Sir Richard Branson came to the Virgin Islands to see about a girl in 1976 and ended up starting an airplane service.
While en route to the territory, Sir Richard and other passengers were bumped off the flight and told they’d have to overnight in San Juan. That’s when the entrepreneur chartered a 40-seat plane and wandered around the airport a blackboard inscribed with the words “Virgin Airlines: $39 one way to the BVI,” he said.
“Well, I had a lady waiting for me in the BVI, and I was damned if I wasn’t going to see her that very night,” he said.
His Virgin Group now controls several dozen companies ranging from telecommunications and airlines to tourism and space travel.
Addressing attendees at the BVI Business Outlook 2012 conference at Scrub Island Resort yesterday, Sir Richard told a crowd of more than 100 of the territory’s business and community leaders how he would prepare for global opportunities if he ran the VI like it was one of his companies.
The conference, which was created by Russell Harrigan, the publisher of Business BVI magazine and this newspaper, was organised under the theme “Preparing for a New Global Opportunity.”
The annual conference, first hosted last year, includes speeches and panel discussions about the future and current state of the territory’s main economic pillars: financial services and tourism.
Premier Dr. Orlando Smith spoke of his plans to “re-energise” the economy, and said that his administration aims to create an “enabling environment” for business.
While he aims to diversify the VI’s economic base, he said that tourism also needs to be strengthened. A stigma needs to be corrected, Dr. Smith added, so that young people realise that “service is not servitude.”
Additionally, improving the territory’s educational system is key to improving the VI’s financial services sector, he said.
“During my meeting with the financial services industry I became disturbingly aware that our high school graduates are inadequately prepared to continue in meaningful positions in the financial services community,” he said.
Mr. Harrigan said he wants the conference to be a forum for open discussion about issues facing the business community and the VI as a whole.
“One of the things we try to do with this conference is to try and encourage people to speak, and speak frankly,” Mr. Harrigan said. “ Sometimes – I’m a citizen – I don’t like some of the things people say, but it’s also very sobering to sit and to listen.”
Sir Richard, the conference’s keynote speaker, said that to position the VI for future opportunities he would safeguard the territory’s tourism industry, which he believes is in danger.
“It is not tourism, per se, that is our greatest asset. It is the environment that is our greatest asset,” Sir Richard said. The economic implications of environmental degradation, he added, are “absolutely massive and could kill off the BVI’s most secure source of income.”
Sir Richard also gave examples of what he sees as a lack of necessary infrastructure, including bad roads and a lack of sewage pump-out stations for yachts “so people literally have to swim in their own feces.”
He added that he has spoken to hotel and restaurant owners who are often dissuaded from investing in the VI due to the territory’s restrictive immigration and labour policies.
“They all agree the current system rules set by immigration and labour treated them all like children. An incorporated company should not treat its customers that way,” he said.
The billionaire also suggested that VI policymakers change laws to treat marijuana possession as a health issue rather than a crime.
“Serious consideration should be taken to decide whether to regulate and tax marijuana alongside cigarettes and alcohol,” he said. “For many it is their drug of choice and users cause a lot less harm to others, and actually themselves, than those who use alcohol and cigarettes excessively.”