In Anything You Want, CD Baby founder Derek Sivers shares 40 lessons he learned from being an accidental entrepreneur whose hobby turned into a $22 million business. Sivers’s non-traditional approach to business ownership—centering on honesty, creativity, and humanity—is a model for burgeoning entrepreneurs who want to stay true to themselves and do right by others while building their dream.
A professional musician, Sivers founded CD Baby in 1998 to sell his CDs online when major music companies wouldn’t. What began as an endeavor to address his own unmet need quickly led to Sivers helping friends and other independent musicians sell their CDs online. After growing CD Baby successfully through trial and error, Sivers sold the company in 2008 and put the proceeds into a trust dedicated to music education. Published in 2011, this book presents the lessons he learned along the way.
In this guide, we’ve reorganized and grouped Sivers’s lessons into five parts:
Part 1: Know What You Love to Know What You Want
Part 2: Develop Your Business Plan
Part 3: Share the Power
Part 4: Center Your Customer
Part 5: Know When to Say “When”
We also compare and contrast Sivers’s work with that of other business experts and include additional strategies to make his recommendations actionable.
Sivers argues that to run a successful business you have to know yourself, what you love, and what you want in life. He asserts that the point of owning your own business and pursuing your dreams is to make you happy, so your passions should always be your guiding light and the benchmark against which you measure yourself.
Your role matters: Sivers says that as the owner of your own business, you can make your role anything you want, so you should pay attention to which tasks make you happy and only do the ones you love, which will fuel you. Therefore, he recommends delegating parts of your work that you don’t like because doing things you don’t feel passionate about will drain you.
(Shortform note: In addition to enjoying your business and keeping the passion alive, understanding yourself and your priorities as a company head also builds confidence, makes you a more effective leader and decision-maker, and maximizes your performance.)
Size also matters: Sivers warns against growing your business bigger than you truly want it to be, even if your company is successful. This is because pursuing superficial goals, like making money for the sake of making money, will eventually dampen your interest in your business.
(Shortform note: Sivers doesn’t specify how you get to know yourself and your interests better, but you can illuminate your inner workings by asking yourself a range of questions, such as: What are my short- and long-term goals? What am I passionate about? and What new activities am I interested in or willing to try?)
Stay the course: Sivers asserts that once you’ve homed in on what you love, you should keep doing it—even if people tell you that others can do what you’re doing better, faster, and more profitably. He argues that you should measure yourself only against what matters most to you, not what matters most to others because their end goal is not your end goal and it won’t make you happy. He recommends that you ignore naysayers and continue to actively develop the skills you need to do the thing you love. Continue until these skills are so ingrained that they become part of who you are: It’s the act of doing that will make you what you want to be.
Lesson illustrated: Sivers says he was a terrible singer as a teenager—and people told him so—but he continued singing because, more than anything, he wanted to be a singer. Fifteen years of singing later, Sivers found that he actually liked the sound of his voice—and others did too, suddenly praising him for his “natural” talent. He’s been a professional musician ever since.
Sivers asserts that knowing what you love to do should drive what tasks you take on and the role you play in your business. However, Michael Gerber contends in The E-Myth Revisited that new owners of small businesses don’t have the luxury of freely choosing what role they’d like to play. Instead, they must assume and balance three:
Entrepreneur (a creative, future-focused visionary)
Manager (a pragmatic system implementer and enforcer)
Technician (an individualist who prefers to do things on his own, in his own way)
Gerber argues that your business will reflect the role you naturally lean into most, so you must master and learn to keep all three roles in check.
In the previous section, we discussed the importance of identifying and pursuing the things you love. Now, we’ll discuss Sivers’s suggestions for developing a business plan that can help you put your passions into action.
Sivers says that great ideas are meaningless if you don’t do something with them and that the best thing you can do to make them a reality is just get started. It’s okay if you don’t have a clear plan or vision: Sivers had neither when he started CD Baby—he just had a desire to address an unmet need.
Sivers says the most important thing is to not get hung up on everything that could prevent you from pursuing your dream, like a lack of money or fear of something going wrong. Don’t worry about developing the perfect business plan with terms and conditions and legal projections for scenarios that may never unfold. Just keep it simple, don’t overthink, and get started—because taking small steps toward your goal is always better than doing nothing.
Plan Early and Often
Sivers discusses the importance of getting your business started right away so you can put your ideas into action, recommending that you keep things simple and not get bogged down by the details. But some argue that a well-laid-out plan can help you get off on the right foot. Here are a few things you can prepare for before beginning:
Research your industry and competitors.
Identify your audience and mission.
Map out your finances.
Put together a business plan.
Identify mentors and professional support.
