Small Business Owner Quotes

Why - because as a oil and gas small business owner - I know if someone is not doing their job, they should not get paid. Again leadership by example. ~ Jeff Landry

As any small business owner knows, starting a business is not glamorous work. ~ Kevin McCarthy

I am a local economic revitalization strategist. But I am also a TV/radio host, and a small business owner. I find ways to use money more efficiently to realize positive goals for everyone. ~ Majora Carter

Any small business owner wears many hats. We [New View Window Cleaning] are the salesman, bookkeeper, scheduler, cleaner, customer complaint department, etc. If you aren't organized and willing to do all these things (at least in the beginning) you are better off working for someone. ~ Tony Evans

The ultimate proof of confidence for a small-business owner is, are they hiring employees? ~ Brad D. Smith

As a member of the House Committee on Small Business and because of my own experience as a small business owner, I am appreciative of the impact these small businesses have on our local economies. ~ Melissa Bean

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. ~ Sarah Gerdes

I've built employee perks programs before and it's impossible to manually build a program that makes everyone happy. I'd make a deal with one gym then hear about another gym an employee would prefer. As a small business owner, I didn't have the time or leverage to negotiate and manage dozens of vendor relationships. ~ Paige Craig

I'm the guy who's started businesses, I've been a small business owner. I've employed hundreds of Pennsylvanians. I know how to get jobs moving in the private sector, rein in the excesses in Washington, and bring some balance to a town that's lost all balance. ~ Pat Toomey

That Steuben, who needed a translator, what with his English vocabulary consisting almost entirely of swear words, ended up being the perfect hire to upgrade the Continental Army should rattle every search committee, small-business owner, casting director, college admissions officer, headhunter, and voter. ~ Sarah Vowell

It's far more difficult being a small-business owner starting a business than it is for me with thousands of people working for us and 400 companies. Building a business from scratch is 24 hours, 7 days a week, divorces, it's difficult to hold your family life together, it's bloody hard work and only one word really matters - and that's surviving. ~ Richard Branson

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. ~ Sarah Gerdes

In 2007, Michael Grimm, former Marine, former FBI agent, accountant and attorney, was poised for success as a small business owner. Instead, as alleged, Grimm made the choice to go from upholding the law to breaking it. In so doing, he turned his back on every oath he had ever taken. ~ Loretta Lynch

I started my first business when I was 19. I learned a valuable lesson as a small business owner. You are the first one to work, last one to leave, and last one to be paid. ~ Kevin McCarthy

The average small-business owner uses 18 apps to run their business every day, and if those applications don't allow data to flow seamlessly and they don't integrate, it's going to become a point of friction. It's going to prevent the small business from being successful. ~ Brad D. Smith

She didn't play the game, she changed the game! ~ Stephanie Lahart

This nation's 23 million small businesses need a budget that reflects their value to the economy. ~ Solomon Ortiz

The music business is rougher than the movie business. In film you get noticed in a small role, even in a movie that bombs. But in records you better have that hit or else it's 'See you later.' ~ Amy Madigan

Your life is a trajectory. Every choice you make alters that trajectory, in a positive or negative way. Will you categorize that dinner with friends as a business expense? Will you be honest with your daughter? Will you take more credit than you're due? These are just the small questions that we face every day, and little by little, the answers influence the trajectory of our lives and beings. ~ Donald Van De Mark

[Louis] Brandeis, like [Tomas] Jefferson, is an equal opportunity critic of bigness. And he, like Jefferson, sees American history as this incredible clash between small producers, farmers, and small business people on the one hand, and wicked oligarchs and financiers and monopolists on the other. ~ Jeffrey Rosen

Ideas are cheap and plentiful. The original pitch idea is such a small part of a business that it's almost negligible. The real question is how well you execute. ~ Jason Fried

We are going through tough economic times but things are looking up, and the indicators are improving not only for large corporations but also for small business. ~ George Pataki

It's a great discipline to have to report to somebody, even if you're the sole owner ~ Tim O'Reilly

The British Islands are small islands and our people numerically a little people. Their only claim to world importance depends upon their courage and enterprise, and a people who will not stand up to the necessity of air service planned on a world scale, and taking over thousands of aeroplanes and thousands of men from the onset of peace, has no business to pretend anything more than a second rate position in the world. We cannot be both Imperial and mean. ~ H.G.Wells

