Mad Mick’s business advice

He may sport a manic smile and lack any sense of shame or decorum during photo calls, but you can’t dispute Michael O’Leary’s business acumen. Here are some of his best business quotes.

By Robert Carry

“Say my granny fell ill. What part of no refund don’t you understand? You are not getting a refund so f**k off.”

– O’Leary on his company’s flat no-refund policy.

“There is too much ‘we really admire our competitors’. All boll**ks. Everyone wants to kick the sh*t out of everyone else. We want to beat the crap out of BA. They mean to kick the crap out of us.”

– On British Airways.

“They don’t call us the fighting Irish for nothing. We have been the travel innovators of Europe! We built the roads and laid the rails. Now it’s the airlines!”

– On Ryanair’s success on the continent.

“Our strategy is like Wal-Mart: We pile it high and sell it cheap.”

– On his company’s approach to selling.

“Free tickets. In a decade or so, airlines will pay travellers to distribute people around Europe. The airline industry is Tesco, is Ikea, is network TV in the way viewers watch for free and advertisers pay for access to them, is the internet in the same way that websites earn money for delivering click-through traffic to other sites.”

– On Ryanair’s ultimate goal.

“I have never had a sexual experience in my life like it.”

– On how he once opened a newsagents he was running on Christmas Day and sold batteries and chocolates at treble the normal price.

“I would have murdered, I would have gone through concrete walls to make money.”

– On his mentality after university.

“We need a recession. We have had 10 years of growth. A recession gets rid of crappy loss-making airlines and it means we can buy aircraft more cheaply.”

– On the potential benefits of the recession.

“In economy no frills; in business class it’ll all be free – including the blowjobs.”

– On the nature of a Ryanair transatlantic service.

“We want to annoy the fuckers whenever we can. The best thing we can do with environmentalists is shoot them. These headbangers want to make air travel the preserve of the rich. They are Luddites marching us back to the 18th century.”

– Dispatching environmentalists who blamed low-cost airlines for increasing emissions.

“Every idiot who gets fired in the industry shows up as a consultant somewhere. Shoot consultants and advertising agency specialists.”

– Michael makes suggestions during a business breakfast.

“The problem with the airline business is it is mostly run by a bunch of spineless nincompoops who actually don’t want to stand up to the environmentalists and call them the lying wa**ers that they are.”

– On his pet hate, environmentalists.

“For years flying has been the preserve of rich fuckers. Now everyone can afford to fly.”

– On the good Ryanair has done for the common man.

“Business is simple. You buy it for this, you sell it for that, and the bit in the middle is ultimately your profit or loss. The word ‘profitability’ is often portrayed as a dirty word here but I fail to see why one is in business if one is not in business to make money.

– On profits.

“Having a long term plan is a waste of time. You see opportunities and you try to take them. There’s no point having some long term plan because a long term plan gets knocked on its ass.”

– On business strategy.

“They were all the same. They were 40-year-old men with ponytails, black suits, black t-shirts and a big buckle on their belt.”

– On advertising agencies.

“It takes analysts a while to digest things. If they had a good understanding of the business they would not be analysts.”

– On bank research analysts.

“People get distracted when they put little bits in technology companies here and there. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be one of the Dublin business elite. I’m just a poor farmer from Westmeath, well maybe not that poor. Denis O’Brien and Dermot Desmond can have all that.”

– On business focus.

“In growing business, you need someone pugilistic, calling regulators gobshites, you need that hucksterism when you are building something small into something big. But when you are big, you need a different relationship with government and regulators. I don’t think that is me. You have to know when the entrepreneurial gobshite has to go.”

– On enterprise.

“Any chief executive who doesn’t have a sense of their own mortality is heading for disaster. They read articles describing themselves as visionaries and geniuses. They shouldn’t believe it any more than when the press are calling them gobshites and w**kers.”

– On leadership.

Quotes reproduced with the kind permission of Paul Kilduff, author of ‘The Little Book of Mick’ published by Gill & Macmillan.