In addition, it can help to begin with a clear financial strategy, which you can develop by determining whether you plan to self-fund your company, approach investors, or seek loans to get it off the ground.
Sivers says that as you develop your business plan, you should stay flexible and open to new ideas and change. He recommends that you design 10 drastically different versions of your plan to explore the various directions you could pursue. This can awaken you to new ways of doing things that would be less apparent if you immediately homed in on a single idea.
For example, if you want to start a business that sells footie pajamas, you could design plans that target a variety of customers (children, teens, adults, or even dogs). You can also explore different ways of distributing your product. Do you want to have an online store, sell at local farmers markets, or have a dedicated space in a mall? Developing a plan for each scenario challenges you to consider all of the options available to you. In the process, you’ll discover which options get you the most excited, and that’s the direction you should head in.
Lesson illustrated: Sivers learned this technique from one of his vocal coaches—his coach would make him practice a song in several wildly different ways (high, low, fast, slow, slurred, crisp, and so on) to shake him out of his preconceived idea of how the song should sound. He often found that he preferred other versions over his original, and he later connected this lesson to brainstorming business ideas.
Sivers doesn’t specify how detailed these plans should be, or what a traditional business plan should look like. A basic business plan typically includes the following components:
An executive summary that explains your company’s mission and goals
A description of your company
An analysis of your industry and competitors
An overview of your company’s structure
The service or product you’re offering and its benefits to customers
Your marketing and sales approach
A funding request and financial projections
Sivers asserts that even after you’ve established your business plan, you should remain open to changing it as your company evolves so you can make improvements as needed. He warns that if you get stuck trying to make an idea you love work, but it’s not resonating with people, this can prevent you from discovering other ideas that could lead to your success. You may have many great ideas, but some will never gain traction simply because of factors beyond your control, like timing. So you should keep generating ideas until something lands.
(Shortform note: Many successful business owners agree with Sivers’s advice to stay open to ideas as your plan develops, and they specifically recommend that you review your plan monthly throughout the lifespan of your business. This will help you stay focused, keep your priorities aligned, and pivot to address changes in the marketplace.)
Lesson illustrated: Sivers says that he reconfigured his business model twice, both times because someone outside his company made an inquiry that prompted him to consider a different and better way to provide his service. In fact, if he hadn’t stayed flexible in his approach, CD Baby would have never become a music store—it would have only been a payment service, similar to PayPal.
Sivers offers some specific ways to avoid risk when developing your business plan:
(Shortform note: In addition to the risks Sivers presents, experts advise you to consider financial perils. For example, most businesses don’t see a profit for the first 18-24 months, so you might have to make personal financial sacrifices to keep your business afloat. This financial strain can cause your physical and mental health to suffer, so you should go into your business with open eyes and a plan for how to handle financial uncertainty. One suggestion is to establish a cash reserve of at least four to six months of business expenses right from the start.)
You’ve learned how to get your business going, so now we’ll examine Sivers’s recommendations for managing employees in a way that keeps them happy, makes you happy, and allows your business to function as effectively as possible.
Sivers says that when you’re the boss, you should always be mindful of the power dynamic that’s built into your interactions with employees because it impacts the weight of your words as well as their work. If an employee asks your thoughts on an idea they’ve come up with or a project they’re working on, be aware that your opinion carries more weight than that of a peer and that they may perceive your feedback as a directive rather than a suggestion or collaboration.
Sivers recommends that, in general, you respond positively to employees who ask your opinion about their ideas and projects, so long as doing so won’t make or break your company. This will encourage them, increase their investment in your company’s work, and will also boost staff morale.
(Shortform note: In Radical Candor, Kim Scott builds on the idea of positive employer-employee communication. She argues that one of the most important things you can do as a leader to improve your work culture is regularly to ask your employees for honest feedback about your impact on the business. After listening and considering what they say, show that you value their opinion by making adjustments accordingly.)
In addition to positively engaging your employees, Sivers recommends you empower them with clear information and the ability to make decisions independently. Doing this will allow you to free yourself from the daily minutia of running your business and focus on big-picture items and the tasks you love.
Sivers suggests that you develop standardized operating procedures and protocols for your business and train staff on how to implement them in your absence.
Lesson illustrated: Sivers says that by making himself dispensable in his own company, he empowered his employees to grow CD Baby from $1 million to $20 million in just four years. Because they were running the day-to-day operations, he had the time to focus on long-range goals and growing the business.
(Shortform note: While empowering employees to run your business can free you up to pursue what you love, some people say that it’s also important to focus on your employees’ needs and interests to inspire and help them grow. You can deepen your support of your employees by encouraging them to follow their individual passions, having open conversations about factors that are causing burnout or holding them back at work, and modeling and advocating for them to engage in self-care.)
