Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

Arlen: Welcome to the e-commerce marketing podcast. Everyone. I am your host, Arlen Robinson. And today we have a very special guest Tony Garonne Nazis who is widely recognized as an authority on digital marketing and has grown over 10,000 small businesses and a dozen Fortune 500 companies, including ADP, Ford, and AutoNation. Tony has managed over $400 million in advertising spend and in 2009 earned the prestigious title of Google Partner of the Year. Later, Tony returned to his entrepreneur roots and founded Big Fish Results, RESULTS Trained, and the RESULTS Club to bring the same strategy, tactics and resources normally reserved for larger enterprises to small business. He believes that by growing small businesses, together we can impact not just our local communities but also our world. 

Tony: Thanks so much for having me here today. Really excited to chat with you. 

Arlen: Yeah, no problem. And I’m super excited to talk to you and hopefully, I’m sorry if I butchered your name, if you can pronounce the last name for me, I went, did it justice?

Tony: Yeah. No, you did a pretty good job. Not too bad. 

Arlen: Okay, great. Thank you. Today’s topic is, um, really exciting for me because I know we’re going to be kind of discussing as a, kind of a, a system that you have for achieving. Results with regards to sales, growth, profit growth, and just overall customer growth and, you know, really excited to see what you’ve come up with as far as the system that you have and how it can relate and help with.

E-commerce businesses and how all that ties into their marketing activities. But, you know, before we get into all of that, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your background and specifically how you got into 

Tony: what you do? Yeah, no, that’s a great question. So I grew up in small business. So when I was 12 years old, my parents had an amazing Italian bakery, which you probably could tell from my last name, how you mentioned.

Right. But they were great bakers. Amazing. You know, the food was. Great. Unfortunately, they didn’t know what they know about growing a business. And so that business failed. And so here I am 12 years old and I find myself homeless. Essentially. We lost our house, our car, everything was gone and we had to move in with my.

Oldest sister in her basement. And so here we are at 12 it’s very impressionable time. You know, I had to change high schools. I just didn’t have the lifestyle that many people today, at least in the United States grow up with. And so that kind of always sat with me. And as I grew older, we rebounded we’re very resilient family.

And so what happened was I went to the university and studied entrepreneurship. And so it was my dream to go back and kind of rectify the past. So in the late nineties, I started one of the first online bakery. So this is kind of how I started in e-commerce. So I left college, I wrote a business plan and I was off to the races.

So I went back for my parents and we reinvented ourselves. And so what it was, it was image cake, and we can take a cake, put a photo on it. And mail it anywhere in the country. And so with that, it was really cool because we won best new product at the New York incentive show. And from there we landed celebrity clients like Jennifer Lopez and Jay Z.

We mailed cakes to Microsoft and IBM and Oracle, all these great big companies. And so that’s kind of where I kind of had my first taste of success, but unfortunately there’s gaps in my knowledge. And I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And that business failed as well. So here I am 28 years old, newly married with a baby on the way.

And I’m saying to myself, clearly, I don’t know what I’m doing, but who does. And that’s when I started a 10 year journey to work and seek out the absolute best companies in the world. So for about a decade, I worked with Google ADP for general motors, a whole bunch of top. Shelf companies. And then after those 10 years, I went back to kind of my first love, which is entrepreneurship with the mission to share what I learned working with these great companies, to the average small businesses, which I call it democratized marketing.

Arlen: Okay. That’s awesome. And that is quite a story. So yeah, you’ve definitely been on the roller coaster of life, you know, even from a young age, So working with the family business and then, you know, seeing the pitfalls and then reinventing that business and having that take off and then kind of going from there.

So quite a journey you’ve had there. And I know with all of the ups and downs that you had, and, you know, specifically the, the down points is really where you do all of the learning and that’s where all of the lessons learned, you know, from those failures. And I always hear this time and time again from people that are successful in various.

Careers and various things that they do that you always learn the most at the low points and when you have those failures. And so I’m sure you’ve kind of learned a lot with those points that you’ve had and I’ve broaden that to helping. Assist small businesses, which is really admirable because especially nowadays we’re in the midst of this whole COVID 19 pandemic and small businesses need help more than ever at this point to just survive.

