Jack Cowin Quotes

102 Jack Cowin Quotes

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Moving to Australia was the hardest decision I’ve ever made.
Jack Cowin

Although I was optimistic about the potential for creating a business there, it was a bit of a gamble. Here I was, 25 years old, married with a young child, a house and mortgage, car payments – the whole catastrophe – but I had been making good income selling insurance.
Jack Cowin

[On setting up his first business] People were saying: ‘You’re crazy to give all this away.’ The reality was it was an adventure for me.
Jack Cowin

A friend… impressed on me that if you build up an income stream and you have something to sell, you’ve created an asset, which you can sell as a multiple of earnings.
Jack Cowin

There wasn’t any capital gains tax in Australia…
Jack Cowin

[On setting up a business] It was better than trying to do it through personal exertion – there’s no eight day of the week; you can’t work harder.
Jack Cowin

KFC offered me $1 million before I’d even opened a store. They were looking to expand, and so were other people, and I had these rights to a franchise area. All of a sudden, they were saying: ‘We want to buy it off you,’ and were attempting to throw big money at me, real cash. Hey, I’m human – it was tempting. I’d never had money like that. But that’s as far as it went because I’d already moved halfway around the world…
Jack Cowin

I’d moved halfway around the world and taken people’s money to build a business – I had to make it work. I had a serious commitment.
Jack Cowin

We soon had one of the highest volume KFC stores in the world.
Jack Cowin

You drill a wildcat oil well and you hit oil. That gave me the confidence to put my foot on the accelerator and open more stores, and that’s what we did.
Jack Cowin



I thought about what else I could get into…
Jack Cowin

In North America, the hamburger business is 50 percent of the fast-food industry, so I thought ‘Let’s get into that.’
Jack Cowin

On a map, Sydney and Perth don’t look that far apart…
Jack Cowin

[Initially he opened a store called ‘Burger Baron’ in Sydney whilst he was in Perth but sold it when he realised the geographic challenges of the flights.] We regrouped and started Hungry Jack’s in Perth in 1971. It was a great success.
Jack Cowin

I wasn’t interested in buying and selling or making a quick trade for a profit. I wanted to establish a business that I could build into something of significance.
Jack Cowin

Don’t get too far into debt.
Jack Cowin

I’ve known some very smart guys who have leveraged things to the maximum. If you get into too much debt and you can’t meet your loan payments because there has been a downturn in business, you’re out of business.
Jack Cowin

You have to take some risk in life to gain some degree of success; if you’re too cautious, you’ll never get anywhere, so risk is part of the equation. But by the same token, you’ve got to ask: ‘OK, what is a reasonable level of debt this business can carry? How much risk can we reasonably take? What’s the worst that can happen?’
Jack Cowin

We could have had a much bigger business today if we had been more aggressive, but we could also have gone down the chute. If in doubt, take the conservative route.
Jack Cowin

It’s simple maths: 99 percent of new ideas fail. The alternative is taking an idea that has already been proven and plugging it into a new environment. The success ratio o that is a lot higher.
Jack Cowin



I don’t think I’ve had too many creative, ‘new’ ideas.
Jack Cowin

There was no reason why the American model was not going to work in Australia, people everywhere want food served fast at an inexpensive price.
Jack Cowin

[On the Australian food industry before he started his KFC stores and Hungry Jack’s] When I arrived in Australia, the industry basically consisted of fish and chip shops, Chinese restaurants and fancy restaurants. There was a market for economically priced fast food.
Jack Cowin

The reality is that no individual can build a business of any size on their own, so you’ve got to build a team.
Jack Cowin

Sometimes you’ve got to be prepared to change. Businesses change, economic climates change, people change.
Jack Cowin

Sometimes you get into a business that doesn’t work, so you’ve got to be prepared to say: ‘Well, that was a good idea at the time, but unfortunately, we weren’t able to make it work, so I’ve got to cut my losses.’
Jack Cowin

It has been a rewarding journey.
Jack Cowin

I gain great satisfaction from the fact that I started from zero, put the initial base together and built a business that employs thousands of people and has an annual turnover of $500 million.
Jack Cowin

It satisfies me that I’ve been able to create something from nothing.
Jack Cowin

[In 2004] I own 92 percent of the business today and the other eight percent is divided among 10 of the original 30 investors. Their initial outlay of $10,000 is now worth about $3.5 million. That’s the book value, but if we sold some of these assets and created some goodwill, it would be worth even more.
Jack Cowin



In some ways, I have become an investment manager, rather than a day-to-day manager.
Jack Cowin

I’ve made some successful investments over the past 10 to 15 years. I participated in the buying of Channel 10 out of receivership in 1992, and within five years turned a $4.5 million investment into $60 odd million. It wasn’t what I knew about the television business; I was able to identify a Canadian by the name of Issy Asper – who did know – and he made me understand how we were going to do it.
Jack Cowin

Two of my business heroes are the late Izzy Asper (Canadian media mogul) and the late Harrison McCain (of McCain Foods). Both men built very substantial companies, brick by brick, in different fields, and were able to do it while maintaining a sense of who they were and where they came from. They didn’t forget the past and the people they’d worked with. I respect their values.
Jack Cowin

The No. 1 thing I look for in an investment is understanding. Can I understand the existing business proposition? And what’s the plan to create more value.
Jack Cowin

I’m also a major shareholder and co-founding investor in the Sydney Harbour Bridge Climb, which, in some ways, was a risky investment initially, but again proved a good one.
Jack Cowin

[On the Sydney Harbour Bridge Climb] To test the market we invited 400 odd tourists to climb the bridge. They rated it the most exciting thing they’d done in Australia. That inspired Paul Cave, the guy who was driving it, to go through years of hard yakka to get it approved.
Jack Cowin

I’m enthusiastic about what I do.
Jack Cowin

There are poor buggers who go to work, look at their watches at 9.15am and say ‘I’ve got 7 ½ hours to go.’ To me, that would be like going to prison. I work hard, but I enjoy it.
Jack Cowin

I would say I have too many divergent activities, but a lot of that is based on curiosity and enthusiasm about this whole entrepreneurial thing.
Jack Cowin

Sometimes you take on more projects than you can realistically handle. Then you’ve got to figure out how to delegate and manage those things.
Jack Cowin



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