[EO San Francisco] Turning Passion for Travel Into a Thriving Global Business With Jim Lutz

Jim Lutz is the Founder and President of Vaya Adventures, a company specializing in tailor-made travel experiences to destinations around the world. After starting his career as a lawyer, Jim transitioned into entrepreneurship, combining his passion for travel and deep knowledge of Latin America to build a thriving business. Since its founding in 2004, Vaya Adventures has expanded to offer custom itineraries across South America, Africa, Asia, Europe, and beyond, focusing on creating meaningful and personalized journeys for travelers.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[2:07] Jim Lutz talks about his background and his younger years
[8:39] What led Jim to leave his law career behind and pursue entrepreneurship in the travel industry
[14:08] The story behind the founding of Vaya Adventures and its early challenges
[19:00] Balancing the tension between customization and scalability
[20:41] The profound impact of the pandemic on the travel industry and how Jim adapted
[26:41] Strategies for mitigating risks in a volatile and unpredictable industry
[28:01] Jim shares his expansion and future plans for Vaya Adventures

In this episode…

Building a business around your passion may sound like a dream, but the journey is often filled with challenges and unexpected detours. Is it possible to turn your passion into a thriving global enterprise while navigating obstacles like economic downturns and a pandemic?

According to Jim Lutz, a passionate traveler turned entrepreneur, success is possible, and it starts with a genuine connection to your vision. He explains that leveraging his own travel experiences and knowledge of Latin America helped him identify a niche and create personalized, high-quality trips that resonate with clients. By staying true to his passion while learning to adapt to market changes during uncertain times, he grew his business steadily. Jim emphasizes that building a thriving enterprise also requires surrounding yourself with the right team and remaining focused on the value you provide to customers.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, John Corcoran is joined by Jim Lutz, Founder and President of Vaya Adventures, to discuss his journey from practicing law to becoming a travel industry entrepreneur. Jim shares how he transformed his love for travel into a successful global business, the role adaptability played in overcoming challenges, and the strategies he used to expand into international markets.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments

“I realized at some point flying out of Rio de Janeiro, I’ve been down here enough, I could start a travel company.”
“I spent one entire day with Snoop Dogg in a small courtroom related to a lawsuit brought by Suge Knight.”
“You don’t have all the answers at your fingertips, but you can do the research and you can figure out most of it.”
“Some of the things they did traveling will be some of the most meaningful things they ever did.”
“You don’t know. And you live with that in this industry, I think, which is the nature of it.”

Action Steps

Embrace diverse experiences: By traveling and exposing yourself to different cultures and environments, you can gain new perspectives that enhance your ability to lead with empathy and understanding.
Develop resilience through change: Like Jim Lutz, who transitioned from law to entrepreneurship, embracing career shifts can teach valuable lessons in resilience and adaptability.
Cultivate a growth mindset: Pursuing continuous learning and education enables leaders to stay ahead in their field and innovate.
Build a strong network: Cultivating a robust network helps leaders overcome isolation by surrounding themselves with like-minded individuals who can offer guidance and new opportunities.
Focus on team building: Hiring and developing a skilled team is crucial for scaling operations while maintaining quality.

Sponsor for this episode…

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Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

John Corcoran 0:13

All right. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran, here, I am the co-host of this show where we feature top entrepreneurs and business leaders sharing their stories. Got lots of great episodes in the archives, so check them out here. And of course, this episode, this particular episode brought to you by EO San Francisco, which is the Bay Area chapter of Entrepreneurs’ Organization, which is a global peer to peer network of more than 18,000 influential business owners with 200 chapters in 60 plus countries. So if you are the founder, co founder, owner or controlling shareholder of a company that generates over a million dollars a year in revenues, and want to connect with other like minded, successful entrepreneurs, eo is for you. And the EO San Francisco chapter, which has been around since 1991 today, has over 100 members in industries ranging from marketing to agriculture, tech, professional services, you name it. To learn more about how it works, or to come to a test drive with us. You go to eonetwork.org/sanfrancisco. And of course, this episode is also brought to you by my company, Rise25 where we help B2B businesses get clients, referrals and strategic partnerships with done for you podcast and I am a member of the board and also a member of Entrepreneurs Organization, proud member of Entrepreneurs’ Organization. And my guest here today is Jim Lutz. He’s the Founder of Vaya Adventures. He, like I, is a recovering lawyer who went into entrepreneurship. So we’ll talk about the perils and the benefits of being a recovering lawyer and becoming an entrepreneur. Jim, such a pleasure to have you here today. And I love to first start by learning a bit about what people were like as a kid. And you were a competitive swimmer. Worked really hard at that, and actually ended up going and swimming at Harvard, not too shabby, except if you have to do it in February, in an outdoor pool, I imagine, but tell me a little bit about what that was like growing up, you know, were you just like every day in the pool kind of thing?

