Ep 223: The Hidden Friction Killing Your Business Growth with Steve Anderson

Are you unknowingly making it harder for customers to buy from you?

In this eye-opening episode, I sit down with risk expert, Steve Anderson, to explore how hidden friction points quietly drain momentum from your business.

If you’re ready to clear the roadblocks standing between you and your customers, this episode is packed with practical insights to help you move faster, serve better, and grow smarter.

Steve Anderson brings decades of experience at the intersection of insurance, technology, and business growth strategy. He’s the author of The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon, a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller that’s been translated into 20 languages. With a sharp eye for spotting the patterns of business success and failure, Steve helps founders build businesses that last.

We Also Talked About:

• Why “obsessing over customers” is more than a catchphrase—it’s a mindset shift
  
• The hidden cost of waiting too long to adopt new technology
  
• What Amazon’s “Day One” philosophy teaches us about staving off irrelevance
  
• Why 3rd-party sellers succeed—or get booted—on Amazon
  
• How to spot and remove friction points in your customer journey
  
• The real definition of a “successful failure” and why you need more of them
  
• Why innovation isn’t enough—and how invention powers real business growth
  
• How AI is changing the game (and why using it badly could be worse than not using it at all)
  

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Book:  The Bezos Letters: 14 Principles to Grow Your Business Like Amazon by Steve Anderson and Karen Anderson
  
• Steve’s website:  thebezosletters.com
  
• Connect with Steve on LinkedIn:  Steve Anderson 

👉  Want regular access to tips, techniques, and advice from experts about growing your business?  My newsletter is for business owners who miss having weekends … and sanity.  If that’s you, sign up here.

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Trudy Rankin is the host of the Online Business Launchpad Podcast, Director of West Island Digital and the founder of the Online Business Lift-Off program.

Affiliate Disclaimer: If you click on links on this page and then make a purchase, I may earn a commission (at no extra cost to you).  I am a proud affiliate of these resources because I use them in my own life and business.

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 223: The Hidden Friction Killing Your Business Growth with Steve Anderson

Trudy Rankin: [00:00:00] Risk and growth are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other. That’s what today’s guest, Steve Anderson firmly believes. And in a world where online business feels more uncertain than ever, that perspective might be exactly what you need to hear. So are you playing it too safe in your business and actually holding yourself back from real growth?

In today’s episode, we’re taking a look at the fascinating connection between calculated risk taking and sustainable business success. Steve unpacks the principles behind Jeff Bezos’s legendary growth Strategies, showing how even solo entrepreneurs can apply the same principles that Amazon used to scale.

We talk about embracing failure, making decisions with limited data, and why protecting what you have might be the very thing keeping you stuck. Steve Anderson is an expert in strategic risk and business growth. As the author of the Bezos Letters, he’s [00:01:00] analyzed 21 principles that fueled Amazon’s explosive rise, and today he shares how these insights can be a game changer for online entrepreneurs navigating today’s digital landscape.

Trudy Rankin: Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast. I’m Trudy Rankin, and this podcast is for business owners who want to hear what other business owners have to say about the problems and challenges they’ve overcome to get to success. I’ve been running my own business. I’ve been running my own online business for over 10 years now, and because of what I’ve learned, I’ve become passionate about helping business owners like you successfully tackle the bumps in the road that could stop you from hitting the goals that matter to you.

I’ve used my experience and the experience of others to help hundreds of people grow the online side of their business, and one of my [00:02:00] greatest joys is working with people who, because of life circumstances, need a flexible work from home option that helps them pay the bills. My mission is simple. I want to help you solve the challenges you face as an online business owner so that you can have more time and money for yourself and your family, and more choices in how you live your life.

Today I’ve got Steve Anderson with me. And Steve Anderson is someone who’s really interested in helping people understand why it’s so important to be focused on your customer. Because in my experience, so many people who are getting ready to start an online business or any sort of a business are thinking in their mind, Hey, I’ve got this thing to sell, or I’ve got this area of expertise.

Here it is, why isn’t anybody buying it? And instead, we need to change our mindset and think about it through the customer’s eyes, and understand what it is that they need, what they want, instead of focusing on what we want to sell them. Steve, thank you so much for being on the podcast. 

Steve Anderson: Oh, [00:03:00] Trudy, thanks for having me. I look forward to our conversation. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, so let’s, as usual, we usually like to start by getting our guests to just talk a little bit about who you are, what’s your background story, how has it brought you to what you do today?

