How the Next Million-Dollar Brands Are Built (And What It Takes to Lead Them) 🧠 EP144

0:05Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of the Money Monday's podcast where we cover three core topics. How to make money, how to invest money, how to give away to charity. You might notice I'm not inside of the RV motorhome where I interviewed this guest previously. It's very, very rare that I bring on a guest for a second time, but this guest is probably going to come on every single year because she's so amazing what she does. She's averaged over 1 billion views in a month, month after month after month after month. It is staggering to watch and watching her career for years, and we're going to dive right into it.

0:35But as you guys know, these podcasts is normally 40 minutes or less because the average workout is 45 minutes. The average commute to work is 45 minutes. However, this episode is only going to be around 20 minutes because we're at the Zeta Global Live conference. We're not inside the motorhome. Downstairs, there's over 2 ,000 chief marketing officers and CEOs of different brands that are learning here today for this big one-day conference called Zeta Global Live. I will be interviewing Adley on the panel very shortly, so we're going to get out of here, but this episode is going to be 20 minutes, so we're going to dive right in.

1:04Adley, give us the quick two-minute bio so we can get straight to the money. All right. Hey, guys. Good to be back with you. My name is Adley, and I'm a viral video engineer. And no one just comes out of the womb becoming a viral video engineer. So naturally, I started with pranks. While I was on tour with Blake Shelton, he was my coach on The Voice, but I got really frustrated waiting for permission from a suit behind a desk to say, you're good enough to entertain people now. So started making videos and made videos for a long time that nobody watched. Not even my mom. That's how bad they were.

1:34And so I kept making content just because I loved the story of it. I loved being able to entertain direct-to-consumer, and we got the data back so much faster versus music or songwriting. If you guys are familiar with the arts, you're building catalogs and waiting for somebody to say, this is good, now is your time. But with video, you don't have to do that. Whether you're marketing, advertising, you can get the feedback so much quicker. So I started doing that in 2020. We were averaging about 20 million views a week. and in March of 2020, we went to 200 million views a week on just my husband and I's prank videos.

2:08So that was changing our lives. But as a storyteller, I was like, man, what else do people watch? They're watching cop chases. They're watching dramas of Karens and these soap operas. Why don't we recreate that for social? So we started doing that, but nobody was used to watching scripted on social. So we got away with it for a very long time before everybody started calling fake on everything. So we had actors, we had 15 people showing up to the house every day for three and a half years, making 18, 20 minute long videos a day. And a single video could do six figures. So we were cranking this out and changing our lives and everybody that we could touch our lives as well throughout the process.

2:50And here we are. Now we get to consult and use our powers for good and work with some of the biggest brands in the world and help them to have more impact with their mission, message, product, or service. Okay. There's so much to unpack there. Viralish is the company, right? It's the actual agency that you actually help do this for brands and other creators. Walk us through why start Viralish when you're just doing it for yourself and for those 18 people, for example. Why start an agency to do it for Land Rover and brands like that? That's a great question. So I did not want to start an agency.

3:19Does anybody ever, like, where you're just saying client delivery? But I think it is natural human behavior once you crack a code for yourself and you've change your own life, it is very natural to say, I have something that can be an unlock for anybody. And you can compress years into months of an unlock for somebody. And that is the best feeling in the world. It really is better, as you know, to give than to receive. That is the ultimate gift. And so when we started doing it for others, I realized I'm training one-on-one, one-on-three, and that's very exhausting and that's not scalable. So we curriculumized the knowledge so we could train viralish creators from anywhere in the world and give this skillset.

3:55But it attracted 95 % business owners. And I was like, oh, I had not thought about attributing what we do of how to get anybody to watch anything and how to compel people with storytelling online and how to package yourself up to tell your story. So we pivoted a little bit. We started doing it for businesses. But then because I was an entertainer too, I'm also getting brand deals from Land Rover. And so it all started from me getting brand deals as an entertainer, but also kind of starting this education company that you don't realize you're building while it's happening but then you blink and six months a year later you're like oh my gosh that's let's formalize this as viralish where we can just take everything that's happening to us everything that we're learning and pass it through right and so that became our education company to where as i learn things as i develop things we can just pass it on to people so that they can implement it without having to hire us to do it for them.

