How you doing? - How are you?
How's the day going?
Good. - Good?
You know, I think this is where you need
to go very selfish and specific.
Obviously, it's unlikely that you're here without
some solid level of context of who I am in theory,
so I think this is where we
can get very, very, very detailed,
so go very, very, very selfish with the question,
and we'll see how many times we can go around.
(light electronic music)
If you're selling self-published books and digital courses,
you're limiting the upside of your speaking career,
because you're doing sales over brand.
The reason I'm one of the highest paid speakers
is 'cause all of you are so bought into me,
'cause I don't sell you a thousand dollar thing,
that you will do something like this,
or you will pay two thousand bucks to get a ticket to a,
so one of the things to think about,
you, it's your business.
You have options, you have more, like what I had,
which is you have economics in the business
that are doing well,
I would tell you to not monetize your audience
for as long as you possibly can,
'cause that's gonna build more economics in the backend.
But I do.
I only build brand 'cause I'm not selling it,
I'm gonna use it.
Now, the one caveat to that is, you need enough sales
so you don't go out of business
in your ideological marathon.
Right?
But, as much as you can build on brand,
brand always pays.
The reason Tommy Hilfiger and Fila
are back on 15-year-olds' bodies is 'cause it's a brand.
It wasn't 'cause they had good sales.
Brand, always brand.
That's why Transformers and Spiderman
and Aquaman and Wonder Woman open.
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The reasons people don't scale well, is they like to,
they don't even realize it,
you might not even realize your subconscious,
you know we talk about subconscious bias
for female, minorities,
there's subconscious bias as an operator.
You get the high that you're so good at everything,
you actually don't wanna hire somebody to do something
that does it better than you.
Or you love doing it!
You love knocking on the doors,
so you don't wanna let somebody do that
while you make a podcast.
But scaling a business comes at two very important traits.
One, humility,
and two, patience.
Also, auditing your fuckin' 24 hours.
So if you're sleeping six, seven, eight, nine hours,
what are you doing the rest of the time?
And what do you need?
You might say, "Gary, cool, I've listened to all your shit,
"but I need three hours a night of Netflix,
"that's how I decompose."
I'm like, mazel tov!
Then, let's go back to your eight hours that you work.
What are you doing every minute?
That's where this has gotten so,
the reason I can do,
it's scary to me how lazy I think the 29-year-old me is.
And he was a workaholic.
It's not that I try any harder,
it's that I'm dramatically more efficient.
It's a game of, and this is for a lot of you,
scaling is predicated on your ambition
versus what you're interested in
in your lifestyle at that current moment.
The reason I'm great at scaling is,
I don't want anything fancy.
My most devastating business decisions have been predicated
at the moments when I've bought my two homes.
I passed, I've never said this this clearly,
I passed on Uber, because I bought an apartment.
If I had just stayed in the apartment I was in
for one more year, I would have $400 million.
(man chuckling)
That I don't have right now.
That's about as basic as I can say it.
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You should be producing an ungodly amount
of LinkedIn content,
in whatever form of communication
comes most naturally to you.
Written, audio, or video.
I couldn't be more bullish on LinkedIn
as a content B2B place.
Couldn't, I'm obsessed with it.
It's grossly under-priced.
The ads are expensive,
ish, 'cause they have a floor.
they don't do what Google and Facebook does,
which starts at the bottom, they have a cost on the CPM.
But organic traction is real.
Just putting your LinkedIn profile that puts out content,
URL in your email signature,
as somebody who emails a lot,
is enough of a match to start your LinkedIn content career.
(light electronic music)
Everyone's like, "Facebook doesn't work anymore,"
I'm like, "No no no, the ad that was working for you,
"has been saturated,
"and it's costing you more and converting less,
"'cause the people that would convert
"on the first thing have converted,
"and the feed's getting more competitive.
"You need to make more content."
This feed is busy.
If it's not contextual, it's not getting consumed.
You can literally be like,
"Hey, are you a 42-year-old woman?"
And run it against 42-year-old women.
[Man] (chuckles) That's just crazy.
