Shawn Kemp Quotes

The business end of business has never interested me.

I couldn't sell water in a desert. I have no business acumen. I can tell you why you have no business acumen, and I can tell you why your project may or may not work, but I have no ability to make money.

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.

No 27-year-old has the experience to run a company that does a quarter of a billion dollars a year in sales.

My head's not in the clouds, but I think I've gotten too much credit for being an astute businessman.

If you want to stay in the business then you've got to be a bit shrewd, haven't you?

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.

Know the business; you need to know the business side of things.

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.

I think I have a pretty decent business savvy, when I give myself room to.

As a businessman, I know that businesses need certainty.

I think it is really important to have a sense of business. As a designer you can get so wrapped up in the design and fashion side that you forget the business side.

You can't run a business based on sympathies; otherwise our business would be hampered.

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

A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination. He must see things as in a vision, a dream of the whole thing.

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

When I first got into business, I made a lot of bad decisions.

A simple idea. And the man that worked on it, Mike Gabriel, doubled the value. Beautiful job. I should say triple. We have others like that, but, unfortunately, shorts, which are my favorite approach, are economically of no value.

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

Business, more than any other occupation, is a continual dealing with the future; it is a continual calculation, an instinctive exercise in foresight.

The Jews had, as a matter of fact, long been all along the most ingenious entrepreneurs. It was only our own future that we had never built upon a business basis.

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

The successful man is the one who finds out what is the matter with his business before his competitors do.

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?'

Every time we bring someone in we ensure that they are a strategic thinker, but even more important that they understand that if the products aren't successful and the products don't sell that there won't be anything to strategize about.