The Entrepreneur’s Edge in the AI & Social Media Era | RightNOW 2025 Keynote PART 1

0:00Morning. Good to be here. So, fun fact, I've known Gary for about 15 years. I saw him speak in New York City and went up to talk to him outdoors because I was blown away. And we kept in touch, and I was able to bring him to Tahoe to participate in a snowshell event that we had when I was at Sea's Entertainment. He did a wine and food pairing and social talking. It was just amazing. So, Gary, I'm so thrilled to have you here. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. Good morning, everyone. All right. We're about to get into it. I know he's got a lot to share with us. So I want to start talking about brand building and content.

0:39Before I do, I just want to share a little bit of who's in the audience. So you have everybody from solopreneurs to large key backed organizations. There are people who are doing books for construction companies. So across the accounting profession, we also have a wide range of services. So some are doing tax services and audit bookkeeping, but a lot of advisory services. And that takes many forms. So some are doing fractional CFO, trying to get in front of their customers on a monthly basis to share their knowledge and help them, help them grow and help the business succeed and just being ready for the future.

1:13And so one of the things that I've heard is that not all of them, not all their clients know their whole range of services. And so how can we be using content in an authentic way across social, but in other ways to tell their whole story and make sure their audience knows everything that they're doing and that their whole range of offers? So what's interesting about being in this room is, and you might have saw quickly in the video, I grew up in a small family business. and for the last 15 years, I've been running a service business that started with me and my brother in a conference room in another company's company because we had no money and went from zero revenue in year one to we're in year 15 this year and we'll do 350 million in revenue, all service.

2:10And then also I've had my career that I have, right? I've written predominantly marketing and business and leadership books, really ultimately for SMBs, but all the way up to private equity firm and Fortune 500s. And what that context for this room means is what I'm about to say is not philosophy for me. It's not teaching in a college what marketing is. This morning, I can tell you that for 95 % of this room, if this room was making one or two videos a day on their phone in their hotel room right now about insights or thoughts they have that impact their customers, whether it's through tax law or opportunities, if they just made a video and said, I'm Carl, I live in the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio.

3:17I'm a CPA. I do this. Here's the fun fact of the day or the thing that is top of mind or the biggest mistake people just made during this last tax season or where most of you just left money on the table, XYZ, XYZ, XYZ, and Carl upstairs posted that video organically on LinkedIn, on Facebook, and then took$50 and ran ads in the five-mile radius of his office for that video,$50, the five mile radius of his office, there is a stunning percentage likelihood that Carl would pick up a customer today. Do you know what else I know? None of those people in this audience did that today.

4:18So what do I think? I think that there is a naivete in the world and definitely in this room on how powerful social media marketing is. It's now been around long enough that it's not the shiny new thing. Many of you, actually watch this. This will be fun for you, Mon. How many people here have tried social media marketing but it's not really worked for your business the way you've liked? Raise your hand. I'm sure it's plenty. Just raise your hand, please. Raise it high. Don't be shy. Right? All right, so the seven or eight people that raised their hand, which is a whole other fucking problem. You're a psyche.

5:03But for the 10 to 12 people that raised their hand, you have to understand because it didn't work doesn't mean that social media doesn't work. It means that they didn't do a good job at it. And this is important to understand. You know, I don't know if you know this but if you play professional basketball, you make an extraordinary amount of money. I would really like to do that. I don't have the skill set to do that, thus I don't get the results. I am going to spend the next hour here desperately trying to motivate, encourage, eliminate excuses of the collective group in here around contemporary marketing and technology because the history of business is completely easy to understand, which is the following.

6:00Whoever takes advantage of the opportunities, both in the technologies that are available to them at that moment and the marketing arbitrage that sits of the moment, win. When the radio was invented, many businesses exploded because we went from just print to a radio device and some of the most iconic brands, Coca-Cola, leveraged a new medium called radio. Procter & Gamble is one of the biggest consumer brand companies in the world because they were the leading advertiser on television in the 50s and 60s while their competitors were still figuring it out. Social media is disproportionately the most important opportunity for this room.

