Everything You NEED to Know to Grow Your Business in 2025 | 4Ds | #7 of 2024 Top Podcasts

Hey everyone, we're counting down to 2025 with our top episodes of 2024. Here's episode number seven. The first question I think is how to balance personal branding versus business branding, especially from a social media perspective, and then also across multiple brands if you're trying to do more than one company like you do. Yeah, so one of the cool things about this format is a lot of times one question helps everyone. So there's so much to that. First of all,

I think that we out academia ourselves a lot of times. So we sit in this room and think about the strategy of personal brand versus the business versus multiple businesses when the consumer on the other side doesn't care about what we're doing in a boardroom. That's always been the case.

It's now been compounded by how social media now works, right? The reason I wrote the latest book is social media has really changed in the last two, three years. So best practices on how many handles do you need? What's personal, like all those best practices got completely annihilated when TikTok had the scene and made it about the individual piece of content. Literally, oh, I don't have it. Literally, can you go to my account on TikTok?

Literally, this is like the best. It's just happening right now. There's something just happened on my TikTok that I think answers this question better in like me. I'm going to show it to you for him in a second than like how I can explain it, which is as I scroll to my TikTok, this video right here got 1.9 million views, right? 400 trillion to one. First of all, it did below average on Instagram. Let's start with that.

So this got 1.9 million views on TikTok. I'm looking at this one right here. It got like 500K in a world of 700K for me on Instagram. That's one, different content, different platform, big part of the thesis. Here's the most remarkable part. This got 1.9, the next post, which crushed on Instagram, this new format I'm doing where like the water hits the phone and it does. It's a lot of fun. We're really excited about it.

5,834 views. So the social media I grew up with, that you all grew up with, was as many followers as you had was an indicator to the general range every post would get. I would call it like email marketing, right? Get a million emails, you get 60%, 30%, 40% open rate, you kind of know what you're going to get. Of course, there's outliers once in a while.

Social media today now is down to the individual piece of content. And I think it's gonna continue to get more extreme because it benefits the platforms. The more we stay on it, the more money they make, the more you see things you wanna see, the more you will stay, the more you see things you don't wanna see. A lot of you follow me, but you may not want the wine content or the crying about the Jets content. You might want the business content. You might want the silly content. I don't know, but as you all know, I do a lot of different stuff compared to most people.

I would say good news, my friend. It doesn't fucking matter. That's right. So if you decide to go one platform under your name and do half of the content about the business and half yours and another business, that individual piece of content is going to find the audience. If you want to have seven different accounts,

I'm like even thinking about new strategies for clients, like if they're a cereal brand, let's just use Cheerios, they're not a client. If we get Cheerios, should I create another account called app morning breakfast so that I can just post on it with Cheerios content just so they don't have to deal with the pilot? It's so crazy what happened and all of you should take advantage of this. You should no longer be paralyzed by any of the ridiculous things we think about for strategy, including even the name of the handle. It's like all out the window.

It's now the individual piece of content. Whether you post on your account, your account, or the company's account, the individual piece of teaporn content is gonna be the punchline. We have as a t-shirt. There you go. So that's the answer to that Christian. I don't think you need to cripple yourselves with three of you on this issue. One account, five accounts, one for each of you. What you need to do is be fucking psychotic about the individual piece of content.

So we've been we've been it's longer and shorter than you think So we've been really active at putting out content for a few years in different places We started with the the podcast and we've done that for a few years and we just recently kind of started to focus on

other areas, but it never goes as fast as you want. It's always like really like slow going, right? So my question is maybe really specific to financial companies. Is there anything you're seeing either good, bad, or otherwise that companies like ours are focused on

helping people better their financial lives. Is there anything you're seeing out there? Yeah, of course. But let's bring this down a little bit. So what would you like them to do after they've been affected by your good content to make their financial lives better?

Like a non-profit would just like it to be good. A profit, like what do you want them to do? What do we want, what do I want them to do? I want them to be happy and live their best life. Like I don't think that I have like grandders of what they should do once they've built that. I would say a lot of them want to, you know, pass it on a charity, pass it on. Makes sense. What about for, what is your business KPI? What would you like them to buy from you? Oh, mostly we sell life insurance. Just like,

sophisticated life insurance-based strategies. How much LinkedIn content do you put out a day? One post a day. What kind? Mostly video. Mostly video. A clip from the podcast.

Sometimes it's just like a short that I've done. We have had like outside FMOs, third party FMOs doing most of it for the last couple of years. And so we've mostly done what they said until more recently where I'm like, I gotta own this more. That part's good. How's it been going?

Slow. Not very well. Not very well. I would say. Because it's challenging to get views on it or because you're challenged to come up with ideas to make content for. I think more challenging to give views. I mean, like, you know, when I put out a short, I get like a, you know, sometimes a short as in like a YouTube short.

What about LinkedIn? Okay, sorry, back to LinkedIn. Please. I would say every once in a while, I'll get like a good post that has like, you know, 10,000 views. But for the most part, it's, you know, I'm getting like a few hundred impressions on it. And that's per day, one a day. Yes, or you're being kind or that's what we're doing. Five a week. Five a week. We are dedicated, at least to that at this point.

