Transcript excerpt from a spoken talk by Gary Vaynerchuk describing a deliberate career decision made five years earlier to take a humbling step back and build a client-service business, accepting difficult meetings and HR responsibilities while growing a company from ~30 to 600 employees as part of a long-term goal to own the New York Jets.
The way I'm gonna buy the New york Jets is 5 years ago I decided to eat a lot of shit and swallow a lot of humility and take a step back in my career at the height of my powers at 35 years old, in my prime, and build a client service business. Go into meetings where people with a third of the knowledge that I have say, well, I think that should be red and all that other horseshit.
Run a company that I've grown from 30 to 600 employees over the last four years where I'm the head of HR, which means my days consist of the following. Gary, Sally's trying to ruin me. Katherine, she's not. Okay. A ton of that shit.
Okay, I just want you to follow here.
Because what I'm trying to build is a human scaled version of me, a big company. I'm gonna teach marketers that I think are on second and third base in their natural skills by practitionership. I get to stand in front of my company as a 40 year old man now, which hurts, just turned 40 in front of them and say, I'm the best at social media in this company, not you, 23 year olds. Because I'm a practitioner. The reason I maintain my personal brand and do the AskGaryVee show is for me to be in it. I want to be an architect and a Mason and 99% of this room can't wait to just be an architect and maybe a consultant to the architect. You got to be in it.
