Travel First Class At Almost ZERO Cost! Tommy Lonergan, Freedom Travel Systems (Podcast 368)

People aren't really as invested in terms of what you're doing. They're invested into you. Who is Tommy? Like, they want to know about the day to day. They want to know about the behind the scenes. Like, I got in really good shape last year. Like, and I'm traveling full time and I'm at the gym and just sharing kind of my, my stories with that. And in terms of I could be doing the coolest first class light in the world, drinking a 300 bottle of champagne.

Okay.

You get a couple thumbs up, but you need to share some, like, the real life stuff, like who you are, what you do. All of a sudden, people buy into that, they're interested, know what's going on next.

All right, we've got a great episode today with Tommy Lonergan. Tawny is the ops guy behind the Travel like Tommy Brand and the Freedom Travel business, where he helps companies and individuals optimize their credit card earnings and their credit card spend so they can travel all over the world first class for free or they can really get a lot of cash back on their cards. You're going to hear some of his systems and ideas behind doing that and also get some really good ideas on how to grow your company. So, Tommy, welcome to the Second in Command podcast.

Hey, Ken, good to see you, buddy.

So why don't you walk us through? Because your brand online is the travel like Tommy, and just for everybody who is watching or listening, we only ever interview the second in command. So you're kind of in this strange role because you are the brand, right in the travel like Tommy. But then your business with the Freedom Travel is really kind of the business that you've got a CEO of, partner Eli. But then you're kind of the ops guy or the COO on that. So can you walk us through the businesses and how it all fits together.

The personal brand, if you will. You know, the travel like Tommy, that was something that I started building, you know, really, you know, it all started about a decade ago, but until I actually started putting stuff out on social media and it just blew up from there. But I more or less went from like a thousand followers to 100,000 followers in about six or seven months because I actually started putting the time into posting all the cool stuff that I've been doing with points and miles, so was able to kind of build that up individually. And as I started the business, it was learning how to monetize it. Essentially. About a year into that whole journey of starting the business, Eli and I linked up and it was almost instant in the sense of the alignment and what we were trying to accomplish with turning this into a business and a lucrative business. But then also we identified the strengths and the weaknesses, the things that I'm not good at and the things that I don't want to do. Is the stuff that he dials in on, that's his jams, where in terms of the product and the travel piece and actually delivering on all the stuff that you see me doing, that's my strength and that's my lane. So, you know, in order for me to be able to deliver the goods and work with awesome clients and most importantly, you know, run a profitable business, I needed Eli on the backside. But then for Eli to be able to sell a killer product to awesome people, there was me on more or less the fulfillment side. And, you know, once that linked up, I mean, it basically just kind of we had to build some things, obviously. But that's really the kind of the dynamic of, you know, how that personal brand, which is still rocking and rolling, but that also transition into the partnership I now have with Eli Travel Guy and Freedom Travel Systems.

So it's interesting because. So he was kind of on the travel side too, as you mentioned. Eli Travel Guy, the only time I've ever seen. And is he still as prominent with his social and the Eli Travel Guy as well? Kind of building that into the funnel.

Everyone's got different styles of travel. I mean, you see the stuff, I'm kind of on the one extreme side of the spectrum where I'm just Globetrotten, flexible, whatever, wherever. But then, you know, Eli stuff, you know, he had multiple things go viral as well, too. He's putting out a lot of, like, value content as well. You know, talking about the credit cards, talking about the travel. And he just hit 100,000, I think, last week, too. So he's been slowly building his up and he's actually put a little bit more effort into it. And in terms of the content itself, my stuff looks cool. If you read the captions, you're going to get a bunch of value and stuff like that. But he's got great content that he is putting out there. We do run some ads and stuff like that that Eli's mostly running through there as well. But yeah, man, like I said, just the dynamics of wanting to accomplish the same thing, but then also being aware enough to know, hey, I'm not good at this, and same thing, it's like, hey, I'm good at this, you're not good at that. So I Mean, it was just an instant kind of, we just knew. You just kind of get that gut feeling where you're like, this is right.

