The Exact Blueprint for Scaling Your Personal Brand, Growing Your Business, and the 500 Posts Rule

Summary

The GaryVee Audio Experience

Episode: "The Exact Blueprint for Scaling Your Personal Brand, Growing Your Business, and the 500 Posts Rule"

Date: October 9, 2025
Host: Gary Vaynerchuk

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Episode Overview

In this dynamic, advice-packed roundtable, Gary Vaynerchuk coaches a group of entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds—including wine, restaurants, e-commerce, early education, and DTC retail—on how to scale their personal brands and businesses in 2025’s fast-moving digital landscape. Gary shares his celebrated no-nonsense tactics: producing massive amounts of content (the “500 posts rule”), leveraging TikTok’s unsaturated organic reach, and using storytelling/pre-sales to drive community and cash flow. The episode is brimming with real founder questions, tactical advice, and signature GaryVee energy.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The 500 Posts Rule & Relentless Content Creation

• Consistency & Volume Matter

  • Gary stresses that most people underpost and overthink. To make progress with personal branding (especially on TikTok), aim for three posts a day, every day.
  • Quote (00:00, 17:25):
    “Three posts a day to the best of your ability. The other thing that people will do wrong with what I just said is they'll post once every three days. That's like doing a pushup and thinking you're doing good health and wellness.” — Gary Vee

• Don’t Worry About Perfection or Low Views

  • TikTok’s interest-based algorithm can turn any post viral, regardless of your previous engagement numbers.
  • Quote (17:50): “Don't worry about anything literally, besides making it. You're not gonna be right anyway...you almost have to go through, like, almost—think of it this way—500 posts before you're allowed to think what's gonna work.” — Gary Vee

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2. Personal Branding While Employed

• Navigating NDAs and Corporate Restrictions:
  Inga (Tesla employee) asks how to build her personal brand without risking her day job.

  • Gary suggests creating content that avoids mentioning the employer, focusing instead on broad expertise (e.g., personal finance)—especially on TikTok.
  • If possible, reduce living expenses to save up and buy time to go all-in, or leverage TikTok to start building an audience now.
  • Quote (14:27): “You can start building brand on TikTok, believe it or not, without any reference to Tesla or Tesla in your bio. There's a huge white space for every business on here right now on TikTok, and all of you are going to blow it.” — Gary Vee

• Hacking Around Content Anxiety

  • Gary debunks the myth that you have to be high energy or on camera. All personalities, styles, and voices work if the content provides value.
  • Quote (18:36): “A lot of people think they have to be so high energy. I'm like, no-no, you have to be yourself...It comes down to: do you know what you're talking about and do you know the platform you’re producing on?” — Gary Vee

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3. Scaling Niche & Local Brands Nationally

• Balance Between Branding and Sales
  Doug (Northern Lights Winery) asks about balancing community building vs. sales in their expansion.

  • Gary asserts that the balance depends on your end goal (selling the company, legacy, etc.).
  • Don’t assume your local market is maxed out—most brands underperform locally.
  • Live humbly to reinvest as much as possible in the business.
  • Quote (23:35): “You don't have as big of a local base as you think. Everyone makes that mistake...The rule is: if living humbly as possible for as long as possible, that means your business is getting more of the money.” — Gary Vee

• Disrupting Traditional Content in Old Industries

  • Use TikTok and creative content to reach non-wine drinkers; it’s all about interest-based content, not generic wine prestige.
  • Quote (25:33): “If you make content that shows people pairing blueberry wine with pancakes...people here might be interested in a world where they’re not interested—because you talked about wine differently.” — Gary Vee

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4. Partnerships, Funding, and Pace of Growth

• On Taking On Partners

  • Jennifer (restaurant owner) asks when to bring on partners.
  • Gary’s advice: avoid outside partners if possible. Rapid growth often leads to loss of control.
  • Consider new financing tools, like Clearco, or traditional loans to keep equity.
  • Quote (30:34): “[Take on a partner] never, if you can help it...I had a meeting with my accountant today...he was flabbergasted that I haven't even reached back out [to a huge VC]. I kind of had my own realization—it's the advice I’m giving you now, which is like, I don’t like it.” — Gary Vee

• Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) As Brand Expansion

  • Both for food/winery/restaurant owners: Have a signature product (e.g., mustard, jam, olive oil) that can be sold DTC as a separate brand to scratch the entrepreneurial itch and scale beyond local reach.
  • Quote (35:30): “You create something that lives within your restaurant...that then can be spun out to be a global DTC CPG brand.” — Gary Vee

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5. People, Culture, and Scaling Teams

• Grow Employees Internally

  • Garrett (early education) discusses staff costs vs. developing talent from within.
  • Gary champions “incubating” talent over hiring pre-existing “experts” with baggage from other systems.
  • Quote (37:30): “I would spend all my energy on building an incubator internally to create people and retain people.” — Gary Vee

• Never Compromise on Culture

  • The “strongest culture” wins, even if it means dismissing high performers who damage ethos.
  • Quote (39:58): “The biggest vulnerability in your company is your weakest cultural employee.” — Gary Vee

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6. Cash Flow, Delegation & Pre-Sales for Small Businesses

• Letting the Customer Decide Quality

  • Elizabeth & Aaron (goat farm & e-commerce): How to delegate and maintain quality?
  • Gary: Let customers judge quality—otherwise ego will stall growth.
  • Quote (47:43): “Let the customer judge it. Most people... think they lose those customers if the job’s wrong, but then you’ll adjust... Ego’s hurting you.” — Gary Vee

• Always Pre-Sell New Products

  • If margin/cash is tight, pre-sell everything new—books, toys, etc.—to avoid cash flow crunch.
  • Quote (53:53): “You have a rabid community that trusts you...Every time you do a fucking book or a stuffed animal or whatever the fuck else, you always pre-sell it.” — Gary Vee

• Don’t Monetize Community Freely

  • Aggressive asks (like requiring payment to chat) may hurt brand trust more than you realize.
  • Quote (55:44): “From a brand perception, it seems like you’re trying to monetize too much. I promise, that’s a very aggressive ask.” — Gary Vee

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7. TikTok: The Essential Platform

• Everyone is Underutilizing TikTok

  • Gary is adamant: TikTok is 2025’s land grab for organic reach. If you don’t leverage the platform soon, you’ll regret it.
  • Quote (27:13, 72:34): “TikTok is a dream come true. It’s been years since we’ve had this...If you do not go ham on TikTok content, you will be making such a regretful moment because we’ve got two more years of this and then it’s going to go away.” — Gary Vee

• Experiment with All Kinds of Formats

  • If one style doesn't work (e.g., “document, don’t create”), try new things until something hits. It's a numbers game.

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8. Building & Owning Your Audience

• Community Platforms Like Discord
  • Beyond social—create deeper connections and community through platforms like Discord. They foster loyalty, conversions, and self-sustaining tribes—especially for young parent communities, food brands, and wine clubs.

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9. Retailers: From Curator to Brand Builder

• Don’t Rely Only on Carrying Brands—Build Your Own

  • Brian & Neha (DTC food store) are pushed to create private label products, not just be a reseller—emulate the Wine Library > Empathy Wines playbook.
  • Quote (66:24): “Make a legendary Lion Barbecue Sauce right away...There’s a lot of comp stores...that have plenty of private labels at the upper premium level...If you stumble into pay dirt...that gets real fun.” — Gary Vee

• Make Viral Consumer-Focused Content

  • Stop making B2B-focused podcasts or behind-the-scenes content—focus on what appeals to end consumers (e.g., taste tests, how food looks/tastes/feels).
  • Quote (62:14): “Don’t try to sell food on altruism...People care about if the jam looks good when you put it on the bagel and then they just buy the jam. You’re too nerdy right now.” — Gary Vee

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “500 posts before you’re allowed to think what’s going to work.” (18:20)
• “If you can live as humbly as possible for as long as possible, your business gets more of the money.” (24:26)
• “The biggest vulnerability in your company is your weakest cultural employee.” (39:58)
• “Every time you do a book or a stuffed animal...you always pre-sell it. Because you have a rabid community that trusts you.” (53:53)
• “TikTok is a dream come true...if you do not go ham on TikTok content, you will be making such a regretful moment.” (72:34)
• “Don’t try to sell food on altruism...You’re too nerdy right now, okay?...People care about if the jam looks good.” (62:14)

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00 – 00:51: Gary opens with the 500 Posts Rule & TikTok algorithm
• 09:32 – 19:08: Inga’s branding dilemma and Gary’s TikTok tactics for employees
• 20:16 – 28:12: Doug/Northern Lights Winery: balancing sales, content, and expansion
• 30:34 – 36:38: Jennifer/Real & Rosemary: on partners, funding, and DTC CPG products
• 36:46 – 42:29: Garrett/Ohana School: Building culture & internal leadership
• 43:17 – 57:10: Aaron & Elizabeth/Goat Soap: Delegation, quality, pre-sales, and community
• 58:37 – 67:39: Neha & Brian/Switch Grocery: Building their own retail brand, private labeling, and content
• 72:05 – End: Final advice: Go “all in” on TikTok and Discord; presale everything; build and nurture communities

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Closing Guidance

Gary leaves the group with actionable imperatives:

• Fall in love with pre-sales for cash flow and demand validation.
• Go all in on TikTok—don’t miss the “window of underpriced reach.”
• Invest in true community-building (Discord, online tribes).
• Double-down on what’s working, but allow 20-30% bandwidth for creative experiments.

