Get More Done With This One Mindset Change!

0:00You're involved in so many different things. How do you edit the time that you spend on any one thing in a given day? Most of all, the way I actually scale it is by not beating up myself when I realized it wasn't good. What makes me work, Mark, and what makes people like me work, and what I would love to get some of the listeners to start to consider is what actually allows me to play it the way I'm playing it is the lack of judgment when I didn't play it well. Too many people beat themselves up instead of using it as a learning experience. I'm just refining along the way. It's my relationship with myself where I give myself breathing room to be a human that allows me to keep doing things and making them better because I'm tasting different things because I am taking, quote unquote, time risk on a daily basis, which makes the learning from the outcome of it, pro or con, a learning that I can build up.

0:46You grew up in New Jersey. Your family had a wine business. That's really ultimately propelled you into many of the things that you've done. Just give us a quick view of that. I was born in the USSR. I came here when I was three and a half. My dad got a job as a stock boy in a liquor store in Clark, New Jersey. He lived his American dream by saving all his money from his two, three, four, five dollar an hour salary. It was really like that in 1980, 81, 82. Eventually bought a small liquor store in Springfield, New Jersey in 83. Very small. I'm talking 800 square foot little house, first floor on Millburn Avenue.

1:26In 1980, he built up a business, worked his face off, worked every hour. I rarely saw him in my childhood. And in 1989, he built a larger store on that same property, shoppers discount liquors. And he built his American dream. And we went from dead poor living in a studio apartment with multiple family members in Queens to living a middle class life in Edison, New Jersey. And at 14, I got dragged into that business. When I was 10, 11, 12, 13, it's interesting when you said Wine Library, which is the brand I changed it into. So my dad had really a liquor, a real package store, liquor and beer. I brought a lot of the wine energy to the business by educating myself in my high school years on wine and becoming the wine buyer, the de facto wine buyer, literally while I was still in high school.

2:14um but it was interesting when you just said propelled you to everything else which is absolutely true where my brain went was selling trading cards sports cards in the jccs and in the malls of new jersey the holiday inns and the fire stations between the ages of 11 and 14 really propelled me no no bullshit and really even lemonade and shoveling snow and washing cars like it's really interesting when I think about my career it really does start at seven when I did lemonade at seven eight nine ten I spent more time making signs than I did on making the lemonade and then in baseball cards I mean when you're 12 13 years old making a thousand dollars a weekend in the 80s you're really like and you know this is in hindsight I was like oh I really had it and by the time I came to my dad's business when I was 14 Mark I'll tell you I had like real subconscious understanding of consumer behavior already like I was literally as a freshman in high school and my dad lived we lived I lived 45 minutes from the store the store was in Springfield I lived in Hunterdon County New Jersey we'd ride down 78 from exit 12 to exit 48 and I would spend like like when I think now back to the conversations I had with my father.

3:30I wish I was recording them. It's really like wild. I don't even know where I got it from. It was such natural instincts. I would talk about like, dad, dad, do you realize like when people first walk in the store, we can't have these$5 wines hit them when they first walk in. We should put$20 wines there because everyone's grabbing them and yeah, 20 bucks is less. Not everyone's going to grab them, but here's the margin. And I've changed the way our registers and brought in, like, it was just like, I was talking real stuff, real shopper marketing by the language that everybody here would be listening to.

4:06And then obviously, you know, but that was 1990. And by the time 1998 rolled around, four years of high school, four years of college, in between, I had become incredibly knowledgeable about wine. But more importantly for the argument or the discussion here, I launched a website in 1997, started building it in 96, e-commerce wine retail which was unheard of I started email newsletter which was really really early in 1997 that allowed me to outflank the Sherry Lehman's and the Zachy's and the Morel's the premium wine stores of New York City because they were doing catalogs and spending a lot of money on making them and sending them in the mail and I was getting into people's inboxes in the late 90s with Opus One and Dominus and Chateau Lafitte before they were by months at a time back then.

