Three Years In: How High Five Tourism Has Grown and Evolved

Three years ago this week, I jumped off the entrepreneurial cliff when High Five Tourism Solutions officially became an LLC.

At the time, the idea was fairly simple: build a one-person consultancy providing marketing support to a handful of tourism-related organizations. After more than two decades working in tourism and destination marketing, I saw an opportunity to take that experience and use it to help smaller organizations that often didn’t have access to the same resources as larger destinations and attractions.

Three years later, High Five Tourism has grown and evolved into something much broader.

From Typical Marketing Agency to Tourism Management Services

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as a business owner is to listen carefully to what clients actually need.

While marketing remains part of what I do, I increasingly found that many of the organizations I worked with needed help well beyond marketing. They needed someone who could help organize a board meeting, manage a project, develop a program from soup-to-nuts, coordinate a committee, develop a budget, communicate with stakeholders, oversee a vendor, improve internal processes or simply make sure the dozens of small things required to keep an organization moving actually got done.

That realization has shaped what High Five Tourism has become.

Today, the focus of my work is providing program and management services for tourism nonprofits, including visitor bureaus, museums, cultural centers, heritage organizations, attractions and other place-based organizations.

Filling the Gap

Small tourism nonprofits face a particular challenge. Their missions and ambitions can be significant, but their staffs and budgets often are not.

Many depend heavily on volunteer boards and committees. Those volunteers bring tremendous expertise, passion and commitment to their organizations, but there is a limit to what volunteers can reasonably be expected to manage.

That’s the gap High Five Tourism increasingly fills.

My work can span nearly every level of an organization, from supporting boards and committees to working alongside executive directors to managing administrative, operational, marketing and strategic needs.

Sometimes that means serving as an extension of an existing staff. In other situations, it means providing the professional capacity an organization needs without the expense or commitment of adding another full-time employee.

The exact role may look different for every client, and that flexibility has become an important part of the High Five Tourism model.

Growing With the Business

High Five Tourism has changed over these three years, and so have I.

I’ve taken on projects I never anticipated when I started the company. I’ve learned new skills, expanded my network of trusted support partners and become much more comfortable recognizing that a business doesn’t have to follow the plan you wrote for it on day one.

Sometimes the best opportunities come from paying attention to where you can be most useful.

For High Five Tourism, that has meant evolving from primarily providing marketing services into becoming a management partner for small tourism nonprofits and destinations.

As I celebrate three years in business, I’m grateful to every client who has trusted me with their organization, every colleague who has referred someone my way and every support partner who has helped me deliver on a project.

High Five Tourism looks different today than the business I imagined three years ago.

And that’s a very good thing.

Here’s to the next three years and continuing to help small tourism organizations turn big ambitions into achievable results.