If You Want to Win at Marketing in 2026, Listen To This

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: The GaryVee Audio Experience

Episode: If You Want to Win at Marketing in 2026, Listen To This
Host: Gary Vaynerchuk
Date: December 15, 2025

---

Main Theme / Purpose

In this high-energy fireside chat, Gary Vaynerchuk unpacks the evolving state of marketing for 2026. He dives deep into core pillars for business and marketing success: platform nuance, self-awareness, the role of culture and popular trends, the power of organic and paid social content, and how to stay on offense during times of change—especially as AI disrupts the industry. Audience Q&A explores real-life agency scaling, resourcing, and adapting to new landscapes.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Understanding Platform Nuances and Creative Strategy

• Gary emphasizes the importance of recognizing and mastering the subtle differences between social platforms, especially for Reels and short-form video.
  • Example: Facebook Reels vs. TikTok—filters, add-ons, URL placement all impact performance ([00:00], [10:15]).
  • Quote:

    “You don't fully understand how the tone and tenor and the creative strategy of a reel in Facebook works differently than a TikTok… There's an incredible misunderstanding on how much goes into the creative strategy.” — Gary Vaynerchuk [00:00]

• The success of paid ads can mask bad creative. Dialing in the creative can dramatically lower customer acquisition cost (CAC) ([10:15]).

---

2. The Power of Self-Awareness and Ambition

• Gary attributes lasting business success to deep self-awareness and patience. He urges listeners to check in on the motives behind their ambition (gratitude vs. insecurity) ([02:41]).
  • Quote:

    “The reason I'm so big on patience… is how healthy is their ambition and what is the fuel of their ambition.” — Gary Vaynerchuk [01:46]

• Money doesn’t change you; it exposes you ([03:03]).
  • Quote:

    “Money doesn't change you. Money exposes you. So if you're in a bad place and you, like, wanted to prove everyone wrong and then you got the money, then you're gonna spend that money on dumb shit.” — Gary Vaynerchuk [03:03]

---

3. Creating Happiness and Personal Fulfillment

• Gary finds happiness in positively impacting others, spending time with family, indulging in simple hobbies (garage sales), and following personal conviction ([04:17]).
  • Quote:

    “What makes me happy is… leaving an impact on the world… But I think the things that, like, I love getting, you know, I love my hobbies… I really love the escapism of rooting for a team that sucks.” — Gary Vaynerchuk [04:22]

---

4. The Garage Sale Mentality: Entrepreneurship from Zero

• Gary’s early experiences flipping garage sale finds on eBay shaped his scrappiness and marketing intuition.
  • The lesson: Exploit underpriced attention or arbitrage—be first, be fast ([06:54]).
  • “The biggest opportunity for somebody who has $500 is to buy and sell things in the arbitrage of the way society works.” — Gary Vaynerchuk [08:37]

---

5. Emerging Platforms & Underestimated Opportunities

• Current Hotbeds for Organic Reach:

  • Facebook Reels: “Facebook reels is crushing. Everybody here should get very aggressive with Facebook reels.” ([10:15])
  • LinkedIn: Underleveraged even for consumer products.
  • YouTube Shorts: Organic search/long tail value.
  • Twitter Ads: Temporal arbitrage due to advertisers’ pullback.

• The "PAC" Framework:

  • Platform, Attention, Culture: “Everything I just said is right, but… it may not work because you’re not winning on ‘PAC’… Platform and culture.” ([11:55])
  • Don't copy-paste content; tailor for context.

---

6. Culture and Relevance: Leveraging Popular Trends

• Deep effectiveness comes from integrating current popular culture and emotional triggers into content ([12:51], [13:31]).
  • “People are not winning on relevance. People are trying to sell shit instead of build emotion. And popular culture is one of the pillars of our emotion.” — Gary Vaynerchuk [13:31]

---

7. AI: Disruption, Adaptation, and Human Progress

• AI will become pervasive “oxygen.” Businesses slow to adapt will get left behind. Emotion and adaptability are needed to continue to provide value ([14:32]).
  • “Humans will always become more efficient… I think there are going to be enormous amounts of tasks… done by artificial intelligence.” — Gary Vaynerchuk [14:32]
• “You’re either on offense or you’re on defense. Most people think there’s an in between. There’s not.” — Gary Vaynerchuk [30:17]

