#378 The Last Oil Baron: Leon Hess

**David Senra** (0:00)
Leon Hess could recite the margins of every gasoline station on the East Coast. John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, could do the same for every Whole Foods store. I actually spent a few days with John Mackey, and he told me one of the craziest things that anyone has ever said about the podcast. He had listened to over 100 episodes before we met, and he told me that if Founders 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, during boom times. It's very natural for a company and for human nature to just not watch our costs as closely because everything is going so well. This is something that History's Greatest Founders would warn a guest. In fact, Andrew Carnegie would repeat this mantra time and time again. 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 cost were permanent. This is something that I was talking about with my friend Eric, who's the co-founder and CEO of Ramp. Ramp is now the presenting sponsor of this podcast. I've gotten to know all the co-founders of Ramp. I've 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, and how doing so can give you a massive competitive advantage. That is a main theme for Ramp. The reason that Ramp exists is to give you everything you need to control your spend. Ramp gives you everything you need to control your cost. Ramp gives you easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting and cost control. Cost control is a very important line in Andrew Carnegie's biography, where it says cost control became nearly an obsession. Ramp helps you do the same. Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. Ramp is everything you need to control your spend and optimize all of your financial operations on a single platform. Ramp's website is incredible. 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. One more tool that I want to tell you about is Vesto. A lot of my friends are using Vesto to see all of their company accounts in one view. Vesto helps you connect and control all of your business bank accounts from one dashboard. I know the founder, Ben, we spent a bunch of time together and I've offered to help him by introducing him to some of my friends that I feel could benefit from Vesto. I call one of my friends and he told me, David, I will meet with anyone that you want me to, but I have to tell you that we say no to over 90% of the software that we are pitched, and yet a week later, I hear back from my friend and he says, Ben and Vesto are great and that they signed up. So I ask my friend, I go, can you ask your team to explain the benefit they get from Vesto in their own words? So I'm going to read you this text message exchange. This is the response back. This is his team explaining the benefit they get from Vesto in their own words. It provides us the ability to view all of our bank accounts and loan accounts on one platform with a single sign on. It makes it much easier to grant access to users in one place as opposed to 20 different banks. I text back, what did they do before Vesto? We have 20 plus different bank logins across like five accountants. We literally use 21 banks, so every bank has an account and a loan that multiple people need access and views to just to log in and see everything would take hours and be in different tabs. So if you have multiple accounts and multiple businesses, go to Vesto and schedule a demo with the founder Ben, tell him David sent you, that is Vesto with a V, so vesto.com.
The link will also be down in the show notes. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Leon Hess was a remarkable person who led a remarkable life. The book that I want to talk to you about today is called Hess, The Last Oil Baron and is written by Tina Davis and Jessica Resnick-Ault. I actually want to start at the very end of the book. At the end of the book, the two authors actually talk about why they decided they spent so much time studying the life of Leon Hess and why they thought writing the book was really important. They said, We think this extraordinary man lived an extraordinary life. The reason we call Hess the last oil baron is that we believe him to be the last of his kind. The last man who could create a multi-billion dollar, multi-national, vertically integrated energy behemoth that could do everything from finding oil in far-flung fields off the coast of Indonesia to selling you a tank of gas and a pack of gum at the local station on the corner.