#370 The Founder of IKEA: Ingvar Kamprad

Ingvar Kamprad founded Ikea when he was 17 years old and worked on it until he died at 91 years old. He wrote what they called the Ikea company Bible. It's a document it's called the testament of a furniture dealer. I actually love the message inside so much that I had the document printed and bound, and it is now sitting on my desk and in that document and something Ingvar repeated for more than six decades was that cost awareness was to be Ikea's Anthem. Ingvar's dedication to that idea was total. And the way that Ingvar spoke about this, it sounded and reminded me a lot of what Sam Walton would say about the importance of cost control in his autobiography. There's multiple different quotes from his autobiography where Sam talks about this. This is one of my favorite. He says, I'm asked why today when Walmart has been so successful, when we're already a $50,000,000,000 plus company, should we stay so cheap? That's simple because we believe in the value of the dollar. We exist to provide value to our customers. This is something Ingvar repeats over and over again, which means that in addition to quality and service, we have to save them money. Every time Walmart spends $1 foolishly, it comes right out of the customer's pocket. Every time we save them a dollar, that puts us one step ahead of the competition, which is where we always plan to be. Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage. For twenty five years running, long before Walmart was known as the nation's largest retailer, we ranked number one in our industry for the lowest ratio of expenses to sales. Anyone and everyone who is committed to being great at building their business is obsessed with watching their costs. Ingvar says this in the book. He says that we pushed cost awareness at all levels with almost manic frenzy. There's a line in Andrew Carnegie's biography that describes what he said, cost control became nearly an obsession. Sam Walton, Andrew Carnegie, Ingvar. I talk about Henry Ford in this episode. They all built two of the world's largest fortunes and what they all had in common, just like Elon Musk, who you and I talked about last week and countless of other history's greatest founders, for them, cost control was an obsession. This is something I talk about all the time 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 has spent a bunch of time with them over the last year or two. They all listen to the podcast, and they've all picked up on the fact that the main theme from the podcast is on the importance of watching your costs and controlling your spend. In fact, Eric just sent me a text from …