---

8. Q&A: Audience Insights

Hiring, Scaling, and Social Content Production:

• When hiring, solve your biggest current pain point or offload the task you least want to keep doing ([23:00]).
  • “What am I spending the most time on that I don’t want to be doing? Is the next hire. 100%.” — Gary Vaynerchuk [23:00]
• The most important business task: Demand and brand creation through omnichannel social media.
  • “It is the most important thing.” — Gary Vaynerchuk [20:50]
  • Allocate more resources (money, time, people) to content creation ([23:42]).
  • Audit your time: most meetings are “double too long.” ([24:39])

The Value of Patience and Delayed Gratification

• Gary’s most rewarding—and challenging—venture: building his father’s liquor business with little personal profit, then pouring all revenue into subsequent ventures ([24:59], [28:03]).

Adapting to Market Threats (AI, Revenue Loss)

• When AI or market changes trigger revenue drop, don’t go passive. Innovate new offers and stay in constant offense, not reactive defense ([29:46], [31:01]).
  • “You can innovate in perpetuity if you want to. The problem is so many of us, me included… just in a life cycle where I was cruising, you know, which is fine… But you never want to be in a place where you’re triggered into offense because of defense.” — Gary Vaynerchuk [30:58]

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Money doesn't change you. Money exposes you.” [03:03]
• “You could be below average and dominate [on TikTok and now Facebook Reels].” [10:15]
• “People are trying to sell shit instead of build emotion. And popular culture is one of the pillars of our emotion.” [13:31]
• “Humans are bad at scale. This is where media and information and the way the world works fascinates me.” [15:29]
• Biggest lesson: “Trying to make no profit for as long as possible… feeding the business, not my ego or my bank account or my vices.” [28:03]
• “You’re either on offense or you’re on defense. Most people think there’s an in between. There’s not.” [30:17]

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:00] – Nuances of platform-specific creative; hiding weak creative with ad spend
• [01:46] – Self-awareness and ambition
• [04:17] – What makes Gary Vee happy and his approach to personal fulfillment
• [06:54] – The garage sale and eBay entrepreneurial mindset
• [10:15] – Recommendations for up-and-coming social platforms to focus on
• [12:51] – The importance of integrating popular culture trends into content
• [14:32] – Thoughts on AI and the future of human work
• [18:21] – Audience Q&A: Scaling, paid vs. organic, and resourcing content creation
• [23:00] – When and who to hire next in a growing company
• [24:59] – Gary's most rewarding and most challenging business experience
• [28:03] – Building VaynerMedia: impatience, reinvesting, and scaling
• [29:46] – Responding to industry threats like AI-triggered revenue drops
• [31:01] – Being on offense vs. defense in business

---

Overall Tone

Authentic, energetic, and unsparing with “real talk,” Gary’s language is peppered with practical examples, challenging assertions, and actionable ideas. He toggles naturally between hard-nosed business advice and personal reflection, always pressing listeners to be honest, hungry, adaptive, and “all in” on content creation and chasing opportunity.

---

Best for:
Entrepreneurs, marketers, business owners, and agency leaders seeking edge strategies in content and marketing for the years ahead. This episode delivers both tactical recommendations and the deeper mindset shifts needed to sustain in an era of rapid change.

