Part 3 - How Going Against The Grain Created A YouTube Sensation

Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

So when you decided we got to get our message out and we've got to use social media, the Internet and so we've got to raise our profile, what steps did you go through and how did that sequence work?

It's actually not that difficult. It's a question of knowing what you're talking about. Having the ability to put it on camera and put it out to people. And people online, they keep, they can call through bullshit in a matter of seconds. And I told my CMO at the time, when he said, grab a camera, start talking, I told him, I said, I am going to be the guy to tell it like it is, beat around the bush. I'm not going to be the suit and white gloves guy. I'm going to be me wearing T shirts and jeans. This is who I am, this is what I, this is how I do things and I'm going to tell people how it is. But here's the problem. I realized that as I went into the space of YouTube, for example, I realized that, hey, there's already a ton of content out there. You're competing with a lot of guys out there that are creating watch content. So how am I going to differentiate myself from everybody else considering that the space itself on YouTube is tiny? It's this big because the watch space in itself, in comparison to everything else in the world is very, it's a very small niche space right by expensive watches. So I said, you know what I'm going to do? Yes, I have the knowledge to tell you about the inner workings of the watch, the history of the watch company, where it came from, what are the previous models, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm going to run through all that and I'm going to describe all that, but I'm also going to give people my opinion because at that point I've had 15 years of experience selling these things. So not only am I going to give you my opinion on the watch, I'm going to tell you about, resell, what these things sell for, what are they being bought for, wholesale, retail, et cetera. I'm going to give people the type of information that is not here. Beautiful watch, great complications. Buy it. This is what the information you need in order to purchase this watch. I'm giving you the market price, I'm giving You historical market data. I'm telling you that five years ago I was selling the watch for X. Today selling for why that allows the consumer to take that information and educate himself. And guess what? He may not be ready to buy today, but when he is, he's going to think of me company and come back and say, you know what? I remember watching that video Roland told me about that watch. I'm ready to buy it. I'm going to give him a call because he seems like he knows what he's talking about. And that's what kind of did propel us to sort of cement the rapport that we had as a company already. But now with faces behind it and real knowledge that people can refer back to because these videos are evergreen.

Well, your YouTube channel is may have started at at small and nothing but it, it's pretty darn popular. Over 200,000 subscribers already at a half a million almost. Oh, half a million. Really? Over a half a million.

That close to. Close to, yeah.

And how is that, Is that a hockey stick type growth? Is it a.

A gradual how it was a hockey stick type growth? Because after we did what I like what we call the talking heads video, right like me and you, what we're recording is called Talking Heads. We decided to to open up sort of the curtains and and show the behind the scenes and the inner workings of the company. And what that did is we came out with a show called Great Market and that showed our day to day operations. It showed what we do here on the daily, how we buy, what we pay, how much we sell it for. All the drama that goes behind. There's a ton of drama behind in the watch industry. People try to screw you for money, et cetera, et cetera. We took our cameras to trade shows, we took our cameras to the wonderful places we traveled to, like Middle east, Hong Kong, etc. And we showed the world a this is what it's like to be a watch dealer. And this is the company you're dealing with. And nothing is hidden. Everybody in the world knows what the guy that ships boxes looks like. Or my head of logistics or my CMO and every single one of my sales staff. And what happens? Like any reality TV show, what happens? You watch a Netflix show, random show, doesn't matter what it is. What do you do? You often fall in love with a character or you absolutely hate a character. Characters in reality will raise emotions in an individual and when those emotions are raised, they can be raised in a negative or a positive way, but it doesn't matter. They remember that individual. So now outside of me, as me doing talking heads video, that made me a bottleneck. Now, I'm not the only one doing videos. Now the entire team is on video. And now there are clients out there that call in and say, I want to talk to Alex or Anna or Dom or Kevin or whoever. Because they've seen them and they've been following them. They fell in love with them as a character, like their style. Because the one thing, remember earlier what I told you, I told my sales people, number one thing you need to remember is to be yourself and they are themselves on camera. And when people see that, they understand that, hey, this is. This is true. This is how this guy is. This isn't porn stars where everything's staged. This is real, real tv. This is what we do here on a daily basis. And the cameras are just rolling. So that was what propelled YouTube. That is what propelled our other social media channels like Instagram, TikTok, etc. And that directly related to increased sales. There is also, I feel, something that saved us because two years ago, a little less, we had a dip in the market when Covid was over and people bought enough, and that's when everything went down in price, if you remember. And guess what, we're still here. While some did not survive that dip, this was probably comparable to the 08 crisis. As I remember. The only reason I survived the 08 crisis, because my business just wasn't that big yet. I wasn't that exposed. But this was very comparable. But having experience, we foresaw this dip coming, so we prepare for it. So therefore, again, we were in the position to say, okay, while business is down, but we can handle it and we can slowly bring it back up because markets are like this.

