It isn't easy to pin down a peripatetic billionaire such as Sir Richard Branson.

Over the course of three months, the possible locales for an interview I was keen to have with him kept changing: South Africa, Madagascar, London, New York City and Necker, his private island in the Caribbean. Finally, on a Wednesday (July 4th, actually), I was asked if I could get to Cancun, Mexico, that weekend to meet with him. "Virgin flies there direct from L.A.," Nick Fox, his communications director, told me-wink, wink. I am based in Los Angeles. And I got the hint; I booked my flight on Virgin, which of course is one of many companies owned by Branson.

Stepping out of my taxi in Mayakoba, a resort community just south of Cancun, I was greeted with a mojito and found myself staring straight at the actress Sofia Vergara, who happened to be staying at the same hotel as I-the Rosewood, one of the most spectacular eco resorts in the world.

Branson wasn't on the property. But I soon came to find out that his universe is infective-its positive energy pulling in or somehow pulling up next to great people, good times and adventurous experiences. Indeed, over the course of several days I would find myself, thanks to Branson, swimming with sharks in the open waters 35 miles off the coast, drinking margaritas in a cave underneath the Mayan ruins, watching the winner of the U.K.'s X Factor perform and gazing at an amazing fireworks display over the Caribbean waters.

The life of a billionaire doesn't suck, not Branson's life anyway. And guess what? He knows it. And guess what else? He's not an ass about it; he's right there with you on the bus or in the same boat as everybody else.

P.S.: This was all business.

The Virgin flight was obvious; the Rosewood was where two of Branson's key executives were staying, making it easier to schedule my time and shuttle to him. The swimming with sharks was an activity to promote a nonprofit he is involved with; the party under the ruins, an event to celebrate Virgin's new flight route from London to Cancun; ditto, the fireworks.
Business can be productive and fun. Business can be productive and matter. Life doesn't have to be so buttoned up. Loosen up, in fact. This is the Virgin creed.

Branson opens the door to his suite halfway. He is barefoot in swim trunks and a polo shirt emblazoned with a resort's logo. A freebie?  He looks exactly like he does in photos and on television: the unmistakable beard and shoulder-length blond hair, blue eyes ablaze with excitement and energy. This is a man who is worth an estimated $4.2 billion, is chairman of Virgin Group, which includes some 400 companies, and who has sailed, ballooned and jetted his way around the world. Some of these adventures have even set world records. His first words to me are of the mundane, however.
"Have you eaten?" he asks.

A couple of minutes later we are beachside at a café munching on fried seafood.

On the way to meet him, Christine Choi, his New York-based public relations executive, who travels so much that she has long forgotten time zones and weekends, told me that Branson had just given an interview where the journalist asked, "If he could be any type of animal what would it be?" It's a terrible question for a journalist to ask because it's rather meaningless. "Don't ask that," she advised.

So, of course, the first question I asked Branson after we sat at our table was, "If you could be any type of animal ... " He looked blankly at me, almost in disbelief that he had heard me right. Then I laughed. Choi filled him in, and he laughed, too. The conversation was breezy from there on.

I had just two questions for him. One: What was the lightbulb moment when he went from thinking about doing well financially to thinking about doing good in the world? Two: Take me from that moment to where he was, today.
I knew that Branson had launched his not-for-profit foundation, Virgin Unite, eight years ago and that he had been spending more and more time on it. Virgin Unite states its mission as connecting "people and entrepreneurial ideas to make change happen. To help revolutionize the way government, business and the social sector work together-business as a force for good."

It has a number of initiatives, from The Elders program where dignitaries such as Nelson Mandela and Jimmy Carter work together to bring about peace in the world; to the Carbon War Room, which fosters innovations to mitigate carbon emissions; to The Branson Centres of Entrepreneurship in Jamaica and South Africa, which incubate and support social entrepreneurs; to Gaia Rocks, which is about preserving and conserving nature.

Naturally, since Virgin Unite is a reflection of the polymath Branson, it isn't just about one thing. And it also bleeds into his other businesses. Part of what Virgin Unite does is to work with the for-profit Virgin Group's businesses to exact and instill positive values for "people and the planet."

What I learned by asking Branson about his lightbulb moment, however, was that it didn't occur with the start of Virgin Unite. His moment happened long ago, with the start of his first real business. Doing good has been imbedded in his business thinking from the very beginning.

"It goes back an awful long way and that was when I was a 15-year-old at school," Branson says, struggling to do the art of eat-speak and answer my question. "The Vietnamese war was raging.  It was the 60s.  It was the time when students wanted to put the world right and students believed that they had a right to try to speak out and be listened to. I, like a lot of other kids my age, believed the war to be an unjust war, a horribly sad war, and an embarrassment to the Western world to be sort of conducting such a horrendous war, a militarily horrendous war with napalm, and killing children, women indiscriminately in the forests and burning them to death. In fact many, many, many years later [former U.S. Secretary of Defense] Robert McNamara on his deathbed confession said that he should have been prosecuted by a war crimes tribunal for conducting such a war. So I decided to launch a magazine to try to campaign against the war."

