David (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 Ingvar Kamprad, who's the founder of Ikea, starts ikea when he's 17, works on it until he dies at 91 years old. And Ingvar 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, Ingvar 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 Ingvar spoke about that sounds a lot like the way Sam Walton talked about his cost control and his manic frenzy for cost control. In his autobiography, this is what Sam Walton wrote 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 a dollar, 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 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. Ingvar 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, Ingvar Kamprad, Sam Walton, and hundreds of other of history's greatest founders at UNI study on 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 going to 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 Besto 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 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 wild life and and this 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'd 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, except I drilled four gas wells. And those four gas wells in 18 months paid me enough money for me to buy the Dallas Cowboys. Paying attention to my kids actually led me to getting involved into the passion of. Of my life. And all along, what I was trying to do was hang out near my daughter. A lot of things happen that you didn't have planned or you don't have the strategy for. Now, I'm not saying I've done anything right, but I made up my mind a long time ago that I was going to work with my kids. They're involved in everything. They're involved in my leasing, oil and gas, real estate. And so when I got the Cowboys, I. I got it so that we could all work together. I thought I was doing it for them, but the one that got the most out of it was me. You're going to be sitting here in a hospital sometime in the future, laying here sometime in the future, and this room is going to be full of your business associates and the people you worked with all your life. And more than likely, your children and your family are going to be there because they're your children and your family. But you could have them there because they're the people that you spent your life with, the ones you worked with, the ones you fell down with, the ones you got up with, not just seeing them on Thanksgiving and Christmas. That's who you want to be with. So when that time comes, it's a celebration of your life, and you're not wishing you spent a little more time seeing a few more suns come up. That's the trip. That's the trip. Because that's going to be your glory. I'm pretty proud of them Cowboys. I'm pretty proud of the stuff that we've done in oil and gas. It pales in comparison to how proud I am to have lived my life working with my kids. You've got a chance to do something about that. I hope you will. That was not an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today. That was actually Jerry Jones on this show called Landman Landman. Is about the Texas oil and gas industry. And I thought that clip was so moving it piqued my interest to learn more about the life of Jerry Jones. He's obviously a well known figure and I assumed that there was going to be, you know, a bunch of biographies or maybe even an autobiography written by him. Turns out there's not many books on him at all. This able to find one that was published all the way back in 95. So that's the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is King of the Cowboys the Life and Times of Jerry Jones and it was written by Jim Dent. Before I jump into the book, I did some other research and I pulled out a few quotes and stories from his life that aren't in the book that I want to start with. It gives you kind of an overview of some of the things I think are important to learn about him. 1 I just absolutely love this. It says Jerry Jones doesn't like to waste time. On the rare occasion he hits the golf course, he's been known to close a business deal by the first hole, shake hands and then walk off saying why would I play another four hours when the deal was done? Tales abound of 4am Phone calls from Jones, leaving those on the other end unsure if he's just waking up or he hasn't slept yet. That is a reoccurring theme throughout the entire book. That the fact that he pushes himself. He's one of the most driven people ever meet and he has the ability to survive and thrive on very, very limited sleep. So in this case he's not waking up at 4am he hasn't gone to bed yet. Such restless energy and single minded drive had defined, has defined Jerry Jones for decades. You talk about the fact that he's this collection, his Persona is part high stakes entrepreneur which is really the amount of risk this guy takes is just absolutely incredible. We'll talk a lot about that today. Part high stakes entrepreneur, part football evangelist and part showman. He's definitely got like a P.T. barnum shown showmanship, very gifted storyteller, raconteur to him. Something I want to talk to you a lot about is the fact that his family, his parents involved him in the family business at from a very young age. Even when that family business started, you know, from a very humble beginning. He says my parents were entrepreneurs. If you just worked hard enough then you had real opportunity. That was instilled in me at a very early age. The his father is going to be the most influential person in his life. His mom describes Jerry and his father later on in the book as twins. And so he says, he credits his father with teaching him to not only embrace work, but to never resent it. One formative anecdote stands out in Jones's memory. After a bruising high school football loss, he came home demoralized and went straight to bed. Pat Jones found his son and delivered. Found his son in bed and delivered a stern bit of advice. Son, if you lie in this bed, you're going to be a loser for the rest of your life. Now get up, and if the team asks you to be the water boy, then drown them with the damn water. Jerry Jones got out of bed and never forgot that lesson. And then just one more quote that I want to read to you before we jump into the book again, I think is really important, and he does think this is in his blood. Direct quote from Jerry Jones here. He says, by instinct, we Joneses, we're risk takers. To win big, you have to play the big hand. So I want to start talking about his intense drive throughout the book. Jerry has phenomenal relationships, and he winds up building relationships and friendships and partnerships with some of the most successful entrepreneurs of his day. And one of them is his longtime friend named Don Tyson. So Don Tyson had the nickname of as the Chicken King, which I thought was humorous. It says, Tyson is one of America's wealthiest men, having built his chicken empire from scratch more than 40 years ago in Springdale, Arkansas. Actually, he scales his. He passed away a few years ago, but he winds up scaling the chicken business to over 10 billion a year in revenue. And this is what he said about his friend Jerry Jones. Tyson talks about Jones. He says, this is one of the most driven men you will ever meet. Here is the guy who, by God, made it by himself. He planted his own crop and he harvested the damn thing. And so, in addition to his drive, which is repeated over and over again through