Great companies are built on great products.
In business, everything starts with integrity. Otherwise it falls apart, though it does take time to find out who has integrity.
I started my entrepreneurial journey right out of college. At the age of 21, I incorporated my first business: a PR firm based in New York City.
A business which exists to make one man or one family rich, and whose existence is of no moment when this is achieved, is not solidly founded.
Without our customers, we don't have a business.
You cannot create employees without first creating employers.
I think many start-ups make mistakes because they are focusing on things that are farther ahead, and they haven't done the work that has built the foundation to support it.
It's an error in judgment to bounce into starting a small business before you cash in on building a strong foundation.
In getting Under Armour started, like any business, I think, number one, you need a great idea.
I'm lucky that my restaurant partners are my wife Liz and Doug Petkovic. We opened our first restaurant over 15 years ago. And we didn't open up our second restaurant for almost ten years. So that gave us a good foundation of employees.
Don't tell me that my parents didn't build their business.
If you destroy the people of a company, you do not have much left.
[Show] business is tough. You never know who or what's real. It's tough when you get in this business, if you have no grounded foundation other than Hollywood, because this business isn't real. We're getting paid to do what we love, but it isn't real.
If you build that foundation, both the moral and the ethical foundation, as well as the business foundation, and the experience foundation, then the building won't crumble.
I believe that every business and company takes two years to establish.
For all Trump's criticisms of government, his family wealth came from feeding at the government trough. His father, Fred Trump, leveraged government housing programs into a construction business; the empire was founded on public money.
The true start-up of a business is what happens before you start-up.
When you found a company, you have the original vision, you make all the original decisions, you know every employee, you kind of know every aspect of the product architecture and its limitations.
I talked about 12 to 18 months, and that's about reaffirming our foundation for sustained growth: getting the discipline back, getting the basics right, getting the customer focus back... so by the end of next year, I hope most of that's in place.
I'm really hoping just to keep building on what we're doing. You have to build your core business first which is really important.
Location is the key to most businesses, and the entrepreneurs typically build their reputation at a particular spot.
No batch of 10 people will have as much an influence on the company as those first 10 people.
Company culture is my number one priority. It's more important than the team, the product, the business model, or the investors. All of those things can be fixed and made better over time. But culture has to be established on Day 1.
A company's culture is the foundation for future innovation. An entrepreneurs job is to build the foundation
Spend the first six to 12 months building a great product or service that people love, rather than chasing investors. When the time comes to engage investors, you will be meeting them from a position of strength. This makes all the difference.