Jim Lutz 2:07

I grew up in New Jersey, so it couldn’t be every, you know, every single day in the pool, at least, you know, outdoors as it is out here in California. But there was when I was young. It was mostly summer leagues. And then, as I got going into, you know, later grades, it became swimming in the winters as well. And then by high school, it was swimming two hours every morning, from 5:45 to 7:45 and then from 6:00 to 7:30 at night, five days a week, and two hours on Saturday morning. So it was a lot of it was, it was a lot of swimming. And that was my life, yeah, through high school. But, yeah, it was, it was great. I happened to live three blocks from the team that was state champs in the high school, state champs in New Jersey. So it was nice to, you know, have just be able to fall into that program, really. And then, you know, everybody kind of pushed each other and motivated each other. So we it was, it was a lot of fun. We used to all shave our heads for state championships.

John Corcoran 3:07

And you also were raised around a lot of lawyers. You had a lot of lawyers in your family, so you didn’t see entrepreneurship in your future. You saw practicing law in your future.

Jim Lutz 3:18

That’s true. I come from a family of lawyers, my dad, my brother, my uncles, my cousins, all lawyers. There is not a single entrepreneur that I could name in my family, no one in business, really at all. And that was the path I thought, you know, I would follow, and that I would want, that I wanted to follow. And so, yeah, I never really thought otherwise, and only later, when it was when, you know, when I got in there and was was practicing law, and realized, yeah, I’m not sure this is for me. And you know, there’s, there’s more to the story, but I had, I had traveled around, you know, after I got out of college, I spent three years outside the United States. I was going to spend one year outside the US and just go learn Spanish in Spain. So I went over there, spent a year over there, got pretty good, you know, good in Spanish, spending one year just intensively studying Spanish, traveling around. And then I just, I realized the at the end of that year, I went to Morocco, and then I and then, kind of, the lights went on for me as far as travel and seeing the world and what the world can offer and and then I said, You know what, I don’t think I’m ready to go to law school yet. I think I’m gonna see if I can find a job in South America where I can get the Spanish to some more level of greater fluency. And one year turned into two. I ended up getting a job that was like a Peace Corps type job in Quito Ecuador. And those are two great years. And then I did go to law school at the end of that, but at that point, I had now sort of laid a foundation for the for the future of the travel business, I think.

John Corcoran 4:55

But without even knowing it, you realize there’s a lot bigger world than you. The Garden State, and it seems like you’re a bit, kind of, you’re definitely bit by the travel bug. If you This Was Your Life, if you lived abroad for three years before going to law school.

Jim Lutz 5:10

Yes, for sure. I mean, I was definitely bit by the travel bug and and, you know, just getting out into the world and seeing more of it. I mean, when I, when I went to law school, I thought, you know, I had in mind international law, which, you know, I thought sounded it had that sounded good international law. It was a little bit of a, be careful what you wish for. I think on that one, because international law can be a lot of things. Some of it probably great. Some of it is big corporate, international business deal law, which is a lot of documents and not that exciting, not as exciting as it sounds like it might be Yeah, not as exciting as Yeah, as the as the label.

John Corcoran 5:50

Probably actually requires more office, more hours in the office because of its complexity.

Jim Lutz 5:58

Yep, it was, you know, it did get me to travel a little bit. I took a firm with a summer position with a New York law firm that did a lot of international project finance. They sent me hours half the summer in New York City and half the summer in Delhi, in New Delhi. Okay, so at the end of that, I got to go up to the Himalayas. Got another little taste of what really getting out into the world can be and, you know, I just, those are the times when I felt like I really came alive. Was in all of that, I eventually went, you know, I didn’t, I didn’t really love the corporate. I didn’t like the corporate, you know, project finance stuff. And then I in the law, I tried out some different things. I worked in the DA office in LA for a while, for a year, and and then I worked for a entertainment litigation firm that had various clients, such as my boss, had a lot of big entertainment industry clients, like Axl Rose, Snoop Dogg. I worked on a lot of a bunch of different Snoop Dogg cases.

