How to Build a Successful Brand in 2019 | Inside 4Ds

Content and Branding

• Like the punch line is for everybody here content that actually brings value to the end user, game over. This portion is like with me, so I think this is when you need to get selfish, you need to ask your question. (upbeat music)

Hiring and Branding

• Hiring is guessing, firing is knowing. Like you’ve gotta move fast, that’s how you get shit done, that’s when you figure shit out. This is the television and the television is the radio. For 4Ds, mother fuckers.

Question on Content Production and Branding

• So my question is how do you work out how much you should spend on the content production side, everything you’re doing, your personal brand, I haven’t even really touched my personal brand, and we’re a content business ourselves versus work on product, generating more revenue to fuel that beast.

Answer on Content Spending and Branding

• My answer to that is as much as possible on the content side financially and time but not to overjudge yourself if you’re not doing it, that’s fine. I don’t dwell. But just so everybody understands, at the end of the day brand is what wins. It always has, it always will. It’s how everybody makes a decision. Literally you cannot imagine how many decisions you’re making on a daily basis solely on brand, nothing to do with sales. Yet everybody so overindexes on sales. It’s why, I’ve been learning a lot about the franchisee world just ’cause the keynote I gave and just ’cause a lot of inbound and like when I started realizing how much a new franchisee pays these brokers to get somebody it speaks to the same thing. Instead of spending those, some of these companies are, when I look at that I’m like my God, 40% commission, 80% commission, tens of thousands of dollars, I’m like I could send a single tweet and put 80 people into franchisees right now. When you build brand, you build leverage. Vayner’s a $200 million enterprise and we don’t do new business well at all. We don’t win FRPs, we’re bad at it, we’re bad at it and it’s not because Andre or me or anything, it’s just it’s not our DNA. Our biggest clients just give us the business because of brand. And by the way, when you do personal brand, you actually lose 20 or 30% of the action ’cause some people don’t like you. When you actually just build a brand that’s a logo, it really gets going. For me, I want to do personal brand. At some level, I’m just not driven by money enough to always make the financial decision over the happiness decision but there’s nothing that is more leverageable for you than the brand of your company or you as individuals. Where people get caught is they fake it until they make it. Where everybody gets caught is they play somebody on the internet that they’re not in real life. That has been the reason I made it. So I would tell you that this is a very simple game of how much profit do you want to take home at the end of the year. The reason I’ve always been able to scale and get to everything is because I’ve always made it at the cost of my own personal financial impact. So you can if you’re willing to make less money or you can if you realize actually I don’t like this, I’m not into it, I’m more of a product guy, I’m more of a product gal, I’m more into, self-awareness is imperative. You can’t imagine how little time I spend on finance or legal. For all I know, Mark Yudkin, our lawyer owns this company. He just puts things in front of me and I just sign. But that’s why, it’s funny (mumbles), comms and new business, that’s what I, or HR, these are the things I micromanage more or at least have opinions on. I actually don’t micromanage but I have opinions or occasionally I’ll have a dictatorship decision. But I think you need to first be self-aware of are you not doing it because you don’t like it or it doesn’t come natural or are you doing it because of whatever financial requirements you’re looking for? Whether that means you want to take money off the table each year in bonus and do something in your life, which is amazing, I don’t judge what somebody does, or is it because you’re trying to flip your company and trying to maximize EBITDA for a multiple, which is all okay, awesome. I’m building businesses in perpetuity and I’m playing for legacy and I don’t want to buy anything in real life. So think about why my advice is always pour it back in. If you understand, those are my north stars.

Importance of Branding

• But let me say this, building personal or brand for your business is the single most important thing in business. It’s the single most important thing. It’s number one, two, three, four, five and six, especially as the internet continues to commoditize everything. Everything will be commoditized, everything you do can be sold cheaper, different, better, dadada. It is your brand that plays in the end. McDonald’s sells a lot of french fries every day. They don’t make the best french fries every day. It matters. You don’t want to be in the sales business. And that’s where everybody for the most part is. ‘Cause then you’re just in a hamster wheel of only as good as your last sale. You want people coming to you. The only way you can do that is through brand. What’s amazing about the way we can build brand now is everybody here can do that by providing value for the ecosystem that they’re trying to reach versus making a clever commercial. How’d you guys get here? It’s a super meta answer. I didn’t call you. I didn’t cold email you.
• We talked about that, the execution doesn’t have to be perfect ’cause the brand’s so strong, the execution of like getting the thing, filling out the form, sometimes it doesn’t work right. Doesn’t matter.
• Doesn’t matter. The amount of dumb basic shit that we do wrong, it doesn’t matter. If you want something, you’ll get it. We don’t want to do dumb shit but dumb shit is always trumped whereas other people have to have everything perfect because they have no brand, they just have the luxury of the quick moment of a sales pitch and the lack of friction too.
• So sometimes it’s just internal, to feel that everything needs to be perfect to get there.
• Oh, my greatest, the singular strength, my friend Tom Bilyeu nailed it for me, I never thought about it, singular strength I have, singular is my inability to judge myself. Harriet, you felt this right away in our first meeting, literally our first meeting, Harriet runs comms now for us, she’s like, I’d like to change the mission statement on our website, this is like maybe the most important thing that people, it was 38 second meeting, I’m like okay. I was dying to think about what was going

through her mind. Those are like seven month processes at other companies.

