Forbes- Secrets Of Success From 6 Visionary Entrepreneurs

Secrets Of Success From 6 Visionary Entrepreneurs

by Robert Reiss

Successful entrepreneurship is at the core of the American Dream. This article is intended to let you “sit down” with six visionary entrepreneurs who have cracked the code on success. They share their specific practices and philosophies. The three topics discussed are: a wow example, customer model and unique practice in culture. My hope is you’re able to use some of these specifics to grow your business. The visionary six entrepreneurs are:

• Daniel Lubetzky, founder & CEO KIND Snacks, is on a mission to make the world a little kinder one snack and one act at a time.

• David Neeleman, founding CEO, JetBlue, and founding CEO Azul — two airlines that practically over night grew from startup to over a billion dollars, both transforming how people travel.

• Michael Mulligan, founder & CEO ABGPrint, reimagined a new access and response model for a mature industry.

• Tariq Farid, founding CEO, Edible Arrangements, who rapidly grew from startup to become a beloved brand with over 1,200 stores.

• Michael Houlihan, founding CEO, Barefoot Wines: From their garage, he and Bonnie Harvey built America’s No. 1 wine brand and then wrote the New York Times bestselling book, The Barefoot Spirit.

• Terry Jones, founding CEO, Travelocity.com; founding Chairman, Kayak.com; founder, Wayblazer. Travelocity.com was an intrapreneurship, which did an IPO after six years for $1.2 billion; Kayak.com sold after eight years for $1.8 billion.

Robert Reiss: What is something you did that wowed customers?

Successful entrepreneurship is at the core of the American Dream. This article is intended to let you “sit down” with six visionary entrepreneurs who have cracked the code on success. They share their specific practices and philosophies. The three topics discussed are: a wow example, customer model and unique practice in culture. My hope is you’re able to use some of these specifics to grow your business. The visionary six entrepreneurs are:

• Daniel Lubetzky, founder & CEO KIND Snacks, is on a mission to make the world a little kinder one snack and one act at a time.

• David Neeleman, founding CEO, JetBlue, and founding CEO Azul — two airlines that practically over night grew from startup to over a billion dollars, both transforming how people travel.

• Michael Mulligan, founder & CEO ABGPrint, reimagined a new access and response model for a mature industry.

• Tariq Farid, founding CEO, Edible Arrangements, who rapidly grew from startup to become a beloved brand with over 1,200 stores.

• Michael Houlihan, founding CEO, Barefoot Wines: From their garage, he and Bonnie Harvey built America’s No. 1 wine brand and then wrote the New York Times bestselling book, The Barefoot Spirit.

• Terry Jones, founding CEO, Travelocity.com; founding Chairman, Kayak.com; founder, Wayblazer. Travelocity.com was an intrapreneurship, which did an IPO after six years for $1.2 billion; Kayak.com sold after eight years for $1.8 billion.

Robert Reiss: What is something you did that wowed customers?

Michael Houlihan, Barefoot Wines: We color coded all our cartons, labels and finishes with distinctively different colors for each type of product. This prevented confusion from production to distribution to the retail shelf. Our end user loved the clarity, fun and ease of finding their favorite type. Clerks built colorful stacks of our products.

David Neeleman, JetBlue: Live TV.

Terry Jones, Travelocity.com: At Travelocity.com in the days of paper tickets we offered a FedEx service for overnight delivery of tickets. When a FedEx failure caused the tickets to arrive later than promised we refunded almost $20,000 in FedEx fees to customers before anyone asked. It turned out that few customers actually had flight issues as they still got their tickets before their flights. But the fact that we refunded their money, before they asked, and even though they were not actually inconvenienced made them customers forever.

Daniel Lubetzky, KIND: We spread kindness while letting people discover KIND bars. We previously had physical #kindawesome cards that the KIND team used to celebrate individuals they spotted performing kind acts, but there’s a limit to how far you can go with physical cards. We recently digitized the #kindawesome program. Now, anyone can join us in celebrating kindness by visiting howkindofyou.com and sending a digital #kindawesome card to someone they encountered being kind. The recipient then receives a KIND snack to try, as well as another #kindawesome card to pay it forward.

Tariq Farid, Edible Arrangements: So many examples, but I think a true wow is when you have to go above and beyond to make the occasion / date special. Our franchisees do this every day, especially during the holidays when the majority of the customers are calling last minute. We make sure every order is fulfilled at the highest standard. To the outside world this may seem simple, but when an average store has to scale from 30-40 orders to 900-1000 orders and then deliver every one of those orders, that’s a wow.

Michael Mulligan, ABGPrint: Recently, we were contacted by an International Technology Company for a company-wide initiative. Within 72 hours, during the Easter Holiday Weekend, we printed, bound, quality checked and shipped 7,000 full-color high-quality manuals for weekend delivery to 33 International locations, including Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul and Tokyo. Our client reached out to us and said, “Thank you so much, you have definitely reduced our stress levels. We could not have had a better experience. That was a WOW-Moment!

Reiss: What’s at the core of your customer philosophy?

Mulligan: 24 hours a day seven days a week you get a live person on the phone … in the heart of New York City commerce; it’s something customers do not expect, but deserve and is the summary of our customer credo – around the clock, on the dot.

Neeleman: Put yourself in place of a customer and say, “If I were a customer and I were interacting with the company, what would make my life easier?” So Azul provides free bus transportation for residents of Sao Paulo to our airport, Viracopas, as Guarulhos airport is closer and that is not where we fly, Viracopas is further away and taxis are very expensive.

Lubetzky: Over the years, we’ve worked tirelessly to build and increase consumers’ trust and loyalty through our obsession with quality and commitment to using nutritionally-dense premium ingredients. We always strive to exceed consumers’ expectations and provide them with healthy and tasty options for them to enjoy throughout their day.

Farid: I built my business with the customer always being the focus — “looking at everything from a customer’s point of view.” For us, if does not wow – we will not do it. Every aspect of our business, our service, and our mission to wow our customers and recipients.

Jones: At Waybazer our customer experience is changing how customers book hotels. Rather than having to enter “city name,” “arrival date,” “departure date,” now they can say, “I’d like to go to an island in January with my wife and two kids, stay in a deluxe hotel with golf, spa and kids activities and their result will be exactly that. Plus the hotel description will include editorial and review information about why this is the right hotel for golf, spa and kids! It is having great results in turning shoppers into buyers.

Houlihan: Even though the wholesalers and retailers we sold to were beyond our control, our end user would blame us if the retailer was out of stock – the worst customer experience. To stay in stock at retail, we focused on satisfying each person in the distribution chain who touched our product.

Reiss: Specifically how is your culture set up to drive great service?

Jones: At Kayak.com all customer emails go directly to the engineers (not customer service). In that way all the engineers are intimately involved in the customers pain and quickly keep the product up to date and in line with customer desires. This allowed us to quickly change the design of our first mobile product (more focused on next flight out) to an overall booking product and now Kayak has over 50 million downloads of its mobile product…the world leader in mobile travel.

Houlihan: We handed each new hire a “money map” that started with the customer and ended with their own pay check. It showed all the necessary relationships to service the customer. They knew their raises, bonuses, and benefits required an excellent customer experience and what it took to make it happen.

Lubetzky: At KIND we’ve worked to create a culture of ownership, one in which we are all one team working together toward a common goal. We think of our team members as true members of the team, rather than as “employees” (which has a connotation of subservience). I also dislike the word “boss.” In my mind, no one is working for someone else – we’re all working with each other. Another way we uphold a culture of ownership is by offering stock options to all full-time team members, entitling them to truly own a piece of KIND. This direct economic stake in our business encourages everyone to think like a co-owner and entrepreneur – putting the company first, being open to giving and receiving feedback to strengthen themselves and the team, being resourceful and scrappy in their decision-making, and remaining committed to solving problems and challenging conventional wisdom. Beyond being financially aligned, ownership is above all a mindset and a culture that we strive for every day to ensure that everyone feels invested and empowered to reach the best decisions on behalf of our team.

Farid: On a weekly basis, and with every interaction, we remember and restate our mission to our customers and our staff—that is every interaction must be a wow–every product and the reaction to the product and the service. This is reinforced repeatedly, and in my 16 years of doing Edible Arrangements, we’ve never missed this mission in our weekly office staff huddle. And I’ve never missed reminding myself, and the company, that it’s all about the customer. This formula is what works and should only be enhanced and repeated often.

Neeleman: We feel if we treat our crew members right, then they will feel that this is the best job they have ever had, it will translate into exemplary customer service.

Mulligan: Our culture is the cornerstone in the foundation of who we are. So what do we stand for? 1. Our reputation is sacred to us 2. We build our relationships on trust 3. We work with a sense of urgency 4. We inspect what we expect. In other words, our culture is not an aspect of our business, it is our business.

In summary, perhaps the greatest lesson I learned from spending time with each of “The Visionary 6” is that buried beneath problems are solutions that can not only reinvigorate a company but reinvent an entire industry.