Nick Candy

Sometimes our idea of luxuries are our client’s ideas of necessities. You might think having a helicopter pad in the back garden, 20 housekeepers and two tennis coaches is over the top. But for them it’s like you buying a sandwich.

We know everything about our clients – if they like their dressing gowns heated, what colour flowers they like, if their chef works left-handed – we know everything and we incorporate it into our work for them.

Possessions are always secondary, loved ones are all that matters.

One client didn’t want to go out so had us build him a nightclub in his house.

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 get my design inspiration from Christian Dior and Chanel.

Salesmanship is limitless. Our very living is selling. We are all salespeople.

You can’t tell me you can make any system or country work with low wages and high prices, and high wages with high prices don’t mean anything when the prices eat up the wages and don’t leave anything over.

Any business arrangement that is not profitable to the other person will in the end prove unprofitable for you. The bargain that yields mutual satisfaction is the only one that is apt to be repeated.

The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace.

I’ve been making deals all my life.

In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.

When most people ask about a business growing, what they really mean is growing revenue, not just growing the number of people using a service. Traditional businesses would view people using your service that you don’t make money from as a cost.

Workers – men and women – of all countries, place yourselves under the banner of the Fourth International. It is the banner of your approaching victory!

Listen more than you talk. Nobody learned anything by hearing themselves speak.

I foresee the time when industry shall no longer denude the forests which require generations to mature, nor use up the mines which were ages in making, but shall draw its raw material largely from the annual produce of the fields. I am convinced that we shall be able to get out of yearly crops most of the basic materials which we now get from forest and mine.

Leverage: don’t make deals without it!

There is a time and place for all things to be successful. There is fate and destiny and opportunity, and you need all three things in line at the same time.

Nobody buys a farm based on whether they think it’s going to rain next year. They buy it because they think it’s a good investment over 10 or 20 years.

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.

I started the site when I was 19. I didn’t know much about business back then.