I’m a little biased in that I like Amazon and use it on a regular basis. Anything that saves me from making the trek to the mall to fight through traffic and weekend drivers is a good thing to me. Here’s a Forbes article that peels back some of the layers to explain just WHY Amazon (and, to the same extent, Apple) is so successful at what it does when the company looks an awful lot like it doesn’t know what it’s doing.
P.S. Amazon might become key to the work I’m doing right now. Still trying to figure out how to leverage their cloud services.
I met one of my jewelry vendor neighbors, Igor, over the weekend. I was telling him about the Watkins business and he was familiar with the name and some of the products. Igor remembered another vendor who sold Watkins products at the flea market years ago. The vendor had a big booth. I nodded and said, “Yeah, we’re starting small for right now.”
I was proud to make that statement about the size of my business. Why? Size impacts your profit margins in a big way. You could come out of the gate, guns blazing, tons of capital being flung around, installing pinball machines in your conference rooms…and run your company into the ground. If that story sounds familiar, it’s because I’m summarizing the tale of most dot-com startups in the 1990’s.
I don’t want to be one more startup. I want to be a STAYUP. There’s a big difference between those two ideologies. One thinks that the champagne and caviar and praise will flow freely forever. The other knows that success is not solely up to them, but success lies in how well they use their resources, how they serve their customers, face off against their competitors, and nature of the market as a whole.
