I've been through some tough times.

What are some of the tough times that store 1th has experienced since it was officially launched in 2008? 5 years, in just from a professional manager to a business operators, entrepreneurs, from being qianhuhouyong to supercilious disdain, 1th store performance from zero to annual sales of nearly billion, Gege and 1th stores experienced some how difficult the threshold, As the leader of the business, how did he lead his team across the threshold? What are some of the secrets of electric business start-up? The following is an excerpt from the lecture by the Chairman of store 1th on the training of the Dark Horse Camp, which provides answers to these questions, and believes that both the electric business practitioner and the entrepreneur can get some inspiration from this article.

Five years ago, what was shop number 1th? It's just a concept, a dream, a vision, and there's a huge gap in the idea of turning this concept into reality, because it's always a concept if it stops in the mouth.

The first threshold: from professional managers to entrepreneurs

In 2008, my partner Liu and I were all Dell's top executives, a 18 billion-dollar purchase per year at Dell, a sales in the region of Dell China, where we often met and talked about work most of the time. Once, he pulled me together for lunch, not talk about work this time, but wanted me to come out with him to start a business.

Because the first time in the United States to start a business for me to bring a very good life experience (note: Gege's first venture was to do aviation management software in the U.S., and he sold the product to almost all of America's big airlines, so when Liu was only proposing entrepreneurial ideas and didn't know exactly what to do, I promised him. And this is largely based on the belief that if both of us are able to devote ourselves to it, we will create greater value.

The idea of starting a business seems simple, but it's not easy, because at the time we were senior executives at the top 50 companies in the world, with huge salaries and benefits, and starting a business meant giving up everything Dell gave us. Then we moved to a 10-square-metre office in a desk in Zhangjiang high-tech park in Pudong, Shanghai. But you won't get it if you don't lose it, so we burn our bridges and make this decision.

The initial stage of entrepreneurship, the mentality is very important, we have just retired from professional managers to start a business, bumpy many, such as financing. I remember one time we went to Puxi (Shanghai) to meet a 30-year-old VC partner. I and Majestic have prepared a very full PPT, the core competitiveness, business model and market analysis written clearly. However, just 10 minutes, he was not interested in, and began to give me and majestic class: said we are professional managers, know how to do 1 to 10, but do not believe we can do 0 1. I argued with him that I had created a business in the United States, and I had done 1 from 0. He said it was America, and it was China, and it gave us more than 40 minutes of class.

On the way back, I and Majestic did not say a word. May be here in the Dark Horse camp students are thinking, I was not very frustrated at that time, when the senior executives were Qianhuhouyong, now suddenly encountered this supercilious. I can tell the Dark Horse Camp students, I do not have any frustration, in the mind only one thing: in the future I must prove that he is wrong. Now it seems that this investor may have lost his greatest opportunity in his life, perhaps never again!

Second sill: What do you do for a startup?

So, I started in Zhangjiang, a small office with only one table, and we sat face-to-face for four months. What to do, this is a problem we have to carefully consider, because this business can not be as young as there is enough opportunity and time, patted the head to start a business. We must do a mature business, fully think through what to do, how to do, business model is right, the future can not profit and can create value. Otherwise, we cannot afford the opportunity and the loss of time even if we cannot convince ourselves.

We'll be in the small room for more than 10 hours a day, and all the business plans and assumptions will be one to one, and all the data will be identified. If it's not clear, we'll go out and do market research. Later, we were convinced that the cause of the electric business could convince us. Because I have the experience of E-commerce in the Amazon, and participate in the Amazon acquisition of the remarkable part of the process, know the rapid development of e-commerce in China. Start to choose the industry words must choose the sun-type industry, this is very important, you can not go against the tide, but to the Times headwind. And E-commerce is a good industry.

What do we do? We found a lot of vertical electric operators, such as books, mother and child, clothing and digital camera. But Amazon's experience tells me that E-commerce must be a scale thing, not a vertical category, because once the platform, traffic and customers trust you, you have nothing to sell. The characteristics of E-commerce is not limited by time and space, with a certain vertical category may be easier to start, but if you have been positioned in that category more deep, you will encounter a lot of bottlenecks and difficulties.

