Beyond Boundaries: Virgin Atlantic’s Four-Decade Flight With Oliver Byers

Virgin Atlantic rose from a maverick challenging the transatlantic market with a fun, friendly experience to a global airline. Jack McCullough spoke with CFO Oliver Byers for the most recent episode of Secrets of Rockstar CFOs to recount Virgin Atlantic’s trajectory. Founded in 1984 by Richard Branson, the airline started with a London to New York flight, aiming to transform the air travel experience.

Byers shares insights into the airline’s strategic evolution, its commitment to delivering exceptional customer experiences and how Virgin Atlantic continues to redefine air travel, blending innovation with a customer-first ethos. Listen by clicking below. The Q&A, lightly trimmed and edited for clarity, follows.

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Introduction

We have a great guest today, and I’m excited to introduce Oli Byers. Oli is the CFO of Virgin Atlantic. Oli, welcome to the show.

Thank you. It’s great to be here and to have a conversation with you about this. I’m very excited. 

We were excited when we heard from your comms team about your potentially being on this show or speaking at a conference. The conference didn’t work out, but we’ll get you one day. I’m happy to have you here. Virgin Atlantic is pretty well-known. Certainly, the Virgin Empire generally is known, but tell us a little bit, a 10,000-foot view of what Virgin Atlantic is all about. 

Virgin Atlantic is an airline based in the UK and London. We started in 1984, and our Founder, Sir Richard Branson, started the airline with the first flight going from London to New York. The purpose was to revolutionize air travel. It was, I think he was very frustrated at the time with the experiences he’d had and saw a real opportunity to improve a customer’s experience of air travel. Being an incredible entrepreneur, he decided to take up that challenge and started an airline. 2024 is our 40th birthday. It’s a big year for us and as well as celebrating that we’re now an airline that will carry about six million passengers. We’ve got about 8,500 people in the company. 

We have revenue of about £3.5 billion a year. Just before the pandemic, we were a founding member of what is a $17 billion joint venture with Delta Airlines, Air France and KLM in Europe. Having gone from the very humble beginning of one aircraft, one 747 back in 1984, we see ourselves now as a global network based in London. What’s different about us is that we think of ourselves as offering a unique customer experience.

What drives the company?

It’s that ethos of Sir Richard Branson and the Virgin brand at the beginning, whether that’s with the flight, the onboard experience, the food, the in-flight entertainment, but brought to life with our people, and it’s our people that make the difference. Whether that’s the fantastic cabin crew that we have on board and our pilots all the way through to our engineering team or our enabling teams back in the office, it’s consistent throughout. It’s how we try and differentiate that customer’s experience. 

I’ve only had the pleasure of flying on the airline once, but it stuck out. I flew to London a few years ago. My colleague, I went with the VP of marketing, Kristen Todd, and she dropped her laptop and all of her papers flew out. Three people from Virgin came over to help her, and she ended up getting a first-class upgrade. I’m like, “I’m going to intentionally drop stuff next time I fly.” 

It’s interesting because when we fly a lot and when you go and talk to our customers, a lot of our customers don’t fly that frequently. Flying can be a stressful experience for them. What we think our people do, which goes above and beyond and we see other airlines do, is they try to make it as easy an experience for people as possible. When things go wrong, they try to fix them, to make the customers feel great about that, even from the small touches of how they smile at customers, how they greet you, when you get onboard the aircraft, it is a unique experience. I’d say that being with the airline now for a long time, but even being a customer beforehand, you notice it. It’s an incredible company from that perspective to be a part of.

It’s such a good idea because most people, even people who fly a lot, find it a little intimidating. They’re going through security, standing in lines and whatnot. Why not at least be nice to your customers doing that when they’re going through some trauma there, but that’s pretty cool. The companies, I understand it’s owned by Delta Airlines and Sir Richard Branson himself. What’s that like?

We’re a private company in the UK. We’re 51 percent owned by Virgin Group, Richard Branson, then we’re 49 percent owned by Delta Airlines. Delta came in and bought 49 percent of the company many years ago. It’s been an incredible partnership to build with them, both as an owner, but also commercially as a partner in a joint venture. I have to say that they’re an incredibly well-run organization from the top of their senior management team and down.

