Gerry Harvey Quotes
120 Gerry Harvey Quotes
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If you don’t perform you don’t deserve to get paid.
Gerry Harvey
You’ve never been in business until you’ve been to the brink, looked over the edge, seen what it’s like and then come back.
Gerry Harvey
The world works on people’s personal endeavour.
Gerry Harvey
Failures are reality checks.
Gerry Harvey
Franchisees only hate you when you are not making money for them.
Gerry Harvey
If you go into sales you can build your own business – it has huge potential.
Gerry Harvey
I don’t do any market survey’s; I’ve never done one in my life. I just work on my gut feel.
Gerry Harvey
You can’t clone outstanding individuals.
Gerry Harvey
[On property developers] Most of them don’t have any money and they’re trying to put it all together and sell it to you and make a quid and there is no risk for them… In my view you should cut the buggers out if you can, and do the lot in house.
Gerry Harvey
When I started up the second time I thought, ‘I’ll just start up one store and see how I go.’
Gerry Harvey
I didn’t like being a tenant in shopping centres because you are not in control of your own destiny.
Gerry Harvey
Success is probably not a destination but that’s a good thing because it is good to have goals and that keeps it interesting. If you were in the satisfaction zone in terms of all things, then what are you going to do tomorrow? My goals now are to do everything that I have done in my life a bit better. I want to pull off a few more deals that are significant.
Gerry Harvey
Whenever you get people on their deathbed, they always say family is the most important thing and that is pretty much to a person. All the trappings of wealth and achievement seem to just go out the door. If that’s true – that they all wish they could have spent more time with their family or that they were more considerate – well then knowing that to be a truism, why didn’t they do that all throughout their life?
Gerry Harvey
For me that awareness of the importance of family has always been there. If you come from a very wealthy background it can very often be a major obstacle in your life going forward. If you look at people that come from wealthy families that haven’t necessarily got a great success rate at making money or being successful, being happy, or being fulfilled. The ones that have the greatest success are the ones that can figure out what life is all about and play that game rather than pursue money or pursue, to the exclusion of all other things, self-promotion just because of naked ambition. If you get the right philosophy of what it is all about, that’s a bloody big start.
Gerry Harvey
At age five or six, I used to do rabbit trapping every morning, so I’d be up at 5:30 picking up all my traps and all my rabbits and selling the skins. I was a little entrepreneur. You’d put the rabbit skins on the wire coat hanger and the rabbitoh bloke would come along and you would sell your skins and in the meantime if anyone would buy it you’d sell the meat as well.
Gerry Harvey
When I was fifteen I got a job at a place packing parcels, and when the bell rang I hadn’t finished packing but they said, ‘You’ve got to stop.’ I said, ‘Why?’ That was as a fifteen year old just after doing the intermediate certificate at school. They said it was a union rule. That was a turning point for me. I decided then, ‘I’ll never join a union.’
Gerry Harvey
I had a job to do and they [The union] stopped me doing it. So at fifteen years of age I became a conservative, a capitalist.
Gerry Harvey
I was watching Russia and China and Vietnam. There were millions of people saying that socialism and communism is the way the world works and I was fifteen and thinking, ‘That’s not right, they’re wrong!’ The world works on people’s personal endeavour, I worked that out pretty easily.
Gerry Harvey
I was trying to work out the difference between communism and socialism in the 1950s and probably the rest of the world was trying to work that out too. I’m thinking, ‘Maybe they know and I don’t. I thought I’d better go out and make a heap of bloody money quick, before they take over.
Gerry Harvey
Yes, I’ve failed plenty of times doing different things. I’ve never failed in a major sense. Plenty of times I’ve failed in investments I’ve made or people I’ve trusted. I nearly went broke in my early twenties. If I looked back and went to write all my failures, I could write pages of them but I could also write pages of my successes. This is what happens if you have a varied life like I have and you have a finger in so many pies. From my point of view failures are reality checks.
Gerry Harvey
I’m in the horse business, and if you aren’t in the horse business, you never understand the reality of it but it is 98 per cent failure and 2 per cent success. You can invest $500,000 on a horse and it dies on you. What do you do about that? Do you want to reflect on it? If you were the next bloke who comes in I’d say to you, ‘Sh*t, I just lost 500 grand!’ Am I going to worry about it? No! Something has died and there is nothing I can do about it. To spend any time at all thinking about that is a waste of time.