Yeah. Well, now, as you started into, you know, YouTube, how much experimenting did you. You know, the short. They haven't had the shorts out there until recently. But you were putting regular videos up. How did you settle on the right kind of pattern? The length, the style? How much experimenting did you go without?

There's really no 100% way proof of figuring out the algorithms of any social media platform. And they're always changing. Right. To be fair, when it comes to social media, like most recently, Instagram changed their algorithms, and all of a sudden the content is not getting as much as many views. It's like. And you basically throw shit against the wall to see if it sticks. Because that. Anybody out there that tells you, I'm the foremost expert, I know exactly what to do you follow the trends? You follow the trends that the platforms want you to do. Why did YouTube come out with shorts? Because they wanted to compete with TikTok and Instagram. Right. So they, they gave your shorts more attention. They put them up there in front of eyes and that's what propelled as we picked up a lot of subscribers because of the shorts. But then when that was over, shorts weren't as effective anymore. It was a time where they wanted one hour long videos, that was a time where they want a 12 minute video. So there's basic principles that you follow and you see what's worked for you in the past. But lucky for me, I have a team in place that does all that. You know, I don't need to make that decision. I just. Talking to a camera.

Yeah. When you have. It's no accident that half of your screen is this bright red billboard basically with shiny luxury glitter and it says status.

Talk about how to paintings. I say branded status. It's a play on words.

Okay.

And behind them there's a collage on the brand. There's a bunch of different brands. Watch brands.

Oh, okay.

And on the status, there are a bunch of famous folks, right? Actors and athletes and things of that. And branded status, it's. It raises a question. Just because you have a big name, does that give you status? And just because you wearing something brand name, it's a bit of a play on words. It's something that myself and my kids put together ourselves. So it took us six months to make cut out a bunch of little things and glue it together and then paint over it. Peter Tuni is an artist. He's a modern artist who is actually his studio is in Wynwood Walls in Miami. And I remember a long time ago, these paintings are more than 10 years old. We went into Wynwood Walls myself, my wife and our two kids at the time, I have three now. And we went into the studio and we really took a liking to his play on words and how he did his collages. And I found the one canvas that I like. I said, how much? I said, It's $300,000. Meanwhile, we made a decision that we're just gonna make them ourselves instead of spending 300 grand.

Well, you did a great job.

Looks great. A lot of people walk in and they think it's Peter Tuni, but I have to tell them that it's fake. Peter joint.

In the course of a year now, how much traveling are you actually doing? And it sounds like getting ready to.

Leave to Geneva Next Tuesday. I just came back from a trip a month ago and a half ago I was in London. I was also in Germany. We since we scaled down our B2B, we also scaled down on the amount of trade shows that we do. When I was more full blown B2B or mostly B2B, I was out of the house probably I did, my wife did the math. I was out of the mouth. Two out of the house, two full months on business. So 60 days out of the year I was out of the house. And that was Middle East, Hong Kong, Vegas, la. Best part about our industry takes you to five places. I don't go to Oklahoma, right. I go to Dubai, I go to Oman, I go to Hong Kong, I go to Singapore, I go to a lot of good places. And now my travel is really consistent mostly of being in places where I need to be in the industry. I'm going to Geneva because Geneva watch face we have there's anybody who's anybody in the watch industry will be there. But mostly majority of our fan base, if you will, that follows us is going to be there as well because they are going to be there for the show. And then you know, if you, I, not to sound conceited but because we're in such a small space on YouTube, on social media, once you get a following, you sort of become a celebrity in your own space, right? And I use that word because I don't consider myself a celebrity. But you know, anywhere I would go today, any major city of sale, I mean you walk down the street, somebody will recognize, say Roman, I love your videos, right. And it's good to be in places where there's a large concentration of watch people to show your face, to shake people's hands, to talk to them. I'm going to be doing a couple of panels there with a magazine. I'm going to be visiting a couple of brands that I work with, looking at what's new because you also have to keep up with the industry. You got to talk about it, right? I my knowledge is only as good as the next piece of news that comes out in the morning.