---

Transcript

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You don't fully understand how the tone and tenor and the creative strategy of a reel in Facebook works differently than a TikTok, and you may not know exactly the platform nuances of all the things you can do with that reel. Are you using the filters? Are you using the add ons? Where is the URL placed? There's an incredible misunderstanding on how much goes into the creative strategy to make all of this work, especially if you're good at running ads because the money hides the bad creative. You think you're doing well on your $39 CAC when if you did the creative strategy right, it's actually 16 before you go to the podcast, I've got a big announcement. I know several years ago a lot of you bought 12 books of 12 and a half to get the NFT, the book games NFT. I also know that a lot of people have dropped off on their journey with veefriends, which is a massive mistake because what we're doing on Burn island and what we're doing on base with book games is remarkable. So you need to go to Vee Friends veefriends.com oldbooks go to veefriends.com oldBooks with an S. You will go to that landing page and we will help you explain if you are trying to figure out where your NFTs are, how to bring them over to the website and how to start activating them so that you can start using them for all the incredible exchanges and draws and raffles and experiences that we're doing for people that actually own the book games. So please go to veefriends.com, where you can start your journey on reactivating your book games journey. This is the GaryVee audio experience. I think for me the universal answer to any of these questions is grounded in very hardcore self awareness. The reason I'm so big on patience is for a room like this. The thing that I always worry about is how healthy is their ambition and what is the fuel of their ambition. For me, as I've gotten older I'm like oh. The fuel of my ambition is this beautiful mix of gratitude and even micro guilt that I had this perfect circumstance of mother immigrant upbringing. It comes from such a place of fuck. I'm so happy and whoa, so many people aren't that I'm very inspired on a daily basis while I'm doing my thing to figure out ways to say something and change the perspective in some way that might help someone start to achieve more happiness. The other big revelation for me As I go through my journey is how many people's ambition is completely fueled by insecurity. And that's been really eye opening for me that people want to show their parents that didn't do the right thing. The girl or the guy or the system or like the town they came like, you know, or like a lot.

[Moderator]

Of ambition comes from.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Right? Yeah. And I actually think that's a problem.

[Moderator]

Unhealthy.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

That's what you mean by it's not sustainable. Right, Right. It becomes not sustainable. And then very honestly, when you're able to use that to amass dollars, money doesn't change you. Money exposes you. So if you're in a bad place and you, like, wanted to prove everyone wrong and then you got the money, then you're gonna spend that money on dumb shit. And so my advice is, it's really funny. I don't think of myself as being in the advice business. I understand what I do. I view myself in the here's observations. And I'm hopeful that whether you completely agree with it or completely disagree with it, that you're able to take it, process it through your self awareness and reality and see if you can extract value from it, whether you want to do it or completely run away from it. Because boy, oh boy, do I know a lot of people who make $47,000 a year that are really in solid places because they live a $38,000 a year lifestyle and they have a good sense of who they are and what makes them happy. And I know even more people who make $3 million a year, live a $4.9 million a year lifestyle, have no idea who they are or what makes them happy, and are completely swirling, out of control.

[Moderator]

What makes you happy?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Hey, everybody. Hope you're enjoying the podcast right now. Make sure you follow the podcast. That's why I'm interrupting. Let's keep going on this show, but follow the podcast. It'll make my mom super happy. What makes me happy is a couple things on a selfless standpoint. Gary Vee makes me happy. You know, leaving an impact on the world makes me very happy. I am very aware. And I'm a young man. I'm 47 years old. I live a life where more than 1,000 people a day reach out to me and say thank you for something that they didn't buy from me or I sold them. And that feels incredible. So that feels unbelievable. Selfishly, I love spending time with friends and family, you know, that's not selfish. Yeah, I mean, I think the Things. Fair enough. But I think the things that, like, I love getting, you know, I love my hobbies, you know, like, I really love the escapism of rooting for a team. That sucks. I enjoy, like, I really love garage sailing. I'm not kidding. It's amazing to me, like how excited I am that it's like early March. Cause I'm like, couple more weeks, you know? You know, so silly, silly things like that. Probably the thing I enjoy the most is like. And I've done this since I was a 10 year old child. I'm really good at doing what I want to do. The reason I got D's and F's was I wasn't even willing to put in the minimal effort to get Cs and Bs because I was like, fuck this. I'm really good at like having pure conviction. And I'm. But I'm willing to deal with the ramifications of my conviction. I think I'm very good at respecting the game more than wanting what I want. So, like, I love entrepreneurship because I micro lose all the time and I love that. So that I'm just very grateful that I get to do what I get to do. And then I think what makes me happy is the luck of the draw of being the firstborn to very young parents. So I'm 47. My parents are 69 and 67. So just very grateful for that, you know? Yeah, just like, you know, it's funny, I do a lot of things professionally. I'm a very high energy dude. I put out all sorts of content. I get it. But I'm extremely simple. Like wildly simple.