What they’ve equally accomplished as an airline over the past decade is pretty incredible. It’s been a fantastic partnership to build with them. We have very similar cultural similarities. We have very similar ethics behind our brands. We see a real synergy between the companies from that perspective, which I think when you come to difficult decisions in management from the boardroom, having those alignments makes it a lot simpler. It’s been a privilege and a pleasure to work with that team. 

Oliver’s Background

I want to talk about you a little bit before we get into some of the inner workings of Virgin. Where did you grow up? 

I grew up in the north of England in a small town called Chorley, which is outside Manchester. Manchester in the Northwest of the UK.

I thought for sure you were from Texas. Did you have a big family, a lot of brothers and sisters?

I have one brother who’s two years younger than I am. I have two half-sisters as well who are quite a lot younger than me now. They’re 17 and 18, right on the verge of university and coming out of school. … It’s quite a unique experience to be around. 

That must be a lot of fun to still have sisters only in your case, but who are younger than you. It keeps you cool.

It makes me absolutely aware of how not cool I am, but it’s great to be a part of.

It’s great to know that because it’s easy to get caught up in your career. It’s good to have the family to keep you grounded. One thing I found interesting in your background, you studied aeronautical engineering in college, and now you’re a CFO. I’ve interviewed CFOs in my day. That’s a first. What can you tell me why you choose engineering and how does that prepare you for a career in finance? 

Back in my teens when I was at school, I loved math and sciences. At that point, I hadn’t had much exposure to engineering. I didn’t like many of the other subjects, but that was what I focused on. What I discovered towards the end of my time when I was 17 or 18 was we offered a course that was around computer programming, engineering and electronics. It was the application of the theory of science and of maths. I found it incredibly stimulating. It was one of those times when you get into a real flow state when you can go for hours working on particular problems and trying to solve problems. 

It attracted me to engineering and science. When I applied for university, at the time, I wanted to do something difficult, hard and something that would challenge me. I felt that aeronautical engineering would be a great challenge, and it was. I enjoyed doing that and spent four years at Durham University in Northern England studying that. What then took me on to end up being a CFO?

The first choice was towards the end of my course. I was lucky enough to do two internships in part of my final two years. The summers in between the courses. One was at UBS and in investment banking, and the other was at Grant Thornton in corporate finance. What was demonstrated to me and highlighted to me is an application of the mass and the numbers and my understanding of that, but it got me interested in business. I did it at the time to get work experience and to try and understand what it was like. I enjoyed it. The choice then was that when you get to the end of your degree, if it’s a science-based degree, do you make the choice to continue down that path in either industry or academia, or you pivot and do you look at business and go down that route? I went down that route. That was the choice at the time. It felt like a natural choice given what I’d enjoyed in the summers and then I didn’t look back from that. I joined UBS in the summer of 2008. 

It makes a lot of sense. When I got my master’s degree, there were a lot of engineers in the program with me. They were very natural to take finance types of jobs or to work on Wall Street or something. A lot of things that the rest of us found hard, they found it easy. I graduated in ‘97 and to this day, I still hate all of them for that. I’ll get over it someday, but probably not until I retire. You’ve had quite a run at Virgin. You left UBS and within the Virgin family in a few different companies for about 14 years. Take us through that journey a little bit. Clearly, you made a great choice to join the company.

I would maybe start a little bit before that because when I think back about the way I think about Virgin, how it appealed to me and why 14 years at Virgin and 10 years at Virgin Atlantic, I’m still in love with what we do here. My very first job was when I was 17. I started working in a Starbucks. At the time, I was trading off studying. I was wanting to get out there, get a job and get some real-world experience from that standpoint. I got it through harassing the team there. I spent too much time in that coffee shop, stood around and tried to talk to them a lot. 

When they finally had an availability for a role that came up, I went for it. This was back in 2001. Starbucks at that time was in the UK. It only started in 1998. We saw it as a cool place to hang out. It seemed like a cool place to try and work. I went for that. What I learned from that, and that has come through into Virgin, is that at the beginning, the first job that I thought was the cool job to do was to make the coffee. It was interesting. You look at it, you see people, you think, “That could be quite good fun.” After being there for two years, I realized it wasn’t the most important job, and the best jobs there were two things. 

