Best Small Businesses to Start

• "Being an entrepreneur is a way of dealing with the world--it is a way of looking at life that not everybody's comfortable with. And what is this way of seeing life? It is one where the individual enjoys the uncertainty and insecurity of not knowing what will come tomorrow. The entrepreneur gets a certain amount of pleasure out of uncertainty."
  -Fernando Trias De Bes, Spanish entrepreneur
• "The entrepreneur who hasn't made the mistake of a lifetime doesn't exist."
  -Fernando Trias De Bes, Spanish entrepreneur
• "As a rule of thumb, if you have a good idea, five companies are doing the same thing. If you have a great idea, fifteen companies are doing the same thing."
  -Guy Kawasaki
• "A man can succeed at almost anything for which he has unlimited enthusiasm."
  -Charles M. Schwab
• "A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one."
  -Henry Ford
• "Happiness is a positive cash flow."
  -Fred Adler, venture capitalist
• "Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things."
  -Peter F. Drucker
• "There is no correlation at all between success and hours worked."
  -Seth Godin
• "Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed."
  -Peter F. Drucker
• "Whenever an individual or a business decides that success has been attained, progress stops."
  -Thomas Watson Jr.
• "The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of his or her organization is going to blow the competition away."
  -Walter Wriston, influential commercial banker
• "Three components make an entrepreneur: the person, the idea and the resources to make it happen."
  -Anita Roddick (1942-2007), British entrepreneur
• "I wanted to set the world on fire and that would not come about through working for someone else in a nine-to-five job."
  -Ian Schrager (b. 1948) US entrepreneur
• "I need problems. A good problem makes me come alive."
  -Tiny Rowland (1917-98) British entrepreneur
• "Is your company so small that you have to do everything for yourself? Wait until you're so big that you can't. That's worse."
  -Michael Bloomberg
• "No one can possibly achieve any real and lasting success or 'get rich' in business by being a conformist."
  -J.Paul Getty
• "Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things."
  -Robert Louis Stevenson
• "The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It's as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer."
  -Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese's
• "The best reason to start an organization is to make meaning - to create a product or service to make the world a better place."
  -Guy Kawasaki,
• "An entrepreneur tends to bite off a little more than he can chew hoping he'll quickly learn how to chew it."
  -Roy Ash, co-founder of Litton Industries
• "One of the unique things we small companies have over the big guys is the ability to establish personal relationships. Big companies really can't do that. You read about effective organizations, learning organizations, lean and mean organizations, but small companies can be virtuous. We as small companies can have virtue because we as small companies are basically the embodiment of one or two people, and people can have virtue, while organizations really can't."
  -Jim Koch, founder of Boston Beer Company
• "A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well."
  -Jeff Bezos
• "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."
  -Steve Jobs
• "Money is the most unimportant thing in the world if you have enough to live."
  -Kemmons Wilson, founder of Holiday Inn
• "Concentrate your energies, your thoughts and your capital. The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket."
  -Andrew Carnegie
• "No person will make a great business who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit."
  -Andrew Carnegie
• "It doesn't matter how many times you fail. It doesn't matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you. All you have to do is learn from them and those around you because... All that matters in business is that you get it right once. Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are."
  -Mark Cuban
• "It doesn't matter what it is. Whatever your hobbies, interests, passions are. Find the one you love the best and GET A JOB in the business that supports it. It could be as a clerk, a salesperson, whatever you can find. You have to start learning the business somewhere. Instead of paying to go to school somewhere, you are getting paid to learn. It may not be the perfect job, but there is no perfect path to getting rich."
  -Mark Cuban
• "Judgment comes from experience - and experience comes from bad judgment."
  -Walter Wriston, influential commercial banker
• "Capital goes where it's welcome and stays where it's well treated."
  -Walter Wriston, influential commercial banker
• "The only thing that differentiates one business from another in any given field is the quality of its management on all levels."
