Show business

“ Where competitive selling makes up a large proportion of the aggregate final cost of the marketed product, this fact is likely to show itself in an exceptionally large proportion of good-will in the capitalization of the concerns engaged in the given line of business ”

“ The history of the formation of any one of the great industrial coalitions of modern times will show how great and indispensable a factor in the large business is the invention and organization of difficulties desired to force rival enterprises to come to terms. ”

“ Advertise your business.—We all depend, more or less, upon the public for our support. We all trade with the public,—lawyers, doctors, shoemakers, artists, blacksmiths, showmen, opera singers, railroad presidents, and college professors. Those who deal with the public must be careful that their goods are valuable; that they are genuine, and will give satisfaction. When you get an article which you know is going to please your customers, and that when they have tried it, they will feel they have got their money’s worth, then let the fact be known that you have got it. ”

“ Vendors came and went, when and how they chose, their trade was of the humblest, and their profits were as varying as their punctuality. By degrees the business assumed shape, the newspaper man found it his interest to maintain a locus standi in the establishment, and the establishment, in its turn, discerned a substantial means of helping the poor or the deserving among its servants. ”

“ One is dropped by accident at the charity bazaar at which he is making large purchases. But that is merely a trifle—only one of the many possible ingredients of the whitewash. I do not give you the entire recipe for the fluid, because, speaking candidly, the business is a good business and I want to keep it to myself. Many of my patrons are actors, many are parsons, many are authors. ”

“ Matilall.-- Ah, a brilliant notion! I am daily in need of money. Does commerce flourish in the bazar, or does it grow in an office? Is it merely the buying and selling that goes on in a sweetmeat-maker's shop? My business will lack all importance unless I am to be the chief agent of some English merchant. ”

“ True enterprise is constantly on the alert to discover some new want of society, some fertile source of profit or honor, some unexplored field of business, and is ready to supply the one or to take advantage of the other. ”

“ This is, beyond question, a bold and presumptuous doubt, inasmuch as many distinguished characters, called men of the world, long-headed customers, knowing dogs, shrewd fellows, capital hands at business, and the like, have made, and do daily make, this axiom their polar star and compass. ”

“ Watson’s Jeffersonian Magazine
All selling finally resolves itself into buying—buying the services of good men, buying business-bringing booklets and form letters, good advertising copy and advertising mediums—buying orders at a profitable figure.
An advertising medium is a known quantity. Why buy advertising space as you must choose a salesman, why trust to intuition or snap judgment, when you can work with figures? ”

“ The producers of these things—the physician, the trainer, the money-maker—each in turn contends that his art produces the greatest good. Surely, says the physician, health is the greatest good; there is more good in my art, says the trainer, for my business is to make men beautiful and strong in body; and consider, says the money-maker, whether any one can produce a greater good than wealth. ”

“ He takes with him twenty or more films. Your constituents must see and know you before you can hope for their vote. The Cinema introduces your personality and your policy.
"Your film will cost you—
First reel ... Three guineas.
Each extra reel. One guinea."
The more I see of business-men the less they seem to me to know about business. I never read an advertisement without thinking, "How much better I (or even you) could have done that!" Yet they will tell you that it is their advertisements which make the money. ”

“ Every one of you doubtless has in mind the amiable man of business—maybe your tailor, your broker, your banker, your lawyer, your grocer—who cultivates your good opinion, and for the sake of the customer in you tolerates lightly the doubtfulness of your employment. ”

“ The weather of the face, the temperature of the hand, the color of the voice, will win customers where other means fail. Make your patrons feel that you are their friend. Inquire about members of their family. Be exceedingly polite. Recommend your goods. Mention anything of an especially attractive or meritorious nature you may have. Join the church, the regiment, the fire company, and the secret society. Become “all things to all men, if by any means you can sell to some.” Be everywhere in your place of business. ”

“ They speak of limited commerce united with a social or observing disposition—on the part of the shopkeeper,—allowing, as they do, talk with passers-by, yet keeping off such as have not the excuse of business to cross the threshold. ”

“ Some, with more enterprise or capital than others, buy by wholesale, and sell to others with less capital. A few, standing on the street corners, have regular customers who pay or not, as the case may be, each night; and as the business men pass, one after another, the papers are handed to them almost as rapidly as tickets at a crowded concert-room. ”

“ A margin of prepossessions or illusions as to their superior, but intangible and inexpensive, utility attaches to a given line of goods because of the advertiser's or salesman's work, -- work spent not so much on the goods as on the customer's sensibilities. ”

“ The commercial world may hearken sentimentally to that plaintive ballad, "Silver Threads Among the Gold," as it floats into the Emporium from a street organ, but the commercial world never allows sentiment to interfere with business. ”

“ Remember that every sale you make is an advertisement that will either help or hinder your business. It is an advertisement of the character and general policy of your firm. It advertises the squareness, the honesty, or the cunning, the trickery of the whole concern; in other words, the man you approach will get a pretty good idea of your firm,—their policy and methods of doing business,—by the impression which you make on him. ”

“ And for this reason you see the artisans leave the workshops, the merchants their counting-houses, the lawyers their causes, the shopkeepers their business, and all repair with open mouth to the barbers' shops and the groups of chatterers, to listen to stories, fictions and gazettes in the air. ”

