3 Essential Strategies to Future-Proof Your Business in 2025

0:00I promise you that if every person here leaves and does proper LinkedIn content three times a day that they would see miraculous results for their business a year later. Attention is the number one asset. What is universally true for everyone in this room, regardless of where you are on the journey within this industry, is that the far majority of individuals, humans here, and companies are not taking advantage of what's happening in LinkedIn right now. So just from a pure practical standpoint, there's so many wants and dreams and hopes and things that you want to happen in this room and one of the most significant opportunities to make that thing happen is actually knowing how to make content for LinkedIn and actually posting it and actually reaping the benefits of it.

0:49LinkedIn right this second is acting like a social network more similar to what Facebook was in 2013 and 14 and the land grab for B2B companies and B2B2C companies that I've watched over the last two years grow and explode and really, I won't use the word exploit, but just so everybody understands, no ads, just taking advantage of best practices to create organic reach is disproportionately the underpriced attention, the underutilized move of this collective room. You can literally make videos and pictures and run$25 to$50,$100 on LinkedIn against employees of venture capital firms and reach them and not have to go to conferences and pray that you'll run into them in the hallway to pitch them your startup.

1:41So that leads me to the next C that I'm gonna talk about, which is massive in this room, in my opinion, especially for the people that continue to slow their role on incorporating new tech within their organizations, really the writers in the room, is this concept of complacency. You know, I think there's a really interesting direct correlation with complacency and fear to growth of business. Or my favorite, well this is tried and true and this is how I got there, as if that's what's gonna get you to the next place. And when I analyzed this industry and I have clients in it, I run a 2 ,000 person marketing agency called VaynerMedia.

2:26We work with some of the biggest brands in the world to do their marketing both on the media and the creative side. So we've had plenty of pitches for the brands in this room. I spend a lot of time pretty much analyzing business and attention 24-7. And so when I think about this, actually I'm gonna jump all the way back to my opening question with the hands. I was born in the Soviet Union. I came to the U.S. when I was three. And one of the ways that my dad started his American dream was getting a bunch of side jobs. One of them was to be a stock boy in a liquor store. I lived in a studio apartment half the size of this stage in Queens with seven family members when we first got to America.

3:09My dad got a job as a stock boy in a liquor store in New Jersey. He eventually became the manager of that store and that's where his journey began. My entrepreneurial journey began in Edison, New Jersey where when I was six, I started a six lemonade stand franchise. Anyways, really. I don't, how many people here, I see there's some youngsters in here, but there's some people my age here. You guys remember big wheels? Before you'd get an actual bike? I used to ride my big wheels to the five lemonade stands I had where I tricked my friends to stand there all day and collect the money. And at the end of the day, I would literally ride my big wheels to pick up the cash like I was Tony Soprano.

3:52And that was my first business. but what I was doing while they were manning and womaning the lemonade stands was I was making signs and trying to figure out where to put the signs on what streets and what trees so that people would come and buy my lemonade. And from the age of six when I did that to the second I stand in front of you right now at 47, for the last 41 years, all I've really done was try to understand where attention is and try to understand what to say in it. If you understand that, you'll understand the rest of my story which is at 14 I was making two, $3 ,000 a weekend selling baseball cards in the malls of New Jersey.

4:33And I don't know about you, I know there's a lot of sales people and business people here. But when you're 14, and you're 14 in 1989, pre-internet, and you have$10 ,000 in cash under your bed, and you're not selling weed, you're fucking awesome. So that was, I was crushing it, thank you. I was crushing it, I was feeling good. And then my dad ruined my life. Oldest son, the only one born in the old country, turned 14 and now I have to go work in what is now my dad's liquor store, a small store in Springfield, New Jersey. And I went from making$2 ,000 a weekend to making$2 an hour bagging ice in the basement for 14 hours a day.

