PDF Summary:Anything You Want, by Derek Sivers

In Anything You Want, CD Baby founder Derek Sivers shares the lessons he learned from being an accidental entrepreneur whose hobby turned into a $22 million business. Sivers’s non-traditional approach to business ownership—centering on honesty, creativity, and humanity—is a model for burgeoning entrepreneurs who want to stay true to themselves and do right by others while building their dream.

A professional musician, Sivers founded CD Baby in 1998 to sell his CDs online when major music companies wouldn’t. What began as an endeavor to address his own unmet need quickly led to Sivers helping friends and other independent musicians sell their CDs online. Sivers sold the successful company in 2008 and put the proceeds into a trust dedicated to music education. These are the lessons he learned along the way.

In this guide, we’ll look at Sivers’s recommendations for building a business that meets customers’ needs while still fulfilling your passions. We’ll also provide strategies from other business experts to help you apply Sivers’s aspirational vision in your own business.

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Sivers recommends that, in general, you respond positively to employees who ask your opinion about their ideas and projects, so long as doing so won’t make or break your company. This will encourage them, increase their investment in your company’s work, and will also boost staff morale.

(Shortform note: In Radical Candor, Kim Scott builds on the idea of positive employer-employee communication. She argues that one of the most important things you can do as a leader to improve your work culture is regularly to ask your employees for honest feedback about your impact on the business. After listening and considering what they say, show that you value their opinion by making adjustments accordingly.)

Empower Employees to Run Your Business Independently

In addition to positively engaging your employees, Sivers recommends you empower them with clear information and the ability to make decisions independently. Doing this will allow you to free yourself from the daily minutia of running your business and focus on big-picture items and the tasks you love.

Sivers suggests that you develop standardized operating procedures and protocols for your business and train staff on how to implement them in your absence.

Lesson illustrated: Sivers says that by making himself dispensable in his own company, he empowered his employees to grow CD Baby from $1 million to $20 million in just four years. Because they were running the day-to-day operations, he had the time to focus on long-range goals and growing the business.

(Shortform note: While empowering employees to run your business can free you up to pursue what you love, some people say that it’s also important to focus on your employees’ needs and interests to inspire and help them grow. You can deepen your support of your employees by encouraging them to follow their individual passions, having open conversations about factors that are causing burnout or holding them back at work, and modeling and advocating for them to engage in self-care.)

Delegate With Care

Although Sivers suggests you empower your employees as much as possible, he cautions against turning over all control of your business to others. With this in mind, he says you should balance trust and oversight when delegating responsibility. Two incidents taught him to give employees the independence they need to run things but also check in on them:

1. Sivers trusted an employee to execute a goal that was crucial to his business. He discovered months later that the employee had failed to complete the task, and Sivers had to fire him. Sivers learned the importance of following up with staff to make sure they’re doing what they said they would.
2. After empowering his 85-person staff to run his business in his absence, Sivers learned that they’d opted into a profit-sharing program that funneled all of his company’s profits to them. Sivers says that when he subsequently canceled the program, employees were furious, and the damage to their relationship was so bad that they never recovered from it. Sivers says this taught him that while it’s good to empower your employees, you should never hand over full control of your business.

In an analysis done by Harvard Business Review, empowering employees was shown to have positive, neutral, and negative effects.

• Positive: Leaders who delegate responsibilities and make decisions collaboratively with their employees are viewed as more trustworthy, and employees demonstrate better cooperation and higher levels of creativity.

• Neutral: In routine day-to-day tasks, there was no sign of improved performance post-empowerment.

• Negative: It was shown that some employees feel burdened by the responsibility of participating in decision-making and don’t want the extra delegated work. They would prefer instead to stick with what is in their job description.

The key takeaway is that leaders should consider all personality types when seeking to empower their employees.

Part 4: Center Your Customer

Now that you know how to manage your employees in a way that keeps everyone happy and your business operating smoothly, we’ll explore how to cater to, develop, and maintain strong relationships with your customers.

Prioritize Customers, Not Growth

Sivers says that the primary goal of your business is to help people, so while your company needs to be profitable enough to survive, your primary focus should be on understanding and addressing your customers’ needs, rather than growing your business or getting rich.

Sivers argues that it’s better to scrimp and save to build your business right than cater to investors. Although investors can help grow your business quickly, they may demand that you change your vision or compromise your values in ways that don’t help your customers.

