Small Business Entrepreneur Quotes

I want to see a world in which entrepreneurs give time to their visions to reality so that they have more money, more family time, and more support, a world in which they can stop working so hard and start living!

Do you know great minds enjoy excellence, average minds love mediocrity and small minds adore comfort zones?

Hard work without a solid plan isn’t likely to get you where you want to be. You need to be teachable; you need to be dedicated, and you need to work smart.

Entrepreneurs aren’t looking to go backward. They are looking to go forward, toward their prize of realizing their dreams.

Listen, not to answer, but to understand.

This sounded the death knell of small family businesses, soon to be followed by the disappearance of the individual entrepreneur, gobbled up one by one by the increasingly hungry ogre of capitalism, and drowned by the rising tide of large companies.

Sell the results, not the nuts and bolts.

Much to the confusion of small-minded people, confidence does not equate arrogance.

Even in engineering-driven Silicon Valley, the buzzwords of the moment call for building a “lean startup” that can “adapt” and “evolve” to an ever-changing environment. Would-be entrepreneurs are told that nothing can be known in advance: we’re supposed to listen to what customers say they want, make nothing more than a “minimum viable product,” and iterate our way to success. But leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum. You could build the best version of an app that lets people order toilet paper from their iPhone. But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1. A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen? Darwinism may be a fine theory in other contexts, but in startups, intelligent design works best.

Your confidence, competence and belief will sustain you through the fear, uncertainty and doubt you will face. Knowing with everything you are, that you can do it.

Asking a hard-core introvert to get excited about working the room is like hiring a performing artist to get excited about accounting: it's just not in their nature.

As anyone who starts a business knows, it is a fantastic race. There is a statistic that hangs over your head - over 90 percent of all new businesses fail in the first three years. For anyone with even a bit of competitive spirit in them, especially for someone who defines himself or herself as an entrepreneur, these overwhelming odds of failure are not intimidating, they only add fuel to the fire. The foolishness of thinking that you're a part of the small minority of those who actually will make it past three years and defy the odds is part of what makes entrepreneurs who they are, driven by passion and completely irrational.

To The Manager, then, The Technician becomes a problem to be managed. To The Technician, The Manager becomes a meddler to be avoided. To both of them, The Entrepreneur is the one who got them into trouble in the first place!

Strive to be bored is a contradictory statement for most entrepreneurs. But we have to strive to be bored to make space for more if we want to grow our business.

You should never have to feel inauthentic or deceptive to succeed in business.

Your business is always changing- your process needs to change too.

If you don't control your mindset, you can't control the sale.

Trust in the process, assume the sale, and they will come.

If you are going to dream then dream big, why spend time dreaming small?

He added, We knew it was going to be a big problem. You’ve got this guy with an army of upward of forty walking corpses that he acquired legally but was meant to bury a while back, it’s time for some hard conversations. He’s curing cancer, that’s great, but he’s bookended by two zombies that they’ve dressed in outfits, that’s bad. You’ve got a wizard out in the wop-wops who’s now got blanket bans from nearly every video upload site and a whole bunch of people have entered the country because of his YouTube channel, the government isn’t all, Love that small-business entrepreneur spirit. The government says, This is a cult.

Many entrepreneurs have a “can do” attitude, which is often a requirement if you want to succeed. Unfortunately, this attitude often leads to a dangerous mindset where you feel like you need to do everything yourself.

Every Spring, nature teaches a class on business entrepreneurship. ....We see how capital is re-allocated, currencies are re-directed, growth is re-emphasized, and numerous life forms promote their value with re-vitalized marketing programs that implement flowers or seeds or aromas or habitability or pollination in an effort demonstrate a unique value proposition in a busy economy. Smart entrepreneurs enroll in this class every Spring and take good notes. Whether you're an entrepreneur of a small business or an entrepreneur of a line of business within a large company... learn from nature.

The goal is to build a profitable business, not maintain an expensive hobby that will leave you in the poorhouse.

Time is your most valuable currency!

Everyone you come in contact with knows a person who runs or owns a business. Make sure they know what you do, so when the time comes, you get the call, not someone else.

Contrary to all myths and beliefs, introverts make the best salespeople.

To sell successfully, you don't have to be aggressive. You don't need to be anything other than you. You just need to experiment until you find a way that feels natural.

You don't just want to learn to sell, you want to learn how to keep getting better.

Trying to copy extroverts is a recipe for failure. To achieve success, introverts must embrace their own unique and powerful abilities.

