I’ve become comfortable with
my income from my business. As a result, I’ve become lazy. How do you stay motivated to keep growing? – Lloyd, you know, I’m
probably not the right person to answer this question for you, because that’s something
that never even remotely crossed my mind, or has
ever entered into my body. I love the climb, the
income level that I was at was never something that
could ever be a variable in me becoming lazy or unmotivated. You know, I would question
if that even matters. Maybe you’re good, maybe you’re good. I mean, to me, if I ever hit
a day where I’m not fired up to keep climbing the mountain, I think that I would actually– and listen, I think it’s po– actually, it is 100% possible, that somewhere out of nowhere, for business reasons,
obviously health issues in my family could be the other variable. But for business issues, if I woke up and I was good, and I
started becoming lazy, I would probably retire. And I, I’m throwing a curveball here, like this is a real answer. I think you may be
thinking that I’m joking, like you may read a blog post,
that just says “I’m done.” Hey, it’s me, remember I said hustle 24/7? I’m out. I’m out, and I’m going to do this. Because, if that feeling
ever entered my body, that’s what I would do. You know, to me, I think
the bigger question is, don’t get ra-ra’ed by me or other people, or live the world or the life that other people tell you to live. Maybe you should just check out, maybe you’re done, maybe you’re just done. Which is, sounds kind of nice. (laughter) You know, like, maybe you’re just done. So, I don’t know how to motivate that, because I never would know how to get into that zone in the first place. I just have no answer to that. My intuition is, you’re making your money in a way that doesn’t inspire you, and that you should go and do something that you really wanna do, and if you still have
the money vibe for it, why don’t you go to Hawaii
and start surfing all the time and then try to build a surfing business on the back, after you
surfed for a little while. Something like that, that
feels practical and real. India– – I like this India reading
– [India] Next–

“to scale a business with an
inherently low profit margin?” – So, Jared’s got a low
profit margin issue. He’s asking the best way to scale it. Jack? – New products, new innovation, new angle. If you’ve got, the last thing
you wanna be thinking about is making large something
that’s small margins. You wanna find ways to
take the assets you have and transform it into a
high-growth, exciting player in maybe adjacent fields. But take the asset you
have and deploy them to grow the business, but not maybe the existing business completely. – Get away from the low-margin businesses. Create services, right? I mean, isn’t that what you did at GE? Took all the stuff that was low-margin, and you added on high-margin services. You don’t wanna be in
a low-margin business. You’ve gotta do everything
with your innovation and creativity to get away from it. – I’m gonna go with an
interesting, different angle from my own life experience. When I got into my dad’s business, it did three million dollars in revenue and ran on 10 percent gross
profit before expenses. It was a family business, right? – Right, right. – That’s low margin. The liquor business is bad,
cause there’s a middle, wholesale part that takes 25 percent of the 50 percent that a
retailer normally takes. Extremely low margin. What I did was actually
went the other way. Meaning, I took the low margin items that were driving the store’s business, and I actually bet on them. What I did was, I took all the
items like Santa Margherita, Kendall-Jackson, the liquor
items that were low margin, at cost, by the way, and
I used them to market, to drive people into
the store as the honey, and then I merchandized the store and built the brand that they
came in for, Kendall-Jackson, but I sold them a different
Chardonnay with margin. And so, both these things
are, of course, right, I’m curious, and we don’t know, where you are in your life cycle. What I’ve watched a lot
of people do is try to go, you know, bandaid off from low margin to some new innovation that
maybe the market doesn’t want. I think the hedge there, that’s
interesting to understand, I really felt the effects of
this, is use it as an offense. Right now, we’re testing Facebook ads for my wine business, and
everything we’re using are these low-margin
items, because they have the brand equity to drive in,
and then we’ll take care of it from there, so you may be far enough along in your business where, the first answers here
were 100 percent right. You need to get into a
place where the margins are gonna get right,
but I worry, depending on your sophistication as an operator, that you go complete cold turkey. There’s a way to use the
low-margin items as an asset. – That’s a very good idea, but I would use the low-margin items and the margin from those low-margin items
to invest in other areas. – 100 percent. That’s what I did, right? The pennies we made turned
into the advertising, that drove people in, then I
grabbed them, and so, da-da-da. India.

