Graham Turner Quotes

110 Graham Turner Quotes (Skroo Turner Quotes)

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I want our shops to stand out like dogs’ balls.
Graham Turner

[On being asked what his USP (Unique Selling Proposition) was] I’d never even heard of this concept before. I thought it was some form of contraception.
Graham Turner

We’re into profitable growth. One without the other isn’t much good.
Graham Turner

Humans hate to be accountable and will make many excuses why their case is different.
Graham Turner

When you see the CEOs and senior managers of a company riding around in chauffeur-driven limousines – you know it’s time to sell out of the company because it’s basically stuffed.
Graham Turner

[On the development of their global website] We had a five year vision that we were trying to put in place in six months. It was a total unmitigated f*ck-up.
Graham Turner

[On QANTAS cutting their commissions again to agents in 2005] We’re thinking of starting up our own domestic airline in Australia. That’ll stir QANTAS up.
Graham Turner

The ultimate truth about business is that there is no ultimate truth.
Graham Turner

Everyone does their own sh*t work.
Graham Turner

Most of our major lessons were learnt through our mistakes.
Graham Turner



Quite often we’d make the same mistake three or four times and we really bloody learned.
Graham Turner

We ignored red tape and bureaucracy.
Graham Turner

Why have we stuffed things up so soundly? Why do we continue to have to relearn the lessons of the past so often?
Graham Turner

Better to have twenty-five per cent of something than fifty per cent of nothing.
Graham Turner

[On a lady regional general manager of an airline being surprised when he pulled off his shirt] Don’t mind me, I’m just going for a jog.
Graham Turner

The Gulf War showed us that certain shops and consultants were war and recession proof.
Graham Turner

A change is as good as a holiday and not being a public company would’ve been interesting, but you accept these things and move on…
Graham Turner

F*ck, f*ck, f*ck!
Graham Turner

FCL’s bullsh*t detectors – generally the front-line people. Those guys can smell a ratsh*t idea coming down from head office a mile off.
Graham Turner

No matter how much pressure you have coming from outside, the biggest difference you can make is to how your people are working for the same outcomes inside the company rather than to what competitors are doing outside.
Graham Turner



We found that once you went to over six or seven people the team started to disintegrate. We had one shop that was very successful with seven people, so we kept growing it, because there was huge demand, to fourteen people. The profit kept going down instead of up.
Graham Turner

It’s a psychological or sociological thing that humans work best in teams or families.
Graham Turner

If you have the right people, that’s twice as important as having the right location.
Graham Turner

There’s no point having philosophies if your company doesn’t operate by them.
Graham Turner

In tougher times, our costs are lower.
Graham Turner

I read a fair bit – The E-Myth, How to Motivate People. I didn’t take any courses.
Graham Turner

[On the very early days of what would become Flight Centre] I had this idea with a couple of friends of getting a double-decker bus. We thought, ‘Great way to travel through Europe’.
Graham Turner

We had 1,500 pounds and the bus cost 650 pounds. It was pretty old. I was twenty-three at the time.
Graham Turner

We put in enough bunks to sleep twenty people, so it was economically viable. I can’t say we didn’t have a few problems, but the first trip went off pretty well.
Graham Turner

By the late seventies, we had about eighty double-deckers.
Graham Turner



Travel is a competitive game but the real issue is what you do inside your business, not what other people do. Most of the problems come from within, not without.
Graham Turner

I can’t imagine why you’d retire before you’re seventy-five or eighty.
Graham Turner

[On success] You have to have a picture you paint in words that you believe in. You have to be totally focussed… You have to be passionate and disciplined.
Graham Turner

You can have two teams that are physically equal, but one can have a better team spirit, better morale, perhaps better leadership, and the difference will be huge.
Graham Turner

[On where FCL (Flight Centre Limited) received its inspiration from] I really don’t know. We didn’t sit down at the start and say, for instance, ‘Let’s make a just company.’ It simply happened.
Graham Turner

Why complicate business by bringing family into it?
Graham Turner

Kids need to go out in the world and prove themselves to themselves. I would hope my kids want to do their own thing. Mind you, in the longer term it would be great to see the talented kids of our current company people working in the business.
Graham Turner

Whatever you do, don’t write one of those sickly corporate books that glorify the company. We need to have all our f*cking mistakes in there – that’s what has really shaped us.
Graham Turner

[Don’t get] bogged down in the technical detail.
Graham Turner

Our company is our people.
Graham Turner



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