Richard Branson: Advice for Entrepreneurs



Don't miss new Big Think videos! Subscribe by clicking here: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Since Branson founded Virgin in 1970, the company has grown from a small record outlet to a global powerhouse. Can the brand continue its success without him? Question: What is your advice for entrepreneurs? Richard Branson:  I think the most important thing about running a company is to remember all the time what a company is.  A company is simply a group of people. And as a leader of people you have to be a great listener and you have to be a great motivator.  You have to be very good at praising and looking for the best in people.  People are no different from flowers.  If you water flowers they flourish, if you praise people they flourish. And that is a critical attribute of a leader. Question: What has been the most difficult part about running Virgin?Richard Branson:  There is a very thin dividing line between success and failure.  Most people who set off in business without financial backing they fail at some times in their lives. I've only just stayed at the right side of that dividing line.  For instance, just after...  You know we had a record company.  I was fed up flying on other people's airlines.  I felt that the experience of flying on other people's airlines was an unpleasant one and I decided to set up an airline.  Well our bank went into a complete panic attack and when I came back from doing the inaugural flight of Virgin Atlantic's very, very first flight from London to New York I came back to find the bank manager sitting on my doorstep and informing me that they were going to close Virgin down on the Monday and this was the Friday and that I had two days to effectively pay them off the monies that they'd loaned us and I remember pushing the bank manager out of my house, telling him he wasn't welcome, which is a dangerous thing to do to your bank manager and then spending the weekend ringing around the world to all of the distributors of our music asking if they could give us a temporary loan to get us through the following week, which they were good enough to do and by the end of the week we had changed banks and we actually managed to find a bank that was willing to lend us 30 times the overdraft facility that our bank had lent us and we managed to survive. And I think the moral of that story is actually don't think of your bank as somebody that you're beholden to.  I mean don't...  You know people just don't move from one bank to another.  Sometimes you need to be willing to step up and move your banks in the same way that you should step up and move your doctor on occasions and anyway, I learned from that lesson. Question: Can Virgin continue to be successful without you?Richard Branson: Virgin does work very well without me.  I mean I use myself to build the brand, to build the sort of three or four hundred companies around the world, but I also learned the art of delegation.  I have a fantastic team of people who run the Virgin companies, give them a lot of freedom to run the companies as if they were their own companies.  I give them the freedom to make mistakes and the Virgin brand is now maybe one of the top 20 brands in the world, well respected. And when my balloon bursts Virgin will continue to flourish. And maybe I add the icing on the cake on occasions, maybe they'll have to spend a bit more money on marketing, but fortunately Virgin is in a state where it can live on healthily without me. Recorded September 22, 2010 Interviewed by Victoria Brown

Comments

  1. Richard Branson is a globalist piece of shit
  2. Did Sir Richard Branson say: " people are no different from fly's..."
    ? Or did he say something else and I heard wrong ?
  3. 17rGqiKitVXhQNmo31SH9bW5yEm8dyvqid
    send me what u can send
  4. Yo! I'll teach you how to actually make money online. Search on Google for: moneydude699
  5. Much Respect!
  6. Lots of great advice! As a previous owner of a failed business he's right! there are struggles and there are losses! and sometimes great success!
  7. No job for someone with a massive brain with turbo charged processing power, and genius level abilities, the cognitive dissonance of taking orders from an inferior person may cause mental health issues. So you start companies.

    Employees are not healthy and are poorly paid at any organization, they function as mercenaries in fact, moving around at the whim of an employer like a soldier. Try to avoid that and own the means of production. Because the robots don't talk all day, they don't talk at all or sleep or complain, spouting madness because their cheeseburger is under cooked or something about healthcare or rights, like the average prole worker slave.
  8. Interesting & motivating vid
  9. In love with this kind of motivation.
  10. Interesting stories, from a big man. Good job Virgin, Richard and his team. ;-)
  11. i think when virgin mobile launched in INDIA,the idea that people get paid 4 incoming calls was awesome.
  12. hes like a golden retrivrr
  13. A company is a group of people? Last time I checked a company is an entity itself. The person or group of people who started a company skip off into the sunset if the company can't pay it's debts any more, because the company owes the money and not the person or group of people. If someone dies as a result of bad company policy, the company is fined and the directors get no criminal record, because the company committed the crime.
  14. Richard, the lion heart king. :D
  15. get back down 't pit lad
  16. just dropped by to say fock yo richerd
  17. so everything my boss isn't. yet our company does very well every year.
  18. my airline.failed I just could not make big enough planes with the paper I had. maybe I can use some tacky old virgin posters seem to shed load in bins now days
  19. Less views than Nikki Minaj. How ironic.


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Duration: 4m 4s

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