  -Peter F. Drucker
• "As I see it, conventional wisdom takes you only so far. At a certain point it becomes like a hall of mirrors in a fun house. Everyone stands around reflecting back the same belief to each other, until reality gets warped and bent out of shape. The reason people hang around too long is that they don't want to be caught standing outside the fun house all by themselves"
  -Sam Wyly, American entrepreneur
• "Some entrepreneurs are able to use only their own money and get much richer than if they share the equity upside while at the same time reducing their own risk of loss. But most entrepreneurs who use only their own money end up sitting around broke, reading books about entrepreneurs who understood how to create companies at least partly with other people's money."
  -Sam Wyly, American entrepreneur
• "In the competitive marketplace, if you're going to pour your heart and soul into a company, then you want that company to rise to the top, because being an entreprenuer isn't about making money. There are easier ways to make money. Being an entrepreneur is about creating an enterprise, it's about building, it's about winning and it's about the quality of the journey--my definition of success."
  -Sam Wyly, American entrepreneur
• "A gardener who cultivates his own garden with his own hands, united in his own person the three different characters, of landlord, farmer, and labourer. His produce, therefore, should pay him the rent of the first, the profit of the second, and the wages of the third."
  -Adam Smith
• "Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre."
  -Warren Buffett
• "If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete."
  -Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric
• "Willingness to change is a strength, even if it means plunging part of the company into total confusion for a while."
  -Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric
• "I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity."
  -John D. Rockefeller
• "I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature."
  -John D. Rockefeller
• "If your only goal is to become rich, you will never achieve it."
  -John D. Rockefeller
• "If you can't make it good, at least make it look good."
  -Bill Gates
• "It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure."
  -Bill Gates
• "I think one of the most misunderstood things about business in America is that people are either doing things for altruistic reasons or they are greedy and selfish, just after profit. That type of dichotomy portrays a false image of business… The whole idea is to do both."
  -John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods
• "Business social responsibility should not be coerced; it is a voluntary decision that the entrepreneurial leadership of every company must make on its own."
  -John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods
• "I never took any business classes in school and if someone had told me back then that I was going to become a business entrepreneur when I was 24 and start my own business I would have laughed them out of the room."
  -John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods
• "The trouble with my life is that I do not think I am cut out to sit behind a desk."
  -Howard Hughes
• "If you've got an innovative idea, and the majority does not pooh-pooh it, then the odds are you must not have a very good idea. When people thought I was loony, it did not bother me at all. In fact, I considered that I must really be onto something."
  -Ted Turner
• "The increasing volume of information is just more opportunity to build better answers to questions. The more information you have, the better."
  -Larry Page, co-founder of Google
• "If you make a product good enough, even though you live in the depths of the forest, the public will make a path to your door, says the philosopher. But if you want the public in sufficient numbers, you better construct a highway. Advertising is that highway."
  -William Randolph Hearst
• "Putting out a newspaper without promotion is like winking at a girl in the dark --well-intentioned, but ineffective."
  -William Randolph Hearst
• "Hell, there are no rules here--we're trying to accomplish something."
  -Thomas A. Edison
• "If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward. "
  -Thomas A. Edison
• "Anyone can be a millionaire, but to become a billionaire you need an astrologer."
  -J.P. Morgan
• "What should exist? To me, that's the most exciting question imaginable. What do we need that we don't have? How can we realize our potential?"
  -Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft
• "We have no patent on anything we do and anything we do can be copied by anyone else. But you can't copy the heart and the soul and the conscience of the company."
  -Howard Schultz, chairman and CEO of Starbucks
• "We don't want to be rich, we just want to be richer than other people."
  -John Stuart Mill
• "There's no good idea that can't be improved on."
  -Michael Eisner
• "There aren't that many original ideas out there."
  -Steve Wynn
• "Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties."
  -philosopher Erich Fromm
• "Great ideas need landing gear, as well as wings."
