Rating: 8/10
Summary
What I appreciate about this book is that I listen to the GaryVee podcast about 3-4x a week. Yet I still found a lot of insight in this book.
The important reminders are:
- If you want something, you have to be willing to work for it. However, you have to make sure you’re listening to *yourself* about what you actually want (and not anyone else.
- There are a lot of different approaches to success. It’s good to see different angles.
- Be in it for the long-run. That’s okay — fingers crossed, you’re going to be around for a while anyway.
Notes
Lewis Howes
“All I ever wanted to do was be around inspiring people that I could learn from.” He spent the next year, eight hours or so a day, connecting with local business leaders, inviting them to lunch and conducting informational interviews to learn more about how they’d achieved their success. Thinking he might be a natural fit for a job in the sports world, he’d at first reached out to a number of sports executives. As one person connected him to another person, who then suggested he meet with another, his circle grew wider. As he learned more of our LinkedIn’s possibilities, He optimized his profile, which then led to bigger and bigger influences agreeing to meet with him. By the end of 2009, he had thirty-five thousand connections.
At the time, Tweetups – in-person gatherings of Twitter users around a common cause – we’re a popular networking venue.
I went to a couple and I thought, Hmmm, I’m building this following on LinkedIn. Why don’t I do a LinkedIn meet up?”
(pg. 35)
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“So I was like, Hmmm, why don’t I see if I can do another event and charge five dollars at the door?” He did, and he made money off the entry fee as well as the sponsorships.
“And then I was like, Hmmm, I’m building a relationship with these venues. What if I ask for a 10 percent commission on the food and bar sales from these networking events?” They said yes.
In short order, Lewis was bringing in a couple thousand dollars a month, enough to finally get off his sister’s couch and move into his own apartment, the cheapest one he could find, a little one-bedroom for $495 per month in Columbus, Ohio.
People were astounded. How was he pulling this off? He didn’t have a real job, he didn’t have a college degree, and yet he was bringing big influencers together all over the country and being asked to speak at conferences. All through LinkedIn. They started asking if he could show them how to use the platform for their businesses, too. And Lewis thought, Hmmm.
Lewis started teaching other entrepreneurs and businesspeople how to optimize their profile and reach out to potential clients, investors, or whomever they needed.
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I never felt like I was smart. I never felt like I had the intelligence, or the skills, or the experience, or credentials. I didn’t have any of that. So when I read that word, I thought, yes! I needed to continue to deepen my level of care! When I would meet with these influencers, I would never ask for advice. I would just say, “I’m so curious to hear your story about how you became successful.” And at the end of that I could say, “What’s the biggest challenge you have in your business, or your career, or your life right now? ” and listen. And they would tell me everything they needed. I said, ” you need a sales guy? I’ve got three of the top ones right here. You need a programmer? I’ve got this person. You need a designer? I meant one last week. He was great.” I just became the connector to all the most successful people. I never asked for a job. I never asked for business. That one-word chapter confirm that when we show up and we add value and we care, then we can learn how to make money around it later. But show up with value first. That is how I built the last decade of my life. (pg. 37)
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…that’s what he did. “I was working my ass off.” He built up his expertise until every social-media conference was booking him as the LinkedIn speaker. He also got creative.
I started approaching venues, which were mostly restaurants and bars, and built a relationship with either the manager or the owner. I’d try thinking about how I could make my event valuable for them. How could I care for their biggest need, their biggest challengers? So I started asking, “What is the night you make the least amount of money?” And they would answer “Tuesday night“ or “Wednesday night” or whatever it was and I’d say, “OK. I’m going to bring you 500 people on that night because I want to make every night a profitable night for you, not just the weekends. And I’m going to bring new Business Leaders, and a new audience of quality people to your business.”
Lewis did, and what was once these venues’ worst night became their biggest night. From then on, they were willing to let Lewis host events anytime he asked. He did, but he also started taking bigger risks.
