but I think that the most important the
most important thing about running a
company is to remember all the time what
a company is a company is simply a group
of people and as a leader of people you
have to be a great listener you have to
be a great motivator you have to be very
good at praising and looking for the
best in people you know people are no
different from from flowers if you water
flowers they flourish if you praise
people they flourish and and that's a
critical attribute of a leader
you know there is a very very thin
dividing line between success and
failure
most people who set up in business
without financial backing they fail that
sometimes in their lives and you know
I've only just stayed at the right side
of that dividing line for instance just
after you know we had a record company I
was fed up flying on other people's
airlines I felt that the experience of
flying another people's Airlines was an
unpleasant one and I decided to set up
an airline
well our bank went into into complete
panic attack and when I came back from
Lourdes doing the inaugural flight of
Virgin Atlantic's very very first flight
from London to New York I came back to
find the bank manager sitting on my
doorstep
and and informing me that they were
going to close virgin down on the Monday
and this was the Friday and that I had
two days to effectively pay that pay
them off the monies that they'd let
they'd loaned us and I remember pushing
the bank manager out of my house
telling him he wasn't welcome which is a
dangerous thing to do to your bank
manager and then spending the weekend
ringing around the world and to all of
the distributors of our music asking if
they could give us a temporary loan to
get us through the following week which
they were good enough to do and by the
end of the week we changed banks we'd
actually managed to find a bank that was
willing to lend us 30 times the the
overdraft facility that that our bank
and had Bank Atlantis and and we managed
managed to survive and I think you know
the moral of that story is actually you
know don't you know think of your your
your bank has somebody that you're
beholden to we don't you know
I mean people just don't move from one
bank to another sometimes you need to be
willing to step up and move move your
banks in the same way that you should
step up and move their doctor on
occasions or and anyway
I learned I learned from that lesson
Virgen does work very well without me I
mean I used myself to build the brand to
build you know this sort of three or
four hundred companies around the world
but I'll also learnt the art of
delegation have a fantastic team of
people who run the Virgen companies give
them a lot of freedom to run the
companies as if they were their own
companies give them the freedom to make
mistakes and and you know the Virgin
brand is now maybe one of the top 20
brands in the world well respected and
you know when my balloon bursts virgin
virgin will will will continue to
flourish and you know maybe I had the
icing on the cake on occasions maybe
that I have to spend a bit more money on
marketing but but fortunately the Virgin
is in a state where it can live on
healthfully without me