4:49Got it. So on the make money side of this podcast, you mentioned something about some of your videos could go make hundreds of thousands. Let's say someone listening wants to make a few thousand dollars. Obviously there's anomalies, you know, that you might teach people how to go make hundreds of thousands. Let's talk about a few thousand dollars. How could someone, whether they're 15 years old, 92 years old, everyone in between, how can they make videos that make a couple of thousand dollars? Where attention goes, money flows. So step one and what we over-index on teaching people how to do is getting attention.

5:19So ultimately, you have to do that in a way that's going to be sustainable and authentic to you. Otherwise, you're going to give up, right? So for some people, that's making videos that entertain the masses or educate the masses, and you're getting paid from platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok. Or some people get the attention and they have their own product or business or service. So you've got to pick how you want to monetize. Is it from platforms paying you? If so, you need a crap ton of views. or is it getting that attention to parlay it into your own business and your own product?

5:48On the investing side of this podcast, normally we talk about investments into real estate, stock market, cash flowing businesses, cryptocurrency. I want to ask about investing into yourself. Why is it important for an influencer, creator, or a person that wants to become one? Why is it important to invest into their personal brands? Because when you get it, you have to invest into your personal brand and your personal brain is not going to be of service to anybody if you are not pouring new knowledge, new inputs into yourself that are helping you become the higher version of yourself. If I was Adley five years ago, I would not be equipped to handle the success that we're having today.

6:24So developing yourself not only from an outward optics perspective, but also the ethics that are inside of you to be able to handle the pressure. You have to learn how to hire, how to make good decisions. You have to constantly be ingesting new information and controlling your inputs, who's around you, what you're listening to, because there is so much noise that it is our job to find the signal to take care of ourselves and our personal brand. What I'm trying to say is you first have to become a different version of yourself so that your personal brand is even sustainable. Interesting. But if we want to talk about why you need a personal brand.

6:58Okay. Here's my, here's my forecast is in five years from now, I want you to picture social like an automated advertising system that here's the shelf of the world and all of its products, services, and people. You are on that shelf whether you want to be or not. You have a reputation whether you want one or not. And most people are not showing up online in a way that's sustainable for them. It's the necessary evil. It's a way that you have to do it. But if we can help you present yourself well in this black mirror type of future, that's where I think it's going because you're on the shelf whether you want to be or not.

7:39So how can we help you show up in a way that represents who you are on the inside and the gifts that God's given you and how you're putting your product out into the world in the best way possible with the least amount of manual creativity. There's Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Threads, YouTube. 1 billion users, 2 billion users, 1 billion users, 2 billion users. Instagram just announced three weeks ago, 3 billion active users. When you think about it, there's 8 billion humans. 2 billion, unfortunately, don't even have electronics. So 6 billion humans that have a phone. Half of the free world is on Instagram.

8:13That's insane. How do you decide what platforms to create on? Do you create on all six? Do you create on one specific one? How do people decide they're out there? What do I do? Not only is half of the free world on Instagram alone, Instagram just put out a stat that their output is 10 ,000 times more content going out a day than it was two years ago. What? 10 ,000 times more. So there's so much more to consume, which is crazy. So no wonder you're having a hard time standing out. No wonder your views are low, which is what we try to help people combat is a way to cut through that noise where you actually become signal, right?

8:49But it's very interesting because people tend to want to pick one platform and just be a YouTube shorts creator. You can, but I wouldn't advise it. I think that's step two. In the beginning, you're making the content already and you don't know where you're gonna hit. You might have an educated guess, but I would put it everywhere because you may not have thought it was gonna hit on LinkedIn, but it did. Now, based on the data, you put most of your focus on LinkedIn. For us, we are Facebook first creators. So we're putting it everywhere, but when Facebook was the one that crushed it and started building the biggest audience, Facebook and Snapchat, we optimized then from the data.

