The #1 Marketing Opportunity Every Business Should Leverage

0:00YouTube Shorts acts in a lot of ways like TikTok has elements of Instagram but unlike TikTok and Instagram YouTube is a search engine. The number two search engine in the world is YouTube. Number one is Google for people that can read and number two is for people like me. Attention is the number one asset. God, I love New York, boy. Love you, thank you. Tons to talk about. A lot of opportunity and like what's most fun for me when I speak is my speaking style is really based on of the moment. It's extremely contextual. There's two core things, maybe three core things I'll want to touch on here.

0:48One, marketing in general, especially in the B2B world. I'm incredibly empathetic that the far majority of people in this room underestimate how much opportunity there is for them to grow what they're up to if they got incredibly serious about LinkedIn marketing. I know that to be true, because this is what I do for a living. I watch it every day, and especially the biggest companies in the world are completely missing the mark with social media. Midsize, smaller, or even the largest players in this room by comparison to a Pepsi or BMW or small, and this genre, my company included, are really, really missing how big of a deal it is.

1:24On the flip side, why I love to talk about business and life is it's contextual. Obviously right now, I'm feeling it in my world as well with my clients and my business, events are on fire. We were all like, you know, I don't know if you remember, but there was this thing called COVID. And we were locked up. And it's just the way the world works, supply and demand. And we're really ready to go out there. And so I know a lot of people in this room might not even be thinking that much about marketing because right now they're just trying to figure out how to handle the inbound that they actually have.

1:55That gets into probably my favorite thing, which is scaling. You know, I think about, maybe I'll even start here. For the people that don't know anything about my story, I grew up in Edison, New Jersey, and my dad, let's go Edison.

2:14And my dad had a store in Springfield, New Jersey. Okay, good, two for that. This one will have less. And then in high school, my parents moved to Hunterdon County, New Jersey. Oh shit, I was wrong. So anyway, I grew up in Jersey, and my dad had a liquor store. He built his American dream. We immigrated from the USSR, and he went from being a stock boy in a liquor store to having a small liquor store, but a nice business, and we had our American dream. I started working there at 14, and really learned the business and became very knowledgeable about wine, and at 22, when I was done with school, came and took over the business.

2:55From 1998 to 2003, I took my dad's business from a$4 million a year business to a$60 million a year business and from six employees to like 150. And I did that in five years. And I did that with no VC funding or investment. And my dad is Russian, which means we didn't even have a credit line because his whole thesis was if you didn't have the money, you shouldn't buy it. We didn't even take credit cards until 1994. Not only did he think that, he thought you shouldn't do that either. anyway why am I bringing that up not because that's cool and yay me it's actually the biggest thing I'm thinking about when I thought about this talk you know a thing that fascinates me is I was talking to one of my friends the other day and he's a complainer which is literally my single least favorite thing about humans on earth that is definitely one of the best things that my parents taught me which is like the complete utter non-value about complaining because it really doesn't do anything except gets you deeper into the problem you have Anyway, he was complaining.

3:58So after listening to him complain for the last three, four years about business being slow, he was complaining to me about business being busy and he's too busy. And I think about that because I think about this industry a lot having that paradigm. Not that everyone's doing that, but I know a lot of you are. And it's because when you're in a business of production or being a vendor of production or doing what you all do for a living, a lot of people struggle delegating. The reason most companies don't grow is because they're scared to let somebody else make a mistake which hurts their reputation or they think will make them lose business.

4:37And what they don't realize often and this was a huge issue for my father. He was more worried that people were gonna steal money from the register so basically everybody had to work the register that was family or manager which meant the store wasn't really being run. But for a lot of you, I would say that ideology is usually the biggest reason people don't grow as much as they can. For most of you in this room, if you're in this industry right now and you've decided to allocate time to come to something like this, you're giving me indications in the macro of where the industry is and in the micro that you decided to come to something like this that you have ambition for something to grow.