6:47and yet we continue to underestimate it. And that is what I want to get everyone to understand in this room, that it will lead to new customers and too many people here are relying on the word of mouth of their reputation of being in the business in their area for a long period of time. And they will get outflanked by people that use these platforms. And I think that's a mistake. talk a little bit about um you know the sort of range of people on social at a lot of people in this room you know have challenged getting staff when staffing was a giant issue for this profession how can we be authentic with their social media posting and still you know live into who they are but also attract and get in front of people who might be interested in working there as well as just making sure their clients feel connected and engaged?

7:44Is this something that you can do in a different way? Yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day, I think a lot of you have built your careers through your people skills, right? It's not super complicated. I think people struggle to be authentic on camera because people are insecure and people change in front of a camera because they're worried about judgment on the other side. Humans buy from humans and some people overthink variables. I think a lot of us in this room are not gen alpha and we remember where a suit and tie and the way you presented yourself was an imperative variable. I think we can all agree the world has become dramatically more casual.

8:31I'm wearing a baseball cap. Things have changed. And I think that the authenticity is an incredibly easy game once you understand what's actually happening here, which is humans will always buy from humans when they trust. It's very hard to trust someone when you can feel it's not fully them. They're holding back. So all I would do is encourage people to not overthink what they're saying on video or in the written word or the copy that supports a picture they put out on these mediums because that's what's hurting people. But I'll be honest with you, Monica, I'm not worried about that. I'm worried that I believe that every business in this room should be posting two times a day, minimally, on these platforms to get employees and to get customers.

9:27and I think we're millions of miles away from that in this room. It sounds like a mistake is not making mistakes. It's not doing good at all. That's right. I think people have done a ton of different things with social media that's hurting you. I think a lot of you don't post on it on an ideology of what you think about social media. You know, there's a lot of people here who don't post on social media because they have a philosophical point of view about what social media means to society. I want the kids to go outside and play too. But your political views or your ideologies of how the world should be should be left at the door when we're talking about making money.

10:10So I think people haven't put in the work to figure out how to be good at it, what platforms do what, what does the first three seconds have to look like in a video to get people to actually watch it, what's the copy that it puts in. So there's just a lot of one-on-one hurdles that I want to get through. But, you know, as far as employee acquisition, again, it is disproportionately the way things are working right now. This same 15, 10-mile radius advertising that I'm telling you about to get a customer is exactly how you're going to find those needles in the rough that you're looking for for employees because it is not lost on me the friction that this industry is now finding with the expectation of compensation that the youth that used to drive so much of the scale is looking for in comparison to what you can actually pay them.

11:06But good news, AI is going to replace them all and so you'll be fine. So I'm embarrassed to say that I spend more time on Facebook than other channels at my age and gender, do they have to be in Instagram and TikTok and LinkedIn and Facebook? If they want money.

11:27Like, what are we talking about here? You don't have to do anything. You're more than allowed to slowly go out of business.

11:38You know, Man, I'm being serious with this. Like, look, what can I tell you? Like, I didn't want to wake up this morning and go to the gym. I really didn't like I just think that this is we're talking about business and work I didn't make up the rules I'm not happy that marketing changes every minute I wish it was the 1950s I would be Don Draper I'd be in midtown Manhattan right now having a cocktail and doing business I don't like that this stuff changes you've seen my career for 20 years I've been on top of everything do you know what it feels like to be at the top of the game and then see TikTok come along and be like damn it now I have to learn all this too Like, I'm not thrilled.

12:17I like easy too, I'm a human. Do they have to be? They don't have to do anything. But you're missing opportunity for customers and employees if you're not on these channels. You're allowed to decide. But the world's changing. How many people here get business from Google AdWords? Raise your hand. Raise it high please, I'm just trying to get a sense. Great. So for the seven or eight people that just raised their hands, again a problem we'll get to that in a minute I mean Google's in trouble we are right now as we all sit here AI how many people now use chat GPT or perplexity to do search instead of just Google raise your hands look at the crazy high actually stand up if you don't mind please don't be lazy on me I want your fellow teammates to see this this is a good showing please keep standing up if this is you this is important This is a room that barely raised its hands for social media marketing and search.

