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Today’s show featured an interview with Richard Applebaum, Manager-Partner at Rein Teen Tours.
Richard first appeared on the Sales Game Changers Podcast at the height of the Pandemic on March 26, 2021. Listen to the episode here.
Find Richard on LinkedIn.
RICHARD’S TIP: “it’s so important and so rarely done that we show the correct amount of appreciation to our clients. Where when there’s nothing going on, it’s a quiet day, I pick up the phone, call 10 clients who have been with us before and say, “Thanks. We really appreciate that you trusted us with your child, your most valued possession.” Take the time to let your customers know that you appreciate them. That will have a very good result for you.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I’m talking to Richard Applebaum. I interviewed Richard Applebaum in, I guess it was March of 2021, and that really was, for a lot of intents and purposes, the heyday of the pandemic and all the fallout from it. It was a great show. I interviewed you and a guy named Bart Berkey, and we talked about what you and he were doing at the time.
To give people a little bit of an update, we’re doing today’s interview in November of 2024. Richard, I’m going to ask you in a second to describe your business, but you’re in the teen tour business. You have buses of kids who go all over, international, which I’ll ask you to talk about, but your business pretty much was wiped away by the pandemic. You’re the sales guy, you’re one of the leaders of the company, and your job is to get kids and families to participate in your programs. It went away, but now we’re doing today’s show in 2024 and things have come back. This is one of those where-are-they-now-type of a show.
Introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about your business, and then let’s go back to that time, to the winter and spring of the pandemic and what happened.
Richard Applebaum: I am one of the owners of a company called Rein Teen Tours. What our business does is we spend about 10 months out of a year planning trips for teenagers, for lucky teenagers, to travel all over primarily the United States, but the world as well. We have some international destinations. It’s almost like a school trip where you have 35 or 40 kids and then 5 adults who are our staff that we hire, mostly school teachers, to serve as chaperones on tours that are as short as two weeks and as long as six weeks during the summer. We are a summer camp for kids who have been to sleepaway camps, they’re ready to move on. They’re 15, 16, 17 years old. They look forward to this as this summer of a lifetime.
When March 2020 came around, we were having probably our best year in terms of sales preparing for the summer, and then we started to get a sniff that there could be a problem. It all started with a cruise ship off the coast of Italy. People had something called SARS or COVID, they didn’t know what to call it, and they couldn’t get off the cruise ship. Now, we send kids on cruises in the summertime as well, so we started to scramble, made alternate arrangements. Instead of taking cruise ships to Alaska, we’ll fly there, and we were really just scrambling. Then we had to close our office. That’s when we got a sense that there’s trouble here.
I called my wife and kids, sent them to the supermarket, told them, buy lots of pasta, stop at the ATM, get as much cash as you can, and we’re going to see what happens. Over those next four months, we had lots of loyal families hoping that we would run our trips. All the kids were home, we were Zooming, we were emailing. We were pushing trips to later start dates. In the summer the virus will go away, you’ll be able to run your company, and that really never happened.
On June 20th of that year, we canceled all of our summer trips. We owed lots and lots of money to families who had paid deposits. Of course, we spent most of that on overhead, and it was really a question mark as to what we would do going forward. We basically had to have our employees pretty much quit. They went on unemployment, we sat around for about nine months, and then there was a vaccine, and that vaccine was going to change everything for the travel industry. People started traveling, people started calling. They wanted tours in the summer of 2021, we still knew that COVID was going full fury at us and we didn’t know what would be.
We did decide that we would take any kid who was vaccinated and staff members who were vaccinated and try to run our company at about 50% of what our normal capacity would be. We were able to do it. The demand was there, it was coming back slowly, but we did run it about 50%. But fortunately, that summer gave us the opportunity to pay back money to the families who had been kind enough to wait for their refunds. They waited.
Fred Diamond: This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast. The reason that we had you on the show back in 2021 is you sell something. Most of our listeners, they work at large companies like Amazon, Hilton, Microsoft, but we also have a lot of business owners who are responsible for doing the sales. Give us a little bit of a peek into before this, because you’ve been very successful, how many tours did you have going on at your peak?
Richard Applebaum: We could have 35 or 40 trips going simultaneously during the summer with close to 40 to 45 kids on all those trips.
Fred Diamond: Just give us a ballpark of what the average price that a family may pay for a kid to be on one of your tours.
