The Exact Blueprint for Scaling Your Personal Brand, Growing Your Business, and the 500 Posts Rule

30:06We're not ready to sell it anytime soon, but maybe within the next five to seven years, if that opportunity presents itself. But we're building a brand that we don't have to sell. I understand. So one question, what do you want to narrow in on? Because that's a great context. One of my questions to you is, I've listened to a lot of your content, but I haven't heard you talk a lot about partners. wins and how you decide to bring on a partner operationally or financially when is that appropriate versus going it along never if you can help it yeah okay right you know and this is my experience yeah and it's not that's some good ones but it goes back to like what makes you happy yeah i mean i have an offer for somebody for one of the biggest vc firms in the world to buy 10 percent of vFriends it has my brother on the ground in excitement and I'm not even returning the email to set up the meeting and it would be a game changer for me think about the level I'm playing at and it would be a game changer for me so we're talking real economics and my I had a meeting with my accountant today like planning for next year and taxes everything and he was flabbergasted that I haven't even reached back out in the last 30 days it's because I kind of almost had my own realization it's the advice i'm giving you now which is like i don't like it jamie knows my deal with steve ross and i only did that because aj was at a point in his life where the money mattered to set up his life and i didn't want to do it i didn't um but like i'm sure when james looked under the hood it's so egregiously bad for steven ross like they have no rights like i could i could start a new agency by changing all the names of the company like It's crazy the deal they made.

31:48That was the only reason I've even had a partner other than like family. Like it's not fun. Right. That's really helpful. But in your business model, if you want to take in PE money or things of that nature to expand it, make it, you know, if you want to sell it, it's things like that. I want to go with speed. I really like the growth and development. That's what I've done. The problem is, the problem is that's why I hate speed so much. I know. the speed comes with compromise yes you're going to speed yourself into money that has control and that's why we've tried to be patient and we have it ourselves now and so tagging on for that the other thing on just on that point something you've heard a lot from me i wish you knew how young you were yeah for sure no but no no before yeah for sure like in 17 years you still have like 35 years like you know like you know what i mean like if you can contextualize time

32:47yeah i agree um the the other thing there's a company called clear bank okay so obviously the canadians shook their heads right like there there's some really new funding mechanisms where you don't have to give up control that you may want to look into right there's also people that just want to lend money and make interest okay it's james is right there like the good old fashion credit line and the good old fashion like like we don't even talk about getting bank loans anymore that you pay off so you don't have to give up your we don't have to talk about that remember everybody grew up with that concept so there's a lot there's a lot of other things you can see what's going on in the chat right now so keep that in mind as well thank you i appreciate that um kind of piggybacking off of that we um you know i do believe we've tried to be really patient with the restaurant and grow it the right way and i think it does need more time as we grow We're trying to do it the right way, but we have big brains and big motors and we're trying to decide how or when we should add a business to keep us interested, so to speak, versus just focusing on the one.

33:49And particularly because we have a location based business, kind of, you know, a community business. And I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of, you know, e-commerce and these the opportunities that are really in front right now. We are in Birmingham, but, you know, it's a big world and just trying to balance this. I'll give you one that might work for you. And it could actually work for Doug. And Doug, thank you for the empathy in the background. Both of you could go into products that are very viable for the things that, you know, Brian and Neha know. Like, for example, with Doug's business, he should, in my opinion, stand up his most signature fruit wine and then make a fruit jam complement product within the brand so he can ship that nationally and globally.

34:36you should do the same thing like like for example i've actually am starting a restaurant group uh in new york right and one of the things i'm talking about guys about i'm like look i don't i'm really supporting two friends but now that they've brought me a little bit more in than just money i'm like look i'm not interested in this but if you say that we're gonna start a restaurant that has a signature mustard that everyone's gonna love the fucking mustard like everyone's focused on the mustard that I can build a 300 million direct consumer mustard brand now I'm really interested so I think one of the things you could think about is could you create a signature condiment or dish in your place that become you strictly stood up the concept of this unique pepper just to create a DTC pepper business I would like to do that I think I'm gonna work ruin that for sure yeah absolutely that could when i believe that could scratch your big ambition creativity muscle right you create something that lives within your restaurant that then can be spun out to be a global dtc cpg brand i just wanted to say when you started the vcr group i reached out to dacid ronald let's see skyline up to give me some of his time and he was amazing and gave me some great ideas for the business it was also encouraging seeing you going into the restaurant business after COVID in the last year.

