Virgin Atlantic

"My take on Virgin Atlantic is simply this: if you can start a business that requires a $200 million 747 jumbo jet and a boatload of employees in a tightly regulated industry for virtually no capital, then virtually any business that you want to start can be gotten off the ground with minimal capital. All you need to do is replace capital with creative thinking and solutions."

"Venture capitalists ought to look at the Virgin model because the Virgin model is the VC model of the future. Branson is an ultra low-risk, ultra high-return VC. People keep feeding him ideas, and he acts on a select few. He gets large equity stakes, sometimes 50/50 equity stakes in these businesses without putting any money in them. In some cases, like Virgin Atlantic, it is a 100 percent stake with very little invested. There are two words that encapsulate Branson’s journey: Virgin Dhandho. Like his “twin” brothers Manilal and Papa Patel, Branson is all about: Heads, I win; tails I don’t lose much!"

"Branson sees employees as a source of ideas. In 1996, a Virgin At¬ lantic flight attendant told Branson that she had just gotten married and found it extremely difficult and time-consuming to make the arrange¬ ments. She proposed opening a store in which a bride could buy her wed¬ ding dress, have her hair done and receive a manicure, obtain help in planning the reception, and then use Virgin’s travel service to arrange the honeymoon. Branson made her dream come true by opening Virgin Bride in London and immediately began thinking about adding Virgin Babies and Virgin Dating to the product line.30"

"Similarly innovative thinking got Branson around the problem of an advertising budget much smaller than the major international carriers’ outlays. Breaking out of his past pattern of resolutely keeping his personal life private, he began staging stunts that attracted widespread media cov¬ erage. He began by announcing the creation of Virgin Atlantic dressed as a World War I aviator. Next, he attempted to break the record for crossing the Atlantic in a small powerboat. That 1985 attempt failed when his ves¬ sel sank 150 miles short of its destination, but he tried again the following year and succeeded in setting a new record. Additional millions of dollars worth of free publicity followed in 1987, when he and Swedish aeronaut Per Lindstrand made the first successful crossing of the Atlantic in a hot¬ air balloon."

"As with John in Australia three years earlier, Craig’s hiring may have been a surprise to a few people who had thought Steve Ridgway’s successor (Steve had been Virgin Atlantic’s CEO for twelve years) was probably going to come from within the airline. Again, though, like in Australia, we opted to take someone from a big legacy carrier – it wasn’t the first time we went fishing at American, having hired David Cush from there to head up Virgin America some years earlier."

"When I was hands-on CEO at Virgin Atlantic I did something similar with our staff. I’d write them a letter every month with an update on how things were going and – before cell phones and email – gave them my home address and home phone number if they wanted to get in touch with me. And, as with the Florida hotel manager, on the rare occasions they did I was always delighted to hear what they had to say."

"In the event, as the television pictures around the world showed, when Branson reached the shore, the tide had dropped a little too low and he needed a lift from some bystanders to get the back wheels on to the ramp. It was only a problem because we’d been held up by two things. First, he and I had taken off in the Aquada when I took a message on the radio to tell Richard that some guy called John, evidently a journalist, wasn’t on the flotilla. ‘Oh, we can’t go without him,’ Branson said. So we stopped and floated around in the harbour for 20 minutes waiting for this guy to arrive from London. Then because it was the twentieth anniversary of Virgin Atlantic and Branson had taken possession of his first Boeing 777, he wanted a photo of the plane swooping above the car. We reached the precise spot using GPS coordinates, but there was no sign of the plane. It had been delayed by air traffic control. That left us waiting another 20 minutes or so for it to fly by."