Business Metaphors, Analogies and Similes

Each business success buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.

The any-other-business boardroom discussion developed into a heavyweight artillery exchange of egos.

Claude, the department's grand fromage, had a desk the size of a badminton court.

Bailiffs with bad breath walk up the driveway like blood clots rising up the throat.

A lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a gang with guns.

Borrowing is the canker and death of every man's estate.

Sir Walter Raleigh

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.

Sigmund Freud

My pension company changed its name more times than Cat Stevens.

Unfilled tax returns haunt your existence like bad cholesterol counts — you know you must do something about them.

Whatever your profession, realise you are in debt to your profession, not it to you; as a servant to give, a student to learn.

With a toothy smile and oily logic he offered me my old job back, his manner like an audition for the part of the devil.

In selling as in medicine, prescription before diagnosis is malpractice.

In business you adapt and transmogrify as rapidly as you can, or you will be left stranded, like the last dinosaur by the last warm lake on the last continent that the ice-age has yet to reach.

We are fantastically busy working hard to have leisure and do nothing; we fight a war to create harmony and peace.

This chap implies that borrowing money to buy a house and rent it out is the E=MC2 of minted money-making schemes.

People in business (Branson, Sugar, Dragon's Den) are trying to be entertainers, while entertainers are trying so hard to be businessmen.

If a punishing work environment is a prerequisite for success in your field, could it be that you're in a game not worth winning?

An infectious greed disease of irrational exuberance seems to have gripped the business community.

Your business services are as useful as a barber's shop on the steps of a guillotine.

I'm working as hard as the fire brigade on Guy Fawkes Night.

The supervisor is like an egg: if you keep him in hot water long enough he gets hard boiled.

Sub-prime loans did for finance what the Hindenburg did for air travel.

As mendacious as a High Street bank.

To increase business sales we must be like an ice-hockey player and skate where the puck is going to be, not where it is.

People use statistics as drunkards use lampposts — more for support than illumination.

Money is a terrible master, but an excellent servant.

Phineas Taylor Barnum

Anyone who plays the stock market not as an insider is like someone who buys cows in moonlight.

Money is like muck: no good except it is spread around.

In a large company, the chief executive's salary is no market award for achievement, but frequently a warm personal gesture by the individual himself.

Their debts swirled like particles speeding up in a physics accelerator waiting for the moment — when they catastrophically crash.

Potential house buyers have had their poles in the water searching for signs of a bottoming out of the market.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich.

Some earrings are cheaper than a Marks & Spencer prawn sandwich but probably wouldn't last as long.

Gerald Ratner

Statistics are like prisoners under torture: with the right tweak you can get them to confess anything.

Our CEO demonstrates qualities of leadership, i.e. is tall, has a loud voice and the patronizing bonhomie of a public schoolboy.

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.

What is robbery compared to founding a bank?

Barry's been sacked more times than Rome.

Working in that office was like going daily to the dentist to have root canal surgery on the same tooth.

It is not work that kills men: it is worry. Work is healthy. Worry is rust upon the blade. It is not the revolutions that destroys machinery, but the friction.

Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink the thirstier we become.

We are in an industry of sequoias and acorns.

A 'rights issue' as saleable as a carton of sour milk.

Our market share isn't even a slice in the industry pie-chart.

Wealth is a tool of freedom, but the pursuit of wealth is a road to slavery.

Overheads walk on two legs.

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fine weather, and ask for it back again when it starts to rain.

Employee-of-the-month is an example of how you can be both a winner and a loser at the same time.

Trading without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark, you know you are doing it but nobody else does.