The Exchanges

Q I'm curious about expenses, like at what point, because I, you didn't have any investors, right? I mean, this is all.

A Didn't have any investors, never, it's, um, remained a hundred percent closely held family business for 46 years, and, um, my dad, and my uncle, and my best friend from graduate school, They all, for some reason, I had this 30,000 dollar, um, amount in my head that that's what they provided as a loan, and it was always a loan to get, um, a very short-term loan to get through the winter. We are a very strong cashflow company. I read this little book, uh, when I was thinking about starting this company up, it was really small book called buy low, sell high, collect early and pay late. And you didn't even have to read the book. You just read the heading. And if, if that's the kind of business you have, it's a really good thing. Um, you know, or our guests first of all are paying their deposit Maybe 90 days in advance or more on average. We are paying the hotel. Sometimes the balance due is paid after we have already finished the trip. So I didn't know that that would become so important, but it made us able to do this.

AI assessment note: “Didn't have any investors, never, it's, um, remained a hundred percent closely held”

Q You worked for like the city of Las Vegas?

A The city of Las Vegas, yes. I worked on air quality, water quality, solid waste plans, etc. And, you know, um, I remember driving up the coast, and my mom was saying, Tom, you are somebody that needs to be passionate about what you're doing, but the implication was, Tom, you don't love what you're doing, and she could not have been more, um, more right on that count, and I think I, I recognized that when I was in Las Vegas, and I didn't like Las Vegas, so the whole do something you love to do, I made the wrong decision. I see so many kids Doing exactly what I did, which is I love the environment, ok? I always have. I've been running out in the woods all my life. I love the environment. Well, I love the environment, so why don't I do environmental planning? There was nothing about that job that resonated with me.

AI assessment note: “The city of Las Vegas, yes. I worked on air quality, water quality”

Q Where does it come from? I mean, clearly you liked being around people, or you liked the idea of leading people, or not, or it was just completely random.

A It's about as random. I have asked myself that question hundreds of times, and I cannot remember anything that led up to me waking up I, I literally, uh, I think it was a reaction against Las Vegas. I leave. I had got ahold of a book. Uh, what color is your parachute? Which I could summarize by saying, find something you love doing that you're really good at. But what I saw as I read it is like, oh my God, this is a perfect thing for who I am in my personality, whether as far as wanting to have control of my life, wanting to do something exciting, I might have seen something in a bicycling magazine, maybe, a classified ad. I'm not sure there weren't too many companies doing this sort of thing. I don't even know if I had seen a bicycling magazine at that point, but, um, it must have been something like that, some trivial thing that said, well, that's interesting, maybe. Yeah. This shouldn't have worked. I didn't have a nickel to my name, practically, and, you know, just jumped in.

AI assessment note: “It's about as random. I have asked myself that question hundreds of times”

Q Tom, I'm curious, in 1979, I mean, today it's so common to see packs of cyclists everywhere, like just all over the country. And it's – but in – was it kind of an oddball thing to do to get on a bike and just ride around the country? Like there wasn't the infrastructure. There weren't bike lanes. There weren't – No, no.

A But there still aren't necessarily bike lanes where a lot of people do long bike rides. That's true. So you're sharing the road with cars. And so riding a bike by yourself is a very solitary thing. Experience. You almost never. And back then there, like you say, there weren't that many bikes out. So I, I was by myself the whole time, a lot of room for introspection and thinking about, well, this is a good idea. And, and I was initially going to start a company in a geographic area like the Northern California where I'm from, but I got back and realized that I got, there's all these national parks that would be great to do. And so that was that 5000 mile ride became a formative aspect of the company.

AI assessment note: “back then there, like you say, there weren't that many bikes out.”

Q To the company. So you have some experience, but really all the logistics are being done. I mean, you've got your warehouse, you've got your bikes, you've got your van. How are you going to do that in Hawaii or two years later in New Zealand? Let's start with, with Either of those. I mean, you had to basically replicate that without the van, without the bikes, right?

A You're right. So, you know, we figured out how to ship bikes. Um, I'm, I don't know if they had rules back then in all of these places that we should have been adhering to. My guess is they probably did have rules and we probably weren't adhering to them. So we basically did things as close to how we do them in the States as we possibly could. We used our national leaders, which were, um, U S and Canadian at that point for the most part. And then we also use some local guides in places like, um, Bali. Um, but we really wanted our own leaders to be leading our trips cause they were, you know, really heavily trained and we could trust them and they knew what they were doing, et cetera. And we'd do the trip.

AI assessment note: “we figured out how to ship bikes”

Q When it became a reality in March of 2020, You know, this is when you're just about to launch your spring trips. What happened?

A Yeah, it was just disastrous. And, um, the only reason we had any signups that year was because we had signups before, uh, before February and March. But, um, yeah, we basically stopped all this revenue, more or less stopped for about a year. And we laid off people. We did temporary layoffs, full-time layout. We, we, Even reduce pay. And then we made a lot of that up after we came out of COVID, but we did everything we could think of. And the one thing that, um, I've gotten pretty good at is, you know, we're going to come out of this stronger than when we went into it. And I attribute my belief in our ability to do that to the experience we had with nine-eleven and great recession, because we, um, as tough as COVID was, it was just hellacious. I mean, all of the rules we had to follow and, you know, everybody was in the same boat, but we came out of COVID faster than anybody purposefully. There was some, I think our guests were incredibly generous with us. You know, we always survey our guests how to go and they were, you know, quite honestly, well, I think they were overly generous because, you know, the National Park restaurants aren't exactly known for their fine cuisine to begin with, but, um, it went from that to boxed lunches because of COVID, and so, um, really I think our guests were just so darn happy to be outside and doing something with people that, uh, We shot up i…

AI assessment note: “revenue, more or less stopped for about a year. And we laid off people.”