There's a book that Ken Griffin recommends reading.
It's called Hardball and the subtitle of that book is Are You Playing To Play or Are You Playing To Win?
It is a book about extreme winners and some of the best operators in business.
There is a line in that book that sounds
like it could have been written by any of the almost 400 founders that you and I have studied on the podcast so far.
And the line says, if you have not examined your costs in detail,
it is very likely that there exists lurking somewhere in your cost structure,
a major opportunity to improve your profits, weaken your competitors and expand your influence.
The first move is to drive down your costs faster than your competitors can and use that cost savings to upset their strategy.
That sounds like the author was describing Dell, as you will hear me mention.
In his autobiography,
Michael Dell says that one of the ways he was able to out-compete his better funded competitor,
Compact, was with a structural cost advantage.
Compact's operating costs were 36% of their revenue compared to Dell's 18% of their revenue.
40 years later, Dell is thriving and Compact no longer exists.
There is something that history's greatest founders have in common.
They know their business from A to Z and their costs down to the penny.
Ramp makes doing this effortless.
Ramp gives your business easy to use corporate cards for your entire team,
automated expense reporting and cost control all on a single platform.