5 key business lessons from Amazon CEO & Founder Jeff Bezos

Monday October 30, 2017 , 3 min Read

Amazon's Founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, is one entrepreneur who is looked up to by all aspiring tech businessmen and women. Bezos has spent the better part of his life inventing and revolutionizing e-commerce, and he continues to tirelessly do so. It is no wonder that his efforts have made him one of the wealthiest men on the planet. Aside from his analytical mindset, he is a methodical and highly intelligent entrepreneur, and that combined with his unique leadership qualities makes him a force to reckon with.

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Here are a few lessons all aspiring entrepreneurs can learn from Jeff Bezos:

Be flexible and stubborn

According to Bezos, if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to be stubborn and flexible. If you're not stubborn, you're bound to give up on your business sooner or later. If you're not flexible, you'll never come up with a different solution than the one you already have. You need to be stubborn in your vision and flexible about the details. Being stubborn and flexible at the same time isn't easy and you need to know when to be which in order to succeed.

Focus on customers, not competitors

Bezos often points out that tech companies are more likely to obsess over their competitors. They wait and see what their rivals introduce and then try to one-up it. By listening to your customers instead, you can build services and products that are designed to solve the problems your customers are facing. He believes that to get ahead in the industry, you need to think for yourself.

Keep innovating

Today, Amazon is more than just an online retailer. It got to where it is today because its CEO believes in continual innovation. In addition to making films and TV series, Amazon has also developed physical shops, drone delivery systems, a massive cloud computing business, and so much more. Most companies are satisfied when they come up with one or two good ideas, but Amazon comes up with a dozen of them.

Failure is inevitable

If you are experimenting and trying new things, you are bound to flop before you achieve success. Amazon, too, has faced its fair share of failures in the last few years. Its smart-phone, that cost $170 million in investment, was a complete turkey. Its web payment service too went nowhere. Bezos believes that if you don't try new things, you'll never have more than one or two businesses.

Positive word-of-mouth is crucial

When Bezos started Amazon, he didn't have a marketing budget to promote his business. The reason Amazon succeeded was because of positive word-of-mouth. If you build a great experience, customers are bound to tell their family and friends about it. Therefore, focus on generating positive word-of-mouth for your business and the rest will fall into place.

As Jeff Bezos once said, “There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.”