And so I think what you’ve got to bring to the table can definitely assist. So really what I want to start with is what I alluded to earlier is this, this kind of system that you’ve created. So why don’t you just tell us a little bit about exactly what a results flywheel is and how can that be applied to an e-commerce business?

Tony: Absolutely. So the result flywheel really comes from, uh, uh, initially a book I read. So there’s this kind of Seminole business book called good to great where Jim Collins, the author talks about the idea of creating a flywheel and your business. And this is where you at first are very slow going. You’re kind of pushing this Boulder up a Hill until the point where.

Things go for you. You get a little bit of momentum and the mentor goes faster and faster into the point where you achieve breakthrough and that’s called the flywheel effect. But that sounds great in theory, but looking at a lot of actual businesses, I’ve learned and discovered that most businesses.

Their flywheel is broken. And so I asked myself, you know, why is that the case? Because I went from, again, working with these great companies. And then I started a marketing agency about gosh, eight years ago, called big best results. We worked with these small companies and. I understand that they just don’t get traction.

Like they’re not getting that flywheel effect. And so I went on kind of my own discovery to figure out why is that the case? At the end of the day, I learned that they aren’t able to get the flywheel effect because they don’t have what I call is a results flywheel. And to get results flywheel, you need essentially three things.

Number one, you need to know what. Steps to take what to do. Number two, they need to know how to do it. Like what steps or how to take those steps. And third, they need to know how to take action on those steps. And so just to give you an example, a lot of business owners, small business owners, especially in retail, their first question is how do I do a Facebook campaign?

How do I do SEO? Those kinds of things, but they don’t first start with the, what. What do I want to accomplish? So what’s my goal. What’s my revenue goal. What’s my profit goal. And by what time, and so they’re missing a lot of the fundamental things about the what, and even more importantly, the why, like, what’s your purpose?

Like, why do you want to accomplish this? Especially in times like this, because we don’t have a big enough purpose, a why you’re not going to be sustained through the downturns through the tough times. And so it’s so important to first think about the why, and then to get the flywheel effect. You want to know the, what, the, how, and then take action on those.

Arlen: Yeah, really interesting. And I think what you said really makes sense because these days, you know, there’s 1,000,001 and marketing strategies and things that you can do. And a lot of times I think businesses. Approach these things as just like a to-do list where they just know, okay, I’ve just launched my e-commerce business.

You mentioned Facebook. I know it would be good to do some Facebook ads. You know, I hear so much about Facebook. They just think, okay, I got to do this. That’s a line item on my test task list. I got to do that. But you know, a lot of times, like you’ve mentioned, they don’t really align that as to why would they do this and how are they tying that to a specific.

Objective, what are they trying to meet? What profit growth are they trying to tie to this particular tactic? How do they test that? Uh, you know, how are they going to use analytics to determine all of that? And so, um, yeah, very important to have more of a. A structured approach. I guess if you will, as far as going about these marketing ideas, rather than just treating them like a task list and things that you just have to do, just because somebody said that there is the next hottest marketing channel, you should do this.

So, um, yeah, that really makes a lot of sense now, you know, with so many possible marketing strategies, as I mentioned, that are available now. How does a business really know what to focus on and what really is right for their business. Keeping in mind for your particular. System. 

Tony: Yeah, that’s a great question.

So what I, I’m a big fan of his strategic planning and we talked about the what and the, what is really the strategy, but what strategies should you use is a lot of the times the question that people ask, that’s kind of what you’re saying now. I’m a big fan of what I call growth compounding. So growth compounding is how the fastest growing companies in fact grow.

And the reason why is because when you do multiple things that build on top of each other, you get compound effect. So typically most small businesses grow between five to 8%. But if you compound just six growth factors or actually five, five growth factors, you can grow by as much as 61% in one year. So the growth curve becomes exponential.

And so what I found is that there’s really six growth factors that impact businesses that are really the key ones to focus on. 

Arlen: Interesting. And as far as those particular factors, what are they. 

Tony: Yeah, that’s a great question. So the six factors are number one, the markets you serve. So who are going to be the buyers that are going to buy your products or services.

The second factor is your offerings. What products and services are you going to provide them? The third factor is your value, which is answers the question why your buyers would buy from you as opposed to anyone else or do nothing at all. Factor. Number four is how do you get new buyers? So how do you get additional blood, additional new business?

