Zuo Hui's valuable legacy to the business community

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play Zuo Hui left to pay tribute to a dedicated entrepreneur and commemorate a man who was upright

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Wen/Jun Zhi

Source: Lishi Business Review (ID: libbusiness)

Although many people know that Zuo Hui, the founder of Shell House, has been in poor health for several years, the news of Zuo Hui's death on May 20 shocked the whole media circle. In the past few years, when I saw Zuo Hui's occasional appearance in public, I once thought he had broken through the jaws of death. In particular, seeing the rapid development of the company led by him, from the chain home to the shell house, I also remember from time to time that Inamori and Fu said, "A successful person must have experienced a near death disaster, serious illness or great setbacks, and his life is definitely not a happy life or a smooth life". But Zuo Hui still left.

Similar to the author's feelings, the news of Zuo Hui's death also caused shock to many media people and entrepreneurs. But unlike similar emergencies, many people expressed more regret than shock. The most important reason, from the simplest point of view, is that people feel that society has lost not only an excellent entrepreneur, but also a "good" entrepreneur.

This is an entrepreneur who adheres to the values of being good and upward, and practices business philosophy with such values. As early as in the "barbaric period" of the real estate brokerage industry, he shouted "integrity determines success". Lianjia Real Estate, which he founded, has also become a real estate brokerage company trusted by Chinese people. Not long ago, on the third anniversary of the founding of Shell's house hunting, he wrote an article titled "Believe in the power of values, believe in the power of belief!".

As someone said when commenting on Zuo Hui, "The modern commercial society is very pragmatic. On the one hand, people advocate values, but on the other hand, they also want to see that values can bring commercial success. Mr. Zuo Hui's great commercial success (as well as the achievements of his freedom and vision of not landing in the capital market) , let people see the power of long-term doctrine, let people believe that this kind of values can really bring success. This provides a huge positive incentive to drive people to pursue and practice such values more firmly. "

Although Zuo Hui has left, his spirit and business ideas are valuable assets for the business community and young people. Today, we are here to select some key nodes of Mr. Zuo Hui's entrepreneurial path, explore his entrepreneurial mentality and business thinking on these key nodes, in memory of him.

　　 one

　　 First entry into society: the most important thing is to give play to your strengths

Like many college graduates who have just entered the society, Zuo Hui has been in a mess since he graduated in 1992. He was first assigned to a factory in the suburb of Beijing, but within a few months, he moved to a software company in Zhongguancun. The new job is to answer the phone and collect information from customers. He had to face all kinds of complaint calls every day because he was not good at words. During that time, when he got off work, his ears were full of buzzing sounds, and his mind was often blank.

However, Zuo Hui has been doing this job for three years. Three years later, he changed jobs to another software company, also doing marketing. At that time, in order to prepare a detailed product introduction for colleagues, Zuo Hui did not have a rest day in three or four months. He thought that with a good leaflet, he could achieve the corresponding market effect, but the result was contrary to his wishes.

After that, Zuo Hui figured out that as a marketing staff, excellent materials and tools are not the first priority. What is important is his ability to communicate with people and public relations, which is exactly his weakness. He is not a qualified marketing staff.

So later Zuo Hui warned young people: "A person who does things in a major he is not good at can never inspire the greatest potential. In the face of many career choices, don't waste time after figuring out what he is not suitable for. The most important thing to do is to play to his strengths."

　　 two

　　 First time entrepreneurship: "knowing the enemy" is an effective weapon for you to defeat your rivals

In 1995, Zuo Hui and two classmates resigned and started their own business. They each took 50000 yuan to set up an insurance agency. The biggest challenge at that time was that the three of them did not understand insurance at all, and they were not even "consumers of insurance products" before. They were completely laymen.

At that time, the general quality of insurance practitioners was not very high. Zuo Hui thought that if his team could study more carefully and do more professionally than these people, there would be opportunities. So every day after everyone gets off work, he shuts himself in his office and begins to study the terms of various insurance companies.

The insurance company's claims settlement and terms and conditions are complicated. Sometimes there are more than 10000 words in a clause and it is written in a special "professional" way. Zuo Hui often looks at it and falls asleep when he is not careful. But in order to find the most critical information and "traps" from these "heavenly books", he forced himself to hold the dense small words, read them silently and aloud until they were completely clear.

At that time, Zuo Hui taught himself in the evening and trained his employees in front of the blackboard during the day. But because Zuo Hui and his team know more about products, industry and competing products, they have done a very good job in business. At one time, this small company accounted for 3% of the market share among hundreds of peers in Beijing.

Three years later, when the state prepared to make policy adjustments to the insurance market and Zuo Hui and his team withdrew from the insurance agency market, the three shareholders received 100 times of their investment in that year.

