#AskGaryVee

by Gary Vaynerchuk

  Now, once you have a product, there could be tons of things you could do to promote a local business—Facebook ads, tweets, geolocation, mobile ads, Google AdWords—the options are tremendous. And who knows, you might not need to pull out all the stops. After all, great products don’t need that much marketing. Marketing, however, won’t fix a crap product or app or service.

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  What is your advice for small business owners with limited budgets? Local listings, SEO, writing content, social media?

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  I loved this question as much as I hated the last one. And here’s the answer: Work more. Whatever it is you’re doing, add a few more hours of hustle. It’s the greatest way to shore up the gap between you and a bigger competitor. I promise you Goliath will never work as hard as you.

  This is an issue I had to grapple with myself when I started working in my father’s business, Wine Library. I didn’t have the base that I have now, of course. No one gave a crap about us. So I went out and pounded the pavement, walking into any business that might be relevant to my community and passing out flyers and coupons one by one to gain more exposure. And then we made sure to have such amazing customer service when people walked in the door that they couldn’t wait to return.

  What could a start-up do today to get that kind of exposure? The answer is going to be different depending on your business. If you’re e-commerce, Facebook ads for sure—it has one of the best ROI going right now. Google AdWords is a strong contender and banner retargeting would work well for you, too. If you’re trying to drive retail into a store, start spending time on Yelp and Foursquare’s Swarm, and yes, local TV and radio. Maybe it would be worth your while to go to the barber and ask if you can put a flyer in the window. Make cold calls. Network. Bizdev. Barter with local businesses. Attend Chamber of Commerce events. Get creative! Fight, attack, talk, ask friends for help . . . This is your life!

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  What would you do if you were starting over and trying to get the name GaryVee out there today?

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  I would do exactly what I did back then—I’d keep my mouth shut.

  Go ahead and google it. You won’t find a single piece of content from me that predates WLTV. For the first eight years of my career, 1998–2006, from the time I was twenty-two to the time I was thirty, I did nothing to build the Gary Vaynerchuk brand.

  So what was I doing?

  I was working. I was learning, practicing, questioning, researching, and experimenting. I was building the expertise and experience that would allow me to position myself as an authority, not just in the wine world but in the business world as well. Today I can say I built two $50 million businesses in five-year periods, and showed a talent for investing in companies early and making a lot of money. I can rattle off an educated answer to almost any question about wine or Internet business you can throw at me. You think I came by all that knowledge overnight? I got in the trenches and lived my business and did the work that allowed me to build the Gary Vaynerchuk brand. I created reasons for people to think I was worth paying attention to and even worth spending money on to hear me speak at events or read my books.

  I’m stunned at how many people think you can just hop onto YouTube and build a personal brand without actually having anything to show for it. You have to know something in order to be a brand. You want to be sought after as an expert? What have you done to make people want to hear you speak? Have you accomplished anything? Have you proven yourself in any way?

  No? Then shut up and get to work.

  People have tried to argue with me that you don’t have to be a practitioner to have something valuable to contribute on a subject. For example, they’ll point to football coaches who never played pro ball as proof that you don’t have to be a great player to be a great coach. And to that I say: seriously? Have you studied these football coaches’ backgrounds? Ignoring the fact that coaching is an entirely different skill set from playing, no football coach comes out of nowhere at twenty-three and wins Super Bowls. They’ve been ball boys since they were seven. They’re the sons and daughters of coaches. They’ve lived and breathed their sport their whole lives.

  Don’t ever think you can hack expertise and branding by relying on social media and modern tech. There is no substitute for honest hard work. You have to execute and accomplish something before earning the privilege of being a personal brand.

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  When you have a billion-dollar potential business plan without financial resources and inventory, where do you start with funding?

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  I don’t think you should. Not yet anyway. You know why?

  Because ideas are shit without execution.

  Do you know how many emails I receive from people swearing they have a billion-dollar idea? Everybody’s got ideas. Hell, I have unlimited ideas.

  There are people out there who might finance a venture based on ideas alone. It’s happened. But in general, those ideas don’t go anywhere because that’s all they were—ideas. This is why so many businesses are starting to fail in the tech space, and I am sure by the time you are reading this book many more tech companies funded in 2010–14 will be done and finished. Passion is great and creativity is awesome, but practicality matters more than the current business world values. You’ve got to put the work in before approaching anyone for financial backing. That’s what all the entrepreneurs we look up to did. They didn’t pat themselves on the back just for having a great idea. They hustled and made it come to life first. They made sure their idea actually did what they believed it could.

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  Do you respond to posts, tweets, and messages yourself, or do you get your staff to do it?