13:17And yet more than half the room, and again, this is not the Silicon Valley elite we're looking at right now. More than half the room right now is now using ChatGPT versus Google. This is a profound indication that I want you to see. What do you think is happening to Google AdWords if all these people are no longer even seeing it? You can sit, thank you. so things are changing google adwords is going to look like the yellow pages in seven years that's crazy so for that gentleman in the white shirt and others that raised their hand for they're going to start losing those customers from that channel we have to continue to adjust that's i just don't know anything else than adapt or die i prefer not to die in business it's about outcome.

14:06Makes sense. All right, well let's let's talk a little bit more about AI. Okay. Obviously it's here to say it's scary in some cases but it can create efficiencies. Which of this room be thinking about for AI in their day-to-day? I mean you just talked about attention to you but what else you know can you offer? Well I think you know it all depends on how you want to look at it. Like, the reality is this is the biggest technology shift that we've faced since the internet itself. This is big, big. Let there be no confusion. This is the biggest opportunity to people in this room, and this is the single thing that's gonna put people out of business in this room.

14:48It's black and white. So I think first and foremost, actually this is a good question for this room. How many people in this room are retiring in the next five years. And I don't mean you're gonna crush it and like dominate the next five years and buy an island. I mean you're old and you're finished. Go turn me four, five, six. All right. So for this, oh, seven. So for the seven people that just raised their hands, I have some good news. You'll probably be able to use one of my least favorite business strategies which is this, on this issue, and probably see yourself out. For the rest of the people in this room, as much, and I could speak for five hours on why I think social media videos and advertising will change your life, for as much passion as I have on that, I'd be willing for you to never do social media marketing in exchange for you spending one hour a day going forward learning about AI and using AI.

15:58This is big, big, man. This is big, big, big, big, big. Like nothing scares me given who I am as a businessman and entrepreneur. This has eaten up an enormous amount of my time in the last year to protect myself from having my companies exist. Here's why. This technology will be better at doing my taxes for me than anybody in this room and it won't even be close. That's it. I don't know what else to say. And it will take one second. And that's real. And like, I don't know how you don't focus on what does that mean, right? This leads to why I want so many people to build personal brand in here.

16:47I believe one of the few things that will be defensible in the next decade or two is people wanting to do things with you. And I think the way people want to do things with you is they discover you and see you every day on the internet. But the task at hand is profound. The AI is able to do all the work and that's that. And I don't know how to sugarcoat it. So there's a couple of things. In the next five years, 10 years, before consumers fully go to a place where they are using these tools at scale. For a lot of people in the next two or three tax seasons, if they listen to me and learn how to use AI over the next year, next year's tax season, it will be them and AI doing all the work and they will never worry about the issues that are having with employees or outsourcing to the Philippines or anything else ever again.

17:44I think that's great news. I mean, this is a relationship business. Trust is paramount. if they can take away some of the medial tasks and focus on the relationships and the consulting that is where they make that second part that second part i think this is not lost on any of you i know a lot of you are moving in this direction getting into the consulting you know being the right hand it's just it's going to become imperative trust is going to become so uncomfortably important. Trust over task should sit as a sign above everybody's, you know, computer screen. You know, it should be your wallpaper on your iPhone right now.

18:30Trust over task. Getting paid for just the blocking and tackling of what you've done historically is going to get harder and harder. Getting more integrated and becoming a consider to these businesses I think has incredible merit and would be 100 % what I would be doing if I was sitting out there. So this group would not say that they're bleeding edge, bleeding edge. You don't say. But they want to be in the mix. They know that they need to be in the game. How can they be on trend related to AI and not, you know, bleeding edge. And by the way, when I say you don't say, I go to every one of these events with zero pre-judgment or what have you.

