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This American Serial Entrepreneur's Tips on Disruption-Distribution Balance The millionaire shared his secret to entrepreneurial success

By Ritu Marya

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From being a wine connoisseur to being one of the world's leading digital and social media pioneers, Gary Vaynerchuk is a name that's known to everyone in the start-up ecosystem the worldwide. Vaynerchuk, who is often referred to as a self-made millionaire even though he inherited a wine business, is credited to have scaled his family's business. An internet celebrity, who's religiously followed by entrepreneurs and wannapreneurs alike, his words are often considered to be holy in the start-up world.

Vaynerchuk spoke about how he sees the stark difference between disruption and distribution and has yet managed to find a way to balance the both.

Disrupt or Someone Else will Disrupt You

In most of his talks and appearances, Vaynerchuk has spoken about building a sustainable business that lasts. This requires start-ups to scale and that too, with speed. But in an era of disruption, for start-ups to find a balance between disruption and distribution is a difficult task. Most start-ups give up on the disruption aspect when it comes to first finding consumers for their product.

While this is the popular belief, Vaynerchuk begs to differ. "Distribution and disruption are in very different places. Disruption is a thesis of how you look at the opportunity for your boss. You are either going to disrupt or someone else is going to disrupt you, or you start from scratch and will disrupt someone. There are only two groups – the incumbents and the newcomers. The newcomers want to disrupt something the incumbent has and that's where the opportunity is. The biggest problem with incumbents is that they are not willing to disrupt themselves 99 out of 100 times, which is why we have what we have."

Your Business, Your Distribution

Vaynerchuk believes that distribution is completely different from disruption. Building your business, you need to know about all of its aspects and bring about a stronghold. You may have built a product that will disrupt the market, but if you don't know how to take it to the market, the product fails.

"Disruption is a thesis, distribution is currency. So, the best thing in the world is that the product or service you're providing is disrupting and also alludes to bringing more value to the end-consumer than what they're offered today. This automatically puts you in a good situation. You have to be great at distribution and should understand that there could be better things than what you're doing now. Creating a better way to clean people's clothes is disrupting it, but if nobody knows here how that can be implemented through distribution it is not going to matter," he said.

Find the Balance, Sustain it

From a man who has scaled his family's wine business to who has identified the disruption in some of the top tech companies in the world, Vaynerchuk has done it all. "Be blindly religious about being great at distribution and disruption. That's what I have done. Wine has been disrupted. Everyone was selling wine at the local stores, and I wanted to ship it to you from FedEx, UPS and DHL. And I did that in 1996, when everyone told me that internet was a fad and nobody will buy wine on the internet," he said.

He is an advisor to companies like Uber, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, among others. With his own companies Vaynermedia and VaynerX too, he has shown disruption while distributing his product amongst the right audience. Having identified the internet and its uses to his advantage very early on, Vaynerchuk believes in the Web and its power.

"Vaynermedia is disruptive. While the biggest brands in the world want to spend all their money on radio, television and banner ads. I think they should spend nothing on that and should spend on Facebook, instagram and things of the same nature, we're disruptive while distributing too," he said.

Ritu Marya

Editor-in-Chief, Entrepreneur Media (APAC & India)

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