People are surprised when I'm in small settings. They'll be like tell my friend he needs to do Tick Tock and I'm like, well he doesn't I'm like hey friend, what would you like to happen in your life? well I Want to Triple My business I'm like now you have to do social but if you didn't and you're happy then you know, Clap your hands everybody Welcome To the first episode of the Marketing Scenes of Success where we plant scenes for business growth. I'm honored to introduce Our Guest for this show is a national entrepreneur and leader of a massive business Empire including one of the largest marketing agencies in the world. Being a media, he's a five-time New York time best-selling author, a top tier motivation with speaker and the creator of be Friends none other than the legendary Binger Chuck Thank you Gary so much for joining me today! Aiden It's great to be with you my friend.

Yeah! I miss any of your achievements on that list. you uh, you know, uh yes and no yes and no I mean we don't need to worry about achievements I mean my achievements are those are like the secondary things. the way the relationships I have are the achievements. So that's what I mean by yes and I was very kind of you and I wanted I know we don't have a lot of time so let's get right into it to provide value a lot.

So so what I love about you Gary is that you're a practitioner of everything you speak about. You're you're not just living in the clouds, you operate in the dirt. Which is why I think a lot of our audience is going to benefit from um, these questions that I have for you. So you ready ready to get ready to start I Am all right.

So to start this off I Thought it would be fun to share a fun fact. One of the reasons why I chose our business name was in honor of you Gary The first question is what's your favorite color and why my favorite color is green I don't actually know if green became my favorite color because of the New York Jets my favorite football team or that? well actually I know how I picked the jet so that wasn't it was Eric Godfrey my friend said you're a Jets fan I think it's because of the New York Jets though I gotta find there's some sort of like piece of paper my mom has like for me from kindergarten which was before I liked the Jets where I think green is my favorite color. so I've got to figure that out. Love it all right.

So moving into the marketing stuff, about the important stuff, what are your thoughts in the economy right now and how an ambitious business owner should navigate that? especially a contractor. Yeah, I'm not a economist so I'm not I'm coming from a complete guess What do I feel I Feel that there's just a lot of instability in the world, right? There's there's war in Europe There's a huge shift in the way the world communicates between social and traditional media. There's clearly uh, East versus West scenario between China and America that continues to get more strategic if not contentious. You know you've got alliances bricks, right? Brazil Russia India China South Africa Um is a real economic Alliance Now that is something that the U.S and Europe can't ignore.

That leads to like different actions, different instabilities. Um I Think that there is incredible lack of people saving money. You know the coolness of saving money of the 50s and 60s has become not cool. People live on credit, people buy things they can't afford, so that's always scary.

And I think you know companies are in Shake You know. an interesting part. You're seeing a lot of the big tech companies lay people off and a lot of people are like, what the hell, They have record savings. They have record dollars.

Why are they laying people off? It's not like they're laying people off to like survive. it's that we just have a lot of inefficiencies, technology, and over hiring during Covid have just created inefficiency. Like, no matter how good or bad you feel about running a business, if you think that there might be issues in front of you, you'd rather get ahead of them, right? It's like you know why why are companies laying people off? They haven't had a heart attack yet. Well, if You, don't eat the wrong things and if you exercise, you can prevent a heart attack.

So like I feel like we're in very interesting times. I Would say an ambitious small business should make sure that they have a just in case fund so like, don't overextend yourself, be sitting on cash to the best of your ability a little a little. Nest Egg But don't be frozen by fear like be on the offense if you're good. Like if you're good, you'll pick up business during tough times because your competitors will lose their business to you.

And so you know with Vayner we're trying to be thoughtful, but we're also trying to be on the offense and pick up market share. Agree. Same same here. same logic here.

Love it is Word of Mouth alone by itself a reliable way to grow a business, especially again for a local contractor like a landscaper. You know what they can afford on social media because I think or Google because I think it will search your social will help them grow. But you know I'm not going to sit here and say you have to run marketing. There's too many people watching right now.

Who've only Built their business on Word of Mouth Word of mouth is powerful. My big point about that is like why wouldn't you want to double your business if you could afford it And it didn't create anything negative for you like work-life balance like why would you know like it's kind of like that Facebook movie right? Like you know what's better than a million a billion kind of thing. Like that whole thing, it's like yes, you can build a three million dollar a year landscaping business with just word of mouth because you have a big enough wealthy enough area where you're the guy. you're the gal for the last decade.

My question is like why wouldn't you want it to be 5.3 million because you were good at Facebook and Google of word of mouth in a lot of ways, especially with Social. Of course it is it just it goes back to one's ambition. Like people are surprised when I'm in small settings where like there'll be like 10 of us and they're like tell my friend that he needs to do you know Tick-Tock and I'm like you know, like well, he doesn't I'm like hey friend, what would you like to happen in your life? Well I want to Triple my business I'm like now you have to do social Yeah, but if you didn't and you're happy then you know, clap your hands. You know, smaller company.

When is the right time to start looking for a marketing provider like an agency or a freelancer And what what should you look for in that provider? Um, that I think is a lot to do with word of Mouth or examples. So let's just be very direct in your world. anybody who's watching and considering your shop. they should talk to your current and former clients and see what they like.

And there's not a single service provider that doesn't have clients that have had negative experience like I think we're the best and there's plenty of people like, yeah, it didn't work for us and it might be casting it might be them. We might have had a bad day, they might have had a bad day like so there's that. And and then as far as considering it I think it's one of two extremes. You want to be on defense.

You're worried that the economy is going to get worse and you're going to lose 25 of your clients. So you want to go on the offense or defense depending on how you want to look at it to grow. or it's pure offense. like you're feeling great, you're not even worried about a recession, and you just want to double because you want to because you want to have a bigger business for whatever reasons.

The Vanity: You need the money to pay for your mom in her nursing home Like there's like I People always forget about all the reasons one would want. and so by the way, you just want to go to nicer vacations with your family while your kids are still in the house and aren't gonna. You know when they move out you're never going to have 11 and 8 eight-year-old again and you just want a nicer vacation, a longer one, a fancier one. I Don't care like everyone gets to choose what they want so you know if that's the case, Well then you need to grow your business and marketing.

Oh, is how you grow a business? Yeah, they got it. How would you so a lot more? Uh, again. a lot of our clients are smaller. Uh, really.

out in the field working a lot. Yeah. the job. What are some some things they can do to get themselves out of the field and then actually working on the business side of things? Well, that's a big one in your world.

I Think almost everyone who's got a you know Hefty six-figure seven figure landscaping business isn't hiring enough people to get them out of the field. That's my next question. I Mean it was my biggest argument with my dad when I had a small liquor store I was like Dad if I'm behind the register I can't be on the computer to make business grow. same thing my dad was like I want you on the floor and at the register I'm like I want to be in this little office with a glass pane watching the floor in the register while I'm on the computer growing the business.

So how do you find good employees to work in the hot sun and and retain them? You find them by guessing. literally. you just hire people and then you get to see what they're like. You retain them by communicating with them and finding out what they value.

Whether that's money, work, life balance, even just caring about you know the the Mendoza Line The threshold for being good in this industry because I've followed this industry for a long time isn't very high. There's so many people that don't even have any kind of relationship with the people in the field. And then there's people that are incredibly good at having relationships and appeal because they're in the field and it's just about caring about your employee. Yes sir.

All right, let me, uh, let me thank you Gary for for coming on here. Thanks for having me brother I Went a little bit over so no worries I I Bought us a couple minutes. My next meeting's here so I'm gonna run I Love you Aiden I Wish you well.