John Corcoran 6:55

A bunch of different Snoop Dogg cases. Now we can’t avoid Snoop Dogg. He’s in every single advertisement on television. It seems like he’s he’s done quite well with his personal brand. He’s everywhere. Any crazy stories and any crazy entertainment, interesting stories, you don’t have to name the name of the celebrity if it’s if it’s if you can, repeat if you can. Don’t have to.

Jim Lutz 7:15

I mean, the reality is, I did interact with Snoop Dogg. I spent one entire day with him, one time in a small courtroom related to a lawsuit that was brought by Suge Knight. I don’t know if anyone remembers Death Row Records, but Suge Knight was the one of the founders of Death Row Records, and his his wife was Sharitha. Knight was claimed to be the personal manager of Snoop Dogg. He said she really never acted as the personal manager. So it was a lawsuit over whether or not he owed her money. There was a lot of litigation around Snoop Dogg in this type of thing. And, yeah, you know. And none of it, you know, it was a lot of it was not, you know, there was just like any other lawsuit wasn’t necessarily the the sexiest, you know, thing going on. And, sure, in LA, you know, it was la law, for sure, given the people involved and everything else, and but it was, you know, pressing law, bare knuckles litigation in Los Angeles, which, you know, again, I did that for two years and realized this wasn’t sure this wasn’t for me.

John Corcoran 8:22

And meanwhile, this is so this is 99 This is the.com boom, all over California. You’re in LA at the time, and did you feel like, Okay, I gotta go pursue this. I’m gonna miss this opportunity. What was going through your mind as far as what you’re gonna pursue then?

Jim Lutz 8:39

Yeah, this is late in so I started practicing that firm in the late 90s. And then as as as it got into to, you know, really the late 90s that, yeah, the.com you know, bubble was really very inflated. I saw a lot of people leaving the law, a lot of people going doing things like biz dev. That was the phrase a lot of people use for what you can do. As a former lawyer, and I, you know, at some point, I realized I just don’t want to do this, and I don’t have the time to figure out what I can, you know, what I’m going to do next, but I need to get out of this and then figure it out. So and I left the law, I picked a date, went into the My partner’s office, and I not knocked on the door and said, Bert, I can I talk to you? And he said, Oh, and very smart guy, very perceptive, and and I, and I told him that I wanted to leave it. He was very supportive, you know, and I ended up, I ended up leaving the law and ending up going, I left there and went to Chile. I decided to go work for a nonprofit in Chile that was in Chile that was working with entrepreneurs. Figured I’d get back to South America, see what I could, you know, maybe I could figure out a company I could work for. Then .com bubble burst. You know, I was there. I was in Chile in early 2000 and by May, I was sometime around May, June, .com bubble burst, yeah, over eight. April 2000 or something was like the, yeah, exactly, April 2000 and then all the jobs dried up. All, you know, there wasn’t really anything to be, to be, you know, getting a job in there. So I decided to go back to school. I had, you know, had no experience in business, but I thought business could be fun, and it’d be an opportunity to take a couple years and figure out how I can pivot into that and maybe study entrepreneurship and, yeah, figure out a business that I could start. And that’s what I did.

John Corcoran 10:26

So you figured Harvard, then law school, more schooling will certainly on top of all that, will solve all my problems.

Jim Lutz 10:34

See, it does seem like too much school that sometimes, when I think about it, on the other hand, it, you know, it helped me figure it out.

John Corcoran 10:40

So, and that’s what I say about, you know, being recovering lawyers, you you figure out that you can figure out everything. You know that no matter what the challenge is ahead of you, you can do the research. You know, you don’t have all the answers at your fingertips, but you can do the research and you can figure out most of it. You know, I think that it gives you a lot of confidence, as far as that’s concerned. Does it help?

Jim Lutz 11:02

Definitely helps with problem solving and critical thinking, yeah, type of thing which, yeah, has been valuable all in the way.

[Continue to Page 2]

John Corcoran 11:08

And so by the time you got to near the end of your MBA, you, you knew you wanted to start a business, but you didn’t know what that business would be. And I think it was within about a month of graduation, you do you have an epiphany? Would you decided that it was going to be that you were still passionate about travel and you wanted to have to do with travel?

