements, they show up to someone with a bottle of champagne, it's like, they're going to drink that and they're gonna forget about you. That's, like a gift makes an impression. So whenever we are in marketing, we want to make impressions. That's the whole goal of marketing is to make an impression. So if you give somebody something like food, or a one-time event, like you go to do something that makes one impression one time, right, and that's it the other 364 days a year, they're not thinking to you, right, so that's why you gotta give somebody that's these gifts have to be something they see everyday, something that's useful, something that's of good quality, and something that's about them. So, like I said, I keep going back to the scissors, because that fits all of us. Cutco is a great company for that. And you can give, that's what I do recommend them for some gifting things. But we have other vendors, too, that we use that like they have like CNC machines, and they make these really cool personal Christmas ornaments. It's all about the family. Like we have all kinds of cool stuff. Right? So

Gary Pageau  7:08  
but actually, that was one of the things we talked about before I started was sort of, you know, the peak period for your business actually isn't the fourth quarter, which for our audience is the peak period. So talking a little bit about the philosophy of, you know, business-to-business gift giving, you know, not during the hot gift gifting period, what's the theory there? What So,

Steve Buzogany  7:34  
alright, so I'll start off with a question here. What does your kitchen table look like right now. And what you have is full of crap. But

Gary Pageau  7:42  
it's actually quite clean right now. But I know where you're going.

Steve Buzogany  7:46  
Yeah, so it's got a bunch of like most people's kitchen tables at this point, they have a bunch of stuff from work, their bosses are giving them stuff their friends, or send them gifts, there's a bunch of stuff all over the table or the countertop, or wherever. So if you give a gift at this time of year, it's just gonna go into the mosh pit that's already there. And it's not going to really stand out. So I tell us don't like we Yeah, like before the call here, like, when we get like, once Thanksgiving hits, we really tell people, we don't we're not we don't allow our clients to send any gifts between Thanksgiving and the end of the year. Because you're just not going to stand out there's not only are you not going to stand out in their house, but people's minds aren't even present. They're too busy thinking about a million different other things right now give shows up in the middle of that the end of January, or the middle of March or the middle of July. They're like, why the heck did I get this? Like it's gonna be like it's smack in the face. It's like, Wow, what a cool thing. And then there's shock and awe factor. And that's just like a whole nother level of attention. So like, I have this thing, like when it comes to impressions, like the best impressions are made early on, and then they repeat. So constantly heated and early impressions.

Gary Pageau  8:57  
So do you escalate the quality of the gift based on how long you've had the relationship? Or is it pretty much around that price doing

Steve Buzogany  9:08  
one or two ways. So it depends, like sometimes, like if we're doing a bulk order for somebody, what we'll do is they'll do maybe they're gonna buy gifts for their top 25 clients. And they might be getting the clients all the same thing. But the personalization for each one will be different. So that'll be one, like you could do it that way, which is like I want to spend a certain dollar amount per client. That's fine. But what we could also do is you could say, Hey, I got my top 10 clients and I want to do my one clients worth 100 grand, and my other clients were 50 grand, you might want to do a little and you do the bit small business owner you want to do a little bit more for the 100 Grand client that's fun, or whatever. As a real estate agent. Our average client might be like, might be somewhere between 3010 1000 a year. I tell people in terms of appreciation and this goes like a flat rule. Whatever your client is worth to you would net wise like after your or appreciation or after your taxes and insurance, retirement, whatever, whatever the net number is to you should take about five to 10% of that and give it back to the client. Because without them, you have no business.

Gary Pageau  10:12  
That's where accounting comes into play, you just figure it out in your head. That's where you are using your accounting background.

Steve Buzogany  10:18  
Yeah, here it is, finally showed up, I guess it was worth 200 grand for that one.

Gary Pageau  10:28  
So how did you come upon this as a business concept, because like you said, there's other people out there doing it. And, you know, you know, frankly, a lot of my audience is, you know, producing many of those gift items for other people or for their customers or things. And, you know, a lot of people would say that markets saturated. So what did you see as the differentiator for what you're doing?

