Be Brilliant with the Basics – The Amazon Way, with Jon Derkits

Welcome to the Athletics of Business, a podcast about how the traits and behaviors of elite athletes and remarkable business leaders frequently intersect. The real stories and hard lessons to help you level up your leadership and performance. Now your host, Ed Molitor.

Welcome back to another episode of the Athletics of Business podcast. I am your host and CEO of the Molotor Group, Ed Molotor. And man, do we have an other incredible conversation for you today with my special guest, John Durkinson. John and I go way back and I'm saying way back. Okay. And he is an incredible man with unbelievable leadership insight and we are going to talk about so much. But let me tell you a little bit about John and his background and what he's currently doing. He is a founder of Oxo E Commerce, which is a consultancy that helps brands launch and grow on Amazon. Prior to oxo, John was a leader at Amazon. Now get this. He was managing a two plus billion dollar business and recruited over 25,000 third party sellers to the marketplace.

At OXXO, John teaches brands how to think like Amazon and I love this and be brilliant at the basics. That's something that we talk about all the time when we're focusing on the high performers. He works with both large brands including the number one third party seller on Amazon and small brands to tap hidden growth opportunities, improve operations and gain share of voice through Amazon advertising. He is recognized as an expert in Amazon and e commerce marketplaces and is regularly quoted in Bloomberg, Business Insider, CNBC and the Wall Street Journal. John is also an active advisor to an investor in early stage digital startups, which is something that we're going to talk about inside this podcast. What are the three things that he looks for in startups? Okay.

He's a mentor at Chicago based Tech Incubator 1871 and recently joined the advisory board of Vexpo, a very cool technology company that has created a wedding marketplace designed for today's digitally centric couples. And some of the things we'll jump in and talk about are what exactly is the shopping cart test and where do you learn that lesson. A phenomenal part of the conversation wrapped around what it takes to succeed in a fast moving and high pressure environment like Amazon and how you're really thrown into the fire in those first 100 days and how that revealed what John already had inside of him as a leader and a performer. And then we're going to talk into a very interesting piece about why John, though not against goals, but he focuses on long term systems instead. And we'll talk about what Those systems are.

And then he's going to share two mental models which he leans into when making big decisions. Okay, I'm going to get out of the way. And I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I had recording it with John Durkitz. John, thank you so much for joining us today on the Athletics of Business podcast. It's great to have you here.

Yeah, it's been a long time in the making, Ed. I'm really happy and honored to be part of this.

Well, you know, it has been a long time in the making, and I shared that with the listener in your introduction. But let's jump right into what you do with your clients and how you teach brands to think like Amazon and be brilliant at the basics.

Yeah. So, Ed, I work with all size brands on Amazon, whether they're just starting out and looking to establish a digital presence, or they've been on Amazon for a few years and are running into common issues. Amazon is such a dynamic marketplace, it's such a complex ecosystem that even if you're on top of your game, it's hard to keep up. It's hard to stay in front of the pack. And by the way, the pack is big, it's hungry, and it's ever growing. So to really stay on top, what I really counsel brands around is focusing on what you can control and really embracing the simple ideas that have stood the test of time. And I mean something very precise by that. When I worked at Amazon, our business was anchored around what we called the virtuous cycle or the flywheel.

We built a retail marketplace by focusing on three things, selection or product assortment, convenience for customers and pricing. And there's a lot of thought that goes into it, but it's a very simple idea. And I think we'll get into the power of simple ideas in a little bit. But in a retail business, Jeff Bezos, one of key insights early on was not what retail is going to look like 10, 20 years from now, but what's it not going to look like, what is not going to change, what is going to be durable about operating in retail, whether it's physical or digital. And his key insight was customers are never going to want fewer product choices at higher prices with longer delivery times. Those are the components of the flywheel. And that's what we embraced at Amazon.

That's what I used to build my business into a $2 billion business in the three years that I was there. And that's sort of the thinking that I instill upon my brand clients. There is A lot to focus on when you're running an Amazon business operations, advertising, customer service. But if you focus and kind of zoom out on adding good products for your customers, pricing them competitively, and making it very easy for customers to get them or return them, a lot of the other stuff becomes tangential.

Where does one start when you start working with these brands, you start talking to them and you have them pull back and you talk about getting good products and having customers be able to find them. How do you start that whole process?

That's a great question, Ed. And this is where I really lean into one of the decision making heuristics or patterns that I learned at Amazon, which is to start from the customer and work backwards. Amazon has this reputation of being customer centric, customer obsessed. It's right there in their mission statement. It's one of their leadership principles. And there's a process that we followed religiously at Amazon in which for any product that were launching or any customer pain point that were trying to solve, we put ourselves in the shoes of the customers and worked backwards to what a solution would look like. And that's exactly what I counsel my brand clients to do, whether they're launching a product or have some products on the marketplace.

