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Business Builders
I created Business Builders as a weekly interview series to have honest conversations with business owners, entrepreneurs, and investors about their journeys; their successes, setbacks, and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. As a growing business builder myself, I want to learn directly from my guests and share those insights with you. My goal is to provide listeners with practical takeaways, fresh perspectives, and real inspiration to help you on your own path to building and growing a business.
Business Builders
How To Build A Business That Survives Anything | Pat Byrne, CityJet
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Pat Byrne explains why great businesses fail when leaders stop challenging themselves, why resilience matters more than avoiding failure, and how CityJet evolved from a small challenger airline into one of Europe's leading regional aviation operators.
Pat Byrne joins Business Builders to share the story of founding CityJet, transforming it from a startup airline challenging the Dublin–London monopoly into an international aviation business that grew to operate almost 50 aircraft across Europe through innovative wet leasing partnerships with some of the world's largest airlines.
Pat reflects on building and selling multiple businesses over a career spanning more than five decades, including Cornmarket and CityJet, recounts how a cold call to Richard Branson led to a partnership with Virgin, and explains why the biggest breakthroughs often come from challenging conventional thinking. He also discusses surviving constant crises in aviation, overcoming failure, building customer relationships instead of transactions, creating high-performing teams, avoiding the dangers of groupthink, and why the most successful founders never stop transforming themselves or their businesses.
This is a conversation about entrepreneurship, aviation, leadership, resilience, transformation, business strategy, innovation, customer experience, scaling, organisational culture, founder mindset, sales, marketing, change management, and building businesses that can survive constant uncertainty.
"The real risk is not being prepared to take one."
🎧 In this episode, you'll learn:
• How Pat built CityJet from a startup into a major European regional airline
• The cold call that led to a partnership with Richard Branson and Virgin
• Why the airline industry is one of the hardest businesses in the world
• How one customer conversation transformed Cornmarket into a market leader
• Why selling is about relationships, not transactions
• How to lead teams through constant uncertainty and crisis
• Why founders become prisoners of consensus—and how to avoid it
• The dangers of groupthink in business
• How Pat approaches failure and bounces back from setbacks
• Why great businesses are built through continuous transformation
⏱️ Timestamps
00:00 - Cold open
00:56 - Building CityJet from scratch
04:28 - Why airlines are such difficult businesses
06:37 - Surviving constant crisis as a founder
11:00 - Building Cornmarket from one customer insight
18:16 - Why relationships beat transactions in business
20:01 - Selling Cornmarket and starting again
23:15 - Challenging convention and avoiding groupthink
24:34 - How Pat partnered with Richard Branson
31:24 - The mindset behind making bold decisions
40:09 - Selling CityJet to Air France
43:52 - Why Pat returned to CityJet years later
53:04 - Building a career through transformation
56:33 - Pat's philosophy on failure and resilience
59:11 - Helping businesses transform today
01:11:44 - Final thoughts
Topics covered:
Entrepreneurship, CityJet, aviation, airlines, Richard Branson, Virgin, Cornmarket, leadership, resilience, business strategy, transformation, sales, customer relationships, marketing, innovation, founder mindset, scaling, organisational culture, failure, risk-taking, change management, consulting, business growth, Irish business.