Steve Anderson: Really background industry is insurance and technology. Long story there, I won’t go into all of it, but I did work at in, in independent insurance agency, selling insurance to both individuals and businesses. Got an interest in the technology used in those environments. And shifted my focus, actually, 30 some years ago to helping that industry with technology.

Pretty much think of anything document management database systems, tracking customers and policies, websites, lead gen all of the different things that go into making an agency successful. [00:04:00] That led me to really start looking at the intersection of technology and, business practice.

And we know technology has developed rapidly, continues to develop rapidly. And so I started asking the question, is the biggest risk? Business face actually not taking enough risk and waiting when new things come, sometimes too long, right? And then get behind. That led me to start looking at different companies.

Some that were once very successful and are no longer here and others that have been successful over time and try and understand that the differences, that led to actually writing and publishing a book on Amazon. specifically, but really looking at the tools Amazon used to grow. And I did a deep analysis of the shareholder letters that Jeff Bezos wrote.

So that’s the background of, and [00:05:00] again, like you said, one of the principles I talk about is customers and it’s called obsess over customers. So I look forward to talking a little bit more about that.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, no it’s really interesting. I’ve got a number of questions. Make sure that I ask them one at a time, but one of the things that I’ve found as I’ve talked to entrepreneurs, especially SaaS founders or software as a service founders, is that the ones who have been successful in building up their business to a certain level or getting past the startup stage, basically, to be honest has been those businesses who have hyper focused on the customers, how the customers are finding the tool.

What are the customer problems? How can they help solve the customer problems? And it’s always such a balance between the cost of doing that and then actually serving the customer which I find interesting. Can you [00:06:00] talk a little bit about, based on your experience and the research that you’ve done, about whether or not that’s always the case?

that you need to hyper focus on customers in order to be successful? 

Steve Anderson: I think every business owner knows they need to take care of the customer and they talk about customer service, customer journey, customer focus, right? Lots of different words. What intrigued me about Jeff Bezos is he talked about obsessing over customers.

And that, and he said that in his very first 1997 letter, so that’s when they went public. The shareholder letters, typically the CEO writes every year, as part of their Security and Exchange Commission filings, requirements, etc. And that first letter, there were several sections, one was devoted to his philosophy or thoughts around customer obsession.

[00:07:00] Let’s think about that word obsession, because that still intrigues me. It’s a really interesting word, not one you hear too often in business speak, right? Either owners, founders, even, business press about obsessing over customers. And I think if you look at Amazon as an example, that’s one of their core tenets.

And so what does that mean? I think it means Removing friction. If I could take another quick summary, it’s where in your business do your customers stop, or get stuck, or slow down. I call those friction points. And when you obsess over customers, you’re continually focusing on finding those points and trying to create [00:08:00] solutions that smooth them out, get rid of them so that customer, it’s easier to do business with you.

And as you say, SaaS companies, any online type business, whether it’s information products, whether it’s software as a service, whatever it is, think about even your own experience, even those listening, where do you have friction points in your experience? Journey to actually give somebody money for something that you want to receive for it.

And that’s to me the core philosophy or the core idea around customer obsession. And I would say for a lot of companies it’s really hard to keep that focus. Because again, you say the cost, right? How do we balance profitability and expenses, and can we afford to do more for the customer? And I think one of the problems is short [00:09:00] term thinking versus long term thinking.

Let me give you an example. Early 2000s. Amazon created what they call Amazon Marketplace. So this was a place for third party sellers, non-Amazon sellers, Amazon’s competitors, to get on Amazon’s website and sell products and services literally next to Amazon’s products. That’s a crazy idea. Why would the A world, would you let your customers.

on your website that you’ve spent billions of dollars developing. I think there are a couple reasons, and the primary one for Bezos was if a third party seller has a product that we are out of stock, that’s better for the customer. If they have a price that’s lower than what we can offer, that’s better for the customer.

And if it’s better for the customer, it will ultimately be better for Amazon. But [00:10:00] that’s a bit of customer obsession, long term thinking. There are a couple factors that go into that mindset of obsessive focus on the customers. 

Trudy Rankin: It’s interesting because Earlier we were talking and I was saying that I typically, I’m not an e-commerce expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have family members who are very much involved with buying and selling and using a number of different platforms, including Amazon.

And it’s interesting to hear their opinions about what Amazon’s doing, how it’s operating. And I find it fascinating because there’s this sense based on a very small sample size, I must say. 

Steve Anderson: Yes, I agree. 

