Crushing it follows the laws of thermodynamics: whatever energy you put into something will manifest itself in equal amounts when it comes out. Sometimes that resulting energy gets harnessed to move muscles or machines; sometimes it dissipates, unused, into the ether. A successful entrepreneur is one who puts in enough energy to move the gears and executes well enough so the work isn’t wasted.
How I’m Crushing It
Deon Graham, Digital Architect
IG: @deon
Deon Graham was a tennis pro. Now he’s Diddy’s digital director.
He’s only thirty-one, but already he has one of the most coveted jobs in the marketing world.
That’s what personal branding can do for a person.
This story starts in 2008, in Miami. During the day, Deon was teaching tennis. At night, he was spending too much money at the clubs and “doing young people stuff.” He noticed there was a void in the marketplace. Clubs wanted to market only to a certain type—white, Hispanic, etc.—and while they liked having hip-hop parties because the revenue was good, they shied away from projecting the image of having a heavy hip-hop crowd. No marketing company was focusing on clubs that catered to an urban or hip-hop audience. So Deon decided he would.
He created the nightlife website City Never Sleeps. By offering to market the club brands on his site, he circumvented the owners’ reluctance to prominently market their hip-hop nights. Partygoers got access to their photos, and club owners got access to patrons. People loved the site, so he knew he was on to something, but there was no money in it.
But Deon says that was kind of his fault. “I was just trying to make deals and make moves for a profit. I wasn’t trying to build a brand. I wasn’t committed to the branding process; I was committed to try to make money.”
It wasn’t until he started to dive into Crush It! principles and focus on building a brand for the long term that things started to turn around. He started being more selective about the caliber of clubs he worked with, turning down money if he didn’t think the club was on brand and would lead to bigger clients. “All my decision making changed. The reactions I was getting from people changed, and not coincidentally, the checks started to get bigger.”
He’d been engaging people on Twitter and Facebook, but not as much as he should have been. He started watching Gary Vee. “This guy has all these followers, he looks like he has a more successful business than me, but every day he’s on social media talking to people, giving them advice, giving them free content. So why am I not doing that?”
He doubled down on the engagement. “It was 24/7. Literally anybody mentioning anything, I would join conversations, reply to everybody. If it was two a.m. and there was a popping party going on, we were in those conversations, letting people know about other parties in the city. There was no room for anything else.” After landing a contract with a prominent nightlife group, he felt secure enough to quit his day job.
The site’s popularity rose quickly until his was the biggest platform catering to the urban and hip-hop market. He was approached by Cîroc vodka’s marketing team, Blue Flame Agency.
“They asked, ‘Did you make this site?’”
“Yeah.”
“We’ve paid people $75,000 to build a website.”
“I said, ‘I’ll do it for $10,000.’ I just wanted to get in the building.”
And he did. Blue Flame Agency hired him, and from then on he was busy with project after project. For two-and-a-half years, he brokered deals with Hennessy, LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy), any brand you could think of that would want to reach the urban nightlife consumer.
In 2015, Aubrey Flynn of Combs Enterprises offered Deon a position as his digital director, working with eight different brands, including a tequila, a TV network, and a music label.
It’s a busy life. Deon has a family, so a lot of the work is done after his three kids are asleep and before everyone wakes up. His in-box has been flooded with requests for speaking engagements since his mention in the May 2017 issue of Entrepreneur magazine.
He’s got massive ambition, and nothing is going to get in his way.
I’m definitely going to have a digital agency similar to what Gary’s running, doing what I do for Sean Combs with many different brands and celebrities.
Sometimes I go to these meetings, and you kind of get a different look, just based on being a young black male. That’s actually been the hardest part, getting taken seriously by the corporate world. That’s why it’s good to be aligned with someone like Sean Combs, who fights for that. But it’s definitely a different conversation when I go into these rooms, than for say, Gary. I walk in the door and they definitely get surprised. You can tell they were thinking or looking for someone else. It’s just something I gotta deal with; can’t use it as an excuse.
The most important thing is to be fully committed and to block out any noise, because nobody has done what you’re attempting to do. And the only way to get it is to put the blinders on and push forward.
Attention
Where are the eyeballs going? What are your customers talking about? What are the newest trends in your field? What are the biggest controversies? You have to pay attention to everything. One of my great advantages has been the ability to see where the attention is shifting even as my competition is looking elsewhere (usually backward). Knowing how to spot underpriced or 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 become ineffective or overpriced. Keep experimenting even when 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.
How I’m Crushing It
Andrew Nguyen, Brand with Drew
IG:@brandwithdrew
“My market started on Facebook, then jumped onto Twitter. They got away from Facebook, then jumped onto Instagram. They got away from Twitter, then jumped back into Facebook. And Snapchat, too.” Where the attention goes, so goes Andrew Nguyen.
