Crikey. 10 years of Go Cotswolds!
Go Cotswolds’ co-Director Lisa shares her thoughts on 10 years of Go Cotswolds.
Yesterday, I spent some time creating this video (below) to celebrate Go Cotswolds’ 10th birthday. It was quite emotional scrolling through 10 years of photos and memories! What a decade it has been!
@go_cotswolds 🥳 CHEERS TO 10 YEARS OF GO COTSWOLDS! 🥳 It’s today! Our birthday! We have been operating our guided tours of the Cotswolds for an entire decade! A HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who has supported us, loved us, trusted us, worked with us, helped us, advised us, toured with us, reviewed us (yeah, even you, 1 star lady!) – and so much more! We wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for all the fabulous people in our lives! 🥂 #happybirthday #tenyearanniversary #10years #smallbusinessbiglove #teamworkmakesthedreamwork #gocotswolds #cotswoldstours #guidedcotswoldstours #cheers #besttourguides #travelchat #cotswoldstourism #shakespearesengland ♬ original sound – Go Cotswolds – Guided Tours
It all actually started around 12-and-a-half years ago when, at the end of 2012, Tom (my husband and co-Director) and I both found the courage to quit our jobs. Tom had an unfulfilling sales job, travelling the country and staying away from home several nights per week for scintillating meetings with disinterested people about water leaks at industrial sites. I had a job in medical communications, working in a toxic industry where the final straw was quite literally being told by my boss, “my f*****g dog could do your f*****g job better than you”. So that was that.
(Side note: my boss’s chihuahua was carried in a handbag and sat on the table to eat from her dinner plate, so I highly doubt it could’ve done my job, but there you go.)
When in doubt, travel! 😂
Tom and I took off to Africa for a few months in early 2013 (that’s us in Namibia!). We had both travelled extensively before (we met in Argentina in 2007!), so we knew there’s nothing like travel to recharge your batteries, widen your perspectives and break from the norm!
When we came home (engaged to be married!), we found happy jobs with “our people”. Me working in science as a communications officer and scientific editor with wonderful, kind scientists doing amazing research to help people and the planet, and Tom – at first – mowing lawns for the people of the Cotswolds!
And though the seed to start a tour company had been planted years before as Tom travelled the world, that is where Go Cotswolds started to grow. (I like to imagine the eureka moment came as Tom applied a moss treatment to Prue Leith‘s croquet lawn, but this may be fanciful!)
Go Cotswolds is GO!
After months of research, study, exams, web design, buying a minibus, and lots and lots of reading and exploring the Cotswolds, ‘Tom Benjamin trading as Go Cotswolds’ took his very first customer on a tour on July 11th 2014! Just one person! (Hi Kristi, if you’re reading this!)
Working together
I’ve always helped Tom out with the Go Cotswolds admin, but after a wedding, a house move and a baby, four years had passed and I had firmly caught the Go Cotswolds bug! I joined Tom as co-director and we converted Go Cotswolds to a ‘proper’ limited company. We bought a second minibus, ‘Roxie’, welcomed tour guides Colin, then Mark to the team…
And almost as soon as Mark joined us, the pandemic struck.
The ‘blip’ years
2019 had been a record year for Go Cotswolds – we ran more tours in 2019 than we had ever done before, and even showed US travel guru Rick Steves personally around the Cotswolds! Go Cotswolds was finally starting to pay Tom and I a small wage! We had started to dream bigger, and literally days before lockdown, we took delivery of our third minibus to meet the demand we anticipated in the year to come (oh, hindsight!).
But then lockdown happened. We had no idea how long it would last, or whether we would ever be able to do what we loved again. It was a bleak time.
But not to dwell. How many bad days have you managed to get through? 100%.
Enormous thanks to some of those wonderfully kind scientists who took me back on for freelance science editing work (what do you do if you’re a scientist and you can’t go to the lab? Write up alllll your research!) – you folks really kept us afloat.
We muddled through 2021, with all its social distancing and face-mask-wearing and temperature-taking and hand gel-spraying. It’s weird to think about it now, but even in 2022, travel was still affected by Covid testing and vaccine passports, and there was still a general fear of making travel plans in case of another lockdown or travel companies going bust. Which they did, in their thousands.
We were lucky. Go Cotswolds survived, and as we came out of 2022 with a little bit of money in the bank, we felt we could breathe easier.
Let’s GO!!!
2023. Wow. What a year. Travel was BACK!
Buoyed by winning our first ever actual solid glass trophy (Experience of the Year at the West Midlands Tourism Awards), we dared to do something we’d never done before: advertise for new tour guides!
Colin, Mark and by now Lizzie too had all approached us to work with Go Cotswolds – but now we needed more people! Enter Dave, Steve and Martin – three new recruits from Stratford-on-Avon who had never worked as tour guides before but are absolutely smashing it. I choked up when I heard that Steve – a former oil industry exec – had remarked, “at the age of 60-something, I think I’ve finally found my dream job.”
At the end of 2023 – our busiest year yet – another important person came in to our lives: Kevin. Kevin is a business coach with a background in coach travel, who advises and inspires us, but most importantly challenges us to “be comfortable with being uncomfortable”, and do things we never thought possible. Previous experience of “business people” had led me to believe they’re all arrogant, self-serving, money-grabbing, bitchy – but I was wrong. Kevin is definitely one of “our people”, and I truly appreciate his “no d***heads” policy! 😂
What’s next?
And so here we are in 2024!
One of the best decisions we have made so far this year – encouraged by Kevin – is that we have hired our first two admin staff! Sue, on the Sales & Marketing side, and Patrick, on the Transport & Operations side. These two wonderful folks have slotted right into our business like they’ve always been there, and we can’t imagine life without them now!
Quick recap of we’ve achieved in 10 years of Go Cotswolds: As well as Tom and I, we now have 4 Mercedes minibuses, 6 fabulous guides, 2 admin staff, 2 operator bases, 4 different small group tours (and a partridge in a pear tree?). We’re the top-rated Tripadvisor company for Tours & Activities in our home town of Stratford-upon-Avon, with 1400+ 5 star reviews and hundreds more on other sites. We have won multiple awards, are featured in international guide books (thanks Rick!), and have appeared in national and international press. We even seem to have inspired other companies to try and copy us… flattery is the best form of imitation, so they say?! I digress.
Most importantly, ever since Kristi, our first customer on July 11th 2014, more than 18,000 other people have put their trust in Go Cotswolds and taken a tour with us. This stat just blows my mind.
So now, even though Go Cotswolds is 10 years old already, it feels like we’re only just getting started. We’re excited for what, and who, the next 10 years of Go Cotswolds will bring! Let’s GO!
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