“an old school mind set? “Why not focus on building
wealth via passive income?” – You know, Tommy, I think both work. You know, I think that when people say, “Hey, let’s do passive
income,” they go into Spam City, USA oftentimes. You know, I have passive
income when I’m investing in early stage startups
that then go sell for 400X and I didn’t do anything, I made money, shit, I made more money
on my passive income, probably, than my hustle income. They both work but please
make sure that your passive income has practicality to it because all the people who
have tried to create systems and automate their cash,
there’s been a very small percentage of people that have
been able to lay on the beach while they collect money on the internet. A lot of that stuff is
completely ludicrous and I promise you the ones
in the 1% of passive income spent a boatload of
hard work and hard time to get to that evergreen
place up in the sky. And so, you know, I think that there’s an enormous, massive, misunderstanding that there are (scoffs) almost zero people that
have pulled off substantial success without putting
in real time and effort. Now, we all have different
ambitions and goals. Do I think that it’s easier
to create $60,000 a year in passive income on the internet today? I sure do and if that’s where
your goal and ambition is, that’s more practical than millions. Millions of dollars in passive
income on the internet, smoking (beep) weed in
Jamaica while it just keeps coming in is just not
as real as you think, partner. (laughing) You like that one? I’m right, because that’s
what everybody thinks it is and it’s just not real. (beep) Show me, ’cause I’ll show you a billion people that have won through hard work. Show me. Show me this magical person, ’cause I’ll show you
somebody who sells you that dream but isn’t actually doing it. That, I’ll show you. You want me to hire some
models for the afternoon and get a boat and go to
some sunny (beep) place and be like, this is it? I’ll show you that. You want me to show you
the people on Instagram who go take all the money
they own in the world in $100 forms in the bank
and throw it on a bed and take a picture and then
put it back in their bank? I’ll show you that. I’ll show you the front of
this passive income dream of the internet.

on sale tomorrow, if
you were a Girl Scout, how would you maximize your sales?” – Damon, one of the moves I would use is try to go viral and go very practical. Clouds and dirts, so I would do hardcore
one-on-one activation. Literally, I would have
a five minute meeting with my parents and ask them who their 11 best friends are, and then call them and ask them to buy the damn cookies. I would also then go outside and knock on every single
door of every person and I would ask them multiple times. I would twice knock on
doors and ring door bells in the course of a week to
show them that I’m gonna relentlessly bother them until they buy a box of cookies. Hardcore aggressive in the dirt stuff, and then I would try to do one kind of viral move. I would take a picture of
me holding a sign saying if you guys help me sell
1,000 boxes of cookies, I’ll do X. That kind of stuff tends to work. I would do that on Instagram. See if I can get a couple celebrities I’d hit up on Twitter to show
them awareness around this, and then try to create some
sort of big event that allows me to really blow it out of the park, going real up there while that’s trying to get viral, knocking on doors. – [Voiceover] Daniel asks, “How
do you decide what to trust

– [Voiceover] Jonathan asks, “I import wines from Italy and sell via e-comm and through distributors. I’m currently focusing on
obtaining new distribution and have fallen behind on the e-comm side. Question: What percentage of my time should be split between
each side of the business, and what’s a good way to balance the two?” You know, Jonathan, it’s interesting. I’m trying to give a general answer to the whole market, but I
know your business so well. When you’re importing, I don’t
know what state you’re in, but when you’re doing e-commerce, are you selling to the end consumer? Because you can’t do that
in New Jersey or New York. Are you in a state- He’s in California, and Kermit Lynch, I think, does do that, so I think he can. I think in California,
I was about to say that, thanks, India. In California, ’cause
Kermit Lynch does that, you’re able to actually
sell to the consumer and also sell to distributors. You know, to me, if you
can sell e-commerce 100%, you’re no dope. You know that you’re making 50 cents more on every dollar by selling that way than selling to distributors, but what you know is you’re not that big, and you’re not necessarily
a retailer by trade, and it takes a lot of money and skill to be able to be a good
retailer to sell enough, where the distributors are
giving you the buying power. So my strategy for you is- Now, I’m giving you as
black and white a strategy as I’ve given on this show’s history. 80% to the distributors, 20% of your time, energy, and money to the consumers. Once you get that established, you spend every minute
to turn that into 70/30, 60/40, 50/50, 60/40, 70/30, 80/20, 90/10, maybe 80/20, right? Because you wanna get some restaurants and key retailers to bring
some awareness to it. And for everybody who’s watching, the reason I’m giving him that advice is he just makes more money
if he sells it direct. He’s also far more in control, where you sell to distributors, they’re maybe giving a deal to a retailer, that retail sells it cheap,
and that all of a sudden screws up the pricing in the market. So, that’s the answer. By the way, before you’re
done editing here, DRock,

