Harvey Firestone Quotes

100 Harvey Firestone Quotes

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I had learned to cut down every expense to the minimum. I looked around until I found some fairly good second-hand equipment, for I had not forgotten what it meant to try to run a business without a surplus. I decided never again to invest all the ready cash I had in the plant itself.
Harvey Firestone

One of the principal causes of failure is the fact that men do not leave themselves sufficient capital to swing their business operations? Often they could take advantage of a favorable opportunity to buy raw materials or to secure a desirable piece of property, if they only had the ready cash…
Harvey Firestone

The man who pushes his credit to the limit is taking too many chances. He should always take a little less than is offered to him.
Harvey Firestone

I attribute much of my advancement and progress to the fact that I lacked capital. Because of this I had to watch every expenditure. If I had not known or experienced the situation of needing money – where I really had to do some close figuring – to start my business, it would never have grown to the proportions you see here today, because I would not have had to study its every detail.
Harvey Firestone

Constructive work of all kinds has always gripped me… As a child I would stand for hours, watching bricklayers or carpenters put up a building. And to this day the laying on one stone upon another in the erection of a structure holds my attention.
Harvey Firestone

As I employed men, I found an absorbing interest in their development…
Harvey Firestone

To be successful in business a man must be a profit-maker…
Harvey Firestone

The man who is to be an asset to the business must have energy and persistence…
Harvey Firestone

Why many men fail is because they have no goal.
Harvey Firestone

The minute a man finds himself running around in a circle and not getting anywhere, he should set some definite point which he desires to reach, and then make everything he does assist him along to that end. When he has gained this point, he should then set another one higher up, and so on until his ultimate goal is reached.
Harvey Firestone



It takes energy, foresight and ability to pull against the current. There’s an old saying to the effect that ‘only the game fish swim up stream.’ It requires work, hard work, in any endeavor, to achieve success.
Harvey Firestone

To me selling is merely a matter of impressing people with certain facts.
Harvey Firestone

Life gives back to us more than we bring, it is true; but if we bring nothing it gives us nothing in return.
Harvey Firestone

Interest, sympathy, a love for earnest work, the human touch, a conscientious wish to close each day with at least some little addition to the structure we are building; the pleasure of knowing that something we have done has speeded the other fellow on his way – these are the things that make life worthwhile.
Harvey Firestone

No man is important in himself, except as he is able to influence others. Any one individual is a mighty small atom in the universe. If it is only as we are able to develop others, to bring out the best that is in them; to guide them to things to which they would not have found their way alone; and only as we are able to receive from them what they have to give, that we can grow and become a worthwhile part of the scheme of things as they are. These are the things that make life complete.
Harvey Firestone

There was nothing at all complicated about the business or its finance, excepting that we did not have money enough to swing our volume of operations – and not having enough money is always complicated!
Harvey Firestone

No man likes to be panhandled and some selling comes close to panhandling.
Harvey Firestone

Success is the sum of detail. It might perhaps be pleasing to imagine one’s self beyond detail and engaged in only in great things. But, as I have often observed, if one attends only to great things and lets the little things pass, the great things become little – that is, the business shrinks.
Harvey Firestone

The only firm rule I have is to take up one thing at a time and to take up nothing else until my mind is free. I do not believe in quick decisions unless in an emergency. I would rather take my time about making up my mind, and I nearly always manage to do so. Indeed, anything that can be decided in an instant is something that ought not come to me.
Harvey Firestone

Almost every man tries to dodge thought or to find a substitute for it. We try to buy thoughts ready made and guaranteed to fit, in the shape of systems installed by experts. We try to substitute discussion for thought by organizing committees; a committee may function very well indeed as a clearing house for thoughts, but more commonly a committee organization is just an elaborate means of fooling one’s self into believing that a spell spent in talking is the same as a spell spent in thinking.
Harvey Firestone



Competition rarely puts any one out of business – a man usually puts himself out of business by not making a good article or by wrong methods in sales or finance.
Harvey Firestone

[On watching his father being active as a fine businessman in the local livestock markets] It was a whole course in trading to watch him at work. First he saw the whole market and heard what everyone had to offer or say – saying almost nothing himself. He often told me: ‘Never rush in on a deal. Let it come to you.’ That is the course he followed, and by the time he was ready to trade, he knew the whole market. If his survey convinced him that the market was not a good one either to buy or to sell in, he simply went home again.
Harvey Firestone