So often when you see a company, the CEO tends to be kind of the figurehead or the, the spokesperson for the brand. But I guess in this case you're less of the figurehead spokesperson, you are more the product in many ways. Or, or I guess there's a couple of products. Right. The other part of the product is really the back end service and the analysis. I've seen it done a couple times where Harley Finkelstein, who is the COO of Shopify and was actually one of our very first guests on the podcast, he's really the outward facing brand for the business. And Tobias Luque, a CEO, is very kind of inward facing. But I guess, is it, is it only because I've been more exposed to you that I'm not seeing Eli as much? Would you say that you're kind of equally out there as parts of the brand then?

Yeah, it's definitely an equal realm in the sense is, you know, one of the things that we figured out, it was like, you know, the stronger our individual brands are, you know, the stronger the, you know, the company brand is. And then, you know, also then tying those two together where you know someone just like in this story, like someone might know me really well, where not Eli, or then, you know, we'll get on calls where someone might know one of us but not the other. And all of a sudden once some of those things are connected. But the idea was like we both wanted to build strong individual brands and then essentially be able to fuel that into, you know, the company brand. So, you know, the faces are both out there, different types of content. But in terms of practicing what we preach, let's just say we eat, sleep and drink this stuff.

So it's interesting, back when I was the CEO for 1-800-GOT junk, which is crazy that I still talk about it because it was 17 years ago. Brian the CEO and myself as CEO both had very outward facing brands. We both did speaking events on behalf of the company. Social media didn't exist yet. I was one of the first 200,000 people in the world on LinkedIn in about 2003. But so that was a different. It wasn't even social media. And then I had the first Facebook account in the company just as I was leaving in May of 2007 and people were laughing at me, wondering what the hell the Facebook was. So there really wasn't anywhere for us to be Kind of outward facing, other than talking to the media. We both did lots of media appearances, media interviews and speaking events. But that's very unusual for a company to have multiple spokespeople. And I think that it's something that now that we have social media, more companies should do. Do you have any thoughts around, you know, the normal day to day, like let's say your clients, companies as an example, do you encourage them to have multiple people on social media or to get the CEO more on social media? Can you give us any lessons or thoughts around that?

You know what, the way I look at it, I mean, this is how Eli I did it. It was kind of like, you know, this is. Even with our client success team. You know, I've got five client success, I call my points pros underneath me who are all people in the travel space that have been doing this stuff for, for a while and they wanted a way to monetize these things. And you know, in terms of, you know, not only just Eli and I, I want, you know, my team members to grow their brands. You know, one of my got, one of my kids, Victor, fresh out of college, had one credit card. The kids traveled the world. He just, he's about to hit 20,000 followers. So to me, like, I'm kind of more of that supporter in the sense of like, you know, I don't need to be the, the rock and roll star and nor does Eli, but it's like, hey, we should all be able to, you know, the more powerful all the individuals are, that just takes everything collectively as a whole. So I'm someone that's like, you're actually not behind the scenes. You're live in it. You're the one that's also helping deliver all this other travel stuff to the clients. And when they see you out there, like I said, it's just more reason for people to be like these, you know, these guys know what they're doing.

You know, do you get your employees to be active on social media as part of the brand or part of communicating the way that you operate? Is that part of your strategy?

Definitely. They've been growing, you know, obviously growing their brands. You know, we're into the several thousands, into the ten thousands now where, you know, they had a lot of the knowledge. They had a lot of knowledge. I really didn't have to teach them much about the points and miles. Like they know this stuff, but it was more or less teaching them how to work for the types of clients that we're working with. But in terms of, you know, like just the social media in general. Regardless of what your, your niche is or whatever you're talking about or your product, if you don't feed it, it's never going to grow.