5:16If you didn't, you wouldn't be here, right? or for a small group of people, you might actually be sensing that you're in a stuck spot and you are using this as an opportunity maybe to see something that you aren't seeing or maybe you can reignite. Listen, I'm incredibly bullish events. I throw something called VCon, which is from my V friends. Thank you. You know, that's a$10 million production. So I went from not knowing any of this stuff to like, Jesus, the shit you do is intense and I have a lot of respect. I really want to talk about this for two more minutes and then I'm gonna move on. I couldn't be more fascinated by people in growth moments, which is 100 % what's happening in the macro in this industry right now, without knowing everybody's individual business.

6:07In the two crucial mistakes that the majority of this room is gonna do, which won't allow them to double their business in the next three years, which should be on the table for most of you. Actually, this is a better question. How many people by show of hands would be open to doubling their business in the next three years? Let me just look. Who doesn't want to? Raise your hand because that's real. Okay, good. All right, so it seems like most of you want to. There's literally only two things that are stopping you. One, your ideology, which is actually, believe it or not, stick with me here, it's wrapped up in your ego.

6:42You enjoy the thought that you do it better than anyone else, which is why you're actually not delegating. You literally don't even see it, it's in your subconscious that there's this insecurity, because by the way, that's what ego is. Ego is just insecurity with some makeup on. Your insecurity that somebody might actually do what you love doing and you feel that you're good at, better than you do it. or your pride in your craft, which is absolutely blended with your deep love of your clients and wanting to deliver for them. These are things that are intermixed. You can absolutely want to deliver an incredible product, build a great reputation.

7:26Most of you built something on the fact of doing it yourself. It went well. They recommended. I don't know if you guys can see this. I get the goosebumps on this one because I come from this. I watched what my father was doing every day and I understood but I understood how much that didn't allow us to grow. If you were stocking the shelves and ringing up the person at the register and buying the stuff you weren't growing. Too many of you if not all of you how many people here own their business? Raise your hands. Everybody who just raised their hand right now is doing two things. One, doing too much dumb shit that they should hire for and two, their meetings are twice as long as they're supposed to be.

8:11Everybody here has hour meetings that are actually 30 minute meetings. Two hour meetings that are actually an hour. And so if literally, you know, I come to this and I'm like, this is business. We could be talking about a lot of things but we're talking about business today. It is incredibly obvious to me in service production, event businesses that this is the poison. The other poison is you want as much profit as possible to buy shit and not reinvest it in your business. Most of you are crying about too much business, too much business, and the answer is to hire people, but you don't want to hire people because you want the profit to buy a watch.

8:50So, I kind of weirdly feel like I should leave now. Because it scares me and excites me at the same time how much just those two things. If I could literally just get, one more time, how many people own their business? And how many people feel like they're in a spot right now where they have too much business even that they can't take everything? Just raise your hands. Too much business? Ooh, this is good. One more time, because I made some assumptions and now I'm getting excited because it gets me to talk about something else. How many people here feel like they have too much right now and so they can't take on more?

9:22Raise your hands high. Don't be, this is why you're embarrassed. This is the best. Great, so that small group, literally the only thing you need to do is actually leave, do not listen to the rest of my keynote, and go hire someone. Real talk, it is the number one mistake of small business. Small businesses do not hire enough in moments of growth. So I challenge you to marinate with that, find your version of what I'm saying, but I promise you, you will be flabbergasted. Because remember, I understand what people worry about. You may over hire ahead of it, business slows down. You can fire people.

10:00You know it's not fun, you don't want to, it's not like we're hiring with the intent to fire, we're not trying to hurt anybody, but the hesitation to hire is fascinating. And by the way, let me give you a really good insight. I am standing on this stage predominantly because of emotional intelligence and the luck of the draw of good intuition and things that were given to me the night my parents decided to have sex. But even with all of that, the amount of times I've hired poorly is staggering. it's just real and I just want to remind people hiring is guessing firing is knowing and the one in between is probably going to be the most important hire fast a lot of you are trying to be perfect with the hire because you're scared and I get it you make a mistake, she or he makes a mistake the project gets, I get it I hope everyone understands I'm coming here I'm not an author, I'm not a motivational speaker I run a 2 ,000 person global agency that I started 14 years ago that does$350 million in revenue.

