The Unauthorized Guide to Doing Business the Richard Branson Way

10 Secrets of the World's Greatest Brand Builder

Des Dearlove

• Éditeur: Capstone
• Année: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781907293245
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Betriebswirtschaft
• Sous-sujet: Kleinbetrieb

Richard Branson, the international powerhouse entrepreneur, is an opportunist with an uncanny knack of sniffing out great deals where others hesitate or fear to tread. Branson is the ultimate brand builder and never before has a single brand been so successfully deployed across such a diverse range of goods and services. So how does he do it?

The Unauthorized Guide to Doing Business the Richard Branson Way draws out the universal lessons from Richard Branson's remarkable success and identifies 10 strategies that can be applied to any business or career:

1.Pick on someone bigger than you
2.Do the hippy, hippy shake
3.Haggle: everything's negotiable
4.Make work fun
5.Do right by your brand
6.Smile for the cameras
7.Don't lead sheep, herd cats
8.Move faster than a speeding bullet
9.Size does matter
10.Never lose the common touch

Want to be the best? The secrets of phenomenal success are in your hands.

Check out the other Unauthorized Guides in this series: Jamie Oliver; Duncan Bannatyne; Alan Sugar; Bill Gates; and Philip Green.

TWO

DO THE HIPPY, HIPPY SHAKE

“When I started, I didn’t realize there was a different way to be a businessperson. Now my business is using its credibility and power to make our world a better place to hang out in.”

- Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade¹

With his informal style and nonconformist attitude, Richard Branson has been called a “hippy capitalist.” A product of the swinging Sixties, his aversion to wearing a suit, in particular, has led to him being linked to other “new age managers” including Anita Roddick of the natural cosmetics company Body Shop and those purveyors of love and ice cream, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade.

In the 1960s, Branson marched on the American Embassy in London calling for an end to the Vietnam War - as did many other long-haired young men and women. He also used his magazine Student to voice the views of liberal reactionaries such as the actress Vanessa Redgrave. But he was more attracted by the buzz and excitement of London at that time than he ever was to the hippy cause.

In Branson’s case the hippy tag is misleading. In reality, his affinity with flower power and the 1960s movement is less a commitment to a hard and fast set of principles or political beliefs, and much more to do with being in tune with the times. This sense of being part of whatever is hip and trendy is one of his greatest business attributes. It has allowed him to project the Virgin brand as a “cool” alternative to whatever the suits are offering.

Branson has always been uncomfortable with the hippy label. More accurately, he is and always has been anti-corporate. He has a healthy disrespect for the hubris and bullshit of big business. In particular he has no time for those who hide behind suits and ties, or for business school graduates who think that managing a business is just about numbers.

Looking around him at the British business establishment in the 1960s, he didn’t much like what he saw. “Apart from a few exceptions, post-war Britain has bred a domestic commercial culture that is anti-competitive, cartel-based, and patriarchal,” Branson notes. From the start, he appointed himself as the official debunker of that culture, and has made his fortune by providing an alternative.

Here again, fact and fiction fuse to create an impression of Branson that is teasingly open to interpretation. “A child of the revolutionary 1960s, he’s forged a unique synthesis of the youth revolution’s values and the needs of a modern business,”² says one commentator.

Branson on the
British business
establishment:
“Apart from a few
exceptions, postwar
Britain has
bred a domestic
commercial
culture that is
anti-competitive,
cartel-based, and
patriarchal.”

Alternatively, as his biographer Mick Brown observes, he simply “absorbed the idealism of the era and assimilated it into a hazy benevolence, ‘to do something for young people’ - particularly if that something provided fun, excitement and a challenge for himself.”

Branson would have been drawn to whatever was happening at the time. In the 1960s it was inevitable that he would be involved in the hippy scene. His antenna always pick up the latest crackle of energy - and he usually slaps the Virgin brand on the source. In the early 1970s, for example, his record label signed Mike Oldfield and Tangerine Dream. Later, it helped put Punk on the map, signing up the Sex Pistols when the other record labels thought they were too controversial.

As one journalist noted: “it is as if we got it the wrong way round all along. Instead of a hippy entering the world of business; it was a businessman who entered the hippy world (and the Punk world, and then any other gap in the market he happened to see.)”³

Branson isn’t that interested in politics, although his popularity and influence with younger people mean that politicians beat a path to his door. In the 1980s, he was photographed with Margaret Thatcher. But even though she liked to see him as an exemplar of her policies, the two were never close. More recently, Branson has been linked with Tony Blair’s government.

“Instead of a hippy
entering the world
of business; it was
a businessman
who entered the
hippy world (and
the Punk world,
and then any other
gap in the market
he happened to
see.)”

The truth is that he is not particularly interested in ideologies. Pragmatism is the Branson creed, a point reflected in his willingness to work with governments of different shades. At heart, he is left of centre on social issues, but not fanatically so. “I suppose I am left-wing-well only to the extent that I think left-wing views are sane and rational,” he told the left-leaning Guardian newspaper. “Utopian but almost apolitical” is how one former employee describes him.