35:57Oh, I love it. When I was saying to them, I'm not interested, it wasn't because I'm not interested. It's just that they're such experts, my three partners. I'm like, you don't need me to run a restaurant. You guys have done this for 74 fucking years. I'll bring innovation. And here's an innovation. Let's create olive oil that we pour for people the second they sit down with incredible bread. And let's build up the reputation of the olive oil so that we can then sell a hundred million dollars a year in olive oil directly consumer right right like the level of focus to an olive oil that's just on the table that's not the normal move for a restaurant but for me that's the innovation right i appreciate that thank you yep let's keep it going all right uh we're gonna go over to garrett wilhelm uh down in virginia here we go garrett yeah again super thankful for your time gary had been following your content for quite a while and can attribute some success to that.

36:55So thank you so much. I'm extremely grateful. My question is very specific. It's around people and it's around scalability, right? So my business is at about 1.2 million a year and we're ready to kind of move forward and grow. The challenging thing is, is the cost of humans has gone up. And so for us, you know, we're kind of playing around with this idea of bringing people up through the company comparatively to you know paying the higher cost for more skilled skilled people yeah i would i would spend all my energy on building an incubator internally to create people and retain people yeah that's what we think about a lot i think the challenging thing around that is is is for me is that human to human training or is it something like a train you all or something human human human to human that's you know why the part you're gonna need is the nuanced emotional intelligence part and like your culture that's exactly right i was just gonna say how do you scale a feeling right like you scale it through dictatorship like just being that that ambassador of the brand to James and Joe know what doesn't fly in my world.

38:17Got it. Both of them have spent enough time prior to me knowing there are people that are talented, that they would never consider hiring because they know if I sniffed out their behavior, which was completely appropriate in places they used to work, that there's no shot that that person's going to succeed because I'm going to smoke them out if they don't. Got it. So you start with kind of your Mal Rushmore of people in leadership, put your value into that, and then allow that to kind of trickle down, if you will. And then what you have to be is never let it be compromised. Right. So that's exactly right.

38:53Comma, as you start to scale, I'll give you an example. Carol is adored by every parent and people are signing up to your school because of Carol because she's insane with parents and kids but Carol makes Ricky and Susan and Sally miserable because she's audacious and braggadocious and snarky to them because they're not Carol you have to fire Carol do you know how hard that is for most businesses the scenario I just told you I mean it's a very hard thing right because they bring in a lot of I see your point exactly what I do that is highly unusual that I'm trying to teach the business world to do is to not compromise on culture over finance and that's incredibly foreign because people have to keep the lights on I promise you right now for everybody here who has employees the biggest vulnerability in your entire company is your weakest cultural employee

39:57so then spending time on finding that person or people and yeah and creating them is the best way you get a raw asset at 23 you have a better chance in 25 months making them the 25 year old version retraining is hard that's what i'm finding that's what i'm finding i i come and you're also you're also coming and trying to hire people from a system you don't like exactly aware yeah so it's you can't achieve what you want that's right you can't achieve what you want yeah you're what it doesn't get first hand we've got Julia Balik here straight out of school she's a good one she's a keeper we're growing her from the ground up I get it and we have a better chance with Julia than if she was you because you came in with a lot of baggage Joe and by the way I'm making a joke but like Joe's like the greatest.