• [Harriet] And I was just like, you said okay and I didn’t know what to say after that.
• Yeah ’cause you come from a world, which is most of the world, where that literally, people would have seven-hour meetings about one adjective.
• That was the one answer you were not prepared for. (crosstalk)
• And think about it, it’s like your first week in a company, you’re talking to the overindexing face and founder of the company, it’s a complete reversal of what one would think. But it’s because most things don’t matter once you establish a brand. I really think you should lean into it. I think it will help your business. But it takes time. And I think the biggest thing for a lot of you, and obviously I’m giving an answer that helps a lot of you as I keep doing this, the intent of the content is imperative. The singular reason we win and I win is ’cause not a single piece of content I ever put out has any intent to sell sneakers, wine, 4Ds or VaynerMedia. Not interested. And people feel it. What’s that? – [Male] You can’t hide it. – People call it bullshit radars but we’re animals. A bat can sense things, a dog can sense things. We inherently have been sold to for so long at this point that of course you can be tricked for a second because usually you’re the kind of person that wants to dream and not put in the work. The reason diet pills and quick rich schemes work is ’cause people don’t want to put in the work. You want to look like Nick Dio? Eat well and work out every day. Take off your shirt, Nick. – It’s good content, go ahead. He did that last night as well. – But you know what I mean? It’s crazy.

Health and Fitness Industry

• There’s a trillion dollar health and fitness industry and the math is as basic as fuck. Eat well, work out, sleep. But we don’t want that. We want to eat fucking cheeseburgers and fucking potato chips and get the results and that’s how I think about business. This answer is 100% right. We live in a world where there’s so much supply of everything we do and it will continue to grow because what I understood 15 years ago was the internet was gonna be the middle and everything was gonna be commoditized and the only thing that wasn’t gonna be commoditized was brand and then the ability to execute a product that was at least within the circumference of the competitive set. But this ideology of we have the best product, no you don’t. You think you do, just like everybody thinks their kids are the cutest. Did America say that you’re Miss America? So that’s how I think about stuff.

Growing in a Competitive Space

• How do you look toward growing, ’cause we live off of memberships and those kind of things, in a very competitive tight space? They want me to move in to a place where there’s six other places around the corner.
• Yeah, I mean look, and it’s fun to have some franchisors in the building, this has become such an intriguing space for me. First of all, what’s really interesting is when you’re a franchisee, I’m trying to calibrate in my mind this half pregnant entrepreneurship DNA. And it’s not a negative. You know what, I’m actually never gonna say half pregnant again, I’m not kidding, ’cause I use it as a, ’cause I love entrepreneurs, it’s a very interesting idea where you’re in between employee and entrepreneur. That’s why you signed up for it. To me, the thought of being at the mercy of the franchisor is devastating. I don’t even have a board. I don’t have investors. I don’t know what to do because if I think this is right, this is why I hated school, this is why I hate anything that contains me. Even like comms, I’m like hey, I hope you know what you’re signing up for. You’ll tell me but I have no idea what’s gonna come out of my mouth. I think first of all, anything the franchisor wants, you have to be empathetic. This is not a negative. It’s in their best interest. And that’s fine. That’s amazing, that’s business. But you have to A, that would be the first thing I would calibrate. If you’re my brother, I’d be like, okay, let’s first understand that they want you to do that because they want you to do that. That has nothing to do with you. You’re a commodity. Even though, it’s just the truth. It’s okay. I think that’s not a negative. That’s number one. And number two, what are you able to do that distinguishes yourself that still stays within the lines of the franchisor’s rules? I don’t know enough about CrossFit’s rules. Every franchisor has different rules of how hardcore, how loosy goosy. They all run diff–
• [Male] They’re super basic, it’s use the name, have people trained and so with that structure, but I’m also looking at rebranding obviously so that we’d have more flexibility and experiences we can create.
• And do they allow that?
• [Male] 100%. Literally the requirement is use the name, we’re gonna use the name, and it’s a marketing agreement.
• [Female] It’s a license, not franchise.
• [Male] It’s literally use the word CrossFit and you have to get trained by CrossFit.
• I think that if you’re talking about, there’s two separate conversations here. One, is the location right is just a classic supply and demand conversation. Is the rent worth the natural foot traffic or the way I now think about it which is not 1987 anymore where you just get the traffic

Operations and Hiring

• because there’s a Whole Foods or a mall or what have you, it’s how much do I like the two-mile radius of Facebook and Instagram ads against it? That’s how I think about it now.
• [Male] Well I like that as a good metric.
• I think that’s a really, what I would do, Tim Ferriss did something super smart when he did the Four Hour Workweek. I mean I heard about it 13 years ago and to this day, I still think about it ’cause I didn’t do it and I wish I, at some level it’s so smart. And I do it with my content. I’m doing something incredibly interesting lately with my content. We call it the machine. I’m running the same video on Instagram with seven different thumbnails and titles, seeing which one overindexes and then I’m posting it organically on my page and they’ve done much better. I think one thing you could do is almost run an ad on Facebook and Instagram on a fake gym that doesn’t exist and say coming soon and just seeing what people react to and be like, and just getting a sense of, I would almost run a fake gym with maybe another popular brand, whether it’s Equinox or Barry’s, whatever, or Orange Theory or whatever and run it on 15 different mile radiuses, or if you have four options of locations and just seeing where there’s more demand.
• [Male] I love that.
• I mean for 1,000 bucks, you can get a read on if there’s more demand than not.

