How To Win By Focusing On The Customer (Jeff Bezos Principals)

so guys in this video we are gonna talk about how to win by focusing on the customer and touching a little bit on the guiding principles that led Jeff Bezos and Amazon to the success that they have today now something new that I'm going to be doing on this channel and just within the grow your agency community is I read most of my books on this thing right here which is a Kindle oasis I believe reason I just like fully change over to the Kindle is because it's really good to highlight notes and it's available

digitally on the like Kindle notes web cloud browser thing and then I can easily make a good cliff notes from there so starting from now every single book I read I'm doing a cliff notes directly after some books are gonna be worthy enough for me to create a video I would have had enough that I learned from it to create a video some books are just gonna be like whatever they're gonna be man so I'm not gonna do a book review or a cliff note on it but today we're talking about the everything store I

believe the author is like Brad Stone or something like that everything store it is a biography about Jeff Bezos and Amazon now in this video I'm gonna give you the main takeaways the three main takeaways I've got from the book but right below this video there is a download link so you just have to click on that link that'll take you to a Google slide and then from there in the top left just click Edit make a copy and then that'll go directly over into your personal Google Drive and Google slides account from there you

can see my notes you can download as a PDF and you can even add your own notes or your own thoughts so that is available for download right below this video now let's get into my main three takeaways from this book so number one is an extreme just monastic obsession when it comes to customer you know and always putting the customer first of all people out there I mean look one thing that I would say is Jeff Bezos took a lot a lot and then built a lot on Sam Waltons principle so if you ever

read Sam Walton made in America if you haven't already I highly recommend that book with Sam Walton was basically the founder of Walmart and that guy was just a crazy and Jeff Bezos basically took his principles and pulled them out and put them into you know ecommerce world and you know what a Sam's mean overarching principles was always put the customer first so he had an extreme view on customer obsession as well and Jeff went ahead and just carried that over in fact he always states that Amazon's corporate mission is to raise the bar across

industries and just across the world as to what it means to be customer obsessed and customer focus and this is really just gonna be something that's overarching if you read the book or if you just look into Jeff if you look into his letters to shareholders you know for a long long time Amazon people thought it was just a complete scam Amazon it just barely survived the the.com burst just for a long time Amazon just like god of crap ton of slack for things that had done you know things like the fact that this kindle

right here this has this little strip and with that strip what that strip means is that I get free 3G anywhere in the world to download books like anywhere in the world and I don't need a sim because when he was releasing the Kindle he looked at it and he was like okay this needs to be super easy and easy enough that just a grandma could use it you know could look up a book that she wants to purchase on the kindle directly and purchase it anywhere from the world whether they had Wi-Fi or not

and his engineers thought he was just like psycho because he's like look Jeff if we make this thing have like cellular capabilities then what we're gonna have to do is we're gonna have to have the ability for someone to put their sim card in there and Jeff was like no no way we're doing that I want them to have the ability to have 3G anywhere in the world for free forever and once again has any nurse thought that was crazy his shareholders looked at the fact that he want to do just simply you know simple

things like free shipping and then that went on to be like free two-day shipping and then free one-day shipping and then that went out to be next day delivery and then now you know you've even gone was that Amazon like now or something like that or prime now or something where it's literally same-day delivery so came by most CEOs they have investors they have shareholders you know they have a lot of people they need to make happy Jeff basically looked at that and was like okay now that I'm gonna focus on the one thing I

was gonna bring the highest yield long-term and one thing about Jeff was he always was a long-term thinker Jeff never had a 1 or three-year or five-year plan you know he had just immense foresight and has said I highly recommend you read the book and you'll find a little bit more about it but Jeff wasn't playing like a 1 3 or 5 year game he was playing a long long-term game and that's why even if you look at Amazon I think the first year that actually had profits was like 2004-2005 but really they did start

making a crap ton of money until recently now one of the reasons that was actually the case is because they wanted to avoid paying tax so they put as much money back into the business into growing to the business to the point now we're like they can't keep investing in the business because it's just gone so so big and that's why if you look at Jeff Bezos is worth you know in the last year or two years it's just absolutely skyrocketed now all of that derived from the fact that they were customer focused so I

think that it's it's good to great I think that's a book by Jim Collins but in good to great he basically outlines the flywheel effect so Amazon knew that it could pretty much spread through like word-of-mouth I mean I - I was like I can't remember the last time I've seen an Amazon like ad on Facebook or Google and I can I mean I think they did some for the Kindle and Alexa but apart from that they pretty much never run like TV ads or billboard ads or magazines I could be wrong I could be

totally wrong but I'm I just can't remember seeing money and one of the reasons that was was because Amazon understood the concept of the flywheel right and the flywheel is something you know I could talk about that in far far greater detail in another video but that's the same principle that something like uber or Airbnb uses you know when uber first starts you know it doesn't really have that flywheel effect when uber first starts you know a lot of people are tentative to use it but once more more people use it you know the more