Jim Lutz 11:29

Yeah, yes. I had spent the better part of business school working on a business plan that it did involve Latin America. It involved a woman who had a small, small chain of home furnishing stores that imported things from Central America and Mexico, and I worked with her on a marketing research plan, on the business plan class at Northwestern where I went to business school. It was great. And I thought, this is, this is a viable, you know, possibility, I could go into business with this woman and kind of help her grow this business. I still think that actually would have been a good, you know, that would, that would have been a good road to go. But when I was towards the end of business school, I did a spring break trip to Brazil, and on that trip, I remember being in Rio de Janeiro. And I had, at this point, spent a lot of time in South America, the two years in Ecuador, half a year in Chile, I’ve been back down several times for different climbing trips and other other things. And I realized at some point, flying out of Rio de Janeiro, you know, I definitely had the sort of Epiphany, light bulb, you know, moment where I said, I’ve been down here enough, and I speak Spanish now, like, I started travel company, and it’s, you know, there was, it was definitely one of those cases of, there’s no looking back, you know, you know, as soon, as soon as I had the idea that that was pretty much, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, and immediately started really just digging in on, like, okay, is this feasible? And I realized it’s actually a not very capital intensive business. It’s not that, not that, that hard to get in, not low, low barriers to entry. And, you know, it’s very competitive. It’s a volatile industry, but it’s a fun industry, and it’s, you know, it’s fascinating. And you do get to do all the, all, you know, the things that you love. You do get to do them. I mean, I remember at some point thinking, I thought to myself, you know, should I do this? And I thought, I think, you know, so what I can do is go visit a whole bunch of lodges in the Amazon and then figure out page one, best one. And then, you know, get paid to pay me to tell them which is the best one. Yeah. Said, Okay, not too hard.

John Corcoran 13:41

Not too hard. Of course, this was you’re graduating in 2002 not the best economy. And I imagine at that point your network, well, you probably knew some people still who are lawyers and things like that, but a lot of your network at that point is other broke grad students who are graduating with a lot of you know, debt from their business school. How did you get clients in those early days? How did you get people to sign up for your trips?

Jim Lutz 14:08

Yeah, it was interesting. I mean, I when I launched the business, the very first thing I did was go to the New York Times travel show. I was I was in New York at the time. I had moved to New York after business school, so I was in Manhattan, and the New York Times travel show was right there in Manhattan in early 2004 when I launched the business and and I went to, you know, had a booth, had a small tri fold brochure, and I got my first clients from that show. And then, you know, not long into that year, paid, search was really coming into its own? 2004 Wow. Yeah, I think, I think I don’t know exactly when the sort of momentum grew for Google with paid search as the primary source of their revenue, which I think it’s still about eight. 80% of Google’s revenue is paid search, which I don’t think people even really know that, or even understand what, what it is, where they get all of their money, but that’s still the big driver of the business. And, you know, and I, and when I saw that, I tried it out, and, you know, it worked. You know, I did get some, you know, referrals from friends and other, you know, marketing efforts I did, I think I put a couple ads here and there, and, you know, got the word out as best I could, and went to some other travel shows, and that that worked to some degree. The first year was very slow. I mean, I think I had, you know, I think probably the first year, I sold just a few trips the second year, and these are group trips, like a couple of people, to begin to try private custom travel. And it was all focused on South America. And it was only focused on a few destinations in South America, specifically Ecuador and the Galapagos, which is has become our biggest destination, still is, and Peru, which is machu, Picchu, Patagonia in Chile, and then some central American destinations. We were very focused in South America, which I knew well and, you know, and then it just started to take off, you know, by over time, you know, by after a couple years, it was, you know, 1314, hour, 15 hour days for a couple years, trying to do, doing everything, no employees, one man show. And then by about 2006 I moved out to California, and at that point, I realized it’s, it’s way too much for me to handle. So I got, I got, you know, hired my first employee, and got an office in Berkeley, and just been building it since then.

John Corcoran 16:42

And did you reach a point? You know, there’s, there’s the great book which is behind me here, the E-Myth, by Michael Gerber, which is tells the story of this baker who loves baking cakes, so she starts a bakery, and then she finds herself doing everything but the thing that she loved, which was baking the cakes. Did you run into that with your business where, you know, I got into this because I love travel. I love going exploring new places, and all of a sudden I’m managing people, and I’m looking at spreadsheets instead of going on trips.