Into your, your business. And then the fifth factor is how to increase the lifetime value of those buyers. And finally, the sixth factor is how to drive loyalty and what that means is getting your buyers to buy again and again, and also having them drive referral business to your business. 

Arlen: Yeah, very interesting.

I was actually just talking to. Somebody else that I recently had on the podcast about that very last point, the referral and loyalty aspect of it. And it actually is something that, that I think oftentimes is overlooked by a lot of businesses. They they’re focusing on all those other areas, which are really just out there trying to drive sales, drive new customers.

And that’s a lot of times the focus of so many businesses and they do forget about those customers that have already purchased from them that are probably more than willing to buy other things from them. But everybody’s just focused on just those new sales. So yes, the loyalty programs, the referral programs are really huge these days.

And you want to. Make sure that you don’t forget all of those customers that are, are your current customers that have already purchased from you because they have already taken the time and they’ve already established the fact that they trust your brand and, um, you know, most more than likely would be willing to purchase other items from you 

Tony: as well.

Absolutely. Yeah. The lowest cost sale you’ll ever make is to an existing buyer. Or someone they refer to you. And so even if you look at venture capital companies or any companies that make acquisitions, they’re really looking at in many times a businesses ratio between their cost per acquisition and their lifetime value of their buyers.

Because if you can acquire. A customer less than your lifetime value, you’re guaranteed to grow. And the bigger that ratio, the better position you are. So if you have everything dialed in where you can get 10 times the return from a customer relative to your competitors, that means you can spend. Up to 10 times more acquiring that customer, which means you can get a greater market share and grow that much faster.

So savvy businesses always look at the lifetime value. Again, that’s driven by getting them to buy it more, more frequently and refer that’s really the formula that’s really critical. And that’s what those factors, which I call the results loop. I have a whole planning system around this, but that’s how you really grow exponentially.

Because if you think about it every time you go and get a buyer, If you just focused on just getting a buyer, maybe you get a new buyer in, you get 10% growth. That’s great. But if you also in turn, got them to refer one other person, that’s 21% growth. If you get them to buy just one more time, you know, it goes up.

Again, if you do all five factors, you get 61% growth. So you can have exponential growth just by compounding. That’s the power of growth compounding. It’s always exponential growth in that. If you look at any of these great companies like Amazon, that was their secret Apple. Now, how are they doing that?

Well, you look at them. What they do is they get you in very inexpensively. That’s one of the reasons why Apple has subscription services. It’s also why Amazon has prime and these are all the things that really drive the recurring revenue. You know, the monthly income that just comes in automatically. And then they layer different kinds of other sources of revenue on top of it.

And then they expand to new markets, which is factor number one. Then they add new products, which is factor number two. So this is a very systematic way to look at your business, say, okay, where am I weak? What area kind of dress, but 99% of the time, if you’re an established business, the lowest hanging fruit is always getting people to buy more and refer you out.

That’s really bold. And. A golden ticket. 

Arlen: Yeah, it really is. And you’re, you’re so right about these major brands like Apple and Amazon, where they’re focusing a lot of effort on getting that under those initial customers, into their kind of ecosystem at a low cost, you know, the cost per acquisition to, like you say, getting those customers in that are subscribing for them, for Apple music, for instance, which I think, you know, it’s like, Nine 95 a month or something like that, which is, you know, a low cost to them and efforts to get those customers.

And they’re not spending a lot on those and the same thing with Amazon and Amazon prime annual membership. But, you know, once you get those people into the ecosystem, it’s, that’s a whole nother ball game. They’ve they’ve already said they’ve trusted your brand. They’ve either signed up for Apple music or they’ve got a prime membership.

Then the rest is really just a. Kind of gets gravy, as you say, because once you kind of get into, I know for myself hooked into the Amazon ecosystem, there’s like almost no turning back. I don’t think there’s a week that goes by on my end where I’m not ordering something on Amazon and it’s been that way for a long time ever since I’ve been a prime member.

So it’s, um, you know, it’s really amazing and it just speaks to what you just said. So it was very true and the same thing goes with Apple. Subscribing to just their $10 Apple music plan, or what have you getting exposed to their whole ecosystem then, you know, kind of opens you up to of course, other things, Mac book pros, Apple TV devices, and then, you know, the list goes on and on.

