Backroads' Avery Hale Smith on Surviving Succession in a Legacy Family Business

Superwomen with Rebecca Minkoff

Rebecca Minkoff

Society & Culture

4.8 • 543 Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2026

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Nepo baby” is an easy label to apply to anyone who joins a family business. What we rarely talk about is the pressure to prove yourself and the effort it takes to be taken seriously. This week on SUPERWOMEN, we sat down with Avery Hale Smith, Chief Experience Officer at Backroads, to talk about the experience of working inside a family business. Avery opens up about the challenge of stepping into a company with such a rich legacy. Avery reveals how she navigated Backroads through the chaos of COVID, when everything was falling apart, and how she rebuilt the company from the ground up. From handling massive layoffs to keeping the business alive with no roadmap, she learned that surviving crises takes a whole lot of grit. Episode Guide: (00:00) Meet Avery Hale Smith, Chief Experience Officer at Backroads (01:44) What is Backroads? (03:33) Growing up around the business (07:10) How Backroads survived COVID (11:32) When chaos becomes the best teacher (13:53) The reality of being a working mom (19:05) Going back to work after postpartum (22:19) Lessons learned from dealing with crises (25:53) The one rule for working with family (27:41) Women's adventures at Backroads Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	In the spring of 2021, a huge resurgence in demand for travel, but we had no staff.
0:05.7	So we had to totally rebuild that team.
0:08.3	Every manager who had institutional knowledge of what was going on, quit or had been laid off.
0:13.3	It was the wild, wild west.
0:14.8	Today's guest is someone my mom talks about her all the time.
0:18.0	My mom has taken many of her company's trips.
0:20.2	It's Avery Hale Smith, the chief experience officer at Backroads. I was having a lot of conversations
0:26.1	with my dad and my parents and family as COVID was rearing its ugly head and seeing just how
0:31.9	decimated the travel industry was at large and Backroads in particular. Was it weird to come
0:37.4	into Back roads?
0:38.1	Were you welcomed by the team?
0:40.6	One of the best things about working here is the people, is an incredibly collaborative
0:44.6	and supportive environment.
0:46.3	And I think that you really knew that if you're coming into a family business, you want
0:50.8	people around you who actually want you to succeed versus want to see you fail.
0:54.8	Having been through COVID, having been through the rebuild, what is your approach to crisis?
1:00.9	When I first joined Backrose, you know, there was a new crisis. It felt like every week, I would
1:06.1	say, whether it was a natural disaster or something COVID related or a personnel thing or a
1:10.8	cyber attack or whatever. There was just something every week. It was like whack-a-mole. whether it was a natural disaster or something COVID related or a personnel thing or a cyber
1:11.0	attack or whatever.
1:12.2	There was just something every week.
1:13.8	It was like whack-a-mole.
	...

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