9:27We said, okay, we're going to optimize for Facebook first, still post everywhere, but you can get where you want to go and elevate your personal brand by just being a LinkedIn creator, by just being a TikToker and all your other platforms can be crappy, but you're not going to know that if you never started posting on TikTok in the first place. All right, so the charity side of this, why do you think it's important for influencers or brands to have some type of charity component to their world, to their ecosystem? Because your gifts are not for you. They're not for you to feel cool about yourself and just feed your ego, right?

9:58Our gifts are given to us and our job is to refine them, to literally pay them forward and leave something in the world that makes it a better place. That's why we have unique gifts. And you're such a good example of that and somebody that I aspire to be more like because you are the true epitome of a river and not a reservoir. And that goes with money, that goes with fame, that goes with everything that comes to you. if you operate from scarcity and you just hold on to it, like I'm never going to have this again, this will be all you ever have. But if you understand that it is not yours to begin with and you let it flow through you like a river and you don't become that reservoir, more will be given to you.

10:34And so whatever, whether it's charity, whether it's meeting a need and just being able to see that where, where, whenever it presents itself to you, I think it's not only just It's our duty to try to be a good person, but it's also how we're uniquely wired. All right. Where can people find you? Where can they find Viralish? Where can they find your whole ecosystem and world? Adley. My name is Adley. It's A-D-L-E-Y, and it's pretty much Adley on every single platform, except for YouTube. If you look up Adley, I will never win on YouTube. There's a 10-year-old who's been at it since the day that she was born.

11:06Let's make her an offer she can't refuse. Oh, man. So Adley Kinsman on YouTube or Viralish. What about Blake? He's crushing it now, too. What's going on there? Yes, so we got my husband into this world. Hold on. Tell me about Blake. What's going on? So my husband, he's an engineer by trade, so he was developing hospitals. The least creative person that you can imagine, but he was proof to me and many others that this is a muscle you can build. So because he's an engineer, he would look at our formula for creating content that stands out, and when we're doing billions of views, we have over 62 billion data points.

11:40Way more than that. That's just views. Think of all the data points inside those views. but he would look at it like an engineer like a beautiful mind like exactly right and so he's like oh i see what's happening here i can make videos go viral very easily and i bet i don't even have to say a word i bet i can pick a tiny niche and still reverse engineer this formula and be successful and i was like well this is fascinating so go do it do it yeah let's try it so we set out uh our first benchmark test for him was how quickly can you go from zero to a million followers on TikTok. Four months, 29 videos just using our formula.

12:15So he approaches it totally different than I do. And now we've blended a little bit, but he approaches it like a science because he doesn't like being on camera, but it is case a point to me that anybody can do this when you just follow a proven path. And so Blake and I have come together and that is the mission of Viralicious to make this accessible for everybody. And it should be learning how to master organic social, it is free. We are the greatest wave of free advertising the world has ever seen. And so everybody needs to master it because again, you're on the shelf whether you want to be or not.

12:48So how can we help people present themselves in the best light possible and make it accessible to everybody without just using this formula to make rich people famous? So as you guys know, this podcast is designed to have blunt discussion about money. We grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. I think that's ridiculous. We got to be able to talk about loans taxes finances should i rent should i lease what happens if my friend borrows 600 bucks what do i do how do i get it back should i sign a contract these are parts of our real life salary is part of your real life taxes and ubers and the things you spend money are part of your daily life so have discussions with your friends family and followers make sure to check out ali viralish.com and we'll see you guys next monday here at themoneymondays.com

13:33Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of the Money Mondays podcast, where normally I'm inside of an RV motorhome driving around the country. But I'm here at the Zeta Global Live Conference because there's over 2 ,000 chief marketing officers and CEOs downstairs in this building during this live event. And so I caught one of them. This gentleman has had 54 locations and growing of a brand called Gregory's Coffee. As you guys know, we cover three core topics, how to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. What we like to do is keep these episodes to under 40 minutes, but because of the conference, this episode will actually only be around 22 to 25 minutes for your listening pleasure because we're at the show, we're at the conference, so we're going to go back to back to back.

