Speaker 1: The man that we're about to interview, Gary Vaynerchuk, he is an all star when it comes to commitment. That's all he does. He just keeps committing and committing and committing. So I'm super excited to have you here, Gary. So what we're talking about is how do you get flooded with tons of leads? So for lawyers, what would be your advice?

Speaker 2: The answer is LinkedIn content at scale. That's the actual answer. And I know this because one of the reasons I'm trying to speak a lot less. And one of the reasons I agreed to this is because of how many lawyers in the last 24 months have emailed me because they've seen my content. I've actually brought up lawyers a lot subtly in different podcasts. And how many of them have reached out to me and said, you know, when I saw you say it once on LinkedIn or on TikTok or Twitter, I thought it was silly. But the fourth time you said, and lawyers, you need to get serious about LinkedIn. All of a sudden, the fourth time I saw it, I decided why not give it a chance? And just the amount of people that have been stunned that it actually works has been quite enjoyable. The problem is most people on here have maybe tried a LinkedIn post or two. But what I think a lot of people for law firms as well, when I say LinkedIn content, I mean two to three original LinkedIn posts a day. Two to three posts a day. Somebody said, for what purpose? To educate people, to provide value, not to sell. When you ask, how do you actually get results? It's called putting in the work and challenging yourself to create formats.

Speaker 1: Let me ask you a question. The next, we get a question. A lot of times lawyers will say, okay, well, I want to create content, but I don't know what to create. Now you have this great strategy called document, can you talk a little bit about that and how lawyers can use that?

Speaker 2: I'm worried about documenting for lawyers because you can't film a lot of stuff. It's personal information, right? But what can be done is what you're doing right now. So one thing that I think is a huge concept is starting a podcast around the genre of legal area that you're playing in and having guests and then chopping up the content and displaying that and distributing it through LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook groups, starting a Facebook group. One of the great lead generation opportunities in the world right now is starting a Facebook group around your local town and just talking about the town. But then since you're the person that started the group, everyone's looking at you and they can see that you're a professional lawyer and that leads to business, no different than joining the local chamber of commerce.

Speaker 1: Yeah, that's huge. So repurposing, so that's really big, everyone. Creating a podcast around the genre, right? So don't create the divorced person podcast, make it around like, you know, family health and relationships.

Speaker 2: Or the podcast is, there's a two-prong attack. The podcast is the divorce family law show and you interview other lawyers, people that have gone through things. You try to provide value. The biggest reason people struggle with social media content is they try to use it for sales instead of using it for content that brings people value that then leads to sales. Every time I make a piece of content, I have zero expectation of business. I know some of it leads to business in my world, but there's never been a time that I think that what I'm making right now is anything other than me being a radio personality, a TV personality, a print personality. I am in the business of publishing. I'm not in the business of selling, but then I also know all my businesses are linked in my profiles. And if they wanna buy wine or if they wanna buy NFTs or if they want social media services, they may consider me, but I'm okay if somebody takes 800,000 hours of free content for me and never buys a thing for me. I prefer it.

Speaker 1: Yeah, you've done a great job with that. So my team was telling me to ask about the dollar and 80 cent engagement strategy. What is that?

Speaker 2: I love that. 90 times a day, going to different platforms, different social media accounts on Instagram and leaving a comment that's valuable to the piece of content. So maybe you search legal, lawyer, divorce, maybe it's around your interests. One of the biggest things that people can find value in in getting business is by becoming a big, becoming a part of the social media community around their interests. So if you love golf, if you just go leave a ton of content replies to golf content, somebody might agree with you on the way the person swung that club, they click your face. And then they see in your profile that you're a professional lawyer, they click your site. They might be into tax law. They might need some divorce help. They may need some real estate. People are too rigid and social. They don't understand that humans do business with humans on the internet, just like they do in real life. They knew that they wanted to join a country club, be active in the school system, be active in the sports community, sponsor local stuff to get business, but they don't do the same thing on the internet. On the internet, they're just selling.

Speaker 1: Let me ask you a question. That is fantastic insight. You know, we live in a world where everybody seems to be offended by everything. And I know a lot of lawyers kind of want to stay on the side of not offending people. How do you find that mix between creating interesting content and maybe not offending people? Or what's your take on that?

Speaker 2: By being a nice person.

Speaker 1: There you go.

Speaker 2: How about that? That was an easy answer. And listen, I get people that get upset with me. I'm extremely nice. By then being empathetic and compassionate that they're in a place of hurt and they're trying to tear you down. Like when people leave bad comments, that's a bigger indication on them, not on you. Could you imagine living a life where you're spending time going around the internet, trying to hurt other people's feelings because of what content they made? That's a sad existence. I'm not mad at people that troll me or give me hate. I'm compassionate, empathetic, and sympathetic.