“I just started to go for it and ask for what I wanted, even if I thought it wasn’t going to work. I started asking for 20 percent commission of food and bar, as opposed to 10 percent. I charged twenty dollars at the door instead of five. And I started charging more for sponsorships.”
(pg. 38)
Lauryn Evarts Bosstick – Skinny Confidential
“Another thing that Crush it! said that resonated for me was, ‘Always put your money back into your business. ‘So, I was like, work, work, work for tips and then put it back right into The Skinny Confidential. And then work, work, work for tips and then right back to The Skinny Confidential. I had zero dollars in my bank account for the longest time.”
When she finally did launch, she kept her content narrowly tailored to health-related topics. “Find that niche you’re so good at and ride it, and ride it, and ride it until you can slowly expand out. “ In retrospect, she might have been able to start diversifying her brand within 3 months but her brutal schedule would have made that difficult.
I would shoot all my photos from 2:00 to 3:30, Barton from 4:00 to 12:00, come home, write my blog post from 12:00 to 2:00, wake up, teach Pure Barre, teach Pilates, go to school, rinse and repeat, five days a week. And then on the weekend, I would do Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and the emails and all the other little stuff that comes with it.
Slowly, methodically, she started expanding the scope of her brand into other categories: wellness, beauty, home decor, and clothes. But she didn’t make a penny for two-and-a-half-years. “The biggest mistake I see influencers…
(pg. 43)
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On Passion
You’re going to go through a time where you’re not going to make any money. It’s not going to be a week, it’s not going to be a month, it’s not going to be one year. It’s going to be years. And during that time, if you don’t love what you do, it’s going to be very hard to stick it out. That is something that people don’t understand when they hear, “Follow your passion.” They hear rainbows, unicorns, bullshit. But the truth of it is that it’s important, because if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, you’re going to be that much more likely to quit when it’s hard.
When you’re passionate about what you’re offering the world, whether its a sales training method or vintage toys, the quality of both your product and content will more likely be what it needs to be to get noticed, valued, and talked about. Interestingly, many of the people we interviewed pointed out that you don’t have have to be passionate about the product or service you’re offering. What’s imperative is that you are passionate about giving. That’s what Shaun “Shonduras” McBride discovered. Before developing his massively successful personal brand on Snapchat, he sold jewelry online. The guy was a skater and snowboarder; he had little interest in jewelry per se. But after reading Crush It! in college, he decided to sell jewelry to test the book’s principles and confirm what his instincts told him were true: that engaging with customers and involving them in the development of his brand would pay dividends no matter what he sold. As you’ll see later in this book, he was right.
Finally, most entrepreneurs will tell you that passion is proactive, buoying you when you threaten to become overwhelmed by the stress and frustration that is a natural by-product of entrepreneurialism. Passion is your backup generator when all your other energy sources start to sputter. And passion keeps you happy.
(page 47)
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Patience
It’s interesting that passion and patience go hand in hand. To live in line with your passion will probably require that you go slower than you might want to. It will definitely mean that you say no more than you say yes. Bide your time; you cheapen yourself when you make deals while holding your nose. Remember, you’re only crushing it if you’re living entirely on your own terms.
It’s not impossible to make Bank when you build a business with the sole goal of getting rich, but very often entrepreneurs who get rich quickly sacrifice their chances for wealth for the long term. When I was just starting to grow my family business, my friends who graduated college at the same time that I did also went to work. They started making money and spending it on trips to Vegas and hot girls and nice watches. Me? I was making money, too. In the first five or six years, I grew that business to $45 million, and not many years later, it was a $60 million wine empire. When a normal twenty-six-year-old dude builds a $60 million business, he leverages it for twenty-year-old dude things. Yet I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Springfield, New Jersey. I drove a Jeep Grand Cherokee. I had no watch, no suits, and no flash. I could have paid myself hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, but the most I took was $60K. I kept my head down like an ox with a plow, putting almost every dime I earned back into the business and focusing all my energy on building a personal brand around unparalleled customer service, both in the store and online. When not talking to customers, I was the most boring human being on the planet. Today I not only have everything I ever wanted (except the Jets) like all the other entrepreneurs in this book, but also I’m having the time of my life. Some achieved success in a relatively short time; most worked their asses off for years before anyone knew who they were.