Trudy Rankin: There’s a sense that Amazon might be there for the customers, but they’re not necessarily there as you said, their potential competitors, because Amazon has this habit of setting [00:11:00] themselves up in competition to some of the stuff that gets sold on their website.

And so it’s interesting to me where you start to find that balance between making it possible to serve the customer by having better pricing, better choices, more choices. And then making people so grumpy and unhappy that they, your competitors leave because they can’t be successful on your platform.

Any thoughts on that? 

Steve Anderson: Yeah, and I think that’s interesting. Again, part of what Amazon did is they charge a fee to be there. They charge, a fee for fulfillment, for warehouse storage, for, lots of things. And business owners are free not to compete on Amazon. They can choose if they want to do something else.

And so that’s an interesting tug of war. And for Amazon, even today it really is if it’s better for the customer. And I think you’re right. They don’t focus on their third party sellers. [00:12:00] They try and help them, but it’s in service of helping them help their customers. And if a third party seller doesn’t meet their standards of customer service, they’re gone, they won’t tolerate less than what they consider to be the best. And so that’s, I think some of the grumbling is they’re very exacting and very particular about how their customers are treated. And and not everybody’s going to like that. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah no, that’s exactly right. So it’s just an interesting and challenging thing to be thinking about.

And once again, it comes back to balance and that sort of natural tension that exists that you always have to, you’re always walking a tightrope between. One side and the other. I want to come back to what you were starting to talk about a little bit earlier and that is this whole process of researching something to the depth that you can then turn around and write [00:13:00] a book about it.

Can you just tell people what the name of your book is and then just talk us through that process of creating that book? 

Steve Anderson: Sure. So the book is called The Bezos Letters. 14 principles to grow your business like Amazon. And I always want to say, at that point, a lot of small business owners especially go, I’m not Amazon, I’m not going to be Amazon.

There probably isn’t going to be another Amazon for at least a while. And you can learn from How they did it, and what applies to your business. So everything Amazon doesn’t necessarily apply. But are there things that do? It really started with that question about risk taking and business growth.

And, I, coming out of the insurance industry, it really is counterintuitive to say, we need to take more risk, because everything we do in insurance, is exactly the opposite. We mitigate risk, we transfer risk is not a good thing. Except in technology and [00:14:00] business development, I think you are, have to take risk, you are going to take risk.

Are they smart risks or not? Are they strategic risks or not? And what I came to realize is Bezos, I call him in the book the master of risk because how he uses risk strategically to grow. And he made crazy ideas, crazy bets, some worked, enough worked to make up for what didn’t work. And so the, it really was that research.

 Coming across the shareholder letters, which I have read, one or two when they came out, people talked about them. But I literally sat down and got every shareholder letter that was published to that, whatever that date was, and read them through as a narrative. And I realized there were threads through the letters.

That Bezos talked about what Amazon did in those letters. But I think more importantly for [00:15:00] him and for those that want to learn, he talked about how they did things. What are the things, the mindsets, the things they put in place at Amazon that did allow them to grow from literally a garage in Bellevue, Washington to a worldwide 1.3 million employee massive firm. And how did they do that? And so that’s, that was the background. So real quick, the iterations of the book, the, when I became intrigued with the letters, I actually created a lead gen, right? PDF, I took the letters that were already published, I did a one page executive summary of each letter, some of the key takeaways, a couple key quotes I actually was intrigued with it, and I thought, this is some good information that my audience could use.

I’m going to talk a little bit about how you can learn from this. Fortunately, I showed it to my wife, who’s in the book publishing business and had been [00:16:00] in it for a long time. Sent it to her, and really it was, take a look at this, are there any edits, or some glaring errors, just Give me some feedback on, I want this to be the best it can be.

She sent it to the founder of the publishing company she works for, and they both immediately came back and said, this is a book. And I affectionately say at the time, I went, oh shit. I don’t know how to write a book. And I’ve been writing my entire career, but, a 1, 000 or 1, 500 word article is way different from a 65, 000 word book.

And anyway, so that, that started a journey of figuring out, one, how to write the book, actually getting that really bad first draft done. Fortunately, my wife, Karen, helped write it, and which is why her name’s on the cover, also. And it was published in the fall of 2019 right before the pandemic.

Or it [00:17:00] surprisingly to me, I have to say, Trudy, it appeared on the Wall Street Journal and the USA Today bestseller list at, just after it was published, and it’s up, up to now been translated into 20 different languages. So …

Trudy Rankin: That’s pretty impressive. 