The message: There are no shortcuts, but there are wide-open opportunities for those who produce relentlessly, adapt quickly, and audaciously own their audience.

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This summary is designed for entrepreneurs craving the raw, tactical, and energetic playbook of Gary Vaynerchuk’s 2025 mindset: Be prolific, be authentic, build communities, and use every tool (especially TikTok) before the window closes.

Transcript

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Three posts a day to the best of your ability. The other thing that people do wrong with what I just said is they'll post once every three days. That's like, that's like doing a push up and thinking you're doing good health and wellness. The good news with TikTok is it's completely based on interest. So you can post something that gets 14 views and the next one might get 47,000. This is the GaryVee audio experience. So because you're succumbing to the algorithm, get out of your own head, like, don't worry about anything literally, besides making it, you're not going to be, you're not going to be right anyway. So you almost have to go through, like almost think of it this way, 500 posts before you're allowed to think what's going to work. You don't like being on camera because you feel self conscious. You don't like how your voice sounds. You don't like, like you can hack around everything. Like a lot of people who follow me, they think they have to be so high energy. I'm like, no, no, you have to be yourself.

[Brian]

Hey.

[Moderator Joe]

Hey, Gary. How you doing?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I am well. Hey, Britt.

[Elizabeth Simon]

Hey Joe.

[Moderator Joe]

Welcome everybody. Thank you, Brittany, for everything. Appreciate it so much. And we're going to get started here for you, Gary, because I know you're, you're pretty busy and we want to get this plugged in. So let's do a quick little round robin, we'll go around the the room. I'm going to introduce you to gary, give quick 30 second high level, just vital signs of you and your company. Then we'll come back around, we'll spotlight you and you can have your time with Gary. So we're going to start out in Vancouver, big area with Inga Von Olak who is working on one of the biggest brands in the world. But she's here to really unlock her personal brand. So Inga, say hi to Gary.

[Inga Von Olak]

Oh, hi Gary.

[Neha]

Hi.

[Doug Bell]

How are you here?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Great.

[Doug Bell]

I'm super excited. Session's been really great.

[Inga Von Olak]

Yeah. I'm here to start working on my personal brand and you know, I've made a ton of money for other people in my life and ready to, ready to get myself out there.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

That's awesome.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Yeah.

[Moderator Joe]

And sticking in the Great White north, we've got a guy that's operating in one of your favorite spaces, Gary. He is a serial entrepreneur but he also owns a winery up there in bc. Doug Bell, say hi to Gary.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Hey Gary. Great to be here. Thanks so much for dropping in. And yeah, this is a second generation entrepreneur. I took over my family group of companies 14 years ago when I was 22 and have had the fortune of growing that business quite a bit. And now we're just kind of looking at getting into, you know, new businesses, building existing businesses. And we have Canada's largest fruit winery, which I constructed in 2015. So a bit of a different concept and looking forward to chatting about it.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Awesome. Obviously feel very comfortable in that combo.

[Moderator Joe]

Another combo you'll probably feel pretty comfortable with is I'm going to draw out the accent a little bit because we're going to go down to Birmingham, Alabama and say hi to Jennifer Carlson who owns a slew of restaurants and different brands now in that area. J.C. say hi.

[Doug Bell]

Hey, Gary. Super happy to be here today. My husband and I own a polished, fast casual restaurant. We have two locations right now, getting ready to open a third one this spring. And we also have a coffee concept here in Birmingham. We're looking to grow and scale our brand and that's why we're here.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Awesome. Thanks for being here.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Yeah.

[Moderator Joe]

And over to Virginia, we've got Garrett Wilhelm. Garrett, say hi to Gary.

[Garrett Wilhelm]

What's up, Gary? Thank you so much for this opportunity and time. I know your time is valuable. I own early education schools. Childcare is in the area. I saw a gap in the education system in not preparing our kids for the actual future. And knowing that permanent learning is done in infancy to six, six years old. I decided to see a space that I was going to attack. And so I have two brands, the Ohana School and Creative Gardens. And I'm growing a network of schools across the country.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Very cool. I like it a lot. Thank you.

[Moderator Joe]

Next up, we have Doug and Brennan who are in the NFT space. Doug, Brennan, go ahead and say hi to Gary.

[Doug Bell]

Hi, Doug, my partner. Hi, Gary, my partner.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Well, that's still, it's still nice to.

[Moderator Joe]

Say hi to Doug.

[Doug Bell]

I've talked to him for a couple hours.

[Neha]

Yes.

[Doug Bell]

So my partner Doug and I, based in Philadelphia, longtime real estate investors, newly hotel owners, boutique hotel owners, and about to dip our toe into the NFT space.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Very cool.

[Doug Bell]

Pleased to meet you.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Nice to meet you, Doug. How are you? I'm doing great. Doing great. I think I first met you ten.

[Brian]

Years ago at Yonex Underground event. So good to be with you again.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And as Brennan said, we're getting ready.

[Brian]

To launch a NFT around Women empowerment.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Very cool.

[Moderator Joe]

And if you're interested in taking your kids, Gary, up to Connecticut to See some goats. We've got Aaron and Elizabeth Simon who own one of the awesome company up in Connecticut.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

I'll let them explain a little bit more to you.

[Aaron Simon]

And Gary, I would invite you to come see goats any day. You are a true goat in my mind. You might remember me. I did a couple activations with Vayner Sports with our barbecue sauce brand back in the day and now we've created a substantial community about 30,000 strong. And my wife makes super fancy high end goat milk soap now and we all e commerce and we just opened our own retail store here on the farm.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I love it. You also look remarkably cozy which is putting me in a good mood.

[Brian]

Good.

[Elizabeth Simon]

How do we do it?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

So super premium goat milk soap.

[Aaron Simon]

Yeah, I have some here if you want to see it where we go to.

[Elizabeth Simon]

We actually. I think what makes us really unique too is that you can watch the goats 247 on our YouTube channel.

[Brian]

Love.

[Elizabeth Simon]

And you can watch them from conception to birth.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And so smart.

[Elizabeth Simon]

So we teach everybody about like yep. How we are going to care that goes into our product and everything.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

It's really good. I love it. I'm super into these kind of businesses. Okay, awesome.

[Moderator Joe]

And then lastly we have Neha and Brian up in Toronto. They're essentially like a cross between like a James or Cini because they're both CPAs, but they know a lot about DTC E commerce and they run a grocery store up there. So Neha and Brian say hi.

[Doug Bell]

Hi Gary.

[Neha]

I like Neha. I'm reading your book every night right now. So I like the exercises.

[Doug Bell]

Congratulations.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Thank you. Anything, anything stand out so far?

[Neha]

Yeah, just the exercises because a lot of the concepts you talk about are really here. And what stood out to me was that. And then the other thing was the story about the woman who started a blueberry jam.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I love it with her kit.

[Doug Bell]

And.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And for yourself. Yeah, I'm really glad you attached to that one. I. For everybody who's not reading the book, I did a bunch of scenarios to kind of like re. I feel like I do best in trying to make my point in a story and the one that Neha is referring to really got me like it's such a classic female entrepreneur email that I get. You know, it's what's great is I'm just listening all the time. So that scenario is the combination of at this point maybe 10,000 emails or direct messages from women in detail of like what they go through in that scenario. And I'm really glad you attached to it. Ironically, I just Tweeted a piece of data from people doing the exercises or tweeting about the book. It's really very funny, actually. It's, it's based on the first 739 tweets of people talking about what their weaknesses are. Here's the best one. This is like so meta. The one that has the least responses to what their weakness is is humility, which in itself is the meta of the whole thing. Like only 16 of 739 people said their core weakness is humility, which is the whole punchline of the whole thing. Anyway, nonetheless, go ahead.

[Neha]

So I'm Neha, I run Switch grocery and we're an online retail store, Gary.

[Doug Bell]

In Canada.

[Neha]

We find food brands faster than traditional grocery stores. So find food brands, bring them to Canadians, ship across Canada. We're a highly social company. And I'll turn it over to my co founder, Brian Fine.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

How are you? Hi, Gary.

[Brian]

Good, how are you doing? Well, I don't have the time to add beyond Neha said, as Joe said, Neha and I are also both CPAs accountants, so there's that as well.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

The math of the company is strong.

[Brian]

The math of the company is strong. And somehow Neha has also learned the social marketing. I'm not there yet. I only joined full time four months ago, so I haven't got there. But yeah, we're both.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And Neha, Brian, when you talk about find, like you're just finding emerging brands quicker, high quality emerging brands quicker. So you have some competitive advantage of like whether it's exclusivity or just storytelling.

[Brian]

Blah, blah, blah, exclusivity a lot of the time. Exactly.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You're, you're getting, you're, you're making, you're making deals where whether how much you buy or the package, you're just expanding to the market. You're getting a six or 12 month head start.

