Crushing It! EPB

  “It started freaking going everywhere.” Alex quickly added a few more names to the graphic—Lupita [nyong’o], Uzo [aduba], Angela [bassett], and Queen [latifah]—and turned it into a T-shirt with the Foolies logo on the back.

  That detail, the logo placement, is important to what happened next.

  A few months later, on a Wednesday, Alex got an e-mail from Essence asking for shirts for a youth choir to use at an event called Black Women in Hollywood. They needed them by Sunday in time to tape the show later in the week.

  “It was a Hail Mary mission.” It usually took weeks to get T-shirts printed, and on top of that, he had just switched printing companies because the previous one kept blowing him off. The new company managed to give him a quick turnaround time, and he shipped the shirts in time for the event.

  There was no footage when the event itself happened, but soon afterward he got an Instagram alert. It was a picture of the girls wearing his T-shirt, and standing there with her arms around them was Oprah Winfrey.

  He’d had no idea the event was sponsored by the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN).

  He and his COO, Kim, started plastering the shirt everywhere they could. When the show aired on OWN, at first there was no sign of the choir. Alex was sure the segment had been cut. Then, right after a commercial break, there they were.

  The T-shirts looked fantastic, but Alex realized that maybe putting the logo on the back instead of the front hadn’t been such a good idea. “We had wanted the shirt to be about the graphic, not about us, and we wanted to make sure that our customers knew that we always had their backs. Real smart, genius.”

  That night Shonda Rhimes tweeted out a picture of the shirt, tagged to Foolies, and posted it to Instagram, too. “I’ve never gotten so many notifications in my life,” says Alex.

  Since then, any money Alex has earned has gone back into the business or into free shirts for influencers. There are a few new versions of the shirt, listing different actors. He tries to attend as many conferences as he can where he will meet other influencers, volunteering to work there because he usually can’t afford the ticket price. He recently received a comped ticket to the BlogHer conference from someone who heard him speak about Foolies at another event several months earlier and wanted to make sure he could go.

  He’s committed to motivating people to reach their goals with more than just a T-shirt. “I don’t want to just sell you T-shirts. What happens if you don’t buy one? Is it now over for you to be motivated? Why not serve just to serve?” To that end, he launched a podcast called Dream Without Limits Radio, where he collects stories of dreamers, game changers, and people living out their purpose.

  So the podcast numbers are interesting. I think more people are following me as a whole than necessarily listening to the podcast. The episodes will fluctuate, so we’ll probably see two or three hundred, or we’ll see fifty, forty-five. I’m OK with those numbers only because the responses that I get and the people, they’re the fifty or two hundred who really want it. It doesn’t sound as cool because I don’t have tens of thousands of listeners, but I know those fifty or two hundred are the ones who are actually taking it and doing something with it, and that’s what I’d rather have. Because they’re gonna be the ones who give me two, three, four thousand later.

  I get to bring on people of color and women, who don’t get highlighted enough. You’ll see all these dope women on there. I love guys, but I know where my market is, and my niche. People tell me, “Oh, you need to expand and talk to all these people,” and I’m like, “Gary gets it.”

  Alex mentored a lot of students at the University of Florida and continues to visit middle and high schools to talk to them about entrepreneurship and getting out of the ’hood. When his brand started to take off, a number of his former mentees told him that it made perfect sense that this would be his calling. “This has always been what you’ve been doing. Now it’s just in the form of a clothing company.”

  Speed

  I love a good contradiction, but this isn’t one. Patience is for the long term; speed is for the short term. The pressure that builds between the two produces the diamond.

  Speed is one of my two or three obsessions in business. I will always gravitate toward the thing that allows me to live my life more efficiently and do my work faster. It’s one of the reasons I’m so excited about voice-controlled assistants like Google Home and Amazon Echo (see more in Chapter 15). Entrepreneurs—heck, humans!—care about time and convenience, and it’s just faster to spit the toothpaste out and say, “OK, Google, remind me to buy more toothpaste,” than it is to grab your phone and type “toothpaste” into your shopping list. If you’re just starting out, you’re going to be slogging it alone for a long time before you can hire an assistant to help you manage your time. In the meantime, put whatever tools you can find to good use to keep you moving through the day and using your time wisely and efficiently.

  You need to constantly be in do mode. I see you out there 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 seen I’ve made a mistake, in my mind, it’s over. I’ll admit it: I was wrong in 2010; location-based chat app Yobongo was not the next great startup. But what good does it 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. Being unafraid of making mistakes makes everything easy for me. Not worrying about what people think frees you to do things, and doing things allows you to win or learn from your loss—which means you win either way. Hear me now: you are better off being wrong ten times and being right three than you are if you try only three times and always get it right.

  How I’m Crushing It

  Timothy Roman, Imperial Kitchen & Bath

  IG: @imperialkb

  Timothy Roman got by with a little help from his friends.

  Once he got rid of the old ones, that is.

  Timothy is the son of Russian immigrants who brought him to the United States nineteen years ago, when he was eleven. His parents got busy doing what immigrants do: working, trying to get by, and adjusting to a new country, a new language, and a new way of life. They expected Timothy to do his part by doing well in school and getting into college.

