The $100 Strategy Every Local Business Needs | Tea with GaryVee ep. 77

Executive overview

Most local businesses and aspiring creators are stuck overthinking instead of doing. The common thread across every caller: inaction driven by fear, entitlement, or waiting for conditions to be perfect.

The fix is blunt — post more, run $100/week in hyper-targeted Facebook ads, go live on Whatnot, and stop living in your head. Action creates the feedback loop that thinking never will.

If you don't post, nothing happens — you just sit around and think.

The $100 local business ad strategy

• Run $100/week on Facebook ads targeting a 10-mile radius of your location.
• Boost content that already performs organically, or create content specific to that area.
• Narrow further by demographic if you know your customer profile (e.g. 40–60-year-old women).
• Post organically every day across Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook — volume matters more than perfection.
• Privacy concerns about clients' homes are valid — find other angles: dog parks, interviews, street content, costumes.
• 90% of ideas won't work; doing them anyway is how you find the 10% that do.

The 2025 virtual garage sale challenge

• Creators with 1,000–100,000 followers who can sell should go live on Whatnot this week.
• Whatnot's audience is pre-qualified to buy; TikTok gives reach but lower purchase intent.
• TikTok requires ~5,000 followers for a shop; Whatnot requires none.
• The hack: text everyone in your phone on Friday with the link to your Saturday show.
• Most people won't do it — that's the whole point of the challenge.
• Live shopping platforms are coming from Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and eventually YouTube and Instagram.

Creator vs. influencer: the live commerce path

• Many people chasing a million followers have a better shot making $100K/year via live commerce.
• Commerce-tainment — selling on live platforms — is the underused path for mid-tier creators.
• Being good enough to entertain 11 viewers who are buying beats chasing viral fame.
• Building a personal brand as a creator and selling things are not competing goals — they reinforce each other.

Personal brand for actors and career builders

• Sharing thoughts, observations, and personality on social media builds a profile that attracts casting opportunities.
• Worrying about being perceived as a "content creator vs. actor" is a head game — drop it.
• A side hustle works precisely because it fills downtime without competing with the primary career.
• Someone may cast you because of a rant about your football team, not a showreel clip.

Hiring for a growing business

• Hire fast, based on intuition — don't overthink it.
• Fire faster: you know within a week or two whether someone will work out.
• Promote fastest: reward what's working immediately.
• Hesitation to hire because you're scared to get it wrong is the wrong frame — bad hires are solved by firing, not by not hiring.

Patience and gratitude at plateaus

• Growth plateaus are normal — in fitness, business, follower counts, everything.
• At a plateau, deploy gratitude for recent progress, not envy of others' bigger numbers.
• 229K followers, a published cookbook, and The Rock following you is winning — not a crisis.
• Envy and jealousy are triggered precisely when gratitude is what's needed.

On entitlement at work

• A company giving three years' notice of relocation while preserving remote jobs and salaries is remarkable — not a grievance.
• Lack of adaptability is the employee's problem, not the company's.
• Companies that over-coddle go out of business; everyone loses.

On parenting and work guilt

• There is no objective standard for "enough time" with kids — stop using one to beat yourself up.
• Kids remember how you made them feel, not individual events.
• Being physically present but checked out is worse than being away and genuinely engaged when there.
• The binary question: do your kids think you gave a fuck? That's the whole game.

On career changes and risk

• "Safe" jobs are always available — they are not going anywhere.
• If someone is asking for validation to make a leap, they've already decided they want to do it.
• The fear isn't about the new path; it's about leaving the familiar one.
• You can always return to risk-averse employment; you cannot always return to the opportunity you passed on.

On entrepreneurship

• Real entrepreneurs can't help it — it's compulsive, not rational.
• If you have to ask whether you're built for entrepreneurship, you probably aren't a purebred one.
• That's fine — experimenting is valuable, but self-awareness about fit matters.
• Most people dabbling in entrepreneurship are experimenting, not committed; the market eventually exposes the difference.