My best decision was leaving the comparative security of the City in 2002 to pursue my dream of creating a bespoke, experience-led tour operator.
I ended up squeezed in my spare room with my two fellow founders. Going from the relative glamour (at the time) of the City, to a cramped spare room was quite a move, particularly as Sars and 9/11 had just happened, and War in Iraq had started for the second time.
We pumped all of our start-up capital which consisted of our personal savings, into creating the brand. We thought if we're going to do this, we should find out as soon as possible whether it would work.
We pumped all of our start-up capital, which consisted of our personal savings, into creating the brand
Having a consistent brand from the beginning meant that in our first year we came runner-up in Marketing’s Best Brand in Travel award, pushing Opodo into third place, and our brand positioning and proposition has been relatively easy to develop along the way. We now turn over £7m a year. I am strongly of the belief that never would have happened if we hadn't created a strong brand from the start.
My worst decision was not to take the same attitude for our back-end systems as for our branding. We looked at two options; one was to build our own bespoke reservation system, the other was to buy something off-the-shelf.
Everything up to that point was done by hand and to some extent it still is because of the relatively small number of clients we have. You can’t operate in a bespoke industry without looking at things very closely indeed.
We looked at the cost of getting a bespoke reservation system that would help us manage the business better, but the scale of difference in price compared with the off-the-shelf system was massive.
We stupidly made a decision based on price and soldiered on with it for about a year and a half. It continued to be a bad decision until we bit the bullet and invested in better systems.
