This Travel Tech Founder Says We’re Entering an Era of “Unlimited” Travel Demand

0:00I'm Tim Hentschel and you're listening to Sweet Success.

0:07You've just checked in to Sweet Success. Join me, Katie Cline, for exclusive conversations with hotel executives, hospitality leaders, and industry innovators. Together, we'll uncover the strategies and techniques these masters of hospitality relentlessly refine. Whether you're already in the industry or just starting out, tune in every week to unlock the secret to your sweet success.

0:36Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Sweet Success. I'm your host, Katie Klein, and today I'm thrilled to welcome Tim Henschel to the show. Tim is the co-founder and co-CEO of Hotel Planner, one of the world's leading travel technology platforms connecting travelers, businesses, and groups with hotel accommodations. Since launching Hotel Planner in 2003, Tim has helped transform the way group travel and hotel bookings are managed through the use of technology, data, and personalized service. A graduate of the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration with a degree focused on hotel management and microcomputing, Tim combines deep hospitality roots with a passion for innovation.

1:21Tim, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. I want to start with a bit of your background, because when I was doing my research, I found out that you are a third generation hotelier. Talk us through that, what growing up around hotels taught you and how it influenced what you've created today. Yeah, it's a lot of responsibility, you know, keeping the family name in good shape. It's about achieving new levels of success in the hospitality industry, which is hard to do when you had a very successful grandfather that owned hotels in Palm Springs, developed and owned hotels in Palm Springs.

2:02And father was an executive with Hyen for a couple of decades and then started one of the first Reliant Chateau Purple Shields in North America called Stone Pine in Carmel, California, and then bought Lorellis Lodge. uh for me it bent working in the hotel industry since i was about 12 so uh yeah you grow up in in that kind of a small boutique hotel space and you uh you work every job uh you always have to fill in at any time and did you see this and think to yourself this is the space i need to be in when i get older or was it more of that absolutely not i'm going to do anything i can to get away from the family business?

2:45Oh, no. I mean, when I decided to go to the Cornell Hotel School, I knew that I was looking to expand on the knowledge that I already built in the family businesses and then see what the greater world was doing in the hospitality industry. So shortly after Cornell, spent some time in the banking industry, Commonwealth Associates in pipes. And then I was an analyst reading a ton of business plans and just decided that, you know, entrepreneurship's in my family. I moved back to California and that's when we started Hotel Kleiner with a patent and group hotel booking technology. Family is also a tour operation company for a few decades.

3:28So group travel is also something that we know very well. So it was a smooth transition. So it sounds like you're from California originally. Obviously, you lived in New York State with Cornell. I believe you're now based in London. So give me a little bit about your geographical history. I'm actually with Boca as we speak right now. Boca Raton, Florida. Is that where you're based right now or are you based in London? I did. I gave my family from London to Boca a few months ago. Wow. Okay. So London to Boca. I mean, very different places, I imagine. Yeah, it's very different. I mean, I still can split some of my time back in the UK.

4:13You have a lot of towels there, including an office. But yeah, the kids are all in school now in Boca Raton. Amazing. I lived in London as well for about six years, so I have a very strong affinity for the city. If you think about all the different places that you've lived and that your career has brought you, is Boca the one that feels most like home, or how do you think about each of those places? Being in the hospitality industry, their home is wherever you reside. Traveled all over the world growing up and continued to do the same as I raised a family. So, you know, we started in California and moved our headquarters from California to Florida about 13 years ago.

4:55Three years into that transition, opened our first office in London. And that was where I found myself and my family when my two oldest were very, very young. uh then from london we ended up buying a couple companies out of asia and moving to singapore where we had a set up our asia headquarters and then moved back from singapore to london and now back uh home to florida so yeah it's been been a worldwide journey uh growing the company internationally and we were very hands-on and doing it which was unique to to see all those different cool places and uh and raise a family uh pretty much on the hex pad uh lifestyle i always find that so fascinating my daughter was born in the uk but we moved back to the states when she was about 10 months so it wasn't you know super uh influential on her yet though i hope it will be in the future but my third daughter was born in london as well do you feel like your kids feel American?

