Tom Potter Quotes

101 Tom Potter Quotes

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Life’s about doing things, not having things…
Tom Potter

Eagle Boys: Ready When You Are.
Tom Potter

Starting a business from scratch is difficult. Okay, let’s call it what it is – hellish.
Tom Potter

What you put in is what you get out.
Tom Potter

Always try new things. Even if it fails, failure is a lesson learnt!
Tom Potter

Dream ideal plans, and develop practical plans.
Tom Potter

Our ideals and goals drove us, not the reality of what we lacked at that moment.
Tom Potter

If you’re in the sh*t, be straightforward with the bank and employees and show them your plan for going forward. They want solutions, not problems.
Tom Potter

The irony was both hilarious and awe inspiring – the bloke who dropped out of high school because he found it confining and, well boring, was headed to one of the world’s great universities [Harvard Business School], as a treat for being a real live successful businessman. Does anyone need more proof that life’s funny sometimes?
Tom Potter

It doesn’t really matter whether you’re born with a silver spoon in your mouth or the thumb of one of your hands. What you make of yourself in life is entirely up to you.
Tom Potter



I met guys who were in their mid-20s, married with children, high-graded managers who were very successful. But they looked like they were 40 and headed toward burnout.
Tom Potter

[On Coles in the mid 1980s] The company was so aggressive to be the biggest and best, it forgot the things that were important, like happy employees – not to mention happy customers. Though once known as Australia’s largest retailer, Coles ultimately was overrun by retailers such as Woolworths.
Tom Potter

His gutlessness was apparent, as he couldn’t look me in the eye and tell me I was sacked. His inability to address me frankly reflected his desire to deny the real troubles in his business.
Tom Potter

People want to buy a franchise, not just because it’s a tried and proven system, but because of the enormous stress, pressure and strain born of trying to be creative and efficient at every level.
Tom Potter

Advertise once you were up and running, not when your whole crew was green.
Tom Potter

[On accounts before computers] I assembled a monthly P&L (Profit and Loss) on foolscap paper – a total pain in the arse.
Tom Potter

[On his trip to Wagga] I felt a bit like a prospector first visiting the Bendigo Goldfields a century ago. Opportunity was dripping out of the town’s seams and no one had taken it.
Tom Potter

I was fully leveraged and without more capital, growth wasn’t an option.
Tom Potter

Franchising is a business model that can be highly successful as long as the franchisees make heaps of money. When a franchisee’s potential earnings are limited only by their efforts, they can achieve whatever they truly want.
Tom Potter

We saw, in real-life application, that old lesson of losing the odd battle to win the war.
Tom Potter



For an undercapitalised fast food company that wants to grow successfully, a franchise system is essential.
Tom Potter

In a franchise system, franchisees need not reinvent the wheel. Rather, they hit the ground running much faster and fuelled by the experience and knowledge of those who went before them and succeeded.
Tom Potter

There will always be a small percentage of franchisees in a system that never seem happy, no matter what you do.
Tom Potter

[To potential franchisees] If you’re the type who lies to buck the system and its rules… it likely won’t work for you. Try another business.
Tom Potter

Vision needs to be something that can be followed from one to five year’s from the date it’s developed.
Tom Potter

Be number one or number two in every market you’re in.
Tom Potter

When you commence the roadshow, make sure you sell the sizzle.
Tom Potter

A great saying is ‘Fight the fights you can win, and don’t take a monster head on because you could be fatally wounded.’
Tom Potter

Be the only pizza company in Australia that can supply customers pizza in two minutes.
Tom Potter

The reality is that pizza was never a fast food, compared to the KFC and McDonald’s of this world.
Tom Potter



If you sell a pizza for X dollars, and somebody down the road sells something similar to yours for a buck or two less, our experience shows that slowly, and eventually, you will lose some customers, as much as 25 percent if you don’t work to compete somewhat on price.
Tom Potter

There’s no rocket science behind our becoming the new and, ultimately, predominant player in the regional pizza market throughout Australia.
Tom Potter

It didn’t hurt growing up a country boy… because that gave me good insight into the minds of small town customers and markets.
Tom Potter

We rented our first offices at 19 Orlando Street… which is now a thriving brothel.
Tom Potter

Another idea came to mind: build a mobile pizza shop we could literally wheel into town, hook up to the electricity, plumbing and phones, and build a market with a low, initial investment. Once demand was created, we could relocate that existing business into a store that could be sold, based on existing sales.
Tom Potter

He was so badly in debt… that the finance company sent a truck to take his ovens away.
Tom Potter

My company was growing; my bachelorhood was happily over… it seemed my future was shaping up rather nicely. I was about as happy as a young man could be.
Tom Potter

I learned the hard way that when changes… need to be made, they should be made system-wide and rapidly.
Tom Potter

I nearly always spent Friday nights, and a lot of the time on the weekends in our stores.
Tom Potter

The businessman’s golden rule applies well… ‘He who holds the gold makes the rules’.
Tom Potter



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