COMPLETE SUCCESS STORY OF " RICHARD BRANSON "
With over 360 different companies in the Virgin group, interests
ranging from mobile phones and internet to trains and drinks,
and a net worth of £2.6 billion, Richard Branson is probably the
UK’s best-known entrepreneur. Much of this is down to his allconquering
love of publicity; sometimes it’s difficult to tell whether
he’s a businessman or a celebrity. But whatever the case, the
famously bearded British businessman has been in the headlines for
the last 30 years. In 1986, the Sunday Times wrote, ‘Whether
advertising cars or credit cards, sitting in the bath playing with a
model aircraft, or setting out to conquer the Atlantic… Branson
nowadays sells himself as assiduously and imaginatively as his
innumerable companies sell their records, films, et al’ (Brown,
1986).
Little has changed in the intervening quarter of a century. At 60,
Branson is still ubiquitous and is still very much the face of the
Virgin brand. The only real difference is that he has rather more
competition these days. When he first noticed that celebrity could
work for a business as well as it worked for pop stars and artists,
most UK businesspeople were buttoned up and reserved, and the
idea of using stunts and themselves to sell their products would
have seemed not so much unseemly as simply unimaginable. Now,
in many cases, businesspeople are household names, and Branson
has gone from being a maverick to a trailblazer.
Branson was born in 1950 near Guildford in Surrey. His father was
a lawyer, something of a family tradition, while his mother had
been a dancer and an air hostess in South America. He did not excel
at school – the reason for this, he would later discover, was that he
was dyslexic – but he was a good athlete and, with the help of a
crammer, got into Stowe, a famous independent school. He showed
early form as an entrepreneur when, at the age of 16, he launched a
magazine called Student while still at school (previous failed
business ventures included attempts at breeding budgies and
growing Christmas trees). He ran the magazine for the next three
years, and his circulation reached 100,000.
In 1969, Branson ran an ad in his magazine for discounted mail
order records. The record industry at the time was something of a
closed shop where labels and shops conspired to keep profits fat,
and the response to Branson’s ad was huge. The only trouble was
that he had no stock, but eventually he found a shop that would sell
to him. Records, he decided, were far more profitable than
magazines, and he closed Student. This was the start of his mail
order music operation. The Virgin name, incidentally, is supposed
to have come from an employee, the thinking being that they were
all new to business – it is not as popularly supposed anything to do
with the Virgin Islands.
Meanwhile, Branson’s girlfriend was pregnant, and the duo
struggled to find help and advice. The baby was aborted, but
shocked by the lack of support Branson set up the Student Advisory
Centre to help young people with problems such as unwanted
pregnancy and trouble with drugs. All these activities gave him
quite a public profile, and by the time he was 20 in 1971 he’d
already made a considerable splash and was the subject of a BBC
documentary, which featured, among other things, a slightly surreal
sequence of him walking along a river, chewing a hayseed and
talking about the difficulty they had getting an abortion. But as
much as that, it was about his business ventures and a young man
going places.
Virgin’s early years were pretty hand-to-mouth. The company had
been hit by a huge tax bill, and staff would sometimes pretend no
one was in when debt collectors knocked on the door. In late 1970
– largely because of a postal strike – Branson decided that he needed
physical premises, and he found a space above a shoe shop on
Tottenham Court Road; he opened his first record shop in January
1971. His philosophy remained the same – big volumes and big
discounts – and he expanded rapidly, mainly because he thought the
competition would try to crush him if he didn’t. Around this time,
he was memorably described as ‘a public school Arthur Daley’.
Having incurred the displeasure of the big labels, he also had his eye
on creating a label of his own. Now with significant cash, he bought
a manor house near Oxford and turned it into a recording studio;
in 1972, he founded the Virgin record label. The company’s first
signing – Mike Oldfield – recorded Tubular Bells, which went on to
sell 5 million copies. After a brief dip in its fortunes, the label signed
the Sex Pistols in 1977.
At the time they were so controversial that no other label would touch them. It was a bold move and one that paid huge dividends in terms of publicity. Throughout the late1970s and 1980s Branson continued to expand, revelling in hisnew-found role as the UK’s favourite entrepreneur. Moreover, as hisempire grew, those who had dismissed him as a ‘hippy capitalist’found they were having to take him rather more seriously.In 1984, Virgin launched the Virgin Atlantic airline, which is nowthe UK’s second-largest long-haul airline. The following yearBranson attempted to win the Blue Riband by setting a new recordfor crossing the Atlantic. The boat, the Virgin Atlantic Challenger,sank, but the publicity did Branson no harm. The following year hebroke the record in the Virgin Atlantic Challenger II. The rest of the1980s were a whirl of ventures. Virgin Records went international.Virgin launched an airship and balloon company, started a condombrand, went into hotels, and entered – and exited – satellitebroadcasting. The group’s one big stumble in the 1980s was its1986 flotation. This lasted all of two years (but managed to take inBlack Monday). In 1988, Branson took the group back into privatehands. He was, he said, sick of the City’s suits and its short-termistapproach – and, it be must said, many in the City said they weresick of Branson.
