Business Revival Quotes

While Safeco's turnaround is one of the greatest things I have ever participated in, the heart-wrenching decisions to let people go will stay with me forever.

It was Labor Day weekend in 1983, and Dad hired me to run Mick's Lounge, a bar he co-owned, for $200 a week. The business was nearly bankrupt. But I said, 'Dad, I can fix it.' It was the most natural thing I'd ever done. It just made sense to me.

I see myself as a private-equity investor that helps rebuild companies. Restructuring is a cottage industry in that there aren't that many serious practitioners.

Folks, you're the reason that the automobile industry is back. Whether it was the wage freezes, the plant closures, folks, you sacrificed to keep your companies open. Because of your productivity, the combined auto companies have committed to invest another $23 billion in expansion in America.

If I have to tell you what was and is my mission, I think UBS can be the Apple or IBM of the banking industry: companies that went from being admired to severe difficulties and to being back stronger than before.

In our equities business, 49 of the 50 most important Lehman clients are back doing business with us. The flows are 75 to 80 per cent of what they were prior to the bankruptcy. The issues which damaged Lehman were around commercial mortgages and illiquid private equity assets.

Almost every dot-com idea from 1999 that failed will succeed.

The one term I don't like to be called is a 'vulture.' Because to me, a vulture is a kind of asset-stripper that eats dead flesh off the bones of a dead creature. Our bird should be the phoenix, the bird that reinvents itself, recreates itself from its ashes. And that's much closer to what it is that we really do.

I mean, what Fiat had it was not very big, it was something like forty or fifty million dollars, but it's enough to get revolving credit, to get starting away again, the buying of new machinery.

I made my money turning around distressed or bankrupt companies. I did 50-some of them in my career... I started on a shoestring and eventually built up quite a fortune.

It's different when you're trying to turn something around, especially something that you built, at a time when so many constituents - the media, Wall Street, competitors, ex-employees - are all saying that Starbucks's best days are behind it, and that Schultz is never going to be able to bring it back.

In 1980, aided by $1.5 billion in loan guarantees from the U.S. government and his own pitchman routines on television, Lee Iacocca brought Chrysler back from the abyss.

I do not think a revival of business will be greatly postponed by [Samuel J.] Tilden's election. Business prosperity does not, inmy judgment, depend on government so much as men commonly think.

On 'Bar Rescue,' failure is not an option. I have to try to turn the business around.

If you look at my business record, I basically love to do turn-arounds. That's where I made all of my money.

I started FUBU in 1989 but ran out of money three times and closed it down.

Towns find it as hard as houses of business to rise again from ruin.