When trying to be helpful, focus on important things

I just finished reading one click by Richard Brandt. I’m not sure how much you already know about Jeff Bezos and the history of Amazon, but Richard’s book will give you a good, quick oversight into Jeff Bezos as a businessman, and into Amazon’s business model.

So what can we learn about business from Jeff Bezos and Amazon?
My 2¢:
a. There’s no such thing as a fast follower.
b.
Best brands sell through innovation and marketing. (A quick reminder: Peter Drucker gave birth to an incredibly empowering idea that every business has only two functions that create value—marketing and innovation.) Consider Amazon’s proprietary “One-Click” purchase option—it’s so unique and valuable that even Apple licenses it from Amazon.

Before you say, ” but we don’t have the money to invest in hi-tech ideas,” let’s first take a quick zoom-in on the term innovation. Often when people hear it they think: Google, GE, Apple, Dyson, Facebook, etc. People think about businesses that dazzle with high-tech ideas.

But what if you were to take a quick zoom-out on the term innovation?
Let’s do it together right now.
What do you see? What unifies all innovative ideas since the beginning of time? Are you seeing it too?
The essence of all innovative ideas is simple: they tend to offer a remarkable value to the end user.

You can be innovative even if you are running a very small business in a super competitive industry.
But don’t take my word for it—one of the stories I share in my ebook Are You a Sales Phobic is about a US based entrepreneur who became super-succesful through a conceptual innovation—the kind of innovation that often costs essentially nothing but which can bring handsome profitable growth.