Understood. Have you thought about were you based? Salt Lake. But we're totally virtual. Understood. And the consumers that you're trying to reach can be national? Yep. That's been a huge advantage first because we started doing that 10 years ago. I think a couple things. If I was to join the business, the first thing I would do is pitch the idea of hosting a dinner.

within Salt Lake running ads on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn on a 10 to 15 mile radius of our office where the video was an invitation to fill out a form to join this dinner in a private room in one of Salt Lake's nice restaurants.

where you would send him to a google form to fill out who they are and what you're going to talk about is overall entrepreneurship in business a little bit of like salt lake local entrepreneur business in salt lake life because that's obviously such a tight in the community i know pretty well

And for this lovely dinner roll, you're going to have to bear with us. We have a five-minute halftime show commercial for what we do for a living. But the general thing is I, Christian, we would like to be more part of the community and the business community.

and the growth of the city and the energy of everything that's going on. We have a hockey team now. We would like, you know, again, I don't know, like, you know, whether it's steak dinner, whether it's alcohol, no alcohol, whatever the dynamics are. We're going to do this nice dinner. There's only 12 seats. We're just running this ad within 20 months. Like you're literally, this is literally the video. We are running this ad for like-minded, ambitious people.

Uh, footnote, we're also doing this for our social media content. So this dinner is going to be filmed. You don't need to be in it. It's from my content. So your face can be blurred. It can be back in your head. By the way, you can be in it and can get a nice little plug for your local business. I believe what you're doing in that scenario is a couple of things. One, I think it would explode your local business. Uh, I think scaling this for everyone. I think scaling the unscalable is the move right now in a world of AI.

So like a monthly dinner with 12 to 20 prospects who don't forget, filled out a form that you're gonna ask the questions you wanna know answers to. Are you happy with your insurance provider? Yes, okay, you're not invited. You know, like you could. You could do whatever the hell you want in that form. But you will create an engine for your content. My team, as John may know, like yeah, you literally, as many of you may know, if you follow me closely, yesterday I did Tea with Gary Vee.

I brought it back. It was a show I did a lot during COVID. I did it for two reasons. One, it's one of my best format shows. People like it the most for me because I'm providing real depth. It's what this is at some level. Two, I really believe in social media shopping and I wanted to do it on what not to show people that you can do it on these platforms. There's a lot I'll definitely get into it with them.

but here's the punch on why I'm telling you that story because I put myself in my best position to make good content. We made a piece of content, like I made a piece of content in reaction to the question. My team clipped it yesterday. We normally go into testing. We test under different accounts how well the content does and then do it on my main channel. I felt so good about it intuitively. We ran it last night. It was the one where I ranted about like, nobody gives a fuck about you, humility is the key.

Right. That video, that is the first video that wasn't tested that got over a million views in years. And the reason I think it did that, because the other 50 I've done that way, I thought we're going to hit. But this morning when I woke up, I was like, it's I put myself in a position to make that video.

Like I'm putting myself for an hour in my best spot. I get most excited when I talk to a human and I'm just trying to break through to them. And that gets me to a different place. I think you in that setting has the chance to make better content. So you're going to get local. And by the way, you're going to run ads on meta and LinkedIn to the tune of about $200 in media spend. Because when you're in a very confined area of a 10 mile radius, you don't need a lot of dollars.

Yeah. That's what I would do. Very cool. Thank you. I think you'll get the right kind of content. And by the way, your production day is going to be a sales pitch.

You see what's happening for the low, low cost of like, listen, I don't underestimate covering 12 people's dinner. I view that a couple of, I think you're gonna win. I think you get, I think it's gonna work. I like this non-scalable local physical to film to then scale, got it? Putting all of you have to put yourself in a position to make the best possible content.

Good stuff. Thank you. You got it. Yeah. So I think we're here because we are growing really, really fast. Awesome. And we want to make sure we have the right plan. So is it all direct to consumer? Yes. And Shopify. Yeah. I'll Shopify. And I'd say like 75% through Shopify, 25% through Instagram and Facebook. Okay. Direct buying.

Direct in within it right like you're doing it hit by hand or you got using shop or what what's happening Yes, it's like DM if you want to buy and you're like kind of hand-holding it So just through the meta ads were running like meta will give them the option to either buy through our website or buy Just in platforms

Right, so the buying in platform, it's passing on to your shop. Yeah, exactly. And they're taking a rake. Yeah. And so we basically, just for context, like we did 250,000 in sales last year. And I think we'll probably, we're on track to do two million in November. Amazing. And we're growing 30 to 50% month over month. And most of it is on just meta ad spend. Of course. And that meta ad spend, and it's been really profitable too. So that's good.

That means you have a product that's fit the market against the attention. Yes. Okay. Who's running those ads? You? Yes. Okay. And how good do you feel about your capability in that? Well, like if you had a self guess, because you probably don't have a lot of, I have a thousand social media buyers literally in this company. So I could assess like Ronnie versus Sally. I'm aware that you don't have a context point, but what's your gut tell you?

So I'm 100% self-taught. I'm just good. Yeah, I think Advantage Plus ads have made me feel a lot smarter this year than in the past. So like basically all we're doing is we're testing a bunch of creatives, but we're like 100% of our ads have been in Advantage Plus campaigns, which has been working for us. How much organic social are you doing?

