Sir Richard Branson recently shared five key lessons from over five decades of building businesses across the world. For context, this is a serial entrepreneur who founded the Virgin Group, a brand and conglomerate that has stretched its wings across more than 400 companies spanning music, aviation, telecommunications, and even space tourism. He started his entrepreneurship journey small at the age of 16, and over time evolved into one of the most recognizable entrepreneurial figures globally.
When people like Branson speak about business, as a business owner or entrepreneur it is usually worth pausing to listen—not just to admire the success, but to understand the thinking behind it and to learn from his journey.
1. "Just start. You don’t need a perfect plan. You don’t need permission. Most of what I’ve built began with a simple idea and a willingness to give it a go". Just do it- Just start. This is true as much for Entrepreneurs as it is for Investors. We keep hearing these words and they sound so simple and negligible, but they are the truth and can be the difference between an idea that never comes to fruition and a megabusiness changing lives globally. It is great to have ideas and to fantasize about them. There is always a temptation to overthink—to attend one more seminar, read one more book, wait for one more signal—but ideas that are not acted upon rarely become anything tangible. If you do not start, that idea would never become a reality.
You don’t need a perfect plan, and you certainly do not need permission. Break out of every fear of starting; your ideas can barely ever be foolproof - Failure is an integral part of success. Most successful ventures did not begin as polished strategies; they started as ideas backed by action.
Today, Aliko Dangote is a central figure in Africa’s industrial story, courted by governments all over the continent and respected globally. But what if Dangote did not start? What if when Dangote was starting off he had dreamt of building a refinery and was waiting for the right funding, skills, etc, to start - he might not have achieved so much. He started small with what he had, where he was, and kept growing to different stages and sectors. His journey did not begin with refineries or mega infrastructure. It began with trading commodities—sugar, flour, cement—building layer upon layer of capability over time, then transiting to manufacturing. If he had waited for the “perfect” conditions to launch his most ambitious ideas, it is unlikely he would have achieved what he has today. The same pattern is visible in Elon Musk, who did not start with Tesla, Inc. or SpaceX, but started small with earlier ventures like PayPal. The lesson is clear: You just need to start- think globally, but start locally- where you are with what you have. Then as you go along you will grow and maybe diversify into other sectors that you never even dreamt of, but are aligned to your core. Like Nike says, Just do it!
2. "People come first. Your team, your customers, your partners - look after them and everything else tends to follow. Businesses are built by people, not spreadsheets". Businesses are often analyzed through numbers, models, and projections, but at their core, they are built and sustained by people. No matter the amount of strategy or simulations you do, your business will be built by your people. Your team, your customers, your partners—these are not just stakeholders; they are the engine of the business. People start businesses for different reasons, some even do so to get rich. Whatever the reason, keep your people at the center of what you do. Do not neglect your team, your customers, your partners.
When Marketing professionals talk about the Ps of Marketing, they include "People", because it is your people that will execute on the other Ps and build your business, and you do not want them to be left out. It is easy to say “people matter,” but harder to live it out consistently. It requires deliberate investment—training, nurturing, rewarding/incentivizing, and sometimes making difficult decisions when standards are not met. It also requires a mindset shift: from extracting value to creating mutual value. Do not be selfish or self-centered while building your business. Business is about win-win solutions, not win-lose.
Look around you and you will see that the most successful and enduring businesses are those that solve real problems for real people, and do so in a way that keeps everyone in the ecosystem meaningfully engaged. Are your team, customers, and partners happy? Is your business solving a particular problem for people? Apparently, scale often follows impact—the more people you serve effectively, the more your business grows; the more people your business can solve problems for, the higher the scalability of your business. Keep "People" at the centre of what you do.
3. "Don’t be afraid of failure. If you’re not failing occasionally, you’re probably not pushing yourself far enough. Some of my biggest mistakes turned into my greatest lessons. Other ones paved the way for unexpected opportunities. All of them kept me humble, which is a vital trait as a leader". Failure is an integral part of success, and every successful entrepreneur you admire has a trail of failed experiments from their entrepreneurship journey behind them. The difference is not the absence of failure, but the response to it. Branson is candid about his own missteps, and this honesty is important. It is not something to run away from, but to embrace as part of your journey. Failure, when approached correctly, is not a dead end; it is feedback. It builds resilience, sharpens judgment, and sometimes redirects you toward opportunities you would never have considered (unexpected opportunities).
This does not mean being reckless; due diligence and risk assessment still matter. But even the most carefully thought-out plans can go wrong. When they do, the ability to extract lessons and keep moving often becomes the defining factor. You cannot go through your entrepreneurship journey playing it safe all the time, otherwise you are not stretching yourself... not pushing yourself far enough. Sometimes you need to be daring, regardless of the outcome. In the end, your failures will keep you humble, always remembering that you are still human, which is a vital leadership quality.