11:05And I started it 14 years ago coming from the wine business on Madison Avenue. I'm an operator. These first 15 minutes have not been about marketing. It's not been about like psychology. I'm talking to you about operating a business. I'm telling you right now, please do not let this era that clearly has a lot of demand in it. I'm looking at macro trends. There is an extraordinary amount of demand for events. And it will continue. And please don't... You gotta go?

11:38Please, please, please don't go and miss this moment. Because a lot of... How many people have been doing this for more than 15 years? Raise your hands. Perfect. You all know. It's waves. And if you don't catch the waves when they're right, you're leaving a lot of upside. you are all in the beginning. We've been in now for six to 12 months but we're here. These next three to five years are very fruitful. You can expand, seems like a lot of you wanted to. You don't have enough employees. I'm telling you, you don't. And here's a big one. This is very important and will really help a lot of you. How many people here feel that if they decided to go to sleep for three months, that they have a number two, and shit will be okay.

12:28Raise your hands. Let's clap it up for these 11 people.

12:37And who does not feel that way? Raise your hands. My friends, let me tell you something that I'm very passionate about. If I can get all of you to leave here and remember this part of the talk and make a commitment to start building up a real number two. That comes in all shapes and sizes. Giving minority equity is somebody that's been with you for a long time so they feel like an owner. You don't have to give them 50%. Sometimes it's five or 10%. Recruiting somebody. One of the worst, there's a lot of bad sayings in life. The worst one is nice guys finish last. It's taught people in the world that you can't be a good person while building a big business.

13:18but another really bad one right is I forgot but I'll get back to it in a second I'm so passionate about the nice guys finish last that it bothers me 10 % I'm going to go with it I'll get back to it in a minute but what I really really really oh I got it they tell you not to work with friends and family I stand here today as someone who lives it but more importantly has invested in over a thousand businesses in his life analyze business the way people analyze movies and sports. It's my hobby. I couldn't be more bullish hiring friends and family. It's hard. You as the person that's doing the hiring have to make a commitment to the relationship more than the money in your pocket, which I know does not come natural to most.

14:04But for all the people that just raised their hand and don't have a number two, you are uncomfortably vulnerable. And so I beg you to walk out of here and start the strategy of how you're gonna do that? Do you have a friend or best friend or family member who might not love what they do and should you have a talk with them and maybe joining? Do you have someone that's been with you for a while and do you take the next step maybe before you give the equity? Maybe you don't have to give the equity but you need to change your dynamic with that. A lot of you take your number two for granted. Business owners are very good at thinking that the number two is just gonna work for them forever just because they pay them.

14:43so please please leave here a lot with number two now what really just excited me a few minutes ago was how many people didn't say what i thought was maybe happening which is too much business which then allows me to segue into something i'm incredibly passionate about which is how you all get your business my belief is that every single company in this room should be posting on linkedin three times a day. Just LinkedIn three times a day. There's a good chance that more than half this room has never posted on LinkedIn. And it's probably higher than 50%. So let me tell you what I'm referring to.

15:26I believe that this is the most important device on earth for business. I also know that the majority of our attention, which to remind everybody how you sell shit, you need someone's attention, you tell them and then decide if they want to buy it or not. That for every person in this room, the only currency that they need to be chasing on a day-to-day basis is the attention of potential decision makers for their business. Attention is the thing I've been chasing my whole life, even when I started in Edison, New Jersey. My first business was a lemonade stand. I had this epiphany on stage, similar to that weird thing I just did there with trying to remember, I actually, in the middle of my speech, stopped 10, 12 years ago, early in my speaking career, and realized that I was very weird with my lemonade stand.

