The Power Of Soft Skills: How To Grow Your Business

0:00I get more consumption on my LinkedIn than CNBC gets viewers. That's absurd. That makes no sense. You cannot comprehend what one thoughtful two-minute video can do for business development. We're the fastest growing independent agency in advertising in the world. Our entire business model is my content on LinkedIn. We spend nothing on sponsorships, no bullshit fucking conference events, no booths, nothing. LinkedIn. Free. Attention is the number one asset. Thank you for having me. There's a couple different ways I can go with this. So let me start with this and then I'll decide based on that. in this room, how many people are familiar with me and consume my content?

0:38Please raise your hand. Okay, that fucking hurts. So I guess I'll be going left. All right, let me actually then with that, I thought that might be the case and so what I'm gonna do is give you four or five minutes of context that will set up what I wanna talk about here which is these 12 and a half attributes. But first, you know, prepping for this, back to the clapping it up. Instead of clapping for people up here, if I just may, louder than we just did for him, I am just incredibly impressed of the journey of this. I live in and have only run two family businesses. Most of my clients are private equity or public companies.

1:20There's probably not many things I enjoy more than a properly at scale run private company. And so if I just may, I'd like you to clap it up for each other. And so if we can just do that, that would be very nice.

1:43And no bullshit, I genuinely meet it. I get to do this a lot, I analyze a lot of businesses. I run a 2 ,000 person global advertising agency right now. We look at it, I started my agency to be an infrastructure for all the private equity behavior I plan on doing as I'm on my path to buy the New York Jets. And so I'm a, thank you, brother. It's hard out here for us Jet fans. I needed that. So I'm really excited about this talk because I do this a lot for a living, but like the mix in this room and the format of this business is interesting. Even if you look at the, like it's really hard to balance number six and seven, right?

2:21Like balancing kindness and tenacity for the makeup of this room and your framework's super interesting. You're all one big family, but some of you are like weirdly willing to cut each other's throat for more business in here. And so I think there's plenty to talk about. I think I'm going to focus on two core things, which is culture and content. But because most of you don't have context, I will spend three minutes, if I may, on telling you why I believe in these two things. And I think the backstory will help. I was born in the Soviet Union. I came to the US in 1978 when I was three so I don't really remember that part of my life but we grew up extremely poor as you can imagine for some of the OGs in this crowd you may actually even remember the Carter years the economy wasn't super great and so I lived in a studio apartment roughly the size of this stage with eight family members for the first two years that I lived in America my dad got a job as a stock boy in a liquor store in New Jersey and that's how our American dream started.

3:21We moved to Edison, New Jersey. That's where I kind of started my entrepreneurial career when I was six, seven. And I started with like six or seven lemonade stands. I somehow manipulated or tricked or inspired my friends to man and woman the lemonade stands. And at the end of the day, I don't know if some of you remember this, remember big wheels? Before you'd get a real bike, you'd get a big wheels. I used to literally at like six o 'clock at night in the summer, ride my big wheels to my six locations and pick up my cash like I was Tony Soprano. But what I was doing, and this is what I want to talk to you about when we get to the content side, which is why I'm, I mean, I was already pretty thrilled about this talk with the makeup, but when I understood that there's a real commitment to the LinkedIn thing that I see, and I'll get into underpriced attention, the next book I'm writing in a minute, I've been chasing underpriced attention my whole life.

4:18The reason I wasn't manning my lemonade stands when I was seven was because I was actually sitting on the corner of streets in New Jersey as a seven-year-old. This is like how sick I am and how much this was in my DNA. And I would literally watch cars drive by and try to figure out which tree or which pole to put the sign on that gave me a better chance to sell lemonade. when I was 14 after spending several years selling baseball cards, which by the way, when I was 11 and 12 doing baseball card shows, I would also set up my table that way with attention. And I was making$1 ,000,$2 ,000 a weekend at like 12 and 13 selling baseball cards.

4:59And I don't know about you, but back to entrepreneurship, which I know a lot of you will associate with, when you have like$5 ,000 in cash under your bed and you're 13 and you're not selling weed, you're doing a pretty good job. So it was always in me. And then I was killing it and living like, you know, 5 ,000 bucks at 13, you're like trillionaire. Especially in the 80s. But then my dad dragged me into the liquor store that he now owned. Because he lived his journey. And at 14, I started stocking the shelves of my dad's store in Springfield, New Jersey. And that was the worst because he paid me two bucks an hour.

