Pegasus Havayolları Yönetim Kurulu Başkanı Mehmet Tevfik Nane | @AdemMetan

Retail is actually my grandfather's profession. I didn't want to become a retailer. I started as an intern at Emlak Bankası in 1988 and became a banker. I finished university in 1990. There were management trainee programs back then, and I was the sixth management trainee at Emlak Bankası. The diploma is right there behind me. I did banking after that. In banking, there are scholarships and opportunities to go abroad and develop yourself, so I looked into those. I'm from Mersin—the son of a shopkeeper. I was the eldest of four children. Two younger sisters were at Çukurova University, I was in Istanbul. When I graduated, my younger brother came after me. Thankfully, he studied at open university so his expenses were lower. All of this was done from a twenty-square-meter shop. God rest his soul—may his resting place be paradise. My father's car was a Renault Toros, a station wagon. I found and bought my father's first car, and I keep it as a memento. Where we're from is mountainous—we'd go up to the plateaus. They call us mountain goats, and that vehicle was great at climbing. Then we went back to banking and looked for scholarships. There were various places offering scholarships—Fulbright, TEV, British Council. I won the British Council exams and received master's acceptances from three places. Master's acceptances back then weren't through the internet—you wrote letters. I got accepted to Birmingham, Southampton, and Edinburgh—Heriot-Watt University. I chose Edinburgh entirely by chance, thinking Scotland would be more interesting. Thank God I chose it—a magnificent place.

I went in October 1991 and returned in October 1992. I had a magnificent year there. In England, master's degrees usually take one year—nine months of coursework, then if you pass the exams, they give you three months to write your thesis. After that, your supervisor and an academic committee read it within a year. If they decide you've graduated, you receive the diploma a year later. My master's diploma says 1993, but I finished university in 1992. If your thesis isn't accepted, there's a non-thesis master's degree, which doesn't exist in Turkey as far as I know. I did my master's on derivatives—options, swaps, things that weren't well-known subjects in 1992. I thought when I returned to Turkey, everyone would fight over me. I was at Emlak Bankası—I'd gone on unpaid leave. When I came back, I'd worked four years in the General Directorate, and suddenly they'd sent me to the Karaköy Branch. I worked at Emlak Bankası Karaköy Branch for six months, then moved to Demir Bank in 1993. I was at Demir Bank from 1993 to 1997, and in 1997 I moved to Sabancı Holding.

You can't escape destiny. The first year I remember is 1969—I was born in 1966. In 1969, my grandfather passed away. After that, I was a very active child—if it were today, they'd probably diagnose me as hyperactive. They sent me to kindergarten, and in my free time I'd be at the shop. My father retired in 1993. I've always served end consumers. I did shopkeeping. When I was in middle school, around 1980—I think that was around the time of the coup—I took the shop keys, took the cash register keys, and started opening the shop myself. This is a very important thing: being in control of money, controlling finances, recording daily sales in the ledger. This is very, very important. Recording debts when they're given—this definitely happens in small shops. We weren't grocers; we were haberdashers. We had spices, toys, stationery—a variety like the old million-lira shops, but more refined. We had fewer SKUs but very different, unrelated products. I spent years with my fingers getting cut, winding silk thread onto large spools. Cross-stitch and embroidery were popular back then, and we sold them thread. Those threads came on small spools, and we'd wind them onto larger ones using a winding tool—colorful threads.

When my father came to Istanbul to buy goods—my grandmother and grandfather had thirteen children, six survived: four boys, two girls. My grandfather was one of the rare people of his era who demonstrated gender equality through his actions. He gave all six children—without distinguishing between sons and daughters—each a house, capital, and a shop. He even gave the daughters capital so their husbands could use it. This was extraordinary for that time. The social gender equality of that period—that's what we call it today, but back then it was called acting justly. Of those seven children, let me tell you—for example, my eldest uncle, God rest his soul, passed away at 100. He was born in 1910 and died in 2010, from old age, not illness. There was an Armenian persecution period where they'd say 'kill, kill' and people fled to the mountains. My grandmother—I was small but she used to tell the story—lost two children, probably to malaria, because they'd flee to the mountains where there was no hygiene, no doctors, nothing. An Arab man, whom we called Arap Dayı—Captain—saved my uncle; otherwise they would have taken him too. Of those thirteen children, six survived. My father was the youngest—my grandmother had him at forty-five. The age gap between my uncle and father was over twenty-five years. My uncle was born in 1910, my father in 1935. Because of this age difference, my father became my grandmother's favorite, and she sent him to university—the first in the family to attend. That's why he stayed in Istanbul, at the Academy of Economics and Commercial Sciences, which is now under Marmara University, in the old rectorate building at the Sultanahmet campus.

Since he graduated from there and knew Istanbul well, my father would come to buy merchandise. He'd bring very interesting goods. For example, there were Benka brand shirts—a shirt would arrive in Mersin and sell out in fifteen days. He was an entrepreneur of that era. Or there was a brand called Nehir—knitwear, which still exists. We'd prepay to get Nehir products manufactured to our specifications. When the products arrived, we'd settle any price difference. Nehir products would sell out in a week. Fascinating, and he wouldn't come back to Istanbul until the next trip—there was no phone ordering or shipping by cargo.