I'm not particularly smart as an individual, I interviewed terribly, they didn't offer
Three weeks later I got a call to say the person who was going for the job has pulled
out, would you still be interested?
So I said yes, I took the leap, my starting salary was £18,500, that was less than half
what I was earning.
Hi, I'm Sally Patton, editor of BOSS from the Australian Financial Review, and welcome
to 15 minutes with the BOSS, a podcast about success and failure and everything in between.
And in the meantime, we're hoping to get some great tips from our leaders.
My guest today is James Thornton, the chief executive of Intrepid Travel.
Hi, James, lovely to see you.
Thank you so much for coming into our Melbourne studio and agreeing to look at me on a screen.
It's great to be here, Sally.
Now, James, you're the chief executive of Intrepid Travel, which is an adventure travel
company with an annual turnover of around 540 million.
And I believe last year you organised holidays for more than 122,000 people and you have
3000 staff or thereabouts to help you do this.
That sounds like kind of enough on your plate.
It is. No, it's a good challenge.
Well, thank you and thank you very much for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the
BOSS. As promised, we've only got 15 minutes, so let's start the clock now.
OK, James, my first question is about your morning routine.
What time do you get up? What happens?
When do you have your first cup of coffee?
I don't like routine, Sally.
I don't like morning exercise.
I'm not into mindfulness.
I also travel 70 percent of the year, so I'm not at home.
So every single day is normally different.
The one thing that is universal is I will always check my email first thing and I'll
grab a coffee. But getting up probably when it gets light and then going from there.
Wow, that's so interesting.
So you really do get up according to the sun?
Pretty much, yeah.
I mean, again, I'm travelling such a significant amount of time.
So it could be London, New York, could be in our Asian destinations, Latin America,
wherever it might be.
And typically you always sleep well, but when the sun rises, tend to sleep with the
curtains open, get up and always just straight on to email.
And Trev, it's a very global business.
We have 28 offices around the world, as you said, employ more than 3000 people.
So I want to get fingers on the pulse.
What's happening? What's going on?
And then, yeah, start to think about what the day is going to lead.
But of course, coffee is critically important too.
I'm a big exerciser, but not first thing in the morning for me.
I like to do that kind of later in the day.
So coffee sounds at least like it's something that's fairly constant?
Coffee is constant and really important.
And that's particularly challenging as some of the destinations we travel to around
the world. Growing up in Melbourne in the last 15 years, I've become a bit of a
coffee snob. So finding a great coffee in a destination is normally very high on my
gender when I get into the city.
So what's your coffee of choice?
Skinny flat white or a magic.
Pray tell, what is a magic?
So magic is a very Melbourne thing, somewhere between a flat white and a long
macchiato. So it's just a slightly stronger version of a flat white and a slightly
more milky version of a long macchiato.
For me, it's perfect.
Right. The wonders of the Melbourne coffee scene.
Okay. Here's my next question.
Tell me about a pivotal moment in your career that really changed the trajectory of what
you were doing or changed you as a leader in some way.
So I came out of university and I went and got the traditional corporate job.
I joined a private client asset management company.
Now that's a posh way of saying I was about to spend the next 40 years of my life making
rich people richer.
And a few years into it, I thought, hang on a minute, I don't have a lot of passion for
it. So what am I really going to do that's going to get me going?
And I had two passions in life.
One is sport and the other one's travel.
I wasn't good enough to play for the England soccer team.
So I started pursuing travel companies and came across a small group adventure travel
company called Intrepid.
They took Australians to Asia predominantly and were opening a small office in the UK.
And they were looking for a sales rep to be second or third employee in the country.
And I thought I'd put my name forward.
I had no qualifications, no experience.
Went along to the job interview in a pinstripe suit and I was sunburnt because I'd run the
London marathon the day before.
I interviewed terribly.
They didn't offer me the job.
They offered the job to someone else.
Would you believe it?
How dare they? Exactly.
Three weeks later, I got a call to say, actually, the person who was going for the job has
pulled out. Would you still be interested?
So I said, yes, I took the leap.
My starting salary was eighteen thousand five hundred pounds.
That was less than half what I was earning in private client asset management at the
time. And I thought, you know what?
I'm going to do it for two years, have some adventures, go off and see the world.
And then I'll probably go back and get the traditional corporate job.
And here I am 19 years later, living on the other side of the world and having been C
over the last seven years.
So I'm glad they called me back and I'm glad that person rejected the rejected the job.
So did you think twice about taking a lower paid job with a smaller company?
Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I remember speaking to my dad at the time when I got the job
offer and, you know, going to get half the money, move out of a really good kind of
traditional corporate career to go and join a small privately owned Australian company
who really only took Aussies to Southeast Asia.
And he just said, I think if you're passionate and I think if you, you know, you're
willing to work hard, chances are you might be successful.
And I know that sounds terribly cliche, but it worked incredibly well for me.