[Brian]

A lot of the US brands don't want to deal with Canadian customs, all that. So we have, we deal with all that and then as a result they give us some of them. We're on like third, fourth year exclusivity because they see no reason to change. Good for you.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Very cool. All right, Rock and roll.

[Moderator Joe]

Yes. Yeah, I'm gonna go flip it first over to Inga and we're gonna go with her. So Inga, let me just, and just.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

To remind everybody, you know, obviously you've been go through the day. This is the time to get very, very narrow and very, very selfish. Like what is your actual question? Everybody will find ironically value from Each other, but please, fire away.

[Moderator Joe]

Inga, you're up.

[Inga Von Olak]

Thanks.

[Doug Bell]

Hey, Gary.

[Inga Von Olak]

So I. I was just talking to Brittany about this, but I'm really kind of struggling to figure out how to separate my day job from, like, all the other personal branding things that I want to do.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

When you were talking, for some reason, my headphones weren't working super well. I caught the tail end. But I was going to ask you up front. What is job again? Remind me.

[Inga Von Olak]

So, I work for Tesla in operations and I, you know, I like, I haven't really done anything on social because I've been with Tessa for almost five years and you know, we're under very strict NDAs. And.

[Neha]

Yes.

[Inga Von Olak]

You know, I just, it just like I couldn't figure out how to talk about.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And why do you want to. And why do you want to make personal brand content?

[Inga Von Olak]

Because I feel like I have a lot to say, I have a lot to give. I have a lot to any of you that.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Without disclosing where you work or without. Or without referencing anything and talking in general.

[Inga Von Olak]

Totally. It's just that my main platform is on LinkedIn and that's where I have a current. A bit of a base. I have.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Is the company giving you any headaches for putting out content?

[Inga Von Olak]

No, not yet. I haven't really. Like I said, I haven't. I went on LinkedIn in 2015 and I. I knew that I, you know, wanted to build something in the future and I started building up a network and I, you know, I have 30,000 followers, which is not a lot, but it's a lot. It's not nothing.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

No, it's a lot.

[Inga Von Olak]

But I haven't been engaging them and I feel like that's sort of my place. That's understandable.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And, And I apologize for interrupting because I just want to give you as much value as possible. What. What was. Why'd you sign up for this? What is the KPI? What would you like to happen?

[Inga Von Olak]

I ultimately would like to, like, deliver value to people who struggle with the things that I see people struggle with all the time and ultimately monetize.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Got it. And how would you like to monetize? At least as a hypothesis right now.

[Inga Von Olak]

I. I mean, I guess I would like to, like, provide. Provide training materials. Provide, you know, is your hope to.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

So you're in a pickle where you want to build personal brand to monetize, but you'd like to do that while you're still getting paid by Tesla, but you're half pregnant because you can only go so far because you work at Tesla. Yes, yes. So in this scenario, I think there's a couple things to think about. One, you can start building brand on TikTok, believe it or not, without any reference to Tesla or Tesla in your bio. And there's a huge white space for every business on here right now on TikTok, and all of you are going to blow it. I don't know what else to say. That's the word I'm going to use. Organic reaches through the moon. 30 and 40 and 30 year olds are on the platform at scale. You can literally post one video and many more people will buy your fruit, wine or buy your, you know, ketchup that you're exclusive in Canada to, or sign up for your nursery school. Like everybody here is grossly underestimating how much they can do on TikTok, because TikTok is now Instagram from seven years ago. But you're going to wait another three years before you treat it that way. Like the little rant I just made right now for 74 seconds is a hundred percent a massive ROI to what you spent on this program if you actually listened to me and do something about it. So, so for you, you're in a really tough spot because you could either save money and like cut down your cost of living so that you can buy yourself an entire 18 months to not work at Tesla and go all in, or you can go ham on something like TikTok, which is a blessing because there's not a lot of places where you can grow that fast and do these. You know, if you look at what's going on on TikTok right now, most of you in the world 24 months ago were like, well, I'm not going to dance on there, so what am I doing here? Right? And if you look carefully, there is some crazy content being produced on the platform right now. ASMR type cooking stuff, um, just like educational stuff. Like it's really happening.

[Moderator Joe]

And Gary, I shared with her the example of Ms. Excel earlier, who's got a million followers. She never puts her Facebook camera. It's just Excel tips.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

That's right. So, you know, I think for you really specifically, if you're going to do it while you're employed at Tesla, it's going to be TikTok. The other option is to stop spending money for two years on anything but food and shelter so that you can save it and you can then give yourself two years to then like. Right. Cause that's the other. And by the way, you might have won the lotto. Or made great investments, if you can do that now. But. But you've gotta recognize that you can't. You can't change reality. And the reality is, you know, this. You're playing this weird game where, like, if you get successful at it, then they're gonna see it, and that's gonna be the problem. Yeah, yeah. Just fun. This, like, vicious game.

[Doug Bell]

Yeah.

[Inga Von Olak]

And the pro. I guess part of the problem is that I. I actually, like, really love my job. And I. I love.

[Doug Bell]

And.

[Inga Von Olak]

And I. I don't. I am in complete position to quit my job. I never have to work again.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Okay, so then can I. Understood. So that. Yeah, five years of Tesla is a good move. You know, I think, you know, there's a left field one you might want to really go inside yourself and find out if you. So, for example, for me, right, I'm an entrepreneur, but, boy, do I have a lot of Guidance counselor, you know, Reverend psychologist. You know, you might be able to scratch your emotional itch by helping people. Not in the subject matter of business and, like, ops. Well, my.

[Inga Von Olak]

My whole other thing is, like, around personal finance. And, um, I. It's not something I do at all for my work, but I'm, like, really good at it. I coach.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

That gets really interesting to me, because then you can have your cake and eat it too.

[Doug Bell]

Okay.

[Inga Von Olak]

So that's what I need to do.

[Doug Bell]

I just need to.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And I would do it on TikTok hard because, A, it will work. B, the quicker you can help the youngsters that stumble on it, the bigger.

[Inga Von Olak]

Thing, people, especially women, have, like, no clue, and they get left behind.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And I'm disputed. I always hear this, especially women, especially minorities. I always say this to my good friends. I'm like, the amount of white men that have no idea how to manage your fucking money is extraordinary. So let's not, like, kid ourselves. Like every. Like the. The reason is from 0 to 18. Back to our good friend Garrett here. The world is broken. The education system of the world is broken. How the fuck did I go through 18 years of school and not learn anything about basic money management?

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Yeah.

[Brian]

Brutal.

[Doug Bell]

Absolutely.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I think you should go ham. On Instagram. Excuse me, on TikTok, all of them. But TikTok, specifically on this subject matter will dominate. And there's a lot of people out there on it, But I have a funny feeling you could do well just by spending a few seconds even with you.

[Inga Von Olak]

Amazing.

[Doug Bell]

Thank you so much.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

That's really helpful. It will work. Yeah. So we're gonna do three. Three Times a day to the best of your ability. Three posts a day to the best of your ability. The other thing that people will do wrong with what I just said is they'll post once every three days. That's like. That's like doing a pushup and thinking you're doing good health and wellness. Yeah, yeah.

[Inga Von Olak]

I gotta get outta my own head.

[Doug Bell]

It's my problem.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

The good news with TikTok is it's completely based on interest. So you can post something that gets 14 views and the next one might get 47,000. So because you're succumbing to the algorithm, get out of your own head. Like, don't worry about anything literally, besides making it. You're not gonna be, you're not gonna be right anyway. Like, you don't have enough experience to be right of what's gonna work. So you almost have to go through, like, almost. Think of it this way, 500 posts before you're allowed to think what's gonna work.

[Doug Bell]

Okay, that's helpful.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And back to his point again. Other things that a lot of you might be thinking through. You don't like being on camera because you feel self conscious. You don't like how your voice sounds. You don't like, like you could hack around everything.

[Inga Von Olak]

Okay.

[Doug Bell]

I love it.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Like, a lot of people who follow me, they think they have to be so high energy. I'm like, no, no, you have to be yourself. Everybody, like the 15 years on the Internet is very clear. All versions work pretty. Not pretty, high energy, low energy, monotone, high pitch. Like, all, all of it works. It comes down to, do you know what you're talking about and do you know the platform that you're producing on? So what you need to do is now go consume a ton of TikTok information content to then get a sense.

[Inga Von Olak]

Okay, doing it. Thanks, Gary.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You got it.

[Moderator Joe]

All right, Doug Bell, you are up, sir.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I like the CPA data. Real quick in the chat, the math was running.

[Neha]

Go ahead.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Yeah, yeah, thanks so much, Gary. Just a bit of a preamble for you. So Northern Lights Winery is my brand. We're Canada's largest fruit winery. Started about six years ago. Family company, found a group of companies and we're a super niche brand in that we obviously are making wines from things other than grapes. So cranberry, strawberry, rhubarb, blueberry, you name it, BlackBerry, all that kind of stuff. And because we're in such a niche market, there's a lot of education, but, you know, we're not trying to sell to People who don't want to be sold to. We really want to kind of focus and find our consumers within our area. We've been extremely successful because we have built this really nice community of people within our region that really kind of know us and love us. But as we're getting further and further away, it's kind of harder to connect with people in that same manner. So we're not able to kind of grow as fast as we get further away from our home base.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Of course they're very, very different businesses. One's a local business, one's a scaled brand play.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

That's right. So I mean we're kind of in an interesting place Cause we're struggling with the need to create the community and brand awareness with also our desire to grow to become one of the more well known brands and really can create experiences for people across the country. And so in that we're always getting this push and pull of how much time do we spend branding and how much time do we spend on sales and how do we kind of balance that? So that's kind of my first question how we do that?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Well, our push and pull with whom? You yourself? In the mirror?

