Nik Powell is the name of a childhood friend of Richard's. Their first venture together is planting and raising four hundred Christmas trees at Tanyard Farms to sell the following second Christmas. Rabbits eat the tree sprigs, so they shoot and skin the rabbits to sell at a local butcher shop. Their second childhood venture is breeding and raising budgerigars that multiply too fast for local demand to keep up with. Richard asks Nik to join him at the Student when Jon returns to school in the fall of 1967. After working together for awhile, Nik becomes dissatisfied with the way Richard does business and tries to take it from him. Richard sees a memo about his plan and fires Nik, although they remain friends. When volume at the mail order record business grows too big, Richard offers Nik forty percent of Virgin Mail Order Records to join him as the other permanent employee. Nik operates the record shops. Virgin Films is set up by Nik to run "The Great Rock and Roll Swindle" produced by McLaren. Nik sets up the Venue, where bands play in a nightclub to live audiences and film-editing to make and edit videos. Richard takes severe cost-cutting steps until Nik and Simon disagree over the cost of hiring Phil Collins. Richard agrees with Simon and later buys two nightclubs without telling Nik, who he knows will disagree. They split again and Richard now owns 100 percent of Virgin's 900,000 pound loss.
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