So, uh, yeah, it really is so true what you said and how these larger companies are doing it. And this is something that you can do as your, as a small business as well. Now you mentioned a couple of key things I wanted to kind of get you to kind of drill down into, or focus on rather, and with doing all of these things, following the model, following the system, it’s going to of course, lead to exponential growth in profits, but.

What are some things that you need to have in place in order to handle these growth, this exponential growth? Because I think there does need to be a fair amount of planning before you, you kind of get running with this. 

Tony: Yeah. Yeah. So to get to exponential growth, depends on where you’re at. So if you are in your business, You want to start at the beginning of the loop and look at your markets and see if you can expand those in your offerings.

Will they go hand in hand? So for instance, you can expand by going to a secondary market. So if you look at, you know, I’m on the East coast and we have Dunkin donuts, so Dunkin donuts goes into lunch or they expand and they offer new products. You know, they have a new coffee, you know, that’s how they expand their products.

But if you’re an established business and you’re really looking at. Exponential growth. The best way is to get a referral system in the place that is a major game changer because every client you get can drive another client or another client on top of that. And so there’s a whole breakthrough growth just through that.

And then also gain people just to buy more. And so a lot of times you want to have processes and systems in place. You want to have email templates, marketing automation is always a fantastic thing, depending on how you operate. It could be a sales process as well. You’ve got salespeople incorporate that into their sales process where they always ask for a referral or an upsell, or there’s a lot of software, which I know your team provides Arlen.

So any of those are really powerful game-changers to get your business to the next level. 

Arlen: Yeah, definitely. Key things that you mentioned is getting to the next level by putting all of these things in place. But then also, as I was saying to handle these things, I think you do still also have to have systems and processes in place to be able to handle the influx of customers that you’re going to get.

Because if you don’t and you know, you leave customers hanging as far as, you know, you’d see get an influx of sales because you know, you’re following these methods and you’re getting some exponential growth, but you get to the point where you can’t fulfill orders. Or you can’t properly service customers are you’re slow to respond to emails.

You know, that leaves a bad taste in people’s mouth. And these days with social media, a brand can get tarnished really quickly, very easily. And so the systems and processes definitely have to be in place on the backend to be able to handle exponential growth. So you definitely have to take a step back and before you kind of get going with these systems, you know, make sure you have your ducks in order so that you will be able to.

Handle, you know, an influx in business that may come in in a short amount of time, uh, you know, for sure. 

Tony: Well, and that’s also why it’s a good idea to start working with your existing client base or customer base, because the support isn’t nearly as much to give someone an upsell or to cross sell them or.

To get them to buy more frequently. So a lot of times you can grow your business without the overhead of additional customer service or, or sales teams or anything like that, because all you’re doing is providing more to what you already have. And so that’s the power of the system is if you stop it, start.

With that part of it, the factor number five, which is the lifetime value and factor number six, which is loyalty. Those all the times are huge because most businesses think I gotta get new buyers. Then when you do that, that is exactly when you have a lot of those headaches of expanding your sales team, your customers, service support, all that.

A lot of times, if you focus on factors five and six, you avoid that problem. Yeah. 

Arlen: Yeah. Very true. Well, you know, as we get ready to wrap things up, what are some success stories that you could highlight and what are some things that these companies did to achieve exponential growth in profit? 

Tony: Yeah. And that’s a great question.

I mean, there’s so many to discuss, but I would say, you know, one of my favorites now, this is not an e-commerce story, but one, it gives a great illustration. One of our clients that went through the system has a home care business. And what he realized is by looking at factor number one, which is your markets that he had untapped potential in one segment.

So he has a home care facility. And what he realized is that the people that are over 89 years old are much more profitable. So he totally pivoted his business just to focus on that niche. And his business has gone through the roof so much that he’s opening a second business now during this pandemic.

And so. He is a great example by just looking at the six factors and just focusing on one alone and just taking what the name of my book that’s coming out, it’s called small steps. And the whole idea is to take just one of those factors and focus and just change one of them and that alone. Can have a huge impact.

