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

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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