Sir Richard Branson Has Always Believed in Working From Home

You’ll hear a number of fascinating anecdotes during an hour-long chat with Sir Richard Branson. During his recent visit to Dallas, where he and the Virgin team chose to launch their entrepreneur-focused RM72 event series, the famous billionaire shared the tale of his airlines’ first champagne-fueled flight across the Atlantic, discovering Sarah Blakely (founder of Spanx) on his 2004 Fox reality TV series “The Rebel Billionaire,” and how he his many world record attempts doubled as brand marketing in a pre-internet world. But perhaps his most universal career advice landed at the tail end of the panel, when a young Dallas entrepreneur asked about work-life balance. “For years, I’ve been pushing that people should really consider working from home,” Branson said. “It worked for me.”

For many, it’s difficult to remember a time when working from home was a privilege few were afforded. But for Branson, it was always baked into his entrepreneurial ethos.

“I lived on a houseboat and I learned the importance of delegation early on,” Branson told a rapt crow. “I found someone to run the record company day-to-day, and then I would move from the office back to the houseboat. My kids were literally crawling around while I was on the phone. I might change a nappy while having a meeting.”

Branson went on to explain that, when launching one of Virgin’s many new ventures, such as Virgin Mobile or Virgin Atlantic Airways, he would immerse himself in the office for a couple of months, then hand the business over to someone whom he believed could run the day-to-day operations better than himself.

“It was not only good for myself and my family, but it was also really good for the individual companies,” the humanitarian noted. “I could think about the bigger picture when there were problems, and we had a great team in place to actually run the companies.”

Of course, the pandemic has led to a major increase in remote workers. In Texas, remote employees accounted for about 16% of the state’s workforce in 2022. (Austin in particular is one of the nation’s top hubs for remote work, just under Boulder, Colorado, according to Axios.) However, in a new survey by professors at Stanford, MIT, Princeton, and more, nearly 50% of respondents reported working from home at least once a week since 2020.

Ultimately, Branson believes companies should be flexible.

“For some people, working from home works really well,” Branson says. “For some people, especially younger people, they might need the camaraderie and feedback of an office to learn from. Whatever is best for the individual is best for the company.”

Dallas Is a City of Entrepreneurs

Branson’s bullish attitude toward business (“screw it let’s do it” is the billionaire’s motto) was well received by the invited crowd of predominately young Dallas entrepreneurs, which included Mizzen+Main founder Kevin Lavelle, who is currently raising capital for his new venture Harbor, a pediatric telehealth company that seeks to democratizes access to sleep expertise. The evening’s moderator, Liz Tsai, represented what HN Capital’s Vipin Nambiar (who organized the event) called “everything you read in the paper about Dallas”: a young tech entrepreneur who moved her company, HiOperator, from San Francisco to Dallas post-pandemic.

Looking around the slick ballroom of Virgin Hotels Dallas, it made sense why Branson and his team would decide to kick off their RM72 series in Dallas out of all the cities that boast one of the brand’s hotels. “Dallas is a city of entrepreneurs,” Virgin Hotels CEO James Bermingham noted at the top of the show.

A Few More Pearls of Wisdom from Richard Branson

“A CV is so misleading. We have a policy at Virgin not to look into a CV beyond university. I think it’s almost wrong for companies to be asking for exam results. For most jobs, they’re not a judge of capability at all.”

“There’s not much difference between an entrepreneur and an adventurer. Both have to protect the downside.”

“Delegation is crucial. When you delegate, you also have time to get fit and healthy… I can’t overemphasize the importance of that.”