Quotes: Bob Fifer - Double Your Profits: In Six Months or Less, 1993

• ‘The first critical ingredient to doubling your profits is creating a culture that says "The Best" means always thinking, always striving, always re-making yourself to be better, never being satisfied as long as there's something out there which we've not yet achieved.‘ Pg 18

• ‘If a manager who has run a business for fifteen years can't sit down and clearly state his or her strategy for the business in ten minutes or less, then what has that manager been doing all those years? (Answer: Probably setting up processes.)’ Pg 25

• ‘No business ever made a penny on a forecast. Optimizing profits is what the business is here for, not predicting them. At most companies, I would eliminate 80% of the people resources dedicated to forecasting and number-crunching and spend that time on making money, not counting it.’ Pg 31

• ‘Superb managers are instinctual, making the right decision most of the time based on limited data.’

• ‘Superb managers do 1% of the work but add more than 50% of the value to their organizations, because they make the truly profit-enhancing decisions based on superior experience and judgment.’ Pg 33

• ‘Weak managers study their businesses in detail (over-quantify) and manage their businesses only in general (over-delegate). Superb managers study their businesses only in general but manage in detail-the important details.’ Pg 34

• ‘People respond to a host of your non-verbal signals. How do you act, how focused are you on results, how much of a hurry are you in, how intolerant are you of wasteful, time-consuming parts of the day? Pg 38

• ‘The first thing I do the morning of every work-day is divide everything I have to do that day into three lists.

  • The first list includes anything that brings in new business (i.e., raises revenue) or eliminates costs.

  • The second list includes things I have to do to maintain existing business or keep an existing internal operating system running.

  • The third list includes all the things that someone expects or wants me to do, but that really add no value to the bottom line.’ Pg 41

• ‘You have to make sure that the most important things are completed with the most urgency’ Pg 42