Adam Schwab is the co-founder of the world’s most loved travel businesses, Luxury Escapes, has been a prolific author and podcast host (of the top rating The Contrarians with Adam and Adir and From Zero podcasts) and was awarded the Young CEO of the Year in 2015.
Adam trained as a lawyer and worked for five years at Freehills before founding his first business a school friend with just $50,000 in capital. Within two years, the business was profitable turning over more than $2m annually.
In 2010, Adam co-founded what would become Luxury Escapes from a tiny, windowless office in a dark Melbourne laneway. Fourteen years later, Luxury Escapes has growth to turns over more than a $1 billion annually with more than 600 team members across four continents. Adam and his co-founders bootstrapped the business until 2022, before raising more than $120m in growth and secondary capital.
Luxury Escapes survived and thrived during Covid better than any other travel business globally - doubling in size and being one of the only travel businesses to increase its team during the pandemic.
In 2012, Adam co-founded MyTable, one of Australia’s first online home delivery businesses, which he exited to Menulog (and then participated in Menulog’s $855m sale to JustEat)
Since 2004, Adam has been a financial journalist and business commentator specialising in corporate governance, economics and start-ups for SmartCompany, the Australian Financial Review, and has appeared on Channel Seven News nationally, 3AW, 2GB, Sky Business and Today Tonight.
Luxury Escapes: Luxury Escapes was named the fastest growing company in Australia by BRW in 2013 and by the Australian Financial Review in 2017. It was also ranked #1 in Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 while Adam was the Young CEO of the Year in 2015 and was nominated for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2014 (Southern Region). Adam has been on the BRW Young Rich list since 2014 and in 2015 and was named a Young Business Leader 2015 by CPA.
Director: Adam is a director of the Myeloma Foundation of Australia and is on the Investment Committee of the Save the Children Investment Fund.
Author: In 2010, Adam released the Amazon bestseller, Pigs at the Trough: Lessons from Australia's Decade of Corporate Greed, published by John Wiley & Sons
Talking Points
How Luxury Escapes Bootstrapped to $500m
Key Takeaways:How Luxury Escapes Bootstrapped to $500m
- How Luxury Escapes grew to more than $500m without raising a cent of external capital
- ‘Founder Mode’ – how to scale a global team
- How to create a culture of innovation and risk-taking
- Think like the customer – how to build a business with lots of customer love and no capital
What I learned from Stepping Away from the Business
Key Takeaways:What I learned from Stepping Away from the Business
- Adam went from junior lawyer to CEO – the learning curve to becoming a leader of no one to 600 people
- After ten years, Adam stepped away from the business from eighteen months, before returning during Covid – since then, the business has tripled in size
- Scaling as a leader – what do growth leaders need to understand about themselves?
Building Competitive Advantage in a Brutal Global Market
Key Takeaways:Building Competitive Advantage in a Brutal Global Market
- The importance of investing deeply in customer service to build a sustainable brand
- How to use technology to create a cornered resource
- Building brand as a sustained competitive advantage
- Zig when everyone is zagging – how doing the opposite made Luxury Escapes one of the world’s best marketers