The Oklahoma. There are some people that think they have a lot of fun there too.

I've never been and if I was anybody who's from Oklahoma, I'll tell you. Like this Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Have you ever heard of it?

Yeah.

Okay. It's a tiny little town outside of Fort Knox. We'll use that as an example. Not a whole lot of fun things going over there.

Yeah, well, I thought I would Just divert any kind of unnecessary chatter from that.

But I'm sure my Oklahoma followers.

I apologize, and I'm sure they would recognize your brand walking and your YouTube thing. You'd probably be a celebrity in Oklahoma if you were walking down the street, too. But I doubt they buy as many luxury watches as they do in Hong Kong. So if you have to go to a trade show.

Hong Kong, Hong Kong. Right now, at the very moment Hong Kong and actually mainland China down, they're dragging the export market from Switzerland down tremendously. They're down about 30% because of what's going on economically in their currencies and all that other stuff. But luckily for us, when one market is down, another one emerges. I just did a segment. Every week I do a segment called Watch News Weekly, and I talked about exports out of Switzerland. And right now we're actually up 2%, which is good for the month of July. And again, the only reason it's only 2% is because of China. Hong Kong markets being down, but Japanese market is up and so is the US Market. Right. So when one is down, the other one is up. But mainly China and Hong Kong are sort of the biggest indicator in our industry for us. And simply because China makes up for 60% of all luxury goods bought worldwide, and 22% of that is watches and jewelry. So it's a significant marker for us to watch and keep an eye out on. It affects pricing across the market. It affects. It affects a lot of things. But lucky for us, like I said, when one market is down, the other one is up. When we do look at these things globally and we pay closer attention to it, it makes us. It allows us to shop in places like Hong Kong at the very moment where prices may be slightly less. And we're talking about a couple of points here and there, but across items with average price tag of 15 to $20,000, it doesn't make.

Now, with three kids, it's probably tough for your wife to get away, but it's nice to know that if she wanted to, she could go. You could work, work the babysitting arrangements out or. And if she wanted to go with you on a business trip, you'd be going to some pretty nice places. That's kind of one of our priorities.

And I've always said this as a priority is. I have. I'm a pretty simple guy. People ask me, what are my priorities. My priorities are simple. It's family, God, country. Right? Simple. It's as cliche as it sounds. These are my priorities. So ever since my kids have been little, we've taken them any chance we've gotten, whether it's a small weekend, a short weekend, a long weekend, a spring break or whatever it might be. They've been to dozens of major metropolitan areas all over the United States. They've been up and down the east coast, the West Coast, Canada, the keys that we've been overseas with them. And whenever we travel, we make sure that it's history, it's art, it's cuisine, kiddie stuff they learn as they're traveling. And once a year, sometimes twice, me and my wife will take the time to ourselves too and go somewhere in the summer. We always go away for two weeks with our kids, somewhere nice, somewhere. We have very similar interests. We both like art, we both like history, we're both like fine wine. So my last trip I was in Portugal. Guess what? We visited a bunch of wineries, we went to a bunch of museums and art studios, we visited a bunch of historical places and we ate a lot of good food. And I do make sure that it's not just work. And the reason I'm telling you I need to get off in five minutes because believe it or not, all these years we've been married 22 years. And all these years, if I'm not traveling, I'm home for dinner every night at 6:30. And I sit down with my kids to have that dinner at 6:30 every night. And every morning I have breakfast.

