- The most important question is, what are you trying to do?
Like, are you trying to make more money?
Are you trying to build a huge company?
Are you looking for legacy?
But if you have better people
you'll probably make more profit
in 2020 and have more time for yourself.
Like, when you put yourself out there
you deal with the ramifications of the end consumer
or the B2B consumer judgment.
Everybody gets hyped when I hype them like this,
then they do it for four days, a week, a month,
nothing happens, they're like, fuck that.
(electronic music)
It depends on what your ambition is.
Right, so like you know, that's the most important question.
Like for me the number one ambition
for me coming out of school was to repay my parents.
So that's what it is,
built a business for my parents for 12 years.
then I went on to my, so, the most important question is,
what are you trying to do?
Like, are you trying to make more money?
Are you trying to build a huge company?
Are you looking for legacy?
Do you want to move to Seattle?
- [Audience Member] I'm sure those will change over time.
- I agree.
- There are things that I would like to do for my parents,
they don't need me to take care of them by any means,
they've done all right for themselves, god bless 'em, but,
I'm sure there's something, like to get my dad a Porsche
just because I feel like he would have fun in that car
'cause he drives an SUV for work everyday.
- So does that come in the form of like
you just want your business to grow?
- [Audience Member] Yeah, I just want the business to grow
and so being just an army of one and not having maybe what--
- Facebook and Instagram video content
about you being a real estate agent.
People struggle, all of you struggle producing content
'cause you think you have to have something to say.
And my point is if you just tell me what happened
that's more than enough on the delta
of not doing anything at all.
What I need to get people to understand is
most people say, well my life is boring
and I have nothing to say
and they just don't put out content.
And I'm just like, if your first video of every day
was about the Nationals or the Capitals or the Wizards
you will get business.
Because I promise you if you made fuckin' Jets content
and I saw it I'd buy my house from you.
That's how I make decisions.
It's better than not. - Right
- But I love that you said,
I love how quickly you responded.
It's a very important moment.
Just so you know, 99.999% of everybody
who's ever heard anything from me
decided not is better than the Wizards thing.
So the answer is more volume
but the part that everyone's struggling with is
nobody's, it's all insecurities, nobody's listening,
I only got two likes, it doesn't look good,
is this is anybody listening to this, everybody quits.
Everybody gets hyped when I hype them like this
then they do it for four days, a week, a month,
nothing happens, they're like, fuck that.
Did you look carefully at the 2009 and 2010 Tweets,
how much engagement they had?
- Versus now? - Yeah, did you or not?
- [Audience Member] No.
You know that some of those Tweets
only had two likes and a share.
- [Audience Member] I did know, yes.
- People forget what my 2009 and 10 looked like.
(laughs)
Everybody starts with only one like,
here's the tactical part, you put a ton of content,
eventually something kind of goes viral
and you spend a fuckload of money against it
because people prove that they gave a fuck.
(upbeat music)
This is actually a stunningly easy answer
and outrageously difficult for small businesses to execute.
Number one, pay $18 an hour.
Let's start, let's go block by block.
You know, if I bought into your business
and now we were partners and we started tomorrow
and you're like all right, here we are,
9:00 a.m. Monday, right.
You'd say, this is our biggest problem.
I'd say, okay, who are our competitors
and or similar businesses to us,
even if they didn't do the same exact thing.
Doctors offices versus dermatologists, dentists,
whatever, right, and how do we figure out,
and I'm being dead serious right now,
how do we figure out, like I used to go to liquor stores
as a customer and if I thought somebody had
any level of hustle or charisma I took note.
I didn't try, I always, it's funny,
I would go to see it, I never would poach somebody in it
'cause that for some reason was my line of disrespectful,
but then I would always come back to my store
and ask my salespeople who were part of the industry
to get me that person's number or do you know this person.
You could call, read Yelp reviews, you could figure out
who they are and literally just pay them more.
When I hear I want to grow, create abundance for my family,
but not always be there, that means you have to hire people.
Like, if you don't want to be there and you want to be home
or you want to at least be able to mentally relax
on a Friday afternoon, well then, you need to pay 18 not 14.
People create these arbitrary numbers,
well salespeople in the Sugarland area,
they get this, like, why?
Do you know why people are charging 30%
for like back-end kind of infrastructure on technology?
