Act 3 - why we bought a business in a pandemic

I don’t like being told no.

Actually, I really don’t like being told no.

I used to think this was because I had a fear of failure, and a no was failure to me. When I was a kid and I went to a tennis tournament, I often thought of how I could avoid defeat. When I entered an exam room to sit a test, I often did so with the mindset of avoiding bad grades.

Like with a lot of things in life, I have even taken this mindset to its extreme.

When my dreams were taken away from me in 2004 and I was dropped from the Athens Olympic team I made the decision that I was going to finally tell my childhood sweetheart that I loved her. I phoned her up and invited her down to Salcombe, where my Gran lived, whilst I processed one of my biggest failures to date. I wined and dined her, showed her the sights of Devon, and even treated her to one of the finest Cornish pasties you could imagine. How could she say no?!

But I couldn’t bring myself to say those 3 words, because all I could think of was ‘what if she didn’t feel the same way’.

To cut a very long and romantic story short, she ended up so frustrated with my complete lack of courage and gave me a kiss.

A marriage, two kids, a dog, two cats and 12 years later, the rest is history.

It wasn’t until I met a very wise man that I realised that I didn’t actually have a fear of failure, I had a love of winning. I loved the yes so much that I couldn’t bear the no. I do believe that we can apply this philosophy to most fears we have. The fear of not being accepted could be the love of being part of something. The fear of dying is actually the love of life. The fear of loneliness the love of people. And so on and so on.

Every fear can be reversed into the love of something. The fear of the no is a love of a yes.

Almost overnight our industry had completely stopped.

People couldn’t travel.

We had paid quite a lot of money for something and we had no one to do it with.

Coming back to the story of why we bought a business in the pandemic.

We had a vision.

We had a platform.

We just had no one to do it with.

And one thought kept on popping up in my head: how do you build and position this thing so that they (the airlines) have to say yes?

I think one thing that people who know me cannot deny me of is what I lack in talent I more than make up in resourcefulness.

So I listened.

I listened to the world.

I listened to our clients.

I listened to our competitors.

I listened to anyone who I believed had something useful to say.

Because I wanted to make sure that when we presented the platform to an airline or travel partner, they had to say yes.

Imagine you had a business where your customers had to say yes to your product or services? How cool would that be?

At a time when travel had stopped, our airlines were losing millions of $ a day, most people were either being made redundant or being furloughed, and many of those who were left were being told to find ways of saving money - we went to market with our new platform.

And I had to get a yes.

One of the books I read right at the start of lockdown and I book I would encourage any business leader to read is ‘Building a Story Brand’ by Donald Miller. He talks about how to build a brand (surprisingly given the title!) and one of the points he raises is about identifying a problem and having the right solution to fix that problem.

It's not about us, it's about what we can do for them.

So, I set about identifying the problem and creating a solution that perfectly solved that problem, and one I could therefore build value around. To guarantee (or almost guarantee) a yes.

Our airlines were losing money – a lot of money

They had limited resource – those who were working were doing 2-3 jobs

They needed to sell more tickets, but marketing budgets had been decimated

I may sound simple, as many things should be, so we built it to

1.      Generate a significant amount of money for them

2.      Not need any, or very little, resource from the airlines

3.      Have the ability to generate marketing $ and even be used by their marketing teams and save them money

Then the fun started

Part of my 7-stage process to transform adversity into long-term success is making it an adventure, not a chore. True, we were in a position where we needed to make this work and we needed to sign up clients. We are under immense pressure to deliver short-term results to secure the long-term future of the business and the people who worked with us. But I am a big believer in making it an adventure and having a lot of fun along the way – whether you win or lose.

The urinal pitch turned into a wider conversation during lockdown and signing up our first partner on the platform with one of Europe’s biggest airlines.

Shortly followed by many late evening/night-time pitches to the US and one of the world’s top 3 biggest airlines giving us a yes.

3 airlines in Asia were quick to follow in short succession as we guided them through the vision we had for them and the opportunity we could uncover.

Hours and hours of practicing and perfecting the pitch and positioning of our platform and now I am proud to say we have 7 of the world’s biggest airlines signed up in a little over 3 months of going to market.

An incredible adventure and lot of fun as well as blood, sweat and tears along the way.

I know that there will be more clients to come and I know there will be a lot more hard work to get the platform to where we want it to be. But the process has started, and we are off and running.

We exist to help solve the problems of airlines and travel partners. To deliver them a solution they would otherwise not have had and to make sure we maximise the potential we have with our platforms.

We now have a digital first business and the vision of becoming the Amazon of Travel is well and truly under way.

I and we are under no illusion of the fight we have ahead as Covid still exists in our world and will do for some time. Travel restrictions remain in place and our airlines are unlikely to resume some kind of normality for some months to come.

And that’s ok, because we have built a business that will not only survive this period but will come out of it ready to accelerate towards our vision and make sure our people are taken on the journey with us.

This is definitely not the end, its only the beginning.

So why did we buy a business in a pandemic? Because there is always a way and with visionary leadership – anything is possible.