Give us some basic lessons then for the CEO or COO that is listening today on things that they can do with their social media account to grow their followers, to connect more with their customers, to kind of build a brand around themselves to be relevant. What are some lessons that you can impart to people that aren't necessarily even in the travel space, but like let's say you were advising clients of yours, clients of Freedom Travel. What are the things that they should be doing more on social?

I like a love hate with it. You know, it's, it's constantly going, you got to feed it. It's like you can be reached at any day, any time. But one of the biggest things that was kind of eye opening to me was, you know, I get, I do some cool stuff, like I take crazy flights, I travel all over the world. Like I do interesting things. But one thing that I've really kind of discovered more or less in the last year or so is people aren't really as invested in terms of what you're doing. They're invested into you. Who is Tommy? Like they want to know about the day to day, they want to know about the behind the scenes. Like I got in really good shape last year, like and I'm traveling full time and I'm at the gym and just sharing kind of my stories with that. And in terms of I could be doing the coolest first class light in the world drinking a 300 bottle of champagne. Okay, you get a couple thumbs up but you need to share some like the real life stuff like who you are, what you do. All of a sudden people buy into that, they're interested, know what's going on next. So just getting to know the person behind, whether it's the company, the product, the service, who is that person? That's where all the investment from the audience really kind of comes in. And then from there it's like, hey, you've got them invested. And then, and I'm still bad at this. People want to work with you, right? And whether that's you actually self promoting, which I do a terrible job of self promoting. But when all of a sudden you're sharing these things, not using it as a sales tool, just like, hey, you know, sign up for this, do that, it's being real, being organic, being authentic, and guess what? People start reaching how can I work with you? Do you have a course? How do I sign up? So share that personal piece. Be real and be organic. And like I said, not the, it's the who. That's what people really buy into.

Part of the real piece that I've been struggling with recently is that I think we all glorify the entrepreneurial journey or even being the COO of a company and building out an organization, we tend to glorify what that looks like. We don't often share the tough stuff. You know, just like I'm sure that you have flights that suck. You don't really share those. You sometimes probably have to fly economy. You probably don't share those. You don't share the hotel that you go into that you were hoping is better. We also don't share the hard parts of the building a business journey or do you share that stuff? Any thoughts around sharing the hard parts?

Yeah. And, you know, and I think that's kind of like ties into that last piece of like, you know, that realness and that authenticity and quite funny. Like, you know, on those rare occasions where I am flying economy or I have a travel day hiccup, people tend to enjoy that. They're like, ah, I knew he'd finally be in economy. Like, so they'll kind of laugh a little bit in terms of peeling back the layers of, okay, you're seeing me do all this. What's going in behind the scenes that make all this stuff happen. And those are some of the things that I kind of started to share a lot more this year as well too, where it's, hey, it's not just me traveling, doing this, having fun on the beach. That's about, you see about 10% of my day. You don't see me on a Zoom call at 4am When I'm in Asia. You know, you don't see me dial down with the blinds closed, rocking through, you know, just, just items where I'm uninterrupted. You know, you see the fun. But then I've started to share a little bit more of the behind the scenes of, like I said, that just kind of shows, hey, anything's possible, but nothing is easy. And we might make it look really easy. But in reality, like I said, you see about 10% of the day to day. But what goes on to make that happen and make that dream a reality, that's where most people miss the ball.

You don't share much about the actual business itself, about the freedom travel side of the business. You said you're a bad self promoter, you tend to share a lot on the so and I'm going to switch gears in a second into the core business. But you tend to share a lot about travel and using of points, but not about the actual running of the business. Is there any reason for that?

You know, I think, you know, I kind of started this too as well. It was like, you know, when I learned all this, this travel hacking and the credit card points and stuff like that, you know, that was my 20s, I was an executive chef. I was making, you know, close to six figures. I was making a good, good living given, you know, given the scenario. But my biggest piece with starting was like, hey, you know, I'm able to do this and if I can do this, like anybody can really do this, you know, so I think kind of putting that out there, but then, you know, I don't know what my roadblockers are and stuff like that. In terms of like me actually, you know, self promoting on the business and stuff like that, I think you're just kind of flooded with, you know, everything's turned into like, you know, a business page or this. It's been tough but, but I think with how I've kind of done everything, I will start self promoting more. But you know, I've been so focused on, you know, building the credibility and.