(Shortform note: If you’re able to start your business without outside investors, it will be easier to make customer satisfaction the priority of your business. To do this, however, you’ll likely have to lower your start-up costs. Are you selling merchandise? Consider an online store rather than brick and mortar. If manufacturing is a cost you’re not able to afford, you might think about selling a service rather than a product. A willingness to start with used, free, or borrowed equipment and spaces will also save you money.)

Here are two ways that Sivers says you can communicate to customers that they’re your top priority:

• Keep your website as free from advertisements as possible. When your customers easily find what they’re looking for on your site, the experience is positive. If they’re bombarded with distracting and targeted ads, on the other hand, it sends the message that your interests lie elsewhere. (Shortform note: Pop-up ads are a particularly off-putting version of online advertisements—and they can deter customers from visiting your website because not only are they annoying but they also can hurt your website’s search engine optimization and keep you off the first page of Google search results.)
• Publicly and loudly cater to your preferred customer base. This demonstrates to your niche clientele that you value them more than the general populace. This will attract like-minded customers and earn you a devoted fan base.

Signal That Your Customers Are Priority #1

Sivers recommends that you get loud about why your select customers matter to you, though he doesn’t specify how to identify your niche customers from the outset. Here are five steps you can take to home in on your niche customers:

• Identify an idea you feel passionately about and a problem you’d like to solve for yourself and others.

• Assess your target market’s greatest needs using surveys and looking at sites like Quora, Reddit, and Twitter.

• Research your competition so you can distinguish yourself from them.

• Examine the potential profitability of your idea with your niche market.

• Vet your idea with family, friends, and acquaintances to assess its appeal and viability.

Provide Great Customer Service

In addition to centering your customer, one of the most important things you can do as a business owner is providing stellar customer service. Sivers says that having positive, meaningful, personalized interactions with customers will help you keep customers, which is preferable to having to find new ones.

To start, Sivers argues that you should treat every person who reaches out to your company as if they’re a VIP. Customers feel valued and important when you take the time to have meaningful interactions with them. Though this may feel unnecessarily time-consuming, having longer, more meaningful interactions with customers is more productive and satisfying for everyone involved than interactions that are efficient but soulless.

(Shortform note: As a business owner, you can also show customers that their experience matters to you by personally making follow-up calls to customers who have purchased your service or product to ask what works well and what doesn’t. In fact, some business owners make these calls months or even a year after the product or service was purchased because they want to know how it fared over time. To take it a step further, you can reward customers for their feedback with small tokens of appreciation, like a gift card to a coffee shop. It’s one more way to show that you value their opinion.)

Sivers says you can meaningfully engage customers by tapping into your creative, playful spirit rather than defaulting to rote scripts. He recommends personalizing your interactions with customers in unique and funny ways to grab their attention and make them remember you.

For example, if a customer mentions during a phone call that they're having a rough day, you can follow up on your call by sending them a note saying you hope things get better. It might take you a little extra time, but your customer will remember that you listened to her and went the extra mile to brighten her day.

(Shortform note: In Raving Fans, Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles argue that it’s not enough to simply meet customers’ needs—you must continually exceed expectations to win customer loyalty. The authors assert that customer service work never reaches a pinnacle of excellence because customer needs are ever-evolving. As a result, your strategy for delivering customer service that surpasses expectations must remain flexible so you can adapt it to clients’ changing demands.)

Sivers finishes by pointing out that a little generosity can go a long way with your customers. In general, if you have something they need, you should try to make it available to them at a reasonable price, even if you know you could charge more. He argues against trying to make a buck off your customers or skimping on your product or service to save a few pennies. Instead, he says that if you give breaks to customers where you can, you will build customer loyalty and respect.

(Shortform note: Others expand on Sivers’s suggestion that you be generous with customers, suggesting that you create exclusive access groups, build loyalty programs, and give memorable promotional products to entice and hold onto the customers you care about.)

When Customers Are Difficult, Find Your Inner Grace

While you can aim to always have positive interactions with customers, you’ll inevitably encounter situations where unhappy customers rear their ugly heads. Sivers contends that the customer is always right—even when they aren’t.