5:12I was just bagging ice for 14 hours a day, two bucks an hour was the worst. Finally I was 16 and I was finally allowed upstairs. And when I was stocking shelves, my life changed again because I realized on one faithful day that people collected wine, not just drank it. And I thought that was the coolest because I was into collecting comics and cards and all that stuff. And about 16, 17 I decided that I wanted to build the biggest wine store in the world for my dad. That was gonna be my passion. And this is when the story starts to make a lot of sense for this room. My great fear in this room is that a lot has happened in this industry over the last seven years with technology, I think we can agree with that.

5:52If you start looking, I kind of did a lot of homework for this talk, start looking at the mid-2015, that kind of area, a lot of you in this room started to finally make a transition from paper to technology. And then obviously COVID sped that up for a lot of people in the industry. But COVID also did the thing that we're dealing with now, which is it created an artificial growth, which is why we're in an artificial valley right now, and we're all dealing with that shit, and I'm sure a lot of you are thinking about that. What I'm worried about for the business owners in here that are considering technology is there's multiple things going on right now.

6:23The market's tougher. AI is looming. Real talk. Like no matter what you've read or what you've thought, I just want to remind, how many people here are over the age of 45? Raise your hand. For everybody who just raised their hands, you lived a full childhood before you went on the internet like I did. I went right through high school never being on the internet. We have all, if we're over 45, in our grown up life, young adult life, have watched technology completely change the world. My first ever talk was for like 13 people in Union, New Jersey at a Chamber of Commerce event in 1997 when I told them that I was going to build a website on the information super highway on the World Wide Web and I was gonna sell wine on it from my dad's liquor store and I gave this passionate rant of what was happening and why this, that and why some of you, I know all of you are advertising in the yellow pages.

7:28Remember that shit, OGs?

7:32Kids, you have no idea how crazy the fucking world was pre-internet. And I gave this talk and I'm done and I feel like I fully laid out why the internet was going to be big and I felt amazing and literally those 13 people laughed directly in my face. The first guy raised his hand and said, you're telling me that I'm going to go to a computer and buy a bottle of wine? Why wouldn't I just go to your fucking store? And then everyone laughed. And I looked at all of them and said, all of you are gonna laugh right now and then someone like me is gonna go into your industry and make all of you fucking cry.

8:07And then it got quiet. And then it happened. What I'm worried about is when I was doing my homework, how many people still haven't advanced their tech stack? And I get why. I come from small business. I grew up with a father where every dollar mattered. And so I get that in a tough year, it's hard to unravel all your legacy tech and make the investment to cloud-based SaaS this and this, that, and retrain all your own. I promise you, I'm from the dirt. I really, really genuinely understand. The problem is we have a perfect storm of why you get hurt. Macro market, tough. Macro technology train coming very fast.

8:52You try to hold off for another year or two because you want this year's P &L not to be a disaster. And then we wake up in 2026 and 2027 and it's really ugly. That concerns me and that's why I talk about complacency. everyone's, my favorite strategy to watch in business is this one.

9:16This is the one that I've watched when the internet came along. This is the one that I watched when blogging came along. By the time social media came, which is why I'm an investor in Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, all these companies very early on was I had seen the pattern recognition. Your industry, all of you, are going to be wildly impacted by AI. You're also gonna be wildly impacted by the blockchain. Don't let the greed and the ridiculousness of NFT summer confuse you of what's going on in the blockchain. A decentralized server that is owned by no one, that is a ledger that is foolproof and non-manipulatable and zero cost is gonna be where every contract on Earth sits.

10:00All of them. It's really gonna happen. By show of hands, how many people here know what a deep fake video is? Raise your hands, put up the lights, I just wanna see. First of all, epic, good work. For the ones that didn't raise your hands, don't feel bad. It's still an emerging tech, but clearly, either that Weekend Drake song or the Dame Lillard ESPN thing last week. So, just for everybody to fully understand, for the last 100 years of society, the judge and jury has not been the Supreme Court in America. the judge and jury of our society has been video proof. Right? Think about history. History will always tell you the future.

