Turkey’s Richest Man, Hüsnü Özyeğin, Came to Our Class

This week, on the Özyeğin University Master’s Programme in Entrepreneurship (MinE – Master In Entrepreneurship), we held our first keynote speaker session with our school’s founder/financier/namesake/pride and joy, Hüsnü Özyeğin. We were lucky that he was telling many of these things for the first time.

YOUNG HÜSNÜ IN AMERICA

When young Hüsnü goes to the USA after Robert College to study civil engineering, all he has in his pocket is the 1,000 US dollars he got from his grandfather. In the time left over from his studies he works at Newport City Hall during the day and waits tables in the evenings. Özyeğin manages his money with a small notebook, in which he writes down every penny he spends. Thanks to this meticulousness he is able to balance his finances and carry on studying. In fact, he is so meticulous that he even records what he spends on the girls he goes out with: “Cinema with Sally: $4.5” :)

His first venture, at the age of 23, was running the grill bar at Harvard, where he was doing his master’s degree. He took it over from its previous owner, who was about to graduate, and in the evenings he would make hamburgers and sell them to the other students. While the previous owner had employed one person for the washing-up and another for the cleaning, Hüsnü Bey did all of it single-handedly. That way he was able to save far more money.

When Harvard accepted him he had neither US citizenship nor a Green Card. In those circumstances the only way he could get a student loan from the university was with an American guarantor. He persuaded the owners of the house he was living in, took out the loan, and paid off the whole debt with that grill bar.

WHAT FAILURE TEACHES

On returning to Turkey, Özyeğin started working at Çukurova Holding and went into the underwear elastic business with a friend from work. That is how he lost the 50,000 dollars he had saved up and brought back from the USA. “A business you visit only a handful of times a year is doomed to go under,” says Özyeğin, adding, “There is more to be learned from failure than from success.”

“Don’t become an entrepreneur before you have been a professional manager. Work as a manager for 5 years; see your strengths and weaknesses.”

After that Özyeğin spends 13 years carrying on working without taking risks of that kind, becoming General Manager of Pamukbank and then of Yapıkredi. Then they sell the two houses he owns, move into rented accommodation, and put together the founding capital for Finansbank. The journey that begins on the 6th and 7th floors of a building on Gümüşsuyu Caddesi goes on to reach 250 branches employing 7,000 people.

Founded for 8 million dollars, Finansbank is sold 19 years later for 5.5 billion dollars. “If a business reaches an astronomical price in its sector, you have to sell. If you miss that opportunity, it’s a shame,” says Hüsnü Bey, pointing out that selling a business is frowned upon in Turkey and that this attitude needs to be broken.

“If I hadn’t studied civil engineering I would have studied psychology. The most important thing in business life is human behaviour.”

Özyeğin, who stayed on for a while as General Manager of Finansbank after the sale, now has various investments, chiefly in banking, in 11 different countries. According to the Forbes 2010 list, Hüsnü Özyeğin is the richest person in Turkey and the 221st richest in the world.

Hüsnü Özyeğin continues to serve our country through Özyeğin University, founded in 2007 by the Özyeğin Foundation.