Daniel Schwartz quotes: the businessman’s best quotes.
“I like people who genuinely are looking for a project and not a job.”
“I like people who are passionate, who have persevered, and who are clearly humble and not arrogant.”
“We’re looking for people who want to be part of something bigger. We don’t want people who see us as a stepping stone.”
“Your first job can set the trajectory for the rest of your career. I think most young professionals would be surprised to learn how accommodating employers can be to inquisitive potential candidates.”
“I also like people who say they’re willing to do anything. They just want to get in the door. I had that attitude earlier in my career. I didn’t care what I was going to do. I just wanted to be involved in interesting projects, working with interesting people.”
“I ask job candidates: ‘Are you smart or do you work hard?’—and there’s a right answer.”
“You want hard workers. You’d be surprised how many people tell me, ‘I don’t need to work hard, I’m smart.’ Really? Humility is important.”
“I acquired my desire to hire hard workers with humility from my parents.”
“My mom’s a lawyer. She was part of the group that wrote the bar exam. My father is a dentist. They’ve always worked.”
“Probably the biggest influence my parents have had is about always being very respectful of other people. I always have that in the back of my head, regardless of who I’m talking to. The world’s a small place, life’s short and so you should only be nice to people. I don’t raise my voice at work. I don’t have tantrums.”
“I’m younger than many people I work with. I realize that I still have so much to learn from people who have been there and have been involved in the business longer than I have.”
“If you want to change something or if you want to really influence or impact someone, you need to be in that person’s market and be with them face to face. You can’t run a multinational business from your desk. You can’t just get on the phone and tell the people that you need to do things differently.”
“If you make the trip, that’s a big investment of time for you. People appreciate that, and they’re going to be more open to your feedback. You’ll also have more credibility because you’ve seen their business and been in their market.”
“I have my goals on the wall, and anyone can see them. They’re marked green if I’m doing well, yellow if not so well and red if we’re not on track.”
“I believe in MWA—management by walking around—so I spend as much time as possible traveling and visiting franchise partners. You only learn by walking around and meeting people.”
“It’s okay to be confident, but not arrogant.”
“Everything isn’t about synergy.”
“I am not smarter than anyone else. It is usually the smartest people though that say that.”
“My parents were willing to spend time and invest time in my hobbies, no matter how odd they seemed. When I was really young, I collected rocks and minerals. But mostly I would hang out with friends, playing basketball. It was not the most eventful childhood, but I think that’s good.”
“In high school, I split my time between my classes, playing basketball, and tutoring math to other students—a job I got by advertising my services through a paid ad in the local newspaper.”
“I kept an open mind early on. I took some pre-med classes, life-science classes and also business classes. I started reading a lot of books about business and Wall Street, and I really liked Finance 101. I decided to go into investment banking.”
“I took some extra courses so I could graduate in three years. Once I decided what I wanted to do, I wanted to start quickly. After a few years, I joined 3G Capital, an investment firm. They have a culture of making bets on people who they think have potential and who can grow over the long run.”
“I joined 3G when I was 24, but I didn’t really have much of a management role there. I became CFO when we acquired Burger King, so that was my first time managing people. I had just turned 30 and never worked in a company, operationally, so I was certainly not comfortable at first.”
“I credit my success in part to two pieces of advice I received over the course of my career. One piece of advice came a couple years after I graduated from Cornell University, when I was working in mergers and acquisitions at Credit Suisse. Someone said to me, ‘You have to work really, really hard to put yourself in a position to get lucky.'”
“This advice came at a time in my career when I was working particularly grueling hours. And not long after that, I got lucky. I now dish out that advice about hard work and luck to my own colleagues. I tell this to people all the time at work.”
“When I started working at Burger King, I recall the co-founder of 3G Capital, Alex Behring, the co-founder telling me, ‘When you transition from working in finance to working at one of our portfolio companies, you can’t just manage the business—you need to manage the people, and let the people manage the business.'”
“I followed Behring’s advice and made it a goal to find Burger King’s hardest workers, and quickly promote them to leadership positions. I have since done the same thing at Tim Hortons and Restaurant Brands International, and will soon execute a similar strategy at newly acquired Popeyes.”
“To identify the best workers, I look for people who are hard-working, hungry and humble.”
“My life advice to give to new college grads is, first just work hard. Don’t take anything for granted. Then I tell them that they’re going to interact with a lot of people who have different qualities and traits. So copy the best of what you like in people and don’t copy the bad.”
Related: Tilman Fertitta quotes.