5:56Do they feel British? Do they sound British? Like, how has growing up in so many different continents, let alone cities, influenced them? Oh, they differing up quite a bit of British slang that they could have. It's in my oldest, when we were just in London, was in the high school years. So, you know, that's where we get pretty thick in the accent and the use of slang. So, we've got some of that, but, you know, It's mixed with the time we spent in Singapore. I would say it's a pretty neutral accent to just English from the States. My wife and I are both from the West Coast, so I don't think we have strong accents.

6:40Adam, you let me know. You have a very neutral accent. I worked very hard at that, actually. I'm from Long Island, so my accent used to be anything but neutral. I was quite aggressive and I had a, let's say, very particular first boss. So when I was about 22 years old, she would stop meetings and correct my pronunciation in front of everyone. So nothing changes an accent faster than public humiliation. That's funny because when I first moved to London, my wife was visiting a speech coach for our youngest, who specialize in antipats to help them assimilate into British culture. And she wanted to take a stab at me and specifically said, look, if you ever want to be on the BBC, you will never get on with that accent.

7:31And I was like, that's okay. I'm neutral to the BBC. I'll keep my West Coast accent. So it hasn't been my skirt. I couldn't imagine trying to put on a fake accent. Did you ever get on the BBC? Now we need to know. I actually did get on the BBC radio, one, and it was about the last year when we launched the first AI reservationist. And so, you know, that's the closest I got to BBC was radio. It's not obviously as big as the TV. But we have so many talented British people out of the London office. I mean, our chief communications officer is from Cornwall, is British. I would always volunteer him first.

8:22Might as well use some of our local talent for that. It doesn't have to be me. I'm not particularly, how would you say it? I'm not saying I'm not fond, but I don't need media attention. It doesn't really do much for me. and so I'm happy to share the responsibility throughout our entire company with whoever wants to jump in front of the camera go ahead I feel like we hire the best and the brightest so anybody is a good representation of the brand so yeah we're happy to have whoever the most local is be our representative because I do appreciate that people gravitate especially in Europe to you know whoever the local presence is So much of our AI is based on that because it was trained off of a gig call center and the gig thing was about moving call centers away from Mexico, India, the Philippines, where you get kind of a predictable customer service experience to having gig agents that work from their living room.

9:29and we transfer the calls to customers that we, as best we can identify, we'll have a local connection with that agent. And obviously that agent obviously should have a local knowledge of the region that the people are looking to travel to. That is so fascinating. Because I felt that when I lived in the UK, we're speaking the same language, but as you're pointing out, we're not really speaking the same language. And there were little things like in New York, I would call a restaurant. OK, most of the time we're emailing or booking online. But if I'm calling a restaurant to ask for a reservation, I ask for a reservation.

10:09If I'm in the UK and I'm calling a restaurant, ask for a booking. And I feel like those two, that's such a like small example. But it's just about using the right word that makes it not stick out. Like in the UK, you would ask for the bill versus in the US, you'd ask for the check. Right. And it's those little things that allow you to blend in a little bit more, even though, like you said, you and I will always have American accents. So whenever we open our mouth, we're going to stand out as other. But at the same time, it allows you to kind of feel a bit more part of the culture and have a more seamless interaction.

10:48So it's really cool to hear that you're applying that to your agents as well. Sure, but I never applied it to my personal life or business life or being overstated. I mean, I was maybe affectionately or non-affectionately known as American Tim because I refuse to assimilate. I don't really feel like I need to. I mean, our cultural differences is what makes us unique. And I would feel like you'd be too much of a sycophant or an Anglophile to be trying to assimilate too much. I mean, this is what makes life interesting. I think to build close enough friendships where I know that if the Brits like you, they're generally taking the piss out of you.