10:39There were human beings that used to live without video. Didn't exist. It was invented. It's not even that long ago. For the last hundred years, all proof has been the video proof. We are entering into a new era of technology and society that every person in this room in five years will not believe a single video they see. There will be more fake videos on the internet and on the news in the next half decade than real videos during that same period of time. Think about that. So what's going to happen is every company that produces video will first have to put it on the blockchain to show they were the people that made the video and then it will go to the internet.

11:25We now take the internet for granted. It is infrastructure for this world. It is the biggest thing that happened to this industry in the last 25 years, and there's not even a close second. But it's only 25, 30 years old in the form that it is today. We take for granted that there won't be new technologies that come along. The blockchain and AI together over the next 20 years. How many people here plan on being, plan on working for another, actually let me go a different way. How many people here plan on retiring in the next five years? And I don't mean you're gonna crush it next year and buy an island.

12:05I mean you're fucking old and you're finished. Raise your hands. Retiring in the next five years, raise them. All right, let's clap it up for these 14 OGs. Enjoy the fishing. Get that sunshine. For the 99.9 % of the rest of you, this stuff is coming. And what I'm concerned about is it's hard to run a marathon when you're not on the treadmill setting up for it. The thought of how many people here are still in the same tech stack or not even in a tech stack in 2024, knowing what the world's gonna look like in 2030 is petrifying to me. 14 people in here are lucky because they're going to be fishing and laying on the beach but for the rest of you if you feel like you're a step behind on tech look on the record I don't like tech I don't like innovation I wish nothing changed every five years I figure it all out start crushing and then the shit changes I'm annoyed I understand I don't want anything to change I wish it was just emailing Google AdWords like in 2000.

13:21I had it fully figured out. I wish it was before internet. My direct mail and newspaper ads crushed. I don't want this. I'm not a futurist. I don't think this is cool. I didn't even own a computer until I was 19. I'm actually not that interested in tech. I'm just interested in not going out of business. I'm just interested in growing. I'm just interested in not being delusional. When I said this is most people's tech and innovation and marketing strategy, I mean it. Most people, when they see new shit come, put their head, they see a huge tidal wave of innovation, they put their head in the sand and pray.

14:02And a very few amount of people grab a surfboard and ride it. There are people in this room that, if they understand what I'm talking about, have the ability of correcting the fact that they've been behind in their competitive set for the last 10 or 15 years, and they can leapfrog everyone if they were willing to put in the 50 hours of research on actually learning what's happening in AI, blockchain, and this is results tomorrow, LinkedIn content for your business. You can literally reach everyone, so many people's agendas here today is to do business development. You'll listen to my talk, but what you're worried about is what's gonna happen out there and what's gonna happen tonight.

14:44That's why you're here. That's the actual business. The fact that I know that scales 365 days a year, if you spend the five or 10 hours to do research on how do I make good LinkedIn content. By the way, there's an incredible website that will tell you everything you should do. I know some of you are taking notes. I'll spell out the website for you. G-O-O, thank you for doing that. That made my fucking morning. You can literally type in, how do I make LinkedIn content for an insurance SaaS company enter and get obnoxious amount of results with best practices? This isn't about when I talk about this stuff, they're like, Gary, but how do I do it?

15:26That's like saying, how do I get into shape? Everybody here knows how to get into shape. It's called stop eating shit and go to the gym. Doing it is hard. I promise you that if every person here leaves and does proper, because there's the right way to do pushups versus the wrong way, does proper LinkedIn content three times a day, that they would see miraculous results for their business a year later. The first six months will be terrible. A month in, you'll be like, why did I listen to that fucking guy? It won't happen, because you don't know what you're doing yet. It's like everything. You didn't know how to swim as good as you did later, ride a bike, your first kiss was a disaster.

16:10Right, you got better. And so, when I think about this talk, what can I universally talk about? I can universally talk about content. I can't encourage the startups looking for capital, the B2B2C players, the people that are, like literally, instead of cold calling or praying or business developing your way into getting to a third party to put your insurance into, right? Like when I check out on a website, do I want to buy that insurance? Those biz dev deals are big, I get it. I know how it works. I also know that almost everyone in that sector is not producing content for the e-commerce retailers to make them consider them.