One of the easiest hacks to getting started on Amazon or improving your Amazon storefront is to just listen to what customers are saying. And Amazon makes that super easy. It's in the product reviews, it's in your seller feedback. If you structure your business in such a way that you're orienting toward what your customers are saying and building that into your products, building that into your internal processes, you're going to succeed on Amazon. In fact, there's a great recent success story of what I'll call an Amazon native brand. Not a digitally native brand, an Amazon native brand. They launched on Amazon, I want to say 2010, 2011. It's a company called Anker A N K E R. They were one of my first big sellers that I worked with on Amazon. I worked with 25,000 sellers during my time there, but they were the one.

It was a huge amount. And there's a whole other story about what it takes to manage that.

25,000. Not 25, not 2500, but 25,000.

Yeah, it's a massive number. And we talked about this the other day, Ed. I came from the consulting space where my client portfolio at its biggest was probably 20 clients. And with 20 clients you can provide high touch support, get really close to them. 25,000 requires a whole different attitude and thinking around account management and helping your, in my case, my seller succeed. But Anchor was a company that launched on Amazon about a decade ago and they just went public yesterday at a $4 billion valuation. And in their first day, that valuation popped to 8 billion. And they succeeded on Amazon because all of their product development, they're in the consumer electronics space, has been based on what customers have said to them on Amazon.

And they are rigorous about incorporating that into new versions of their products and bringing those versions of product to market quickly. So they're a great example, a template for what it takes to succeed on Amazon. And at the core of what they're doing is just listening to their customers.

And the work you did with them. How much different is that from the work you did with the other 24,999 brands that you worked with? In other words, is there a system? Because we talk a lot about systems. Is there a system that you have in place?

There was the broader system to how I approached managing those 25,000 sellers. And there are a few kind of working parts to it. But one of those working parts was acknowledging that not every seller requires the same level of service. So recognizing within my first 30 days that I couldn't talk to all 25,000 sellers in a given week, in a given month, I had to contrive a way to blend managing all of them both on a one to one basis and a one to many basis, and then secondarily prioritizing who gets to talk to me and who communicates with me, but in a more unidirectional fashion.

So one of the first things I did in my business at Amazon was to create a link, what I called the levels of service program in which I tiered those 25,000 sellers into three or four different tiers. And each tier was associated with a different level of service from myself or my account management team. So there was a kind of prioritization element to how we approach managing them. Within that, there was a decision whether a given tier has more one to one contact, more white glove service, or more one to many type of management. And the one to many type management, it seems kind of trite and an afterthought, but at the same time, there's a lot of science that and thinking that needs to go into any one to many type management. It's not as simple as blasting out email campaigns.

It's also, that is a component of it, but it's also arming those probably 24,000 other sellers that are on this one to many style management with the tools that they need to succeed and creating tools that automate processes for them, that enable them to scale their businesses. That, in a nutshell, is what Amazon does well. It finds a problem, it develops a process that is repeatable and then pushes that out. So that was deeply inquiring.

Can you say that again? Because that's so perfect. It finds a problem.

Yeah, it finds a problem, develops a repeatable process to address that problem and pushes it out.

Right. And that's something, you know. And one of the things I've enjoyed so much about connecting over the last six months and all the amazing conversations we've had is how simple you make the Amazon leadership principles, the processes, the systems. And one of the things that amazes me is how you have this ability to not get distracted. Can you talk into about how significant that has been in your enormous success?

Yeah, I mean, you look at a lot of different spheres in life. A lot of successful people, leaders. And focus seems to be that consistent through line. We talked about the Last Dance, that documentary on the Chicago Bulls that came out. And I was a big Bulls fan growing up here in Chicago. The 90s for me was really the story of Michael Jordan and the Bulls. So I drank that documentary like Kool Aid. But one of the recurring themes throughout all the episode is the emphasis on Michael Jordan's unrelenting focus on winning. And there were collateral consequences to that. In his personal life, he certainly rubbed people the wrong way in some cases. But it was that focus that really was the core driver of his success. And I think that truth exists in business as well.

It existed for me at Amazon, the ability to focus on what matters and discard all the rest. And it's simple to say that and sort of recognize it. I think it's a separate issue or separate challenge to determine what you need to do to affect that, what processes you need to put in place to structure your work around focus and prioritize the things that you say you want to focus on. And I can give you a few tools that I used heavily at Amazon and sort of developed. The first one is something I know you use religiously. It's the Eisenhower matrix. Absolutely. The two by two box. And for your listeners that don't know, it's a two by two matrix with tasks in which you would categorize tasks along two dimensions, urgent, non urgent, important, unimportant.

And the idea is that you're focusing your time, your best hours on the tasks that are important and urgent or important and Non urgent. For everything that's non important, whether it's urgent or not urgent. Those are the tasks that you delegate or ignore. And that's one of the beauties of the Eisenhower matrix. It gives you permission to do that. But then for those boxes that you really have to focus on, I think what was key for me at Amazon, and I think this is true more generally, is you're going to go through the process of categorizing your to dos and you're going to use some level of judgment for that. Your judgment early on. My judgment early on at Amazon wasn't great. I wasn't sure what was important or what was unimportant, what was urgent, what was non urgent.

And the way that I really leveraged the Eisenhower matrix and took it to the next level was I sought feedback. I was very fortunate to have as a manager at Amazon, a 10 year Amazon veteran, which is really a unicorn in the world of Amazon. No one stays at Amazon really for more than a couple years. I think the average tenure is about 18 months. So I had this great manager, this mentor of mine, who had great judgment and a great understanding of the Amazon retail business. And part of my process with her on a weekly basis was to go through my Eisenhower matrix and get feedback from her on how I had categorized everything, to challenge her to tell me what was miscategorized, what was correctly categorized. And I used this feedback to refine and improve my judgment around where things belonged.

And you do that over time. You create a closed feedback loop and you improve your judgment. You approve the efficacy of this tool, this Eisenhower Matrix, and to help you prioritize and focus your efforts. I love this tool. It exemplifies something that you and I have also talked about, which is the power of simple ideas. And not only simple ideas, but ideas that have withstood the test of time, that have been durable in time. Time is a great quality filter. And I think anytime that you can lean into a simple idea that has existed for decades, if not centuries, existed that long for a reason. And there's fundamental truth in that. And so when it came to my first 30, 60, 100 days at Amazon and the phrase that we used at Amazon was drinking from the fire hose.

Struggling to stay afloat, I leaned into the old ideas. I'll admit I read self improvement management books, seeking to figure out a way to make sense of everything that was coming at me and organized my life, stay sane. But ultimately it was a very simple idea. An Eisenhower, two by two matrix that put me on the path to success at Amazon.

What were some of the, and I absolutely love this, what were some of the sustainable leadership principles that tied in with the Amazon leadership principles? If that question makes sense, where were the meshing points and the things that have held to be true over time and to what Amazon was preaching and teaching and living every single day?

Yeah, so I'll have to kind of back up a little because some of your listeners might not be familiar with the Amazon leadership principles. Amazon has a set of 14 core values. They call them leadership principles. And I don't know what it says about me that it's been over a year since I left Amazon, but I still have these committed to memory, I still speak to my wife in the terms of these leadership principles. So I'll leave is a little bit, but I'll leave it to your listeners to pass judgment on that fact. But without naming each of these 14 leadership principles one by one, they encapsulate things like earning trust, insisting on high standards, customer obsession, bias for action. Learn and be curious. These leadership principles are important to the cultural DNA of Amazon.

Amazon will hire people in screen for the presence of these principles in their past behavior, their past experience. More importantly, when you're at Amazon, your actions, your decisions are expected to align with these leadership principles. So I see this a lot. In the corporate world, companies proudly showcase their core values, but at the end of the day, the values are more for marketing than actual day to day behavior and decision making. That's where I think Amazon is different. Because of the way they hire, because of the way they talk internally, because of the way they promote people. It's all anchored around these leadership principles and that enables them to persist as kind of powerful mechanisms to drive behavior over time.

That's so interesting. And let's talk a little bit about that. How does Amazon hire and how do they live out those principles over time?

Yeah, so the hiring process at Amazon for most roles is centered around the leadership principles and behavioral in nature. So when you're sitting down for an interview loop with them, you're being asked questions to cite examples from your history that demonstrate you taking ownership of a problem or you having a bias for action, you thinking big about a problem. And on the basis of these examples and how you answer them, they determine whether or not you're going to be a good cultural fit. And I think that the core premise behind this is we can train skill, we can train technique, we're going to hire smart people and they'll be able to learn our systems and our processes, but you can't train values, you can't train integrity, in a way.

And by screening for this upfront, they ensure that they have a group of smart, passionate, highly motivated people that are going to learn everything else, but they're also going to contribute positively to the Amazon culture and, to use an Amazon term, raise the bar on the overall level of performance. I think that's the magic of how the leadership principles are used in. Amazon is now a. An employer of, I think, 750,000 people, give or take. It's grown to a behemoth in the past 25 years and kind of the magic in how they've kept the day. One mentality, as it's called at Amazon, is really through relentless focus on bringing people in that not just demonstrate these leadership principles, but live and breathe them every day.

When I was there, Ed, I used to think that, you know, I was being trained in these leadership principles. But now that I left, I realized they just revealed what was already inside of me. You know, I've always been the type of person that has an ownership mentality, you know, this attitude that there's no such thing as it's not my job. I've always been the type of person that insisted on high standards, both for myself and for others. I've always been the type of person that seeks to earn trust with the people that I work with by making hard promises and keeping them. So all these things I was already doing, I just didn't have labels for them until the Amazon leadership principles entered my life.

And I look back at my time there fondly, partly because these leadership principles helped reveal in me who I am at a deeper and more precise level.

Let me ask you a question. Let's back up a little bit because I want to get back to. They reveal what was already inside of me, and I just didn't have labels for them. Okay. And you and I, as we talked about, cut from the same cloth, very similar experiences growing up in gyms and locker rooms. And one of the things I firmly believe in athletics is you have to make the practices harder than games, right? And your first 100 days at Amazon, we've talked about this, and I'd love for the listener to hear about how challenging and how difficult it was because, you know, folks like me, I see the package get delivered to the door. I see the product get delivered to the door.

I see how easy it is to maneuver inside of the Amazon marketplace and place my order and have comparable products. And we Talk about simple ideas and let's go back to drinking from the fire hose, right? And trying to stay afloat and how hard it was and how grit showed up and how you and I talked about putting in the reps in those first 100 days.

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because the truth is most people don't make it past those first hundred days. It's taxing physically, mentally, emotionally. I really believe that my background in athletics provided kind of baseline mental toughness and grit that was needed to endure that. Because with anything that's new in your life, whether it's a new sport, a new skill, a new job, there's a period of enduring, of embracing the suck. And during that period, it was critical for me not to focus on my absolute level of competence in anything, because you're not going to be competent in the first 30, 60, 90 days of anything. So to focus on absolute levels of competence and compare yourself to others, that's demoralizing, it's fatiguing, it puts you in that negative frame of mind.

So what was helpful for me was to focus instead on progress, focus on trends. And you do this in sports, right? You know, in basketball, you know, early on you're learning to use your offhand for a layup, right? And maybe the first day of doing it you make zero layups, but the second day you make one or two. The third day you make three, four, five. And if you can focus on that trend rather than the absolute level of proficiency, you reinforce in your psyche that you are growing and empower yourself at a subconscious level to really continue on this path with sort of trust that you are going to make it, that you are capable of growing into what is expected of you. That's critical during those early days at Amazon.

But separate from kind of that psychological emotional orientation is really leaning into your teammates and then searching within yourself for processes and I call them mental models that you can use to extract more signal from the noise because you're drinking from the fire hose, you need to know what to drink and then to really simplify your decision making process. So there were a few mental models, decision making tools that I learned from longtime Amazonians, my managers, my peers, as well as just kind of brought in from my own background that really helped me get past that hundred day period and stay sane and also set myself up on a path for success.

In one of those mental models you shared, I'd love, and I'd love if you could spend some time on it is the consequential versus inconsequential as well as the reversible versus irreversible.

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, Ed. So a mental model or decision making framework that we used extensively at Amazon was what we called one way doors versus two way doors. The basic concept here is you'll make decisions in business, in life that are reversible. So it's a two way door, a door you can walk out and then walk back in very easily or irreversible. That's a one way door. Where you walk through that door, it's closed, there's no going back. That's a helpful framework for making decisions. Where I think you can sort of level it up is by adding another dimension which is the decision consequential or inconsequential. So right now we're back to another two by two matrix, Ed. And in this case it's categorizing decisions by whether they're one way doors. Two way doors, Right. So irreversible or reversible.

And then is the decision consequential or inconsequential? And this is a fantastic filter. Basically anything that is inconsequential, whether it's a one way door or two way door. If you're a team leader, those are the decisions you delegate. You delegate them because they don't matter and because they train your team to make decisions, they give your team reps in making decisions in a low risk, low cost environment. I did that very frequently.

And that plays right into something else. We'll get into that. You believe in so much and that's empowering others on your team. So we'll get back to that. But that plays right into that.

Yeah, I do want touch on that. But then to round out this decision matrix, the decisions that are consequential, the key insight there is, if it's a one way door, those are the decisions that you spend time making. You bring in stakeholders, you develop business cases, you gather a lot of data, create insights around the Data. It's probably 3 to 5% of all the decisions that you're making in total, but those are the ones you spend time on. For the decisions that are consequential. But two way doors, these are the ones that, to quote Jeff Bezos, and it was either the 2017 or 2018 shareholder letter, those are the decisions where you only need about 70% of the information. And then it's better to just move forward, gather data and evidence and refine your decision making along the way.

Go back through that door or go forward through the next door. And one of the, I guess, secret sauces within Amazon is that they're able to make fast, high quality decisions on a recurring basis because they frame them in the context of these one way doors, two way doors, and spend time on the ones that really matter. Say, for instance, launching a program like subscribe and Save on Amazon, that would be one, it's been around for years, but that would be one that they really spent a lot of time on. Or launching the prime program in the mid aughts, that was the one that they spent a lot of time on.

But for everything else, you know, a lot of the secret sauce in Amazon is moving quickly when you have enough to make an relatively informed decision, but gathering data and using that data to direct your path going forward, or scrapping it entirely going back through that door. Wow.

And how much did that come into play for you? And I know you mentioned it in the first 100 days when you learned that all of a sudden, did your learning curve just accelerate?

Absolutely. And I was fortunate at Amazon to have a team around me, a set of managers that really encouraged me to experiment and to jump through a lot of two way doors as quickly as possible. I did things for my category that I had informed beliefs around and kind of educated hypotheses that might help and might work. And I was encouraged to try those. And more importantly, I was encouraged to report back on success and failure. The way that we communicated at Amazon internally was through written narratives, through Word documents. That's one of the peculiarities of working at Amazon. There's no PowerPoints, everything's in a Microsoft Word document with full sentences, full thoughts. So I reported very frequently to my country leadership team, my extended stakeholder group, on the things that I did that succeeded and the things that I did that failed.

And what's interesting, and maybe a testament to some of the aspects of Amazon's culture and leadership principles, is we spent more time in my business reviews talking about the learnings from the things that failed, because there were always kernels of truth in there that could inform the next step, or at minimum would prevent others from making the same mistake and investing time in a lost cause. So it was something that I valued highly at Amazon and in many business settings, in many careers, people face career risk for screwing up, for taking a gamble and seeing that thing fail. And that was not the case at Amazon. And I attribute that directly to the leadership principles, the decision making tools that say it's okay to go through a two Way door and come back the other way and reverse course, you know.

So you get through the 100 days. You talk about what was revealed inside of you. And one of the things that was revealed was the fact that you do insist on higher standards for yourself, for those folks around you that are in your orbit. But where did that come from? And you shared a little bit of this with me. But I would love for you to tell the story of the insisting on the highest standards and share a story with us. Yeah.

So I'm glad you brought this up, Ed. And this is going to tie in my dad here, who you know very well from your time at Palatine High School, roaming the halls, playing basketball. So I think this notion of insisting on high standards, if I had to trace it back to its roots, came from a singular event in my childhood. I was eight or nine years old, going grocery shopping with my dad on a Saturday morning. And were going to this grocery store, a local one that I think is probably still around, called Eurofresh. And I like any kid, I love going grocery shopping with my dad. I liked it in particular because it often meant that were coming back with something that was more in line with my tastes. And so it's a routine shopping trip where we check out.

We go to the car with the cart, load the car with all the groceries, and then it's my responsibility to kind of put the cart in the cart corral. But this one time, this one day, I didn't do that. There was a curb next to us, and it seemed like the easy path was to just park that cart on the curb. Looking around the parking lot, you see other people do this. And I step into the car, and my dad says nothing. Doesn't start the car, but he just looks at me, and then he looks at the shopping cart. And without saying anything, I knew exactly what he meant. What he meant was that doesn't go there. And how you do one thing is how you do everything.

If you're going to allow yourself to take the easy path when no one's watching, what are you going to do when people are watching? Are you going to be able to rise to the occasion when it really matters? And without saying something, he taught me that the shopping cart test, as I call it, is a great litmus test for a person's standards, for what I do, what others do when no one's watching, when no one's forcing. There wouldn't be any consequences if the cart was just left there on the curb. But that's not What I should expect of myself. And that moment stuck with me that again, I didn't have words for it at the time, but you can bet.

That it's no shock because. And I have to share this, I didn't share it in the introduction, but one of the things that always amazed me and impressed me about your dad was his ability to continue learning. And what I mean by this. I can remember sitting in the training room doing like the hot cold treatment for God knows what injury we had going on that day. And he always had this knack for being able to get people back on the court or back on the field much sooner than any doctor ever said. And I spent a lot of time my junior year in the training room. And I remember watching your dad one day and he kept pulling books off his shelf above his desk. I'm sure he remembered that shelf right above his desk. Oh, yeah.

And I remember he'd sit there and he'd look something up and he'd read. And I'm like, hey, if I go to school for this long and I'm this smart like your father, that's what I was thinking, right. And I still have to keep reading. I mean, that blew me away. And he was always trying to better. He was always trying to search for the right answer and that's just the way he was. So it's no shock that he would do that with the shopping cart. How fast did you jump out of the car?

Oh, real fast. And that might have been the fastest 40 yard dash that I've ever run in my life. That's awesome.

That is. I mean, and it's stories like that though, right? The impact and again, the timeless lessons that go on. And you said something else along these lines. When you talk about that the deeper you get into a craft, and I touched on a little bit with your dad, the simpler the answers are. And now you're with, you were with Amazon. Certain things about your character and your values were revealed and you had the ability after the 100 days to really start to peel back on things and to simplify them. And one of the things I've asked you before is long term systems, how do you sustain success? Can you talk into some of those long term systems you've used?

Yeah, and there's kind of a related conversation here about goals, Ed, because I think, you know, I'll be the first to tell you that if anyone were to ask me the question, where do I see myself in three to five years? What are your short, mid, long term goals, my answer is going to be poor. It's not going to get me any job, it's not going to win me any awards. And you know, the truth is that I don't think about goals in the same way as most people. And there's very specific reasons for that. I think when you set goals for yourself, you're in some ways telling yourself that you're not good enough, so you're reducing current happiness. You're also kind of banking future happiness on what you think you want to be in the future, which could be wrong.

I also think that when you create a goal which is almost a point outcome, a specific result, you limit your long term growth. The example I always give is, let's say you have a goal to run a marathon. A lot of people have this goal, maybe not this year with COVID but a lot of people, you know, they get to March, April and say, hey, I want to run the Chicago marathon in October. And they started on a training plan to do that. October comes, they run their marathon, great. They check that goal off their list. But what I see probably nine times out of ten is these people stop running, they stop exercising because they've reached that goal and along the way they haven't developed a system to maintain that.

So my whole attitude here and what you were getting at is for long term success. I personally orient myself more towards systems and there's a few in particular that I really lean into. The first system is to seek out discomfort. And what I mean by that is when you're growing in life, a lot of the meaning comes from leaning into things that make us vulnerable, that suck in the beginning. A lot of the meaning from my Amazon time came because it sucked in the beginning. But I made it through. And I have that to look back on and say I endured and I prospered from it. And so part of the reason I joined Amazon was because I had this system to seek out discomfort. It was a role that was completely divorced from the rest of my professional background.

But I said, I can do this. And that system was something that kind of led me down that path. Another system that I take seriously is surrounding myself with people that are smarter than me. There's a great quote, don't know who to attribute it to, but it goes along the lines of if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. I mentioned to you one of the startups that I'm advising now. I joined that group of founders and the rest of the advisory board because I looked at them and said, okay, these founders are incredibly bright and knowledgeable about their space. They're high energy and high integrity.

And then when I looked at the rest of the board of advisors, I said, these are all people that are successful in their own domains and I can learn a lot from them. So system surround yourself with smart people. That was a case where it was an easy decision for me to commit my time to advise this startup because I was going to be surrounded by smart people. And then this isn't the final system. But just for the sake of keeping this short, the final system is empowering others. And you mentioned that before, so I'll go into a little detail here. My grandma used to always say to me, empowering others empowers you.

And what I've found through leading teams over the years is that when you step back, put your ego to the side and really become a champion for others, you get the best out of others. When you put trust in others and demonstrate to them that I know you got this, show me that you have it, you get great results. And I firmly believe that my personal bias is to err on the side of over trusting, over empowering. Because I firmly believe, and this probably has its roots in experiences with my dad and your dad, that when you set high expectations for someone, nine times out of 10, they achieve them for you as a matter of personal pride and kind of this human need to live up to others expectations of you.

And the fulfillment knowing that somebody saw something in you that you didn't see in yourself. Like all of a sudden you realize that you are capable of more.

That's right. It's a vote of confidence in the person that you maybe think you could be from an authority figure, from someone that you look up to. And that's usually enough to get you over the finish line.

Right. You know, let's go back if we can for a second to goals, because you're absolutely right. Like it's so. Your take on goals is so interesting. You know, reduce both current happiness, reduce future happiness and future happiness, stunt long term growth. And they're fragile. And that's why, you know, one of the things I believe into wholeheartedly and I work with my clients on this and I've talked to so many folks about this is why the process and embracing the process is so critical. You know, and you use the marathon comparison and I'll never forget I was training for this half Ironman and back right prior to the 4th of July weekend and I had been Working my lips off.

And prior to the 4th of July weekend, I got out of the water only to find out that the half Ironman's been canceled, right? So I had a choice right there. And J.J. gotts, who was on the podcast twice, said something to me a couple days later on the phone. He goes, listen. He goes, I'll never forget when I was on the airplane headed to New York to run my final marathon. It's when there was a hurricane moving up the east coast. And he goes, I literally found out on the airplane that the marathon was canceled while he was in route, okay? And he goes, and I wasn't upset, sure, I was disappointed. He goes, but that was just a celebration of all the work I had put in and what I had become in the process.

And that's why what you talk about, you know, focusing on what you do on a day to day basis, right? And embracing that and embracing the suck and the challenges, I think that's so critical. And we work a lot, you know, with lag goals and lead goals. And I think when you really focus on the lead goals, so to speak, you are embracing that process and getting the joy out of it. And is this something, I'm curious, is this something with the goals that sort of evolved and developed over time in your career, or is this something that someone said to you or you read or you studied and you're like, God, this just resonates with me.

I think it was a mixture of both. I think I evolved into it. You know, we all change and have seasons of life. If you would ask me what I wanted to do when I was 12 years old, I wanted to be a professional soccer player, right? That was a goal, right? A goal I didn't achieve based on a future self that I thought would make me happy over time. What I've seen is that because the future is so uncertain, the thing that I can control is the systems that I have that are durable in time, that I can rely on day in and day out. I think there's a theme here of the power of consistency. When I actually interviewed at Amazon, one of the oddball questions I got aside from the leadership principle based behavioral questions was, what's your superpower?

And my response was, my superpower is consistency. I think people are so focused on big, immediate results that they often overlook the power of orienting toward the long term and just increasing your average speed each day. If I had to put a goal down on paper, I would say my goal is to show up every day, to show up on the days when I don't want to. To show up on the days when I'm just bored out of my mind. You look at successful leaders, successful athletes, all of them show up and, you.

Know, it's one of the things that Steve Martin, who's one of my all time favorite actors and comedians, said was it's easy to have a great performance. Right. But it's those days where you don't feel like doing it and you have to get up on stage and just be good. You just have to do the basics better, which is something that you talk a lot about and something. I mean, all the amazing leaders that I've had on this podcast, they don't talk about like I set out to become the best at this. It's. I focus every single day on just getting better. Yeah, yeah. How does that show up in your world? And you just touched on it, obviously, but can you go a little bit deeper on that?

Yeah, that's absolutely right. And I'm glad you use that phrase that the best do the basics better. That's something that's been kind of in my lexicon for past decade or so. It actually comes, I think, from a Navy seal. But I love this concept. It's very easy, especially in today's society, to jump from the newest thing to the newer thing. And it creates sort of a schizophrenia and also causes you to lose focus. I tried to orient myself toward the things that have been durable in time and the things that are really at the core of success in any endeavor, any business setting, any kind of physical setting. And the way that I think you can do that is just embracing that mindset of doing the basics better.

I talk about this sometimes with friends that are starting to exercise and they don't know what to do. They get their tips from Instagram or just reading the Internet, and that sends them on all sorts of paths. And what I counsel them is buy a single kettlebell and learn the kettlebell swing. Because this is a movement pattern that builds strength, builds endurance, builds explosiveness. And if you do this well, this is one exercise where you can get sort of massive results from doing something very simple and very basic. And I counsel them to do that. But I think you look around and there are a lot of situations like that where if you focus on. It's funny. I was listening to your dad's episode and you guys talked about fundamentals, but you focus on doing the fundamentals well, the basics well.

And a lot of things fall into place for you.

And then there's so much to be said about that. Right. And when you get to one level and the basics are going to take you to another level, and so on. And I want to go back as we start to wind this down, which I hate to do, because there's so much great stuff to talk about. And as we start to wind this down, though, you mentioned that you're serving as on the board of an organization. Tell us a little bit about that, because here's what I'd love to do. I love to put as much in the show notes because there's so much gold that you've shared with us today, John.

I'd love to put that.

I'll put the Eisenhower box in there. I'd love to put the other matrix in there with the consequential versus inconsequential. Is it feasible to put the Amazon principles of 14 core values in the show notes for our listener?

Oh, yeah, those are publicly available. I'd love to share them with people.

Awesome. Then we'll put a link. We'll put a link right there for that. But also this organization, amazing company that you're on the board for. Talk a little bit about that and I'll get a link to them in the show notes as well.

Yeah. So the company's name is Vexpo V, as in Victory Expo, and it's a startup that's less than a year old, founded by a group of women who were involved in the wedding planning space. Some were photographers, some were vendors in other capacities. But these were all women who looked at the wedding planning market and said, it's broken. It's very hard for brides and grooms to find, select, coordinate with vendors. The existing sort of places where that happens, websites called, like the Knot or Wedding Wire, they're antiquated. They're sort of like Craigslist in a way.

Right.

So what they've built is a marketplace, a platform company that matches vendors with brides, sprinkles in a little artificial intelligence to do it in a smart and scalable way. And this is my history with them, goes back about three, four months at this point. But it started with a cold outreach from one of the members of the founding team. And you're a founder, you're an owner, Ed. You get these messages all the time. You mostly ignore them. This one piqued my interest because the business.

Why, yes. Okay.

Yeah, the business model was interesting. Right. My expertise is in marketplaces, the Amazon Marketplace in platform businesses. So I did a little homework, saw that's what it was. Did a little additional homework. Also saw this is a $70 billion industry, so it's a big total addressable market. The kind of investor in me got excited by that. So I'm like, you know what, I'll have a conversation with the CEO. And one of the co founders had a conversation with this woman, lovely girl by the name of Kristen. And immediately I was struck by three things. She was highly passionate about the problem, very well informed and educated about it, because she had direct experience. And in a way, she was solving a problem that she dealt with as a wedding vendor. And she was high integrity.

And more broadly, those are really the things that I look for, whether I'm hiring people or deciding where I want to spend some time as a mentor, advisor. I look for intelligence, integrity, and passion. And through a few weeks of conversations with Kristen and the rest of the leadership team there, I saw those features in spades. And that really cemented my decision to join the board and really invest some of my time with them. I saw potential in the business that kind of wet my appetite. But what sealed the deal was the personalities and character traits of the founding team. And I am overjoyed to be a part of their journey. Look, the journey might fail, that's the nature of startups.

But I'm not going to regret the time that I spend with deeply passionate people that I can learn from that bring such positivity to my life. And, you know, I mentioned before that the rest of the group of advisors, these are all super successful, super smart people, so I'm getting a free education along the way too.

What a great perspective. But you said something to me the last time we talked that I wrote down and I'm sitting here staring at right now because I absolutely love it. You said you can tell a lot about a person by the type of people they attract into their orbit. Talk into that a little bit.

Yeah, you know, I think I mentioned it in the context of the five chimps theory, which is that we're all the average of the five people that we spend the most time with. That theory itself suggests that there's some level of choice, some level of selection, that I'm going out and picking the four people I want to spend time with. But the way life works sometimes is that people get thrust into your orbit. And I think it happens, you know, through some combination of fate and the path that you set yourself on. But it also happens because you have some great people in your orbit already and they have great people in their Orbit and, you know, as the planets orbit the sun and those orbits overlap and intersect, your personal orbits, your professional orbits intersect with those of other people.

And so I think a life, maybe a meta life skill, is to seek out talented people with the expectation that these talented, these passionate people have similar people in their orbits, too. And it creates a great compounding, sort of lollapalooza effect for your own personal and professional growth.

Yeah. And the reason I asked that question was as a compliment to you because you talk about the type of people that reach out to you for situations like this board, and then you talk about your intentionality of the people that you surround yourself with. And I think that speaks volumes about you. And. And one of the many reasons why you're so successful. Which leads me into this last question that I'd love to ask. I firmly believe that today's workforce wants three things, right, John? They want to know that they're valued. They want to know that the work they do is important, that it has meaning, and they want to be coached. And one of the things I talk a lot about with my clients and talking to quite a bit is the ability to be coachable.

Something that you were, you know, you've always had in your entire career. You obviously were at Amazon. Can you give some advice? Two things. One, the leaders that are doing the coaching. Okay. And two, to the folks that are being coached, how can they be coachable?

Yeah. I think my attitude toward leaders that are doing coaching is you have to model the behaviors that you expect of others. So if you want your people to trust you have to extend that trust first. If you want to be acknowledged as a leader, make it a point to acknowledge others. So I think this probably roots in your dad and my dad. I think as a leader, it's important to model the behaviors that you expect when you're on kind of the student side.

The coachee.

Player side. Yeah, the player side. And make no mistake, all of us are both of that at many times in our life. I'm a coach and a player in a lot of different dimensions. But on the student side, on the player side, I think it's important to adopt what I call a white belt mentality, this attitude that there's always more to learn. And you kind of touched on this when you were talking about my dad and his bookshelf in the training room. He had that same bookshelf at home, but it was a completely different set of books. And I think what I observed in him was that white belt mentality. This Attitude that, you know, there's always more to learn. It's good.

It's okay to be curious and to venture outside your core interests in the pursuit of knowledge, in the pursuit of bettering yourself. And as a student, as. As a player, as, you know, an employee, when you kind of adopt that. That mindset that, you know you're just getting started, even if you're super advanced, it unlocks next level growth. And by all accounts, I'm an expert on the Amazon marketplace. I've worked on the inside. I know how the sausage is made, and I've been on the outside now, but I still approach it with that mentality of there's a lot that I don't know. And when you can come to terms with that's how you get better over time. That's maybe the fourth system that I didn't mention. Having a white belt mentality or things, you know, in Carol Dweck's terminology, a growth mindset.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The white belt mentality. And it's just. It's when you think about it, that's it, right? You're just getting started. And my kids, I should say, they take karate. They've been taking karate for two and a half, three years now. And their instructor, Mr. K, is one of the best human beings I've met. He's so amazing with the kids. One of the first stories he will tell them is when a black belt passes away, they're buried in their white belt. And he, you know, he waits for it. He's obviously done it many times. He waits for the head tilt and for kids to ask why? And he absolutely goes right through that story. The white belt mentality, the fact that you're always just getting started, I love that.

That's a great story.

Yeah, yeah. So cool. But, hey, what a great way to wrap this up. John, I cannot thank you enough for taking the time. And there's so much here that the amount of value that you provided to myself, to our listeners, I'm at five pages of notes right here, and I'm not done writing, so I love it. I love it. So thank you so much.

I'm overjoyed that I could be a part of this, Ed. I'm grateful that you gave me the opportunity, and I really hope that I did provide value for your listeners here.

You did, and we'll have to have you back on again.

And good luck.

You have a few big, significant things coming up in your life here, and I wish you and your Mrs. All the best.

Thank you, Ed. We appreciate it. And for your listeners, we got a daughter on the way, so I'll be a first time parent and very much a white belt in parenting.

Hey, I've got a whole journal, as a matter of fact, two journals here of notes. If I had to do it again, would I do over. So I'm here for you, brother. Call me.

I love it.

You know, I'll help you the diaper changing. Call my wife. John, thanks a lot for everything. Appreciate it.

Thank you, Ed.

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