  Problem was, Timothy hated school. “I failed everything miserably. I couldn’t concentrate. Always, my head was floating around. I was always doodling some stuff, whether it was plans, or ideas, or dreams, or counting my profits. I don’t recall any formal education.”

  The profits Timothy is referring to were from his dual revenue stream. See, he was putting his natural entrepreneurial tendencies to use. By the time he started high school, he was DJ-ing and selling mixes. He was also selling weed. In tenth grade, when he realized he was making the same amount of money as his teachers, he told his mother he was dropping out and getting his GED. She thought he was dropping out to be a DJ, and that was indeed the original plan; the drug dealing was just supposed to be supplemental income. Pretty soon, though, things reversed, and for about ten years, that was Timothy’s life.

  “I was in a poor neighborhood. Nobody has the knowledge or anything to influence you enough to say, ‘Hey, you know, you can maybe try to do something legally, and try to become an entrepreneur, and start a small business, and work really hard, and try doing that.’ You know, that wasn’t even a conversation.”

  Until he finally wound up in jail (which is how his mother found out how her son was really making his living).

  When he got out a month later, he was determined to change. He started by eliminating all his old friends and making new ones.

  “One was doing Web development and SEO [search-engine optimization]. Another was selling high-end real estate. Another
one was selling high-end furniture. But all created these situations themselves and were like-minded. We really clicked immediately. They respected me, and I couldn’t wait to learn the way it’s supposed to be done.”

  The friend who sold real estate let Timothy crash on his couch. He also introduced Timothy to his father, who owned a construction company, who then offered Timothy a position. At the same time, Timothy, who thought he might like to be a website designer, was spending a lot of time trying to educate himself via YouTube. That’s how he somehow came across a Gary Vee video. “I find out that he’s Russian and that his parents are immigrants, and immediately there’s this crazy connection and I really get sucked in. I got hooked.” He plowed through all the video material he could find, and when he realized the only other way to get more information was through Crush It!, he read that, too, even though reading was so difficult for him that he’d read only one book (Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness) in his life until that point.

  I’d never had a sounding board, no one to say, “Hey, you know, you can do this. Go out there; get it done.” The message from Crush It! was, no matter where you are, who you are, color of your skin, where you’re from, size, shape, and all that good stuff, if you really feel like you’re good at something, if you put in the work, I guarantee you, you will get somewhere. You know, it’s hard to get your mind around it when you have no experience with that, but I kinda just took it and ran with it.

  That was the end of 2012. Within six to eight months of working with his friend’s father, Timothy was sure that he wanted to start his own company, a kitchen and bath specialty contractor. In two-and-a-half years, he went from pushing paper to closing projects, becoming the owner’s right-hand man. That was just during the day. After work, until two or three a.m., Timothy studied.

  I would learn everything I possibly could about the construction industry, read magazines, learn architects’ names. I wanted to have so much information on day one of my business that if I had a conversation with a client, I could deliver so much value. I was trying to learn so much about the product that people would not look at my age and lack of experience as a weak point but overlook that when I told them everything that I know.

  I was computer savvy and had some basic skills, so I would work on the website. I would try to write content. Contractors didn’t have proper marketing materials. Forget about SEO. The ones who had websites were really big companies with ten trucks. Your regular kitchen-and-bath guys were all in their forties, fifties, and sixties and have been in business for twenty or thirty years. They’ve established so many relationships that some are doing business literally through word of mouth. I knew that it would take me years to establish word of mouth the traditional way. I was doing things that other contractors didn’t even understand, and it was very time-consuming. We didn’t have all the apps that we have today that can automate it for you.

  Through his work, he’d developed relationships with subcontractors, and with his boss’s blessing, he spent all his time outside of his day job planting the seeds for his own company through Facebook and YouTube. Little by little, people started to engage with his content. If someone liked a picture, Timothy sent a thank-you message. If someone e-mailed for an estimate and he was able to get an address, that person got a thank-you note and small gifts around the holidays. He landed his first projects by the middle of 2015. Fortunately, he didn’t have to be at work until 9:30 a.m., which gave him several hours to focus on his own projects before his day had even officially started. This meant that by lunchtime, he could just run out to check on his subcontractors’ work, leaving his evenings free for e-mails and sales work.

  Once he had three projects lined up, he informed his boss he was ready to quit. His schedule didn’t ease up, though. He just filled those hours with more work, more engagement, and more content creation. He uses Snapchat Stories and Instagram Stories to share behind-the-scenes peeks at projects, and now that he has a showroom, he can easily introduce new products when they come in.

  Two years after going out on his own, Timothy’s company crossed the million-dollar sales mark, with projections to hit $2.5M to 3.0M by the end of 2017.

  “You know, I make sacrifices and crazy decisions every day, knowing that it’s all going to work out. Now it just becomes routine. Owning your own business sounds really, really scary, and it’s a lot of responsibility. But Gary was like, ‘What’s the worst that could happen? Go for it. The market will tell you if you’ve got it or not.’”