You'Re more like a magnetic attraction to the brand and then it goes from there into the conversations. And that's something that I think a lot of entrepreneurs need to realize too is they don't need to be there promoting their brand and selling, selling, selling. It's just more share and attract and share and attract and know that that organically leads into something. Right?

Exactly.

What is freedom travel? What do you do for companies right now?

So biggest picture here is we work with travel loving business owners. Okay. In terms of all these credit card points and the first class flights and all that stuff. Essentially there's two pieces to this. We're spending money. How can we maximize what we're getting out of that? Spend in the form of points, using the right cards for the right things, earning the right types of points that allow us to do these cool things that you see me doing. So basically it's getting kind of just set up with, you know, having those maybe two to three cards on the personal side and then obviously with the business owners as well. We got business spend a lot of times across multiple businesses where hey, you know, what are those two to three cards that still very simple and effective. But how do we go from 1x point on every dollar to maybe averaging 2 and a half, 3x even 4x points per dollar. Where all of a sudden the things you're already doing, we're starting to stockpile these points that are just coming back. And you know that points earning piece, once you look at the numbers, I mean if you just say, hey, I spent this much last year and your times it by one, you've got that many points, times that by three or four over the course here and all of a sudden you're like, oh man, I could be earning 3 million or 4 million. So that points earning piece, maximizing what you're already doing by using a simple and effective strategy, that's the first piece that doesn't take all too much time. You know, you got to bring in the new cards, you got to get them set up and just train your brain. But it's pretty simple. Then you're on autopilot and it's not just for right now, it's for next year and the following year.

So I'll give an example of this and I'll ask a question. And then we go into part two which is using the miles and booking them efficiently. So my EA literally this morning sent me a note and she said, hey, we have two bills to pay for our COO alliance events. One for the one that we held at mit, one for the one that we're holding at the Fairmont in Vancouver. Which credit card should I put them on? I'm like, I don't know. I think, I think we put them on the chase. But, but you guys are helping us and her. And I even went back to her, I said talk to Freedom Travel and find out where we're supposed to put all these expenses. So for us it ends up on autopilot, right? Because if I put those hotel expenses on my amex, I'm getting paid something. But if I put it on my chase, I'm going to get more points. Correct?

Exactly.

It's not just about put it on a card and get points. It's about putting it on the correct card to get the most points. But I know that I put all my advertising on the Amex, on the Amex Gold, right? So can you give us a couple of specific examples of where the typical entrepreneur or where, where me where, where should I be spending some of my dollars on things? Let's talk about the big ones. Try like air. If I book flights, if I pay for hotels, if I run events, if I do advertising, if I pay contractors, where should I be paying for those five kind of things.

Sure. So I've got to group this in like three of those. So we'll just say travel as a whole.

Okay.

We love marketing and online ads. It's one of our favorite categories. And then we'll kind of say like almost like in everything else. Okay, so those are my three biggest spend items. Which card is going to earn me the most points for travel? So for example, on the personal side, Chase has a card called the Chase Sapphire Reserve Card. Okay. Now to frame this out, the banks want you to have multiple cards. Amex is going to have cards that compete with Chase Cards and Capital One. So the idea of there's really not one card that fits all. There's going to be some layers to this thing, but three cards is good. The Chase Sapphire Reserve earns from 3x all the way up to potentially 10x points on our travel purchases. Flights, hotels, rental cars, tours, parking. The broadest version of travel. So with that card, guys, that's your travel card. Train your brain. If this is a travel purchase, I want to use the Chase card because it's 3 to 10x your Amex Gold card. Now this is the personal Gold card. That's the card I use for food.

And only for me. The Amex Gold card is my. Is a business card.