19:22My answer is based on the fact that, you know, so few people are doing the social media marketing and the Google AdWords. But I have good news. What's amazing about technology is you could have missed every trend of the last decade. And if you actually decide to get serious and do the homework an hour a day, what does AI mean? How do I use AI? And AI is crazy itself. You can use AI to get smart about AI. You can literally go into chat GPT and be like, literally this is what you type in. All right, this morning I was at a keynote with Gary Vaynerchuk and he made me feel some sort of way. Like you can literally tuck these kind of things in.

20:02I am an accountant. and I am a fractional CFO, whatever it might be. You can literally talk to it on like literally for seven minutes. Seven minutes. The biggest issue right now for a lot of you using AI is you don't know how to be good at using AI yet. Remember when we first started using search engines? We didn't know what we were doing either. The first time I used a search engine, I just typed in wine, enter. I didn't know. You got better at it. You're going to get better at using chat GPT and things of that nature. But you can literally talk out and say, what are the 13 apps I should be using if I'm an accountant to save myself 10 to 15 hours a week on tasks that I might be doing in Excel?

20:40I mean, it's incredible. Like, literally talk to it like you're talking to a therapist or a strategist. It's profound. I don't even type. I literally audio it. So I get every nuance of what I want in there. So I think what I'm excited about, what motivates me to continue to do what I'm doing right in this Thanos second is I'm desperate for one person in this audience to hear me and say, you know what? I have an hour a day. Yeah, like I'm doing this for another 20 years. I don't want to fall behind. This is real stuff. Gary's not wrong. Let me put in the hour a day. And you can literally go from someone who's been not on the bleeding edge to being the most bleeding edge because you put in the work.

21:21I genuinely think about it like health and wellness. This will not be lost on this crew. I'm sure you're aware, maybe you've lived this in your life or you've seen it in someone that you know. Some people do not live healthy for 20 years, eating, drinking, staying up, like no exercise. And then they just start. And it's a little ugly at first, it's hard. But a year later, it's a lot better. And that's exactly how I feel about this technology thing. You might've been the person that like passed on learning how to do search and you kept doing direct mail instead. You decided social media was stupid.

21:58you might, you could have, no, apps, like you could be that person. And yet tomorrow, you can decide that this keynote this morning motivated you and you agree. And now you spend an hour a day researching and you could be cutting edge in a year. And I could not recommend that more because I believe that this AI thing is big, big. And some of you are old enough looking around here to remember we underestimated the internet and a lot of the internet companies have been a problem for our business too. And this is bigger than that.

22:39All right. So not just in your business, you spend time with a lot of companies all year round as well. What's an example, and it doesn't have to be AI specifically, you have other kinds of automation, but what's a great example of a company that used automation or AI to sell their strategic services or build another business, like do something drastically different? Well, I mean, you know, what's happened, that is just, I would argue that's the plight of everything. Let me, let me give you an example. When the iPhone was invented, it changed the landscape, right? and so when when I I basically think of that as the watershed moment that we all live in today I mean when I think about companies that have built things I think about things like uber like completely trans we're about now like waymo I mean self-driving like like what about the way people order from restaurants do you remember again this is what's fun not talking to a high school crowd like you remember that we used to like have to go into our kitchen drawer and find a menu and call the restaurant and stay on hold and place the order and like like think like my answer to your question is everything like every business has transformed people have taken market share.

24:07People have evolved. Look what's happened to retail. Like everybody in this room now has the expectations that they can order a blender and it should be at their house in a couple hours. Not wait to Saturday to go to, you know, like, I mean, it's funny how that question formed in my head, Ma. Like, I don't think anything's the same. Look at dating. Again. That's actually worse in some ways. I mean, just like the apps instead of the personal connection. I don't know. Dating, that's a hard one. Yeah, but remember, the app is just a gateway drug to get you there. Right? It's just a technology to get you to the date.

24:50I do not think randomly going to bars with the hope of finding your spouse 30 years ago is some ideologically better thing than using an app to find someone you're attracted to or have a conversation with to then create a date later, right? I think that what we do is society and business people are very good about being romantic about yesterday and demonizing tomorrow. I remember a couple years ago when people were like, you should send people letters, that's good. I'm like, why? Why? Like why did we put writing on a piece of paper and sending it in the mail on this ideological pedestal versus sending a text?

