#379 Jerry Jones (Dallas Cowboys)

**David Senra** (0:00)
The year before Jerry Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys, the team lost $9 million. And just a few years later, the Cowboys were making over $30 million 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 Ingbar Kamperad, who's the founder of IKEA, starts IKEA when he's 17, works on it until he dies at 91 years old. And Ingbar 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, Ingbar 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 Ingbar spoke about that sounds a lot like the way Sam Walton talked about his cost control and his manic frenzy for cost control and his autobiography. This is what Sam Walton wrote. He said, I'm asked today, when Walmart has been so successful, when we're a $50 billion 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 $1, 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 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 who is committed to being great at building their business is obsessed with watching their cost. Ingbar 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, Ingbar Camprad, 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 founders are running their companies on Ramp. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com. One more tool I want to tell you about is Vesto. A lot of my friends are using Vesto to see all of their company's accounts in one view. Vesto helps you connect and control all of your business bank accounts from one dashboard. I know the founder of Vesto, Ben, spent a bunch of time together and I've tried to help him by introducing him to some of my friends that I feel could benefit from using Vesto. So I called one of my friends and he said, David, I will meet anybody you ask me to meet, but I have to tell you, we say no to over 90% of the software that we are pitched. And yet a week later, I hear back from my friend, he says, Ben and Vesto are great and that they signed up. So I asked my friend to ask his team to explain in their own words, the benefit that they get from Vesto. And I'm gonna read you this text message exchange that we had. And so this is the response to that question. Can you please ask your team to explain the benefit they get from Vesto in their own words? Says, it provides us the ability to view all of our bank 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 all be in different tabs. If you have multiple accounts and multiple businesses, make sure you go to vesto.com. That's Vesto with a V. 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 enjoy this episode. Jerry Jones lived a wildlife. And his book is full of unbelievable stories of deals and risk that Jerry took during his career. My daughter went to Stanford. I couldn't stand it. She was so far from Arkansas. So I think of reasons to make trips out there, to try to come up with a little business or something. I'd go out there with her, and I got an old office downtown Palo Alto. And I said, you know, I need to get some things going out here if I'm going to spend this kind of time. So I went over to Brentwood, about 20 or 30 miles from San Francisco, and I bought 25 lots, like I was going to build 25 houses.