“You’ve joked about being overstaffed, “but what’s the balance between hiring “for capacity and waste?” – Tim, that’s a great question. For all of you that are growing quickly, I think one of the things
I take the most pride in is my ability to have a
pulse on my organization from a sales top-line revenue impact, and on the bottom-line cost thing. I think I grow businesses way faster. I do believe that if I end up
operating two more businesses, if I have four businesses
in my career before I die, that I’ve hypergrown, I
have two now in my bag, like, really fast, like,
all-time, like, really, especially non-technology
companies, really fast, I will be known, I mean,
I actually think my legacy as an operator could be speed to victory. I think what I’m really good
at is I have disproportional understanding of the
pulse of what I’m selling, and I’m willing to bet right to the brink, because I don’t need to
take home a lot of money. Like, I’ve always left my own moneys and my own vices on the
table to reinvest back into my business, which
allows me to overstaff, which means I’m them
ready for the new business that comes in, and I
don’t have to go crazy finding the talent, and so, because I’m trying to build culture, sure, you can freelance and
outsource less margin, but you can do better cash
role, make more profit, but I want those people part of my team, and grow with them, let them
learn the religion, grow. So, I think everybody’s
got their own balance, but I think it’s completely
predicated on your stomach for risk, because it comes with risk, you don’t wanna overstaff,
then you lose an account and you have to let people
go, that changes the vibe. I think it comes down to
your salesmanship ability, can you always, in a
pinch, sell some more stuff out of nowhere, and I
think that it comes down to the understanding of where
your business is positioned compared to the landscape, meaning, I always knew that I’m
ahead of the market, and the world’s gonna come to me. A lot of our scopes,
our contracts for 2016, are growing very quickly,
because I knew the world in 2009 would spend more money on
Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram,
Snapchat, or whatever was there at the time, you know, the current state of the internet, so I’m riding that wave. It lets me bet a little bit more. It’s a pulse-cadence feel, taste thing that allows me to get away with it, but ultimately, more than anything, it’s the balance of your own selfish wants of your take-home income,
versus how much you wanna reinvest in your business. It’s as simple as that. If you’re running a
business and you’re making a million dollars in revenue, and you have $600,000 in expenses,
you’re taking home $400,000. You could make it $850,000 in expenses, take home $150,000,
and then know that that extra investment will allow
you to make three million the next year. I believe in myself ultimately, any entrepreneur, CEO, or decision maker that’s taking money off the table, I believe is betting less
on themselves along the way and are playing a short-term game. To me, the time I start extracting dollars is when I believe less in
the growth of the company.

– Hey, Gary, this is John McAlpine, reaching out to you from Toronto, Ontario. My question for you here
– T-Town – is in regard to my
father-in-law’s business. My father-in-law is from
Minsk, Belarus, originally, so his English is very poor and moved here about three years ago, but he’s an amazing, fantastic contractor, and he wants to grow his
business, and I wanna help him. So, given the scope of,
let’s say, about $1,000, because we’re really small, what are some baby steps you could suggest me, as a marketer of his business, to do so I can help him out and so we can start gaining some traction here. You keep answering our questions, Gary, and I promise we’ll keep asking. Thanks for everything you do. – John, great question. Obviously, you know how
to hit my emotional center by going back to the old country. And that’s a great, great question, and a real practical one. And $1,000, I think, is
really so much more realistic for a lot of people that listen. Way more the clients that
we have here on Vayner, spending hundreds of
thousands, millions of dollars each month in different
marketing activities. Couple different things. Number one, I noticed
you said a heavy accent, which made me believe that you were alluding to
don’t give me the advice to put him on camera or put him out there. Now, if his personality is like my mom’s, who never shows up, actually asked my mom for the first time at the Jets game yesterday, I said, mom, I think it might be time for you to be on the show and make your first ever appearance. She said no, she really,
