Running a company

C1  
 

I think, eh... The most important... 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 and you have to be a great motivator. You have to be very good at praising and looking for the best in people.

And, you know, 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.

You know, there's a very thin dividing line between success and failure. Most people who (1) set up in business without financial backing, they fail, at some time in their lives. And I've only just stayed at the right side of that dividing line.

For instance, just after, we had a record company, I was fed up flying on other people's airlines... I felt that the experience of flying other people's airlines was an unpleasant one, and I decided to (2) set up an airline.

Well, our bank went into a complete panick attack and when I (3) came back from doing the inaugural flight of Virgin Atlantic very, very first flight from London to New York... I (3) came back to find the bank manager sitting on my doorstep... and... informing me that they were going to (4) close Virgin down on the Monday and this was the Friday... that I had two days effectively to pay them off the moneys that they'd loaned us.

And I remember pushing the bank manager out of my house. Telling him that he wasn't welcome which a dangerous thing to do to your bank manager. And, then, spending the weekend ringing around the world, and to all our distributors about music... asking if they could give us a temporary loan to (5) get us through the following week which they were good enough to do.

And by the end of the week, we'd changed banks and we actually managed to find a bank which would lend us 30 times the overdraft facility that our bank had lent us. And we managed to survive.

And I think, you know, the moral of the story is, actually, don't think of your bank as somebody that you're beholden to.. I mean, people just don't move from one bank to another, sometimes you need to be willing to (6) step up and move your banks in the same way that you should (6) step up and move your doctor, on occasion. And, anyway, I learnt from that lesson.

Virgin does work very well without me. I used myself to build the brand, to build the three or four hundred companies around the world ah... but I also learnt 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, you know, the Virgin brand is now one of the top twenty brands in the world... ah, well respected, you know, when my balloon bursts Virgin will continue to flourish. And maybe I had the icing on the cake on occasions, maybe I'll have to spend a bit mor money on marketing but, fortunately, Virgin is at a stage where it can (7) live on healthily without me.

Now take this test

Phrasal verbs

(1) set up: people who start a company, who start their own business.

(2) set up: start an airline. Make all the necessary arrangements so the new airline can start operating.

(3) came back: when he returned home.

(4) close down: the bank wanted to force Virgin to stop operating.

(5) get us through: enough money to survive during that difficult period.

(6) step up: Take action. take the initiative.

(7) live on: continue to exist