people they use uber the more drivers there are and the more drivers there are now there's an influx of drivers so there's gonna be more customers and it just creates this flywheel effect and when more customers and more people are using the word then it becomes more mainstream than it ends up in rap songs and you know once becomes more mainstream once again it just creates this flywheel effect again and again so Jeff looked at where he was with Amazon in early 2000s and he's like hey look if I can create this flywheel effect you

know if I can get this thing going then this is gonna be one of the biggest businesses in the world which it is currently and I that's gonna overtake Apple as the most viable company I I genuinely think it will but I guess we'll see now Jeff was always kind of crazy about this like to give you an example whenever he was in meetings he would always leave one chair open before the customer so like you know it'd be like him and a couple executives and he would leave one chair open all the time for

the customer quote unquote the customer and really what he was trying to do there was basically sure like hey we can't see need to be thinking about the customer even if they're in our presence or not they constantly need to be in our forefront so he literally would like leave a chair open in a meeting with some pretty high-level dudes and he was like yeah that's for the customer and just in general like Jeff had a lot of just weird things about him these meetings would be going on and what he called the war room

so him and his executives like their meeting room he called that the war room which I thought was pretty cool so now I gave you just some sort of like high-level stuff you're like okay cool a man like Jeff Bezos had this opinion and you know these philosophies but like what does that actually do how does that actually apply to my business now if you're watching this more than likely you are an agency owner trying to get into the agency world or you might be a coach a consultant usually I think that's my demographic if

you're an agency owner what this means is if Jeff had an agency he would constantly put his clients first and you know he might maybe cut into his profit margins a tiny bit you know he might maybe take on another contract or another team member employee just in order to fill a role to make the customer aka the client in this situation happy you know it's just something to think about to be honest like you don't need to read every single book and think that everyone is right you know with the agency I prefer to

use a concept called profit first I forget what like who that book is remember but that's another great book so I prefer to use a profit first model rather than like client obsession because if you we're talking about client obsession there's a lot of stuff you can do that really cuts into your profits so once again you can take a little bit of everyone's ideology and just you know mesh that into your own but that's what that would mean for an agency or if you are talking about like you know being a coach or consultant

for example me I have a training business like this is an example right here putting my customers first and just my community first you know by doing things for example like in six-figure resume we do live calls I have free lab calls twice a month that I do with the community things like for example right below this video you can just download my cliff notes you know it takes me time to read these books curate these notes put it all in there once again you know my customers and my paid programs they get a lot

of resources that is putting the customer first when I could I could have taken that equally taking that exact amount of time and put that into my paid traffic efforts or like into all this other marketing stuff and you'll notice a lot in in the training space you know if you're a coach you're consulting your you know info product business a lot of people out there especially focusing just only on their marketing and you know that might work on the front end you know to give you an example you know that might work in the

same way that if eBay at the same time Amazon and eBay were head-to-head in fact eBay was worth a lot more for quite a while you know if eBay just spent all this money on you know marketing rather than doing some R&D and fixing it's kind of janky platform so you know in the moment eBay is making more money or at least at that time eBay was making more money but Amazon was just just drilling into its profits is that a lot of people thought you know they're like how can a business run for this

long and not focus on making money like Jeff must be a psychopath and Amazon must be a scam like that's what people thought for a long long long time but Jeff was clever he was like no if I just put the customer first then today I won't make more money than my competition but in five 10 15 years I'll make a ton more than my competition and that's exactly what happened as I said you just have to look at a company like eBay who is worth a crap ton more than Amazon at the time and

now is worth TV loss I don't know how much eBay is worth compared to Amazon but it's a hell of a lot less so number two is Jeff had an extreme view on decentralization here's the issue when an organization start just to get like that big like Amazon's pretty big these days it can cause a lot of mayhem so Jeff very early on he knows like hey communication we don't want more of this you know you'll find a lot of times with startups are just in the business world you know like businesses focus low on

like we need to communicate we need to have better communication you know communication is really just select one of those buzz phrases I feels it's very similar to like culture like I know a lot of people don't really understand what culture means I die I definitely know I don't you know and that's something that I'm trying to build up and my company as its starting to become more of an actual real company as mature and so yeah communication is one of those things where like a lot of people want more of it Jeff was like

no I want less fit Jeff saw communication as just complete dysfunction he saw it as hey if there is a lot of communication going on then things aren't getting better things are getting worse we're gonna be slower less efficient so that's how we saw communication which kind of ties into decentralization I think I talked about this in one of my other videos but if you go look at a decentralized approach especially within an organization that means that everyone isn't circling back to the top that means there are smaller clusters more entrepreneurial clusters and smaller teams

and then those root teams report back to you know a head of a department and that department stays kind of decentralized you know it focuses on its own department rather than as I said just trying to kind of mix and match every single department because that really slows things down and that's what Jeff realized very very early on so he wanted a very decentralized approach to Amazon I think he kind of achieved it like triage his main nightmare would just be having managers like managing people he just saw as the biggest waste of time possible

