“If You Couldn't Manage it When it Was Nothing…”

I was talking to the unstoppable Glenn W. Turner just the other day. We were talking about different things—I was interviewing him, asking him about a few things that he'd found interesting in his ride up.

Well, this is a hare-lipped country boy. I mean, the first time he went to New York he didn't even own a tie. He didn't even know, until he was 11 years old, that shoes were normal, because he didn't have shoes. This is a boy born in a charity ward to an unwed mother.

This is a boy who didn't have the best start; even as a young man, he was ridiculed. So when he announced his dream, when he put together a plan and when he borrowed money to do it—people laughed. All of a sudden he caught the dream—he caught the vision that he could sell and make money. He'd been on the farm, a very slow process. This was very fast.

He took off, and everybody roared with laughter!

A few years later, he's got hundreds and thousands of employees. I think over his career he had over 100 airplanes—part of the reason why is because in the 150 companies in nine different countries that he put together, he owned an airline. He had his own personal, private big jets, too – 4 of them.

And the people who laughed, who reeled with laughter at him, who ridiculed him when he was getting started—now were coming to him asking for jobs, asking to manage some kind of division and get a cushy little thing going.

Of course, this man got where he did because he was always on the move. His quick reply: “You couldn't manage it when it was nothing, how do you think you're going to manage it now that it's something?”

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