Barnett Helzberg Jr.

“My personal vision of mentoring is that no individual advice will necessarily fit you. I see mentoring as a process of brain marination. When your brain is adequately marinated, you will look in the mirror and a light bulb on top of your cranium will flash the…”

“Get your second sources now when you do not need them.”

“Dad was the ultimate extrovert, yet he told me that the right strategy was to be, quote, a sleeper. That is, not to be known for success when it did come.”

“If you're going to test something you think is important, it's going to be really important to the future of your business, put one of your best people on it.”

“I wish that I had known sooner that if you miss a child's play or performance or sporting event, you will have forgotten a year later the work emergency that caused you to miss it. But the child won't have forgotten that you were not there.”

“You do not need to invent a new industry to start a new business. Study an existing industry and do, study an existing industry and just do it lots better. Henry Ford did not invent the automobile, nor did Kinko's invent copying.”

“We phased out lines of merchandise such as china, crystal, silver, luggage, and radios. We believed that the dollar volume of business would decrease, but the profits would increase. So he's saying on a store, an individual store level, Like, hey, we're going …”

“He who takes bad advice is the one and only culprit in the scenario. Advice is advice, not a command.”

“He said, you make more money closing bad stores than by opening new ones.”

“We elected to pull out of our lease in one of the first 11 covered malls in the United States. This was a nearly fatal error, causing us to waste years of precious time and resources”

“Just providing super service is actually a friend to the entrepreneur. It's something that you can do that giant companies can't.”