And within two years, I'd been offered the opportunity to move to Melbourne on a one
year contract. I came down with one suitcase and haven't really been home since.
My next question is, what is the best piece of career advice you've ever been given?
I think it was early on at Intrepid and in my first couple of weeks, I was sat down
with one of our global leaders and they said, Intrepid, we want you to make decisions
and we want you to own your mistakes and we want you to learn from it.
And then if you do those things, you're able to continue to make more, hopefully
better, more informed decisions.
I think the one thing that's changed for me as my career has developed is I became
a relatively young leader of the business.
I was the first non-founding managing director of the Intrepid brand at 31.
I was Group C at 35.
So I've had to get people around me who are much more experienced and skilled than I
am. And so I've now added to that my own personal thing, which is you've got two
ears and one mouth.
And so there's a reason for that.
And that's because as a leader, you need to listen more than you talk.
So I spend a lot of time trying to listen to more experience around me.
Then I've got to make a decision as a CEO.
And then when you make a decision, you still often make mistakes.
And when you do that, you've got to own those mistakes.
So that's that's the best advice for me.
And on the decision front, is the key to make a decision quickly or does it not
matter how much time you take?
Personally, I'm willing to take as long as I might need to do around making a
decision. But I'm also very aware that as CEO, you can hold up a lot of things in
the business if you don't move forward relatively quickly.
So I might take an opportunity in a meeting to say, I'm going to go away and
reflect on it, but I'm going to come back with a decision within 24 hours.
So I think it's OK to go away and reflect.
But you as the leader of the business, you're holding things up if you're not
willing to get on and make a call, I think.
And it also sounds like you're not afraid to have smarter people around you and
not always be the smartest person in the room.
How do you deal with that?
Well, I'm definitely not the smartest person in the room, and I'm just very
I'm not particularly smart as an individual.
I did OK at school and I kind of think I know what I'm good at and then I get
other people in who are much better than me in many, many other areas of the
business. And it's my job to listen to them and take their informed judgments
and then try and make calls accordingly.
And I've just become very comfortable with that because I think I became a
leader at a very young age.
So, you know, inheriting management teams of people who are older than you,
you've got to be prepared to listen to them.
And that's the way you kind of get their respect and then make those calls.
And on that note, James, stay right where you are.
We're going to take a short break.
And when we come back, we're going to open our very famous Chatterbox.
Welcome back to 15 Minutes with the Boss.
I'm here with James Thornton, the chief executive of Intrepid Travel.
Now, James, this is our section called the Chatterbox.
The Chatterbox is a, as you will see, a beautiful cardboard brown box,
which would normally be in front of you.
But as you're in Melbourne, I have total control over it.
Sorry about that.
Inside the box are about 20 questions, all folded up on small bits of paper.
I am going to choose one on your behalf, which I will then ask you to answer.
So I hope you trust me.
Bad luck if you don't.
Sounds good, Sally.
I shall start foraging.
Who is a leader, business or otherwise, whom you really admire and why?
I think Yvonne Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia.
Intrepid is a certified B Corp.
B Corp's are businesses that operate with the highest standards of environmental,
social welfare and transparency.
And Patagonia is that benchmark.
Yvonne Chouinard never wanted to create a successful business.
He wanted to go hiking and surfing.
And yet by creating fantastic products, making decisions that were the best for
his people and for the environment, he created this incredible business.
And he's now taken the step of a business that he owns 100% of.
He's donated to the planet through putting it into a trust.
So the dividends from the business go through to benefiting the planet and
the environmental causes that Patagonia stand for.
And yeah, he's just an incredibly inspiring leader.
He's written some fantastic literature.
Go surfing with my people or let's go surfing with my people is an iconic read
and really encourage all business leaders who are interested in purpose of the
ESG movement to follow Yvonne.
So how do they use marketing?
Is there marketing generally word of mouth and just creating good products?
Cause I'm not sure that I am aware that I see a lot of advertising from them.
A lot of the advertising that they do is through the purpose led
activities that they speak out on.
So they might speak out against certain legislative things that happen
in the United States.
And by that, it gets them incredible word of mouth.
It gets social media coverage.
The great example is the Black Friday sales that take place in the US.
Patagonia a few years ago decided they'd shut all of their retail network and
give all of their staff a day off on that day.
And the press that they got as a result of it was hugely disproportionate to
the sales that they would have received.
So I think that that's some of the ways they've gone about proving their model.
And at Intrepid Travel, do you try and do similar things in
terms of supporting causes?
Yeah, absolutely.
So Intrepid has been a certified B Corp since 2018.
We've done many, many things.
Good examples were that we were the first tour operator to ban elephant rides in
2014, which might not sound like a big bold move, but at the time, 32% of our
business was to Southeast Asia and everyone traveling to Southeast Asia at
that time would often hop on an elephant.
