#393 The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers

**David Senra** (0:00)
The Michelin brothers have to be one of the best co-founder teams that I've ever read about. So one brother made the product, and the other brother sold the product. And they did their respective jobs better than anybody else in the world. André Michelin may be the greatest marketer of all time. And his brother, Édouard, is one of the greatest industrialists of all time. In fact, Édouard would give the following speech to his employees constantly. It says, Little streams make big rivers. A single minute lost each hour adds up to eight in a day.
2400 minutes in a year. That's 40 hours per worker. If our factory employs 20,000 workers and each loses that minute per hour, that is the equivalent of 333 years of work lost. The best founders in history were all looking for ways to save both time and money. The Michelin brothers were no different. In fact, there's a line in one of their biographies that says, saving both time and money was one of the principal concerns of the chiefs. That is how I know that if they were alive today, they'd be running Michelin on RAMP. RAMP is the presenting sponsor of this podcast, and RAMP is a guaranteed time and money saver. RAMP gives your business easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting, and cost control. Michelin was one of the fastest growing and most innovative companies in the world in their day. Many of the fastest growing and most innovative companies in the world today are running their business on RAMP. Why?
Because one of the reasons is because RAMP has the most talented technical team in their industry. Becoming an engineer at RAMP is nearly impossible. In the last 12 months, RAMP has hired only 0.23% of the people that applied. That means when you use RAMP, you now have top tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers working on your behalf 24-7 to automate and improve all of your business' financial operations. And as you're about to hear, the Michelin brothers would have loved that. RAMP has built a team of A-plus players that would make Steve Jobs proud. And what kind of product can a team of A-plus players build? A product that creates so much value for their customers that the customers never leave. RAMP is an example of that. Last year, 12,059 businesses signed up for RAMP, and only 8 of the 12,059 businesses decided RAMP wasn't for them. I run my business on RAMP, and so do most of the other top founders and CEOs I know. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com. There's another tool in technology I want to tell you about, and RAMP actually uses this tool. It is Vanta. I just told you that RAMP has the best technical talent in their industry, and how becoming an engineer at RAMP is nearly impossible. Knowing that the team at RAMP trusts Vanta was a huge positive signal for me. And when I talked to Vanta's founder, Christina, it became obvious why RAMP uses Vanta. Vanta helps your company prove you are secure, so more customers will use your product or service. You can think of it like an intelligent security assistant that helps your company pass audits without tons of manual work. This is important because number one, customers need to trust you. If your company handles sensitive data, customers want to know that it's safe. The certifications that Vanta helps you get it prove that you take security seriously. Number two, Vanta helps you win deals and close contracts. You will lose deals without it. Many big companies won't sign contracts unless you are certified. No certification equals lost sales. This is why the average Vanta customer reports a 526% return on investment after becoming a Vanta customer. Number three, manual compliance is slow and painful. Doing everything by hand takes months. The Michelin brothers would not tolerate wasting valuable company time, doing something with labor when technology can help you automate it. And number four, you stay secure over time. Vanta keeps checking your systems constantly so you don't fall behind or forget anything important. Your intelligent security assistant works around the clock. Vanta will help you win trust, close deals, and stay secure faster and with less effort. Go to vanta.com to learn more. That is Vanta with a V, vanta.com to learn more. And if you tell them that David from Founders sent you, they'll give you a thousand dollars off. That is vanta.com.
So I spent the last two weeks reading two biographies on the Michelin brothers and both books centered around how they took over a bankrupt and a decrepit factory and then turned it into one of the leading tire manufacturers in the world. In fact, a place that the company still holds more than a hundred years later. So the two books I read were Michelin, A Century of Secrets, which details how the two brothers kept their entire operations shrouded in secrecy while simultaneously going to extreme lengths to make their company and its products known to the world. And the second book was The Michelin Men Driving an Empire. So the first book was actually translated from French by my friend Cameron Priest, who also helped me with last week's book on Michael Ferreira. Cameron and I have been texting all week about the just insane stories there in these books. So, most of what I want to talk to you about is the genius that the older brother, André, applied to marketing and advertising. But there are a lot of things, there's just a lot of things in this story I think will blow your mind, at least they blew my mind. And even more amazing is what André was doing in marketing and advertising. Before there was any kind of playbook to learn from, he starts coming up with great ideas in the late 1800s for God's sake. Before I get there, I need to give you, there's a few things you should know, like some prehistory and some background, before we get into how André came up with all these great ideas, essentially to market what would seem like a commodity product. It's a tire. There are other people making tires. So the prehistory that's important was the fact that the brothers were asked to take over a failing family business. So the two brothers, André is the older one and Édouard is the younger one. They will eventually turn this failing factory into Michelin. It was not that at the time. And so, André, when this happens, he's in his early thirties, Édouard is in his late twenties. André was trained as an engineer and he was the obvious choice to run a factory manufacturing new products, right? But he wanted to live in Paris and not the remote and isolated part of France where the factory is located. So in a reversal of roles, he convinces his younger brother, who is an art student, to run the factory instead. And so I was thinking about this while I was reading both books.