Bo Burlingham > Quotes

“Success means you’re going to have better problems. I’m very happy with the problems I have now.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“If there’s one thing that every founder and leader in this book has in common with the others, it is a passion for what their companies do. They love it, and they have a burning desire to share it with other people. They thrive on the joy of contributing something great and unique to the world.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“I hear other people saying, ‘I can’t wait for my vacation.’ To me, it’s a lost day out of your life when you feel that way. It’s such a waste to be unhappy when you can wake up in the morning anticipating the day. Your work should be something you enjoy.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“The shareholders who own the businesses in this book have other, nonfinancial priorities in addition to their financial objectives. Not that they don’t want to earn a good return on their investment, but it’s not their only goal, or even necessarily their paramount goal. They’re also interested in being great at what they do, creating a great place to work, providing great service to customers, having great relationships with their suppliers, making great contributions to the communities they live and work in, and finding great ways to lead their lives. They’ve learned, moreover, that to excel in all those things, they have to keep ownership and control inside the company and, in many cases, place significant limits on how much and how fast they grow. The wealth they’ve created, though substantial, has been a byproduct of success in these other areas. I call them small giants.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to be Great Instead of Big

“Second, the leaders had overcome the enormous pressures on successful companies to take paths they had not chosen and did not necessarily want to follow. The people in charge had remained in control, or had regained control, by doing a lot of soul searching, rejecting a lot of well-intentioned advice, charting their own course, and building the kind of business they wanted to live in, rather than accommodating themselves to a business shaped by outside forces.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“Now I think my role is to make sure that everybody here gets the idea that we have a theme and to remind people what we’re up to and to set standards. . . . I’m actually a little embarrassed to talk about what I do because I love it so much and it’s such a sort of a selfish, quixotic kind of existence I have. But life is short, and if I thought we were being silly, and the beer was a joke, and it was all a con job, then I’d really be embarrassed about what I do. But I have so much fun and do such amazing things, I’m beginning to relax and enjoy it. Because I’m persuaded that the beer is so damn good.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“Canadian entrepreneur John Warrillow, who has started five businesses and sold four of them. “I don’t believe you are really an entrepreneur until you’ve exited, because you haven’t completed the cycle. You’re still standing on third base. It is not about starting. Anyone can start a business. Until you’ve actually sold one, you haven’t touched all the bases.”
― Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“When contemplating our reader, he reminded us, we needed to take the whole person into account. “I always tried to tell the editors to think of the business person as an artist using both sides of his brain,” he said. “You’re not just writing for a rational person. You are writing for someone who has the soul of an artist, and his expression is business.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“that speaks to the little secret behind the relationships that small giants have with their suppliers and customers. It’s generally not the people at the top of the organization who create the intimate bonds. It’s the managers and employees who do the work of the business day in and day out. They are the ones who convey the spirit of the company to the outside world. Accordingly, they are the company’s first priority—which, from one perspective, is ironic. For all the extraordinary service and enlightened hospitality that the small giants offer, what really sets them apart is their belief that the customer comes second.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“That’s their philosophy,” said Greder, whose day job was associate dean of students at Illinois Wesleyan. “Dance with the ones who brought you.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“Entrepreneurship, Bernie realized, was the means by which an economy continually renewed itself. Without it, a country would lose its vitality, its energy, and become impoverished—just as a culture would become impoverished without the ongoing creation of art. “I kept thinking that the entrepreneur is like an artist, only business is the means of his expression. . . .” he said. “He creates [a business] from nothing, just a blank canvas. It’s amazing. Somebody goes into a garage, has nothing but an idea, and out of the garage comes a company, a living company. It’s so special what they do. They are a treasure.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“I decided, was to look at the common threads among the companies I’d already identified as having mojo. First, I could see that, unlike most entrepreneurs, their founders and leaders had recognized the full range of choices they had about the type of company they could create. They hadn’t accepted the standard menu of options as a given. They had allowed themselves to question the usual definitions of success in business and to imagine possibilities other than the ones all of us are familiar with.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“Third, each company had an extraordinarily intimate relationship with the local city, town, or county in which it did business—a relationship that went well beyond the usual concept of “giving back.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“Danny Meyer of Union Square Hospitality Group talked about businesses having soul. He believed soul was what made a business great, or even worth doing at all. “A business without soul is not something I’m interested in working at,” he said. He suggested that the soul of a business grew out of the relationships a company developed as it went along. “Soul can’t exist unless you have active, meaningful dialogue with stakeholders: employees, customers, the community, suppliers, and investors. When you launch a business, your job as the entrepreneur is to say, ‘Here’s a value proposition that I believe in. Here’s where I’m coming from. This is my point of view.’ At first, it’s a monologue. Gradually it becomes a dialogue and then a real conversation.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“give a credit. Or whatever else we think is best.” Like 140 or so of her fellow employees, Michelle was an owner of ECCO. She was a member of the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) that controlled 58 percent of the company’s stock. When I met her, her stake was worth $12,000. More important, she felt like an owner and believed she was treated like one. She had a lot of direct contact with the CEO, Ed Zimmer. Among other things, he held a regular monthly lunch with all the people who had a birthday that month, and they talked about themselves and the company and whatever else they wanted to discuss.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“Fifth, the companies also had what struck me as unusually intimate workplaces. They were, in effect, functional little societies that strove to address a broad range of their employees’ needs as human beings—creative, emotional, spiritual, and social needs as well as economic ones. Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines once observed that his company’s famously vibrant culture was built around the principle of “caring for people in the totality of their lives.” That’s what the companies I was looking at were doing. They were places where employees felt cared for in the totality of their lives, where they were treated in the way that the founders and leaders thought people ought to be treated—with respect, dignity, integrity, fairness, kindness, and generosity.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“may also include coming up with a number—that is, the amount of money you’d be happy to walk away with when the time comes—and a time frame. Stage two is strategic. It requires learning to view your company as a product itself, not just as a deliverer of products or services, and then building into it the qualities and characteristics that will maximize its value and allow you to have the kind of exit you want. Stage three is about execution. It’s the process you go through to get a deal done, whatever type of exit you may be looking for, be it a sale to a third party, a management”
― Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“And the influence ran both ways. The companies shaped their respective communities, and the communities shaped them.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“They were also interested in being great at what they did, creating a great place to work, providing great service to customers, having great relationships with their suppliers, making great contributions to the communities they lived and worked in, and finding great ways to lead their lives.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“Up to the surgery, I was coming to the weekly meetings of the leadership team and the annual planning meeting,” he said, looking back. “It wasn’t good for me or them. There were times when I was impatient. I’d complain to the leadership group that we weren’t solving obvious problems as fast as we should. We’d identify a quality problem, for example, or a problem with shipping to the wrong location. They weren’t difficult to solve. They just needed people’s focus. It seemed to me we could solve them more quickly by fiat than by having a committee and reaching consensus. I suppose it’s less expensive to let people figure it out for themselves than to send them to school to learn it, but it’s hard for me to do. That’s why I’m not here in the building. It’s too frustrating. Ed and I have different styles. It took me a long time to come to grips with that. Anyway, the company is better off with Ed. It’s a major stress out of my life, and he has made a huge contribution to my net worth.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“Norm Brodsky, for one, had what he called his knock-your-socks-off policy. When there was an opportunity to reward people, he wanted the reward to take their breath away, which meant doing what they didn’t expect when they didn’t expect it.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“You might reasonably ask why Erickson didn’t simply sell the business and start another company. In his book, he noted that his ex-partner’s attorney asked him that very question, and his immediate, visceral reaction was no. He said he refused to consider the option. He later saw other entrepreneurs try that, and they all regretted it. Besides, he added, Clif Bar was where he belonged—“my place in the world.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“they focus on survival. Some never leave the survival stage. The more fortunate ones move on to the growth stage. Either way, they run the risk of getting caught in what Covey calls “the activity trap,” the tendency “in the busy-ness of life to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it’s leaning against the wrong wall.”
― Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“Meyer’s version of service, however, was a little different from the norm and sprang from another source. “What I’ve learned,” he said, “is that I have an intense, nearly neurotic interest in seeing people have a good time.” Enlightened hospitality was his name for the process of making sure they did.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“But Obert Tanner’s greatest gift to his employees was contained in the provisions he made for the company after his death. He arranged for his 65-percent interest—the other 35 percent was owned by his nephew and the nephew’s family—to be put into a so-called one-hundred-year trust, under the terms of which the company could not be sold, merged, or taken public. Tanner’s express purpose was to protect his employees by ensuring that, as long as the trust remained in effect, their jobs would not be subject to the financial priorities of outside shareholders. (By law, the trust could last only as long as the lifetime of any descendants alive at the time of Obert’s death, plus twenty-one years.)”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“in the future. And what about business? He’d obviously blundered by focusing so intensely on sales, rather than profit. Wasn’t it better to have a highly profitable $10-million company than a $100-million company that didn’t make any money? Wasn’t it better to have a business with a great reputation in its community and its industry—a company known and respected for its fabulous service, its unstinting generosity, and its happy, dedicated workforce rather than its size? He didn’t know exactly what type of company that would be, or how he would create it, but he had a pretty good sense of the direction he wanted to go.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“At the time, it looked like either a wonderfully gutsy or an extremely foolhardy move, depending on your viewpoint. Not only was Erickson turning his back on a fortune, but he was proposing that Clif Bar remain independent and continue to operate as a relatively small private company in a marketplace filled with huge conglomerates out to get it. The investment bankers assured him that the company would be crushed in short order. So did the venture capitalists he spoke to. His partner agreed, and the risk of losing everything she’d worked for frightened her. Shortly thereafter, she resigned from the company and insisted that Erickson cash her out. (She could insist because, as a 50-percent owner, she could have shut the company down if her demands weren’t met. A less-than-50-percent owner does not have as much leverage.) They eventually settled on a deal whereby he would pay her $65 million over five years. He had $10,000 in his bank account at the time.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“It’s also about successfully navigating the four stages of the exit process: Stage one is exploratory. It involves investigating the many possibilities, doing the necessary introspective work, and deciding what you do and don’t care about in an exit.”
― Bo Burlingham, Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top

“The companies I was looking for all operated on what you might call human scale, that is, a size at which it’s still possible for an individual to be acquainted with everyone else in the organization, still possible for the CEO to meet with new hires, still possible for employees to feel closely connected to the rest of the company. That was not accidental, either. On the contrary, scale played an important role in their approach to business.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big

“Finally, I noticed the passion that the leaders brought to what the company did. They loved the subject matter, whether it be music, safety lighting, food, special effects, engineering, beer, records storage, construction, dining, or fashion. Though they were good businesspeople, they were anything but professional managers. Indeed, they were the opposite of professional managers. They had deep emotional attachments to the business, to the people who worked in it, and to its customers and suppliers—the sort of feelings that are the bane of professional management.”
― Bo Burlingham, Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big