16:10Because I was telling a story about my lemonade, and I realized I don't even remember selling any lemonade. And I used to think it was just because it was 100 years ago, but it wasn't. It's because when I sold lemonade, I spent my entire day walking up and down the streets of Oak Tree Road in Tingly Lane in Edison, New Jersey, and literally would sit there and watch cars drive by to try to figure out what tree or what post to put my lemonade sand sign on. I later did that the way I built out my baseball card tables, I would analyze, and then I really changed my dad's business long before I did internet and marketing just by re-merchandising the store.

16:49Just watching every person that walked into the store, where they would go, why would they go there, and I changed the traffic flow and made people walk into the things I wanted to sell them. I was doing this as a teenager. This was not something I learned in college. This was intuitive to me. Today I do it professionally. What I do for a living is I day trade attention. Every day I wake up and I think about what on social media organically can reach people, what can reach people on social media with paid media for my biggest clients. I convince them and push them to understand why the Super Bowl is the only television ad that's good because all of you want to watch that commercial.

17:27Why banner ads on websites are complete garbage None of you have clicked one in 100 fucking years. And more importantly, what videos, pictures, and all the science behind the art is required to compete. I can tell you as we sit here today that LinkedIn, for anybody here who's never posted once and never created a business account for your business on LinkedIn, that your first post, if the post is good, and we'll get into that in a minute, can reach tens of thousands of people. It's the business version of TikTok. Many of you at this point have probably been affected by somebody in your life, probably someone quite young, cousin, niece, nephew, someone like that, who literally posted one TikTok and got a million views.

18:12LinkedIn doesn't have that extreme. It's highly unlikely that anybody here on their first 10 posts just get a million views, excuse me, a million views, but it is staggering how many people here within their first 10 posts on LinkedIn can have business development and get inbound for working together or working for an event. For me, I love selling. I love being a salesman. But selling and being a salesman is always the thing I most try not to do. The most interesting thing is to be a marketer and a brander and let the selling come to you. And so when people, when I talk about LinkedIn and started two, four years ago because I started seeing that it started to act more like Facebook than the LinkedIn that we all grew up with.

19:00When I was like, you need to market on LinkedIn, people were like, got it. And what they thought I was saying was, go spam people and message them. What I was saying was, make content and let it show up in the feed. If you were to start making content, and not every piece of content needs to be a commercial for what you do, though some of it can be. But if you started making content, for example, five mistakes people make on their first event. Do you know how much collective wisdom of events there is in this room? Or in your own head from all your years? You know the cliche mistakes, you know how people miss budget, you know where the mistake is, you know what's valuable.

19:40Are the flowers a good idea versus not? Could you get away with it or not? You know shit. I stand here before you with the largest advertising independent agency in the world because I gave away all my secrets for free on the internet for the last 15 years. I give away my best information the reason I have followers and people like me is I'm only trying to give it to you for free at scale daily period I think a lot of you could be doing the same thing for your businesses I actually think one of the biggest mistakes in this industry overall is how many of you in this room think you're competing with other people in this room I think people are incredibly built into scarce mindset A lot of you leave money on the table by not referring someone as a referral fee because you're scared to refer that person thinking who you referred to will keep that relationship forever.

20:31So you would rather take money out of your pocket and not even engage in that and bring value because of your fear of it going away. There's a lot of interesting cliche things going on in this industry, bless you, that if, by the way, and you know this, there's a really fun Russian superstition that if somebody sneezes after you say something, it means it's true? So I'm just gonna remind you, there's a lot of crazy shit going on in this industry that makes no fucking sense.

21:07It's really true. Pravda, exactly, exactly. So listen, I really, really, really think there's some fun stuff to talk about, which is why I chose to do this talk. I feel like I had something to say. Here's what I have to say. you're going into a half a decade of growth and you need to be on more offense do not you know don't put yourself in a bad position but remember hiring employees though you don't want to it's not like you have a sunk cost right you can get out of it if you got caught make sure you realize how much of your non-growing is not that you're a perfectionist and want it awesome for your client it's that you are insecure and egotistical and don't want other people doing shit of course people are gonna do it different than you.