14:11And so without further ado, Gregory, give us the quick two-minute bio so we get straight to the money. Sure. Nice to meet you. Nice to be here with you. Greg Zanfotis, founder and CEO of Gregory's Coffee, started in 2006, single store in Manhattan, New York City, focused on delivering amazing coffee in a volume setting. So it was novel at the time. And we were able to take that, expand across the country now and deliver high quality coffee in a volume experience. And no sacrifices. Folks want great coffee, great experience. They want it fast, great products. And yeah, why have to sacrifice things if they don't have to.

14:50So that's what we focus on every day. It's worked for us. So there's thousands and thousands and thousands of coffee retailers that open up one location, maybe two if they're lucky. What made you stand out? What do you think was it about the brand that helped you scale to 54 locations and growing? Well, I think it started and stopped with me. I poured myself into this and I was very passionate about everything we sold, everything we did. And it just felt authentic. There was nothing I was trying to do, sell or create that I wasn't interested or passionate it in myself. So if I felt like I wouldn't want to consume it or I wouldn't want to be a part of it, I wouldn't do it.

15:24So with that authenticity and my ability to sort of really push and, um, and lean into what I was interested in and loved, um, the brand felt authentic. The, the, the team was able to rally around me and what I was trying to do. Um, and our customers connected with it. So when you create that sort of community, uh, not only amongst our team, but our customers. We call them Gregulars, right? So our Gregular community feels special and feels like they're getting something unique that they can't just bounce around and get elsewhere, right? So once I was able to cultivate that and create that culture, it became infectious.

16:03And that was sort of how we came to where we are today. So if you think back to location number one, and you walk into location number 54, how different are those locations? Was there food items originally were the snacks was the size different was it 600 square feet versus 300 versus 800 like talk us through the difference between location number one location 54 so some things have stayed the same right the ethos that we're trying to really deliver amazing experiences to our guests and no sacrifices um how we're delivering that has probably completely changed so the aesthetics it looks completely different right we've modernized the look uh what was once warm and inviting back in 2006 now would feel very dated.

16:42So we had update the aesthetics of the location, the menu, which was originally just core coffee products, um, and very light pastries that we were purchasing from somebody else. Um, now we make, we make all our bakery items from scratch, baked fresh in the store every day. Um, so that menu has expanded and become much more interesting. Um, while we're, while we're still anchored by our coffee program. And obviously I love that. My blood type might as well be espresso at this point in time. I drink so much of this stuff. We do offer amazing ancillary products like matcha. Matcha is huge right now.

17:15We buy an amazing ceremonial grade matcha from Uji, Japan. So we do a great matcha. We build on that program as well, do some interesting mixes of matcha and other ingredients. We launched a line of energy drinks using like really clean ingredients. So zero sugar, 180 milligrams of caffeine, things that you don't really find elsewhere. Cause again, I didn't want to just do energy like others were other folks were doing it i wanted to do it in a way that was authentic and what i would actually consume so yes the menu has has changed um the experience has adjusted where now there's apps there's mobile payment order ahead delivery those things certainly didn't exist 20 years ago in our space um but overall the sentiment of trying to make amazing experiences and you know our tagline was see coffee differently i guess that hasn't changed in 20 years.

18:01So is it franchises, is it corporate owned? And how do you decide between, you know, when wanting to scale which one and which path you decide to go down? So I was very protective of the brand for a long time. So all those stores right now are corporate owned. All 54? All 54 corporate owned. So yeah, the hair has gotten a bit gray over the years. I've been able to hold on to it, but it's still gray. But that being said, I was very protective of the brand because I felt like we needed to deliver an elevated premium experience. I always struggled with the notion that maybe others wouldn't be able to deliver that same level of quality and care in order to deliver that sort of experience to our guests.

18:37That being said, as we continue to grow, you can just see how hard it is to continue doing that on the corporate side. And this last year, we've penetrated about 14 new markets around the country. And the best and most productive way to expand in those markets will be franchising. So the company is moving to pivot to start franchising probably in 2026. So what's the difference between like a$2 coffee, a$3 coffee, a$5 coffee, a$6 coffee, a$7 coffee? Um, there's, that's a loaded question, right? So obviously the cost of coffee has skyrocketed lately. So it's harder and harder to get to a$2 coffee, but, um, the quality of ingredients you use, the care involved with the preparation, the training, um, the, um, the experience you're creating, the team, there's robots that are serving you coffee now, right?