16:52We're fully reliant on sales when marketing and brand always beats sales. I love sales, I'm a salesman. but let me explain to you what sales is. It's what you do when you don't know how to market and brand. I need everybody to hear that and I'm very aware of how people look at sales and marketing. People love sales in this room. It's black and white. Johnny got the gig. He brought home the bacon. Yay Johnny even though he's a fucking asshole. We'll talk about culture in a minute but what we don't understand and we think marketing is a waste What did that video do for us? What's the ROI? Everyone wants to be so last touch attribution.

17:34Ro, ASCAC, it's fine. It allows marketing and brand to win. Almost every piece of clothes that everybody is wearing here is not because they sold you and called you on the phone. It's because they built a brand and you want to wear it. Marketing and brand works. There's a lot of big brands in this room. You see what they put out. You think they're making these silly commercials on TV for their health? You think it's not working? You think they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these videos to put out to the world and distributing them because it's funny? They like it? It's ha ha ha?

18:08I promise you it's not. It's called business. And I think for even the smallest people here, two founders who started their SaaS business today and are here hoping to stumble into a VC who will give them capital during a very hard market, even for that early stage company, all the way to the top five brands in the building that are billions of dollars in market cap, understanding how to be a contemporary marketer, aka how do you make content for this? This is the television. And not for long, by the way. All of you that like hate that this is like, you hate that your kids are on social all day, wait till they sit in a pod on VR for the rest of their lives.

18:46You know what this is? This is the beeper. Remember the beeper? I know you do, you fuckers loved it. A lot of you didn't get a smartphone back in the early 2000s, because you were like, I don't want anyone calling me whenever they want. I got my beeper, they got my pager, they'll hit me up and I'll call when I want to talk to them, right? And then my favorite, let's talk about why people resist new technology. When this thing came out, I called my mom, who's the greatest, I called her and said, Mom, this thing is gonna change the world. And then I went out and I was speaking then and putting out content, and I would say, who's getting one of these?

19:23Too expensive, why? And you know why? Because you guys loved your fucking Blackberry. You know why you loved your Blackberry? You needed to touch the buttons because you knew how to type without looking. How many people here rocking a Blackberry with us right now? Nice, two. All right, I need to see it. I gotta buy it from you and sell it on eBay as a fucking antique.

19:48We always, here's one thing that I would like to really land with this group. that I think is like an easy sentence to remember that may stick in two years and four years and five years and help you make a decision. I believe the business world, and I believe humans in general, are obsessed with no. It's safe. They're obsessed with or. I can either do this or that. I really believe the most important word for almost everyone in this room is maybe. When new stuff comes, instead of no, for the stuff I'm talking, post three times a day on LinkedIn, your business will grow. Do you know how many people are here?

20:33No. Can't. Why? No. I've tried, it didn't work. You tried, but you sucked. Right? Do you know what the ROI of a basketball is for LeBron James? Billions of dollars. You know what the ROI of a basketball for me is? Negative 10 ,000. I've torn both my minuscuses and I haven't made a dollar on it. Social media, LinkedIn, B2B marketing works. If it doesn't work for you, it's because you're not good at it. And these are the things we need to understand. Maybe, maybe. There are so many major things going on in the world right now from a technology standpoint that the biggest thing that I need to get to is get you into understanding the analogy I made five minutes ago.

21:20You will not be able to compete in five years no matter who you are in the chain right now if you do not up your mental and financial investment into understanding tech. It's just the way it is. It's now oxygen. Please, I get it. Legacy stack, pull out, new, high cost, high anxiety. My dad has had the same POS register system in the liquor store for the last 25 years. I call him every day trying to get him to unwind it. It's holding him back, but he doesn't want to do the capital investment and even more training the whole staff. It's too painful. It's got a bunch of old dogs. I understand old dogs.

