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Gav Kwok is anything but your your average Vegas-by-way-of-Sydney speculator. He was driven by an intense competitive spirit, which he first displayed as a Pro Junior tennis player, dominating his opponents on courts worldwide from a young age.
At 13 years old, he moved to Florida, but unfortunately, he had to give up his beloved sport due to injuries. Where many would receive this kind of abrupt and involuntary transition as a smarting excuse to quit everything else, Kwok did not allow despair to derail his dreams of becoming more than anyone believed he could be.
Languishing for a bit as a dispassionate pre-med student at Florida State led him back to the core value of his entrepreneurial ethos and his personal mantra, which has always emphasized freedom above all other things.
Freedom can mean many things, but to Gav Kwok, it meant financial liquidity, the ability to build his own work schedule, and the chance to live his life at the highest decibel after a tough childhood where fiscal liberty was not on offer.
He jumped heart-first into ecommerce after quitting college and saving a sparse $5K, starting with Shopify as his primary bread and butter. He then realized that the life he envisioned would vanish as soon as the private jets he imagined decamping to exotic locales if he did not make big, bold moves quickly, so he made the leap to Amazon Wholesale FBA and has never looked back.
Going from a broke college dropout living with five roommates in a rough neighborhood to owning a seven-figure Amazon business in five months is not for the faint of heart or the light of determination. Still, Kwok has always believed that obsession always beats talent and is now in a position to share his hard-won tips with others for developing the kind of laser focus that being monumentally successful in his or any other business requires.
Now running a nine-figure business that cracked $100M in revenue in 2022 and serving as the forthright host and founder of the GEM Podcast, Kwok has become a go-to inspiration to many, even outside his field, for his mindful willingness to share the truth of his story. His popular podcast was born out of Gav Kwok noticing a plethora of wrong information circulating about what goes into becoming an entrepreneur at his level.
The same commitment to relationship-building that drives him to untold heights in his industry compelled him to correct some of that misleading narrative himself. Turning down hugely lucrative sponsorships to be able to stay fully unfiltered in that arena, Kwok takes time out of his 16 to 20-hour work days to formally inform aspirant business owners that the secret is there is no secret. "Wealth and success are attained only by focusing on process, by staying focused on your end goals," he says matter-of-factly.
Reluctant at first to drop into the mentoring space because so much negative energy has existed around the too-plentiful predatory users in that realm, Kwok now feels that it is good to give back once you are in a position to. He thereby puts forward a few experience-based tenets that he feels anyone, entrepreneur or otherwise, can profit from in the search for success:
- You only learn by doing. "Good entrepreneurs stay close to the ground and learn or implement new things all the time. They never turn their brains off."
- Be passionate about your end results. "What you actually have to do in a day will very often not line up with the vision you have of the life you want."
- Pick one thing. "I see this Shiny Object Syndrome with entrepreneurs who want to do everything at one time when really what they need to do is get really good at one thing, make money at it, then diversify the income."
- Be respectful and compelling at all times. "Don't waste anyone's time—especially not anyone from whom you are seeking advice."
- Don't let your relationships hold you back. "You have to ignore invitations and talk straight to friends and family about letting you work. I cut off everybody when I started because you have to stay disciplined and motivated. Perseverance and tenacity are required, as is reciprocity. You can't quit when things get hard because they will get hard."
As Kwok describes his way of life, doing fun things with cool people is a desirable path for anyone. When asked what one thing people should know expectation-wise concerning deciding to join his profession, Kwok is characteristically straight-shooting and succinct: "There are no legitimate get-rich-quick scheme. Be patient and hard at work."