Before turning himself into a Vin Diesel lookalike, palming off his wife, and taking over the world, Bezos was just a regular 'Jeff' but with sh*t hot business acumen. Here we've pulled out 10 of his best moves to help guide your thinking.
How to build a business like Bezos
1. Customer-Obsession
Bezos is famous for total commitment to customer satisfaction. And as you may have found out if you've ever 'mistakenly' ordered a movie on Prime, they're pretty good at sticking to this approach.
“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts.”
The concept is fairly simple: obsess about the customer. Understand what they want from your product/service, listen to feedback, and continuously adapt things to exceed expectations.
Here's the rub - customers will always want lower prices, so you've got to work out how to keep them happy when you can't reduce the bill...
2. Think Long-Term
Bezos famously emphasizes the importance of thinking long-term. Often this will result in people challenging you. Don't be afraid to make bold moves that may be misunderstood in the short term but contribute to the success of your business in the future. Perfectly captured in this quote:
"If you had gone to a customer in 2013 and said, ‘Would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen about the size of a Pringles can that you can talk to and ask questions, that also turns on your lights and plays music?’ I guarantee you they’d have looked at you strangely and said, ‘No, thank you."
Worth being a little bit savvy to this - if people are literally laughing in your face over your idea, its probably a good idea to think about it more carefully. But fortune favours the brave. Keep an eye on the long-term trends as well as the short-term. And think through how your business could position itself for that future world.
3. Embrace Failure
For all its success, Amazon has failed at a lot of things. But unlike in more traditional places, failure is embraced at Amazon. Bezos encourages failure as a natural part of innovation.
“If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.”
Here are just some of the examples of failed Amazon products and businesses:
Amazon Destinations (Travel)
The Fire Phone
Amazon Payphrase (payments solution)
If you get a kick out of Amazon's failures - a longer list is available here
Learn from mistakes, iterate quickly, and view failures as opportunities for growth.
4. Innovate and experiment
A close relative of failure, innovation is at the heart of Amazon: "Invent and Simplify" clocks in at #3 on Amazon's list of 14 Leadership Principles.
Its fair to say Bezos has been pretty good at innovating. He's grown an online bookstore into the 5th largest company in the world, now worth $1.5 trillion....
When starting something off, you need to be in full-time experimentation mode. Every email you send, blog post you write, product feature you develop will provide an opportunity to assess what is working and what's not. You will not have the perfect business from the start. Changing things up and experimenting should be core to what you do
5. Count the pennies, cents and centimes
Bezos was notoriously frugal. Even as a billionaire, he still drove around in a Honda Accord up until 2013. Nowadays, with a wealth of $100bn+ he seems to enjoying spending a little bit more (his latest mega yacht clocks in at $500m...)
However, being thrifty and efficient is still a big part of the Amazon culture. If you don't like writing you're in luck - people are limited to using a 'one-pager' in meetings which summarises the main discussion points so people are prepped before the meeting begins.
Given you're probably not running anything with the kind of cash Amazon has, its fair to say if they can be frugal, so can you. Question all expenses, minimize meeting times, and focus on the 80:20 rule.
6. Data-led decisions
Bezos loves numbers. When he was at school he developed a statistical survey to judge the quality of teachers. At Amazon they've always incorporated as many data points as possible into decision-making.
When Bezos started out, there wasn't nearly as much data available as there is today. You should be incorporating results from all of the analytics built into your everyday business tools to help inform decisions.
Use your instincts to develop ideas, use data to validate them.
7. Focus on Culture
There are books written on the Amazonian culture, so we're not about to capture it all in a paragraph. But here are a few of the main things emphasised throughout Amazon:
High performance
Action-oriented
Ownership (everyone gets Amazon shares)
Start-up mentality (every day is "Day One")
Bezos is relentless. The Amazon culture is not warm and fluffy. But thats not to say the Amazon culture is right for you. You choose the culture: think through your values and how you want them to be reflected in your business, and let them drive the culture.
8. Invest in Talent
Being interviewed by Bezos was probably a pretty gruelling experience. He expects a lot and wants every new hire to 'raise the bar'. There are 3 questions Bezos considers when hiring people:
Will you admire this person?
Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they're entering?
Along what dimensions might this person be a superstar?
Investing in talent doesn't just mean paying the big bucks. It means spending time researching and meeting with lots of people to find the right hire rather than the easiest hire.
9. Diversification: Don't Put All Your Eggs in One Basket
Amazon's most profitable business now is AWS, its cloud hosting solutions. But it started as a bookstore. Every step of diversification both de-risks the core business whilst opening up new opportunities.
Diversification just means having more than one product or service line. It doesn't need to be a radical shift. For example: the first step could be offering beanie hats alongside baseball caps, eventually this could lead to winter clothes alongside summer clothes, and then non-clothing products and accessories.
10. The Two-Pizza Rule
Bezos introduced the "two-pizza rule" at Amazon - every team should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas. Small teams are better at prioritizing tasks and getting sh*t done. A company filled with small teams is also forced to work better together and avoids becoming too smothered in politics.
Takeaways
💰 You probably won't go on to become the world's richest person (but thats ok)
🎯 Bezos was relentless in sticking to the principles outlined above
⭐️ This is how you build a business - these principles can be applied at any stage of organisation but remember to make them personal and relevant to you
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