25:40I understand why we did it. We decided that that was more effort and meant more. But so is like walking instead of driving. So is a million things. I think we are incredibly scared of being left behind. but I want to remind everybody here, you're only left behind if you choose to be lazy. Exactly.

26:09All right. But I want to say something that's important to me. This room is full of judgment. You're business owners and executives. You've judged Gen Z workers for the last five years. You love to say in my day during tax season, I would have worked 800 hours a week and got paid a dollar. These fucking kids are full of, right? Right? This crew has judged the living crap. A lot of people in this room have been successful. You've judged, you have so much pride in how hard you've worked. I know this crew. I am this crew. Here's my problem. Why are you being lazy now? you judge people being lazy and things that come easy to you.

27:00I'm not interested in what comes easy. I'm interested in what comes hard. I get that you didn't grow up with AI and social media. News alert, I'm 49. I didn't either. But I put in the work.

27:19Well, it got quiet in here, Mon. I want to talk about something that I saw this week from you that spoke to me. Okay. And it's about how we feel as humans. Oops, sorry. How we feel as humans. There was a post that got into what you give out, you get back. And it's about our narrative. And if you think about what you post, or actually a conversation in your kitchen, you're talking about a ski trip. And all of a sudden, we all know 30 minutes later, we're seeing destinations and ski sales in our fees. but you talked about if you're trying to feel better and be more positive what you put out there is what you give back can you talk about that because I thought that was amazing what I was referring to in this piece of content that went viral this last week is people think the algorithm is changing you a lot of you have demonized social media because you think it's bad and it's trying to pump certain things what I don't think any of you realize is your newsfeed, your algorithm is actually exposing who you actually are, not changing who you are.

28:26And in the video I said, you want me to prove this to you? I've got a way to do it. And by the way, I hope some of you do this, what I'm about to say. If you want to go into Facebook right now or Instagram or whatever app you use, TikTok, if you go into the search at the top and you type in motivation, positivity, good news, good vibes, happiness, joy. You type that in and you get results. And in those results, you go to all the videos, 20, 50, in the video I said 200 of them, and you like 200 of them. And you leave 25 comments on the posts. The next morning when you wake up, your entire algorithm will look different.

29:12The end. The end. And so I think that humans have become incredibly good at not being accountable. We've become the generation, including our generation, of pointing fingers, not thumbs. It's this president's fault, it's that president's fault. It's my mom's fault, it's my dad's fault. It's my boss's fault, it's China's fault. It's everyone's fault but ourselves. Because I'm such an advocate for marketing on social media, I'll be at an airport, this happened several times in the last year, and a parent will come up to me like, Gary V, big fan, but I gotta tell you, I really don't like that you push social media, it's really bad, and I don't like my 14 year old being on TikTok.

29:57And I look at these people and I'm like, so take it off their phone. The hell do you want from me? I'm literally talking about these things from a business lens. I'm not telling people that it's good for their health or they should do it. If you don't like it, on your child's phone, be a goddamn parent and delete it off the phone. Amen is right. In the same way that I'm concerned that a lot of people have ideologies or political views about these things right now and not using it for their business. If I didn't, you know this about me, I'm inherently incredibly private. I've posted more than any human in the last 20 years, but none of my family, no pictures of my kids, none of my personal beings.

30:43I'm private. I don't want to share that. I view these things as business tools. This is marketing and sales and recurring revenue and real life that you need to pay your income and your taxes on. And your life is dependent on your business. These tools are incredible for that. But yes, I think that a lot of people in this room, if you don't like what you're getting in your feeds and you're feeling depressed, it's because you got sucked into fear. my friends mainstream media pushes fear both sides it's all fear-based and then humans on social media amplify that stuff it's just fear and i don't believe in that fear the data is very very black and white my friends let me say this nice and slow to everybody i really want you to leave with this this morning as we sit in this room this morning this is the greatest moment to be alive as a human being.