Because Apple decided 30 percent was the rate
they were gonna take for the App Store
and that became the standard.
And had they decided 27, bless you, Reed, or 33,
or something else, that's what everybody would do.
My senior executive team was like,
but this is what's going on in industry,
and I'm like, that's nothing to with Vayner.
There's places where we have to overpay
and there's places we should not pay anything
because we're Vayner, like, you have to play in the reality.
So the first thing that comes to mind
is you'll get better people if you pay 18
and if you run the math and you can afford that
there's something funny that happens,
you may make a little less profit in the next six months
but if you have better people
you'll probably make more profit in 2020
and have more time for yourself.
Number two, then you get into retention,
and retention is really
completely predicated on communication.
You have to be willing to,
my dad would never talk to his employees
'cause he didn't want them to ask him for a raise,
it's real.
Like and so that worked for nobody.
He might've extracted a little less cost
for six or nine months
but then he had a deal with the ramifications
of people leaving, right.
I think it's communication.
(upbeat music)
If you're trying to reach B2B people
you run ads on LinkedIn for employees
of those B2B organizations so they pass on that content
and that content is strictly for B2B.
On B2C when you run Instagram story ads
with swipe up to your landing page, you run them.
What's crazy is, it's funny, this is back to and versus or.
Because you come from a TV back,
this is like back to like me literally on a plane being like
wait a minute, I'll hire somebody then I'll feel bad
if I let him down, like, strategy's crazy.
You're literally one thought away from changing everything
and you can't even see what's in front of you.
It's you're asking an or question
when the answer is an and, it's a both.
TV was tough, you had to pick one commercial,
this is why you guys over thought the shit out of it,
that's why he tested the fuck out of it,
because once you had it, whatever the fuck you were doing,
it was running on remnant late night
and you were at the mercy of how good it was.
So I proactive got so big 'cause they had call centers
and they really ran data
and they were doing a bunch of different commercials
and they're like that (snaps).
But you didn't do that, right, you like did your shoot,
you fuckin' did your best and you fuckin', right?
- [Audience Member] He changed and called action
and that was it, and the offer.
- That's right. - The content was the same.
- But on social you just run 58 pieces of content
'cause it doesn't cost you a lot to make the content
and you just see what actually converts.
Facebook is not your foundational page.
- Got it, it's the content. - It's the content.
You know, like I don't care if you have a single,
like if somebody said, Gary but I'm embarrassed,
I have, hey Madigan's, I don't have
a single follower on Instagram,
I'm like cool, just run ads.
Your Facebook page is not your foundational page.
You know, it was foundational for people
maybe six, seven years ago
when the organic reach was so bonkers
but that went away so even if you have two million followers
on Facebook it's not your, I'm getting a 20th
of the organic reach I got two years ago from Facebook
even though I have 15% more followers on it
'cause they killed organic reach
to put more ads into the funnel.
Got it? - I understand.
- So basically every, they used to call them dark posts,
basically you're just running ads on Facebook and Instagram
but you're driving 'em to your mobile-optimized
landing page, right, don't forget,
you're in a mobile world now, a lot of people
if they've been around for a little bit
they've maximized the desktop
but when you land on a mobile device
which is where Facebook and Instagram
is gonna be consumed, got it?
(upbeat music)
The vulnerabilities you create
on the judgement of the people you're trying to sell to.
Pfizer awarded VaynerMedia a three million dollar
piece of business four years ago
but then a board member saw me cursing in a YouTube video
and killed the deal.
You said that you were a Patriots fan
and I no longer wanted to be your friend.
Like when you put yourself out there
you deal with the ramifications of the end consumer
or the B2B consumer judgment.
Some struggle with the judgment of just the human aspect
but on the business side you will win and will lose business
because there are plenty of people,
like I like your energy but I know your energy,
there's a lot of people that wouldn't like it.
You know your life, the end. - I love what I do.
- And I think what will work for you based on my quick read
is you probably realize it's a net-net game, right,
if you have 17 people that love it
and 13 people that hate it you're a plus 4 versus a zero.
(upbeat music)
Look, you're talking to somebody who's
first 20 years of his career
I couldn't sell wine on the internet to the state of Texas.
You sleep in the bed that you choose, the end.
Like, you're in that industry.
The good news is nobody else can do it too, right,
so you have to lay in that bed.
