If you're an Australian with a query on your Delta flight or looking at booking a trip to Abu Dhabi, it's likely you've dealt with The Walshe Group without ever realising.
The travel business employs 125 staff and manages turnover of over $300 million for clients but owner and managing director Jacqui Walshe is happy to fly under the radar.
"Our primary customers are airlines and tourist boards," she says. "They are global businesses but they have a base outside of our market. We basically act as them in the market, we act under their brand, we have offices in their name, we have staff wearing their uniforms. Our employees effectively in those teams feel like they work for the airline whether it be South African Airways or Delta. They are 100 per cent dedicated to that brand."
Breaking into the boys' club
Walshe's father Rodney Walshe started the business in New Zealand in 1976 and Walshe joined 10 years later eventually moving to Australia to establish The Walshe Group here.
Speaking to Fairfax on the sidelines of the Dell Women's Entrepreneurs Conference in San Francisco, Walshe says she has had to work hard to succeed as a female entrepreneur.
"It was a very old boys' club in the early days," she says. "I absolutely was underestimated which I personally found extremely useful. Because no-one was paying attention to me and disregarded me but I still had the stubborn determination to make our business succeed I just ignored all that and came at things from a different angle."
Walshe says she had to find new ways of building relationships by offering something that was different to the rest of the market.
"I couldn't fit in to the traditional networking, the whole golf thing," she says. "It wasn't even an option. I had to make them choose the business because we were different, not because of some guy that they know. We changed the way our business operated relative to our competitors."
Fluctuating fortunes
Tourism and travel is a booming market estimated by Tourism Research Australia to make up 3.2 per cent of Australia's gross domestic product in 2015/2016 and valued at $53 billion.
But Walshe knows from experience that the fortunes of her business can fluctuate wildly on the basis of world events.
"September 11 was huge for us," she says. "United Airlines was our biggest client. It was 90 per cent of our business at that moment. It just overnight disappeared, we completely lost a lot of that income. When the tsunami hit Japan we lost 2000 customers in a few days."
Walshe had to work quickly to find new income sources and from time to time has had to bring investors on, exiting them when the business got back on its feet.
I absolutely was underestimated which I personally found extremely useful.
Jacqui Walshe.
"We don't have any debt now," she says. "We want to know whatever happens we don't have any debt to pay back. We don't even have an overdraft. We are quite risk averse and at the same time it gives us a lot of freedom."
Walshe says she manages being debt-free by operating with a "quite large" cash reserve.
"To achieve what you do, you have to have this kind of permanent anxiety about 'What haven't I noticed? What should I be worried about'," she says. "You just can't afford to totally relax there is that constant desire to do better. Some days it might be a major issue and some days it's a tiny thing. The big stuff is easy to deal with but the little tremors and currents are harder."
Continuing to evolve
After 40 years in business Walshe says The Walshe Group has to keep adapting.
"Over time the skill sets and the functions we perform have changed to fit what the latest developments are," Walshe says. "We have far more analytical people, we have far more social media people now. We used to have a lot of ticketing people in ticket offices but they have all closed. We have had to continue to evolve all the time but still understanding the people and players in the market."
Walshe's next task is working out how to deal with the digital disruption impacting the travel industry.
"My challenge is how do you take a successful relationship based business and turn it into a software company in order to survive in the long term," she says. "We are doing great now but I'm very conscious of that disruption. How do we have to pivot ourselves to make sure we are as successful in 10 years as we are today?"
The reporter attended DWEN in San Francisco as a guest of Dell.
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