Quotes About Business

A small business with a handful of employees might be able to handle two or three concurrent small bets, while a large company with thousands of employees should probably be considering hundreds of potential small bets and implementing scores of them.

Customers, knowingly or not, seek an experience to accompany the product or service they're purchasing, and the business that offers the best experience in that category wins.

When a company is growing it is more likely to acknowledge the importance of its vendors and suppliers and treat them fairly. In return, its suppliers frequently become trusted partners in uncovering new business opportunities. When a company is constantly changing and its revenues and profits are growing you'll generally find a more engaged group of vendors and suppliers who are interested in truly being good business partners

If a business isn't growing between 5 and 10 percent annually, the good, highly talented people won't get the responsibility and the financial rewards they want, and they'll leave.

Your job as you know it and your business as it is currently run will eventually change. The only chance any of us have for prosperity is to constantly reimagine, rethink, and reinvent everything we do and how we do it in order to remain relevant. We must all become reinventors, and we'd better do it quickly.

I undertook this project with the vague notion that reinvention was about moving a business from point A to point B. But that's not what I found. We discovered that in the process of moving from A to B these businesses developed new skill sets and values that allowed them to quickly progress to C, D, E, and beyond. They all became serial reinventors and embraced constant radical change.

Given how inexpensive technology and analytics have become, it's inexcusable for any business not to know every customer

Companies that do the best job of embracing constant change, growth, and reinvention make it look easy, because they've systematized and scaled all the core business practices. Systematizing means determining the best way to do something (step-by-step), making certain everyone does his or her part the same way (without significant variation), and then using the system as a baseline for continual improvement.

All entrepreneurs get strapped for cash. Private equity and other sources of funding will buy into the company. But many don't buy into the dream and end up driving the entrepreneur away. "We don't want to let that entrepreneurial dream disappear when they become part of our twenty-billion-dollar business," Long says.

thousand CEOs, business owners, and highly successful entrepreneurs about their businesses and how they lead companies through good times and bad. One of the most important questions I ask them is "What's the biggest worry keeping you awake at night?

Arrow doesn't allow that kind of "home office knows best" bureaucracy that kills momentum. "The people that run a business really know that business. We execute better because we push activities and decisions down to them," Long explains. "I believe our success is because the people we acquired in the deal all feel they are a part of it.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it," when he added that those words are, in Powell's perspective, "a slogan for the complacent, the arrogant, or the scared." How can such a commonsense maxim be so insidious and disastrous? It's because of an immutable law of business: By the time you figure out it's broke, it's been broke for a very long time.

It's not the sense of entitlement shared by spoiled rich kids. Instead it's the misguided and arrogant belief shared by so many business owners and executives that their business has a right to continue to exist and do well simply by virtue of either being in business or having been successful at some point.

Today, every business, including yours, is being observed and studied by others who want your revenues. The world operates with such speed that as soon as potential competitors sniff out the fact that another business is doing well and they believe there's a buck to be made they'll be all over it like a cheap suit

The only guarantee in business is if you do nothing, nothing will happen. Also, as the school of hard knocks teaches, most good strategy is made by doing.

When companies haphazardly throw money at what they perceive their problems, challenges, and opportunities to be, the real answers that could solve the real problems or allow them to embrace radical change and take advantage of the real opportunities are seldom found.

grow double digits each year for decades. To scale any business you must first create a reliable system for all functions—manufacturing, sales, promotion, talent acquisition, innovation, even leadership from the CEO.

You can run a business any way you like, but you'll run it better if you build it around your strengths.

An entrepreneur in debt is an entrepreneur in business.

By now, a significant portion of the whole Sherpa economy depends on the spring and fall seasons on Everest.

Mr. Gryce was like a merchant whose warehouses are crammed with an unmarketable commodity.

Denis Eady was the son of Michael Eady, the ambitious Irish grocer, whose suppleness and effrontery had given Starkfield its first notion of smart business methods, and whose new brick store testified to the success of the attempt. His son seemed likely to follow in his steps, and was meanwhile applying the same arts to the conquest of the Starkfield maidenhood. Hitherto Ethan Frome had been content to think him a mean fellow; but now he positively invited a horse-whipping.

But the long hours of mechanical drudgery were telling on his active body and undisciplined nerves. He had begun too late to subject himself to the persistent mortification of spirit and flesh which is a condition of the average business life; and after the long dull days in the office the evenings at his grandfather's whist-table did not give him the counter-stimulus he needed.

W]hat with the hours dedicated to the law and those given to dining out or entertaining friends at home, with an occasional evening at the Opera or the play, the life he was living had still seemed a fairly real and inevitable sort of business. But Newport represented the escape from duty...