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

No, with us and ourself. Yeah, I mean with our sales team and with ourselves. Right. In terms of.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I think you can really run the gamut of 80, 20 in either direction depending on what you're trying to accomplish.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Yeah, what we want to accomplish, we want to create more experiences with people and we want them to connect with us. I understand that.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Sorry, that's the micro. I'm going macro. Are you planning on selling the business?

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

No, not at any time. Not anytime soon.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Good news. Then you have no problem. I mean this. I'm going to break this down for you. I understand everything you're saying. It's. You're just talking about pacing now. Yeah.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Right.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

The answer is, the answer is both can work. It just depends. Honestly, I think it comes down to what you like more. If it's second gen and you're thinking like not anytime soon and like and this is where I need real answers. If you're like no, Gary, actually I'm second gen and I'm the guy who I want to sell it to a PE firm in six years, well that's different. If you're telling me 21 years, well that's different. So like that's the answer to your question comes from the North Star. It's why you know James yous know James comes in, knows exactly what he's doing in ad Land. And, and because I don't even at that point, I even at this point, I don't over communicate everything running through my mind. I was doing things very differently. Not because I was right or wrong or James was right or wrong when he was my coo. It's just that there are not many agencies on earth that are being built to be built in perpetuity. So my, my appetite to not make any profit is not in a custard. That's not normal. Almost every agency of any size is a publicly traded company. They have to make numbers every 90 days, let alone every year. So all my decisions were foreign. And, and for James up front and then he got accustomed to it and his feedback and his vision were things that I had to factor into. Hey, this is his framework. That's where I'm going with you and everybody else right now. Most of the decisions all of you have to make is what are you actually up to? Like if you tell me you're trying to sell the company in three years, I'm going to give you very different advice if you're trying to sustain it in perpetuity and how much do you care about money versus loving it?

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

That's the. I really don't want to sell it. I don't really want to sell in the short term. Of course, you know, never know what it's going to be like 10 years. I would say 20 years is a longer time frame. But let we're kind of in a decision point.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Is 10 a fair one?

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Yeah, you never know what'll happen in 10 years. So I definitely don't want where I need another 10. Yeah, yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I look, I think here's what I would say the you don't have as big of a local base as you think. Everybody makes that mistake. Everybody. Everyone's like, man, we've got this squeezed. The community loves us and now we're going to go to Toronto. You never have as much local business as you think. Number one rule of a business like this for sure. So a if that's exciting for you, right, because you're like, we really know how to do this. We got this model down. You can go ham and quadruple down on it. If it's not because you got youthful, big ambition and conquering Montreal sounds more fun, well then you can just do that. But it won't be as financially viable as quickly.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Right. So we can grow and it just has to. We just have to kind of suck it up and make sure it's. We're gonna Keep the lights on.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yeah, that's my. That's what I think I'm a huge fan of. If you can live as, like, for all of you, live as humbly as possible for as long as possible. Cause that means your business is getting more of the money.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

I've got a second question really quick. If possible, I just want to talk.

[Brian]

A little bit about.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Strategically, I really feel like the winery game is very traditional and there's a lot of history and legacy behind it. And that's something that we, we, we aren't really about all of that. We want to be kind of a new player with new ambitions and bring it down to earth a little bit. For the average person who maybe is, you know, they're interested in wine, but they feel intimidated by it, we want to kind of open up and, and introduce new people to wine.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

So, like, how, how do we.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Everyone seems like in a place, especially in Canada, that all the legacy players are doing the exact same thing. They're working sales funnels, They've got general content. It's not really personalized and it talks about kind of the, the, the prestige of wine. But how do we, like, what things can we do to kind of change that game and that narrative?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I mean, I.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Obviously our content, but.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

No, no, no, no. That's it. Yeah. Like, this is where everybody makes the same move, right? Like, obviously our content, but what else, Gary? None of the content. Like, if you make content that shows people pairing blueberry wine with pancakes and you have a good time with it, people here might be interested in it in a world where they're not interested in it at all. The reason why Liberty TV was so game changing in the industry was I did it differently. It wasn't about barbing YouTube ads. It wasn't about anything other than I talked about wine differently. And you've got fruit wine. Like, like you should be targeting. Like your content should be targeting. Like, do you not like wine? Good news. We made a wine you'll like. Like, you have a whole different game going on. You should be making content for everybody but people that are into wine. Like, like, like your content needs to be about interest. Graph around hunting and hockey and, you know, sledding and do you like hot chocolate? Well, then you'll like this. Like, you have so much more freedom than most people, but it's only about the content. There is nothing else on earth. It. The only thing that matters is the communication, which is the content. Of course, there's the distribution of the content, but if you don't Start with the content. I can get everybody in Canada to see your video if it's boring as shit or not interesting. It lost.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

So should I spend more time on organic in that realm, like the TikTok and stuff like that?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

TikTok is a dream come true. It's been years since we've had this. Yeah.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

And trying to do things maybe stay. Not stay away from paid media, but make sure that the paid media's got a better return. And then the. And then the organic is.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

But you know, this iOS14.5, like, there's a lot of paid media issues now for DTC total. This is time to lean into creative and brand. TikTok's heaven and everyone's lally gagging it. If, I mean, if you're here, you're aware of me and I've been very consistent about this and you're all underperforming on TikTok and you know it. It's like it's going to like, how many times are we going to do this all together? Right? Like, I like it's the same game and every time comes around, like I put out content, you're like, damn, I wish I found Gary when Instagram was good. And then TikTok comes and you're not doing it. That.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Cool. That's awesome.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Thank you, brother.

[Moderator Joe]

Hey, brother. All right, we are going to move over to Jennifer down in Alabama. Let me pull you up, Jennifer.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Here we are.

[Moderator Joe]

Hey, jc.

[Doug Bell]

Hey, thanks for your time, Gary. I really appreciate it. As a bit of background, my husband, I opened Real and Rosemary. It's a polished, fast casual concept in Birmingham. In 2016 was an immediate success. We did really well with it. In 2018, we opened a coffee shop called Caveat Coffee. It was also a success. Later that year we opened the second location of Real and Rosemary. It opened slow. Within about six weeks, our investors decided the restaurant wasn't going to make it, which made it really difficult, difficult to operate and, you know, scrambled around all of 2019. We retooled everything below the sales line. I had a one year old and I would take her for a stroller walk every day and listen to your podcast. And you do wonderful social media. But also I really appreciate the operational advice that you gave because that really helped us navigate. When Covid hit in 2020, everything clicked and came into focus for us. My husband and I are both what I would consider wartime generals. And it was, it was great because we had already done all the work on the brand. We had the mousetrap built so we could really just focus on building the brand. Through Covid. We opened a second unit in Birmingham. We just hit a year on that one. As of this week, we own the company 100%. All our vendors are paid. We have a cash flow positive business. And I'm forever grateful for helping us get there. I'm getting ready in a couple weeks to announce that we're going to open a third location in Birmingham, which is really exciting for us. And we want to continue. I completely agree with what you said. We don't own enough of the local market. I'm sure it's impossible to. But we want to do more of that. And then, no pun intended, we have really big appetites and we want to continue to grow the brand across the south, across the Southeast. We're not ready to sell it anytime soon, but maybe within the next five to seven years if that opportunity presents itself. But we're building a brand that we don't have to sell.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I understand. So when.

[Doug Bell]

Question.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

What do you. Yeah. What do you want to narrow in on? Because that's a great context.

[Doug Bell]

One of my questions to you is, I've listened to a lot of your content, but I haven't heard you talk a lot about partners, wins, and how you decide to bring on a partner, operationally or financially. When is that appropriate versus going it alone?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Never, if you can help it.

[Doug Bell]

Yeah. Okay.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Right.

[Doug Bell]

You know, and this is my experience. Yeah.

[Moderator Joe]

And it's.

[Doug Bell]

I've had some good ones.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

It goes back to, like, what makes you happy.

[Doug Bell]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I mean, I have an offer for somebody for one of the biggest VC firms in the world to buy 10% of Veefriends. It has my brother on the ground in excitement, and I'm not even returning the email to set up the meeting. And it would be a game changer for me. Think about the level I'm playing at. And it would be a game changer for me. So we're talking real economics. And my. I had a meeting with my accountant today, like, planning for next year and taxes, everything. And he was flabbergasted that I haven't even reached back out in the last 30 days. It's because I kind of almost had my own realization. It's the advice I'm giving you now, which is like, I don't like it. James knows my deal with Steve Ross, and I only did that because AJ Was at a point in his life where the money mattered to set up his life. And I didn't want to do it. I didn't. Um, but like, I'M sure when James looked under the hood, it's so egregiously bad for Steven Ross. Like, they have no rights. Like, I could, I could start a new agency by changing all the names of the company. Like, it's crazy. The deal they made, that was the only reason I've even had a partner other than like family. Like, it's not fun.

