business

The thing that keeps a business ahead of the competition is excellence in execution.

If you love your company and love what you do, you will serve your customers better—period!

I think one of the things people don't understand is we can build more shareholder value by lowering product prices than we can by trying to raise margins. It's a more patient approach, but we think it leads to a stronger, healthier company. It also serves customers much, much better.

Embrace opportunities with limited downside, unlimited upside.  The best deals are those where your risk of loss is predictable and fixed if things go wrong, while your potential gains are enormous if things go right.  Take such deals whenever you can get them if the odds of success are halfway decent.

Fail your way forward.  Recognize that Ready, fire, aim is superior to ready, aim, aim, aim.  Straightforward trial and error produces better results than endless vacillating.  If you’re afraid to make decisions and act on them in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty, get a job.  Failure’s lessons are essential to success.

I'm not saying that advertising is going away. But the balance is shifting. If today the successful recipe is to put 70 percent of your energy into shouting about your service and 30 percent into making it great, over the next 20 years I think that's going to invert.

Our premise is there are going to be a lot of winners. It's not winner take all. Other people do not have to lose for us to win.

Do what you love, but be damned sure it’s profitable.  If you do work you love, but it doesn’t generate income, your business will fail.  If you do work you hate, but it generates income, your health will fail… and your business along with it.  If you can’t do what you love and make it profitable, you’ve either got a hobby or a headache, not a sustainable business.  Don’t settle for anything less than passion and profit.

Understand that relationships are more important than contracts.  Business deals are relationships between people.  The signed piece of paper is important, but it’s merely the result of the relationship, not the cause.  If the relationship crumbles, the contract won’t save you, although it could be very lucrative for your lawyer.

...making profits is important because it keeps all our people in jobs and, you know, it keeps what we — what we’ve created going, but, you know, what we’re — what I get my — what I’m proud about doing is creating companies which we’re really proud of, you know, which we can really be proud of and a byproduct of that hopefully will be that they’ll be profitable and be able to pay the bills.