Sir Richard Branson: My most notable failure | Trending Now

0:00Hey Chicago, class it up with Crocs. You know back to school is coming in fast. So why wait to find your new fave footwear? Step into a local Crocs store and step into your new look. Try it. Style it. Make it yours. Because the right pair doesn't just show up, it shows off. First day fits, handled. Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest Crocs store today. Hey guys, Graham here. It's Friday, which means we get to share with you another one of our most popular clips from a past interview. This week, Sir Richard Branson. This trending clip comes from our TikTok. Hope you enjoy. What would you say has been your biggest failure over the years and what do you think you most learned from it?

0:50I suspect the most notable failure has been not knocking Coca-Cola off their pedestal. Virgin Cola? Virgin Cola. We had a good try for a year or two. It looked like we were going to take Coke for everything they had. We were out selling them in Britain, in all the retailers that we were stocked. And we were out selling Pepsi. I then got a bit too big for my boots, and I arrived in Times Square with a Sherman tank from Britain. I crushed all these Coca-Cola and Pepsi cans. Cola was flying everywhere. And I then turned our Sherman Tanks turret onto the Coca-Cola sign in the middle of Times Square.

1:37Anyway, Coke didn't take that too kindly. And the next day in Atlanta headquarters, they got bagfuls of suitcases of money. They got a DC-10 on the runway at Atlanta. They filled it with squat teams. They arrived in England and retailers suddenly became very wealthy. And all our Virgin Cola disappeared off the shelves. And they basically kneecapped us. For real? Kneecapped us. I mean, it was that quick? No, they kneecapped us very systematically. And we did not know this was going on. I mean, I would ring up Tesco's and say, what are you doing? You've taken Virgin Cola off all the shelves. and they would say, I don't know, they would come up with some excuse.

2:23So it wasn't until about a year later that a lady arrived who announced to me that she was the new manager of Virgin Group at Lloyd's Bank and we went out to dinner and it turned out that she was the lady at Coke at the time who'd been in charge of the kneecapping exercise and now she was my bank manager and I wasn't sure whether to strangle her or not. You said before, real leaders see opportunities where others only see challenges. Explain that. I look at everything as an opportunity. So, you know, I'm positive about life generally. And I generally feel that you can find ways of solving problems and making things work.

3:08And, you know, I'm definitely a sort of glass, you know, nearly full kind of person rather than a glass half full. So, you know, I think out of being just a generally positive person, you can make positive things happen. What do you think about during your decision-making process? So if I come up with an idea for a new business, I don't bring in accounting firms to cost analyze it. You know, because one accounting firm will say it's a good idea and another accounting firm will say it's a bad idea. So if I, for instance, had brought in an accounting firm to say, will Virgin Atlantic work when we started the airline, I'm sure they would have said no way.

3:54But what I knew was if I could create the kind of airline I'd want to fly on that was exceptionally better than any other airline flying, that it was likely that more money would come in in the year and I'd have money left over at the end of the year. and that turned out to be the case because people loved Virgin Atlantic. They went out of their way to fly it. The planes were full and at the end of the year, we ended up getting our second 747 and the end of the next year, our third and fourth 747 and so it grew. So my whole attitude to life is if you create a new business that's the best in its field, it's likely to survive.

4:37When we took on Coca-Cola, a can of cola, virgin cola, and a can of coke, you know, ours may taste a little bit better than theirs, but we're not exceptionally better, and therefore it was easy for them to, you know, just their share might and their share market dominance, they could put us out of business, but when you've got British Airways versus Virgin Atlantic, when they tried to put us out of business, Virgin Atlantic was a much better airline, so, you know, people didn't desert us in droves. And that's this week's fan favorite. To see more popular videos, go to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash Graham Bensinger.