Your Seat At The Table With Richard Branson.

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You're listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. This is your seat at the table. Welcome to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. This is the show's producer, Darren Clark and we are so glad you've tuned in. Now, I'm pretty sure you've heard of Richard Branson and if you're an entrepreneur, you're likely a fan of his and we have him on the show today. Before our world was hit with this pandemic, Roland managed to maneuver a deal that led to this conversation and we've been saving this episode for the right time. Today is our 250th episode and you'll hear what they talked about, the advice Richard gives to entrepreneurs like you, and the mindset that precedes world changing success. But before I hit play, would you help us reach more entrepreneurs like you? Hit the follow or subscribe button on Apple Podcasts today and help us climb those entrepreneurship charts. Share the show with your business minded friends and we will love you forever. And go to businesslunchpodcast.com contest for a sweet giveaway Roland's doing for our listeners. Okay, enough is enough. Let's dive in.

Hey everybody, Roland Frazier here. Welcome to this very special episode of Business Launch. I'm really excited to have today Richard Branson, Sir Richard Branson, who is the founder of Virgin and owns hundreds and hundreds of companies. Just the kind of one of the ultimate entrepreneurs, I think. And it's really cool how we were able to get connected and have the opportunity to bring this to you. And it was through having Richard at one of our events called the Traffic and Conversion Summit. And one of the things that we do is we try to anytime we have someone who has lots of great stuff as Sir Richard does, to share to get them for you to have the opportunity to hear them on the show. And so I'm gonna not spend a whole lot of time introducing as much as I am going to just tell you that this is, this is very exciting for me to have Richard here with us. And so I think it's four $14 billion businesses or so he's got right now. So I'm gonna let you read all about his extensive background in business. So we're all very excited to see you.

Well, that was a lovely welcome. Thank you as well. Thank you.

Let's jump right in and start. So a lot of folks here have a knack for building brands and you obviously have a knack for doing that. What would you say are the top three things that people should be thinking about as they go about building their own brands.

Well, first of all, you're only as good as your own reputation, and it's your personal reputation and it's the reputation of your brand. So you've got to zealously protect your reputation and not get tempted to do anything that could possibly, you know, you could read about the next morning and feel uncomfortable about reading about it in the newspapers. So I think the Virgin brand has survived 50 years, by and large. I think we've got it right and we know we can sleep well at nights. And we have people who are in each company making sure that the way they deal with the customers is great, that we treat people fairly, that we don't overcharge. All these sort of factors are really important. So you have your brand and then obviously your people.

People. It's interesting that you've intentionally reached outside of the industry to find just good people. Could you comment on that a little? Because I know that that's one of the keys.

Yeah. I mean, when we started an airline, we did not want to bring in a whole lot of airline people to run our airline. I mean, yes, okay, in the cockpit, we quite like to have pilots that have flown before. You'd be pleased. But apart from that, we wanted fresh faces with fresh ideas. And that's what we do with any new company. We do. We get a big blank sheet of paper and we think, right, how can we make this company different and, you know, far more appealing than any other company that's gone before us? And we bring in people from different Virgin companies around the world to create the magic. And I think, you know, we do look after our people well at Virgin in our offices in London and in New York. If people want to take holidays for two months, they'll still get paid. They can do it.

Was it your daughter that suggested that you implement the program where you do that?

Yeah, my daughter just came, rang me one day and said, I think you should be brave and just say, treat people as adults. You know, they want to work at home, let them work at home. If they want to go part time, let them go part time. If they want to take a sabbatical, let them take a sabbatical. If they want to take a week off, if you, you know, anytime through the year or month off or two months off, let them do it. If you treat them like that, they will perform even better at the times that they're at work, and it's turned out that way.

Your personal brand has been undeniably helpful in helping the Virgin brand And one of the challenges I think a lot of folks have is that they only have a personal brand or they only have a corporate brand. How do you believe that your personal brand has helped Virgin? And how have you kept one from overshadowing the other?

So in the early days, the headlines would be Branson this, Branson that. And I felt I wasn't building the brand. And it was only after about 10 years or 15 years that people started talking about Virgin this and Virgin that. So I think the personal brand, I mean, because I was young, I mean, I started off at 15, 16 years old, that helped me get interviews and get the press interested and. But now I think the Virgin brand is well established around the world. And if I get run over, I think the Virgin brand can way outlive me and continue in the future.

