Top 110 Small Business Quotes

Run a home like you would a small business and treat it with the same seriousness.

We are going through tough economic times but things are looking up, and the indicators are improving not only for large corporations but also for small business.

One of the best programs that the federal government sponsors is the Small Business Innovation Research program, in which more than 2.5 percent of federal research and development funding at the largest agencies goes directly to small businesses.

My father is a taxi driver, and my mother ran a small business. I hadn’t even met a barrister before I got my first shot at the legal profession. But back then, I was lucky enough to be given a break – I can’t help but wonder if I would be so lucky today.

One of biggest lies in politics is the lie that Republicans are the party of big business. Big business does great with big government. Big business is very happy to climb in bed with big government. Republicans are and should be the party of small business and of entrepreneurs.

Oh, I’m all about small business. I think what we’ve learned from big business and big Wall Street is that unchecked greed and the creation of false value gets us all in trouble. If we look at the American economy, who’s really creating value? It’s the small businesses.

Legitimate small businesses are put at a huge competitive disadvantage when bad actors lie about their small business status and don’t play by the rules.

We want to create more jobs. We want to qualify more lenders and expand lending markets. But also, I want a very different SBA – it’s not your father’s SBA. I want to modernize it and reposition it so when people think about jobs, they think about how the Small Business Administration would really be helpful.

Having a small business and being one of thousands of people whom no one in government will listen to, I have decided to run for supervisor as a person.

Every life a legacy, every small business a school.

Small business owners are experiencing great uncertainty because of the possibility of tax increases, the inconsistent flow of credit, an outrageous national debt, high energy costs, and overreaching federal regulations.

We need to repeal and replace Dodd-Frank. We need to make America fair again for all businesses, but especially those being run by small business owners.

My parents are conservatives. Owning a small business lent itself to that viewpoint.

Anytime you own a small business, it’s all you. There is nobody to fall back on.

We have been fighting for solutions that will spur economic growth and create jobs for all Americans because we have been listening to what small business owners and employees have been telling us all along.

I am a local economic revitalization strategist. But I am also a TV/radio host, and a small business owner. I find ways to use money more efficiently to realize positive goals for everyone.

Time and time again, small businesses testify before the Committee on Small Business that they simply want the government to ‘get out of the way.’

Supporting iconic, growth-oriented industries, combined with tax policies that encourage small business growth and investment, represents a potent combination and is the basis of our entire administration.

As you probably know, half of the people who work in this country work for small businesses. And it’s more than that, because two out of every three net new jobs come from small business. So we mean it when we talk about small business being the engine for the economy.

After working for 14 years on Wall Street and growing up in a family with strong roots in small business, I know how important the entrepreneurial spirit is to attaining the American dream.

I’ve spent time in the coastal Carolinas and have seen what small business development has done to maintain the wetlands and reestablish the fisheries and secure jobs for the people that make their living off the water.

Happy is the small business that can hire additional employees besides the proprietor; rare is the indie-film enterprise that can be happy in this way. The norm is an unpaid principal with no employees between productions.

In six short years, small business owners and family farmers will once again be assessed a tax on the value of their property at the time of their death, despite having paid taxes throughout their lifetime.

It’s not government that creates jobs; it’s small business. Our job is to make sure they have the access to capital, the access to contracting opportunities, and the help, advice and mentoring that they need to go out and be successful.

How can you, as a small business owner, figure out what you are and, from there, begin to take action? Simple – you have to understand what part of the job you are doing and, if it isn’t fulfilling the role of the entrepreneur in your business, you must make the decision to take on that role.

Every small business will give you an entrepreneurial way of looking at things. I guarantee you that for every plant that closes, if you gave it to one small-business person in that community, he or she would find a way to make it work. The small-business attitude is you always find a way to make it work.

There is no greater country on Earth for entrepreneurship than America. In every category, from the high-tech world of Silicon Valley, where I live, to University R&D labs, to countless Main Street small business owners, Americans are taking risks, embracing new ideas and – most importantly – creating jobs.

