Jeff Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and raised in Houston, Texas. After completing his education with degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, he went on to work as an investment banker in Wall Street between 1986 to 1994, when he quit to launch Amazon.
Bezos launched Amazon as an online bookstore, then eventually added more products to the store slowly with time. In 2000, he ventured into aerospace by launching Blue Origin. He’s currently in the midst of a space race with Elon Musk. In 2013 he purchased the Washington Post for $250 million in cash. As of the writing of this article, Jeff Bezos is the richest man in modern history with a net worth of $171 billion.
Jeff is definitely a driven individual. He has turned Amazon into the biggest online retail company in the world. The company is thriving, with continued expansion even in the middle of an economic downturn. Even as Amazon serves hundreds of millions of customers per year, the surface is unscratched and the CEO is unrelenting in the push to get into newer markets.
Jeff Bezos is living the American dream today. We figured it would be very important to delve into the beliefs and philosophies he relies on to run the world’s biggest online shopping store. For startups that aspire to become successful companies, here is the Jeff Bezos definitive PR and marketing guide to becoming successful:
1) Value your customers
Jeff Bezos’ rule book has customers at the very top of the chain. His customers are what drive him to push Amazon from one level of greatness to another. He obsesses over customer satisfaction. He’s captured worldwide attention with his constant drive to offer the best products at the best possible prices. He’s also put Amazon on the map for fast delivery, and faster turnaround on complaints and returns.
“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”
He advises startups to focus on ensuring the customers have the best possible service they can offer. In their millions, Amazon customers still enjoy some of the very best customer service. What about a startup with only a couple of hundreds? It is the happiness of the customer that pushes companies to the next level.
“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”
Furthermore, Bezos believes that if companies want to survive the recession, then they should prioritize what their consumers need over what their competition is doing. At a time when many people are feeling anxious about the economy, it is imperative to connect with them and reassure them. By doing this, you can also find a way to develop products and services that these people need at the moment.
“Customers are always wonderfully, beautifully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.”
2) Treat employees like owners
Despite various allegations in the recent past of bad treatment at Amazon by some former employees, Jeff Bezos has always maintained that Amazon is what it is because it treats its employees like owners of the company.
“When I interview people, I tell them, ‘You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three,” he wrote in a letter to employees in 1997.
Amazon’s extremely driven and demanding work culture has attracted among the best talents in the world around all sectors from marketing to engineering.
“We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore actually be, an owner.”
3) Hire well
A company’s culture is best shaped by the earliest employees who work for it. Amazon’s speed and work ethic were shaped very much by Bezos in the early days as it was shaped by the first people he hired. According to one of the richest men in the world, hiring the best talent is about looking for one trait: being right.
“Smart people can be wrong a lot of times” he once said.
It is not how smart you are that makes you work at Amazon. It is about the number of times you have made the right call in tough situations and it worked out well for the company you worked for. Jeff Bezos is always looking for a track record of the number of times you have made the right call.
Whether this strategy was guided by data, or instinct, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you were right then, and a couple of times afterward.
“I want people who are right most of the time. It’s always better in business to be right than smart.”
4) Get an under-served market
When Amazon was starting out, the bookstores would stock only best sellers. It was hard for young publishers or new authors to make it in the market. Even so, these young publishers and new authors were in plenty. Jeff Bezos figured that if he could stock their books and sell them online as the internet continued to take shape, then they would all eventually submit their books to his online store for sale. With this strategy, Bezos would go on to build a wider market than what a physical bookstore could provide. While a bookstore simply sells books, Amazon’s publishers and authors could also market their books on the website.
The book-selling business was definitely very problematic, especially for new books without glorious New York Times reviews. His advice to startups today is that there are still lots of problems in the world today that can be solved by a new way of thinking. Finding an under-served market and putting in your best effort to build a product that solves the problem places you in a better position to succeed.
5) Tell a story
When speaking to graduates in a recent graduation ceremony at his alma mater, Princeton University, he ended the talk by telling the group to build themselves a great story.
Amazon is the great story of a great American dream that came to life. For Jeff, how you feel about your story when you are 80 years old is important. Do you look back and rejoice at your story, or do you wish you were younger so that you could change that story?
Storytelling is at the forefront of today’s biggest companies in every sector. We have discussed Coca-Cola’s amazing short story that led to its founding in Simon Sinek’s feature article a while back. Apple is another great story built and told in the eyes of Steve Jobs.
