Quotes & Sayings About Profitable Business

Privatisation is presented as being the only alternative to an inefficient, corrupt state. In fact, it is not a choice at all ... it is a mutually profitable business contract between the private company (preferably foreign) and the ruling elite of the Third World — Arundhati Roy

Every time you're exposed to advertising in America you're reminded that this country's most profitable business is still the manufacture, packaging, distribution, and marketing of bullshit. High-quality, grade-A, prime-cut, pure American bullshit. — George Carlin

Of all the things that your company owns, brands are far and away the most important and the toughest. Founders die. Factories burn down. Machinery wears out. Inventories get depleted. Technology becomes obsolete. Brand loyalty is the only sound foundation on which business leaders can build enduring, profitable growth. — Jim Mullen

But if a railway in the wilderness is to be a profitable business, if it is even to be possible, if it is to obtain the labour power necessary for its construction and the security necessary for its operational demands, there must be a State authority strong and ruthless enough to defend the interests of the foreign capitalists and even to yield blindly to their interests. — Anonymous

Legal business has, from the beginning of time, been profitable - to those who have conducted it; because it is concerned with things that touch men's passions very deeply, and because men are willing to pay, and pay highly, for wisdom and skill in the conduct of it. The real merits of the Norman lawyers were, not altruism, but ability, energy, and enthusiasm for their work. — Edward Jenks

To be the governor of the Bank of England in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was therefore not a mark of any particular merit, but merely a sign of the right pedigree, patience, longevity, and the luxury of having a sufficiently profitable business with partners willing to let one take four years' leave. — Liaquat Ahamed

Shifting your focus from getting to giving is not only a nice way to live life and conduct business, but a very profitable way as well. — Bob Burg

One gets the impression that Elvis Presley does what his business advisors think will be most profitable. My advice to them: Put Elvis Presley in the studio with a bunch of good, contemporary rockers, lock the studio up, and tell him he can't come out until he's done made an album that rocks from beginning to end. — Jon Landau

We believe responsible business can be profitable business — Stuart Rose

Most people blindly accept the fact that gaining money is essential for survival, without questioning its nature. The truth is, our current monetary system is the reason that humanity is in such a devastating state, the reason that the world is so full of corruption. Our monetary system has been limiting the potential of human beings for centuries.
Inventions that benefit humanity are hidden or destroyed because they are not profitable, or because they interfere with the business of corporations. The supreme goal of modern man is to obtain wealth, because he believes that material things will bring him happiness. He invests the majority of his time and energy into gaining money at any cost. The accumulation of wealth has contributed to man's greed and selfishness. Earning money is more important to him than being a good person, benefiting humanity, and even life itself. — Joseph P. Kauffman

Sustainability at Nike means being laser-focused on evolving our business model to deliver profitable growth while leveraging the efficiencies of lean manufacturing, minimizing our environmental impact and using the tools available to us to bring about positive change across our entire supply chain. — Mark Parker

Prisons are a profitable business. They are a way of legally perpetuating slavery. In every state more and more prisons are being built and even more are on the drawing board. Who are they for? They certainly aren't planning to put white people in them. Prisons are part of this government's genocidal war against Black and Third World people. — Assata Shakur

I have always been an advocate and was, in my last job at M&S, a supporter of the Al Gore dictum that a sustainable business can be a profitable business. We were the first sizeable company in the U.K. to prove that was the case. — Stuart Rose

When we separate the word business into its component letters, B-U-S-I-N-E-S-S, we find that U and I are both in it. In fact, if U and I were not in business, it would not be business. Furthermore, we discover that U comes before I in business and the I is silent-it is to be seen, not heard. Also, the U in business has the sound of I, which indicates it is an amalgamation of the interests of U and I. When they are properly amalgamated, business becomes harmonious, profitable, and pleasant. — Zig Ziglar

A business owner is the boss, but it's a job, a place that is stable and profitable. An entrepreneur is an artist of sorts, throwing his/herself into impossible situations and seeking out problems that require heart and guts to solve. Both are fine, but choose. — Seth Godin

Aside God, you have just one boss! That is you. You choose to be a good boss or a bad boss with the business of your life! That is you! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

How engaged are your employees right now? You may consider such a question impossible to answer, but the truth is, you need to know this if you want a more profitable, ethical organization, as everyone must share the same values to make the changes genuine — Jim Craig

