The Sea We Swim In by Frank Rose

Author:Frank Rose [Rose, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

A Global Growth Investor

One contradiction remained. “Our purpose is to change business for good,” the company declares on its website, even as it defines itself more soberly elsewhere on the site as “a global, growth investor” with a portfolio that is “diversified across multiple asset classes and geographies.” Virgin’s early history is replete with hair-raising tales of entrepreneurial derring-do, but Virgin Group today is essentially an investment vehicle that does deals with such top-tier private equity and venture capital firms as Bain Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, and Venrock, founded as the venture arm of the Rockefeller family. As the Financial Times put it, Virgin “most resembles a huge ‘family office’ with a portfolio run by professional investment managers and the profits channelled—via a number of trusts and a network of holding companies—to the Branson family.”

When the FT investigated, in 2014, it found “about 80 businesses” bearing the Virgin name, with combined revenues the previous fiscal year of some £15 billion (about $24 billion at the time). But Virgin Group held direct stakes in fewer than half of them. As with the Trump Organization, many of Virgin’s profits actually come from licensing its name to enterprises it has no other financial interest in. Among these companies are some of the biggest, including Virgin Media, the UK telecoms and mobile provider, and Virgin Mobile in the US, Canada, and Australia. And though Branson was deeply engaged with his start-ups earlier on, he has had minimal involvement since 2005 in anything save Virgin Galactic, his space tourism venture, and Virgin Unite, a nonprofit that aims to address climate change, spur entrepreneurship, and promote the well-being of people and their planet.

Not only are Virgin’s other companies not run by Branson; many of them share little to nothing with one another except the Virgin brand. All this makes the personality traits that determine Virgin’s voice more important than ever, since those are the attributes Virgin is licensing—not simply the name but what the name represents: the idea of doing well while doing good, not to mention smart disruption, boundless enthusiasm, defying expectations, and delivering experiences that are “red-hot.”

Various constituent parts of Virgin Group have done their own version of the “Virgin Way” study. One is Virgin Media, the Internet and mobile services provider formed in the 2006 merger of two cable and broadband companies with Virgin Mobile, which Branson had launched several years before. Branson was a major shareholder of Virgin Media, having sold Virgin Mobile to it for close to £1 billion ($1.75 billion) in cash and stock. Then, in 2013, it was bought by Liberty Global, a multinational telecom provider headed by John Malone, the US cable billionaire, in a £15 billion ($23.3 billion) deal. Branson was no longer involved, though Liberty Global continued to license the Virgin name. Meanwhile, Virgin Media was working with a London consultancy called Engine Service Design on an initiative they dubbed Voice of Our Brand.

Few customers like their telecom providers. You might think that’s because telecom services tend to go out all the time.

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