Why Choose Ownership Over Being a CEO

Um, good on them.

Super, super technical people very familiar with the tools we wanted to use in house. So initially we had them take a look and they were going to do the work and then had some personal life things come up that made them not able to do the work. We then went and quoted it out and we're unhappy with the quotes that came back.

Not necessarily Zapier, but tools like that and a bunch of AI telling me, hey this is a bug, why don't you debug it by doing these behaviors? And so a month of me in a cave with AI eventually built actually like some of the major functionality of We Travel and Soft trip that we're now deploying to production. So yeah, we'll save about 10 to 30k of top line. That would have been haircutted by like…

Good for you guys. And so when you did you look. Under the hood at name of the. Business again, Katherine, Women Travel abroad, did.

You look under the hood at Women Travel Abroad and prescribe what the tech enablement that you were going to do was going to be? Or did you just sort of have a broad tech enablement thesis that these cat this category of businesses is desperate for technology. So whatever business we buy is very likely to need something built and then we'll build that and increase margin that way.

I guess. And I guess what I'm trying to do is tease out whether or not there's a lesson here because tech enablement in these businesses is, is kind of a, an assumed lever to pull for many searchers in many categories. Were you just playing that game or were you specifically looking at women Travel abroad and saying oh, like we can build something to do X, Y and Z in this specific business that I…

I think initially we, we had the thesis right for the industry. I don't think we knew exactly what it was going to be, but I knew through having worked for Experience Morocco and seen the fact that there is a step, right? Revenue increases $500,000, you have to add two people headcount.

Like it was just, it kept stair climbing up. I knew that I did not want that when I grew Women Travel Abroad and so we thought through a lot. We did a certain level of technical diligence, understanding what tools they were using, which were terrible and not specific for the travel industry.

I think where we got into specifically what we've built was both women Travel abroad, but also some conversations actually with other similarly sized tour operators where I reached out to other women owned travel businesses to just connect. As I owned this business, I wanted to hear what was working for them, what wasn't working for them. Some of them were search owned businesses, some of them…

And I kept hearing the same things of there are a lot of issues with, you know, the back end operations of communicating with vendors, making sure that we're paying vendors on time, making sure that we're collecting traveler payments on time, invoicing issues.

And there was just a lot of really detailed work that goes into orchestrating both the collection of money as well as the sending money to vendors, which every business I was talking to was either struggling with and had to hire a lot of people to manage or was using technology but not satisfied with the technology that they were using. And so I think that was actually more of the thing.