Biography Edition: The Innovator's Mindset Inspired by Jeff Bezos

Welcome to the Profitable Painter Podcast Biography Edition, where we delve into the lives of some of the most successful individuals to uncover the strategies, tactics, and mindsets that propel them to greatness. Today we're exploring the extraordinary life of a figure whose relentless passion for the customer experience changed the world. So join me as we navigate the journey of this remarkable individual and extract invaluable lessons that you can apply to elevate your professional painting business. Get ready to be inspired, to learn, and to transform the way you think about success and leadership in your own entrepreneurial journey. So over the past week or so, I read the book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone. And so here's an excerpt out of the beginning of the book. It says, when you are 80 years old and in a quiet moment of reflection, narrating for only yourself, the most personal version of your life story. The telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. And that's from the book, and that's an actual quote from Jeff Bezos himself. And this kind of highlights his relentless ambition and ruthless execution that have been pivotal in Amazon's success, and that's kind of the foundation of Amazon's culture: relentless and ruthless. Here's a quote from the book again: Relentless and ruthless—those words show up repeatedly in the following pages. They are extreme but familiar values at most successful companies. Getting the lethal combination precisely right has been Bezos's a prestigious talent and perhaps Amazon's greatest asset. And this is something we just see over and over again with, with Jeff Bezos. He actually owns the URL relentless.com, which forwards over to amazon.com. He, when he was starting Amazon, he was actually considering calling it Relentless instead of Amazon, but that really underpins the culture at Amazon. Their meetings are actually pretty intense. He's a very intense individual. He digs into the details, and he is absolutely serious about pursuing the customer experience and making sure customers get what they want. So next, let's go into Bezos' vision of innovation. Here's a quote from the book: There's so much stuff that has yet to be invented. There's so much new that's going to happen. People don't have any idea how impactful the internet is going to be, and this is still day one in such a big way. And so this was quoted in the early 2000s from Jeff Bezos coming out of the book, and he had a— has and had an unwavering belief in the potential of the internet and the ability to continuously innovate. He was obviously pretty early on in starting Amazon, and like right after the internet became into the public consciousness around 1995. So, he was on the ground floor and continues to think that there's a lot of room for innovation. So, next, let's go into the Amazon meeting culture. So, Amazon's— and this is a quote from the book— Amazon's internal customs are deeply Idiosyncratic. PowerPoint decks or slide presentations are never used in meetings. Instead, employees are required to write 6-page narratives laying out their points in prose because Bezos believes doing so fosters critical thinking. And this is something that Jeff Bezos, whenever he reads something, he's an avid reader, first of all, so he's always reading. And if he ever gets a hold of a good idea, from his reading, he'll implement it into his business in Amazon. And he actually got this idea from a paper that he read, and that they should just get rid of PowerPoint. And instead of doing PowerPoints, actually do 6-page essays instead, you know, because with a PowerPoint, you can kind of be lazy in your ideas. You don't have to clarify everything, whereas when you're writing a paper, you have to support your arguments, provide counterpoints, examples, etc. So he felt that that was really important that people actually dug into their ideas ideas. And so the beginning of meetings at Amazon, they actually a lot of times just start the meeting in silence as everyone reads a 6-page essay about an idea that, you know, for change or whatever the case is. And so going into Bezos leadership and personality, descriptions of Bezos, you know, he's very high energy. He has a kind of a jarring laugh that people often comment on. A very boisterous laugh and sometimes taking you by surprise and not sure why he's laughing. It comes up quite often. And he likes to engage in conversations, get into the details. He's not afraid of the details. He will definitely dig into those things, which kind of intimidates some people. Going into Amazon, what makes it different? Jeff Bezos is very focused on making sure that Amazon differentiates itself from others. And here's a quote from the book: "If you want to get the truth about what makes us different, it's this: we are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term-oriented, and we genuinely like to invent." So customer-centric, long-term-oriented, and like to invent. And here's another quote: "We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. This value will be a direct result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market leadership position. The stronger our market leadership, the more powerful our economic model. Market leadership can translate directly to higher revenue, higher profitability, greater capital velocity, and correspondingly stronger returns for on invested capital. Our decisions have consistently reflected this focus. We first measure ourselves in terms of the metrics most indicative of our market leadership: customer and revenue growth, the degree to which our customers continue to purchase from us on a repeat basis, and the strength of our brand. We have invested and will continue to invest aggressively to expand and leverage our