4:57And then Google AdWords, right? I bought Google AdWords when they first came out and was able to outflank everybody with intent-based marketing. And then YouTube came along. I started a wine show on YouTube in 2006, February 2006. And that really propelled me and the business to another stratosphere. And, you know, Wine Library became one of the largest independent wine retailers in America. And I did that in my early 20s. And it became the foundation of how I thought about things, because I knew that I was going to leave my father's business at some point, because I knew that it wasn't mine, and he was going to give it to me when he dies.

5:34And I'm 47. My dad just turned 70 this two weekends ago. And he's healthy as an ox. And, you know, he's going to live to 100. And I didn't want to inherit it at 80. You know, And so, especially because he wasn't paying me anything, Mark. My dad never paid me that much money. And so all my 20s and early 30s, I knew I had to do something for myself at some point, which meant I had to build a brand. I knew that when I left, my dad would go back to his old behaviors. And he has. And I knew that would be at the detriment of the business. So if I built a huge brand, I knew that it would take him more time to decrease the business.

6:09but while I was building that brand, every day my dad cared about how much money was coming through the register. So I was trained in sales and brand and that, as you can imagine, has serviced me incredibly well when in my mid-30s, I entered into the Fortune 500 marketing arena and created a new version of an agency which I think has done well in caring about short and long-term business results, sales and brand and not wasting a penny because that was definitely Sasha Vaynerchuk's biggest fear, that I would do some sort of marketing behavior that returned nothing. And so I got very fortunate that I was trained in the trenches of a family business, but had the natural ability to understand how that translated to Fortune 500 land.

6:55And that's been a big factor in our growth. You mentioned grateful a couple of times, and I've seen a post that you had put out on LinkedIn a while ago about being grateful, taking a deep breath, you know, so much that about the things that we worry about really doesn't matter. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? You know, it's funny reading my bio, which I was literally thinking like, oh, I got to talk to my team or my PR team. Like I need to add like desperate in that bio. And also as an entrepreneur, that's desperate to scale kindness and eliminate fear. And I literally just thought that seven minutes ago when we were doing the intro.

7:34I could see your mind going as I was reading it, that you were like, that's not what he wants. Yeah. First of all, great intuition. It was like, I'm fine with it. And for the people that don't know me, it's important to create context. I get it. I'm agnostic to it. I don't need it. But I definitely am passionate and I'm pumped that you just went there. I really dislike fear, like genuinely. I think it's weaponized. I think parents misuse it. I think the government really misuses it. And I think it leads to a lot of anxiety and a lot of the things that all of us fear in society right now. I think we all fear suicide.

8:10I think we all fear, you know, shootings at schools. I think we all fear, you know, the separation we're getting from our neighbors on politics and religion and social issues. I even fear very aggressively the generational warfare that the world is pushing, Gen Z versus boomers. I don't like fear. And so as I built my company out from zero people, or two, me and my brother, which was really what it was, to the 2000 employees we have globally now across the world, I spend most of my time trying to eliminate fear inside my four walls. As I've worked with Fortune 500 companies, I've realized fear is a real, real thing.

8:52reporting bonus structures, HR, like, these are all like real fascinations to me. And so, you know, I just want the world to be happier. And I do think gratitude and accountability are two incredible places for the majority of people listening to this podcast, that will speed up the process of eliminating their anxiety and making them happier hour by hour, day by day. Accountability is a big one, because I think we point fingers too much. It's my boss's fault. It's the Republicans fault. It's the Democrats fault. It's my parents fault with how they've, you know, raised me and, and all of them can be grounded in micro truths.

9:28But the most macro truth is you're in control, you can go to therapy, you can quit, like, you can take the financial step back to leave a bad job, you can do a lot of things as a human being, especially, by the way, this is important contextually, Mark, anyone who's listening to this podcast, from your or my circles. If you have the time to listen to this podcast, it means you have the capacity for change. Do you know what I mean? Nobody in a third world country that doesn't have electricity is listening to this podcast. Do you know what I mean? Or access to clean water, which 750 million people on earth.