Startups must realize that behind every great company is a beautiful story. In the 90s starting a company from a garage was a beautiful story. Today it is no longer as appealing because so many founders have done it.
As a PR firm, the founder’s story is among the first things we want to know before embarking on a journey with a startup. At Pressfarm, we pride ourselves on using this information to craft compelling brand stories by writing winning press releases, developing engaging feature articles and designing creative media kits. After all, journalists love a good story. Beyond creating that good story, we also develop a strategy to push it out to the right people.
Firstly, we build each client curated media lists with contacts in their niches. In addition, all our clients have access to our media database of over 1 million contacts across industries.
6) Be stubborn but be flexible
Jeff Bezos has always handled the mission of Amazon in a stubborn manner. In fact, he insists, this is what has kept the company on course despite so many reasons to quit.
“Be stubborn on vision but flexible on details.”
Amazon’s vision has never wavered. Not in the face of calamities, shareholders’ disapproval or low revenues and sales.
However, the way to achieve that vision is in the details. Moreover, the Amazon founder insists that you must be flexible in the details. If the suggestion from someone on the board of directors, or the team, or a customer helps you to get to your vision, be willing to try it, but do not abandon the vision. All suggestions must be made around that vision in order to achieve it. According to him, how you get there is negotiable but the goal remains the goal.
“If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon. And if you’re not flexible, you’ll pound your head against the wall and you won’t see a different solution to a problem you’re trying to solve.”
7) Do not obsess over the competition
As said before, rather than obsess over what your competitors are doing, you should focus on your customers’ needs. If you focus too much on the competition, you forget the goal for which you launched your company, you lose your focus, and the customers start to wonder whether the competition is actually better than you are.
“When [competitors are] in the shower in the morning, they’re thinking about how they’re going to get ahead of one of their top competitors. Here in the shower, we’re thinking about how we are going to invent something on behalf of a customer.”
8) Know when to ignore the hierarchy chain
When looking for solutions to problems within companies, bosses often ignore the advice or suggestions from junior members of the team. Bezos advises every founder of a startup not to be that guy. Rather, you have to understand that even as your company grows, ideas from junior employees can do so much good for the company.
“The great thing about fact-based decisions is that they overrule the hierarchy. The most junior person in the company can win an argument with the most senior person with regard to a fact-based decision. For intuitive decisions, on the other hand, you have to rely on experienced executives who’ve honed their instincts.”
When suggestions and solutions are provided on the basis of facts, it is wise to listen even to the least experienced team member. However, if a decision relies on instincts, experienced team members are a safer bet because they have sharpened that skill over a long time. For this reason, they understand the implications of the decisions they make.
9) Focus on the long-term
In the startup world today, so many founders think they can come in, launch a company, make some quick cash to convince an investor then get seed funding and eventually exit after selling for a billion bucks. Jeff Bezos thinks that is a crazy way to build a company. 10 years ago, Amazon was not as big as it is today. 18 years ago, it was trying to recover from the dotcom crash. It is the resilience and focus on the long-term game that has made it the giant it is today.
Founders of startups must strive to build a long-term strategy so that their companies can last a lifetime. Companies that last a lifetime have been tried and tested in the rough muddy terrain and gone through some of the toughest times.
You shouldn’t be out to make a quick buck, especially if it jeopardizes the values of your company. It is understandable to want to make some quick cash to keep the company afloat in the early days. However, ensure that your strategy is informed and based on the long-term goals of the company.
10) Don’t be afraid to fail
Jeff Bezos has overseen some of the biggest failures in Amazon. The Amazon Fire Phone cost the company millions of dollars before they eventually discontinued it in 2015. However, this is only a recent failure among many more in the near past.
In 2000 after the dotcom crash, the company dwindled in sales and the stock came tumbling down in a depreciation of about 80% its initial value. The shareholders were ready to quit. The employees were stressed and they didn’t know if the company would survive. In that year, Amazon was barely the humongous company it is today.
He wrote a letter to the Amazon shareholders and employees that year, and his focus was on the future. A paragraph from it stated:
“Amazon.com today [has] the brand, the customer relationships, the technology, the fulfillment infrastructure, the financial strength, the people, and the determination to extend our leadership in this infant industry and to build an important and lasting company.”
