The best business advice and quotes we’ve heard so far in 2023

At Yelp, we talk to hundreds of business owners, decision makers, and experts every year to uncover the secret sauce of entrepreneurship. What makes a business successful? What mindsets serve entrepreneurs best? How can local businesses achieve their goals with less time, money, and stress?

Read on for some of our favorite quotes so far in 2023—plus, discover even more useful advice in the full articles linked below.

January

“I think it’s important to reply when anybody puts anything in writing about you or your business. Period. First of all, no harm can come of it. Second of all, you let people know: ‘Hey, we’re looking, we care, this is important to us.’ Third of all, you can correct a record, or even more importantly, you can address a concern.”
— Ninette Wassef, Chrome Cycle Studio
The 3 stages of a creating a comfortable customer journey

Always have a good attitude. No matter how hard things get, if you keep trying hard and working hard, I believe that things will eventually work out and things are going to happen the way they’re supposed to. My hard work ethic comes from my parents. My family all immigrated to the States, and all I’ve seen is hard work from them. They’ve all worked seven days a week, 365 days a year.

– Tim Lee, Broken Mouth
At the #1 restaurant from Yelp’s Top 100, everyone is family

“As chefs, we always like to say that we welcome constructive criticism, that we welcome feedback, even if it’s not good because that’s how we learn and we get better. Well, if you really believe that, then you need to embrace stuff like Yelp [reviews], which really are almost a little bit of a behind-the-scenes [look at] what your guest is thinking that they might not have told to your face. That’s huge. That’s almost invaluable.”
– Justin Werner, Trust
Yelp’s Top 100 Places to Eat: tips from the 2023 winners

February

“Being true to yourself is the most important thing. If you are passionate enough to start this business, tell your story, tell your why. Your ‘why’ is the biggest thing that you have going for you that nobody else does that sets you apart from the crowd.”
— Grayson DiFonzo, BuddyLove
How to Turn Your Social Presence into Dollars

“We have to create experiences that are super positive because when you don’t have a huge marketing budget or PR or a lot to spend on SEO, you are required to get collaborative and really create awesome experiences that are consistent throughout.”
— Alex Bradberry, The Sparkle Bar
Building Customer Trust—and Relationships

One, don’t overthink at the cost of doing. I think you can get lost in your thoughts and the action never follows (guilty as charged). Two, you can’t lose if your intention is to serve.

— Esther Lee, Asian Founded
Lessons Learned From Small Business Owners

March

“I’m not at my restaurant every day because I have a million things going on, and I’m trying to expand. If I can’t be at the restaurant every day, what tool can I use to still know what’s going on and make sure that my customers are happy? Because at the end of the day, you want to make sure that your customers are happy.

“Having Yelp and being able to read the reviews [means I can go]: ‘Okay, well, someone said that the service wasn’t good. Who was the server on this night? Do they tend to have an attitude with customers?’ Or if [someone said the food is] too salty, let’s go and check.”
—Leah Cohen, Pig & Khao
Top restaurateur Leah Cohen on delegating, hiring, and learning from failure

“Always understand that reviews are marketing for your business. Whether it’s a positive review or even a negative one, how you handle those reviews can help your business and attract new customers who get what you’re all about and are looking forward to a great experience.”
— Jeff Toister, author and customer service expert
Celebrating 100 episodes of the Behind the Review podcast

April

“The kitchen team does their best to keep up with reading Yelp reviews at least once a day. If they see anything that needs to be adjusted or corrected, they will actually go there, go to the kitchen, cook line, check on whatever food the customers just commented on, just to make sure and to encourage that family sort of atmosphere.”
— Elizabeth Chan, Adela’s Country Eatery
A roadmap for small business sustainability: lessons from the #5 restaurant on Yelp’s Top 100

I firmly believe this: Do what you’re good at. And if you’re not good at that, get someone else to help you with it, because I promise you, any one of your employees might be better at it than you.

— Taniya Ahmed, Sunbliss Cafe
Educational marketing: 3 ways to reveal your value to customers

“What are you looking at when you’re looking at a problem? Are you looking at a door or an engine? Imagine you’re driving down the street in a car, and the door falls off. Is that a problem? Yes. But can you still drive? You can. Car still goes. Now imagine you’re driving down the street and then the engine falls off. Can you drive? No, the ride is over.

“If it’s a door, then you can make small tweaks on the margins. You can try to improve the product, whatever it is. But if you’re looking at a problem and it’s an engine, and in three to five years that engine is going to fall off the car, then you have to start now. You have to.”
— Jason Feifer, Entrepreneur magazine
Entrepreneur magazine Editor in Chief Jason Feifer on his favorite advice from a celebrity and how to flip the script on failure

May

As a Black woman, it is so hard to sometimes break into the market—get capital, get funding, get support. And so I lend my talent to teaching entrepreneurship, facilitating for organizations here locally so that other Black women can see somebody that looks like them and can tell them the truth and be very transparent and say, ‘You may face this these things, but you have a community or you have somebody now that you can go to.

— Taren Kinebrew, Cream + Sugar Coffeehouse
4 ways to build and expand your own small business network

“[Chaereen and I] think a lot about how our Asian American identity is unique, in that the idea of belonging to a place is difficult to understand for ourselves and to convey in words. We’ve always been perceived as the other. And so that’s why inclusivity is so important to us, because that is a point of connection for our customers.”
— Kai Talim, Persimmon Coffee
From pop-up to a brick-and-mortar: charting Persimmon Coffee’s small business journey

“The military creates lifelong learners, and then once you’re out, that shouldn’t stop. I always strive to learn something new. We learn from our own mistakes and not to be upset if we make a mistake. You pick up, you learn a good lesson, you move on, and you don’t let that mistake happen again if you can help it.”
— Stephanie Bacskay, bRaised in the CLE
How an Army veteran brought perseverance and patience to her food truck business

June

[Social media is] just trying to replicate how you talk to people. The more aesthetic our photos became, the less I talked about things we cared about. The less I talked to people, our rates went down. I would sit there and go, ‘What is going on?’ And [then] I realized, I’m not social. I’m just media. If you’re not talking to someone, if you’re not using it to talk to people, if you’re just posting chocolate chip cookies, no one cares. If you’re talking to someone, they care.

— Mo Sahoo, Best Damn Cookies
Bake storytelling into your business: 3 branding ideas from Best Damn Cookies

“Having our own physical space, a lot of people in the neighborhood don’t know we exist, so having a really quick way to search [is important]. If anybody lives in the area and they’re searching for personal trainers, I always want to be the first one that shows up for people, and Yelp is a really good way to do that.”
— Miriam Fried, MF Strong
MF Strong’s Yelp journey—from starting her Yelp Page to getting her first client

“When you’ve got momentum, you have to keep going. We were named the number one chocolate shop in New York City by Timeout in New York. So I got a banner—it’s bright white, and the text is in black, so everyone can see it driving down the street. I started reaching out to media contacts and said, ‘We were just named number one. Now we’re in the airports. Valentine’s Day is coming up. Why don’t you feature us?’ And then we got more and more press.”
— Rachel Kellner, Aigner Chocolates
5 tips for boosting your business’s reputation with media coverage