11:38They make fun of you. They have to do that as part of their culture. Then you get used to after a while. And then you almost, if they're treating you too politely, then you know they do not friends. And there's little social cues like that that make a big difference. And then every European country has its own quirks. They realize who your real friends are and who they are. And you can never do it by, you know, kisses on two cheeks or three cheeks, you know, the extended kiss, the extended hug. It's, it happens for pretty much next to nothing. You know, it's always very diplomatic when in first greetings.

12:24But yeah, I mean, it's heavily localized, as you know, there. So if you don't have actual local representation, it would be very hard to build long-term business ties. Americans are the one culture that's different from that. They generally just tend to go with a business based on the right deal terms. And there's a general trust for everybody until proven wrong. and it is faked into our cost of doing business, which allows our companies to grow really fast and grow well internationally, even though we're one of the only countries that has no international growth subsidies by our government. In fact, we have negative flight subsidies.

13:10We get taxed at a high corporate tax rate regardless of where income's made. If you look at international commerce in all different countries, is completely the opposite. Not only do they not tax their businesses international revenues or profits, they typically will give them subsidies so they can grow faster. So, but at the same time, we're very competitive because we have a natural trusting attitude and non-discriminatory attitude at that too. Like, you know, Americans just tend to like and trust everybody. And maybe you're overly friendly to a fault. It is watching, you know, as you probably noted, as you live over there, you and the Americans first come over, especially on their vacation.

13:56They wanted to just, you know, say, hey, I'm here and chit chat with everybody. It's not really in the European culture to be overly friendly when you first meet somebody. But I mean, it's so typical of Americans. People get used to it. But, you know, I think the term ugly American makes zero sense to like everybody I've ever run into has always liked Americans internationally. We're big tippers. We're very generous. Like the term ugly American, I think, is more invented for political gain in this country than it actually exists internationally. Internationally, I've never, ever seen anything but a warm reception to Americans everywhere.

14:41And you felt the same way living in Asia as well? Oh, absolutely. It was, I mean, I don't know, maybe somewhat has to do with the way that I've traveled my entire life. So I don't tend to oppose anything. I mean, like I said, I don't assimilate, but I'm not going to impose in any way or demand or feel entitled. um you know and maybe that's a little bit of the fact that i grew up in hawaii and california i had a bit of a of a surfer background in that way uh you know just about you know go with the flow be be one with nature and the waves don't fight the waves because it's the dominant energy i mean you just can't really fight other societies or cultures you do you'll be crushed obviously over the power of them one person being bad.

15:37So maybe that's why I've never ever experienced any kind of, you know, pushback or adversity when it comes to, you know, getting along with other cultures and other places. And I've never ever firsthand seen the expression or felt any expression of ugly American. And the only time I've ever heard that term is in the U.S. too, by the way. Interesting. I'm really interested in how this global view has impacted Hotel Planner. So maybe let's back up and go back to 2003 when you created the company. Obviously, online travel looked very different then than it does today. What problem did you see at the time that you thought you'd be able to fix with Hotel Planner?

16:25It was very simple. And the group was a big part of revenues for hotels. and there's just the internet was beginning to really take off in the travel sector uh you know around 1999 2000 2001 you had hotels.com you had expedia you had price line uh and and there was all the buzz for my generation you know people that were in university at the time uh shopping on the price line and naming your own price and you know getting cheap tickets here and discounts on hotels.com or remember travel zoo that was fun you know every day a new deal and it could be better than the next is the discounting was was was exciting as somebody who's always you know been in the industry and what was possible and how cheap could you travel with all these deals that were being unleashed so you know there was nobody doing groups or it was natural that for me it was in my mind that somebody needs to do group I mean group is a massive part of the industry and nobody's cracked that code so then it was just about building a system that could allow people to book groups online and then we were the first in that and then we picked up some really big partnerships in the very beginning my triple a like price line then of course private ep we saw what we were doing they spent tens of millions of dollars backing competitors to us.

