Stay flexible. Accept that you
may change the way you have
decided to go and even
change direction in midstream. It doesn’t matter what
direction you have set, you
should be flexible enough,
regardless of the size of the
company, to change the route
at any time.
Stay flexible by dividing the
company into multiple,
smaller companies and also
by having management of
the companies handled by
people you trust to let them
run it the way they want.
By doing that, you are creating flexibility. In general,
the flexibility of a company
is taken away when the company becomes too big and
too bureaucratic. If you can
take that away by breaking it
up into small offices, then
you have the result of the
flexibility you are looking
for: managing a small corporation but being a big corporation.
Don’t settle for less than the best. We’re looking for perfection.
We try not to rely on any third
party. It was impossible for us
to have a reservation center
365 days a year. It would take a
lot of money, lot of people.
So just like every other travel management company, we
used a third party, but the
problem was the third party
didn’t care much. We tried
nearly every service that
existed.
So we were working
extremely hard to provide fantastic service to our clients —
and then there would come a
time when one of our clients
would be stuck in a snowstorm on a Sunday or somewhere in Hong Kong, having a
problem. They will call, and
the telephone will ring for an
hour, and no one will pick up
the phone.
That was the best service you
could find, and it didn’t get better since then. So I instructed
my team to create our own 24-hour center. In the past year,
we have received hundreds of
compliments. Before, I didn’t
even have one of them.
It does cost us about four
times the price. But we’re in
the business of service. If we
don’t know how to provide
service to our clients, we
should be doing something
else. We should go deep-sea
fishing, but we should definitely not be in the business
of service.
The bigger price we would
have had to pay was losing a
client.
HOW TO REACH: Altour International, (310) 571-6000 or www.altour.com