Richard Applebaum: The shorter trips would be about $6,000. Our longer trips could be up to $15,000, and that would be four weeks all over Europe, trips to Hawaii, Alaska. There are expensive trips. There’s a lot of value there, but from a sales perspective, everything changed because before the pandemic, we were talking about the great things that we did in South Dakota and California, and national parks, and Jeep trips, and all that good jazz.
After, it was only about, what are you going to do? How are you going to keep my kids safe? It was almost refreshing that parents were starting to finally ask those questions that I would’ve always been asking if I was sending my kids away. The questions really were regarding safety, supervision, and contingency planning if something were to go awry. We learned a lot.
We learned a lot about what people needed to hear, and we adjusted away from worrying about which hotel we would stay at in Los Angeles and more about, well, if a kid does have COVID, we’re going to test the other kids. We’re going to call parents. It just really turns into something that is nothing new. It’s good communications. You have to have good, honest communication with your clients, because we had always done that.
We started the company in 1985, this year is our 40th year. But for 35 years before that, that was our strategy. Our strategy was be honest, make sure we presented our product that we ourselves would use. I have two children who are grown now. Between the two of them, they traveled on nine of these trips. As a dad, I knew what I wanted. I wanted them to be safe. I knew what I expected of our staff that was on the trips with my kids. That just became the emphasis.
Interestingly enough, now we’re a few years out, it still seems that those questions are coming up a lot more than they did before the pandemic. People are dissecting everything that’s happening around the world. This is a very small world. We hear everything. We had a horrible antisemitic event in Amsterdam last week, and our phones lit up. We don’t go to Amsterdam, but our phones lit up like crazy because they wanted to know what are we doing to protect their kids from that type of attack.
Fred Diamond: Talk about some of your ways that you’ve communicated with customers. I remember when we talked in 2021, you talked about how way back in the day you used to physically go to people’s homes. You would show up at their homes and talk about the trip and all those kinds of things. Over the years, obviously with social media and with technology, probably a lot of the selling techniques have changed, but talk a little bit about the sales process. I’m just curious, what is the value prop that you want to communicate?
Richard Applebaum: The sales process, typically it begins in the fall when kids have just come home from their previous experience, whatever that may have been. Now the parents are anxious, “Sammy doesn’t want to go to camp anymore. We need to find something for next summer.” In the old days, like you said, we made appointments, we carried briefcases, we went to houses, showed slides, showed videos, fought the dogs off of us who were in the house, and you tried to close. The big thing was leaving with a check. If you left the house with a check, you felt really good. If you didn’t, well, you knew your competitors were probably waiting to go in behind you and you followed up with phone calls.
Everything, of course, is different. Without question, our website is our number one salesman. He works 24 hours a day, and so much of our attention is really on making sure that the website is current, is modern, something that looks really good and friendly to both kids and their parents. Then after that, it’s getting the word out, where now we’re buying search words on Google and paying for that. We do a lot of Instagram sponsored posts, which is pretty fascinating that they actually really get you in the living room of the people you want to reach. Very specifically, you can target towns where we want to get kids, people whose friends have been on trips. There’s just a lot of technology there that’s very, very clever and very, very valuable. That’s where we spend our money.
Fred Diamond: You mentioned you start the process right after the summer had ended, the previous summer for the next summer. The sales process, do you have to talk to the customer more, less? A lot of the people we interview are in enterprise sales, so they may have to have 40 touches with a customer before a “proposal” is made for some of the larger types of entities, if you will. I’m just curious, how many touches do you guys have for a new customer and also for someone maybe who had a younger child or best friend or niece or something, just curious for that type of entity.
Richard Applebaum: For the new client, we do typically have one conversation. “Okay, they’ve already come to us, they’ve done their homework. They don’t have the time, everyone’s very busy.” It’s that one conversation that if it goes well, you feel good and you may never speak to that client again. They go online, they fill out an application, they put down their credit card, and they’re locked in. That’s a lot different than it used to be.
Now for a returning client, and a lot of our business is the same families over and over, just pops into the email and there it is, So-and-So enrolled. There’s a lot more servicing going on in May and June regarding getting ready for a trip like this. A big part of it is transportation. There’s a lot of flights involved getting the kids from all over the country to Denver on that first day to start the trip. There’s a lot of logistics and plans that the parents are involved in. But the actual selling, it’s unique. When you look at the cost of our product that we’re just having that one conversation, and in some cases, not even having a conversation.
