MBA1008 Must Read: The Everything Store by Brad Stone

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Hey O welcome to the 100 Business Insights and Strategies you can't help but implement with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and today's episode is a must read episode in our Must Read Episodes. I share with you a book that has greatly influenced me as an entrepreneur. I share with you its insights, its takeaways, what I've learned from it and why you should read it too. And today's must read is the Everything Store by Brad Stone. The Everything Store is the best biographical documentation of the success of Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos. In fact, when Bradstone approached Jeff Bezos about doing this book by allowing him to basically hang around him and Amazon to learn more about their story, Jeff was very resistant because he's so ambitious. He's like, wow, I'm just getting started. I think it's too early for a biography type of book. Nevertheless, we all know Jeff Bezos and Amazon has had incredible success. Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world and its founder Jeff Bezos, his net worth is $132 billion. His net worth is one of the Fastest growing. This past year it jumped 40 billion alone. This book is really not about money. It's about the story of Amaz Amazon and the will and drive of this guy, Jeff Bezos. I have so many takeaways, so many insights, so many game changing moments that have happened in my mind when I read this book that I want to share with you in today's episode. I wanted this book knowing a bit about the Amazon story, but not as much as I wanted to. So I learned a ton. But more importantly, my mind has changed on a lot of different aspects in business. I had some mind shifts in this book that I want to share with you. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. If I had to sum up Jeff Bezos ambition and his drive, I probably would do it with this quote of his. And that quote is, it's easier to invent the future than to predict it. I mean, think about it. This guy is the kind of guy that's like, hey, I'm going to create the future. I'm going to take control of the future. I am the future. I'm not going to sit on the sidelines and try to benefit off predicting the future. So let's start with that. But let me also mention that this book is a pretty long read. I picked it up on Audible. You can get two free books at Audible, one of our sponsors over@Audible.com MBA and it was about 20 hours to listen to. Now for me, when a book is very thought provoking, it's not an easy book to kind of just zoom through. So it took me a while to get through this book because I had to pause so many times to just think about what I just learned. And when I wasn't pausing for that, I was pausing in awe of Jeff Bezos. The more I learned about him, the more I learned about who he is and what he's accomplished, the more and more I felt like this guy is not human. He's like some sort of superhuman, right? I'm joking. But of course he is talented, yes. He's gifted, he's smart, he's driven. And I don't want to discourage you by saying that. I mean, the guy is very, very talented. But we can learn a lot from his experiences and his story. One of the things I picked up really quick about Jeff Bezos by reading this book is that he's not an ideas guy. He's not one of these people that are like, I have this great idea. I have this brilliant idea that's Going to change the world. You know, Amazon started as an online bookstore. Very boring. That's not something revolutionary. We have bookstores, you know, in very boring, not something revolutionary. We had bookstores before that. He moved it online. And in fact, when he started Amazon, he had some stiff competition with Barnes and Noble's online store. So he's not really inventing the wheel. He's not an ideas guy, he's an implementation guy. He's an action guy. He's a guy that takes massive action. I'm talking about takes things to the extreme level in so many ways that he just takes over a market. Hardworking is an understatement when it comes to Jeff Bezos. So there's a few things I learned in this book that I want to share with you. Some huge insights I want to share with you. Here's the first one. Jeff really believed from the get go that Amazon could be the everything store that you could sell and any kind of product. And they weren't just about books or CDs or anything like that. He believes that his business is not products, it's service. So their customer service has no limits. It's like to the extreme. They want to make sure that every customer is extremely happy, even if that means they're making a return, even if it means they are unhappy with some sort of experience. They want to turn them around and, and wow them over. And if you ever dealt with Amazon's customer service, you definitely agree with me. Jeff Bezos really believes putting the customer first. Let me give you an example. When he started Amazon, he started with books. He wanted to be the biggest bookstore on the planet. One of the things he implemented really early on is allowing customers to review the books and post those reviews publicly. Now, the publishers of these books were really against this. They're like, no, what if somebody gives a bad review? That's bad for business. You have to remember in the late 90s, when Amazon was starting to really turn the corner with books, this was still very revolutionary. This idea of people reviewing products and crowdsourcing information through customer reviews. Jeff Bezos ignored the publishers and said, no, customers have the right to know what other customers think of their books. Now you might be thinking, wow, Jeff, what a great guy. Puts the customers first. But Jeff is a pretty smart guy. And not only does he allow customers to review books so other people can know what the books are all about and what they think of it, but he understands that by doing this, by allowing people to sign into accounts and look at their browsing history, and their reviews. He gets more and more data about his customers. And this is why it's so, so easy now to find things on Amazon. They suggest things that you usually buy, you suggest things that you've been browsing. They might even follow along and do some retargeting on Facebook. Jeff Bezos goal was to create the biggest customer centric business in the world. And he completely achieved that, even though that was a lofty goal. But what you can learn from that is set big goals. Like they say, shoot for the moon. If you come up short, you're amongst the stars. If you shoot for a huge goal, even if you don't hit that goal, you'll be further along, you'll be further ahead than if you set, you know, pretty weak goals. The next lesson I learned is that in the Amazon culture, Jeff really encourages innovation and ways for Amazon to be independent and as well as serve other customers with other types of products. So for example, if you notice Amazon's been creating their own products, whether it's Amazon prime, music, movies, their own types of hardware like the Kindle. I love the Kindle. Right. Fire phone or all other types of gadgets. And in fact, Jeff rewards his employees that actually think of crazy ideas, ambitious ideas, win, lose or draw. Even if those ideas fail, he rewards them because he wants people to think big and to really create some amazing products. They actually call it the just do it award where he gives an oversized sneaker. It's like a Nike basketball shoe. And it's kind of like the award. It's like the trophy of being, you know, a go getter and just doing it. The other takeaway I got from this book and from Jeff Bezos's life is that the guy is super long term. He, he's a long term thinker. And when you read all the things he's done and when he started to do them and how, you know, five, 10, 15 years later that you saw, you know, the fruits of those ideas, hard work he put into it, leading up to it, you start to realize, I gotta start thinking more long term. Stop thinking about today, stop thinking about tomorrow, start thinking about next month or next year. Think the next five years, 10 years, 15, 20 years, you are going to thank your formal self for doing that. That's how companies really become dominant. Building for the future. They're staying ahead. Or like Wayne Gretzky says, you got to go where the puck is going to be, not where it is right now. Now I want to be clear that his story, Jeff Bezos story and Amazon story is not just a bunch of, you know, flowers and rainbows and just good times. There's some real gut wrenching challenges he goes through building this company so many times. He's on the verge of failure, of bankruptcy, of not making it. He's dealing with lawsuits, he's dealing with personal, he's dealing with ex employees that are, you know, unfaithful and totally unprofessional. He deals with his own challenges of developing as an entrepreneur like we all do. But one of the things that comes up in the book over and over and over again, surprisingly, is Jeff Bezos's laugh. If you never heard Jeff Bezos's laugh, you should YouTube it. It's like this large, loud, boisterous bellow of a laugh, right? People say at Amazon, you could hear it down the hall. You can hear Jeff coming before he's there because of his laugh. Now, for a guy that's super driven, super serious about work, hard working, he doesn't forget that he's still in this world with other people. And sometimes you just got to laugh things off, laugh the problems off, laugh at yourself and not take yourself too seriously. Now one of the things I really admired about Jeff is how well he spent his company's money. Now they had plenty of funding, they still do, and they got tons of money. Now they're still very frugal, really very thrifty when it comes to spending money on the company. If you've never heard Amazon, sort of the opposite of working at something like Google, where you get all these great fancy meals three times a day and you know, massages and doggy care and all that kind of stuff, right? Amazon really believes in saving as much money as possible so they can pass it on to the customers. And in fact, as a reminder till this day, they started out doing this from day one, but they still do this till today, even though they're, you know, a multi billion dollar company. So every desk at Amazon, I'm talking about their actual offices, you know, Jeff Bezos's actual work desk is a door from Home Depot put up with by some two by fours, right? So his actual desk is not even a desk, it's just a bunch of pieces of wood. And it's just a reminder to everybody that hey, we're here to save money so we can pass it on to the customers. Employees that work at Amazon pay for their own parking, they don't get fancy lunches, and they all fly economy. Even the execs fly economy whenever they have to travel. So Jeff runs a tight ship, and he does it with a purpose for the customer.