“ They established the tradition of American business.
It has been a tradition profitable to keep alive. The men who by luck, by picking other men's wits, or by the possession of a special talent, useful only in a society like our own, grow vastly rich, love to read how wonderful they are. For their delectation a journalism has grown up to celebrate the [Pg 106] epic of their marvelous industry, resourcefulness, efficiency, their god-like insight into the hearts of men; whose praises they pay for liberally in the disposition of advertising. ”

“ His first venture in the business of pandering had been a success; a company, always on the lookout for bright young men, offered him good pay, work intricate but interesting, and that protection without which crime would not be profitable. ”

“ And every merchant will be judged of by his customers in proportion to the courteous treatment they receive from him, or from clerks in his store. The lawyer or the doctor will also acquire popularity and patronage as he exhibits courteous and kind treatment to all with whom he comes into social or business relations. ”

“ In the uncritical eyes of the commonplace men of affairs, whose experience in business has trained them into a quasi-tropismatic approval of notoriety as a means of advertising, these puerile demonstrations will, of course, have a high value simply in their own right. ”

“ At all events, we mailed a few letters to customers explaining the matter, and a business on this basis was commenced and quickly grew to large proportions.
This fact made it dangerous, for the larger the business the greater the risk. We had to continually have an interest in the market either on one side or the other, and if the business was large our interest must be in proportion.
For some time the business was most satisfactory. My judgment of the market was correct, our customers were well pleased, and we made good profits. ”

“ Nothing but a cold, emotionless, methodical, business-like precision, a well-considered series of commercial transactions, conducted by men specially acquainted with the articles required and regularly trained to office routine. ”

“ I mean to get into the promotion of big things—big corporation business. A fellow that finances street railways and industrial plants, controls banks and makes towns grow—a builder; that’s what I mean to be. ”

“ You can make your business do for your employees what this book is doing for you. You can so conduct your business that it will be a sort of ladder, by which every employee who will take the trouble may climb to riches himself ”

“ That again, is the business of the Society. Every member should be a salesman. The kindling would be put up in bundles of uniform size, warranted to be dry and to give satisfaction and delivered at the door by the workers of course. It ought not to be difficult for you to secure a sufficient number of regular customers to insure the success of the business. ”

“ Then there is a third source of material, scarcely less important than the study of the house and the customer, and that is a study of the competitors—other firms who are in the same line of business and going after the same trade. The broad-gauged correspondent never misses an opportunity to learn more about the goods of competing houses—the quality of their products, the extent of their lines, their facilities for handling orders, the satisfaction that their goods are giving, the terms on which they are sold and which managers are hustling and up to the minute in their methods. ”

“ Pa says he made a speech at the managers' meeting, in which he showed that the business man who attended strictly to the business which he knew all about, would make money, while the man who knew about dry goods, but worked in a millinery store or a stock of tinware, got it in the neck. ”

“ It comprises Commercial Travellers, Canvassers, Insurance agents, commission agents, the great number of Shop Assistants, the majority of clerks, workmen employed in the construction and adornment of business premises, people occupied with what they call ‘Business’, which means being very busy without producing anything. Then there is a vast army of people engaged in designing, composing, painting or printing advertisements, things which are for the most part of no utility whatever, the object of most advertisements is merely to persuade people to buy from one firm rather than from another. ”

“ His success is their success, and without favorable results neither he, nor they, can prosper.
Teach ’em, Red—show ’em their responsibility! Fire their minds and hearts with the fact that they’re not working for the company—bless your heart, Boy, they are the company to all intent and purpose on their territory, and either their lackadaisical or their aggressive, businesslike demeanor and actions will be interpreted by their trade exactly as they appear and the company will be so reflected. ”

“ Instead of that, the audience before him were mainly bankers and successful business men whose Puritan characteristics had enabled them to win great success in the competitions in the great metropolis in every branch of business. ”

“ In this great business community there was no better man of business, no man by whom the humdrum obligations—punctuality, method, preciseness, and economy of time and speech—were more keenly recognized or more severely practised. ”

“ I know personally and through my books and articles hundreds of employers who look upon themselves and are looked on by their employees as gentlemen and sports—men who are in business as masters of a craft, artists or professional men, who are only making money as a means of expressing themselves, making their business a self-expression and putting themselves and their temperaments and their desires toward others into their business as they like. ”

“ If there are qualities in literature which are above price, these are also to be found in the world of manufacture and finance in that huge pyramid of loyalty which is modern industry, and that vast network of fidelity which is modern commerce. ”

“ It is plain that business, the press, and politics all tend to promote a great activity of body and mind. In business, the love of gain, the enterprising spirit of our practical men in all departments, their industry, [Pg 158] thrift and forecast, stimulate men to great exertions, and produce a consequent development of the faculties called out. Social distinction depends almost wholly on wealth ”

“ The qualities that count as of prime consequence in business enterprise, therefore, particularly in such business enterprise as has to do with many impressionable customers, are the salesmanlike virtues of effrontery and tact. ”

“ As to the wages paid to the men engaged in the routine of competitive selling, as salesmen, buyers, accountants, and the like, - much the same holds true of them as of the income of the business men who carry on the business on their own initiative. ”

“ And the more he enjoyed his business in his own particular way—that of building a house for a man in less time than he said he would, and for less money, not infrequently sending him a check at the end of it—the more his business grew. ”

“ Persuasion plays a small part in selling general commodities, such as machinery, equipment, supplies, and the articles of every-day business, but correspondence courses, insurance, banking, building and loan propositions and various investment schemes can be pushed and developed by an intelligent use of this appeal. ”

“ "Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!" ”