Speaker 1: So that's such a good point. So I want to get a little more kind of tactical here because you have crushed it in so many different ways. And I also want to talk about your ability to delegate because a lot of people don't see the size of the team that you have, right? But I first want to ask if there was one habit that everyone here who wants to blow up their brand online and get tons of cases and leverage social media, what would that be? Is it the just constant putting out of a video? Like if there was one thing you did every day.

Speaker 2: Yes, this is singularly like health and fitness. It is about eating well and going to the gym. Yet everybody wants to take apple cider gummies or do plastic surgery or eat like magic pills or like do it well for a week, but then get discouraged. The answer to everyone's question here is as much content as possible on YouTube and LinkedIn and Twitter. The answer to the question though is very different. It is about leaning into your creativity and most importantly, leaning into your humility because people don't like starting from zero. People email me all the time, Gary saw you on the law thing, did it for three weeks, got nothing. You suck. I'm like, no, you suck. You gave up for three weeks and you have insecurities. Like you didn't like getting no likes. You didn't like the feedback of not hitting in the first week. You don't have conviction around this. You don't want to put in the work anymore because you have a solid career. Like back up your words. If you want to crush it and push the leads, what do you think it's going to take? What do you actually think it's going to take? But there's something even more important which is self-esteem. This is one big game of self-esteem. The reason people don't put themselves out there is they feel insecure about the way they look on camera. They don't like when somebody says that they stink. This is a waste of time. Their friends say it's a waste of time. The lawyer they looked up to says it's a waste of time. Just do it the old school way. You know, look, I've been doing this for 15 years. Everything's always the same thing. You're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong. And then you're a genius. It's happening with me with NFTs right now, right? Scam, bullshit, fad. I'm like, okay. But in four years, six years, nine years, everyone's like, how did you see it? I see it because I watch people's behavior. I don't make judgment. I have no feelings. I'm a completely emotionally agnostic person that only focuses on what people actually are doing, not what I think they should be doing. Got it? I don't care what my feelings are about LinkedIn or social media or Facebook. I care what humans are doing. I don't judge humans based on my subconscious laziness or preference.

Speaker 1: So, you know, I talk to lawyers all the time. They're like, I gotta get my brand right. I gotta get my brand right. I gotta build my brand. But you know, I always tell them that social media, creating content is your brand. Can you talk a little bit about lawyers that think they need to focus on their brand and how creating this content, becoming this helpful person, providing value actually becomes your brand?

Speaker 2: Of course. It's a game of being human in a world where lawyers have been trained for 75 years to act their most fake professional self to get business. Look at every single person in this chat's LinkedIn profile. It's their most uptight photo they've got on LinkedIn.

Speaker 1: Oh, it's so true. That's a good point. Hey, can everyone press the space bar and say, that's true? Press the space bar and say, that's true right now.

Speaker 2: That's true.

Speaker 3: That's true.

Speaker 2: That's true. And people do business with people. People do business with people. I'm telling you, if I could get this lovely crew of 300 to just talk about golf or wine or whiskey or parenting or comic books or sports, I just want people to act human. Talk about things you care about in LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter. Somebody will do business with you because they also collect comic books. Somebody will do business with you, but you mix it in, right? One post is about your first comic book. The next post is your feelings after losing a case. Next post is about a new law change in your sector that nobody's paying attention to. The next one is how to find, here's a big one, how to find a perfect lawyer for you that might not even be me. That's a valuable piece of content. That's humility. Everybody's gotta be human and humble in their content and then push themselves to make content. Lean into creativity. Look what other people are doing. Interview people. Hit up old clients to do stuff with you. Friends, family, coworkers. It's work. It's work.

Speaker 1: So question on the team you've built, because I think this goes unseen. A lot of people don't, they look at you more frequently than they do the hundreds of people that work with you. So what is your belief around HR? I know that we weren't planning on going here, but I'd love for you to inspire everyone as to, are you just a glorified HR director?

Speaker 2: I am a glorified HR director. If you looked at my calendar, if you looked at my calendar and looked at, I'm averaging, I'm working eight to 7 p.m. with no lunch break, every minute booked. That's kind of my style. Nine to eight. I have zero breaks. I have ungodly amounts of meetings that are five, 10, 15, 20 minutes. So you're talking about 40, 60 meetings a day. And 20% of them, 30% of them, 40% of them are HR meetings, because I only believe that people are the core and utter variable of business success. And a lot of people here would have businesses much bigger if their culture was kind. I really believe that. And I think that, I think we need to have a new conversation around alpha business winning. I think kindness matters. And I think people should look into it. So, Sebastian just said, Sebastian just said, where do I get all the energy from? From gratitude. I'm incredibly grateful. I think people struggle with perspective. I was born in Belarus. Look what's going on in the part of the world I come from. There's 850 million people on earth that don't have access to clean water. The average American income is $52,000. If everybody that you love is healthy right this second, what on earth are you complaining about? I have enormous amounts of energy because the math around being a human being is 400 trillion to one. We are a miracle. This is insane. This is absurd that we get to do this. I'm talking to you from a car right now through a phone. We just don't have gratitude. Gratitude is my greatest, greatest, greatest driver.

