Hopefully it will be a long, long time before my funeral, but I’m hoping for a shockingly big crowd.
CHAPTER 15
MANAGEMENT
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IN THIS CHAPTER I TALK ABOUT CREATING CULTURE, CUTTING MEETINGS, AND HOLDING TEAMS ACCOUNTABLE.
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I love being a manager and I love talking about management. It’s similar to the topic of leadership, but in my mind management is almost synonymous with mentorship. One of the great pleasures of running Wine Library and VaynerMedia has been the opportunity it has given me to show people how to be better managers. We all probably have our own opinions of what makes a good manager, but in this one man’s point of view it’s the ability to reverse-engineer every person that works for you and put him or her in a position to succeed at the task for which they’ve been hired. That’s what I try to do for the people who report to me, and that’s what I expect the people who report to me to do for the people who report to them.
In less than four years, VaynerMedia grew from thirty to more than five hundred employees. And in all that time, we had only one person in the HR department—me. That’s how much my employees matter to me. Every company lies about how much they care about their customers, and how much they care about their employees. It’s such an easy thing to say, but it’s really hard to put in the work that proves it.
From the very beginning, when AJ and I were just starting VaynerMedia, we made a few key decisions and set standards that we swore would be upheld no matter what. We did this because we had seen too many companies become breeding grounds for unhappiness, places where uninspired, unappreciated minds went to wither. For that reason, my employees’ happiness is paramount, to the degree that I tell my clients up front that I care about my employees first, their customers second, and them last. Interestingly, I’ve never lost business because of it, maybe because my track record speaks for itself. Clearly, putting my employees above everything else hasn’t hurt my business. It could only help yours.
The quality of management in any venture is, like its cousin leadership, one of the core determinants of whether a business will succeed or fail. You want the people working with you to want to be there, to feel challenged, appreciated, and valued. People always respect and like the manager who’s thinking ahead and guiding them to places they’d never thought of, but they love and admire when that manager stays with them until 2 A.M. working that deck or stocking the shelves. Is this you? A disproportionate number of the readers of this book are managers or will be someday. In fact, the day you launched an entrepreneurial venture you became a manager.
One of the reasons I was excited to write this book was that I knew it would allow me to freely explore some of the topics about which I’m passionate and that have made The #AskGaryVee Show so much fun for me. Management is at the top of that list.
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Where is the best place to hire employees?
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I’m at a sweet stage in my career where I’ve become a known personality and my company has made its reputation, so people are coming to us. But don’t let anyone tell you it’s tough to find good people. It’s actually really easy. It’s only hard for people unwilling to do the work.
You can break this down in a few easy steps.
1.Go to Twitter Search and start looking for the people who are talking about what you do for a living. Search the terms that would line up with the responsibilities inherent in the kind of job you’re trying to fill. If you need a Web designer, find people who mention website design, or graphic design, “landing page optimization,” or any other term that might indicate they’re talking about or interested in the kind of work you need done.
2.Find the most promising candidates, click on their profiles, click on their home page, click on their portfolio, and see which ones look like they have talent.
3.Email them and find out if they’re interested in looking for a new position. Most will probably say no, but maybe one will say yes, and the other three would probably give you referrals.
4.Interview five people and hire one.
There. It might take you as little as eight hours. Eight hours of hard work, to be sure, but far less than the days and weeks it might take you if you go the traditional hiring route and wait for the right résumé or LinkedIn inquiry to land in your inbox. And yes, someone did try this approach and met with success, so I know it can work.
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What role does internal culture play in a company’s success?
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A starring one. Building a strong internal culture is one of the best ways to ensure success for your company. Sales matter, profits matter, customer relationships matter, but every one of those pieces of your business—in fact, every piece of your business—is affected by the culture. Culture is a product of people, and when people aren’t happy and instead are constantly thinking of a way to get out, their work will reflect it. Wouldn’t it make sense, then, to make your culture a priority? And given that people shape culture, wouldn’t it make sense to keep it at the forefront of your mind every time you hire?
Because that’s how you build a strong internal culture—you hire one. And you don’t make hiring or firing a financial decision; you make it an emotional one. Just because you suddenly have the budget to hire someone new doesn’t mean you should. Just because someone isn’t performing the way you expect doesn’t mean you show him or her the door right away. You have to think about how every hiring and firing will affect the collective community before taking action.