all these stories and anecdotes by the people that worked with him and knew Jerry for a long time. It's peppered throughout the entire book is the fact that he's something that's repeated over and over again is the fact that Jerry has this wildcatter mentality he is full risk on. In fact, there's another great quote that I found when I was researching him that he says, the only way to break out is to gamble. And I think this is a great description of them. It says Jones still operates on the oil patch mentality that he picked up during his early business years. Roll the dice until your knuckles bleed. Never ever do what traditionalists would do. Wait till he buys the cowboys. There's like so much low hanging fruit and it was actually shocking. One of the most surprising things I learned from reading this book is just how unsure the investment Jerry Jones investment in the cowboys was at the time he made it. Now it's, you know, worth probably somewhere between 8 to 10 billion dollars is the rumor. If he tried to sell the cowboys, how much did he go for? So it says, roll the dice until your knuckles bleed. Never ever do with the traditionals do. Jones is determined to succeed on his own terms in his own way. And one of the most important, or maybe the most not, not even one of the most influential person that taught Jones to take risks, to be bold and to, you know, blaze his own path and basically do what he wants to do in life is his father, Pat Jones. Obviously this is a great example of this maxim that you and I talk about over and over again. It's almost every single book that the story of the father is embedded in the son. And I'm going to go to the childhood of Pat Jones and Jerry Jones. But I want to talk about towards the end of the when it was interesting. There's a, there's a story in the book where Jerry is worried his father's in poor health. They were worried that he was about to die. And there's this story where this is what Jerry's like. Devastated. So it says. As Pat Jones clung to life, Jerry Jones leaned over to his father and whispered in his ear, fight. Try hard. Don't give up. We all love you so much. Tears in his eyes, he hugged the man that he calls the most influential man in his life. And so as a way for you and I to try to understand the son, we obviously want to study the story of his father. So he is raised in this tiny town in Arkansas. It actually had enjoyed the distinction of having one tavern for every six citizens. So there's a saloon on nearly every street corner. Most it's a, you know, rather poor, lower, lower class neighborhood. Primary railroad and machine shop, people that work in railroads and machine shop. The description of Jerry's dad is going to sound a lot like Jerry when he's a young man. Says Pat Jones had the energy of a locomotive. He was a born promoter. Uh, he was raised in a tiny farming community. The Jones family lived in a leaky, poorly painted shack. So his dad grew up during the Great Depression. And one of the things that helped his dad survive the Great Depression is that he was a born salesman. He says what he did best was sale sell. So even from a young age he's like walking down the streets with buckets of peas and he's like selling them, you know, hand to hand to mouth. Essentially. Jerry's dad gets married, has kids, he raises his family. So they live in this like tiny second floor apartment above what starts out as a fruit stand that his dad starts. So Pat Jones starts a fruit stand that eventually is going to evolve into a full fledged supermarket. But it says the family of four lived in a small apartment for over seven years above the fruit stand, which turns into the grocery store. Nurturing the store downstairs by working day and night. And so this idea that both Jerry and his dad have this like, showmanship, this P.T. barnum esque personality, he's like, okay, well how do I get as many people into the store as possible? He does all kinds of things. He, he. At night it turns into a dance hall. And then one of the most successful advertising and marketing promotions he did was he actually sets up a radio show inside of his grocery store in, you know, rural Arkansas. No one was doing this at the point. The reason I bring this up to you is because there's a lot of ideas that Jerry has when he takes over the Dallas Cowboys that, you know, seem obvious to us now because everybody does it, but nobody was doing it back then. One of Pat's ideas was his next promotion was nearly unheard of in 1954. A live on site radio show that mixed music with heavy endorsements for the products in the stores. I don't know why I found that funny. The guys running the radio store is this guy named Brother Hal Weber. Did his hillbilly act from the back of Pat's Supermarket and the parking lot was jammed. People would drive from the surrounding 15 counties. It's one of the damnedest things I'd ever seen. They came wondering what the heck was going on in the store. This part of his life is so important because how young Jerry is. Pat's Supermarket was young Jerry Jones first exposure to hard work and showmanship. And he took to his father's example like duck to a duck to water. I worked everything Jerry said. I learned how to do everything in the store. I was up at the crack of dawn and I'd be working until midnight. My dad was a driver, but he was also a teacher. He just somehow knew where he was going. More than 60 years after the Great Depression, Jerry Jones still feels its influence. It was that Mentality from that era that drove him my dad. When I was a kid, it was all my dad could talk about. The Depression. It scared the hell out out of the people who grew up there, especially the ones on the farms. My dad passed that fear along to me. That is why I always worked when I was a kid. My dad said, I'm going to teach you to work so that you don't mind working and it will become part of your personality when you grow up. God dog it. If I wasn't down there working at the store every day, I knew my butt was going to be in trouble. And this is what his dad says is about Jerry as his kid. I knew that Jerry had the right instincts even when he was a kid kid, he could talk to people just like he was an adult. It was a gift. Jerry heard nothing but business talk during breakfast, lunch and dinner. He understood that he wanted to make money and get ahead. Keep in mind, Jerry is seven years old. They're talking about Jerry when he was seven years old, what he's going through. In fact, I had dinner with one of the wealthiest people in the world a few nights ago. And there's two interesting things, especially if you've been analyzing the books that I've been reading the last few weeks, just how reoccurring the steam was. And the guy I was having dinner with, he's in his 70s and he was telling me his father was the one that originally started the business and it's just drastically expanded under the second and third generation. And he was telling me he's like, my dad started me and my brother working in the business when we were six. Every holiday from school was spent working in the family business. And so there's two striking things. I mean, the conversation was incredible, the dinner was incredible, but I learned a lot. But two of the most striking things was just how common. Again, like if you look at Jerry Jones this week, Leon Hess last week, the Wallenbergs, Hedy Green. Go back to older episodes like Estee Lauder, the Waltons. I even think