Business Transition Quotes

My father - a Lebanese-origin small businessman - had a stroke in 1997 and couldn't work anymore. I paused my career and made sure he was taken care of by overseeing the sale of his businesses, but after that, I was able to dedicate myself to politics. It's what I had always wanted.

I'm quitting the business today. I'm going to open up an appliance store, I've always really been into toasters. I'm giving it all up.

If Bill Gates left Microsoft we wouldn't allow Donald Trump to run it.

After I retired, I spent a quarter of a century in the business, and when I retired and a new regime took over, Vince McMahon Jr. and that, and in the beginning I went back to help out. I color commentated with him, but then I started to see things that were disturbing to me.

Find somebody else to run your business on a day-to-day basis.

According to the Small Business Administration, more than 70 percent of all family businesses do not survive through the second generation, and 8 percent do not make it to a third.

The final test of greatness in a CEO is how well he chooses a successor and whether he can step aside and let the successor run the company.

I am retiring from startup investing. It's hard to leave all this behind right when things are going so well.

Unfortunately, modeling takes you with no transition from being a girl to being a business woman.

I'm going to take over on the Techno Comics so I'm going to be dealing in the children's merchandising type department. But that's just setting it up and having somebody run it.

I used to run record companies, and I went to the advertising business at 29 years old.

My son is the main shareholder of my company, and I help him explore some of those opportunities that are related to things I know about, such as energy and the environment. But I'm active because I can't think of anything else to do in my so-called retirement.

I like businesses in transition, first of all. If ever there were a business in transition, it is publishing.

Deciding whether or not to bring in an outside CEO is one of the most gut-wrenching decisions that a founder will ever need to make.

As I became a venture capitalist, it's almost like I went to the dark side for a while.

Most startups flame out or just muddle along. Your chances of spotting a unicorn, pre-horn, are incalculably small. But if, knowing that, you still want to toss aside your cushy job, at least listen to corporate vets who have made the transition.

I think when you sell your company and are no longer the master of driving it, it's quite difficult.

I think the fact that father is running now as opposed to in 2012 where he didn't that he's had enough faith in myself and my siblings to be able to run the company.We've got tens of thousands of people that are under his direct employ. Those people, he wouldn't leave a company and leave those people and their lives and everything they've put into it at risk if he didn't think there was competent leadership to take over after him.

They keep the old business. We keep the ongoing business.

When the founders retire, it's always difficult for the second generation and third generation.

I was an investor doing well and decided to be an entrepreneur.

My father had a country store and then later, when I was 10 or 12, sold it and bought a farm equipment dealership in nearby Camden.

I ended up working in Michigan for a young company called Sycor out of Michigan, worked there, and that company got bought by Northern Telecom. We became the Bell Northern Research Labs of Northern Telecom.

If you are a manager with a new owner who has more ideas than knowledge, all you can do is get your head down and do your best, which is what Malky Mackay did at Cardiff.

A critical question to ask when bringing in a new CEO to take the reins of a company you started is: Do you want someone who will maintain company culture or reinvent it?