Later, Zuo Hui concluded: "In the fierce market competition, if knowing the 'length of oneself' is the starting point for a young person to choose a career, then 'knowing the enemy' is an effective weapon for you to defeat your competitors."

　　 three

　　 Entering the real estate intermediary industry: integrity determines success

After the "housing reform in 1998", the state abolished the "welfare housing distribution" and implemented marketization. Since then, new housing construction and second-hand housing transactions have become active, and real estate intermediaries have risen in response to the trend. Zuo Hui, keenly aware of this market opportunity, decided to enter the real estate intermediary market.

In November 2001, Beijing Lianjia Real Estate Brokerage Co., Ltd. was officially born. At that time, there were thousands of real estate agents in Beijing, with a mixture of good and bad. The basic common problem was that the operation was not standardized. Fraud, deception, false advertising, and the use of incorrect information were everywhere. In the face of intermediaries, ordinary people do not understand the rules of the game. It is like "blind people ride blind horses and go to the deep pool in the middle of the night". They are easily deceived.

At the initial stage, the chain home was no different from other intermediaries. It also took advantage of information inequality to get a price difference. Zuo Hui said, "The joy of the price difference is very real, and the anger of consumers is also very real." He began to reflect, "You can't ignore it, you can't care about others' feelings, you can't be completely self. You need to take care of others' feelings, and then you can realize your personal ambition."

Zuo Hui feels that his opportunity is to solve this information asymmetry, just as he used to help customers understand insurance terms. In March 2004, Linkhome compiled the first User's Manual of Beijing real estate brokerage industry, which includes selling, buying, renting, asking for rent, lending, transferring and other issues in the process of real estate transactions, as well as basic knowledge and risk prevention measures. From the perspective of customers, this manual takes out all the "precious crystals" accumulated by chain owners. 181 questions and answers, all for the people.

After the book was distributed free of charge in chain stores, it attracted great praise from customers, and some units also purchased it collectively. At that time, someone asked Zuo Hui that you would tell customers about all the places that can hide secrets and what money you can earn. Zuo Hui said that a gentleman can get money in a proper way.

Facts have proved that Zuo Hui's approach is correct. With the establishment of its reputation, its stores began to expand rapidly. In 2004, there were only more than 30 stores, but by 2005, it had increased to 105.

In the face of the achievements, Zuo Hui said at that time, "I am very clear that in many cases, it is not our services that are really" genuine ", but that so many customers give the salesperson a chance based on their trust in the brand of" Chain Home ". What can we rely on to repay this trust? It can only be professional ethics."

　　 four

　　 Team building: Only when practitioners have a sense of security can the industry develop healthily

In 2004, Zuo Hui went to Tsinghua University for an MBA. At that time, a senior business manager in Taiwan said on the platform that brokers should be core assets, but in reality they are consumables. Just like a towel, wring it dry and changing it. No one paid close attention to and thought about the status of professional dignity and protection of the most basic service providers in this industry.

Zuo Hui was deeply impressed by this sentence. He understands the position and difficulty of brokers. In his eyes, the real estate agent is the carrier of products provided to consumers and also the service provider. They will fundamentally affect the development path of the industry.

So Zuo Hui tried his best to provide brokers with various resources within the company, not only to help them solve problems in business, customer search and service, but also to help them solve all problems in their lives and families.

As a result, in the industries where the average monthly turnover rate of employees is more than 10%, only 3% of the chain operators are. There are many brokers who have worked in Linkhome for more than 5 years, which is almost a miracle in the field of real estate intermediary.

A senior manager of the chain house once said that the chain house has always been doing things around two essences, one is good for brokers, the other is good for customers and brokers, changing the ecological environment, becoming more and more orderly and healthy, good for customers, and improving the consumer experience. Zuo Hui said that only when people who serve in this industry can work in peace of mind, can this industry achieve healthy development, and ultimately benefit every consumer and customer.

　　 five

　　 Enterprise management: stick to the long-term principle and do difficult and correct things

Around 2008, the underlying rule of the real estate intermediary industry was that real and fake houses were released at the same time, and fake houses were used to attract prospective customers to promote the sales of real houses. On the one hand, this is because there is little information about real houses. On the other hand, it can attract customers with fake low prices. Whoever publishes real houses is likely to scare away customers.

Such hidden rules are undoubtedly beneficial to intermediaries, but they are obviously unfriendly to customers. People angrily call real estate agents "black intermediaries".

Lianjia was already the largest real estate agency in Beijing at that time. Zuo Hui didn't want to bear the name of "black intermediary" and let his children be pointed at in the future. He wanted to change this through his own actions.

In 2009, Zuo Hui proposed the idea of "real housing supply action". The so-called real houses are the real houses that exist, are on sale, have real prices, and have real information. Once this idea came out, it immediately exploded in the company. Many brokers thought the boss was crazy. Zuo Hui did not push his own idea. On the one hand, he did the ideological work of brokers, and on the other hand, he arranged people to "sweep buildings".