Power has to be transmitted before a wheel will turn. We give various names to the thought which has the power to turn the wheels. Sometimes we call it management. But there is another kind of management which is not based on thought and which is not management at all; for instance, there is the kind of management which operates solely on records. Records will guide thought, but they will not substitute for thought. Good management – that is, management with real thought behind it – does not bother trying to make its way by trickery, for it know that fundamental honesty is the keystone of the arch of business. It knows that you will fail if you think more of matching competitors than of giving service; that you will fail if you put money or profits ahead of work, and that there is no reason why you should succeed if what you do does not benefit others. This is not idealistic philosophy; it is the hardest kind of common sense. If you ask yourself why you are in business and can find no answer other than, ‘I want to make money,’ you will save money by getting out of business and going to work for someone, for you are in business without sufficient reason.
Harvey Firestone

I am continually advising the organization not to compare present-day business with our past records – although it is a natural thing to do. We are doing much better business than we did last year. But to do a better business than we did last year really is not much of a credit to us. We must compare what we are doing today with our opportunities of today.
Harvey Firestone

Hard work and faithful work isn’t everything. If you find that you are going around in a little routine circle, your head down, just plugging, the only thing for you to do is look around you, pick out a definite goal which you want to reach, and begin traveling toward it. It may not be some remote and difficult peak… When you have gained that one, you can pick out the next higher one, and begin climbing toward that. But a man must have some goal to work for, or he is not likely to do much traveling.
Harvey Firestone

The man or the woman who doesn’t accomplish anything doesn’t get much out of life. I believe most men will make good if they find the work they are happy in doing.
Harvey Firestone

I have never found that pay alone would either bring together or hold good men.
Harvey Firestone

[On hiring the companies first chemist – John W Thomas in 1908 who he declared his successor to the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company in 1932 ] He was getting, so he told me, ninety dollars a month. ‘Will you come with me and lay out a laboratory and take charge of it?’ I asked. ‘And how much would you want?’ ‘I’d like to think it over,’ he answered. ‘But it seems to me I’d like to do it. However, I ought to have one hundred dollars a month. ‘No,’ I answered, ‘we might as well decided it all right now, and I can’t afford to pay you over ninety a month.’ ‘If I have to decide, then I’ll decide to come out, and I’ll start at ninety dollars. I think there is a chance to do something.’ ‘If that’s the case,’ I continued, ‘then we’ll make it one hundred dollars and call it a bargain!’… I will never bid a man away from a job. It is not fair to the man and it is not fair to his employer. If a man comes to you for the single reason that you offer him more money than he has been getting, he is not worth having, for then he is thinking too much of the money and too little of the job. Very often a man is underpaid in his job and perhaps treated unfairly in a number of ways. He may be in the kind of organization in which there is no future; there may be a good many reasons why a man feels he ought to change his job. If such be the case, he ought to change his job and he would be a fool if he made the change simply because the second job offered less money, but he would be almost as much of a fool if he changed simply because the second job offered more money. The money part cannot be put aside; everyone has to live; and there are unfortunately times when a man has to look solely to the pay, but from the employer’s standpoint the really valuable man is the one who is willing to take the change of eventually making himself worth a large salary.
Harvey Firestone

[During over expansion Firestone started offering dealers a range of advertising products including their glossy magazine called Milestones] I began to see salesman’s reports like this: Fifty Milestones, One thousand blotters, Five hundred buttons, Ten tires. Looking through the accounting department, I noticed a new division of clerks that I had never seen before. I asked what they were doing. ‘Billing advertising,’ came the reply. That set me to thinking. I began to ask myself: ‘Are we in the business of selling tires or are we publishers and sellers of advertising? [Firestone then told his sales staff to ‘sell tires and nothing else.’]
Harvey Firestone

Every addition to the indirect or overhead expense should be studied vigilantly. This is especially true in the days when luxuries so rapidly become necessities. An executive is the better off for having a comfortable desk and chair and a convenient place to work, and there is not reason why surroundings should not be good looking rather than ugly, but an office is essentially a place in which to work. It is not a club and it ought not to be fitted up as a club – else it may turn into a club.
Harvey Firestone



