David: Holly, you trained to be a doctor. Why did you join the business?

Holly: I qualified as a doctor. I worked in the U.K. for a bit. And then in the U.K., you get randomly allocated your jobs when you’re a junior doctor. The first year, I got a great job that I was really passionate about. And then the second year, I got allocated predominately surgery. And I knew I didn’t want to be a surgeon. I’m just not that into cutting people open.

So I went to Mom and Dad. He said, “Why don’t you take a year off and go work at Virgin?” I never ever thought I’d be working in the family business, but it was a great opportunity. So I thought, “OK, I’ll do that for the year, and then I’ll go back to medicine.” Now I’ve been at Virgin for 10 years.

Richard: You don’t automatically assume that your child is going to come into the company. If one of them ended up wanting to come and work with this, obviously that’s lovely. But the key thing was that they found what they wanted to do in life. It’s great that Holly, from the company’s point of view, and from the 80,000 people who work for it, is becoming a figurehead. I’m not going to be able to be the figurehead forever.

David: Is that a formal announcement of succession planning?

Richard: No. I don’t think I’ll ever retire.

David: Richard, you’ve had hits and misses. What differentiates Virgin Music and Virgin Atlantic from Virgin Cola and Virgin Clothing?

Richard: The businesses that we’ve been successful at are the ones where we have made a radical difference in people’s lives. The businesses that have not been as successful have been the ones where it was fun doing it, but we weren’t really changing anything.

When Coke came down like a ton of bricks on Virgin Cola, we had a fun brand, but they could squash us. When British Airways came down with a ton of bricks on Virgin Atlantic, we were so much better than they were. The public stuck with us and were loyal to us, despite the fact that we only had one plane against their 300 planes. Thirty-five years later, Virgin Atlantic is still going strong.