Graham Turner Quotes
110 Graham Turner Quotes
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I took a wrong turn out of Amascus and we ended up in the middle of hundreds of armed troops on the Lebanese border.
Graham Turner
Some shops were making big profits, while others struggled with losses. This inconsistency seemed inexplicable.
Graham Turner
We had always listened to the people who made the loudest noise, even though sometimes they were our poorest performers. After reading The E-Myth we realised that our systems should be determined by those who were a proven success within the company.
Graham Turner
Our marketing guys were always complaining about how awful the captain was so we took him off our ads for a while. Our enquiry level dropped so we brought him back again. The fact that people had a negative reaction to him was actually a positive thing – he made a real impression.
Graham Turner
[On Flight Centres goals of 150 locations worldwide, $450 million in turnover a year, and an annual profit of $8 million, all by July 1995] We were a bit outrageous, but we needed to convince people we were serious, to get better deals.
Graham Turner
[In 1990] For the first time in recent history we appear to have our accounts under control.
Graham Turner
[On the gulf war] So what? There’s a f*cking war. Just keep doing what you’re doing.
Graham Turner
What gets rewarded gets done.
Graham Turner
Following the success of Moneywise, we realised that if we helped people grow personally, financially and professionally, we would benefit as a company.
Graham Turner
[On setting up a Flight Centre shop in Vietnam] It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Graham Turner
No one was discounting airfares in South Africa. It had a similar feel to Australia twenty years earlier.
Graham Turner
[In 1995 – he was five years out] We stand on the threshold of a new era for Flight Centre. We are about to float the company on the Australian Stock Exchange. Now, this isn’t insider trading… I’m just giving you a bit of a tip. You should buy every Flight Centre share you can. Mortgage your dog, your husband, your wife, anything you have to. Now, I can’t guarantee it but I believe anyone who buys fifty thousand dollars worth of Flight Centre shares will be a millionaire in ten years time.
Graham Turner
[To one of his people just before the FCL float who then went and bought] Are you guys buying any f*cking shares? You’d better go and borrow as much money as you can and buy some.
Graham Turner
[On some stock exchange employees being bewildered about a small crowd cheering in front of their electronic price billboard and popping champagne] Don’t worry. It’s just some of our people making that racket. They bought their shares at 85 cents each and they’ve just listed for $1.14. They’re pretty happy.
Graham Turner
Luckily we were young. We worked hard and long (not necessarily effectively) and played hard – the social life was part of the business.
Graham Turner
[On purchasing a company called A-Trek in 1978] We really only bought them as the owner was so desperate. It didn’t cost much, but we inherited all their debts and it nearly sent us broke.
Graham Turner
The greatest success of Top Deck was really the growth of buses and passengers. We could never say, ‘We can relax a bit now’ or ‘We’ve done pretty well.’ We had a lot of financial pressure and we were not well organised, so the stress levels were high.
Graham Turner
[On the initial vision for Flight Centre] To have a lot of shops and make a lot of money.
Graham Turner
We decided that the best way to expand was to involve other people, preferably by them putting in their own money.
Graham Turner
[On a new store having counter so high they couldn’t see over them] Are you standing in a hole?
Graham Turner
Geoff was the key retailer, and he developed our model in the early to late 80s, making it profitable and replicable. He was definitely more important than Bill, Mick or myself in this area. We all just copied his methods and tried to beat him at his own game.
Graham Turner
The ‘80s were a time of high risk for us. We might have gone broke…
Graham Turner
People’s focus on company targets was thirty per cent higher than in the pre-option era.
Graham Turner
We bought a distressed business, then we added to the distress.
Graham Turner
[Questions on a new business before being shocked when it made $100,000 profit in it’s first year] Why aren’t the doors open? Why do you need such big desks? And why do you need a TV and a video system?
Graham Turner
It wasn’t a bad idea. We just executed it poorly.
Graham Turner
[On an early business acquisition] We agreed on a price fairly quickly but we were naïve when it came to the details… We should’ve been tougher on what was and wasn’t included in the business.
Graham Turner
We knew from experience that incentives didn’t work unless they were the right ones.
Graham Turner
Ultimately we had to force some decisions onto the small businesses, whether they liked it or not.
Graham Turner
Our retail people are very important ‘bullsh*t’ detectors of head office ideas. If they don’t like them and can’t be convinced, then they do not happen. This cuts a lot of bad ideas off at the roots.
Graham Turner
[On black hole funding] This occurs when the reason for spending the money on extra people or projects is so spurious that there is no hope of any return, no one at team level is prepared to pay for it out of cost-of-seat and no management team will sign off on it as a special project. Hence these operations are funded out of profit.
Graham Turner
People in the shops have no choice – they produce or go. If we are being fair, then the same needs to happen in every back-end business.
Graham Turner
[On their website] It cost us $1.2 million dollars and we had almost nothing to show for it.
Graham Turner
[In 2001] We made two big mistakes this year, and it cost us four million dollars.
Graham Turner
I gave people too much rope. We simply didn’t plan and budget big projects enough.
Graham Turner
The US isn’t crucial to our success. The company is doubling every three to four years anyway. Therefore, it’s not important from a financial point of view, rather from a challenge point of view.
Graham Turner
[After September 11] If airlines turn their backs on travel agents they are ignoring the cheapest distribution network available to them. Unhealthy airlines that choose this route do so at their own peril. Many of them will go broke by following this path.
Graham Turner
What the f*ck’s going on?
Graham Turner
[When asked if Flight Centre can grow forever?] Of course it can. Provided that you can sort out issues as they come up, there’s no reason why it can’t.
Graham Turner
Times change, the market changes and the model changes. In ten years FCL won’t look anything like it does now…
Graham Turner
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