December 3: Get Big Fast

"Once you reach scale, you have to turn the focus from growth to operating efficiency."

Source: The Film Archives
Published: April 2001

Get Big Fast

“If you look at what we’ve done over the past five years, we followed a strategy of Get Big Fast. Once you reach scale, you have to turn the focus from growth to operating efficiency.

At the time of our IPO, we had annualized sales of $60 million per year. At that scale, doing a bunch of hard work to improve operational efficiency by 1% nets you $600,000 of cost reduction.

Now [in 2001] we have annualized sales of $2.7 billion, so that same work to improve efficiency would net $27 million of savings.”

-Jeff Bezos

Bonus: Amazon’s 2019 net revenue was $280 billion.

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