These notes and highlights are from the book;
Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson
My parents always encouraged us to have our own opinions and rarely gave us advice unless we asked for it.Read more at location 426
There was a great sense of teamwork within our family. Whenever we were within Mum’s orbit we had to be busy. If we tried to escape by saying that we had something else to do, we were firmly told we were selfish. As a result we grew up with a clear priority of putting other people first.Read more at location 447
Hastings. My dyslexia was a problem throughout my school life. Now, although my spelling is still sometimes poor, I have managed to overcome the worst of my difficulties through training myself to concentrate.Read more at location 546
I worry about all the people who have been classified as stupid by these kinds of tests. Little do they know that often these IQ tests have been dreamt up by academics who are absolutely useless at dealing with the practicalities of the outside world. I loved doing real business plans – even if the rabbits did get the better of me.Read more at location 651
In order to avoid the operator coming back on the line to cut me off, I learnt how to pack all this into five minutes. I started speaking faster and pushing harder. My voice had broken early, and nobody guessed that they were talking to a fifteen-year-old schoolboy standing in a public telephone box.Read more at location 712
I was lucky. I always felt that I could speak to my parents as if they were my closest friends.Read more at location 749
Throughout my life, I’ve always needed somebody as a counterbalance, to compensate for my weaknesses, and work off my strengths. Jonny and I were a good team. He knew who we should interview, and why. I had the ability to persuade them to say yes, and the obstinacy never to accept no for an answer.Read more at location 884
If that is the sole motive then I believe you are better off not doing it. A business has to be involving; it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts.Read more at location 911
The responsibility made me grow up fast. You might almost say that I was old before my time. While the others might happily sit around in the evening getting stoned, unconcerned about waking up late the next morning with a hangover, I was always aware of the need to keep a clear head.Read more at location 924
That court case taught me that, although I was young, wore jeans and had very little money behind me, I need not be afraid of being bullied by the police or the Establishment. Particularly if I had a good barrister.Read more at location 1139
My parents had always drummed into me that all you have in life is your reputation: you may be very rich, but if you lose your good name you’ll never be happy.Read more at location 1532
It was a bold move but even then I knew that it is only by being bold that you get anywhere. If you are a risk-taker, then the art is to protect the downside.Read more at location 1899
Our gamble that we could promote it ourselves made us our first fortune.Read more at location 1929
As Oscar Wilde pointed out, ‘The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.’Read more at location 2173
The next month Patrick came to London and called me up. We had lunch on Duende, and I asked him whether he would leave PolyGram and set up Virgin as an independent subsidiary in France. I would give him complete independence to sign whichever French bands he liked. We worked out some rough figures on a piece of paper, and Patrick agreed to do it. He set up Virgin France with a friend of his, Philippe Constantine, who was a wild, ragged individual, on and off heroin but with excellent musical taste. While Patrick did the business, Philippe spent his time with all the bands.Read more at location 2477
I recognised that if rumours like that are not hit hard on the head they have a horrible habit of becoming self-perpetuating. Worse still, they were true.Read more at location 2585
I explained that the beauty of starting up from scratch rather than buying an existing airline was that we could easily retreat if it didn’t work. In my mind it was that simple.Read more at location 2830
My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable, challenges and trying to rise above them.Read more at location 2836
nobody would supply an airline with anything such as fuel or food or maintenance if word went about that the cheques were bouncing. And no passengers would fly with us.Read more at location 3034
‘It’s not worth going on,’ Chay shouted in my ear. ‘We’ve all spoken and we’re all gutted. It’s over. I’m sorry, Richard.’ I knew that if we failed on this attempt there would be no third time. We had to go for it. I had to persuade them. ‘Let’s just try to get the engines going and see how far we can get,’ I said. ‘Come on. We’ve got to make a stab at this.’Read more at location 3244
had to get somebody to find him. I had to survive. I cleared my mind and concentrated on the options in front of me.Read more at location 3558
Two of the main ingredients of an airline’s profitability are the number of passengers and the cost of aviation fuel.Read more at location 3975
I put all thoughts of death out of my head, and for the next ten hours concentrated intently on the dials.Read more at location 4374
They owed us several million pounds of compensation and by delaying payment precipitated a cash crisis at the airline which Virgin Music had to bail out. Just before I set off to Japan for the balloon flight, we had sued BA.Read more at location 4625
My parents had always drilled into me that the best motto to follow is ‘Nothing ventured; nothing gained’.Read more at location 4751
Throughout my business life I have always tried to keep on top of costs and protect the downside risk as much as possible. The Virgin Group has survived only because we have always kept tight control of our cash. But, likewise, I also know that sometimes it is essential to break these rules and spend lavishly. The chance of signing Janet Jackson was one of these moments: she could not be missed.Read more at location 4789
‘Live for the present –’ I heard my parents’ old maxim in the back of my head ‘– and the future will look after itself.’Read more at location 5429