17:55They still do. But we did outwork those competitors and eventually we took over the partnerships that those competitors have. And now we power in the OTA space with 90 % of the group hotel bookings. So we've done a book rock consolidating that market. You said something there that's really interesting to me. You said we outworked the competitors. What do you think it was that made you guys so successful in the long run versus them? We were poor. They call it bootstrap, call it whatever you want. But we were just a couple poor college kids working these problems out. And we didn't have outside funding.

18:43And so we had to work with the resources of just making a small profit and reinvesting it back into the business. So where other private equity-backed companies would throw labor at any problem because they could afford just hiring more people, we were always looking for an engineering tech solution. So we would solve the problem with automation. And then the long term, that obviously made a massive difference. And the more we could automate, the more the customer liked it because it was faster response. And then, of course, the more efficient financially the company would be to be able to return more value to customers and to suppliers.

19:30So interesting and such a good lesson, I think, for any entrepreneur in any space. It's not necessarily having a money problem. Like you think if you get this influx of capital, every issue is solved. But actually what you're proving with that example is you guys had to be scrappy. You had to work smart. And that is what made you so successful in the long run. Yeah, absolutely. The thing is the private equity markets have been flushed with cash for over two decades. So, you know, raising money is, was it easier as a channel than for them to become profitable and competitive? So obviously, we're going to gravitate towards the easier money stream.

20:13We never had that. We never went down that path. But I can understand, and I have lots of entrepreneur friends that love it and love that. But the tough thing was, with every round of funding, it was dilution. And so you're basically just being diluted out of your own company. and then unless there's some big exit which less than like five percent of a half or big exit you're just basically working for free eventually and then when you know the company doesn't fails to get to that next round or the you know or an IPO status it never hit profit it doesn't typically hit profitability because it's not efficient and there is the automation that you have.

20:56And so the whole thing's worth it. So he basically worked for free as an entrepreneur because he was working for that sweat equity, but then the equity is not worth anything. So did you see that early on? Is that why you never went down that path yourself of raising private capital? I don't know if I could say that I saw that. I just never saw that the deal terms were great. And then I, as we got bigger and started to become friends more with the PEs behind closed doors they will i don't feel like they ever felt they were doing the right thing morally so they would they would hint to us as friends like that they feel bad for those entrepreneurs and because we do it was not really and then i would ask well well why do they take it then and they're like you've rave a million dollar check in front of somebody's face and or more and that's all they need to see that's all they're saying yeah they don't they don't read the small print they just they just like the cash that's coming you know that's being presented to them also they don't really understand i mean now there's more people are asking those questions about is this cash in the company or is this cash i take off the table i mean basically i mean like is it the is it my cash or or the because once we start the process even if you're only selling 20 30 percent um it comes with with governor control like board control which essentially means that they could say i'm writing you a 300 million dollar check they're writing themselves a 300 million dollar check because that check is going into the company which now they have controlling you know interest in and then once you're under you know deleted down under 50 percent that you're essentially are just funding themselves and you are going along for the ride for whatever is left of the equity that continues to get diluted so you know there's some people who did it right like back in the early days like a zuckerberg who was obviously very um coached by people who came before him that knew the tricks of the game who got you know special class a shares that didn't get diluted there's no peas that do that anymore i don't even think they made those deals after you know in the last 15 years that stores for staff so i don't know i mean it kind of reflects in the fact that the new like wave of tech has not really been as successful as the first decade for that reason maybe it's because they they didn't keep the entrepreneurs around the people with the vision and and then everything becomes uh based on what a board decides to do on private equity side which you know they've got a million things on their plate in their minds uh you know probably making the decisions on the direction of one of their portfolio companies isn't really the the most important and uh i mean any visionary entrepreneur i go said then prior you know times like um virgin galactic uh richard branson kind of type i mean yes he's had his failures but he he's definitely a visionary.

