535: How a Former Lawyer Built a $450M Global Travel Brand | Adam Schwab [VIDEO]

The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan

Nathan Chan

Marketing, Business, Entrepreneurship

4.8 • 662 Ratings

🗓️ 25 October 2024

⏱️ 86 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Adam Schwab, founder and CEO of Luxury Escapes, shares his entrepreneurial journey from humble beginnings to creating one of the leading travel brands in the world. Adam reflects on the strategic decisions that helped him scale the business, including early challenges, pivotal business shifts, and successful acquisitions. He provides insights into how he built Luxury Escapes into a trusted brand known for premium travel experiences and shares advice on maintaining long-term growth in a competitive industry. Listen to Nathan and Adam discuss: - Adam’s journey from lawyer to entrepreneur - Critical pivots that led to Luxury Escapes’ success - Strategic acquisitions that helped scale the business - Navigating the travel industry during the Covid-19 crisis - Building a brand and maintaining customer loyalty in a competitive market - Key lessons on resilience and adapting to changes as an entrepreneur And much more business advice… Click here to start your business for $1. You’ll get all-access foundr+, where you’ll find more in-depth, proven strategies from founders like our guest today and support and advice from our global community of 30,000 founders. If you loved this conversation and learned something new, rate and review this episode. Stay in touch with us, follow foundr on your favorite platform: Foundr.com Instagram YouTube Facebook X LinkedIn Magazine

Transcript

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0:00.0	Eight years of sweat, of putting together furniture, of dealing with bed bugs.
0:03.5	Business goes under after six months, people go, whatever.
0:05.5	Gave a crack, no market market fit.
0:07.0	We had all that.
0:08.2	So it would have been a death by stupidity.
0:11.4	We started a backpacker apartment's business.
0:13.4	I drove around Melbourne with my dad's trailer and bought secondhand furniture.
0:16.7	So furnished the apartment for a couple grand.
0:18.1	And we were making so 10 grand.
0:19.6	20 grand here actually off that one apartment. We thought, how good is this business? Making 20 grand per,
0:23.8	we could do 50 apartments. That's a million bucks a year. And very mind, I was earning 50 grand as a lawyer
0:27.8	to work all night. So, yeah, wow. The bar was low, what we had to get over. So we knew we needed
0:32.0	to create a travel on the new website. So we had the world's best travel deals. Travel deals you couldn't get anywhere else. We had a cornered resource.
0:37.9	I think we're a fraud.
0:38.8	This is too good to be true.
0:39.8	How can they be so much cheaper than everyone else?
0:41.4	There's something going to be a catch.
0:42.4	Because it actually is unbelievable.
0:44.4	You have runs of bad things and runs of good things.
0:46.7	We had like bad, bad, bad, bad.
0:48.6	Just through pure grit, got through. through, took all our money out, put it back in. Like when you were in paying poker, you just check everything you have in that last hand.
0:54.8	And we literally did that.
	...

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