The industry used to heavily rely on camp shows, camp fairs, where parents would show up and you would man your booth and they’d come and ask you questions. We probably do about 10% of what we used to do in terms of attending these types of shows. We’ve just seen businesses just go away and there was an industry of camp advisors, and these were people who run businesses where you would go to them as a parent, describe your child, and they would say, “You need to send your kid to camp A, B, C.” The camp would pay them a commission for that. That’s gone away. There’s still a few that are hanging on, but they can’t compete with the internet, just like travel agents. We are a travel agency but only to do business with our summer clients. We don’t do any family leisure business.
Fred Diamond: Let’s say you’re going to do 30 buses this year in the summer of 2025. Just curious, are you sold out by February, or are you constantly selling until June 1st, or do you add a bus if you get like 30 more kids, do you add trips? I’m just curious on the concept of the capacity of what you bring to the market.
Richard Applebaum: There’s a lot of variables involved. We do have a limited capacity based on the number of leaders that we have who we’re comfortable with because they could make or break the business. We have our leaders lined up. We do most of the planning. We work with bus companies and airlines. We’ve got trips that are right now, this is November, that are already sold out. Sometimes we will add additional departure dates, but the industry is going crazy right now.
The travel is up, up, up. We’re trying to get more space for trips that we do that go to the Greek islands. You can’t get a hotel room in the Greek islands this coming summer. Everybody wants to go to Greece. Our trips are full and that’s it. We can’t add any dates. But we’re selling trips up until the day before they start. We’ll get a call June 20th. Plans have changed and bam, we get the kid on an airplane June 27th on a trip for six weeks. The season really doesn’t stop, but the majority of the sales are done right before the new year, during the month of December. That’s our biggest sales month and we really know what kind of year we’re going to have based on where we are on December 31st.
Fred Diamond: You said the company is experiencing its 40th anniversary right around this time, and you’ve been selling this almost since the beginning. What might people not know? Most of our listeners are people who sell enterprise software, technology, large hospitality type of things. We also have a lot of small business owners who have to sell, like you. They might not be “salespeople”, but if you’re not selling, or the rest of your leadership team, there’s no kids coming on the buses and there’s no business. What might people not know about your business that they might find fascinating?
Richard Applebaum: I think something that’s really key for us that may be different than other businesses is our reliance on returning clients, returning customers. It’s made for our business because we have products that kids can start when they’re 13 with us and continue every summer until they’re 17. Then most people have more than one child. If we’re really doing our job right, we will get the same families over and over and over again. Without that, it would be impossible to put the numbers of kids on these trips that we really need.
In addition to that, the clients that are returning clients who have been with us are always bringing new business to us. A lot of them wonder if we’re going to give them a referral fee for that, which we can’t because so much of our business comes that way. When you talk about a word-of-mouth industry, we have a very small market. These are the same kids who are lucky enough to go to different sleepaway camps in the summertime, and everybody knows everybody. Our reputation, really, it’s parents are talking about us at the swim club, at the book club, waiting in line to pick those kids up at school, it’s all word of mouth and you are only as good as your last sale.
Fred Diamond: I want to pursue that for a second. That’s something that’s very transferable to almost everybody who’s listening here. One of the big messages we got at the beginning of the pandemic was it’s going to be very difficult, which was proven to be correct, to get new customers. A lot of the messaging from the sales experts that we had on the podcast and at the Institute for Excellence in Sales was to go back to the base, figure out how do you help your customers make it through whatever people were going through. Then how can you upsell, increase what you’re offering to them at this particular time, and that’s a big focus on a lot of companies.
The reality is, again, we’re doing today’s interview in November of 2024, it’s still difficult in many industries to get new logos, to get new customers. Because not just us as a selling entity, but our customers are also dealing with what the last couple years have meant to us, and their customers are dealing with what the last couple years have meant to them. Everybody is still focusing internally.
Based on what you just said, give some advice on some of the things that you would recommend sales professionals and sales leaders do to ensure that you keep that integrity, that you keep that reputation as high as it goes. Is that something that you’re conscious of or is that just natural with the leadership? Because you’re right, you were saying you’re selling these trips for kids and there’s plenty of options. The biggest option of course is they don’t do anything. They just sit home and get a job for the summer.
Richard Applebaum: Like 98% of the kids do.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. I like what you said before about there being a small community of prospects for what you do, because that is a pretty big investment, but it is a lifetime of joy and lessons. Give us some advice on how your leadership has made it a priority to ensure that, I don’t know what words you use, family or touches, whatever it might be.