it’s just not her thing. And so that crushed my heart, mom, and you crushed the entire
Vayner Nation’s heart, mom, they all want you to be on the show. So, now, if his accent is something you’re worried about but
he’s willing to do content and become Bob Vila, which,
I know you’re in Canada, but I think Vila might be an
international star, right, but if you don’t know
who it is, look it up, he became like the home, he became America’s
contractor in the 80s on PBS, when people weren’t
doing the kind of content we see on cable these days, when chefs and real estate
agents became famous, and so I would put, I
would make videos of him, if he’s that great of a
contactor, and I believe you, I think, you know, you
get different skills from different parts of the world, he’ll bring a little of
that Eastern European flair or soundness or whatever that angle is to the Canadian building market. I think you put him on and start
doing Bob Vila-like videos. Now, with $1,000, I would
spend that on the 10, 15, 20, 30 mile radius of your guys’ area to get those videos out
to people that are fans of things like Architectural Digest or things that are into
building and interior design, into the culture of home
building, contract work, renovations, things of that nature, so, now, if he’s not
willing to go on camera because he’s introverted,
shy, worried about his accent, I know a lot of those variables, you need to figure out how to make content that is compelling to people, maybe you translate his
advice into written form, and then you run ads on
Facebook in a 20 mile radius, ‘Did you know you could fix
cabinets by doing this?’ ‘Replacing new floors.’ And you gotta target
people based on interests that may find that interesting. Content is the gateway
drug for small businesses, that don’t have a lot of money, have to put out great
contents, spend little dollars, just like I did with Wine Library TV, but now there’s more things. Instagram accounts, those kinds of things, that’s what I would do.

– What are the differences
in the way you deal with small vs big accounts/clients? – There’s a ton of differences. When you’re dealing with
small or big businesses senior or junior employees, big or small in all shapes and sizes in business really dictate very different strategies. Small accounts a lot of times don’t have the same budgets. Small accounts often have
chips on their shoulder and lack confidence. I think one of the great things we do for small accounts is
actually bring a little bravado to them. I’m more comfortable actually coming from small to going big, because that’s what I do. You need to be scrappier. You need to build self esteem more. I think big needs the
reverse a lot of times. We need to make sure they
don’t waste their money, because the sorrows of riches, or what is it, help me. What is it called? Anyway, right, thanks for being there for me Andy. The spoils of riches or
whatever it’s called. They have so much money sometimes they just mail in and waste a ton of it. I think a lot of time our biggest brands need a huge level of humility. It’s really the yin
and yang to each other. I think the small
accounts need that bravado and self esteem and like we can do this, screw the big guy. If we’re smarter we can beat them. They’re wasting money on TV and other dumb shit. Big accounts stop wasting money on dumb shit, you’re not as big and as cool as you think you are. Somebody small can come and catch you. Those tend to be the two
different religious pillars and they’re very important
and having those strategies at the top really really do matter.

– Gary Vee what’s up? Lewis Howes here from the
School of Greatness podcast. Big fan of the
#AskGaryVee Show keep it up, love what you’re doin’. I’ve got a two part question
for you and it’s geared around selling books. Now I’ve got a big book launch coming out in October, in the fall. It’s called the School of
Greatness, very excited about it – Good plug.
– [Lewis] and I’ve got a two part question for you. One with Instagram ads looking like they’re gonna be opening up here soon, – Somebody’s paying attention. – and if you could only
spend money in one place on ads Facebook or Instagram,
where would you be putting your money on a book launch
coming out this fall? That’s part one and part
two if you were looking to get 10,000 preorders
through bulk orders where would you be focusing
your energy and efforts to get 10,000 preorders come through.
– [Gary] Piece a cake ’cause I’ve done it so many times.
– [Lewis] That’s the question. Hope you like it. Thanks for all you do.
