Leadership In Law Podcast

22 Steve Anderson: The Bezos Letters to Build a Better Firm with Steve Anderson

• Marilyn Jenkins • Season 1 • Episode 22

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Discover the innovative strategies behind Amazon's success with our special guest, Steve Anderson, as he decodes the principles from Jeff Bezos' shareholder letters. You're promised insights into transforming your business by embracing intentional risks, learning about Amazon's unique six-page memo system, and understanding how concise communication can align teams and drive growth. Steve's journey from the insurance industry to becoming an emerging technology expert offers a wealth of knowledge for anyone looking to foster innovation and long-term success in their field.

Explore how legal practices can elevate client experiences by overcoming friction points and establishing trust, paralleling Amazon's renowned customer service model. We unpack the concept of the "day one" mindset to inspire continuous reinvention and client prioritization. For law firm owners, there's a treasure trove of community support and resources waiting for you at lawmarketingzone.com. Whether you're looking to redefine your customer pillars or connect with a network of peers navigating similar challenges, this episode is your gateway to growth and innovation in the legal industry. Join us on this journey and become part of our thriving community.

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Leadership in Law podcast with host Marilyn Jenkins. Cut through the noise, get actionable insights and inspiring stories delivered straight to your ears your ultimate podcast for navigating the ever-changing world of law firm ownership. In each episode, we dive deep into the critical topics that matter most to you, from unlocking explosive growth to building a thriving team. We connect you with successful firm leaders and industry experts who share their proven strategies and hard-won wisdom. So, whether you're a seasoned leader or just starting your journey as a law firm owner, the Leadership in Law podcast is here to equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to build a successful and fulfilling legal practice.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to another episode of the Leadership in Law podcast. I'm your host, marilyn Jenkins. Please join me in welcoming my guest, steve Anderson, to the show today. Steve has spent 35 years shaping the insurance industry through a deeper understanding of emerging technologies and how businesses today can best integrate and leverage them. Steve is a sought-after speaker and influencer. He's the author of the bestselling book the Bezos Letters, where he reveals 14 principles for business growth based on the ideas and patterns that emerged when he examined Jeff Bezos' 21 annual letters to Amazon shareholders. Steve is here today to share some of his key insights that he discovered. I'm excited to have you here, steve.

Speaker 3:

Marilyn, thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely so. I love the different principles that you're talking about. Can you tell us what got you started digging through the Bezos letters?

Speaker 3:

I sure, yeah, I can, and it really is a growth out of my work in the insurance industry. As you mentioned, I've been in the industry my entire career on the distribution side. So insurance agents selling insurance to individuals and businesses got an interest in technology. And really that's what led me to asking the question is the biggest risk agencies face actually not taking enough risk? So kind of counterintuitive, because the insurance industry is all about reducing risk, transferring risk, mitigating risk, and because technology continues to develop so rapidly, I started wondering do we need to take more intentional risk? So that led me to research and look at various companies, some who once were very successful and literally are gone no longer here, others that have been successful over time and continue to be successful. And what made the difference Came across Amazon, I kind of say now, of course, but, and discovered the shareholder letters that Jeff Bezos wrote.

Speaker 3:

So they went public in 1997. His 97 was his first shareholder letter and then he wrote a letter every year up until a couple of years ago when he stepped aside as CEO and went to executive chairman. But what I realized in those letters were they were more than just touting Amazon. It certainly did some of that, but there were threads of thoughts on how he and Amazon grew to what we know it to be today, and that's what really intrigued me and that's where the idea for the growth principles came out of. That I actually think can help virtually any type of business be better and have long-term success.

Speaker 2:

Fantastic. Yeah, I was listening to the successes, the risks they took and then the few things that failed. But they got it out there and realized it wasn't necessarily something customers were going to enjoy. I do remember when the Kindle was in R&D, and so the other thing is the six-page memo Now that I found was really intriguing, on how to get someone, say in R&D, to boil down the benefits to the customer and look at the project a whole new way when they bring it into the meeting, to the customer, and look at the project a whole new way when they bring it into the meeting.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's one of the tools that I would really base those developed and incorporated into the culture at Amazon. So you know what it is. Is that a little bit of background? In 2004, he sent an email out to his senior leadership team and said that no longer will any slide-oriented presentation be allowed in our meetings. So PowerPoint, keynote, whatever. And the reason he said it was that people hide behind bullet points. Bullet points are easier to kind of throw on a slide without really fully understanding what goes into the thought of the bullet point. So what he replaced it with was a written memo For your audience, a brief Right, and that's exactly what it is.