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That's fantastic. Congratulations. And obviously you've seen that pay dividends for you. Where did you say you're from? You said you came over originally from.

The Soviet Union and so have you been back?

Have you taken the family back over there?

So I'm from Ukraine at the time. It's from Ukraine. So I was there before the war started. I actually took my oldest son to show him where I was born and he looked around and he's like, wow, this looks like a crack house, right? And I'm like, no, this is actually a pretty decent Soviet apartment, believe it or not. It was 450 square feet. He's like, wow. And like, what do you mean? That's huge. An average apartment was 200 square feet. And I showed him around. I showed him Odessa, which is where I'm from. I also took him to kia and, you know, it was. It was a good experience for him. It was a good experience for me. I've been back and forth. We left in 1988. I've been back about three, four times because I still had a sister there. So I would travel every so often there. She would travel here. But let's just say it's a lot better here. And especially with the war and everything that's going on in the world today, it's not very peachy over there, as you can imagine. I have since brought my nephew, his wife and two kids over here since the war started. They moved permanently to the United States. My sister, unfortunately, is no longer with us. So he was the only family I had left there. Everybody else is here.

Well, I really excited for you and your family and because the thing is, you put yourself through the wringer and you put up with all the trauma of running and building a business, and you wanted to pay off, but you wanted to pay off and more than money. And, you know, you've been able to balance the whole thing out. It's really fun to check in with you and to see how the things are going. Where do you have.

How.

How big of a. You know, I gotta say, compliment you on your move into social media. That was a masterstroke of being a CEO. You know that when you're a CEO, you're president, the company owned the company. You. You've got to make those kind of shots. But you did it, obviously, at the right time, called the right shot, and you're now the payoff. And everybody on your team gets to benefit from it. So my compliments to you on that. And now, as you've got a feel for where you're headed and as we wrap this thing up, where do you see? What are you excited about? The possibilities of being able to happen with the organization and the team and the brand that you put together, I.

Know exactly what's happening right now. I'm working on a less hooray big project to bring something to the market that doesn't exist in the watch space today. Based, again, on experience that we have and staff and everybody else. And right now I'm working towards an exit. I'm at a point in my life where I have to start thinking about that exit. I have to start thinking about an exit that's gonna not necessarily destroy the company, but take it to the next level and uplift some of the younger people that are here with it. While I go and eat good food, drink fine wine and look at history all over the world and enjoy my kids. And hopefully my son's already 22. You know, it's only a matter of time. Thought I'll enjoy grandkids. And that's what it's about for me. It's now I'm working on something towards a grand exit where I can pass the reins on to someone else. And I'll still do YouTube videos because I actually like it. I have a very narcissistic personality, so I do like doing videos and I like to sound. But I certainly want to be able to. As you said, I wanted to be. I wanted to step back a little bit and take some chips off the table, as they say, and start enjoying however many years God gave me to live.

Do you have 10 seconds? As a parting shot to send off our people who've stayed with us to the end? As a last word?

Well, the last word is, I think that if you follow the most basic principles and the like. Right? And again. And those are family, God, country. If you have. If you make your family your number one priority, you know what you're doing everything for, you know what you're fighting for, you know what you're working for, you know that it's all worth it. It's not about the money. It's about how you're able to provide for those that are closest to you. If you have religion in your life without anything, you don't have to be a fanatic about it. But if you have a religion in your life, regardless of what your religious beliefs are, every religious book will tell you things that you should do that are all good and tell you the things that you shouldn't do that are bad, dating back thousands of years. And if you love the country that you're in, you'll understand, you have to understand why you love this country. For me, this is a land of opportunity. I came from the land of communism, so I know the difference really, really well. And sometimes a lot of people in this country take it for granted. Not trying to get political on anybody, but think about where you are, do a comparison to other places in the world and realize that this country provides you with every opportunity in the world as long as you want to be willing to work hard for it.

Yeah. Fantastic. I appreciate your time, Larry.

I appreciate it as always. Thank you.

Yeah. Looking forward to do it again. I'm glad you're able to make the time. And good luck in your next trip, man.

Thank you. Have a good weekend.

All right, we'll see. Bye. Thank you for listening to the final.

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