21:51There's not one person at VaynerMedia of my 2 ,000 employees that does anything every day the way I would have done it. It's called being a company. It's called being a company. Now by the way, this is why I ask the questions who, if you don't want to grow, you're more than welcome to have a project. You're more than welcome to have your thing. But if we're talking business in this room, you need to start hiring and you need to start delegating you need to start trusting. Because culture, how many people here have more than 10 employees? Raise your hands. So for this group, culture, more than 10.

22:28Culture is so interesting to me. When I see the hands that just went up with more than 10, all that I think about is like, where is their relationship graph with those 10? You know, when I think about how I took Vayner, how I took my dad's store from six to 150 in five minutes, or how I took Vayner literally from zero to 2 ,000 globally, It's because the hour I just spent prior to walking in here, I had four one-on-one meetings with employees I've never met for 15 minutes just to get to know who they are and let them have some sense that they can reach out to me if they have a problem. I have 2 ,000 employees.

23:04I have so many friends who have 10 to 15 employees who really have no connection with their employees. I could not recommend more getting deeper into your business if you have employees and really knowing these people. Your retention of those employees is how I can get you from 10 to 40. 10 to 40 happens because of your relationship with zero to 10. These are really important themes. Back to marketing.

23:30Content on the internet and I'm sure we have plenty of feelings about that. I know how people feel about it especially in times of conflict like we're in now. How many people here have kids under 18? You've got all sorts of opinions and feelings about it. Right? but in the context of your business, the attention that you need to start providing to this platform is very high. There's a direct correlation of how real it is for you to double your business, directly correlated to how much output you put out on social media. This organization itself changed the way they marketed after I spoke here four years ago.

24:11It's been good. I think we should learn from that you could what really gets me fascinated about this is you can have opinions about it and a lot of people here have opinions about doing social media marketing but have never done it you've said no before you started I promise you that if you focus on two specific platforms in the short term in my opinion for this industry LinkedIn number one YouTube Shorts number two okay let me tell you why I said YouTube shorts and I saw some faces YouTube shorts acts in a lot of ways like TikTok has elements of Instagram but unlike TikTok and Instagram YouTube is a search engine the number two search engine in the world is YouTube number one is Google for people that can read and number two is for people like me.

25:16When I'm really researching, if I'm going deeper, now I'm using chat GPT. I mean AI makes search look like the yellow pages, but we'll get to that another time. But YouTube is the visual and the audio and that's how I learned. If you were to put out content on LinkedIn and YouTube, that was to help people that hire you without the expectation of them hiring you in the content you make, you will be flabbergasted how much your business can grow. Now, nobody got here by accident, so you put in work to be here. The problem is with social media is most people don't realize how much work it is, and when they've gone, they stop because it's real work.

26:01My point of view is that you waste four hours a day on dumb stuff anyway. And so if you reallocated two of those four hours to actually getting good at this, you could have the things you want. But that's just gonna be up to what you decide to do. It's kind of like getting into better physical health. It's not super complicated. You've gotta get your protein ratios better than your sugar and carbs. Don't eat crap, go to the gym. Everybody here knows how to be in better physical shape. But it's hard. Same with this. but it is a remarkable time to be in the B2B industry to have, you know, when Facebook and Twitter were happening back when I was really going at it, it was tough to come to B2B conferences and know that they couldn't take advantage of it the way I could do with B2C.

26:47Right? Nobody was crushing events doing hardcore Twitter and Facebook in 2012, 13, 14. LinkedIn is a monster. The consumption is huge and people are discovering businesses to do business with, heavy. Not to mention, how many people here have specific targets? Meaning, there are specific companies or specific events that you would like to start servicing. Raise your hands. Epic. So, LinkedIn. Do you know that I run ads against employees of companies I want to do business with and have a stunning hit rate on it? The fact that you can run ads, meaning you make a piece of content, it goes organic and you see that it does well.