Code of Honour

• Money is a machine. Cursing the steam gets you nowhere. Check the gauge.
• A scheme that works, everyone copies. The copies are worse, and everyone pays for them.
• Ban an honest machine and you get a fake one with no inspector.
• Protection that learned to count is called an insurance company.
• Twenty shops lit by one spark aren’t twenty cases. They’re one. Keep your reserve for that one, not for an average year.
• Leave the client a reason to stub out his cigarettes.
• You choose an insurer by one question: will he pay without a lawsuit?
• A company is a way of trusting strangers. A Family can only trust its own, and so it stays small.
• A seal is neutral. Read the list of directors.
• Let each business answer for itself, not with everything you own.
• If there’s a king behind the company, what you’re buying is faith in the king.
• Never lend to a man you can’t drag into court.
• Other people’s money gets spent more boldly than your own. Remember that when you hire.
• The one who spends and the one who writes it down must be two different people.
• Fear is cheaper than accountability, but it doesn’t grow with the business.
• A bank that has turned you down even once knows how to say no to others too.
• Profit to the nameless borrower, loss to the bank: that’s how banks become feeding troughs.
• A share in someone else’s name isn’t property. It’s a favour.
• A vote is worth more than a dividend, until they start diluting you.
• Sell your share because you need the money by tonight and you’ll give it away for nothing. Keep a reserve next to your share.
• Your own people give you their own money. Strangers’ money comes only with the signature of someone they trust.
• Stand surety, and you pay for the other man’s mistake—or your word is worth less than the paper.
• Divide what’s in the till, not what’s in the books.
• A fixed payment doesn’t ask what sort of month you had.
• You can’t frighten the taxman. Capone found out.
• Reputation isn’t left in a will. It’s proved.
• Money without structure runs out the same way for everyone.
• The asking price is not yet the price of the deal.
• The spread makes you money; the warehouse breaks you.
• A right to a house is worth what its protection is worth. Sometimes that’s until Monday.
• Don’t sell on credit to people who are dancing.