Corporate Growth Strategy with Steve Anderson

Apply the practical principles of Amazon's corporate growth strategy in your business. Listen to today's episode and grow your business like Amazon.

Steve Anderson, is the author of the new book “The Bezos Letters, 14 Principles to Grow your business like Amazon”.

For More info, book, bonuses click below:

Amazingfba.com/Bezosletters 
Why this book? 
Been in the insurance industry. Last 20 years, looking at emerging technology. 

The biggest risk for all businesses is not taking risks correctly. 

The growth of software has made it hard to evaluate opportunities. 

Eg: Kodak, Blockbuster - missed innovation. 

Amazon was excellent at dealing with correct risk with technology and corporate growth strategy. 

Steve started reading the Bezos letters. Hidden in plain sight were principles Bezos had used to grow their corporate growth strategy. 
Evaluation of the Amazon “Business opportunity”
What is it from a business/investing 100,000-foot view? 

Starting any business implies

- What are your objectives/why do this? 

    - Goal setting

- Comparing business vs. Any investments

    - Eg: own business vs. The property, stock market, bonds, forex etc. 

- Compare online to offline businesses

- Ecommerce vs. Info marketing and consulting

    - In-person 

    - And mastermind 
Amazon Marketplace
Let’s start with the Amazon marketplace. It was a radical idea in the early 2000s. There was strong internal opposition. Putting 3rd party sellers against Amazon right next door. 

Evaluation of whether the marketplace is right for you, you should understand why the 3rd party marketplace exists. 


It’s about customer obsession. If 3rd party sellers can sell something amazon can’t or for a better price, that actually means because customers benefit, long term Amazon benefits.  
It was actually the 3rd iteration of the marketplace 
1st one - Auctions -  tried to compete with eBay. This failed. 

Z shops were on a separate site and log in. This failed too. 

The third version is the marketplace. This worked amazingly well in their corporate growth strategy. 

The opportunity is you don’t have to build an online process - infrastructure development. 

On the other hand, if you don’t understand how Amazon sees the customer, you may be misguided. 
It’s their party
You’re playing on someone else’s corporate growth strategy platform. 

But Amazon is always in the news with the marketplace and 3rd party sellers - they use the info from 3rd party sellers to find possible product lines. 
It’s about a balance between risk and reward. 
How to evaluate risk vs. Reward?

Do what Amazon does which is to experiment!

“Successful Failure” is principle #1. 

Amazon experiments all the time with new products and services. They have a reasonable expectation of success but they didn’t know the answer. 

Amazon is an inventive company - and the reason why is that failure is not a career-ending move. 

It’s like learning to walk! People don’t really fear failure; they fear the consequences of failure. There is less to lose when you start.
2018 Letter
Jeff Bezos talks about growing the size of failures as Amazon grows. 
“We need $1B failures!” 

How to evaluate Amazon as a platform?
Expertise
The first thing is your expertise or skill sets. 

The same applies to property or Forex for example. 

The other question is: What skills am I willing to learn? 


Return for time and money in. Nothing is risk-free. There is no reward without risk. 

That comes back to your risk mindset/risk tolerance. 

And also your “return on risk”. If I take this risk, what could be the return? 
Risk analysis
How can you protect the downside?

The downsides of being on Amazon Marketplace is getting cut off by Amazon. 

So if you have identified a risk, what can you do to protect the downside? 

4 Growth Cycles - what are they?

Test
Build
Accelerate
Scale