Delivering Happiness

Delivering Happiness explains how mega online shoe retailer Zappos built a unique company culture and customer experience worth remembering, which turned it into a billion dollar business.

At his first company, Tony Hsieh made the mistake of hiring too many people, way too fast. This hyper growth eventually led to him coming into the office, looking around, and not knowing who half the people even were. Many of these folks turned out to be a horrible fit for the company, which taught Hsieh a valuable lesson:

Your company culture is the most important predictor of success.

Hire slowly, and carefully pick the people you work with. Make sure whoever you hire is someone you can go out for drinks with, because even the greatest programmer won’t do your company any good if he’s a pain in the ass to talk to.

Tony says once he focused on developing a great company culture, the team’s core values developed naturally. This makes company culture even more important than their number one focus: customer service.

Why? Because it’s impossible for people to give their best serving customers when they hate their work environment. If the company culture is great, however, then kick-ass customer service is the only logic consequence.

A big step that helped Tony improve company culture at Zappos was to move everyone to Las Vegas, where their customer service center was, huddle up together, spend face-to-face time and grow together as a team.

Zappos entire strategy can be summarized in one word: WOW. That’s all they want to hear out of their customers’ mouths. They didn’t try to be the cheapest online store for shoes, not the one with the biggest selection, or the rarest shoes.

No. Tony picked one thing, customer service, and decided Zappos would be the best in the world at it.

They could’ve been average in all the above areas, but that would’ve never gotten them to a billion dollars in revenue. Moving everyone to Las Vegas and focusing on company culture was the ultimate commitment to a single focus, because these were directly tied to how customer service would turn out.

If Tony could only teach you one thing, it’d be this: Never outsource the one thing you’re trying to be great at.

You can outsource anything, but not everything. If you decide to create the greatest pizza delivery experience in the world, then you better be the one delivering the pizza. You don’t have to make it, but you can’t let someone else handle what’s supposed to be the thing making you unique.