about like Steve Jobs dad when he was five years old teaching Steve how to take apart and the fact that he. You could, you could make a tv. These aren't magical things like some you love TV and radio and electronics. Well, guess what? Humans figured out how to make that. And essentially teaching his young son that from a, from a early age. But just it's. It's remarkable to me and I need to point this out to you because it may be obvious to you, but in case it's not obvious to you? It wasn't obvious to me before I started reading all these books was just how common this is for these. You know, the amount of valuable education you're able to instill in your child about business and producing goods and services and working your ass off and, you know, trying to help other people and build wealth through doing that is so valuable. And regardless of industry, all the people I've read about, the person I was talking to, they all work in different industries, and yet their family did the exact same thing. And then the other thing that was interesting about the dinner is this encyclopedic. Another thing they do is this encyclopedic knowledge of business history that was in this guy's head. And, you know, we talked about a bunch of the books I'd covered in the past. In some cases, he knew, you know, the entrepreneur or the family or whatever the case is. And he filled in a lot of. He just knew everything. Again, I think it just speaks to the idea. It's like, what. What can we do if we're trying to build the most powerful families possible? One, we get our kids involved and we. We teach them the value of business and entrepreneurship and investing and working really hard from a young age, and then obviously get them reading and studying as much of business history as possible, because that's just this reoccurring theme. So there is another thing that his. That Jerry picks up from his dad. And his dad was extremely hard worker, just like Jerry's going to be. But his dad partied a lot. And so I'm not going to cover it, but there's entire chapters in this book about how much Jerry parties. So I'm just going to give you an anecdote from his childhood that he sees his dad doing. Early one morning, after failing to make it home the previous night, Pat Jones looked up to find his wife staring coldly into his bloodshot eyes. He happened to be in the company of two young ladies. By his mother's side was young Jerry. Jerry, I want you to take a good look at your father, Jerry. If you're wondering where your father was last night, he was right here with these. You know what's. Son, I don't want you to grow up this way. So his father was known, a known philanderer. He, in fact, later on, his dad's going to run and then sell a very successful insurance company. And there's an anecdote in the book where it says that his father would hire insurance salespeople based on how well, they could seduce women. So again, there's a lot of these stories in this book about just the hard again, this drive to work excessively hard. They also applied it to their nightlife too. Jerry Jones describes his father as the most influential man in his life. At the dinner table, Pat Jones would lecture Jerry almost every night on his business philosophy. He also instilled his taste for flamboyant risk taking and a fearless compulsion to do things his own way. There's just 20 years age difference between them. His mother points out they're as much brothers as they are father and son. They're both. This is still his mom describing both her husband and her son. They're both workaholics. They also happen to love their work. They make it their life. They're. They are just alike. They are almost like twins. So Jerry's main love in life besides work is football. He starts playing football when he's in high school, winds up playing in college. I'm going to skip over most of that because I want to talk about his early oil and gas career and then him buying the Cowboys. But I do want to pull out. There's just a couple interesting lines that I think can tell you an entire story in like a sentence or two. It's the fact that he played football. If you analyze the way he played football, the way he approached football, it's like, oh, that's how he works too. And so there's just these quotes from his, from like people on his team. And also his coaches says he played with reckless intensity. His head coach remembers that Jerry didn't have a whole lot of anything as an athlete, but when he started something, he didn't quit. The kid just worked his ass off night and day. Another coach to the next page. He was the fiercest competitor we had. So he is wheeling and dealing and selling as much anything he can while he's in school. When he gets outta school, he's gonna start working in oil and gas, which I'll get to how he, how he gets there. This was very interesting though, because I'm reading this section, this entire. It's about his personality, his salesmanship, his just intense energy. The fact that this guy just goes and goes and goes with almost no sleep. And for some reason I get to this sentence after reading, you know, this entire chapter and it made me think of Ted Turner says Jerry has always been a total extrovert. A salesman, a promoter. He always had that tremendous energy level. So back on episode 327, I did the autobiography of Ted Turner. It's one of the most fascinating autobiography autobiographies that I've ever read. But what I did is like, man, why am I having. Why does this remind me of Ted Turner so much? So what I did is I went and I asked sage, like, can you describe the personality and traits of Ted Turner? And it actually created this outline for me. And I'm like, this sounds just like Jerry Jones. This is why this was in my head. So here's some key characteristics. I'm going to read the parts. Almost this entire outline is Jerry Jones. So I'm describing Ted Turner, but really it is. Gives you an overview of who Jerry Jones is, especially when he was young in his career. Where we are at in the story right now. Key characteristics. Number one, boundless energy and intensity. Okay. Known for non stop talking and nervous energy. He cannot sit still. Needs constant movement and activity. This sounds like Jerry Jones to me. Worked incredibly long hours, often sleeping in his office. Okay. Number two, extraordinary vision and belief. Had absolute conviction in his ideas. This is again still about Ted Turner. Wait till we get to the massive bets, these risk, huge risky bets that Jerry Jones place in his life. Had absolute. And why would you do that? Because you have absolute conviction and ideas. And Ted Turner's case, particularly about the future of cable tv. Was willing to be early and made bold prediction. Had an obsessive work ethic. Live by the motto, early to bed, early to rise, Work like hell and advertise. He would consistently be the first to arrive and the last to leave. He pushed himself and his organizations relentlessly. Again, still about Ted Turner. It's the same person we're describing. The same exact personality type. Complex personal background. Deeply impacted by childhood experiences and the relationship with his father. Developed a fear of abandonment and the need for constant companionship. Struggled with personal relationships despite business success. Also at the same time, they were both charismatic leaders. They had incredibly enthusiastic and infectious personalities. They could be incredibly