Want to Know the Future? Don’t Ask Jeff Bezos; He Focuses on the Past.

I was listening to an interview recently where Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, gave a lot of insight into his business model and tremendous success. The conversation started by setting the stage of where Amazon had come from and where it was going. Started in 1994, Amazon began by selling music and books locally in Seattle, WA, and by 2002 it had shifted entirely online, selling almost anything they could legally put a price tag on. Today with a credit card and a few clicks, you can buy an entire house, ready to be built on your land, a car, or even live animals and have them shipped right to your door.

Bezos admitted what Amazon has become over the years far surpassed anything in his wildest dreams. His company has even been said to have changed culture worldwide by altering the way people shop, consume, and what they view as “accessible.” Not to mention the necessary changes forced on our shipping and logistics companies just to keep up with his incredible volume.

But here’s where my ears perked up. Bezos was asked a pointed question, “With your company growing and changing so rapidly, how did you seemingly predict the future?” And his answer was pretty simple.

“With all our ties to technology and the power of our brand, I very frequently get the question, ‘What’s going to change in the next ten years?’ And that’s an interesting question. It’s a very common one, and quite honestly, I have no clue. But I almost never get the question, ‘What’s not going to change in the next ten years.’ And I submit to you that second question is actually the more important of the two because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. And so, as you pointed out, in our retail business we began selling vinyl records and paperback novels. There’s no way we could have visualized the iPod or Audible. But what I did know is that customers wanted low prices, and I knew that’s going to be true ten years from now. They want fast delivery. They want fast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future ten years from now where a customer comes up to me and says, ‘Jeff, I love Amazon, I just wish the prices were higher. I love Amazon, I just wish you delivered a little more slowly.’ Impossible. So, the market changed, and the offerings changed, but that was all just sales. We decided to focus our business on the things we knew wouldn’t change.”

I hope you didn’t miss that. That’s some amazing advice from a business genius who has about 180 billion reasons why you and I should listen to him. Let me paraphrase: We don’t know the future, but we can bet pretty safely some things in the marketplace will remain constant. There will always be some type of exchange of goods and services. And while what those goods and services are will change, the fact that people want a fair price, quick delivery, and to do business with someone they trust will be just as true in 2055 as it was in 1905. Amazon is not the only Fortune 500 company to adopt this model either, and as things get increasingly unpredictable around the world, you’re seeing many of them double down on the things they feel like they can control.

I know many of you are thinking that your business model is worlds different from Amazon, and that may be true. You’re in the service industry, not shipping products all over the world. However, I think the fact that much more of your business is done face to face makes this all the more vital for you. We can’t control what the EPA decides to roll out or the kinks in the supply chain from our manufacturers. Most of us can’t control what happens in Russia any more than we can control the weather. But we can always be confident in the fact that the homeowners we service will want their problems solved as quickly as possible, as fairly-priced as possible, and by someone they trust to do the job right. Guaranteed.

Now, which of those factors can you control? Can you complete a job as quickly today as you could pre-COVID? Due to supply and labor issues, that’s unlikely. Can you do it as cheaply as you could even 6 weeks ago? Probably not. But that last one is all on you and decides how well the customer receives the bad news from you on the other two fronts. Very few people are surprised that necessary work on their houses has gone up when they’ve seen prices on gas and groceries triple right before their eyes. Every business seems to be shorthanded, so people will be patient with and even pay more to those who can communicate the issues well enough, and most importantly, have built enough relationship capital with them to get that far.

Business history has taught us that if we’ve earned a customer’s loyalty and trust they’re much more likely to stick with us through unpredictable changes. With all the uncertainty and misinformation that’s out there, the safest bet in business right now might be a simple message of, “You know me. I appreciate your business. We’re all in this together, and I’ll shoot you straight.”

It’s no coincidence that Hudson,Ink has been preaching for decades the extreme importance of building ongoing relationships with your customers beyond the first invoice. Our customer retention programs have been helping contractors across the country grow from the inside out, and we’ve mailed millions of homeowner newsletters to put a face and personality on their service companies. Why have these programs been so successful? Because it’s built for crazy times like these, when life seems unpredictable. Never forget that we deal in the business of people and investing in making them friends instead of just numbers is rarely a bad move.

If you’d like more information about Hudson,Ink’s automated Customer Retention program, click here.