You can't blame yourself for what you didn't know.

Don't give price more attention than it deserves. Say it and move on.

If you are a small business owner, then you are first and foremost a person who sells.

Don't sell features and benefits. Tell a story.

A smart business owner learns from the mistakes of others.

The genius of niches is they are too small for large competitors, allowing a nimble entrepreneur the breathing room to focus on an underserved audience. Once you’ve succeeded in that niche, you can leverage your success to establish credibility for your business to move into larger markets.

Nobody wants a sales pitch. So instead of trying a hard sell, focus on telling a story that captivates your audience by painting a vivid picture of your vision. When you get good at storytelling, people want to be part of that story, and they’ll want to help others become part of that story too.

It’s one thing if a mistake occurs because of circumstance or a miscalculation or the unexpected or inexperience; it’s another if it’s part of a pattern of carelessness or ineptitude or laziness. Then it becomes a choice.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a small business, or a Fortune 500 company, great marketing is all about telling your story in such a way that it compels people to buy what you are selling. That’s a constant. What’s always in flux, especially in this noisy, mobile world, is how, when, and where the story gets told, and even who gets to tell all of it.

Just start. A small business can take you to the level of empire.

It is a big deal being a small business. The world needs you. Actually, the world starves for you.

The best entrepreneurs specialize in making "new mistakes" only.

the typical small business owner is only 10 percent Entrepreneur, 20 percent Manager, and 70 percent Technician.

Convenience will put you out of business!

As an entrepreneur, value creation will always be your first line of defense against business failure.

Just as no two entrepreneurs are alike, there is no one-size-fits-all start-up.

Too often entrepreneurs are reactive to the challenges inherent when building a company... the most successful founders are proactive.

The key to most start-up successes is seeing a need and filling it.

Growing a company is a marathon that requires patience, dedication, knowledge, good decision-making, vision, and the ability to see the big picture.

To The Entrepreneur, the business is the product.

When we think a thought enough times it becomes a belief and that belief becomes a pattern which, in turn, becomes how we live our lives.

With a strong personal brand, you become the only option in the eyes of your ideal customer.

The Overlooked Expert is the person who's fully capable of starting and running a profitable business.

Where one sees a dead end, another sees a freeway without a speed limit. That's what separates the entrepreneur or small business owner from the rest of the world.

The business motivation behind creating a partnership is to dramatically accelerate revenue at a fraction of the cost.

Trust: it's the basis of everything else.

Want more sales? Ask better questions.

If you quote a price before knowing exactly what they need, then you're chasing a moving target.

Use a true story jam-packed with credibility points to sidestep objections.

See the sales process for what it is-- a big assembly line.

The secret? Never stop improving your process.

You can't have an effective discussion on price until the prospect understands your value.

Discover your driving mission; then redefine your business around it. That, in turn, will lead you to discover your market's blue ocean.

If you want consistent sales results, you need a consistent sales process.

Instead of trying to counter an objection, sidestep it with a story.

It's not your prospect's fault if they have sticker shock; it's yours.

Trust; it's the basis of everything else.

The better you know your customer, the better you can speak directly to them and their situation.

To become a better salesperson, become a better listener.

You have to win the customer on both fronts: personal and professional.

We spend our lives living by rules we've never tested. Who knows what can't be done until it's been tried?

You have to get through: establishing trust, asking questions, providing stories, and handling objections before you share how much you charge.

If you're like me, you simply want to promote your promote your products and services in a way that's authentic and congruent with who you are.

When people tell me, "It's always been done like this," I just can't give it much weight.

You need to bootstrap when you first start your business, but once money starts coming in, it’s important to focus on your strengths and hire people to do everything else.

When you buy a product, you don’t just buy the product: you buy everything that company stands for. Sisters, are your things rooted in peace?

Up until the last 200 years basically everyone was a freelancer, entrepreneur or indentured. Of course entrepreneurship is a learnable skill.

One of the most common mistakes that start-ups make is not focusing on building a brand starting on day one.

Hidden skills and knowledge are the essence of a successful small business or consulting firm. Unlease and leverage what is locked inside your head to help others while help yourself.

We knew it was going to be a big problem. You’ve got this guy with an army of upward of forty walking corpses that he acquired legally but was meant to bury a while back, it’s time for some hard conversations. He’s curing cancer, that’s great, but he’s bookended by two zombies that they’ve dressed in outfits, that’s bad. You’ve got a wizard out in the wop-wops who’s now got blanket bans from nearly every video upload site and a whole bunch of people have entered the country because of his YouTube channel, the government isn’t all, Love that small-business entrepreneur spirit. The government says, This is a cult.

