Roman Abramovich

I decided to sit quietly and do business and don’t stick your neck out and tell everybody everything belongs to me. That would only cause problems for myself. Therefore I never told these stories or declared all these things to anyone.

I’ve never tried to impose pressure on the authority of the government through my business achievements. I cannot tell you what the others were doing.

I can understand the British media and why they are doing that. It does not add up to much. I’m used in my life to not paying much attention to some things.

I myself never make any notes. Usually, if I write something down, I can’t read it afterwards.

Our friendship was based on my payouts. That wasn’t a friendship when – as, for example, it’s me, my friends, we are friends for many years, and it doesn’t matter for me what the position is, where they work; we simply are friends. And with Mr. Berezovsky, our friendship was based on my payoffs.

When I started to make more or less serious money – for those times – then, of course, I wanted to show everyone that life is different: it’s a new kind of life; we are earning this money. We wanted to pay taxes and live honestly.

The well-satisfied customer will bring the repeat sale that counts.

My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There’s a lot of that in Silicon Valley.

Sales are contingent upon the attitude of the salesman, not the attitude of the prospect.

There should be rivalry between men and between business.

Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn’t sell much of anything.

In New York and Los Angeles, you can throw your car keys to the valet and he parks it. Same in Hong Kong and Singapore, the service is off the scale. In London it’s sub-standard to abysmal.

London has got better as it’s become more international – you only have to look at the quality of the restaurants to see how improved it’s become.

I myself never make any notes. Usually, if I write something down, I can’t read it afterwards.

See what a 25-cent raise will do to us, said Mr. Ford. So they figured the daily and monthly cost of a 25-cent increase. Put on another quarter and see what that will cost, he said. And so they went on, 25 cents a step. Finally the wage of $2.34 stood at $4.75–more than 100 percent increase. One of the associates–a good financial head–remarked rather sarcastically that if they were going to be fools, why not be first-class fools and make it $5. All right, said Mr. Ford, let’s make it $5.

No company can afford not to move forward. It may be at the top of the heap today but at the bottom of the heap tomorrow, if it doesn’t.

I don’t know the exact details of his background but from what I have read Mr. Abramovich had a very humble start in life and has made his own luck.

Burdening people with debt is an old deal not a new deal.

Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.

While I love technology and social media, a text or a tweet can never replace the real value of conversation.

Founding a company is hard. Most of it isn’t smooth. You’ll have to make very hard decisions. You have to fire a few people. Therefore, if you don’t believe in your mission, giving up is easy. The majority of founders give up. But the best founders don’t give up.

I do not believe a man can ever leave his business. He ought to think of it by day and dream of it by night.