Simply Brilliant

About ten years ago I interned for a hugely successful auto retailer while I was in business school. Eager to share my fancy new general management tips and tricks I sought every opportunity to pitch an idea. Then one day, about a month or so into my internship, the owner "Mr. Dealer," called me into his office, sat me down, and scrawled three words on the back of a napkin: “Revenue, Expense, Profit.” He then looked at me and said “All your fancy professors want you to think business is complicated, but it’s not. This here is all you need to understand to be successful in this business or any other. Make that number big (pointing to revenue), keep that number small (expenses), and put that number (profit) back into your business. Got it?”

To this day, I recount that story more than any business school lecture, case, or book. Sometimes it’s not about 2x2's, 5 forces, or 7 S’s. Sometimes, and Mr. Dealer would argue most times, it really is "just business."

It's probably no surprise that Mr. Dealer didn’t have a business degree, in fact I don’t think he had a high school diploma, but what he did have was the rare ability to see past the noise and focus only on what’s important. Well that, and the hundreds of millions of dollars he earned from building a successful business over time.