Makes sense. So I think one of the things that we all want to think about is how can we create both a personal and a business brand, and how can they support each other? And I look at a lot of folks that have done this successfully. Obviously, Elon Musk is his own personal brand, and yet he uses that to prop up Tesla and SpaceX. And you look at Richard Branson with Virgin, you look at Sarah Blakely with Spanx, Warren Buffett with Berkshire Hathaway, all of these people, Steve Jobs back when he was the kind of the. The heart and soul of Apple, all of them were personal brand people who use their personal brand, which a lot of them obviously came from the business themselves. They didn't start with the personal brand. But if you've got a personal brand like them, you can really use it to point your traffic, your followers, the people that like you, towards whatever business you've got. So I think that it's really becoming more and more important to have a personal brand that's separate from the corporate brand, but to use that to prop up the corporate brand. And nobody does that I think as well as Richard Branson does. He literally puts his life on the line doing all kinds of crazy stunts to help promote his brands. And people who like him and his personality are drawn to the personal brands. And his personality has bled into the personality of Virgin. But at the same time, we. Virgin has its own brand, it has its own value, independent of Richard Branson. And when Sir Richard Branson's no longer there or doesn't want to be a part of that company anymore, that personality that he's built in, Virgin will continue on. One of the big things that we do at our scalable companies to help Our companies have brands of their own is to build this thing called a character diamond. And my business partner, Ryan Deiss is if you Google character diamond and we'll put some resources on the site as well at business lunch. But there's a four point process that we use to create these personalities of the companies we have. And so if you do that so that your company has a personality and it's not all you, if it's all you, then like if it was just Steve Jobs, then Apple would not have any independent value. If it was just Warren Buffett as an investment advisor guy, then Berkshire Hathaway wouldn't have an independent value like it does. Right. And I've seen this happen a lot where people create a personal brand and that personal brand is their business brand. You can't sell that. You have a really hard time separating the two. And if you aren't tied with it forever, then the value can go completely away or significantly diminish. So as you're going forward, listen to the examples that you get from somebody like Sir Richard Branson or some of these other people and watch how they're building personal brands at the same time they're building the business brand and be sure that you focus on building both of those. So one of the things that we were very sad about when Virgin America went away as an airline here in the States, so was I, was that that customer experience, the customer experience that Virgin is really well known for is very special and very unique and it's always good. What is your process for designing the customer experience, how the customer actually experiences your product and the customer journey. When you're looking at how the journey of the customer across the buying and consumption experience is going to be, what's the process for doing that?

Let's go back forward to 13 years. When we started Virgin America, we wanted to bring in an airline into the States that when people walked on it, they would go, wow, this is just fantastic. And we wanted to create the kind of airline that children would get really upset with their parents if they weren't flying on Virgin because the entertainment system, for instance, would be much better. And we wanted to create a kind of airline where everybody working there absolutely loved everything about it and therefore they had a smile on their face all the time.

I know partnerships have been very big in your life with Singapore Airlines and several others. What makes a good partner and what do you think that you look for?

Partnerships are so important in life. Obviously, if you're lucky enough to find a lady you love or a man you love and you stay together throughout your life. It's an absolute joy. If it works, it's a joy for your children. It's just wonderful. But partnerships in business can be equally magical. And I think you've got to do the sort of give and take and. And you've got to sometimes be overly generous to your partner to make sure that it works. But no, I mean, we've been very lucky. We've had some great partnerships, and we'll continue to have partnerships in new ventures that we do.

Sir Richard Branson talks about how it's important in life to have partnerships and in business and how they can be equally magical. And the truth is that. That good partnerships are ones that are built on the two parties getting together with complementary skills. And so I think when you're going into business with somebody or you're thinking about partnering your business with someone else, you want to think about, how can the superpowers that I've got, the things that I'm really good at, or the things that my business is really good at, how can that best compliment someone else who maybe is lacking in those areas? So when you're thinking about how you're going to create business partnerships, and I like to go through the exercise of first identifying what are the superpowers that you or your business have, right. What are the. What are the things, like the top seven things that you're really, really good at or that your business is good at? Maybe it's lead generation, maybe it's conversions, maybe it's analytics, maybe it's product creation, maybe it's customer service. It could be anything. Maybe it's getting publicity. Right. Whatever that thing is that you're good at, then that list becomes your superpowers.

And.

And the next thing is to think about people who don't have the things that you or your business has as superpowers yet that they're really, really good at, that they could really benefit from this. One of the best examples that I can think of in our businesses is that digital marketers very good at content marketing. And there's a software company now called Keep. It was called infusionsoft when we first did our deal. And we're still doing this. We've been doing it for a long time where they said, you know, really, you guys are really great at content marketing. We're not. You've got a brand that can help generate leads, and we would like to get more people who want to demo our software. So we partnered with infusionsoft and Said, tell you what, we'll do the content marketing. So my business partner Ryan Deiss recorded a bunch of things. We did a project together called Double youe Sales. And, and the content is all digital marketer and Ryan Dice content. And it's designed to talk about infusionsoft and how you can double your sales with CRMs and that sort of thing. And so our partnership has lasted for a long time and it will continue for a long time because we're really good at content marketing, they're really good at software. We didn't sell software. That is CRM software. They don't teach content marketing. And so each of our superpowers were able to come together and we were able to both benefit by working together to advertise and have a budget that was generating people that would be customers for both of us. So that's a really good example. So when you're thinking about that, go through that exercise. What are my superpowers? What are my businesses superpowers? Who are the people that are missing that? Where there's a gap that I could literally just go in and take the thing I'm good at and help them be better. That is an ideal partner for you. So one of the things that we look at here is earned media or publicity, which you're obviously amazing at. And then we have paid media where we're paying for advertising. Is there a way that you approach that? Like is there an ideal mix of it or how do you think about those two things?