I once started a small business when I got out of college and enjoyed the stress of making it work. High-stress situations clear my head, and I love the challenge of getting along with many different kinds of people. I’m scared of routine.

Where are the jobs going to come from? Small business, manufacturing and clean energy. Where’s the money to finance them? The banks and the corporations in America today have lots of money that they can invest right now.

Occupational licensing laws – in trades like moving companies, realtors, hair dressers, limousine services, beauticians, physical therapy, and on and on – stunt small business start ups, destroy jobs, and raise prices for lower-income consumers.

I was honored to start a small business and to borrow an enormous amount of money and to build piece upon piece, place upon place, building upon building and product upon product, throughout the United States and eventually Europe and facilities around the world.

Small business owners are fighting every day to create and innovate, but continue to face government barriers to job creation.

The only choice that leads small business owners to real success in their endeavors is the one that requires real thought. Understanding and building the systems they need within their company to afford them a framework of organization that can scale the business from a company of one to a company of one thousand.

It is simply unfair for the Internal Revenue Service to lay claim to the bulk of a small business or farm when a death occurs. Federal tax policy should instead be geared toward helping the next generation keep these family-owned operations alive.

I’ll never have the seniority of lions of the Senate who’ve been in office for decades. What I do have is a lifetime of experience as a parent and activist, small business owner, and lieutenant governor of Minnesota.

If you aren’t talking to your kids about socialism, someone else is. So use car time, dinner time, tax preparation time, and time spent together at your work or small business to teach your child about the virtues of capitalism, the system of government that has lifted more people out of poverty.

A large social-media presence is important because it’s one of the last ways to conduct cost-effective marketing. Everything else involves buying eyeballs and ears. Social media enables a small business to earn eyeballs and ears.

It is hard to be enthusiastic about the economy’s prospects when house prices are falling: Households spend less, small business owners can’t use homes as collateral for loans and local governments are forced to cut jobs and programs as property-tax revenue disappears.

We see – every week or two, we see another story of a small business that went out of business because Donald Trump.

Small business is the backbone of America.

The romantic person instinctively sees marriage in terms of emotions, but what a couple actually gets up to together over a lifetime has much more in common with the workings of a small business. They must draw up work rosters, clean, chauffeur, cook, fix, throw away, mind, hire, fire, reconcile, and budget.

Obama wants to take the individual small business tax to 44 percent, and the corporate rate – he says – down to 28 percent or whatever. But that really damages the small businesses. And it doesn’t make us competitive. You got to take them both down to 20, because state and local corporate taxes are 5 percent.

A small business can survive for a while without making a profit, but if its cashflow dries up, the impact is fatal.

Removing government-created obstacles to small business growth is what Washington should be addressing, and this focus should start with removing the herculean impediments to job creation found in the health care law.

The average small-business owner uses 18 apps to run their business every day, and if those applications don’t allow data to flow seamlessly and they don’t integrate, it’s going to become a point of friction. It’s going to prevent the small business from being successful.

We are not going to be the agency where large businesses can masquerade as a small business and get a contract. We are closing down on fraud, waste and abuse.

It’s tough for people to get into business, especially a small business.

The most important thing for small businesses is getting the economy back on its feet. That – the key driver of small business activity is demand for their product, and that is what we are trying to do, getting the economy back on its feet. That’s far more important than other factors.

Growing up on a family farm, I know firsthand the challenges of running a small business… challenges that only seem to be growing for today’s entrepreneurs.

Born in Jabalpur, I was brought up in Deolali, where my father ran a small business of making fire extinguishers.

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.

Yet our small business owners across the country are unfairly losing potential interest income on a daily basis until the Business Checking Freedom Act becomes law.

The Small Business Administration was fundamental in helping our company. There’s great initiative from the government if you know the right places to look.

Small business creates more jobs than large corporations.

