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Staff post about: Wayne Huizenga Become an Author

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Huizenga was able to achieve the success that he did because he loved what he was doing. He loved being able to take an idea and try to sell others on it to make it happen. But what was behind Huizenga’s confidence in those ideas? What made him believe so strongly that they would work when others might have already tried the same thing and failed? The answer is quite simply, gut instinct.

Huizenga relied on his gut instinct to give him the faith he needed in his ideas to take them to the next level. Where his gut told him that he could make something happen, Huizenga went full force ahead to make it a reality. That is why, the more successful Huizenga became, the more he wanted to get out of his company; he did not want to be an administrator, which is what tended to happen as his businesses grew larger and larger. Huizenga wanted to be the ideas man, the one who could let his imagination run wild thinking of ways to take his companies to the next level. As soon as he found his imagination constrained, Huizenga knew it was time to get out.

It is Huizenga’s gut that has allowed him to pursue businesses that others chose to avoid, to try and change the very way people shopped. Think about the car industry: What kind of a reputation do car salesmen have? How difficult is the process of buying a car from start to finish? To what lengths do people go to avoid having to buy a new car.

Huizenga reformed all of that with his company Autonation. He removed the middleman. He removed the angst that came with making such a large purchase. He brought new standards and reputation to an industry that was the butt of jokes at every dinner party. He changed the industry forever. And, he did it all at a time when the economy was suffering, when economic advisers were telling everyone to get out. Huizenga checked his gut, saw the opportunity, and stole it.

When Huizenga was building up Blockbuster, he became known as the “Toilet Man” for his tendency to check the state of cleanliness in his employees’ bathrooms. He thought that if those bathrooms were not clean, the rest of the store would be in the same condition. “The good things take care of themselves,” he says. “We want to find all the negatives.” Still, despite his reputation for hanging around in the dirtiest part of his stores, his gut was as good as golden.

It was also Huizenga’s gut that told him what his customers wanted. After all, he believed he was his own best company. More than anything else, people wanted to be treated like people. More than the price of a product, more than its convenience or utility, Huizenga’s gut told him that people made their buying decisions based on their own buying experience, on how they were treated by his staff in stores. He believed that if he gave the customer not only what they wanted, but in a friendly and efficient manner, they would not be able to help but come back for more

It worked.

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