Said another way, the Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is. When The Entrepreneur creates the model,

Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon and an extraordinarily successful entrepreneur, once said about his company: “In the factory Revlon manufactures cosmetics, but in the store Revlon sells hope.” The commodity is cosmetics; the product, hope.

ideas are lost if they aren’t captured in some way. Additionally, according to the Zeigarnick Effect, any incomplete thought—such as an idea or task you need to complete—will occupy your mind until you take some kind of action on it by either completing the task or capturing the idea with a plan for accomplishing the task.

commodity. Understanding the difference between the two is what creating a great business is all about. Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon and an extraordinarily successful entrepreneur, once said about his company: “In the factory Revlon manufactures cosmetics, but in the store Revlon sells hope.” The commodity is cosmetics; the product, hope.

many people mistaken for entrepreneurs fail to have true skin in the game in the sense that their aim is to either cash out by selling the company they helped create to someone else, or “go public” by issuing shares in the stock market. The true value of the company, what it makes, and its long-term survival are of small relevance to them. This is a pure financing scheme and we will exclude this class of people from our “entrepreneur” risk-taker class (this form of entrepreneurship is the equivalent of bringing great-looking and marketable children into the world with the sole aim of selling them at age four). We can easily identify them by their ability to write a convincing business plan.

Optimists Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person—you already feel fortunate. An optimistic attitude is largely inherited, and it is part of a general disposition for well-being, which may also include a preference for seeing the bright side of everything. If you were allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer. A study of people who exaggerate their expected life span beyond actuarial predictions showed that they work longer hours, are more optimistic about their future income, are more likely to remarry after divorce (the classic “triumph of hope over experience”), and are more prone to bet on individual stocks. Of course, the blessings of optimism are offered only to individuals who are only mildly biased and who are able to “accentuate the positive” without losing track of reality. Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the political and military leaders—not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented and they have been lucky, almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge. They are probably optimistic by temperament; a survey of founders of small businesses concluded that entrepreneurs are more sanguine than midlevel managers about life in general. Their experiences of success have confirmed their faith in their judgment and in their ability to control events. Their self-confidence is reinforced by the admiration of others. This reasoning leads to a hypothesis: the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realize.

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I decided, was to look at the common threads among the companies I’d already identified as having mojo. First, I could see that, unlike most entrepreneurs, their founders and leaders had recognized the full range of choices they had about the type of company they could create. They hadn’t accepted the standard menu of options as a given. They had allowed themselves to question the usual definitions of success in business and to imagine possibilities other than the ones all of us are familiar with.

Entrepreneurship, Bernie realized, was the means by which an economy continually renewed itself. Without it, a country would lose its vitality, its energy, and become impoverished—just as a culture would become impoverished without the ongoing creation of art. “I kept thinking that the entrepreneur is like an artist, only business is the means of his expression. . . .” he said. “He creates [a business] from nothing, just a blank canvas. It’s amazing. Somebody goes into a garage, has nothing but an idea, and out of the garage comes a company, a living company. It’s so special what they do. They are a treasure.

The Entrepreneurial Model What does The Entrepreneur see off in the distance that The Technician finds so difficult to see? What exactly is the Entrepreneurial Model? It’s a model of a business that fulfills the perceived needs of a specific segment of customers in an innovative way. The Entrepreneurial Model looks at a business as if it were a product, sitting on a shelf and competing for the customer’s attention against a whole shelf of competing products (or businesses). Said another way, the Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is. When The Entrepreneur creates the model, he surveys the world and asks: “Where is the opportunity?” Having identified it, he then goes back to the drawing board and constructs a solution to the frustrations he finds among a certain group of customers. A solution in the form of a business that looks and acts in a very specific way, the way the customer needs it to look and act, not The Entrepreneur. “How will my business look to the customer?” The Entrepreneur asks. “How will my business stand out from all the rest?” Thus, the Entrepreneurial Model does not start with a picture of the business to be created but of the customer for whom the business is to be created. It understands that without a clear picture of that customer, no business can succeed. The Technician, on the other hand, looks inwardly, to