persuasive. One on one. Jerry Jones is one of the best salespeople you could ever read about. They were both known for thinking unconventionally and making themselves unforgettable. Strategic risk taker, willing to bet big on their convictions. Often competed against much larger companies and had more commitment and desire than their competitors. And then finally, this extreme level of self confidence to act on their beliefs. Extremely self assured, not afraid to challenge industry giants and believe strongly in their ability to succeed. It is remarkable how much of just like what I remember reading about Ted Turner like really just jumped out at me as I was Going through this biography of Jerry Jones. Now, when we move into his early life and his early career, you see this, like, relentless drive also produces this, like frantic energy. He was. He had this deep burning desire to get rich, and he wanted to get rich and go into football. And he talks about this like a decade and a half before he had the money to buy the Cowboys, but it was so overwhelming. All the different businesses that he tried and in many cases failed at before, he winds up making a ton of money in oil and gas. So it says. For more than 15 years, Jones had moved like a human meteor. Since leaving the University of Arkansas, he had helped his father turn his new business, which was a moderate sized insurance company, into a booming success. He had also invested in real estate, pizza and chicken. He winds up getting married and also having three children at the exact same time. He borrowed $50,000. This guy's going to be up to his eyeballs in debt. He borrowed $50,000 from John Ed Chambers, which was his father in law who owned a small bank in Arkansas. What did he do with the money? Jones had the chance to invest in both McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises. Instead, he decides to buy the Missouri rights to a pizza chain called Shakey's. Problem is, this pizza chain goes out of business. Now he's got a bunch of misses, but he also has a few solid early investments. One of those being in his friend don Tyson's Chicken Company. But for most of the 1960s, Jerry, a young Jerry Jones, is trying all these things and he's failing at a bunch. He says. There was so many times where I was down on one knee. One of the hardest things I would learn would be keeping my head together during those tough times. You just have to buck up and go on to the next decision. If you don't move with enthusiasm to the next deal, you lose. So he is in his mid-20s. He is vastly overextended. He was borrowing as much money as he could. And he's also buying in and trying to invest in real estate. And he's almost broke because they're almost calling in the loans. So it says. By the late 1960s, Jones Financial problems had become so complex and so intense that that his hands would shake and he would cry. The strain of all the debt he's under is overwhelming. His biggest financial Burden was a $500,000 investment he had made on some land. He planned to eventually build a Walmart on the property. So sell to Sam Walton. It sounds like this, okay. Friends advised Jones to sell off the land. So he pays $500,000 for this plot of land. Jones stubbornly stuck to this investment. Thanks to an array of failed investments, banks started calling in his loans. One of the hardest things you'll ever have to do is sit across the desk from a banker who's calling in a $50,000 loan, then turn around and ask him for another $50,000. Jones says one afternoon. So he owns a bunch of land. He also owns a bunch of rental properties. Jones says one afternoon he went to visit an elderly lady who lived in one of his rental houses. She was more than three months behind on payments. When she told Jones that, that she didn't have the money to make a payment, he turned and walked away. As he drove off, he began to cry. The banker who had made the half a million dollar real estate loan learned of Jones generosity to the old lady and persuaded the bank to give Jones an extension on his payments. Now here's the crazy part. There is like a, there's like a benefit. I don't know how to describe this. So like being a little nutty or being a little crazy. Uh, I guess the way to think about this was put best by Charlie Munger where he says, never underestimate the man who overestimates himself. I'm gonna read the full quote from Charlie Munger cause I think he picked on up on something very unusual. So Charlie says, while an excess of self regard is often counterproductive in its effect on cognition, it can cause some weird successes from overconfidence that happen to cause success. Never underestimate the man who overestimates himself. And so Jones is in his 20s, you know, doesn't have a track record, record a lot of track record of success. And yet he's just so damn stubborn. It's like, I'm not selling anything, I'm going to go down fighting. Okay, so they're like, sell this piece of land, you nut job. Right? It's $500,000. What are you doing? And he's just saying no because he has this relentless drive and self belief in himself. And he winds up being right. This, this is like the whole story. I almost accidentally even stumbled upon that idea from Munger when I was rereading the highlights for this book. It's like never underestimate the man who overestimates himself. Why 30 years later, Jones still owns that piece of property which now has long been paid off. There's a Walmart that is on it, on that piece of property. And then after that they developed this New interstate highway. So this piece of land that he buys, they build a Walmart on it, makes a piece of land more valuable. Then here comes the highway. That land is now valued at $20 million. He refused to sell the $500,000 piece of land. You know, what is this? 20 years later? Did I say? Or 30 years later? 30 years later, it's now $20 million. And there's so many examples, and really that is the theme of, of this conversation, this podcast is all these things that Jones did shouldn't have worked out, but they did work out. Like even when you get to the cowboys, when you see the financial performance of the cowboys before he bought them, it was just like unbelievable that he turned this around and it turned out to what it did. So in night and he, he catches a break here. So remember, 1960s have just been absolute hell for this guy. You know, he's crying, he's up to his eyeballs in debt. He's like having meetings with banks are like, give us your money. He's like, not only I'm not going to give you your money, your money. I want you to give me more money. It's just, it's a completely crazy story. So in 1970, his father sells the insurance company the modern security life that I was telling you about that Jerry helped his dad build. As a result, from what I've read, Jerry nets about $500,000 from that sale. Then he's like, all right, I'm going to move now, my little young family to Little Rock, Arkansas, and I'm going to get into the oil business. So Jones puts out the word that he was ready to enter the oil business. A relative introduces him to this Oklahoma oil man named Bill Sparks Is again, let's go back to never underestimate the man who overestimates himself within. While an excess of self regard is often counterproductive in its effects on cognition, it can cause some weird successes from overconfidence that happens to cause success. So he's introduced, hey, I want, I'm moving my family. I'm