5:33But somewhere around 16, I realized that people collected wine. And that's when my infatuation with building the biggest wine company in the world started. And then it all fast forwarded into me launching one of the first e-commerce websites in America in 1996 called winelibrary.com. And in a five year window, on the back of email, on the back of Google AdWords, and on the back of blogging before social media became the primary opportunity, I built that business from a three to a$75 million business in a five year period with no capital, not even a credit line because my dad didn't believe in it.

6:07that became the foundation of what I want to talk to you about. Growing stuff, I just saw some of the ambitions, 500 million, 2027, all the stuff, getting a sense of the DNA in this room. I do think it comes down to in 2023, 2024, and beyond, in these two hardcore Cs, which is content and culture. Culture, I think, is incredibly unique because especially as I started digging into the founder story, and especially when I think about the makeup of the room, of the ambition and the growth and the sales DNA, I'll use American political terms to set up where I want to talk about, which is the world increasingly, both clearly in politics, but even in the business world and our realities, really fall into the category of red or blue.

6:56And the reality is all the magic is in purple. And when I look at these things, when I think about gratitude, let's start there. You are not in this room if you're not winning. Back to clapping it all up. I think people have completely lost context of gratitude living in a first world country like America. Just to remind everybody to level set where I'm going with this. The top 1 % earners in this country, you know, one of the two dominant empires in the world right now at a very rich company. The top 1 % earners in this country start at about$440 ,000 a year. If you make$440 ,000 a year, you're in the 1 % in the richest country in the world.

7:42Even different than that from a business standpoint, looking around this audience, we're all of the age where some bad stuff has happened. We've lost a relative, we've lost things. When I think about why people don't build good cultures, especially when I think about this, which is you're the hunters and back home on your team are the farmers. And that framework excites me and I think about it a lot. Just the complete and utter lack of ability to understand how much gratitude, if it actually is in you, how much that shows up with how you manage a team is huge. We lost Ford as a major client. My head person that runs all of the New York office, which is the biggest office on the Ford account, runs in and when I tell you white is a ghost, I'm talking like Casper the friendly ghost, like whiter than that, like dead, walks in.

8:38He's like, we lost Ford and we're talking about eight figures hefty. On my computer I look up at him like, okay. I'm like, let's deal with it later. He had come from all these agencies where like, what would have happened is complete chaos, 100 people would have been laid off, blah, blah, blah. That doesn't come because my P &L is healthy though it is enough to absorb it, it comes because I'm incapable of letting business dictate my emotional behavior. I'm completely detached from my success. When I say 5.3 million fans back in the story he just told me, I'm not proud of that. I mean, I'm proud of it.

9:15I know I put in the work, but it's definitely not my identity. And I think, when I think about winners at this level, I always think about like, man, if people were just really grateful because what I always think about, and what I said earlier, I know there was some chuckles, since I was 10, I've been on a mission to buy the New York Jets. I think about it, I strategize against it, I own an e-sports team and a pickleball team, and with other owners in the league, Steve Ross, the owner of the Dolphins, owns a piece of my agency, I'm in it, and I'm trying. But when I think about balancing real obnoxious ambition, compromising it, and changing your culture because you're so driven by a number, a goal, success is actually stopping you from getting to the thing you want.

10:06For me, it's the same old game that I always play, back to gratitude and I'll move on. If everything was going awesome, if today was the day that I bought them and then I get a phone call and the most important people in my life are hurt or truly terminally ill or the worst of worst have just passed in the last seconds or minutes, where am I? And I really think we struggle with that. I think when you're winning and you're succeeding and you're driven, which is what every single person clearly has to be doing here in this room, I think we're completely detached from gratitude. And if I could challenge you to be grateful for what you have versus obsessed with what you don't have yet, forget about even business and how I think it affects your team.

