#379 Jerry Jones (Dallas Cowboys)

The year before Jerry Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys, the team lost $9,000,000. And just a few years later, the Cowboys were making over 30,000,000 in profit per year. In fact, in the middle of this turnaround, the book describes Jerry Jones as a ruthless cost cutter. A few weeks ago, I was telling you about Ingvar Kamprad, who's the founder of IKEA. Starts IKEA when he's 17, works on it until he dies at 91 years old. And Ingvar wrote a document, which they call the IKEA company bible. It's actually called, the name of the document. It's the testament of a furniture dealer. I loved it so much. I actually had it printed and bound and, put it on my desk. But in that document, Ingvar repeated something that was very fascinating. He said for six decades, that cost awareness was IKEA's anthem, and he said that his dedication to that idea was total. The way that Ingvar spoke about that sounds a lot like the way Sam Walton talked about his cost control and his manic frenzy for cost control in his autobiography. This is what Sam Walton wrote. Said, I'm asked today when Walmart has been so successful, when we're a $50,000,000,000 plus company. Why should we say so cheap? That's simple. Because we believe in the value of a dollar. We exist to provide value to our customers, 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 pockets of our customers. Every time we save them a dollar, that puts us one more step ahead of the competition, which is where we always plan to be. He continues, control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find a 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 who is committed to being great at building their business is obsessed with watching their cost. Ingvar says in his book that we push cost awareness at all levels with almost manic frenzy. The reason that Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast is because Ramp gives you everything you need to make cost control an obsession, just like it was for Jerry Jones, Ingvar Kamprad, Sam Walton, and hundreds of other of History's Greatest founders that you and I study in this podcast. Ramp gives you easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, expenses that submit themselves, bills that get processed in seconds, procurement that runs without delays, and business accounts that earn more. Ramp gives you everything you need to control your spend and optimize all of your financial operations on a single platform. Take the time and set up a demo to see the product, and you will see why many of the world's top …