going to get into the oil business. And he's introduced to this guy where this guy is shopping an oil deal that everybody is like, you're, you're crazy. He says no. Everybody is telling Bill Sparks no. The one person that doesn't tell him no is going to be Jerry Jones. This is insane. So Sparks wants to come out on his own. He's working for a company and he's like, listen, I think I found this essentially meandering underground river of oil. And I'm almost positive if we drill here and if we can sketch this out, we're going to find a river of oil 7,000ft below the ground. The P. And it's called the Red Fork Sand. No one believed him. The company that he was working for thought he was so crazy that they fire him. They're like, this is the stupidest idea we've ever heard. You're fired. So Bill Sparks is shopping the deal again. The funny thing about this is that this is a deal that everybody said no to. Wait till you see the financial performance of this deal. And so one of Jerry's partners in oil and gas is describing Jerry for us. Probably one of Jerry's worst traits is his inability to say no to risky ventures. He does love high risk, high return ventures. So he loved this Bill Sparks idea. Bill managed to sell the idea to Jerry when he couldn't sell to anybody else. Remember that? The same exact thing is going to happen when he buys the Cowboys. I think the owner of the Cowboys, if I remember correctly, he shopped the Cowboys to like 75 other people before he did to Jones. It's crazy. And then you talk about this, like, frantic energy that. And this did like this. He just. He's involved in so many things. So when Jerry gets pitched this idea from Bill Sparks, what is Jerry doing? And this is why I love. It was like, kind of humorous and funny to read the book because you're reading about all these, like, investing in pizza and chicken and real estate. And so now he's getting pitched the deal. And what was Jerry doing when he gets pitched deal? He was selling mobile homes. Like, what is going on here? So it says Jones and his partner, Jim Dooley were selling mobile homes when they got word of Sparks's scheme. So Jones decides. Jones and Dooley team up with Sparks and this other guy named Ran Ricks. They have the funniest names in this, the book, by the way. Ran Ricks. Wait till we get to the owner of the Cowboys name that. That Jerry buys it from. So you got Jim Dooley, Jerry Jones, Bill Sparks and Ran Ricks. Okay. And so I was trying to figure out. I was like, where the hell do you get the money from? This is why it was so important for the sale of his father's insurance company. Okay. So Jones's faith, he's like, okay, I'm gonna buy into your idea. Jones's faith in Bill Sparks paid off. The group hit their first well. The first well. So keep in mind this deal that Bill Sparks and shopped to everybody. Everybody said, this is not gonna work. His previous company said, this is stupid. We're going to fire you. The first well, the first time they drill that well is worth more than $4 million. So what does that mean? Hitting that first well meant that we could go to the bank and borrow money and keep drilling. It meant everything in the world to us. The group hit their next well and the next one and the next. In all, they hit oil in their first 15 wells that they drilled. This is what Bill Sparks said about this. Right off the bat, Jerry believed in me. Why? I don't completely know, other than the fact that he was hungry to get rich. He wanted to strike it rich. But there was another thing. All he could talk about was that he wanted to make enough money to buy a football team. After the first successful well came in, the partying began. So this is what I mean about just these, like, these guys work excessively hard and party hard. So what do I mean about partying hard? You know, they're. They're starting to get rich. The first successful wall comes in. How do they celebrate? They rent out an entire hotel. So they rent every single. They're in Oklahoma City at the time. They ran out every single room in this hotel. They invite over 500 people and says they would rent out every room in the hotel and the party would go all night. Just about everybody got drunk naked and jumped in the pool. And so then Jones doesn't stop there. His excessive drive, his excessive self confidence is like, hey, I drilled oil successfully. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to drill for natural gas. So he winds up partnering with this guy named Mike McCoy. He walks into Mike McCoy's office in 1980. He was coming off one of the greatest financial and emotional highs of his life. Jones had sold one of his oil production companies in 1976 and walked away from the Red Fork sand, that deal with Bill Sparks with a profit of more than $50 million. This is another one of his partners. You see how everybody that runs into Jerry Jones, he's remarkably consistent. The way his partners and his coworkers all describe him, essentially, they're just, he doesn't change. Jerry has never met a high risk deal that he didn't like. He's a risk taker, and the riskier, the better. You have to be a gambler to play in this business. If you get disappointed over failure, you shouldn't be in this business. At the same time, if you get too high over success, you will bust yourself. The excitement in the oil and gas business is unmatched by any other business. There's a great line when you watch Landman. I think the best single line in that entire series says the. The billionaire oil founder, one of the main characters in the show says, our business is a constant state of crisis interrupted by periods of immense success. So Jones goes to Mike McCoy and he's like, okay, let's get into the, the, the gas drilling business. Let's, let's drill for natural gas. This is what Jones was referencing earlier at the very beginning where he's like, I'm going to drill for gas out in San Francisco when my daughter was at Stanford. So they're like, okay, we're going to take a shot at two wells. We're going to drill for natural gas near San Francisco and then in southeastern Oklahoma at the same time. Okay. Almost immediately the project met with disaster. This is the first one they do is Oklahoma. Almost immediately the project met with disaster when an employee made a half a million dollar mistake. After drilling the customary 8 inch diameter hole, he, he tried to pour cement into the casing to add support to the well. Instead he mistakenly dumped cement into the well itself, ruining it. Jones took the bad news in stride. Remember what their description of the oil and gas business, if you get disappointed over failure, you should not be in this business. You, you made a mistake, that's fine, you get up and you drill again. This is exactly what they did. The partners invested another $500,000. They moved the drill bit 100ft. The next day they learned they had hit a natural gas well worth over $40 million. The same time they're drilling in San Francisco. The first reports from the well near San Francisco were not good. The guy running the job for them out there called and said we had turned up nothing. Then he called back eight hours later and said, we're going to be rich. The well outside of San Francisco would produce $40 million worth of gas. Over a two year period. Jones and McCoy had made $80 million on their first two natural gas wells. The crazy stories in this book continue. This is one of the biggest, I think this might