[Doug Bell]

Right? That's really helpful.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

But in your business model, if you want to take in PE money or things of that nature to expand it, make it, you know, if you want, if you want to sell it, it's things like.

[Doug Bell]

But I want to go with speed. I really like the growth and development. That's what I've done.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

The problem is. The problem is that's why I hate speed so much. I know speed comes with compromise.

[Doug Bell]

Yes.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You're going to speed yourself into money that has control.

[Doug Bell]

And that's why we've tried to be patient and we have it ourselves now. And so tagging off of that, the.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Other thing on, just on that point, something. You've heard a lot from me. I wish you knew how young you were.

[Doug Bell]

Yeah, for sure.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

No, but. No, no, before. Yeah, for sure. Like in 17 years, you still have like 35 years. Like, you know. You know what I mean? Like, if you can contextualize time.

[Doug Bell]

Yeah, I agree.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

The, the other thing, there's a company called Clearbank.

[Doug Bell]

Okay.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

So obviously the Canadians shook their heads, right? Like there. There's some really new funding mechanisms where you don't have to give up control that you may want to look into.

[Brian]

Right.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

There's also people that just want to lend money and make interest.

[Doug Bell]

Okay.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

James is right there. Like the good old fashioned credit line and the good old fashioned, like, like we don't even talk about getting bank loans anymore that you pay off so you don't have to give up your. We don't even talk about that. Remember, everybody grew up with that concept. So there's a lot, there's a lot of other things. You can see what's going on in a chat right now, so keep that in mind as well.

[Doug Bell]

Thank you. I appreciate that kind of piggybacking off of that. We, you know, I do believe we've tried to be really patient with the restaurant and grow it the right way. And I think it does need more time as we grow. We're trying to do it the right way, but we have big brains and big motors and we're trying to decide how or when we should add a business to keep us interested, so to speak. Versus just focusing on the one and particularly because we have a location based business kind of, you know, a community business. And I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of you know, E commerce and these the opportunities that are really in front right now. We are in Birmingham but you know, it's a big world and just trying to balance this.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I'll give you one that might work for you and it could actually work for Doug. And Doug, thank you for the empathy in the background. Both of you could go into products that are very viable for the things that you know. Brian Nihon know like you like for example, with Doug's business he should in my opinion stand up his most signature fruit wine and then make a fruit jam compliment product within the brand so he can ship that nationally and globally. You should do the same thing. Like, like for example, I've actually am starting a restaurant group in New York, right. And one of the things I'm talking to my guys about, I'm like look, I don't that I'm really supporting two friends but now that they've brought me a little bit more in than just money, I'm like look, I'm not interested in this but if you say that we're going to start a restaurant that has a signature mustard that everyone's going to love the fucking mustard. Like everyone's focused on the mustard that I can build a 300 million direct consumer mustard brand. Now I'm really interested. So I think one of the things you could think about is could you create a signature condiment or or dish in your place that become you strictly stood up the concept of this unique pepper just to create a DTC pepper business.

[Doug Bell]

I would like to do that. I think I'm gonna work on that for sure. Yeah, absolutely.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

That could, that could scratch your big ambition, creativity muscle, right? You create something that lives within your restaurant that then can be spun out to be a global DTC CPG brand.

[Doug Bell]

I just wanted to say when you started the VCR group, I reached out to David Rodowitz. He signed it up to give me some of his time and he was amazing and gave me some great ideas for the business. It was also encouraging seeing you going into the restaurant business after Covid in the last year.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Oh I love, I love it. When I was saying to them I'm not interested, it wasn't because I'm not interested, it's just that they're such experts, my three partners, I'm like, you don't need me to run a restaurant. You guys have done this for 74 fucking years. I'll bring innovation. And here's an innovation. Let's create olive oil that we pour for people the second they sit down with incredible bread. And let's build up the reputation of the olive oil so that we can then sell $100 million a year in olive oil direct to consumer. Right, right. Like the level of focus to an olive oil that's just on the table. That's not the normal move for a restaurant, but for me, that's the innovation.

[Elizabeth Simon]

Right.

[Doug Bell]

I appreciate that. Thank you so much.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yep. Let's keep it going.

[Moderator Joe]

All right, we're going to go over to Garrett Wilhelm down in Virginia.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Here we go, Gary.

[Garrett Wilhelm]

Yeah. Again, super thankful for your time, Gary. It been following your content for quite a while and can attribute some success to that. So thank you so much. Extremely grateful. My question is very specific. It's around people and it's around scalability. Right. So my business is at about 1.2 million a year, and we're ready to kind of move forward and grow. The challenging thing is, is the cost of humans has gone up. And so for us, you know, we're kind of playing around with this idea of bringing people up through the company comparatively to, you know, paying the higher cost for more skilled skill people.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yeah, I would. I would spend all my energy on building an incubator internally to create people and retain people.

[Garrett Wilhelm]

Yeah, that's what we think about a lot. I think the challenging thing around that is, is. Is. Is for me, is that human to human training or is it something like a tranual or something human to human. Human to human.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

That's, you know, why the part you're going to need is the nuanced part, emotional intelligence part. And like your culture.

[Garrett Wilhelm]

That's exactly right. I was just going to say, how do you scale a feeling? Right.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Like you scale it through dictatorship.

[Garrett Wilhelm]

Like just being that. That ambassador of the brand to James.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And Joe know what doesn't fly in my world.

[Garrett Wilhelm]

Got it.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Which of them have spent enough time prior to me knowing there are people that are talented that they would never consider hiring? Because they know if I sniffed out their behavior, which was completely appropriate in places they used to work, that there's no shot that that person's going to succeed because I'm going to smoke them out if they don't.

[Garrett Wilhelm]

Got it. So you start with kind of your, Your. Your Mount Rushmore of, of people in leadership. Put your value into that and then allow that to kind of trickle down.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

If you will, and then you what you have to be is never let it be compromised. Right. So that's exactly right. Comma, as you start to scale when I'll give you an example. Carol is adored by every parent and people are signing up to your school because of Carol because she's insane with parents and kids. But Carol makes Ricky and Susan and Sally miserable because she's audacious and braggadocious and snarky to them because they're not Carol. You have to fire Carol.

[Moderator Joe]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Do you know how hard that is for most businesses? The scenario I just told you, I.

[Garrett Wilhelm]

Mean it's a very hard thing.

[Aaron Simon]

Right.

[Garrett Wilhelm]

Because they bring in a lot of re. I, I see your point exactly.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

What I do that is highly unusual that I'm trying to teach the business world to do is to not compromise on culture over finance. And that's incredibly foreign because people have to keep the lights on. I promise you right now, for everybody here who has employees, the biggest vulnerability in your entire company is your weakest cultural employee.

[Garrett Wilhelm]

So then spending time on finding that person or people.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And creating them is the best way. You get a RAW asset at 23, you get have a better chance in 25 months making them the 25 year old version. Retraining is hard.

[Garrett Wilhelm]

That's what I'm finding. That's what I'm finding. I, I come.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And you're also, you're also coming and trying to hire people from a system you don't like exactly aware.

[Aaron Simon]

No. Yeah.

[Garrett Wilhelm]

So it's.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You can't achieve what you want. That's right. You can't achieve what you want.

[Doug Bell]

Yeah.

[Moderator Joe]

You're witnessing it firsthand. We've got Julia Balik here straight out of school. She's a good one. She's a keeper. We're growing her from the ground up.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I get it. And we have a better chance with Julia than if she was you because you came in with a lot of baggage.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Joe.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And by the way, I'm making a joke but like Joe's like the greatest. And what you don't realize is the sub. Some of the teachers you're hiring, they're wonderful. They don't even realize that they're doing it.

[Elizabeth Simon]

I'll.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I'll give you Joe's. It's a lot easier if I get Julia from the beginning to be like we're going to be Vayner X centric, not client centric. We do it our way. Joe has 7, 8, 12, 15 years of doing client services anywhere else in the world. He subconsciously doesn't realize that he's letting the client seep in the dictation, which ultimately becomes the reason we lose that.

[Inga Von Olak]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

It's wild. In my business. In my business, the number one reason we lose is because we let the client get what they want in the short term, and then they fire us for it. I better not. Because they stink.

[Aaron Simon]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And they tell you to do stink. And at first they love it because you're doing what they feel comfortable with, but then they fire you because it's not doing well and they don't even know how to score it.

[Garrett Wilhelm]

Amen.

[Aaron Simon]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

That's what you're dealing with. You're trying to hire teachers who already conformed to the education system, which has remarkable flaws against your hypothesis.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Yep.

[Garrett Wilhelm]

And it's unlearning people rather than teaching people, which is what I'm. Great.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And unlearning is impossibly hard, and teaching is wildly easy if you get them in the right state.

[Aaron Simon]

Awesome.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

That's it.

[Garrett Wilhelm]

My very.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Yeah.