(pg. 52)
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Content Production
You need to constantly be in do mode. I see you other overthinking your content and agonizing over your decisions, taking forever to make up your mind. Your confidence is low and you’re worried people will call you a loser if you make the wrong call. Get over that quick. I love losing because I learn so much from it. The reason I don’t talk about my failures much is not because I’m hiding anything, but because once I’ve see I’ve made a mistake, in my mind, it’s over. I’ll admit it: I was wrong in 2010; location-based chat Yobongo was not the next great startup. But what good does it to do me to dwell on what didn’t work out? I’d rather look ahead to the next thing that I’m sure will My track record speaks for itself. (page 60)
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Knowing how to spot underpriced and underappreciated attention is a key influencer skill. People have always dismissed or underestimated the new thing, from radio to TV, from the Internet to the social networks. They’re the same people who believe that Hollywood, not YouTube and Instagram, still incubates the biggest stars. As anyone under the age of twenty-five will tell you, they’re wrong.
Don’t become so comfortable on one platform that you don’t take the time to develop solid skills on the others. On the other hand, don’t cling to your favorite even when it’s becoming ineffective or overpriced.
Keep experimenting even you’re sure you’re doing it right. Your willingness to risk discomfort will save you in the long run. There are a lot of you whose competitors were mastering Instagram five years ago just in case it got really big, while you were still debating whether to get an account. Don’t make that mistake again. (page 72)
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Don’t worry about seeming vain. Embrace it. Everybody else who is crushing it did. Remember, smart entrepreneurs don’t care what other people think. You’ll look like an ass for a while if you walk around with a camera constantly pointed at your face, but everyone looks like an ass when trying something new. Reality TV was once a joke, remember? Now you can’t turn around without seeing a reality star on a magazine cover, a makeup counter, some exercise equipment, or a frozen-food package. Everyone’s an ass until they’re a pioneer.
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As you gather your ideas and put your strategies in motion, set yourself up emotionally to succeed. Find your courage and strengthen your self-esteem until you feel brave enough to make some noise and invite people’s attention. Then show them that you care deeply about keeping it. (page 112)
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(Re: Snap) So what my followers get out of that is where to go, what the benefits are, what they should wear, and what it looks like when you’re in the chamber. With every single thing I do, I try t hot those four points. I’m not just going to post a picture of my coffee cup. I’m going to say, “Today, I’m drinking iced coffee. I’m drinking it with a silicone straw because it’s BPA free, and I like cinnamon in it because it helps with your blood sugar.” Every single snap needs to leave them with something or else it’s narcissistic. (page 164)
Shaun
At the time, Facebook was still in the early stages of its gargantuan growth, adding millions of users every month, women leading the way to makeup 57 percent of the site membership accounting for 62 percent of the shares. And Facebook had all these features that could enhance engagement. For example, if one person commented on a post, all their friends could see it! It’s hard to remember, but at the time that was still pretty remarkable.
Facebook became Shaun’s storefront and his design studio.
