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Few entrepreneurs have a resume as formidable as Michael Dell's.
The billionaire founder revolutionized the PC industry, took his company public twice--completing the largest corporate privatization in history in the process--and pulled off an astonishing transformation from PC maker to global technology giant.
Today, the three-time Inc. cover subject--and our first Entrepreneur of the Year, back in 1990--achieves yet another milestone for his namesake company: 40 years in business.
To mark the occasion, Inc. compiled 40 business lessons from Dell's remarkable career, sourced from our own archive of stories as well as his 2021 memoir, Play Nice But Win: A CEO's Journey From Founder to Leader. While 40 years is a long entrepreneurial journey, the 59-year-old Dell isn't showing any signs of fatigue.
"My goal is to be CEO for 60 years," he told Inc. in 1989.
Talk about playing the long game. Here are 40 of Dell's best tips for business owners.
One of Dell's favorite quotes comes from former Intel CEO Andy Grove: "A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of these changes is transformation."
"For a few years we'd been prioritizing profit over growth and share, and a company's success is always a balance between those three," Dell writes in Play Nice But Win. "Our profits were strong in the 2000s, but now our share was eroding. And that can be a slippery slope."
A major reason Dell took his company private in 2013, 25 years after its initial IPO, is that "transformation as a company could proceed without the tyranny, the ever-ticking shot clock, of a quarterly earnings report," he writes. "Going private would open up the possibility of dramatically accelerating the growth of the company and allow us to have a far greater impact in the world." It also had the effect of "reinvigorating the entrepreneurial spirit of the company's origins."
When selling subscriptions to the Houston Post newspaper as a college student, Dell learned that "if you sounded like the people you were trying to sell a subscription to, they were much more likely to buy from you." For this reason, Dell would adopt a heavy Texan accent on the phone.
When pursuing a large deal, it's important that word of the transaction........