Yes. So the business goes like I said. So yeah. So the Travel Chase Sapphire Reserve Personal and then also there is a Chase Inc. Preferred which is the business card. It's maxed at 3x points but still a 3x multiple is a home run on anything. So you got the Chase cards for travel. Now advertising favorite, you scale your ads, you scale your business. Right. So lots of our clients are spending a boatload of ads. The MX Business Gold Card will earn you 4x points per dollar on your advertising on the first 150k a year in spend.

Right.

Basically, I mean you got 600,000 points just from that 150k in advertising, which is massive. If you're doing a million in advertising, trust me, there's ways to add layers to that. But amex business goal, and not only just for ads, that card's great in the sense that it has six or seven categories. You know, shipping, there's software, a lot of those key business expenses where every month your top two spending categories amongst that group will hit that 4x points. So in terms of that one card, that's fantastic for those multiples on multiple categories as well, it's the no brainer card there. So your business Gold card right now that last piece is okay. It's not travel, it's not advertising, you know, it's not shipping. In terms of being able to execute on all this stuff, we get past three cards, it starts like, oh, you know, I got too much going on. How do we make sure that we're earning more than one point per dollar on every purchase? We want to be earning one and a half or even two if possible. So one of the cards that's kind of recent that came out is the Capital One Venture X business card. That card earns us 2x points on every single purchase. You don't have to think about what we're buying. It doesn't matter. But now some of those types of spends like, you know, masterminds, education, things that we wouldn't be able to get those multiples on. Well, now we've just raised our floor to every dollar being spent is returning.

A 2x multiple for business owners. Where does the traditional Amex Platinum card end up? In the garbage.

So this is one of the biggest things that I get. You know, almost everybody that we're talking to, you know, has a Platinum card and unfortunately that's where a lot of the spend is going. Platinum card, it's flashy, looks nice, it's fun to pull out the Platinum card, both the personal and the business. It's a poor points earning card. The only scenarios where I actually use my platinum card is one, it does earn you 5x on flights. So anything flight wise that I'm paying, I do put that on my platinum card. The only other use case I have in terms of spend on the business platinum is if it's a purchase over $5,000, you will get 1.5x points. So if we want to go back to that advertising scenario, we've got an Amex business platinum earning us 1x points on 150k and spend. You got 150,000 points. The gold doesn't look as nice, doesn't matter. The gold card is the points earning card on the personal business. Plug the gold card for your advertising. Now you've gone from 150k to 600k and guess what? All you had to do was log into your advertising account and change the credit card. Two minute change.

Yeah.

And you're 4X.

So the Amex Platinum is really flights only.

For me it's flights only. And if you are, you know, a business that does have a lot of those higher, you know, 5,000 and above purchases to get the one and a half X that's, you know, it's still a good move. And the ability to have that purchasing power, you know, it doesn't really have a limit attached to it. So because it's a spending, it is, it's a good tool to have between, you know, the spending power and then the lounge access, the perks, the benefits, they're all good.

So what Freedom travel does is if you can walk us through the model, you actually take a look at clients, the company and the individuals that are signing up and changing the cards over. You look at all their credit card statements, you look at their P L, you look at their general ledger and you show them what cards to get rid of, what cards to sign up for, and what cards to actually start using for proper purchases so they can max out the amount of points. Is that correct?

Nailed it.

You give them the plan to follow, they execute on the plan. So now they've got all these points. Like I'm starting to accumulate way more points than I used to accumulate. So now the second part of your model is what? Walk us through that.