Steve Buzogany  10:54  
Yeah. And that's a great question. So I actually did a lot of research on this, and I, there's one, there's not a company out there that will do personal personalization for an individual, on an individual level, they'll do, hey, look, we're gonna buy 50 items from you, and all 50 items have to look the same. And these gifting companies are all thinking the same way. They're all thinking, it's about the brand of the company buying it, it's not about the recipient. So they do gifting in a branding way where they're trying to buy 50 I don't know, books, or notebooks or whatever, they're gonna send all these notebooks or tablets, or whatever out to their clients, but they're all gonna be branded with the company logo, so they're all gonna be the thing. And it's essentially that swag. Swag stands for, make a G-rated stuff, we all get runs. That's what swag stands for. When you're just giving away swag. That means nothing. So like, what we do is like, you could send me an order of 25 of your best clients. And I say, Okay, why do you want to do for this person we want to do for this person when you want to do for this person. And we'll take care of all of that. Nobody does that. That's hyper-personalized. So and the other thing that we do that's different, is we're affordable, like I said, and in our company mission statement, which you'll see on our website, like, it literally says, We stand for the small business owners of the world, the mom and pop shops, the average Joe's and we make, and we make ourselves accessible to them so that they can compete and exceed the, the big corporations over the world in the areas of client appreciation and gratitude. Because before my company exists, nobody has that access. Like you have to spend 10 to $20,000, just for the consulting fee before you buy any gifts. Right. So, you know, like I said, Before, I don't I'm not 10 or $20,000, to talk to you. I'm like, I don't have charged gifts. So like I'm, I'm not trying to make money on the gifts as well. You pay for the service and the consulting and the automation of it. And then you focus on going out and getting your business off. Take care your best people think so yeah.

Gary Pageau  12:46  
So let's say I was a contractor, and I had 25 great customers, so I could come to you. And I'll say, Here's my customers. I need some gift ideas. And so your process is really the consultation piece of figuring out what's best for those customers, maybe based on some dialogue, maybe a little research or something. So every single one of those 25 guests could be completely different.

Steve Buzogany  13:12  
Could they Yeah, yeah. So what it's a really a five-step process, really, and that's on my website. So you could do the basically, you're gonna come to me, we're gonna get on a call, I'm going to we're going to do a consultation call, we're going to tell me a little bit about each client. And you might again, you might get them all the same thing, but just personalized differently. And then we get on the consultation call. And then after the call, my team and I will put together, I guess a plan for you, then we'll send it to you, you say yes, no, make a couple changes, eventually sign off on the plan. And then we execute the plan. We deliver everything to your clients for you, I obviously I'm gonna need their addresses and stuff so I can get them to them. Right. But then all you have to do really is just keep doing your day-to-day basis. I do encourage my small business owners to make a call, like I'm gonna say, hey, just so you know, they're going out this day, they're probably going to be enhanced, the gift will be enhanced. The enhanced data is what we used to just, you know, that's when the clients going to get it. Right. So I'd say like literally the day after the enhanced date or the day or two days after, you should make a phone call, just because that really helps it on the impact level. So like that came from you. We try to be as invisible as possible. Like we don't send them a box that says Appreciation Advocate. It's about the small business owner and their relationship with their client like we are almost as invisible as possible. Like that's the whole thing. Right? So, yeah, it's a pretty straightforward like basically call consultation plan, plan approved execution.

Gary Pageau  14:37  
So when you talk personalization of a product, I mean, you know, once a Cutco scissors How do you personalize something like that that's basically a you know, utility items, if you will.

Steve Buzogany  14:51  
So in that item you like with with scissors, you can just get their name engraved on it. So that would be like their last name engraved on the scissors or what's really cool. I've seen done. I learned from another Cutco sales rep. What I did is she she actually had like one of those large butcher knives she was given to a client. And our client had like his favorite quote, yet his favorite quote engraved on the side of it of the knife. So like, that's super cool and super personal. And it's like, no one else is gonna have that knife. And it doesn't mean anything else to anyone else other than this one client she had. So I was like, that's a cool way to do this, like so like, that kind of personalization of the color. The color is always important. Like, I one time I personalized like, like speaker systems, like, you know, like, like a like a Bose like pill-shaped speakers. Like I texted all my best clients. When I was a real estate agent. I said, What are your favorite colors? And everyone's like, Well, I'm gonna we're going to Steve, but yeah, it's blue or whatever. Or it's pink or it's yellow. And I had all of their last names like, and like written on it and some cool form and it was in their favorite color. And they all got different, they all got the same gift, but it was all very different. So one guy got like a blue and green and red one. Another one, we got a yellow and gray one like, one had flowers on it one at soccer balls on it, like everything was so different, personalized. That's what I mean by personalized sleeves. It's just about the recipient and what they like.