It was the job of cleaning, making sure you’re creating an environment for customers that they want to be in. You see customers when they come in and it’s tidy, it’s clean and it is an inviting place to be. You want to create more of an experience than just going for a coffee. The other one was being on the till and people used to hate being on the till. It used to be that people didn’t want to stand there and take orders from people. I saw it differently because it’s the first time you get to have a moment where you can say hello to a customer and you can greet them.

When you greet them, and you do it in a way that invites them in, it changes their perception of just not that experience where they’re going to sit and what they’re going to drink, but it creates a warm and encouraging environment for them to be in. Those are the two jobs by the end of it that I most loved. When I think now about what we do at Virgin and how we try and welcome our customers, how we think about the environment we create and the importance of that as well as the fact we’re getting them from A to B.

I feel like I almost know what I do, and having thought back some of the origins of why I see how we do and how I relate to it starting from back then. Having done that and going through university, I started at UBS. At the time, it was back in 2008, I took that job in 2007. It was a pretty interesting time to start working in an investment bank. It was probably one of the most unique and best times to join because while the world was imploding through the growing global financial crisis around us, we were as busy as they’d ever been. At the same time, going through difficult times in terms of the numbers and the teams and the redundancies that were going on.

I was partly lucky enough to get through that, make it through that, lucky enough that I picked the right bank to join because that was to some extent, naiveté at the time of knowing, when you’re coming out joining a graduate program, there’s a lot out there. Not everyone made it. I was lucky from that perspective, but what it taught me was it taught me a real ethic around resilience and a work ethic.

That’s what you expect to get when you go into a harsh environment like that. Doing that in the global financial crisis exponentially made that more difficult. I took an awful lot from that. We talk about resilience from what I bring and how I think about my role, but that was where I learned that. It brings you a financial rigor in how you think about analysis, how you think about companies, how you think about industrial logic whether it’s transactions, mergers, equity, capital raises and anything that has to do with corporate finance 101. You learn it there, and it’s a great way to bring that together. 

It is interesting for some people that you’ve mentioned your first jobs at Starbucks and probably without the master plan, when I think of two companies that are notoriously dedicated to their customers, Starbucks would certainly be right up there. You were 16 or 17 at the time.

I was 16 or 17 when I started working there. The other thing that taught me after working there for about two years, I had a stint right at the end where I was running the store before leaving for university then you get real exposure to running a P&L and how you see the direct relationship between the customer experience that you’re bringing, the products that you’re selling, the return customers, how you increase the frequency and the number of those and you recognize that they’re coming into your store every day and the direct link between that, driving revenue and driving performance as well an early introduction to inventory management and how to keep that right and make sure you’ve got the right products on the shelves all day. It was a phenomenal experience at that point in time. 

Learnings And Mentorship

My niece has worked at Starbucks as a barista and she had a good experience like you to the point she’s a college student and she wants to keep working there rather than do something in her field because it’s such a great experience for her. When I hear you talk about how it was for you, I don’t know that she’s wrong. She loves working there, loves the customers, loves the coworkers, loves the culture. It’s remarkable how that can have an impact on you. All of these things prepared you for Virgin. You’ve had a heck of a run there. Tell us a little about what you’ve learned, how you’ve grown professionally and those sorts of things. 

I spent more than two and a half years at UBS before joining Virgin. Originally, I joined the Virgin Group and was part of the team that looked across Richard’s investments globally. I had a focus on airline investments. Back at the time, I owned 51 percent of Virgin Atlantic and had ownership stakes in Virgin America and Virgin Australia. Given the global distribution of those businesses, I was more focused on the airlines, Virgin Atlantic and Virgin America. What struck me most on day one was that I’d gone from working in an enormous investment bank. When I joined, I was 1 of about 200 on a graduate program to a team where I was 1 of 4. 

What you get there from a straight shift in understanding the accountability that you have and the impact that you can have as an individual. That’s almost from an entrepreneurial perspective of what Richard’s been about. You get that immediate long day. I would also say that the same way I’ll talk about Virgin Atlantic in a minute, it’s a company that’s purpose-driven and the people that join it are purpose-driven. The environment, the ethos you’re working in is a place that if you’re aligned to that you can thrive. I spent a couple of years there with them towards the end of my time at Virgin Group, I spent quite a lot of time out in California working with Virgin America. This is pre-IPO and subsequent purchase from Alaska. 