[Moderator]

Love it, love it. Great answer. So I've seen the garage sale thing and I always thought that was really interesting. I remember going to garage sales as a kid myself. Is that where you think you maybe got the love from? Did you go to garage sales as a kid?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I did. That happened because there was a time and place where my content was like, hey, you know, I worked for 12 years at my dad's liquor store. I never made a lot of money, but I lived within my means, so I was able to have some savings. And then Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr came along and I invested that money into it and you can too. And then I started getting emails like, fuck you, I don't have $25,000 to invest in a startup. And I was like. And I started getting enough of that that I was like, that's good, fine. I'll just go further back in my journey and I'll show you what I did when I had $0.00 and like I woke up at 6 o' clock in the morning on a Saturday and went garage saling. Especially when ebay first came out, there was a supply. No different than the way I talk about social media creative, which is like, when there's a new platform that has enough attention on it, there's not enough content for it. So if you go there heavily and aggressively and you post organically, you're gonna get a lot more organic reach for no cost. And that's a land grab of attention, and that runs all the time between paid and organic. And because social is where so much of society is playing out, this is very important. Well, the same thing happened with Internet 1.0. So few people knew what was going on on ebay. There was more people searching for stuff to buy because it was the first time collectors in the late 90s could find Pez dispensers or video games or comic books, not going to a big show or a store. But there wasn't as many people listing them. So everything was super valuable. Like you literally could make $1,000 garage sale with 80 bucks every single Saturday if you were willing to put in the work. Obviously that market evolved, but it's still very true. I still believe to this day that the easiest, AKA hard but easier than other things, that the biggest opportunity for somebody who has $500 to their name is to buy and sell things in the arbitrage of the way society works, between Poshmark and a thrift store and Craigslist and a garage sale and a pawn shop and ebay. And so I got motivated to make that content to help people. And like, now it's super fun because my profile's grown, that content's done well. So now when I garage sale, 10 people that are actively garage selling as well somewhere in New Jersey roll up on me and tell me their stories. And it's really. It's really. Yeah, I learned a lot in garage sales. I learned more in baseball cards shows, I would say. But then I started working for my dad's liquor store when I was 14. And just watching customers behind the register is definitely watching customers at, you know, flea markets, watching customers at baseball card shows, watching customers in a liquor store really framed up my intuitive and skill around following attention and understanding what to put in front of it.

[Moderator]

Great, great answer. And that leads right to the next question. So a lot of us in here are. We run a lot of Facebook ads, Google Ads, very familiar with Social media. And one of the things that we know about you is that you've been very, very good at knowing the up and coming platforms kind of before pretty much everyone else. So what would you say is, are the up and coming platforms currently, besides, you know, Instagram and TikTok, where currently you can get a lot of organic reach? What would be kind of your advice beyond that?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

So Instagram is actually not doing well with organic reach. I'm sure a lot of people are feeling that and TikTok is still doing well. But Jesus Christ, if all of you listened four and a half years ago when I was yelling at the top of my lungs, you could be below average and dominate. Facebook reels is crushing. Everybody here should get very aggressive with Facebook reels. So much attention on that. So many people actually on that. My fastest growing audience on Facebook fan page on my Proper Facebook is 18 to 25, which is completely mind boggling. So I think Facebook is probably the thing that most people are underestimating here. LinkedIn is such a massive opportunity even for consumer goods. If you're selling purses and orange juice and you know anything like, it's not just business. That's a feed that has a lot more attention. YouTube shorts. If you title your videos very smartly, YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world that has incredible long tail potential. You might make a video today that might Crush on search three and a half years from now in YouTube Shorts and be a big driver. So YouTube Shorts is another place. Twitter ads, if you put the URL or the call to action in the copy, is a massive arbitrage right now because a lot of advertisers have run away from Twitter as a political statement which has created a supply and demand opportunity. Those really stand out for me right now, but they all require something that we call, I call at Vayner pac platform and culture. You know, everything I just said is right, but many people here will go home, especially a crew like this, and actually do something about it and it may not work because you're not winning on pack. You don't fully understand how the tone and tenor and the creative strategy of a reel in Facebook works differently than a TikTok. And you may not know exactly the platform nuances of all the things you can do with that reel. Are you using the filters? Are you using the add ons? Where is the URL placed? There's an incredible misunderstanding on how much goes into the creative strategy to make all of this work, especially if you're good at running Ads because the money hides the bad creative. You think you're doing well on your $39 cac when if you did the creative strategy right, it's actually 16. And there's a big fucking difference between 16 and 39, especially at scale.

