Well, it actually all began in October, 1987. I had been in business with a partner for six years. Our little company, Pacesetter Tours, was an outbound tour operator. We took about 3000 people to the
1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, TN from my office in the basement of our house.
After the Fair, I found us booking more and more groups like taking
University of Tennessee fans to the Sugar Bowl, and
Vanderbilt University fans to the Great Alaskan Shootout in Anchorage. We were also booking a lot of incentive groups on cruises. Then, we started getting more and more requests from individuals who had travelled with us wanting to book cruises.
Charlie and I talked at length that October about changing the entire direction of the company and becoming a cruise-only agency. Being the pragmatist that he is, Charlie insisted that I contact a number of cruise-only agencies around the country in markets similar to Middle Tennessee. I had a list of questions, and the last question on my list was "If you had it to do all over again, would you?" Every single person I spoke with answered with a definite "Yes, but I just wish I had done it sooner." That solidified our decision to proceed with plans that we had been formulating.
The first week of November, 1987, Charlie went out-of-town on business. When I picked him up at the airport on Friday night, he asked me what I had done all week. When I told him I had contacted all of the cruise lines and told them that we would be opening as a cruise-only agency on January 1, Charlie's first question was "What year?" Naively, I said 1988. He immediately said we had to do a business plan, buy my partner out, find an office, and an entire laundry list of things that had to be done. While he was gone, I had found an office. The picture isn't our first office, but it was very similar. I think you get the idea that we started our small, very small.
Well, long story short, we put together our business plan, went to our friendly banker who turned us down for a loan because we just needed a line of credit, bought out my partner, and opened our doors as
Just Cruisin' , Tennessee's first cruise-only agency, on January 4, 1988.
I had done a lot of preliminary work getting press for our little company for our big opening week. We had stories in the
Tennessean, the
Nashville Business Journal, were on a radio talk show, but on January 8, I was scheduled to be on
"Talk of the Town", a midday local TV show on our CBS affililate. On that particular day, Nashville got a BIG snowfall - 8" to be exact. Because of the weather, I was the only guest who showed up that day, and my 6 minutes segment turned into 12 minutes.
The company consisted of me - and Charlie when he could help because he was a chemical engineer and had a "real" job that sustained us for a time - and we left our phone on the recorder while we were gone. Upon our return, the machine was full with 30 messages, all wanting information on cruises!!!
And, as Paul Harvey would say, that, folks, is the rest of the story...