be the biggest deal he does. This next story is the biggest deal he does before he buys the Dallas Cowboys. It is also the hardest to explain and the one that he has the most controversy over. So Jerry has a friend, this guy named Sheffield Nelson. Sheffield Nelson was CEO of Arkansas Louisiana Gas Co. Which is a state regulated utility company. Before Nelson was CEO of this utility company, him and Jones had Been friends for almost a decade. They owned a bunch of businesses together. So they owned a television station, a racehorse, a farm and a condominium. And so in January 1981, Jones forms a new gas drilling company. He's going to call it Arkoma Production. Jones is then going to do a deal again with a state regulated utility which people call one of the greatest sweetheart deals of all time. The agreement that he signs with the company that his friends is co of, it allows Jones to sell gas to Arkansas Louisiana Gas Company, which is also known as arkla, at a price that was far higher than what the utility was paying others in the field. So he managed to sign an agreement with them where they would pay him $4.50 per thousand cubic feet, more than nine times what the previous producers had been receiving from the same company. And in a few years, this deal gets even wilder because in 1985, the natural gas industry was deregulated. And so the price of gas drops dramatically. Unfortunately, under the terms of their agreement, the utility company was committed. They had to buy as much gas as Jones could produce at the maximum legal price. So what does he do at this point? He goes, and him and his partner, this is the same guy, Mike McCoy, they go and they make deals with other gas producers to turn their leases over to Arkoma Production. Because Arkoma Production has a guaranteed contract where they can sell it for a higher price than if you were drilling the gas yourself. McCoy and Jones pointed out to landowners and potential leasers that they could receive a much higher return on their gas by working out deals with Arcoma instead of continuing their low paying contracts with Arkansas Louisiana themselves. And this is the end result. Arkansas Louisiana Gas Company was paying Arkoma production 40 million a year for gas that it didn't need. And so if you sign a bad deal, one way to get out of that deal is to actually buy the company, to buy out the company. So then Arkansas Louisiana Gas Company announces that it's actually buying Arkoma Production. So Arkoma Production was started from scratch in 1981. In 1987, Jones and his partner sell it for $175 million, which means if you calculate how much money they took out of the business plus the sales price, Arkoma Production had walked away with more than $300 million. Now this again goes back to never underestimate the man who overestimates himself. There's another wildcatter I think it was. I can't remember if it was Marty McCree, Monty McCreef, or maybe Sid Richardson. He said, I'd rather be. I'd rather be lucky than smart. Well, here's an example here. So they walk away with $300 million. Jones and McCoy had drilled more than 200 wells and they had come up empty on exactly one. So Jones is going to get to the end of the 80s, he's around 47 years old when he's going to buy the Dallas Cowboys. Winds up after all of all of these adventures in oil and gas, he winds up having about $90 million in cash. Now he has enough money and the opportunity to do what he's been wanting to do. So if you go back throughout the book for over 20 years, says as early as the 1960s, all throughout the time he was in the oil fields in the 1970s, Jones would tell anybody who would listen that someday he'd buy a football team. As early as 1982, he started sharing his blueprint with his old college roommate. His college roommate is Jimmy Johnson. This is a guy that when he buys the, when Jones buys the Dallas Cowboys, he fires their long term coach, Tom Landry and immediately hires Jimmy Johnson. And what he told him in 1982 is like, hey, you keep doing what you do best, which is coaching, and I'll keep doing what I do best, which is making money. And one of these days we'll do this together in the NFL. So the owner of the Cowboys at this time was this guy named Bum Bright. HR Bum Bright. I love these, these names. And he is going to be forced to sell the team. There's actually a history of the owners of the Dallas Cowboys being forced to sell the team because they had a severe cash crisis. So Bum Bright had made a bunch of money in trucking, oil, real estate and banking. He's making a ton of money in the early 80s. By 1989, his financial empire is crumbling. His bank is in utter disarray because it's suffering these catastrophic real estate losses. In fact, at the time he's selling the Dallas Cowboys, his bank is being run by federal regulators. Now Bright is motivated to sell for the same reason that force the original Cowboy owner, this guy Named Clint Murchison Jr. Who sold Bright the team in 1984, he was in a financial free for all free fall and the ground was coming up fast. Now here's really interesting thing. Essentially Murchison, or Murchison, I don't know how to pronounce his last name, essentially hand picked Bright to sell the team to. And Bright did not. He didn't love football. In fact, before he owned the team, he'd only ever gone to ever two Cowboy games in his life. And the reason he was persuaded to buy the team was he's like, oh, there's enough depreciation in the team that it can use the team as a tax write off for at the time, his booming oil business. So I need to go back to this idea that there's over and over again we see Jerry making an investment that other people, they're, they're just not sure bets at the time. And in many cases people were offered the same deal and a ton of people said no. So buying the Cowboys was not a sure bet. The difference was that unlike Bum Bright, Jerry's like obsessed with football. He's actually obsessed. And I want to read this quote from Graham Duncan about the importance of being obsessed in a second. So Jerry's gonna buy the team for $140 million. What is he buying? He's buying a football team that in 1988, the last year before he was a principal owner, lost $9 million. A team in an organization that was incapable of selling the majority of the luxury suits suites, I think like 90% over 90% of the luxury suites were unsold, were sitting empty. Attendance had dropped by almost 25% and only one home game the entire year had sold out. Bomb Bright starts shopping the team cuz he's in dire financial distress, right? He tried to sell for 180 million. He pitched 75 people before he got to Jerry Jones that said no. And so we see this immense appetite for taking risk again from Jerry Jones because what he's do, he has 90 million in cash, he empties entire bank account, then he borrows the remaining balance at steep interest rates. Financial advisors at the time warned that buying the Cowboys was, quote, ridiculously overpriced and financial suicide. Jerry Jones risk tolerance in the 1980 and 1999 kind of reminds me of, of what Elon did after he sold PayPal when he cleared I think 180 million after taxes when they sold PayPal and he put a hundred into SpaceX, 70 into Tesla, and 10 into SolarCity. And I think one of the advantages that Jerry has here and why he's gonna do this phenomenal turnaround, one of the reasons is cause he's completely obsessed. He's completely obsessed with football and doing