On the one hand, Porto Monenegro is shape-shifting – it replaced a naval shipyard with a new marina – but it’s also mind-shifting, opening up an array of other small business opportunities. And this shape-shifting and mind-shifting, it is exactly what we’re trying to do in Montenegro.

It’s time to level the playing field for small business owners and give them the same health care choices that large corporations have. Because they don’t have as many employees, they have little ability to negotiate lower rates.

As a member of the House Committee on Small Business and because of my own experience as a small business owner, I am appreciative of the impact these small businesses have on our local economies.

I’m a big fan of small business ownership. I think it’s the backbone of American innovation. But to be successful, you first have to have the courage to go for it.

Small business is America’s engine of job creation.

Closing the gap for women entrepreneurs should be a priority for the federal government – and yet the Small Business Administration has failed in their promise to women business owners.

I’ve always loved small business.

In the private sector, as the president of a small business, my focus has been on driving the growth of our business, not driving any partisan political agenda.

The only agency of the federal government with a more demoralized workforce than Homeland Security is the Small Business Administration, a notorious turkey farm that should have been abolished years ago.

I have reviewed literally hundreds of dotcoms in my drive to bring Boomer Esiason Foundation onto the Internet, and have selected ClickThings as a partner because of the advanced technology it offers small business, and its understanding of the entrepreneurial spirit of the small business community.

Let’s find those areas where modest and reasonable tax cuts will have the biggest positive impact on our economy, and which will improve the lives of those who need it most: working families, retirees, and small business owners.

The collusion of big business, big labor, and big government threaten the spirit of small business that makes America great.

Claiming to ‘fight for small business’ is often used as a political tool in Washington D.C., but it is actually the policies behind that battle cry that small firms care about.

You can be hostile to greed. You can be hostile to income inequality. You can be for raising raises… but you can’t be hostile to businesses because 98 percent of businesses are small business people.

There are so many veterans in Kansas with the entrepreneurial skills it takes to run a small business, and we must do a better job at setting them up for success.

One of my bosses happened to be one of the early architects of some of the ways Internet providers work. He taught me how the cables connect, how the telecom providers work… I learned how to make my own Ethernet cables, all the way up to running a small business.

I myself am a parent in a small business. Number of employees: one.

I’m the guy who’s started businesses, I’ve been a small business owner. I’ve employed hundreds of Pennsylvanians. I know how to get jobs moving in the private sector, rein in the excesses in Washington, and bring some balance to a town that’s lost all balance.

The Small Business ‘common app’ would function much like the one that students complete to apply to multiple colleges and universities simultaneously. It would ensure that small businesses across the country can concentrate on growing and creating jobs – not wasting time, filling out mountains of repetitive paperwork.

At the end of drama school, I made a contract with myself: I’d try acting for five years. I was 26. I had already spent eight years working in restaurants and gas stations. So I had seen enough small businesses to understand that that’s what acting is: a small business.

As a small business owner for the last 15 years, when I think of what truly changed my life, it was my faith, a strong family, my mom did a really, really good job of encouraging me in very clear and discernible ways.

The mismanagement of the Small Business Health Options program is very frustrating.

Oftentimes, small business owners are unable to obtain reasonably priced financing and instead turn to higher priced forms of capital, such as credit cards.

Obamacare has got everyone on edge. I mean, small business – men and women or big business are sitting out there saying we have no idea what this is going to cost, but we know it’s going to cost us and cost us a lot.

If you’re going to run a small business, you need to know what everyone is doing, be the first one in and the last one out, and work weekends.

My father was into textile painting and ran a small business. He encouraged me a lot and loved seeing my plays.

Entrepreneurial education in grades K-12, if it exists at all, still focuses on teaching potential entrepreneurs small business entrepreneurship – the equivalent of ‘how to run a lemonade stand.’

Square has already found that the micro-merchant market isn’t a profitable business, and as a result they have been trying to shift into the more lucrative small business market.

We need to open up private sector markets. We need to empower small business people, working Georgians, and entrepreneurs.