The so-called sweeping is to find out the real information about the housing supply. Zuo Hui recruited thousands of people and counted houses in different communities in more than 30 cities. At that time, this huge and tedious work of "housing census" seemed not only useless, but even Zuo Hui did not know when it would generate value. However, he still proposed to "invest at no cost" development, because in his opinion, it was the right thing to provide customers with real information.

After ten years of "building counting" work, a "building dictionary" containing information such as the original data of the house, the house type diagram, the house coordinates, the building environment, the distance from the subway, and the historical transaction data was born. This "dictionary" now covers 322 cities in China, with 240 million pieces of real housing information recorded in the database, becoming the largest housing information database with the largest amount of data, the widest coverage and the most comprehensive dimensions in China.

After the "real estate dictionary" had a certain scale of real data, in 2011, Zuo Hui began to promote the "real housing supply action" at Home Link. In the first three months of the operation, the business of Lianjia declined continuously, and the brokers also experienced a wave of resignations. The voice of internal vacillation was loud, but Zuo Hui resisted the pressure. About 100 days later, many customers who had left came back, and the business of Linkhome began to recover rapidly, and its reputation was getting better and better.

The action of Zhenfangyuan is a milestone event in the development of Homelink. On the eve of Shell's listing in the United States in 2020, Zuo Hui said in a letter to shareholders: "The uniqueness of our organization is that we firmly choose long-term interests, choose to do the 'right' thing rather than the quick success thing, and we have a natural aversion to taking shortcuts. We also realize that 'right' things are often difficult and need to be transformed for a long time, so as to improve efficiency and consumer experience and obtain long-term commercial returns. Doing difficult and correct things is the way we understand and believe in success. The most difficult thing is that a 'right' decision often leads to a decline rather than an increase in earnings. Of course, this decline is phased. After this stage, it will naturally enter the channel of long-term growth. But it is this decline that makes organizations face a lot of tests. We call it the 'no output period'. "

"What we are proud of is that our team has cultivated a large number of managers with this core concept over the years. They have all experienced a difficult 'no output period' time and time again, and then ushered in long-term growth and positive feedback from consumers, which further strengthened this belief."

　　 six

　　 Peer competition: recognize, learn and surpass the advanced

After 2015, chain stores that have already practiced "internal skills" began to expand at a high speed. In the first and second tier cities such as Chengdu, Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Chongqing, Jinan, Guangzhou, Dalian, Yantai, Linkhome has successively acquired 11 real estate intermediaries, including Yicheng Real Estate, Deyou Real Estate, Yijia, Zoomlion (Real Estate), Beijing Gaoce, Sheng Shiguan, Daxingye, Furui Real Estate, Mantanghong, Haowangjiao, Yuansheng Real Estate, etc, The intermediaries that are a little reliable in the country have been purchased by Linkhome.

However, with the expansion of business, Zuo Hui also found a corporate bottleneck: more and more stores must be set up to support more and more real estate agents before they can cover more and more customers. However, the turnover of customers does not increase with the increase of the number of customers covered. The huge cost of supporting people generated in the process makes many intermediary enterprises miserable.

Moreover, Zuo Hui is also worried about the emergence of platform enterprises like Alibaba in the industry, which will eventually suppress the chain home through the head aggregation effect. So it's better to change your own life than wait for others to make revolution.

Under such consideration, in 2018, LinkedIn was upgraded to a shell house hunting platform. There are not only chain family brands such as Lianjia and Deyou, but also a large number of third-party real estate brokerage companies settling in Shell to look for houses. Data shows that by the end of December 2020, Shell House has connected 265 brand chain brokerage companies. These brands have 42000 stores in 103 cities, and the total number of brokers exceeds 456000.

However, the development of shells obviously hurt the interests of some other real estate intermediaries. In June 2018, Shell House was just launched two months ago. Many domestic real estate service agencies gathered together to count the crimes of "some enterprises" being both athletes and judges.

Last year, a peer in the industry said more bluntly that Shell would find a house: "If you unify the Jianghu, the whole industry will not agree, the developers will not agree, the customers will not agree, and the government will not agree." This year, the country's antitrust thunder rumbled, and Yao Jinbo, the boss of 58 Group, suggested that the country give Shell a small punishment - a fine of 4 billion yuan.

However, Zuo Hui does not like to always mention competition. He believes that competitive thinking is inefficient. In his opinion, the progress of enterprises does not come from competition or changes in the environment, but "irreplaceable value that can create core for the industry".

As for competition, Zuo Hui said: "If you want to win, there are two ways. The first way is to make yourself stronger, and the second way is to make others weaker. It is easy to use the second way because it is easier to care more about competitors. In doing so, it is easy to attack others, and it also gives you a psychological hint: I am not stupid. I think this is a very bad situation for the organization. No enterprise has succeeded by attacking others. A truly strong team, including a strong nation, a strong organization, and a strong individual, can do three things: recognize the advanced, learn from the advanced, and surpass the advanced. In particular, if the first thing cannot be done, the last two things will not happen at all. "