Richard Branson: My best tips for entrepreneurs

In this video lending advice to entrepreneurs, serial entrepreneur Richard Branson takes wisdom from his own experiences. Expanding on the principles of good leadership, finding funding that works for you and the subtle but crucial art of delegation. A must watch for all those in business who need to be reminded of the essence of keeping it simple and focusing on the long haul. – LF

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VH35Iz9veM0]

RICHARD BRANSON: I think that 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. People are no different from flowers. If you water flowers, they flourish. If you praise people, they flourish and that's a critical attribute of a leader.

There is a very thin dividing line between success and failure. Most people who set up in business without financial backing…they fail at some times in their lives. I've only just, stayed at the right side of that dividing line. For instance, we had a record company. I was fed up, flying on other people's airlines. I felt that the experience of flying on other people's airlines was an unpleasant one and I decided to set up an airline. Our bank went into a complete panic attack and when I came back from doing the inaugural flight – Virgin Atlantic's very first flight from London to New York – I came back to find the bank manager sitting on my doorstep, 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 off the monies that they'd loaned us.

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 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. By the end of the week, we'd changed banks. We'd actually found a bank that was willing to lend us thirty times the overdraft facility than Bank Atlantis had, and we managed to survive. The moral of that story is actually; don't think of your bank as somebody that you're beholden to. People just don't move from one bank to another. Sometimes you need to be willing to step up and move your bank, in the same way that you should step up and move your doctor, on occasion. Anyway, I learned from my lesson.

Virgin does work very well without me. I used myself to build the brand, to build the 300/400 companies around the world, but I also learned the art of delegation. I have a fantastic team of people who run the Virgin companies. I give them a lot of freedom to run the companies as if they were their own companies. I give them the freedom to make mistakes and the Virgin Brand is now, maybe one of the top 20 brands in the world – well respected. When my balloon bursts, Virgin will continue to flourish. Maybe I had the icing on the cake on occasions. Maybe they'll have to spend a bit more money on marketing but fortunately, Virgin is in a state where it can live on healthily, without me.