Imagine what happens if you do all six over time. And so the idea is just to take small steps over time, even daily, you know, just make one small improvement and that can have a compounding effect on not just your business, but also your life, whatever you’re trying to accomplish. If you break it down, go step by step and just make small improvements at the end of that year, you’re going to see a dramatic change.

Arlen: Yeah, that is so sure. That’s some awesome, great advice, Tony, because a lot of times. Businesses to get overwhelmed with all of these things that they can do and the possibilities of these different strategies. But yeah, she just focused on one thing. You can definitely see growth on that and then just take it step by step and not try to do everything at once because you know, you can’t or you overwhelm yourself and just get burned out.

Tony: Yes, so true. 

Arlen: Yeah. Great. Well, uh, it’s definitely been awesome talking to you, Tony. And, um, I’ve learned a lot and I know our listeners have as well, because I know these systems are definitely proven, as you mentioned with that testimonial and you can follow them, you definitely can receive, you know, exponential growth and profits with your own business.

But what I would like to do now is just to. Close things out with just a little final, fun fact question so that our audience can get to know you a little bit better. So what is one final fun fact that you can let our audience know about yourself? 

Tony: Yeah. So I’ll tie this into kind of a business lesson. So one of the things I learned when I was in college, not only was I a business major, I was also a violinist.

And so I played a fairly decent level and I was learning one of the hardest violin. Concertos call the Mendelssohn violin concerto. I remember back then, you know, I was a college kid. I just wanted to go right to the melody, like skip through all the hard stuff and just go right to the melody. And one of the lessons I learned was that to have success, you have to slow down the speed up.

And so what my teacher taught me was to take each note, note by note, play it slowly and then speed up. And then you’re going to get to where you want to be. And that’s the life lessons, because so many times we want to jump right ahead. And I don’t know about you in business, but I’ve lost a lot of money that way, you know, you mean the wrong people doing the wrong advertising.

I haven’t had a lot of successes. Also have had a lot of failures. A lot of times is because I rushed ahead before really thinking it through and planning it out. And so my lesson is really to slow down and speed up. And that really came back from me learning to play the violin. So that’s kind of one thing that you may not know about me.

That might be interesting. 

Arlen: Yeah, definitely. And thank you for sharing that. I do know personally that, um, I’ve noticed a few people that do play the violin and it’s not an easy instrument to play. So yeah, I can imagine trying to take on a piece like that. You’re almost have no other way to do it, but, you know, breaking it down step by step like that and that, that whole.

And what you did with that can definitely be applied to businesses as we’ve seen by just kind of taking things now, breaking it down. And I’m not trying to just jump ahead, which a lot of businesses do and it’s, um, you know, don’t follow businesses. Everybody wants to be successful, but you got to kind of slow down and really understand that even these big companies and all of these success stories that everybody sees, they they’ve all been there before.

They didn’t get there overnight, you know, most. Taste is there’s really no true overnight success stories. Everybody has had to burn. The candle at both ends. So, um, you know, you can’t get around that. So you just have to understand that, that you just gotta, you gotta get in line. There’s no shortcuts, really.

That starts awesome. Thank you for sharing that, Tony. Lastly, before we let you go, if our listeners want to get a hold of you and pick your brain any more the system and growing their business profits exponentially, what is the best way for them? To get in touch with you. 

Tony: Yeah, absolutely. So one thing I strongly encourage everyone to do is go to my website results, score.com and fill out this quick assessment.

It takes about three minutes. And at the end of it, you’ll get a report that shows you, which of the six factors you should focus on in your business and what your strength is in each of those categories. So that’s our results score.com. Anyone has a question that I wasn’t able to answer here. Just email me at Tony.

Uh, meet Tony g.com. Okay, great. 

Arlen: Well, thank you for sharing that, Tony and I definitely will include that link in the show notes and, uh, you know, we hope all of the listeners will take advantage of that, our results score website and complete that, and get in touch with you directly as well. Thanks again, Tony for joining us today on the e-commerce marketing podcast.

Tony: Yeah. This was a lot of fun and I really appreciate you having me on today. Thanks so much. 

Arlen: Sure. No problem. Thank you for listening to the e-commerce marketing podcast.

Podcast Guest Info

Tony Guarnaccia
CEO and Founder of Big Fish Results