How To Get Rich According To Richard Branson

There are a million ways to make a million dollars, and in this video, we're looking at how the rebel billionaire himself, Richard Branson, did it. When he left high school, his headmaster told him, "You're either going to become a billionaire or end up in jail." Funny enough, both of those things came true. With an estimated net worth of 3 billion U.S., Richard Branson has a lot to say about how he likes to conduct business. So, let's see what you can learn from this.

Welcome to alux.com. Here's how to get rich according to Richard Branson, a series by alux.com. First of all, don't start a business if you don't actually want to. We're going to begin right here with something a lot of people need to hear. Similar to Mark Cuban, whom we covered in a previous video, Richard Branson thinks you should 100% believe in what you're doing. Because if you're not proud of your idea and you don't believe in it, why would anyone else?

So many people get drunk off the idea of being an entrepreneur, but produce only half-baked crap that doesn't have any value to anyone. If you do something you truly care about, you'll be in a much better position to find customers, connect with them, and keep them coming back. So the first piece of advice is to start with something you actually care about and are interested enough in to make a great product.

Next step, you got to be brave when you have to. Richard Branson believes any aspiring entrepreneur needs to be an optimist first, because starting any kind of business is essentially a bet, and you need to be able to see the glass half full in order to persevere. At the end of the day, those who sit on the sidelines need to not bother. Those who take charge, success doesn't come to you on its own. You need to be brave enough to go out and grab it and also be okay with the idea of you missing your shot.

Branson had plenty of failed businesses. Even in recent years, the pandemic put him in a position where he could lose everything. But that's a given in the business world; not everything works out as you expect it, but that shouldn't stop you from being brave enough to take your chance.

Make a great product first. Richard Branson believes the reason most businesses fail is because they're set up to make money, not great products. Now, of course, a business needs to be profitable to keep existing, but there is a huge difference between profit and product. When you focus only on profit, you end up gutting the quality of your product in order to sell solutions to problems you create. That's why your phone doesn't come with a charger anymore.

But when you focus on creating a great and finished product, it's much easier to understand and connect with your customers and grow the business naturally. You see, great products are few and far between nowadays. As mega corporations get even bigger, the decision-making power gets stolen from creative people by shareholders, and this could be an opportunity the world needs—simple things that actually work.

Find people better than you. You've heard this a million times before: find people better than you and have them do the work. But there's one thing that's missing from this saying, and so far, very few truly successful entrepreneurs are mentioning it. You see, if you want to work with people smarter than you, you also need to give them a good reason to work with someone dumber than them.

Branson said a company is simply a group of people. People are no different from flowers; if you water flowers, they flourish. If you praise people, they flourish. You can't expect people to do their best work if you don't give them anything valuable in return, and that doesn't mean money. It means understanding what motivates them, what they need to do to make great work, and why they're doing what they're doing.

So many wannabe entrepreneurs hire employees just to expect them to be on top of their game because that's what's written in the contract, but in real life, oh, it doesn't work that way.

How to market? There are two reasons why Richard Branson acts the way he does. One is because he actually enjoys life and doesn't take himself too seriously. But secondly, it's also a marketing strategy, which one of his mentors taught him: use yourself, make a fool of yourself; otherwise, you won't survive. That's what Sir Freddie Laker told him when Branson started Virgin Atlantic.

You see, the chances of your success depend on how many people hear about you and your business. It doesn't matter if you create the biggest product known to humankind; if nobody hears about it, in a world that hunts for every second of your attention span, marketing has become pretty difficult. Not everyone has millions of dollars to throw at ads on billboards. Even back then, Branson knew he couldn't compete with other corporations on marketing budgets, so he became the marketing for his own business.

He did everything he could, using his own image to get the company name in front of the newspaper. He took it to great lengths. When Virgin Airlines finally got permission to use Heathrow Airport, the competition was not happy, to say the least. They even called them pirates. So what did Branson do in response?

