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#AskGaryVee
Gary Vaynerchuk
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eBook - ePub
#AskGaryVee
Gary Vaynerchuk
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About This Book
The New York Times bestselling author draws from his popular show #AskGaryVee to offer surprising, often outrageous, and imminently useful and honest answers to everything you've ever wanted to knowâand moreâabout navigating the new world.
Gary Vaynerchukâthe inspiring and unconventional entrepreneur who introduced us to the concept of crush itâknows how to get things done, have fun, and be massively successful. A marketing and business genius, Gary had the foresight to go beyond traditional methods and use social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to reach an untapped audience that continues to grow.
#AskGaryVee showcases the most useful and interesting questions Gary has addressed on his popular show. Distilling and expanding on the podcast's most urgent and evergreen themes, Gary presents practical, timely, and timeless advice on marketing, social media, entrepreneurship, and everything else you've been afraid to ask but are dying to know. Gary gives you the insights and information you need on everything from effectively using Twitter to launching a small business, hiring superstars to creating a personal brand, launching products effectively to staying healthyâand even buying wine.
Whether you're planning to start your own company, working in digital media, or have landed your first job in a traditional company, #AskGaryVee is your essential guide to making things happen in a big way.
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CHAPTER 1
CLOUDS AND DIRT
IN THIS CHAPTER I TALK ABOUT PRIORITIZING, THE OXYGEN OF YOUR BUSINESS, AND WHY THE MIDDLE SUCKS.
I spend all my time in the clouds and the dirt.
The clouds are the high-end philosophy and beliefs that are at the heart of everything I am personally and everything I do professionally.
Personally, itâs really simple: family first. Nothing else really matters.
Professionally, itâs not much different. Thatâs what I often tell my staff at VaynerMediaâ99 percent of what we deal with every day in business doesnât matter. This usually gets me a mix of confused, curious, and even disdainful looks from my new top execs or employees hearing it for the first time because of course they think that to do their job well, everything has to matter. But itâs just not true. If you religiously follow just the few core business philosophies that mean the most to you, and spend all your time there, everything else will naturally fall into place. My clouds are extremely simple, and might sound familiar to anyone who has been following me for a while:
Bring value to the customer.
Provide 51 percent of the value in a relationship, whether itâs with an employee, a client, or a stranger.
Always play the long game of lifetime value.
Smart work will never replace hard work; it only supplements it.
People are your most important commodity.
Patience matters.
Never be romantic about how you make your money.
Try to put yourself out of business daily.
These are my commandments.
So you see, the clouds donât just represent the big picture; they represent the huge picture, the everything. They are not goals. Goals can be achieved and set aside or moved. Iâm Going to Buy the Jets is a goal. It drives me, too, but itâs not at the core of how I run my businesses.
The dirt is about being a practitioner and executing toward those clouds. Itâs the hard work. On a personal level, my dirt is making sure I communicate well with my loved ones, that I show up and stay present, that I apologize when I mess up and that I make sure it doesnât happen too often. You know, the stuff of being a good spouse, parent, son, sibling, and friend. Professionally, itâs knowing my craft. Itâs knowing there is a fifteen-person limit to an Instagram chat and that infographics overindex on Pinterest. Itâs understanding Facebook ads and the ROI of Vine. Itâs noticing changes and trends and figuring out how to take advantage of them before anybody else.
The vast majority of people tend to play to the middle, which is why they usually only succeed up to a certain level and then plateau. Alternatively, they get stuck in one or the other, getting so bogged down by minutiae or politics they lose sight of the clouds, or so into the clouds they lose the appetite or neglect the skills they need to execute successfully. Ideas are worthless without the execution; execution is pointless without the ideas. You have to learn to prioritize properly and quickly identify whatâs going to move you further ahead and whatâs going to make you stall.
I saw how these tendencies played out early in my career in the wine industry. I encountered a lot of amazing wine people with brilliant palates whose businesses stunk because they werenât good at that part. Conversely, Iâd meet with some of the best wine retailers in the country and be shocked to find that their actual knowledge about wine was incredibly limited. A great wine merchant has to be a businessperson first and a wine person second, for sure, but that second part really did matter. I always thought the reason the success of my family wine business, Wine Library, accelerated so quickly once I got involved was that I took both seriously. I knew my business, but I also knew my craft, and that practitionershipâloving wine, tasting as many as I could, and caring about the regions and producersâcreated tremendous value for my customers and ridiculous ROI for me.