Richard Applebaum: We spend a lot of time with our alumni families, people who have sent kids to us over five, seven years ago. Right now we’re preparing our annual brochure and we’ll just send thousands of them. They might all end up in recycling baskets and they might never make it into the house, but it still brings back that memory of that magical summer that we need to nurture. We continually send out emails, e-blasts to families that haven’t done any business with us in a very long time. They don’t unsubscribe, they keep accepting it, so it keeps giving us hope that, hey, there’s another one at home. We value them. That probably is really one of the main things that we talk about when we sit around at the lunch table and say, “What can we do next to just touch those families?”
Sending out birthday cards, just different packages and gift items that we’re now sending to staff members. We’re doing some promotions where we’re trying to get alumni to just open a card and then they’ll see a scratch-off ticket inside and they’ll scratch the logo and maybe they’ll win a discount off of a future trip. We recognize how important those families are. We’re in a business where probably 40% to 50% of our clients each year are returning clients. The other thing that’s almost obvious is your product better be real good. You have a bad summer, you’d run some bad trips. That trip, the domino effect is excruciating to how many kids you may have lost by just not doing right by these two families in Boston. You really have to look at each family and do right by every single client. You don’t know who your most important client is.
Fred Diamond: You’ve been doing it for close to 40 years, the company has been around for close to 40 years. We like to say now that sales has always been hard and people like to say now it’s harder than it’s ever been for a lot of reasons that we’re familiar with. For your industry, it’s interesting because one of the big challenges in enterprise sales is the customer can do a lot of research ahead of time, because everything, like you said, is on the internet and it’s on social media, et cetera. By the time, in enterprise sales, the customer gets to you, they may be 60% down the road of where they’re getting to.
That’s also something that you do as well. However, what you’re bringing to market may bear differently with how they’re making their decision process. I’m just curious, is sales harder than it’s ever been, or is it great right now? Because like you said before, there’s this huge demand for things and things are pent up. Just curious how you would answer that question.
Richard Applebaum: There’s a couple parts to that. The product is great and the demand is there now because everybody wants to travel. In the industry, there’s something now that we talk about called the thousand-dollar hotel room. Nobody ever paid a thousand dollars for a hotel room five years ago. If you try to plan a trip with your family to London, you might pay a thousand dollars a night for a hotel room. Things have become much more expensive. I think people are valuing travel more than ever, that if you ask people what do they like to do, what do they look forward to? They’re going to tell you their vacation, their trip. There’s a lot of crazy stuff going on in the world and that gives them a nice escape.
At the same time, however, there’s more and more competition than there’s ever been. We have a product that people want. The problem is we’ve got a lot of competitors and the internet makes the little guy look like the big guy. You can really be who you want to be. You buy a drone, you have a good graphic designer, you could attract people to your company even if you’ve never even done this before. The competition is there. There’s a lot more competition than I think there has ever been, and that’s what we’re battling.
Fred Diamond: One of the great things that you just said though, which is a commonality that has to be there, you said you have a great product. Well thought out, and experience. One thing that a lot of people want right now on the leisure side is experiences, as compared to things. Being able to gift your child or your grandchild the opportunity to spend a summer seeing all the national parks, if you live on Long Island or something, and get to go all over the national parks in the West, things that you typically wouldn’t see, and have those memories for a lifetime, is a great thing.
I want to thank Rich Applebaum. I appreciate you being on the show back in March of 2021. I know it was a very, very challenging time. Matter of fact, I remember when I interviewed you, it was a rainy day and I remember I was thinking it was appropriate.
Richard Applebaum: It was gloomy.
Fred Diamond: It was gloomy, it was March. I was doing the interview not far from Atlantic City, New Jersey. But you were brave enough to come on. I appreciated that. I appreciate you coming on today and giving us the update on how the business is going. As you celebrate your 40th anniversary, just want to wish you and the company the best.
Give us a final action step, something specific that sales professionals, be them working for companies like Microsoft or a small business owner like you, give your action step. You’ve given us a lot of great ideas, which I thank you for, give us something they should do right now to take their sales career to the next level.
Richard Applebaum: I think it’s so important and so rarely done that we show the correct amount of appreciation to our clients. We talk about that here, that’s a theme where when there’s nothing going on, it’s a quiet day, pick up the phone, call 10 clients who have been with us before and say, “Thanks. We really appreciate that you trusted us with your child, your most valued possession.” Take the time to let your customers know that you appreciate them. I think that that will be something that will have a very good result for you.
Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Richard Applebaum with Rein Teen Tours for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo