Jeff Bezos’ rules of business

When’s the last time you left a shop or hung up the phone after speaking to a business and you thought, “Wow, that was great. What an awesome company”?

I can honestly say it’s been a while since I felt that way. The last time was probably in 2003 when I spoke to one of the super nice people at Dall Tile, one of my dad’s tile suppliers in Chicago.

Last week Amazon bought Zappos, the online retailer famous for its customer service. To mark the occasion, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos posted a video describing his business philosophy, or as he calls it “everything he knows.” This video inspired my CEO to write a short blog as to how Real Insurance is going in regards to the four principles outlined by Bezos and in turn got me thinking how I could do my job better according to these golden rules. I encourage you to watch JB’s video below and think about your company and your personal work ethic in this context.

Here is everything Bezos knows:

1. Obsess over customers.
2. Invent.
3. Think Long Term.
4. It’s always day 1.

When I think about some of the biggest companies in Australia, I can’t help but think that they’re extremely lucky. Take Telstra. I don’t think the phrase “customer service” is in their dictionary but I guess it helps being spawned by the government and thus inheriting a majority market share. They don’t need to worry about little details like servicing customers. Telstra makes it too hard for people to leave since they pretty much own the industry in which they operate. That’s the case with a lot of companies here since many industries are oligopolies or close to it. Insurance is definitely in that bucket too (Suncorp – including Promina – own 80% of the market), which is why my company tries to break the mould as much as we can by living by the sorts of rules that Bezos proposes. That’s how we ended up with the only innovations to hit insurance in Australia in ages – we were the first to have a cash back bonus for not claiming and are the only ones to offer pay by km car insurance.

Anyways, here’s Bezos’ “Everything I know” video. Hope you get something positive out of it.