Hiring and Operations

• So what worked from an operations side of things? When did you get a, did you get a chief operating officer? What kind of worked? But also what didn’t work and kind of the why aspect.
• That’s a great question. So I always overhire, always because I’m anticipating growth and that’s how you grow.
• [Male] Overhire as in more volume as opposed to quality?
• Well you’d like to think that you’re getting the quality but yes, to your point, I was like, you seem nice, you’re hired. That was literally how it went for the first 300 people because I was willing to fire. And I don’t like to fire. I’m kind of like I’ll turn this bad boy around, like that kind of DNA. So it was a really interesting double play on my side which is I talk about hiring fast and firing faster but I also don’t love firing because I was so into being operational and trying to fix in parallel. I think a lot of this comes down to knowing yourself first of all. So I’ll give you a very good piece of advice. I genuinely believe this and I’ve seen this everywhere. Hiring around you on the things that you don’t want to be doing is unbelievably powerful. I couldn’t be more bullish on it. If all of you right now just truly take a step back and say, what do I do every day that I don’t want to be doing and hire for that, I couldn’t be more, the reason a COO has never worked for me, not my dad, not my brother, not James Orsini is ’cause I’m an operator and I love it and I’m willing to leave money on the table ’cause I know if I’m a CEO I could probably generate more top of the funnel business but I love the challenge of operating. It’s the game. I like it. Oh, Rick should be there or Susan should take that account or we’ll create this pro, I love operating and I’m good at it. That’s why we’re not vulnerable. When you hunt, you gotta be able to farm it. And when you know how to operate, that’s where most entrepreneurs lose. They can get the business but she or he can’t operate it. So I would highly recommend hiring around you. So if you’re thinking about COO, are you just so overwhelmed or are you trying to be more physically out there? But then if you’re trying to be physically out there, look, nothing excites me more for B2B businesses today than running content ads on LinkedIn against the employees of the people you know you’re trying to reach. Your business is so, as somebody who’s been in B2C and B2B, B2B’s easier. When you know who you’re trying to reach, it’s easier. I don’t know who the fuck drinks wine or wears sneakers. But when you know that literally the companies you’re trying to reach, you can run ads right now against employees of that on Linked In and all you have to do is make content that is valuable to them instead of saying sign up now. Instead of an infomercial, make a B2B magazine. It could be even not even about your own product.
• Yeah, we’ve got this big, so the reason I’m here is we’ve got this big conference coming up, it happens every year, American Library Association Conference, rock and roll, it’s in DC actually in June but we have a 20 by 30 booth and we’re talking about taking a video team with us but we’re going to interview, not just our customers but other vendors in the industry and that kind of stuff.
• Obviously you know enough about me to know this, the second everybody here can be the voice of the industry and bringing value to everybody in the funnel, the quicker they win. It’s what I learned with Wine Library TV. I started that to do QVC and within episode one, within the episode, intuitively I needed to become the wine spectator, not QVC, and it changed the course of my life and I’ve done it ever since. Guys, there are hundreds of agencies that literally just watch my content and get clients that we’re trying to get with the same words, think about how much I believe in it, it’s coming out of my own short term pockets. I’m really giving my best shit. What?
• [Male] Thank you.
• But think about how interesting that is. It’s a really like, it’s kind of, not that I’m knowledgeable enough about the bible but I get it thrown at me,

Targeting Different Audiences

• it’s quite biblical. It’s truly that. So the greatest thing you could do at this DC conference besides be successful and do your thing is to listen to the problems that they’re all facing and put out content that addresses it or makes fun of it. The amount of two-minute videos made that is a skit by comedians that make fun of library culture is zero. Every single fucking person in the industry would share a video that was funny about the 11 truths in your business. You know what I mean? The cliche shit. The Dewey decimal system shit, yeah like that.
• [Male] There’s a character show that–
• If you guys did a Dewey thing, if you dug up Dewey, the punch line is for everybody here, content that actually brings value to the end user, game over. Back to CrossFit, the big cliche thing I hear all the time is like people get hurt. If you just put out a content series, and that might struggle with corporate, and I have empathy for that, but if the content series in theory was just like how not to get hurt and just deep knowledge on the cliche 44 reasons why people do, you get overcompetitive, you lose your form, I don’t know what the fuck, I believe in that shit. I put out so much content with the hope that nobody ever hires us. I’m not kidding ’cause enough people will. And that’s how you build brand and sentiment and like karma and a whole lot of other things. Plus, there’s one thing that I always have which is that I know that I’m always gonna be good at emerging trends. I’m not scared to give away all my social media advice ’cause I know I’m gonna be great at voice and AR and machine learning and blockchain. I’m the same thing just, you know? You’re welcome.
• All right, so I have two kind of questions. So the first one is where I get mixed up a lot is that we have two audiences. So we’re selling franchises to a million-dollar network investor but then our end user, whose their client, is a hair stylist making $50,000 a year. So how to differentiate our company to these different audiences and then the second piece is we’ve been–
• I think one thing you can do is the logo could focus on the end user addressors and then the humans, whether you or somebody else, could focus on the franchisees. You see where I’m going? First of all, you or somebody and the logo of the company should have separate accounts. There’s a VaynerMedia account, there’s GaryVee, there’s Wine Library. So if you think about the nature of it, the brand can really focus on the end and you can focus on the B2B part with occasional reference to the end.
• [Female] Having two distinct user accounts or two distinct brands?
• Look, I’ll be honest with you, I’m also extremely comfortable with the account doing both. Some people may find it intriguing on the back end business stuff. It’s not the end of the world. Most of this stuff is not about organic anyways. It’s about paid amplification. But I think there’s a natural for you guys to have a human face, yes.
• [Female] Yeah, absolutely okay. And then the second one is so we’ve been creating content and putting it out there with very little success. I don’t think our competitors are doing it great but how do you set benchmarks for your team to hold them accountable? How do you know when to fire? If I say hey, our socials are digital stakes now, I could fire everybody.
• Business results.
• [Female] And we’re doing good but I don’t think we’re knocking it out of the park with digital by any means.
• So fire.
• [Female] Fire?
• Yeah, there’s no benchmark, that’s a she or he decision. What you’ll learn is it’s like breaking up with a boyfriend and then thinking two boyfriends down the line, eh, was I wrong about Rick? ‘Cause he’s been a lot better than Stan and John. Maybe I fucked up. That happens but that’s the true answer. To me, it’s like, are you happy with your business results from the thing? And if you’re not, business results, not how many likes or shares or followers, business results. And if you’re not, that’s attributable to that, you break up with Rick and you just hope that that was right.
• [Female] Yeah. I haven’t seen anyone in my space do it really well so it’s like–
• As well trying to get the one million dollar people into the funnel or as well on the end user?
• [Female] I would say both, both. We’re all, in franchising, really dependent on brokers, especially at that million dollar investment level versus a CrossFit or a

fitness. The owner-operator models of 100, 200,000 to invest are pretty easy organically but that million dollar investor it’s been a little bit harder to tap into organically.