But having done a piece of research with world animal protection, we found that
of 114 wildlife venues only four met the basic standards of animal welfare.
And so we decided to make the big leap that we would ban elephant riding, very
conscious that if we did, customers might choose to make their travel plans with
some of our competitors.
What actually happened was that we got the biggest media coverage we've ever
got for one of our actions and we've really changed the industry because more
than 200 tour operators around the world have followed some of the likes of the
biggest travel companies in the world.
The trip advisors will not endorse products that have elephant riding on it.
So through that decision, we really changed the industry, I think.
I shall start foraging on your behalf.
When you fly interstate, what time morning or evening flights do you generally take?
Are you on the 6am flight going to Melbourne and back on the 9pm flight?
To be honest, I don't fly interstate a lot because most of my
travel is international travel.
I'm probably more frequently on the flight to London than I would
be on the flight to Sydney.
So for me, it doesn't matter whether it's first thing in the morning or
last thing at night, whenever it's convenient, it's often over weekends,
but it's to suit my schedule as much as possible.
So yeah, I don't have a set routine because just love working.
So it doesn't really matter whether I'm early or late.
So you're okay with having to get up at 3am, 4am in the morning
if you've got to get a flight?
There's a flight that goes out of Melbourne that I think is a 5 or 6am
flight and can get you into Europe by the evening.
So you can wake up in the morning here, get up at 3, be on the 5am flight,
transit through the Middle East, be in a European city for dinner.
So on the travel front, do you have tips for jet lag?
I always, always run when I arrive in a destination because I just find
getting to a destination and running is really important to get some fresh air.
Having been bulked up in the airplane for a long period of time.
The other thing I do is immediately get on the time zone of the destination
that I'm going to, because there's just no point wondering what time it is
where you were, you've just got to get immediately onto that time zone.
And if it's, you know, if you can't sleep, I just try and rest and relax
when I'm in the hotel room and really don't stress about it because eventually
you will be tired enough to sleep when it gets the time in the
local destination to do that.
And how long would you run for?
Half an hour, 40 minutes.
Just good to stretch legs, get some fresh air.
I also think running is a great way to see a new destination or a new city.
Just getting out fresh air, new city and always feel better having done
it, even if I don't feel like it.
Are you ready for me to pick out one more question for the box?
What's your pet hate in the office?
Intrepid runs a open plan office, hot desking.
And it frustrates me when people go back to the same desk every single day.
I love, love getting connections with different people and sitting next to
different people and hearing different stories and learning different things.
But often people are creatures of habit.
So that frustrates me a bit.
You really don't like routine, do you?
You would hate me because we had a hot desk policy here for quite a while.
And I went to the same desk every day.
Well, so the one thing I often do, if I see that it's going to sit in that
person's desk, if I get in early, cause I like to be an early in the office.
So I might go and sit in your desk, Sally.
You're also a disruptor.
Well done, James.
That is the end of the chat a box section.
You have survived admirably.
Now I have one more question that I ask all the guests who come onto the show.
And that is if you had 12 months off, unencumbered, you could do anything you
liked, what would you do?
I'd buy around the world ticket with my wife and my 11 year old son.
And we would go and have a big adventure and visit many of the countries we
haven't had the opportunity to go to yet.
So we would go through central America over the course of a couple of months,
traveling from San Diego and the bottom of the U S right through to Panama City.
We'd relax on a couple of Caribbean islands where we haven't visited before.
We'd then head over to parts of Europe that we haven't explored the
Baltics or the Balkans down to Southern parts of Africa.
We'd go up into Asia and go to the five stans.
And I think we'd finish with some tracking in the pool and they're kind
of Himalayas, the Annapurnas, we'd learn lots, we'd eat lots of great food,
meet lots of new people.
And yeah, that's how I'd be spending my 12 months unencumbered.
So if I said to you for about a month or six weeks of that 12 months, you had to
go back to places that you've already been to, where would you go back?
I'd be going to Rwanda to go and trek with the mountain gorillas, which is my
personal favorite travel highlight.
Perhaps back to Antarctica, the seventh continent, the remoteness and the
majesty and the isolation there is quite stunning and incredible.
And I think I'd have to squeeze some time into Southern Europe as well.
I love the, the kind of culture of Southern Europe, the relaxed lifestyle,
the food, the beaches, bit of sailing in Croatia, perhaps.
Well, I wish you a fabulous time on your year off.
On that note, that is the end of our 15 minutes.
James, thank you so much for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.
It has been fabulous talking to you about your routine or rather lack thereof.
The fact that you don't mind not being the smartest person in the room.
I'm not quite sure that I'm with you on not sitting in the same spot every day,
but I take your point.
So again, thank you so much.
It's been an absolute delight.
Thank you, Sally.
Thank you, Sally.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
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Our theme is by Alex Gao and our executive producer is Fiona Buffini.
The Australian Financial Review.