Although Sivers suggests you empower your employees as much as possible, he cautions against turning over all control of your business to others. With this in mind, he says you should balance trust and oversight when delegating responsibility. Two incidents taught him to give employees the independence they need to run things but also check in on them:
In an analysis done by Harvard Business Review, empowering employees was shown to have positive, neutral, and negative effects.
Positive: Leaders who delegate responsibilities and make decisions collaboratively with their employees are viewed as more trustworthy, and employees demonstrate better cooperation and higher levels of creativity.
Neutral: In routine day-to-day tasks, there was no sign of improved performance post-empowerment.
Negative: It was shown that some employees feel burdened by the responsibility of participating in decision-making and don’t want the extra delegated work. They would prefer instead to stick with what is in their job description.
The key takeaway is that leaders should consider all personality types when seeking to empower their employees.
Now that you know how to manage your employees in a way that keeps everyone happy and your business operating smoothly, we’ll explore how to cater to, develop, and maintain strong relationships with your customers.
Sivers says that the primary goal of your business is to help people, so while your company needs to be profitable enough to survive, your primary focus should be on understanding and addressing your customers’ needs, rather than growing your business or getting rich.
Sivers argues that it’s better to scrimp and save to build your business right than cater to investors. Although investors can help grow your business quickly, they may demand that you change your vision or compromise your values in ways that don’t help your customers.
(Shortform note: If you’re able to start your business without outside investors, it will be easier to make customer satisfaction the priority of your business. To do this, however, you’ll likely have to lower your start-up costs. Are you selling merchandise? Consider an online store rather than brick and mortar. If manufacturing is a cost you’re not able to afford, you might think about selling a service rather than a product. A willingness to start with used, free, or borrowed equipment and spaces will also save you money.)
Here are two ways that Sivers says you can communicate to customers that they’re your top priority:
Signal That Your Customers Are Priority #1
Sivers recommends that you get loud about why your select customers matter to you, though he doesn’t specify how to identify your niche customers from the outset. Here are five steps you can take to home in on your niche customers:
Identify an idea you feel passionately about and a problem you’d like to solve for yourself and others.
Assess your target market’s greatest needs using surveys and looking at sites like Quora, Reddit, and Twitter.
Research your competition so you can distinguish yourself from them.
Examine the potential profitability of your idea with your niche market.
Vet your idea with family, friends, and acquaintances to assess its appeal and viability.
In addition to centering your customer, one of the most important things you can do as a business owner is providing stellar customer service. Sivers says that having positive, meaningful, personalized interactions with customers will help you keep customers, which is preferable to having to find new ones.
To start, Sivers argues that you should treat every person who reaches out to your company as if they’re a VIP. Customers feel valued and important when you take the time to have meaningful interactions with them. Though this may feel unnecessarily time-consuming, having longer, more meaningful interactions with customers is more productive and satisfying for everyone involved than interactions that are efficient but soulless.
(Shortform note: As a business owner, you can also show customers that their experience matters to you by personally making follow-up calls to customers who have purchased your service or product to ask what works well and what doesn’t. In fact, some business owners make these calls months or even a year after the product or service was purchased because they want to know how it fared over time. To take it a step further, you can reward customers for their feedback with small tokens of appreciation, like a gift card to a coffee shop. It’s one more way to show that you value their opinion.)
Sivers says you can meaningfully engage customers by tapping into your creative, playful spirit rather than defaulting to rote scripts. He recommends personalizing your interactions with customers in unique and funny ways to grab their attention and make them remember you.
For example, if a customer mentions during a phone call that they're having a rough day, you can follow up on your call by sending them a note saying you hope things get better. It might take you a little extra time, but your customer will remember that you listened to her and went the extra mile to brighten her day.
(Shortform note: In Raving Fans, Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles argue that it’s not enough to simply meet customers’ needs—you must continually exceed expectations to win customer loyalty. The authors assert that customer service work never reaches a pinnacle of excellence because customer needs are ever-evolving. As a result, your strategy for delivering customer service that surpasses expectations must remain flexible so you can adapt it to clients’ changing demands.)
Sivers finishes by pointing out that a little generosity can go a long way with your customers. In general, if you have something they need, you should try to make it available to them at a reasonable price, even if you know you could charge more. He argues against trying to make a buck off your customers or skimping on your product or service to save a few pennies. Instead, he says that if you give breaks to customers where you can, you will build customer loyalty and respect.
(Shortform note: Others expand on Sivers’s suggestion that you be generous with customers, suggesting that you create exclusive access groups, build loyalty programs, and give memorable promotional products to entice and hold onto the customers you care about.)