Well, he went at 4:30 in the morning, dressed as a pirate, covered a British Airways display jet in Virgin branding, and did a photo shoot. The skill of marketing on a budget alone can make you millions of dollars.

Find your differentiator. When Branson started Virgin Airlines, his main goal was to not get driven out of business by the already established airlines. When his mentor Freddie Laker started Laker Airways, it only lasted a year, and that's because British Airways, the Goliath in the Airways business, did everything in their power to drive out the competition.

You see, Freddie Laker hoped that low fares would be enough to compete with other companies. But what happened was British Airways dropped their prices even lower than his because they could afford it, and they only needed to do that until Laker Airways went bankrupt, which turned out didn't take very long.

Now, Branson figured out that simply having cheaper prices wasn't enough to compete in the market. Starting a business with your only differentiator being a small price puts you in a position where the corporation has a very simple way of driving you out of business. So he needed to find a differentiator—something the competition could not replicate.

Since he came from the entertainment business, he knew just the thing that would cut it. He started throwing parties during flights. He hired masseuses, comedians, even jugglers, to keep people entertained during their flight. It turned out to be just the right differentiator to set them apart.

Be your own customer. Richard Branson doesn't do board meetings. As a matter of fact, he said he hasn't been into such a meeting for more than 50 years. It's all just paperwork and other things that don't help the end customer. Instead, what he likes to do is experience each part of his business purely as a customer to see what can be improved and what can be done better.

Even when he went to space and officially became an astronaut, he said the main reason he did that, besides the amazing experience, was to try out firsthand what his future customers will go through. And as a matter of fact, when he landed, he had a list of 35 things that needed improvement. Things like personalized seats to fit any kind of customer, a more automated seat belt, color-coded seats so people could more easily find their own while floating in zero gravity, and so on.

He said that most leaders live their whole professional lives in offices when their real work needs to be done in the field. Start with a ring around yourself. Richard Branson has a mantra where you should start with a ring around yourself, and inside that ring is just you. Make sure you're healthy, balanced, well-rested, and living a good life.

Then, you extend that ring to your immediate family and see how you can help them. Then you extend it to your community, and if you're lucky enough, you get to extend it to your whole country and even the entire world. The point of this is to teach you to always do good, because he believes the only reason a company should exist is to improve the life of others. And if you always have this in mind, you'll unlock a whole new level of energy that will fuel your happiness.

It can always be done better. Throughout his entrepreneurial career, Richard Branson sought out things that could be done better. From his music label turned Empire that provided everything for artists to his Transportation businesses taking better care of its customers and many other ventures, he understood that if your whole point is to make things better, you will eventually succeed.

This is probably one of the best points on the list. There's nothing out there that's done to perfection and probably never will, but if your intentions are for good and you put in a lot of effort, the chances of making something great happen will increase.

Lastly, you need to have fun. My friend, Branson is one of the very few entrepreneurs who believes business should be fun. As a matter of fact, he thinks it's crucial and a part of the reason why he was able to find success. You want to smile and have fun, your staff wants to smile and have fun, and your customers, they want to smile and have fun too. So really, there's no reason for that not to happen.

When he took over a chunk of British Rail in the UK that was previously run by the government, the whole staff was demoralized. The first thing he did was to invite everyone to his countryside home for a party of their lifetime. Mind you, we're talking about 10,000 people. He set up tents, bands, there were playgrounds so people could bring their children and stay overnight, and basically organized a small festival for the whole company.

Surely, that definitely boosted morale straight across the board. He said that you as a leader should be the first one up on the bar or the first one jumping in the pool with your clothes still on, and that's because you need to allow people to relax and have fun, because only then will you get to meet their real selves.

It's definitely a different and rather refreshing approach to how most highly successful entrepreneurs conduct business. So what do you think, Alux, or what part resonated with you the most? We're curious to know. We hope you found this video useful.

If you did, check out the rest of this series by clicking the link in the description. We'll see you back here next time. Take care.