Hiring and firing should be emotional decisions because you’re dealing with people, not contracts. We’re all told to think “business is business,” which is generally interpreted as a mandate to remove our emotions out of our decision making so that we can arrive at the most objectively and financially profitable end. Well, I disagree. Business is business when it comes to financial or contractual negotiations, but not when it comes to deciding what happens to the human beings who make your business run. Besides, there are financial consequences when you treat an individual’s job prospects as a financial return on investment; they’re just harder to see because they don’t show up right away on the balance sheet. They’re there, though, coloring the unmade profits, the missed opportunities, the lost innovation and enthusiasm that results from the low loyalty and morale that pervades companies where people don’t come first.
That doesn’t mean you can’t fire people who aren’t performing, of course. It just requires that you take more time to think through other alternatives. For example, let’s say you’re unhappy with someone who is extremely popular at your company because they’ve got great people skills. How much will everyone else suffer if you let him or her go? Is it possible they’re just not in the right position, and that maybe putting them in a different department would solve your problem, increase and improve their work, and keep everyone happy?
Maybe you really need to let this person go. Could you help them find another position outside the company over the span of sixty days, rather than cutting them loose in one day? It’ll cost you a lot more money, but it will salvage just as much in the form of an intact, vibrant company culture. And at some level it’s just a great thing to do.
Never underestimate the power of great culture. You want outstanding results and sales and projects and awards and accolades, and you know you need great teams, great leaders, and hard work to get them. Well, how many great teams have you ever encountered that are made up of tired, resentful people? How many great leaders hate what they do? How many unhappy people are willing to give their jobs everything they’ve got? Not many. A great company is grounded in great culture, and great culture begins and ends with whom you hire, and how they leave.
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What’s your best time management tip?
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Hire an assistant and make him or her the czar of your time. If that’s not possible, use technology apps and programs like proworkflo
w.com, Evernote, Calendly, Asana, timetrade.com, and even the Apple Watch.
Make time management your religion. Learn to say no to the things that keep you out of the clouds and dirt.
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What do you look for when hiring creatives?
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Good creatives love their art, but great creatives who work in business love to use their art to sell. In other words, they aren’t held up by romantic notions of artistic integrity. A creative who wants to work effectively and happily at an agency shouldn’t care more about the craft and winning awards than the agenda. So that’s the kind of person I’m looking for—someone with tons of creative talent who wants to make fantastic art, yet who understands that we’re in the business of selling stuff and gets a thrill out of that, too. If we don’t move product, or raise awareness for the cause, or inspire people to donate, or click, or buy, we haven’t fulfilled our obligation to our client.
Benjamin Israel Lazarus
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Do you drug-test your employees? Why or why not?
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We don’t.
There is no real overwhelming reason for it. It just doesn’t seem needed or appropriate, or something I have any real emotion about. I don’t have any huge stance on drug culture. It just hasn’t come up.
SEAN BURROWS
DIGITAL MARKETING CONSULTANT
@SeanThoughts
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When running a company or providing marketing services for a VaynerMedia client, how do you segment out sales, marketing, and business development? All three disciplines overlap so much, and the waters can get really muddy when one or more of those areas are clearly lacking and the others are strong.
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They all work together. Being good at marketing is different from being good at sales, but a good marketing campaign can lead to massive sales. By that same token, business development is just a gateway drug to sales. Now, when all three are working in harmony, you’re obviously cruising. A great example of that would be SalesForce. They’ve invested heavily in salespeople, they market themselves excellently for a B2B SAAS business, and they execute on business development through events like nobody else.
But not everybody is SalesForce, and that’s okay. Take a look at HubSpot, which is one of my investments. Maybe not as strong with sales early on, but they crushed it on biz dev and marketing and had a highly successful IPO as of this writing.
I would argue that a business’s strengths and weaknesses will always be somewhat uneven depending on the composition of its DNA, culture, and people. What it comes down to is recognizing if one of those three areas—sales, marketing, or biz dev—is bringing you down as a collective, and addressing the problem through hiring, training, re-orging, or some other solution. The good news is that unlike a car, where the failure of one cog can cause the whole system to break down, I have found that when one branch of a client’s company or my own businesses isn’t working, it doesn’t necessarily drag down the entire organization.
The truth is that all three of them lead to the same finish line, so if you have one that is overindexing, it’s possible that you can ride it home. Obviously, I’d love for you to be great at all three, but don’t get too worried if one is lagging behind the other two. This all speaks back to my core tenet of betting on your strengths and not your weaknesses. I’m much more interested in you doubling down on the two things you’re good at instead of the one where you’re behind.
