Being a writer for Web In Travel has put me in the advantageous position of being able to interview countless travel startups as they head towards (hopefully) eventual success.
It’s frankly a nice place to be, buffered from the realities and hardships that budding businesses face day in and day out, as they strive to not only validate their idea but to develop it into something profitable.
On paper, I knew what the experience would be like – working with a small but dedicated team, figuring out just how much you could accomplish without funding, waves of doubt on whether you can make it work, or even just having the confidence to wing it when the situation calls.
Organising Tern is perhaps the closest I have come to experiencing but a fraction of what that sort of life is like. It was like a juggling act with a baseball-pitching machine. Once we found ourselves in the rhythm of handling a particular set of tasks, a torrent of new ones would come firing past.
The sheer amount of manpower and energy that goes into ensuring the event ran without even a glitch is staggering. It reminds me of Under Armour’s “Rule Yourself” campaign earlier this year, wherein your success in the eyes of others, relies solely on your performance come game day. In reality, this success is accrued in fractional steps.
Every e-mail enquiry. Every sponsorship opportunity. Every ticket sale. Each one was some form of validation that our hard work was paying off. Every little piece ultimately fed into the much bigger picture – our mission of creating a platform to inspire students and young professionals to pursue a career in travel.
Perhaps most importantly, it was the gang of industry leaders who stood behind our cause that meant the most. It was proof in my eyes that while the industry is so widespread, there exists a strong community of supportive individuals that wanted to see our event succeed.
I may not have many years in the workforce under my belt, but that sense of community is not something I have experienced in any other industry. It reinforced the very reason why I found myself drawn to working in travel in the first place. It makes sense, given it specialises in professional hospitality!
Ultimately, Tern is a microcosm of what I imagine the complexities of starting up a business actually involves, or even just managing a much larger-scale event, like WIT Singapore in October.
Nevertheless, I can see how the hunger for success builds from there. As the event went on, a growing itch at the back of my mind began. It painted an increasingly clearer picture of what Tern could realistically evolve into, given time. How this crafty little ‘bird-brained’ idea hatched and was slowly but surely finding its wings and taking flight.
Launching our first event opened new windows of future opportunities, potential partnerships, spawned ideas of future plans and built a small but sturdy community of like-minded folk, all eager to learn.
Tern 2016 is only phase one of what I hope to be a long, zig-zagging journey of future events geared at uniting and educating folks with a budding passion for travel. It’s a journey I am personally eager to pursue.