unfortunately something you have to do but he just saw it as the biggest time waster so yeah managers that's like what he wanted to avoid and in order to do that he had to have a very decentralized approach to his business so last point is Jeff was a long-term thinker now as I said I just want you to put yourself in his position which is like they started to have some success there's a stock price after their IPO I believe that their IPO was like 1998 or something of that but after their IPO obviously their

stock price went up then the dot-com crash happened yeah their stock price obviously plummeted but Amazon like survived the dot-com bust and after that there was just so many opportunities for Jeff to you know open up that profit margin and just really increase the bottom line but time and time again he decided not to time and time again he decided to put his customer first even if that meant hurting himself and the funny thing is you know that wasn't that that wasn't coming from just a purely like ethical or moral decision yes he wanted to

put his customer first yes he wanted his customers to love him but he knew that if he put his customer first that maybe not today but 5 10 15 20 years down the line that's gonna put him in a much better position than the rest of his competition and that's why you see things from Amazon like same-day delivery next day delivery things like in the Kindle the fact that like you have free 3G anywhere in the world if you can get connection but you know just all these things where he can't see put his customer

first over himself over Amazon stock price its profit margins that means that as I said that's really created that flywheel effect where now like you want to buy anything you want Amazon these days if I want to buy something I'm going to Amazon and if it's not available on Prime and then I'm not ordering that you know and that's how he's really changed ecommerce you know in the past 15 years or so Jeff he's just an extreme long-term thinker and going you're just kind of reading the book and seeing how he went from those early

stages you know it's funny when he first started Amazon what they used to do is they had a belt in the office so they used to ring the bell whenever anyone made an order and then eventually it got to a point you know if you know anything about Amazon you know that they initially started just selling books so eventually got to a point where he couldn't keep you know people couldn't be bringing the bill because there was someone ordering like every second or every couple seconds so I got a little bit obnoxious but it's really

just cool to see what he's done from taking it from that stage where he was you know him and his employees were ringing the bell whenever someone ordered you know made in order to now twenty years down the line being I think they're the second most valuable company on earth I think second or third I'm sure you know going from there from those beginnings to where they are now I think has just been absolutely incredible now as I said taking all this high-level stuff and just funneling it down to if you are an agency owned

or maybe you're a coach consultant maybe you own an info product business the main things that I can take away from Jeff is although you look today and you know you might be looking to your next month and going okay either I can focus on you know a new webinar funnel or maybe I can focus on a new case study phone or maybe I can focus on all these sort of new customer and client acquisition methods and pumping money into paid traffic or doing YouTube or you know speaking on this person's podcast or doing all

this like other stuff to bring in new leads and new attention you know maybe sometimes the best thing you can do for your business is just focus on your customers you know focus on your customers are focused on your clients and focus on improving and making your product better or making your service better and although you know you got to think about it you know if you're focusing on the customer if you're focusing on the product or the service and everyone else is focusing on the marketing and then like obviously everyone else is gonna scale

in front of you within you know today or within 365 days slope obviously that's gonna happen because the thing is at the end of a short term the thing that drives a business forward is the marketing is the sales like that stuff is so so important don't ever neglect that but you know sometimes the best thing you can do is let your competition get a little bit of an edge on you because they're focusing on that stuff knowing full well then in three five ten years you're gonna be way ahead of the competition because you

took some time to focus on your customer or your client as I said depends on what business you have and just making you know putting them first because that will ultimately make the difference you know business is all about creating value for people the more value you create for a single person the better and the more people you can create that same amount of value for it you know if you go look at Amazon I don't think they create the same amount of value per person that they actually affect this say something like iPhone you

know say something like that iPhone but Amazon it creates a small to moderate amount of value for its customers you know it's not something that you would think about anger life you know oh my god that is literally life-changing like you know I can't live without an old furnace when I think about Prime I'm like I can't live without that but the thing is they've just had such a big reach and that big reach as I said the only way that that was made possible was by this flywheel effect him by Jeff 15-20 years ago

okay you know what this while everyone else focusing on this marketing and increasing stock price and all this stuff I'm just gonna focus on the customer because in 10 15 20 years that's the only thing that's gonna matter and you know while lots of people laughed at him I guess you know just only one laughing now so guys I hope you enjoyed this grow your agency community cliffnotes I said if you want to actually get the full slides you want to get my full notes and everything like that it's available right below this video you

just have to open it up and then click Edit make the copy and then it'll be in your Google Drive you can add your own thoughts and I recommend like I do I print out all of them and that way you can just kind of review them before bed and just get these little like yeah just get like these little pieces of information just instilled in your in your head whenever you have a couple minutes here and there whenever you're having a coffee at home or whatever so I said hope you enjoy this video and

I'll see you in the next one