• It makes sense because I think to get that person you need to be making a show about the whole concept of franchisees, not about your specific content. You see where I’m going? You need to become the back of Inc. Magazine, you know what I mean?
• [Female] We’re in it this year.
• But you need to become Inc. This is where I keep going into that, you need to interview 365 days a year somebody who’s successfully run a franchise to inspire the people who listen to that to then get into the potential funnel of considering you.
• [Female] And see, that’s where I think those two audiences come back in, that’s not relevant to the salon person–
• It’s not. And so you make that and you run that on LinkedIn and then on Instagram, you see what I mean?
• [Female] Mine is stay with the brand, move on to a new brand idea. So we have a brand that, it’s called Cibu,

Building a Platform vs. Staying as a Brand

• it’s our private label, hair care, it does have its own website. It has no brand awareness. We have links from that platform onto our other salon sites. So we do a little business online and a little bit more now that everybody understands what a CTA is in email on our team. But the issue is could we create something bigger and better that actually solves to a bigger purpose, not just selling Cibu, but it allows indie brands to have a bigger site to be able to launch their brands.
• As long as you understand how big of an ambition the sentence that just came out of your mouth is. What you just said in that sentence is usually a $50 million to $100 million funded startup with deep two-way marketplace DNA. The answer is you could but there’s, people sometimes ask me, hey Gary, God you were so early at all these tech companies, this and that, why don’t you have an app, why don’t you have a company? I’m like because I don’t want to ’cause I don’t think it’s my strength. I don’t think I’m the founder of Uber or Facebook or Twitter. You’re also talking about at a time where Shopify and Amazon are gonna grow at scale. So for you to create a third-party marketplace, an infrastructure to be a WordPress, you’re going into shark territory, which you could win within a small niche but you have to make sure that you guys have the DNA to actually, as long as you notice, I’m jumping in because I want to make sure you realize that that’s not, everything so far has been like a pass away comment meaning, not to undermine it, it’s like it’s doable. Yours is doable but you’re gonna build a billion-dollar business, that’s a real big thing. And I think people throw around this theory very nonchalantly in the business world. Every day, I get a, oh, we’re gonna be a marketplace, I’m like pttth, there’s like six marketplaces. Yahoo lost being a marketplace. So yes, I just want to make sure that you understand, I’m giving you a reaction to make sure you understand how grand that is.
• [Female] Yes, I do, I do. I’ve actually started a website before and it’s monstrous in terms of the money and the time and the people–
• At this time when it’s never gonna be easier or less friction to do short term sales through the Shopify and Amazon ecosystem it’s not about, it’s not the macro thesis, it’s the thesis at this moment in the emergence of those two specific platforms that gives me just pause to think about it but go ahead.
• [Female] Yeah. I mean my worry is if we stay with what we’re doing, at some point I don’t know how relevant what we’re doing today on ecomm is gonna be.
• Speak to me about that. When you say, I just want to make sure I’m following along, you mean how relevant that one brand will be?
• [Female] Yes.
• So look, I mean it’s not a very complicated thing. To your point, you just have to understand if you’re looking to become a platform or a product. Are you gonna be a Smartwater or are you gonna be, its not Walmart but QVC, right? They’re just two very different things. I will say this, I believe that we’re walking, it’s ironic, I’m gonna take a little bit of a different stance, I think we’re walking into the golden era of the capability of direct-to-consumer brands at scale. You’re gonna be competing but the opportunity to have the leverage, think about the nature of being a product. You’re always at the mercy of your distribution.
• [Female] Yes.
• You’re not going to be. And so that’s exciting. It’s now how good is the product and how good are you at building a brand around a product versus how good are you at building a platform and building a brand about the platform? I think that becomes the debate. But I wouldn’t run away from being a brand because a lot more brands are coming. I would try to, I see the positive in DTC more so than the negative, I really do because the ability to compete against everybody else’s DTC is I think more of a fair fight than competing with the hope that Sephora carries you. There was major tollbooths that kept all the margin. The retailers have won the leverage game over the last decade. So I think that’s the question. I’m excited about DTC. I just think you have to be the best, let me rephrase, I think the long tail of DTC is more fruitful than the long tail of marketplace.
• Got it.
• You see where I’m going?
• [Female] I do.
• That’s my point of view on it. And I’m spending a lot of time in that world, a lot.
• I’d like to piggyback on that. For us, we’ve got 10% of our sales. So we’ve got $500 million in sales. 10% comes from product and then 90% from service, right? The 10% more profitable, better margin for us. We have a stallion on haircuttery.com. We tried to how do we build that name and the thought was do you build a different site that allows you to track more eyeballs