DON’T BE A BREAD HEAD

“Money is not his motivation,” says a friend who has known Branson for 25 years. “It is not a necessity. He could cope fine without it.” And he does, travelling the world without any cash on him. Some see this as the affectation of a millionaire, but others say Branson’s only real interest in money is as a way of measuring his achievements. Somehow, too, he’s persuaded others that money isn’t the most important thing.

Virgin has a long-standing tradition of not overpaying its staff. Many employees have been content to work for less than the going market rate because they enjoy the buzz. (The company also tries to provide a long-term career for those who remain loyal.)

The cousin of one employee who worked on Branson’s first commercial venture, for example, recalls his initial impressions of the fledgling entrepreneur. On arriving in Albion Street, where the magazine was based, he was surprised to be greeted by Branson with a kiss. “I thought, Christ, this is odd, but also what an interesting and exciting place to be - because it was a friendly kiss.”

It needed to be,⁴ because nobody on the magazine’s staff was being paid a salary at that time. Many have remarked on Branson’s extraordinary knack for getting people to work for little or no financial reward and no other obvious personal advantage. A number put it down to a curiously inspiring sense that it was somehow for the greater good, and in some way furthered the cause of some noble idea. But nobody could ever quite put their finger on what it was. By some ingenious method, Branson convinced these otherwise rational individuals that to forgo financial reward was “fun.”

He doesn’t like paying big executive salaries either. Even though he has made several of his long-term managers millionaires by giving them a stake in the business, he is canny about using financial carrots, and is astute enough to offer shares in individual businesses worth much less than a stake in the group.

Despite his wealth, Branson’s own appetite for material things is surprisingly modest - by billionaire standards, at least. True, he did own a Caribbean Island which is now owned by the Virgin Group, and has several homes around the world, but unlike other very rich men he doesn’t flaunt his wealth. He doesn’t collect priceless works of art, cars or horses (some rare species of duck at his Oxfordshire home don’t really count). He hates shopping for clothes, and is famous for wearing cheap shoes and tasteless jumpers. These days, he prefers to let his wife shop for him.

Sometimes, say those who work with him, he can be arrogant, but he is never flash. He also shows little interest in hanging out with the international jet set - although his interests in the music business mean he bumps into the odd rock star here and there, usually at his own parties. As one Virgin employee observes: “He sees everything as a game. He regards life as a cosmic version of Monopoly.”⁵

NO JACKET REQUIRED

Branson’s dislike of wearing a suit and tie is legendary. These days, the trademark patterned sweaters are less evident. The look is still casual though - usually an open shirt and sports jacket. He may have put on a pin-stripe and bowler hat to promote Virgin shares when the company was floated, but his idea of power dressing remains resolutely low key.

Here again, though, he is not the hippy people take him for. The young entrepreneur was more nerd than beatnik. “The outsize jumper and untidy haircut, the black, horn-rimmed spectacles, fractured at the bridge and held together with Sellotape, gave him the air of a perpetually genial schoolboy - an air which he has never quite shaken off.” Mick Brown, notes in his biography of Branson.⁶

His informal dress sense stands out from the crowd, something that works to his advantage. There is one story that epitomizes his inverse power dressing. In the early days of Virgin, the sight of pony-tailed men and women in jeans and tank tops walking into Coutts, one of the oldest and most conservative British banks, became a regular sight. It was natural therefore that when the company experienced a cash flow crisis that threatened to put it out of business that it should turn to the bank for help.

A meeting was arranged between Branson and the Virgin account manager at Coutts. When the day arrived, the young entrepreneur turned up for work dressed as usual in jeans and T-shirt. “Richard,” said one of his colleagues, “don’t you think it’s time to put a suit on?” The young Branson grinned. “If I suddenly turn up at the bank wearing a suit and tie,” he explained, “they will know we’re in trouble.” In the event, Branson strolled into the meeting in his jeans, and informed his bankers that the business was expanding so quickly that he needed a bigger overdraft to keep up with orders. The bank took one look at the scruffy, self-assured youth and agreed.

Andrew Davidson, a journalist who interviewed Branson, tells another story that sums up the Virgin chairman’s attitude to the stuffy British business establishment.⁷ Due to give a speech at the Institute of Directors’ annual conference at the Royal Albert Hall, Branson was answering questions in a makeshift office in his Holland Park home, wearing grey slacks, cheap black shoes and a hand-knitted sweater. Then from the room next door, his assistant enquires about the whereabouts of his suit. He groans. “Do I have to wear a suit?”

“Without thinking,” Davidson says, “I tell him how years ago, I was once thrown out of the Institute of Directors for forgetting to wear a tie. It’s like a red rag to a bull. ‘Right, that’s settled,’ Branson shouts through to his assistant in the next room. ‘No suit, Penni. I’m going as I am.’ He knows that, as he is giving one of the keynote speeches, he is hardly likely to be turned away.”

POWER TO THE PEOPLE

One area where Branson’s sixties credentials are genuine is ...