What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so? Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne - we may stop there. Of these, all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men, and of these three, Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairly well to do. It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to say: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve were University men: which means that somehow or other they procured the means to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hard fact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well to do, and I challenge you that, if he had not been well to do, he would no more have attained to write Saul or The Ring and the Book than Ruskin would have attained to writing Modern Painters if his father had not dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income; and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew John Clare in a mad-house, and James Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug disappointment. These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It is - however dishonouring to us as a nation - certain that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hund ~ Virginia Wolf

Mr. Pickwick took a seat and the paper, but instead of reading the latter, peeped over the top of it, and took a survey of the man of business, who was an elderly, pimply-faced, vegetable-diet sort of man, in a black coat, dark mixture trousers, and small black gaiters; a kind of being who seemed to be an essential part of the desk at which he was writing, and to have as much thought or sentiment. ~ Charles Dickens

Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living? ~ Virginia Woolf

Being general manager is like being the de facto owner. It's like wearing the crown of 'Restaurant Man' without being 'Restaurant Man.' You're trying to run the business, but you're running the ranch without riding the big horse. ~ Joe Bastianich

In the space business, space had gotten very much to be the aerospace industry. This is something that governments only do and it's where the Boeings and the Lockheed's and the Northrop's and so forth. And there's no way these small companies could do it. ~ Peter Diamandis

I am excited to rise today to support National Mom and Pop Business Owners Day. This celebration honors the husband and wife business owner teams whose work helps drive the economy and fuel job growth. ~ Melissa Bean

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. ~ Gary Vaynerchuk

Too many people glorified small-town America, making it seems like a Normal Rockwell painting, but the reality was something else entirely. With the exception of doctors and lawyers or people who owned their own business, there were no high-paying jobs in Oriental, or any other small town for that matter. And while is was in many way an ideal place to raise young children, there was little for young adults to aspire to.There weren't, nor would there ever be, middle management positions in small towns, nor was there much to do on the weekends, or even new people to meet ~ Nicholas Sparks

We very much hope that as we get growth that we can reduce the burden of taxation, that we can reduce income tax and increase the amount of genuine free enterprise and business enterprise ... This is going ... toward the restoration of the personal responsibility, the independence, with every man a property owner, every man a capitalist. ~ Margaret Thatcher

Prosperity may be found in small as in big business. ~ I.L. Peretz

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? ~ Ashley Asti

Firing people, damaging morale, and changing the entire way you do business. Ramping up doesn't have to be your goal. And we're not talking just about the number of employees you have either. It's also true for expenses, rent, IT infrastructure, furniture, etc. These things don't just happen to you. You decide whether or not to take them on. And if you do take them on, you'll be taking on new headaches, too. Lock in lots of expenses and you force yourself into building a complex business - one that's a lot more difficult and stressful to run. Don't be insecure about aiming to be a small business. ~ Jason Fried

Do you wonder then that this man's behaviour used to puzzle me tremendously? He was an ordinary clergyman at that time as well as being Headmaster, and I would sit in the dim light of the school chapel and listen to him preaching about the Lamb of God and about Mercy and Forgiveness and all the rest of it and my young mind would become totally confused. I knew very well that only the night before this preacher had shown neither Forgiveness nor Mercy in flogging some small boy who had broken the rules.
So what was it all about? I used to ask myself.
Did they preach one thing and practise another, these men of God?
And if someone had told me at the time that this flogging clergyman was one day to become the Archbishop of Canterbury, I would never have believed it.
It was all this, I think, that made me begin to have doubts about religion and even about God. If this person, I kept telling myself, was one of God's chosen salesmen on earth, then there must be something very wrong about the whole business. ~ Roald Dahl

Small bits of life crawled and flew about the ward on ancient business. ~ Peter Matthiessen

Conventional wisdom suggests the primary motivator for entrepreneurs is money or wealth creation and, in fact, much of the political debate tends to center around what kind of tax or regulatory policy changes will turn corporate suits into small business adventurers overnight. ~ Chip Conley

It's difficult for people to come to the understanding that only a small minority of the people ever really get the word about life, about living abundantly and successfully. Success in the important departments of life seldom comes naturally, no more naturally than success at anything-a musical instrument, sports, fly-fishing, tennis, golf, business, marriage, parenthood, landscape gardening. But somehow people wait passively for success to come to them, living as other people are living in the unspoken, tacit assumption that other people know how to live successfully. ~ Earl Nightingale

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

RULE #1
Market your business to the customer YOU WANT.
Most beauty businesses try to be everything to everyone. It's exhausting and expensive promoting yourself to everyone. Most people simply give up.
Focus on the customers you really want. What is your passion, what do you excel in? Who is your ideal customer? What would you ideally like to do every day in your business?
Focus on what you want to do and the clients you want, and market directly to them and only them. ~ Jana Elston

We have lost that which has made us great over the generations, and that is the sense of individual and personal responsibility that we can come up, we can pursue our dreams and our aspirations and we won't be blocked by government regulation, by the inability to get a loan as a small business to make our dreams come true. ~ Jon Huntsman, Jr.