Selling Products and Branding

• (Speaker 1): to sell our product off of versus haircuttery.com? – Or you could just, what is the brand called?
• (Male): Cibu.
• (Speaker 1): What about building, well we do that, that’s correct but we sell, our concern is the 10% we sell right now, you can buy it on Amazon, you can buy from the website of Paul Mitchell, you can go to Amazon and buy, our concern is are we gonna lose that 10% because we just–
• (Speaker 2): You’re gonna lose it if you’re not thoughtful about it. But if your site has an added layer of value, like a club that creates content or access, I think you should immediately start creating a weekly, monthly, yearly special skew only available on your world. So if you’re formulating new products, one of the things I’m trying to push a lot of my CPG brands is to create a super premium version, so like I’m literally trying to sell $100 ketchup that only comes out during the holidays, you can only buy on their dot-com. So I think what’s amazing is I think this is fun, my natural DNA is always to look at the offense of a scenario versus a defense. Your defensive point of view is absolutely correct. There’s far less friction buying from Amazon when you’re buying your deodorant and your peaches and then throw yours in. But you actually fucking own the product. So your ability to create a club, so if you’re buying your stuff, you’re in the club, and I have no idea what you want to add onto that ’cause you have, one more time, I’m trying to remember, so you’ve got this product then you have salons, right?
• (Female): We do. We sell ’em in salons and then our products also sold on Amazon.
• (Speaker 2): Right and then you have your own salons?
• (Both): Yes.
• (Speaker 2): I mean look, in theory, you could tell the end consumer that they get a five percent discount on their salon work if they buy the product on your site. You have all the advantages. I’m a big fan of fucking Amazon before it fucks you. That’s what I did with Facebook. Facebook didn’t fuck me, I built myself off of it. You have the leverage. You can use Amazon to get people into your ecosystem and then remarket to them as the brand by printing something on the back of the fucking bottle that says join Club Cibu. So I think it’s a concept of, I don’t think it’s as black and white as the convenience of the lack of friction of shipping or cost, I think it’s what are you gonna do to the product and what are you gonna layer as bells and whistles, added value, that forces everybody, I actually genuinely believe that the smartest brands are gonna fuck Amazon, not the other way around, if they’re very thoughtful to some of the stuff I just referred to. When you build added value around buying it from you at the same price, you win. Now you can use Amazon as your gateway drug to acquisition. That’s what I would do.
• (Female): Okay, well thank you, appreciate that.
• (Male): Other question I had is, we’re gonna talk later on the agenda about culture. We have a very strong intentional culture. We have founded business by Dennis Ratner and he’s really created that culture which we’ve got a lot of tenure in our business. But we’re projecting it out over the next 10, 15, 20 years from a legacy perspective, how do we keep that culture and how do we actually make it stronger? So any recommendations on how you believe culture here, for example, and what you’re trying to do to create a legacy and what you’d recommend?
• (Speaker 2): You’ve already kind of won. Even if there’s 98%, let alone 100% truth behind your statement, you’ve already won. The ambition for legacy already changes behavior. I think this is a big game of firing. I think the biggest challenge for people that look like me and it sounds like what you guys have is do you have the stomach for short term financial pain by firing the most productive but people that don’t actually bring value to the culture. It’s a very simple game of like do you live your truth? It’s really easy to maintain culture. Choose culture over money. I really believe it. I live it, I watch it, I see it in companies that I push it into if they’re an investment of mine. I really think it’s, it’s scary when something like that is so simple but it’s like religion, do you follow it or don’t you? And where you choose to bend becomes the variable of how good the culture is. The culture’s made up of the humans that are in it at the time. And like when there’s lore, founder Rick Thompson or Susan McGoo, whoever’s the executive of running that, whoever runs VaynerMedia when I go and buy Smartwater and become the CEO, and that’s what’s gonna happen. The next chapter of this company is I’m gonna buy something when the world melts and when I go run Mountain Dew or Snickers or Puma or whatever the fuck I buy, I’m gonna be at the mercy of her or his capability to uphold what I believed in. And so I think you make it clear. That’s why, it’s funny if you think about America this way, right, how we interpret the bill of rights or the constitution becomes obviously very intriguing, it’s what becomes our culture, but having it is already the starting point. But I think it’s one, I believe culture’s one big game of do you have the ability to fire the most productive, worst person? I really believe in that.
• (Male): And it’s not gonna be that, it’s gonna be the Jets you’re gonna buy, right?
• (Speaker 2): Yeah but the way I think I get there is by that in between move. I really do. I really think, the reason I built Vayner and the reason it’s built this way and unique in its way is I think I’ve built something that, if I truly bought Smartwater tomorrow, it would be a much bigger company after four years based on all the things we’ve done.
• (Female): So I’d like to get back to the concept we were talking about about company brand versus personal brand. Right now, our social media content is kind of focusing on both. We’ve got our company brand that I focus on probably more than Arie’s personal brand. And Arie really is the brand of the company. So my question is my time is limited. I only have so much to put into it. Which one makes more sense to put more time into?
• (Speaker 2): Which one is doing better from your perspective? Are you doing it yourself on your own page at all?
• (Male): My own LinkedIn page, you mean?
• (Speaker 2): Or wherever you guys are?
• (Male): Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s correct, off my own LinkedIn page and then off–
• (