I didn't want to take anybody else's money. I wanted to do something small that could be profitable from the beginning, and grow that way - and never need someone to write me a check to keep the business going. — Nick Woodman

Breakthrough Management Group International (BMGI) India is the strong Global Consulting firm mainly focuses to provide consultant services establish a profitable business with the challenging success. — Breakthrough Management Group International

John D. Rockefeller said that he found friendships based on business to be far more long lasting and profitable than the reverse. I think there's something to that. A company can end up being very Confucian, where the good of the individual is subjugated to the good of the whole. — Ben Horowitz

The satellite business is a very successful business, very profitable business, and serves the broadcast market in addition to the telecoms market. — Chua Sock Koong

One thing, Ms. Gray, is forgotten by this tragedy: the embryo is human, not a nonhuman as the Supreme Court declared. Abortion never was about the poor or about women's rights. It's an ideology with an agenda - and it's a profitable business. So, Ms. Gray, I dare say few politicians will speak that truth for fear of political reprisals. I'm not afraid. Politicians and courts made legal what is a morally reprehensible act of brutality. I call it what it is: judicial tyranny. — J.W. Brazier

What the meat industry figured out is that you don't need healthy animals to make a profit. Sick animals are more profitable ...
Factory farms calculate how close to death they can keep animals without killing them. That's the business model. How quickly they can be made to grow, how tightly they can be packed, how much or how little can they eat, how sick they can get without dying ... We live in a world in which it's conventional to treat an animal like a block of wood. — Jonathan Safran Foer

To Wall Street, a firm like BP isn't just a profitable energy company with lots of assets like oil rigs and pipelines and gas stations - it's also a corporation that routinely borrows hundreds of millions of dollars to keep its business up and running. — Matt Taibbi

How could Digital's collapse be so precipitous? It's because, in many ways, financial performance data is misleading. As you move up to the top of the market, you're getting rid of the less profitable products at the low end and adding business with more attractive margins at the high end. The rate of unit volume growth might be tapering off as you pursue these smaller markets, but your margins actually look better. So Wall Street rewards your stock price until you hit the ceiling. — Clayton Christensen

A better brand = better clients = a better, more profitable business — Peter Montoya

Today, National Geographic has a membership side with a magazine and some television side, and they generate about a billion dollars in revenue, and they're profitable. And so at the end of the year they have some bottom line profit which they can then reinvest, because they're running it as a not-for-profit in charitable endeavors. — Steve Case

There are two key lessons: a) The only way to survive in business is to be profitable, unless you have an unlimited amount of money; b) Get through your difficulty and learn to do better next time. — Jim Rohn

American business at this point is really about developing an idea, making it profitable, selling it while it's profitable and then getting out or diversifying. It's just about sucking everything up. My idea was: Enjoy baking, sell your bread, people like it, sell more. Keep the bakery going because you're making good food and people are happy. — Ian MacKaye

I let her know that I expected as much money with their daughter as would pay off my remaining debt for the printing-house, which I believe was not then above a hundred pounds. She brought me word they had no such sum to spare; I said they might mortgage their house in the loan-office. The answer to this, after some days, was, that they did not approve the match; that, on inquiry of Bradford, they had been inform'd the printing business was not a profitable one; the types would soon be worn out, and more wanted; that S. Keimer and D. Harry had failed one after the other, and I should probably soon follow them; and, therefore, I was forbidden the house, and the daughter shut up. — Various

A well-functioning microfinance bank can actually be a profitable business as well. So it became a perfect proof point that, through business, you can provide an experience that leads to individual self-empowerment. — Pierre Omidyar

I won't close down a business of subnormal profitability merely to add a fraction of a point to our corporate returns. I also feel it inappropriate for even an exceptionally profitable company to fund an operation once it appears to have unending losses in prospect. Adam Smith would disagree with my first proposition and Karl Marx would disagree with my second; the middle ground is the only position that leaves me comfortable. — Warren Buffett

Every company in America should be on its knees thanking Jesus for being born. Without Christmas, most American businesses would be far less profitable. More than enough reason for business to be screaming 'Merry Christmas.' — Bill O'Reilly

Don't be insecure about aiming to be a small business. Anyone who runs a business that's sustainable and profitable, whether it's big or small, should be — Jason Fried

