Like every marketer, @garyvee originally thought he needed somebody’s product to sell. A marketer without a brand to manage seemed like a bricklayer with no bricks to lay. But the digital revolution changed that. It may be an old observation now, but what Wine Library TV taught Vaynerchuk back then was still a revelation: People could be brands. He could be a brand. And by treating himself like one, he could fashion himself into a walking, talking R&D lab, testing his more forward-thinking marketing theories on himself, without having to gain some client’s permission first. Then, if his personal brand took off, he could package those theories and strategies and sell them to clients, in effect helping them be more like Gary Vaynerchuk. “I never actually set out wanting to be a personal brand, leveraging that to sell my own stuff,” he says. “Instead it’s how I learned my craft, by being the plumber and the electrician and the general contractor. I got to test my beliefs.”

One of those beliefs became this: Provide value over and over again – educate, entertain, enlighten – and then present your “ask” to the audience. Subscribe to my channel. Buy some wine. Read my book. (He’d go on to spell this out in his 2013 book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. The jabs are the value; the right hooks are the asks.) So he handed control of the wine shop back to his father and began preparing for his biggest ask yet: If you like my social media insights so much, hire me to execute them on your behalf. In 2009, Vaynerchuk and his brother AJ launched @vaynermedia. _

From the June 2017 issue of Entrepreneur Magazine

Written by Eric Adams

Photo by @pieterhenket via Instagram http://ift.tt/2CT364p