Sir Richard Branson

Sir Richard Branson

Sir Richard Branson is the founder and chairman of Virgin group, a highly diversified business conglumerate. Down in this article I wish to present a brief biographical sketch of this maverick and unconventional business icon.

Sir Richard Branson is a flamboyant British entrepreneur with a seemingly insatiable appetite for starting new business. His internationally recognized brand "Virgin" is splashed across everything from credit cards to airlines to music "mega stores". Branson continuously seeks new business opportunities and loves a good challenge, especially when he enters a market that is dominated by few major players.

Sir Richard Branson was born on 18 July 1950, Shamley Green, Surrey, England.Branson was educated at Scaitcliffe School (now Bishopsgate School) until the age of 13. He then attended Stowe School until he was 15. Branson has dyslexia, resulting in his not having been a good student. He was the captain of football and cricket teams, and by the age of 15 he had started two ventures that eventually failed: one growing Christmas trees and another raising budgerigars.

Sir Richars's talents began to show themselves during his later school days. Seeing the energy of student activism in the late 60s, he decided to start his own newspaper. not particularly unusual, except his paper was intended to tie many schools together. It would be focused on the student and not on the schools. It would sell advertising to big business and feature articles by members of Parliament, rock stars and movie celebrities. That was the business plan of the 17 year old - Richard Branson put together with his friend, Jonny Gems. The rest is history. The head master of Stowe, where Richard and Jonny were students wrote: "Congratulations, Branson. I predict you will either go to prison or become a millionaire".

When he was 17, he opened his first charity, the "Student Valley Centre". Branson started his first record business after he travelled across the English Channel and purchased crates of "cut-out" records from a record discounter. He sold the records out of the boot of his car to retail outlets in London. The name 'Virgin' was a selling point because records were sold in a new condition.Branson eventually started a record shop in Oxford Street in London and, shortly after, launched the record label Virgin Records with Nik Powell. Branson had earned enough money from his record store to buy a country estate, in which he installed a recording studio. He leased out studio time to fledgling artists, including multi-instrumentalist Mike Oldfield.

Virgin Atlantic Airways, started in 1984, is now the second largest British long haul international airline and operates a fleet of Boeing 747 air crafts to New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Orlando, Boston, San Francisco, Washington, Dallas, and Tokyo.In 1992, the Virgin Music Group -- record labels, music publishing and recording studios -- was sold to Thorn EMI in a $1 billion US deal, to keep his airline company afloat.The airline was founded on the concept of offering competitive and high quality first class and economy services. The airline holds many major airline awards and recently earned "Airline of the Year Award" for the third consecutive year.

In 1997, Branson took what many saw as being one of his riskier business exploits by entering into the railway business. Virgin Trains won the franchises for the former Intercity West Coast and Cross-Country sectors of British Rail. Launched with the usual Branson fanfare with promises of new high-tech tilting trains and enhanced levels of service, Virgin Trains soon ran into problems with the aging rolling stock and crumbling infrastructure it had inherited from British Rail. The company's reputation was almost irreversibly damaged in the late 1990s as it struggled to make trains reliably run on time while it awaited the modernisation of the West Coast Main Line, and the arrival of new rolling stock.

Virgin has acquired European short-haul airline Euro Belgian Airlines, renaming it Virgin Express, and subsequently merging it with SN Brussels. It also started a national airline based in Nigeria, called Virgin Nigeria. Another airline, Virgin America, is set to launch out of San Francisco International Airport in 2007. Branson has also developed a Virgin Cola brand, but is now retreating only to the UK market, and even a Virgin Vodka brand, which has not been a very successful enterprise. As a consequence of these lacklustre performers and perceived obscure accounting practices, the satirical British fortnightly magazine Private Eye has been critical of Branson and his companies

On September 25, 2004 Branson announced the signing of a deal under which a new space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, will license the technology behind Spaceship One to take paying passengers into suborbital space. The group plans to make flights available to the public by late 2009 with tickets priced at $200,000. The deal was mostly financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and the American aeronautical engineer and visionary Burt Rutan.

Branson's next venture with the Virgin group is Virgin Fuel, which is set to respond to global warming and exploit the recent spike in fuel costs by offering a revolutionary, cheaper fuel for automobiles and, in the near future, aircraft. Branson has stated that he was formerly a global warming skeptic and was influenced in his decision by a breakfast meeting with Al Gore.

Branson has been tagged as a "transformational leader" in the management lexicon, with his maverick strategies and his stress on the Virgin Group as an organization driven on informality and information, one that is bottom-heavy rather than strangled by top-level management.

In addition to his own business activities, Richard is a trustee of several charities including the Virgin Health Care Foundation, a leading health care charity which is responsible for the launch of health education campaign relating to AIDS. The foundation has also become involved in a lobbying campaign called Parents Against Tobacco, which aims to restrict tobacco advertising and sponsorship in sports.

Branson also launched the Virgin Health Bank on 1 February 2007, offering parents-to-be the opportunity of storing their baby's umbilical cord blood stem cells in private and public stem cell banks after their baby's birth.

On 9 February 2007, Richard Branson committed to a $25 million prize for a practical plan to reduce greenhouse gases and global warming. Branson will judge the contest along with 5 other environmental campaigners, such as Tim Flannery and Al Gore. The entrant must present a project unlike technologies being currently developed.

He is one of Britain's best-known entrepreneur who combines his enthusiasm for running the Virgin group of companies with his love for high-risk, high advantage world record breaking attempts

Richard Branson has been involved in a number of world record-breaking attempts since 1985. In 1986 his boat, "Virgin Atlantic Challenger II" rekindled the spirit of the Blue Riband by crossing the Atlantic Ocean in the fastest ever recorded time. This was followed a year later by the epic hot air balloon crossing of the same ocean in "Virgin Atlantic Flyer". This was not only the first hot-air balloon to cross the Atlantic, but was the largest ever flown at 2.3 million cubic feet capacity, reaching speeds in excess of 130 miles per hour (209 km/h).

In January 1991 Richard crossed the Pacific Ocean from Japan to Arctic Canada, the furthest distance of 6,700 miles. Again, he broke all existing records, with speeds of up to 245 miles per hour in a balloon of 2.6 million cubic feet.

Between 1995 and 1998 Richard Branson, Per Lindstrand and Steve Fossett, made a number of attempts to circumnavigate the globe by balloon. In late 1998 they made a record-breaking flight from Morocco to Hawaii but were unable to complete a global flight before Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones in Breitling Orbiter achieved the first circumnavigation in March 1999.

Richard received his knighthood for his service to entrepreneurship in 1999.He lives in London and Oxfordshire, UK and is married to Joan, has two children - Sam Branson and Holly Branson.