We have cut our manufacturing turnover from sixty to fifteen days. We have cut our seconds to a negligible fraction, and we have so simplified processes that, whereas a few years ago we were in pressing need of space in which to build more tires, we are now, with a far larger output than then, using less than all the space we have at our command. All of this due to: ‘Is it necessary?’ and ‘Can it be simplified?’
Harvey Firestone

Unless one can see and plan for a year or two ahead, one’s business will not grow evenly and naturally. It will pass through a series of emergencies, and one of those emergencies will wreck it. Emergencies will come about in any business, but they will be few and not hard to meet if the future has been mapped. This is so self-evident that I wonder why it is so much neglected. The only danger in mapping the future lies in making the plans inflexible.
Harvey Firestone

Much of the thinking of business has to be along the lines of comparing values. If we make a change in manufacturing or selling methods, will the added return pay the cost? This appraising operation in business is continuous. For instance, in 1920, when we began to compare expenditures and results in our office, we promptly discovered we actually needed only 300 – or in other words, we had 1,200 men performing operations of no value to us. We found an even worse situation in selling; in a period when no selling was necessary since people rushed in to buy, we had built up, because we had lost our sense of values, a most intricate organization that could not possibly pay its way. It was being paid for by rising prices and not by work…
Harvey Firestone

Many of the values are intangible and cannot be put down on paper in terms of dollars and cents – but this is the point – if you can make a picture of a situation in your own mind, then you can make comparisons and relate values, even if you cannot express them. Some people call this vision, and we hear a great deal about the necessity for vision. But vision, as I see it, is not dreaming forward. It is a thinking through with the values ever in mind. For instance, I should not be exercising vision if I looked forward to a day when I should supply all the tires in the world. That would be just idle, profitless dreaming. In quite another class is thinking out ways and means to get a certain percentage of all the tires used and relating prices and manufacturing schedules and so on to that end. It is perfectly possible to make an exact mental picture of what would be required to do a decided percentage of business – and if that picture be kept in mind, the decisions to carry them out can come quickly.
Harvey Firestone

Every change we made in sales methods brought results – and proved the new method. We did not know that we would have shown as startling increase had we abolished our whole sales force, closed all our branches and dealers, and just sent out our tires in freight cars to be thrown off on sidings and taken away by clamoring buyers.
Harvey Firestone

We do not care for sales contests or high pressure selling. We have tried most of the approved devices for stimulating sales. For several years we set up quotas. If the end of the month were near and a salesman were below his quota, it was natural for him to go to a dealer that he knew well and say: ‘Help me out with an order to make my quota.’ That is not selling – that is asking for alms. A dealer with a charitable bent of mind will order to help the agent, which is no reason at all for ordering. We have had sales contests with prizes and bonuses, and these, too were successful, in that they produced results, but the results were not permanent. When a sales contest closed, the salesman took things easy for a week or two, and we would have a sharp drop in sales. We did not gain any permanent advantage by the contests.
Harvey Firestone

Glad sales improving. Regret your policy of giving prize money for increased sales. It exhibits a weakness in management and impresses your branches that you do not have confidence that they are making their best effort in these strenuous times. My judgment is that all your branch organization wants is helpful suggestions, confidence and inspiration from the home office.
Harvey Firestone

There was nothing at all complicated about the business or its finance, excepting that we did not have money enough to swing our volume of operations – and not having enough money is always complicated! Our margin of profit was very narrow at the best, and at the worst we lost money. For three years we lost money operations as a whole, but this did not bother me as to the eventual success of the enterprise, because I knew how and why we lost our…
Harvey Firestone

A good salesman will never intrude. In the first place, he will know that intruders do not make sales, and in the second place he will have brains enough to arrange for the right kind of meeting with his prospect – no man likes to be panhandled and some selling comes close to panhandling.
Harvey Firestone

It is unusual, and indeed abnormal, for a concern to make money during the first several years of its existence. The initial product and the initial organization are never right… The new company will think that it has taken every precaution. It will think that it has made every sort of investigation, but really the most searching trials that a new company can make are of small moment, first, because the promoters can never get themselves into the cold detached frame of mind in which the public approaches anything new, and, second, because the knowledge of what really is a test will be lacking.
Harvey Firestone



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