Business Stripped Bare – Lessons in Entrepreneurship!

Richard Branson, the renowned Entrepreneur and founder of the Virgin group, is a larger than life celebrity and a great businessman. With a net worth of over $4Bn, here’s a take from his journey on business lessons –

• Core theme: You have to protect against the downside. This doesn’t mean you stop taking big risks, but understand the risks. This book is for everyone, whether or not they imagine themselves to be business people. Takeaway – how to bring success despite poor economic conditions and changing markets. We’ll be looking at – people, the brand, what we learn from our mistakes and setbacks, innovation as driver of business, value of entrepreneurship and leadership, wider responsibility of business!
• Nationalisation can only ever be an emergency manoeuvre. In the long term it’s disastrous. It’s a relatively small step from a politician propping up the economy to thinking that he or she can run the entire economy. A dreadful mistake.
• Stay small (specially banks) so that even if one fails, the entire system doesn’t fall. Also, by staying small and privatisation, they compete to increase customer service. Medici family did this in the 15th century. No branch managers, but junior partners who paid themselves a share of branch profits. The sort of dinosaur businessman who brad’s about his 100,000 strong workforce and his 100 Bn pounds turnover is finished. The planet cannot support him. If he’s split up into 100s of companies, each turning over half a billion and forced to stand on its own 2 feet, he’d be hurting; but alive! Think big, but build small. A good idea will grow itself. Virgin group has organised it into around 300 limited companies
• At its core, a company is its talent, its expertise and its relationships
• Definition of business – it is simply something that concerns us. If you care about something enough to do something about it, you’re in business. Business is creative – like a painting. You can create anything and there, right there, is your first problem. For every good painting you might turn out, there’s a zillion bad ones just aching to drip off your brush. Scared? You should be. You pick a colour, then the second, then the third and it all has to go along. You’re invested now. You can’t go back.
• Business is about getting better things done whilst making money. Being better is hard to do, the bigger you get, it only gets harder and the ethical questions are bigger. Turnovers can be huge. But it is the profit margin that matters.
• First law of entrepreneurial business: there no reverse gear on this thing. You can’t unmake!
• Avoid taking on someone else’s legacy. Mergers are difficult. Fighting the outer world is easy. Trying to make peace among one’s own staff is hell. It’s better to start from the scratch
• Seek out people with the right spirit, bubbling just beneath the surface, and get working with them. These people don’t know they’re special, but they are, and you can spot them. These people, by their nature and their outlook on life, enjoy working with others. They’re attentive. They smile freely. Often lively, and fun to be with. Someone who can stay cool and calm under pressure is an asset. It’s a positive sign when people don’t take themselves too seriously. Be good at what you do and don’t worry about your image!
• 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 together on the same show for too long grow stale. When the business let’s you, shake things up a little
• Customer service and staff satisfaction are pretty much the same issue. They should be handled as one!
• Hire for attitude, train for skill. One key quality: Discipline. Not the rigid thinking, machine like discipline. A self disciplined person will have the patience to conduct routine business routinely, the talent to respond exceptionally to exceptional circumstances, and the wisdom to know the difference between the two.
• Remembering who you are: it’s the biggest challenge an expanding business ever has to face. No wonder amazon still focuses on day 1. If your business has ossified to the point where you haven’t a close what’s wrong, and you’ve now called in consultants who charge by the hour, then, your troubles began some while ago.
• If someone has a lousy experience at your hands, they will warn people. The knock on effect of this destroys businesses.
• Entrepreneurs have literally destroyed poverty in the western world as the rest of the world knows it, and as history knows it. No other social system can compete with the entrepreneurial free market system in terms of productivity, raising standards of living and creating permanent prosperity. Entrepreneurship is not about getting one over the customer. Not about looking for number one. Not about making a lot of money. It is absolutely not about letting work take over your life. It is about turning what excites you in life into capital, so that you can do more of it and move forward with it.
• Business teachers are right. You should focus on what you know. Focus on what gets you up in the morning. What is it for Virgin and Branson? Music? Air travel? Ballooning? Trains? Mobile phones? Money? Healthcare? Space? It is the challenge. It is the Brand. The virgin brand tells you using this credit card is like using this airline, which is like using this health spa, and listening to this record. The virgin brand is the core that he knows! Finding new ways to give people a good time! Example of the ‘pinched from virgin Atlantic’ salt and pepper pots
• Publicity is absolutely critical. You’ve to get your brand out and about, particularly if you are a consumer oriented brand.
• The things that make India an ideal territory for us are the very things that make it difficult. It’s hard to be the consumer’s champion in a nation of business that, rightly or wrongly, claim value for money above all other values
• Staff is desperate for someone to listen – the most important lesson. Someone has to make a call basis the inputs to solve basic problems. Otherwise it simply becomes frustrating. Jot it down!
• Success one day does not give you a free lunch everyday thereafter. Delivery is not just hard work: it’s endless. The way virgin Atlantic started was dividing the cost of a chartered plane to Puerto Rico among the stranded passengers
• Remember to communicate, and pay attention to detail. You wouldn’t believe how far you can get, just by remembering and practising those 2 rules
• If you are a late entrant to a market, you need to be radically different to win over customers (virgin mobile mvno proposition as a startup)
• Never do anything that means you can’t sleep at night. Always have a disaster protocol in place. And show your face first in such situations. Eg – pendolino train accident in 2007 leading to 1 fatality
• Admit mistakes. Virgin pulse bombed (if you drive down the retail price fast enough when you are the dominant player, you never allow anyone else to catch-up because they can’t make enough money. iPod did it). Taking on Coca Cola was his highest profile business mistakes (coke did indeed have a SWAT team to ensure virgin cola was dead).
• It’s always worth getting the contract right in the first place. And if it falls to that, protect your reputation. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes
• If you’re hurt, lick your wounds and get up again. If you’ve given it your absolute best, it’s time to move forward. Eg bid failure of northern rock bank (it was nationalised)
• The best, most solid way out of a crises in a challenging market is through experimentation and adaptation ( innovation is key ). Innovation doesn’t mean being the first or the biggest, but being the best
• The secret to success in any new sector is watchfulness, usually over a period of many years. It’s hard to spin waiting and watching into a vibrant business lesson. But this is what it takes!
• Luck is essential. The b school gurus tend to underplay this commodity, presumably because the power of chance undermines every other business rule they teach you. Chance favours the prepared mind
• True leadership must include the ability to distinguish between real and apparent danger. You simply do not go about believing everyone!
• Decent leadership is about explaining clearly and unemotionally why a decision has been taken. Firing is easy, but it’s not right. If you’ve promoted the wrong person, it’s your problem, not theirs. Same happens in football. You can sack the coach but finding a better coach is a challenge
• What you’re bad at actually doesn’t interest people, and it certainly shouldn’t interest you. However accomplished you are, the things you’re bad at will always outnumber the things you’re good at. So don’t let your limits knock of your self confidence. Push towards your strengths