- I would literally be sitting in English class and
reading the Wine Spectator.
There was just no controlling my insanity.
("Legendary" by Welshly Arms)
- What if I told you this was
the last Monday morning of your life?
- [Gary] If you think a lot's happened in the last 10 years
wait 'til you see what happens over the next 10 years.
The stakes are enormously high.
And I'm not here fear mongering.
This is just what's happening.
Very honestly, the fact that
you're the crème de la crème of this,
I assume that the majority of
people in this room are like yes.
This is the opportunity.
This is where I transition from a $6 million a year business to
$15 million a year business.
This is when a transition from $180,000 a year business to a
$2.9 million business.
This is pure opportunity.
The problem is and this is where everybody defaults into,
they raise their, "Gary, I don't grow up with this."
Me either, Carl.
(audience laughter)
I didn't grow up with this either, Carl.
And guess what, Carl?
You didn't grow up driving and you figured it out.
Understanding the digital landscape and what our consumers
are doing on it is now oxygen for businesses.
- Awesome.
- Thank you, darlin'. Give me a kiss.
- Oh. - [Gary] Take care.
Thank you for having me.
- I'm glad you had a nap.
- [Gary] Yes. I did have a nap.
Take care.
Thanks for listening.
Bye guys. - [Woman] Thank you.
- Thank you for listening.
Bye, thank you.
Take care, man. Thank you, brother.
Thanks, Michael. Bye.
Let's name it the 2017 small business talk.
DRock.
- [DRock] Gary.
- Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter.
What's going on? Good to see you guys.
Morning.
I'm in Louisiana headed to
Vegas for CES.
Got a phone call in a few minutes but just wanted to jump
onto Twitter and give you guys some love.
See how you're doing.
Maybe we'll jump on a little bit and see how we do this.
Hope you guys are doing super well.
Hope life is good.
And yeah, this new jacket is fly.
You love it, DRock, right?
- [DRock] Yeah, it's really nice.
- All good stuff.
Dublin, what's up? Good to see you.
No, Patriots, no way.
Yeah, anyway.
See ya.
This is for you, my friend.
- Oh, that's very generous of you.
- [Gary] Take care of yourself.
- Thank you very much, sir. I appreciate the courtesy.
- [Gary] Happy New Year.
- Alright. - [Gary] Take care.
- Watch your step.
- Gonna try to add more context to days.
In the time that I got off the stage and drove to this airport,
one of our big new scopes for last year got cut in half from
$2 million to $1 million which is a problem because the scale
of the dollars was going to help it be more successful and
one of the CEOs of one of my successful startups is having
some cultural issues where the
team is struggling so that's hard core.
And so, very quickly in two seconds two pretty substantial
fires but you take them in the
micro at the moment and then you
start leveling them up to a macro. Right?
I take the hit, I absorb it.
Now I'm thinking, I'm pondering,
and now I'm already strategizing on how to fix it.
I think way too many people spend too much time dwelling and
they allow something like this to ruin their day or ruin their
week or ruin their month or ruin their year.
I think one of the things
I talk about is having a stomach,
having the stomach for this game.
This is exactly what I refer to.
I've been around a lot of executives and a lot of partners
who would use something like
this as a day-ender as I call it.
I've come to realize how much of a strength that is of mine of
putting things in the proper context and
dealing with reality.
You know, when you're an entrepreneur
you're a firefighter.
Especially if you're the last line of defense.
It's all on you.
There's no punting it down.
Right now we have a potential conflict issue of
which account do we go to.
I'm trying to keep Marcus off as a CEO,
give me a day, give me a day.
The truth is I'm not accomplishing anything here.
I'm just thinking, I'm trying to ponder but the quicker you make
actions, the quicker you can adjust to negativity,
big blows, medium blows, large blows.
The turnaround speed in your adjustment to an issue is
usually an unbelievable proxy to the level of success you'll have
as an entrepreneur.
So you need to start conditioning yourself for the
emotional war that entrepreneurship is.
- [DRock] What are you doing now?
- [Gary] Right now, I'm answering an AMA for Mogul,
a media site that I'm an investor in.
Great entrepreneur, she asked me and it's really not what I want
to be using my time on but I think you have to come through
for the partnerships you make and so she doesn't ask often and
so even though it's a tough week and things of that nature,
I'm doing this AMA on their site on OnMogul.com
and OnMogul.com
and cranking away at answers, just trying to get through a
bunch so I can get through security here.
Somebody asked me about a time in my life when I was going
through a struggle and how I got through.
And it made me think about 2005 when I turned 30 and I realized
that my actions were not backing up my words.
I've said that a couple of times,
if you have the audacity to dream you have to make your
actions, you have to do it.
And I had a moment like that.
I was very successful.
I built a huge business and I would say from 28 to 30
I probably got caught in to some form of complacency.
We were growing like crazy.
But it was complacent compared
to the ambition that I set out
to accomplish and so from 28 to 30 I was building a
big business, a big wine e-commerce business.
I was innovating, I was hustling
but I wasn't working as hard as I am now.
I wasn't doing strategically smart things that were
gonna allow me to achieve the
professional things that I wanted.
And I wasn't so over-capitalizing on my
family time with Lizzie in return either.
So it wasn't like I was getting some amazing benefit.
And so, 28 to 30 was an interesting time for me because
I think that there was so much success so fast that I got
caught for 24 months of maybe not hustling as hard and as
smart as I could and more importantly,
on my 30th birthday I realized
I wasn't gonna buy the New York Jets.
And that's kind of weirdly okay
as you guys know I want that but that's okay.
What crushed me was I was full of shit.
I wasn't putting in the work
at a macro and micro level to give
me a chance to buy the New York Jets.
Just got in to Vegas.
Connected in Houston.
Waiting for DRock to come off the plane.
CES for a couple days, day and a half and then back on the grind.
Going to Seattle to try and sign a kid for VaynerSports.
Just did a bunch of email,
the eBay challenge is out of control.
The 21 Savage moment in The #AskGaryVee Show
caught people's attention.
So, what's going on.
The ambition I have and the excitement I have is the process
of trying to buy the New York Jets versus buying them and so
yeah, I think that era was interesting to me and so when
I tell you your actions have to backup your words,
I come from a place of experience 'cause I lived a
couple years there where I didn't.
And I know what it tastes like and I got into a place where
I really spoke myself from November 14th, 2005
through probably January 15th, 2005
and then February 20, 2006,
February 2005, I started Wine Library TV and started
taking the internet more seriously and
the rest was history.
(light music)
When I was 15 years old,
I signed up for your catalogs and would post it in my room
like it was a Pamela Anderson poster.
Macarthur's legitimately one of the seven or eight stores that
I looked up to before I built Wine Library.
That's really cool.
That is like...
That is such an amazing time in my life where I was still in
high school but knew who I was gonna be and would literally,
this is not a joke, would literally take the catalog you
guys would send and read it in the middle of English class.
Like the level of disrespect that I had for my teachers was
so extreme like out of a sit-com.
I would literally be sitting in English class and
reading the Wine Spectator.
There was just no controlling my insanity.
Just leaving the MediaLink party and now heading to a
Carbone dinner with a bunch of friends.
Just hustlin'.
CES is a grind.
18, 19 hour days.
Meeting after meeting, in Vegas, trying to make it happen.
So, see what's up.
See ya.
(light music)