Eleven years at a bank I thought I'd retire from
I spent eleven years at one of the largest banks in the country. I started at the absolute bottom — entry level, no title worth printing — and got promoted about seven times over ten years until I was managing a team of bankers.
I want to be clear that I was good at it. The benefits were excellent. The retirement plan was excellent. I assumed I would retire there.
I also drove to the same building for eleven years and had to talk myself into walking through the door most mornings. It was a heavily HR-managed environment — everything careful, everything processed, everything on somebody else's schedule. For lack of a better description, it felt like working with Mister Rogers.
Then they shut our site down. Big round of layoffs, severance packages, and I was one of them. Eventually everyone was.
Here's the part that surprised me. I wasn't shocked, and I wasn't upset. I felt relief. An enormous amount of weight came off my shoulders in that meeting, and that's when it occurred to me I'd been carrying something heavy for a very long time without noticing. I didn't understand how bad it had been for me until it was over.
Then I rebuilt the same thing with a different logo
I went into another corporate job, also in finance. Different building, same feeling. Sitting at a desk all day, on calls all day, pushing products I didn't necessarily believe in.
December 12, 2022
I was at my desk, on a sales call, when it started.
I was born on December 8, 1985. So I was thirty-seven years and four days old.
Lying in a hospital bed, the first thing I thought needed to change wasn't my job. It was everything around it. I'd been sitting down all day, every day, for years. I smoked. I ate badly. I had been prioritising my income over my health for so long that it genuinely hadn't occurred to me those two things were in competition.
Then the other thoughts arrived, in the order I imagine everybody gets them. What would my kids do without me. What would my family do. Is my life insurance actually set up properly, or do I just assume it is.
I quit smoking. I started going to the gym. I followed the doctor's orders and changed how I ate. I want to be honest about the sequence, because most versions of this story skip it. I did not have a revelation and quit my job the next morning. I fixed my body first, and that took months. Only once that had settled down did I start looking hard at what I was doing with forty-plus hours of every week.
You spend more time with your employer than you do at home. It's worth being deliberate about who that is.
I overcorrected first
I stayed about four more months, in a different role, working from home rather than going back into that office. It was still wrong. So I left.
Then I swung the pendulum much too far. I went from being chained to a desk all day to an outside sales job where I was pounding the pavement all day instead. Opposite problem, same exhaustion. Travel is where it finally landed in the middle.
"Oh God, this is another one of those"
That was my honest first reaction when this was put in front of me. Oh God, this is another one of those MLMs where you have to recruit people and blah blah blah.
I'd been approached about Amway and Scentsy over the years. Neither was for me. I didn't want to buy inventory, hit a minimum purchase to stay qualified, or keep product stacked up in my garage.
My family's contribution was: "If they give you a website, you know you're in a pyramid scheme." You are currently reading a website. I built it myself. Make of that what you will.
What actually got me past the hesitation was fairly unglamorous. I already knew several people doing it, so I could ask real questions and get real answers instead of a presentation. There's no inventory. No minimum purchase. No quota I have to hit to stay in good standing. And there's a refund window, so the downside was defined before I started rather than after.
It was the lowest barrier I had ever seen to actually owning a business. I sat on it for a couple of days, asked a few follow-up questions, and started.
The first ninety days
The training is self-paced, which mattered, because I was doing it at strange hours around everything else. Most people take about two weeks. I pushed and finished in roughly one — not because I'm clever, but because I worked out early that training doesn't earn you anything. Opening for business does.
That turned out to be the hardest lesson of the whole thing, and it's the one I now repeat to everybody I work with: you do not need to know everything before you start. There is an effectively endless amount of training available in this industry and you could disappear into it for six months. Don't. Learn enough to open your doors, then learn the rest while you're actually working.
The first person I helped start their own travel business was a former roommate of mine, coming out of the insurance industry. He was hesitant. I think everybody is at some point — I certainly was.
Plenty of people said no. My friend in real estate wanted to stay focused on selling homes. My sister-in-law is happy where she is in the service industry. My mom passed. Various friends passed.
That's normal and I've stopped taking it personally. Most people are settled into what they've got, and there is genuinely nothing wrong with that. I'm looking for the ones who aren't.
Where I am now
I run a couple of different businesses, I'm raising a family, and I travel as much as I can manage.
I'm also building something. It's a CRM designed specifically for travel agents — clients, itineraries, payments, notes, marketing, follow-up emails and texts, with a lot of AI underneath it. Six tools in one. I'm building it because my team and I needed it and I got tired of waiting for somebody else to make it.
That's probably the most honest summary of where I've ended up. I stopped waiting for other people to build the thing I needed.
Why I help other people start
I've personally helped five people start their own travel business. Five. Not a hundred. I'd rather give you that number straight than dress it up — and honestly, it's the reason I'm any use to you. Five is small enough that you'll actually get my attention. When you text me, I answer.
I'm also part of a wider team of close to three hundred business owners that meets every single week. So you're not learning this from one guy in Idaho with an opinion. You get me, and you get them.
As for why I bother: somebody did it for me. When I started I had three or four proper sit-down meetings with people already in the business who told me what to focus on and what to ignore. That's the only reason I got moving instead of drowning in training modules.
And because I spent eleven years being managed, and another stretch selling products I didn't believe in, and I know precisely what that costs you. If you're reading this at a desk you've been talking yourself into walking up to every morning — I've been there. I'd like to help if I can.