While I am a capitalist at heart and I have no problems with commercialization as such, I believe that while it's okay if education becomes a profitable business, it's not okay if it becomes corrupt. — Chetan Bhagat

To build and sustain brands people love and trust, one must focus-not only on today but also on tomorrow. It's not easy ... but balancing the short and long term is key to delivering sustainable, profitable growth-growth that is good for our shareholders but also good for our consumers, our employees, our business partners, the communities where we live and work, and the planet we inhabit — Irene Rosenfeld

You don't get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore," says a friend of mine who has worked in tech since the 1980s, a former investment banker who now advises start-ups. "It's all about the business model. The market pays you to have a company that scales quickly. It's all about getting big fast. Don't be profitable, just get big. — Dan Lyons

This is one of the most important lines of cleavage between Wall Street practice and the canons of ordinary business. Because the speculative public is clearly wrong in its attitude on this point, it would seem that its errors should afford profitable opportunities to the more logically minded to buy common stocks at the low prices occasioned by temporarily reduced earnings and to sell them at inflated levels created by abnormal prosperity — Anonymous

If it can be profitable to be green, that's just smart business. — Barry Sternlicht

I think Salesforce, going public very early on before they were profitable, it made a lot of sense for them because it got customers comfortable that these guys were going to have capital and be transparent about their business. — Dave Goldberg

When you sell options, you get paid for assuming risk. That can be a profitable business, but it does not mix well with the risks inherent in a leveraged portfolio. — George Soros

PepsiCo is a $63 billion company. Half the company is snacks, and half the company is beverages. We have a glorious snacks business and a glorious beverage business. We are extremely profitable. We are growing. — Indra Nooyi

One of the reasons Wall Street had cooked up this new industry called structured finance was that its old-fashioned business was every day less profitable. The profits in stockbroking, along with those in the more conventional sorts of bond broking, had been squashed by Internet competition. — Michael Lewis

Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting "prison-industrial complex" - the business interests that capitalize on prison construction - made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. Incarceration became the answer to everything - health care problems like drug addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America's prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States. — Bryan Stevenson

I built a huge profitable business with no debt. — Sophia Amoruso

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. — Richard Branson

Basically, I'm just a guitar player that figured out I wasn't ever gonna be able to buy dinner with my guitar playing so I got into songwriting, which is a little more profitable business. — J.J. Cale

The profitable part of the online business is very likely several years away. Entering the business because it's the hot topic of the day doesn't make a profitable business nor satisfied customers, ... That's why it will be a part of Nintendo's strategy, not the mainstay, as other companies are attempting to do. There still are too many barriers for any company to greatly depend on it. — Satoru Iwata

I have no interest in being the biggest, the most profitable or the largest retailer. I just want The Body Shop to be the best, most breathlessly exciting company - and one that changes the way business is carried out. — Anita Roddick

One other note on this same subject. Think about it logically. If the trafficking of methamphetamine and other narcotics is such a spectacularly efficient and profitable business endeavor for the Hells Angels ... if we're moving hundreds of millions of dollars of this shit all over the world . . . then why are so many of our members dead fucking broke? — Chuck Zito

War is the most profitable business on earth — Kenneth Eade

The American business man cannot consider his work done when he views the income balance in black at the end of an accounting period. It is necessary for him to trace the social incidence of the figures that appear in his statement and prove to the general public that his management has not only been profitable in the accounting sense but salutary in terms of popular benefits. — Colby Mitchell Chester

My job was to turn the company around and to give Time Warner a profitable Web business to spin off and a profitable access business that still throws off a tremendous amount of cash. I can check both of those boxes. I am done, and I feel good about what we've accomplished. — Randy Falco

Kaizen should be done when times are good or when the company is profitable, since your efforts to streamline and make improvements when the company is poor are limited to reduction in staff. Even if you try to go lean and cut out the fat to improve business performance, when your business is in a very difficult position financially there is no fat to be cut. If you are cutting out muscle, which you need, then you cannot say that your efforts to become lean are succeeding.The most important thing about doing kaizen is to do kaizen when times are good, the economy is strong, and the company is profitable — Taiichi Ohno

