Mike Pompeo Quotes

If you don't drive your business, you will be driven out of business.

If your goal is anything but profitability - if it's to be big, or to grow fast, or to become a technology leader - you'll hit problems.

Any business owner can tell you that if their company isn't performing profitably and up to standards, one of two things will happen: either you make changes to improve its efficiency, or a competitor will drive you out of business. Market forces have a way of cutting to the chase rather quickly.

First, we have to lower our costs to levels that are more competitive. This will prevent the lower-cost airlines from pushing us out of the markets we want to serve. We've made great progress on this front, but we need to keep pushing.

I don't fret much about the natural life spans of shoe companies. If stores don't do the right things, they cease to exist, and that doesn't trouble me at all.

Business 2.0 was hugely profitable last year, and will be profitable this year.

The biggest challenge to thriving in the marketplace is identifying the strategic moves that will keep us ahead of the competition.

I have almost no interest in quarterly reports. Running a business or investing in a business based on quarterly earnings doesn't make any sense at all to me.

For a startup, you need to stay small so the others don't attack, or you aim to be one of the big guys. If you don't do it right, you might lose everything.

People in retail banks are not smart. They have a business model that's quite difficult to not make money out of - but still they somehow manage it.

European and American banks are conservative in the sense that they don't come at their full strength to markets where we are; that leaves us an opportunity to be successful.

I'm a businessman, and what I know is numbers and business.

I learned that you shouldn't take your most esoteric concept and fit it into the largest space with the highest fixed costs. It puts too much pressure on the restaurant to hit grand slams every day when there just aren't enough people who want to watch that sport.

It's obvious that Pemex doesn't have the financial capacity to be in every single front of energy generation.

As they grow, companies saturate their markets, become more complex and difficult to manage, and face larger and more entrenched competitors.

I am sure there will come a time when we are going to use AMD. The products have been getting better. The acceptance is getting better. But we have not been suffering as a company for either growth or profitability because we haven't had AMD.

A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.

You just can't get too focused on worrying about what's going to happen in the next quarter. You have to worry about where the business is headed long-term.

There's no evidence that large, diversified food companies win over time.

When you're talking about capital and financial things, which I certainly pay a lot of attention to, I base those decisions on one question that I typically ask myself, which is 'Does it help us to build a better company?'

Well, as we built the business in the 1990's, as I said, I enjoyed that.

Entrepreneurs have only the murkiest picture of the future in which they are making their bets, and also there is ambiguity: they don't know when they push this lever or that lever that the outcome is going to be what they think it is going to be - there is the law of unanticipated consequences.

In the U.S., we didn't have scale, and without scale, it's difficult to operate.

You're either making money or you're not. If you're not making money get out of the business.

Businesswise, everything's been good.