10:04I'm on the board of Charity Water. 750 million people, Mark, do not have access to clean water on earth. Wow. and we're complaining about like our wi-fi slow in our apartment or like or like somebody said a joke and he didn't like it like like we're really in a place where perspective is being lost we're looking for we're looking for headaches we're looking to get into conflict right now we're just in this weird spot and i get it i'm deeply empathetic i'm so empathetic that it drives content like gratitude like how about instead of what sucks right now how about what are you thinking about what's good.

10:42Like I had four to five things already. It's a 1 46 PM Eastern right now. I've had four to five things that a executive of a business could dwell on happened today, already today. And I just think people complain about dumb shit and they don't lean into gratitude and gratitude starts with the wellbeing of the people you love the most starting with yourself. And so yeah, I talk about gratitude a lot. You talk about also time and, you know, there's, you know, we all have limited amount of time. How do you edit yourself? You're involved in so many different things. I've read one of the things that you kind of do is you believe in 15-minute meetings, but how do you edit the time that you spend on any one thing in a given day?

11:20Surrounding myself with great people because I can afford it now and intuition. So I have three full-time admins. I have two chief of staffs. That's a lot of human infrastructure for someone who has a holding company with eight companies and then many other companies outside of it and investing vehicles and all this personal life and real life and being a public figure and just speaking and doing a pod like this, this, you know, you know, like, I really wanted to do this. And I know you've been incredibly patient. And we've had some stop and starts. And I'm not canceling in August, because I want to, it's because I am getting pulled in a million different directions.

11:52And there are a lot of fires. And like the logic of my infrastructure team is like, this fire is probably more important, this podcast, that's right. But on the flip side, I'm a human being. And I like you. Obviously, I really like your daughter, she spent some time I'm here and I want to do this. And so, you know, you're going on a little bit of humanity mixed in with operational excellence, right? You're like trying to be efficient, you're using smart people around you, but you're also going on intuition. You know, I do so many meetings that don't look right on paper that five years later, you're like, if I didn't take that meeting, it wouldn't have led to this.

12:23And so I'm trying to do a little bit of mix of the gray and the black and white. But most of all, this is gonna be powerful for some people. Most of all, the way I actually scale it is by not beating up myself when I realized it wasn't good. What makes me work, Mark, and what makes people like me work, and what I would love to get some of the listeners to start to consider is what actually allows me to play it the way I'm playing it is the lack of judgment when I didn't play it well. Too many people beat themselves up instead of using it as a learning experience. I'm just refining along the way.

12:57And it's my relationship with myself where I give myself breathing room to be a human that allows me to keep doing things and making them better because I'm tasting different things because I am taking quote unquote time risk on a daily basis, which makes the learning from the outcome of it, pro or con, a learning that I can build on. In your businesses, part of what you've done a great job and you've talked about it a bunch already is the content that you produce. I've been in the retail space for a long time And oftentimes it's difficult to get retailers to produce the right content. And I'm putting air quotes around right.

13:37How do you and your organizations, you know, get with your clients to demonstrate to them, you know, that they need a full view of content. It's not only one channel. You talked about the wine library and the things that you were doing with YouTube and Google AdWords. So, you know, how do you get the retailer to understand that they need to produce quality content? my biggest preference is to be their partner in media and creative and prove it to them through sales you know one of the like this is one thing that i always tell young i meet a lot of young agency owners these days um and a lot of them do organic social and they keep asking me like gary how do i keep clients better or how do i get more clients or how do i prove it this is obviously the other side of the spectrum of the fortune 500 landscape and i always ask them i'm like well does your service build their business?

14:31And it's fascinating how big of an issue of that question is to most of the kids I talk to. Because most of them will answer honestly with, I don't know. And then I say, well, if you're trying to convince somebody to pay you to grow their business and you don't know, imagine how bad that is. And a lot of times I encourage them to learn about media because to answer your question for the Fortune 500 brands that I work with, I tell all of them, hey, if we're going to do content, brand, creative, your commercials, VaynerMedia has done more Super Bowl commercials in the last five years than any creative agency in the world, which is a brain twist to a lot of people because they have us, me, pegged in social media.