When questioned about his failures in creating the light bulb, Thomas Edison famously replied: "I have not failed. I've just found 1,000 ways that won't work."
4. "Stay curious. The moment you think you’ve figured everything out is the moment you stop growing. And where’s the fun in that? Approach every new venture like a beginning. When you stop having fun, your team have probably stopped having fun too, and that’s something you really don’t want to lose". This is an important trait especially for serial entrepreneurs, but is applicable for all types of entrepreneurs and business owners. Curiosity keeps the mind open, the business adaptable, and the team engaged. Staying curious sparks continuous improvement (the Kaizen method) in your business and processes. "Kaizen" is a Japanese philosophy, often studied in Project Management courses, focused on continuous, incremental improvement in processes, involving all employees from top management to line workers. Meaning "change for the better," it emphasizes small, daily, and often low-cost improvements to eliminate waste and boost efficiency.
Being curious can stretch you and your team's thinking and keep your business ever innovative, and ever green. There is always a way to do things better. It can also lead you to exploring other business ideas, just like it has helped in scientific discoveries. Legend has it that Isaac Newton's curiosity led him to discover the Law of gravity while sitting under an apple tree and observing a piece of fruit fall to the ground. History also has it that an engineer, Simcha Blass, discovered drip irrigation when he noticed that a tree in an arid region was flourishing better than nearby foliage, and upon investigation (driven by curiosity), discovered a small leak in a water pipe that was dripping consistently onto the tree's root system, rather than flooding the entire area, leading to the development of modern agricultural water management. In business, curiosity works in much the same way. It drives continuous improvement, opens new pathways, and often reveals adjacent opportunities. It is also what keeps the journey enjoyable—for both the founder and the team.
In order for your business to grow, you need to stay curious, and not think that you have figured everything out. Africa's respected entrepreneur, Dangote's plan to venture into steel, according to him, stems from the work involved in building his large Refinery, where he and his team discovered the quantity of steel that they required and the length they had to go to make it available to achieve the "9th wonder of the world" - the Dangote Refinery. As we said previously, all you need to do is start, and as you stay curious you will grow - you will build capabilities, competencies and capacity which will lead you to your next stage of growth.
5. "Don’t get too bogged down by the strategy. If you get too tunnel-visioned on the strategy, you’ll miss the opportunities that arise on the periphery. These tend to be the most interesting ones".
Strategy is important—it provides direction and structure—but when it becomes too narrow, it can blind you to opportunities that lie outside the original plan. Some of the most valuable opportunities in business are not the ones you set out to pursue; they are the ones you discover along the way.
There is a delicate balance here. You need enough focus to execute effectively, but enough openness to adapt when new possibilities emerge. Businesses are dynamic by nature, and those who succeed over the long term are often those who can evolve without losing their core.
As attributed to Jeff Bezos, "Be stubborn on the vision, but flexible on the details". While you can be rigid about long-term goals and strategy, be flexible, nimble, and agile in execution, and be humble enough to accept when you need to update the strategy.
In many ways, these five lessons tie back to a simple but powerful idea: business is less about perfection and more about progression. Start before you are ready, build with people at the centre, embrace the lessons from failure, remain curious, and stay flexible enough to recognize opportunity when it appears.
Fifty years is a long time to test ideas in the real world. The fact that these lessons still hold true suggests that while industries may change, the underlying principles of building something meaningful remain remarkably consistent.
Let us round up with a story Richard Branson shared recently:
"When I was 16, I built a business from inside a phone box.
We didn’t have computers, the internet or smartphones. I also didn’t have a network. I didn’t have funding. And to be honest, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing!
All I had was a telephone box, a phone book, and a big idea. I wanted to start a youth culture magazine so young people could better understand what was going on in the world, and have a safe place to learn about topics no-one talked about at the time...
The problem was, no one knew who we were. We had no advertisers, no office, no contributors and certainly no credibility.
At a bit of a loss, I decided to open the phone book and started calling people. I would ring up big companies and ask to speak to the person in charge of advertising. When they answered, I’d do my best to sound far more experienced than I was.
“Are you interested in reaching the most influential young people in Britain?”
“Your competitors are already advertising with us.”
“This is going to be the biggest youth magazine in the country.”
Call by call, rejection by rejection, something started to happen. A few people said yes. Then a few more. I could hardly believe it. Eventually, we had enough advertisers to print the first issue.
That scrappy little magazine went on to interview people like Mick Jagger and John Lennon and it taught me one of the most valuable lessons of my life: You don’t need everything figured out to get started. You just need a bit of tenacity, a lot of self-belief, and the drive to keep the promises you’ve made (especially when they’re a little ambitious!)."
Wishing you all the best in your business. Feel free to share this article within your network.
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