Travel and tourism
A B2B travel business, built from scratch and scaled 10x
Spotting a gap in bulk airline ticketing, then building the finance, technology and team to grow it from $5k to $50k in monthly recurring revenue.
Services
Strategy, technology, operations
Industry
Travel and tourism
Role
Fractional COO / CTO, later shareholder
The opportunity
Businesses in Asia were buying airline tickets in bulk, yet we had limited large players serving the B2B market for tickets. The client wanted to focus on the model to sell high volumes on a margin, with pricing based on volume. Making it work meant handling large ticket values, tight margins and expensive card payments, while growing fast on borrowed capital.
What I did
Built the business from zero: Turned the opportunity into a working B2B model, with volume-based pricing and margin-based sales.
Institutional partnerships: Signed five institutional partners and became the ticketing channel for their sales staff.
Funded the growth: Worked with the founder to secure external financing and managed revolving credit and day-to-day liquidity. With tickets paid upfront and thin margins, cash flow decided how fast the business could grow.
Built the custom technology: Built a platform linking to airline ticket brokers, with automatic price calculation and management reporting.
Payment gateway: Built in-house payment processing by integrating with a major multinational bank at a time when card fees were costing businesses heavily.
Scaled the team from 3 to 20: Hired and structured the operations team, and tracked staff performance so growth didn't cost quality.
Kept it running: Kept systems available and set up manual workarounds for when brokers or systems failed, so customers could still be served.
Results
$5k to $50k
Monthly recurring revenue in two years
3 to 20
Staff
5
Institutional partners
Profitable exit
Invested in the business, then sold my shareholding at a profit