– [Gary] I love it Lewis. I would, I’m hedging here
because I just don’t know exactly what Instagram’s gonna do. If I knew that Instagram was
gonna fully open up the funnel, the firehose and ads are just rolling in, and we’re seeing five,
seven ads a day on our feed then I would say Instagram. I really would ’cause I do
believe the attention is sitting in Instagram the problem is my intuition without any knowledge is they’re
gonna be a little tighter on the spigot and it’s
gonna be a little tougher to actually break through. And so I would spend 50 cents on a dollar in Facebook and Instagram. The problem is your book’s
coming out in October. The ad platform’s supposed
to come out in October. My belief is it comes out later so I think I want you mentally in Facebook,
Facebook’s gonna dominate. Number two’s a piece a
cake ’cause I’ve done it multiple times and I’ll do
it again in March or February for my #AskGaryVee book. The place to go is to your homies. The place to go is to your homies. What I mean by that is
reverse engineer everything you’ve done for people
for the last 18 months and send them one by one, not in bulk, biggest mistake people
make is send a bulk email and say this is the one time
I wanna send a bulk email. You know I just need all
of you to buy my book. I get that all the time, that
is a piece a crap execution, it will not work. I don’t feel like it’s
personal, I never buy but Lewis when you email me and
you write a whole thing like hey remember when
we first met in Ohio and I drove you around, or St.
Louis, and I drove you around and this and that and
you know thanks for being on my podcast and hey
remember a couple months ago I asked this question on the
show so here’s my thinking and hey it was great to see that. Like real stuff, like real
stuff, like the party in LA that I helped, like real stuff, real stuff that happened between you and I. Not a bulk control c,
control v, this is you and me. You spend five minutes writing this email. It would really mean a lot
to me, I’m gonna be guilted into buying 100 books. And that’s it. And you’ve gotta lotta people like that. And some people are
even more homie with you and they’ll buy 1,000 or
they’ll buy 40 or they’ll buy 90 and literally when Jab,
Jab, Jab Right Hook came out in that August, it came out
in February, in that August or when did it come out? In January, I don’t even remember, when did Jab, Jab, Jab,
Right hook come out? Anyway, in that August. Maybe December? Anyway, in that August I emailed thousands of people one by one, wrote
them one by one emails, it took forever and I got a lot of sales and well into the tens of thousands so that’s exactly what I would do. I’d reverse engineer, CRM,
your whole social graph. The 25 to 7,000 people
that most matter and one by one by one remind them
the nice things you’ve done. I know how you roll, you
build up leverage one by one by one, one by one by one, one by one by one. Tedious, long but effort that
converts into actual sales and follow-up. I went in right in there be
like look you need to say no in this email or, at the time
Nate who’s the CEO of the book, or Nate is gonna email
you and ask you every week on the week and I’m cool
as shit if you go with no ’cause I get it. Cool but you need to say
it ’cause I will bother you until you tell me and
so put them in a corner, suffocate them, don’t let
them be able to just delete it and not answer, pound them,
let them basically understand that you will not have a
relationship going forward if you don’t at least answer
and that no is equally as awesome as 1,000 and that’s what I did. I really made everybody
feel very comfortable in saying no ’cause I get it
as I did with them being 1,000. It’s funny after I did Jab,
Jab Right Hook, even though I did it for Crush It
and Thank You Economy after I did it for Jab,
Jab Right Hook it’s funny I’ve been giving this advice
to a lot of people and as you guys know we’ve been buying a lot of hundreds and two hundreds
and putting them out for Vayner. So that’s the scoop my man,
that’s what I would do. Guys, thank you for watching the show.

