Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur
1905264437
Richard Branson
Notes
It is, I would say, superhumanly difficult to change a company’s existing culture… Avoid taking someone else’s legacy…“Its difficult to change someone’s attitude – so hire for attitude and train for skill.” – Herb Kelleher…Build businesses from scratch in order to build a specific culture (wherever possible).
There’s another thing about teams: they don’t last forever. Think of a team as being like the cast in a theatrical play. Actors who work too long together on the same show for too long grow stale. In the early days, when one of our Virgin companies ended up employing more than a hundred staff, I would ask to see the deputy managing director, the deputy sales manager and the marketing director. I would say to them: “You are now the managers (same titles) of a new company.” Then we would split the company in two. And when either of those companies got a hundred people, I would once again ask to see the deputies and split the company again…Once the entrepreneur has the company up and running, they often need to pass the baton on to the manager. The creator’s job is to find someone with expertise who understands the vision and is prepared to follow the path…The entrepreneurs job is to effectively put themselves out of a job each time the new company is up and running. Then they can step aside and free themselves up to be entrepreneurial in a different business. It is generally asking for trouble for an entrepreneur to stick around for too long, trying to cover both roles…In a small business, you can be both the entrepreneur and the manager while you are getting it going. But you need to know and understand everything about that business. And I really mean everything. An emerging entrepreneur should sign every check.
When you have a strong business idea and it falls on stony ground, there is only one possible response; “Sod it, I’m fed up with this lot. I’m getting out of here.”
Our customers and investors relate to us more as an idea or philosophy than as a company…Brands exist as a means of communicating what to expect from a product or service – or to highlight the family likeness between different products and services. An established brand on a new product is a guarantee that what you;re getting will be, in its own way, like something you’ve enjoyed before…Brands, remember, are about meanings. Every brand means something, and nobody ever really control all the meanings a brand acquires. Brands are ideas.They are tangles of associations. They are dreams…The only common denominator that should run throughout are: brand values. These values should be easily identifiable across different businesses.
I learned an expensive business lesson; Get the best equipment you can possibly afford.
I now have a team of people who meet once a week to go through every Virgin company, looking at figures, projections and income. They have a list of priorities and a list of new projects. They make sure that the Virgin Group is running efficiently. This frees me up to dive in and out when necessary. They know if there is something urgent, they can phone me and I can then focus on the things that really need my personal input.
Nothing short of an act of God should ever put your customer’s at risk.
One of my biggest mistakes – indeed, regrets – was not selling all of our stores sooner.
From the off, the business acted like a listed company – and that’s how all start-ups should try to behave… An expert who makes things more complicated isn’t doing their job right – and frankly, this is probably your fault. An expert should make things simpler…You can’t protect yourself against the unexpected, so you need to keep your house in as good an order as you can. If disaster strikes, you don’t want to find yourself doing twelve things at once and mis-prioritizing them in public. It’s vital, therefore, that you take control of your internal business risks – the ones you can influence.
Start Modestly but Grow Boldly