It wasn't the idea of making money for Branson that was attractive about business, it was the challenge to change things.
Steve Jobs, in his biography by Walter Isaacson, said it wasn't about the money for him either; it was about bucking the system and forging new ways to do things.  "Think Different," remember, was the famous Apple slogan. Branson has his own way of putting it: "Screw Business As Usual." Seriously, that's the tagline to Virgin Unite's Web site, as well as the title of the book he released last year. (He says it's written for those who want  "to develop a business and make a living, [and who] also want to do more to help people and the planet.")

With a few fried squid out of the way, Branson continues with our talk: "So I left school to get the magazine going. I never thought that I was going to be a businessman and an entrepreneur; that grew rapidly since. I just wanted to create a magazine, edit it, and be proud of it. Then alongside the magazine we soon found that people were coming to us with problems, young people with suicidal problems, or psychiatric problems, or people who had contracted venereal disease, or wanted advice about contraception, etc., etc. And so we set up a center, the Student Advisory Center, to help people who had problems."

It makes sense, this bit. As the magazine began to cover social issues relevant to students, it also became more engaged in those issues. It's a logical progression. But I had to stop and think about the root, the foundation and the drive that made Branson into a billionaire. This bit is important. The crux is that Branson gravitates toward serving a need-whether in the marketplace for a new business or in the mind space for a new social solution, or for that matter, space itself. (He recently announced the launch of Virgin Galactic to take tourists into outer space.)

The idea of profits lags the promise of something new.

To be sure, Branson is aware that it takes profits for a business to have the luxury to do good. Take the magazine. "The business aspect was just, you know, the magazine had to survive, so I had to sell enough advertising to cover the printing and the paper costs. Survival played a part, but it was the boring side of what we were doing," he says.

It all sounds like such a matter of happenstance. Of course it wasn't. Anyone who has created a business from the ground up knows how much work it takes. Nor does Virgin Group's evolution sound like such a big feat, as Branson tells it:
"In those days it just came. An artist came to us, he had a tape, and nobody else would release it. I set out to try to get it released by the record companies. Nobody would release it, so we formed a record company and put it out."

So was born Virgin Records, a company that signed Mike Oldfield, the Sex Pistols, Culture Club and many other chart-topping artists, including the Rolling Stones, to its label. It sold in 1992 to EMI for nearly $1 billion.

"We ended up going into the airline business. I was sitting in Puerto Rico one day trying to get to the Virgin Islands and they bumped us. Airlines do bump people. So I got a blackboard and hired a plane and walked around in the foyer, $39 single to Puerto Rico, to all the other people who got bumped. I managed to sell my first flight, and we headed off to the Virgin Islands. I forgot to divide my name amongst all the other names so I actually made $39 profit."

So was born Virgin Airlines, which operates a multitude of routes throughout the world as Virgin Atlantic, Virgin America and Virgin Australia. The franchise is worth billions, and is recognized as one of the top brands in the world today.

Add to those businesses a mobile phone company (Virgin Mobile), a travel company (Virgin Holidays), a bank (Virgin Money), the previously mentioned space travel company (Virgin Galactic), and several hundred more companies peppered with the Virgin prefix, if you will, and you have the Virgin Group.

"It's only I suppose once we got to a stage where our group was not going to go bankrupt, was financially strong, then basically what we said was why invest in any kind of business? Why don't we start looking at businesses that are good. We've got a choice of cigarette companies or clean fuels.  Let's go for clean fuels. ... We've got spare money to spend. Let's direct it in ways that make a positive difference and hopefully make a profit as well."

What Branson has described-making a positive difference and profiting-is impact investing, one of the fastest-growing segments of the financial services industry.  Other billionaires such as Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll and financial institutions such as JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, as well as big nonprofits with familiar names-Rockefeller, Ford, Kellogg-have turned to impact investing as well. Funds have been devised. To date, about $65 billion to $75 billion has flowed into the space, with estimates for 10 times that amount to be invested over the coming decade.

This autumn, Virgin will launch its own impact investing fund in the United Kingdom. Virgin Unite will also be adding to its initiatives and deepening its ties to the business community with its Business Elders program. The idea is to enlist top minds and thought leaders to shift the business landscape.
Additions should come as no surprise. Virgin Unite invests in causes and starts programs at a blistering rate and speed.
"The trouble with Jean and I is, normally at Virgin [Group] I've got the board that says 'no' occasionally," Branson says. The Jean he is referring to is Jean Oelwang, the chief executive of Virgin Unite, where, Branson notes, there is no board that says "no."
As he casually mentions her name, Oelwang sits down at our beachside table to join the conversation.