Hopefully, two posts a day on Instagram. Just Instagram? On TikTok, but TikTok's just not going very well, but we're still. Well, it's not going well because you look at all of this as like conversion funnels, right? Yes. So you live in CAC and LTV life, and that's your rendering. Back to what I just showed you, you do know that you could go from two to eight million in sales in a year based on one organic TikTok post.

So that's a good thing for everyone to hear. Like you noticed, if you follow it along of how we were just talking, where they'll eventually go is eventually the math won't work. That's what happens to everybody.

That might be 6 million. That might be 11 million. I don't know. I'd have to look under the hood. But by the way, if they're destined to do 20 million before the math doesn't work out, people are going to watch them and figure it out and do the same thing. And then it's going to slow that. The copycat thing will happen very fast. What I was going to say is that's where we're getting to the point where

When I said 2 million in November, I mean the month of November, we think we'll do 2 million. And so we think next year we could hit 20 million. Okay, I see. That's staggering. So you're not going from 250,000 to 2 million around it. You think you're going from 250 to 20 million. Yes. So a couple of things real quick for the rest of the room. This is what's happening in social media when you do it right. Just like so everybody wraps their head around it.

It's that real. But keep going. Yeah. So I'm just getting kind of nervous that like, OK, we've been riding this wave all year. I feel like we were pretty early on like the advantage plus ads, Power BI, like getting really good targeting. But now I feel like we kind of have experience with a couple other small businesses where we've run them, you know, up to like maybe five, you know, three to five million in annual sales.

getting to this point where we're like, did you come from like that angle? Were you like servicing other businesses and then started? Like when you say that, why did that happen? So like I owned a business with my dad and my brother selling like really niche horse related products. Awesome. And so we've grown that business. It does, but it'll probably do about five or six million this year. But that's kind of like the biggest business we've ever been involved with. So

And this one, just the products hitting and the nature of how social is. The addressable market's bigger, just given the nature of all women are in play, but then just the way women are shopping. Just the reality of the business, okay? So basically I'm coming to like, okay, we're on track to do two million in November. I think it's really realistic. We'll do 20 million. So let's go backwards. Instead of what you're going to do in November, because I've been through that rodeo, let's talk about what you did do in August.

So, like sales-wise, I think we hit close to 600,000. And you're anticipating by just putting more dollars into the machine because you're reinvesting what you're making, that's how you see it, right? Because for everybody, like the reason, when I said this is how it works, the reason not everyone does it is if your first 100,000 doesn't work, because you weren't good at it, then you're out. If you only had 100,000.

or 50,000 or 10, like, these are small bit, like, right? If you got 10,000 and you go and spend 10,000 on social ads and you don't convert, then the game's over. On the flip side, if it does convert, you see what's happening, right? If your 10,000 makes you 40,000, you take 20,000, like, and then all of a sudden you just, like, see what he's doing, he's stacking. Got it? But this is why I want to talk about Oregon. This is why I wrote the book. This is why I'm yelling from the loudest way I can.

that organic social is important when people don't think it's important because there are one, two places. One, they're advanced and paid. And so like, why guess? He's just fucking running it, right? You can see, think about being at 600,000 in August and sitting here and having confidence and I believe him, by the way, that he's gonna do 2 million in November. That's just like, okay, I know what works, but then things change too. And so that's why creative is the whole variable. The targeting's there. The people are on social.

Um, keep going. So I guess my question is like going into next year and thinking like, okay, we could take this business to $20 million. I, it's just so open ended. I feel dumb almost asking it, but like, how would you be thinking about it? Yeah. No, I don't think, I don't think it's dumb. I think you're, you're, first of all, you need to reconcile something. You're in the sales business, not in the brand and marketing business. Right. Notice what's happening. It's all math.

So he's selling. So the biggest fear I have, brother, Lexi, is are you building a brand? Because if you're not, you're going to get copied out. Somebody's going to buy something close enough from China and start pounding against your own, the same audience, for half the price. We see it happening. Already. That's right. Because people are watching everything.

Got it? So my number one recommendation in the way I hear everything is don't worry about 20 or 30 or 18. Worry that you're in trouble unless you build a brand. Do you know how many people have social media agencies and wanna be Gary Vee? Half the people on social media. But the brand is what allows me, I gotta back it up by being good and like, I gotta show up in this room and bring, but it's all brand.

Everything is a commodity besides brand. Everything. So by far what's obvious to me is brand, brand, brand. What does that mean? You know, first off, I think the biggest asset you have is Lexi and her sister. So like to me, that's not replicatable. There's only what's your sister's name? Tikal. Tikal Lexi or Tikal Lexi? There could be other sisters doing it, but like they're them.

You know, I don't know you like that Lex, but if you and Tequila are willing to go out in front, I think that is a very important part of the next step. You know, joint podcast, original content, showing them in the field. Like you're going to, what's the name of the brand? Oh, Clementine. Oh, Clementine. You've got to make people give a fuck about that.

