Fred Deluca Quotes
102 Fred Deluca Quotes
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Microentrepreneurs are frequently over-looked simply because their businesses are tiny, but many of them contribute significantly to the American economy, and to several economies worldwide.
Fred Deluca
Since the beginning of time, people have started businesses with small amounts of money. They begin modestly, without fanfare and often without great expectations…
Fred Deluca
Microentrepreneurs are as likely to be high school dropouts as they are college graduates.
Fred Deluca
[On prerequisites for microentrepreneurs] Basically, they need an idea, a little bit of money, and most importantly the desire to get started. There’s nothing complicated about what they do.
Fred Deluca
Conventional wisdom offers little hope to those who dare to try what so many say can’t be done. But start small, finish big is… about hope.
Fred Deluca
Impoverishment is the only qualification a borrower needs to do business at the Grameen Bank.
Fred Deluca
When a family friend offered me a small loan to start a business selling submarine sandwiches, it made all the difference in my life.
Fred Deluca
More often than not, people will spend a little more and buy the brand name. The fact is, branded products sell, and they sell for more than unbranded products.
Fred Deluca
When my business partner, Pete Buck… invited me to go into business with him, I had the choice of saying yes or no. If I had said no I don’t know what I’d be doing today, and there’s a chance Peter would have offered the same opportunity to someone else…
Fred Deluca
When you’re faced with opportunity it’s important to be prepared to say yes before the opportunity goes elsewhere.
Fred Deluca
My dad was a high school dropout who worked in an electrical factory…
Fred Deluca
While I was growing up, my mother instilled in me the value of an education. She not only told me how important it was to go to school, she also gave me the confidence to believe that I could graduate from high school, and college, too…
Fred Deluca
The more I thought about college, the more I wondered about how I could find the money.
Fred Deluca
[On his first business partner] I was really impressed when I saw the two-car garage with two cars parked inside! Peter must have landed himself a great job, one that paid a lot of money, I thought to myself.
Fred Deluca
I said, ‘Pete, I want to go to college, to the University of Bridgeport, but I don’t have the money. And I was wondering if you had any ideas about how I might get the money to pay my way through school?’ When I asked the question I had a secret hope that Pete might offer to loan me the money and tell me to pay him back after I graduated… But Pete looked at me, and without hesitation he said, ‘I think you should open a submarine sandwich shop.’ What? Of all the possible answers, this was not one I expected. What an odd thing to say to a seventeen-year-old kid…
Fred Deluca
Pete explained the submarine sandwich business very simply. He said that all I had to do was rent a small store, build a counter, buy some food, and open for business. Customers would then come into the store, put money on the counter, and I would have all the money I needed for college. To Pete it was just as simple as that, although Pete had never owned a business nor run a sandwich shop himself.
Fred Deluca
‘Lease? What’s that?’ I asked… [On the cost for the lease being $25, 2.5 percent of their capital and more money than they could afford.] ‘I think we’ll just take it without a lease.’ I responded… It’s easy now to say that we rushed into the deal, or that we were carried away by the excitement of our new enterprise. I certainly should have conducted a wider location search and I probably should have signed a lease. However, we were just getting started…
Fred Deluca
Sometimes, knowing less and actually doing something is far better than knowing everything and never doing anything at all.
Fred Deluca
Rather than sitting around making plans for the rest of our lives we decided to just go ahead and do it.
Fred Deluca
Pete and I were, and still are, the type of guys who like to make decisions without belabouring things.
Fred Deluca
Until I was face-to-face with our first customer, I had never made a submarine sandwich. Nor had Pete. We enjoyed eating them… but we had absolutely no experience making them.
Fred Deluca
We were starting a small business… We didn’t have much to lose. If there ever was a time to experiment, it was now.
Fred Deluca
Why would we spend our limited time and capital on research? Today, however, it’s a different story.
Fred Deluca
When we were just getting started, we couldn’t get much research for $5, and we couldn’t have afforded much more than that… We did what we could as quickly as possible without getting hung up on what we didn’t know.
Fred Deluca
If the store wasn’t open, we couldn’t sell anything. If the store wasn’t selling anything, I couldn’t get paid. My singular focus was to get the store open.
Fred Deluca
[On his first cash register] It was so old that the highest dollar amount it could ring up was $2.99. That wasn’t a problem, though, because our highest-priced sandwich was 69 cents.
Fred Deluca
We didn’t have an accountant. We kept our own books, and we didn’t know how to produce a financial statement…
Fred Deluca
The record of 312 sandwiches sold on opening day had quickly faded, not to be seen again. By November, 100 sandwiches sold was a big day, but it was far from adequate. All the more disappointing, and worrisome, the numbers continued to fall… So we invested in the Jingle Bell Special, an advertising promotion sponsored by a local radio station. It cost us $550, an enormous sum of money…
Fred Deluca
[When still making losses on the first Subway store only six months after opening.] We decided the second store was worth the risk. As it turned out, it was one of the best decisions we ever made.
Fred Deluca
A second store would give us the opportunity to experiment and compare results. We could accelerate our learning curve in the business by keeping one store as a control unit for measurement purposes. Plus – and this was a major benefit – two shops in the same market would be like advertising… We figured no one would know we weren’t successful because hardly anyone was coming into the store!
Fred Deluca
Since we didn’t have much money to start the business we never allowed ourselves to build up big expenses.
Fred Deluca
As management, I earned $1.35 an hour, 10 cents over the minimum wage. That worked out to $67.50 for my usual workweek or fifty hours.
Fred Deluca
In reality most new business owners can’t collect all of their salary at the time it’s earned.
Fred Deluca
The real reason we didn’t run out of money, however, had less to do with delaying my salary than with the special relationship we developed with our vendors… In the early days, we could never pay as much as we owed, which is why bills started pilling up. But I always wrote a check for each of the four main…
Fred Deluca
Business isn’t a science. It’s not like mixing this chemical with that chemical to get a predicable outcome. You can make a plan and set a goal and even be reasonably sure that you’ll reach that goal, but until you do, you won’t know if you will.
Fred Deluca
There’s not much comfort in the unknown and there’s not much comfort in the elusive art of business. Consequently, many people who say they want to start a business never move beyond thinking about it. they get stuck worrying about the ‘what ifs.’…
Fred Deluca
‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.’ This applies to starting your business. If you want to get started you must take the first step…
Fred Deluca
No matter what business you’re thinking of, you must get started at some point.
Fred Deluca
I didn’t think it was going to be easy, but I also didn’t think it was going to be impossible. I simply thought there was a business to start, there were things to be done, and that I would have to get going immediately.
Fred Deluca
I prefer the philosophy of Ready, Fire, Aim… especially when you’re starting small. If you can make a mistake, if you guess wrong, if your aim is off, you can fix it, and fire again, and adjust again, and again as needed.
Fred Deluca
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