Branson, which is involved in industries such as record label, radio, airline, beverage, cinema, wedding dress, cosmetics, bookstore, bank, gas and electricity, automobile and electronics, operates under the Virgin brand in many countries around the world.
Richard was born in 1950, who said, “If I were born again, I would like to be myself again”. His second wife, Joan, is extremely devoted to his family, which includes his children Sam (21) and Holly (25). Being with them, sharing life is a great motivation for him.
Because that's how he saw it when he was a kid. Richard is one of the three children of a middle-class English family.
Especially his mother's teaching him to "stand on his own feet" contributed greatly to his self-confidence today. How many mothers can get their 5-year-old child out of the car 4-5 kilometers away from home and say, “Let's find the way to the house yourself”?
Richard grew up in their home without a television or listening to the radio. The dominant mother is always an expert in job creation, while the father is creative and strong in manual dexterity. They have to constantly help with the fabric chest and paper box work they produce in their garden sheds.
This not only contributes to his resilience, but also causes him to learn teamwork at a young age. 'Selfism' had to be removed from the dictionary at that age.
At the age of nine, he realizes his 'first job'. When he was eighteen, he planted a thousand Christmas tree saplings in their garden with the dream of selling and making money. The first business venture fails as the rabbits eat the seedlings! (We don't know if he's joking - he says he shoots and sells bunnies!)
If you have difficulty reading and writing in the years when you don't even know what dyslexia is, you will be treated as an idiot in class and ridiculed. Especially if you have glasses!
However, Richard turned this to his advantage and started to question “if I can't succeed in standard school education, then where will I be successful” at a very early age. And this quest led him to drop out of high school at the age of 16 and publish a school magazine called 'Student'.
“If he wasn't at school, the research and interviews I would do with the magazine would have taught me life,” he says, and it really did.
The way they bring their business ideas to life is different from many others. Because in none of his initiatives, the first priority was to “make more money”.
- Belief that you can change the world,
- Desire to 'live life to the fullest' and
- After the ill-treatment he faced from time to time in his own life, the thought of “I can do better than this” always came before money.
We see this philosophy in Richard, starting from his first works.
Young people also had their own ideas and said, "We believed that we could change the world with our thoughts," and published at the age of 18, "Student," a publication that only young people worked for, where they could put their beliefs on paper with the same sincerity, and each issue was read by fifty thousand people.
And, of course, the struggle to get the first issue of the magazine and the continuation of it teaches Richard a lot at an early age.
Among them, how to do business (trade) and how to persuade people (advertising in a magazine) is perhaps the foremost.
However, having to improve his organizational skills and learning how to find people who are better than him in different subjects and learn how to work in coordination in order to keep things running gave him the key to becoming a great entrepreneur of the future.
The magazine is a youth magazine, it also examines the topics of interest to young people. Music is one of the subjects that young people are most interested in. And young people with little money. He also decides to implement the project of 'home delivery of cassettes and records below market price'.
Age 20. Virgin Mail Order Company is established.
In 1971, he opened his first music store (later referred to as the "first" Virgin Records store) inside a shoe store on Oxford Street. He convinces the owner by saying "you will sell more shoes thanks to me"!
He offers coffee to those who come here and offers a warm environment for conversation. The store soon becomes the meeting point of young people. Richard Branson begins to grow by selling both by mail and by selling in his shops (which soon numbered twenty).
When he couldn't get any producer to accept the songs of a 15-year-old musician friend (Mike Oldfield) whom he liked very much, he founded Virgin Records by saying "then I'll do it". (Because, to him, these were great songs and young people should be able to listen to it. It did happen. 'Tubular Bells' was a bestseller for years and even later became the soundtrack to 'The Exorcist'.)
While doing music business, he travels a lot, and he sees that airline companies, which can not satisfy both their employees and passengers, although they receive good money from passengers, are doing business in the sector. Good job too. But the food is bad, nobody smiles, the service is bad, there is no entertainment…
The dream of an airline transport with a smile on the faces of passengers and employees puts him in the airline business.
An experience he had in Puerto Rico triggers him to enter this sector.
“Our plan with my wife was to go to Puerto Rico, but when we got to the airport, the flight was cancelled. Everyone was talking and complaining. Nobody was doing anything. That's when I decided to do it. Someone had to. I rented a charter for $2,000. I divided this money by the number of people there. $39 per person. I took a black board and wrote on it:
VIRGIN AIRWAYS
PUERTO RICO
$39 ONE FLIGHT
Richard Branson, who has never rented a plane before, says he wants to buy a second-hand 747 by calling Boeing when they get home. There's a long silence on the phone! And while Boeing was initially unwilling to sell the plane to Richard (with a refund if it failed at the end of the first year), he eventually convinced himself.
Although British Airways did its best to make them fail, in 1984 the first London - New York flight with Virgin Atlantic became a reality. On this first flight, the engine failed while the plane was in the air. Without insurance (which would kick in when they got back to London), he lost a few million dollars before he even started.
In his fight against conservative British Airways (who are trying to destroy Virgin Atlantic after they can't digest its success in long-haul flights), he gets the financial support he needs to keep his airline business by selling Virgin Records to EMI for $1 billion (1992). The day of this sale is also the saddest day of his life.
Even though the New York Times wrote "Who flies with Virgin" at the beginning, Virgin Airlines is the airline company that carries the most passengers between the USA and Europe.
“They warned us a lot when moving into the airline industry, they said it would be very risky to move to different industries, but I think you have to constantly evolve to be successful in business, you shouldn't stay in just one line of business, that's what we at Virgin have done and we've grown,” said Richard Branson. Today's total annual turnovers It has 350 brands, mostly small, in excess of $20 billion.
It is possible to see the Virgin brand from music to condoms, from trains to wedding dresses, from mobile phones to cola, from balloon rides to spas, from airplanes to books, from wine to limousines, from bike rentals to space travel.
The common features of the companies that manage these brands (which distinguish them from other mega holdings) are;
- they are not very big in their sector,
- they are hungry,
- the top managers are also partners in the company,
- global action and
- to create brands 'out of life'.
The job that excites everyone the most is Virgin Galactic.
“Everyone living in this world wants to go to space. NASA and government agencies do not bother to realize such dreams of individuals. “With that in mind, we decided to take people into space.”