Speaker 3:

When you brief a case, you you think deeply about what the judge or the ruling had said about the case, and so and it morphed a bit over the years it ended up being six pages maximum, including the first page, a future press release. So what's the press release going to say? When the product, the project, whatever they were, the person, the team was pitching to get funding for, get approval for, when that was announced what was the benefit to the customer and again people tried all kinds of different things. So rules kind of grew up around it. As I said, six pages maximum.

Speaker 3:

Start with future press release FAQs. What are the most common questions people are going to ask? And, maybe most importantly, that memo is literally written out, printed out and handed out at the beginning of the meeting. It is not sent out beforehand Because what Bezos said was executives are busy, they're going to say they read it, they don't, and so we're going to take the first 15 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it takes at the beginning of the meeting, so everybody will read the memo together and what that does is it prevents, like all of those questions that come up and the presenter saying, well, I'll cover that in a few minutes, or that's the next slide, or right, everybody literally is on the same page and it's fresh and it's fresh Exactly, and they're making notes.

Speaker 3:

You know other questions and they may scratch those out because that their question was answered in the FAQ and it's been described by employees who have gone through that process as being magical that literally everybody in the meeting's on the same page.

Speaker 3:

Now this is not just theory for me. I actually started a company four years ago and in the initial stages we were pitching to a group of potential investors and I said I want to do a six page memo ever done. Just thinking deeply about what are the questions going to be, what don't we understand? Now that we need to understand to get this company started and going, and printed it out, handed it out to a group of about 15 potential investors. First, 20 minutes were spent reading the memo and it was excruciating, I have to say, to sit there, look at their faces, wondering what they're thinking. You know what are they writing, and but when we opened it up, the discussion that came after that was so much richer than trying to go through a PowerPoint, and so it's one of those really interesting tools that Bezos came up with and incorporated into the culture at Amazon that continues today and I believe is one of the key factors in how they are able to continue.

Speaker 2:

Factors in how they are able to continue. And this is Bezos' phrase invent on behalf of the customer, right. I love the idea. I agree you have to get so granular about what you're talking about to write a press release for the future. And this comes back to the customer's obsessed business that he talks about, not just customer-focused. We all have a good, world-class experience. We're our clients. But being customer-obsessed when you're planning your future or planning your marketing or whatever you're working on in your business, do you find that?

Speaker 3:

it's crucial. Yes, it is. And again, any business, any lawyer, anybody knows they need to take care of their customers. Bezos' use of the word obsession is to me really interesting and he used it and talked about that in his very first letter in 1997. There were several sections in that letter. One of them was on the customer and that we will have an obsessive focus on helping the customer.

Speaker 3:

And certainly that word could have positive and negative connotations. Right, you're too obsessive, it's too much. But when you're talking about customers, can you be too much focused on the customer? And that's been something that has again been incorporated into the culture at Amazon. And again, as you mentioned, every business, they customer focus, customer journey, customer service. But when you're obsessed over the customer, when you know your customer so deeply that you can anticipate their wants and needs, that's when you can create something that will really resonate with them. And I would say that I suspect your audience, being lawyers, are thinking I'm not Amazon, I don't sell things right, I'm not the everything store. But think about your clients as a lawyer, what is the process that your clients go through from initial contact? Right, they have a problem they need help with. Where are the friction points in your process that helps or keeps the client from moving forward, and what can you do to remove those friction points? So, one, they want to talk to you. Two, they feel connected to you because, again, it's a relationship business.

Speaker 2:

And three, they don't have to bail at some point because it's too hard, it's too much work Right, right, and one of the things is what we recommend is doing having intro videos on your website. Yes, you know, the first thing is that that reach out. But people do business with people they know, like and trust and if you and people, the everyday person, doesn't feel like attorneys are approachable. So, thinking about that, I love your idea of the friction points and addressing that, because your process is through your whole team to make sure that client feels comfortable when they come in and that they do hire you and move forward. So, absolutely Thinking about the three pillars of the customer experience, can you elaborate on that and how we can implement that into a law firm or a local business?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So again for Amazon, the three pillars are low price, and again, amazon now generally has good pricing. It may not be the lowest For them. Wide selection meaning the everything store. You can go there and find now just about everything or anything that you want. And three is fast delivery. So, and again Bezos talks about those three pillars and says I can't imagine a time that a customer would want higher prices, less selection and slower delivery. So those are things we focus on. Now, again for attorneys, I'm not saying low pricing is where you need to be, but what are your customer pillars? What can you focus on and what will your clients not want?

Speaker 3:

I mean again back to they're not going to want slower delivery, they're not going to want less selection, they're not going to want higher prices, selection, they're not going to want higher prices. What is that for you in your practice when you interact with customers, both from a I call it lead gen right From initial contact, honestly, all the way through the entire process to the end, meaning resolution, whatever that might mean and look like that might mean a settlement, it might whatever. And then how do you follow up? So how do you get the reviews and even think about long-term more business, because people need attorneys for lots of different things, and so are you building in that process a repeatable client coming back to you for other things?

Speaker 2:

And referring you.

Speaker 3:

And referring you because the experience that they had with you was referable, meaning it was good, it was unusual. Maybe it was all those things that help you be referable to their circle of people.

Speaker 2:

And we suggest also reaching out. Whether you're doing a monthly newsletter or just periodically doing a database reactivation, you don't know what's changing someone's life, or if they're with their friends, they may need something, right? You're right. I mean, we need attorneys all the time for different things, so keeping in touch with your database is important as well.

Speaker 3:

Well, and even if you, as the attorney, don't do wills, for example, you can refer to another attorney who does, and just that whole ecosystem, and again being focused on the customer and their wants and needs, is key.

Speaker 2:

And Amazon has set the bar on that and they taught us what to expect.

Speaker 3:

Yes, and I think as importantly, when it just happened to me recently. There was a delay, it happens, but they were proactive in letting me know, not just letting me hang out there thinking something you know that I ordered online was coming tomorrow and it's not coming until the day after. Whatever it is, but being proactive with the customer, keeping them informed of the process and again, technology can be such a great advantage to help you be able to do that.

Speaker 2:

And I agree, I mean expectations are usually the reason a customer is unhappy is unrealistic expectations, right? So we get the expectations from them when we make a purchase, when to expect it, that sort of thing, I agree, and that would be yet another way of making sure that your clients have the right expectations of what they're getting into. Right, exactly, yep. So why is it? It's always day one mindset is the key to propel business growth.

Speaker 3:

So again, a little bit of background. So there are 14 growth principles and I've grouped them into what I call four cycles. So test, build, accelerate and scale. And the last principle number 14, is what you just asked about Believe. It's always day one and it really is a mindset. Again at Amazon, that is helping all employees and encouraging to think of Amazon as a startup and I know that sounds crazy today, meaning Amazon has 1.3 million employees worldwide. I mean, it's a huge company but still thinking as a startup and even a practice, and it may be a single attorney or a small group thinking what was it like that first day? You opened the door to your office and walked in in the anticipation. So a little background on where that came from.

Speaker 3:

Bezos was in Seattle at an all-hands meeting, a couple thousand employees in an auditorium and giving a state of the company. So here's what's happening, here's what we're doing. At the end, he always had an opportunity for employees to ask him questions and he had no cards. So he looked at the no cards for questions and one of them, one of the questions, was Jeff, what does day two look like? And so he kind of chuckled and he said I think I know the answer to this and he said day two was stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline followed by death. That's why it's always day one. He went on to write about this incident in one of his letters to shareholders and he said that's what happens to a lot of companies is they rely on what got them there and don't continue to try and invent on behalf of the customer a phrase I used earlier. And he said I'm actually more interested in how you prevent that day two process. And again, we can talk about lots of companies that have gone through that. Those are the companies that once were very successful and are no longer here, but a couple of these that we've talked about.