Speaker 1: Yeah, that's amazing. So, on that point, so you have a team, right? And the team is who repurposes your content, right? So when you make one video, that one video gets chopped up and placed on every social media site conceivable. So can you explain- And it's made, yeah,

Speaker 2: it's made contextual to the platform. So the clips we use for TikTok and the words we use are different than what we do for LinkedIn, is different than what I do for Twitter. I always write the copy because I want it to be from me. I post it, but yeah, we have a work stream. I have a 25 person full-time team that I pay to produce content on the internet. It started by me, by myself for nine years. And over the last seven years, that team has blossomed from zero to one, two people for a long time, four people for a long time. But over the last four years, that team is now 25 full-time employees whose job in the world is to help me scale my content. That's how much I believe in it.

Speaker 1: When a new platform comes out, and I already know the answer to this, you're always one of the first people on that platform. Why do you do that? Why is that so important? Except for Clubhouse. Or maybe not Clubhouse.

Speaker 2: I was very early on Clubhouse. I was there in July. I didn't stay on Clubhouse because it's time allocation, right? I get more reach on Twitter. I'm an investor in Clubhouse. I love Clubhouse. The problem with me is I run $2 billion businesses in BeFriends and VaynerMedia. So I don't have time to actually make content. What you just said is very powerful. I do podcasts, I do speaking so that content can be created out of it, not because of the fees associated with it. Think about that. So Clubhouse is hard for me because I don't really take time to make content for the sake of making it.

Speaker 3: Hmm, that's so key.

Speaker 2: Now I did and I used to, but I'm running an 1800 person agency and a 50 person IP and I got a lot going on, you know? And so I'm early because I day trade attention. The only thing I'm after in the world is attention. Once I have that attention, it's up to me to fill that attention with quality information that creates the karma that I'm looking to put into the world.

Speaker 1: Well, one of the things, my favorite quotes of you that I've ever heard you say, and I've watched hours of your content, is when somebody asks you what's the return on investment of social media? And lawyers ask me all the time, what's the ROI? What's the ROI? What's the ROI? And what was your answer for that? Because this is my favorite thing that I think you've ever said that I've heard you say anyway.

Speaker 2: I ask people what the ROI of their mother was. Because, and I'll tell you why. Because I am the byproduct of a remarkable mother. Everything that I have can be traced back to the way I was mothered and fathered for that matter, but predominantly mothered. And I can't show you a direct correlation to the monies I've made because my mom built up my self-esteem here, held me accountable there, or taught me kindness mattered over here. But this concept of people wanting to measure every single dollar and action is an incredible misunderstanding of how brand is built. And everybody here is a brand. And, you know, again, I have no interest in dictating people's ambition. Maybe everyone's happy with how much business they have, but let there be no confusion. There is an incredible amount of opportunity being done for people that are putting out podcasts, written article. If you're good at writing, write. If you're good at video, do videos. Like, but just try for a year. I mean, people are incredibly scared of putting themselves out there. And it's all grounded in their own insecurities, which is why I talk so much about mindset and perspective. But just because they're insecure or potentially content and complacent, or maybe even borderline lazy, doesn't mean it's not happening. Just because you don't wanna do it doesn't mean it's not happening.

Speaker 1: So Gary, I know your time's limited. I appreciate that. What would be your last kick in the butt for everyone who wants to make 2022 their best year yet and just crush their competition and take things to another level in their firm? What is your, like, kick in the butt, drill sergeant, piece of advice for everyone as our last kind of question for you?

Speaker 2: Use curiosity and accountability to not have regret. Somebody out of the 300 here is actually gonna say, you know what, I'm doing what Gary said. And they're gonna remind you in a year after they were successful of these 79 wonderful things that happened. And the 299 remaining here are gonna be like, shit, I wish I did that. And they're gonna have regret because it's 100% happening. So use curiosity. Maybe he's right. Maybe I haven't tapped into writing or my comedic style or my interests. Maybe I should put myself out there. And then hold yourself accountable. Don't give up after a week, a month, three months. And most of all, be comfortable in your own skin. Everybody else sucks too.