Ep206 – Adam Schwab (Co-founder & CEO – Luxury Escapes) on reinventing Luxury Escapes & Scaling to $1B+ GTV

My guest for Ep206 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was Adam Schwab.

Adam started his career as a lawyer before transitioning to startups and has had a number of successful businesses, but is best known as the Co-founder & CEO of Luxury Escapes.

Luxury Escapes is one of the world’s leading travel brands, revolutionising the way people book luxury getaways.

Despite their success, it hasn’t always been a straightforward journey for the company, particularly going through periods such as COVID (an extremely difficult time for all travel businesses) and with Adam stepping away from the CEO role for a period of time.

However he stepped back in the role with a renewed vision of the company and has seen the business grow from $350M pre-COVID to now doing over $1B in GTV sales annually.

In this episode we covered a variety of topics including:

• Why Adam no longer looks at acquisitions as a growth strategy
• Why stepping away from Luxury Escapes made him a 10X better CEO
• The pivot in the business led to them growing from $350 million GTV to $1 billion+ GTV
• And much more!

Timestamps:

• 3:05 Adam’s background
• 7:10 Early entrepreneurial journey, inherent traits and developed skills that helped him
• 9:39 Lessons from first business
• 13:14 Initial growth strategies at Luxury Escapes
• 18:50 Getting sued by Gabby & Hessi and then doing JV deals with them
• 25:23 Pivoting the business model
• 29:11 Creating culture and hiring at scale
• 33:45 Barefoot running
• 35:14 Understanding the needs of the customer and market
• 37:33 Leaving Luxury Escapes
• 43:41 Playing offense instead of defence during COVID as a travel company
• 48:55 the choice to limit outside funding
• 50:49 Key business metrics he tracks at Luxury Escapes
• 52:06 Future plans for Luxury Escapes
• 55:44 The changes he made coming back to Luxury Escapes after leaving
• 58:25 Taking care of health
• 1:00:28 How life priorities shift over time

Our partners:

A big thank you to Jeremy Sane and Shay Hamama for their help with this interview!

Also a big shout out to our long-term partners for the show:

Scendar

Scendar is the OG startup accounting firm in Australia catering to all stages of your business’ life. If you’re busy running your startup, you don’t have time to do your own books and forecast. Instead, fully outsource your finance function, giving you time and resources back to focus on what you do best in growing your business. Find out more at Scendar.com

Vanta

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Startup Playbook Podcast listeners get access to an exclusive offer of USD$1000 off their plans. Head over to vanta.com/playbook to get access to this exclusive discount.

Links mentioned:

• The Komo Club – Details & Cohort #1 applications available here

Adam’s Links:

• Adam’s LinkedIn
• The Contrarians with Adam and Adir
• Luxury Escapes

People mentioned:

• Jeremy Same
• Evan Spiegel
• Elon Musk
• Mark Zuckerberg
• Warren Buffet
• Mike Sneesby
• Steve Jobs
• Gabby Leibovich
• Hezi Leibovich
• Mark Hoenig
• Joshua Landy
• Chris McDougall
• Jensen Huang
• Shay Hamama
• Campbell McComb
•  Hamilton Helmer
• Jeff Bezos
• Adir Shiffman

Companies mentioned:

• AirBnB
• OpenTable
• Groupon
• Herbert Smith Freehills
• Nine
• Microsoft
• LivingSocial
• eBay
• Scoopon
• Menulog
• Wesfarmers
• Catch.com.au
• Amazon
• Expedia
• Trip
• Auctus Investment Group

Feedback/connect/say hello:

• Rohit@startupplaybook.co
• @RohitBhargava7 (Twitter)
• /rohbhargava (LinkedIn)
• @rohit_bhargava (Instagram)
• My Youtube Channel

Credits:

Music: Paycheck

Other channels:

Find all of the links for the podcast on Linktree here

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