[Garrett Wilhelm]

Thank you so much.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You're welcome. Yeah. I'm excited for you. It's going to work.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Thank you.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

It. Because what. Here's what it is, Garrett. If you like, if you now execute on what I just felt from you in response, it becomes a religion. So you waste no time. You just don't hire from there.

[Moderator Joe]

That's it.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

That's it. I love it.

[Doug Bell]

Shifting focus.

[Garrett Wilhelm]

Younger.

[Elizabeth Simon]

Yep.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Love it. Awesome.

[Moderator Joe]

Thanks, Garrett.

[Aaron Simon]

So when we. When we started. You remember Swanky Sauce with Baner Sports? We started. Oh, my gosh. We started that back in 2012, based on your regret is poison kind of thing. And it was just a passion project. We did it. It's been going. We sell a couple thousand bottles of barbecue sauce a year. Nothing crazy.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

We.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Yep.

[Aaron Simon]

And we started a YouTube channel, actually, my wife started it. How to. Videos about goats. We own a goat farm.

[Doug Bell]

Right.

[Aaron Simon]

How to do this, how to do that. And then to make a long story short, I started vlogging the family, everything. Four kids living on this farm, running the barbecue sauce business. And then we had some stupid idea of going live 24 7. And that's what we do now. We have two barns, four cameras. It's all ridiculous. Pretty much. But it's two live cams all the time on YouTube. One stays still all the time.

[Neha]

Really?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

It's really not. I mean, you know, this. It wasn't a stupid idea. You've seen other executions of this work, so you were smart. I think it's the furthest thing from a stupid idea, but go ahead.

[Aaron Simon]

So then the stupid part. Well, the part we didn't realize. And that's when we get into the question. Here is the community that we built and how close we have gotten to them and how close they have gotten to us. Half this stuff you see behind us was sent here from our community.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

That's awesome.

[Aaron Simon]

Because I'm a DNF student, I'm going to let my wife read the question.

[Elizabeth Simon]

Yeah. So, I mean, it really kind of originated back in 2009 when we wanted a source of fresh eggs for our growing family. At the time, we had two young boys and we knew that grocery store food wasn't exactly the healthy sort of. And so we started with chickens. Turns out chickens are the gateway livestock animal. And so we had to naturally upgrade. And we got ourselves into goats, mainly because I felt cows were a little too big and to manage around a young family. So we got into goats for the milk. And then my kids started showing them and really creating that bond with their animals. And to your point, we started the YouTube channel so that I could teach kind of how to. Or how we do, because it's not. You ask 10 different farmers how they raise their goats, you're going to get 12 different answers. So we started that as sort of my New year's resolution in 2018. By 2019. Kidding. Season rolling around. It was actually out of convenience that we started to live stream because it was becoming too hard to have documenting, having to go in and edit all that. So we just live streamed it and we would take the camera off the wall for the, for the community. And we. It was like, you're having a bird.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I see. Totally, totally, totally get it. As you know.

[Elizabeth Simon]

Yeah. So fast forward during one of our Q&As that we were doing, and our community actually was asking us, well, what can we buy that we can have a piece of your home?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Makes sense.

[Elizabeth Simon]

And so I had dabbled in some lotion and you know, a month or two later we were taking hundreds of pre orders and having to upgrade our manufacturing facility. And. And then in 2020, he got laid off from his day job. But we had a foundation and all we were able to do, you know, 2018, we had a gross income of 30,000. It was really just a hobby that helped pay for the hay bill. This year we're looking to gross over 250,000. And we have, like I said, we really go into the quality of our products is what. What our brand is about. People have learned to expect a certain quality, of course, and. And it's there so we, of course.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

It'S at, it's at the size and scale where it can be extreme quality.

[Elizabeth Simon]

Exactly. So I guess a couple of our questions. Because our quality is what it is, I am not willing to budge on, on our quality. I have a hard time delegating to other people, and we don't have any real employees yet. We have some friends and family that help us. But to take some stuff off of my plate and off of his plate, we kind of delegate some of these projects that I have a hard time honestly delegating. And it's because when I get the quality of work back, I'm like, I should have just done this myself. So on a scalability issue, as we're growing, how, how do I continue to ensure that the quality is there, but be able to delegate and by, by.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Letting the person that should be judging it judge it?

[Aaron Simon]

So let the customer judge it.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yes. Most people.

[Garrett Wilhelm]

Yep.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yeah.

[Elizabeth Simon]

The biggest mistake, we don't lose those customers if the job.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Because, because you may lose 17 customers when that batch went wrong, but then you'll adjust. But at this point, you're going nowhere.

[Brian]

Right.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

This is how I took my dad's business from 3 to 65 million. He wanted to do everything I said, let the customer decide. This is deja vu for me.

[Aaron Simon]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You know what? You learn.

[Elizabeth Simon]

Who not to let do it again.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

No, that's again thinking. You're thinking too much. Defense. You're so focused on that part. That part's easy to your point. You'll find out at one second about that. You're compromising on ego. Believe it or not, ego's hurting you. I make this better, and it's coming from a good place. It's, you know, sometimes ego's a bad word, but, like, it's not that bad. But it is. What's happening here? I, I, I have a news alert for you. Many, many, many, many people on earth can do it too.

[Elizabeth Simon]

Yep. Yeah.

[Doug Bell]

Oh, yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Okay, good. Find them.

[Elizabeth Simon]

Well, that's the, that that leads me to my next question, because we are 18 months into this real, like put putting fuel on a fire, and we're sitting at 250 gross sales, but we haven't actually paid ourselves yet. Yo, how do we, you know, with reinvesting constantly back into the business to grow at the speed that we're growing at? We can't afford an employee hasn't gotten there yet.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of ways to think about this one. Are you selling it for enough margin.

[Elizabeth Simon]

As Well, I believe so, yeah. Yeah. Our soaps were selling at about an 86% margin.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

What's wrong with 300%?

[Aaron Simon]

That would put us, I mean, well.

[Elizabeth Simon]

So we're already for goat milk. So industry standard is, you know, even on a high end is about a dollar fifty an ounce. And I believe we're already at. You would know the number.

[Aaron Simon]

Oh, we're up in the $2 an ounce range.

[Elizabeth Simon]

And same goes for our goat milk lotion.

[Aaron Simon]

But to Gary's point, and I'm just going to show because it's easier, we've launched very simple soap. Right. $7 a bar. And then to my wife's point, we're up in the $15 a bar soap. When you get into the fancy, you know, holiday stuff, you know, and in $15 for a bar of soap in the soap world is high. But we look at it as artwork that happens to be in soap. And to be honest, we sell out of a lot of it. I just don't think 20 can be justified. I don't.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

15 couldn't be justified if you were talking about it at 12.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Right?

[Aaron Simon]

Yeah. And we were at 12 and we.

[Elizabeth Simon]

Went to 15 and we just did a five dollar increase per bottle of lotion. We were at 15, now we're at 20. And I mean, I, I, you talk about the big guys with the beakman lotions. Price per ounce were even higher than they are.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Right.

[Elizabeth Simon]

But we're still selling out.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yeah. I mean, you've not figured out your price, like upside. Right. You just, you're not going to be able to hire somebody if you're not making enough margin against how you're reinvesting back in. You're going to have to figure this out.

[Elizabeth Simon]

Yeah.

[Aaron Simon]

So I'm just, I don't think based on the margin, I don't think that's it. Because where all the money's going is actually not into the soap and the lotion. It's going into other products behind the brand. Like the custom stuffed animal of one of our goats. Our audience is excited about this. They love it. But it's stuck in the shipping container in la based on the current co. Yeah, that's. But that's where the body.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yeah, that's just small business mismanagement of cash flow. Like, you should have pre sold the toy.

[Elizabeth Simon]

Yeah, and we were told to. Well, well, we were told to. And we were told not to because.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You were, you were totally not right, though. Because think about what's happening. Like, think about this conversation.

[Elizabeth Simon]

Yeah, yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You know, like I think the, you know, the reality is, is that when you're in a cash flow crunch, outlaying money is always a bad idea, Right?

[Aaron Simon]

Yep.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And what you could have done is created perceived value. How much are you selling the stuffed animal for?

[Neha]

$30.

[Aaron Simon]

That's going to go for 40.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Great. So you could have sold it for 36 on pre sale and 44.99 when it got here, which would have created urgency and savings.

[Doug Bell]

Yeah.

[Aaron Simon]

So that just comes down to a logistic issue. We tried to pre sale once before and Shopify was a mess and we were like, oh my gosh, no pre sales anymore. So that just might.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

That's an ideological mistake. Like maybe there's been technology advancements, maybe there's a new Shopify plugin that's, you know, like you made an ideological point of view. Yeah, yeah. And what you've done is you've created a financial cash flow crunch, which is the number one rule of your business. The number two and three rule is manage your cash flow when you're this small.

[Elizabeth Simon]

Right.

[Aaron Simon]

Yeah. Which if we managed it or pre sold those, or we even have a book we just launched that happened to show up about a week before we thought it was going to. So we'll watched it. What's that?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Is that bad or.

[Garrett Wilhelm]

No, that was good.

[Aaron Simon]

We.