In that letter and in the face of failure, he showed why he was unmoved. Even more, he proved that he can take short-lived failure with his chin up and focus on the long-term goal. Startups should understand that failure will happen no matter how big or small.
11) Run a lean company
The lean startup methodology might appear to have been coined only recently as the startup industry started to grow. However, entrepreneurs from centuries past have been bootstrapping for ages. Amazon is no exception. In the initial years, Jeff Bezos literally ran everything in the company. He played the role of salesman, accountant, marketer, CEO, head of strategy, and any other role you could imagine.
The point for startups is that you have to run lean as long as possible. Instead of hiring more people to increase wages when you don’t have to, use the finances to improve the product and drive more sales.
Avoid unnecessary expenses, and focus on the customer and the product. Improve as much as possible on the mechanisms and systems that deploy more sales instead of trying to hire every talent you can get. If you have more trial customers than paying customers, find ways to convert them. Instead of getting a bigger office space for yourself, use the funds to expand the business. Instead of hiring yet another door-to-door salesman, use Google advertising or Facebook ads to get the word about your company out because you will spend less and get useful data to improve your future advertising campaigns.
Even in its current status as one of the largest companies in the world, Amazon still minimizes their employee expenditure. For example, they use stock options to complement salaries so that they can reinvest the money in the company to keep the wheel moving.
12) Maintain the startup mindset and culture
It can be challenging to maintain the startup culture in a company that is continuously growing. For a company the size of Amazon, it is even harder. However, for so many years after Google become a multibillion-dollar company, it was still considered a startup. This applies to Facebook and Salesforce too. Amazon moved from startup zone to a big startup zone.
The secret in maintaining the startup mindset and culture according to Jeff Bezos is to always stay customer-focused. Never get complacent on that. This is because startups never have the big finances to keep them afloat if things go south. All they have are the customers who trust the company at that time.
13) Deploy simple logical solutions
Companies want to analyze the significance of a solution when planning to implement it. Sometimes these companies actually overthink the solutions. The chief cause of this overthinking is data. Companies can rely so much on data that they end up implementing the right solution too late. Similarly, they may end up deploying the wrong solution at the wrong time. Data has never stopped being a defining factor of business and it plays a huge role in modern public relations strategies.
Jeff Bezos doesn’t always rely on data. He makes a decision based on how logical it is even when the data might be stacked up against that decision.
“You have to use your judgment. In cases like that, we say, Let’s be simpleminded. We know this is a feature that’s good for customers. Let’s do it.”
The Amazon founder and CEO was an investment banker in his early years. He understands that data carries weight. However, he also understands that data has its limitations and the figures are not always black and white. When in doubt, he believes that startups should make simple common-sense decisions that help the customer.
14) The two-pizza team rule
At Amazon, big meetings are highly discouraged since meetings can be extremely unproductive, especially when the team is a whole 15 people. Bezos developed the two-pizza rule in the company’s early stages, and they still follow this rule to date.
“We try to create teams that are no larger than can be fed by two pizzas. We call that the two-pizza team rule.”
The only way for a meeting to happen is if the number of people in that meeting can be adequately fed using two large pizzas. This trimmed meetings to a maximum of seven to eight people. More importantly, this strategy made the meetings shorter, and more focused.
Startups should ensure they don’t waste valuable time on pointless meetings. Short and precise meetings between smaller teams improve focus, productivity, accountability, and follow-ups.
15) Treat each day like Day 1
Jeff Bezos believes that companies whose leaders don’t treat each day like Day 1 are bound to fail eventually. Keep in mind that the entire world has been in pandemic mode for over two years now. In addition to that, we’ve had to deal with monkeypox, the war in Ukraine, racial tensions in the US. As if that wasn’t already bad enough, we’re now plunging headfirst into an economic recession.
In the face of these never-ending crises, treating each day like Day 1 requires a lot of humility and honesty. In other words, it is only when company founders and CEOs admit that they’re afraid and don’t know what to do that they can go back to the drawing board and develop effective strategies. Admitting to being afraid of the unknown is the first step in figuring out how to survive that unknown.
“Day 2 is stasis. Follower by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”
These strategies can apply to every startup today. As you launch your company, your focus and vision can all be sharpened by the advice from one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our era. Startups have to remember that the goal, if worthy, must never shift. Coupled with a good PR strategy, it could define your story.
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