40:55And what you don't realize is some of the teachers you're hiring, they're wonderful. They don't even realize that they're doing it. I'll give you Joe's. It's a lot easier if I get Julia from the beginning to be like, we're gonna be VaynerX centric, not client centric. We do it our way. Joe has seven, eight, 12, 15 years of doing client services anywhere else in the world. He subconsciously doesn't realize that he's letting the client seep in the dictation, which ultimately becomes the reason we lose that.

41:34Yeah, it's wild in my business. In my business, the number one reason we lose is because we let the client get what they want in the short term, and then they fire us for it. I've got to not, because they stink. and they tell you to do stink shit and at first they love it because you're doing what they feel comfortable with but then they fire you because it's not doing well and they don't even know how to score it. Amen. That's what you're dealing with. You're trying to hire teachers who already conform to the education system which has remarkable flaws against your hypothesis. Yep. And it's unlearning people rather than teaching people which is what I'm great at.

42:20and unlearning is impossibly hard and teaching is wildly easy if you get them in the right state awesome that's it my man yeah thank you so much you're welcome yeah I'm excited for you it's gonna work thank you because what here's what it is Garrett if you like if you now execute on what I just felt from you in response it becomes a religion so you waste no time you just don't hire from there that's it that's it I love it shifting focus younger yep love it awesome alright thanks Garrett when we started you remember swanky sauce with Boehner sports we started oh my gosh we started that back in 2012 based on your regret is poison kind of thing and it was just a passion project we did it it's been going we sell a couple thousand bottles of barbecue sauce a year nothing crazy and we started a YouTube channel.

43:19Actually, my wife started it. How to videos about goats. We own a goat farm, right? How to do this, how to do that. And then to make a long story short, I started vlogging the family, everything, four kids living on this farm, running the barbecue sauce business. And then we had some stupid idea of going live 24 seven. And that's what we do now. We have two barns, four cameras. It's all ridiculous pretty much, but it's two live cams all the time on YouTube. One stays still all the time. It's really not. I mean, you know this, it wasn't a stupid idea. You've seen other executions of this work. So you were smart.

43:57I think it's the furthest thing from a stupid idea, but go ahead. So then the stupid part, well, the part we didn't realize, and that's when we'll get into the question here, is the community that we built and how close we have gotten to them and how close they have gotten us. Half this stuff you see behind us was sent here from our community. That's awesome. Because I'm a DNF student, I'm going to let my wife read the question. Yeah. So, I mean, it really kind of originated back in 2009 when we wanted a source of fresh eggs for our growing family. At the time, we had two young boys and we knew that grocery store food wasn't exactly the healthy sort of egg milk.

44:36And so we started with chickens. Turns out chickens are the gateway livestock animal and so we had to naturally upgrade and we got ourselves into goats mainly because I felt cows were a little too busy and to manage around a young family. So we got into goats for the milk and then my kids started showing them and really creating that bond with their animals and to your point we started the like YouTube channel so that I could teach kind of how to or how we do because it's not you ask 10 different farmers how they raise their goats you're going to get 12 different answers um so we started that as sort of my new year's resolution in 2018 by 2019 kidding season rolling around it was actually out of convenience that we started to live stream because it was becoming too hard to have

45:31documenting just having to go in and edit all that so we just live streamed it and we would take the camera off the wall for the for the community and we it was like you're having a bird i'd say totally totally totally get it as you know yeah so fast forward during one of our q a's that we were doing and our community actually was asking us well what can we buy that we can have a piece of your home. Oh, that makes sense. And so I had dabbled in some lotion and, you know, a month or two later, we were taking hundreds of pre-orders and having to upgrade our manufacturing facility. And, um, and then in 2020, he got laid off from his day job, but we had a foundation and all we were able to do, you know, 2018, we had a gross income of 30 ,000 it was really just a hobby that helped pay for the haybill um this year we're looking to um gross over 250 ,000 and um we have like i said we really go into the quality of our products is what what our brand is about people have learned to expect a certain quality of course and and it's there so we of course it's that it's at the size and scale where it can be extreme quality exactly so I guess a couple of our questions because our quality is what it is I and I'm not willing to budge on on our quality I have a hard time delegating to other people um and we don't have any real employees yet we have some friends and family that help us um but to take some stuff off of my plate and off of his plate we kind of delegate some of these projects that I have a hard time honestly delegating um and it's because when i get the quality of work back i'm like i should have just done this myself so on a scalability issue as we're growing how how do i continue to ensure that the quality is there but be able to delegate and by by letting the person that should be judging you judge it

