Michael Dene knows a thing or two about vertical integration. The Long Beach restaurateur made a lifetime of work out of selling cheap lamps (like the kind you buy for your dorm room), building atop his father’s business by taking control of the entire supply chain. Instead of just buying cheap parts from China for his lamps, he became his own source for parts, living half the year in China and taking on manufacturing for all the individual pieces necessary to build his final product.

Not only did he have control over the cost of each part, he could make things better quality too. "When I was building lamps, it wasn't 'worse for less,' it was 'better for a little bit more,'" he told me a few years ago.