Business Stripped Bare Read Free Page B

you find Business Stripped Bare a useful read. My experiences may even shake up your ideas about what business is. They've certainly shaken up mine.

1
People

Find Good People – Set Them Free

'Mr Richard! Mr Richard! Do you have a minute, please?'

I was visiting Ulusaba, our private game reserve, close to the stunning Kruger National Park in South Africa. It's an enchanting piece of bush and, thanks to Karl and Llane Langdon, a well-managed one. The previous owners had planned to fence it in – all 2,060 hectares of it – to protect the local wildlife from poachers. We decided, on the contrary, to take the advice of our rangers, and have allowed our leopards, lions, elephants, cheetahs and rhinos to move and migrate freely between our land and the neighbouring Kruger.

The reserve had cost me nearly $6 million in 1999 – a testament to the salesmanship of the South African president, Nelson Mandela, who persuaded me to keep faith with his homeland. Even when times have been hard for the Virgin Group and I needed liquid cash, I could never bring myself to sell it.

'Mr Richard!'

I stopped and turned round and stood there, dazzled by one of the most winning smiles I've seen in my life.

'Mr Richard.' It was a woman from the village, dressed in a KwaZulu gown of bright reds and yellows. 'I've heard you are a very generous man. Can you lend me money to buy a sewing machine?'

At this time Virgin Unite, our charitable foundation, was busy at work in the villages in and around the reserve. The villagers had been walking a long way to Sand River for water that was not particularly safe to drink. So the foundation had sunk boreholes to provide the villagers with a nearby source of clean water. It taught skills, helped with the school and built a medical clinic. It created play areas for kids, and huts from which the villagers could sell their goods to tourists.

The tourists were our business too. For nearly ten years, Ulusaba has been a magical place, especially loved by people who come here to rent our upmarket lodges, one perched on the summit of a granite outcrop with stunning eagle-eye views across the bush, the other a tree house overlooking the Mabrak riverbed, where many animals come to drink and frolic.

I've been asked for money hundreds of times over the last thirty years, but rarely with such directness. You've heard of the elevator pitch? This was the elephant-pool pitch.

She told me she was a talented seamstress but that she needed cash to buy a sewing machine to get her business going.

'So how much do you need?'

'Three hundred dollars would be enough,' she explained. 'And, what is more, I'll repay it within three months and employ six people full-time.' The woman's determination and ambition were fantastic. So was her focus: she knew exactly what she wanted, and why. She got her $300.

And as I walked away I said to myself: That's money I'll probably never see again.

I wasn't being cynical. I simply had experience of how the odds were stacked. At Ulusaba – which means 'place of little fear' – I had come to know many local people who were working on the game reserve and looking after our visitors. And believe me, they have big fears. Malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/Aids stalk their daily lives.

Three months later I was invited back to the village to open some of the community projects supported by Virgin Unite, including crèches, orphans' homes and an Aids-awareness clinic. When I got there, six women came up to me, and gave me a gift of the most exquisite cotton pillows and tribal clothes which they had made. And, to complete my surprise, they returned the $300.

But where was the original entrepreneurial seamstress? I asked.

'Mr Richard, she is so sorry she can't be here personally to see you. She is off to the market selling the products,' they told me.

I've thought of her often since that day: a confident, direct, intelligent woman, using a sewing machine to better her own and others' lives. Never