It’s a self-drive boating company that the Cheryl proudly says not many Aussies know about… yet.
Cheryl Brown,the Managing Director of Le Boat was in Sydney earlier this month chatting to KarryOn about the company’s growth plans, particularly in Aus.
While it’s still a relatively small brand in our part of the world, in less than five years it has managed to become a two-million euro company – or one sixth of its entire business.
We get a few tips from Cheryl on overcoming the challenges of bringing a new business to the market.
What are some of the challenges for a tourism business expanding operations in Australia?
For us one of the biggest challenges has been planting the seed.
Most people don’t realise they can self drive our boats with no experience and no licenses required.
It’s quite an exciting adventure for most but most people don’t realise they can do it.
That’s our biggest challenge how do we let more people know that there’s this fantastic adventure waiting for them.
What other challenges are there?
Once the seed is planted, I guess the next challenge for us is teaching people how to get there.
Which airport do they fly into? How to get from the airport to the base.
We’re conquering this with an experienced team now based in Sydney that can help every step of the way.
We’re also training agents with webinars and we’ve got a lot of training guides on all our destinations.
Can a business bounce off the success of the sector?
It’s interesting because they’re so different and at the moment, we’re not really finding anything in common with the cruising industry.
In general I think if you’re a smaller river cruise operator amongst all the big river cruise players that are spending a lot of money, you’re generally going to benefit at the back of that success.
But I think we’re such a different product we don’t benefit from cruising or river cruising exploding.
So that’s another challenge for us because we have to find new customers and it’s difficult to know who they are.
One way of us growing our business is talking to people about our product and showcasing it.
The more awareness we can get out there the more customers are hopefully going to come experience our product.
How do you decide when to drop marketing money?
We’ve got a big marketing budget in Aus and the more revenue we get out of Aus the bigger the budget.
When we are entering a new market we invest but generally we invest in marketing activity and where we think we will get the best return.
And what are your tips for conducting business long distance?
We’re a global business, we started off in Europe and then started looking at new source markets as new opportunities.
In my experience at looking at new source markets, there are two ways to invest in a source market and your starting point has to be either working with a good GSA in the market or hiring somebody with a lot of experience.
Most of our source market stories start with hiring a head of distribution and then they basically start growing the business – one person, one telephone.
They start the conversations with various partners and we start growing the business. We’ve done that in Aus – we now have a team of five here.
How big can it get?
I haven’t got the answer to that yet, but I like to think we can double. For me there’s no reason why Aus can’t be absolutely enormous.
The challenge is just planting the seed.