THREE COMMUNICATION LESSONS FROM THE MOST FASCINATING BRANDS       1.   Don’t focus on how you are similar to others, but how you are different. Leading brands stand out by sharpening their points of difference. The more clearly and distinctly a brand can pinpoint its differences, the more valuable it becomes. If a brand can carve out a very clear spot in people’s minds, the product or service ceases to be a commodity. As we’ll see in Part II, different personality Advantages can be more valuable than similar ones. 2.   Your differences can be very small and simple. The reality is, most products are virtually indistinguishable from their competitors. Yet a leading brand can build a strong competitive edge around very minor differences. Similarly, you don’t need to be dramatically different than everyone else—your difference can be minute, as long as it is clearly defined. The more competitive the market, the more crucial this becomes. 3.   Once you “own” a difference, you can charge more money. People pay more for products and people who add distinct value in some way. And just as customers pay more for fascinating brands, employers pay higher salaries for employees who stand out with a specific benefit. If you are an entrepreneur or small business owner, your clients and customers will have a higher perceived value of your time and services if they can clearly understand why you are different than your competitors. The more crowded the environment, the more crucial these lessons become.

Danny Meyer of Union Square Hospitality Group talked about businesses having soul. He believed soul was what made a business great, or even worth doing at all. “A business without soul is not something I’m interested in working at,” he said. He suggested that the soul of a business grew out of the relationships a company developed as it went along. “Soul can’t exist unless you have active, meaningful dialogue with stakeholders: employees, customers, the community, suppliers, and investors. When you launch a business, your job as the entrepreneur is to say, ‘Here’s a value proposition that I believe in. Here’s where I’m coming from. This is my point of view.’ At first, it’s a monologue. Gradually it becomes a dialogue and then a real conversation.

GET BEYOND THE ONE-MAN SHOW Great organizations are never one-man operations. There are 22 million licensed small businesses in America that have no employees. Forbes suggests 75 percent of all businesses operate with one person. And the average income of those companies is a sad $44,000. That’s not a business—that’s torture. That is a prison where you are both the warden and the prisoner. What makes a person start a business and then be the only person who works there? Are they committed to staying small? Or maybe an entrepreneur decides that because the talent pool is so poor, they can’t hire anyone who can do it as well as them, and they give up. My guess is the latter: Most people have just given up and said, “It’s easier if I just do it myself.” I know, because that’s what I did—and it was suicidal. Because my business was totally dependent on me and only me, I was barely able to survive, much less grow, for the first ten years. Instead I contracted another company to promote my seminars. When I hired just one person to assist me out of my home office, I thought I was so smart: Keep it small. Keep expenses low. Run a tight ship. Bigger isn’t always better. These were the things I told myself to justify not growing my business. I did this for years and even bragged about how well I was doing on my own. Then I started a second company with a partner, a consulting business that ran parallel to my seminar business. This consulting business quickly grew bigger than my first business because my partner hired people to work for us. But even then I resisted bringing other people into the company because I had this idea that I didn’t want the headaches and costs that come with managing people. My margins were monster when I had no employees, but I could never grow my revenue line without killing myself, and I have since learned that is where all my attention and effort should have gone. But with the efforts of one person and one contracted marketing company, I could expand only so much. I know that a lot of speakers and business gurus run their companies as one-man shows. Which means that while they are giving advice to others about how to grow a business, they may have never grown one themselves! Their one-man show is simply a guy or gal going out, collecting a fee, selling time and a few books. And when they are out speaking, the business terminates all activity. I started studying other people and companies that had made it big and discovered they all had lots of employees. The reality is you cannot have a great business if it’s just you. You need to add other people. If you don’t believe me, try to name one truly great business that is successful, ongoing, viable, and growing that doesn’t have many people making it happen. Good luck. Businesses are made of people, not just machines, automations, and technology. You need people around you to implement programs, to add passion to the technology, to serve customers, and ultimately to get you where you want to go. Consider the behemoth online company Amazon: It has more than 220,000 employees. Apple has more than 100,000; Microsoft has around the same number. Ernst & Young has more than 200,000 people. Apple calls the employees working in its stores “Geniuses.” Don’t you want to hire employees deserving of that title too? Think of how powerful they could make your business.