That was probably the first time I got actively involved in a business. The great thing about the Virgin Group is it gives you the opportunity to both work at it from an investment management perspective and to get actively involved in businesses. I spent a lot of time in San Francisco with Virgin America, helping them get ready for that. That was my first taste of being in a business. I joined Virgin Atlantic in early 2013. We’d gone through quite a radical shift there where Delta had bought a 49 percent stake in the company. We had a new CEO start at the time. I went in having come off the back of the work I’d been doing in the States as his chief of staff to help him establish the company, understand the strategy and think about where we were going to take the company next. 

That was the beginning. I’ve had an amazing career there. I feel like I spent up until September 2020, a lot of experience across and a number of roles across the commercial side of the business——leading the revenue management organization, leading our global sales teams, leading our loyalty program. We’ve since emerged and built that as a business, leading that for a period, and bringing me up to the beginning of the pandemic and then what we’ve done since. 

What it’s brought me is particularly, I’ve always had an interest in a passion in aviation. I think that’s how I ended up at Virgin in Italy and then at Virgin Atlantic. What you learn from working across the commercial landscape there in terms of the inner workings of business and the commercial aspects of a business and how the decisions we’re making every day optimize that. I think it allows me as a CFO to behave and act differently to focus on how to support them and support the business in a different way. It’s been an invaluable experience up until I took this role in September ’20.

I noticed you referred to Sir Richard Branson as Richard. Do you want a first-name basis with him or does everyone do that? He’s one of those people, at least to an American, he has an aura that few CEOs or business people would have. 

I wouldn’t go as far as saying on a first-name basis. I work with him and help him. He helps drive us hard in terms of how we build our business and make our version better. 

One thing I always like to ask, and working with this company, is whether you’ve probably had some influential mentors along the way; with all the talent you’ve come across working for this empire, who are some that stand out, and what have you learned from them? 

I’ll give you three. I think the first person that I would call out would be Richard. I think this was luck or timing, but before I joined Virgin back in 2013, I read his book for the first time on a holiday about three months beforehand. It was the first real experience I’d had an understanding of what it was to be an entrepreneur, his history, the story and what it meant. There was an allure of that to the company and to understand it and then when I heard about the role and the opportunity to join, it drove me to probably jump, to take the leap and move from what was a clear career path in investment banking to go to something that was very different. 

Without that, I can remember several moments over the last many years where we as a company have been very focused on major strategic priorities and big decisions. He’s got an ability and clarity to focus on what matters for customers in the moment. He’s got a sense of where that’s right and where that’s wrong and drives you to focus where it matters. As you’d expect from someone of his success, he has a broad understanding of business and its context and strategically, where we should be and how we should be successful. Even down to the minute details.

It keeps your understanding of the customer focused on that. The two others I’ll call out for you. I’ve now worked with our CEO. We’ve worked together for many years. We worked together at the Virgin Group before I came into the airline in 2013. He joined in 2014. He’s an incredible leader who combines absolute willpower and commitment with a force of nature, but brings together a real action orientation and together with strategic acumen, and business acumen, which is quite a unique combination. 

He’s the CEO of Virgin. 

Shai Weiss is the CEO of Virgin Atlantic. We’ve become very good friends. He’s been an incredible mentor to me, supported me and has pushed me out of my comfort zone a number of times into roles that I’ve taken on and got me to where I am now. The third one is Delta. The leadership team at Delta led by Ed Bastian, who is their CEO, they’re an incredible team. I think you would rightly see them being referred and being called out as one of the best, if not the best, leadership team in aviation. The success they have as an airline, we learn from that every day. 

It’s incredible to be both a partner of theirs and to have been on the journey alongside them as they’ve built that brand and built that business into what it is now. It’s been incredible. They push us. We learned an awful lot from them as to how to run a great airline. The three of those, if I think about over the last many years and what we’re building and where we’re now and how we think about the Virgin landscape going forward, have been critical in shaping me over that decade. 

Financial Strategy

I want to ask you a few questions about your own role at Virgin. One of the first ones, you don’t have a traditional accounting-type background. You’re a strategic financial engineer, but how do you approach financial strategy and planning at Virgin to ensure growth and stability? The airline had its hits in the last many years.

