Richard Branson Employee Quotes

Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.

I have always believed that the way you treat your employees is the way they will treat your customers, and that people flourish when they are praised.” Sir

The first thing that has to be recognized is that one cannot train someone to be passionate--it's either in their DNA or it's not.

A typical Virgin airline employee is the sort of person who will joke with passengers and smile, not just nod their head and say: ‘Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir.’ I shared a story about one occasion when we had a short delay before a Virgin flight and people had to queue up at the gate. One of the passengers jumped the queue and marched up to the desk. Our team member very politely asked him to get back into the queue. He turned on her and said: ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ So she picked up the intercom and announced: ‘I have a young man at gate 23, who seems to be lost – he doesn’t know who he is.’ The other passengers roared with laughter. ‘Fuck you!’ shouted the self-important man. She kept a straight face and replied: ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to get in line for that too, sir!

A New Yorker by birth is David Karp, the child prodigy who at age 21, in 2007, founded Tumblr, whose headquarters are located just one block east of Hunch. The son of a composer and a science teacher, at 14 Karp began working as an intern in an online animation company; at 15, tired of traditional school, he continued to study at home alone, learning, among other things, Japanese; then he became the chief technology officer of the Internet site UrbanBaby and at 17 he went to Tokyo for five months by himself. In 2006, UrbanBaby was bought by CNET, and Karp used his share of proceeds to establish Tumblr, a blogging platform with elements of social networking that allows its users to follow other bloggers. Tumblr allows users to build a collection of content according to their own tastes and interests. Easy to use, with a format of short entries to be enriched with photos and videos, Tumblr has quickly gained many followers among the creative community as well as the public at large. Today it is home to nearly 70 million blogs, including those of Lady Gaga and Barack Obama, with a total audience of 140 million users. At 26, Karp is leading a company with over 100 employees, valued at more than $800 million, with shareholders of the caliber of Virgin Group’s Richard Branson. He defines Tumblr as new media, as opposed to technology, and seeks to attract non-traditional ads, inviting brands to create awareness and desire in their ads, rather than just trying to capture intent. Karp has already received several acquisition offers from other media groups, but he has always refused because he thinks big: he wants to reach billions, not millions of users and one day be in a position to acquire rather than be acquired. Meanwhile, in order to grow he is convinced that New York City, the capital of media and advertising, is the right city.[47]

Richard Branson described it as nurturing “intrapreneurs”: “An employee who is given freedom and financial support to create new products, services and systems, who does not have to follow the company’s usual routines or protocols.

Entrepreneur Richard Branson is known for encouraging lifelong learning in his employees. Branson is wise to point out that providing this training doesn’t necessarily mean huge expense. Author Mary K. Pratt echoes this sentiment in regards to affordable training, outlining six creative and low-cost ways you can encourage learning.

When asked on retirement what advice he would give to budding entrepreneurs, Conrad Hilton, founder of the eponymous hotel chain, told them to sweat the small stuff with a memorable one-liner: “Don’t forget to tuck the shower curtain in the bath.” When Sir Richard Branson visits any of the three hundred businesses in his Virgin empire, he makes a note of every small failing that catches his eye, from a dirty carpet in an airplane cabin to an employee using the wrong tone of voice in a call center. “[The] only difference between merely satisfactory delivery and great delivery is attention to detail,” he wrote recently. “Delivery is not just limited to the company’s first day: employees across the business should be focusing on getting it right all day, every day.