deals and selling and just winning. So this is a great excerpt from the Tim Ferriss podcast where he interviews this guy named Graham Duncan that I always keep on my phone and I listen to and read over and over again. And he this is a direct quote from Graham talking to Tim. He says, one question I like to ask people is, if you're hiring an analyst, what criteria are you looking for in the analyst? So he's talking about money managers, and people who've been managing money and managing people before begin to look for things in their analysts that make those analysts most valuable to them. And this guy said, what I'm looking for is a trace of fear in myself. Okay, I'm trying to hire somebody that it makes me almost scared. Why? What I'm looking for is a fear of a trace of fear in myself that this guy is coming for me, that he will replace me. And I think what he's capturing is that the level of intensity, that obsessed obsessiveness that you see in a minority in any field because they found the game they want to play, and they bring an intensity and an obsessiveness to it that over time they're just working so much harder. It's like Wayne Gretzky finding hockey at age 5. He's obsessed, and he's just going over and over and over again. And there are people in the finance industry who are like that. They are just obsessed with investing in this really distinctive way. Warren Buffett from a young age, obsessed. It is obvious. People say, oh, there's like all these, these people criticizing Jerry Jones in the book. He's just doing this for money. He wants to make a lot of money. But he's, you can clearly tell he's not doing this for money because 30 years after this book was published, he still owns the Dallas Cowboys. He's obsessed with owning a football team and, and, and running a football team. And you just clearly see this. And, and as a result of this obsession, he's going to work so much harder at this than the previous owner did who wasn't really interested in football. He's like, oh, this is great. This is a way I can, you know, offset some taxes for my oil business. Where Jerry's like, no, I'm going to build the best football. Like, not only football organization he's trying to win on the field, but also football company. And he just, he, he really invents a lot of ideas that are used, you know, throughout sports. That to you and I, looking back 30 years later is like, why they weren't doing this back then. It just seems so obvious. So again, just one of his superpowers. Jerry can sell, sell, sell. He was selling since he was a nine year old greeting customers at his family's supermarket in college. He Sold shoes from the trunk of his car. He would make up to $700 selling student tickets before his college football games. So he buys a team and he immediately, just like we said that he has in common with Ted Turner. It's like, I'm going to blaze my own path. I'm going to run the business not how it used to be run. How you think I should run it, how I want to run it. Immediately takes over the team and then turns the entire staff over. There's a bunch of detail in the book, but I think this one sentence gives you an idea of what he does. It says he took a wrecking ball to the past. And so we see immediately these reoccurring, like, personality traits. These the way he wants to run his business. He's going to be obsessed with speed. He likes to take risks in bunches. He's really just intense and rather a little crazy. He's obsessed with speed, with making decisions and acting on them as quickly as possible. He learned to take his risk in bunches in the Oklahoma oil fields. This is. He describes his reasoning why he takes risks in bunches. Some of your risks are bound to be busts. The more risks you take, the better the chance of one of them hitting. Don Tyson, who built the Tyson poultry empire. Who have already referenced a few times here. Talked about his friend again during this time. I know a lot of intense people, but no but there is nobody as intense as Jerry Jones. Jerry is a little crazy. He can change moods without blinking. He's got two personalities. He's got the P.T. barnum, the raconteur, the storyteller. And then on the other side is the tough businessman from Arkansas. He can immediately switch from very charming to a very tough man. Very few people know how to read him. His complexities as an individual can be disarming. He runs into any project believing that he can beat any man at anything. Goes back to the Charlie Munger never understood. Underestimate the per. The man that overestimates himself. This is somebody who's done several interviews with Jerry, describes him. Life is not about smelling the roses. With Jerry, life is hard work. He just doesn't have any time for things like philosophy or poetry. You get the feeling that he will break your balls if you cross him. You have to be on guard with him all at all times. And so when you actually analyze like what he actually did when he took over the team, it's just this reminder. I think it's important. It's like most businesses are actually poorly run Even businesses, you would think like an NFL team in 1989. You know, this isn't like it was the 60s. Like, NFL's not nearly as big as it is today, but it was still like a, you know, a big business. A business that sold for $140 million in 1989, and yet it was just run very shittily. There's no other way to put this. It's crazy that. That somebody would run that business and allow it to lose, you know, 9 million a year before he takes it over. So what does he do? He just asks himself, like, well, he goes around and he's like, what is the potential for generating revenue? And Jones just has a very simple way of operating. He's like, what did the previous owner do wrong and why do they lose so much money? And then you ask yourself, like, what's the highest impact thing I can do if I need to generate money? I just bought this business, I emptied my bank account. I'm, you know, 60 million in debt just on high interest rates. This thing has to make money right away. What are you going to do? And the idea was just like, well, you have all these luxury suites. The luxury suites sell between 400,000 and 1.5 million a piece. Okay? And he also read the rule book for the NFL League, and he realized that selling a suite off also offers an additional bonus. According to the NFL rules, revenues from the boxes are not shared with other NFL owners the way ticket revenues are. So he's like, okay, how? What did the previous owner do? They had 188 luxury suites. You know how many the previous owner sold? 6. 