So second part is like I said, some clients come to us with some points but we're leaving a lot, so I have none. But let's say, hey, we got our cards, we took action, we're rocking and rolling now we've got some points. Okay, the points are any piece, once you're set, it's on autopilot, you're good. The points redeeming piece, this is the hard part. Okay, so in terms of being able to use the points, there's so many different ways to do it. But then also every single client that we service is different in the sense of, you know, what's a home run win to them? Do they want to get more value out of their points? Do they want to only have non stop flights? So every client is going to be different in terms of their preferences. And this is one of the challenges overall with this. But the back end piece is we've got a private Slack channel. It's like a white glove concierge service. Think of it like, you know, if your mom was a luxury travel advisor and your dad was like a, you know, CPA tax person, they had a kid, like, that's, that's essentially us. So people are going to send us a request of like, hey, you know, Tommy decided we're going to go to Europe this summer. Me, my family of four, we're looking to go sometime in July and essentially a week, have that basic information. We're going to go in and actually do all the searching. All the researching the planning, but then most importantly, it's the monitoring of these flights, specifically the flight flights. A lot of people will see, they'll go to United, go to American and they're going to see a bunch of flights that are, you know, 300,000 miles, 400,000 miles. We're not sending those flights to our clients. We know all the different award charts, we know the pricing, we know when seats are going to open up. So we spend time where it's like, hey, got your trip? We're going to need to watch this for a few weeks, maybe even a month. But when it pops, we're going to book you this flight for 60,000 or 70,000. So there's kind of a math, they call it cent per point. So how much value are we getting out of each one of these points? That's kind of one of the point nerd metrics, if you will. But for example, if you go to Amex Travel, probably a lot of you have Amex cards, you can go redeem your Amex points right through Amex Travel, you have a hundred thousand points, you got $1,000. Okay, that's cool. Or what we do, we know what your points are. We're going to go look for those flights directly with the airlines where I can book with that same hundred thousand points, I can book a round trip business class ticket to Europe for that same hundred thousand points, which might cost 4, 5, 6 or $7,000.

How do you do that? You're booking the points. Are you doing a point swap? What do you, what's the, the logistics that you're helping companies do this?

Yeah, so the biggest piece here is, you know, one, go back to that points earning is we want to get set up to earn these transferable points. So that was the Chase, the Amex, the Capital One, just like the name says, when it comes time to use these points, we want to pull them away from Amex, pull them away from Chase, and send them to the right airline program for that specific trip, whether it's United, Air Canada, British Airways, all these different airline programs will charge differently for these points, these points, flights. And that's where the strategy lies in, is, hey, where can I send it to? And then sometimes there's going to be multiple options of hey, this exact same flight might be able to book it three different ways where it's 70,000 here, 60,000 or 50,000. So it's a, it's a giant spider web. And this is all the stuff that I nerded out on for you. Know, the better part of a decade learning all this stuff. But it's, you know, we're, we're 3xing to 4xing our return on the points earnings. But then we're further taking those points and we're, you know, I think, I think last year we averaged about 5.2 cents per point in redemption value. So that same hundred thousand points got us 5,000 in travel.

Wow. Versus a thousand. So you're getting 5x return. Like that's the big upside there. Now what's, what is your service charge cost? How do you take a company and help them? What do you, how does your model work that way?

Yeah. So this was also, you know, kind of one of the challenges that we had to figure out because no one was really, you know, doing this stuff. So this was one of those things where we had some ideas, we tried some things out, we've made some changes, but, you know, essentially right now we kind of had just have really have two kind of core offers. Okay. One of them is like for you, for example, that's our first class CEO program. Okay. How valuable is your time? It's valuable. Do you realize we might be missing out on some stuff here? Sure. But hey, is your time still gonna be better spent doing everything else with the business? So basically this is that whole white glove concierge service where we've got a private Slack channel where whether it's you, your assistant, whoever's running your travel, not only taking it off your plate, but maybe even off your assistant's plate as well, where you're going to be putting all of your travel requests through us. We're not going to actually go in and hit that booking button. We're going to run the marathon and that person just cuts the tape at the very end. Most importantly, said we're meeting the client's specific preferences. Maybe there's specific things for the trip, but the goal here is to one, deliver an epic travel experience and eliminate as much of the annoyances of travel as possible. Save the time and then maximizing that value. It's like we got these points. That's where most people mess up is they do a very poor job at redeeming the points because that's the hardest part. If you have somebody do it the right way for what it costs to work with us, I mean, that's you would spend on one trip.