It's seamless, really, how the subjects blend together, overlap, gel, morph into something else and then carry on. The same with people. They come and go, enter and exit, all without pause, pomp or circumstance. This is the casually effective way in which Branson operates. It's an open door policy.

On her Web site bio, Oelwang asks where else in the world would she be able to get the chance to be part of changing the world for the better ... and get to work with "a crazy man with a beard who never accepts the unacceptable?"

Take, for example, the hardcore nature of business. Branson says: "Business people, we think, can play quite a big part in tackling a lot of these [social] problems and so we have been looking at getting a business group together, people who have already made a big difference ... maybe even change the rules slightly. A company's current rule is simply profit motive. I mean 100% bottom line if you are a public company, that's really the only criteria. Should a business group of leaders look at it and just change it, just tilt it slightly differently?"

The simple "it" Branson is speaking of is the framework for business as we know it today: the money, the earnings, the distribution of wealth. Pure capitalism. Bringing people and the planet into the mix isn't easy. But he'll try. And he'll have an impact. That's what Branson does best: He gets things heard.

In terms of effect, Virgin Unite is having it. The Branson Centers are churning out social entrepreneurs by the dozen, training them and guiding them to grow their businesses and employ others at the community level and beyond. The Carbon War Room is onto new types of clean fuels that foster climate change solutions and business efficiencies. (An interesting statistic is that airlines only have 1,700 fueling stations so "once you've actually got enough supply of fuel, it will be quite quick to turn the airline industry into the first self-sufficient industry in the world," Branson says.) The Elders are raising awareness about human rights issues from Syria to Sudan. And groups like WildAid, part of the Gaia Rocks campaign, are stomping out the poaching of endangered species such as rhinos in Africa (killed for their horns) and whale sharks in the Caribbean (killed for their fins) among many others.

Branson doesn't have to work as hard as he does or get involved in as many things as he does. He could sit on his private island and chill. But I can see why he lives his life the way he goes about it: It's fun. There is no difference among work, philanthropy and pleasure. It's all the same. They mix and match and turn out good times and good profits. More and more this also means more good for the world, too.

Branson's Brand Of Social Entrepreneurs
One of the more intriguing ventures Sir Richard Branson has created is the Branson Centre for Entrepreneurship. It has operations in South Africa and Jamaica and it trains young social entrepreneurs to grow and prosper.

This is important work in the developing world, where capital, of both the human and financial variety, is scant. Yet with these emerging markets and entrepreneurs lies the biggest opportunity for global economic growth.

The International Finance Corporation reports there is between $2 trillion and $2.5 trillion worth of opportunity through social entrepreneurs in the developing world. That means there are millions of businesses representing that much capital waiting to be born. And that is what the Branson centers are trying to help spawn.

It does this through business training programs that provide access to a community of mentors, role models, industry experts and business networks, as well as facilities and online resources. There is ongoing support and advice to help entrepreneurs grow businesses efficiently and effectively.

Here's how it works: Entrepreneurs apply to the center (www.bransoncentre.org)-up to 20 are chosen after interviews and vetting-and they take a 12-week course. At least one day per week is onsite.

"The goal is to help support, educate and develop local entrepreneurs," says Lisa Lake, who's in charge of the center in Jamaica, adding that the center works with existing businesses-not start-up ideas. "So we know they are serious."

The Branson Centres incorporate impact measurements from the get-go to track job creation and revenue growth on the ground.

It's working. The majority of entrepreneurs who graduate from the program see increased revenue and hire multiple employees. This is good not only for the entrepreneurs, but for their local communities. And that's the whole idea.

Mentors for both centers are sought. A gap the Branson Centre is trying to fill is the access to growth capital. Lake says the social enterprises are typically too small to qualify for traditional bank loans or venture capital.
Jean Oelwang, chief executive of Virgin Unite, which oversees the centers, says engendering growth among these entrepreneurs is important because it's how the business and investment landscape can be shifted to empower those who are typically disenfranchised by the conventional financial system.

"We see this as a way to kickstart new markets," Oelwang says.

Because social enterprises do two things-have a positive impact on society as a charity would and create financial return as a business would-these hybrid models could forge positive change in the world.

Moreover, by encouraging collaboration-Virgin Holidays, for example, is the lead Virgin business sponsor of the Caribbean center-people can learn from one another. Tenured business executives glean new insights and ideas from the entrepreneurs, and the entrepreneurs gain proven practices.

"It's very exciting," Oelwang says, "because it's also how we create new leadership models."