While you can aim to always have positive interactions with customers, you’ll inevitably encounter situations where unhappy customers rear their ugly heads. Sivers contends that the customer is always right—even when they aren’t.
Sivers recommends that you always practice genuine kindness in response to negative feedback from customers for two reasons:
Sivers says it’s particularly important to appease customers who make a loud, public stink about your company because when you alleviate their concerns they can become some of your business’s most vocal proponents.
This doesn’t mean you should prioritize difficult customers over your loyal ones, however. Rather, Sivers says you should always aim to serve the vast majority of customers who aren’t problematic. If, for example, you have a handful of customers who complain about your service, you shouldn’t respond by changing that service or your policies in ways that will punish the larger group that uses and benefits from those things responsibly. Instead, always stay focused on what’s best for the greater good, let small problems roll off your back, and be grateful for your business and what’s working.
Manage Bad Customer Energy
Sivers argues that you should appease difficult customers but doesn’t offer specific suggestions for how to do this. You can manage challenging customers using the following strategies:
Stay calm and lower your voice to bring down the temperature.
Listen to understand the problem. Don’t argue.
Convey that you understand their frustration.
Don’t personalize their problem.
Follow up on promises you make.
Summarize the next steps so everyone’s clear about how to proceed.
As important as it is to thoughtfully address difficult customers’ needs, it’s also smart to ensure that employees working with them engage in self-care to prevent burnout. Toward that end, you should encourage your staff to:
Take five- to 10-minute breaks every hour to collect and recenter themselves.
Ask for help when they need it.
Use breathing, relaxation, and mindfulness techniques to destress.
Keep a calm, uncluttered workspace.
Celebrate their successes when they get positive feedback from customers.
Finally, research suggests that there’s good reason to abide by Sivers’s recommendation to let the undesirable behavior of a few “bad apple” customers roll off your back: You can boost your profits by tolerating some bad behavior if there’s a net benefit for your business. For example, if a customer tries to return a sweater she bought from your store six months after the designated return period, you might object to her violating your policy and even find the behavior unethical. However, if you permit the return and the customer then buys three jackets and a pair of pants from your store, has the customer actually done anything to harm your business? Researchers say that staying flexible in your thinking and tolerating some bad behavior can help your bottom line.
You’ve followed your passions, built your business, led with balance, and always centered your customer. Now we’ll talk about how to know if or when it’s time to walk away from your business.
Sivers says that when you no longer have passion for running your business, it’s time to close shop or sell. This is more than having a bad day at the office—when you’ve surpassed your goals for the company, you can’t think of where to take it next (or simply don’t have interest in it), and when you begin routinely fantasizing about getting out, that’s when you know it’s time.
Leaving the company isn’t just for you: When your interest in your company wanes, sticking around only risks doing damage to it. Sivers says that if you care about your company, you’ll make sure that it’s being run by someone who wants the job and will do it with their whole heart.
Lesson illustrated: Sivers says he knew it was time to sell CD Baby when he’d achieved all his goals, didn’t have a vision for taking the business in a new direction, and was more passionate about projects outside the business than in it. He received two competing bids for the company and chose the lower offer. True to his principles, he chose the person who he felt was a better fit for his customers.
(Shortform note: CD Baby is still alive and well. They retired the retail store in March of 2020 and are now focused on its distribution, monetization, and promotion services for musicians.)
How to Close or Sell Your Business
Sivers recommends shutting down and walking away from your business when it’s fulfilled its purpose and your passion for it wanes, but he doesn’t provide specifics on how to do this. If you decide the time is right to close your business, you can take the following steps:
If you’re a sole proprietor, you can simply decide to close. If you have partners, you must get an agreement from your co-owners.
File dissolution documents.
Cancel registrations, permits, licenses, and business names.
Make sure you’re in compliance with employment and labor laws.
Wrap up outstanding financial obligations.
Hold onto tax, employment, and other legal documents per their specific regulations.
If your business is still fulfilling a genuine customer need but you’ve lost a passion for it, you can make selling your business a more positive experience by taking these three steps:
Identify a clear sense of direction you want to move in next.
Compile an exit memo that details every aspect of how your business operates to help the next person taking over the helm.
Give yourself plenty of lead time before you sell.
Sivers says business owners should empower employees through delegation and trust, but that owners should also retain overall control. Reflect on times that you have or haven’t delegated to others and how you might improve that power balance.
Describe a time when you delegated a task to someone else (in your professional or personal life) and that person dropped the ball. What happened and how did it affect your relationship with that person?
How do you think you could manage that delegation better in the future? For example, would you have given the person less control, or checked in on them more frequently?
Now think about a time that you decided not to delegate a task. Looking back, do you think it would have benefitted you to share the load? Why or why not?