6. So he spends all his time, he's just like, I'll just make up the huge difference here if I just able to sell the sweets, okay? So now within a few years. So he buys a team in 1989. The book is written in 1985. Six years later, the suites are all 95 to 98% occupied. Profits from those suites alone over the last few years since Jones has bought the team $50 million just from that one product. Then he looks and he's like, hey, we have one of the best locations in. The entire building is on the 50 yard line. It's the press box. Why the hell are we giving them. We give these seats away for free to writers for the local Dallas and Fort Worth newspapers. And so he's like, what's the difference? They could just move them over there to, like the five yard line or something like that. They could still see the game. They could still write about it. And so then he moves again. This is just very common sense. Most businesses are poorly run if you just sit there and think about it. And obviously it helps that he's obsessed. It's like, yeah, I'm not going to give you the best seat in the house for free. You know how valuable the seats are. You're going to be moved over to the five yard line and I'm going to sell the press box that, that's on the 50 yard line. The literally the best seat in the house. Then he identifies more opportunity hiding in plain sight. There was no ads inside Texas stadium at the time. So he's like, okay, he did something that had never been done before. This is what I mean about really low hanging fruit like opportunity hiding in plain sight. He's like, we're going to put ads inside the stadium. So when you're watching the game, you also see the ads. And he asked himself like, who's likely to buy the ads? Well, probably beer companies, car companies, local car dealers, local banks, local supermarket chain sells a ton of ads. At the time they, they were not allowed to sell beer and alcohol. He's like, well that's a problem. I needed. People like to drink beer while they're watching football. So he goes and Irving County City council, where the the stadium is, they're the ones that have to grant a stadium license to sell beer and wine. So he realizes, okay, high leverage use of my time and activity, I'm going to convince the city council members to give me the ability to sell beer and wine. Which he winds up making, I forgot like $1.5 million per game, $2 million per game in alcohol sales and profit just by doing this. So he wines and dines them, gives them free seats in the luxury suites, brings them into the locker room after games. And very shortly after it says Jones won his vote at the next city council meeting. Millions and millions of dollars were now rolling in from previously untapped resources. He's maximizing his revenue sources at the exact same time he develops a reputation as a ruthless cost cutter. Any positions that are not generating revenue, he winds up cutting. He began hiring sales and promotions people while weeding out non revenue producing jobs. You won't find many people around here, with the exceptions of scout coaches and secretaries who are not making money. For Jerry Jones, he wanted no fat. He wanted this lean cash flow machine. If you go back, I told you this before, but one of my favorite all time biographies I've read is like the early days of Microsoft. It's called Hard Drive. Bill Gates in the Making of the Microsoft Empire. If I remember correctly, one of the things that jumped out, and I've never forgot since I read that book for the first time a few years ago, was the fact that the first Bill Gates ran Microsoft like this. In the early days, the first 30 employees of Microsoft, it was 28 programmers, Bill Gates and a secretary. And Bill was doing all the sales. And something that jumps out as you read the book is like, a lot of the ideas that Jerry Jones applied to this business. Just like, it's the difference between, like, do you give a damn what you're doing or not? And if you give a damn, you're just going to pay attention. You're going to pay attention to these little obvious mistakes that previous management or maybe other competitors were doing. It's like, I don't. I can just do a better way. And I have trust in my own judgment that I'm able to do that. Another thing that he doesn't shy away from it is the fact that he is ruthless. He. The good thing about being an entrepreneur is like, building your business. Like, you get to literally, like make your own world within the world. And if you know yourself, which I think Jerry Jones definitely knows himself, is he just understands, like, he wants to be number one, he wants to be in charge. And so there's a lot of people, if you're going to have long term partnership with Jerry, they say whether it's in oil and gas, whether it's in football, you have to be comfortable being a number two. And if you're not and you kind of cross that line, Jerry can be ruthless. Him and Jimmy Jones were, or Jimmy Johnson, rather, were college roommates. They were friends for a long time. He fires because Jimmy Johnson had a hard time sharing the spotlight with Jerry Jones. You know, Jerry's the owner. He's the one that calls the shots. He winds up firing his friend and his coach after Jimmy Johnson won the second Super Bowl. And he winds up hiring another one of his friends, this guy named Barry Switzer, who lasts a little bit longer, but he was more comfortable playing like a number two role. Now all these, there's a bunch of things in the book where they're describing the people in Jerry Jones life and they give like little small biographies of them. I've skipped over most of them because I want to focus on Jerry Jones. This just shocked me so much. I had to share with you. And it's just a reminder that one of the benefits of reading biographies, like the Ability to step outside yourself and you realize, like, we all have shit to deal with. We all have problems to deal with. But it helps to also be thankful to never have to deal with someone. There's always somebody has it worse than you do. So I'm reading about Barry Switzer and his parents and what he had to live through were nuts. So his dad was a bootlegger, sold, you know, drugs and alcohol. He was a gambler. He loved to chase women. He would, like, go around with a gun, like a.38 revolver and just like shoot it in the air and, like shoot it in the house. And listen to how Barry Switzer's parents died. So Barry Switzer's parents, Frank Switzer, suffered a violent death. He was shot by a jealous girlfriend who, feeling immediately remorseful for shooting him, helped him into the backseat of her car and drove off in a rush towards the hospital. She was speeding down a gravel road. She drove the car, she lost control, drove the car into a bridge, and the car exploded and both died in the fire A few years later. His mom, who was also a drug addict, she was addicted to alcohol and prescription medication. She had a very strained relationship with her son. She goes and tries to, they're having a fight. She goes and tries to kiss her son on the cheek, but he turns away. She then leaves, goes to the closet, finds a pistol, walks out to the back porch and shoots herself in the head. And so Jerry Jones, long term partners, the people who work with him for a long time, talk about, like, if you want to work with them, it's very easy to interface with them. Says, what does it take to get along with Jones? This is one of his partners. First of all, you must have a desire to succeed and you must also have a willingness not to be number one. And then the book ends describing the impact that Jerry Jones had on that organization. The Cowboys financial ledger portrays one of the greatest turnaround stories in all of sports. The team lost $9 million in 1988, the year before Jones bought the team. The Cowboys have averaged more than 30 million in profits per year over the last three years. And then I read they're doing over a billion dollars in revenue a year now. And that is where I'll leave it for the full story. I really recommend reading the book. This book is full of wild stories. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show, notes in your podcast player are available@founders podcast.com, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. That is 379 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.