22:05I get it. And I don't mean old in age, just stuck in their ways. You could be 27 and you've been doing it for five years, since 22, and that's old dogs. So I highly recommend everybody heed the call that I'm making this morning and understand how significant the change is that's coming. I think the things that are practical really fall into the sea of content, which I've touched on, and I'll get back to it a little bit later. And now I want to talk about one other thing that I think really resonates across the board in this room, culture. So there is an incredible thing going on right now in the world, which is people have options.

22:46for a lot of us that grew up in the 80s, 90s, even 2000s when we were 22, 23 the reason, you know, how everyone wants these Gen Zers to take shit jobs it's because we did I get it we didn't have options we've got to really start talking about culture in our organizations how many people here are a boss and whether they're direct reports or they have reports underneath them to their direct reports how many people here in essence manage over 10 people raise your hands Raise it high. Great. This is really important. I think we're going through no different than the technology shift, and the big one was the internet.

23:24Obviously in the late 90s, and now the big one that's brewing is blockchain and AI. I believe the biggest shift we're going through right now as businesses in this room is even bigger than the innovation. It's the requirements to be a successful organization from a culture standpoint in 2023. And I know this is on everyone's mind. It's on everyone's mind because people are dealing with remote work. I mean, I would say 50 % of my employees that work remote probably work one hour a day. It's tough. We're dealing with that, right? We're dealing with what a lot of us deem as entitlement. Two days ago there was a TikTok video that went super viral because a young woman was talking about how unacceptable it was for her to be commuting to work.

24:10that didn't land with Gen X super well. But here's the problem. We can sit here and shit on the emerging generation or we can understand the truth. There's a lot of people in this room that if they were born in a different era, when they were 22 or 23, would have not chosen a minimum wage job that sucked. They would have just built their business or their brand direct on TikTok or LinkedIn or somewhere else. these kids are not lazy. They have options. They don't want to make 47 ,000 a year doing something they hate. They know they can make 47 ,000 a year selling t-shirts because of three viral TikToks.

24:54We, not them, need to adjust. We, to build huge organizations, need continuity. People are starting to get other options. There's a lot coming. There are people who are gonna be able to write policies in a second that don't even know this industry by pressing one button on AI in three years. That's coming. I could be in the insurance business in a week with today's bullshit AI. And I'm saying that obviously a little bit ad lib, but it's not as far off as many people in this room think. Well, my institutional knowledge that I've built my whole life is being commoditized. This is a wild time. And I just highly recommend you take a step back and think about this, not only from a business leader standpoint, but from a parenting standpoint.

25:42The world parents and manages and runs governments and companies predominantly weaponizing fear. You wanna know why everyone's anxious? Fear is the currency of our world. We're gonna cancel you or shame you. We're gonna call you bad. You're gonna get fired. Sales teams know those numbers are up there the whole time, right? If you don't hit your number, like think about how many people here are parents? Raise your hands. Think for a second of the things that come out of your mouth. If you, you better not fear. By the way, it works in the short term. It works in the short term. The problem is it doesn't work in the long term.

26:24It leads to massive resentment. It leads to underperforming. I am stunned, literally stunned, by how people have not figured out that nice guys finish first. We've been sold a bag of bullshit. For most of the people in this room, the profit and growth in your business is not about the first part of my talk, it's about the second. Yes, do I believe you need better tools? I do. I don't even understand how one can debate it. I know why one isn't doing it because they don't want to have the financial thing happen this year or next year. The problem is you're digging your hole deeper. So I think that's very easy to understand for this audience if you have a half a brain.

27:08Where your growth is gonna be is continuity and growth of your people. When people are happy, they perform better, not when they're scared. We have done an atrocious job in business over the last 70 years to play a game that is not sustainable and is about to hit a tipping point, not because they're entitled and lazy, but because they have options. What that dude that made fun of me about buying wine on the internet didn't understand was buying stuff on the internet is a better option than going to the store. Because what I know, that you know, is we pay for time. Time is money. You know how many people here buy coffee on Postmates and Uber Eats and pay$13 for a coffee to come to their house?