19:28You could press a button and get a$2 coffee. I can't speak to the quality of what it might be like. Obviously it's getting better over the time, but still, if you're having a highly trained barista using amazing beans and high quality equipment, really taking care to make sure they're delivering a high quality product every time, that's where the price starts to go up because you're validating it because you're delivering like a luxury experience, right? It's affordable luxury is how we like to think of it. You go to a bar, no name pub, you order a glass of red wine at the bar, you have no problem paying$15 for a glass of wine that, you know, you don't know about the vintage or anything special, but just because that's what you expect to pay.

20:05Coffee started at a much lower point, but, you know, we're delivering an amazing specialty coffee beverage, a specialty beverage made on demand to your spec in a busy environment. So the ability to start charging a bit more, what I believe is commensurate with what the value we're delivering has been interesting to see over the years and hopefully we'll continue to over-deliver on value even no matter what we're charging. So someone's listening to this podcast and they're like, man, I want to open a Gregory's Coffee. What do I need to think about? How much ballpark money do I need? How do I pick a location?

20:38Like, how do I start a business like a coffee shop? So whether it's a Gregory's or other coffee shop, It all starts with, again, having a point of view and understanding like what you want to do and what you're interested in, just kind of like me. If you're just here saying like this looks like it's a it's a good business and I think I could sell a lot. I have to sell 500 cups of coffee and I'm going to break even. It's going to be hard because this is a business about passion, about community and creating third spaces for people. Oftentimes, obviously, there's drive through and convenience elements that I think are super important.

21:08But at the end of the day, if you don't have that anchor, the reason why people should care, because there is so much competition out there. that's going to be challenging. Um, but it starts with having that care, that passion, that, that point of view of how you want to differentiate and how you want to pour yourself into that brand. Um, and I can't deny real estate obviously is probably the second most, if not the most co important item selecting the right locations. Um, you know, if a broker tells you, well, it's close to a great area, it's right around the block and it's, you know,$30 less per square foot.

21:38You know, you don't want that. You need to be, cause this is a volume business at the end of day so the more eyes that you have on your space the better traffic yeah you don't you can't substitute that and you can't always expect people to to find you you you want to find the optimum location make sure you know you're you're you're being economical with the the rent that you're paying based on that and then you know doing all all the sorts of resources that you have at your disposal these days there's um so many tools from a data algorithmic set that you can pay people to tell you the quality of a space less than just the traditional demographics, which are helpful.

22:14But if you really want to learn more and more about the types of customers that are coming in, not just the raw number, but the, where they're coming from, where they're going to, this is all information you could find these days, which helps inform your decisions. So don't be afraid to use the data and information at your disposal when you're making those choices, because you got to measure not once or twice, measure three or four times before cutting, because once you start making that investment for a coffee shop like ours, might be a$500 ,000 investment between equipment and just the general build-out, depending on what kind of deal you might cut with a landlord.

22:50But if you want to spend 500 grand and you want to pay yourself back in 18 to 24 months, you don't want to make a mistake on the real estate. So talking about investing side of things, why is it in a company for a corporation important to invest into their team? Like why go hire that 180 grand executive or that quarter million dollar executive or 120 grand executive, obviously, depending on the area and territory type of company. Why is it important to go get that six figure person to help a company? Sometimes it might be nerve wracking to go spend that kind of money. So it's always the hardest, right, to measure ROI on human capital or human talent because it's not always so linear to say like, hey, I hired this person and six months later our profitability jumped.

23:30But it has to be, you know, a more thoughtful exercise as to what how do you calculate ROI? What what are you saving in other departments? What are you what are you able to do that you couldn't do before? Because how do you stay competitive? How do you stay cutting edge? There's nothing more important than your people. And I've always said I would only expand or continue to grow the company dependent on the amount of the quality of people I had around me. The more people and the stronger talent on my team and my bench gave me more confidence to grow. And if you don't have that, it can be very daunting, right?