Tony Hsieh Delivers Happiness

In Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness, Tony writes about his journey as an entrepreneur starting from various small ventures going before and during college, to beyond with founding LinkExchange and Zappos. The underlying key themes he lists out in his book focuses on a few core principles.

The first of Tony’s principles was to get your company to be the best at one thing. In Tony’s case, he wanted Zappos to be the best at Customer Service and make that the focus of the company. This included having great deals to customers, as well as having the best training for employees so they could succeed in this aspect.

Another principle of Tony’s was improving the product over getting marketing. When you are making money, don’t spend it on marketing, but more on your product, and when it becomes so good, people who are interested in your product do the marketing for you. Tony didn’t put money into more marketing, but rather he put it into improving his core product of superior customer service. Eventually, people were so amazed with the customer service involving Zappos that they would start talking more about the company and spreading the word about it, effectively taking care of the marketing.

Finally, what was perhaps most valued to Tony was the principle of having a strong core company culture over everything. Tony stated that he often made many mistakes while he was hiring. This included hiring too many people at once, and this led to him not knowing many of the people in his office. This fast hiring also resulted in getting many employees who didn’t value the company mission like he did. He looked mainly for technical skills on the resume as opposed to more of the personal traits that made people likeable and easy to work with in the company. When you have employees who don’t fit into the company mission or culture that is aimed for the company (especially when it came to customer service in Tony’s case), then the company’s ability for success and unified culture will gradually suffer as a result. Tony was ultimately able to achieve success through some restructuring of the company’s hires to realize those who were better aligned to the company mission, and by moving the company to Las Vegas in order to get everyone to be closer to each other.