Deborah Meaden Quotes

Entrepreneurs are great at dealing with uncertainty and also very good at minimizing risk. That's the classic great entrepreneur.

Thinking big is only one part of being a successful entrepreneur.

You have to be a little commercial, and that's what I learnt over the years.

I did all kinds of things as a young person to try to make money. I had a chicken operation - I sold chickens. I can remember going to high school football games as a ten-year-old and gathering Coca-Cola bottles, 'cause you'd turn them in and get a nickel. I wanted not to remain idle.

People ask me all the time, 'How can I become a successful entrepreneur?' And I have to be honest: It's one of my least favorite questions, because if you're waiting for someone else's advice to become an entrepreneur, chances are you're not one.

Being an entrepreneur is a mindset. You have to see things as opportunities all the time. I like to do interviews. I like to push people on certain topics. I like to dig into the stories where there's not necessarily a right or wrong answer.

A lot of drive is innate, self-perpetuated, reinforced energy. As a kid, I could always sell anything I could get my hands on - from newspapers to lemonade to 'TV Guide.' I knew how to make a presentation.

I was raised with a sense of entrepreneurship - my father owned a roofing business, and I grew up with the idea that you never want someone telling you what you can and cannot do.

If I had to give one piece of advice to a budding entrepreneur, I would say: 'Aim big.'

Even as a kid, I was a businessman. I figured out that if you plucked all the berries off my neighbor's tree and smashed them up, they made a Nickelodeon Gak-type consistency. I sold them to all the neighborhood kids and made stacks of quarters. Of course, the berries were poisonous, and I got in all types of trouble.

Seeing the world around you clearly is a critical step in developing an idea for a business, carrying out that idea, and then thriving with an ongoing concern. Through choice, predilection, lack of education, impatience, or other causes, the entrepreneur lives, in a way, outside the mainstream.

Entrepreneurs see the thing they want or need, then try to figure out a process of how to get it. People who shouldn't be entrepreneurs see the standard process they need to go through to get the thing they want or need then decide if they want to go through that process.

The constant in all the businesses I've become a part of is taking what I do and making it real for everyone. I believe fantasy and dreaming can be made a reality. You don't have to be rich. You don't have to be a VIP.

It takes more than capital to swing business. You've got to have the A. I. D. degree to get by - Advertising, Initiative, and Dynamics.

My experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren't so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.

All human beings are born entrepreneurs. Some get a chance to unleash that capacity. Some never got the chance, never knew that he or she has that capacity.

You know how people always talk about how vision is the key to entrepreneurship and perseverance and really seeing what other people don't see? We can actually redeem a fair amount of that folk wisdom.

Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.

As an entrepreneur, the pressures of a startup can be enormous, but it's rarely life or death.

A lot of people who own a business aren't entrepreneurial at all.

Great entrepreneurs focus intensely on an opportunity where others see nothing.

When I was 8 years old, I sold garden seeds.

I think entrepreneurs are born and not created, and so I think you see a lot of similarities among entrepreneurs in different parts of the world. Their backdrop may be very different, but their drive to create a business and to create jobs remains very much the same, whether it's in Silicon Valley or Kandahar or Kabul.

I have a mother who never took no for an answer when it came to her creative pursuits. She started a hair salon in her spare bedroom and four years later had 30 employees.

I stood up for what I believed in starting businesses.