Steve Anderson: Yeah it’s amazing. It’s surprising.

I will say, I will take some credit, we wrote a good book, and, that’s my wife, not me, I had the ideas, she was able to craft it. And, people are intrigued with Amazon having that topic was, not strategic, cause I just was interested, but it helped, I have to say.

Trudy Rankin: It’s a huge business and everybody knows …the brand recognition is huge. 

Steve Anderson: Yes. 

Trudy Rankin: Which is always helpful when that, when you’re able to talk about that. I just had a curiosity in, in terms of coming up with a title for the book. Did you have any problems with that or with with brand protection or anything with the name of Amazon?

Steve Anderson: We, we talked a lot about that. A couple things. One, book titles can’t be copyrighted or [00:18:00] trademarked. That was pretty open. Two, the shareholder letters themselves are public documents. They’re filed with the SEC. There was a little discussion. We actually published two of the shareholder letters in the book.

A little bit of a discussion there. Could we do that? And so we had a lot of discussion there. We ended up doing, publishing that. Part of it was, if we get pushback from Amazon or from Bezos, then we can take them out. That, it’s, it was a relatively easy solution. And that was part of the benefit of going with the publishing company I did go with.

But and to answer your question, I have not met Jeff Bezos. I usually get that question. And I wrote it as an outsider. So I didn’t do a lot of interviewing of people. There are other really good books about Amazon and their history and deep interviews. That wasn’t my purpose. My purpose was to, as an outsider, [00:19:00] what could I look into Amazon and Jeff Bezos mindset and learn that others could learn too.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, and then take those learnings and apply them to a specific context. 

Steve Anderson: Correct. 

Trudy Rankin: To specific situations. I think that’s really interesting. So we’ve talked a little bit, or you’ve talked a little bit about the different threads. the lessons that you’re pulling out of those letters.

One of them was about reducing friction for your customers. What might be another couple that, that you that are top of mind. If somebody’s listening to this podcast and they’re maybe struggling a little bit with engaging with their customers and things, what might be another couple of things that they could think about that might help them. 

Steve Anderson: As I said, there were 14, there are 14 principles. That’s a lot. I grouped them into what I call cycles. The cycles are test, Build, accelerate and scale, and I believe every business, big or small are going through those cycles. They’re [00:20:00] testing a new idea, figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

They’re building on the positive results of those tests. They’re. Starting building and then they’re accelerating with the success they find and then scaling. And so how do they scale into a larger organization and keep, that startup mindset? So one of the ones, there, there are two I like best, I will say that.

In the test cycle, one of the first principle is encourage successful failure and You don’t typically find those words together, successful and failure, and the idea here is that Bezos was very much a supporter and encourager of experimentation, because his, he said, you have to experiment in order to invent, [00:21:00] and an experiment by its very nature means you could fail.

If you are going to do an experiment and you know it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment, right? So you have to be willing to suffer losses, but learn from them. Now, I always, again, want to say this isn’t willy nilly who cares. It’s very strategic. It’s very thoughtful on the experiments that you do.

And Amazon, even today, is experimenting and they’re failing. And I just read, FreeV was an Amazon Prime video service that was ad supported. They’re closing that down. That is really typical of Amazon. They tried something, didn’t get the results they wanted, or they decided a pivot was appropriate.

So they did something different. And I think for any business [00:22:00] owner, one is, experiment and Bezos was very intentional about invention. And I, that’s a whole other topic, but I’ll just say it this way. I believe the focus on innovation in business is backwards. Because innovation is taking something that’s already there and incrementally making it better.

And I think that’s the path to companies going out of business. Because at some point, incremental change, somebody else is going to invent something new and leapfrog. Again, look at all the companies that are no longer here. I believe one of the reasons is because that focus on innovation. So in my mindset, experimentation allows you to invent, and then you can innovate.

Cause they do. Kindle, they keep innovating, right? They keep updating, changing. The innovation’s part of it, but not the only thing. So [00:23:00] that’s encouraged successful failure I think is a really, important mindset for a company to have. 

Trudy Rankin: So that, that’s really fascinating because that brings me immediately to my next question, which I think is highly relevant to just about anybody who runs a business these days.

And for people who are thinking about starting up a business. And that is that AI now exists, and we’ve gone through these cycles of super hype, AI is going to take over the world, it’s going to eat your job for lunch, you’re going to lose your job, or your business is going to go out of business.