[Moderator]

Absolutely love it.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

The C in culture is very important. I kind of talked about the P. The C is, do you know what's happening in society? Like, do you know two years ago that mom genes are gonna start trending with young women? Do you know that? Like, XYZ's happening or protein this? Or you know, which rappers are doing well or what couples in Hollywood are doing X or what's the sneaker culture? Or do you understand that health and wellness brands need to be outrageously clean to even be considered by somebody under 25? And da da da, da, da da. Do you understand what's happening in popular culture?

[Moderator]

Do you think that's a really important thing to kind of tailor your content basically to popular culture?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I think it's a massive misstep of most people that they're not taking advantage of the emotion behind popular culture and integrating it into. Into the reality of. Look at how I popped wine. Library TV is how I hit the scene. Seventeen years ago, I did a wine show on YouTube the day YouTube basically came out six months later, and I did a wine show and I tasted wine. But why did it work? It worked because while I was doing the wine tasting, I was referencing what was happening in the world of that day. And so if you think about drive time radio, if you think about daytime television, if you think about things that are shock jocks or podcasts or social media, like, if you make it relevant, people are not winning on relevance. People are trying to sell shit instead of build emotion. And popular culture is one of the pillars of our emotion. Human truths and popular culture. Love it.

[Moderator]

Love it. What do you think about the current state of AI?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I think a lot about it. I think it's an inevitable train that will become oxygen in the way we live. Humans will always become more efficient. I think that people are going to make a lot of emotional decisions about it and make missteps because of it. They're scared of it because it's hurting their business. In the short term, they become too altruistic and think it's taking people's jobs away and don't realize that then they should throw away their iPhone. Cause that took people's jobs away. I think there's a lot to it, but I think that there are going to be enormous amounts of tasks and things that are done in our society today inefficiently by human beings, that will be done by artificial intelligence. And then those humans, and we as humans will learn from that. Other things will be created from that and we will adjust to that reality. It's an enormously big invention and it. And I'm just worried that too many people are putting their head in the sand out of ideology and fear. One of the things that I'm fascinated by is humans capacity to think. Humans are bad at scale. This is where media and information and the way the world works fascinates me. Humans are stunningly amazing. Of the 8 billion people that roam this earth, it is stunning how many are remarkable to at least neutral. Yet we are infatuated with paying attention to the 1% of the 1% of the 1% that are not. And so I'm very optimistic about human beings. I mean, do I think the robots eventually win and kill us? Maybe, but that's just not something that I can spend a whole lot of energy on that's going to happen one way or another way. Right, right. It's either going to happen or it's not.

[Moderator]

So do you kind of on that topic, you know, neuralink and other stuff like it, I can either see you being one of the first to jump into that or one of the last. Where do you think you're going to land there?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I'm not educated enough on neuralink. Are you talking about like, me turning into a robot?

[Moderator]

No. Well, I guess sort of. It's where they can, you know, put a microchip in your brain. You can essentially access the Internet and whatever.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yeah. I think to your point, I feel like, you know, it's funny, it's the same thing I talk about with like, Gary. You're always so da, da, da. I'm like, I'm not predicting shit. I'm just a very fast mover. Once I see shit with something like that, I think I would like, need to see like a couple of hundred to ten thousand people like there. But like, you know, like my one friend said, I'll never do that. It's gonna give me cancer. I'm like, your cell phone's not, you know, like, you know, I always think about the people who were like completely confused about cigarettes back in the day, and we're all like these fucking idiots. And then I'm watching us put like ear po and then the phone to the brain, and I'm just like, fuck, in 20, 30 years, is everyone just gonna be in A really bad spot. And are the kids that are born tomorrow gonna laugh at us of like, hadn't we know that putting hardcore technology into our head 247 was not gonna be a problem. So like before I worry about robots killing us, I try to pay attention to today. And so that's where I'm at.

[Moderator]

All right, let's take some questions from the crowd now. Raise your hand if you're question and then let's run the mic over here.

