On the 10th of September 2001, two men who had just lost most of their money signed the paperwork for a travel company. You already know what happened the next morning.
Every plane in the world was grounded. The industry they had just bought into stopped dead overnight. The company that sold them the franchise even rang to offer their money back, and they turned it down.
That is Steve Witt and Paul Harrison, the two people behind The Travel Franchise, and that one decision tells you a lot about how this business got built. Everyone around them was pulling back. Steve and Paul had no idea what a normal year was supposed to look like, so they simply kept going. By the end of that first year they were one of the fastest growing travel companies in the country, mostly because everyone else was going backwards.
Steve told the whole story on our webinar last week. It is worth sharing, especially if you have ever wondered whether someone like you could actually do this.
He had been on a plane once
People assume you need to know travel to sell travel. Steve is proof that you do not.
Before any of this, his entire experience of the travel industry was a single holiday to Lanzarote. In his words, “I thought, well, I’ve been on holiday to Lanzarote, I loved it, I’m a travel expert, I can do this.”
By the time he started The Travel Franchise he had already lived several lives. As a teenager he spent more time windsurfing than revising, and his first business was importing the little straps that keep your sunglasses on your head. It failed, and he will happily tell you he was rubbish at it. He became a national windsurfing champion, then a firefighter, which lasted five years despite one fairly significant problem.
“It was only then that I discovered I was scared of heights. So when you’re up a ladder of a burning building and then suddenly realise you’re scared of heights, not the smartest thing.”
What the fire service gave him was a way of thinking that runs through the whole business. Firefighting is built on process. Do this, and this happens. Follow the steps, and you stay safe. Steve got very good at following a proven system, and years later he got very good at writing one.
The other thing that shaped him was a habit of saying yes before he knew how. When a local internet cafe asked him to build websites, he agreed on the spot with no clue how to do it, and that single yes turned into a web hosting company and later the first monthly subscription internet in the UK.
“Unless you say yes to it, you’re never going to do it. It feels nervous, it feels uncomfortable, but ultimately it was just saying yes and then figuring it out later.”
Two men with nothing, and one conversation
Steve and Paul met through a shared disaster.
They are chalk and cheese. Paul is the loud, larger than life one with a Liverpool edge, and Steve is the quiet one who would rather sit at the back. What they had in common was that they had both put money into a friend’s overseas property business and both watched it fall apart. Paul went into real debt over it. Out of that came a conversation Steve still repeats word for word.
“Paul said to me, look, I’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing. If you ever fancy doing something together, let’s talk.”
Two men with empty pockets, deciding to build something anyway. Everything that followed grew out of that.
The day they stopped selling cheap holidays
In the early days they sold holidays through Teletext, which meant waiting on a television page for the right advert to appear while customers rang a number that charged them by the minute. It was cutthroat, and not much fun.
“We got very, very good at selling cheap holidays. I can teach you how to do that, it’s not fun.”
The trouble with cheap is that people shop around to save a pound and never come back. So they tried the opposite. They started talking to people properly. Friends, family, whoever they met at a wedding fair or a local networking evening. And it worked.
“We spent a hundredth of the amount we used to spend on marketing, and we made ten times as much money. We had more time for the customer, we enjoyed it more, and they enjoyed it more.”
That is the whole model. Not chasing strangers and undercutting everyone, but looking after people who already know and trust you, so they come back and bring their friends. It is exactly why nobody here teaches you to be a pushy salesperson. You tell people what you do and invite them to give you a try, which is a very different thing.
They built the business they wish they’d had
This is the part that matters most if you are weighing this up yourself.
Before they built their own franchise, Steve and Paul bought into someone else’s. They got two days of training and then never heard from that company again until the day they left. No support, no mentor, nobody on the end of the phone. So when they built their own, they built the opposite of that on purpose.
“We looked at, if you were brand new to travel, what would you want? What would somebody new to the industry need? Here’s what we wish we had when we first got started.”
The support that sits behind every consultant today was not dreamed up by a marketing team. It was built by two men who knew exactly what it feels like to be handed the keys and left standing on the pavement.
Now look at where it has got to
Their very first franchisee, Agatha, found them through an advert on Gumtree and turned up to a Premier Inn near Heathrow for training. She is still with the business today, and now spends half the year in Thailand and half in Scotland, running her business from wherever she likes. From a budget hotel off the motorway to a life like that, all because she answered an advert and said yes.
That was one person. Today there are over 800.
Behind those consultants sits a corporate team of more than 80 people and a dedicated operations team of 35, there to handle the ticketing, the schedule changes and the admin that catches most new business owners out. Through the partnership with Hays Travel, everyone plugs into more than £3 billion of buying power, over 450 tour operators and around 12 million holidays. That is how somebody who joined last month can price a holiday as competitively as a high street agent who has been doing it for thirty years.
The business now turns over more than £200 million in holiday sales a year. The average booking is around £4,500, though that figure hides the fun of it. The day after this summer’s conference, one consultant went out and booked a single £165,000 holiday. That is not a typical week, but bookings of twenty, thirty and forty thousand pounds happen all the time.
It also keeps growing. Four years ago cruise made up around 8 per cent of sales. The company launched a cruise division, took everyone on a ship to learn it properly, and cruise is now more than a fifth of the business. The same has just been done with luxury, there is a corporate travel arm on the way, plus a brand refresh and a new website. It does not stand still.
Then there are the trips. Join on Elite and your first is the Millionaires Retreat, most recently a five star hotel in Turkey, a few nights of sun and good food with three days of proper business training built in. After that comes the Elite Experience, smaller and further afield, with recent ones in Mauritius, Dubai and ten nights in Japan. As Steve puts it, they are not really holidays. They are life changing trips that happen to feel like one.
None of this existed when Steve and Paul were sitting there with empty pockets. All of it exists for the person who starts today.
So is now a good time to start?
You would expect us to say yes, but the honest answer is that it genuinely is, and not for a soft reason.
ABTA’s own research shows that 38 per cent of people now want to book with a real person rather than sort it themselves online. Not because they cannot manage a booking website, but because after the last few years people want someone they can phone when something goes wrong. That shift plays straight into the hands of people who do this for a living, and in Steve’s words it has made the business busier than ever.
Here is the whole thing in a sentence. Two men with no money and no experience started a travel company on the worst possible day, refused to quit, and built the best version of it in the world. Almost everyone who has joined since started with no travel experience either, around 98 per cent of them. Most start part time, around a job, and build it up before going all in.
You do not need to decide anything today. Have a look at the discovery tour on our website when you get a quiet ten minutes. It is a short set of videos, with no big sales moment at the end, just the full picture so you can make up your own mind.
If Steve and Paul could build all of this from nothing, the question worth asking is what is genuinely stopping you.
