Buy Well, Exit Better: A $67m Win in 4 Years

Well, and this touches on one of the, the reasons not, you know, one of the negatives of this category that we didn't touch on earlier is the, you know, the, the expectations of your customer that this is a big spend for them. This is maybe a once in a lifetime trip for them. You know, it's like being in the wedding business.

People are only going to have one wedding, hopefully. And so if you're, if you're, you know, in that business, everyone, all your customers expect perfection every. So it's, it's a command performance by you all every time.

So these are, there's a lot that's, that's out. It could be airline delays, which certain, you know, certainly a tour operator has no control over. And so, you know, you own it all as the, as the company that, that cashes the check and, and, you know, owns the experience and, and that's, that's, that's, that's part of the, that's part of it.

Now you can mitigate a lot of those, those issues by, by how you respond and providing good service in response to unanticipated events or events that are, you know, fairly clearly out of, out of your control. But nevertheless, it's, it's high stakes and you don't get you, you get blamed. Unless the experience is, is 10 out of 10. Yeah.

And that would, that would be. Drain you after a while, that pressure.

Yeah, certainly. No, no, no question.

Crises or not, I mean, you know, Ebola or not, just the day to day is, could be draining in that way for sure. We talked about the reoccurring revenue, that the quality of revenue here is higher than it might seem at first because you do do a good, if you deliver a good experience, they'll come back. What does in general customer acquisition look like? What did it look like?

So, you know, the, the biggest source of customer acquisition was word of mouth referrals. So that's another beautiful feature of travel.

If, if you, if somebody goes on a trip, they have a great experience, they're going to put up on Facebook, they're gonna, they're gonna print photos and show them to their friends, they're going to put out a little a booklet and put it on their coffee table and they have friends over, they'll brag about the time that they had in Thailand or China or Cuba or where, you know, or what have you.

And there's just a, there's that natural built in word of mouth referral engine. Now there are some things that you can do to even to supercharge that, but often it's best just to let that sort of marinate and happen organically. So there's nothing that you can do to compete with just the beautiful engine of word of mouth and referrals.

When we came into the business, I thought, gosh, we're going to grow this thing like a weed through digital marketing, paid social, paid search, you know, which.