Start Something That Matters

by Blake Mycoskie

I surround myself with inspirational quotations. This easy-to-follow piece of advice has played a huge role in my being able to get past my own fears and insecurities throughout my entrepreneurial career. Say you’re starting a company, and you don’t have the money to hire a high-powered assistant or a board of directors or anyone at all who could give you advice, motivate you, or just be a sounding board for your ideas. You still have the ability to seek out amazing help.

Change your thoughts and you change your world. —NORMAN VINCENT PEALE

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. —THOMAS EDISON

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. —WINSTON CHURCHILL

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ … You must do the thing you think you cannot do. —ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

You’ll probably be able to find stories by or about people who have done (or who are doing) something similar to what you have in mind. Learning how someone else is already doing the thing you want to do, or a version of it, can eliminate fear—every path is easier to follow when you see someone else’s footprints already on it.

Thinking big always sounds good, but it’s a common mistake shared by lots of people starting a business. We started TOMS with 250 pairs of shoes in three duffel bags—that’s it. I didn’t quit my job immediately. I didn’t invest tens of thousands of dollars. I just made 250 pairs of shoes and tried to sell them.

By starting small, you can work through your story, try out your idea, and test your mettle. There’s a Japanese concept known as kaizen, which says that small improvements made every day will lead to massive improvement overall.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. —ALBERT EINSTEIN

A lack of resources is no reason to avoid starting a company. If anything, it often inspires creativity and a competitive edge. Even though they may have excellent ideas, many people still believe that they can’t start a business because they don’t have enough of everything else. But our lack of resources when we started TOMS is one of the reasons we’ve succeeded.

Our culture is lean and mean—well, maybe not mean. But being creative and resourceful are skills we honed in our hungry days, and they are just as useful now. It’s an impulse that can lead to extraordinary success.

In the long run, titles are simply a way to get the job done. If a new employee can call herself the vice president of partnership and can use that title to get in the door with a big prospect, why not let her be vice president of partnership? Tomorrow she can be something else.

In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity. —HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Simplicity is simple. Perhaps this sounds redundant. But it’s true, and it’s important. If you’re searching for success—whether you’re starting a business, already working in one, or thinking about switching to a new career—think simple. Businesses like Michele’s SENDaBALL long ago realized this wisdom and have used simplicity to make both waves and money. At TOMS, this philosophy guides two primary areas: simplicity of product design and simplicity of business model. The latter value applies to all businesses. The former pertains only to businesses that are design-oriented. If your business is a service, there are ways to keep your service simple as well.

In design, simplicity rules. Look at the world around you—many of the most successful design concepts are also the simplest.

Simple ideas are also easily adaptable to changing times—and sometimes they never have to be adapted at all.

The easier it is for someone to understand who you are and what you stand for, the easier it will be for that person to spread the word to others. Having a clear function, design, and purpose means that your story can be spread easily, whether you’re pitching it to investors or chatting to riders in elevators. Someone must understand it before they can adopt it or purchase it. It’s really that simple.

Making it easy for people to share your brand story.

Keeping it simple means the message is also sticky. When people hear a catchy phrase or idea, it stays in their head and they tell others. That’s why so many of the greatest taglines and mantras in the corporate world have been the most direct.

It sounds counterintuitive, but scheduling actually simplifies life and allows you to let go of worry. People often ask me if having a full schedule is stressful. In the past I was often preoccupied with trying to make time to see friends or returning phone calls. Now I schedule everything, so that when I’m with a person, I am totally present. I don’t check to see if I need to talk to someone else.

Too many people take what’s good about technology—the convenience—and turn it into a form of oppression. For me, the BlackBerry or iPhone is a great simplifier; it allows me to work from anywhere in the world, but I use it with purpose: i.e., I don’t let it control me. I use it when necessary, not through habit. One way I do this is by having a private email account as well as a business one. Try it—and remember not to look at the latter on weekends. I tell my staff that I don’t want to hear from them on weekends, and I do my best to save my ideas in draft form so I don’t interrupt theirs either.

Write one sentence to answer the questions below that pertain to what you are trying to do. For some of you, that could be all of them; for others, it might be just one: 1) What is your business about? 2) What do you want to be known for as a person? 3) Why should someone hire you? 4) What social cause are you seeking to serve? 5) If you are designing a product or a service, look at it and then decide: What else can you remove from the design or service and still keep its function intact? The key is to answer the appropriate questions using a single sentence. If you can’t, then consider going back to the drawing board until you’ve honed your answers down to a simple statement.

Tony has shared with me many of the secrets to his success, but one of the most important is the highly respected culture he created at Zappos, a culture that, at its core, relies on trust. “Trust is a fundamental part of a business,” Tony says. “It’s the most important part of getting our work done right. A brand succeeds or fails based on whether or not people trust the company with which they’re about to do business.” That trust works on various levels and includes employees, vendors, and customers. For example, according to Tony, “Organizations can only function at peak capacity if their employees are looking out for the best interests of the company, not just motivated by their own selfish reasons.”

Trust is an enormous subject, but I want to boil it down to two fundamental aspects: 1) the internal trust you build within an organization as a leader and 2) the external trust you build with your customers, your vendors, and your donors (if you’re a nonprofit).

As a leader, your job is to motivate your staff, your co-workers, and your partners—anyone you’re in a position to influence and direct. Whereas past leaders tended to be egomaniacal and charismatic, commanders in the mode of a General Patton, these days great leaders are those who trust and empower their staff. After all, we all derive enormous satisfaction from feeling that we’re in control of our jobs rather than being victims of them—and, as a leader, that’s not a difficult feeling to provide.

Always remember: The better your employees feel about their jobs, the better your business performs. One way to motivate is to make sure your team is all on the same page, or, as one of my mentors, Lou George, says, “that we are all hearing stereo.” When the team is working together and hearing the same direction, their confidence soars.

For good ideas to flow smoothly, your people have to first feel empowered to offer—and execute—them. You can’t motivate someone by giving him or her the position but not the power to do the job or to voice input. Powerlessness is the ultimate demotivator.

A phrase that has gained much traction over the last four decades is “servant leadership.” Coined by writer and business consultant Robert K. Greenleaf in his 1970 essay “The Servant as Leader,” the term refers to someone who uses qualities like empathy, listening skills, stewardship, and awareness rather than power to assert his or her authority to lead. Certainly leaders of the past offered this kind of authority; as far back as the fourth century B.C., the Chinese thinker and politician Chanakya wrote that “the leader shall consider as good not what pleases him but what pleases his subjects.… ” Throughout history, scholars and philosophers from Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr., have advocated this kind of guidance.

A leader can create a company, but a community creates a movement. Truly great servant leaders are inspiring. They create loyal employees who are attached to the company and its mission rather than only to their own careers. Servant leaders realize that their primary job isn’t about figuring out what they can get done and cross off their to-do list, but how many people they can help get things crossed off their own to-do lists. It’s about making sure that everyone on the team is performing to their fullest capabilities. So, as a leader, your job is to help others do their jobs better. This is why I tell my top people to help serve everyone in their group.

Although there are many aspects to servant leadership, one of the clearest ways to build the kind of trust you’ll need to succeed is to admit your own mistakes.

Conversely, just as you should own up to your mistakes, you must allow room for your employees’ lapses as well. They’ll misfile claims, or lose orders, or damage goods, or insult a customer. Mistakes happen. But the cost of the employees’ slipups may well be less than the benefit of the personal growth they obtain from them and the value they provide to the organization. If someone in our customer-service department makes a $5,000 mistake, yes, that’s money down the drain. But it could also save us a great deal in the future. Why? Well, for one thing, that person will probably never commit that error again. And, best of all, we don’t have to train someone else to do that job—someone who might innocently blunder into that same $5,000 misstep. Now we have someone who is not only experienced but who knows the position’s potential pitfalls and is on guard against further mistakes. It’s even possible that some errors are built into the system itself and that someone is bound to make them no matter what. By allowing people to be open about these lapses, you can correct the system.

Some of the most successful business leaders of the century succeeded precisely because of the trust they created with their customers. Carl Sewell is another of my mentors and is among the most successful entrepreneurs of his era; his book, Customers for Life, is still a bestselling classic. In it, and in his life, Carl preaches that trust is one of the most important parts of a business, rather than, say, making money: “For our way of doing business to work, we have to convince you that there is something more valuable than money.”

Another way to build trust is to create a powerful promise for the customer.

Being open and forthright is even more important when your business has a philanthropic component—being clear about where your donors’ money will go is the best way to build their trust. A good case in point is the company called charity: water, run by Scott Harrison, who has taught me much about how to run an organization.

We’ve also made it clear to our customers from the very beginning that our company is not like most others in the social-impact sector—we are a for-profit company. Our goal is to help people and to make money doing it. We have never hidden that from anyone and in so doing have paved the way for a new type of social venture.

As should be obvious by now, building trust is not only a business strategy or even just a nice thing to do. It is mission critical. Whether you’re starting a corporation, a social enterprise, a nonprofit, or are working within an existing organization where you have a degree of autonomy, begin your new venture by stating your goals clearly and regularly. The more you articulate where you are going and what you are doing, the more your employees, customers, and funders will feel they can be a part of your goals, ensuring that they will trust the company’s vision.

compliment publicly and criticize privately, but do both directly. If an employee makes a mistake, say so. Don’t tell other people, or pretend it didn’t happen, or cover up for him or her. People are putting their livelihoods in your hands as a leader. When you offer honest, constructive criticism, they’ll feel more comfortable putting that trust in you.

Also, show some emotion when talking to your people. No need to be a cold fish. Revealing your true self makes you more real to everyone around you. And the more real you are, the more they’ll trust you. Of course, you can show your joy and your pleasure too, but, when appropriate, openly show your weakness, frustration, and pain.

As more and more leaders work remotely or with teams scattered around the nation or the globe, as well as with consultants and freelancers, you’ll have to give them more autonomy. The more trust you bestow, the more others trust you.

Giving away responsibility to those you trust can not only make your organization run more smoothly but also free up more of your time so you can focus on larger issues. This means avoiding micromanagement. Involve yourself actively only at the beginning and end of a project, giving others the freedom and creativity to guide it along the way. When you micromanage, you’re effectively telling people that you don’t trust their judgment and that, unless you’re personally involved in every detail, the project won’t get done right. That attitude hardly inspires confidence.

If hiring excellent people becomes one of your top priorities, and the whole company pitches in together to make it a great process, you will wind up with excellent employees and a more trusting environment.

The heart of great proactive customer service is empathy. If you ever enter into a dispute with a customer, treat him or her as you would like to be treated. And when customers have special needs, make them feel as special as you would want to feel.

Once again, openness is important no matter what your business or venture. The charity: water website includes a Google Map with location coordinates and photographs of every well it has built. When you look at the site, you see that there’s no question that charity: water is doing what it says it’s doing.

Finally, here’s one more way to foster trust in your own organization. You can’t truly tout your product or service to others unless you have a good sense of it yourself. Trust springs from knowledge. At TOMS, we work to fulfill this dictum however we can.