  Incidentally, Timothy’s mother is incredibly proud. “My mother is in tears every time I tell her about some new accomplishment, or project that I’ve done, or a milestone I’ve crossed. It’s just been, you know, really great.”

  Work

  I’ve audited a lot of people over the years who on the surface seemed to be doing everything right. They’d established a good niche, they were personable and interesting, their content was on target and valuable, yet they expressed frustration that they weren’t meeting their business goals. When I looked closer, I’d see that they were still playing golf or tweeting about the previous night’s Walking Dead episode. Let me make this as clear as I can:

  When you first start out, there is no time for leisure—if you want to crush it. There is no time for YouTube videos or shooting the shit in the breakroom or an hour-and-a-half lunch. That is, of course, why entrepreneurship is often seen as a young person’s game. It takes a lot of stamina to get a personal brand and business off the ground. It is a lot easier to devote all your time to a new business endeavor when you’re twenty-five and single with no one to answer to but yourself. Still, 95 percent of the people reading this book, even the young ones, probably have some kind of obligation: college loans (many are likely still in school), mortgages, child support, elderly parents, or dependent families. Most probably already have a job. Maybe you’ve got a flexible schedule because you’re driving for a rideshare company or working part-time or nights. But most of you are working nine to five or even eight to six. Your only prayer to one day live the Crush It! life, therefore, is to deploy ungodly amounts of work from seven p.m. to two a.m. Monday through Friday, plus all day Saturdays and Sundays. Ideally you’ll be building your business around the thing you love to do for fun and relaxation, so it won’t feel like losing your leisure time. The only additional thing you will have time for is your family. They deserve to get the best of you, so make sure you don’t let the work creep in to all of your time with them—unless you can make them part of it, which would be wonderful. Bring them in on this adventure with you! Many people interviewed for this book have done this. Rodrigo Tasca hired his sister to help him build his video production business, and they worked out of his bedroom in their parents’ house. Jared Polin and Lauryn Evarts both regularly featured their grandmothers on their blogs. Rich Roll’s children and his wife, Julie, are a constant presence in his videos and photographs, and the couple are listed as coauthors on their first cookbook. When Brittany Xavier books a mother-daughter Mother’s Day branding opportunity or photo shoot, she puts a portion of the fee in an account set aside for her daughter, because without her child, these opportunities wouldn’t exist. Since she turned nine, Chad Collins’s daughter Jordyn has run the trivia events conducted at Brick Fest Live, the nationwide LEGO event that grew out of the LEGO YouTube channel they built together. This is what the modern-day family business can look like.*

  You have to decide how you’re going to spend your time. Start by blocking off the hours you must spend on your obligations—your job, your kids, your spouse, your aging mother. If you’re serious about crushing it, every minute not spent on those obligations should be spent producing content, distributing content, engaging with your community, or engaging in business development. Stephen Marinaro (IG: @TheSalonGuy), who was a hairstylist, a DJ, a fireman, and a fugitive recovery agent before becoming YouTube’s TheSalonGuy, one of the largest professional hair channels on the platform, was relentless in his quest to bu
ild his brand. “If you sit on your butt all day waiting for things to come to you, nothing is going to happen.” Once just a vlogger who might film himself demonstrating haircutting techniques, his dogged persistence led him to being featured on reality-TV episodes, making appearances on Good Morning America and Fox News, covering the Oscars, and becoming a fixture at New York Fashion Week events, where he interviewed celebrities and designers. He went from earning a total of $20K four years ago to being able to charge thousands of dollars per month to offer media services to brands.

  Do things! Create content daily. Biz-dev daily. Meet with two or three people per day who can get you awareness, distribution, or sales—somehow closer to your goals. DM people on Instagram with offers to collaborate (instructions in Chapter 13). You should be taking these actions twelve, fifteen hours per day. If you’re working another job, you should be cramming as much work as you can in the three or four hours you have to yourself per night (or day, if you work the night shift). And don’t forget to sleep. Six to eight hours of sleep per day or night is ideal for most people. Just make every minute of your remaining sixteen to eighteen hours count.

  Do you think this kind of relentless work ethic sounds unhealthy? Does it sound like too much? Pay attention to those feelings. Self-awareness is vitally important.

  Crushing it is about living on your own terms, equally satisfied with your income and your life. You will get no judgment from me if your goals are modest. I have obnoxious ambition, but I don’t think everyone else should, and I don’t want anyone to think I’ve got a mold and expect everyone who reads this to force themselves to fit into it. But please, if you’re not willing to do the grind, for God’s sake do not complain when your business doesn’t grow as fast or as big as you want it to. Maybe you decide to spend two hours a week volunteering at the animal shelter or the food bank, or maybe you decide to join a cycling club. You go to the movies. You play mobile games during your flights. That’s fine! It probably makes you a better person. But then accept that your ambitions are humbler than you originally thought and be good with it. Not everyone should try to build a business as big as it can get. The truth is that you can’t do it all, so you’re going to have to make choices. Be practical. Raising your self-awareness and suffocating any self-delusion is a crucial piece of keeping you on the path to success, however you define it.