"Live a work life you love; you’ll never have to struggle to focus and stay motivated" with Simone Collins

In partnership with Malcolm Collins and with their son Octavian perpetually strapped to her back like a baby sloth, Simone Collins is CEO of Travelmax, an international collection of travel companies that sells travel on a wholesale basis to boutique agencies and provides white-glove travel management services for a select group of celebrity, entertainment, corporate, and leisure clients. Simone previously founded and ran ArtCorgi.com (a 500 Startups-funded art marketplace she co-founded), managed over 20,000 writers as Director of Marketing at HubPages (the 45th-most-visited site in the US during her tenure), and founded The Pragmatist Foundation the non-profit organization that published the bestselling book The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life.

Can you tell our readers about your background?

I’m a pragmatist hell-bent on bringing back the corporate family: The most prevailing family format before 1900 in which families lived and worked together seamlessly. Under the brave supervision of Octavian, our eight-month-old infant, my husband Malcolm and I run Travelmax, our travel management company by day, and write books by night.

Malcolm and I swore to only work as a family after spending close to a year working on different continents after marrying (he, after getting his MBA from Stanford, relocated to South Korea to work in VC and I flounced off to Cambridge in the UK where I got my graduate degree).

What inspired you to start your business?

After stints in the startup and VC industries, my husband and I were bored to tears by the idea of starting a new business. This leads us to the world of search funds (aka entrepreneurship through acquisition or ETA), which involves raising money from investors to acquire and run a single gem of a business. 

Travelmax, the travel management business I run now, was actually by two brilliant travel industry veterans: Roque Gargano and Lucy Leyva. We NEVER expected to end up in the travel industry, but we and our investors were so inspired by this business, its potential, and its amazing team that we decided to go for it.

Where is your business based?

Travelmax’s headquarters are in Philadelphia, which is supplemented by a satellite office in Lima Peru (this is where the wholesale division runs) and team members throughout the US as well as in Europe and Asia. Like so many businesses now, we’re becoming increasingly virtual, so while some of our team works from offices, the rest is remote. 

How did you start your business? What were the first steps you took? 

Entering the search fund world is a wild ride. To raise the fund used to conduct the business search (which typically takes one to two or more years), we went on a fundraising roadshow, burning through our savings to meet with investors in Silicon Valley, Southern California, Dallas, Salt Lake City, Denver, Chicago, New York, and Boston. We jokingly called it our second honeymoon—the great thing about going through stressful processes with a spouse is you can ALWAYS pretend whatever challenge you face in a given day is just a creative date idea.

 What has been the most effective way of raising awareness for your business?

So many of our target clients don’t even know that travel management companies are a thing. “Wait…” they say, “Travel agencies still exist???” 

We, therefore, raise awareness by running massive email campaigns, kicking off conversations with business owners all across the world to let them know those travel agencies do, indeed, exist—and the good ones can make their lives a heck of a lot easier.

What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?

Many businesses now have been decimated by the pandemic. Goodness gracious, I wish we were only decimated. That would be brilliant. We would be popping champagne bottles and breaking out our hottest dance moves.

Alas, we are being destroyed by SARS-CoV-2. By some measures, we have negative revenue (due to all the refunds passing through us). We clearly haven’t made it out of this industry shock yet, but we’re doing our best to overcome the massive challenge by cutting costs as much as possible and doing our best to innovate and find new ways to make money before the travel industry recovers (it may take a very, very long time to recover).

How do you stay focused?

 The Collins Family has to take over the world—or at least the USA. To do that we will need massive success, yet here we are with only one bestselling book under our belts and a few companies. The knowledge of how much we have yet to achieve lights quite the fire under us.

That and our infant Octavian keeps us in line. He runs a very tight ship around here. 

How do you differentiate your business from the competition?

 We’ve brought a very scrappy, Silicon-Valley-influenced mindset to Travelmax, keeping it extremely lean in a manner that enables us to provide highly-customized services at super low prices. 

Beyond that, Travelmax has entertainment contracts with several airlines that enable us to offer better services to entertainment, production, and sports team clients—these contracts were hard-won by our entertainment department, which has bent over backward to get the best possible prices and travel experiences for our clients. This certainly helps us stand out in that world.

What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?

Emails. We contact loads of people via email to spark conversations. Our email campaigns perform infinitely better than ads.

What's your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs? 

Forget work-life balance. Live a work-life you love; you’ll never have to struggle to focus and stay motivated. Work with your spouse. Get your kids involved. You CAN have it all, and not in a manic-comedic-woman-pretending-to-have-it-all-but-failing-miserably sort of way, but rather a Sound of Music sort of way.

What's your favorite app, blog, and book? Why?

Favorite app: I just discovered Magisto by Vimeo, which uses AI to edit together professional-looking videos. Since we don’t have time to spiff up our family videos, this is a godsend. 

Favorite blog: The British Psychological Society’s research digest blog (https://digest.bps.org.uk/) is full of delicious posts summarizing psychology studies. I can’t get enough of it.

Favorite book: Since I’ve been spending loads of hours editing them, my new favorite books are now The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships and The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, which my husband and I put together to see whether choosing more “sexy” subjects would engage people even more enthusiastically than our first book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life (which, despite being an Amazon bestseller, is such a mental death hike). These books are slated to go live on July 6th.

What's your favorite business tool or resource? Why?

Canva has been at the top of my list for ages—it enables you to create beautiful printed and digital materials (think: Facebook banners, one-pagers, slide decks, ads, brochures, etc.) without having expensive design software.

Who is your business role model? Why? 

Martha Stewart has always been my hero. She’s the Phileas Fogg of the business world: Covering immense entrepreneurial ground at breakneck speed, accepting nothing less than perfection, and never breaking a sweat.

How do you balance work and life?

Screw that. My life is my work. My work is my life. Work-life balance is for the weak and infirm.

 What’s your favorite way to decompress? 

I love to get through work backlogs from my elliptical. I bought a tray that enables me to prop my tiny laptop on the handlebars and I can just peddle away for hours. The endorphins help me focus. 

What do you have planned for the next six months? 

My family has a business to save. We’re doing everything we can to pull Travelmax through the pandemic and continue to support our clients—whether they’re on the road or not.

How can our readers connect with you? 

Email me: Simone@Travelmax.com. 

You can also find me on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/SimoneHCollins), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/simonehcollins/), and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonehcollins/).