Travel remains one of the most impacted industries hit by COVID-19, and businesses that operate within the space have had to get scrappy.
Some even partnered with competitors.
Take Travelers Haven, a furnished temporary accommodations provider that has helped traveling nurses and other essential workers find housing since 2008.
Earlier this year, when nurse relocation housing requests began to surge in coronavirus hotspot areas like New Orleans and New York, Travelers Haven tapped competitors to fulfill demand faster.
“It usually takes us three to five days to set up our apartments when a reservation request comes through,” President and CEO Carlos Abisambra said. “We do a new set-up for each new lease agreement that includes providing furniture, utilities, cable, and internet, as well as conducting a quality check to make sure it meets our standards.”
But these nurses needed immediate accommodations.
Travelers Haven turned to competitors that had furnished apartments sitting vacant and pitched them tenants in exchange for housing. Shortly after, deals were made.
“It was a nimble change,” Abisambra said. “We hadn’t done business this way before to this scale, so we had to quickly figure out internal processes, communication, payment terms and so forth.”
All of the participating companies benefited and — most importantly — traveling nurses found lodging in cities overtaken by COVID-19.
It’s one of many examples from the past year that highlights how Travelers Haven thought outside the box to overcome volatile market conditions and keep the company in growth mode.
In this Built In Colorado exclusive, Abisambra shares how his team fought 2020 with creative, scrappy solutions that put the company on pace to increase its staff by 17 percent over the next two months.
What was one of the first major setbacks your team faced as a result of the pandemic? How’d your team respond?
In April, our credit card processor unilaterally decided to keep in their possession 20 to 25 percent of the money our customers had already paid us for 14 days. Normally, they’d hold it for two to three days. For a bootstrapped business like ours, that’s significant and cash began to tighten up. So, I, along with our head of finance and two associates, began calling the credit card processor every day and messaging contacts on LinkedIn to get through to someone who could overturn this cash hold. It took a week, but after we explained how our diversified portfolio of customers had low liability because they fall under essential services, they lifted the hold. We were scrappy and persistent, we pleaded our case, and it ended up working. One of our company values is “Get It Done,” and this was an example of us living it across multiple layers of the organization.
When customers began asking if they could pay you later, how did your team meet them in the middle?
In April and May, customers began to ask us if they could pay us 30, 60 and 90 days late. We didn’t want to say ‘no.’ Internally, we proposed that we would work with customers on payment terms if they could show proof that they applied for the government paycheck protection program (PPP). We learned that a lot of customers hadn’t heard of the PPP yet, so our team helped some of our customers get started with their banks. Once they showed they had applied, we worked out terms.
Supporting essential service from the onset
What did your team drum up on the technical side to support market changes?
When we have a client who needs to move in quickly, our property partners will not allow our furniture delivery suppliers into the unit until they’ve received a check from us confirming the lease agreement. Due to the pandemic, mail companies pushed out guaranteed delivery times by at least two hours. Now, we’ve got this pressure of our vendors not being able to furnish a property in time because of a check not arriving on time.
Our team responded by building a function that automatically sent an electronic copy of the check to the property partners with a tracking number included. This electronic copy was enough proof for the properties to let the suppliers in even if the physical check had not arrived yet. It was a cool, innovative fix without adding a single headcount. The feedback from the properties was overwhelmingly positive, so we will expand this functionality.
What stands out to you as some of the biggest lessons learned throughout the past year?
Being aware of macro headlines. Everything in the news showed the stock market going down and COVID-19 cases increasing. As we conducted internal research, we found niche markets that were conducive to our business model, like golf course repairs. Golf courses couldn’t operate their normal springtime season due to shutdowns, so they bumped course repairs and remodels while they were closed to customers. These crews needed housing, and we were able to see quite a bit of year-over-year improvement in this very small niche of business.
Internally, I also learned how important it is for our leaders to overcommunicate with our team. Early on in the pandemic, we held companywide updates every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to share results and point to areas of improvement. This overcommunication created alignment that allowed us to survive April and May.
How has your team’s ability to be nimble in 2020 prepared Travelers Haven for a promising 2021?
This past year forced us into an information-gathering stage. Over the summer, we conducted an in-depth market share analysis by industry, and we found untapped niche markets for us to go after in 2021 that will remain unaffected with or without a pandemic. Now, we can be smarter about our approach into new spaces. The other part involves the strength of our team. We’re more aligned than ever. Like most companies, 2020 called for an “all hands on deck” team effort. We’re optimistic about 2021. We realize that, despite being one of the top three companies in our space by volume in the U.S., our participation in the market is still very low, which is why we’re taking on new industries next year and increasing our headcount by 17 percent by the end of January.
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