Missionary or mercenary? 3 keys to small business success

Don’t forget, we humans will do more of anything that gets easier: If we make it easy for our customers to do business with us and use our products, they will. Talking about the Kindle he said, “People who get a Kindle read four times as many books. We reduce the friction of reading.” What can we do to make it easier for our customers to do business with us? We should always be looking for ways our customers can quickly and easily gain value from working with us. I’m convinced therein lies success. What can we do to reduce the friction associated with using our products and services to gain value?

Although Amazon has become a huge company with technological interests that have gone beyond selling books, at their core is a desire to meet customers’ needs. They work backwards from the customer when developing new products or services, they aren’t afraid to make mistakes, and work very hard to make sure their customers get to value easier and faster than anyone else.

When asked when they plan to start opening traditional brick-and-mortar stores, he suggested it wouldn’t happen until they found a way they could provide more value to their customers with a traditional store. “Until then, we’d be just another store,” Bezos said.

What are you doing to make your business more than just another store?

As a Main Street business evangelist and marketing veteran with more than 25 years in the trenches, Ty Kiisel writes about leading people and small-business issues for Lendio (www.lendio.com).