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  The thing I might be most proud of is that every tweet I’ve ever sent out has come from my two fingers. I can’t write for shit so I collaborate with a professional writer on my books, and Steve and India usually massage my blog posts and articles, adding sprinkles and turning them into English based on answers from my show or interviews, or interviewing me for them. But all the base material you’ll ever read or hear is mine, and if I ever talk to you on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, it’s really me.

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  Do you work seven days a week?

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  Early on in my relationship with my wife (I think it was the second date), I told her that if time went on and I still didn’t have my New York Jets, I was going to be working harder and be a lot busier than I already was. Lucky for me, she married me anyway. But believe me, I never take her understanding and acceptance for granted. Today I’m typically and happily consumed with work Monday through Friday, and my calendar is fully booked from 6 A.M. to 11 P.M. But once I’m home on Friday night, that’s it. I turn everything off for the weekend and devote my time to my wife and kids.

  That’s my version of work-life balance. Will it always be? No. Lizzie and I are constantly talking about what’s working and what isn’t, and I’m aware that as the children get older there are going to be days when I have to run to the school at 5 P.M. to watch a recital or go to a baseball or football practice (you know which one I’d prefer). You have to adjust as life evolves.

  I think a lot of people make the mistake of assuming that if you believe in hustle, you can’t ever take a step back. That’s too narrow a definition. Hustle means adjusting to business opportunities as they come and adjusting to life as it changes. If your north star is family, then there’s no shame in revolving your hustle around that. It’s about quality versus quantity, being fully engaged while you’re working, not necessarily working every day of the week. Instead of 365 days of complete insanity, you can have 265 days of really hard work with 100 days of rest and rejuvenation. Hustle is not just working obnoxiously hard—it’s also working obnoxiously smart.

  And when I rest, boy, do I rest. I couldn’t care less about traveling the world when I’m on vacation—I just want to lie on a beach in peace. So now you know that i
f you bump into me on the street or at a function, by all means come by and say hi, but if you happen to catch me on the beach with my eyes closed, don’t bother me. I’m resting.

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  How do you avoid procrastination so well?

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  I would be an obnoxious procrastinator if I weren’t so busy and I have no choice but to get as much done in every minute as I can. What some people might call procrastinating I call reprioritizing. I’m in constant audit mode adjusting to real life all the time. Something might be super-important one day only to get demoted the next when I open my inbox in the morning. Trying to keep track of what’s most important and when can drive my assistant crazy. He’ll have worked out a whole schedule for me based on what I told him was most important to me and by the end of one three-hour flight he’ll get an email from me adding another fifteen things that force him to completely dismantle it. Apparently he has figured out that if I tell him something is “tippy top” that’s the thing to put ahead of everything else.

  You might think that means that I’m only half paying attention to everything, but you’d be wrong. I live in the moment, and my pants are on fire for whatever it is I’m paying attention to at that time. As long as you’re treating something every day as a tippy-top item and executing on it, you’re moving the needle.

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  Are you a morning person?

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  I am not. Believe it or not I make it a point to get six to seven hours of sleep per night, and I sleep like a brick. It takes a lot to wake me up. I mean a lot. I’m rising with a little more energy since I started working out and eating right, but there was a time when someone could have broken into my home, stabbed me in the leg with a knife, and stolen everything I own and I wouldn’t have noticed until the next morning.

  The thing is, though, I’ve never really understood why it would be an advantage to be a morning person, or why morning is valued more than other parts of the day. If you do your best work first thing in the morning, great. But some people work best at 3 A.M., 5 P.M., or 10 P.M. There is no right time to hustle, as long as you are hustling.

  You don’t want to exhaust yourself, or collapse, or make yourself crazy. Just work as hard as you can when you are working, and rest when it’s time. Because guess what? It’s not about how much you sleep. It’s what you do while you’re awake.

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  How do you deal with burnout?

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  It doesn’t happen to me very often that I decide I want to check out and bury my head under the covers. I think the last time was when the state of Texas singled out Wine Library and restricted our shipping while allowing many other stores to ship. We lost about $4 million in revenue. I think the day I realized we’d lost that fight I went to sleep at 6 P.M.

  If I’m feeling burned out or stressed by work, it means that I’m focusing too much on business instead of the big picture. So when I feel myself start to get that way, I just try to imagine how it would feel if my mom died (I know it’s dark but it’s the truth). That’s all it takes to put the whole world back into perspective and move on.

  So in a nutshell, my solution to burnout is rest and recalibration.

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  What are your practical #HustleHacks when it comes to diet, sleep, and your daily routine? How do you maintain energy and brainpower while hustling nonstop?