47:40so let the customer judge it yes those people yep yeah the biggest mistake we don't lose those customers if the junk is because because because you may lose 17 customers when that batch went wrong but then you'll adjust but at this point you're going nowhere right this is how I took my dad's business from 3 to 65 million he wanted to do everything I said, let the customer decide. This is deja vu for me. Yeah. You know what you learn? Who not to let do it again. No, that's again, you're thinking too much defense. Yeah. You're so focused on that part. That part's easy. To your point, you'll find out at one second about that.

48:30You're compromising on ego, believe it or not. egos hurting you i make this better and it's coming from a good place it's you know sometimes ego's a bad word but like it's not that bad but it is what's happening here yeah i i have a news alert for you many many many many people on earth can do it too yep yeah oh yeah okay good fine then well that's the that that leads me to my next question um because we are 18 months into this real like putting fuel on a fire um and we're sitting at 250 gross sales um but we haven't actually paid ourselves yet so how do we you know with reinvesting constantly back into the business to grow at the speed that we're growing at we can't afford an employee um gotten there yet yeah i mean i think uh there's a lot of ways to think about this one are you selling it for enough margin.

49:33I believe so. Our soaps were selling at about an 86 % margin. What's wrong with 300 %? That would put us... We're already for goat milk soap. Industry standard is, even on a high end, is about$1.50 an ounce. And I believe we're already at, you would know the number... We're up in the$2 ounce range. And same goes for our goat milk lotion. But to Gary's point, and I'm just going to show because it's easier, we've launched very simple soap, right? $7 a bar. And then to my wife's point, we're up in the$15 a bar of soap when you get into the fancy holiday stuff. And$15 for a bar of soap in the soap world is high.

50:21But we look at it as artwork that happens to be in soap. And to be honest, we sell out of a lot of it. I just don't think$20 can be justified. 15 couldn't be justified if you were talking about it at 12. Right. Yeah, and we were at 12. And we went to 15. And we just did a$5 increase per bottle of lotion. We were at 15. Now we're at 20. And, I mean, you talk about the big guys with the Beekman lotions. Price per ounce were even higher than they are. Right. But we're still selling out. Yeah, I mean, you've not figured out your price. like upside right you just you're not going to be able to hire somebody if you're not making enough margin against how you're reinvesting back then you're gonna have to figure that out yeah so i'm just gonna i don't think based on the margin i don't think that's it because where all the money's going is actually not into the soap and the lotion it's going into other products behind the brand like the custom stuffed animal of one of our goats our audience is excited about this they love it but it's stuck in the shipping container in la based on the current coat but this is where the money is right yeah that's just small business mismanagement of cash flow like you should have pre-sold the toy yeah we were told to well well we were told to and we told not to um because well you were you were totally not right though because think about what's happening like think about this conversation yeah yeah you know like i think the you know the reality is is that when you're in a cash flow crunch outlaying money is always a bad idea right yep and what you could have done is created perceived value how much are you selling the stuffed animal for that's gonna go for 40 great so you could have sold it for 36 on pre-sale and 44.99 when it got here which would have created urgency and savings yeah so that just comes down to a logistic issue we tried to pre-sale once before and shopify was a mess and we were like oh my gosh no pre-sales anymore so that just might the ideological mistake like maybe there's been technology advancements maybe there's a new Shopify plugin that's your mind.

52:42You know, like you made an ideological point of view. Yeah. And what you've done is you've created a financial cashflow crunch, which is the number one rule of your business. And the number two and three rule is manage your cashflow when you're this small. Right. No, which if we managed to, or pre-sold those, or we even have a book we just launched that happened to show up about a week before we thought it was going to. So we'll watch it. What's that? Is that bad? No, that was good. It was great because it then opened up more cash flow. Yeah, you guys basically need to do 80 % of the thing that's working, maximize the fuck out of it.

53:25It sounds like you just did with raising your prices. 80 % of your energy needs to go there. And you guys are such entrepreneurs and creatives that you're getting caught up in the other stuff, which is amazing. but when you do that stuff, max 30 % of your energy, my preference, 20 % of your energy. Every time you do a fucking book or a stuffed animal or whatever the fuck else you're going to come up with in a week, you always pre-sell it. Okay. Because you have a rabid community that trusts you. Right. So we have other products we want to launch. Good news. All this creative entrepreneurial juice you have from DNF Student DNA, you can launch them all but I want you to pre-sell every one of them.

54:06should I kickstarter them? Because we thought of that too. That's just a tactical slight difference. That doesn't mean anything. Doesn't mean anything. It sounds like you need to Google if there's a better plugin for pre-sales on Shopify. And to your point, it was short term. We needed that cash. You made a strategic decision to make it something and you needed this strategy right before it to make that thing. Right. Yeah. Right. It was, yeah. So we do subscription-based products as well. And one of those is actually a subscription-based to our live chat. So we moved away from a volunteer moderator chat on our live streams and moved towards a membership platform that YouTube provides where only people who are subscribed and pay us a monthly he.

55:05Anybody can watch. It's free. Anybody can log in and watch. Right. What would you suggest to grow that membership on our channels? It's a very aggressive ask. It is. And we set it only at$1.99. But to your point, it's still like, why am I going to pay to chat? Yeah. And the only reason we did that is because the trolls and because we're live 24-7, we can't watch it 24-7. And people were coming in, talking. I understand. It just got ugly. I understand. But it's hurting you more than you think. Yeah. From a financial side, it's hurting. No, no. From a brand perception, it seems like you're trying to monetize too much on your audience.

55:53I promise. That's a very aggressive ask. Yeah. Yeah. I really believe that. Okay. It works. It can work. But you want to think that through. Yeah. Yeah. What it did help us with, though, was save the continuity of the environment. I understand that. I understand that. I get it. It was definitely a... You could also ban people. We have about 4 ,000 banned already. You also, if you have that many banned, I'm also curious what you banned people for. Yeah. Well, we had a distrust in our moderators is what happened. So we had to, instead of just getting rid of one, we had to get rid of them all and then create a new model.

56:39And that's what we did. We actually went dark for 48 hours and got hate mail because we shut them down to try to solve all this. Yeah, I think I understand. Again, I think that business is about strategy. You know, whatever drama was going on with your mods. I love the idea of cleaning the deck, but you can also build back. I mean, now that you've paid people, you've got perfect people to decide to be the mods. Yeah. You know, like so. Yeah. We actually put that idea out there that like we might go back to moderators. We might go. I think you should. I don't like the, I don't, for the wholesomeness of what you're doing, the$1.99 to talk thing is an egregious ask, I think.

57:24Yeah. I get the value of the cleanup, but that you do with mods. Yeah. so i'll shift gears while you look at a different question back to your tiktok please don't look at mine um i won't yeah well it's that push-up thing i do it every other day or every once in a while but really i'm trying to do the document don't create model on tiktok and it doesn't seem to be working good do something else okay so most important thing that you can focus your thing could go banana shit on TikTok. Yeah, we get like 100 views on all of them and then one pops at 40 ,000 and then 100. Okay. How many posts a day?

58:05One of your three days? Once every three? Or a week. Yeah. Three a day. Got it. Figure it out. Alright, I don't want to run out of time. I know we got one or two more. Go ahead. Thank you. And I love the conversations going on, Jennifer. Thank you so much for offering the help cash flow for some of our lovely 40s customers. I'm sure some of these folks will take you up on it, particularly Neha, who's very active in the community right now. Neha and Brian, you're the last folks on with Gary and Vee today, so we're going to go out with a bang.

