Janine Allis Quotes

101 Janine Allis Quotes

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I do enjoy reading biographies of business people…
Janine Allis

All technology is good technology to me…
Janine Allis

I think that if you can start a successful business in Australia, you can do the same almost anywhere else in the world…
Janine Allis

[Advice to young Australians wanting to start a business] Surround yourself with good people, learn how to keep your ego in check, and don’t be scared of hiring someone smarter than you.
Janine Allis

We’re getting into shape for listing.
Janine Allis

From the start we wanted not just a business but a brand that would be able to carry whatever we wished. We started with juice and then carefully expanded across the range: smoothies, health foods and salads. I think if we protect and develop the brand the right way… then anything is possible.
Janine Allis

It seems like there is new competition on every street corner. Business is beginning to realise that there is this huge shift from fast food and coffee to health foods and juice.
Janine Allis

Boost was always a brand project, and I did not want a brand without a face – I was prepared to be the brand.
Janine Allis

I didn’t go to college and I never worked at the top end of town, but I worked in dozens of places and I saw life from the employee’s angle at every turn. I saw people have their kids’ school fees paid by the company. I saw guys go out to lunch three and four days in a row. I saw good people get overlooked and management hide behind the symbols of status. I always said, if I ever have my own enterprise it is not going to be like that.
Janine Allis

This is my shot – I’m not going to blow it.
Janine Allis



From the start I’ve had a company full of very young people.
Janine Allis

I… like to encourage people to create their own initiatives. I want people to call me or walk in the door and say, ‘Janine, we just achieved something and now we’re going to go bungy jumping’, or ‘now we’re going to have a party’. I want to see them happening all over the place.
Janine Allis

I wanted to know someone could glance across the street and immediately recognise the key features of the brand…
Janine Allis

I had an idea that the brand should be very simple and very easy to understand…
Janine Allis

I like to know that we fully control our brand. When you get into co-branding or other joint ventures, then control slips. We don’t want that to happen, so in future we will not be doing much in that direction.
Janine Allis

Every now and then somebody runs off with a bag of money and you know you can’t do anything, because it’s a corporate crime and most of the time it’s too expensive to take it through the courts. But it underlines you have to really try to build principles in a company, because if people believe in you, if they are loyal to you, then that type of thing just won’t happen.
Janine Allis

[At age 21] I had no money and no qualifications, but I was tuned in, and I had by then a damn good idea how to play the whole game.
Janine Allis

The women in Boost are not a bunch of ball-breakers. We are women and we are certainly not going to camouflage that in any way. We’re a pretty-looking circle of women and I think a lot of our business partners and competitors have been affected, charmed or disarmed by that, and it often works to our advantage, so let it happen.
Janine Allis

There are many women I admire in business and in cultural life. I suppose I admire women who have encountered difficulties and go over them.
Janine Allis

I like people who are comfortable in their own skin, people who are able and successful and yet are unaffected by it.
Janine Allis



I don’t like women who try to be men.
Janine Allis

Being very wealthy does not create or enhance people’s characters. Some people who are very rich are really decent, and others can be terrible. It’s like any other circle of people.
Janine Allis

[On working as a stewardess in her early days on a millionaire’s yacht including for David Bowie] One of my worst days ever on the boats was the morning I was unlucky enough to arrive on my own at the jetty to clean up before something that was happening that day. When I got inside the cabin I found that the toilet had literally exploded… and it was pretty full at the time. I’ll never forget it. I was down on my knees taking poo off the walls. That was a time when you asked yourself, what sort of life is this?
Janine Allis

I don’t take well to boredom…
Janine Allis

People say it must have been tough, you poor thing, a single mum and all that. I never really felt that way.
Janine Allis

Our business is not complicated: we sell juice and other foods. Nothing in the product mix or service suggests people will want to come and work for us, but they do, because there is a lot more going on inside the company than making and selling juice.
Janine Allis

I’ve got a zero tolerance policy on dishonesty across the company… We all make mistakes, but we don’t all tell lies.
Janine Allis

One thing you want to encourage in a start-up company is staff longevity. In our business, sometimes that simply means getting a casual to stay for a few extra weeks.
Janine Allis

I want problem-solvers – tell me how you can solve it.
Janine Allis

Juice is better than soft drinks; juice is better than beer.
Janine Allis



I want solutions, not problems.
Janine Allis

There is no point in blaming other people – that’s just useless. Take control of situations and fix them.
Janine Allis

If you are selling something like a packaged juice brand, in a way you are selling a lifestyle.
Janine Allis

I had a four-year-old son so, you know, I was clearly not a virgin!
Janine Allis

[On her husband Jeff Allis] People sometimes think it’s strange that Jeff [Allis] has stayed outside the company, keeping his job in the radio industry, but that has a number of advantages. For a start, his salary virtually financed out start-up. I didn’t draw a salary for the first year, and the second year I’d say it was only about $30,000. So having Jeff in a regular job outside the business allowed us to take risks we would never have taken otherwise. It provided a platform for us to grow the business on.
Janine Allis

Jeff goes to meet this guy [Westfield shopping centre executive] while I’m putting out fires all over the place. He comes back to Melbourne and says: ‘Honey, I’m home! Great news with Westfield – I’ve signed us up for 20 new sites!’ I could hardly catch my breath for a few minutes after that.
Janine Allis

Selecting franchisees is crucial in this business; you have to be the gatekeeper of your business.
Janine Allis

[On selecting Boost franchisees] I always looked not just for money but for people who also brought something extra to the business. If you have a strong business, getting finance is not that hard. What is hard is getting people on board who fit the business. I wanted people who understood what we were doing, people who had done something similar themselves and could teach us as we went along.
Janine Allis

Selling our home was a very big deal for me. But it had an unlikely effect in making me feel much freer about the business. Everyone has this fear that they will lose their home. Like most people, I loved my home. I had been working on it for years. I’d used beautiful timber we had extracted from the wreck of an old mansion. My home was an important part of my life, and the fear of losing it was an important issue… well, after the sale that fear had been removed! It couldn’t happen to us.
Janine Allis

[On charging a $3,000 refundable franchise application fee] The fee works as a kind of deterrent: it scares off tyre kickers…
Janine Allis



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