The 1990s saw much of the same: books, vodka and cola, radio,bridal services, trains, cosmetics, gyms and mobiles all caughtBranson’s attention. In 1992, he had to sell Virgin Music to EMI tobail out his airline; he said he cried when the deal went through, asVirgin Music was his first business. He also tried to win operationof the UK’s National Lottery, promising all his proceeds would goto charity – but he lost to the Camelot consortium. Meanwhile hisrecord-breaking – and publicity-gathering – attempts continuedapace, moving from the sea to the air. In 1991, he crossed the Pacificin a balloon, breaking a record. And, from 1995 to 1998, heattempted several circumnavigations of the world in a balloon; histeam were beaten to the prize by the Breitling Orbiter 3 in 1999. Byway of consolation he became Sir Richard Branson in the millenniumNew Year honours list.
The 2000s were scarcely any quieter and, although by this stageBranson was in his 50s, the trademark blond mane and beard werestill there. Virgin launched Virgin Blue, a low-cost Australian airline;Branson sold the British and Irish Virgin Megastores; he launchedVirgin Fuel, a company to produce clean fuel, in keeping with hisincreasing interest in solving environmental issues… and the ratherbreathless list goes on and on. A few ventures do stick out though.First, Virgin Money, his financial services group, came very close tobuying the troubled UK bank Northern Rock; ultimately it didn’t,and the Rock remained a ward of the UK state. His second headline grabbing venture was Virgin Galactic, which is devoted to space travel for tourists; the company is currently taking bookings and is entirely serious about the undertaking. Finally, in 2007, with AlGore, he launched the Virgin Earth Challenge Prize to combatglobal warming – the prize goes to the first person or group to comeup with a means of scrubbing a billion tons of CO2 out of theatmosphere every year for 10 years.
What Branson has consistently done best is personify the Virgin
brand. Of course, there are plenty of other people who embody
their brands – Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett and the late Anita Roddick
spring to mind – but Branson is different because in all of these
cases there is a kind of core product, whether it’s personal electronics
or investments or cosmetics. With Branson, the product is secondary.
The Virgin brand can be slapped on anything, whether it’s condoms
or vodka or mobiles or planes. Sometimes it works; sometimes it
doesn’t. But you’ve got to give it a go, and when things don’t work
out people rarely hold it against Branson.
Even the publicity stunts – which might look ridiculous on someone
less comfortable with his own celebrity – add to the brand, because
they’re entirely consistent with who Branson is. You could probably
make a case that Branson’s entire life sometimes seems to be a
publicity stunt – but that doesn’t really diminish him. It’s probably
because he seems to be having so much fun whatever it is that he’s
doing. The BBC journalist Robert Peston (2009) referred to
something called the ‘The entrepreneur’s wound’, that is, the
unpleasant childhood or traumatic experience that drives many
people to succeed but means they are never satisfied and never
happy. Branson is quite the opposite. He’s hyperactive and driven,
certainly, but he seems to do it because he genuinely enjoys it.
For all Branson’s love of publicity, though, there is one area where
this notoriously public figure is a notoriously private one. Those
who look into Branson’s financial affairs usually come out little the
wiser. The book Branson by the celebrated investigative journalist
Tom Bower paints a picture of a man who often sails very close to
the wind, and whose group has often been faced with the very real
prospect of insolvency. A question many ask is: which of Branson’s
companies actually make money (and which of them are subsidized
by those that do)? In fact, Virgin’s holding company’s accounts have
often shown little real money being made outside the airlines. It is
for this reason, so the thinking goes, that Branson likes his companies
private, not because City suits are stodgy and unimaginative. Bower
paints Branson as a shameless self-publicist, a sharp operator and a
man whose greatest talent is separating bankers from their money.
Branson’s endless stunts may also have started to pall. In 2008, the
Economist noted that these days Branson spends precious little time
in the country of his birth: ‘The British took Sir Richard to their
hearts originally for his rebellious image, but many have grown
weary of his self-publicising. Maybe Americans will applaud his
chutzpah.’ There may be some truth in all of this, but it’s a little
early to consign Branson to history. He turned 60 in 2010 (but
looks 15 years younger); it seems very unlikely that he is going to
grow old gracefully.
DONE!! :)
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