58:41Okay, great, thanks. I'll do a quick intro and then throw it to Neha for the question. Gary, as we said, online retail, D2C, specialty food, highly curated so we're not the 5 000 skew hope you find something you like we're three to four hundred skews the only things we sell are what lasts in our team's kitchen if they don't like it doesn't last in our kitchen well we don't want to sell it and yeah i think that's uh that's a quick intro so i'll throw it to neha can you hear me awesome so gary we've relied on the brands that we carry to build our own brand. I get it. So what we're now looking to do is it's like wine library, right?

59:29Like you carry wine, but you made empathy later. So we're kind of at this juncture where we're, how do we build our own brand as a retail store? The brand or actual brands like private labels, but maybe not named directly after your retail store, but other brands. That's one way to do it because four days ago you did tell another retailer to do this. But I have four, five quick ideas. I'm just going to pitch into you really fast. Yep. One, size does matter. So we're the retailer that figured out how to ship in the smallest fucking box possible. Like really, really small. Two, podcast where we interview suppliers, people in the CPG, about the one biggest mistake they made building a food brand.

1:00:13Why do you want to do that as the creatives? Because that's a B2B show. It is. So you're using that to acquire more products for your store? Absolutely. Okay. I don't enter through this. Is that a need? You know, it doesn't sound like the biggest need of the organization is more products. Right? Because given all the... I'm not selling. Right. You have such a moat with how much of the pain of the ass it is to get into Canada that I feel like you're building another moat that takes a lot of effort. the podcast on something you already have a moat for and you only have so much energy and time and resources which is why we haven't done it yet we've talked about it about it got it got it got it keep going but understood we're we're a team of five and yeah favorite number uh storytelling the the challenges of the food industry on tech talk so some of our suppliers they're just shutting down like small food brands they just can't compete clockwork private labeling them or just building their own you know product or knocking off the jam or whatever the case is well what does that have to do with you though it does because it is what we do is all of the brands we carry are small to mid-sized brands who are bypassing the traditional broker distributor panel but but the end customer doesn't understand that right so i think what they don't understand the food, the trajectory of like how difficult it is for a small to mid-sized food brand to survive.

1:01:49They don't care. The fuck would a customer care about that for? Don't try to sell food on altruism. I don't think it's altruism. I think it's something that's interesting, which is like really not. But what if I do a TikTok like basically presenting to a large retailer as a brand and how difficult it is? The worst. Terrible. so interesting that you're saying that. Nobody gives a shit about what you just said. People care about if the jam looks good when you put it on the bagel and then they just buy the jam. You're too nerdy right now. Okay. You're making shit that you find interesting and I find distant.

1:02:30I do. I always do. I'm watching you do it in real time right now. I do. That's why I'm giving you the answer. I'm here to help you. You spent money today. I'm going to make you money. You're making content that nobody gives a fuck about. Okay. You need to make content. Like you, the supermarket, like Wine Library, forget about empathy. Wine Library exploded because I did things to build Wine Library, which then gave me customers, which then gave me leverage for my suppliers. You need to become the, you've been relying on the exclusivity and they've been driving your business. You need to be the driver of your business.

1:03:04Thus, you have to make content that's interesting to consumers. Like you need to make viral peanut butter content for the brand you decided to sell peanut butter for. But that's still focusing on the brand, right? So, okay. Yeah, so you're the platform that that's being done on though. Like, sure, I might be like, this peanut butter is super gooey and then I do something that makes 800 ,000 people watch it, but it's still being delivered from your company. Like Whole Foods markets, like Ulta markets, Sephora markets, like Costco, You have to become the marketer and you have to be consumer marketing using your products that you're selling.

1:03:47And yes, sure, you can integrate your own private labels over time, but you still need to make content because what that's gonna do is give you double leverage. You're gonna make product that sells better, but even better than that, now you're providing demand for brands, which is gonna bring more brands to you. Right now, you're a value prop from a logistics standpoint, but they're driving your business.