When we were established as a mail-order record company, and thus dependent on the post, out of the blue came a six-month postal strike. If we hadn’t reinvented ourselves, we would have gone bust. There was no choice. Within days of the strike we had opened our first Virgin Records shop. It may have been up a dark, narrow flight of stairs above a shoe shop and have consisted merely of some shelves, a shabby sofa and a till, but in its own small way it taught us all we now know about retailing. I can draw a straight line from that tiny shop to the Virgin MegastoresRead more at location 5712
but first you have to believe you can make it happen.Read more at location 5716
After a few further enquiries, we discovered that it was easier to get £4 billion credit to buy eighteen new aircraft than it was to get £10 million credit for the seat-back video sets. As a result, Virgin Atlantic suddenly had a brand-new fleet of planes, the youngest and most modern fleet in the industry, at the cheapest price we’ve ever been able to acquire planes before or since.Read more at location 5728
Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson
But I do know that Virgin Cola, which has now expanded to become Virgin Drinks, is indicative of the Virgin philosophy – beneath all the fun and razzmatazz of selling it there is a sound business plan. The decision to launch Virgin Cola was founded on three key things: finding the right people, the positive use of the Virgin brand name, and protection of the downside.Read more at location 5768
Once I was convinced that we had protected the downside – which is always my first concern – the other significant question to resolve was whether the move into Virgin Cola really enhanced the Virgin brand name.Read more at location 5775
As with our other ventures, we needed a partner who both knew the industry and could put up the money to go alongside the Virgin name. Despite some of our past difficulties, I still believe that a fifty-fifty partnership is the best solution to financing.Read more at location 5799
When something goes wrong, as it invariably will at some point, both partners have an equal incentive to put it right. Such is not always the case. At worst, such as with Randolph Fields and Virgin Atlantic, Virgin will buy out the partner entirely. At best, as with Sprint, our partner with Virgin Mobile in America, it stays at fifty-fifty and both sides remain content.Read more at location 5801
Virgin Money may appear to have been an incongruous departure for Virgin, the rock’n’roll company: it was a lateral leap in the same way as it had been from records to airline. But it was still all about service, value for money and offering a simple product.Read more at location 5823
have always lived my life by making lists: lists of people to call, lists of ideas, lists of companies to set up, lists of people who can make things happen. Each day I work through these lists, and it is that sequence of calls that propels me forward.Read more at location 5840
If there’s a good business plan, limited downside, good people and a good product, we’ll go for it.Read more at location 5868
For us, our employees matter most. It just seems common sense to me that, if you start off with a happy, well-motivated workforce, you’re much more likely to have happy customers. And in due course the resulting profits will make your shareholders happy.Read more at location 5882
I felt so confident about the business that I had continued expanding by starting a new airline in Australia almost exactly a year to the day before the Twin Towers tragedy. It is called Virgin Blue and was based on the low-cost model of Southwest Airlines.Read more at location 6242
This was not the only new investment of the previous few years. We had done a lot to rationalise Virgin and its brand in the late 1990s and, by 11 September, we had a clear strategy in place, based on the concept of ‘branded venture capital’. Instead of being a conglomerate with lots of subsidiaries, Virgin had become a diverse investor. So we’d choose business sectors carefully, trying to bring more competition to sectors that would benefit the consumer. Then we’d find good partners and managers to take the businesses forward, with the eventual aim of letting them stand on their own two feet, just as companies like Virgin Records and Virgin Radio had already done.Read more at location 6245
What we are trying to do at Virgin is not to have one enormous company in one sector under one banner, but to have two hundred or even three hundred separate companies. Each company can stand on its own feet and, in that way, although we’ve got a brand that links them, if we were to have another tragedy such as that of 11 September – which hurt the airline industry – it would not bring the whole group crashing down.Read more at location 6386
find entrepreneurial managers like Frank Reed and Matthew Bucknall at Virgin Active, and give them the resources, and the sky will be the limit.Read more at location 6398
One of the things I’ve learned over my years in business is that, once you have a great product, it is essential to protect its reputation with vigilance.Read more at location 6439
beautiful quotation purportedly from the Dalai Lama: “If you wish to experience peace, provide peace for another. If you wish to know that you are safe, cause others to know that they are safe. If you wish to better understand seemingly incomprehensible things, help another to better understand. If you wish to heal your own sadness or anger, seek to heal the sadness or anger of another.Read more at location 6617
By mid-2004, it was becoming obvious that the model really worked and we could provide a better deal for consumers, through leveraging our brand off other networks’ excess capacity.Read more at location 6630
‘BLESSED ARE THE PEOPLE WHO ARE EAGER TO HELP BECAUSE GOD WILL GIVE THEM WISDOM’Read more at location 7247
How people deal with adversity is important and they did so well.Read more at location 7706
It took eighteen months to fine-tune the proposal before a fifteen-page summary was sent to me early in 2007. Obviously, the structure of the deal took many more sheets of paper, but I have always preferred summaries: I am able to see at a glance whether a deal is for me or not, by cutting to the chase and skimming the main points.Read more at location 7829
also smile at the irony of being in partnership with Boeing. When I think of how I had telephoned them once out of the blue and naively asked if I could rent one of their jumbos, it makes me realise that the future is a highly intriguing place to look back from.Read more at location 7985