I’d start by saying I took the role of CFO in September 2020. We were at the early stages of the pandemic. At the time, we did expect that, and I think everyone thought that, we’d get through that pandemic sooner and faster than we did. We were planning at the beginning on being able to emerge in early 2021. It took a lot longer to get fully through it, but having not come from a financial background or a traditional CFO background, the way I approach the role is to think of it as how I can enable the business to reach this potential. We hire phenomenal people, whether it’s our commercial teams, our marketing teams, or our frontline teams, and what can I do to enable them to deliver for the business.

I would contrast that to if you think of a traditional controller gatekeeper type function versus an enabling function, that’s the ethos I bring to it. It is how we build our team and the way we think about what we do. When we break that down, there are three things we think about. I often think about, “How can we make better decisions every day? How do we as a finance team enable our business to make better decisions? How do we make sure we have the right priorities and that we can accelerate those that matter most? How do we continuously improve and challenge the business to do better?” We can only do those things if we have a solid foundation from a control and a compliance perspective. 

Having come from a non-traditional background, and I’m not a trained accountant, what we’ve had to do and what I’ve had to do early on is make sure that I have the right team. You don’t outsource that accountability. You don’t pass that on because you’re still absolutely accountable. You have to make sure you have the right disciplines and expertise to build that foundation, and it is solid. I was focused on that very early on. I’ve been blessed that I have a phenomenal team and that, over time, we’re building that skill and that capability.

You also have to make sure you lean in. You have to to ask the difficult questions. You have to not be afraid of not understanding an accounting policy, but you have to understand the ones that matter most, where the most risk is, the ones that are most material to you, and you have to to get underneath it and understand it. That is a foundation. That comes as a given. Then, beyond them, the way I think about making better decisions, I break it down to say, “Everyone comes into the office every day; they come into work and they want to make the right choice. No one, I think, comes into work to make a bad choice. Some people may on occasion.”

I do, just to be different.

You want to come in and you want to do the right thing. At the same time, as a senior team, you only want to be making the 50/50 calls. If it’s an easy call to make, if it’s not a 50/50 call, you should empower your teams to make it. You need to figure out what’s getting in the way of that. How can you continuously make that an easier process for your people? As a CFO, what that means is providing better insight to people. It’s making sure we have the right data, we have the right financial understanding, but providing the right tools and the right skills to people to be able to do that. 

We’ve spent a lot of time, not in the immediacy of the pandemic, but since then, on how we’re building that capability as an organization. We’re pushing that down into the teams across the company. Being able to empower people to make those decisions more, making sure we’re setting the right priorities and we’re accelerating the right ones. 

I think that all comes back to making sure that we have our annual plans as a business or are aligned to the strategic goals that we set. That’s not about financial plans. It’s the business plan. The financial plan is an output from that. The way we think about it and, and I talk about it with the team, is we’re not focused on the financial outputs. The financial outputs are the P&Ls. It’s the metrics we look at. We’re focused much more on the financial inputs and the input metrics that are ahead of that. How do we make sure we understand the right ones, the ones that have the most material impact on our business, and then how are we making sure we’re focusing, prioritizing those and figuring out how to improve, what investment needs from a capital perspective, from a people perspective, and how do we get the right allocation of that? 

That’s how I see that. And then making sure that we’re continuously reviewing performance. I say to the team, we’re quite downstream from a lot of what happens in the business, but we need to make sure we’re making upstream decisions that our people can impact. Making sure we have the right discipline in the review process, but we’re not challenging it from the perspective of trying to figure out what’s gone wrong. We’re trying to challenge it from, how do we make ourselves better and how do we empower people to make the business better? That’s how I think about it. I’ve got a background from a commercial perspective, which means I understand commercially what we are aiming for and figured out how we as a finance team can unlock some of that performance. 

The final thing I’ll say is that this has been a more recent mindset I’ve been adopting. I’ve recognized that as you work more and more, you progress more and more through an organization. The nature of the accountability that you hold shifts. I’m accountable clearly to our CEO, owners and investors, whether that be our equity investors or our debt holders.

As you progress in an organization, you realize that your team doesn’t work for you, but you begin to work for them and you’re accountable to them because they’re the ones who come in every day to do a great job; it’s their livelihoods. The success of the company is what’s generating that, and you’re accountable for making sure they have as great an experience as possible, as easy as experience as possible, so they can ultimately do a great job. A lot of it’s around, “How are we making the environment better? What are we investing in to make it better?”

