I’ve been home a week now and the strangest thing keeps coming back to me.
Richard’s house on Necker had no locks.
And you’re probably thinking, well, who’s going to swim over and burgle him. That’s not what I mean. He hosts people on his island all year round, and not a single door has a lock.
Not his office, not his bedroom, nothing. You can walk through the whole place and nobody stops you. In fact, some of us were literally sleeping in his house that week, a few rooms down from his bedroom.
It says I trust you. And that's a strange thing to see from someone who's built one of the most recognisable brands in the world and had some proper tough times along the way. He had every reason to lock things down and he chose not to.
That sentiment ran through the whole week. He did his talk because it was on the schedule, but what he really lit up about was looking after people, the planet, and getting up to dance.
When people went for selfies, he’d rather photobomb them. He’s a man of few words, but the way he carries himself, calm, having fun with it, says more than most speeches.
What I’ve found, from the founders I’ve worked with and from my own experience is that, the further we get, the more we tend to want to protect. More process, more barriers. And I think a lot of the time that’s fear dressed up as being professional.
I was 21, living in Oxford, and Richard had his estate at Kidlington, a couple of miles up the road. My mate and I drove past one night, saw a stage rig and heard music over the wall. So we went home, put suits on, parked his Peugeot 206 in a field and walked straight past security into a Virgin Money party.
We ended up backstage, and out came Richard. He thought we were staff. He walked us round for a quarter of an hour before he asked which part of Virgin Money we worked for. We told him the truth. He stopped, looked at us, and said, just be respectful. Then he carried on walking, took us down to the bonfire and introduced us to people.
I think about that a lot now. He could have had us walked out. He chose to trust two lads who'd chanced it. Twenty years on I was sat at his poker table on his island, and I'm immensely grateful for that. I don't think it's a coincidence either.
I met a lot of people on that trip doing things not a million miles away from what I do. Listening to them, it was obvious the models I was running had been restrictive. I’d been scaling in a way that kept the businesses small.
I’d been doing what a lot of us founders do. Build the thing, then build the walls around it. Protect it so hard that it can’t grow. I came home with two or three out-of-the-box ideas that could take Unusual a long way further. And they all came from listening in a room, I initially felt like I didn’t belong in.
Writing a book is the most open I’ve ever had to be. There’s no wool to pull over anyone’s eyes. The calls I got wrong, the bits I’d rather have kept to myself, they’re all in there. The useful version of my story doesn’t exist without them.
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Continuing on my crusade to be more open,
- Luke
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