Are you about to start up a small business or you have an already existing business? These amazing small business quotes will motivate you on the days you feel like throwing in the towel.
So, you are excited about how things are holding up in your business.
The cash flow is constant, you are seeing maximum profitability in the business and you have the best set of employees working for you.
With all these, you’ll feel on top of the world about your business.
However, certain unforeseen circumstances such as changes in economic policies, recession among other things can greatly affect the business.
When this happens, you’ll need some kind of emotional reminder to keep your hope alive.
Things such as these small business quotes.
Each business has its own challenges.
Due to this, as a business owner, you need to have a source of motivation to keep you focused on your goal of achieving success despite all odds.
These 118 small business quotes are truly inspirational.
They’ll keep you motivated every step of the way as you try to give in your best to your business.
When you encounter problems in business, reading motivational quotes can be very helpful.
These 118 small business quotes are not only inspirational, but they are also enlightening.
This is because these small business quotes are born out of the experiences of people who have had similar challenges to what you might be experiencing.
They might have failed, but they learned their lessons and found the courage to still reach for success.
So, what better way can you learn than from the experiences of others?
118 Small Business Quotes
1A big business starts small. – Richard Branson
2A small business is an amazing way to serve and leave an impact on the world you live in. – Nicole Snow
3A word of encouragement during a failure is worth more than an hour of praise after success. – Unknown
4Action is the foundational key to all success. – Pablo Picasso
5Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else. – Judy Garland
6Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later. – Og Mandino
7As ever, the accountant in me saw the risk, the entrepreneur saw the possibility. So I split the difference and kept moving forward. – Phil Knight
8Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it’s holy ground. There’s no greater investment. – Stephen Covey
9Because, you know, resilience—if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you’d be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn’t a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities. – Jeff Bezos
10Behind every small business, there’s a story worth knowing. All the corner shops in our towns and cities, the restaurants, cleaners, gyms, hair salons, hardware stores – these didn’t come out of nowhere. – Paul Ryan
11Bringing great people onto your team is about demonstrating that size really doesn’t matter – people do. – Jess Campbell
12Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs. – Farrah Gray
13By recording your dreams and goals on paper, you set in motion the process of becoming the person you most want to be. Put your future in good hands — your own. – Mark Victor Hansen
14Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way. – Edward de Bono
15Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. – Steve Jobs
16Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong. – Donald Porter
17Desire is the key to motivation, but it’s determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal—a commitment to excellence—that will enable you to attain the success you seek. – Mario Andretti
18Don’t be afraid to assert yourself, have confidence in your abilities, and don’t let the bastards get you down. – Michael bloomberg
19Don’t let the fear of losing be greater than the excitement of winning.” – Robert Kiyosaki
20Don’t spread yourself too thin… focus trumps freneticism any day. – John Coleman
21Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better. – Jim Rohn
22Don’t wish it were easier, wish you were better. – lisa M. Amos
23Everyone who achieves success in a great venture solves each problem as they came. They helped themselves and they were helped through powers known and unknown to them at the time they set out on their voyage. They keep going regardless of the obstacles they meet. – W. Clement Stone
24Failure is not to be feared. It is from failure that most growth comes. – Dee Hock
25Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently…. A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large. – Henry Ford
26Fearlessness is like a muscle. I know from my own life that the more I exercise it, the more natural it becomes to not let my fears run me. – Arianna Huffington
27Find a great mentor, someone who has already been through the many challenges of being an entrepreneur.. – Jodi Levine
28For maximum attention, nothing beats a good mistake. – Unknown
29I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. – Thomas Edison
30For every sale you miss because you’re too enthusiastic, you will miss a hundred because you’re not enthusiastic enough. – Zig Ziglar
31Give yourself an even greater challenge than the one you are trying to master and you will develop the powers necessary to overcome the original difficulty. – William J. Bennett
32Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion. – Jack Welch
33Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them. – Paul Hawken
34Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort. – Franklin D. Roosevelt
35Help your team feel more connected to your company by incorporating the right digital technology tools into their workflow. – Andrea Meyer
36I can’t imagine a person becoming a success who doesn’t give this game of life everything he’s got. – Walter Cronkite
37I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying. – Jeff bezos
38I make a conscious effort to keep things in perspective when I get burned out. It is easy to get stuck in the daily grind, but if you think about all the distance you have covered, and what lies ahead, it is much easier to feel motivated and optimistic. – Alex Litoff
39I may be over the top on this, but I just don’t want to like my competitors. I want my people to believe that whenever he and our other competitors succeed, we will be less able to do all the things we want to do. – Paul Knight
Small Business Quotes
40I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the phonograph. No, when I have fully decided that a result is worth getting, I go about it, and make trial after trial, until it comes. – Thomas Edison
41I would rather die of passion than of boredom. – Vincent Van Gogh
42I’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. – Bill Rancic
43I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. – Steve Jobs
44I can’t imagine a person becoming a success who doesn’t give this game of life everything he’s got. – Dominique Ansel
45Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard. – Guy Kawasaki
46Ideas in secret die. They need light and air or they starve to death. – Seth Godin
47If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it. – Albert Einstein
48If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative. – David Ogilvy
49If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative. – Bob Hooey
50If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. – Tony Robbins
51If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. – Henry David Thoreau
52If you just work on stuff that you like and you’re passionate about, you don’t have to have a master plan with how things will play out. – Mark Zuckerberg
53If 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. – Glen Mazzara
