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- Zappos’ first investor and former CEO Tony Hsieh died on Friday.
- Hsieh raised the bar for customer service while leading the online shoe salesman, allowing his employees to send flowers and cards to customers, talk to them for hours, help them order pizza and even hand-deliver particularly valuable parcels.
- The Zappos chief sold the company to Amazon for $ 1.2 billion in stock in 2009, after making sure the transaction would enhance the company’s culture and protect its relationships with customers.
- Scroll down for six of the best quotes from Hsieh’s memo to Zappos staff announcing the deal.
- Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.
Tony Hsieh, one of Zappos’ early investors and former CEO of the online shoe seller, died on Friday. He set a new standard for customer service, and his memo to staff announcing the sale of Zappos to Amazon in 2009 for $ 1.2 billion is a reminder of the extraordinary corporate culture it nurtured. .
Hsieh pushed his employees to go above and beyond to make customers happy. Zappos employees sent flowers and handwritten cards, spent up to 10 hours chatting with a single caller, searched for nearby pizzas for hungry customers, and even boarded flights to personally deliver packages containing lost valuables.
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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos acknowledged that much of Zappos’ value resides in its customer relationships and culture, so he agreed to structure his buyout to leave them intact. The transaction echoes Warren Buffett’s approach of acquiring quality companies with solid management and trusting them to operate with minimal intervention.
“We tend to leave our many subsidiaries to operate on their own, without our oversight and oversight to any degree,” the billionaire investor and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway wrote in his 2009 letter to shareholders.
Hsieh and his team insisted on the same degree of freedom to protect Zappos’ “special sauce” and continue to build the business.
Here are Hsieh’s 6 best quotes from his memo to Zappos staff, slightly edited and condensed for clarity:
1. “Personally, I would prefer the title“ Zappos and Amazon Sitting in a Tree… ”- portraying the deal as closer to a romantic partnership than a sale. Hsieh likened the deal to a marriage and exchange shares to a couple opening a joint bank account, in Inc. magazine in 2010.
2. “We learned that they really want us to continue building the Zappos brand and continue to build the Zappos culture in our own way. I think “unique” was their way of saying “fun and a little weird”. 🙂 ”
3. “Our culture is the platform that enables us to deliver the Zappos experience to our customers.”
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4. “Their desire is that we continue to grow and develop our culture (and maybe even a little of our culture could rub off on them).”
5. “We’re both very customer-centric companies – we just focus on different ways to make our customers happy. Amazon focuses on low prices, wide selection, and convenience to make its customers happy, while Zappos does so by building relationships, creating personal emotional relationships, and ultra-tactile customer service (“WOW”). “
6. “We will not offer the Zappos discount to Amazon employees unless they bake cookies for us and deliver them in person.”
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