#370 The Founder of IKEA: Ingvar Kamprad

**David Senra** (0:00)
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 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 billion 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 25 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 cost. 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 him. It said cost control became nearly an obsession. Sam Walton, Andrew Carnegie, Ingvar, I talk about Henry Ford in this episode. They all built some 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 is the co-founder and CEO of Ramp. Ramp is now a partner of this podcast. I've gotten to know all the co-founders of Ramp and have spent a bunch of time with them over the last year or two. They all listen to the podcast and they 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 this biography of a founder that he's reading, and in it, one of his employees is talking about the fact that you get a handwritten note asking things such as, why is this expense higher than last month, and what steps are you going to take to change it? And he didn't forget it the next month either. He would notice, he was sharp, he knew exactly what every dollar went for. And that founder, just like Ingvar Kamprad, Sam Walton, Elon Musk, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, the reason they did this is because they knew that watching your costs and controlling your spend gives you a massive competitive advantage. And that is the reason that Ramp exists. Ramp exists to give you everything you need to control your spend. Ramp exists to give you everything you need to make cost control an obsession. I think Ramp's website is incredible. It will make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business control costs. That is ramp.com.
Imagine one of the coldest little countries in the world. Think of the most barren part of that country. See in front of you, a godforsaken place deep in the forest. This book is about a man who grew up in this harsh environment, which was to mark his whole life and fundamentally color the philosophy with which he built his vast empire consisting of thousands of employees and millions of customers all over the world. The country is Sweden. The man is Ingvar Kamprad, furniture dealer. He aims to give his business eternal life. It's a long way to the country where an empire was built. Where he was born, loneliness, silence, and reserve prevail. The cottages have always been small. Survival has never been taken for granted. It was here that the dream of Ikea first grew. This is where the rough outline of the whole concept began to be written by a dyslexic boy on a farm. Two empty hands, the myth says. He built an empire from nothing. But what are two empty hands? And what is really meant by nothing? Do love and encouragement, innate energy, desire for revenge, imagination, and curiosity all count for nothing? What about the vanity of one day showing your father and your mother and the whole world what you could do?