Zappos is a extremely popular online shoe company. In fact, it’s the largest shoe company online. They went from making virtually nothing in 1999 to grossing over $800 million dollars just a few short years later. The secret to their success is from the brain of the company’s mastermind creator and CEO, Tony Hsieh (pronounced Shay). His unique ideas of customer and employee loyalty and making the customer happy has made his company a great success as well as one of the top 25 companies to work for. They place a great emphasis on company culture and core values, which the company annually publishes a “Culture Book” made up of contributions from its employees. Also the company enables the employees to deliver the “WOW” factor to its customers. Hsieh is such an innovator thinker. One of the most interesting thing about Zappos is that every employee goes through customer service training and at the end of training he offers the employee $3ooo to LEAVE the company because he wants only people who LOVE their job to work there.

So why all this talk about Tony and Zappos? Well, Tony has written a book called Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose. In this book Tony explains how his decision to focus on happiness produced those profits, passion and purpose in his business. While going over his points, I couldn’t help but notice that delivering happiness the Tony Hsieh way could also work in building a great marriage. Here are his points:

1. Invest in the Culture of Your Business Marriage: Before you got married you had some sort of idea what you dreamed your marriage and family life to look like. When you got married, perhaps you and your spouse talked about it. Days go by and we sometimes forget about what we talked about and the culture of the marriage morphs into something that you hadn’t discussed. Keeping a culture of anything takes conscious investing. If you said that your marriage was going to consists of a “culture of kindness” you have to invest in being kind on purpose. I work in Human Resources as my day job. One of the major things that companies try to do is to attract, motivate and retain the type of employees that fit the culture of their company. You retain the culture by the investment into it.
2. Embrace Your Employee’s Spouse’s Creativity: I’ve said this time and time again, but your spouse is not like you. In fact, that may be subconsciously the very reason you married them. You enjoyed who they are as a person. Don’t stifle who they are. Embrace it. Who they are makes for the variety in the marriage that it needs.
3. Make Your Company Marriage Stand For Something: If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know I am a fan of the marriage being more than just a relationship. I wrote about that here . What does your marriage and family stand for? Are you two just hanging out or do you have an objective?
4. Give Your Customers Spouse a Reason To Come Back: This is one of my favorites. Just like you want good customer service to want to keep coming back to a place, those same feelings of being treated like you’re not a piece of trash translate to the home. (Geez, especially to the home. When I first got married to Thea, I told her that I wanted for our home to be a place of refuge when I got home from work. I didn’t want to get beat up by the world and then come home and get beat up there. We do a pretty good job of that for each other now. Do you ramp up your Spousal Customer Service? Do you make them think about coming back home to you every night when they are away? Or are they working and hanging out with friends to avoid coming back to the drama?
5. Don’t Focus on the Money (Or Other Issues): Don’t worry. What I have learned about life is that things tend to work themselves out if you are putting forth some amount of effort. Don’t get so focused on the issues all the time that you forget to enjoy each other and life’s culmination of little moments.

Tony Hsieh has some great insights on delivering happiness. I wonder did he know that he was a marriage guru too? Hmmm…

Any thoughts on these 5 points? I would love for you to comment below.

Link Love Fridays: Most of these today have little to do with marriage, but what you learn can be applied.

Never - Milan Ford again with his simple words make BIG impact. No one can say so few words and make such an important point

Peak Moments - On The Art of Non-Conformity blog, Chris talks about peak moments in your life and how to add more of them by making a small adjustment.

For Poorer – For many couples, the economic climate has forced them to get a chance to actually honor the “for poorer” part of their marriage vows 

Focus - This is a free book from ZenHabits.com author. Whenever this guy gives you something. Take advantage. He has great thoughts on simplicity of life.

Related posts:

1. Secrets to Happiness
2. Who’s The Homewrecker, Really?