The ‘send me a postcard’ Breakfast

Mathew Prior’s career highlights might not fit on a postcard, but he’s certainly sent a few during his career in the travel industry.

Joining us at our February Chamber Breakfast, he shared his beginnings as a trainee accountant, the mistakes he made, and how his journey eventually led him from holiday repping in ski resorts, to working on iconic travel brands, and now the CEO of TrustedHousesitters. 

“Mum, Dad, I want to be an accountant.”

Mathew started his career in the world of reinsurance accountancy, although quickly learned it’s not as exciting as it sounds...

Realising that he had made a mistake, he left the accountancy world, instead deciding to go overseas and be a holiday rep.

Mathew says that everyone should work in hospitality at least once. Swapping long lists of unexplainable reinsurance items for a list of customers unaccounted for at the end of a bar crawl, he loved the new experience, learning the ropes of customer service, thinking on his feet and problem solving. 

Mathew’s first big break

After five years of holiday repping, it was time for Mathew to come back to the UK. He returned to complete an MBA, later getting his first career break in the dot-com bubble of the late 90s, helping to launch an online travel agency and taking it from concept through to a thriving international business in the space of six months.

He remembers the heady days of hitting high on the Yahoo directory’s search results, when ‘ecommerce’ was a new buzz word, and a colleague asking him if they should start trying to be high on search results for this new thing called ‘Google’. 

Then two big things happened

The dot-com bubble burst, and Mathew got married.

Working long hours in London, he’d been busy and not actually moved in with his wife after seven months of marriage. With the dot-com crash, Mathew moved down to Brighton and joined what was then called First Choice (now Tui).

A low growth but very cash generative business, Mathew was helping First Choice to acquire and operate niche activity adventure businesses, running iconic travel brands there for 15 years. 

Categories of failure

Successes came during these years when Mathew and his team dug deep into what was making customers tick, what was working well, and working on doing simple things better to drive growth.

Despite this, he admits there were plenty of failures too – putting them into three categories:

1. Hiring
2. Acquisition
3. And the catch-all, what Mathew calls the entrepreneur’s disease – thundering on in the face of overwhelming evidence that you’re wrong. 

Irma: Mathew’s biggest crisis

Working in the travel industry, you’re aware that things go wrong all the time. Mathew had dealt with the aftermath of 9/11, the 2008 financial crash, the Icelandic volcano – but nothing could prepare him for what happened in September 2017.

Hurricanes were a yearly occurrence – and so were the annual preparations, making sure that customers and cruise ships alike were safe and secure. Although warning systems said there was a big one on the way, Mathew and his team couldn’t prepare for the most powerful Atlantic hurricane ever: Hurricane Irma.

In what Mathew described as biblical carnage, they were hit with a category 5 hurricane with 180 mile an hour wind. The roof was ripped off the hotel, 50% of their boats were destroyed, including a 58ft catamaran weighing 30 tons that was lifted into the air to land 300m away on dry land.

Luckily, everyone survived, but it resulted in an eye-watering nine-figure insurance claim that has only recently been settled. 

Time for a change

After 15 years at Tui, Mathew decided it was time for a change – and a break. Awarding himself a year off, he threw himself into voluntary work. Helping Martlets on their snail campaign, running the girls section of Brighton & Hove Cricket Club, and becoming a listening volunteer at Samaritans (which he still does today).

He was then introduced to TrustedHousesitters, a business that inspires and empowers pet people to explore the world in different ways. Pet sitters look after pets in exchange for a unique home stay. It’s a value exchange.

Both pet owners and house sitters alike pay an annual membership fee. House sitters apply to stay, and pet owners pick from applicants – there's no individual fee paid in exchange for the housesits. 

(Pet)sitting at the heart of four big trends

Mathew says that the success of TrustedHousesitters is due to the business sitting at the heart of four big trends:

1. Pet humanisation – the relationship between humans and pets. According to recent research, pet owners find it harder to leave their pets when they go on holiday, than they do leaving their partners and family!
2. Travel – people want different types of authentic adventures.
3. The way people are working today with more flexibility and remote working.
4. The economic environment moving to smarter ways of consuming.

But to Mathew, it is trust that’s the core. The business recognises that there are more good people than bad people in the world, helping people to lead lives with community at the heart.

This success is interwoven with Mathew’s question for any business, including his own: if you didn’t exist tomorrow, would more than half of your customers feel like they’ve lost something? 

Everyone has their own way to grow and scale

During Covid and lockdowns, despite limited travel, TrustedHousesitters’ renewal rate didn’t dip. And since then, they have scaled rapidly and are now twice the size with 150,000 users worldwide (almost 50% of these are in the US).

Mathew says that everyone has their own way to grow and scale, but for him it’s these five things that have been the key:

1. Value proposition – dig deep into what makes you great, understanding your USP and how to make it better
2. Really clear strategy and objectives – no room for ambiguity.
3. Autonomy and accountability – if leadership set a clear vision, it empowers teams to be autonomous.
4. Collaboration – a zero tolerance for silos.
5. Values and culture – mistakes are made when you forget about these.

All five of these have enabled them to scale, becoming a completely remote business. They’ve never looked back. 

But what about the pets?!

Of the pets on TrustedHousesitters, 65% are dogs, 30% are cats and the remaining 5% are lots of other animals – including sheep, goats, horses, reptiles, chickens. They recently had their first armadillo sit!

Some of Mathew's favourite pet names from this plethora of animals are: Pablo Pawcasso, Fluffy Paws, Ramen Noodles and (our personal favourite) Professor Karl Barks. 

A big thank you to Mathew for joining us at our February Breakfast and sharing his career journey. Find out more about TrustedHousesitters on their website here.

Find our monthly Chamber Breakfasts, plus other networking events to inspire and build a community of like-minded business people, head over to our events page. 

If you want to contribute to the Chamber blog, contact us on hannah@brightonchamber.co.uk