That, like, jingle, like, this is some madman shit. Like, what's the, like, oh, Clementine, like, there's, like, a song you should make? I'm being serious. Like, I think you should make a jingle, and that jingle should be an organic post, and maybe the first three seconds of every video, or at the end of every video, the jingle should play. You know, one eight seven seven car for kids. Like, if you're from the Jersey, New York area, like, PC Richards, The Whistle, like, everything is a commodity, except brand.

So I think the biggest thing that's obvious to me is for you to go all in on organic and all in on ownable shit. But I would give up a lot of money. If I ran the business, I would give up, instead of pouring, what you're just gonna do is pouring it back in, pouring it back in, I would take some of that money and bring it to zero. I would level out your cap. I'd pay more. I'd take 100K of it to be awesome at organic.

to be awesome at brand building. Mostly investing that in like basically a team to help us do more. That's right.

external or internal building at the best cost association against the results to get as many views organically with a complete lens on brand. The other thing you're going to fall in love with, and as great as the AI is for meta, it's the same AI that gets an organic post to a lot of views, and then that one, that one on organic, will outperform the AI generated testing.

So there's double benefit from organic social, the organic ad, the organic post that gets three million views when you bring it back and slightly tweak it to make it a conversion ad. So it's just a video of the two girls walking down the street talking about something and just hit.

you taking that video back and at the bottom put, you know, maybe they just tell a story about their pet. I'm literally making shit up right now. Their pet dog, Carol, in the video, it gets 14 million views, 4 million. Now you run it again as an ad, but at the bottom, you take the bottom of the video and you put used, at checkout, put, you know, code, Carol, to get free shipping, because you know it's going to emotionally

hit, it may end up being your best catcat. The thing that fucks up all the mathematicians in the game that I play is when I get an organic thing going viral and I convert it into performance, it outperforms all their best shit and they're like, how the fuck did this happen? Because it's the fucking creative.

Got it. Thank you. Pauline Hill. Hey Gary. Hi. So Matt Higgins was the one connected us. He's coaching me. He said that we're sitting on a very valuable asset having rights to think and grow rich and Napoleon help. The first question I have is so we have the rights to use

the name, the material, the content, everything he's ever created, Napoleon Hell. Should we be going with Think and Grow Rich or Napoleon Hell? Both. Both. And. Both. And. OK. And. So much of the world we live in now. Life is about life. Business is about distribution. And we used to have to make choices because the internet and social didn't exist.

So like, if you were going to open up stores in 1987, you had to pick one because it's fucking expensive to open up duplicate stores. But when you're talking about what I'm talking about, which is building brand in a modern social world, the answer is aunt.

because some people would, it goes to good to cohort. Some people would resonate with Napoleon. Hell, some people would resonate, think are rich. Plus, if you go to Napoleon's route, you have unlimited upside. Do you have the right to his image? Is it name, image, and like this? His is much bigger upside. Napoleon in AI form should be competing with me right now. And it has a lot of leverage against me. It's all historic.

Like I think this will play out, like if you own the, so if you're sitting on the IP, you need to probably stand him up. So something a little far-fetched that I want everybody to hear is virtual influencers. One of the biggest conversations of the next decade is going to be influencers that aren't real people, that you all own. Now they're sitting with gold, they're owning something that's real. You're gonna have to make up your third sister.

That's right, or the dog. That was our question too, because we have the voice tone of like... You have his voice on record, right? I don't know, I met like the voice of our brand. Yeah, I mean, you're gonna find with me in the audience like voice and tone become, it's subjective.

I mean, I watch people on my team that have been with me for 10 years trying to capture my voice and send me stuff, and I'm like, I would never say that. So you have to remember voice and tone, like, brand talk. The reason I've always pushed against brand talk is it's subjective.

Like, what's a brief? I'm gonna give you a brief. Oh, the brief is bad. A brief is a piece of paper with words on it and how you interpret it. Like, you know what else is words on a piece of paper? The Constitution. I don't know if you've heard, half of America sees it one way, the other half sees it another way. So, you know, voice and tone is subjective. You four ladies leave and four other people come in and they're gonna judge if it's on voice or on tone. Got it? You need to really reconcile that truth.

Okay, so as we bring Napoleon back, whether it's AI, virtual... That's what I would do. If I was in this seat, I would bring him fully back. Like, actually... He's the one... Like, actually, in a year, I just want... And by the way, it looks like he's a lot. I don't know if you guys have seen the AI. Yes, we have. We talked him on the phone. We asked him a question. We asked him a question. He talked to me yesterday. Okay, so now...

You know, thinking grow rich is a heavy read. Yes. And it's been thanked by many entrepreneurs, right? Yes. So what we want to do is we want to launch an easier read called Think and Grow Rich 10 Minutes a Day. OK. Make it more sexy, more modern, for younger crowds. OK. What did you do with this? Meaning, how would I get people to know about it? Yes.

by making unlimited social media organic creative across the seven platforms that matter to society. To me, basically, let me take a step back that might help all of you. I believe your phone is the television, and I believe that Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, to some degree, are the seven channels on the platform. Just like your great grandparents had six channels, three channels,

You know, I'm 48. We were pretty poor. So I was in the 13 channel world pre pre cable. Some of you can stick around that and remember it. Those seven platforms, those six platforms are the channels on the television. Unlike the way Hollywood worked, everybody here is allowed to make a show.

on the channels. If you were trying to be in everyone's home in 1984 or 1963 or 1949 and you could, why wouldn't you have a show on every channel? This channel choosing that so many of you are doing is that's a strategic nightmare to me.

not the tone of voice, the not making content on all these platforms, to not make content on LinkedIn, YouTube, YouTube shorts, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat Spotlight, which acts like Instagram. And I mean, for you, Snapchat Spotlight could be the golden goose, because no one's fucking there. No one's even thinking about it. You know who is there? A fuckload of 15 to 30 year olds.