Gary Pageau  16:09  
Now that's a very, as opposed to a piece of cutlery like a butcher knife, and I can really see if someone's really into cooking that would be super meaningful. Whereas a speaker, it's got a shelf life, right? I mean, it's not lasting forever. You know, technology tends to wear out, do you recommend a technology-focused? Yeah,

Steve Buzogany  16:29  
not not a ton, not a ton. Usually like, it depends on what the technology is. So like, in that case, the speaker, they typically will last a few years and make a good, a good impression. And plus, some people only use them the, at the beach, or when they go camping. The one I bought them. It wasn't waterproof, and very it was meant for being in a really rugged environment. So it probably will last a little longer. And then because it's personal to them, and they probably going to be using it when they're hanging out with other people. People will see and be like, hey, what that speaker is so cool. Where'd you get that? Oh, my real estate agent gave it to me. And there's no doubt I'm a conversation piece. But your names out on the speaker hidden No, no, no. About me, because that's a promotion at that point.

Gary Pageau  17:12  
Because there are people who would say, Wow, that's an opportunity. So you're really kind of going counterintuitive to that mentality. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Buzogany  17:21  
Cuz like I mean, for me, like I do think like the very stereotypical real estate agent gets like the buy sell like a cutting board for a house, a home buyer will buy a new house, the first time homebuyer, you give them a cutting board. But it's got, you know, Steve zagging real estate expert, Berkshire Hathaway REMAX or whatever on it. And it's like, you ruin the gift, like, your stuff on there. But like, so what I did, I kind of put it up, I put like their name up and like their monogram on it with their last name, the address of the house, they bought the date, they bought it. And it's all engraved onto the wood. And it's like, I get calls from clients. Like actually, I do have one post from a client on my website. And she's actually says like, I don't want to use this to cut, I want to make sure I want to hang this on my wall. It's like, I don't want to ruin this. So that's why we do that.

Gary Pageau  18:07  
So do you do work anything right now with photographic type cut personalized products? Is that something you think there's a market for for this type of thing?

Steve Buzogany  18:17  
Yeah, so like, we're always looking for good vendors in any type of aspect. So like, and I know you have a good audience for that. So they can, they can totally reach out to me if they have cool ideas for personalization, and customization. What we do like any kind of cool ideas, like even like for what you guys do, like like doing something just off the top of my head, like doing some kind of like who family tree diagram or something like that would be like a really cool way to basically live inside someone's home for generations, right? He also like a cool way to be remembered all the time, like, Oh, this is cool family tree diagram. And obviously, you guys are your vendors, or when someone in your audience can build the photos around it or whatever. Sure. Yeah, definitely. Or any other kind of, you know, photographic display of some way that's like super cool. You need, like that kind of stuff. That's super awesome. So I'm always open for that kind of stuff.

Gary Pageau  19:05  
So speaking of your website, what is the website? And how can people become directly involved with you,

Steve Buzogany  19:13  
you can reach out to me my phone number is actually at the bottom right corner of the website. So you can definitely reach out to me there. Or you can just go on the website and just opt in like there's a couple of opt in buttons just send me a message on there. The website is appreciation advocate.com So I'm pretty straightforward.

Gary Pageau  19:30  
Well that's great. I'm really excited by this because I really think that is always for my audience. There's an opportunity to you know, tap into this market and you know, perhaps partner with you maybe not but it's you know, it's with so many of them focused on the fourth quarter as their profit center. They're always looking for other times of the year and other occasions for gift giving other than, you know, the usual Mother's Day, Father's Day, graduations and things like that. So I just think you know, there's be at this business to business Mark Good is potentially quite large.

Steve Buzogany  20:02  
Yeah, I mean, definitely call me either new if you want us to do business for your clients or if you want to be a potential vendor like I will take any phone call that way. We're always open to either one of those things.

Gary Pageau  20:14  
Awesome. Well, thank you, Steve, for your time best wishes on your venture and have a great holiday season.

Steve Buzogany  20:21  
Now you took Eric, it's been a pleasure talking to you.

Erin Manning  20:24  
Thank you for listening to the dead pixel society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at www the dead pixels society.com