Stacking supermarket shelves helped me launch one of world's fastest-growing travel companies

Adam Schwab is co-founder and CEO of Luxury Escapes, growing from start-up in 2013 to global travel brand that employs more than 400 staff across four continents. The Melbourne-founded firm is on track to generate AUD1bn (£780m) total turnover value.

Stocking shelves at a supermarket was more of a fun job than you’d think and I’m still friends to this day, almost 30 years later, with people I worked with.

We didn’t have one specific boss and tended to work for five different managers depending on which day it was. Without the tech of today there was little tracking of employee efficiency and, as a result, almost no motivation for team members to do more than the bare minimum of work.

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As the most junior person there, the better managers I worked with were able to make sure we had fun working but also got lots done. One manager even gamified the role by creating a ‘shelf stacking competition’ which led to me working like a maniac for a week until they stopped the competition.

This was the perfect real-life example of the notion that ‘if it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed’. I loved being held accountable for my work and wanted to be the best. Without that brief week of gamification there seemed no point in anyone going above and beyond.

That small example has always stuck with me — we want to make sure that where we can (and often you can’t), we measure our teams’ output — not to scold someone for not working hard enough, but to recognise and reward where team members go the extra mile to serve customers better.

We once had a manager who was a pretty smart guy — I remember once he called me and a few of the other guys over and gave us a stern lecture on the need for us to show initiative.

While the delivery wasn’t polished and timing was strange, the lesson was absolutely correct and has always stuck with me. The ability to show initiative is one of the most important characteristics, alongside grit and empathy, that makes a great team member.

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At Luxury Escapes, leadership at our size means a few different things: first, you need to create and retain a world-class team, especially in a business like ours that is almost solely dependent on intellectual property. Second, a leader needs to be a shrewd capital allocator — willing to take risk and seek asymmetric returns, but also be a keen steward of shareholders’ capital.

Finally, great business leaders are also product owners. As Steve Jobs noted, you need to be able to know what products your customers want before they know they want them. A leader needs to be able to guide the product vision of the business and create beautiful products that customers love.

In travel, the main challenge for us is a customer acquisition one. Our brand is incredibly strong in Australia, not only have most travellers heard of Luxury Escapes, but our customers almost all love us and we have one of the highest Net Promoter Scores of any business globally.

We’ve never thought of ourselves as smart businesspeople — what we’re good at is understanding what customers and clients want and creating lots of value for all our partners.

The most important thing in buying travel is being really smart and planning ahead. Hotels, cruises, tours and airfares never get cheaper as the holiday date approaches — if you can book a year or even more in advance (flights you can only book a year out but hotels and tours and cruises you can often book up to two years in advance) you will pay a lot less.

Also, avoid travelling in super peak season; shoulder season (or if you have kids, just before or after school holidays) will probably save you around 50% on your costs. And you can invest those savings in an incredible experience.

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There are so many challenges in starting any business, but being an online travel business we encountered the unique challenge of multiple trust hurdles. Not only do our customers buy online, but they’re also purchasing an expensive travel product, often to an exotic destination like Thailand, Bali, the Maldives or Dubai.

If you’re travelling on an expensive holiday to somewhere like that, you need to be really sure that the person you’re buying from is totally legitimate — while we’re a multi-billion business and don’t have these issues now, when we were starting out, getting customers to trust us was incredibly difficult. We’ve been an overnight success that has been 14 years in the making.

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