So to not make content on every one of them, just choosing the cliche, Instagram, and TikTok only, Facebook's the most fertile opportunity. How much damage do you guys do on Facebook? Facebook. Yeah, I'd say over a minute, ads probably like,

75% plus is going through Facebook. Say it nice and slow for everyone in the back. 75% of our ad spend is going to purchases through Facebook. And what he knows that I know, because we're in it, is I'm selling a 20 and 30 year olds on Facebook, not Facebook.

So, you know, I would say the strategy you need to do is bring him to life, that book to life, the mini 10 minute version book to life, all of them to life on all six platforms. We've never done an ad. You don't need to do an ad. You can do an ad. I'll just say creative.

Yeah, organic and paid both work. I believe we're now in a world where you go organic first and when things do well, then you go paid. That was done in platform for ad people before. Now, what I just that nuance I showed him to add is another element that affects the thing that they really need to worry about, which is brand. You start with brand. You start with juice that none of us started with. You're sitting on brand.

How do you do this question? To answer where you're about to go, you have to be. So I just told you that you should play basketball. Just so everybody knows, I just told everybody here you should become a professional basketball player. Why did I do that? Because out of all the major sports in the world, the way the new collective bargaining agreement for the NBA is and how big the media rights are, basketball only has 12 to 15 players. But the players are going to get 50% of all that money.

So the money is so extreme, but unlike football where there's 53 players and you divide by 53, in basketball you divide by 12. So you're gonna hear from your buddies that are either you're into basketball or you're gonna hear from your buddies in basketball. I can't believe this player just got $400 million and they're not even good. And you'll be like, how is that possible? That's how.

I just told you to be a basketball player. I've given you the answer to how everything in society is working. Those six platforms dictate everything. The presidential election, the temperament of our society, everything that is popular, what is famous, what sells, it is absurd how much on social media is underrated. Now you've got to get good at it.

That part, that's where you're about to go. How? That's why I went textbook on the new book, but it's an everyday game. You all must get as good. Notice the first question I asked him. How good do you think you are? Because the delta between him being, and I was listening, if he's a seven point eight against the world, which is very high, the delta between him being a seven eight and an eight eight is four million in November, not two.

If you go look at my organic social, if John, you know this because you're on a team, I've been complaining to the team for the first seven, eight months, nine months here that we're not good anymore. That's been the energy on my team, because it's true. And we had all sorts of excuses. I'm not making as much original content. We've been a lot better. John, you've seen the last two months, we've been a lot better. We're just better. We just got better. We just got refocused.

Would you go lifestyle or personal development? Yes. Lifestyle. No. The biggest liberator of strategies and humans in boardrooms are obsessed with or. Or is comfortable. Or is school. Or is having a job. And. So it's just about throwing everything at the wall. But not that.

Yes, because I'll explain. No, no, I love what just happened. It sounds like it's throw against the wall and see what sticks. It sounds like spray and pray. It sounds like test and learn. It's sat right, but none of it is illogical. You're sitting there and you're thinking about who am I trying to reach? You're thinking, who would Napoleon resonate with? We have historic data on what he means for 18 to 35 year old dudes. You know that.

So obviously you're going to make different content for that crowd versus a 63 year old female immigrant from Hungary because you want everyone. Right? So it's just that that's what's great. The rest of the day and the book and team and before and maybe even before like cohorts, if you're already talking about that, like that's the game. But you have to get good at the craft. Like the first three seconds, the thumbnail, like all of it, the copy.

Like, until you're great at the craft of the video or the picture or the written words in social, everything will be hard. I promise you. Because everything else is getting more expensive. Because they're all losing market share to this machine. Newspaper ads are more expensive than they were five years ago.

Would you, if you had this brand, sorry, if you had this brand, would you modernize the message or keep it traditional in the polling style? So I haven't read the books, but obviously I've been very, especially because of who I am. Like I have a general sense. It sounds like a lot of the principles are tried and true. Would I make the examples contemporary? Yes. Thank you. You got it.

Hi, Gary. Hello. My first question is about our podcast. Okay. We started it 40 years ago. Yes. And we choose our target audience to be founders, operators, tech, DC backed investors. Smart. And we got a lot of them in the show, like the most important in the region in whole Latin America. Yeah. Then we found out that that's the

actually a target that we want to sell to. So now we have this package that has a lot of authority in the field and some recognition on it but it's not working so we can invite like

It's not working because those guests and that energy is not directly impacting your business. Great. Yeah, it makes sense. What I would do is back to the theme of this whole meeting is I would go into and I would cut back the kind of guests that represent that by a lot, but not completely kill it because you got equity there. So instead, how often do you do the podcast? Great. I would probably do one guest like you used to every two months.