And that can, that’s partly true, that I can see that happening in some industries to some extent. But at the same time, I’ve also seen a rise in People going, okay maybe I need to upskill and I need to figure out how to use this thing in ways that’s going to save me time, create a better product, [00:24:00] whatever.

Can you just talk a little bit about your thoughts as they relate to what you’ve learned around, this whole focus on the customer? With respect to AI, do you use it yourself personally? How might it fit in with this whole focus on the customer? 

Steve Anderson: Yes, I do use it personally. In fact I’m, I would say I’ve done a deep dive into it.

I, my opinion is say it, let me rephrase it this way, I’m in the camp of having lived through the internet, literally in the 90s, and looking at it myself going, I don’t know about this thing called the internet, and then embracing it, and now look what happened. I think the AI, and I like to be more specific right now, the generative AI I think is a tool, and will continue to be a tool especially after the hype cycle gets its air blown out of it.

I do think it’s a [00:25:00] tool I do think it can be used appropriately as human augmentation. Helping people, not replacing people. I think those that use it will begin to replace those that don’t. And I think you’ll always have to look carefully at how you’re using it. Content creation’s an easy one right now.

And if you’re copying and pasting what comes outta ChatGPT or Claude, you’re in trouble. It’s helping, but you, it, you’ve gotta add the, your voice. to whatever you create. So it’s learning how to appropriately use it and It can save a huge amount of time, which again goes back to how much of your employees, how much of their time is being spent on repetitive tasks that don’t add value to the customer.

And if something else could do [00:26:00] those tasks quicker, half the time, Seven, whatever number you want to try and use, that will free up your staff to be better engagement. Have better engagement with customers, and that’s what customers want. And frankly, too much customer service now is. Is automated because people don’t have time because they’re buried in, as I call it, soul sucking tasks, right?

Stuff that nobody wants to do. And I think it can be quite good at helping people replace some of that to free up their time to do what people do best, engage with others. 

Trudy Rankin: I think that’s interesting. To me, looking at the landscape, it’s an interesting mix of tools, platforms, whatever who really, they think that putting up a chat bot’s going to solve everybody’s customer problems.

You can’t get to them on the phone. You can’t get to them by text. You can’t get to them through a person on a chat. And that’s, I think that goes [00:27:00] against the principles that we’ve been talking about. That’s not good. But in terms for the customer, it’s really bad for the business as well. But there’s that nice balance, once again, between just enough AI capability to answer the most commonly asked questions, but then a really quick flip to a human when it’s obvious that this question is more complex than what They can either express or that the AI can answer.

I think that’s interesting. Interesting. 

Steve Anderson: Yeah, it is. 

And again, we’re all experimenting with that right now. We’re figuring out where that line is and when to use it and when not to use it. And we’re going to make mistakes and we’re going to learn from them and we’re going to figure out a better way to do it.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, so I also like using AI and I’m always experimenting with what it can do and the different things that can do and it’s fascinating, 

Steve Anderson: it is fascinating. 

I agree. 

Trudy Rankin: And once again, bringing the focus back to customers and how to make things better for [00:28:00] them, easier for them in so many different ways.

We could talk about AI for a long time in terms of the, how do you actually use AI to do that? But I think what I would like to ask next is, in terms of the, these principles that you’ve been sharing, we’ve talked about reducing friction, we’ve talked about encouraging successful failure.

AI is part of that whole experimentation around successful failure. What would be the next most important principle that you would share with people who might be listening? 

Steve Anderson: I will go to the last principle, number 14, which is in the scale cycle. It’s called Believe It’s Always Day One. And there’s a little bit of story behind that.

In the shareholder letters that Jeff Bezos wrote, the very first letter, one of the phrases or comments he makes is, It’s day one for the internet. And again, remember, this is 1997. It really was. It’s day one for the internet and for Amazon. com, if we execute well. Meaning, it’s that [00:29:00] excitement of startup.

It’s that first day of opening the doors or getting your first customer. How do you keep that mindset of being day one? Being curious, experimenting all of that weaves in together. And so he ended every one of the letters he wrote from that point on with some form of, It’s still day one. It’s always day one.

Even in the pandemic letter, the 2019 letter said, even with all of the challenges we face, it’s still day one. And I think that’s really an interesting way to think about it. In 2016, he was at an all hands meeting, Bezos was at an all hands meeting in Seattle, couple thousand employees there, doing a company update, quarterly common thing that they did, and at the end he took questions.