54In every success story, you will find someone who has made a courageous decision. – Peter F. Drucker
55In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure – Bill Cosby
56Innovation almost always is not successful the first time out. You try something and it doesn’t work and it takes confidence to say we haven’t failed yet.… Ultimately you become commercially successful. – Clayton Christensen
57It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop. – Confucius
58It is common sense to take a method and try it, if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. – Theodore Roosevelt
59It is never too late to be what you might have been. – George Eliot
60It’s important to be willing to make mistakes. The worst thing that can happen is you become memorable. – Sara Blakely
61Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground. – Theodore Roosevelt
62Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy. – Norman Schwarzkopf
63Obstacles are necessary for success because in selling, as in all careers of importance, victory comes only after many struggles and countless defeats. – Og Mandino
64One of the best predictors of ultimate success … isn’t natural talent or even industry expertise, but how you explain your failures and rejections. – Daniel H. Pink
65People don’t ask for facts in making up their minds. They would rather have one good, soul-satisfying emotion than a dozen facts. – Robert Keith Leavit
66Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work. – Peter F. Drucker
67Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, ‘Make me feel important.’ Not only will you succeed in sales, you will succeed in life. – Mary Kay Ash
68Small business isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s for the brave, the patient and the persistent. It’s for the overcomer. – Unknown
69So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard. – Caterina Fake
70Spend time upfront to invest in systems and processes to make long-term growth sustainable. – Jeff Platt
71Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business. – Zig Ziglar
72Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. – Albert Einstein
73Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill
74Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out. – Robert Collier
Additonal Small Business Quotes
75The best way to sell yourself to others is first to sell the others to yourself. – Napoleon Hill
76The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer. – Nolan Bushnell
77When you find an idea that you just can’t stop thinking about, that’s probably a good one to pursue. – Josh James
78To be successful, you have to have your heart in your business, and your business in your heart. – Thomas Watson Sr.
79To be successful, you have to have your heart in your business, and your business in your heart. – Patricia Fripp
80Where do you put the fear when you choose to innovate? The fear is there, but you have to find a place to put it. – Seth Godin
81Where focus goes, energy flows. – Tony Robbins
82Without hustle, talent will only carry you so far. – Gary Vaynerchuk
83Work 9-to-5, spend a couple of hours with your family, 7 to 2am is plenty of time to do damage. – Gary Vaynerchuk
84Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really: Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, so go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that’s where you will find success. – Thomas Watson Sr.
85You are not your resume, you are your work. – Seth Godin
86You can’t ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new. – Steve Jobs
87You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. – Steve Jobs
88You do not get what you want. You get what you negotiate. – Harvey Mackay
89Your smile is your logo. Your personality is your business card. How you leave others feeling after an experience with you becomes your trademark. – Jay Danzie
90You don’t build a business, you build people, then people build the business. – Zig Ziglar
91You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself, any direction you choose. – Dr. Seuss
92You must be the change you wish to see in the world. – Gandhi
93Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. – Bill Gates
94We are really competing against ourselves, we have no control over how other people perform. – Pete Cashmore
95We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. – Aristotle
96We think, mistakenly, that success is the result of the amount of time we put in at work, instead of the quality of time we put in. – Arianna Huffington
97We used to write this down by saying, ‘Move fast and break things.’ And the idea was, unless you are breaking some stuff, you are not moving fast enough. – Mark Zuckerberg
98Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin by always expecting good things to happen. – Tom Hopkins
99When times are bad is when the real entrepreneurs emerge. – Robert Kiyosaki
100The greater danger for most of us isn’t that our aim is too high and miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it. – Michel Angelo
101The important thing is not being afraid to take a chance. Remember, the greatest failure is to not try. Once you find something you love to do, be the best at doing it. – Debbi Fields
102The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand. – Vince Lombardi
103The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing. – Walt Disney
104The foundation stones for a balanced success are honesty, character, integrity, faith, love and loyalty. – Zig Ziglar
105There are no bad soldiers under a good general. – Napoleon Bonaparte
106There is no royal, flower-strewn path to success. And if there is, I have not found it. For if I have accomplished anything in life, it is because I have been willing to work hard. – C.J. Walker
107There is no finish line. There are only mile markers. – Michael ventura
More Small Business Quotes
108There’s lots of bad reasons to start a company. But there’s only one good, legitimate reason, and I think you know what it is: It’s to change the world. – Phil Libin
109This is the key to time management – to see the value of every moment. – Menachem Mendel Schneerson
110Leadership is working with goals and vision; management is working with objectives. – Russel Honore
111Make each day your masterpiece. – John Wooden
112Make something people want” includes making a company that people want to work for. – Sahil Lavingia
113Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations. – Tim O’Reilly
114Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure. – Napoleon Hill
115Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it. – Dwight D. Eisenhower
116My biggest motivation? Just to keep challenging myself. I see life almost like one long university education that I never had—every day I’m learning something new. – Richard Branson
117My definition of ‘innovative’ is providing value to the customer. – Mary Barra
118Nobody ever wrote down a plan to be broke, fat, lazy, or stupid. Those things are what happen when you don’t have a plan. – Larry Winget
Conclusion On Small Business Quotes
It doesn’t matter what challenges you might be encountering in your small business now.
The thing is you aren’t the first person to experience it.
So even if you’ve failed in business a couple of times, it means you’ve learned a couple of things that won’t work.
Use these small business quotes to keep you motivated as you strive for success in your business.
What challenges have you encountered in your business?
How did you tackle it and what gave you hope to push harder?
Which of these quotes do you feel motivates you the most?