“What’s your best piece of advice “for a first generation
American entrepreneur, “venturing out on her own,
away from her family business?” – April, first and
foremost, India just shared some other photos from your Instagram besides your question and
your product looks delicious. There’s a pretty known thing
amongst the most hard Vayniacs is that when I go on book tour, I always start at Powell’s
in Portland, so… I’m on this hardcore diet but I think we may have to
sneak in when we do that February, March, April
next year, and try you out. Look, I think the biggest
thing that I tell everybody is number one, practicality. How much money do you have
to stay alive for how long? That is always my biggest fear. First-time entrepreneurs
make this mistake. Do you have one year’s
worth of rent and overhead, and then, you have to
make your actions respond to your bleeding of cash
before you turn a profit. When you start a new business, especially an ice cream parlor, a restaurant, kind of what you’re doing, you’ve got to make sure that you’re putting up upfront investment, financially, not just time. It’s not like you’re
building something with code, you’re literally paying rent
and buying supplies, and so, you need to have a high
level of practicality. The other thing that I tell entrepreneurs that are more practical,
again, a physical location, it sounds like the way
you asked the question that you’re leaving your
own family’s business and doing your own thing. Hopefully it’s not competing directly with your own family’s business, so there’s not some weirdness. I think the thing that you
really need to pay attention to is you have made a decision that does not allow you, in year one, any time to do anything
but build your business. You are not allowed… You’re almost not even allowed
to watch The #AskGaryVee Show going forward. Like, you are in such a code red zone, that every minute, call it 18 hours a day out of 24, if you want this to be successful, need to allocated for your business, even at the mercy in year
one of your family time. Even at the mercy of that, and so, I guess what I’m getting at
and you could tell by my tone and vibe on this question, is I’m scared, and I think one of the biggest reasons so many people go out of
business in the first year, first two years, small
business, practical, where that they’re burning cash, is they don’t realize how hard it is, and how all in you have to be, and so if you really want
this dream to come true, you’ve got to make substantial sacrifices. – Hey Gary Vee, Michael Pierce here,

– [Voiceover] Jeanluc asks,
“This questions really “got me thinking. “When do you shift from
hiring a freelancer “to hiring someone for full time?” – Jeanluc, easy question. It’s just easy. There’s really a couple of scenarios. Number one, the moment
you fall in love with them and you say you should
join my team full time because we’re going to be great together, this well bring value to my business. Number two, when you have a necessity. When you’re business is growing, whether it’s a new
client or you’re selling more of your stuff that
they’re producing for or whatever it may be. Your business has grown and now you have a tested employee that goes to full time. There’s a third scenario when the freelancer is so infatuated with love with your business that
they’re pushing aggressively to join the team. It may not be practical,
you may not be able to fully afford it, but
your intuition tells you that long term, you know
nine months from now, the ROI will start kicking in and I want to reward this
person’s passion around me so I’m willing to make a little
less money in the short term for that relationship and that
stickiness of the long game. Those tend to be the
scenarios when you make the shift, Jeanluc. – [Voiceover] Zack asks, “What’s
your travel schedule like

become too expensive for a new start-up to compete with larger
companies for ad spots?” – Marc, the answer’s absolutely. I mean, that’s the whole point. That’s the whole point of
everything I talk about which is jump into new places when the grass is greener, ahead of the market to create the arbitrage
when it’s under priced compared to the market, a la, email marketing for
Wine Library in 96 and 97, nobody else was doing it. I was asking for it. My conversions were better. More people came. The conversion rates went down, it became more expensive, and harder to get people
into the email funnel, that became the expense. Google Adwords, on the word
wine for five, ten cents. A hell of a lot better than
owning it for two bucks, right? Of course it will get more expensive. We’re seeing it on Facebook now. Facebook ads to get into the feed are more expensive than they were 12, 18, 24 months ago. Even when I started this show and told you to do dark posts, it’s
gotten more expensive since then. So the answer and the
question and the debate and the opportunity all
lie in the same place which is what are you
doing about Instagram and Snapchat and Meerkat and Periscope and all these new things. Are you moving there when
the audience is not as big, the returns are not as
big in the short term? My overall plan is to go to those places hold my breath for three
or four or five or six or seven months, when
it’s not as valuable, but be there when it does become more valuable, and then ride that wave for 12 to 24 months before those platforms become an add their ad product. Instagram’s ad product
is still not mature yet, so the organic reach for the people that jumped on three,
four, five years ago. Is it five years already for Instagram? Feels like it is. 2009 for Instagram feels right, right? Or 2010, trying to remember. Anyway, if you’ve been, you know, fuck charity right, and like
other people of that nature, they won, they moved quickly. They’ve got the biggest audience. They can command enormous dollars. So, I think the answer is yes depending on your budgets. It becomes more price prohibitive. What a small start-up or small business has is time versus a big brand’s money. Right, so are you willing
to work seven pm to three in the morning to
get the disproportion arbitrage of new platforms to over index before money becomes the variable. I hate when small businesses are like, oh, that’s it, we don’t
have enough money to compete with the big guys. What you have is speed and time. What I mean by that is they have time too, but people that work in corporate America don’t want to stay up til
four o’clock in the morning that often. And even if they do, they want to move within the system of corporate America, and they cannot do the
same things you can do. It’s not that same
entrepreneurial nimble system. By the time they even understand what Snapchat, Instagram,
Periscope, Meerkat are, it takes two years for it to get approved. In that time, you’re executing, and so, the answer’s yes, but that’s not a bad thing. It only speaks more to
my overall philosophy of jumping into these new platforms, extracting the value before the ad product becomes mature, and then using the ad
product, Facebook dark posts while everybody else is waiting. Now, in 2016, 17, 18, when Facebook darkposts unpublished
posts, the ad product become the mainstream, that’s when it becomes prohibitive for you, but you’re on to the next one.