“I would ask my fans to tell me what kind of styles they wanted and help me name the pieces. I’d do giveaways like, “Whoever picks the best name for this necklace will get ten free necklaces.’” Engagement went through the roof. He gave people every opportunity to interact with the site. “It felt like they were part of the jewelry boutique and that we were creating it together.” (page 169)
How to use Twitter
Start by looking at the trending topics (in the mobile app, you’ll see them listed when you click on the Search symbol). There is bound to be something sports related there. Click on it, and then start expressing your thoughts. You can do this in two ways. You could just start writing. With a 280-character limit, it could take you eleven tweets to say everything you want to, but that’s OK. Or you could try recording a video of yourself talking about the topic (the current video time limit on Twitter is 140 seconds), then posting that. Include the relevant hashtag so that everyone else searching for information on that topic will see your tweets. Once you’ve exhausted yourself with the trends, start searching other sports topics and inserting yourself into the conversations happening around them by replying to people’s tweets. You show you’re well rounded by sharing your thoughts all day, every day, via text or video on everything from the NHL to MMA, the PGA, and World Taekwondo (which was known as the WTF until June 2017, when it rebranded and dropped the word Fed (page 182)
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I found the thing that I could do, and I beat the shit out of it. I locked myself away for two years Every day, day in and day out. I shot a video every single day. Wake up in the morning, come up with an idea, shoot a video, edit it, have lunch, come back, and put it out into the world, have dinner, then stay up unto one or two in the morning replying to comments. I didn’t use teleprompters or anything. If I made a mistake, I would make fun of myself and keep going, partly because I didn’t know how to edit video. All I knew how to do was put a beginning and an end on it Sometimes good enough is good enough. (page 187)
Case Study – Vlogging
Things continue to get better. Over the course of two years of training and vlogging, you pick up the attention of thousands of people who are inspired by your commitment to later-in-life fitness and a beautiful art form normally associated with the young and svelte. You and your spouse are anything but, but people love watching you anyway Your fans help you pick out costumes, make workout suggestions, and trade dance stories, but you find they’re just as eager to talk about strategies they’ve used to reinvigorate their personal relationships as they are about your hobby. As your audience has grown, you’ve gotten to meet some of your fans, and you’re stunned at how pleased they are to meet you in person, how they want to pose for pictures with you as if you’re some kind of television star. Your following gets big enough that you think it’s worth reaching out to other (page 199)
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It’s been six years since you started this project, Sam. You’re now fifty-eight years old and your income has nearly doubled now that it’s subsidized by brands associated with dance, healthy lifestyles, and personal development. You think you’ll be able to retire from your insurance job in a year or two, after you’ve earned enough to pay off the kids’ school debt. You have no intention of ever retiring from your vlog, though, even though it takes a lot of work to keep up the momentum. Nothing about this transformation has been easy, but it’s been incredible fun.
I made this story up, but it’s not a fantasy. You can do it, or your parents can. Hell, your grandparents can. It’s a scenario that could be replicated in real life. In fact, it’s already been done. (page 200)
How To Use Facebook
Facebook is not only a canvas where you can create original content, but also an imperative distribution channel. The DNA of Facebook is word of mouth. It is the place where sharing culture has thrived beyond measure. On other platforms, you generally either hit a grand slam or you strike out. Not so on Facebook. There, with sixty-one shares, you’re getting at least a single very day. If you’re good at creating content, on another day you could hit a double with two hundred shares. You might drop down to thirteen shares with the next piece of content, only to follow up with something spectacular that gets you seven thousand. With every share, no matter how micro, you’re building awareness of your brand in a native way. If anything, it’s the best place for people with no followers to begin their personal branding efforts. (page 210)
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Track down those five teachers, take their picture, and create a Facebook post that asks, “Did you know that five Sacramento School District teachers have been nationally recognized for excellence in education?” You include a link to your podcast interview with the school superintendent. More and more Sacramentans learn who you are and become regular listeners. When one of them finds out that his friend’s family is moving to town because his wife got a job transfer, he forwards the podcast link so they can learn more about the school district. Suddenly, a family who need to buy a home has your voice in their ear and your contact information at their fingertips. That cycle repeats over and over until, within five years, you’re so established as the primo real estate expert of Sacramento that your new business comes in almost exclusively by referral.