24:09I don't know. It would exist or Steve Jobs would exist in today's tech environment or Zuckerberg for that matter. And would Zuckerberg have really like stuck around if he was diluted down to one, two percent, you know? Wow. Really interesting. You know, you talked a lot about automation and technology. I'm curious how you think about balancing technology to improve that efficiency, but also maintaining that personal connection that hospitality is known for that we think about it all the time and that's the basis of what the ai reservation agent is it's trained off of you know highly rated gig recorded gang agent calls but the hyper between the two will will last forever uh i've been explaining this that uh you not only are you always going to have a customer says i want to speak with with a human uh real human right so you always come in you have to have gig agents but the gig agents local knowledge or and vernacular or the way that they you know speak helps train the ai and then of course the ai helps make the gigs more efficient by taking more complex you know calls or you know we call it high in the funnel low in the funnel calls i don't know a little bit if you're high in the funnel it's basically like you don't know exactly what you want and you're going to have a lot of questions the calls can take a really long time knowing the funnel calls are more transactional that's essentially what the human wants so you know the ai and the and the human complement each other i mean i know that there are people that are talking about the dystopia of potential ai armageddon whatever you want to call it and that uh one of the original founders who got a noble peace prize on AI so that there's a 10 % chance that AI will destroy, you know, the humans.

26:03I don't see it that way. I honestly do not see AIs being evil in any intent, like a way to give it an evil intent or a human nature. It makes no sense to me without humans to give it purpose. It doesn't even exist. So I don't know. I came to this conclusion because I was thinking, you know, with the technology Elon Musk is working with, it connects, you know, microchips to our brain. And, you know, if you could download every memory, everything from your brain into a supercomputer and then your self could be put into a robotic body and then you could have unlimited life, would it be worth it? I think the answer would be definitely, it wouldn't be worth it because you wouldn't have the sensory that a human skin brings and then the hormones and the rewards for, you would be cold feelingless, right?

27:14You would see the world, but it would be almost from just attracting a cell, that you want to be part of the world. You would have no emotions up or down or sideways. So you essentially have no motivation because there is no pleasure or pain, like reward in that scenario. You know, so then it's just logically you think, well, AI, that's their reality. That's AI's reality right now. So if you have no pleasure or pain, you have no emotional stake in everything, anything like if you, AI can never be the most popular in their class. You know, they're not going to be like, oh, if I can only do this backflip, then, you know, everybody will love me.

28:09AI doesn't think like that, right? So what I'm getting at is where is the motivation to have world dominance or any of these things that we are afraid of? Those are human instincts because it comes with having an emotional reward for achieving something like that. But in AI, it's not rewarded now. Now, could an evil human program it, you know, to do evil on its behalf? Yes, but the evil comes from the human, right? You have to have the evil. So where is it? And then we deal with that all the time. Every technology the human race has ever developed is going to be used for good or bad. So I guess that's where the Nobel Peace Prize, you know, scientists, you know, came up with is 10%.

29:03It's probably just based on the 80-20 rule, you know. 10 % of people ultimately will always do good, 10 % will ultimately always do evil. Maybe that's where the 10 % of AI could destroy your world comes from the 10 % of humans that will only look to do evil. And if they get their hands on the keys to AI, but then I feel like it's balanced out by the 90 % that are always trying to rein those human instincts in. so I feel confident that it's a force for ultimately a force for good and I don't see the distilled the end just because I grew up in the 80s and the 90s and watching all the Terminator movies like everybody else or reading sci-fi is giving us this impression that that's what the future will look like and then I just don't see it.

30:02What's wild about what you're saying is here in 2026 you talking about like downloading all of our memories and such onto a chip that actually doesn't seem impossible and like you said Elon Musk and the technology that he's working on versus if I think about when you started the company back in 2003 if we were having that same conversation I might have been like that'll never happen like that's absolutely impossible. And that just makes me, I feel like that articulates how much travelers must have changed in that amount of time, or maybe not. Like you said, you guys are really specializing in group travel.

