For about 10 months, I’ve worked at a boutique tour agency.
It was a family business owned by a married couple.
On paper, it sounds like it’s going to be one of those companies that treat you like family and where you never want to leave.
It wasn’t.
They’ve been running their business for over a decade and they had a major partnership with a big travel agency. They didn’t have an experience running an actual company before. Yet, they were managing cross-country operations and earning a little over $300k. I was impressed because they didn’t have experience working with a major company and it started as just 2 of them.
I was hired to manage the marketing and within 1-2 months, the cracks started to show.
The foundation of their business was to serve their clients (partners) and clients only. Given that they were entrepreneurs, they did other business ventures on the side. Running a pub, running a travel gig, and picking up tourists at the airport (with a middleman).
Their priorities was to generate revenue no matter what. Not to build a solid company with solid foundations. Here’s what was wrong:
1. Following money, not people.
They were running a gig for tourists showing the local food market. The profit margins didn’t satisfy them. One of the founder would spend about 3 hours to show them around and bring back about $100 (price of the tour product – included food costs). As a tour agency, it’s only logical to provide such service with that rate but it wasn’t enough for them.
Had they managed a list of the tourists they’ve provided the tours and built a community around it, they would’ve had something that was more than money. They would’ve had a big community with loyal customers and generate returning customers. Because they didn’t see an immediate financial gain from it, they never pursued the idea.
2. Following instincts, not strategy.
I’ve had many conversations with the founders about marketing strategy. My ideas would include:
- a) sending out newsletters to the audience on a relatively medium-traffic blog
- b) setting up a poster in front of their pub to attract more leads via QR code
- c) creating a social media content for viral marketing with scripts and sketches
- d) reach out of influencers for affiliate marketing
However, instincts are hard to not listen to and they decided to follow theirs – to only generate leads from paid ads.
CPL (Cost per lead) in the travel industry ranges from $30-$60. The budget I was given was $200 per month. With millions of bots running on the internet, we’ve only received fake ones for the lead forms.
3. Compromised beyond repair.
The severity of this part can vary depending on a spectrum but even in the office, there were gossips, talking behind employees’ back, a panel for marital crisis and discussions of all sorts of personal problems that should’ve stayed out of the office.
My boss – the founders of this company – worked separately. The wife took over the general operations of the business and managing the employees while the husband took over the finances, business partnerships and sales.
Once I stepped in, there was an immediate power struggle between them. Who will be my superior? Who will be overlooking the workflow and the tasks at hand in marketing? Who will I be reporting to?
These were the things they didn’t figure it out or at least they couldn’t.
When I would initiate a meeting regarding marketing, I would first have it with the husband and if i had suggestions on improving the communication with his wife and talking about project approvals, he would complain about his wife or women in general and tell me that “it’s just who she is”. It was a type of narrative to tell me that given how hard it is to convince her and that he already knows her (since he is married to her), I should accept how imperfect and dysfunctional the communication is.
That wasn’t the hardest part. The hardest part was that I wanted to do my work and do what needed to be done.
Two of my bosses would have different ideas on what I should work on and go on a fight between them. Everything including their brand, their mission, their communication was unclear and wrong.
I don’t think I’ll do the justice of shining the light on how dysfunctional and awful the experience was (along with dramas between employees as well) so I will extensively write about it on a separate post.
Anyways, it was my first experience working in the travel industry and it was quite a wild ride. One thing for certain is that it demands high liquidity in terms of capital (as well as employees in this case).