Then you make more content. You go out and film or photograph the places you talk about in each podcast and post the files to Facebook. You link your podcast to the images, so that now people who don’t already live in the city can see for themselves what these areas look like without having to go anywhere else on the Internet. (page 216)
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A podcast would be the best pillar for a real estate agent, but if you just can’t get comfortable with that but you’re an excellent writer, your pillar should be a weekly post for your blog, This Week in Sacramento, where you share all the same information I suggested for the podcast in written form, plus local real estate news updates. Now you’re not just the virtual-content mayor of the city, but you’re its newspaper, too.
You write a piece about the oldest doughnut shop in town. The owner mention that he was nervous about the new Walmart slated for construction right next door.. You post that doughnut article. Then you draw (or pay someone twenty dollars to draw) a sketch of the corner where the doughnut shop is located,with a big Walmart logo drawn in. You post that arresting image on your Facebook feed as well; it’s striking enough that anyone who cares about the shop or about Sacramento might stop to study it more carefully as it scrolls through their feed. People click the link attached to your blog post, which raises their awareness of who you are and what you do. (page 217)
Personal Finance Blogger
The self-professed “business nerd” also fed on a steady diet of marketing and branding books. She read Crush It! right around the time she moved to an independent firm where there would be more freedom to leverage an individual brand. In 2011, she launched a blog, a Facebook page, a YouTube channel, and a Twitter account. “I had to explain to them, it’s the same thing as going to a workshop and teaching about money. The only difference is, it’s a video on my YouTube channel It was just turning what I was doing offline, online.” But she still had to get every tweet and script preapproved. And yet, “even thought it was a headache, it taught me how to be very thoughtful and intentional, and not just throw up stuff for the sake of it.” (page 220)
Case Study – Instagram
Let’s say your name is Rick, and you’re a twenty-seven-year-old clothing store manager in Nashville, Tennessee. You’re ambitious, and you’re lucky enough to work for an organization that isn’t interested in micromanaging your social-media accounts. You start taking pictures of everything in the store–let’s call it EnAvant–and everyone who walks in, if they will let you. You photograph the tops as they’re being laid out on the shelves, the dresses as they’re being hung, the shoes as they’re being displayed. You photograph yourself in the men’s fashions, adding your personal flair to every outfit, and you photograph your female employees in the women’s clothing. You ask your customers if they’ll pose for pictures in their new outfits. Then you post every picture on your Instagram account, accompanied by well-thought-out, relevant hashtags. You know that how you frame your images, or the techniques you use to give them a sense of fun or creativity and really show off the clothes, will be crucial to growing your fan base. But you can’t build a fan base if you’re not visible. Aside from getting influencers to mention you or your product, or paying for ads, you know that the fastest way for a brand starting at zero, like yours, is to master hashtags. If it’s springtime, and you’re posting a picture of a woman in a canary-yellow raincoat, you include the coat brand’s hashtag, along with #EnAvantwear, #springfashion,, #springlooks, #raincoat, #readyforrain, #yellow. As more people spot your work, in time you become known for your fashion sense and cheeky sense of humor.
You start reaching out to people who live in the vicinity of the store, but you don’t use direct mail, because who’s got money for that? (page 226-227)
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Of the thirty-two people you talk to every week, seven post a story about how this guy named Rick who works at EnAvant reached out to compliment their shoes, top, or hat, and offered them a discount at the store.
Maybe you go even further. You put together a fashion show and DM all the influencers in the area, as well as locals whose Instagram account makes it clear they’re really into clothes and accessories, and invite them to attend so they can see the new collection and get 30 percent off all in-store purchases. And then you make sure the event is so fun and special that people start posting pics of themselves and telling their followers where they’re spending their evening.
Here’s what happens next:
People start posting pictures of themselves on their own Instagram accounts and tagging you, the brand, and the store. Competitors start reaching out to find out if you’re interested in re-creating some of your magic at their stores. Meanwhile, someone in EnAvant’s upper management takes notice and realizes that she has an incredibly valuable employee in Tennessee whom she will do pretty much anything to keep. (page 228)