6 Top Business Strategies By Jeff Bezos to Save You Years of Failure

Jeff Bezos is the third richest person in the world with a net worth of $72.8 billion. He is the founder and CEO of Amazon.com and the owner of ‘The Washington Post’. What started in his garage with a couple employees went on to become the multi-billion dollar company, Amazon.

Here are six top business strategies from Jeff Bezos that can save you years of failure.

1. Be Stubborn and Flexible

According to Bezos, you should be stubborn on the vision but flexible on the details. Being stubborn is essential because it makes you persevere when experiments don’t work and you realize that if you keep going, things will work out.

And flexibility is important to discover new and creative solutions that won’t come your way if you have a fixed mindset. In other words, on a macro level, you should be stubborn, but on a micro level, you should be flexible. This is one of the top business strategies you can adopt.

2. Create 2-Pizza-Teams

Bezos believes in working in small teams because larger teams have a tendency to become inefficient. Therefore, he has created the “Two Pizza Rule” for his teams.

This means that a team should be small enough to feed with only two pizzas. This amounts to 6 or 7 people in a team.

3. Keep Experimenting

There’s a great quote from Jeff Bezos that shows the power of experimenting –

“If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.”

Bezos has done several experiments with Amazon over the years. In the early years, they tested television advertising which didn’t work out, then they tested free shipping over $25, and then the Amazon Prime which wasn’t profitable but was kept intact as a marketing tactic.

Many of the experiments Bezos did, actually failed (A9 Search, Auctions, PayPhrase). But it shows how experimenting should be done irrespective of continued failures. The important point is to measure the result of the experiments you do with your business.

As the saying goes, “What gets measured gets done”. This is one of the top business strategies that will position you as a leader in the long-term.

4. Think Long-term

In the early days of the internet, Amazon retail was still around and Bezos knew that people will buy products on the internet. He tried hard to raise $1 million for Amazon but could only get $50,000.

The hard part with raising money was that people didn’t know what internet was. So it’s hard to convince people to invest in your idea when it’s totally fixated in the future. But that shouldn’t stop you as it didn’t stop Bezos.

According to Bezos, “me-too companies have not done that well over time.” So always be willing to invent and do something new thinking of the long-term. This is one of the top business strategies for everlasting success.

5. Make Your Strategy Change-Proof

Although it’s widely publicized that entrepreneurs love to take risks, but there’s a certain area where it applies. When it comes to strategy, you must eliminate risk by making your strategy invincible from changes in the market.

According to Bezos, entrepreneurs should focus on the following question:
“What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?”

With Amazon, customers will continue to want low prices, fast delivery, and a vast selection of products even after 10 years. This is one of the top business strategies for reducing risk.

6. Obsess Over Customers

The most common mistake business people make is that they keep a close eye on their competitors and try to copy or compete with their offerings.

Bezos says that businesses should instead be focused on the customer. You have to start with the customer and work backward. There are many ways to accomplish this depending on the kind of business you’re working in. For example, Amazon invites customer reviews and has used new technology, Amazon Web Services, that benefits customers.

The lesson here is that, to rise in the market, you need to think for yourself.