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  The reason I can hustle the way I do is that I love it. I love taking my pouting selfies and traveling at 6 A.M. to a random airport. The day I answered this question on the show I woke up at 5:15 to play basketball after getting back into town at midnight because I love it. If I’d been waking up to meet Muscle Mike, my trainer, to work out I’d have probably been grumpier. Passion is an unmatched fuel. Add being happy to that and you have a wonderful formula for good health.

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  You’ve said you watch us fans of the show and can tell if people are hustling. How? Engagement, frequency, or gut?

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  Mark my words, if you tell me you’re hustling, I will go to your Instagram or Twitter account and take a look at your work. I will click the posts and hit the profile where it says “view all with replies,” and I’ll study the engagement rates. I love it when I see one engagement after another with just some retweets. Then I’ll hit the URL on the account. I’ll figure out what the business is and then analyze the profiles and the pictures. I usually see too many people in the right-hook business, but boy does it make me smile when I see people jabbing the shit out of things. Then I’ll worry. Are they doing the right mix? Are there too few right hooks? Are they being responsive enough? I can spend ten minutes on this, which in my world is insanity. I’ve got unanswered emails because I’m spending time on your Twitter accounts. But I believe in karma, and I believe that the reason I can give you the answers you need is that I know you better than you think I do.

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  We spend so much time pouring our creativity into projects for our clients that when it’s time to shift gears and focus on our own brand, we’re exhausted. How do you keep the fire burning for both?

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  You need to work harder and faster.

  Working harder is easy. Drop the hour you’re watching Scandal and voila, you’ve got more time to hustle. Working faster, however, is a little trickier. It takes practice. Train yourself to do a little bit more in each hour than you normally would. Maybe you save checking your emails until lunch. Maybe you turn off your phone. Maybe you work odd hours. Every day add something more and get it all done. The first few days you may not finish what you started out to do, but keep challenging yourself and you’ll get there. It’s like training for a marathon. It takes time, but once you’ve been at this for a while you’ll see that you can accomplish much more in one day than you ever thought you could.

  Don’t kid yourself. Most people say they’re working a full eight hours a day, but very few really are. When someone tells me they’ve got no more time to give, I’ll go through their Twitter and check them out. Usually I’ll find fifteen minutes here and there where they watched a YouTube video, or took a quiz about God knows what. And you’re probably thinking, So what? We’re not machines. Aren’t we allowed to goof off for just a few minutes? Sure. But then don’t complain that you’re not getting everything done.

  I do not have one spare second during the workday. My team fights for minutes on my calendar. Even seconds. It’s basically an inside joke at this point.

  I used to think I was the biggest workaholic who ever lived. When I was twenty-two to about thirty, I really thought I was all in. But I wasn’t, because I had enough time to bullshit about baseball with friends. I actually had free time. It wasn’t until I started working more hours and dramatically faster that my career really started to explode. It’s the context of those first eight years of my career that gives me the audacity you see in this chapter. I just know the difference between what hard work looked like then, and what running a business and investing in and closely monitoring 150-plus companies looks like now. You have the time if you are good at making it.

  So that’s the answer to keeping that fire burning when you’re balancing your own stuff with your clients’. Work hard and work fast. Be the machine.

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  I’d love to hear more on how to hustle faster!

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  Take short meetings. Stop focusing on dumb shit. Don’t be afraid to break things. Don’t be romantic. Don’t take the time to breathe. Don’t aim for perfect.

  And whatever you do, keep moving. Reread this a few times . . .

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  Do you ever get sick, and if so, how do you still hustle through it?

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  The old me got sick sometimes, but since I married LizzieVee eleven years ago I think I’ve only been ill once. She deserves a big shout-out for getting me to wash my hands. Honestly, I think for some people like me it’s a question of mind over matter. I mean, I tak
e more than one hundred flights per year. You’d think a bug would eventually get me. But it hasn’t, and I think a large part of the reason why is that the brain is a powerful organ, and I am so focused and so determined not to get sick, that I just don’t. It helps, too, that I’ve started exercising and eating right, but that’s such a recent event I really do think I outwilled many colds.

  But let’s say I did get sick. Would I drag my sorry ass into the office, possibly infecting all my colleagues because I’m afraid of what will happen if I’m not there? Absolutely not. And I don’t want anyone else coming in when they’re sick, either. When the #vaynerplague hits us (search Twitter, it’s a real thing) I want people to stay home, take care of themselves, and get better. In some businesses there’s a real stigma around staying home when you’re sick, like it means you’re weak or unmotivated. (I have to admit early in my career I saw it that way, but I have evolved.) Coming in when you’re sick doesn’t show dedication, it’s selfish. And kind of gross. And not fun for your coworkers or for you.

  That doesn’t mean I want my sick employees working from home if they feel like they’re dying, either. You get on a call with them and they can’t get their point across because they’re coughing up a lung. How is that helpful to anyone?