1:04:20Okay. A TV show where we case test our product. I like it. You went on TikTok first. TikTok first. Okay. I mean, especially you, because you have charisma. Like, literally, you tasting shit and just talking. Yeah. TikTok. talk we watched wine library episode one last night very different than episode 86 and i just you know what that is by the way and why i know those two numbers yeah i was scared to lose my clients yeah first 86 episodes people forget wine library was already a huge business before wine library tv so i realized all those serious people that lived in short hills and livingston and worked on wall street and bankers that if i was fully me that i was gonna lose that so i was scared but then the show was doing so well and i was like man i'm not even fucking being myself i and it got to a place where i was like oh this is really gonna work so i felt comfortable of like going all in and so yeah okay i love it i'm actually i'm really excited about that i think i would be i think you'd be fantastic okay but jack remember in between like gary episode one and what Gary is today is where I see you and just be you.

1:05:34Don't try to be any version of anything. Just be you. Yeah, I agree. Private label. Yeah. So you've talked about this a lot. And then the food, so right now our margins are, you know, structured. They are what they are. Yeah, private label is immensely important to you. But I wouldn't do it like Kirkland where you have like a brand or I wouldn't do it under your store brand. I would make up brands. That's what did really well for me at Wine Lab. Like, what's your favorite animal? a monkey good actually a lion a lion a lion yeah what's what's a category that you think you could do more business in or something that you don't have great brands with or somewhere where you're doing business but you don't love your margin condiments like mustard barbecue sauce good barbecue make a legendary lion barbecue sauce right away

1:06:24so so on that because typically private label for food is it's your basic staples and that's we've never want to do that because that's I don't want to compete on basic flour. I think there's tons of like premium like there's a lot of comp stores to what you do that are in the upper premium level that have plenty of private labels that are like and what the holy grail is is if you stumble into pay dirt and like another nice Canadian company Moose Knuckle where they created a private label in their own store and then that became the actual business that gets real fun Could you imagine you sell lion barbecue sauce to Kraft for$48 million?

1:07:05That's what can happen when you're a retailer. So focus on like a premium, innovate. You're doing both, right? Start bringing. That's exactly right. But create our own, okay. But what's nice about that is you get to reverse engineer the white spaces of your retail store. Right? So you just said condiments, we'd like to make more margin. That sounds good. there's a new trend and everyone's into honey toast whatever the fuck that would be then now you can make one quickly in that space so the follow-up to that gary is fucking money money right so right you want to take that well and so this is the challenge in my other pfo job i go raise money for startups that's what i do we don't we haven't done that for our company, but it's the, in a product business, like doing a private label, cash flow intensive.

1:07:58If you were going to do... How many active customers do you guys have? 10 ,000? 10 ,000. Somewhere in there? Nice. Yeah, look. Again, a lot of Canada themes. Like, I think ClearBank is a really interesting model. That's one. Yeah, we work with them. Great. So, more if you can i don't know how to work featured neha they featured neha and their women entrepreneur month love um there's that number two there's raising capital which we've talked about in different versions but you might have different feelings per se than jennifer or you know or me or what have you so that's number two number three it like we talked about with with our friends in the Connecticut goat life, like I'm a humongous believer in pre-sale.

1:08:50It works. When you have trust, it's like cashing in on trust. You've done all the right things. Everybody here is honorable, good people, delivering, trying hard, right? Like that's trust. Trust can be monetized in pre-sale. You'll deliver and then you'll have more trust. My dad didn't have cash flow for shit. But pre-selling wine futures saved my dad's business. Which is why we were just thinking yesterday, we were like the$3 million to$60 for Wine Library. It's hard to scale that without any debt and just solely out of the profits of the company, right? Yeah, it's why I went on to become Gary Vee.

