If We Can, You Can

Author:

John Hays

Business:

Hays Travel Ltd

Published:

10/11/2008 11:14:00

I was sat in the Sunderland office when I got a phone call from a friend of mine from school. He had a travel agency in Sheffield and said to me, you seem to be doing pretty well John, I wouldn’t mind spending some time with you. I said ok, and we talked through what was going wrong with his business as he was losing money and had to re-mortgage his house.

I couldn’t see what was wrong with it. His turnover was good and his markets seemed reasonable so I told him to send me his accounts to have a look at. When I got them, I thought, if this was a Hays Travel branch, without us doing anything differently, the company probably wouldn’t be losing money. We’d reached the size where our buying was better, our commercial terms were better, and we’d reached economies of scale. He also had a less efficient administrative process whereas we had teams of people doing administration.

So I re-did the sums and realised that the business could fundamentally be very profitable. So my friend and I came up with a management services agreement for us to do all of his back office functions and that agreement hasn’t been changed in twelve years.

From that starting point of just trying to do a favour for a friend, the concept has grown into quite a substantial business venture. We started the Hays Travel Independence Group, and we’ve got 130 other travel agencies from Sunderland to Athens running their own business, as we facilitate it from the North East.

So we’ve helped lots of people start their own businesses around the country. My natural instinct is to work in partnership with people, and I try and look at things from other people’s point of view in order to really help them.