Success Quote by Harold S. Geneen

Geneen’s line is a piece of CEO realism dressed up as common sense: don’t romanticize the blank slate when you can inherit a machine that already runs. Coming from a man who turned ITT into a sprawling conglomerate, the quote isn’t just about convenience; it’s about power, leverage, and risk management. Acquisition lets you buy time. You’re not proving that customers exist, that distribution works, that suppliers can deliver, that talent can execute. You’re purchasing those answers upfront, then betting you can improve them faster than you could invent them.

The subtext is quietly anti-myth. It pushes back against the founder-as-hero narrative that treats entrepreneurship as purity and acquisition as compromise. Geneen implies the opposite: the “existing business” is where the real complexity lives - messy operations, legacy culture, entrenched incentives - and that’s precisely why it can be a better bet. There’s an implied respect for infrastructure: processes, relationships, brand equity. Starting from scratch is often just paying tuition in public.

Context matters. Geneen’s era prized scale, managerial control, and financial engineering. Conglomerates sold the idea that superior management could be applied like a template across industries. So this isn’t a neutral maxim; it’s a worldview: growth is something you can purchase, integrate, and optimize. It also contains a warning for would-be builders: novelty isn’t a strategy. If you can’t articulate what you’ll do differently with an existing platform, you’re not choosing “starting fresh” - you’re choosing ignorance with overhead.