Tony Hsieh - RIP
We all have at least one person in the business world that maybe you’re not directly connected to, but that you find a true inspiration and you often quote their books or presentations in your own work or meetings. Someone that you really look up to and hope that you could add only a small percentage of their characteristics into your own business or mindset.
For me, that man is Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos who tragically passed away this week.
If you don’t know of him, the long story short is that he helped turn an unpopular idea in challenging the traditional bricks and mortar shoe stores to later sell to Amazon for $1.2 billion dollars.
I never met him personally, I certainly didn’t have his number in my whatsapp groups, but after seeing him speak at a conference and then being able to visit his Zappos operation in Las Vegas, I was left feeling inspired.
You see, he had a fresh approach to customer service. At Zappos they created 10 core values that the entire operation lived by and when we then were fortunate enough to meet Tony on that tour (purely by coincidence, not a paid for opportunity), we found him in the middle of his customer support team’s desks answering calls and talking to his team.
You can read more on the Zappos values here, but essentially they are a guide to how the company interacts with its employees, customers, community and their business partners. They are some of the few I’ve seen in recent years where the team actually understand and live by those values themselves.
There are a couple of quotes of his I particularly enjoy that I wanted to share
Your job should make you want to get out of bed: "I made a list of the happiest periods in my life, and I realized that none of them involved money. I realized that building stuff and being creative and inventive made me happy.” This is something similar I learned from my father’s passing earlier this year when he said to me “does it make you happy?”
I like this next one because it really places the customer at the heart of business thinking. “We’re not trying to maximize for every single transaction. We’re trying to build a lifelong relationship with our customers.”
Tony and Zappos created a fresh approach to customer service to grow their business and in doing so also launched Delivering Happiness to help other businesses to do the same. https://www.deliveringhappiness.com/
I could highly recommend you read his book (available on all good book stores/ downloads…) and hopefully you can take some of that inspiration to your own businesses when you start to look at what’s next for you.
RIP Tony Hsieh, 1973-2020