Gary Vee talks a huge game about business — but how is he actually making that moolah? In this post, I’m gonna break down why Gary Vee’s net worth is around $200 million dollars and how he’s making well over $200 million dollars per year in income from all his different businesses.
Let’s dive in.
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How is Gary Vee’s Net Worth $200 Million Dollars?
Business #1: VaynerMedia Agency
First off is VaynerMedia.
It’s a marketing agency, and you’ve probably heard of some of the companies they’ve worked with:
- Budweiser
- Kraft
- Unilever
- Pepsi Co.
- Subway
The minimum just to work with his agency is $50,000, so this is where he’s actually making the bulk of his money.
Something for you to think about if you’re a creator or you have an audience — maybe a lot of people want to learn how you did it! So create an agency. You don’t have to do the work, you just hire a bunch of people, and then you pass the work to the people that you hire and charge clients to work with your agency.
This is a great way to scale creative talent as an individual.
Plus Gary Vee has such a strong personal brand, people want to be a client at his agency!
Think of it like being a restaurant chef. If you get a show on the Food Network you may not actually make a lot of money from doing the show itself, but you can open up a bunch of restaurants that other people work in, and customers will be like Hey, I know Guy Fieri. I wanna go eat at his restaurant! so you’ll attract more customers just by having that personal brand.
His food is pretty good, btw.
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Business #2: The Sasha Group
This is the same concept as VaynerMedia but for smaller businesses (ones that are “only” making less than $100 million dollars vs. VaynerMedia which is only for Fortune 500 companies).
I really like his tagline for The Sasha Group…
We help ambitious businesses outgrow us.
I think this is really interesting from a business strategy. He offers a spectrum of options:
- VaynerMedia is on the high end
- The Sasha Group is mid-level
- His books are on the low end
So it’s nice that he’s trying to offer a full spectrum of services.
If you have a high service business, maybe you want to offer a free course or a book to be able to get people into your company’s funnel at the price point they’re able to achieve right now. If you can get them in sooner, hopefully you can help them sooner and keep them around for longer.
Key Takeaway: The #1 Mistake Wantrepreneurs Make?
One mistake that I see a lot of wantrepreneurs make is that they feel like they always have to do the work.
Why is this a mistake?
The whole point of being an entrepreneur is hiring people!! That’s the best part!
Hire awesome teams to do a lot of the work (and bonus points if they like doing the work, too).
So if you’re starting any kind of business whether it’s an agency or software or a restaurant or creating content — hire a team to actually help you grow that business!
It’s amazing that Gary has hired so many people to be able to run all these different types of businesses.
Business #3: VaynerSports
I’m shocked by how well VaynerSports is doing.
Did you know that Gary actually runs a full-service athlete representation agency that guides players through the issues they have in their professional careers?
VaynerSports reps some famous-ass athletes in the NFL, MLB, UFC, and eSports!
- Stipe Miocic (MMA)
- Tony Ferguson (MMA)
- Eddie Alvarez (MMA)
- Vítor Belfort (MMA)
- Bugha (eSports Gamer)
And it’s really fascinating because they’re going so hard on repping players in eSports and MMA which is a super smart move because they’re super fast-growing sports.
They have a pretty standard business model for an agency — they negotiate contracts and find endorsements for their athletes and then receive between 4% – 10% of an athlete’s paying contract and about 10% – 20% of the athlete’s endorsement contracts.
I don’t know if they’re representing ping pong players, but holler atcha boy if you need King Noah on the table.
Key Takeaway: Diversify Your Income Streams
Another great takeaway from Gary Vee is how he’s gone from selling wine to books and creating content on YouTube to all these other different types of businesses.
I think a lot of content creators go into making a course and an email list (which is still great, I recommend starting one with SendFox) and then to selling merch — so I love that he’s taken his interests, built different companies around them, and then hired teams to go run those businesses.
