People Profile - Tony Hsieh, the young Zappos entrepreneur
October 31st, 2008. Published under UrbanSpeaker. No Comments.
Welcome to the first post of the UrbanSpeaker! To start off the first post I’m going to profile someone I think is an inspiration to the young and the old.
Tony Hsieh (pronounced Shay)
Tony Hsieh is 34 years old. He is currently one of the youngest and wealthiest entrepreneurs multimillionaire in the world. In 1998, at the age of 24, Tony sold his internet advertising company LinkExchange to Microsoft, for 265 million. Then, in 1999, he joined a small company, specializing in shoe sales, then called ShoeSite.com. He invested $500,000, changed the name, and got to work at his new venture.
Zappos. In 2000, when Hsieh joined full time, the company’s gross sales were $1.6M. Over the next 7 years, Tony grew sales to an astounding $840M, with three year growth of 948%. His goal for 2008? Sales of $1B.
So, what can we learn from the brilliant Tony Hseih?
1\\ Never ignore an opportunity.
A friend of Tony’s, Nick Swinmurn, left a message on his answering machine about the idea for Zappos. Tony almost deleted it, thinking that no one would want to buy shoes they couldn’t see. It was the $40B shoe market that got Tony’s attention, and quickly got sucked in.
2\\ Build a loyal customer base.
Usually businesses are told to pay for lots of advertising. Learn from Zappos’ mistakes and focus on repeat buyers. Around 75% of Tony’s customer’s are repeat buyers.
3\\ Customer service is king.
How does he keep that repeat customer loyalty? Zappos is actually a customer service company that just happens to sell shoes. Tony boasts:
A 356-day return policy, with free shipping both ways.
A 24/7 call centre where they don’t record call times, they will talk to you as long as it takes to resolve the issue.
They’ll even randomly overnight ship an item so the customer is pleasantly surprised!
4\\ Word of Mouth actually will work online.
People will tell friends, the same as a physical shop. However, that means that they will also spread negative word of mouth, which is often very dangerous for a business.
Sources: Inc.com, Zappos.com