[Audience Member 1]

How are you sir?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Good, my friend. How are you?

[Audience Member 2]

Good.

[Audience Member 1]

We talked a few times. So I'm still pretty green, I guess, compared to people in this room. And I think we're doing a lot of things right. I don't think we're doing much wrong. But the question I have is how do we do things better? Like if you're into lifting weights, you know, you can lift them this way or you can improve your form and actually grow. You're doing it anyway.

[Moderator]

Are you doing it right?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yes.

[Audience Member 1]

And in the sense of it's the point now where I'm like, we have 16 full time staff members in house with 50 people in the field doing, you know, contractor work and essentially, you know, how do we know what our next hire is? Who are we missing right now? And it's a big question but like.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

How do you think? Yeah, it's very broad. Let's narrow it down. Like what are you most intuitively feeling isn't going well.

[Audience Member 1]

I feel like we're missing the mark on a lot of stuff. Like where I know that our organic content is good. I had to take a little bit of step back last year. We're getting back to really pressing forward, full steam ahead. We have a good staff for media. They're real creative. We have a lot of good stuff. They were very organic. We're not, not doing much paid ads.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Why? Why not so much paid ads?

[Audience Member 1]

That's what I'm saying. Who do we get? Do we move forward with that? It's not my forte. I'm the creative dude. It's like I got 20 people in.

[Moderator]

This room that have ad agencies are good to go.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I'm sure you're going to get. If that's true, you're going to get swarmed. Here's what I would say. You know, the reason I jumped on that is paid is scale. When it's right, you can waste money in paid, you can waste money in organic, but paid has an incredible amount of scale behind it if done right. And so that's definitely an area. It's Back to lifting. Of course there's form and we just talked about that in the whole pack and sock. Strategic organic content, platform and culture strategy. The content can get better. I would call that form. But it's also about using every platform. So like, you know those dudes that are like super fucking huge up here and like have like fucking stick legs, they're not doing leg day. If you're not doing YouTube shorts, if you're not doing LinkedIn, if you're not doing Twitter, if you're not doing Facebook and TikTok and TikTok stories within TikTok and live on Instagram, not just posts. If you're not doing them all well, then you're not working all your muscles.

[Moderator]

Is there an easy way to do that or easy ish way to do that? But not having to have like a team of guys follow you around filming and cutting, you know, video. Because it's very hard for most of.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Us to do, you know, it's only hard mentally. You just haven't decided that's the most important thing your business does.

[Moderator]

Would you say that is the most important thing for most people?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

It is the most important thing.

[Moderator]

It is.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Of course, creating demand and consideration for your business is always the most important thing. Always. If you are able to grow top line revenue in perpetuity, you always have the ability to fix ops and costs. If you don't, you can die. So it's actually very easy. Every single if you told me everybody here does, from 1 million to 100 million in revenue. It's super easy. They're just taking too much money home to buy things.

[Moderator]

We all can do it. We just, I guess we didn't know the importance of it really.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yeah, I think that becomes a thing. Like it's just very simple. And this goes back to the first question, like the most important thing might be to sell your business and go sailing. It might be. But if we're talking next level, like you're in business and you're about that life, well, I would argue there's nothing one can tell me here that is going to get me more excited than having them completely commit to creating demand. It's very hard for me to think, even if you're inefficient, a lot of people, when they're inefficient, spend all their time on defense. You know, I don't. This is gonna be a very nerdy sports reference, but there used to be a late 80s basketball team called Loyola Marymount and they used to beat teams like 179 to 157. It was like wild. This is an era of like 80 point games, 50 point games, and I've always stuck with that. I'm like, damn, that's how I do business. I'm going to win. 179 to 154. And so, yeah, I think to your point, I think way too many people in this room think it's a nice to have. It's one of the things. It's very clear to me that most people don't understand. It's the thing. And I think once you decide it's the thing, you start realizing how much more money you can put against it, more time you can put against it. Yeah, this just goes back down to like, where is your actual ambition?

[Moderator]

It's the thing, I think. Take that away. That's great. Let's get a few more questions in here.