Jim Lutz 17:13

You know, I wouldn’t say that that happened for you know, I don’t know that that’s actually happened at any point. I mean, it’s a, it’s, you know, it’s not, and not that I was traveling so much either. I mean, I started a family, and I was really only traveling a few weeks a year to check out new places and visit with suppliers, and heading, you know, heading down to South America. I just, you know, every year I would take some, you know, like, you know, fairly lengthy trip, multi week trip, but, you know, so I got some, some every year. I got to keep taking these trips, and I appreciate it. I think I lived all those years, no matter how hard I was working, what I was doing with a sense of I had kind of dodged a bullet, and I was grateful for what I had, and I was totally good to put in the hours and, you know, and then the business, you know, you start hiring more employees. It’s, it gets exciting that the business is succeeding. And you’re, you know, you’re able to have employees and pass off some things. And, yeah, I mean, sometimes you wish you could, yeah, get out on the get on the road some more. But then again, really, for the most part, a lot of that is, is with my kids, you know that are now who are now teenagers. So, yeah, I was really keeping it more at home. And then, you know, more than anything else,

John Corcoran 18:27

I know with Vaya you, it says, right on your website, you specialize in tailor made travel. And from a business perspective, you know, from a customer’s perspective, that’s awesome, because customer comes in, they want to do it exactly that they want to do it. Want to do, want something specific, unique to them, that sort of thing. From business perspective, there’s always a tension because, you know, creating something more systematized and routine allows you to put systems in place and doesn’t require as much, you know, research and labor up front. How have you balanced those two the tension between those two things?

Jim Lutz 18:59

Yeah, it is a, there is a tension there, trying to grow a business that’s such with so much customization poses, I think, you know, various challenges. And, you know, I think that it, it took quite a few years for me to try and figure out how we could actually start to grow this business a little bit more. Rapidly. I mean, I didn’t really want to try and grow it very fast, and so we could maintain quality control, and, you know, remain very personalized. In the end, it was all about having the right people and having the right systems in place. You know, once you get your you know, your your databases set up the right way, and your CRM set up the right way, and the itinerary creation database and the different things speaking to each other. And then, you know, get the right people who really know the destinations. Well, you know. And then the leads are coming in from pay per click and from from other sources, mainly pay per click. And. And getting repeat and referral off of the original business that you got. You know, it’s a matter of just making sure you staff up. You can’t really grow really fast without compromising quality, I think, in this industry. So we haven’t tried to grow really fast. And as we’ve added new destinations around the world, which we have, we expanded to do, you know, quite a few other destinations. And, you know, we grew from, you know, from 12 people pre COVID to six people in COVID, when I thought the business would probably fail completely.

John Corcoran 20:30

Yeah, tell me about that. I mean, what was it like for you in March of 2020, when the world shut down and borders were closed down, and, you know, what was that like?

Jim Lutz 20:42

It was not fun. And I know that men, you know, many other businesses, you know, went through similar, you know, trials. But it was, it was very challenging. I mean, I had, you know, three, you know, the same three kids I have now, and mortgage. And, you know, my wife had gone back to school to switch careers from her business career to become a social worker. So it was, it was challenging, for sure, definitely, what you know, woke up on, you know, different nights like Nicole sweat like, Okay, what am I going to do now?

John Corcoran 21:13

But, and you know, some businesses, like restaurants and things like that, pivoted to like, you know, deal, food delivery or something like that. Did you consider that? Or did you pivot to anything else? Or was there something you could pivot into?