The more media you can get that you don't pay for, the better. So I think if you can get free advertising, you should get it, but obviously you've got to mix it with paid advertising.

Do you think you can get more bang on a long term basis from one or the other?

I think that it depends slightly what kind of company you're building. I mean, we've built consumer facing companies in pretty well everything that we're in. So creating an image that people identify with is much easier through, I don't know, ballooning, boating, your personal charisma, et cetera, than through ordinary advertising. But then once you created that image, then you can lay the advertising on top.

So clearly Sir Richard Branson is an amazing person at generating organic media or what we even call earned media, because he has the extreme sports and the setting of world records and all of those things. And he does it with this crazy good style and flair. And it's very, very helpful if you are going to look for earned media, for you to have something like that too. And he talks about relatability, right? So people can relate to him. He's somebody that. He's kind of like his own rock star, right? He's got, had this company, hangs out with all these crazy cool people and we want to be like that. And you might think about that you have to choose between that kind of organic media and paid media. But the truth is that the best thing is a mix of the two. And what the mix should be really depends on what are your skills, what are you good at? So if you happen to already be good at paid media, don't stop that. But you should definitely take a look at organic. I know we just recently trained our entire team with a team of someone who is amazing at organic because we are very good at paid media, but we're actually not that great at organic outside of content marketing. So what we did was his whole team got on with our whole team on a zoom and across multiple states, we were able to share what we do on paid and he was able to share what he does on organic. And so now we're adding an entire organic component to our businesses. And you know, he's getting 3 million views a day across his social media. So I think that works out to a billion 200 million a year. So. So imagine if we can do that and add that kind of presence that we don't currently have to the paid media that we've already got. Similarly for him and for any of you that are all organic right now, paid media helps you to amplify the reach of all of the other things that you do. So just by adding paid media to your already amazing organic, you could double your business. Just by adding organic to our already amazing paid, we believe we'll double our business. So it's definitely something to think about. And neither is better than the other. It's just that you should have a mix. So scale up whatever you're really good at, but also think about a different team because you have different people on your organic team than you have on your paid team. And ultimately the organic content that you create is going to be promoted via paid and it's one is going to benefit the other and the paid is going to generate more views. So to your organic and each one of those will get wider distribution as a result of that. So I think that's the way to think about it is you need to have both. The mix is whatever feels right to start with. Just be sure that you're working on both and you really want to have different teams that are focused on those things. What final thoughts do you want to leave before you take off for the next adventure?

Well, most of my time these days is spent on trying to solve some of the sort of intractable problems of this world. And I think that when you're a small business, you've got to look after first of all yourself, make sure you keep healthy and well. Then once you know that you've got yourself well looked after, then your employees and the people around you, then maybe your local village, then maybe your local city. Look at what things you can do to help. Then maybe your country. And then when you become a global brand like Virgin, you've got to look at the global issues and see how you can help. And I think if we can get every company to do that, most of the problems of this world, I think, can be solved.

From all of us, thank you so much for all of the good that you do in the world, for inspiring us as entrepreneurs, for being on the Business Lunch podcast and at Traffic and Diversion Summit. Let's give Richard Branson a really big hand.

Thank you.

So one of the things that we get from listening to Richard Branson's conversations about thinking about yourself as bigger than your business is really something that. That you want to think about more and more. It's there. There's a whole movement right now towards being environmentally friendly, and it's called ESG Environment. The E is environmental. You want to think about how can we be good to the environment? The S is social. What is the social good that our business is doing? And he talks about how he's helped people in Africa with, you know, he has a safari lodge in South Africa, and he has helped the entrepreneurs or the people who were working there to start their own businesses as an entrepreneurial center built like hospitals and all this other crazy stuff. So he's really having a social impact. And if you think about the success of companies that have taken up social causes and how that has helped them through Starbucks, Starbucks does it with their fair trade stuff. And North Face, I think it was. Or no, not North Face, the Patagonia. Thank you. Patagonia has done it with putting on their site the sources of all of the independent producers throughout the world that provide their things. And you can dig down into the granularity of the. The individual suppliers, and they're really looking for something that is holistically better for the world. And then the last part of ESG is governance. G is governance, and that is that the companies aren't running amok without some supervision from an independent outside board of directors that is guiding them to do the right things and kind of holding them accountable for that. So I think that what you heard Richard talking about with respect to what he's doing is something that you can, that we can all take and think about in each of these areas in terms of how can we do something that's going to be better to the environment, how can we be socially responsible, how can we as business people have the right governance that will keep us on the right track? That's really what that's about. And really happy to have had the opportunity to, to have this time together with Sir Richard and to get to just kind of take a look in the mind of this brilliant person who I've followed since I was a kid and who's had such an impact across so many different industries, from music to health and fitness to hotels and cruise lines. And very happy that you guys got the time, the opportunity to spend some time with us here. And very happy and grateful to Sir Richard and his team for being available as well. Thank you all. And this concludes this episode of Business Lunch.

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