BUILDING A MORE VALUABLE, TRANSFERABLE TRAVEL BUSINESS
EXIT PLANNING AND VALUE ACCELERATION FOR ESTABLISHED TRAVEL COMPANIES
Open Air Consulting helps established tour operators, DMCs, travel agencies and experience-based travel companies increase profitability, reduce founder dependence and prepare for investment, succession or sale.
Build a company that is stronger today and worth more when the time comes to transition.
TRAVEL-INDUSTRY EXPERIENCE MEETS
EXIT-PLANNING EXPERTISE
Founded and sold an international travel company
14 years as a travel-industry founder
Certified Exit Planning Advisor, CEPA®
Wharton Executive Education in M&A and Corporate Development
Adventure Travel Trade Association Business member
Women Travel Leaders member
Business valuation, buyer and investor perspective
Private, confidential, one-to-one advisory
YOUR BUSINESS IS SUCCESSFUL. BUT IS IT BUILDING LONG-TERM VALUE?
You have built a respected travel company with loyal customers, trusted partners and a team that cares about delivering exceptional experiences.
Revenue is coming in. Trips are operating. Customers are being served.
But the company may still depend too heavily on your judgment, relationships and daily involvement.
You may be generating healthy sales without having enough visibility into which trips, products or customers produce the strongest margins. You may have hired a team without meaningfully reducing your own workload. You may be making important decisions using disconnected spreadsheets, accounting reports and instinct.
From the outside, the company looks successful.
Behind the scenes, you are still carrying too much of it.
That is not merely a workload problem. It is a business value problem.
YOUR BURNOUT IS BUSINESS DATA
Founder overload is often a symptom of deeper structural risks:
Important decisions continue to flow through the owner
Critical relationships are held by one person
Team members lack clear authority and accountability
Financial reporting does not support timely decisions
Profitability varies widely across trips or services
Systems and processes live in people’s heads
Growth creates more complexity without enough additional profit
The company’s brand is inseparable from its founder
These same issues that consume your time can also make a company riskier and less attractive to a buyer, investor or successor.
The good news is that addressing them does not only prepare your business for an eventual exit. It can produce a healthier, more profitable and more enjoyable company to own right now.
A CLEAR PATH FROM BUSINESS SUCCESS TO ENTERPRISE VALUE
Our work follows a structured progression: establish your baseline, diagnose the value gap and then implement the priorities that will make the greatest difference.
Step 1
ESTABLISH YOUR BASELINE
Health + Value Assessment
Before deciding what to change, you need a credible understanding of what your company may be worth today.
The Business Health & Value Assessment provides an initial estimate of value and a high-level view of the factors influencing it.
You’ll consider your company’s financial performance, growth potential, operational maturity, owner dependence and overall readiness for a future transition.
This complimentary assessment is designed for established travel businesses rather than startups or early-stage ventures. This includes a consultation with me in which we walk through your assessments results.
Step 2
DIAGNOSE THE OPPORTUNITIES
Value Gap Intensive
An initial valuation gives you a number. The Value Gap Intensive reveals what that number means and what could make it higher.
During this 3 to 5 week strategic diagnostic, we examine your business from the perspective of a CEO, value advisor and prospective buyer.
We identify what is supporting your company’s value, what may be suppressing it and what you should address first.
The result is clarity, not a hundred-page report that sits on the shelf.
Know what deserves your attention for the next 90 days, what can wait and what materially affects your company’s future value.
Step 3
BUILT AND EXECUTE
Empowered Exit Path
The 12-month Empowered Exit Path turns the findings from your Value Gap Intensive into measurable business improvements.
This is a private, high-touch advisory for owners who want ongoing strategic support as they strengthen profitability, improve leadership capacity, reduce risk and build a company that depends less on them.
We work through focused quarterly priorities rather than working on a long list of initiatives simultaneously.
The objective is not simply to create an exit plan; it’s to build a stronger company, create more strategic options and help you realize the full potential of the asset you have spent years building.
Your personalized CEO dashboard connects performance, freedom and value.
Stop trying to lead your company through disconnected spreadsheets, accounting reports and isolated metrics.
As an Empowered Exit Path client, you receive access to a premium business metrics platform featuring a personalized CEO dashboard. Your dashboard can bring together information such as:
Revenue and gross-margin trends
Trip and or service profitability
Booking pace and forward revenue
Marketing effort conversion rates
Revenue per employee
Employee performance scorecards
Customer and sales-channel concentration
Your custom operational KPIs
Owner-dependence indicators
Business health and exit readiness
Estimated enterprise value over time
The purpose is not to track more data for the sake of tracking data.
It is to give you the 30,000-foot view you need to make better decisions about where to invest, what to simplify, what to stop doing and what will create the most value.
yOUR BUSINESS MAY BE YOUR MOST VALUABLE ASSET
Don’t wait until a buyer approaches (or until you are too exhausted to continue) to find out whether the company is ready for its next chapter. The Health and Value Assessment will show you where your company stands, what may be holding its value back and what to address first. Build a business that produces more income, creates more freedom and gives you more options for the future.