#385 Michael Dell

There's a book that Ken Griffin recommends reading. It's called Hardball, and the subtitle of that book is, are you playing to play or are you playing to win? It is a book about extreme winners and some of the best operators in business. There is a line in that book that sounds like it could have been written by any of the almost 400 founders that you and I have studied on the podcast so far. And the line says, if you have not examined your cost in detail, it is very likely that there exists lurking somewhere in your cost structure a major opportunity to improve your profits, weaken your competitors, and expand your influence. The first move is to drive down your costs faster than your competitors can and use that cost savings to upset their strategy. That sounds like the author was describing Dell. As you will hear me mention, in his autobiography, Michael Dell says that one of the ways he was able to outcompete his better funded competitor, Compact, was with a structural cost advantage. Compaq's operating costs were 36% of their revenue compared to Dell's 18% of their revenue. Forty years later, Dell is thriving, and compact no longer exists. There is something that history's greatest founders have in common. They know their business from a to z and their cost down to the penny. Ramp makes doing this effortless. Ramp gives your business easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting, and cost control all on a single platform. Ramp's corporate cards are fully programmable. That means you can set limits so the spending of your team never gets out of hand. Most companies only find out about excessive spending after the fact. With Ramp, you can stop it before it happens. Matt Paulson, who listens to founders and is the founder of MarketBeat, recently switched to Ramp, and this is what he said about it. Ramp is the best. The amount of money that you will save from unwanted renewals and employees who think company credit card equals buy whatever you want will far exceed the best credit card rewards program. Matt is talking about the importance of cost control. There's a line in Andrew Carnegie's biography that says cost control became nearly an obsession. Ramp helps you make it an obsession. If Andrew Carnegie was alive today, he'd be running his business on ramp. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com, and you will see why many of the world's top founders today are running their company on ramp. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com. One other thing that you will hear me mention this episode is that all of history's greatest founders studied history's greatest founders. And one way to help you do this is by subscribing to founders notes. For seven years, I've been adding all of my notes and highlights about history's …