8 Things I learnt when meeting Gary Vee in Sydney

Last year I was able to catch up with Gary Vaynerchuk when he visited Sydney for 1 day. To say thank you to Gary for his contributions to the marketing and business community. I was able to present Gary with a gift being a Cronulla Sharks vintage jursey. Given Gary is a huge sports fan he was over the moon with the gift.

If you do not know Gary Vee you should. He is one of the most well known names in the marketing world, he grew his family wine business to 60 million and took Vayner Media to over 100 million in revenue.

From meeting Gary I was able to provide some valuable points for business owners I would love to share –

1. Think about the legacy you want to leave behind in business. Do not take short cuts and rip people off. If you want to build a well known brand you need to put in the work. You need to give back to the community and you need to invest heavily in great staff.

2. Move quickly onto new advertising methods if you get a chance. When Google AdWords first came out, Gary was able to secure wine keywords at 5 cents a click.  Back in the early days of business his email open rates were as high as 91%, these amounts would be un heard of in todays market. A example of a marketing method where you might see great conversion into todays market could be a chat bot.

3. Understand the context of your audience. Work out who your correct target market is if you are going to target males between the ages 20-40 have specific marketing messages and targeted content for that age group. If you target market is 60+ you might use a different form of marketing material.

4. Don’t romanticise how you make money, the market doesn’t care. You need to be able to adapt to change in your given market, you need to be open to new service offerings or products to grow new revenue for your company.

5. Big shifts are happening. Pay attention and don’t hold on to things that don’t work any more. You need to be able to move with the market, if one form of advertising was once great for your business, it currently may not be converting like it should be. It might be time to move to a new form of advertising and test new things.

6. Educate yourself. Put in the work which matches your ambition. Self education is huge, you need to invest in on going education and training for yourself and for your businesses employees.

7.  Generations of attention doesn’t last that long. You can be a market leader one day and you can loose a huge percentage of marketshare in a small amount of time. You need to be ready for change and willing to adapt to the change.

8. Now is the time to start, you are never to late to start a business. You can be over 60 and start a prosperous business, Gary’s advice for someone young is to work for someone else when you are young and learn how this business is successful. 

Here is a short video from the event with Gary Vee –