Business #4: VaynerSpeakers
VaynerSpeakers is a booking agency that specializes in the business speaker niche. They find speaking gigs for high-paying speakers and take a 15% cut of the fee.
The speakers they manage get paid somewhere between $15,000 – $100,000 a speech!
Dude, I would speak for like 10k, come on…
But it looks like they manage some really high profile speakers:
- Tom Bilyeu
- Ryan Holliday
- James Altucher
- Jesse Itzler
- Robert Greene
- Dominique Dawes
- Andrew Brandt
And if they book one event a month for each of these speakers, that’s an average of $50,000 per event!
So how much is this actually generating at a high level?
16 speakers x 2 events per speaker per month x 12 months x $50,000 per speaker x 15% agency cut = 2.8 million dollars/year
Again I just want to reiterate that the major lesson for you to take away here is that Gary’s an expert in speaking and social media — so then he made his own speaking agency to offer that infrastructure to other speakers!
Take what you’re great at and make it easy for other people to do, too.
Business #5: Gallery Media Group
Dude, how many businesses does this guy have?!
Gallery Media Group is the media arc to his business.
So right now Gallery Media has two major properties:
- Pure Wow: Which is a digital media company that publishes women’s lifestyle content
- One37pm: A digital media company about pop culture and entrepreneurship for young men
One thing that’s cool about this company is that it’s literally using the same Gary Vee formula over and over. Plus, with Gary’s traffic and his audience, it’s easy for him to get those brands’ attention and help them get rolling from the start.
Business #6: Vayner Commerce
VaynerCommerce is a consulting and engineering firm specializing in helping companies build sustainable ecommerce brands.
Ecommerce has been around for a while — it’s nothing new — but since COVID, a lot of big businesses now want to be more direct-to-consumer and do more online ecommerce selling, and so Gary is capitalizing on that trend.
It’s similar to his media agencies stuff. People like how he does it, so he created agencies people can hire to do it just like him.
That’s something you can think about for yourself.
Like with restaurants, a lot of chefs sell recipe books. So sell your own recipe book! Maybe it’s not actually a book, but something that gives people a step-by-step process of how and why you do things how you do them.
No matter what you do, you can probably sell people either the recipe book or you could do it for them, just like Gary’s doing in this example.
Business #7: Vayner/RSE
For Vayner/RSE, Gary actually partnered with RSE Ventures and they “partner with teams to build tomorrow’s companies, today.”
So basically, they’ve invested in different startups, like:
- Coinbase
- LawnStarter
- Medium
- Omaze
- Snapchat
- Shyp
How most investing happens is you invest in 100 different companies, and just 1 or 2 actually pay for the whole fund and make up all the money they invested in everyone else.
But again, it’s just so interesting how able to get these tentacles into so many different industries.
Business #8: Tracer
And last up is Tracer!
Jesus Gary, when do you have the time to hang out with the fam?
Tracer is a marketing data aggregation and reporting platform that pulls in and visualizes a company’s media spending from all major platforms.
Guess who’s doing a lot of media management?
Gary and all of his agencies!
So the team at VaynerX actually developed this in May of 2015 and they use it for all their clients. And now, Tracer wants to license this platform to a lot of other agencies, publishers, and businesses — it’s the Gary Vee model!
What can we learn from Gary Vee?
I think what’s interesting about all the different businesses that Gary’s running is that they serve his own needs.
They’re all interconnected and he builds a great team to run each business independently.
I’m curious to know how he spends his day. Because it seems to me that he focuses on getting as much attention as possible so that he can pass it off to all the different businesses he has.
How does it inspire you to think about your own businesses?
For me, it’s like I always say: If you want to become rich, your network is your net worth. And Gary Vee’s net worth is so impressive because he has a massively impressive network.
Something to keep in mind.
Stay tuned for Part 2 where we cover Gary’s other side hustles that earn him an extra $5-10 million dollars per year!
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