– Hey Gary, here’s my question,
when will social marketing spending be bigger than
television commercials? – Fred, great question. First of all, if you guys
don’t know who Fred Wilson is, then you know nothing
about the startup in the VC community in New York or the world. One of the great VCs of all time, Fred. I don’t like you for that,
I like you because you’re a Jets fan. We got Revis, can you believe it? So, Fred, great question,
I appreciate you asking it. My gut answer, and I’m going
to use social as current digital platforms, let me explain why. My answer to that question
is somewhere in the ballpark of 35, 20, 22 years, long, and by then, I don’t think we’re going to be calling them
social networks, we’re going to evolve to whatever
they are, but digital is eating up a lot of TV,
but the web’s been around for 20 years, the consumer
web, since 95, and banners and email, and Google adwords,
they’re still not making an enormous dent against television. Now we’ve got over the top. My prediction is 22 years because all these things take longer. I also think advertising in
general is gonna change and the money is gonna go into
content and it’s all going to be native and interwoven much more, but you know, I’m not sure if
I’m right about the year– 22 years out, 2037, but what
I will tell you is this Fred, that the TV commercial
industry is in the early stages of looking very similar to the
late years of the newspaper advertising world. It was Craigslist that
really was a very important, kind of watershed moment
to the death of newspaper advertising, and I believe that it is Netflix that is the same
to the TV commercial world, because as everything
starts going over the top, and people don’t want
to consume commercials, and really you could even
say DVRs, right TiVo, probably was the first
precursor to it, but we’re well on our way, you know, question of the day, how many people in this room actually watch television commercials? and I don’t mean this room, I mean the people that are watching, I mean Meerkat, give it to me right now. Everybody’s watching when
they want, how they want, outside of live TV shows,
which are basically live result shows, awards shows, and
sports, guys without sports the TV industry would be in
such a different, different, different place. I asked my question of the day.

– [Voiceover] Austin
asks, “What do you mean when you focus on top line revenue? Is it because you care
more about staying relevant and having attention
because you can cash it on that for more sales?” – Austin, no I talk
about top line revenues, the answer is no. That’s not what I am looking to do. I’m looking to drive top line revenue. I’m doing it in VaynerMedia right now. I’m glad my financial people aren’t here. ‘Cause they’d be like, “I’m not
sure what you’re up to, Gary but it’s super interesting.” So, here’s what I am up to CFO’s. When you drive profit,
if you bring in expenses like I have, when you
have more and more people. You may not make as much money right away because if you are making $12 million, and it cost you $12 million to run your business,
you make zero dollars. And if the year before it cost you, you know, did in 8 million in revenue, but it only cost you $5.3 million in expenses to drive it,
you made $2.7 in profits. So, even though you are doing
a lot more business this year you are not making as much money. But that’s also human
infrastructure and the learnings and the people to be able to for you to do not 14, but 40 million next year, got it? Simple as that nothing else. You just gotta make sure your expenses don’t over go your sales because then you can’t make payroll and you go out of business or you have bumps in the
road and things of that nature. And I as an entrepreneur have had a substantially good career over 20 years of pushing the limit of how
much I can take expenses and cash to be able to grow my business and that is something that
I am always focused on. I think it’s super important,
I know how to do it and it’s the reason
that I know uniquely now have a second business under my belt where I have taken the business from three to over $50 million in revenue within a 5 year window. That is unusual, that is not the norm, and it talks to having a stomach that wants to drive top line. So, that’s not for everybody, and everybody has got to be
safe and wants to make payroll. But a lot of you are not
moving your business faster because of lack of
offense, lack of spending 18 hours a day e-mailing
800 people on Instagram to know about your music stuff. You are lacking offense on
e-mailing every single person talking about volleyball in
the world on the internet and saying “Hey here I am” and
you are lacking by not investing, maybe you have the finances
for that office secretary, who then will allow you
to be on the offense doing other things, instead of
doing some damn paper work.