First, we put forward the concept of online supermarkets, the main food, beverages, beauty and care, such as fast consumer goods. What are the benefits of FMCG? It is not like the mother and child products to meet the needs of mothers and children, but to meet the need of the public. The cost of getting customers is high, retaining customers is more important than getting customers, so we chose this very viscous category.

The third sill: Catalogue marketing Trap

However, the site is not yet online and we have made a big mistake-spending three months doing catalog marketing. At that time, we found a company through catalog marketing more successful, and I saw an international conference material also said that the future of E-commerce is online and offline catalog combination. So we spent 3 months doing 300 pages of very exquisite catalogs, working day and night. Because before in the big company to be accustomed to, we started also very big money: first time then printed 100,000, each cost more than 10 yuan, such more than 1 million yuan to burn out.

In addition to printing costs, distributing a copy also requires a few dollars. In order to save money, we send their own staff hair, I also sent a directory in the community, one night, I also took a professor at the University of Washington, a friend to send a catalogue, each carrying a student bag, but finally by the Community security to stop.

After the catalogue was sent out, we waited anxiously for the order to fly over like snowflakes. However, by the time we started counting the orders, we found that there were only 20 orders, and most of them were our own. More than 30,000 copies of the time, we decisively stopped sending.

After that, I realized that we did something wrong, because the catalog is solid, and e-commerce should be dynamic, such as inventory information and price information can not be changed. and the directory modification cycle is one months, this one months, all things are not changed, there is no inventory of the above, price changes are not reflected.

The good news is that we are correcting it right away and starting to find the right way to do business.

The fourth sill: Building Enterprise culture

Then, before recruiting the first employee, we did a very important thing-building a corporate culture, because it is impossible for an enterprise to be evergreen without a culture. So, we spent two weeks writing two pages of corporate culture, apparently too long, then reduced to half a page, but felt too long, then condensed to eight words: integrity, customer, implementation, innovation.

So how can this culture be rooted in everyone? e-commerce is a virtual thing, with customers directly with the final only distribution and customer service. How can customers trust us? It takes a bit to do, not you just talk all the way. In the early days, the customer service training was me and majestic personally training, told them: you must stand on the customer side, and even stand on the opposite of the company for the sake of customers.

We once sold a wine called the Stone Vault Door, which at that time had different markings on the wine cover of different sales channels. One of the customers bought it and said, "We sell fakes because the wine caps are not the same as those bought elsewhere." After explaining some, the customer still insists to return goods, customer service lets the customer send back the goods to handle. We talk to customer service, since we do not win the trust of customers should not be to create any obstacles to customers. We sent the delivery agent to retrieve the goods, and immediately returned the whole money.

Let me give you an example of a distribution. We often ask for distribution to exceed customer expectations, which is easy to say. Because it is no use to give a distributor a sermon, they only see how others do it. We share stories in weekly meetings, let them talk about what they do beyond customer expectations, such as one of our distribution staff found the customer's door is not locked, he gave the customer call, has been guarding there for one hours, waiting for customers to return home and lock the door before leaving, the story is very moving. Later, everyone will take this story as their own criteria, to think about what to do in order to exceed customer expectations.

In other words, we are constantly forming new standards, to do new things to exceed customer expectations, so as to gradually build a truly entrepreneurial passion of the team.

In addition, the naming of all our conference rooms reflects a certain element or essence of our corporate culture, because corporate culture is a subtle thing, not one that is enough.

The fifth threshold: Customer Experience

To win, be sure to focus on the most important things, shop number 1th is actually focusing on two things: Customer experience and supply chain management.

Talk about the customer experience first. We feel that the customer experience is too easy to be shouted slogans, we do not want to shout slogans, just want to do. How do we do that? We employ three professional firms to do customer experience surveys, and each employee's salary bonuses are linked to the customer experience indicators, if the customer experience rose everyone has a bonus, down everyone is deducted bonuses.

