Expansion Challenges Quotes

It's a tough problem that a company faces once they branch out beyond one set of offices in California into that big bad world out there.

To globalize for the sake of globalizing-as a matter of ego-is perilous. Expanding internationally is hard, risky work. Globalization is not just about putting up a plant. It's not about making an acquisition. It's much, much more.

As you get bigger, your staff gets bigger, and your costs get bigger.

In order to grow at this pace, there will have to be a couple of acquisitions along the way. The tricky thing is to grow at this rate and maintain a 40 percent operating margin.

The likelihood of success drops dramatically when you expand, especially in the services business. And there's a lot of capital that goes into opening another office.

I didn't understand the culture and what Starbucks was really about. It wasn't a coffee shop. It was really a way of life... we suffer from thinking that since we have it in New York, or it won't work in New York, that it won't work some other place. That's a discipline we keep trying to improve.

A lot of scaling up a company is not very sexy or strategic.

Any large-scale organization must lose some of the merits of its rudimentary beginnings. Quantity will have a coarsening effect on quality.