Jim Lutz 21:27

I’ll tell you. You know, there, there were various companies in our space that pivoted to doing closer at home trips. That was something that some some companies did. I thought about doing that, like domestic exactly doing North America trips, you know, because they’re fairly quickly, within a few months, I’d say, I don’t know, six, you know, maybe summer, late, to 2020 I think you started to see people doing some of that. Are you there? It was on the horizon that could, people could do more of that type of travel around, you know, within the US and close by. I didn’t really see it as something that was, was was going to go anywhere. I looked into it. We benefited from the fact that that Galapagos Islands, which was our number one destination, opened up a lot earlier than most destinations. It was, it’s a very contained, isolated place. People could fly into Quito stay in a hotel room that was, you know, just one night in the city, not really go out and interact with many people, and the next day, be in the Galapagos Islands on a small ship. Often, you would get, we booked a lot of charters that year where people would go with their friends, they’d all know each other. So you’d have 16 people who all knew each other on one ship. And those are great bookings that were big bookings, you know, booking a yacht in the Galapagos Islands for, you know, for a week with 16 people. And we booked a bunch of those that year. So that that, starting in around 2021 at some point, we started to see a bit of an uptick, and into 2022 you know, then things started to open up the, you know, you saw the light on the horizon at some point there. And somewhere in there, I realized, you know, this, this business that had been Mom and Pop and small and, you know, 12 people pre COVID, and now was down to six, you know, it was, it was a business that had a lot of potential. I knew the industry. I’d been in it for a while now, and my kids are older, and I’m, you know, I’m feeling like, wow, there’s, there’s some exciting possibilities to do what we did in Ecuador, and, I mean, what we did in South America, and do it around the world, and then cross sell the destinations, a much, much better opportunity. I had seen other companies in our space do exactly that, and had grown, you know, to be many times our size. I’d had become big, big companies, really, with hundreds of employees. And not that I wanted to get to that size, but I could tell that there were basics of this, this proposition of cross selling, you know, having more to offer. It’s pretty basic really, you know. So I didn’t what I decided to do that. And I decided that what we would do to maintain quality is not take our South America staff and send them on a trip to Africa and start selling Africa Safaris. What I would do is hire people who were a lot like our, you know, veterans of our, you know, our destination, specialists who had many years in, you know, in many of them lived in South America and spent a lot of time there and were deeply connected to it. Do the same thing for the other regions, you know, to hire someone who’d like, lived in Africa and had been selling African safaris for many, many years and traveled all over the continent. Had done all, you know, been to 30 countries in Africa, and that’s what I did. And so we we did that, and then that grew, and we added, you know, bit by bit, I realized that kind of, the quicker I can get this thing up to have multiple destinations, adding Asia and Europe, the more I’m going to have to offer to people. So it should gather some momentum. But in the short term, you know, I’m going to have to make some investments.

John Corcoran 24:48

Yeah, in the short term, it’s expensive, doing that sort of thing, hiring someone, not knowing if they’re Did you? Did you have a test like, Did you email people who had been on previous South American trips with with you, and say, Hey, would you. If I put together a, you know, trip to a safari in Africa, is that the sort of thing that you did?

Jim Lutz 25:06

We, you know, we had, we knew we had a base of people, because now we had a database with, you know, 1000s and 1000s of people in it, and many of whom had been asking over the years, do you guys do trips to Africa? Do you guys do trips to Asia? Do you do them to Europe? So we knew that there was some demand within our own community, really, in our in our database, to offer those trips. And we had had, you know, good success with doing, you know, our marketing in PPC, and had the sense that we could, we could sort of wade in with Africa, you know, pay per click marketing as well do the same thing we had done. We had learned that it’s expensive. It was more expensive for Africa than it had been for Latin America. It had definitely had some challenges. But, you know, it really was a matter of just deciding, you know, I was, I still am fair. You know, the sky could fall and travel, anything could happen the next calamity. It’s not a matter of, you know, if it’s a matter of when it could be regional, it could be global, it could be, who knows? You know? You don’t know. And you live with that in this industry, I think, which is.

John Corcoran 26:11

Yeah, and that’s, that’s the nature of it, right? I mean, people are getting on planes, they’re getting on small planes, they’re getting on trains, they’re getting in cars. They’re going away from their little bubble. That’s part of what Travel is about, experiencing the world. How do you, as the owner of this business, how do you you mentioned sleeping at night? How do you sleep at night, knowing that you know that you’re responsible for all these people out there, or how do you mitigate the risk, to to manage it?

