
“The best bit of advice I think I can give to any manager of a company is find somebody better than yourself to do the day-to-day running,” Branson tells Business Insider. “And then free yourself up to think about the bigger picture. By freeing myself up, I’ve been able to dream big and move Virgin forward into lots of different areas. And it’s made for a fascinating life.”
It’s a strategy he repeated in 1984 when he went into the airline business with Virgin Atlantic. He was only able to convince his business partners at Virgin Records to agree to the deal after he got Boeing to agree to take back Virgin’s one 747 jet after a year if the business wasn’t operating as planned.