But the other seven guests would follow the path that you figured out and you heard, you just need new guests that do address who you want. Do you see what I mean? This goes back to AND. OK, great. Does that make sense? Sure. Other question that we have is more tactical. Please. Our social media team has one graphic designer, one video editor, one community manager, and one copywriter. OK.

How much content should we expect from the team to produce? That's a very fun question, because to your point, it's complicated. Let's talk about that. So number one, there's so much here. Number one, are you doing predominantly videos or pictures? Both? So first of all, back to the rant I just had, and I saw you guys talking, how many platforms are you putting social out on?

We were on everywhere, then we just decided to focus on LinkedIn, because that sounded smart. We say, okay, let's correct LinkedIn. Is your audience B2B? Yeah. Minimally, you need to be on YouTube shorts. LinkedIn. Twitter is about to become much more like everybody else. I believe in the next couple of weeks, Twitter is going to unleash a video tab.

And it will look exactly like this is the game. So I think Twitter is very, very going to be very fruitful for a lot of people. And first movers, same old shit, won't be as good as conversion if you're just cackled to be like, but for brand, it could be completely crazy because of the viral nature of the platform. I'm aware that there's a lot of energy against access, but like for example, I live on Twitter and I do no politics and have plenty of fruitful situations. You're in control of what you consume and what you put out.

So I think X will be good for you. YouTube shorts is very important because of the way search works. And I do think there's strategic things you could do on TikTok that could really find the right audience. But I think it's about, let me give you this one. On TikTok, I'm a big fan, if you're possession of your B2B, but it could also be if you're niche, like T or earrings. Make content that is kind of positioned as, hey, send this.

to your person in your life that's entity. Hey, if you know anybody who's in this small business, like send this video, like literally the name of the video is send this to someone that's into, because there's a viral loop there on TikTok that could work.

So to answer your question, first, when we take a piece of video, what all of you have to be best at is post-production for the platform. Notice how I started speaking with an example of a video that did 2 million on TikTok, but underperformed on Instagram, same video. I changed the copy, but sometimes that's not even enough, but minimally, minimally.

When you make one video, you're actually getting four pieces of content if you're on four platforms by changing the copy that supports the video based on what platform. If I'm posting on LinkedIn, I'm gonna reference people that are traveling for business, sitting at their desk. I may make that reference.

Like if they make a, I'll just use them because this is gonna be easy. If they're making a T video and they post it on LinkedIn, which I think they should, which nobody owns a T brand or retail store would ever think about. But I think LinkedIn has become like Facebook. There's just people on it and they're just seeing shit. And theirs, I would put like a video, could be them in it, whatever it is. But the copy would say, tired of the shitty T they serve in the office. And then comma into what they have to say. I wouldn't put that on TikTok.

I would just go into like average camera wheel blows, here's Oolong, here's the, you know, like whatever they're going to do. So I think that how much content should you expect? Minimally you should expect whatever the output is. It should be times however platforms you have.

But don't take the same video and post it everywhere because it's going to act different. The copy, minimally, should be changed. I'm not even living my same life. We should tweak the first second or the thumbnail. We do that half the time, not 100%. It's even like somebody who's going to fit this. Sometimes you have cheat days. We're not perfect on my team. Every video should be slightly different.

on every platform based on the audience that lives in there and the temperament of the room. I'm gonna act differently in this boardroom with all of you than if this was being done at a private restaurant. This whole meeting would be slightly different if this was from 9 p.m. to midnight with wine at a restaurant. Same meeting, different, different room, right? My slang would be different, the energy would be different. It would just be different. Y'all would be different.

You know, I think for you two, you have to like watch them work for a day. Because everybody's different. Like, look, the number one goal you should all care about is views achieved organically. So let me give it to you this way. There's people on my team that are fast. There's people on my team that are slower.

But if Player One got me three videos a day, and those three videos got me 100,000 views, the Player Two was slower, but she fucking made badass shit and only made me one. And that video got four million views, which one do I like better? But when people play, well, but Gary, my shit's good, I'm like, no, it's not. You took a day, and your video got 8,000 views. And over here, they got me three videos at 8,000 apiece, and that got me 24,000 views.

When you make views achieved, gross and per post as a North Star, it's gonna help you answer a lot of these tough questions. Understand? You like that, right? You can hold, I can see you reacted well to that, but I get it, it's hard. This will help you ground the game in something. Right? Yeah, because sometimes I feel that we're like, I just thrown darts to the air.

And that's okay too, if they can explain the dart, it goes back to that. If I could explain to you, the reason I'm making this video is I'm going after women that grew up with entrepreneurial fathers in California. Well, then when you look at it, you're like, oh shit, I see what you did there. You made a surfing reference, you made a daddy reference, like that, you had a concept. So back to it's not something like everything I make has a thought.

It's not just to get views, there's a reason. And sometimes that is like, hey, I've been heavy. And talking about heavy, like, you know, like stress management, let me post a video that I like blueberries to fucking switch it up. But there was logic. Sorry, it's hard to do that when you have, when you're clipping a podcast, like, how do you decide to get bored? Yes, it's hard to do that, which is why just clipping podcasts can't be your only source of content. Right? Yeah.