[Audience Member 1]

One quick follow up. How do you know who the next hire in your organization is? Like, when is the time to have a cfo? Is that the right next hire? Who is the next person?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yeah, you. Really. For me, it's always what is the biggest pain point and what am I spending the most time on to that I don't want to be doing? What am I spending the most time on that I don't want to be doing? Is the next hire 100%.

[Audience Member 1]

So I've never posted a Facebook reel ever, but I will today before probably.

[Moderator]

But so that's the most important thing. Got it.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

How do we do it to all.

[Audience Member 1]

The channels at once? I mean, there's nothing more that I hate watching a reel or something. And all the text is at the bottom.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Right.

[Audience Member 1]

So sometimes the text needs to be at the top. Is there a certain tool that you like or something to get across all those platforms? Because we probably should post organically to every single one versus using hootsuite or something like that.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yeah, I think that's right. I like people. That's the tool. You know, I just think it's a commitment of time and people.

[Moderator]

People IO or people Humans.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You know, I really think we need to make a bigger commitment to humans. Yeah, look, I mean, again, if this was all first day I'm starting my journey, I'd have to talk about what you're gonna do about it. But again, if I'm Hearing this right, 1 to 100 million in revenue, you need to take less money off the table and put it into people to do social media content at scale and run ads. And to maximize the efficiency, you need to Audit every person you have and what they actually do for your business. And most of all, you need to audit yourself. There's not a person in this room, me included, that doesn't have meetings on their calendar next week that are double too long. And most of my meetings are 15 minutes.

[Moderator]

That's double too long.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Like the amount of, like the amount of big shots in this room who take 90 minute meetings that are actually seven minutes worth of meeting is staggering. With you there, meetings are killing you. Absolutely killing you. Hey, Gary, question for you.

[Audience Member 1]

What's been your most rewarding and most challenging business venture?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Why? Most rewarding was building my dad's business for him. And it was the most challenging. The first 12 years of my career are the most interesting of my career. To be 22 and have so much confidence and passion and ambition and be able to go into a mental place that you're gonna spend the next decade or two building a business for, not yourself even, you know, even if it's your dad, it's not for yourself. And be grossly undercompensated the whole time. And work in a retail environment six or seven days a week for 13 to 17 hours a day was just like, you know that, you know Rocky iv? Do you know that movie Rocky iv? You know how he gets ready for Drago and he's like in the snow with the fucking log on his back and just like doing that shit. I just basically did that for 12 years. Like, it was just such a fucking, like, I'm gonna turn off everything and just go to the woods and disappear for 12 years. And it's just super rewarding. Cause I really wanted to do that for my parents. But it also meant that at 34, I basically had zero money. And that required a level of conviction and humility that has serviced me really well. You know, a lot of people, when they really know my story, like the actual people that watched it from my teenage years, they're flabbergasted by the level of growth from 34 to 47 the last 13 years. And for me, when I think about it, I'm like, it was just the training, you know, I was in such a like fucking crazy mental place that once I had freedom to do it for myself, I just went so hard and so creative. And so it was super rewarding, but incredibly challenging because especially as I got into my late 20s, early 30s, like when I went to go buy an apartment and they laughed me out of the bank. Cause they're like, you don't have anything. I'm like, right? I don't have anything. I don't own shit. I have no money. I'm like, thinking like, you know, I just took a business from 3 to 75 billion. I'm like, fucking really good. And they're like, this is cute, but you don't own anything. You have nothing. I'm like, I remember walking out of there, I was, like, pumped. I was like, yeah, I have nothing. You know, like, it was really motivating in a weird way. And so, you know, that was hard. And this is why I make so much content about patience, listening to these fuckers at 27 who are like. And I'm like, you fucking asshole. I was making $63,000 a year at 27, working in a fucking liquor store. You're way ahead of me. Stop crying and, like, figure this out. Ashley Shank over here.

[Audience Member 1]

Young agency on earth. We grew really fast.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

We have 45 people hit eight figures this year.

[Audience Member 2]

But I'm very curious.

[Audience Member 1]

You built a machine. What were some of the pivotal decisions.

[Audience Member 2]

That you made that really deeply impacted.