10:49I just think it's gonna make your life better. Something worth debating. I think about self-awareness a lot. The other unlock that I've seen in this scenario that I'm spending a lot of time thinking about with the CEOs that I set on the board up, this is why I have some audacity of buying the Jets. In 2006, as I was going through building my dad's business, I decided social media was the next big thing and I became a very early investor in 2006 in Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Uber. Back then, literally Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr were the first three companies I ever invested in. They were remarkable.

11:24If you don't know Tumblr, it was an early, it's basically the social network that I think TikTok is now representing, the interest graph versus the social graph, it sold for a billion dollars to Yahoo 10 years ago. But in self-awareness, I've had funds since, I've done well, but I haven't annihilated it. And it's because I'm not really a remarkable investor, I'm a good investor, but now I'm becoming a better investor because I've asked myself, why did I invest in those companies? I invested in them because I wasn't thinking of myself as an investor. I was thinking of myself as this is a good company, the CEO's good, I'm gonna make money.

11:59I simplified it. I think for a lot of people in this room, as you think about doubling, tripling, quadrupling what you want, I think we struggle in lying to ourselves. At some point I'll get to my half, which is kind candor. If you ask me why have I left enormous amounts of money on the table in my 25 years in all this success, it is completely and utterly attributable to my inability to be candorous to my team because I don't really love negative conflict. I like to find different ways to get to the goal without telling people it directly to their face. It's something I've struggled with for 20 plus years.

12:34Only in the last three or four years when I've been able to assess personal and professional hardships that I've been able to really go to a self-awareness, accountable, honest place with myself and it's completely transformed our business. In the last four years, my agency has doubled in size of people and tons of growth single based on me finally addressing my candor issue and not surprising people. The only thing that was fucking up my culture, and my culture is off the charts, was that I am so proud and I challenge all of you to understand how important as a leader it is to singly be focused on eliminating fear.

13:12Period. If you want to melt this all down to the the opportunity for growth, how good are you, Steve, first of all, great shirt, Steve. Steve, how good are you at eliminating fear is a direct correlation to what's gonna happen to your business with your people. The problem is, there's a lot of parents here. How many people are parents in here? Raise your hands. So a lot of you know this. The problem is when you focus on eliminating fear and you go too far, you create entitlement. and so my vulnerability was I'm so obsessed with eliminating fear that I created a culture of entitlement and so people thought they were better than they were because I wasn't able to tell them and so finding the purple instead of the red and blue is a humongous passion of mine and so I highly recommend for anybody in this room who genuinely is hungry for the growth to start thinking about self-awareness even some of the stuff I talked about earlier this whole one team thing you're on in a world where you're all kind of independently playing like you have to be self aware of like who you are as a partner to this ecosystem more importantly and I mean more importantly even though I'm sure that's incredibly important more importantly you have to be self aware of the leader you are for your team your retention and happiness on the people that work for you has the craziest direct correlation to your growth capacity and so I think in the business world all these foofy foofy feelings especially and I'm a salesman especially when we think about sales and hunting I think we've grossly underestimated that the soft skills are actually the hard skills and I know what a lot of people think when I talk about this stuff I am not talking about wild entitlement for Gen Z who wants to work at home five days a week and not work and wants you to take care of everything but I do want to remind all the people that raised their hands we're the parents of those kids.

15:11My favorite thing that's happening in culture is having dinners and meetings with people where they're shitting on their 23 year old kid and then when they're done I look at them and I'm like you created them. You don't want your kids to be entitled don't give them eighth place trophies when they suck in soccer.

15:32I mean for people over 40 raise your hand this shit where you go to school and argue with a teacher for a better grade that's some crazy ass shit like we've broken way too many rules of merit that's why you want to talk about why everyone's scared and sad it's because we've scared them we've shown all our children that the reason like here's a good one if you have a child that's over 22 years old in your life right now and you give them money in any capacity you pay for their apartment they're Uber, they're Equinox, you just give them money. I will show you a direct correlation to them being unhappy.

16:11But yet it feels counter. And this is the same thing with management. Just like parenting. I don't think what's up here is so easy. Balancing being empathetic to your team and kind while you're tenaciously trying to hit numbers is a fucking tightrope. But I promise you there's a direct correlation to it. And I don't know you well enough. I don't know who is not tenacious enough. Even in this room of winners, I know some of you have hit your cap. You're good. You're not hungry anymore. You hit a thing and you're like, now you're in neutral. You're like, this is a good number. This is where I'm at.