We could cite many cases of companies' similar attempts to create new-growth platforms after the core business had matured. They follow an all-too-similar pattern. When the core business approaches maturity and investors demand new growth, executives develop seemingly sensible strategies to generate it. Although they invest aggressively, their plans fail to create the needed growth fast enough; investors hammer the stock; management is sacked; and Wall Street rewards the new executive team for simply restoring the status quo ante: a profitable but low-growth core business.4 — Clayton M Christensen

We'll do our business in the East Room. It's my favorite at this time of day. If you and I didn't know God is a profitable and self-sustaining construct of the worlds' churches, the morning light would be almost enough to make us believers again. — Stephen King

Profit is not the legitimate purpose of business. The legitimate purpose of business is to provide a product or service that people need and do it so well that it's profitable. — James Rouse

Business 2.0 was hugely profitable last year, and will be profitable this year. — James Daly

It took me years and cost me countless thousands of dollars in lost business before I finally learned that it doesn't pay to argue, that it is much more profitable and much more interesting to look at things from the other person's viewpoint and try to get that person saying 'yes, yes. — Dale Carnegie

The goal is to build a profitable business, not maintain an expensive hobby that will leave you in the poorhouse. — Dawn Fotopulos

Franz's domineering father expected his son to take up a profitable business career that would ensure social advancement for the family, as well as a successful marriage promising the same. — Franz Kafka

Startups don't fail because they lack a product; they fail because they lack customers and a profitable business model. — Steve Blank

What people intuitively grasped was the new efficiences in distribution, manufacturing, and marketing were changing the definition of what was commercially viable across the board. The best way to describe these forces is that they are turning unprofitable customers, products, and markets into profitable ones. Although this phenomenon is most obvious in entertainment and media, it's an easy leap to eBay to see it at work more broadly, from cars to crafts. Seen broadly, it's clear that the story of the Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance - what happens when the bottlenecks and stand between supply and demand in our culture start to disappear and everything becomes available to everyone. — Chris Anderson

In order to access private capital, you have to provide competitive return on investment. In order to give competitive returns to investors, you've got to operate on a profitable basis and be thinking of yourself as a business. — Pierre Omidyar

We have to make sustainable living convenient, sustainable business profitable & sustainable change fashionable — Wayne Visser

The innovator's dilemma: Should we invest to protect the least profitable end of our business, so that we can retain our least loyal, most price-sensitive customers? Or should we invest to strengthen our position in the most profitable tiers of our business, with customers who reward us with premium prices for better products? — Clayton M Christensen

I've drunk Amazon's free Diet Coke. Nothing makes more sense to me than a company trying to make bookselling into a profitable business. I'm not anti-Amazon, and I'm not pro-publishers either. I'm pro-books. — Lev Grossman

To be sure, the cost of managing capital and of "formal" financial intermediation (that is, the investment advice and portfolio management services provided by a bank or official financial institution or real estate agency or managing partner) is obviously taken into account and deducted from the income on capital in calculating the average rate of return (as presented here). But this is not the case with "informal" financial intermediation: every investor spends time - in some cases a lot of time - managing his own portfolio and affairs and determining which investments are likely to be the most profitable. This effort can in certain cases be compared to genuine entrepreneurial labor or to a form of business activity. — Thomas Piketty

Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

All businesses require capital, management and labor, and business executives, wanting to grow and maintain profitable enterprises, have a strong incentive to keep costs, including labor, as low as possible. — Kevin O'Leary

The dieting industry is the only profitable business in the world with a 98 percent failure rate. — Charlotte Markey

It stands to reason: Higher wages means higher loyalty and morale, which means higher productivity, which means a more profitable business. — Thomas Perez

Yes, the disruption of the Internet can be blamed for the destruction of the business model that once made journalism a thriving, well-paying enterprise, but it has also created an array of new tools for reporting. Somebody will eventually figure out how to make online newspapers profitable - I hope. — David Horsey

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work. — Anonymous

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. — Steve Pavlina

The [liberals] consider profits as objectionable. The very existence of profits is in their eyes a proof that wage rates could be raised without harm to anybody. They speak of profit without dealing with loss. Profit and loss are the instruments by means of which the consumers keep a tight rein on all business activities. A profitable enterprise tends to expand; an unprofitable one tends to shrink. The elimination of profit renders production rigid and abolishes the consumer's control. — Ludwig Von Mises

If we aren't profitable by December 20, I will close the business. That would leave him about $800,000, plus his retirement money and home, and he would do something else to earn a living. — Dave Ramsey