Why Mentors Are More Important Now Than EverThis is why a mentor should be one of your most important business relationships.

When Richard Branson founded Virgin Atlantic in 1984, he'd already been a seasoned entrepreneur for several decades. He launched his first business, a magazine calledStudent, when he was just 16, accompanied by a wildly successful record mail-order business that soon became the first Virgin Records.

Branson didn't specifically set out to become an airline magnate. Rather, it was born of the frustration he felt while his British Virgin Islands-bound plane was stuck on the tarmac in Puerto Rico. Rather than suffer in silence, Branson worked out how much it would cost to charter a plane instead, and how figured each passenger could pay just $39 if they pooled the expenses. ″(When) we arrived in the BVI, somebody said "sharpen up your service a bit and you could be in the airline business,'" Bransonrecalled, and from there, Virgin Atlantic was born.