Sir Richard Branson Quotes

Business

• “Above all, you want to create something you’re proud of. This has always been my philosophy of business.”
• “I can honestly say that I have never gone into any business purely to make money. If that is the sole motive, then I believe you are better off not doing it.”
• “Because I don’t see Virgin as a company but as a way of life and I fully enjoy it, I don’t think I’ll ever retire.”
• “Business opportunities are like buses, there`s always another one coming.”
• “Every business, like a painting, operates according to its own rules. There are many ways to run a successful company. What works once may never work again. What everyone tells you never to do may just work, once.”
• “I love stirring the pot.  I love giving big companies a run for their money — especially if they’re offering expensive, poor-quality products.”
• “I never get the accountants in before I start up a business. It’s done on gut feeling, especially if I can see that they are taking the mickey out of the consumer.”
• “Most “necessary evils” are far more evil than necessary.”
• “Our model is to develop each business separately with its own shareholder and management – this way we can concentrate on the job in hand, rather than be part of some enormous and faceless conglomerate.”
• “Perhaps my early problems with dyslexia made me more intuitive: when someone sends me a written proposal, rather than dwelling on detailed facts and figures I find that my imagination grasps and expands on what I read.”
• “We’ve got an engaging, edgy, vibrant, fun product, … It may or may not work, but we’re going to give it our best shot.”
• “When we start a new venture, we base it on hard research and analysis. Typically, we review the industry and put ourselves in our customer’s shoes to see what we could do better.”

Challenges

• “Although my spelling is still sometimes poor, I have managed to overcome the worst of my difficulties through training myself to concentrate.”
• “Complexity is your enemy. Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard to keep things simple.”
• “However tight things are, you still need to have the big picture at the forefront of your mind.”
• “I just like to enjoy life and push myself. Of course, there is method to my madness. When you are entering into a new industry, for example, it helps to do something to get your name on the front pages.”
• “My biggest motivation?  Just to keep challenging myself.  I see life almost like one long university education that I never had.”
• “”My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.”
• “My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.”
• “Records are made to be broken. It is in man’s nature to continue to strive to do just that.”

Entrepreneurism

• “I believe that drudgery and clock-watching are a terrible betrayal of that universal, inborn entrepreneurial spirit.”
• “I think a lot of becoming an entrepreneur is something which people have to learn just from getting out there and giving it a go, and having to learn the art of survival.”
• “I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn’t` really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going.”
• “I was never, ever interested in becoming a businessman or an entrepreneur.  If I was a businessman, or saw myself as a businessman, I would have never gone into the airline business.”
• “The quickest way to become a millionaire in the airline business is to start out as a billionaire.”
• “There are no rules. You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over, and it’s because you fall over that you learn to save yourself from falling over. It’s the greatest thrill in the world and it runs away screaming at the first sight of bullet points.”
• “To be successful, you have to be out there, you have to hit the ground running, and if you have a good team around you and more than a fair share of luck, you might make something happen. But you certainly can’t guarantee it just by following someone else’s formula.”
• “What’s the quickest way to become a millionaire? Borrow fivers off everyone you meet.”
• “You never know with these things when you`re trying something new what can happen. This is all experimental.”