Daymond John Quotes

In business, the competition will bite you if you keep running, if you stand still, they will swallow you.

A strategy is something like, an innovative new product; globalization, taking your products around the world; be the low-cost producer. A strategy is something you can touch; you can motivate people with; be number one and number two in every business. You can energize people around the message.

Business people do two things with their time fundamentally. The first is that they try to create sales, right? Revenue, key to business. But the other thing they devote their time to equally is cost containment. That is to say, how to not create jobs. Because the fewer jobs you can create for the revenue you create, the more profit you make.

You've got to know business before you go to show business.

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

Designing is so easy - it's the business that is hard. That's why you really have to respect Ralph Lauren - look at what he's done. Anybody who can sustain themselves should be applauded.

I think running a business, doing what I've done for the last - since 1996, has taught me so many things because I started from just an idea and then had to figure out how to make it, market it, every single thing from soup to nuts on how to get a product done and out there.

This industry is 90 percent business, 10 percent talent.

I'm an inventor. I don't enjoy running the business.

There are companies with management and companies with money. You can always find money. Management is the key to success in any business.

Having my own label, I have to look at things in a realistic, bottom-line manner.

You can be as creative as you want to and build all these cool projects, but ultimately, if they're not successful and you don't have the business structure in place, everything will flop.

Business has only two basic functions - marketing and innovation.

I still work hard to know my business. I'm continuously looking for ways to improve all my companies, and I'm always selling. Always.

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.

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.

An exit is only a success if you set an exit as your primary goal. My primary goal was to build a globally influential tool, to build something from the ground up that could literally change how we communicated in business and individually.

I consider myself an inventor first and an entrepreneur second. In real life, my hero is Thomas Edison. He was a great inventor, but also an outstanding entrepreneur who was able to sell his inventions to the masses. He didn't just develop the light bulb; he invented the entire electric grid and power distribution system.

I started my first business when I was 19. I learned a valuable lesson as a small business owner. You are the first one to work, last one to leave, and last one to be paid.

When I started Biocon in 1978, the obstacles I needed to navigate were manifold - ranging from infrastructural hurdles to issues related to my credibility as a business woman. With no access to venture capital, money was scarce and high-cost, debt-based capital was all I had.

Business is all about risk taking and managing uncertainties and turbulence.

Entrepreneurship is not really building a product, it's not having an idea, it's not being in the right place at the right time. It's fundamentally company building.

Profit or perish... There are only two ways to make money: increase sales and decrease costs.

Certainly it's a business and you've got to have a salesman, but in my mind, when you've got two guys doing the same thing, you don't need one of them.

Every single thing I learned about marketing and building my business, I learned from my mom, and she had never been in the workforce. She just had great practical sense.