Quotes About Entrepreneurship

Before Booker T. Washington, we have small business owners but we do not have a philosopher of black entrepreneurship, and that's what Washington was.

Most people think the big challenge is having adults take you seriously, but as long as you go into meetings confident and prepared, they respect you. And a lot of my employees think that it's cool to be working for a young entrepreneur,

it is not because of the benevolence of the baker that we eat fresh bread every morning but because of his desire to make money.

the willingness to be ruthless helps innovation.

A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence.

For most of our history, no one dared to tell Americans, 'you don't build that.'

American inventiveness and the desire to build developed because we were guaranteed the right to own our success.

invention should not be pursued as an exercise in technical cleverness, but should be shaped by commercial needs.

HAVING ONE'S OWN shop, working on projects of one's own choosing, making enough money today so one could do the same tomorrow: These were the modest goals of Thomas Edison when he struck out on his own as full-time inventor and manufacturer. The grand goal was nothing other than enjoying the autonomy of entrepreneur and forestalling a return to the servitude of employee.

To find a self-made man, you need a very narrow field of view.

IF MY CLIENTS offer a business

I believe that if you think small, you'll stay small. Getting

When I flew back to Chicago that fateful day in 1954, I had a freshly signed contract with the McDonald brothers in my briefcase. I was a battle-scarred veteran of the business wars, but I was still eager to go into action. I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns. But I was convinced that the best was ahead of me.

ostentatious

The best part of it for me personally was that every time I saw a new Walgreen's store going up it meant new business. This sort of multiplication was clearly the way to go. I spent less and less time chasing pushcart vendors around the West Side and more time cultivating large accounts where big turnover would automatically winch in sales in the thousands and hundreds of thousands.

It was not long after the "Fold-a-Nook" fiasco that I became intrigued by the stories of the McDonald brothers and their operation that kept eight Multimixers whirring up a bucket brigade of milk shakes out there in sunny San Bernardino.

I've been in the kitchens of a lot of restaurants and drive-ins selling Multimixers around the country," I told them, "and I have never seen anything to equal the potential of this place of yours. Why don't you open a series of units like this? It would be a gold mine for you and for me, too, because every one would boost my Multimixer sales. What d'you say?" Silence.

It'll be a lot of trouble," Dick McDonald objected. "Who could we get to open them for us?" I sat there feeling a sense of certitude begin to envelope me. Then I leaned forward and said, "Well, what about me?

Her apprehensions about my becoming Mr. Multimixer had been laid to rest at this point, and I don't think she ever got over the shock of discovering that we were nearly $100,000 in debt. She couldn't seem to handle it. For me, this was the first phase of grinding it out—building my personal monument to capitalism. I paid tribute, in the feudal sense, for many years before I was able to rise with McDonald's on the foundation I had laid.

The agreement gave me 1.9 percent of the gross sales from franchisees. I had proposed 2 percent. The McDonalds said, "No, no, no! If you tell a franchisee you are going to take two percent, he'll balk. It sounds too full and rounded. Make it one and nine-tenths, and it sounds like a lot less." So I humored them on that one. The brothers were to get .5 percent out of my 1.9 percent. This seemed fair enough, and it was.

Besides, the brothers did have some equipment that couldn't be readily copied. They had a specially fabricated aluminum griddle for one thing, and the set-up of all the rest of the equipment was in a very precise, step-saving pattern. Then there was the name. I had a strong intuitive sense that the name McDonald's was exactly right.

I busted my butt all my life building companies.

Scientists are people who build the Brooklyn Bridge and then buy it.

It's very difficult to run a business when you're buying something for $5 and selling it for $10.