128 Quotes by Michael Gerber

As with anything we do as entrepreneurs, researching how our businesses impact and influence our customers and our markets - and our world - is critical to building something of value as a business.

No matter what your company does - build, manage, produce, import - as an owner, you can't avoid the hard work and skip straight to success. No class can give you that, no YouTube video can teach it, and no book can mark it off your list.

As a small business owner, you may not have the luxury to throw good money after bad, but if you can ascertain the 'why' of the failure, you can draw some significance from it and then turn it into something that clients will buy.

Your goal as an entrepreneur is to understand not only what your business does but the clients that it serves. If you really have your pulse on their needs and wants, then your 'absolute' failures are always going to have limits.

At some point, you have to declare an idea dead and, if not a failure, then at least not a success.

'Product life' is measured in months, not years, and as soon as you introduce a 'product,' understand that others in your business are going to reverse engineer it to duplicate the results after they circumnavigate the patents, the trademarks, and the intellectual property.

Look at what is average in your area, your industry, and your company and then be better. That could be as simple as reading another book each month or attending a seminar each year. On the other hand, it also means acknowledging what 'average' actually is and how you, as the owner, arrive at that figure.

For decades, I've spoken of McDonald's as one of the premier examples of how to build a company, scale it, and ultimately sell it.

Small business owners and entrepreneurs worthy of the title need to build systems that replace themselves.