Speaker 2): You know, what is always the way, when Harriet was like, I’m sure, this is fun to have her in the room, when you’re in our industry, as she is, and you look at Vayner from the outside, people believe the vulnerability is it’s so much about me and not enough about Vayner, and there’s real truth to that. If you’re an executive at Smartwater and you’re like, am I getting a company, is it Gary? These are the things you need to think about. At the same token, when you kind of start peeling away and you start realizing this is a company that doesn’t have to win business through RFPs and you think about all the dollars, you start having a really, you have a more complicated debate. For me, for example, this is why I’m bringing this up, the thing I’m probably most proud of in the 10 years that I’ve run this company and built this company is my ability to trick the market of how big it is. My biggest fear was if anybody in the big boy and girl world of advertising understood how big what I was building was going to be that they were gonna focus on it. And I’d never competed against multibillion dollar international companies starting from zero. That’s a challenge. Because if one really understood me, they could just throw money at it. Literally if I was the competitor of VaynerMedia five years ago, I would’ve literally emailed every single person on LinkedIn that worked here and said, “What’s your salary? “I will pay you three times more.” And it would’ve been the right business decision. So I’ve purposely not built VaynerMedia’s brand because I needed the market, my competitors, to underestimate it and continue to think it’s Gary and a bunch of interns, who is this charlatan and this can’t be real. That was our advantage. From the outside, it’s too much about me. But what nobody knew from the inside is I have no clients. I’ve built a scalable company. Building up Gary, you would think, oh shit, every client’s gonna want Gary. I don’t talk to any of ’em. So I was able to successfully create me as a top of funnel awareness. But then when it became a real meeting, she or he on the other side, the CMO, we right away, I’m not your account person. I could be in the backbone business. We could have lunch once a year. But I’m the CEO and executive of this.

Scaling the Business

• (Speaker 1): I don’t service your account. You’re buying VaynerMedia. You’re not buying Gary. That comes down to how he’s running his business right now where you guys are at scale. So I guess those are the questions, are you servicing the business? Is it a vulnerability right now? Is it small enough where we can keep leaning in to what is actually working? Do you do a good job once the customer comes in the funnel to realize it’s not him? Or is it still him at this point? Which is super fine too. That’s the right formula for that. Does that make sense?
• (Male): So to the extent, just to go that one step further, to the extent that it isn’t me doing the servicing, where does that fall into the?
• (Speaker 1): It is not you doing the servicing?
• (Arie): It’s not. It’s very clear early in the funnel, the conversation happens right that it’s not gonna be, but I still do close almost all new business.
• (Speaker 1): I get that and so did I. Then I probably still, I would say this, if you are fortunate enough to have a face that has all the right personality traits, I’m sure Harriet’s gonna continue, I’m not looking to suppress my people into the press. I just don’t want anybody to know who the fuck we are. There’s strategy to it. So I think if you still have all the right characteristics, I think if you’re fortunate enough to have a founder, if she or he has good characteristics and it’s not about ego and insecurity and all those weird things, then you ride that personal brand because it converts better. A human face converts better than a logo often.
• (Female): The struggle is also his time. Because he’s the CEO and he’s doing all these other things, his time is extremely limited.
• (Speaker 1): That’s why I created document, not create.
• (Ari): Can I?
• (Speaker 1): Yeah you can bounce, we can bounce, we got time.
• (Ari): So then the riff on that or where we struggle a little bit there is sort of in the B2B world right? So we’re a small company, a little over 40 people, the B2B world, some interesting parallels, our market, since we’re looking for companies headquartered very nearby, is a limited market, there’s maybe 1,000 companies that could potentially be our clients locally. So we engage there. But the people that we connect to are generally CFOs and CEOs who care very little about the detail of how we execute but care a lot about the outcomes that they get. So I find that we struggle, or I struggle to see the document versus create when I feel like a lot of the documentation isn’t super interesting to them and wouldn’t necessarily get them interested.
• (Speaker 1): Makes a ton of sense. So to that point, I agree with you, I don’t think you should document, create which is why we created the model around the podcast or the show. There’s two ways to go and I think when you start inviting them, so you’re saying it’s literally just like, nothing excites me more, and there’s a couple here, then to having a regional business to do a show around because then you get to host a party.
• (Female): We like parties.
• (Arie): We love parties.
• (Speaker 1): Literally, you guys should literally have every business leader, CEO and CFO on your show. Once you host a party, you win. I’ve said it a lot, and maybe you’ve caught it in my content, I call this the high school party role. If you’re the kid in high school whose lucky enough that your parents travel on weekends and you’re like a C-level popular kid, the second you throw the junior year party at your house you go from a C to an A minus in popularity because you’re letting the A pluses make out at your house.
• (Arie): So where do we figure out how to get, what that good content is?
• (Speaker 1): Do a show where you interview businesses in the Hartford area.
• (Arie): Okay.
• (Speaker 1): Literally once you establish some macro show, whether you call it, New England this or Hartford that, create a macro framework for it and now you’re emailing literally the people you want to do business with saying, we’re intrigued by your leadership, we’d love to have you on the show versus emailing them saying, we want your business.
• (Male): We’re already doing that, not at scale–
• (Speaker 1): Scale, scale.
• (Male): And then to add another wrinkle to it is not only is it businesses, it’s manufacturers, high tech manufacturers. So it’s even more niche.
• (Speaker 1): Love. That’s even better. They don’t get any fucking love. What fucking podcast wants them on their show? Nobody. No, really, this is really quite crazy. I know you know it, you’re feeling it intuitively, like imagine a world, this played out extremely for me real quick, just to bounce around a little bit on the PureWow and 137 side, we have podcasts. We just launched a show called The CMO Podcast. I got Jim Stengel, whose like the former CMO of Proctor and Gamble. He’s like the legendary CMO to all the current CMOs ’cause Proctor was Proctor. He’s the host. And literally the CMOs of the biggest companies in the world are literally coming through our door every day to be on a show. Imagine an hour a day, you will get everybody to say yes that you’ve been dying to have a conversation with about a business, if you say come to my office and sit with me for an hour and I’m gonna interview you about your leadership, your business, your thing. They’re literally walking into your fucking company. And if you really have the discipline to not sell and say nothing, nothing, inevitably she’s gonna be on the way out or he’s on the way out, gonna say, what do you guys do here? Ahnanan. Oh really? Actually I fucking hate my people. Why don’t you call up, I’m gonna put you in touch with Rick Thompson who runs our–
• (Speaker 1): 100%, 100%.
• (Female): You could shoot the shit for an hour.
• (Speaker 1): Easily.
• (Speaker 1): By the way, there’s nothing easier than to be a host of a podcast. You ask eight basic questions. How’d you get into this? What’s been going on? It’s super crazy. I know, it’s super obvious and what’s scary about super obvious is how well it works back to what I think about all the times. The reason I put out everything is I do not believe my ideas, even though a lot of times they’re early and well thought out historically are my special sauce. My execution is my special sauce. Right?