30:45And I imagine the core of why people travel in groups in the first place is relatively the same now as it was 20 plus years ago, as it was 100 plus years ago, right? What have you seen? What do you think from your perspective? What's different now in Travelers and what is more or less the same? I think what's different in society is that we've unleashed human freedom like never before because of technology. And the same technology that's giving people more freedom in their days and the way that they work so they can work remotely. You have terms like pleasure that exist because of this whole new, you know, work-travel hybrid that never existed before, mainly due to the power of the smartphone.

31:36Now, I think about what you can get done. We don't ever see a fax anymore. Why would you need one? All contracts are signed with your finger and you can sign it on a plane flying up high in the sky, a contract, you know, you can have the same phone, call, you know, from anywhere with VoIP that says, remember all the barriers of international calling this out and the cost, that's all disappeared. I mean, basically the only thing that hasn't changed is time zones. But if you're working around the clock, like when I was living in Singapore, we were looking to go public on a SPAC and put a roadshow over COVID and soon from the hours of midnight to six in the morning because I was living in Singapore, but all the investors we were talking to were based in the U.S.

32:27So this has all changed, and this is why we're hitting record occupancies and record run far for the last six years in a row. You take the baby boom retirement with a lot of disposable income, plug in you know the millennials gen c's gen x's ability to uh work and travel we're talking about unlimited demand for for hotel rooms and travel and that's why we're in a position right now where we're entering invest in hotels uh and so actual as a read a real estate investment trust invest in hotels uh because the the brick and mortar will be continue to get more and more valuable as tech makes it possible for humans not to be chained to their desk anymore.

33:17That's really exciting to hear because obviously so much of your business is really technology, but then to hear your perspective on brick and mortar being equally, if not outweighed in some areas of importance, it almost underscores what you're talking about with AI, that there needs to be that human motivation behind it. It's like we're still needing those physical travel spaces, even if we need better, faster, smarter technology to get us there in the first place. Yeah, absolutely. The pleasure pain of travel is real, right? I mean, certain aspects are painful. The weights in the airport, the food sickness that you can occasionally get, or some virus might pick up.

34:05But everybody keeps going back and doing it again and again because the pleasure outweighs the pain. every single time so you know isn't that some motivator and we'll continue to get greater and so more people who have to to to get out there and see what the world has we obviously highly encourage it well after i graduated uh i backfactor onto asia for three months um on a lonely planet guide and i just feel like so much of the human knowledge just comes from that kind of travel you can't live in your classroom you can't learn in the business space uh you have to just be out there on your feet meeting people and moving around and so yeah it has rewards in other ways that develop people's personalities and their knowledge of the world.

34:59And yeah, it pays off in the long run. In addition to what you just mentioned about the wreaths, what excites you most about the future of Hotel Planner and maybe even the industry as a whole? I mean, just staying relevant is pretty exciting, right? Because everything has changed so fast and it's going to continue to keep changing, And especially in the travel technology space, you know, the fundamentals of hospitality actually stay pretty constant. And so if you're on the brick and mortar side, you kind of have a more of a smooth sailing environment. But if you're on the tech side, I mean, the headwinds, the tailwinds are massless, like you're always fighting in the hurricane-like conditions.

35:45And so that's basically what keeps me motivated is staying relegant in this ever-changing environment that's super competitive. Tim, I want to ask you the last three questions that I ask every guest. And the first is, what was the best hospitality experience that you have ever had? I mean, for me, it's tough to move the hospitality experience away from just the best time I had, which I'd say is family vacation to Norway for skiing that early Christmas. So go with that one. That sounds awesome. And what's so special about it? Is it just like having that quality focused time together? Yeah, it's quite an adventure.