[Audience Member 1]

How he is with this?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Trying to make no profit for as long as possible. So now I'm going to really fucking give you a brain twist after what I just said to him. So now I have no money, and I start a new business, and I decide to make no money. Right. So Vayner started in 09. First two years, AJ really ran it. I still had to run the business. Plus, I wrote crush it, and the Gary Vee thing started happening. So we did 1.3 million the first year, 3.7 the next year. And then I came full time, and we went from 3.7 to 14 and from 14 to 27. From 27 to 49. And the whole time, we poured all the money back into business and paid each other $100,000. The pivotal decision was feeding the business. Not my ego or my bank account or my vices.

[Moderator]

All right, so we have time for one more quick question. Then we got to move to the meet and greet questionnaire.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Spank.

[Moderator]

How are you, Gary?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Good, brother.

[Audience Member 2]

You know, you watched the hobby state growth of my business since we had this together six years ago, and we had a really profound growth scale. January and February of this year, we've seen 23% slide of our MRR because of tools like AI.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Makes sense.

[Audience Member 2]

Trying to figure out. And I'm not scared of AI.

[Moderator]

I embrace it.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I love this.

[Audience Member 2]

It's amazing.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yep.

[Audience Member 2]

Trying to figure out how to pivot the business now so that the clients who think that AI is going to magically do a better job than a human who understands emotion and context gets us to stop this shed. Because we have six more months of this. We're fucking out of business.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Why?

[Audience Member 2]

If all of our MRR goes away.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Well, you mean six more months where 100% goes away.

[Audience Member 2]

I mean 23% every two months.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I see. Right. And how many clients is it we've got?

[Audience Member 2]

Well, we've got thousands.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yeah. So I think also you know that that won't happen right back here. I do, yes.

[Audience Member 2]

But emotionally, I'm like, what the fuck?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yeah.

[Audience Member 2]

I mean, you see a 23 drop in MRR in two months.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

That's huge. Of course. But it also probably speaks to how you handled your business last year. Right. So back to what we were talking about earlier. Spank. It comes down to very simply this. You're either on offense or you're on defense. Most people think there's an in between. There's not. And so my concern is that when you rest on laurels, and I want to know about year four and five of that six, or five and six, I want to know everything you did the last 18 months. I believe that is a bigger indicator of what's happening than AI. Well, 20. 21 was a. Yeah, but it didn't have to be.

[Moderator]

Right, true.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I know.

[Audience Member 2]

And thank you for being here today.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Appreciate it. It's always good to see you to put some sprinkles and cherry on that one. You're always on offense or you're always on defense. And so we have things like that happen all the time. There's always things going on. Right. The CEO of our biggest client decides to go completely. 360, you know, last year or the year before at Vayner. And like, we went from we're gonna double your business to you're out of business with us, and, like, that's your biggest revenue thing. Had we not been on offense at scale, different companies, different ideas, different services, well, we would have been vulnerable. Meanwhile, it turned into, like, one of the biggest events in our company. Because when everyone on that business saw how I reacted with. Which was cool and like, I need to go back to my meeting, it became a culture driver instead of a financial concern. So I think what you need to think about is you can no longer just offer what you're offering, which is exciting because you were capable of creating an offer six years ago that worked, which means you're capable of doing that now. And there's forever needs. There's forever needs. Live production influencer marketing live streaming media for you, right? Like, there's, you know, strategy. There's. There's unlimited needs. There's something I'm inventing right now called Merch's marketing. Like, literally, merch as a marketing tool. Apparel as a driver for brand building. Like, you can innovate in perpetuity if you want to. The problem is so many of us, me included. I had an epiphany at 28. I had my first passive. My first and probably only passive year as an entrepreneur. Just, it was passive. I wasn't an offense. I had made it. I did it for my dad. And I was, you know, just in a life cycle where I was like, wow, that was a weird year. 28 to 20. I was a very different entrepreneur than any other year. And it was just like, I was cruising, you know, which is fine. Like, I think that's cool. And I think it's likely that you were not on the offense enough the last two years. And you need to get on the offense now. And for everybody else who's not declining, you never want to be in a place where you're triggered into offense because of defense. That's way less fun. It's more fun to just always be on offense until you sell it or you give it to somebody or whatever you do. Offense, offense, offense, everybody. If you enjoyed this podcast, please go back and look at the prior episodes. They're loaded. I appreciate your attention, and thanks for being part of this journey. See you later.