Toggle Menu
  1. Home/
  2. Business/
  3. Careers/

CEO of a multimillion-dollar company explains what he did in his 20s to assure his success in his 30s

Gary Vaynerchuk, the CEO of media empire VaynerMedia, revealed the secrets to his success during an episode of Business Insider’s podcast “Success! How I did it.”

When he was in his 20s, Vaynerchuk worked his “face off”. By his mid 30s, he had taken his family’s New Jersey wine business from $3 million annual revenue to $60 million. He had written the book “Crush It“, which became a bestseller and built VaynerMedia, which he expects to produce over $125 million in revenue this year, according to the Independent.

Answering the editor in chief of Business Insider US Alyson Shontell’s question regarding what he did in his 20s to set himself up for success in his 30s, he said: “I worked my face off and learned my craft”. He went on to explain: “I’ll give you a good example. There are not a lot of 20-year-olds who can say they worked every single Saturday of their entire 20s. Period. I did. I worked 50 to 52 Saturdays a year, from 22 to 29, until I met my wife and started having to build some level of work-life balance. That’s hard work.”

loading...

He talked about what he was doing during these Saturdays: “I got to Wine Library at 7:30 in the morning and I left at 7, 8, or 9. I just worked,” he said. “I just built a management staff, I tasted wine, I built up the website. Learned how to do Google AdWords. I just worked.”

He told Shontell that when critics “try to take a razz at me as a self-promoter”, he reminds them that he spent a lot of years working behind the scenes, before becoming a YouTube personality and gathering millions of social-media followers.

“If they even spend four seconds digging, they’ll realize I didn’t say a word until I was in my mid-30s and had already built an enormously large business.”

Daisy Wilder

Loading...