[Elizabeth Simon]

That was great because it then opened up a, you know, more cash.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yeah, you guys, you guys basically need to do 80% of the thing that's working. Maximize the fuck out of it. It sounds like you just did with raising your prices. 80% of your energy needs to go there. And you guys are such entrepreneurs and creatives that you're getting caught up in the other stuff, which is amazing. But when you do that stuff, max 30% of your energy, my preference, 20% of your energy. Every time you do a fucking book or a stuffed animal or whatever the fuck else you're going to come up with in a week. You always pre sell it.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Okay.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Because you have a rabid community that trusts you.

[Aaron Simon]

Right. So we have other products we want.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

To launch to your good news, all this creative entrepreneurial juice you have from DNF student DNA, you can launch them all, but I want you to pre sell every one of them.

[Aaron Simon]

Should I kickstarter them? No, as we thought of that, you know, just.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

That's just a tactical slight difference. That doesn't mean anything.

[Aaron Simon]

Doesn't mean anything?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

No. One of the. It sounds like you need to Google if there's a better plugin for pre sales on Shopify and You know what?

[Aaron Simon]

And to your point, it was short term. We needed that cash. We didn't.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You made a strategic decision to make something and you needed, you needed this strategy right before it to make that thing right. Yeah, right.

[Aaron Simon]

It was. Yeah.

[Elizabeth Simon]

So you have.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yeah, go ahead.

[Elizabeth Simon]

Yeah. So we do subscription based products as well and one of those is actually a subscription based to our live chat. So we moved away from a volunteer moderator chat on our live streams and moved towards a membership platform that YouTube provides where only people who are subscribed and. And pay us a monthly fee app.

[Aaron Simon]

Anybody can watch.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

It's free.

[Aaron Simon]

Anybody can log in and watch.

[Elizabeth Simon]

Right. What would you suggest to grow that membership on our channels?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Nothing.

[Elizabeth Simon]

And just keep.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

It's a. It's a very aggressive ask.

[Doug Bell]

Yeah, it is.

[Aaron Simon]

And we set it only at 1.99. But to your point, it's still like, why am I going to pay to chat? Yeah, yeah. And the only reason we did that is because the trolls and the. Because we're live 24. 7. We can't watch it 24 7. And people were coming in talking.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I understand.

[Aaron Simon]

Just got ugly.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I understand. But it's hurting you more than you think.

[Aaron Simon]

Yeah, yeah. From a financial side, it's hurting.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

But no, no, from a brand perception, it seems like you're trying to monetize too much on your audience. I promise. That's a very aggressive ask.

[Aaron Simon]

Yeah, yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I really believe that.

[Elizabeth Simon]

Okay.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

It works. It can work. But you want to think that through.

[Elizabeth Simon]

Yeah, yeah. What it did help us with though, was save the continuity of the environment.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I understand that. I understand that.

[Elizabeth Simon]

It was definitely a.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You could also, you could also ban people.

[Aaron Simon]

We have about 4,000 banned already.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You also, if you have that many banned. I'm also curious what you ban people for.

[Aaron Simon]

Yeah, well, we had, we had a distrust in our moderators is what happened. So we had to, instead of just getting rid of one, we had to get rid of them all and then create a new model. And that's what we did. We actually went dark for 48 hours and got hate mail because we shut them down to try to solve all this.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yeah, I think, I think understand again, I, again, I think that business is about strategy. You, you know, whatever drama was going on with your mods, I love the idea of cleaning the deck. But you can also build back. I mean, now that you have paid people, you've got perfect people to decide to be the mods.

[Aaron Simon]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You know, like, so, yeah, we have.

[Aaron Simon]

We actually put that idea out there that like we might Go back to moderators. We might go.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I think you should. I don't. I don't like the do. I don't. For the wholesomeness of what you're doing. The $199 to talk thing is an egregious ask. I think. Yeah, I get the value of the cleanup, but that you do with mods.

[Elizabeth Simon]

Yeah.

[Aaron Simon]

So I'll shift gears while you look at a different question. Back to your TikTok. Please don't look at mine.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I won't.

[Aaron Simon]

Yeah, well, it's that push up thing. I do it every other day or every once in a while, but really I'm trying to do the document don't create model on TikTok and it doesn't seem to be working good.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Do something else.

[Elizabeth Simon]

Okay.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

So the most important thing that you can focus your thing could go banana on TikTok.

[Aaron Simon]

Yeah. We get like a hundred views on all of them and then one pops at 40,000 and then 100.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Okay.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

How many posts a day? One of three days.

[Aaron Simon]

Not even like. Or a week.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yeah, three a day.

[Neha]

Got it.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Figure it out.

[Aaron Simon]

Yep.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

All right. I don't want to run out of time. I know we got one or two more.

[Aaron Simon]

Thank you.

[Moderator Joe]

And I love the conversations going on. Jennifer, thank you so much for offering to help with cash flow for some of our lovely 40s customers. I'm sure some of these folks will take you up on it, particularly Neha, who's very active in the community right now. Neha and Brian, you're the last folks on with guarantee today, so we're gonna.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

Go out with a bang.

[Brian]

Okay, great, thanks. I'll do a quick intro and then throw it to Neho for the question. Gary, as we said, online retail, D2C specialty food, highly curated. So we're not the 5000 SKU. Hope you find something you like. We're three to 400 SKUs. The only things we sell are. Wouldn't last in our team's kitchen if they don't like it. Doesn't last in our kitchen. Well, we don't want to sell it. And yeah, I think that's. That's a quick intro. So I'll throw it to Neha.

[Neha]

Can you hear me?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Awesome.

[Neha]

So, Gary, we've relied on the brands that we carry to build our own brand.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I get it.

[Neha]

So what we're now looking to do is it's like wine library.

[Doug Bell]

Right.

[Neha]

Like you carry wine but you made empathy later. So we're kind of at this juncture where we're. How do we Build our own brand as a retail store.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

The brand. Or actual brands, like private labels, but maybe not named directly at the retail store, but other brands.

[Neha]

That's one way to do it. Because four days ago you did tell another retailer to do this. But I have four, five quick ideas. I'm just going to pitch and queue really fast. Yep, one size does matter. The word. The retailer that figured out how to ship in the smallest fucking box possible. Like really, really small. To podcast where we interview suppliers, people in the CPG about the one biggest mistake they made building a food brand.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Why do you want to do that as the creative. Because it's. Because that's a B2B show.

[Neha]

It is.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

So you're using that to acquire more products for your store?

[Neha]

Absolutely.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Okay.

[Neha]

I don't enter.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Is that a need? You know, it's. It doesn't sound like the biggest need of the organization is more products. Right. Because given all the headache. Right. You have such a moat with how much of a pain in the ass it is to get into Canada that I feel like you're building another moat. That takes a lot of effort. The podcast on something you already have a moat for and you only have so much energy and time and resources.

[Doug Bell]

Yeah.

[Brian]

Which is why we haven't done it yet. We've talked about it.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Got it, got it, got it. Keep going. But understood. We're.

[Neha]

We're a team of five and yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Favorite number.

[Neha]

Storytelling the the challenges of the food industry on TikTok. So some of our suppliers are just shutting down. Like small food brands. They just can't compete. Klaka's private labeling them or just building their own, you know, product or knocking off a jam or whatever the case is.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Well what does that have to do with you though?

[Neha]

It does because it is.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

What we do is all of the.

[Neha]

Brands we carry are small to mid sized brands who are bypassing the traditional local distributor panel. But. But the end customer doesn't understand that. Right. So I think they.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

What?

[Neha]

They don't understand the food. The trajectory of like how difficult it is for a small to mid sized food brand to survive.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

They don't care. The fuck would a customer care about that for? Don't try to sell food. On altruism.

[Neha]

I don't think it's altruism. I think it's something that's interesting. Which is like really not. But what if I do a TikTok? Like basically presenting to a large retailer as a brand and how difficult it is.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

The worst. Terrible.

[Neha]

So interesting that you're saying that nobody.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Gives a shit about what you just said. People care about if the jam looks good when you put it on the bagel and then they just buy the jam. You're too nerdy right now, okay? You're. You're making that you find interesting. And I find just. I always do. I'm. I'm watching you do it in real time, right? That's why I'm giving you the answer. I'm here to help you. You spent money today. I'm going to make you money. Like, you're making content that nobody gives a fuck about.

[Neha]

Okay?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You need to make content like you, the supermarket. Like Wine Library. Forget about empathy. Wine Library exploded because I did things to build Wine Library, which then gave me customers, which then gave me leverage for my suppliers. You need to become the. You've been relying on the exclusivity and they've been driving your business. You need to be the driver of your business. Thus, you have to make content that's interesting to consumers. Like you need to make viral peanut butter content for the brand you decided to sell peanut butter for.

[Neha]

But that's still focusing on the brand, right?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

So, okay, well, yes, well, you're the, you're the, you're the platform that that's being done on, though. Like, sure, I might be like this peanut butter super gooey, and then I do something that makes 800,000 people watching, but it's still being delivered from your company. Like Whole Foods Markets, like Ulta Markets, Sephora Markets, like Costco. Like, you, like, you have to become the marketer and you have to be consumer marketing using your products that you're selling. And yes, sure, you can integrate your own private labels over time, but you still need to make content like, because what that's going to do is give you double leverage. You're going to make product that sells better. But even better than that, now you're providing, you know, demand for brands, which is going to bring more brands to you. Right now you're. You're a value prop from a logistics standpoint, but they're driving your business.