16:48And for many times, for good reasons, you feel like you didn't have the right work-life balance. You do have 15 and 16 year old kids and you're like, wait a minute, they're about to go to college in two minutes. Maybe you're tired. There's a million reasons. but I think that's why number two means so much to me. Lying to yourself is the quickest way to lose and I'm stunned how good we are at it and when I think about talks like this, like in this exact nanosecond, I'm like, man, if one person is listening right now in this room and decides to go to their hotel room tonight, look them in the face and stop lying about something they're not good at in this or even their personal life, that's how you actually, that's what therapy does.

17:29That's what real stuff does. And I'm telling you, I challenge you to understand, especially in the framework of this business, especially, by the way, complete side note, putting up the rankings of everybody's numbers in front of you, that's some gangster shit.

17:52The concept of let's be a family, but look, John's better than Sally, kill each other. This is what I mean by purple. This is why this was so exciting for me. I'm like, shit, this company's kind of like me. This is weird. I created this Pokemon meets Sesame Street intellectual property that I'm building, another one of my avenues to get to my goals. It's going really well. And one of the star characters in that world is kind warrior. It's a really brain twist, right? Like, how can you be like a gangster but be deep in business and be deeply kind? And I know what's happening in the world right now.

18:29Now we're really in this generational warfare of like boomers and Gen X versus Gen Z and like it's all very blurry. But it's amazing to me when I look at this how easy this is to win. It's there if you're willing to go there. It's there if you care. Like it's just there. Meaning, for example, I have 2 ,000 employees. I have 2 ,000 employees. I spend, I don't know, two, three hours a day on average with one-on-one meetings for 15 minutes at a time with employees at any and every level. This company, when I looked at its growth curve, did anybody else notice how much revenue it was doing after 10 years and 15 years and then what happens?

19:12The commitment, the DNA of this company, the founder, the way this was built, the biggest opportunity is for you to actually double down on that DNA in a contemporary way. Using the technology of the day. Just literally texting somebody while you're here back on the team that's done a good job and be like, you're doing a good job. I don't think people understand these micro deposits, how much impact they have. It's a big deal. And I know a lot of the stuff I talk about sounds like grandma talk, but it is 100 % the game we're playing because I want to remind people, people are starting to get more and more options to not work for you.

19:49Everyone's like, Gen Z is the, Gen Z has options. And when everyone's like, Gen Z is so soft, I'm like, all right, take yourself back to being 23. Would you rather have a shit job, pay you$20 an hour and make$38 ,000 a year, or would you rather make$80 ,000 a year being an influencer talking about the things you want? There are more and more options every day. Your retention and the way you're building your teams is a massive variable. And more importantly, as I did my homework, the thing I'm most fascinated by is how this crew interacts with each other is such a big variable, but the framework that is set up, you have to be purple because if you're looking one way or the other, it's not gonna work.

20:33So it's a huge theme and then I'm gonna bounce to number eight. I'm really interested about this. People ask me a lot of like, why did I invest in all these companies before everyone else did and it's completely based on number eight which is curiosity. For example, as I started digging in and getting more educated, this concept of the one brand under LinkedIn and they're gonna make content and then what are you gonna do about it? I'm pretty sure that the far majority of the people in this room are not gonna commit the level of hours and time into reposting the content that this logo posts on LinkedIn and add their two cents and DJing capabilities because you're not gonna see the direct quick ROI on it.

21:15Right? Love it. Beautiful. Meanwhile, because I've been following social since 2005, LinkedIn today, from an organic reach and from an ads ROI standpoint, is the most fertile ground that I've seen since Facebook 2012, especially from a B2B standpoint. You cannot comprehend what one thoughtful two-minute video can do for business development. Instead of you hunting, it starts to come to you if you're committed to content. The reality is, is playing a marathon in a sprinter's world is always challenging. But to me, I'm very curious about what percentage of this group. And when I leave, there was something I wanted to tell the guys backstage.