Right, Exactly. So which companies out there, which individuals out there should use the cash back Credit cards versus the points occurring credit cards.

Great question. In terms of the types of Business owners that we're working with, you know, once you start getting a lot of heads in the game and stuff like that, it gets, you know, the bigger the company, the harder it is to kind of make some of these changes and stuff like that. So, you know, really what we kind of do is we look at the person's travel frequencies. You know, how often are we traveling, whether that's just you, maybe we're spending, you know, we're doing it some for the business, travel for the team, maybe we're hosting events, but we want to see, hey, what's the most possible points you could use in a year given your scenario? Well, I mean, if someone's only going to need maximum like 2 million miles a year, okay, I want to make sure that they've always got 2 million on hand. They might earn 2 million in the first six months out of the year. Points are not an investment, guys.

Right.

Over time will decrease in value. You want to earn them and you want to burn them. You always keep some on hand. Don't, don't, don't deplete the bank. But now all of a sudden, we've got a couple million dollars in spend for the second half of the year. We have more points than we know what to do with. Well, we still want to get something back, right? We don't want to do debit card, we don't want to do wires. So cash back cards now where, you know, 2%. And even the Chase Chase just came out with a newer card called the Chase Inc. Premier that's earning up to 2 and a half percent cash back on your purchases. So that's what we'll do with a lot of clients is, you know, maybe it's that first half of the year or maybe we've kind of got a threshold for the clients where it's like, hey, you know, once we hit this many points, go ahead, let's shift over to the cash back. So lots of strategies. The idea is we will focus on points first because we can always cash those out if we want to a little bit lower value. But let's get everything they need. Let's keep it there. But then absolutely, it could make sense to transition over to cash back for part of the year as opposed to further just stockpiling these points that we might not have a use for, whether that's immediately or, you know, down the road.

So if you're a business that doesn't travel or isn't going to utilize travel, it still makes sense to work with you guys to have you guys optimize their spend and then optimize which cards. Walk us through some of the logistics on this. So you're operating a company now. Are your employees remote? Are they in person? What percentage of your team is kind of remote and, and how do you work with clients on this? You said you're kind of operating a slack channel, you're getting into their business. Can you walk us through some of the logistics of the day to day?

So yes, of my day to day, you know, similar like you can, like I'm all over the world, you know, it's, I'm in a different time zone all the times making sure that I'm not making my clients adjust to my schedule and nor making my team. I have to adjust to everybody else's schedule so I can go do all this stuff but you know, I can't inconvenience anybody else. So if I have to wake up at four in the morning, guess what, I'm getting up. So some of the day to day there. But then in terms of the team itself, it was just me and Eli for, for several months and that was a challenge. I would say that was one of like the hardest parts of this. But then with my team now I've got four people underneath me on the client success team. All stateside, client facing, they're traveling not anywhere near as much as me, but you know, pretty much they've got their home base. They're taking a trip every, you know, every month, every other month. But same thing, they're, they're eat, sleeping and drinking this stuff. So on my client facing team, they are stateside, but any of us could be anywhere in the world at any given time. That's a good thing in this sense is a lot of times we have somebody with eyes on Slack 24 7. That's kind of a good thing. But then also there's been some challenges of hey, all four of us are on a plane today. Like who's watching this? So those are just kind of some of the challenges from there. But then, you know, Eli is in Austin, our other guy Daniel and our other guy Kevin also all stateside. We do have a couple of VAs in the Philippines and a couple in Honduras that help with like a lot of data entry, just some tracking, just help with, help with a lot of stuff that I don't want to be, you know, I don't want to be doing on the back end. So. But I think there's 13 of us. It's been a fun journey watching it Go from Eli and I up to what it is now.

What's your client journey in terms of like, how do clients find out about you and then what's your sales process like for, for landing clients and then what's the lifespan of a client for you guys? How does that work? Like in a lifetime value?