I see a similar phenomenon in todayâs marketing world. At this point in my career I have sat down hundreds of times to meet with people claiming to be social media experts, only to discover they have gaping holes in their knowledge about the platforms and little idea of how they have changed over time. This is why I feel justified telling potential clients that if they work with me, theyâll be working with the best social media practitioner at the best social agency in the country. Because at VaynerMedia, the clouds matter, and the dirt matters, and nothing else.
There are too many people who are average at what they do, and then confused by their average results. Everyone has their own definition of clouds and dirt, but if thereâs any advice I can offer you that will change the entire trajectory of your career, itâs to start pushing on both edges. Raise the bar on your business philosophy, dig deeper into your craft. You want to be an equally good architect as you are a mason. Youâve got to be able to simultaneously think at a high level and get your hands dirty.
To be in the middle is to be like everybody else. Itâs a start-up that pitches me by saying: âWeâre going to do something in the photo app space.â You mean like everybody has been doing for the past five years? Itâs commodity work. Itâs not influential and itâs not special. Itâs safe.
On any given day, I sit through four or more pitches. And the pitch I usually end up liking? The one where the players are actually doing the work. Theyâre in the trenches. Theyâre not just doing the big holistic thinking or the higher-level branding; theyâre just at a raw level, executing. Theyâre engaging like mad and experimenting on platforms and trying things that risk getting them ridiculed in the trades. There really arenât that many people who are hard practitioners like that. There also arenât that many people who are looking far into the future. Iâm talking 2025 and 2030. Everyone is hanging in the middle space, trying to get the most in the short term out of their new app instead of trying to build something that lasts.
Let me put it this way: If you have pages and pages of notes, but no product, youâve got nothing. If you canât tell me how youâre going to build your product, youâve got nothing. And if you are only thinking three years into the future, youâve got a huge vulnerability. Thatâs what people in the middle are doing. The middle keeps everything going the way it always has. The clouds and the dirt break things.
All the best apps, companies, and products have broken the way we live life, transformed how we communicate, and changed our day-to-day. Good products evolve us.
Youâre surrounded by the middle for 99.9 percent of your life. Most things are unremarkable. I want you to lose yourself in the clouds and the dirt and figure out what you can make that changes the game.
Vagueness sucks. Lack of drive sucks. Half-assing things sucks. And so does the middle.
You need a healthy balance. If youâre leaning too far one way or the other thatâs a problem. Iâd be uncomfortable if you were 70/30 in any direction. That should be your absolute minimum.
You do also need to map your DNA. If youâre a big-picture thinker, make sure youâre still spending 30 percent of your time honing your practitioner skills. If grinding and hustling is more your thing and where you want to spend 70 percent of your time, thatâs cool, but keep at least 30 percent of your time reserved for getting in those trenches and seeing how your ideas actually play out in the real world. And there will be an ebb and flow. Sometimes youâll have to switch from 70/30 to 30/70 because you were doing something right, and now you have to make sure all parts of the business, from the strategy to the operations, is caught up and heading in the same direction. At the time this question was asked, I was actually thinking that I would have to move into a 90/10 division of thinking versus execution because for the nine months prior I spent the majority of my time executing, and in that time I had spotted opportunities to rechart the company.
Thereâs no perfect breakdown of clouds and dirt, but they always need to be in play. You have to make a commitment to strategy and execution and think of them holistically. There are too many prima donnas out there who think that as the brains of the business they donât have to get their hands dirty.
As most of my followers know, I want to buy the Jets. Iâve wanted to buy the Jets since I was a little kid. Three decades later, Iâm still at it, but Iâm not tired. Thatâs how long-term I am. Owning the Jets will be a by-product of ignoring anything other than the clouds and dirt. I consider every decision I makeâfrom launching VaynerMedia to writing books to public speaking to doing a podcast and showâas a chess move, and I donât make it unless it gets me closer to owning the Jets one day.
But I suspect what youâre thinking is, big picture is great but if youâre ignoring all the little stuff in the short term, will you ever really reach your goal? I say yes, because when you have a big picture, a...