He's filming right now. 4D's is different than T with Gary Vee. It's different than I give a keynote. Too many people became one-dimensional. Putting yourself in a position to make content. Look what I told Krishna to do. Do local business. For me, it's a huge win for him because

It's like, you notice how I broke it down? You might get some local business, you're gonna learn, you're gonna listen to people, you're gonna get content. So even if it doesn't sell a single thing to the 140 feet four people that he has in a dining room, 12 times 12 once a month, he just needs one clip to pay for the whole thing.

I mean, to this point, I would tell you that I'm still doing 4D's because I'm sure all of you are smart enough to know this was not the best use of my hour financially if you like really thought about like what's worth my time. Or when I give a, even giving a speech now for a quarter million dollars. Not, thank God, very blessed. Should be running my businesses, but I need to fucking content.

It's not about that. I want to get you under the hood so that you can make your version of it. And you've got to be self-aware. I love this. I hope you can tell. This is enjoyable for me. I can do this all day.

Again, back to if Lexi and her sister, maybe they like running. Well, then fuck it. Find a running camera man with you or like a GoPro. Like, fuck. Again, maybe I pitched to Christian the dinner thing, but maybe he loves golf. And maybe the video says, I'm taking a force them out to my course and we're filming it. I know it's weird, but some of you get it's 2024. Like, I don't know what's right for y'all. Maybe they're doing like, think about what their business we're about to go there. Like they could just invite people to the shop and film.

We're doing a Saturday night. Got it? Yes, thanks. It's almost the opposite of what you just said. So, our most popular content is Jamila and I, but we are a tea room, a tea shop, we just got on the target, so we're doing a CPG now.

And we are the bottlenecks for our content. Make sense? I love your toilets. You're doing everything. I lived that life for seven straight years with Wine Library. So really, how did you get from

you know, you being going on YouTube from my library to producing enough content to do it. You know, you've got a lot of things going for you. You've got emerging AI. So you could late night learn how to use AI tools to help you make more content. You could.

You've got the coolest job that everybody wants to do as a teenager. All of you have that. The amount of people in Brooklyn, here's a great example. Just knowing where you're at, where you live, who grows up there, because I talk to all sorts of kids from Best Sign, Berkeley, all everywhere.

You know, many people would do this shit for free to be your social media person for credits for school, college, or you guys are, I can already tell you're lovely. Like, if I'm 16 and I met y'all and you're like, yo, you coming in turn for us and help us, you're gonna get real life experience. We know who Gary V is. We can tell you, like, I'm serious. Like, you're gonna have to be gritty.

This is gritty life. So like, you just might need young kids to do it for very little or free, but you could also use your employees. With the t-shop, do you have any employees in the store? And we have used them to do it. That. Those 12 part, I almost stood up. That's always when I know I get excited. That's the answer, just so you know. Those 12 part time employees, half of them must also moonlight as the social media people.

You can't think about this. If you have 12 part time, if it's a tee shop, I'm assuming there are some people standing behind the register at times when nobody's walking in. I grew up in that world. I turned my cashiers into being productive. You have to do that because you don't have the monies not to. So that means you have to, and this is not fun, have to unfortunately maybe fire one or two or three people who can't do anything else besides just being there.

There's plenty of youngsters. Actually, ironically, one of my favorite places to look at for something like this is somebody who's retired and just looking at like, still enjoy life. There's an incredible, back to ageism, which is still not really being talked about. Because of the way technologies worked, I think we're sleeping on people 50 to 90, 60 to 90, 70 to 90.

You'd be shocked back to the way our heads work. We don't think a 68 year old can work the register and edit our videos. There's plenty of 68 year olds who are taking online courses to do social media fucking post editing. So I think for you when I hear, I always think about what are your assets. When I was doing it myself, I took one of the stock guys, one of the computer guys, to do Wine Library TV. We didn't have anybody else. I wasn't hiring somebody new.

So for you, those 12 part time, two or three of those people have to help you. They've got a double bubble. And think about what you're representing to them. You're like, hey, we're going to let you do this. This is going to be part of your downtime. You're going to use this to leave here and get a fucking job in social media. Does that make sense? It does mean a way to rehire. So I think that's really like to tap the strategy. Because if you get a copy of people who have had national inclinations and they

to thrive there. But then sometimes they fell off in the store. Makes sense. Right? That's right. They didn't fall off in the store, but they're not socially. And by the way, that's fair. And so there's a couple of ways to think about that. But I think the way I think about it is to not fall off in the store, there's just a line where they don't need to be an 11. If they're an eight or a seven, you're good. You know what I mean? Like the definition of falling off, they just have to be like,

You know, you gotta find that person, and you gotta find ambitious kids. And the beautiful part of what your store is, and you know this, there's unlimited young talent coming up that are just looking for an opportunity, right? And like honestly, and I'll ask that about to take a lead on this, real talk.

I would be thrilled to set up a true partnership that they can email and she'll be like, yep, that's true. Fuck, I'll make a video and say it's true, that if they work for y'all doing social along with their work stuff, that if they do it for 18 months, that becomes a feeder to getting a job here. If they pass some sort of minimum thing, I think that puts you on heavy.