22:08I'm like, whomever in this room actually goes on the attack this year needs to be the focal point of next year's conference. Because how much content y 'all make on LinkedIn in 2024 and they're putting you on third base. This is more like a franchisee, franchisor framework than being a pure entrepreneur or being a pure corporation. The fact that they're gonna put you on third base and you just get to be a DJ instead of being an original songwriter is like huge. But it's not easy. Like a lot of you are insecure of how you look on camera and you don't wanna deal with negative feedback, say the wrong thing, blah, blah, blah, blah.

22:49but if I can leave you with anything besides self-awareness, I couldn't push you harder. And this is a big thing on curiosity. The biggest thing I'm fascinated by is why people say no before they say maybe. I think about this all the time. It's happening right now with AI. The amount of people in this room that have real opinions about AI because they've read one or two headlines or one of their friends said something and have done no homework on it actually is fascinating to me. It's what we do with technology. There's a lot of people in this. Actually, let's see how honest this room is because I see some gray hairs like I have in the crowd.

23:31Friends that are a little bit older in here. How many people remember when they said that they would never get a cell phone because their pager and beeper was good enough? Raise your hands. Raise them high. Tell the truth. and I'm telling you several are holding it down. How many people here said they would never go on Facebook back in 2006, seven and eight and now have Facebook? Raise your hands.

23:58A lot more than that. Bunch of fucking liars. I didn't know that about you, Stockton, but I'll take it. The bottom line is literally electricity was demonized in our society as demons in your house and people held off and kept doing candles. Technology is always demonized. Every single person here, when they grasp what AI is and what it means for sales, in five years will be using it every day just like a search engine, just like an iPhone. This is a big one, you won't lie about this one. How many people said they were never getting an iPhone because their Blackberry had buttons that they needed to touch them?

24:36That's what I think about, what I'm doing right now is trying to give you examples of knowing 98 % of this room is gonna underpost on LinkedIn next year and knowing it has a direct correlation of getting new business. We're the fastest growing agency, independent agency in the world in advertising. Our entire business model is my content on LinkedIn. We have the lowest new business overhead. We spend nothing on sponsorships, no bullshit fucking conference events, no booths, nothing. LinkedIn. Free. The world is constantly changing. I couldn't encourage you enough to understand what this content means and what I love about this room is you know your craft.

25:21A lot of people struggle with content because they don't know what they're talking about. And opinions are fine. Hot takes are fine. But actually going into deep work like if you, and by the way not everybody has to do audio or video. Written word is phenomenal. If you're awkward or embarrassed or you don't want to make that jump I get it. But you can do written word. you do three powerful, in-detailed sentences, paragraphs on top of content, you will be stunned. I just encourage you greatly because the only thing that is universal in our society is that whoever has the attention has the leverage.

26:01You know what's going on in the world? It's called the media infrastructure in our society has shifted. Have you ever wondered why when there's a coup in a country, a coup d 'etat, that while they go to the palace to get the guy or the gal, they also go to the newspaper, radio station, and TV station. Whoever controls the message has the leverage. For the first time in history, we as human individuals have the ability to have scale. I get more consumption on my LinkedIn than CNBC gets viewers. Real. Real. That's absurd. That makes no sense. Not the way we all grew up. This is a massive opportunity, and so I highly encourage, you don't need to do it but don't just be no before you said maybe.

26:45Spend five, you know, if you want to grow your business, I think it's worth five hours of actually really tasting it because we are unbelievable headline readers in America. We are, we got all, you have unlimited opinions about stuff that you've never even spent an hour researching. Got it? Cool. All right. I think, I think, When I look at this list and I look at this room and I really, really very honestly want to go into Q &A about it, I'm going to touch on a couple of other things here quickly, but I do want to talk about, and I noticed over there and I appreciate it when I talked about like texting someone and just saying like you're doing a good job.

27:26I do want to talk a little bit about kindness. It's such a fluffy word in such a business environment, but I'm going to actually tell you a story and then hopefully use it to tie it back. So I'm running Wine Library for my dad in the mid 2000s at this point and it's going extremely well and we're milking Google AdWords, we're milking direct mail, we're milking email marketing and it's like, you know, I could sense that we were getting stale and I was trying to think about how to really win our lifetime value and I'm very aware that your business is incredibly good at lifetime value. Once you get them in, it's hard to unwind which is why it's a good business.