Jim Lutz 26:41

Well, I mean, I think, you know, we learned over many years how to do it in South America, and we’ve applied that same thing to the other destinations. You hire people. It’s all, you know, as with most businesses, it’s, it’s about the people you hire. We have a great team. People are very experienced who have been, you know, working in these regions for many years. So they come into via, in some cases, with more experience than via even has in in, you know, in some cases in South America. I mean, some of these people have been in the industry for a long time, so, you know, they they’re adding expertise and experience to know how to to, you know, set up systems and set up relationships and, and it’s really the partners we have on the ground, and they’ve been around for a long time, in some cases. And I’ll be going down to Peru in April for a company that’s, you know, our oldest partner of the whole business, the first partner I had for brew trips. They’re celebrating their 50th anniversary. You know, they’ve been around a long time, and, you know, they, they know how to run things on the ground. They’re great. They have great contacts. They, they, they run very responsibly, very safely, and we have partners like that now, all over. That’s what we look for. So, yeah, yeah, people who help us operate our trips. So what do you you know, it’s a lot to manage.

John Corcoran 27:50

But yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. What are you most excited about as you look to the future, we’re recording this end of 2024 heading into 2025 What are you excited about?

Jim Lutz 27:59

Yeah, oh, I’m I’m excited to to see, you know, how this, you know, the business unfolds. I mean, just in terms of the business itself, to see the, you know, how we can grow the business and maintain our values culture, which we’ve been able to do, which has been exciting to see, right? We feel, I feel like we’ve, we’ve now grown the business. We have 30 some employees now we’re offering, you know, 40, or you know, more than 40 destinations in countries worldwide. And, you know, adding new ones. And you know, there’s a lot, lot of exciting new destinations we’ll be offering, you know, we added just this past year, Japan, India, Nepal, Croatia, Switzerland, we’ll be adding, you know, a variety of new places, Sri Lanka, Indonesia.

John Corcoran 28:51

That’s a lot of destination. Have you added a destination yet that Jim hasn’t been to?

Jim Lutz 28:56

Yeah, several of those I have not been to.

John Corcoran 29:01

Makes it exciting, right? You know, you gotta.

Jim Lutz 29:03

That makes it exciting, for sure. I mean, yeah, I’ve had the opportunity to go to, yeah, I mean, and then, and then it comes down. And what’s exciting is the opportunity to get out and see more of the world, I mean, and, you know, do the thing that really got me, got me going in this in the first place. I mean, I’ve had, the one thing I’m very excited about is to be able to take my kids on more trips. More trips now that they’re getting a bit older. I took my daughter to South Africa two summers ago, for example, you know, just the two of us, and, you know, we went on safari and just had an had an amazing experience. Hope to do that with my two boys, you know, some point in these come, coming years, and just to see, you know, other parts of the world I haven’t seen. So, yeah, and just that, with more and more people.

John Corcoran 29:45

I’m such a fan of travel. I have four kids, so they’ve kind of got, kind of ruined my game as far as travel comes, you know, I I feel like I traveled a lot more before I had kids, but nevertheless, done some domestic travel, gotten the kids out of their little bubble. And there’s something wonderful about getting people into new experiences, meeting new cultures, you know. You know, we were in Montana and went to a rodeo this past summer, which is very different, you know, for them culturally, to kind of see that experience, you know. And so it’s just something that’s so cool, and it’s fun. It’s amazing that you get to share that with other people.

Jim Lutz 30:22

Yeah, it is. I mean, it’s definitely one of the one of the highlights of the business is, is, I mean, these are some of the most meaningful experiences in people’s lives. I mean, I truly think that by the end of people’s lives, they’ll look back and some of the things they did, traveling around, on the on these trips, will be some of the most meaningful things they ever did. I mean, yeah, they’ll say, I got to see those places and one of the you know, and you get to help them with that, share that with them, you know, connect with them. You know, relate to that. And then also have all the relationships you develop in all these places, which is a, you know, you’re getting to connect with people around the world in a very positive way. It’s like the best of what humans are capable of really connecting. And, you know, positive things related to culture and art and nature. And, you know, yeah, best things in life. It makes a more caring world when we understand people from other societies, from other countries as well.

John Corcoran 31:16

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Jim, this has been a lot of fun learning about your your background. And Vaya Adventures, where can people go to learn more about you and check out some of your upcoming trips?

Jim Lutz 31:26

Sure, thank you. Yeah, I appreciate it. Our website is www.vayaadventures.com vayaadventures.com and Yeah, appreciate the conversation.

John Corcoran 31:41

You got a great list of trips there, from South America to Africa to going to the polls, Central America, Europe, Asia, you name it really cool. So go check out his website. Jim, thanks so much for your time.

Jim Lutz 31:54

Thank you, John.

Outro 31:54

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