Speaker 3:

He said there are four things that help protect a day one mindset. They are customer obsession Talked about that. They are a skeptical view of proxies, and a proxy, in Bezos terms, is a process or procedure that no longer serves the customer. So it's connected to obsess over customers and it's connected to making things as simple as possible. But we've heard that, you know, somebody on the customer service line is like well, that's not our process, or that's not our procedure, or I can't do that when there's a problem we're trying to solve. Third is eager adoption of external trends, and that's keeping a look at, okay, what's new? No-transcript, and again, I don't believe I think the human always will need to be in the equation, yes, but new tools come that we need to be experimenting with to figure out. So that's number three, eager adoption. And the final one is high velocity decision making. So we haven't talked about that one yet. Do I have a few minutes to go?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely let's talk about that.

Speaker 3:

So Bezos describes decision making as a really key and important process as you're growing. And he says as business grow, they tend to add bureaucracy or layers of management. And he describes decision-making at a company in two ways door one, door two. Door one decisions are really big decisions that are really hard to reverse. And he says if you walk through that door, you make a decision. It's not easy to turn around and do something else. He said those decisions need to be made slowly, with as much information as you can possibly gather and with a gut feeling, by senior leaders, the owner, whoever, the lead, attorney. He said door two decisions are more frequent. There are very few door one decisions. There are lots of door two decisions.

Speaker 3:

Door two decisions are characterized because they are easy to change. You walk through the door, you look at the decision you made, the path you're on, and you say no, this is not where we want to go. You can pivot or change. He said those decisions should be made by the lowest people capable of making the decision in the organization and you should have at most 70% of the information you wish you had. And it should be made by a small team of people who are qualified, and so decision making actually supports that day one mindset, meaning we hire good people, we should let them make the decisions we hired them to make, and we should be willing to fail in order to succeed. So that's principle number one is encourage successful failure. And he says failure's part and parcel of running a business. We learn from it and we shouldn't run away from it.

Speaker 2:

Excellent. Well, there's so much to unpack here. It's been really, really good. I'm excited about your book, definitely. Is there anything else that you want to that I missed Because I know there's 14 principles, anything else that?

Speaker 3:

would kind of tie a bow on it, but I think what we covered are some core ideas again that I think will help your audience. Attorneys maybe think a little bit different about their practice and how they go about building that practice and engaging and interacting with their clients.

Speaker 2:

Right, exactly. This has been very informative. I appreciate you being here. Where can we get your book?

Speaker 3:

So the book's available on Amazon, as you might suspect, and in some bookstores you should be able to, you know, might be able to walk in and get that, but Amazon's probably the easiest place to go to help readers actually implement. So at the end of every chapter there are a series of two or three questions to help you think about the principle I talk about and how it might apply to your own organization. The book website is thebezosletterscom, and there's some additional information there that might be helpful as you explore how these principles might help your practice.

Speaker 2:

I love that you have that at the end of each chapter so you can actually start thinking about it and working. So it's more of a workbook to see what I can implement into my practice.

Speaker 3:

Yep exactly.

Speaker 2:

Excellent. So in case our listeners want to keep up with you or reach out to you, where can we connect?

Speaker 3:

with you. So my primary social platform is LinkedIn and I have a pretty large following there. You can usually find me with Steve Anderson Bezos or Steve Anderson Insurance, and if you connect with me, let me know you listen to the podcast. I'd be glad to connect with you.

Speaker 2:

Fantastic, Steve. Thank you so much again. It's been a pleasure having you here and this is super interesting. Everybody go definitely get the book and see what you can do to improve your customer obsession and your firm. Marilyn, thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 4:

Thanks for joining me today for this episode. As we wrap up, I'd love for you to do two things. First, subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode, and if you find value here, I'd love it if you would rate it and review it. That really does make a difference in helping other people to discover this podcast. Second, you can connect with me on LinkedIn to keep up with what I'm currently learning and thinking about. And if you're ready to take the next step with a digital strategist to help you grow your law firm, I'd be honored to help you. Just go to lawmarketingzonecom to book a call with me. Stay tuned for our next episode next week. Until then, as always, thanks for listening to Leadership in Law podcast and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss the next episode.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for joining us on another episode of the Leadership in Law podcast. Remember you're not alone on this journey. There's a whole community of law firm owners out there facing similar challenges and striving for the same success. Head over to our website at lawmarketingzonecom. From there, connect with other listeners, access valuable resources and stay up to date on the latest episodes. Thank you.

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Marilyn Jenkins

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