Virgin Unite

Joe Polish, founder of Piranha Marketing, is a marketing and business building consultant who has been a strong supporter of Virgin Unite for the past several years.

Last autumn, he was recognised by Sir Richard Branson with the first ever ‘One in a Million’ award for his tremendous contribution. In the past two years Joe has raised more than $1 million for Virgin Unite and has mobilised his personal network of entrepreneurs to assist Virgin Unite in expanding our work, including starting a seed fund to assist aspiring entrepreneurs in the United States.

“Joe has shown tremendous zeal and generosity in getting behind our work and his support has meant a great deal to the organisation,” says Sir Richard.

Virgin Unite recently caught up with the Arizona-based entrepreneur to discuss his work with Virgin Unite.

Joe: I guess you could sum it up in one phrase: “life gives to the giver and takes from the taker.” People want to make contributions. Contributing to others makes you feel good. Working with Virgin Unite makes me feel like I’m doing something valuable.

I sell and have sold millions of dollars worth of information products to help entrepreneurs build and grow their businesses, so I have a real appreciation for entrepreneurs. I think they’re the ones that make the world go around!
So, my respect and admiration for someone like Richard is gigantic. His contribution to the world is huge!

My initial involvement was first just simply to meet Richard. I had no idea what Virgin Unite was. But then, I did an interview with Richard for my Genius Network series and I asked him how he spends his time. He said 25% of his time is spent on looking at business opportunities, 25% is spent on marketing, 10% is spent on fighting fires, and 40% is focusing on making contributions and building his foundation and doing good things in the world.

So, I thought, Wow! That’s pretty interesting, where you take a guy that most people would think is involved in lots of stuff, and making the world a better place occupies 40% of his time—that’s where his mind is right now. So, that really got me thinking.

I’ve raised money for lots of different charities. I’ve contributed through other people and organisations with the Make-A-Wish Foundation, JustLikeMyChild.org, children’s hospitals, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, we do walks for autism every year with my team, and we’ve raised quite a bit of money for the Clinton Foundation.

But for the most part, the majority of my charitable efforts have been with Virgin Unite because I love the company, the organisation, and the mission. Everything it stands for, in terms of a coolness factor, is powerful. And Richard is a genuinely very nice, progressive, and innovative guy. The more you can replicate entrepreneurs to have those attributes – business as a force of good – I think, the better the world becomes.

Joe: Actually, not only my employees, but also my clients! When we do my conferences, for instance, we will raise money for Virgin Unite, and my staff – very much going back ‘to life gives to the giver and takes from the taker’ – they all really like helping people and they’ll corral behind it. They want to support it and they want to work on things. My staff has put a lot of time into all of the stuff we’ve done with Virgin Unite in the last couple of years. It’s almost like a part-time job for them, and for me, in some ways.

As the business owner, I have to give them the ability to be involved. So, a lot of times, I’ll just throw one of my ideas out there, and then I’ll let my team plan it.
One of the things that we recently did was an interview with the best-selling author Tim Ferris about his new and updated, expanded version The 4-Hour Workweek. Thousands of people read his blog. So, we decided to take the recording of the interview and sell it on Amazon for a low fee and 100% of the money that we raise will go to Virgin Unite.

So by doing that, we want to see if we can create a model where we can sell things on Amazon. And if it works, we’ll do inserts into the packages that go out, letting people know about Virgin Unite. That can be done with literally hundreds and thousands of different books, CDs, courses, training material, both offline and online.

My staff put that entire campaign together without any of my involvement, working late at night to get it out there quickly. We do not know quite yet how well it will work, it is still a donation “research and development” experiment. However, if it works we will replicate the model with many of my Genius Network interviews, including the one I did with Richard. We’ll simply say ‘if you found value in this interview, please make a donation.’

A lot of lives are being changed through Virgin Unite in all areas of the world. I want to help document what is being done in a way that can be shared with an even wider audience of people so they can all rally behind the cause.

I want them to rally behind it not just because of wanting the recognition of “I donated money to charity and I’m a really good person.” I want to create a strong support base of inspired entrepreneurs that multiplies the fruits being produced to solve a lot of problems that can be solved on this planet with the right entrepreneurial thinking and heart behind it.

Joe: The way I look at it, there’s two ways to set up your business. You can have an ELF business – that’s what we call it, easy, lucrative and fun – or you can have a HALF business, which is hard, annoying, lame and frustrating.

One of the reasons why I like Virgin and Virgin Unite is the whole culture that Richard has set up is about fun. It’s about enjoyment. And, when you’re dealing with situations where people’s lives are at stake, you’ve got to infuse enthusiasm and enjoyment into the process, so that people don’t feel so hopeless and the workplace not just filled with despair.

As a business owner, as a marketer, you want to bring a smile to someone’s face. You want to add some sunshine to their life. So, whenever you’re putting together a message, you want it to be filled with enthusiasm.

Entrepreneurism is all about selling. Capitalism is the greatest thing ever invented, in my opinion. And half the world attacks it, as if capitalism means bad, evil corporations trying to take advantage of people.

Capitalism in its purest form is simply collaboration between people wanting to exchange money for value. Capitalism at its core is a great thing, it’s just unfortunately been defined by others in a bad light. We are helping to be a small part of the movement to share the real power and contribution of caring capitalists.

Richard Branson and what he has done with Virgin needs to be celebrated. He is a great example of an amazing Capitalist with Heart.

There is not a single small business owner who I have worked with who got into business for a goal of simply money. They wanted to make a difference for their lives, their families, and their communities. But many feel that as just ‘one person’ they can’t really have a great impact. We show them that isn’t the case – everyone who works to make someone else’s lives better through contributions or solving problems for others, and serving as an example of a “good business doing good” makes a huge impact.

My job is to help inspire as many entrepreneurs out there as I can to celebrate and expand their value creation, whether they are a small husband/wife operation, or a large corporation.

Everything that I have that is great in my life came to me as a result of someone before me who was an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs innovate and solve problems to make the world a better place. That I can talk on a telephone and record an interview with someone across the planet came from an entrepreneur’s brain and drive.

I think the more focus we create on the true entrepreneurial spirit that is beyond just making money for themselves, the more we can multiply our impact. Even small businesses can do good and help advance humanity.

Virgin is a fantastic example of that. Everyone I have met at Virgin from the front lines to the founder wants to make a difference. That’s why I will continue to support the organisation to the best of my abilities.