#366 Mr. Beast Leaked Memo

A few months ago, I got to spend seven hours over two days with John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods. And it was during one of our conversations that John Mackey told me one of the craziest things that anyone has ever said about the podcast. By the time we had met, he'd already listened to over a 100 episodes. And he said that if founders had existed when he was younger, Whole Foods would still be an independent company. That since the podcast and all of history's greatest entrepreneurs constantly emphasize the importance of controlling expenses, he would have put more of a priority on it, Especially during good times, it is natural for a company and for human nature to not watch their costs as closely because everything else is going so well. The importance of that idea was noticed over a hundred and fifty years ago by Andrew Carnegie. He would go around repeating this mantra. He would say profits and prices were cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces of the marketplace. Costs, however, could be strictly controlled, and any savings achieved in costs were permanent. This is something I was talking about with my friend Eric, who's the cofounder and CEO of Ramp. Ramp is now a partner of this podcast. I've gotten to know all the cofounders of Ramp and have spent a ton of time with them over the last year or two. They all listen to the podcast, and they picked up on the fact that the main theme from the podcast is on the importance of watching your costs and controlling your spend, and how doing so gives you a massive competitive advantage. That is a main theme for Ramp. The reason Ramp exists is to give you everything you need to control your spend. Ramp gives you everything you need to control your costs. Ramp gives you easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting, and cost control. Those two words, cost control. There's a line in Andrew Carnegie's biography that says, cost control became nearly an obsession. Carnegie is not alone with that obsession. In fact, one one other thing that John Mackey told me was which was really surprising. He talked about the role that Walmart played in Whole Foods success. That potential competitors to Whole Foods tried to compete first with Walmart, and they found that it was impossible to do so. Here's what Sam Walton said in his autobiography. Our money was made by controlling expenses. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation, or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient. Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. Ramp is everything you need to control spend and optimize your financial operations all on a single platform. Ramp's website is incredible. I hope you go check it out. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by …