When I started in real estate, despite high ambition, I was constrained by the same 24 hours as everyone else. My early success came from a grueling schedule, long hours, and the high price of near burn-out. In self-defense, I devised a system that featured direct marketing in place of traditional prospecting plus a highly effective team, with all the non-rainmaker tasks delegated to them. This took me to the top of the profession, twice #1 in RE/MAX worldwide in commissions earned, and 15 years as one of the top agents—working less hours than most. While an active agent, I consistently sold over 500 homes a year, even while starting and developing a second business, training and coaching more millionaire agents than any other coach. Without the inspiration of Dan Kennedy’s direct marketing methods and his extraordinary, extreme time-management philosophy, these achievements simply would not have been possible. LEVERAGING yourself, by media in place of manual labor, and with other people is very intimidating to most real estate agents and to most small businesspeople. It frankly is not easy to get right, but it is the quantum leap that uniquely and simultaneously lifts income and supports a great lifestyle. —CRAIG PROCTOR, CRAIGPROCTOR.COM

If the global pie stayed the same size, there was no margin for credit. Credit is the difference between today’s pie and tomorrow’s pie. If the pie stays the same, why extend credit? It would be an unacceptable risk unless you believed that the baker or king asking for your money might be able to steal a slice from a competitor. So it was hard to get a loan in the premodern world, and when you got one it was usually small, short-term, and subject to high interest rates. Upstart entrepreneurs thus found it difficult to open new bakeries and great kings who wanted to build palaces or wage wars had no choice but to raise the necessary funds through high taxes and tariffs. That was fine for kings (as long as their subjects remained docile), but a scullery maid who had a great idea for a bakery and wanted to move up in the world generally could only dream of wealth while scrubbing down the royal kitchen’s floors. The Magic Circle of the Modern Economy It was lose-lose. Because credit was limited, people had trouble financing new businesses. Because there were few new businesses, the economy did not grow. Because it did not grow, people assumed it never would, and those who had capital were wary of extending credit. The expectation of stagnation fulfilled itself.

Increasingly, progressive voices in the media are shining a spotlight on the need for new businesses that serve both entrepreneurs and local communities. Yes! Magazine is a leading chronicler of independence from the global economy, with features such as “31 Ways to Jump Start the Local Economy,” “Wendell Berry’s 17 Rules for a Sustainable Economy,” “A Resilient Community,” “Small Banks, Radical Vision,” and other numerous stories on how consumers and householders can become producers of energy and food. Epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, in his bestseller The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier, offered both a survey of our nation’s growing economic inequalities and an eloquent argument that such inequalities will lead to increased anxiety, fear, isolation, health failures, and chronic insecurity.

In May, Stanton graduated with five other formerly incarcerated adults from Project ReMADE, a 12-week program created by Stanford law students that aims to turn ex-convicts into entrepreneurs. The program matches former prisoners with Silicon Valley venture capitalists and business executives, and with students from Stanford's law and graduate business schools, who mentor the ex-inmates to become small-business owners. "Stanford brings social capital to people who don't have ... the networks that you and I and everyone else leans on and takes for granted," said Debbie Mukamal, executive director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, who oversees Project ReMADE. "We're here to open doors for them.

With bloggers in particular you’ve got millions and millions of people who are working really hard to write stuff up. They're writing this blog, they're posting every day. They really want readers and some blogs have a zillion readers and some blogs have no readers.  But if somebody writes about your business, they're asking for your attention.  And when you see that they said something and when they – you show up and you say, “Thank you so much for writing about us,” for the person who cared enough to say something in the first place, it is the most wonderful thing you can do.  When you say, “Thanks for posting” and they say, “Oh my God, I wrote about so and so and they actually read my blog,” and they immediately write another blog post.  And suddenly you’ve doubled the positive Word of Mouth.

In Seattle, Washington, in 1971, Howard Schultz, the owner of a local coffee roasting and distribution company, noted the increasing affluence of the American public and their desire to receive gracious treatment in their daily activities. Schultz recognized that there was a market for small businesses featuring top quality coffee and an opportunity to relax in an attractive environment. To take advantage of these emerging Minitrends, Mr. Schultz initiated the very successful Starbucks chain which offers top quality coffee drinks in a friendly and relaxed atmosphere Starbucks has a long record of appreciating Minitrends, but failed to recognize the trend that more economically-stressed customers were beginning to opt for similar, lower-cost drinks offered by fast food restaurants such as McDonald’s. While still popular, in summer 2008, the Starbucks company announced the termination of 1,000 employees, and in November 2008, the company reported a 98 percent decline in profit for the third quarter of the year. To be more economically competitive, Starbucks has recently introduced a line of instant coffee.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. -Margaret Mead

Change, even when it seems disastrous, provides incredible opportunities if you’re able to look at seeming disasters through the lens of possibility.