Kevin Harrington Quotes
101 Kevin Harrington Quotes
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I’d tell the car owner, ‘That automobile is your second most expensive purchase. You can protect it for only $119.’ I had been honing my skills at objections. From the get-go, I was closing about 80 percent, making ten to fifteen sales a week, sometimes taking home only $500 in a week, other times as much as $1,500. While kids from my school were scooping ice cream or flipping burgers for $1.60 an hour, I was earning twice as much as the next best salesmen for my company – and he was working to support a family.
Kevin Harrington
I did something rather innovative that my competitors didn’t like: I took out a full-page advertisement in the Yellow Pages that listed an office on the east side of Cincinnati, and another office on the west side, while every other heating/air-conditioning company had only one location and one phone number. I was the citywide company. In fact, our ‘westside office’ was just an answering service taking telephone message. From the start we appeared to be a big company.
Kevin Harrington
When I did a sales call and the customer would say, ‘I can’t afford it,’ I would say, ‘No problem; what can you afford? Can you afford $48 a month for forty-eight months? And I would write them up that night. We would take their credit application, finance it at a local bank, and the bank would pay us cash.
Kevin Harrington
In the heating and air-conditioning industry, summer produces about 80 percent of the profit for almost every company…
Kevin Harrington
Picture a fresh-faced college student who attends class until 1:00pm every day and then hurries across town, puts on a different hat, and spends the next nine hours running his million-dollar company.
Kevin Harrington
When someone asked what field I was in, I said I was in the ‘sellavision’ business. Curiously no one knows where the term ‘infomercial’ came from…
Kevin Harrington
I was bringing in 90 percent of the revenues but being paid like a salaried employee… It was time to be on my own. It was time to walk away.
Kevin Harrington
If you plan to build a big business with another person, spend the time – and the legal fees – to work out every detail of the agreement. Dot every i and cross every t. And never enter an important deal without spelling out an exit strategy that lets either of you terminate the arrangement and lays out the terms of the split.
Kevin Harrington
I stumbled into a gold mine – a suite of offices that had been rented by a company that had just gone bankrupt. They had cleared out only the week before, leaving behind telephones, a bunch of furniture, even pictures on the wall and a few plants. Just one small problem: we would be starting out with a total of staff of three people – the two of us and the secretary we had just hired – but the suite was designed for about twenty…
Kevin Harrington
[On Ron Popiel] Ron liked to say about his generation of the family pitchman that ‘my cousins could sell you an empty box.’ I never saw Arnold [Morris] try to sell an empty box, but on that first occasion, watching so many people pull out their money to buy his knives, my brain shifted into high gear.
Kevin Harrington
Using half-hour television shows to generate leads for selling franchises… sure beat standing in a hotel meeting room doing a presentation in front of thirty or forty people.
Kevin Harrington
When I was starting out, being a young entrepreneur was not fashionable. Parents would ask, ‘When are you going to get a real job?’
Kevin Harrington
I traded a crowd of friends and an active social life for an eighty-hour workweek and no time for meeting people.
Kevin Harrington
[On Regis Philbin] I was starstruck. This guy really is connected, I thought. He can open any door.
Kevin Harrington
[On making a deal paying a salary of $300,000 a year when the highest paid person in his office at the time was making $75,000] I saw his salary not as an expense but as an investment.
Kevin Harrington
The United States is arguably the most innovative nation in the history of the world.
Kevin Harrington
I don’t like being cheated. But I’m not greedy…
Kevin Harrington
There’s little you can do except work harder than the other guys, and offer better deals.
Kevin Harrington
[On negotiations with government agencies.] Having someone along who can quietly throw a bucket of water at you now and then to cool you down is virtually an essential.
Kevin Harrington
From the early days of this business, I had always calculated a target number of sales of a new product in the first hour after the first show aired, a number reflecting the sales we would need in order to break even; if we made that number, then experience had shown the follow-on sales the next day would bring in enough additional money to give us a profit. An hour after the first Ginsu knife infomercial aired in Britain, we had not made our magic number – we had made two-and-a-half times the number. I was elated…
Kevin Harrington
Was it worth spending the money for test airings at a time of year when most people weren’t interested in thinking about waxing their car?… I decided we’d try some limited test airings. That proved a good choice: against expectations, the orders started rolling in.
Kevin Harrington
Envy can be a compliment.
Kevin Harrington
In only eighteen months after our first car wax show ran, we had grabbed over 30 percent of the car wax market. That is the power of the infomercial.
Kevin Harrington
I’m not going to tell him how great we are, I thought. I’m going to tell him I’m here to select a partner, and let him tell me why I should do business with him.
Kevin Harrington
Successful businesspeople in the oil-rich countries can afford different standards for doing business than the rest of us.
Kevin Harrington
No matter how prestigious and established your potential partner appears, you need to spell out the corporate governance in detail.
Kevin Harrington
You need a good product, a good story, and a good pitch.
Kevin Harrington
The pitch is the essence of the deal.
Kevin Harrington
We say, ‘Life’s a pitch, and then they buy.’
Kevin Harrington
I’m a businessman. I thought a screen test was just something they did for an actor who was up for an important role in a movie or to be a star of a television series.
Kevin Harrington
I believe very strongly in the value of connecting with other people who share similar business problems and challenges, and with people who have already walked some of the paths you are now walking.
Kevin Harrington
I wouldn’t be where I am today without my brother Tim, now my full partner in the business. Tim is the guy who keeps everything running, makes sure we’re doing the right deals, and hammers out the terms, leaving me able to do the freewheeling and stay focused on the business side of the business that has made everything possible.
Kevin Harrington
I believe that anyone with drive and vision – anyone – can achieve success…
Kevin Harrington
Being the child of a father who works in a coal mine or a single mother who works on an assembly line or at a grocery store checkout counter does not mean you will need to settle for the same choices.
Kevin Harrington
By almost any measure, I have been incredibly successful, yet it’s been anything but a smooth journey.
Kevin Harrington
I managed… to snatch victory from the haws of defeat, becoming a partner in National Media and helping to take the company from $100 million to $500 million a year and the stock from $1.50 to over $20 per share.
Kevin Harrington
The funny thing about infomercials is that we fail two out of three times.
Kevin Harrington
The biggest loser that I had was Chubby Checkers twistisizer. [An exercising machine. However Chubby was not so slim.]
Kevin Harrington
We test before we invest.
Kevin Harrington
The best way to pitch an idea to an investor is to tell the investor how they’re going to get their money back. A lot of people forget that the investor has other places to invest their money.
Kevin Harrington
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