Leanne Caret Quotes

It is one thing to seek out new ways to grow your company and new potential streams of income from new services or products, but it is quite another to take on responsibilities that are far from your primary job as Entrepreneur.

I always tried to move up the food chain. I started with cement and then moved into textiles and banking. When I was trading sugar, I added salt and flour so that then we could do pasta. And then I thought, why not make the bag for it, too? So, we started making packaging.

We don't want to go starting completely separate businesses that do nothing for our user base.

Diversifying the business is definitely a good thing.

I have 20 restaurants. And if one doesn't work, it doesn't work.

Business fascinates me. It's very creative.

I already have enough apparel businesses that are either doing well or not really doing anything at all, and I'm looking to broaden my portfolio.

They've been fairly positive, as firm as they could be in regards to the derivatives operations in Montreal. We didn't sense that there was a hesitation about it. But things change.

As an entrepreneur, in many ways it's like looking into the crystal ball for what my company will hopefully go through as it starts to think about bigger challenges - scaling internationally, getting ready to go public, and all those different things.

For small businesses trying to figure out how to get big, I would say you are going to have to take some risks. And I think that is what shuts off most people. They are not willing take the risk.

Giving up your core business in search of a phantom audience is not wise.

We are reluctant to do these bigger acquisitions that are then integrated, especially if they are committed to a certain product that they want to build that we can't guarantee we will keep evolving.

I think it's natural for any manager to want to grow his business. The question is at what rate, and in what direction, and in what format?

Read over your existing business plan like you read the menu at your favorite restaurant.

The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.

Finance is critical. If sufficient investment is made in infrastructure and venture capital is made available, there will be a big improvement in the situation.

I'm always thinking as an outsider, and I'm always mindful of whether a company can be impactful on a global basis. Frankly, I'm paranoid about anyone anywhere who could be a competitive threat.

Being a conglomerate, each of our businesses has a different challenge; business landscape is different for each business. It makes it challenging as well as exciting.

We like the size of the company today given the environment and have no plans to split it up and make it smaller.

Votorantim is attentive to opportunities that arise in both domestic and international markets to expand its businesses.

We are quite open, however, to looking at acquisitions and there are opportunities that we periodically consider. and I think that may be something we do in the future, but I must say that there is no commitment to that at the present time in any form or size.

And no again: My studio is not a first or any step toward becoming any type of businessman on my part.

I ended up buying a restaurant. Already we had invested in a gas station and a metal products plant.

At Andreessen Horowitz, we talk about the notion of being 'too hungry to eat.' That's to say, we often see startups that are so entrenched in the product that the founders forget they need muscle to grow.

Enterprises that depend on many rarely succeed.