15:10Meanwhile, I still think social media from a day-to-day standpoint builds more brand than any campaign work that one can actually do. But I tell every retail client, especially retail, more than CPG and others, hey, if you really want to hold us accountable to measure what we're doing for you. Give us the media and the creative and we'll show it to you in sales. Because if I have the media and the creative, I can and should be held accountable to sales. If we just have the creative, I tell them I'm at the mercy of how you measure your brand. What report, what internal MMMs, or like how do you do it?

15:43Because all of you are doing it in a fluffy way. You've all accepted some sort of MMM, MMA, you know, Nielsen Brand Lift Study, brand score, Or all of it is fake math. And I have to be at the mercy of how you do that. And I have to reverse engineer into that. But my biggest preference is doing it the way, Mark, they had. They had this industry right for a long time. Media and creative together under one roof. One throat to choke. One throat to choke. And we as an agency want that accountability. I I'd rather get fired for us falling short with full control than being fired for a subjective opinion that they didn't like the video we made, or if it's not on brand or, or the way we spent their media is like on low cost impressions is a, that's a fake API.

16:36So, you know, I think we're very good at talking business comma marketing in a world where I think people are doing marketing for the sake of marketing. You often give predictions about the future of the internet and retail and digital in general. We're recording in September of 2023. We're obviously getting close to holiday. What does your crystal ball say about retail spend this holiday and as we move into 2024? I think consumer confidence is a little shaky. Think about what we're walking into. do. I don't have to use a crystal ball, like retail struggling right now in September, like there's really no rationale to why it should spin up and get aggressive other than American consumers and global consumers love to collect debt.

17:29And so, you know, there's no rationale for it to be a good season, but it might be a great season because if people are feeling down and worried, sometimes it's like binge eating, right? I do it. I do. I sometimes get mad that I'm not eating as well as I'm supposed to be. And you know what I do? I double down on bad eating because I'm on tilt. It's like gambling, right? You're like, you double down. So there is a path towards it being solid, which is, ah, fuck, everything's fucked up. Let me buy another TV or another outfit. And I get that. That's how consumers work. My intuition is that's not how it's going to play out.

18:04I think you're already seeing people, you know, cut one of their streaming services, cut down on their Uber, like you're seeing it everywhere. So I expect it to be a pretty conservative holiday season. So I think it'll be solid to solid soft. I think there'll be plenty of retailers that do well because they'll outflank their competition on price or something of that nature. I think some will do poorly, even though they outflank, they're going to take on too many cogs, meaning they're going to over rely on free shipping or price, which is going to make them highly unprofitable. And then I think there's another thing we should talk about.

18:42And with full eyes wide open, we're about to kick off presidential election season here in America, for assuming most people who are listening are in America. And we're going to be in full swing by the holidays. You know, it's coming. We've got a bunch more Republican debates. the election this year, you know, an off, you know, November election will happen, which means we are now fully countdown to the presidential election, come Black Friday, come Christmas season. And, you know, I think it's going to be highly contentious. We're on tilt, emotions are high. And when there's that level of anxiety, confidence is not where it needs to be.

19:19And so I think my crystal ball is not a crystal ball. I think it's very practical to think that at best case scenario, it'll be a solid season. There is no exceptional in the forecast. Yeah, it certainly feels that way. A lot of the folks that listen to this show, Gary, are kind of early in their career and you do an event called VCon. What is VCon? And actually, more specifically, you had a great call out that I saw about resumes and how they should be used today for folks. Can you talk about that? Really quick on VCon. VCon is a super conference. I think of it as like the coolest business conference.

