Business Stripped Bare

Media’s 10 million customers and 13,000 employees across the UK. Up till then I’d always thought of myself as a ‘small is beautiful’ kind of entrepreneur. Virgin Media was not by any measure small. It wasn’t beautiful, either. There were acute issues that had to be addressed, and this would mean months of hard work. This time, James Kydd, Ashley Stockwell and our senior brand and customer service people were on hand to remind us who we were, reshaping the company so that it maintained and contributed to the Virgin brand.

The NTL part of our business, in particular, was in a very sorry state. We needed to make drastic changes to its levels of customer service. For one thing, the people dealing with complaints didn’t seem that interested in helping people.

We found out why: it turned out that they were spending their entire working lives reading from scripts.

These went straight in the bin. We told our call-centre people to solve problems with one call if possible, and we reallocated resources to the front line to improve customer operations.

We wanted to keep things simple for the customer and for our own people, and it seemed to us that the best way of doing this was to let people just get on with their jobs. There was scepticism at first. What would happen if one of our customer-service people overstepped the mark? What if people started offering customers too much?

My response to that was pretty much ‘Live and learn’. I don’t think anyone should be criticised for being overly generous when handling a disgruntled customer. If one or two of our people got themselves into a tangle, it just meant that they’d do better next time.

In the airline business, you learn very quickly not to skimp on the goodwill gestures. They let people know that, whatever the difficulty, you’re still working for them. Even better is quick, accurate information. As we know, ‘quick’ and ‘accurate’ almost never go together, but we do what we can, and in the meantime, our gestures go a long way to reassure some seriously inconvenienced people. Of course, families who’ve been waiting for many hours could be let into the business lounge. Yes, of course we can make you more comfortable: would you like a massage? You’ve been fantastic, and we’d like to say thank you: here’s a flight upgrade for next time. None of this is in the service manual, because you can’t dictate attitudes from on high. All you can do is hire the right people and empower them to sort things out as they happen.

If someone has paid you for something, and it goes wrong, being cagey or defensive will kill you stone dead. You will never see that customer again, nor their family, nor their friends. If someone has a lousy experience at your hands, they will warn people. The knock-on effect of this destroys businesses. If, on the other hand, you are able to sort out your customers’ problems better than they expected, then they will be your loyal friend for life.

We began this chapter by discussing entrepreneurship, and we’re finishing with thoughts about customer service. A curious combination, no?

I feel very strongly indeed that young, independently minded businesses can provide customers with great service: it’s the monoliths and the business establishment that make customers’ lives a misery. I think this because the values of the Virgin brand are all about customer service; we are focused on the customer in a way that most businesses aren’t.

But I also want to make a wider point.

In the 1970s, when we set up Virgin Records, no one in the UK used the word ‘entrepreneur’ any more. Or if they did, they considered it something unsavoury. A businessman running a number of firms was seen as a ‘chancer’ — the television comic stereotype was Del Boy, the wheeler-dealer on the outside of the law, in Only Fools and Horses, or Minder’s Arthur Daley, the gin- drinking spiv played brilliantly by George Cole. In earlier days I was regularly dismissed as a ‘Del Boy’ myself (this always puzzled me; I thought I was more like Rodney). In fact, throughout history the entrepreneur has always been a favourite villain. From Ancient Greece to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice right through to the film Wall Street, entrepreneurs represent ‘moneymaking’ and ‘capitalism’ — and in some sections of society those are still dirty words.

The UK media’s view of business people has changed — but not nearly enough. Some elements of the British press still can’t quite get their heads around the idea that business is a worthwhile pursuit, which actually provides most of the tax revenue, employment and wealth of the whole nation. Entrepreneurs have taken the risk in starting companies, innovating products and offering the services that make people’s lives easier, better and safer.

As my friend Jon Butcher puts it, ‘Entrepreneurs have literally destroyed poverty in the Western world as the rest of the world knows it, and as history knows it. No other social system can compete with the entrepreneurial free market system in terms of productivity, raising standards of living and creating permanent prosperity. Asia has exploded out of poverty in my lifetime thanks to entrepreneurs. Huge chunks of poverty should be taken out of Africa in the next ten years thanks to up-and-coming entrepreneurs. So capitalism actually works. Communism and true socialism are no longer taken seriously because they simply don’t work. They actually hurt people. They’ve kept entire generations in poverty. They are disastrous though well-meaning systems that have ruined hundreds of millions of lives. Yet somehow there are elements of our culture that still associate profit-making with vice.’

Entrepreneurs are also the greatest philanthropists, from Andrew Carnegie in the nineteenth century to Bill Gates today. Carnegie, who made his vast fortune in the US steel industry, paid for almost every library in the Western world built in the nineteenth century, which brought about an educational revolution.

So, let me spell it out. Entrepreneurship is not about getting one over on the customer. It’s not about working on your own. It’s not about looking out for number one. It’s not necessarily about making a lot of money. It is absolutely not about letting work take over your life. On the contrary, it’s about turning what excites you in life into capital, so that you can do more of it and move forward with it. I think entrepreneurship is our natural state — a big adult word that probably boils down to something much more obvious like ‘playfulness’. I believe that drudgery and clock-watching are a terrible betrayal of that universal, inborn entrepreneurial spirit.

For centuries — and certainly since the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century — industry has swallowed lives and, in turn, helped to give business a bad name. Men and women have had to conform to a mechanical model of work. They have been treated like cattle (literally, in many cases). Within my lifetime, upheavals in politics, science and technology have changed the nature of work, especially in the developed world. For some of us, it is our incredible good fortune that we are all having to think less like employees, and more like entrepreneurs. The era of ‘jobs for life’ is over — at last!

Inspire your people to think like entrepreneurs, and whatever you do, treat them like adults. The hardest taskmaster of all is a person’s own conscience, so the more responsibility you give people, the better they will work for you.

For thirty-five years, the Virgin Group has steered clear of rote mediocrity and steamed full-speed ahead into a world of pleasurable scheming, spiked with the occasional cock-up. The way we have worked has allowed us to live full lives. I can’t give you the formula for this, and you probably wouldn’t follow it anyway. After all, you’re having to respond to the circumstances you’re in, while doing the job that you’re doing. I hope this book will give you some ideas about how you can empower your employees — and empower yourself, come to that. But you really have to find the solutions that work for you.

Here is the good news: the more you free your people to think for themselves, the more they can help you. You don’t have to do this all on your own.

2. Brand

Flying the Flag

When I was sixteen I was approached by a woman called Patricia Lambert who offered me ?80,000 to sell Student —the magazine I had started at school —to IPC, now the Trinity Mirror stable of newspapers and magazines based in the UK.

It so happened that I had found a tiny island off Menorca which I was thinking of buying and living on. It was a beautiful place with one very small whitewashed house that had a loo which dropped its waste down the side of a cliff. Living in splendid isolation in the middle of paradise seemed like an attractive proposition at the time because, while our music mail-order business was taking off, running the magazine just got harder and harder. Until I’d sold