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When transitioning to a new project management role, how do you maintain high standards with your team while still keeping projects on time and on budget?
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Use your ears more than your mouth. Take the time to understand everything that’s going on in your department, and listen before trying to take control. If you see a problem, let your team explain to you what they think is the problem, and then instead of coming up with a solution, guide them to coming up with it themselves. That may require you pitching in, but you’re not above getting your hands dirty, are you? Become known as the person who “gets it” and you’ll always have all the information you need to make the important calls because people won’t be afraid to come to you for help. Creating an open, trusting, compassionate environment where everyone knows what you expect will save everyone a ton of time and help you achieve your objectives.
As your team continues to grow, hire other great listeners. The best listeners who know how to calibrate all the data and act on it will be the winners. No one ever solved a problem alone.
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How do you prioritize which project to execute first?
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I take care of the biggest fires where I get the biggest upside if I put them out quickly, like calming a new client or handling an employee disagreement. I focus on those immediate concerns while making sure the company vision is still clear and that everything I do will eventually help me build the company and team I want, which will ladder me up to buying the Jets. You know, clouds and dirt. And I don’t worry about anything else in the middle.
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How can agencies make staff meetings more productive?
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By cutting them in half.
Now, how are you supposed to do that when you’re also supposed to be giving your employees room to talk, spending time with them, being compassionate, and all those other touchy-feely bits of advice I tend to offer?
You just do.
I swear to you it works. Estimate how much time you think you will need to cover your agenda, and then halve it.
If you give people a ten-pound bag, they are going to fill it with ten pounds of crap. If you give them a fifteen-pound bag, it’s the same—fifteen pounds of crap. They will never overfill or underfill the bag. When I schedule an hour meeting with my team, we’ll banter a bit and talk about a few other things we didn’t plan on talking about, but we will fit everything we need into the hour. If I cut that same meeting to thirty minutes, we’ll still accomplish everything that needs to be done, hands down. And we’ll have saved thirty minutes, which is really what this is all about, right? Our time is valuable. When you’re hustling like I do—and which I’d like to think you do—every minute, every second counts.
When everyone knows they’re going to lose your attention as soon as the allotted fifteen or thirty minutes are up, they prepare. No one’s shuffling around papers, no one shares irrelevant anecdotes, no one talks around the point, and no one is winging it. People have spent their time before the meeting getting their information straight, pulling their papers together, and tightening their message because they know if they don’t, they won’t get a second chance.
All that friendly touchy-feely stuff I believe in? I do it, but I do it fast. Heck, I do that as I’m walking into the meeting. But the minute my butt hits my seat, everyone had better be ready to go. I’m positive that if there is any one answer that could probably benefit every single person reading this book, it’s this one.
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What’s one question you ask in interviews?
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There is one question I only raise if an interview is gaining momentum and I feel like I may have found a good fit for my team. It’s not just a question I love to ask, it’s one I need to ask. In fact, at some level it’s the only one I really care about.
“Where do you want your career to go?”
I spend most of my interviews trying to get people comfortable enough to answer that question truthfully should I decide I want to ask it. I don’t care if the answer is you want to be the CEO of VaynerMedia, or you just want to move a couple of levels up and have great work-life balance. I don’t even care if you want to come work for me for two years, suck up all my IP, and then go somewhere to start your own agency. I really don’t. Truly. Whatever your agenda is, I’m fine with it. I just want to know what it is, so I can help us get there. You and me.
See, I’m a creature of contradictions. I welcom
e chaos and love to take advantage of trends and have built a business that serves as a port for companies swimming in a constantly undulating sea, but man, I hate change at the personal level. I want to keep people in my ecosystem for as long as possible, because once I like working with you, I want to work with you forever. And I know the best way to keep you close is to deliver on what you want, so the faster I can get that insight the better.
By giving people opportunities and helping them achieve what they want, I keep my relationships with my employees positive and open. Such a positive environment not only makes it hard for people to leave, it ensures I always know what’s going on. This allows me to execute quicker, and together we can do amazing work faster.
I hire a lot of young people, so I know change is inevitable. People fall in love, they decide to start families, and their lives and interests evolve. And that’s the way it should be. But by keeping the communication funnel open and clear, I have a better chance of finding a way to help my best talent achieve all their dreams while still working with me. And I want to start from day one, five minutes in.
#AskGaryVee Page 22
