Jim Koch > Quotes

“Remember that most of us came into this world as screaming, messy blobs of bad plumbing, but with a little love and attention and faith in our future, we managed to grow into fully functioning”
― Jim Koch, Quench Your Own Thirst: Business Lessons Learned Over a Beer or Two

“Some people see sales as morally dubious because they think it’s about merely pushing a product. Not true. Done right, selling is about helping customers.”
― Jim Koch, Quench Your Own Thirst: Business Lessons Learned Over a Beer or Two

“Don’t hire until employees will pay for themselves, either in more sales or cost savings, on day one.”
― Jim Koch, Quench Your Own Thirst: Business Lessons Learned Over a Beer or Two

“The organization ends up fully committed to doing things that most people in the organization know are ineffective or wasteful but that those same people pretend are not stupid and all keep doing. Meanwhile, observers on the outside laugh at these poor souls who are trapped in foolishness that they themselves realize is foolish. Companies do this kind of thing all the time. And the creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams, has”
― Jim Koch, Quench Your Own Thirst: Business Lessons Learned Over a Beer or Two

“I learned an important lesson—that the value of the stock is not the same as the underlying value of the company. The stock goes up and down according to the whims and wiles of Wall Street. The value of the company depends on elements that contribute to the creation of real value—things like providing superior products at fair prices. You need to be learning and innovating, giving your people interesting, motivating work and compensating them fairly, creating value for your community, and doing it all in a way that yields a good profit. That’s not what much of Wall Street values, but it’s what creates long-term value for investors.”
― Jim Koch, Quench Your Own Thirst: Business Lessons Learned Over a Beer or Two

“If you like the thought of being your own boss, don’t stress out about finding the “perfect” company to start. Listen—and listen some more. When you happen upon the right channel, you’ll know”
― Jim Koch, Quench Your Own Thirst: Business Lessons Learned Over a Beer or Two

“This principle of only hiring people who are better than the ones we currently have means we don’t make desperation hires to fill an open position. And the raise-the-average rule makes hiring decisions surprisingly easy. It’s easy to visualize in your mind the average person in your sales force or on your brewery floor or even in senior management and it’s easy for your intuition to evaluate whether a candidate is better than the average person. Your gut will tell you. If you’re used to traditional hiring, you might feel uncomfortable turning to intuition. Aren’t we taking too big a risk by relying on our gut feelings about somebody rather than rationally assessing facts such as past experience or education? I would counter that we’re fooling ourselves by not relying primarily on intuition. As recent neuroscience has shown, our brains don’t work rationally. If you hook a functional MRI machine to a chess grandmaster, you find that the best of them are not rationally calculating their next moves; they’re imagining what will happen, unconsciously bringing to bear the hundreds of thousands of moves they’ve already seen. They’re arriving at a feeling that guides their actions. They are using the nonrational part of their brain. The quantitatively logical part of your brain is pretty paltry. Just try counting by prime numbers while you’re multiplying other numbers by seventeen. Impossible. But reading emotions by looking at someone’s facial expressions while you’re navigating a crowded sidewalk is easy for your brain.”
― Jim Koch, Quench Your Own Thirst: Business Lessons Learned Over a Beer or Two

“Ken Grossman, Beyond the Pale: The Story of Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.’s cofounder talks about home brewing, scrounging for equipment, scaling up his brewery, and growing his business for thirty-five years.”
― Jim Koch, Quench Your Own Thirst: Business Lessons Learned Over a Beer or Two

“Tom Hopkins, Selling for Dummies. Selling is applied communication and vastly underrated in business education. If you want to know how viable your business is, go try to sell your product to some potential customers. This book is a solid primer on basic selling skills. You won’t need much more.”
― Jim Koch, Quench Your Own Thirst: Business Lessons Learned Over a Beer or Two