That’s great how you approach balancing finance and strategy. It’s one of the great challenges for CFOs these days. The tagline to this show is, “CFOs no longer record history. They make history.” It’s cutesy and all that, but there’s truth to it. The days of CFOs reporting what happened after it happened. That’s a bygone era. Right now, it’s side by side with the CEO and with the rest of the management team and building a future.

Balancing Cost And Innovation

In the airline industry, and I don’t know about your company specifically, but I know cost management is a critical thing because it’s not always a high-margin business, and yet there’s a need to innovate continuously to invest in new technologies, to give you a competitive edge and make your customer experience better. How do you balance those two things, the need to make sure that you’re on the right side of the ledger, but at the same time building the future? 

We will approach you into it. Firstly, from an investment perspective, the most significant investment that you make as an airline is in the fleet. It’s in tech. That’s the core technology that you are flying every day. Over the past many years, we’ve invested over $14 billion in at-list prices in new aircraft. we’re now in a position where 80 percent of our fleet is new generation aircraft. We’re going to be 100 percent by 2028. That’s got two key benefits. The first one is the customer experience on board that lets us drive a step change every time we take a new aircraft. The second is that it’s driving a real improvement in sustainability. We’ve reduced on an absolute level our CO2 emissions by about 30 percent over the last many years. 

The investment in technology has driven that. The first question is, how do we continuously make sure that we’re making that investment and we’re generating the right return from it? Those are $100 million plus assets that we’re investing in every year. What that comes down to on our side is making sure that we’re getting the right productivity and right utilization out of all of that investment. We’ve driven a big step change since before the pandemic——we’re generating the same number of flights as we were doing before the pandemic, but with nearly five fewer aircraft. On our balance sheet, that’s roughly over $500 million of reduced asset base to generate the same level of activity. 

There’s the allocation of capital from that perspective and how we’re ensuring we’re allocating it in the new technology and the best technology so that we’re driving the right productivity off that base. The second element to it is every day, the investment every day in the customer experience, whether that’s WiFi technology on board, the food on board, the content on board, all the way through. How many people do we have at our checking desks? How many people do we have on board the aircraft? We’re looking at those every day.

The key way we focus is we try to understand two things. We try to understand what it is that makes the biggest difference to our customers, and at the same time we challenge ourselves to have a cost discipline. We call this the unit metrics. It’s a non-fuel cost metric, which is against all the seats that we fly. How do we ensure that we have absolute discipline on that. Every year we’re finding new ways to do business better, to offset inflationary pressures, to allow us to reallocate cost that would’ve been going into non-differentiating activity and putting that into more differentiating activity.

It all starts with understanding the input metric as the customer. It’s the experience. It’s how we generate a better experience. We track that as Net Promoter Score. We look at it every day. We get over 500,000 customers who give us survey results each year, and we track that on every flight in every cabin to figure out what we can do better. When you look at that, you figure out where it matters and what matters most, it’s then about how you deploy your capital in the right places. At the same time, we’ve built this track record over the last few years of absolute discipline in how we manage our costs.

We had to go through a dramatic change in the company as a result of 2019 had nearly $3 billion of revenue and that nearly went to zero within the space of a few weeks. That led you to do difficult things and different things to figure out how to survive. One of those was we restructured the company and took over 300 million of recurring costs out of the company. A big portion of that was taking out nearly 45 percent of our people. We did that over the course of a few months. Now it’s the discipline to not come back in. It’s the discipline to make sure we’re driving the right productivity rather than let that creep to bring in a cost rate that doesn’t make a difference to customers. That’s the discipline that we bring every day.

Virgin Atlantic During COVID 

It’s interesting because I think it’s a minor miracle that as many airlines survived COVID from what you described going to zero, but particularly your airline and correct me if I’m wrong, but such a focus on customers and whatnot. Everything is spent on enhancing the customer experience, and those customers are down to zero or close to it. There are other airlines that maybe they have other ways to make money. I know you did get into the cargo shipment game for a little while. Did you find creative ways to survive? 

We did. I go back to the very beginning of the pandemic. We saw what was happening in the back end of 2019 and the early part of 2020 in, and firstly, out in China and seeing how that was impacting travel there. The first shift that happened for us was that we canceled flights to Shanghai. That was the beginning of seeing it, the transition to hit Europe and the U.S. Very quickly we went from operating a full schedule. In 2019, we carried about 6 million customers to carry no customers. After Easter in 2020, we saw that for the first time in our history, we were flying no customers. 