Andrew may follow the eyeballs, but he has always marched to his own beat. At seventeen, he tried to follow a traditional path and please his immigrant parents by accepting a scholarship to a small school in Hampton, Virginia, with the intention of studying to become a pharmacist. By the end of the first semester, he was failing almost every class. Thinking it might suit him better, he switched over to a five-year MBA program.
He didn’t tell his parents.
It was summer before he finally confessed. Naturally, they were livid. They also pointed out that if he was just going to get an MBA, he could go to school in their home state of Maryland and get his degree for a lot less money. But Andrew wasn’t willing to leave Hampton, because he had already started making a name for himself there—first as a barber. Andrew had learned to cut his own hair from his father, who had attended barber school after arriving in the United States from Vietnam. When Andrew realized he was in a dorm full of men who needed haircuts, he saw opportunity and hung a barber sign outside his door. Business was good; sometimes he cut ten or more heads per day. He was also gaining a reputation as a DJ. He’d noticed that the most popular DJ on campus was a senior. Someone was going to have to take his place when he graduated. He thought, Why not me? He used his barber money to buy a set of speakers and some DJ equipment and had them sent to the dorm. He started out doing a few events for free, again building his brand, until the reigning DJ noticed hi
s potential and took him under his wing, making the necessary introductions to get Andrew good paying clients. “I truly felt this was something I was meant to do. I was meant to stay at this school, meant to meet the people that I was to meet, meant to grow these businesses. I got to the point where, once I realized that I truly believed in this vision, I was willing to do whatever it took to do it.”
Andrew’s mother and father were not pleased and essentially disowned him. He was on his own, without even enough money to pay for lodging. He wound up living in his car and working in the school cafeteria so he’d have access to food. He became a reservist in the US Marine Corps to help pay his tuition. Eventually, however, he built his DJ brand into a thriving six-figure business serving the campus and the city (his predecessor-turned-mentor, Taylor Austin James, would become better known as DJ Tay James, Justin Bieber’s official DJ).
Andrew didn’t have to cut hair anymore, but he was marked by the months of homelessness. Saving money became his priority. He decided to use his MBA to get a job that would allow him to build up a financial foundation as well as teach him the logistics of the corporate world. He took a sales and marketing job with Pepsi. At the same time, he decided to start his own marketing agency, the O Agency.
“My passion wasn’t barbering or DJ-ing. My passion was branding myself to become this DJ, this facade, this brand. There’s a psychological quality to branding and marketing that’s sometimes hard to quantify. You have to care and show people the quality of who you are and what you do.”
To test his knowledge and skills, he also decided to develop a marketing plan for his friend Bakari Taylor, a trainer who had earned some local notoriety for his brand, Body by Bakari, through a series of free boot camps he had held around the DC area the summer before. Taylor had the skills and charisma, Andrew had the business and marketing background. Together, they launched a big branding initiative, an East Coast No Excuses tour to help build brand awareness.
The tour was a huge success, but it almost broke Andrew. “That was the hardest year of my life, even past sleeping in my car and going into the Marine Corps. I knew that most businesses fail, I knew that the odds were against me, and I knew that I was not supposed to make it, so I was waking up at four or five in the morning to work twelve-hour days for Pepsi, then working six p.m. to two a.m., putting in time for the O Agency and Bakari. And I was still DJ-ing, too.”
Thank God Pepsi made energy drinks, which Andrew could get for free.
Within one year, he was done. He quit the DJ business and put in his two-weeks’ notice at Pepsi. Within six months of launching the O Agency, he’d acquired his first NFL client. Today he works with brands like 7-Eleven and Sotheby’s.
He read Crush It! only about two years ago, but it was reaffirming. “Hearing someone who’s many, many levels ahead of me saying things that I’ve already thought . . . the overall mentality is what really excites me. There was so much confirmation that I was doing the right thing.”
Until recently, he always prioritized the O Agency brand, preferring to wait until he had something to show for his efforts before putting his personal brand forward.
“You can brand yourself all you want, but if you don’t have credibility or have not done anything, it’s almost worthless. You can only sell something that’s actually good.”
Now that he has been able to “liberate” himself from the business, he has started building his personal brand, @BrandwithDrew.
I’m at a point right now where I realize I will probably never be broke again in my life. I’ve truly found my passion. And one of the things I truly want to do is help out a lot of people who are lost, especially the millennial market. I would go even deeper by saying the minority market. That’s the niche that I’m really going after and putting myself in a position where I can really help people out. It’s not about the money. I do a lot of things for free because I care more about impact than the monetary things.