Business Philosophy

• “No, no, but notice how my analogy wasn’t the money.”
• “It was the clients.”
• “I think you’re coming from a good, I think most people come from a good place.”

Topic: Fear and Brand Reputation

• “I do have a big fear around that of breaking the brand. We have so much good street cred.”
• “There’s that huge fear of like fucking up that client–“
• “Bro, everything’s fixable.”
• “Yeah, another at-bat, I know.”
• “Give ’em the money back. Money’s not actually the thing. For me, like I’m never scared”
• “’cause everything’s fixable. I’ll give you a year free of service. I’ll fucking let your son intern here. I’ll do whatever the fuck,”
• “everything’s fixable if you have that, this is why I talk so much about intent. This is why I talk about lack of fear”
• “plus the biggest mistake a lot of people make is they make a call for the other person.”

Topic: Hiring and Ego

• “Life’s about alternatives. If the client’s happy, the client’s happy regardless of what you’re subjective”
• “of like or qual, right? It’s hiring. I don’t overthink hiring. I try my best, I hire.”
• “People have so much ego in hiring. It’s just this underlining like insecurity to be wrong.”
• “I love when I’m wrong. Guys, I mean this, you don’t know me well enough to like, this is the truth,”
• “there’s a weird part of me, I don’t know if it’s like, it’s probably a very flawed sick part, I get excited sometimes when I hire a very senior person”
• “and like a week later I’m like, nope and I know that for the next 18 months,”
• “because right, 18 months, and that’s like C-suite”
• “where you just can’t scare everybody that you’re just fucking changing it like your underwear, you know what I mean? But do you know what that,”
• “that’s happened to me twice. A week in, I’m like eh, fucked it up.”
• “And then all the extra work I have to put in to disguise that and manage it and manage, and then four months later,”
• “the smartest people start saying, wait a minute, I think this person sucks and you got to manage that and nine months later when the next level of smart people”
• “are like I think this person sucks and you gotta, the game.”

Topic: Lack of Fear and Making Decisions

• “So just lack of fear–“
• “Lack of fucking fear. And more importantly, no business, yeah firing.”
• “And listen, I’m the worst. I’m a bleeding heart like you would not imagine.”
• “You have a piece of content where you talked about sort of like,”
• “if you can’t do it, just overpay them out. So we’re just letting somebody go right now, I just feel horrible, she’s got a bad situation,”
• “she’s only been with us for three months, I was like, just give her six months severance, whatever.”
• “I do it all the time, bro. Isn’t it great?”
• “Dude, at the end of the day, it’s not about money out here. It’s about feeling good and happy”
• “and like I understand that my CFO’s not happy with me but that’s what I need. I fucking fire people,”
• “give ’em a huge severance and then I pay them on the side for two months. I do so much weird shit.”
• “I always think like man, if somebody investigated me, they’d be like oh here’s the fucking silver bullet. Why’s he paying Rick on the side?”
• “‘Cause I’m nice. It’s like super weird. Like nobody would ever believe me,”
• “if you played that on 60 Minutes of somebody trying to get me, they’d be like impossible.”

Topic: Background and Family Influence

• “Is it literally just your DNA? Is there some mental pneumonic, again this is a crazy kind of question but it’s like, you know what I mean,”
• “’cause we have sort of similar family backgrounds actually, eastern European Jew, immigrant stuff, right.”
• “And like so we just, first of all, being education, education, education. So like when I went off the lawyer track,”
• “my parents are like oh my God, what’s happening?”
• “I got lucky. That’s where I got really blessed and I feel a huge sense of guilt and gratitude,”
• “I can’t believe my mom let me get away with D’s and F’s where everybody else was like you’re going to fucking Harvard.”
• “Like I really hit the lotto on that one.”
• “But that perfection was like almost like beat in–“
• “Not mine, not mine, that’s where I’m trying to create clarity. It’s why I’m so confident. All that happened in my life”
• “was everybody said I was losing except my mom. So think about that. You’ve won. That’s actually the dream scenario,”
• “the dream scenario for disproportionate confidence is the world tells you you fucking suck but your mom tells you you’re the best”
• “and she’s also smart enough to not create delusion. So when you go 0 for four in little league, it wasn’t the sun’s fault in your eye”
• “or your coach’s. It’s you suck. So it’s accountability but ugh, she fucking crushed it.”
• “I am a complete byproduct of, and not only that, I’ve been hot on my mom stuff lately,”
• “my dad saved my ass big because what I was also though by being such a good storyteller”
• “was I was completely full of shit when I was 14. I would say anything to sell anything. I lied out of my mouth 24 hours a day.”
• “And that’s who I would’ve become and that’s what a lot of people think I am at first ’cause of my showmanship”
• “but he corrected me ’cause I got lucky again that my dad is, my dad thinks if you embellish to him once,”
• “embellish, there were 19 people at the party. He’s like there were eight and that’s it. Three strikes you’re out, I’m not your friend.”
• “Literally. I don’t know a single more extreme version of somebody who’s more uncomfortable with exaggeration,”
• “let alone lying, than my dad, which over the course of four or five years in my teenage years, scared the fuck out of me.”
• “‘Cause it started with like dad, I sold 98 bottles. He’s like you sold six. And then six became from 98 to 44 to 13 to six.”
• “I’m very aware of how this all happened and then if like it was reversed”
• “and my dad was first parenting me and my mom, I would’ve been a completely nightmare. I would’ve been insecure and full of shit.”
• “So like I’m quite grateful. So anyway, I’m sorry, but I wanted to create that clarity. That is important for you to know that part though”
• “and I think a lot of what you’re hearing manifests from that. But I host the party.”