– [Voiceover] Sarah asks,
“As a private music teacher “I have limited hours to teach. “What are your thoughts on
how to increase my income, “or build a brand?” – Sarah, a lot of thoughts on this. It’s called the Crush It! manifesto, which is, there’s plenty of damage between 11pm and three in the morning. I get it, you teach,
you know, I don’t know, teachers to me are actually,
my sister is a teacher, like they have the most
time to do other stuff. They have fairly good schedules. There’s the summer. There’s, you know, and
again, maybe you’ve got a different kind of teaching thing, but to me, if you want to build
more of a scalable brand, you gotta put out content. You gotta look at things like Skillshare where you can put out your teachings and sell that. There’s a lot of ways to do it. Technology has created
an enormous opportunity for you to scale it. You can do live Spreecasts
and Google Hangouts that only have access to people that pay. I would recommend putting
out a lot of content at first as a gateway
drug to the opportunity to charge people so you
can establish yourself. But this whole notion of where is the time, I need more time, I just think people are
loaded with excuses. They aren’t auditing themselves. They don’t realize that
they’re watching every season of Homeland and Game of Thrones. They don’t realize that
they’re having an hour and 15 minute lunch, like lunch. I’ve had two lunches. Robert Souza, our new SVP made me go to a lunch to meet somebody. I was pissed. I was like, why couldn’t
we do that as 11pm drinks? Lunch, like leaving and having lunch? The inefficiency of that time? So you know, I’m pissed at lunch and I’m pissed at Game of Thrones and I’m pissed at playing video games and I’m pissed at a lot of
things in a world where somebody wants more
financially or career-wise. I love it for the people
that need it to escape. I love it for people that are content with their monies and their career path. I love it. As a matter of fact, I envy it. Boy, if somebody could take a shot and suck out some of my ambition,
I’d be really pumped. You wanna do a start up? Create a suck out the ambition app. I’d be really happy about
that because I’d love to be able to take a lunch. I’d love to be able to relax
and play Madden against somebody in Iowa, because
that’s how you can play Madden these days, with the kids, for the last 10 years. But I haven’t been playing it because I’ve been hustling,
because that’s what I want. And so, whether you’re a hundred or zero, you just wanna zen and live in
a mountain with no technology or you wanna buy the Jets
and hustle your face off, or anything in between, you
need to find your cadence. And so if you’re asking this question, my intuition is you’re
spending an hour or two on things every day that aren’t achieving this extra brand or extra
monies that you’re chasing. So cut that crap out and
apply it to these things, putting out content, writing content, making videos, building up a brand, engaging with people,
going to Twitter search, Twitter.com/search searching teachings around, you know, key words around the things you teach. Engage with people, say hello, cold call, saw somebody shout that out in the YouTube comments yesterday. We talked about that, as a matter of fact, link up that video. People need to watch it.
That’s a classic. I don’t know where you want it, DRock. But you guys know which
video I’m talking about. The cold call. I had a
shaved head in there. Anyway, the bottom line is, you need to re-calibrate to your ambitions. By the way, it may be going
from seven hours of sleep to five hours of sleep
because you need all those lunches and video games, and that’s fine. But if you want it, you just gotta go and do that. episode 42 of the #AskGaryVee Show.

– [Voiceover] Tommy asks, “In 13 thoughts of being an entrepreneur, “you say you focus on top
line versus bottom line. Why?” – Tommy, you know, one thing I think a lot
of entrepreneurs do, especially ones that are
just starting companies, since I invest in so many of them, that completely blows me away is they start looking to drive margin, profit very early on. The reason I always focus
on top line revenue, and it was something I
did in my dad’s business and something that AJ felt
when I started going full time on the Vayner front was
you can always drive your profits higher eventually, but when you cut a moment in time, and when I run businesses,
I tend to innovate, and I tend to be slightly
ahead of the market, and the market eventually
catches up to me, and then that’s the good thing. That’s the moment when it gets exciting. People start believing
in social media marketing or believing in internet
e-commerce wine businesses or believing in Australian, New
Zealand, South African wine, I have to really run fast
and grab as many customers because I’m slightly ahead. Then three, four, five, six, seven, eight years down the line, I can start driving profit. You can always start cutting costs and raising prices at any time, but land grabbing more customers gives you leverage of the scale that you ultimately need to convert them, and so I think people go
in for the right hook, the big right hook a lot
of times way too early, sometimes to appease investors, sometimes because they just
want to start buying boats and Rolexes, and I’m just kind of pushing
and building leverage for the long term. – Hey, Gary. John Lee Dumas,