I have heard firsthand from several small business owners about their struggle to borrow and their fear of taking on additional debt.

I didn’t realize how hard it was to run a small business.

Like any small business owner, I experienced the pressures of building a company from the ground up – developing a business plan, balancing the books, meeting payroll and building a customer base.

Our philosophy is that we want to be an ecosystem. Our philosophy is to empower others to sell, empower others to service, making sure the other people are more powerful than us. With our technology, our innovation, our partners – 10 million small business sellers – they can compete with Microsoft and IBM.

Growing up in the Midwest, I was very close to my maternal grandmother, who, as a young widow running a small business in 1920s Kansas City, had known firsthand the old Pendergast regime and its classic combine of politics and organized crime.

I grew up in a family business… that really has provided the core of my belief in American small business, and in America’s ability to grow and operate important businesses that can compete and be successful.

We came from a family where we ran our own small business. Our dad made his own products. We made our own sausages, our own meatloafs, our own pickles. Dad had to do everything himself. He had to figure out how to finance his business.

The people of Mississippi can’t just go home, shut down their small business, shut down their restaurants, shut down their gyms… and just think that you can come back six weeks from now, flip a switch and everything’s gonna be fine. That’s not the way the economy works.

As any small business owner knows, starting a business is not glamorous work.

One of the most important tools we have at the Small Business Administration (SBA) to reach high growth entrepreneurs is the Small Business Investment Company (SBIC) program.

You don’t have the chance in a small business – when every dollar counts, every day – to make too many mistakes and recover from them, and you don’t have the luxury of waiting to make the decision. You have to move quickly.

My father was a small business owner. When I was growing up, he ran a one-hour photo store – back when there were one-hour photo stores.

In almost every profession – whether it’s law or journalism, finance or medicine or academia or running a small business – people rely on confidential communications to do their jobs. We count on the space of trust that confidentiality provides. When someone breaches that trust, we are all worse off for it.

It’s clear that the small business tax credit created under the Affordable Care – while well-intentioned policy – can be improved to better serve the needs of small businesses.

For Central Virginia small business owners, their business is more than a building, a sign out front, or an income – it’s their lifelong dream.

What we won’t become is a ‘Democratic Party lite!’ We are a party that wants smaller government and lower taxes. Obama and the Democrats do not. We are a party that wants to encourage small business. We are a party that has a large constituent group that believes in a social agenda and we will not abandon them.

Every new rule, mandate, and regulatory edict is one more obstacle that small business owners, entrepreneurs, and job creators have to swallow.

I moderated a panel focusing just on women and the specific challenges that women entrepreneurs face. And we found that around the world, the challenges are the same, whether it is gaining access to capital, risk-taking, or the ability to expand beyond a small business and grow.

Tax cuts continue to benefit families, seniors, and small business owners, as evidenced by unparalleled economic growth in Nevada and across the country.

When we look at the investment decisions into the city of Compton, the small business community and global corporations and retailers and all of those types of services that decide to come into the community to serve it, they look at the perception, how does the brand work with the local community.

I’ve started several small businesses myself and know that it is tough out there for the little guy in the global economy. I came to the conclusion that, oftentimes, the best thing the government can do for small business is to stay out of the way.

I tell you what Hispanics in Virginia tell me they want. They want access to the American dream. That’s why they come here to Virginia and to America, so they want more opportunities to start small business, better schools.

The most wonderful thing about having a small business is that every person we dress gets a really intimate process.

My Taiwanese parents came to America with no money and supported my brothers and me as small business owners in Orange County, which is close to L.A. but about as far away from Hollywood as you can be.

We need to preserve our neighborhoods, our small business, our local economy.

When President Obama speaks about raising taxes on the rich, he speaks about high-income employees and small business owners, not entrepreneurs who build big businesses.

The American economy has always been driven by the entrepreneurial nature of its citizens, and blocking access to affordable health care will only suffocate growth within the small business sector of our economy.