[Doug Bell]

Okay?

[Neha]

A TV show where we taste test our product.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I like Tick Tock first.

[Neha]

Tick Tock first. Okay.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I mean, especially you, because you have charisma. Like, literally, you tasting and just talking. Yeah. Tick Tock.

[Neha]

We watched wine Library episode one last night.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Very different than episode 86. And I just put, you know what that is, by the way, and why? I know those two numbers. I was scared to lose my clients. Yeah, first 86 episodes, people forget Wine Library was already a huge business before wine, library, tv. So I realized all those serious people that lived in Short Hills and Livingston and worked on Wall street and bankers, that if I was fully me, that I was going to lose them. So I was scared. But then the show was doing so well, and I was like, man, I'm not even fucking being myself. I. And it got to a place where I was like, oh, this is really going to work. So I felt comfortable of, like, going all in. And so, yeah.

[Neha]

Okay. I love it. I'm actually. I'm really excited about that.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I think it would be. I think you'd be fantastic.

[Neha]

Okay.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

But Jack, remember, in between, like, Gary, episode one and what Gary is today is where I see you and just be you. Don't try to be with any version of anything. Just be you. Yep.

[Neha]

I agree. Private label.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yes. So you've.

[Neha]

You've talked about this a lot.

[Doug Bell]

And in the food.

[Neha]

So right now our margins are, you know, structured. They are what they are.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yeah. Private label is immensely important to you. But I wouldn't do it like Kirkland, where you have, like, a brand, or I wouldn't do it under your store brand. I would make up brands. That's what did really well for me at Wine Lab. Like. Like, whatever. What's your favorite animal?

[Neha]

A monkey.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Good.

[Neha]

Actually a lion.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

A lion. A lion.

[Neha]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

What's. What's a category that you think you could do more business in? Or something that you don't have great brands with or somewhere where you're doing business but you don't love your margin condiment, like mustard barbecue sauce. Good barbecue sauce. Make a legendary lion barbecue sauce right away.

[Brian]

So. So on that. Because typically, private label for food, it's your basic staples. And that's. We've never wanted to do that because that's. I don't want to compete on basic flour.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

I think there's tons of, like, premium. Like, there's a lot of comp stores to what you do that are in the upper premium level that have plenty of private labels that are like. And what the holy grail is, is if you stumble into pay dirt and like another nice Canadian company, Moose Knuckle, where they created a private label in their own store, and then that became the actual business. That. That gets real fun. Could you imagine you sell lion barbecue sauce to Kraft for $48 million. That's what can happen. You're a retailer.

[Neha]

Yeah.

[Brian]

So focus on, like, a premium innovate.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Like Star Brain. That's exactly right.

[Brian]

The creator own. Okay.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

But what's nice about that is you get to reverse engineer the white spaces of your retail store. Right. So you just said condiments. We'd like to make more margin. That sounds good. There's a new trend and everyone's into honey toast, whatever the fuck that would be then now you can make one quickly in that space.

[Neha]

So the follow up to that, Gary, is fucking money money.

[Doug Bell]

Right.

[Neha]

So Brian, you want to take that?

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Well.

[Brian]

And so this is the challenge in my other CFO job. I go raise money for startups.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

That's what I do.

[Brian]

We don't, we haven't done that for our company. But it's the. In a product business, like doing a private label cash flow intensive, if you.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Were going to do active customers, you.

[Moderator Joe]

Guys have.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

10,000 somewhere in there. Nice.

[Neha]

Yeah.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Look again, a lot of candidate themes. Like I think Clearbank is a really interesting model. That's one.

[Moderator Joe]

Yeah.

[Brian]

We were them.

[Doug Bell]

Great.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

So more if you can, I don't know, featured neha.

[Brian]

They featured NEHA and their Women Entrepreneur Month love.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

There's that. Number two, there's raising capital which we've talked about in different versions. But you might have different feelings per se than Jennifer or you know, or me or what have you. So that's number two. Number three is like we talked about with, with our friends in the Connecticut goat life. Like I, I'm a humongous believer in pre sale. It works when you have trust. It's like cashing in on trust. You've done all the right things. Everybody here is honorable. Good people delivering, trying hard like. Right. Like that's trust. Trust can be monetized in pre sale. You'll deliver and then you'll have more trust. My dad, I didn't, my dad didn't have cash flow for sure. Pre sell. Selling wine features saved my dad's business.

[Neha]

Which is why we were just thinking yesterday we were like the 3 million to 60 for wine library. It's hard to scale that without any debt and just solely out of the profits of the company. Right.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yeah. It's why I went on to become Gary Vee. Like I ended up being like what I didn't know at the time was like I was going to be an all time good businessman.

[Doug Bell (possibly same as G) or another Doug]

You.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

You want to hear something scarier? Wine library did 3.8 million on 10% gross profit.

[Neha]

Ooh.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Yeah. You want some real c. You want some real CFO talk? Here we go. 3.8. 380,000 in sales before your expenses. Oh, and I grew that from 3.8 to 65 in seven years with no credit line. Like my. I'm underrated because I know, you know. You know why I'm underrated? Because I never go all the way there because I think it. Because I don't want to make it seem like my dad. Like it's kind of like a family thing.

[Neha]

Yeah, for sure.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Like right. But 3.8 10% gross profit, no credit line.

[Moderator Joe]

Yeah.

[Brian]

I've worked with a lot of companies who have those margins and they shove a ton of debt into the company to fund the growth zero. So that's impressive.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

But I did it through all the advice I'm giving now. Right. Creating high margin items pre sailing. You know, I also. Look, I say it but like I had a lot of juice, right. I'm working 17 hours a day. I had the talent. Like there's a lot go going on there, but that's what happened. And so like not that I expect that from everybody, but the nuances work pre. I'm not making stuffed animals that can get caught up in la. Like we need to pre sell that shit down in Connecticut, you know, that's it. 70% of what's working. Fucking squeeze the shit out of it because you got something good there. And you could fucking have nothing but fun, Aaron. Like with whatever creative idea you have. But here's the rule for your fucking DNF charisma and creativity, like me, it's only pre sell. Any cockamanian out of your mouth is only pre sale. And if you sell seven, by the way, you also make a lot more money. When you pre sale. You guessed how many stuffed animals to.

[Neha]

Make.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

On pre sale. You're like, oh, we can make more, you know. And when you, when you price it with worst case scenario, we only sell 50 of them. This how much it costs. All of a sudden you sell 530, you get a cheaper. Like the whole thing works.

[Neha]

We're good. Gary, can we get a photo of you like just smiling or not smiling at him? Okay. Three, two, one. Love it. Thank you. That was great team.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Listen, there's. This was a really epic session because it was sharp, I think. I don't know, I was in a good mood or something or sharp or just all worked out for like shit that I've been a lot of like actually now I'm looking around it just because I've been doing everything that like I'm very tied into this crew. We have like a lot going on here. Listen, there's a couple things I want to leave you with. First, start falling in Love with pre sale because it can really help you start like really thinking about that.

[Brian]

2.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

If you do not go ham on TikTok content, you will be making such a regretful moment because we've got two more years of this and then it's going to go away. It's going to go away, right? And so like I saw somebody referenced with the new Apple updates getting read like shit changes. TikTok's going to get saturated because everyone's going to figure out what I know. And it's just supply and demand of.

[Neha]

The feed.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

And, and really, really building that community stuff like building like Doug for you. Like if you guys can just hold your breath for four months and actually build the discord, you'll win. You'll mitigate all the other chants out. But you have to do it like building communities really matter. Obviously the Simons know that because that's what they're built on. The community can really work for you. Like Discord's a sneaky one. It's winning so big in video games and in NFTs. I actually think it's going to go to everything. So one left field thing for all of you. If Doug stands up a Discord at first, a lot of people aren't going to. His. His core customer base isn't really going to know what that is. But it's so native to people because it's old AOL chat room DNA. So like even like people that aren't technically awesome very quickly get comfortable inside a Discord. We're thinking about definitely worth you jumping into some discords. Join the befriends one Just so you understand it right? Actually that's what I'm gonna put that link in here. All of you should definitely back to more like actions instead of just talking about it. Here is the Vee friends Discord. Join it. See how Discord get comfortable with this. Download the app like get comfortable for you and then I think it can really work for you. Like for example, if Garrett starts a, you know, young parents of Virginia Discord runs Facebook ads against young people. Like young parent age on Facebook ads to a Discord not to site. Think about how much easier the ad will convert to join a Discord versus do you want to pay $8,000 in tuition? Now you got them in a discord. You live in there and cultivate a community. Now you're getting them in for 49 to 7. You see 49 cents to $7 of the discord but you're fucking converting them after two months when they realize there's something really in there. Got it. Great time.

[Neha]

Bye.

[Gary Vaynerchuk]

Everyone. This is the Gary Vee Audio Experience.