19:59We throw it each year, the third year is coming up. We're about to announce where that is very shortly here. It will be next summer. The last two were in Indianapolis, one in Minnesota, one in Indianapolis, both at the football stadiums, 10 ,000 people, all of which bought the original VFriend NFT collectible, which was a receipt for the three-year ticket to this conference because I was kind of anticipating the NFT you know speculation so I wanted to make sure that people got something of value if they bought my collectible. VFriends is like a Pokemon meets Sesame Street intellectual property that I'm building.

20:32Think Hanna-Barbera, think Marvel. I'm on that journey and so it's a really really exciting conference like high star power Neil Patrick Harris, Drew Barrymore, Jessica Alba, Snoop Dogg those kind of characters but tons of CMOs of Fortune 500 companies a lot of like innovative tech leaders and so really excited about the next one as far as resumes you know like boy I think people's content is the better res like you know I don't know about you and you've been through it like I don't know if I've ever called a reference on a resume in my career because when I'm getting those resumes like they're loaded right like of course you're going to put the three references that you've triple checked that if I call them, they're going to say you were epic.

21:19That's like logical. I don't see that as a bad thing. I just don't think of it as good data, right? And more importantly, what we're doing at scale at VaynerX and definitely many of the companies I invest in, I'm encouraging them as well as like, people are putting out content now. Like the resume is being done on LinkedIn with the content. By the way, I look at people when they're on the final stage, if it's on my radar on the things they like, I'll give you a good one that happened recently, Mark. We were about to hire a creative director at VaynerMedia and everything was perfect. And I went and looked and I looked at all the things that the person liked.

21:53And all of them were way more grounded in the 1991 book, How Brands Grow. And it was very about subjective awards. And like every like was about what I believe is a day that doesn't exist anymore in Madison Avenue. And it was the reason we did not hire that person. Wow. And I don't say that out loud for everyone to listen. Whether I'm right or wrong, that's a subjective call on someone's business strategy. I believe that being overly addicted to an ad week headline or a CanLion Award or believing in subjective opinions in boardrooms is at the detriment of contemporary marketing. So that's a concern of mine.

22:35but that's not why I'm bringing it up. I'm bringing it up for everybody of like, you can get better insights to people that you're considering on the public internet, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, X, on their Instagram. And so I think the modern resume is clearly one's behavior on the internet. But by the way, it's really funny. It's not the cliche thing that us parents tell our kids, like don't put a bikini picture and don't put, like we've hired unlimited people with beer pong pictures. Like that's you being a human. To me, at least in our organization, I'm more interested in your philosophical views on marketing.

23:10And that, it scares me more that you're going to like every award show in advertising more than I'm going to see a picture of you when you were in college playing beer pong. Of course, like who wasn't? And so those are things we think about. Great. Okay. We're out of time here. Great passion. And as I said at the beginning, I really appreciate you doing this. And my daughter had a great experience in her internship at VaynerMedia. That's a while now. But thank you for - I'm going to leave you with something more for everybody. There's a new book I'm writing, which I haven't now. Here's some alpha for you.

23:47Here's a scoop. I have a new book coming out. I was going to originally call it Jab, Jab, Jab, Left Hook, which was a follow-up to one of my successful books, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. But now I'm calling it Day Trading Attention. We didn't get to this, but we touched on it. the concept of what day trading attention is for all the marketers listening is understanding how to media plan where you don't waste a penny on potential reach versus actualized reach we have a you want to talk about a real pandemic we are buying media impressions that are not being actually consumed and then we're putting videos and pictures in there that nobody gives a shit about so there's a new dawn of like how building brand and sales is here and i think it's grounded in day trading attention.

24:29Whether it's an influencer you're working with, whether it's a live event, whether it's buying media on the new CTVs or the OTTs or the fast channels or on social. For the people that grew up in the game like you and I did, we've really got to take a step back and realize 2024 is a new dawn, a new era. And we've got to sharpen our marketing tool belts. This is why there's so much pain and confusion in the system. And so that's not a plug for the book because it's far away away. We'll be out for a while. it's a plug for everyone understanding it's time to stop wasting money on potential media impressions and on creative that's too expensive that isn't making the thing that you want to have great stuff gary thanks very much see you soon