I never get the accountants in before I start up a business. It's done on gut feeling, especially if I can see that they are taking the mickey out of the consumer
Attributed toRichard Bransonb. 18 July 1950 · founder of the Virgin Group
Every large quote site credits this to Branson, and it matches a view he has put on the record many times. But no book page, interview transcript or speech has ever been produced for this exact wording — the documented trail runs back only to a quote aggregator, and Wikiquote has classed the line as unsourced since 2006.
“I never get the accountants in before I start up a business. It's done on gut feeling, especially if I can see that they are taking the mickey out of the consumer” Attributed to Richard Branson (b. 1950), founder of the Virgin Group — widely circulated but unsourced. No book, interview or speech has ever been produced for this wording; Wikiquote files it under “Unsourced.” Via Quotle.info
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In context
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Provenance
What the trail actually shows
Documented source
None located
Nearest documented remark
Business Jet Traveler, April 2008
Oldest trace found
Wikiquote article, 15 December 2006 — credited only to thinkexist.com
Wikiquote status
Unsourced; moved to the talk page on 6 December 2008
“I never get the accountants in before I start up a business. It’s done on gut feeling, especially if I can see that they are taking the mickey out of the consumer.”
Unsourced
The sentence above has never been printed with a source attached. It has been printed with a dateline, though: in April 2008 a Business Jet Traveler interviewer quoted its first two clauses back at Branson — “You’ve said you never get the accountants in before you start a business and that ‘it’s done on gut feeling’” — and he answered at length without disowning it. So the line was in circulation, in a by-lined publication, by 2008. What no source anywhere supplies is where it came from, or any trace at all of the “taking the mickey out of the consumer” clause. That gap is the finding.
The earliest dated appearance is second-hand: in Jeff Burger’s April 2008 Business Jet Traveler interview ↗ the interviewer quotes the line back at Branson — “You’ve said you never get the accountants in before you start a business and that ‘it’s done on gut feeling’” — and Branson answers without correcting the premise. But he is not given as the source of the wording, and his own reply is longer, differently phrased, and mentions taking the mickey out of nobody.
No work, publication or date can be tied to this wording, so no copyright status can honestly be asserted. If Branson did say it, it was in a modern interview or book, and anything first published from 1931 onward is presumed in copyright in the United States to its author or publisher — so this line should not be treated as public domain.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
The problem is the source, not the name
This is not a case of the wrong person’s name on a quote. It is a case of no source underneath one — and of a documented Branson remark being quietly displaced by a snappier sentence nobody can date.
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The sourceQuote aggregators — thinkexist.com, and after it BrainyQuote, AZQuotes, QuoteFancy unsourced
In an April 2008 Business Jet Traveler interview ↗ the interviewer opens by quoting the line back at him — “You’ve said you never get the accountants in before you start a business and that ‘it’s done on gut feeling’” — and Branson answers without correcting it. That is the strongest evidence the attribution has, and it is still second-hand: the journalist gives no source, and Branson’s own words in reply are longer, differently phrased, and say nothing about taking the mickey out of the consumer.
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The bookLosing My Virginity (1998) assumed, not shown
Readers routinely assume the line comes from the autobiography. That has never been demonstrated: no citation anywhere gives a page number, and the Internet Archive copy ↗ is lending-restricted, so we could not check it either.
The sentiment is not in doubt. Branson has said versions of it for decades: that he trusts instinct over spreadsheets, and that the industries worth attacking are the ones whose incumbents have got comfortable at the customer’s expense. Asked in Business Jet Traveler how he decided to start an airline ↗, he described the miserable flights he had endured on other carriers, then added that if he had gotten the accountants in, “they would have almost definitely told me all the reasons why it wasn’t going to work.”
What is in doubt is the sentence. The popular wording is tighter and funnier than anything we could find him saying in a documented interview, and it arrives everywhere with no dateline attached. Its paper trail begins on a quote aggregator rather than in a transcript — the pattern you see when a line has been tidied in circulation instead of copied from a source.
If I had gotten the accountants in, they would have almost definitely told me all the reasons why it wasn’t going to work.
What we checked, and what we could not
“Taking the mickey” is British slang for mocking or sending someone up, and it is genuinely part of Branson’s vocabulary: in a 2006 Wine Spectator interview ↗ about Virgin Vines he said Virgin “felt someone needed to take the mickey out of the whole wine-snobbery thing.” The disputed line leans on a looser second sense — taking liberties with someone — which is how the phrase has to read when the target is a consumer rather than a bit of snobbery. Either way the idiom is no argument against him, and no evidence for this particular sentence either.
b. 1950 · English business magnate, founder of the Virgin Group
Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson, born 18 July 1950, co-founded the Virgin Group in 1970 and grew it into a conglomerate spanning record shops, airlines and spaceflight, launching Virgin Atlantic in 1984 and taking a knighthood in 2000 for services to entrepreneurship. He is also one of the most-quoted living businesspeople, and his taste for a blunt, funny, anti-establishment one-liner is exactly why so many sentences circulate under his name with nothing behind them.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Best available
No primary source located. Oldest attestation found: Wikiquote, “Richard Branson,” revision of 15 December 2006, crediting only the aggregator thinkexist.com; classed as unsourced by Wikiquote ever since. Compare Jeff Burger, “Sir Richard Branson,” Business Jet Traveler, April 2008.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I never get the accountants in before I start up a business. It's done on gut feeling, especially if I can see that they are taking the mickey out of the consumer’?” Last verified 25 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-never-get-the-accountants-in-before-i-start-up-a-business/