That's awesome. Absolutely. Damn. I want to hire practitioners. To me, I'm more excited about a kid that worked in a tee shop doing social for 18 months than somebody who learned it at BU. So that's an example. But that's the graciousness and selfishness that I'm saying. But you can go to St. John's and say, hey, do you want a tee? We're all in power of everything.

It's strategy and action. You could go to other places and make Niagara four options for those kids, then you're gonna have a line up the door. Once people know it's happening. Next question. Please. So we are creating the unscalable intent moments for doing a loyalty tour.

All right, so we haven't won this Saturday. Tell me about it. So basically, you come in, you should have your target receipt, and you give free tea. You give free tea. Love it. Right, because you've done this CPG partnership with Target, you're trying to support that. Yeah. You say, now, Target receipt that you bought our stuff, or anything at Target, respect. And down somewhere else. Okay. How are you letting people know about that?

So we've used mostly Instagram, we've used it, and so it's, it's happening. It's happening, the RCP, RBM, what we expected. Did you run ads locally, or was it while organic? It was all organic. I think the thing is though, it was here in Brooklyn, but we're in stores all over the country. That I understand. Yeah, so like how we reproduce this in Iowa. You don't. Yeah. So what do we do for Iowa? Because I think I promise that it's because

We got put into place, into cities and rural areas that have no knowledge that we even exist. We thought we were going to get a soft launch pad. We didn't even get launched in New York until this upcoming November. So what do we do at those places?

who don't even know to follow. Tell me about that. That's where I want to look under the hood. So we do you know how many doors in Target are you going to be in? We're currently 104 about 168. So I would run five mile radius ads on all 168. Yeah, we did zip codes. And are you in the content?

So here's what I would do. If I own this company and we were three partners, I would say we've got to make 168 videos or use AI to capture our voice and replicate it. And literally it is us. And literally it is us. And your story is so compelling.

It's not super complicated. It's an awfully compelling story to rural area, five mile radius people. Let's understand why Target did what they did, and that's good for you. You make videos and say, hey, we're us. The opening line of the video is...

Hey, like, let's just pick a town. Where do I know where there's a target? Clark, New Jersey. There's a target in Clark, New Jersey. I know that because it's my dad's former shopping center, Rihanna's liquor store. Literally, the video is, hey, Clark, New Jersey target shoppers. Hi, it's me. It's me. We are running this ad within five mile radius of that target. You will not believe this. We have our product in the store.

Then tell them the tear jerking story or the emotional story or the human story of how hard you've worked. How long have you had it? Six years. Yeah. We've been painstakingly building this one store in Brooklyn for six fucking years. Maybe don't say fucking, but.

It would mean the world to us. If you would go to Target this weekend and pick up, we promise you it's the best tea. By the way, here's our, you could go this far, our phone number. If you don't want to blow up your phone, here's our email, here's our Instagram, please DM us. We want to know and thank personally every single person that buys a teabag from us, because this is our fucking lives.

And if this doesn't work at these targets, they're not gonna give us more targets and we don't know what we're gonna do, pull at fucking heartstrings. Five mile radius.

You'll know how to do that on every store, all of them. And if you have to, because you don't know how to fuck with AI, do 168 videos, then do 168 videos. If you can get an AI trained on your voice where you can like save yourself time and just type in Clark, like the lips move and you're like, hi, you know, like the whole like, Mr. Black, that's since episode. But like, but honestly, my thing of why I'm not even scared if you don't do the AI thing is when your life's on the line,

Like that's what's great about a small business. These are our lives, right? When your life's on the line, I just think that you'll sit down and say it. Like you could chop it too. You could literally do the first part, maybe show as you're talking. You could easily be smart about it. You just need to film, hate Detroit, Target, and then have the second sentence be a voiceover with maybe showing your story. This is our store.

And then you kick in the rest of the video, so you only have to film, right? You see where I'm going? Five all radiuses, 50 bucks, boom, boom, boom. It will work. It will work. One more quick one. Please. You didn't mention threads. Yeah. Why? threads deserves to be mentioned. It's just waning users so fast that threads and Pinterest are like on the shelf over here. I'm for it.

I'm just trying to make sure y'all really go to five and six. Even though threads keep showing up that it's doing well, Facebook's just vigging it by forcing people to download the app. The audience is declining, but I'm not against threads. Threads, by the way, for most of your businesses, even though Pinterest would work for y'all, I like it more than Pinterest.

By the way, on the record, add it, but the virality in there, I don't see as much, and all of you are going to rely on the virality, but I'm not against it at all.

And to be just getting the threads post from your Instagram post is an easy way to just see if it's there, even though it's not contextual to it. Plus, I don't have it fully mapped and I like to speak from a place of expertise. But if you're feeling comfortable there, but look, TikTok has the most virality chance. I wasn't kidding what I said about 8 million for them. TikTok has the most. It doesn't fit everyone here. Good news. Every platform is going through the TikTok thing.

LinkedIn, same thing. One video I have, 4,000, next one, 400,000. YouTube short, same shit. First video, 1,000, next one, 250,000. So they're all about to go through it, because it's the right thing. For all of us, it's the right for the platform, it's right for us. People you follow, you follow them, because you worked with them seven years ago. You don't give a fuck about their dog. So like, your interests matter more than who you follow.