Gerry Harvey
Being able to broaden yourself and plug in is essential to being successful in business; make yourself do things that you don’t want to do.
Gerry Harvey
[On being asked how it felt to lose one billion dollars in early 2009 due to the GFC] Well hang on. I was worth two billion dollars say, no I’m worth a billion say, right? Who’d have thought I was going to be worth a billion anyway? So what the hell! I’m way in front. It builds your character.
Gerry Harvey
[On doing his first television adverts with John Singleton] Those TV ads were the turning point in the fortunes of this company because they accelerated our growth exponentially.
Gerry Harvey
[On the snob factor stoping people going into the retailing business] Your mum and dad didn’t want you to be working in a store; they wanted you to be a doctor or teacher, but in reality retailing offers younger people great opportunity. I see all these young people going into other industries like hospitality and they’re kidding themselves. They say to me, I’ll have a hotel or I’ll manage hotels, and really how many of them will end up doing that? You know the truth is many of them will end up waiting on tables because that is the way that industry is structured. If you go into sales you can build your own business – it has huge potential.
Gerry Harvey
[On taking Harvey Norman into the UK] Imagine the possibilities there; it’s such a chance. And the service over there, their service standards are terrible. They don’t know how to sell – we know how to sell; we could beat them in their own backyard. They don’t know about Harvey Norman yet, but they will soon.
Gerry Harvey
[On going into Ireland] If even one of these stores takes off then we are talking about a major lift in revenues. Even without any of this international work we are going to grow maybe at 15 per cent a year, but if these stores are a hit then it’s different. I’m laying the foundations where we could have 50 percent growth a year. Imagine that!
Gerry Harvey
Don’t worry about me. I’m going to be here, I’m going to be in this chair.
Gerry Harvey
We don’t want a situation where we come into confrontation. We are trying to help people. We don’t go out just trying to turn blokes over: in this place everyone knows you are doing your best to try and keep people. They know we leave people sometimes a year or two longer than we should. That’s part of the culture.
Gerry Harvey
Every years there’s some sort of disaster because I’ve trusted someone and they’ve robbed us or done me wrong – and at the end of it there is another lesson: you can train all the people you like, but what’s needed are people who care about what they do and are passionate about it. Developing that culture of passion in any business is an absolute must.
Gerry Harvey
If you work with good quality individuals then you do good business. Every time I’ve dealt with people of dubious reputation they’ve ended up in front and I have ended up behind.
Gerry Harvey
The people management side of the business is more important than anything else. In a lot of big companies, the chief executives are not doing any of the people work. There is nothing more important than to pick the right people and to spend a lot of time with them.
Gerry Harvey
[On his old friend and silent business partner Ian Norman] I’ve never had a falling out with him ever.
Gerry Harvey
A number of people I know are ruthless; they walk around, have no feelings for other people and they treat people as lesser persons. They are ruthless bastards. But when you act like that everyone knows, and the culture of the organization is stuffed.
Gerry Harvey
We get confused a bit about what retail is. It is really just buying things, putting them on a floor and selling them.
Gerry Harvey
[On producing tea and biscuits for the press when presenting his 2001 annual results] This cost $400 – you won’t see me spending that amount again.
Gerry Harvey
[On the issue of corporate governance guidelines] I’ve read all these guidelines. I’ll always be close to the bottom of the list on this because I want integrity – and when I have that in my business I don’t have to worry.
Gerry Harvey
If you ever see anyone who’s had a racehorse and you see that person’s face when the horse first wins at Randwick or something like that, the joy on their face, you’d never see it anywhere. You wouldn’t see it in an orgasm.
Gerry Harvey
[In 1995] In five or ten years there is going to be a computer in every home; some may have four or five computers.
Gerry Harvey
[On losing money buying a $1 million dollar Australian dollar currency contract when the Australian dollar was at USD$0.524 cents in 1999] The bet went down the drain – it cost me a million dollars – and it makes you just want to lie down in a hollow.
Gerry Harvey
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