Lisa Pagotto, founder of Crooked Compass, has worked in the travel industry for around 21 years. For the last eight years, she has run her own tourism businesses.
But nothing could have prepared her for the devastating impact of Covid on the tourism industry.
“Basically, my business pretty much had to stop trading. But I'm the type of person that won't take no for an answer. You can't tell me that I can't trade just because borders are closed.”
Crooked Compass focuses on taking travellers to the lesser-known parts of the planet, using travel to educate people, break down stigmas, and to showcase some of the world's most remote and challenging destinations. The company helps create travel experiences that are different from the norm.
The seed of Crooked Compass was sown when at 21 Pagotto took her first overseas trip. She did not want to follow her peers in moving to London then using it as a base for forays into Europe. Her first excursion was to Tunisia, her first non-western country, where she was blown away by a culture so different to that she was accustomed to.
Further adventures took her to Turkey, India and she spent two months in Africa. “I just wanted to do what other people weren't doing.”
When Pagotto returned to Australia she helped build another tour company’s brand, and in her spare time started a blog sharing some of her more exotictravel experiences. To her surprise, readership grew quickly and people started asking her how they could organise experiences similar to hers, off the well-beaten tourist trail. The blog was called Crooked Compass.
“I never envisioned that my blog would become a business, but more and more people were asking the same questions over and over again.”
The Covid challenge
Before Covid, Crooked Compass ran just one domestic tour a year – and about 120 to overseas destinations. A quick pivot to the domestic market was the obvious solution and she developed nine domestic tours quite early on during the pandemic.
One reason her company could adapt so quickly is because it had already started building domestic products in the background after seeing growth in the number of American visitors seeking unique Australian experiences. “We were a couple of steps ahead of other operators in terms of pivoting, that word we all love. Our new tours started selling like hotcakes, but then we obviously had the challenges of the closed state borders, which stopped us from trading again.”
About this time last year, Pagotto conceived another concept: what if there was a safe, reliable, flexible way to travel, without having to rely on commercial airlines where schedules are constantly being cancelled and changed?
Crooked Compass by Air uses private aircraft to get people to remote parts of their state. Pagotto found many people were desperate to travel – and they had the money because they weren't doing the big Europe and America trips that they would normally do.
The domestic tours Crooked Compass launched last year and the new flying venture were running side by side, and until the rolling lockdowns at the beginning of August were going well. Now, with the Delta Covid variant striking, both are on hold again. “But that's okay, because we'll get through it, then we'll start again. We know how to work with this stop-start now.”
Pagotto believes her experience illustrates the importance of business leaders looking for opportunities during the pandemic, of identifying them and working with them.
“It's very unfortunate that so many small businesses can't do what they would normally do because of the pandemic, but it does bring about other opportunities that perhaps were not considered previously, because Covid forced us to think outside what we were normally doing.
“The importance of being resilient and being dynamic and trying to be creative and think outside the box and do things differently is critical in our industry.”
Step back, take a break, refocus
Pagotto advises business owners to take time out from their work to support their wellbeing in the future.
“At such a critical time like this, it's a trap for business owners to be caught working in their business, as opposed to on their business. It's so important to be able to step back, and to have perspective to look at your business and to look at the bigger picture.”
She counsels: look at what new processes should be kept and how your business operates moving forward. “But you need that work-life balance – being able to switch off and have that time out for yourself. And if you need to completely fall apart and have a cry in the corner, that's okay.
“No one apart from a business owner knows how difficult it is to take a business through a pandemic. You understand how terrifying it is for an employee to be insecure about their job. But from a business owner’s perspective, it's on a whole different level, and it's very, very difficult to relate to unless you are a business owner yourself.”
Pagotto says business owners need to lean on each other because they understand the challenges businesses face. “You can talk to your friends and family but do they truly understand the pain and the mental grief and the stress that you possibly can't even put into words? Taking that time out to lean on other people who are in a very similar situation and who can relate to what you are going through absolutely helps.
“So does being able to get away from your computer or your phone or your emails or anything that you know brings on that anxiety and the pressure of ‘Oh my god, what do I have to deal with today?’.
“A lot of people have started doing things like yoga or Pilates at home, or meditating. Finding these ways, or these places at home or locally, where you can go to switch off, to provide yourself a little bit of stability, a chance to reset, so that you can come back in with a clear head to tackle the problems, is so important,” continues Pagotto.
“Knowing when to stop is so important to looking after your well being and sometimes it takes someone else to tell you to just stop. You can't function as a business leader or business owner if you keep pushing yourself and burning the candle at both ends.”
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