We had a cargo business, but we had to quickly shift to, how can we drive that business to grow more? Anything we can drive from incremental contributions out of that business was going to be incredibly positive from a cash perspective. At the same time, when you’re in a high fixed cost business, a high asset business, we had to figure out how to go from $3 billion to nearly zero. We approached it in a few different ways. The first was to recognize the absolute brutal reality of that situation. You have to figure out what you can control, what matters and how you organize yourselves around that. 

A book I would recommend everyone to read, but every CFO read, is a Jim Collins book, which is Good To Great. I read that back in 2014 first. It’s something that we promote internally to our teams to read. I talk about it when we talk internally. There’s one concept within that book, which is the Stockdale paradox. For anyone who has not read it, I’ll give a brief summary.

It was all built around Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. The key question that Jim Collins was asking him was, “Why did you get through that and other people didn’t?” His answer was simpler. He focused on the brutal reality that he didn’t know when he was going to get out, but he had absolute faith that he would. 

It was a conviction knowing the end, but recognizing that you don’t know how you’re going to get there. For us, it was a real understanding of the pandemic, its impact on our business and doing that early, but still having an absolute belief that we were going to get through and that we had absolute certainty. We didn’t develop a strategy of hope or optimism that things were going to improve in one month or two months. We planned for what we saw as being worst-case outcomes, then we figured out how to survive in that. The core role that we played as a CFO and a finance team in that, I would say is we had to make sure we had enough runway. By runway, I mean enough cash so that we could survive through a period of no revenues. 

There are two key questions: ‘How long is the runway?’ That is all around the forecasting capability. Then, “When are you going to reopen? When’s travel going to grow?” At the same time, it is how you manage to reduce your costs, manage your cash, manage your payables and do that in such a way that you create as long a runway as you can. That was what we did early in the pandemic to make sure we could get through the first few months. 

It’s one of those things, your typical business challenge, there are people you can call upon. There’s a playbook or whatever, but a global pandemic, the last pandemic was the Spanish flu in 1919. If there are any CFOs around them, they’re called upon, “What did you do? Games changed a little bit,” but it’s interesting what you mentioned about Admiral Stockdale. There was a [science] experiment a few years ago, that was a little bit cruel to the animals, but they took rats and rats can’t swim. They threw them in a pool. They timed them to see how long they would go to the bottom of the pool. On the high end, they lasted about six or seven minutes, but then they rescued them. They gave them an hour’s break, and they repeated the exercise. How long do you think they lasted the second time? 

A lot longer than six minutes. 

Two days. You can’t ask them of course, but the belief is that all of a sudden they realized it’s not hopeless that, “When it gets bad, I’m going to be rescued.” It’s probably similar to what Admiral Stockdale did, and I have great respect for the man. I’m not trying to compare him to rats. It’s probably true in business. When you know that there is light at the end of the tunnel, you’re going to keep on fighting. It’s a great lesson you learned.

You have to have absolute belief in that. It is important that you don’t create too optimistic a view of where you are because if you feel like you’re too optimistic, then you don’t plan for the worst-case scenario. Planning for the worst-case scenario is why we took decisive action. We went through three debt restructurings and capital raises in about 18 months because every time we were looking at the runway, we were saying, “If the runway is this long, it could be worse. Let’s make sure we have enough. Let’s make sure we can get through that.” The very last one we did of those, which in December ‘21, was equally recognizing there were going to be opportunities that came as we emerged, how we positioned the company to be able to take advantage of those. 

Having a robust balance sheet, having sufficient cash that we could deploy when we needed to, being able to continue to invest in the fleet on the transition, recognizing that, “As we sit here today, customer experience is incredibly more important now than it was before the pandemic.” We’re sitting here now having an average fleet age of seven years, the highest number of new generation aircraft at 80 percent compared to the rest of our industry. It is all because of the approach we took during the pandemic to make sure we were thinking of the long term and making sure we had enough runway. 

Work-Life Balance

The one thing I like to ask about, because it’s important work-life balance, and I understand you recently snowshoed the Alps.

Yes. Skiing has always been a passion of mine. In the last few years, just before the pandemic, I got into ski touring. I went with my best friend to do a five-day tour expedition across the alps. When we talk about work-life balance, it’s the only time when I say to my team, “I’m off the grid.” I’m off the grid because there is no grid where I am. It’s incredible because of the way it gives you space to 1) Focus on the physical activity and from that perspective, the resilience that comes with that, but also it clears the mind and it lets you focus on yourself outside of work. It’s something that I make a week for every year now, and we’ll continue to do that because it’s an important, balance for me of how to take the challenges of the work that we do every day and the workload that comes with that, with how you create the right time and the right space for yourself. 

Are you telling me that they don’t have WiFi at the top of the Swiss Alps? It’s hard to believe. I’m going to have to make a few phone calls. Get with the modern world people. I also know you have a little girl. How old is she? 

She’s two and a half. She’s three in June 2024. 

What’s her name? 

Aila.

That’s a pretty name. She keeps you busy too. 

She does, very much so. 

That’s the most important job. Within Virgin, you lead like a family that cares about help. I’m not unrealistic. I’m sure it’s a very demanding place to work. You wouldn’t be successful if not, but you do care about your employees and your family. What’s your mission there and how do you help your employees out? 

I’m the executive sponsor for our Family and Carers Network. This is a network we created after the pandemic. It was something that went on when the team said we were going to create this and asked me if I would sponsor it, straightaway, I said yes. It’s coming off the back of my own experience as a father in the pandemic having taken on both a new role as a CFO and also having, having a daughter at the same time. That was a challenging experience from my work-life balance perspective. What I saw as incredibly important is creating the right network, the right opportunity for people internally to talk about their experiences because everyone has experiences and we didn’t have a medium to create sharing of that beyond individual networks and their close-knit communities. 

Creating a much broader network that took this out from being something in the shadows that people talk about to something that is at the forefront of how we think about creating the right work environment for people was important. We’ve seen a real uptick in engagement from people who have experiences and want to share them. The second element to it is making sure that we’re putting the right influence on policy. When you think about your people’s policies, when you think about how you create the right work environment for people, you can see a traditional work model where that is set from a people or an HR department. What we try to do at Virgin is they do a phenomenal job of that, but we have a number of these different networks that also can influence policy. 

We are clear. We think about what’s important for a company, how can we create more flexibility for people? How can we think about allowing people based on whatever situation they’re in from a family perspective, be able to contribute to work, be able to do what they want to do and what do we need to do as a company to make that easier so we can influence policy, we can go to the people team and do that. My role as a sponsor is to both be able to push that agenda and make sure it’s getting heard, it’s getting the right visibility and it felt very natural with my almost three-year-old daughter to take a role and do that. 

Advice For Next-Generation CFOs

It’s such a critical thing. You’ve accomplished a lot at a very young age. I do feel silly asking this question, but do you have any advice for the next generation of CFOs? To me, you’re the next generation of CFOs.

Having come from a non-traditional CFO background, I would advocate 1) Get commercial experience. Understand your business. You can only do a great job and you can only enable and empower your people and take your company where it needs to go if you understand commercially the real nuances of what’s happening and what they need from you. Get commercial experience. I can’t say anything apart from that. 2) Think about your role in terms of how you empower people and business and enable your business to perform. I mentioned earlier accountability and that I come from a non-financial background. How do I make sure that I’m not outsourcing my accountability for the role? You have to dig deep, go learn. 

You have to ask all those questions that may seem silly questions, but have the curiosity and humility to go and ask them. At the same time, I do not think this is necessarily a CFO, but as general advice I would give is you have to have conviction about what you believe, and where the company should be going and you have to have perspectives and views, but you have to balance that with humility. Make sure you’re asking the right questions and figure out and have an awareness of when to deploy each of those. You only get that through testing it and progressing it over time. I think if I could think back over the last few years and what helped me in the way I think about the role, I would give all of that advice to anyone who wants to become a CFO or any leader of business. 

I think that’s very solid advice. This has been a great conversation. I want to thank you for making the time to be here. I’m sure that you have a lot going on in your life. If you could carve out the time, it’s appreciated. I want to give you the final word. 

I want to say thank you very much for having me on. It’s been a real pleasure to have a conversation with you and talk about Virgin and my background. I hope some people find it interesting and useful. 

Important Links:

• Virgin Atlantic
• Good To Great