So in terms of people finding us, you know, there's a couple scenarios like, you know, I'm the relationship person where like I'm, I'm building the networks. A lot of the in person stuff where, you know, if somebody who's met me or knows me, if they hear the word credit card points or travel, it's like, hey, you've got to go talk to Tommy. You gotta go do this. And then from there also, you know, it's the referrals from our current clients. So when somebody's like already working with us and they can deliver the goods, make the referrals for us, like that's a huge, huge piece there we are running some ads, that's Eli's Lane and stuff like that. We've got those dialed in right now in the sense of that takes a while to get your targeting down. And like I said, I'm not the expert there, but man, in terms of the types of people that are ending up on sales calls and ultimately on my calendar for onboard calls, we've got these things dialed right now where like everybody coming in is someone that a, like is a great person to work with. But like, I know that I can really, really deliver the goods to them in terms of what they're doing and you know, those things that we could do to really elevate it. So the quality has been, been great. But in terms of like the lead flow there, there's a little bit of qualifying. They'll do a disco call and then ultimately on to, you know, a sales call with us from there and we'll kind of determine, we generally know which of the, you know, a couple of offers that they'll fall into. But yes, like I said, it's kind of more of the organic side of things where when you're talking to me, I'm going to basically get you all the way through, you know, till you're on that flight when it's all said and done through. Also, you know, the cold side with the ads mostly on YouTube and Instagram as well, where a little bit more of an in depth sales process, a couple calls, a little more heads involved with it there. But see, we kind of got two main mainstreams and then like I said those internal clients doing the, you know, the referrals, I mean, it's a huge, it's a huge piece.

Who's your favorite airline for first class travel?

Everybody needs to fly Emirates once.

Yeah.

You just have to do it. Okay. Yeah. And then I know you've flown it a few times as well too. But Qatar Guitar Airlines, they fly everywhere. I mean, literally everywhere. The lounges in Doha are awesome. Their, their Q suites, Business class is, is top of the line. Embrytz Guitar, two of the favorites for international.

Yeah. And those two airlines, by the way, if anybody who only flies first class in the United States, that's really called economy class on Qatar and Emirates. And business class blows away us first class and then first class, it's just another level. So if you were going to go back and give yourself some Advice As a 21 or 22 year old, what advice would you give the younger you?

Kim? I think the biggest advice that I would kind of give to myself now was, you know, in terms of these ideas with starting this business and learning about this travel hacking and the credit cards and, you know, everything that I'm doing now for a living, dude, I knew about this stuff 10 years ago and I was not, not only knowing about it, but I was doing it. I was still working a 9 to 5, but I had all the knowledge of this whole, this whole game and I wanted to do something with it. I was more concerned about what if it doesn't work. I couldn't put my head on what.

If it does, what if it does.

What if it does work? Eventually, you know, basically right. At 30 years old, I finally was able to shift that in my head because I knew, hey, if it doesn't work, guess what? You go back home, get back into the food industry. You'll make, you know, 150k a year. That's your worst case scenario.

Dude, you'll be fine.

I'll be fine. Yeah. So once that, you know, once I kind of turned that in my head, you know, it's basically been no looking back since. But you know, I would just tell myself like, hey, don't be scared of failure. If you fail, guess what, you're going to learn something from it and you won't fail that way again. And if you don't risk it, you'll never know. Yeah, the biggest thing was like I didn't want to look back and ever have that. What if it took me a minute. But man, you know, no looking back.

Since then, Tommy Lonergan from Freedom Travel and Travel like Tommy and Eli the travel guy. Thanks so much for sharing with us all the Second Command podcast.

I have to ask myself, do I do the work myself or do I delegate it to my team? But my personality is if I have to do the work, I want to make sure there's enough notes that I can pass it and coach to someone and they can do it to the saint, to the next person. That's kind of the approach we're at right now, where it's like, okay, I'm going to take the lessons that I'm learning from.