Topic: Hosting and Content Creation

• “Yeah, get back to the hosting of the party.”
• “And let’s talk more because you’ve got three seats here if you have a question.”
• “I would bounce back to part of the value of this is confirming what we already know and watching Arie go”
• “crap, I know we should be doing that, I know. And then you get excited and we start to hear, you guys have it so easy.”
• “It’s like a niche within a niche. You know the 1,000 businesses, geographically you know where they’re at.”
• “Yeah, because geographically gets into branding that I get excited about. Like to me, I wish, just ’cause I know how big I can make something”
• “’cause I’m an operator, I’m like man, if I had the New England business podcast,”
• “it’s game over. Give me one year.”
• “The New England Manufacturer podcast is even easier.”
• “Yeah. But like yeah, that’s exactly right.”
• “[Male] I think we’ve been struggling a little bit with like Tom, we’ve done this, we’ve done that,”
• “what are the results? Why aren’t they calling us yet versus this patience, patience, patience?”
• “That is audacity. That’s ego. I never think anything. I think I suck.”
• “I’m being dead serious. I’m confident but like I genuinely wake up this morning and be like,”
• “I could suck for the next year and make a ton of bad decisions and literally everything I’ve done is wiped.”
• “I believe that. Business is unforgiving compared to sports on this one.”
• “In sports, Muhammad Ali can lose to Trevor Berbick in his last fight, we don’t know that. I know that because I’m a boxing nerd.”
• “You don’t know that. Business is different. When you lose, everyone then wipes out what you’ve done well.”
• “[Female] Like Boeing.”
• “What’s that?”
• “[Female] Like Boeing.”
• “Yeah, you know what I mean?”
• “[Female] Yeah.”
• “Like the narrative can change very quickly. We shit on Woolworth’s. It was the dominant retailer in this country”
• “for 100 fucking years.”
• “But on that journey right,”
• “so not just having the audacity of expecting why doesn’t it happen faster but there’s got to be something to know”
• “you’re on the right track, right? Is it just content?”
• “No, no, no, the market speaks, your business.”
• “I knew I was on the right track ’cause the first two years when I was half pregnant on VaynerMedia, we did three million in revenue”
• “and the first year I ran it we went from three to 14. That was very obvious. And 14 to 27, like business results.”
• “And that was all based on what? Less clients, bigger fees? Talk to me about that.”
• “There’s a lot of things I’m good at and the core thing I’m good at is a mix of the followings,”
• “I tend to sell something that most people don’t see at first. It ends up being right a lot of times”
• “which creates the back end. But at the time, I’m extremely good at selling in the short term.”
• “There was no brand. Twitter, I had a lot of followers so there was a little something. But what I’m really good at”
• “is wasting no time on selling to the unsellable.”
• “One of the reasons I’m fascinated by franchise to become a franchisor and I’m like what would I do is ’cause I would be incredible at getting franchisees”
• “for a couple reasons. One I’m just, a lot of entrepreneurs look up to me so that would be good probably. But after I filled the bucket,”
• “it’s like Empathy, okay I’ve sold my two million dollars worth of wine. Now I’ve got another four million to sell. Now it’s work.”
• “In that part, I just don’t fucking waste time. I go to a new business pitch,”
• “back to the same way I know somebody I fucked up on, I go to a new business pitch, it’s scheduled for an hour,”
• “I sometimes bounce after 30 ’cause I decide it’s over three minutes in. I’m like she has no interest in me.”
• “And I don’t have ego to be like to convince her. I’ll give it my best at bat and hopefully he or she will like it”
• “but I think the reason I was able to grow so quickly is I’m very good at selling”
• “and focusing on people that will actually buy.”
• “So get enough people interest and then move on from the one and done?”
• “It’s funny, I think, back to like what you said, I never think I deserve anything, period.”
• “And look, VaynerMedia’s the only company run by somebody who actually has success in doing the work that they do.”
• “Like in the whole fucking ad world, like I laugh when people think I’m Gary Vee and don’t realize I’m running this company.”
• “You’re doing social media work with an agency that was built to make television commercials? I’m like the fucking poster child of the whole game.”
• “And yet we don’t get business from people all the time.”
• “Of course, of course. You’re only gonna get certain batting averages,”
• “it’s gonna work out the way it does.”
• “But I think if you host a party, if you create the right packaging”
• “and then the right merchandising of that packaging, it’s off to the races.”
• “How did you recruit early on?”
• “What was the technique to get those, to get the staff?”
• “I hired 50 kids who had no idea what the fuck they were doing.”
• “Just from where?”
• “You mean employees or?”
• “Yeah, employees. At the time I had a big enough Twitter.”
• “My brother brought like six of his friends from high school and college. It was a fucking rat,”
• “we didn’t have any agency people. So at the level you’re at now, the content will recruit.”
• “Run your podcast against employees of your competitors that you want to hire.”
• “We need to do a lot more paid.”
• “You have to do a lot more paid. When organic, this is for everybody, when organic went away from Facebook”
• “and everybody got anger and fuck Facebook, I got fucked, I got pumped”
• “because people started getting confused because paid was under