  -Charles Douglas Jackson (1902-1964), Time-Life publisher and special assistant to President Eisenhower
• "Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius."
  -An Wang, Founder of Wang Laboratories
• "Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them. They make the impossible happen."
  - Robert Jarvik, entrepreneur and inventor of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart
• "Don't spend so much time trying to choose the perfect opportunity that you miss the right opportunity."
  -Michael Dell, founder of Dell
• "Leadership comes in small acts as well as bold strokes"
  -Carly Fiorina
• "Don't be threatened by people smarter than you."
  -Howard Schultz, chairman and CEO of Starbucks
• "If everybody else is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in the opposite direction"
  -Sam Walton
• "A business leader has to keep their organization focused on the mission. That sounds easy, but it can be tremendously challenging in today's competitive and ever-changing business environment"
  -Meg Whitman, Ebay
• "The man who has done his best has done everything."
  -Charles M. Schwab
• "All my life, whenever it comes time to make a decision, I make it and forget about it."
  -Harry S. Truman, president and failed small-business owner
• "A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties."
  -Harry S. Truman, president and failed small-business owner
• "Competition makes you stronger. If our top competitor didn't exist, we would have to make them up."
  -Jim Sinegal, Costco
• "I have come to believe that almost everyone has the entrepreneurial gene — it's been necessary for survival for thousands of years."
  -Guy Kawasaki
• "Sometimes when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things, I am tempted to think that there are no little things."
  -—Bruce Barton (1886-1967), advertising executive and business author
• "Practically every enterprise [is] threatened and put on the defensive as soon as it comes into existence."
  -Joseph Schumpeter, economist
• "For the most ambitious young people, the corporate ladder is obsolete."
  -Paul Graham, programmer and venture capitalist
• "Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets."
  -Henry Ford
• "Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement."
  -Henry Ford
• "When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it."
  -Henry Ford
• "Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority, and don't interfere!"-—President Ronald Reagan
• "Focus means saying no."
  -Steve Jobs
• "Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have."
  -Steve Jobs
• "My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each other's negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are not done by one person, they are done by a team of people."
  -Steve Jobs
• "When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts."
  -Larry Ellison
• "Don't talk to me about aesthetics or tradition. Talk to me about what sells and what's good right now."
  -George Steinbrenner
• "I haven't always done a good job, and I haven't always been successful - but I know that I have tried."
  -George Steinbrenner
• "I think one of the big errors people are making right now is thinking that old-style businesses will be obsolete, when actually they will be an important part of this new civilization. Some retail groups are introducing e-commerce and think that the "bricks" are no longer useful. But they will continue to be important."
  -Carlos Slim, Mexican businessman and at one point the world's richest man
• "When you live for others' opinions, you are dead. I don't want to live thinking about how I'll be remembered."
  -Carlos Slim, Mexican businessman and at one point the world's richest man
• "If you don't sell, it's not the product that's wrong, it's you."
  -Estee Lauder
• "Starting and growing a business is as much about the innovation, drive and determination of the people who do it as it is about the product they sell."
  -Elon Musk, co-founder of Paypal
• "The two most important requirements for major success are: first, being in the right place at the right time, and second, doing something about it."
  -Ray Kroc, McDonald's Corporation entrepreneur
• "While formal schooling is an important advantage, it is not a guarantee of success nor is its absence a fatal handicap."
  -Ray Kroc, McDonald's Corporation entrepreneur
• "An investment in knowledge pays the best interest."
  -Benjamin Franklin
• "Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship."
  -Benjamin Franklin
• "Failures are like skinned knees, painful but superficial."
  -Ross Perot
• "Punishing honest mistakes stifles creativity. I want people moving and shaking the earth and they're going to make mistakes."
  -Ross Perot
• "Creative things have to sell to get acknowledged as such."
  -Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple
• "Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don't quit."
  -Conrad Hilton, founder of Hilton hotels
• "One step at a time, the hardest one first."
  -Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the horsedrawn mechanical reaper

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