Despite forming a travel business while emerging online booking operations threatened to unravel the travel industry, Mark Trim (BBgIntFin ’05) has forged a thriving modern travel company that combines internet conveniences with services attuned to what travellers want and need.
As Director of the Complex Travel Group, Mark runs a series of specialty travel companies focused on such niche areas as business-class airfares and luxury cruises which generate about $141 million a year and continue to grow.
“It is possible to carve out a profitable niche as an independent Adelaide company within an $8 trillion global industry, and our point of difference among all the other massive mega-companies is to show that we care about the customer,” says Mark.
His business success started from an early age, with Mark forming his own travel company at 23 – but this follows his prodigious, speedy success in studies, having passed Year 12 at 17, then completing his Bachelor of Finance at Flinders University when he was still only 20.
Armed with a degree, he initially thought of doing merchant banking or investment banking, and had started work in an unsatisfying job at Westpac, but his hunger to travel compelled him to search for a job in the travel industry.
“I joined Flight Centre, which didn’t actually give me any access to travel, but I did become a store manager at the age of 22. I saw there were not a lot of people with tertiary education in the travel industry, and I could identify business opportunities, so I acted on them immediately.
“It now seems to have unfolded so quickly, but at that time it seemed to me that it was such a long, drawn-out period, because I was so impatient to get on with life.”
Mark describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur… I’m ideas-based, obsessed with taking action, more about firing and less about aiming.” This means that Mark’s company continues to adapt, as he reads and reacts to movements within an ever-changing business environment.
“There is always significant change. First it was the internet, now it’s AI – but new technology doesn’t have to mean the death of everything that had come before it. The constant that doesn’t change is high-quality customer experience, which gets rewarded with return business.”
Through taking a macro view of the travel industry, Mark successfully identified different market segments and created a dynamic hybrid of online operations coupled with providing tangible support for customers.
“I understood the need to specialise, right from the outset, and that set this business on the right path,” he explains. “Being so young at the outset, it didn’t feel like taking such a giant leap, probably because I didn’t initially have so much on the line. But perhaps that’s the leap you have to take to make a mark.”
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