36:25Flying to Oslo, we rented a big Volvo SUV. The rental car company is right in the basement of the airport. So it's like straight out of a Bond movie. You just like flying, jumping in your car, flying out of the airport. You're on those snowy Norway roads. You know, by the time you land in the middle of the night, driving through the snow and drive for two hours, get into the mountains. And then you get to this ski resort, which is in the middle of nowhere, but it has everything. I mean, indoor pool with a climbing wall, with a flow rider, if you know what that is, where you surf. And so you can see that bowling alley, an arcade, and then, you know, you're off on the slopes the next day.

37:15And so it's just got everything right there in the middle of nowhere. So it's quite an adventure. Yeah, so it's fun. And on the flip side of that, what was the worst hospitality experience you've ever had? I mean, just any time getting caught in an airport when you have a total system breakdown, you know, from weather or something else. And then everybody's scrambling just to try to find accommodation. That's probably the worst. I mean, I can call. I mean, obviously, getting sick internationally is quite rough, too. I think getting stranded in the airport for massive delays and just trying to find a place to lay your head for the night has got to be up there as well.

37:59Final question for you. What does hospitality mean to you? And is there anyone, a person, a brand that you think has truly mastered it? Well, hospitality is definitely, you know, taking care of your fellow man. like the way you know you would want to be treated i mean it's pretty close to other professions like being a doctor or nurse i think it actually goes hand in hand because i mean a lot of disease and it can be uh you know avoided if we can relax our bodies and that's what hospitality is designed to do so if it's done right who does the best uh i mean the five stars that are known for it like rich carlton for four seasons um our arm on resorts uh now you've got uh golden doors and anywhere that they can help uh you hit that highest esterion of relaxation so that you can de-stress and annoyed a lot of the you know inflammation is a common term these days that causes disease and system breakdowns you know in the body so that's the utopia that we're trying to achieve in our industry.

39:10Tim, this has been so insightful. Thank you so much for taking the time with us today. Oh, thank you. All right, everyone. It's time for today's sweet summary where I write down the key insights and actionable takeaways from today's conversation. Probably one of the most universal human desires is simply to fit in. My daughter is only four years old and I already see it. I watch little kids figuring out who gets included, who gets left out, and how quickly they start molding themselves to belong. It's heartbreaking because somewhere along the way, many of us learn that being accepted means becoming a little less ourselves.

39:50But one of the best parts about getting older is we stop trying to be something we're not. And even more importantly, we start celebrating all the things that we are. That's really what I heard when Tim said, I don't assimilate. No matter who he's talking to, what he's working on, or where in the world he lives, he stays true to himself. He laughed sharing how his friends call him American Tim, highlighting that it's our cultural differences that make us all unique. Whether you're building a company, changing careers, or simply finding your place someplace new, it's tempting to think that success comes from fitting in.

40:29But more often than not, our differences become our competitive advantage. Authenticity isn't something you sacrifice to succeed. It's often the reason that you do. That lesson is evident in Hotel Planner. While Tim's competitors were taking on more and more outside funding, Hotel Planner remained independent. And in the long term, it's the reason the company outlived most of its competitors. They survived and soon thrived because they didn't have outside funding, not in spite of it. When you don't have endless capital, you can't throw people at every problem. You have to build better systems.

41:07You have to automate. You have to engineer solutions instead of relying on temporary fixes. In a way, constraints became their greatest advantage. It reminds me of the old story of the tortoise and the hare. Slow, steady and disciplined doesn't make headlines, but over the long run, it often wins the race. And that concludes another episode of Sweet Success. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please subscribe, rate, and review the show. We all know how important those five-star reviews are. I also want to say a massive thank you to each and every one of you for tuning in. It means the absolute world to me.

41:44And I'd love to hear from you. If you have ideas for future your guests, new topics to cover, or even just want to say hi, don't be shy. Message me through our website, sweetsuccesspodcast.com or on social media at sweetsuccesspodcast. That's sweet like hotel suite. Once again, I'm your host, Katie Klein, and I'm super excited to see you all next week.