I don’t even consider what I’m doing as work anymore. I enjoy what I do so much. I want to continue speaking and building my own brand and writing books and creating events that help people. I would love to do that for the rest of my life.
These are the first seven essentials to a strong personal brand. I hope they sound familiar to readers of the original Crush It! It would be impossible to say these things too much or too often. You know how I know? Because for the number of times I repeat myself every year, there should be thousands and thousands more of you reaching your goals. The only explanation that such a large percentage of you aren’t is that you’re not taking me at my word. I exaggerate a lot for emphasis and entertainment, but I am not kidding when I tell you that if you scrimp in any way on any one of these building blocks, you will falter. It’s just the truth.
There’s an eighth essential. It’s the only one that has seen some significant developments over the years. It’s so important, it deserves a chapter of its own.
3
The Eighth Essential—Content
To monetize your personal brand into a business using social marketing networks, two pillars need to be in place: product and content.
—Crush It!, chapter 5
It’s still true that the right product and content will be key to building a vibrant personal brand. That part never changes. But how you develop your content and increase its reach definitely has. In Crush It! I recommended simultaneously pumping out content onto all the different channels using a social-media Web service (anyone remember Ping.fm?). It was only later, however, that I realized there had been another misunderstanding. I should have specified that I didn’t mean you should pump out the same content across multiple platforms. Rather, I wanted you to develop high-quality native microcontent. For those of you new to this, that means content that is specifically and perfectly designed to suit the platform you’re using to disseminate it. The audience on Twitter isn’t looking for the same kind of content as Instagram followers. A Facebook post will have greater impact if it’s not just a cut-and-paste job from your blog or a ten-minute video that should actually be living on YouTube. Even if your audience overlaps among the platforms, people are in a completely different mind-set when they’re visiting one platform than when visiting another. If they’re on Twitter, they’re likely trying to keep up with current news. If they’re on Facebook, they’re probably catching up with friends and family. They may go to Snapchat to consume a blip of entertainment on their lunch break, but they’ll go to YouTube when they’re in the mood to settle in for the evening with some long-form video, the same way previous generations watched TV. You should be plotting how to adapt your content to appeal to every platform your audience might visit in a given day.
Creating all that content can seem daunting, but it’s a lot more manageable if you focus on creating one big piece of pillar content that can be splintered into other smaller bits of content—content that breeds like rabbits, if you will. The concept can best be illustrated by a chart my team and I created for VaynerTalent, a division of VaynerMedia I established for influencers who have grown their personal brands as big as they can on their own and need extra help to keep growing. It’s a service for the 1 percent of the 1 percent. If you’re reading this book, you’re likely not there yet, but I hope to teach you what you need to know so that if you get good enough, you’ll need us one day. Anyway, we use a chart to illustrate our strategy for creating endless bits of microcontent out of one “pillar” piece of content:
What those pieces of content actually look like, and the platforms you choose to use, is what you’re here to figure out. More on that in part II.
In Crush It! I also established that great content is a result of passion plus expertise. While the opportunities for people to become stars on various social-media platforms have multiplied, to have a prayer of becoming even the eighty-eighth best whiskey Instagrammer, you’re going to have to make sure that you are constantly updating your knowledge and providing information and insight that people can�
�t find easily anywhere else. Moreover, you’ll have to do it in a unique and memorable signature style. There’s no way around it—your content must be amazing. For some that reality can be as paralyzing as a snakebite. Here’s the antivenin: you don’t have to wait until you’re an expert or you’ve designed a perfect website or written ten perfect blog posts before launching a business. Quite the contrary.
Document, Don’t Create
In 2009, I devoted only three lines to the idea that “you can even make the learning process part of your content.” It was an aside, a possible solution if you were young or still building cred. Since then I’ve come to realize that, actually, the learning process should be your content. That means it’s not a problem if you’ve got more passion than expertise. Our best-loved icons aren’t the ones born to the manor who stayed in the manor. They’re the ones who started out tinkering in their basements, who sold product out of the backs of their cars, who rose and fell and rose again. The only ones we can’t forgive are people who won’t admit to their imperfections or own their mistakes.
It’s true that great content hinges on great storytelling and that every story in the universe has already been told. But not by you. You are unique, and you provide nuance, perspective, and details that no one else can. That means you don’t just have the ability to generate unique pieces of creative—you are the unique piece of creative. Don’t worry about getting people’s attention by plotting a poetic YouTube video or writing four drafts of a snappy Facebook status post. Instead, use every platform available to document your actual life and speak your truth. Let people learn who you are, then let them watch you develop into who you want to become.
Crushing It! EPB Page 7