Sivers recommends that you always practice genuine kindness in response to negative feedback from customers for two reasons:

1. Your reaction is likely to be broadcast far and wide, and bad reviews can hurt your business.
2. People are human, and they sometimes lash out when they’re frustrated about things that have nothing to do with you. More often than not, they aren’t intending to hurt you or damage your business.

Sivers says it’s particularly important to appease customers who make a loud, public stink about your company because when you alleviate their concerns they can become some of your business’s most vocal proponents.

This doesn’t mean you should prioritize difficult customers over your loyal ones, however. Rather, Sivers says you should always aim to serve the vast majority of customers who aren’t problematic. If, for example, you have a handful of customers who complain about your service, you shouldn’t respond by changing that service or your policies in ways that will punish the larger group that uses and benefits from those things responsibly. Instead, always stay focused on what’s best for the greater good, let small problems roll off your back, and be grateful for your business and what’s working.

Manage Bad Customer Energy

Sivers argues that you should appease difficult customers but doesn’t offer specific suggestions for how to do this. You can manage challenging customers using the following strategies:

• Stay calm and lower your voice to bring down the temperature.

• Listen to understand the problem. Don’t argue.

• Convey that you understand their frustration.

• Don’t personalize their problem.

• Follow up on promises you make.

• Summarize the next steps so everyone’s clear about how to proceed.

As important as it is to thoughtfully address difficult customers’ needs, it’s also smart to ensure that employees working with them engage in self-care to prevent burnout. Toward that end, you should encourage your staff to:

• Take five- to 10-minute breaks every hour to collect and recenter themselves.

• Ask for help when they need it.

• Use breathing, relaxation, and mindfulness techniques to destress.

• Keep a calm, uncluttered workspace.

• Celebrate their successes when they get positive feedback from customers.

Finally, research suggests that there’s good reason to abide by Sivers’s recommendation to let the undesirable behavior of a few “bad apple” customers roll off your back: You can boost your profits by tolerating some bad behavior if there’s a net benefit for your business. For example, if a customer tries to return a sweater she bought from your store six months after the designated return period, you might object to her violating your policy and even find the behavior unethical. However, if you permit the return and the customer then buys three jackets and a pair of pants from your store, has the customer actually done anything to harm your business? Researchers say that staying flexible in your thinking and tolerating some bad behavior can help your bottom line.

Part 5: Know When to Say “When”

You’ve followed your passions, built your business, led with balance, and always centered your customer. Now we’ll talk about how to know if or when it’s time to walk away from your business.

Sivers says that when you no longer have passion for running your business, it’s time to close shop or sell. This is more than having a bad day at the office—when you’ve surpassed your goals for the company, you can’t think of where to take it next (or simply don’t have interest in it), and when you begin routinely fantasizing about getting out, that’s when you know it’s time.

Leaving the company isn’t just for you: When your interest in your company wanes, sticking around only risks doing damage to it. Sivers says that if you care about your company, you’ll make sure that it’s being run by someone who wants the job and will do it with their whole heart.

Lesson illustrated: Sivers says he knew it was time to sell CD Baby when he’d achieved all his goals, didn’t have a vision for taking the business in a new direction, and was more passionate about projects outside the business than in it. He received two competing bids for the company and chose the lower offer. True to his principles, he chose the person who he felt was a better fit for his customers.

(Shortform note: CD Baby is still alive and well. They retired the retail store in March of 2020 and are now focused on its distribution, monetization, and promotion services for musicians.)

How to Close or Sell Your Business

Sivers recommends shutting down and walking away from your business when it’s fulfilled its purpose and your passion for it wanes, but he doesn’t provide specifics on how to do this. If you decide the time is right to close your business, you can take the following steps:

• If you’re a sole proprietor, you can simply decide to close. If you have partners, you must get an agreement from your co-owners.

• File dissolution documents.

• Cancel registrations, permits, licenses, and business names.

• Make sure you’re in compliance with employment and labor laws.

• Wrap up outstanding financial obligations.

• Hold onto tax, employment, and other legal documents per their specific regulations.

If your business is still fulfilling a genuine customer need but you’ve lost a passion for it, you can make selling your business a more positive experience by taking these three steps:

• Identify a clear sense of direction you want to move in next.

• Compile an exit memo that details every aspect of how your business operates to help the next person taking over the helm.

• Give yourself plenty of lead time before you sell.