This is a video of Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, delivering his keynote at the B.I.G. Summit in Orlando, Florida.  In his keynote, Tony talks about the company culture that helped grow Zappos from a $1.6M company to a $1B+ company. In my opinion having interviewed Tony, he is one of the rarest CEO’s I’ve ever met. Regardless of his success, his mission appears to be inspiring people to be great, and creating environments that help make that happen. Pay careful attention to his closing remarks, and let me know what you think.

You can follow Tony on Twitter, and learn more about his company Zappos.

When a business views their employees as expenses trust is broken. In many companies, especially larger ones, people are seen as a labor expense to be managed. The bigger the company, the worse the problem. Companies need to focus on helping their people achieve their goals, and thus achieving the goals of the company.

What do you think?

Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, was kind enough to take a few minutes after his keynote at the B.I.G. Summit to gives his advice to entrepreneurs on what they should focus on.

You can follow Tony on Twitter, and learn more about his company Zappos.

Ted Murphy, an entrepreneur and CEO of IZEA, gives his advice to other entrepreneurs on starting a business and making it happen.

Follow Ted on Twitter, or learn more about him by following his blog.

I think Ben sums it up when he says:

“Who said more code is bad when it makes more sense?”

Read the post and let me know what you think. Is this a case of being too DRY? I think it is.

In this video I talk with Alex Hillman, co-founder of Indy Hall, about his experience setting up the co-working space in Philadelphia, and what he loves to do.

Please follow Alex on Twitter and learn more about him on his blog, dangerously awesome.

In this video I talk with Roz Duffy, one of the organizers of Barcamp Philly, about tips on holding a Barcamp and the other community-building activities she’s involved in, which are many.

Please follow Roz on Twitter, and learn more about her on her blog, stellargirl returns.

JP Toto, one of the 3 organizers at Barcamp Philly, took a few minutes to talk with me about his experience organizing Barcamp Philly for the second year in a row, and offers tips for those thinking about putting together their own Barcamp.

Please follow JP on Twitter, and learn more about him by on his blog, Vice Clown.

Every company starts somewhere, and knowing what tools can help you get quickly and surely to launch can be difficult at best. We know how that goes, and want to help.

Today at Barcamp Philly we’re happy to announce that we’re offering 100 startups a year of Scrum’d for free. All you have to do is call me – Robert Dempsey – at 321-274-4684, tell me about your startup and how we can help you. Operators are standing by.

By viewing customers as people with needs and goals, we can form long-term relationships with them, rather than trying to make a quick buck.

Full Transcript

Hey everyone. I’m Robert Dempsey, CEO and founder of Atlantic Dominion Solutions.

And following up on a previous video post about how employees are people, not resources. I wanted to do another post about how customers are people and not invoices.

And the goal that we should all have as businesses providing services or products to our customers is to develop real relationships with the folks that we do business with.

And a few ways that we can do that are doing things like seeking to understand the industry that our customers are in and where others are at in it, meaning, you know, who are their competitors, you know, what are they up against, what, generally speaking are the trends in their industry, how can we help them take advantage of these trends, things of that nature.

You know, how can we really help our customers to get a leg up on their competition using our products and services?  So, what we really need to do in this case is shift the relationship from that of just client and vendor to more of a partnership role.  And when we look at our customers more as partners in really long-term, then that complete shifts the way that we approach them and what it is we’re really offering.

So, you know, giving them products or offering products or services that won’t just help increase our bottom line or our profitability, but will actually help give them a competitive advantage in their industry over all of the other folks.

So, again really what it goes back to is realizing that people are people and we are all really relationship oriented beings out there.  And that with our customers, you know, whether they are, you know, purely online using our, like our SaaS-based products, or whether we really have those, you know, hand-in-hand relationships with folks building products and services with and for them.

You know, that’s what it really comes down to is having those relationships and seeing really everyone that we interact with, customer, employee, whatever, as people that have needs and goals that they’re trying to fulfill and then figuring out how we can help them fulfill those goals.

So, look forward to hearing your comments on this whole idea of, you know, seeing customers as people and not invoices and look forward to that.

Have a great one, see you next time.