Kinko's

“If you go 24 hours a day, your daytime business doubles, which is absolutely correct.”

“You want strong consonants. Google, Xerox, Kodak. Coca-Cola. So I wanted a business with a strong consonant. Once you heard the name Kinkos, you'd never forget it.”

“You can't rely on minimum wage people to have motivation, and so I always figured if I take in a partner, the fact that they have equity in that individual location would make a big difference in the outcome, which is true.”

“I sold 2000 dollars a day worth of notebooks and pens the first day of school.”

“I remember Xeroxing For students how to make Molotov cocktails because the anti-war movement was so strong.”

“Franchisees and franchisors are two people flipping each other off all the time. In other words, if I told the franchisee to do something, they would say, well, he's not, his motivation isn't cure. He just wants more six percent from the top.”

“When I came back I think when you sell your business, they shouldn't keep the founder on. It's sort of like cut, cutting the tail off an inch at a time, and everybody who was unhappy came to me, and I didn't have any influence or power to do anything about it.”

“And overnight, my inventory rotted, my cucumbers, my corn, and I looked at the Xerox machine, and I thought, man, that, that paper does not go obsolete. That inventory stays there for months and months at a time. And I thought, I don't want to be in a business…”

“I actually cash flowed the very first month. I had more money in the bank account at the end of the month than I started with.”

“Most people will brag about how hard they work, this, that, and the other. What I think hard work is what keeps you up all night long when you're worrying. That's hard work.”

“Say at Ohio State, we were doing six percent of the textbook sales by photocopying.”

“You only do three things in business, and it's really simple. Motivate your workers, understand your customers, and balance your checkbook.”

“Our first sentence in the philosophy is we, our primary objective is to take care of the customer. But some of our customers are so outlandishly rude, we had to have a mechanism in our values to fire a customer. So we added in the second paragraph, the coworke…”

“The reason I didn't choose Franchise-een is If they viewed me as a parasite from the top, they would easily go across the street and do it. But I shared in the profits, and they got a good salary, they had a car, we had a pension plan for the partners.”

“I think sometimes we spend our time on the Hardest thing, which was the print shop, where the easy money, the low-hanging fruit was in the copy shops.”

“I put up, generally, 60% of the money. They would put up 40% of the money.”

“Is when a business person says, I love my business. That's absolute bullshit. You love your family. You can enjoy your business, but once that becomes a love affair, you lose your objectivity.”

“Xerox was so screwed up in their invoicing, it gave me an enormous amount of float. I wouldn't get a bill from a Xerox machine for say, 60 days, 90 days after it was installed. And I didn't have to put up any money to get it.”

“I shouldn't be available for those kinds of phone calls. So I became inaccessible and there better be a damn good reason for somebody to call me. And I noticed that the phone, I couldn't get anything accomplished by being so available for phone calls.”