customer base, brand, and infrastructure as we move to establish an enduring franchise Inside Amazon, the shareholder letter became the equivalent of holy scripture. Bezos re-releases the letter each year with the company's annual report, and the company has hewed remarkably close to the promises and philosophies laid out in it. So basically, Jeff Bezos is very focused on the customer, and the reason why is because he wants to keep— he wants to ensure that customers keep coming back to Amazon and buying you know, again and again and again. So he basically— customer reactivation, think about your own painting business. Do you spend a lot of time and effort getting another painting business client or customer? You want to nurture that relationship and reactivate them and get them buying more service from you over the long term. And this is what Jeff Bezos is doing. He wants you buying everything you can from Amazon, coming back because you're having a great experience every single time. So that's why he's so focused on it, because he wants to have that base of customers that are always coming back to Amazon. So he doesn't really focus too much on competition, he's more focused, he tries to focus him and his team on the customer experience, making sure that it's an amazing experience so people keep coming back. And he does this at the expense of profit. A lot of times in the early days especially, Amazon was in negative a negative profit, he had this long-term orientation. He was, you know, in it for the long term and not really in it for the short-term profits. And that's what he communicated to his shareholders. He's like, "Hey, listen, we're in this for the long term. We're showing negative profit right now, but we want to grow the revenue, we want to grow the client base, and this is going to set us up for the long term. I'm not interested in the short-term profits." And even though he was negative on the profit, he was positive in cash flow, which we'll cover a little bit in a second. But he had that long-term orientation for sure. And then the last thing, a passion for invention. Jeff Bezos really saw Amazon as a tech company from the beginning, and it kind of wavered on that— perception of them being a tech company didn't really solidify until probably the Kindle came out in 2010 or so. Most people just saw them as an online retail online retailer, but Jeff Bezos has definitely demonstrated that, you know, Amazon does innovate. They don't just copy. They definitely find ways to improve the customer experience, innovate on how they can deliver value to customers. And so that has been a big theme throughout his life with Amazon. So let's go into the Bezos approach to challenges and opportunities. Insights into Bezos' perspective on challenges and how Amazon's innovation products like AWS were conceived through a messy process without clear aha moments. Basically, AWS is Amazon Web Services. You know, this is an example of how Amazon was innovating and they didn't necessarily know that this would be something that would actually turn out to be a huge revenue stream for them, and that no one was asking for Amazon Web Services. This is basically data storage and web services to small startups. A lot of times computing power, basically, instead of having to set up your own servers, you can just use Amazon Web Services. And no one was ever asking for this, but it turned out, you know, through their innovation, that this was a huge service that people wanted once they realized what it could do for lowering the costs of smaller companies when they can just use a larger company's resources. And another thing that you'll— I saw again and again throughout his life was that he really got excited about issues that were found in his company because he saw those as opportunities to improve his business. Most of the time, you know, in my own life, you know, when you hear about an issue, you kind of get a little bit anxious and like, ah, we got to fix this. People that worked with Jeff Bezos would say like, hey, he would get excited. And I think part of that is because he was always focused on costs. He was always looking at his costs and trying to lower his costs all the time. And he felt like when he found an issue that was like a way he could lower the cost and then give the customer a lower price because he was always He is always trying to give the customer the best experience and the lowest price as possible. And so, when he identified those opportunities for improvement, he would get excited about that. The decision to start Amazon. So, Bezos was working for D.E. Shaw Co. in the early 1990s, and he actually had this framework where he had a really good job, he was making a lot of money, doing great things. And he, he saw an opportunity with this, the, the start of the internet and that coming into public consciousness. And he wanted to start an everything store, basically where they sold everything on, on the internet. He saw a great opportunity and he used, uh, something called the regret minimization framework. And so let me read an excerpt from the book. This is a cool framework. So Bezos would later describe his thinking process in unusually geeky terms. He says he came up with what he called the regret minimization framework to decide the next step to take at this juncture of his career. When you are in the thick of things, you can get confused by small stuff, Bezos said a few years later. I knew when I was 80— I knew that when I was 80 that I would never, for example, think about why I walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus right in the middle of the year at the worst possible time. That kind of thing just isn't something you worry about when you're 80 years old. At the same time, I knew that I might sincerely regret not having participated in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionizing event. When I thought about it that way, it was incredibly easy to make the decision. So this is a cool framework if you're looking at a big decision is to kind of put your shoe— put yourself in the shoes of when you're 80 years old looking back at your life, you know, uh, what does this decision matter? And if it does, what would be your perception of that decision? So I thought that was a really interesting framework to use for kind of big decisions, or even to, to put things in the context if it's not a big decision. Um, maybe if you're upset about something that happened Is this going to matter 40, 50 years from now? You know, when I'm 80 years old, am I going to even remember this day? Kind of puts things in perspective because, you know, as entrepreneurs, we have ups and downs and we might have a bad day. But, you know, is it going to matter 40 years from now? Probably not. And we probably won't even remember it. So it kind of puts things in perspective. So going into building Amazon, so the foundation years of Amazon, One of the big things that Jeff really focused on was hiring practices. He said every time we hire someone, he or she should raise the bar for the next hire so that the overall talent pool is always improving. So he was all about hiring those A-players and not, you know, not sacrificing you know, putting a B player in there. He wanted only the best people. Going into Bezos' leadership philosophy, he was really focused on being bold, and he had a customer focus like we talked about, and not so much focused on competitors, but more focused on customers and focused on the long term. Here's a quote from the book here. Bezos used that word a lot, bold. In the company's first letter to its public shareholders, written collaboratively by Bezos and Joy Covey and typed up by the treasurer, Russ Grandetti, in early 1998, the word bold was used repeatedly. We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions. When we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages, they wrote. Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case. The letter also stated that the company would make decisions based on long-term prospects of boosting free cash flow and growing market share rather than on short-term profitability. And one section in a particular in particular served as a guidepost for the unorthodox way the company planned to approach Wall Street. So basically, Amazon, you know, and Jeff Bezos, they really— he really focused on being bold. And that's something that I've seen repeatedly in biographies of successful people is that, you know, they don't want to— they want to be bold, they want to make those big decisions take on that risk, because when you take on outsized risk, you usually get outsized returns. And so Bezos was definitely focused on that, wanting to capture that market share by making those bold moves. Something else I mentioned earlier was Bezos on cash flow. Uh, one of the quotes here out of the book is Bezos wanted to set his own metrics for success without interference from impatient outsiders, so he encoded his operating philosophy in his first letter to shareholders, vowing a focus not on immediate financial returns or on satisfying myopic demands from Wall Street, but on increasing cash flow and growing market share to generate value over the long term for loyal shareholders. So again, this is— his focus wasn't on like making sure profits were, uh, were up all the time for the short term. He really just, um, they had really good cash flow because they would basically— when you buy something on Amazon, they they get your payment right then and there, but they didn't have to pay their distributors until like 30 days later or so. So they would get cash, you know, quick, but then they could delay cash going out to their vendors. And so he was really focused on that, making sure that cash flow was great, but less so on the actual profits, which you would see on your profit and loss. You know, you could look at your own painting business for this. When you take deposits, or if you're not taking deposits, definitely consider that because that gets cash flow in the door. You can use that cash to reinvest in the business, like putting towards marketing, putting it towards your people. You know, get that cash in the door as soon as possible, and that's just going to alleviate and keep things running, and you can grow your business a lot quicker when you have cash coming in the door every time you make a a sale. I know a lot of painting businesses make the mistake of not taking deposits, and that they— a lot of those folks end up having trouble with cash flow and have trouble growing because they don't have that cash in the door. So that's something that Bezos did realize. He needed that cash flow. He really focused on that, and he was able to sustain negative profits for extended periods of time because he had that focus on cash flow. So going into some things that— some mistakes that Jeff Bezos made, arguably some mistakes he made. I think he would agree with this, but back in the height of the tech bubble, so back in 2000, you know, there's a lot of cash going into internet companies. And I think Jeff Bezos made that mistake. Putting money into internet companies as well. He kind of stretched himself thin by sitting on multiple boards and having multiple investments going on on all these different internet companies, and it kind of distracted him from his primary purpose, which was, you know, running and leading Amazon. And that was— I think he later, he ended up pulling back after the tech bubble burst and he really focused down on Amazon, realized that, you know, he needed to dial things in. And that's something that I see in myself as I've made mistakes in the past where I had too many things going on, too many businesses, you know, at one point