1:09:28Like I ended up being, like what I didn't know at the time was like I was gonna be an all-time good businessman. You wanna hear something scarier? Wine Library did 3.8 million on 10 % gross profit. yeah you want some real c you want some real cfo talk here we go 3.8 380 000 in sales before your expenses oh and i grew that from 3.8 to 65 in seven years with no credit line

1:10:02like my I'm underrated

1:10:08because I know you know why I'm underrated because I never go all the way there because I think it because I don't want to make it seem like my dad like it's kind of like a family thing like right but 3.8 10 % gross profit no credit line

1:10:29yeah i've worked with a lot of companies who have those margins and they shove a ton of debt into the company to fund the growth zero so that's impressive but i did it through all the advice i'm giving now right creating high margin items um pre-saling you know i i also look i i say it but like i had a lot of juice right it's working 17 hours a day i had the talent like there's a lot going on there, but that's what happened. And so like, not that I expect that from everybody, but the nuances work. I'm not fucking making stuffed animals that can get caught up in LA. Like we need to pre-sell that shit down in Connecticut.

1:11:05You know, that's it. 70 % of what's working, fucking squeeze the shit out of it because you got something good there. And you could fucking have nothing but fun, Aaron, like with whatever creative idea you have. But here's the rule for your fucking DNF charisma and creativity like me. It's only pre-sell. Any cockamanian shit out of your mouth is only pre-sale.

1:11:27And if you sell seven, by the way, you also make a lot more money when you pre-sale. You guessed how many fucking stuffed animals to make. On pre-sale, you're like, oh shit, we can make more. You know? And when you price it with worst case scenario, we only sell 50 of them, it's not much it costs. Now all of a sudden you sell 530, you get it cheaper. Like the whole thing works.

1:11:51We're good. Gary, can we get a photo of you? Like just smiling or not smiling. Okay. Three, two, one. Love it. Thank you. That was great. Listen, this was a really epic session because it was sharp. I think, I don't know, I was in a good mood or something or sharp or it just all worked out for like shit that I've been, a lot of like, actually now I'm looking around. It's just because I've been doing everything that, like I'm very tied into this crew. We have like a lot going on here. Listen, there's a couple things I want to leave you with. First, start falling in love with pre-sale because it can really help you.

1:12:30Start like really thinking about that. Two, if you do not go ham on TikTok content, you will be making such a regretful moment because we've got two more years of this and then it's going to go away. It's going to go away, right? And so like I saw somebody referenced with the new Apple updates, getting read, like shit changes. TikTok's gonna get saturated because everyone's gonna figure out what I know. And it's just supply and demand of the feed.

1:13:01And really, really building that community stuff, like building, like Doug, for you, like if you guys can just hold your breath for four months and actually build a Discord, you'll win. You'll mitigate all the other chants out, but you have to do it. Like building communities really matter. obviously the Simons know that because that's what they're built on the community can really work for you like Discord's a sneaky one it's winning so big in video games and in NFTs I actually think it's going to go to everything so one left field thing for all of you if Doug stands up a Discord at first a lot of people aren't going to his core customer race isn't really going to know what that is but it's so native to people because it's old AOL chat room DNA so like even like people that aren't technically awesome very quickly get comfortable inside of Discord worth thinking about.

1:13:51Definitely worth you jumping into some Discords. Join the BeFriends one just so you understand it. Right? Actually, that's what I'm going to put that link in here. All of you should definitely back to more like actions instead of just talking about it. Here is the BeFriends Discord. Join it. See how Discord get comfortable with this. Download the app. Get comfortable for you and then I think it can really work for you. Like for example, if Garrett starts a, you know, young parents of Virginia Discord runs Facebook ads against young people, like young parent age on Facebook ads to a Discord, not to sign, think about how much easier the ad will convert to join a Discord versus do you want to pay$8 ,000 in tuition?

1:14:34Now you got them in a Discord, you live in there and cultivate a community, now you're getting them in for 49 to seven, you see 49 cents to$7 of the Discord, but you're fucking converting them after two months when they realize there's something really in there, got it?

1:14:49Great time, bye everyone. This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience.