Derek Sivers was the founder of CD Baby, a website borne out of frustration that in the late-1990’s unsigned music artists had no way of selling their music online.
Sivers only ever wanted to record and help other musicians and singers. He never set out to build a $22m business – it was simply a ‘means to an end’ to help fellow artists and not something he says he was ever comfortable with.
Anything You Want is a collection of lessons from Siver’s 10 years of building CD Baby. His lessons are quite often a rejection of conventional startup or corporate wisdom – for example: be casual; never take funding; share stuff generously; rather than one plan, identify many options. In its own right, this lack of deference to established norms makes the book an enjoyable read.
But – even though it’s kind of anti-corporate, there are a lot of ideas that leaders in larger organisations can reflect and act on.
Here are three of my favourite themes:
On customer service
Sivers found that rather than his products features or pricing, what customers really loved the fact that people at CD Baby always picked up the phone, you could speak to a real person and emails got a speedy response.
Recognising the importance of Customer Service, Sivers put one third of the staff there, including his best & brightest. CD Baby’s growth came from current customers making recommendations – so Siver’s focus was exclusively on existing buyers, not growth. He says if you keep existing customers happy, success looks after itself.
On delegation
Three years in and CDBaby had 3 employees, but its founder was doing everything himself and working constantly. At breaking point, he had to find a way to delegate.
The answer was that, whenever he was brought a decision to make, he would gather the whole staff together and talk them through how he’d make that decision. Then he’d ask them to replicate this decision-making approach themselves the next time the same thing arose rather than defer to him.
Ultimately, after a few more years, Sivers achieved the ultimate delegation and appointed someone to run the whole operation so he could spend time alone working just on innovation & development.
On advice from leaders
Bosses are always asked their opinion because – well – they’re the boss. Siver’s warns that you should only add your “two cents” where there is a material importance to do so.
Simply making a suggestion (a tweak here, or small addition there) however well intended, subtly undermines and removes ownership from your team. Unless it really is necessary to put something back on track, Sivers suggests you just compliment their work – and leave it at that. Anything You Want is my kind of book. Measure this one by quality of insight, not quantity of text. Every chapter (or “lesson”) is only a few pages long and the whole book takes only an hour or two to read.
It’s a Berocca book, if you know what I mean.
