#427 How Raymond Plank Built a $50 Billion Oil Company

**David Senra** (0:00)
The capacity of the human mind for learning and personal growth greatly exceeds that which I would have deemed plausible in my early years.
The purpose of this memoir is to open the window of my life in the hope that readers may find parts useful in achieving a fuller measure of their own capacities, to attain worthy goals on behalf of self and others, in the certain belief that happiness and understanding uplift the human spirit, contributing to the base for a full and happy life. I look back through the years of my life from the vantage point of now being in my 90th year.
I look back in order to see forward. Hindsight inform me of several primary individual lifetime learnings, which might be useful to others, especially those who desire to expand the remarkable individual capacities granted us when we seek beyond self the greater common good.
My values have been influenced by a few cornerstones. First, at perhaps the age of 10, when I was on a walk with my dad, he dropped my hand, put his arm around my shoulder, and noted, son, over my life, I've found it very useful to try to make a very small difference on behalf of others.
He concluded with, mother will be calling us to dinner, time to get back. We never again discuss the topic, still fresh and off recurring in my mind now, nearly 80 years later.
The second cornerstone was that of this postcard that my mother had written just prior to her death at age 47 when I was just 15 years old. She wrote, my son, the 15 years of my life which you have shared have been such glorious once. How I have loved them. You are so fine and unselfish. You have given me such love and consideration. I have known no joy which could equal that of your companionship. My pride in you will go on through the years if you keep your head up and your courage and faith high. Mother died of a blood clot to the brain following a routine appendectomy only hours before I was to drive my father to the hospital and bring her home. She wrote that postcard a few days before she died.
With the clarity of hindsight, I see that these cornerstones had much to do with the career path that I pursued. I chose to be self-employed rather than working for a large company. I wanted a smaller, riskier initiative. Apache Corporation had a very modest beginning. Founded with just $250,000 in 1954 By mid-2008, that $250,000 had become $50 billion.
Teddy Roosevelt once opined, It is better to have lived one hour of glorious strife than never to have lived at all. You be the judge, let the tale begin. So that was from the introduction from the book I want to talk about today, which is A Small Difference, and it was written by Raymond Plank. So this is a very unusual book. First of all, it reads like a diary, and I'll get to that in one second. The fact that this guy kept a daily diary for 60 years.
What I want to do, what's so fascinating about this is, originally I was going to tell the story of Apache Corporation, but when I was going through all my notes and highlights the past few days, I was like, you know what's actually interesting is the fact that he's 90 years old. He has seven decades of entrepreneur experience in this book. And what I found most interesting is not the company history of the company he founded, but essentially he has like all these ideas and maxims and basically sayings and beliefs that he's accumulated. And essentially just extols his philosophy, almost like you're reading a diary in this book. And so he goes into this natural entrepreneurial bent that he had when he was a child. He's growing up on a farm. He says farm life and responsibilities were the outcropping of a strong work ethic. Life was structured and privileges were earned rather than assumed. And so one of the first businesses he had was selling eggs. Selling eggs gave me some early marketing and sales experience. How fortunate I was to grow up in the country and comprehend self-sufficiency and innovation as building blocks towards independence.
So I think he's like 10 or 12 when he starts that egg-selling business. He says by high school, I was sawing down trees with a physical saw. There's no power saws back then. Stacking, selling and storing firewood. And then as he's sawing down trees, he sees another adjacent opportunity where he's like, oh, some of these trees produce sap. We should actually extract the sap from the trees, boil them down and then make gallons of syrup and then sell that as well. And so by the time he's in high school, he's got this thriving syrup business and he's raising chickens and selling eggs. And so he's selling this to local grocery stores and to the meat markets around Minneapolis where he lives. Then he talks a lot about the relationship with his father, which he talked about in the introduction. He says that was grounded in dad's values of integrity, a strong work ethic, and the desire to be successful. My father praised and was very enthusiastic over my entrepreneurial endeavors. There's also a financial conservatism that runs throughout this entire book. And part of that has to do with the fact that he saw his dad lose most of his net worth in the Great Depression. My family did not escape the Great Depression. I recall dad coming home from the office one night and announcing that his net worth had been wiped out. Yet we had food, much of that we raised ourselves, clothing and a mortgage-free home. He was fortunate to have credit and credibility as an honest and able businessman, and he was scrupulous about paying his bills. And so it is during the Great Depression that his mother dies. One never forgets the death of a parent. Mother had gone to the hospital for a routine procedure. I was to drive dad to the hospital the Saturday morning when we could pick her up and return home. At 3 a.m., I was awakened by the phone. May I speak to Mr. Plank? This is Northwestern Hospital calling. I called dad, who was asleep in the master bedroom above me. As he hastened to the phone, I heard him scream, Oh no, mother was dead at 47 from a blood clot. For six months, I was unable to write in my diary. I questioned why God would let this happen. There's actually an interesting historical parallel here. So Teddy Roosevelt's wife and mother died on the same day. And he also had this habit, this daily habit of writing in a diary. And the night that his mother and wife die in his diary, Teddy Roosevelt draws a big X and he writes, the light has gone out of my life. Before we get back into this, I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world. And one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking and questioning your cost. Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that. And they do this by using first principles thinking. The median company running on ramp cuts their expenses by 5%.