My construction business represents 10 or 20 times what I'll ever invest in football. But from the moment I bought the Chargers, I would become forever known as the owner of that NFL franchise. ~ Alex Spanos

I had to sign the paper to shut down the government. It's terrible ... [But] what the shutdown showed many, many people is the importance of the role of government. And as frustrated [as people get with] Washington, there are so many things [the government does] that are so important to people's lives every day. The panda cam, paying small businesses their loans - these are all things that shut down. ~ Sylvia Mathews Burwell

You know, the funny thing about Lorne and that show is that, you can go over one million things, but in a business of bean counters, he still likes to laugh at small things and creates a show around it. ~ Colin Quinn

It's ironic, since they're supposed to be immortal, but vampires are kind of like small businesses: half of them go down within their first year ~ Alexis Hall

Art with a big "A" is for museums, galleries, critics, and collectors. art with a small "a" is for the rest of us. Art is a business, an industry, a racket. art is about passion, love, life, humanity - everything that is truly valuable. Art is sold, resold, put under the gavel, and insured up the wazoo. art with a small "a" is not a product. It's a point of view. It's a way of life. Art is made by trained professionals and experts. art is made by accountants, farmers, and stay-at-home moms at restaurant tables, in parking lots, and laundry rooms. Art takes Art School and Talent and years of Suffering and Sacrifice. art just takes desire and 15 minutes a day. You may not be an Artist. Big whoop. But I know you can make art - with a wonderful, expressive, teeny, tiny a. ~ Danny Gregory

She forgot the small detail of the business she wanted to engage him on. She enjoyed saying no to him, repeatedly. Refusal was probably a new experience for him, too, but it was hard to tell. ~ A.W. Exley

Paradoxically, then, network effects businesses must start with especially small markets. Facebook started with just Harvard students - Mark Zuckerberg's first product was designed to get all his classmates signed up, not to attract all people of Earth. This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don't even appear to be business opportunities at ~ Peter Thiel

Small-business customers are very conservative and very cheap. We don't have to explain ourselves for the most part. ~ Paul Graham

Rich dad always said, "To be successful as an investor or a business owner, you have to be emotionally neutral to winning and losing. Winning and losing are just part of the game." Quitting ~ Robert T. Kiyosaki

At a small dinner with other business executives, the guest of honor spoke the entire time without taking a breath. This meant that the only way to ask a question or make an observation was to interrupt. Three or four men jumped in, and the guest politely answered their questions before resuming his lecture. At one point, I tried to add something to the conversation and he barked, "Let me finish! You people are not good at listening!" Eventually, a few more men interjected and he allowed it. Then the only other female executive at the dinner decided to speak up
and he did it again! He chastised her for interrupting. After the meal, one of the male CEOs pulled me aside to say that he had noticed that only the women had been silenced. He told me he empathized, because as a Hispanic, he has been treated like this many times. ~ Sheryl Sandberg

When you can identify a specific tax that people don't like, and this is one that was designed for the Rockefellers, for the Carnegies in 1916, to fund World War I, but now it's beginning to hit small business people, real estate holders, a lot of people well down the income scale who just spent a life building assets. Suddenly they get hit with a 40%, 50% tax rate. ~ Paul Gigot

I want to get the economy going again. It's not just enough about what we're against, as important as that is. I have a plan to create new jobs, manufacturing, infrastructure, clean energy jobs that will make us the 21st century clean energy super power. I also want to make sure small businesses can start and grow again. ~ Hillary Clinton

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

No community values entrepreneurship and small business more than the Hispanic community. ~ Marco Rubio

Your world is created by your words. ~ Timi Nadela

I think the knowledge about how legislation really affects small businesses is extremely valuable. If you haven't run a small business, then you don't have this kind of knowledge about how a regulation passed or taxes increased affects your bottom line. If you recognize that every new regulation takes that much more time to comply with, requires that many more employees, then it really gives you that foundational basis to make those decisions. ~ Kristi Noem

There is no such thing as a 'free' government benefit. Ask small-business owners who are footing skyrocketing bills for bottomless jobless benefits. ~ Michelle Malkin