had, you know, military deployment going on while I had two businesses, a painting business and and a bookkeeping business at the same time. And that really stretched me thin, and I didn't have the cognitive power to put, you know, my mind to things like I should have. And so I know I fell into that mistake. I've seen other folks where they'll— they get a certain level of success in their painting business, and then they're like, oh, let me start another painting business or another related trade. And, you know, forgetting how much work it takes to do one business, let alone two or more. So I think that's something that Jeff, you know, learned through experience and something that I've definitely as well. And, you know, looking at— we talked about Napoleon in a previous episode, one of the things that made Napoleon successful in a kind of a military tactic that he did was he would, he would converge and mass fires on a single weak point on his enemy. So his ability to concentrate his forces on a weak point led him to decisive victories. And that's kind of related. If you can focus your energy, focus your, your attention on a particular thing, you can get a lot done. But if you kind of have it scattered about and on multiple things, you're not going to get a lot done. And also Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, That's something that he said in his book, Zero to One, I think it is, that, you know, don't divide your attention. Focusing on one thing yields increasing returns for each unit of effort. So that's definitely something we can learn from Jeff, from his mistakes. So going into Jeff Bezos's management style, Jeff Bezos had the unique management practices, including the two-pizza team and narrative approach to meetings, fostering independence and innovation within Amazon. The entire company, he said, would restructure itself around what he called two-pizza teams. Employees would be organized into autonomous groups of fewer than 10 people, small enough that when working late, the team members could be fed with two pizza pies. These teams would be independently let— set loose on Amazon's biggest problems. They would likely compete with one another for resources and sometimes duplicate their efforts, replicating the Darwinian realities of surviving in nature. So this was kind of an interesting way he organized his team. He actually saw communication as a sign of dysfunction in, in his organization. Here's another quote from the book: I understand what you're saying, but you are completely, completely wrong. Jeff Bezos says, communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren't working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more. Bezos's counterintuitive point was that coordination among employees wasted time and that people closest to the problems were usually in the best position to solve them. This was interesting for me. I I hadn't thought about communication as a sign of dysfunction. And something that I've seen, now I start to kind of look at things differently when I see a lot of— we use Slack in my businesses, in my primary business, but in the past we've used Slack in my painting business as well. So, you know, if there's a lot of communication in a particular Slack channel going back and forth, that reflecting, and that does— is usually means there's something wrong going on. Like, there's not a lot of work, there's multiple people involved, they're trying to get an understanding what happened, we're fixing an issue, uh, there's something has gone wrong usually if there's a lot of things going, you know, a lot of communication. That has kind of made me rethink communication in an organization. And, uh, you know, because if you think about it, if you have good processes and people know what, what they need to do and they also have the resources of what— to complete their job, they're probably not gonna be communicating a lot because they can just do what they need to do and move on, and they don't need to ask somebody for permission or for access to things or where something is. They can just execute. So that's something that you can kind of use in your painting business if you have those internal channels on Slack or wherever you're communicating. If you're seeing a particular part of your process that seems to have a lot more communication than other parts of the process, like maybe it's customer onboarding, when you're trying to get colors from a customer, or scheduling, or whatever that is, maybe that, that will be a way for you to problem solve. Okay, how can we actually streamline this process and make it better? So overall, I definitely recommend getting a hold of The Everything Store by Brad Stone. It's really, really good insights into Jeff Bezos and what he, what made him tick. And like I said, I think his focus on the customer, improving that experience, and so he could continually reactivate customers, right? That was his big focus. And I think he accomplished that. Looking back over the years, he's— I'm an Amazon user myself, so he's got me. So, and then he had a long-term approach to things. He wasn't so much focused on the short-term profits, but he was really focused on cash flow, making sure he had cash to grow and reinvest into the business. I think is another key thing. And also invention, he's really focused on invention, coming up with new ways, new things, new products, was really, really stood out. And also that communication is a sign of dysfunction was an interesting way to look at that. And I thought that was useful to diagnose problems in my own business. So with that, That completes the episode for Jeff Bezos, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on, on this episode and any future ideas for future podcasts or future biographies. I'd love to hear your thoughts in the Grow Your Painting Business Facebook group.