Harvey S. Firestone Quotes

Because Tom Doherty and people like that are not stupid. If they could have streamlined their operation more to get more money out of it, they would have done it. It's not like they're a bunch of idiots.

For resourceful tech founders, finding capital is rarely a problem; making the best use of it is another story. A few years slinging pepperoni pies and chicken wings - on tiny margins and with minimal investment - might not be the worst fiscal training.

And, we have no such thing as a budget anymore. Our manager freaks when we show him the bill. We're lavish to the bone, but all our money goes back into the product.

You can make a lot of mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient.

I can't draw a stick person. I can't play a musical instrument. But I've always had a knack for making money.

I talked about 12 to 18 months, and that's about reaffirming our foundation for sustained growth: getting the discipline back, getting the basics right, getting the customer focus back... so by the end of next year, I hope most of that's in place.

In this business, you don't have to be an architect or an engineer or a brick layer. But you have to understand how the money flows. That you can only understand if you're on the site.

About half my time is spent on business operation type stuff.

Overhead will eat you alive if not constantly viewed as a parasite to be exterminated. Never mind the bleating of those you employ. Hold out until mutiny is imminent before employing even a single additional member of staff. More startups are wrecked by overstaffing than by any other cause, bar failure to monitor cash flow.

In setting goals and executing a strategy, Wanda is sophisticated. We have good systems and departments. If targets are not reached, a yellow light goes off.

There is nothing like visiting a facility to get a sense of how companies work.

I think, as a chef and restaurateur, that you have to take care of your business. Otherwise, you're only as good as your last meal. You have to watch if your food costs are too high, or you could be out of business in no time.

Harman had great brands, but the processes were falling apart.

You have to do things right to stay in business, and that's not easy, and that's a choice on a daily basis, the choices you make in how to run your business and how to have a point of differentiation and how to be true to your brand, how to offer something that people want and to offer something that you love.

As you grow as a company, you get layers and hierarchy that, in theory, should make your decisions a lot better. They get reviewed, and thoughtful people look at decision.

Our focus is to see that we are growing faster than the industry and, whichever product we launch, we do better than competition. We try and manage our operations better than competition. Essentially, we try to be better than what we were the previous year.

I think Amazon is a place where people don't want to work.

I think, in any workplace environment, the atmosphere trickles down from the top.

Great companies have to manage the cadence of what they do.

As much as you need to know your operations, if you don't understand the finance side and how to do the business, you're never going to be successful. So you might be the best operator or visionary, but if you don't understand the finance side... I'm successful because I know the finance side, but I also know operations; it's not an accident.

We have a terrific team, and our managers are terrific managers, but we have made it too complicated for them and too complicated in a way that they just can't do an excellent job in many cases when it comes to the customer experience.

We are not frou-frou creative types. We have done both sides of the business and are constantly asking ourselves, 'How are we going to pay for this?' But the criteria is that it must fit with our world.

When you're finished, bars are not inherently profitable. You got to work at them to make them profitable.

Projects are usually undertaken to either solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity. The probability that the project - even if precisely executed - will complete on time, on budget, and on performance is typically small. Project management is utilized to increase this probability. So in a sense, project management is risk management.

Keep your debt low, and ask, Can your operational expertise make an impact? Then you're taking away a lot of the risk.