Michael Gerber Quotes

Because I didn't have much money, I bought a small shop that fit my budget. The previous six owners had closed their business in three years. The store had no people traffic and, because of that, I was able to focus on figuring out how to provide a better service to each and every one of the customers that did come through.

The whole - it's the economy's bad. It's bad for everybody. I have my own comedy club. I opened it three years ago in a horrible economy. I created jobs. And we just started breaking even after a year and a half, barely. For that entire time, I have had to pay the difference of what we owe in rent and taxes and everything out of my own pocket.

We need to see many more people starting businesses and becoming their own boss, but the squeezed middle exists as much within this group as in the population at large as rising costs are hitting small businesses - who after all are consumers too.

The mismanagement of the Small Business Health Options program is very frustrating.

In the early days, I didn't have the money to pay decent salaries, so I didn't get good people. I got nice people, but I didn't get good employees.

My parents were very strapped for cash when we were growing up.

The Obama administration made it illegal for me to loan any money to anyone in the military. I have one compliance guy just for a pawn shop. It's everything from Homeland Security, FBI, the local police department, IRS - all these regulations I have to keep an eye on constantly, and it's just overwhelming for a small business.

We don't have the money of the Manchester clubs or Chelsea. Arsenal builds its team through training, through recruiting players who can become something. Arsenal has less money than some other clubs, so we have to fight with other values.

The engineering, analytics, design, testing, and delivery behind our products offer some of the hardest engineering and business challenges in the world. As we've brought our franchises into eSports and moved to digital delivery, it's become even more complex and exciting - which, in turn, has allowed us attract even more top talent.

Teams with limited budgets will always find times tough and results won't always go your way.

Running your own business is a huge amount of fun, but there's also a huge amount of seriousness, so actually, they level out.

I know first-hand how hard it is to start a business. Those first few years are rough.

My five years' experience working in small businesses and a multi-national company have helped me as an MP to understand the challenges that businesses face, however the bottom line is that it's up to constituents to judge whether you are good enough to do the job.

Bright graduates will either set up their own companies or come and work for us or a consulting firm or government. But going to work for a small company if you are really good? No way.

I don't want to live in a small Bronx apartment. I don't want to have three kids that got to share one room.

More and more, leadership, whether it's profit or nonprofit, is about recruiting and keeping talented people. That's the biggest challenge. Yes, you've got to create systems that will enable people easily to innovate continuously; you've got to be a system-builder. But finding and keeping geeks and shrinks is the biggest challenge. That means leaders have got to be salespeople, they've got to be recruiters, and they've got to be actively able to understand and keep the talent they have. Leadership is courtship. That's what it's becoming.

But America was built by optimists. Optimists like my friend Amanda, who recently started a small business. When she went to buy her website address-her first and last name-she found that someone already owned it, but wasn't using it. So my friend emailed the owner of the site to ask if she could buy it. The owner wrote back.

My best country record only sold 200,000 copies. I didn't have enough money for the band and the arrangements and the costumes and all. I had to move into wider fields.

We're a family operation. There's not many of us. We have a couple people who come from time to time who work with us. Two of my sons are themselves filmmakers, and we can't afford them nor they us.

Unfortunately, only a small number of patients with peptic ulcer are financially able to make a pet of an ulcer.

Under budgetary pressure (arbitrary or not) it is truly remarkable how many options one discovers one can do without.

In these tough economic times, everybody has to cut back. I am down to three tabs of ecstasy a day.

It's far more difficult being a small-business owner starting a business than it is for me with thousands of people working for us and 400 companies. Building a business from scratch is 24 hours, 7 days a week, divorces, it's difficult to hold your family life together, it's bloody hard work and only one word really matters - and that's surviving.

Each year it grows harder to make ends meet - the ends I refer to are hands and feet.

I was pretty poor for a long time. Not *poor* poor. But college student poor. I lived for most of my adult life living on student wages, then after I got my MA and started teaching, I lived on teacher's wages, which isn't much better.