And one of the questions he had in his hand was, Jeff, what does day two look like? [00:30:00] And he chuckled and said, yeah, I think I know the answer to this. And what he said was, Day two is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating painful decline, followed by death. And that’s why it’s always day one.

Now again, I go back to some of those companies that I mentioned earlier, talked about earlier. When you start looking at it in that lens, that’s exactly what happened. They became irrelevant, excruciating decline, maybe took a long time, 20 years longer, but the end result was still there. And I, we probably don’t have time, but I will say he wrote about this in the 2016 letter, gave that example.

And he said, but I’m more interested in how you fend off day two. And he said, I think, I don’t know all the answers yet, but I think there are at least four things. One, number one is customer obsession. [00:31:00] So back to your point, right? Number two is a skeptical view of proxies. This is also connected to customer obsession.

Now, in Bezos terminology, proxies are processes or procedures, which he said you need. But when they become more important than the customer, that becomes a problem. So skeptical view of those proxies. Third is eager adoption of external trends. And he identified in 2016, machine learning. As one of those external trends.

Now, fast forward to where we are talking about generative AI and everything going on. Huge. Eager adoption of that trend. And then finally, high velocity decision making. He says, one of the things that happens as companies grow, is they add bureaucracy. And bureaucracy adds [00:32:00] layers, which slows down decision making, which slows down growth.

And I think those are really interesting, what he calls defenses of day one thinking. 

Trudy Rankin: That’s really interesting, and it’s highly pertinent to, to people who are running small businesses, they might be solopreneurs, they might have a small team and, instead of the bureaucracy, the friction there is the fact that there’s not enough hands to do all the work.

Everybody’s always time poor too much to do, too many things to do, too many hats to wear. not enough time to do everything. And so I would be interested in your thoughts on how a small business owner might go, absolutely, I agree 100 percent with what you’re saying, with what Jeff Bezos is saying.

How do I implement that as a small business owner? 

Steve Anderson: My experience both personally and looking at other small businesses is that the owner, [00:33:00] founder, whatever that person or singular or plural, are, tend to hold on to decision making too closely.

I started it. I make the decisions. And so they become the restriction for getting things done versus hiring quality people and giving them the permission to experiment and fail. And have a line in the book and I still believe this. I think employees, aren’t afraid of failure. They are afraid of the consequences of failure, right?

And again, that’s a culture that you can build. So a lot of times those small business owners, even as they start growing and they get to a point where they can’t have the same relationship with every employee that they used to, right? And now they have to rely on [00:34:00] decision making and things, and they’re still trying to hold on.

And I would say. And it’s really hard, okay? I’m proof of that. It’s really hard, but giving up some of that control, not all of it, because you’re still the owner, you’re still responsible, and realizing that Every decision is not consequential. There are a lot of decisions that can be reversed.

If they make a bad decision, okay, let’s reverse it. Some decisions can’t be. And those are the decisions the owner needs to make. But there are, those decisions are few and far between.

Trudy Rankin: I think that’s spot on. That is absolutely 100 percent true. Steve, it’s been really fascinating talking with you.

If people were interested in either learning more about you or getting in touch with you or maybe even getting your book, where’s the best place for them to go to get in touch with you and second to get your book? 

Steve Anderson: Get in touch with me. LinkedIn is my primary platform that I [00:35:00] use. So you should be able to, Steve Anderson Insurance or Steve Anderson Bezos should pull me up out of the millions that are there.

The book is available on Amazon, as you might suspect, and the book website, which has some other resources, is TheBezosLetters.com. 

Trudy Rankin: Okay, thank you for that. I’ll put those in the show notes so that people can find them if they’re interested. So much. It’s been fantastic talking with you.

Trudy, 

Steve Anderson: thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Trudy Rankin: Okay, so how’s that for a mindset shift? I hope Steve’s take on risk and growth gave you some serious food for thought. ’cause it’s easy to get stuck in the play it safe trap. But as we heard today, embracing uncertainty might just be the key to unlocking the gate to the next step up in your business.

If you got value from today’s episode, would you take a moment to subscribe, maybe even leave a review? Your feedback helps other online business owners discover this podcast and make smarter, more [00:36:00] courageous moves in their own journey. And if you had an aha moment, I’d love to hear about it. Come find me on LinkedIn or head over to online business liftoff.com/newsletter and let’s keep the conversation going and I’ll see you next time on the Online Business Launchpad podcast.

So until next time, keep taking those steps, big or small, toward building the business and the life that you want.