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To wrap up today's must Read, I want to give you kind of my total summary of this book. It's definitely a must read. But when you read a book about somebody so significant in today's business world, somebody who has accomplished so much, it's really eye opening when you pull back the curtain and see what kind of person you have to be to create something like Amazon. And it makes total sense. You got to get honest with yourself. I actually had an honest conversation with myself and I said, I cannot create a company like Amazon. I just said, I just can't do it. The only way I could do it is if I change who I am. I have to change and become, you know, more like Jeff or have similar attributes. I have to be willing to sacrifice as much as he's willing to sacrifice. And you start to realize that nothing is given to you in life. Gotta earn it. You gotta pay your dues. And not to get too deep, but I started to realize whatever success I have right now, it's proportionate to who I am as an entrepreneur. If I want to have a better business, I got to get better. If I want to have more success as an entrepreneur, I got to become a better entrepreneur. So as overwhelming as it could be to read a story that's so incredible, to read about somebody that's so gifted, talented, whatever you want to call it, it's really a reflection of where you're at. You only think he's so amazing because he, as an entrepreneur, is at a different level. But if you ask somebody like Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, they probably deep down are like, yeah, that's what it takes. Yeah, that's. That's normal. That's what a successful business, you know, does as a successful entrepreneur does. And they're probably not as blown away as we are. I'm just kind of guessing here, but it's an educated guess, but you get the point. I love books that cause and force you to ask some difficult questions about yourself. And this is what this book does. So pick it up if you have the chance. It's a long read, but it's well worth reading. All right, that wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you Our episodes hit subscribe so you don't miss a single one, as well as the fact that you tap into all our archive episodes. The only way you have access to all our thousand plus episodes is to hit subscribe so you can get it in your feed to do that right now, no matter what app you're using to listen to podcasts. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Yes, people like Jeff Bezos are really driven and their business and their life as an entrepreneur is the focal point of their life. But they do have families and they do have some time off, they do have vacations, they do have short breaks where they really just, you know, relax and enjoy life. But the balance of like how much time they're off versus how much they work is completely disproportionate and it's just all relative, you know, for them, they want the business to be at a certain place more than anything else. More than the enjoyment of life. Maybe that's not for you. Maybe you want to spend a little bit more time enjoying life. But again, that's a question you have to answer. There is no right or wrong answer. That's Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg's choice. That's what they chose. What's your choice? Alright, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Until then, take care.

At Capella University, learning the right skills could make a difference. That's why our business programs teach you relevant skills you can take from the course room to the workplace. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella Eduardo.