It is crazy!
You will scale from 800 to two million pretty quickly
if you get Facebook and Instagram ads right.
And the way you do that is literally your fuckin' phone.
Video, after video, after video.
Now you've made the,
notice how my framework works so well for you.
Now that you're all in on you,
you fuckin' can do it on the FaceTime and,
you don't need shit, you don't need DRock,
you fuckin' like, "Hey Atlanta, I'm comin' through."
"Hey Atlanta Falcon fans, I'm coming through."
Running against Atlanta Falcon fans.
Guys, buying ads for everyone is real.
I don't care what you do, concrete, pools,
but the magic is in the long tail of it.
Imagine if you're only talking to African American females,
what you're gonna say in that camera,
versus talking to Middle America 60-year-olds,
who care about our military.
It's gonna be a completely different video.
[Woman] Totally different.
People say things to me like, in YouTube,
because I have so many vlogs, they're like,
"Gary, why are you changing your adjectives?"
They try to razz me for pandering to my audience
They're like, "When you're in Atlanta, in the hood,
"you're using slang."
I'm like, "Right, that's subconscious,"
in the same way that,
when I'm talking to a six-year-old, I'm,
adjusting to your audience is my natural state.
It's not a bad thing, it's a great thing!
It's why I connect with so many different people!
You know? - Mm-hm, mm-hm.
So, that's how I think about content.
That's what you should be doing.
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When Seinfeld's the number one show on television,
you run commercials.
You shouldn't be sitting around predicting,
if Sally Magoo, the surfer,
is going to be around in five years.
You should buy her when she's under-priced attention.
If you tell me that the three, five million people
are so under-priced
based on your budget, and based on what you
or us thought the value of that post was, or video content,
well then I'd be like, "Let's do it!"
To me, it's a buy.
It's like, do you buy one home, or three homes?
Well if you can buy three homes
for 1/100 of the value of that home...
If you can buy a $400,000 home for $1,000,
they wanna sell you that home for a thousand dollars!
And you have to buy all three of their homes,
that are worth 400,000,
but you're paying 3,000,
you buy those three homes and figure it out later.
(chuckling)
That's how I think about influencers.
There's micro-influencers that aren't worth
their fuckin' $80 for their little photo.
[Woman] Oh yeah, totally.
And then there's people that are, you know.
The holy grail is creating an influencer team
that understands how to work with seven billion people,
and understand if they're a good deal or not,
and make that deal.
That's how I think about it.
That is my holy grail of influencer marketing.
I can price every person on earth,
and then when I speak to them,
I can know if it's a good deal or not,
and that I want to maximize my $100,000
on the $100,000 best buy,
'cause I bought $18 million worth of awareness
for 100,000, now that is fantasy land,
but the closest you can get to that.
So what does that mean?
You start casting long, wide nets,
you have 15 interns that work for free or minimum wage,
to DM everybody on earth and ask them how much they cost,
there's a lot of things you can then decide to do.
But, it is not an either or,
do we bet on these three people,
and they're gonna be 15 million followers, versus,
'cause you know, 'cause you're doing it,
it's not about how many followers.
(light electronic music)
My favorite marketing principle
is the high school party rule, which is,
if all of you think back to high school right now,
and think about the person that was a C, D popular kid
by junior year, but started throwing parties
where cool kids could go and drink and hook up,
they became way more popular
on the arbitrage that their parents weren't around.
That's basically how I think you should handle this.
I think you should start a podcast
and just interview the people
that you actually wanna do business with,
and now you've won.
Literally the entire, you sending an email
with a title saying, "I'd love to have you
"on our podcast to know your journey,
"and thoughts of the current state of blank,"
are gonna get a hell of a lot more responses
than, "Do you need to place a front end developer?"
Now, all of the sudden, you're the first person ever
to say that Karen or Rick,
the technology decision maker at a company,
is worthy of a 45 minute podcast.
They share that with their 13 friends on Facebook,
it's also gonna be the fact
that you're gonna be the first person
they reach out to when they,
literally, you host the party.
That will work.