Like, we work with Chase, we work with Diageo,
I have a cannabis agency, like,
they don't take Facebook and Instagram ads.
That's what I do, right, so you just live in the reality.
What I would say though is,
knowing a lot of these rules and regulations
'cause of the clients I have,
there's a lot of lawyers that are lazy as fuck
and would rather just say to you,
something basic without actually pushing it.
Could you put those things in your profile
and then not have to put it on every piece of content?
It depends on the interpretation of the lawyer, got it?
So like, where I get upset for people
in regulated industries is they have lazy legal advice
that is so conservative because they just
don't even want to deal with shit, right,
'cause that's how you maximize your money if you're a lawyer
and so it's your job to push.
(upbeat music)
You know, you have to take the temperature of your company.
I remember when Smith & Wesson, the gun company,
came to us I decided to pass on it
because I just didn't feel the culture at Vayner
would accept us taking a gun client
during nine months after the school shooting in Connecticut,
you know, even the money was huge.
You know, Steve Ross, the owner of
this stadium and the Dolphins,
when I decide I want to take cannabis company clients
I knew that the NFL and cannabis
just was gonna take some time and so
I had to make an investment in another company.
Yeah, I mean, then there's other times
where the liberal nation of nature of my company
goes the other way, I remember when we wanted to work with
a gas company we assigned somebody who I love very much,
I'd actually like them to come back into our world,
doesn't work at Vayner right now,
he came to me and said I'm not gonna work on this brand
and I don't think a lot of people are gonna work on it
and I punched him in his fucking face, verbally,
you know, because I was like, well then why,
then let's not work with Pepsi cause sugar is bad too
and as a matter of fact let's not work with Calvin Klein
because textiles are the second worst contributor
to the environment, I'm like, fuck you
with your liberal bullshit.
I'm outrageously socially liberal,
I was passed on Smith & Wesson I passed on other things,
but then there becomes a line where you're just getting into
foo-foo fuckin' New York, LA, Europe shit
and that's when I get pissed.
and so like, and by the way, that's what my job
as the CEO is so every company,
this is the best part about being CEO,
everything right and everything wrong
is unbelievably tied to her or him, right.
And so I make those judgment calls all the time.
(upbeat music)
If you put out a daily show
about the trials and tribulations at your dealership
and you put it on Facebook and YouTube
your business would explode.
Now, nobody's gonna give a fuck for a year.
So for a year you're gonna put some real money in
but it's a hell of a lot better
than the bullshit advertising you're doing now
in the paper and billboards and radio, if you're doing that.
and amortize it over time, but it will work.
Because you've got one, you know right now
that you have one employee that's a real character
and that becomes your fuckin', you know, Fonz.
I really want somebody to do that
because it's really gonna work.
And what you can do, let me tell you
how I would direct it or produce it.
So now you got, Caleb, he's just filming all day,
funny things are happening, fuck you Charlie,
like you guys make whatever you make.
But what Caleb does better than DRock
or better than anybody who's ever filmed me
is he will ask me questions while we're filming,
he just did it on the back of the cab now
about how I post on Instagram,
and I think you should do that.
I think you should film the show and then stop
and go to the parts and service team
and start a segment in each episode called,
how not to come here.
Let me explain, if you have a segment
that's two minutes long in every episode.
So think about it, it's almost like it's a show
but then it stops and there's like now
an information piece in the middle of it
where the people that do parts and service for you
tell the viewers at home
how not to come to the auto body shop
because the amount of people that come to parts and services
when they could have done something very simple at home
but they're like me and have no,
when I tell you I have no fuckin' idea,
I'd rather throw my car in the garbage
then figure out how to fix it.
Like, and I'm talking about two minutes.
If you're like change the spark plug, I'm like,
I'm gonna leave it on the road and go buy another car.
Like literally, there's a lot of people like that.
If you had a segment, the amount of trust
that your organization would get,
it's what I did with Wine Library TV,
I literally told people to not buy wine we sold
and I did it like emphatically, I'm like this shit sucks.
If you did that it would change your business,
and then you'd be able to chop out that little piece
and do it as a separate one-minute video on Instagram,
you see where I'm going, and that's what Linds
will go into a little bit
but that's how I would produce it.
And then you can strip the audio
and have a podcast for no cost.
(upbeat music)