Founder and President, Virgin Group, Global Entrepreneur, Adventurer and Philanthropist
Self-Employed

Richard Branson

00:00:05 No I’m lucky I’ve never had a job I’ve always been creating things, ever since the age of 15 and you know that’s actually really what business is all about painting a picture, you know, you’ve got a bit of canvas and you want to create something really special you want to make every single little bit of that canvas as perfect as you can, you know, so if you say, you say, you know, you’re creating a new airline in America which we’ve done recently, you know, you make sure the planes are the best the seats are the best the crew are the best the, you know, food the entertainment, you know, every single little detail you get right so you know that the picture is perfect. And that’s what I’ve spent my life doing and thoroughly enjoyed doing it.

00:00:50 There’s two ways to developing entrepreneurial skills one is get out into the jungle and you give it a go and you make mistakes, but along the way and sometimes you’ll make good things and you fall flat on your face and you pick yourself up again and you try again until you succeed that’s a very good way of developing entrepreneurial skills but it’s also highly perilous only 5% of people who set-up their own business will succeed and the rest fail and therefore that can be, you know, quite painful if you haven’t got something to fall back on

00:01:29 The other way could be that you know to try and teach them in schools and they don’t even attempt it at the moment. I left school at 15 with pretty well no qualifications and spent the next 5 years running a magazine and that was my education going out meeting people interviewing people asking questions learning about life and the thing I enjoy most about my life is the fact that I am learning all the time I mean every new challenge I set myself or I’m set I’m learning about life, I’m learning about people I’ve met some of them completely new and it’s so rewarding.

00:02:14 If you’re building a business from scratch and you don’t have financial backing you’re going to have, there is a very thin dividing line between success and failure and I’ve come often very very close to the wrong side of that dividing line and I’ve had, you know, the bank manager on my doorstep the day after I’d launched Virgin Atlantic 25 years ago telling me that he was going to foreclose on the whole Virgin Group on the Monday morning, this was Friday night, unless, we got him a certain amount of money by the Monday morning and, he’d actually walked into my house and it was the first time I’d actually pushed somebody out of my house and told him he wasn’t welcomed in my house and I was shaking with anger and then as he, as I shut the door I was wondering whether it was such a good idea pushing the bank manager out of ones door but anyway somehow that weekend we managed to scrounge some money together to pay the bills but you know building a business is perilous err it is exciting and you know, you will sail close to the wind on occasions but you learn from it your learn from it

00:03:24 Business is life you know all aspect of life, the sofa I’m sitting on was created by somebody the lights was created by somebody the microphone was created by somebody, life is fascinating and so finding out about life, finding out about how these things work and how you create something special how you make it the best how you pay the bills at the end of the day I mean it is fascinating

00:03:56 END