Entrepreneurial skills for Richard Branson

redazione / 15 May 2015

There’s two ways to develop entrepreneurial skills. One is get out into the jungle, and give it a go. And you make mistakes along the way, and sometimes you make good things, and you might fall fat in your face, and you pick yourself up again: and you try again until you succeed. And that’s a very good way of developing entrepreneurial skills. The other way could be that… to actually try to teach it at school: and they don’t even attempt it at the moment. If you are building business from scratch, and you don’t have financial backing, there’s a very thin dividing line between success and failure, and I’ve come often very close to the wrong side of that dividing line.

I’m lucky, I’ve never had a job: I’ve always been creating things, ever since the age of 15. And that’s actually really what business is all about: it’s about painting a picture — you know, you’ve got a bit of canvas, and you want to create something rarely special, you want to make every single little bit of that canvas as perfect as you can. You know, if you say creating a new airline in America, which we have done recently, you make sure that the planes are the best, the seats are the best, the crew is the best, the food, the entertainment: every single little detail you get right so that picture is completely perfect. And that’s really what I have spent my life doing, and fairly enjoyed doing it.

 

There’s two ways to develop entrepreneurial skills. One is get out into the jungle, and give it a go. And you make mistakes along the way, and sometimes you make good things, and you might fall fat in your face, and you pick yourself up again: and you try again until you succeed. And that’s a very good way of developing entrepreneurial skills. But it’s also highly perilous: I mean, only 5% of people who set up their businesses succeed, and the rest fail. And therefore, that can be quite painful, if you haven’t got something to fall back on. The other way could be that… to actually try to teach it at school: and they don’t even attempt it at the moment. I left school at 15 with pretty well no qualifications and spent the next five years running a magazine, and that was my education: we were 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: every new challenge I set myself, or I am set, I am learning about life, learning about people, and learning about something completely new. And it is so rewarding.

 

If you are building business from scratch, and you don’t have financial backing, there’s a very thin dividing line between success and failure, and I’ve come often very close to the wrong side of that dividing line. You know, I’ve had the bank manager on my doorstep, the day after I launched Virgin Atlantic, 25 years ago, telling me that he was gonna foreclose on the whole Virgin group on the Monday morning — this was Friday night — unless we got a certain amount of money by the Monday morning. And he actually walked into my house — it’s the first time I’ve actually pushed somebody out of my house — and told him he was not welcome in my house. And I was shaking with anger, and as I shut the door I wondered whether it was such a good idea pushing the bank manager out of one’s door. But, anyway: somehow that weekend we managed to scrowns the money together and pay the bills. Building a business is perilous, it’s exciting, and you’ll sail close to the wind on occasions, but you learn from it.

 

Business is life. I mean, all aspects of life: the sofa I am sitting on was created by somebody, the lights were created by somebody, the microphone was created by somebody. And life is fascinating, and so finding out about life, finding out how these things work and… how you create something really special, how you make it at the best, how you pay the bills at the end of the day I: I mean, it is fascinating!

Written by  Marco Tantardini