Alan Schaaf Quotes

An adaptable company is one that captures more than its fair share of new opportunities. It's always redefining its 'core business' in ways that open up new avenues for growth.

If a rich person invests in a business, either directly or through stock purchases, it means business can grow and hire more people.

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.

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?

I'm fascinated by management and organizations: how organizations get things done and how successful organizations are built and maintained, how they evolve as they grow from start-ups to small companies to medium companies to big companies.

You can't run a €10 million business the way you run a €1 million business.

Your own business growth and success depends on many things, and along that growing path, you are going to have to concede certain responsibilities and activities - whether for your accounting, your production, or day-to-day management.

I've seen small businesses turn into terrible midsize or big ones because they let their desire to achieve some arbitrary metric get the best of them. Whatever is compromised as a result doesn't matter anymore, as long as the company is growing.

In general, a lot of content creators find that their success is unable to support any sort of organization of scale. It's pretty difficult to support even three or four employees.

As businesses grow, all sorts of things that once were done on the fly - including creating new products - have a way of becoming bureaucratized.

Can a label group by itself scale to make a sensible business? I don't think so.

Slack is actually a technical term in product management that means the excess capacity the system has to absorb any failures or to take on new work. That's something that was really on our minds when we came up with it.

Quit being 'busy' and start actively owning and operating your company, and you'll be able to understand where the money is coming from and how to make more of it.

The ideal time period to get an investment is when you've already proved your concept and know what you're doing, and it's about adding water to the seeds.

When you start off with your first company, you are learning as part of the process and you make mistakes. The important thing is to recover quickly and learn from the experience.

Building a successful business requires a combination of human capital, financial resources, market opportunity, persistence, community support, and even luck.

We'll look after the people who create jobs and business and give them that opportunity to grow in the time ahead.

Too many executives I've met over the years have the mentality of a bodybuilder; they've come to accept the idea that growth is synonymous with success.

I have definitely learnt in business that when you have a smart, engaged entrepreneur with good judgement they can really drive even a mediocre business forward so to me the entrepreneur is very important.

A strong sense of purpose drives businesses to take the long view and invest for growth.

People need to go back and remember what it was once like to lead businesses in emerging markets.

To build a great business, you have to do something hard just to be able to withstand all the competition that will later come your way.

It's important for founders to think about how they would build their company from scratch - again.

So many of the major decisions that affect the entire future of your enterprise happen during its first year in business. In fact, most don't make it because they don't know how to get the resources they need to survive.

If a new company is formed, it hires people and creates jobs in its community. As it grows, people's opportunities multiply and wages rise. Inequality diminishes as more people get pulled into good jobs.