where I need to hire an office assistant. Sales are great, but I don’t
necessarily have the capital to pull the trigger. Any creative ideas on how to achieve this?” – David, that is a great
question, and it’s really fun to be in the presence of DRock, one of the people who
I think payed forward and is going to feel the huge
dividend on the way back. Meaning, I know a lot of
real hard-core watchers and listeners. I know that you DRock first
at a video for me for free. Was that Clouds and Dirt? That’s epic, let’s link that up. And, you know, that led to a relationship which lead to a full time gig. And now, will be my heart and soul as long as he’ll have me in my video’s world, which, you know, Super Bowl videos of the Jets winning. Amazing, you never know DRock. So, I think one of the things you can do is use your social capital to put out there that
you’re looking for somebody and that this how you can compensate. Obviously, money is the accepted
compensation in our society but I gotta tell you, like
I think that there’s a day and age with the internet
being a middle platform where other things can be used. And so, I don’t know So, obviously you just felt an
edit because DRock screwed up kind of like Pete Carol
at the one yard line by not double checking the card. Because I’m not double checking the card, or the card went weird on you. Okay, well, you messed up.
– [DRock] (mumbling) – Yeah.
– Right, let’s get a DRock messed up alert. I wanna make sure, I
wanna double check this. Just so you know, I do double check so I want to see if it’s pretty, but it better really over the top to rock the DRock messed up alert it better be legit, ’cause it only happens once every 66 episodes. Does anybody think it’s
interesting that it’s episode 66 one more six, the devil, the
Patriots won, Belichick. And so, anyway, going back
not sure where it got cut off but just make sure you edit it weird DRock everybody knows that there was a mistake on your end. I think that there’s a lot of ways to be able to barter out that service. I would literally put on Craig’s list and on your social media, and e-mail blast and take your ten closest
friends and have them blast and say look, I’m looking for this, this is what I can offer. Maybe that’s minimum wage, plus I’ll give you all my
services free for a year or there’s a million ways to hack. I think that we in our modern
society across the globe outside a very rural part pockets in parts of the world that you know, I’m not educated enough to know this. We are really in a flat
out currency exchange game and I’m a big believer
that over the next 50 years because the internet shrinks the middle but there will be an
opportunity as a matter of fact I’m gonna make another
prediction, Staphon, that there will be a major
platform in the next 15 years that is a major top 50 start-up that is infrastructure for us to trade. Like, straight up like
Ebay, Craig’s list, mobile you know centric where it’s just like, you know I have this coat laying around and someone’s like, “Cool,
I’ll mow your lawn.” Like just, there is so
much inefficiency and stuff and services provided I think you should go that
route maybe make a video maybe take the momentum of this answer go really do something the other thing is to
really pound the streets meaning just like know,
no rock unturned right, just ask a lot of people there is a lot of people out there and I think in our
society not paying in cash feels taking advantage I think I’ve consistently
been on the offense in nuances of like border exchange I just think there’s a
lot that can be done maybe maybe you have a collection
of rare baseball cards that somebody wants. Or, you know you’ve 14
pairs of awesome Nikes maybe you could’ve six. You have assets around you,
your time, your services a crap load of stuff in your house trade that for what you need. Or go with do your when
good enough of a name to make a promise that hey I can pay this but I promise you as soon as we get going I’m gonna make you the full time person I think the one thing that I promise you that you need to make sure you do. is a lot of people
promise and don’t deliver and I highly recommend you
don’t make that promise unless you feel like you can deliver and the reason I make so many promises I always say to myself,
even if I fail business wise I’ll go to my own bank
account and close the gap. If you’re willing to go to that level and I don’t know your
personal finances, but anyway, barter, barter, barter. Hey Gary Vaynerchuk this is
Colin AKA Dj Veaux here