If you think causing a disruption is just a marketing strategy to get to the top, you might want to sit closer to the front of the room and take some notes as we look at Gary V and his disruptive path.
A disruptive message or pathway is not about getting ahead or making noise, it’s about following your passion and in doing so, causing a ripple effect. How does that work?
I’d love to box it as a secret catch but I can’t because it’s too obvious. You are unique. What you do and what you say and how you feel is unique. Being yourself automatically equals being different and being different is eye catching.
Being different makes noise.
Being yourself means you stand out but being real about it connects you with every single person on the planet. Because we all have emotions, we all have something to say, we all have something we are striving to achieve.
Gary Vaynerchuk says there are two key steps to being a disruptive troublemaker.
Passion and patience.
Passion is like a fire starting fuel. Without it you have lots of hard work, friction, and a very set strategy for how to build a fire.
Flammable passion though, that shit burns through anything, and quickly.
So, while there are people out there carefully arranging their kindling into a tepee and getting a bundle of dried pine needles in exactly the right place, there are others causing ten foot flames.
Noticeable, yes, marketable, very much so, but that wasn’t the original intention.
So how do you get money to do what you love? You don’t. You need to work for it and stay true to yourself and eventually, with enough patience, people will connect and that’s when your fire starts.
No one illustrated this quite as well as Gary Vaynerchuck in building up his personal brand.
He didn’t need to be successful, he already was. He didn’t need to create more wealth, he had enough. What he was looking for was a creative outlet. He switched to creating his own TV program because money and business success wasn’t enough. There was no passion.
Gary took over his family wine business that was making a couple of million US dollars a year. In the seven years, he was CEO he worked in the family store from 7 in the morning until 10 at night, seven days straight days.
His hard work, dedication and strategy increased the company profits by 24% a month and took that wine business to a $50 million dollar company.
The work was hard but what he got from that was equity and cash flow to launch what he really wanted. To connect to more people. His chosen platform was YouTube. He launched Wine Library TV and created a personal brand for himself, so that the show was just as much about Gary, as it was about wine.
It took off slowly. For 17 months he worked on Wine Library TV five days a week and lost money. He couldn’t get a following. He used that time to become part of the community, to know and understand people. Finally, through passion, diligence and patience, he created a brand so big, he’s now unstoppable.
The difference is? Raw honesty. Gary was a disrupter because he put it all out on the table. While other business guides work through a structured script like a university lecture, Gary just says what he feels. He speaks with explosive passion and uncensored truth.
And yes, on the outside he comes across as a ‘loud, obnoxious, East Coast guy.’ But that’s not who Gary is and that’s not what drives him. What comes across so clearly in his talks is how much Gary cares about people. How he truly wants to give people something they can use to excel. His passion has purpose.
“I care about people more than I care about myself.” Gary says it’s a curse he’s turned into a blessing. This is what people tune into.
If you were to stand on a stage and voice your opinion in a Gary V style, it probably wouldn’t get a lot of attention. Why? Because Gary is the key to making Gary work. Just like You are the key to making your business work.
Whatever your passion is, light it.
This is Gary V’s advice on how to be happy.
‘Ask yourself ‘what do I want to do every day for the rest of my life?’
and do that. I promise you can monetize that shit. If you love Alf, do an Alf blog.
If you collect Smurf’s, Smurf it up. Whatever you need to do. Do it.’
All it takes to be a disruptive influence is patience and passion.
‘If you don’t believe in what you are doing, whether it’s your personal brand or the product you’re representing you need to get out now’. He begs.
‘We only get to play this game one time. One life. I just really hope that people understand that this is business.’
Gary says that the modern market isn’t about throwing money into advertising and saturating people to get a brand known.
The game is changing. Content and information accessibility is changing and brand equity is the way to make gains.
The only way to succeed now is to be completely transparent. Everything exposed. Everything you do is actually who you are in real life.
‘There is never a bad time. When you believe, when you work hard.’
Gary also says, just like Lisa Messenger says, do the work. The word they both use is ‘hustle.’
There are no excuses. We live in a time where you can build your brand from scratch if you work hard enough. Although, this is the problem I often see when working with clients. They see the yachts and the cars and want it all straight away. The thing is, you have to earn the right!
‘Work 9-5, spend a couple of hours with your family 7-2am is plenty of time to do damage.’
What’s the payoff?
If you look at Gary V as an example since launching his company seven years ago, he is turning over 100 million a year with 600+ employees. That’s from scratch.
If he wanted to be successful and wealthy he could have continued on in his family wine business and had a very comfortable life on the steady slow burn boy scout fire technique. That’s not the troublemaker path.
So take a good look at what you are doing and what you want to achieve and ask yourself, are you a Troublemaker yet?
In our next instalment, we will take a look at our third and final disruptive influencer, Daymond John, who used disruptive marketing techniques to give people an impression his clothing brand was a big deal, when it was just him and some mates sewing logos themselves in his mum’s house. Ever wondered where FUBU started? This is a story that will inspire you to work your butt off, because believe me, until you know Daymond’s story, you’ll think you’re working hard…
Stay troublesome,
Matt Catling
