How to Think Like Estée Lauder

David Senra's profiled over 300 founders.

And Estée Lauder?

She's one of the most impressive he's come across.

(You can listen to his Founders episode on her here).

By 1995, her company was raking in $3.3 billion in annual sales.

The Estée Lauder Companies went public in 1995, and by 2003, it was valued at $9.7 billion.

All this while she was still running the show.

That's not just success. That's domination.

So, how did she do it?

Let's break down the Estée Lauder playbook:

1. Visualize Success Like It's Already Happened

We quickly discount the woo-woo nature of visualization these days.

But if you listen to enough founder stories you’ll realize that the majority of founders made the active decision to think optimistically instead of pessimistically.

Estée is a great example of this.

She didn't just hope for success. She lived it in her mind first:

She wasn't playing make-believe. She was programming her reality:

Here's the flip side:

We can equate this visualization to an obsession. The obsession of what could be…and the grit to turn it into reality.

Estée has this beautiful line that you can use to start your visualizing:

2. Take Calculated Risks (Because Playing It Safe Is The Riskiest Move)

Estée took a massive risk on her business.

She had people in her ear telling her not to spend her money on it.

That it was too risky.

And that it was a bad idea.

Imagine the bubble of information she was in.

Her “experts” were telling her not to do it.

She couldn’t find examples of people who had taken a chance and pulled it off by looking online.

All she had were these people telling her that it wasn’t going to happen.

And that she’d lose her life savings for taking the chance on her business.

She ignored them.

And she did it anyway.

3. Customer Loyalty Is Your Holy Grail

Estée turned her business into a giving contest.

If a customer didn’t buy something that they looked interested in she’d give them a free sample.

Estée built her business on the idea of a gift with purchase.

She understood that business wasn’t about the sale.

It was about the relationship her customers were building with her products and brand.

How can you turn your business into a giving contest?

4. Embrace The Suck

One of the most relieving things a founder can hear from another founder is a story of failure.

Knowing that you’re not the only one making mistakes, having hard times, and feeling the struggle of business growth is therapy for the CEO mind.

But better than that is knowing that it’s normal to feel this way…and STILL have an obsession.

But this didn’t, ever at all, become a reason for Estée to give up.

She could embrace the suck. And still move forward.

5. Get Your Hands Dirty

You’ve heard, “whoever gets closest to the customer wins.”

Estée is the example of this.

She wasn’t hoping that people would like her face creams and skincare products.

She was forcing people to put them on their face (see #3).

It wasn’t her above her customers.

It was her next to them. Listening to them. Learning from them.

And optimizing her business and products based on what they said.

6. Stop Thinking It’s Too Late

We romanticize the entrepreneur that started their business at 20 and became a millionaire by 22.

That’s a beautiful story.

And it gets shared so much that it makes us think it’s the norm (and that we’re doing a terrible job at running our businesses and our lives).

Estée points out the advantage of starting later.

She was 39 when she started her company.

She didn’t have the temptations and distractions of the average 20 year old to get her off track or tip her toward making the wrong decisions.

She had a strong, intelligent head on her shoulders that could only come from an extra 2 decades of wisdom.

And that was an advantage.

7. Your Failures Are Your Best Teachers

It feels like default mode to reach a point of failure and assume it’s because of a fauly mechanism (that faulty mechanism = your brain).

You think your mind is wired wrong, the “universe” doesn’t support you, and that your destiny is that it’s going to be hard and only hard.

But that’s the lazy way of thinking.

It’s lazy because it’s the easy way path.

It’s easier to think “something out of my control is making me fail and there’s nothing I can do about it,” than to think “damn it I failed again and need to get up and try something else.”

If Estée was your business coach, here’s what she’d say to you:

Instead of thinking of failures as a bad thing, you can think about them as what they actually are.

A new way of thinking and approaching business.

Once you solve a problem or realize that a solution you didn’t realize existed can help you - you’re not the same entrepreneur you were.

It’s like your tool kit expanded and you now have a new “style” of building.

Failures are good. And normal.

8. No Doesn't Mean No. It Means "Not Yet"

When Saks 5th Avenue said no, Estée didn't pack up and go home.

Her response?

Kris Jenner has a similar ethos: if someone says no you’re asking the wrong person.

Founders are rejection machines.

They learn how to stop letting rejection sting and create inspiration instead.

Rejection is a creativity stimulant.

It doesn’t mean no.

It means find another way.

9. Say No To The Good So You Can Say Yes To The Great

You’ve heard this before.

And that’s because successful founders passed down their hard earned knowledge.

But Estée is the first founder I’ve heard call out why you want to say yes all the time.

Your inner psychology is actually running the show.

All the time.

Charlie Munger reminds us that incentives run the world.

And that applies just as much to you as others.

If your incentives are to please everyone around you so you can be liked - you’ll become a “yes” machine that’s busy…but not productive.

This is why every founder needs to question their thinking.

Questioning your thinking means that you’re not taking blind advice from other founders and hoping for the same results (ahem - Paul Graham’s Founder Mode essay).

It means that you’re looking at what worked for others and putting it in the context of your situation.

And then deciding which way to move forward.

Add AI into this conversation and you’ve now tapped into:

• The world’s knowledge to help you bypass your psychological biases (like the invisible incentives running the show)

• Every single piece of technical advice that can show you solutions you’d normally have to pay a consultant $5,000+ to give you

• The thinking models that turn mountains into molehills and help you say “I hadn’t thought about it that way” on repeat

It’s hard to picture what this could look like.

So you can see 3 examples for free.