Majel Barrett Quotes

I'm in the retail business, not the circus business.

I always wanted to have my own boutiques. I'm so passionate about clothing and always have been so business-minded.

My first job was in retail at the age of 14, and I have worked in the industry ever since.

My strengths as a businessman lie in the design and sale of women's shoes, and I have never been comfortable with complicated or technical legal or business documents.

No one in my family had a retail or marketing background. They were professionals. They didn't understand just what I was doing by going into retailing. After I started, though, it got into my blood. I knew this was what I wanted.

Maybe I was born to be a merchant, maybe it was fate. I don't know about that. But I know this for sure: I loved retail from the very beginning.

Retail is my game. I spend every waking hour thinking about it. I started in the industry at the age of 18 after trying various other things that were mind-numbingly boring to me.

I have learned a ton about inventory, co-packing, wholesaling, end caps. All these concepts are easy to breeze by in what I do for a living or assume that there is a marketing manager or specialist in one of our companies that handles that.

What I've come to find out is it doesn't matter if you're selling a $10,000 gown or toilet paper: The everyday sort of humdrum of customer service and retail is the same.

I was first hired at Staples in 1992, by company founder Tom Stemberg and eventual CEO Ron Sargent, to be the first director of marketing and merchandising for the catalog business.

Some of the things I think I learned from that were very educational as far as just paying bills - the basics in dealing with a restaurant like that. It was just life - the education involved in running the organization, even on a small level.

I spend my time being a retailer, not an economist.

I used to sell furniture for a living. The trouble was, it was my own.

The people that are running the bulk of the comic shops in North America aren't business people and they don't understand sales. They don't understand good product.

One of the people who most influenced me was Ben Shapiro, a marketing professor at the business school. He used to rant and rave and pound his fist: 'It's all about the customers!' And he was right. He was also right that, at that time, retailing was devoid of really talented people; he urged me to go in that direction.

Selling is a natural skill. It's developed as a child. You may know it as persuasion.

Working in a store and being a shop assistant, if you don't know what to do and you like fashion, I think it's a great way of getting into the business because you do windows, cleaning, and everything. That was my school for two years, working in a shop, and that's how I met people in magazines and designers.

Most of my career has been in sales. I spend 50% or more of my time with customers and employees, and I can't wait for it to be more than 50%.

I always wanted to work on the consumer market; I always wanted to work with people.

This is my hobby: growing stores, adding stores. It's fun.

Like any small business owner, I experienced the pressures of building a company from the ground up - developing a business plan, balancing the books, meeting payroll and building a customer base.

Even if the chef has a good business head, his focus should be behind kitchen doors. A business partner should take care of everything in front of the kitchen doors.

How can you be on top of the things you do? I think when you are involved in a business, first of all you need to know the business. After that you know the business, you can - the numbers tell you what is happening. You can read with the numbers.

On the whole, and this comment can get me in a lot of trouble, I find that retailers in the comic book business are not business people. They're fans who've gotten themselves shops.

To operate a company of the size of Sears Holdings or Wal-Mart or Target or Home Depot or Lowe's, you need a combination of skills, and each of those skills needs to be sufficiently strong.