It took us three months to promote the policy. Because each promotion there are departments to dodge, for example, they are doing IT systems, customer experience and procurement and have no relationship with themselves, that is the distribution and customer service things. In fact, he misunderstood, customer experience is a comprehensive consideration, such as the customer has not bought the goods he wants, buy the price is good, this is the procurement of things, but the use of the system is not smooth enough, this is the IT system thing. So, everyone has to assume responsibility, even in the HR and other support departments, you have the responsibility to urge those who do not have a good customer experience to improve the department.

At the last meeting, Majestic and I showed directly to more than 20 executives: You can choose for yourself, but you have to accept this idea if you want to stay at shop number 1th. We were promoted in 2011, the initial customer satisfaction is 84.4%, to the end of the year reached 92.2%, very effective.

In addition, we have a weekly review of business meetings, the first half of the week we call VOC (voice of customer), listening to the voice of our customers, all of our customer experience indicators and customer experience survey. Even, play the tape of the customer's complaint and let everyone know what's wrong. Also, the 1th store all senior executives, have to do regularly warehouse, distribution, customer service practice. , I wrote a list of 30 questions two weeks ago when I returned from the warehouse experience. Ask each executive to put up a problem and improve the plan. Customer experience problem, you need to solve this bit by bit, 365 days every day to improve.

Sixth Sill: Supply Chain management

E-commerce is difficult in the supply chain management of this piece, because its essence is to customers want the goods in the place and time he wants to send to their hands, so supply chain management has become the core point of E-commerce. But we have the confidence to do well, because I used to teach in the University of Supply chain management, and later in the Amazon and Dell, they are responsible for the supply chain and procurement. Besides, I've been doing all kinds of systems for the first time. So we hope that the supply chain system can be played as our core competitiveness.

How did we make it? When store 1th was on the line, we made the most important decision-to develop all the systems ourselves. At present, in addition to OA system, finance and so is bought, all the rest of the system is our own development. This is because e-commerce in the future must be large-scale operations, which means that the system becomes very important,

At that time, we also set a number of standards for the system, which has become one of the most correct decisions we make.

First, the system must be integrated. We are not allowed to have a variety of independent fragmented systems, so you can see now a system with suppliers, procurement, warehousing, distribution, customer service, Price, class management and marketing management, and other sizes of modules. This ensures that all systems use the same data, and that all information, such as supply chain and distribution, is transparent.

Second, the system must be real-time. We must see the use of all resources in real time, which is a little bit higher.

Third, the system must be flexible. It will allow us to constantly try out new business models, allowing mistakes to be changed.

Four, this system must be extendable. Now it seems that this standard is becoming more and more important, because when we flow, sales, merchandise more and more larger and bigger, we do not need to change the infrastructure, just add modules and servers on the line.

At present, No. 1th shop in Wuhan has more than 1000 people's IT team, responsible for the development of a variety of systems, such as warehouse management system, from the location optimization, picking optimization, sorting optimization to the final library sorting optimization and so on. Many Third-party logistics are also using our system because our system can help him plan the path and feedback all the information. This decision has indeed laid a good foundation for us.

The insight of Electric business entrepreneurship: Flexible decision

Looking back on these five years, we have gone a lot of detours, but we have done a very good job: quickly make decisions, found incorrect immediately corrected, and then go to the right road.

In the field of E-commerce, decision-making speed is often more important than the quality of decision-making, because the electric business development time window is very short, do not quickly make decisions, the timing is gone, you have no chance to do below. For example, when our virtual supermarket "Unlimited No. 1th Shop" if not online, one weeks later, our competitors will be online similar products, and it is because we are online, they canceled their plans. Later I was told that our concept had just come out and that our opponents had been prepared.

As a form of innovation, it's hard to say which mode of the electric dealer is right or wrong. So now we are not afraid to make mistakes, and second is to make mistakes, because we can learn a lot from it. And the most important thing is to have an error correction mechanism, the next time not to make the same mistake, or next time smarter.

In this, I have a lot of experience, just start we find a 5000 square meters of warehouse, looking at the empty, then the doubt in the future can fill it. As a result, 2009 was a bust, and by now we had at least 6, and every plan was not enough. For example, we are now unwilling to build warehouses, because of the need for a large investment, and the warehouse is probably not good location, recruitment is not easy to recruit, the area is not big enough, but these are very realistic problems. So, I'd rather make our decisions very flexible and change them anytime.