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$1.4B through the till, 700 staff, and the CEO still signs off every deal
Contrarians CEO and co-founder Will Hayward takes the other chair for a different kind of episode: a look at how Adam runs Luxury Escapes, the Melbourne travel business he co-founded in 2010. Like most travel businesses it runs on negative working capital, with customers paying well before they travel. It sells through two models: its original flash deals, and a curated marketplace.
Adam: “The biggest challenge most founders have is how do I fund my growth. Travel doesn’t have that issue. You’ve got other issues with travel. It’s certainly not the perfect business.”
Adam: “We’re about $1.3, $1.4 billion through the till. But travel businesses have high scale. If you look at Flight Centre, which is probably the best travel business in the country, $25 billion through the till. And Booking.com is like $200 billion. We’re actually a bit of a minnow in the world of travel mega companies.”
Will: “People outside of this company would find it extraordinary to know that you personally sign off every deal.”
Adam: “I might spend five minutes. Sometimes less, sometimes more, but it’s not like I’m spending hours and hours on each deal, because we’ve got a really strong management team that sits in the middle and does a lot of the work. I’ll just be that final sign-off.”
Sale of the Century, the 2am partner and never being the blocker
Will’s observation is that Adam almost never takes more than an hour to reply to a message. Adam, a former Freehills lawyer, traces it to two places: a run on Nine’s Sale of the Century, and his years as a junior lawyer.
Adam: “The reason I was good at that show is because it’s about speed, not intelligence. Almost everybody I beat would have been much more intelligent than me, better recollection, better trivia, but Sale of the Century is a game of guessing the question and being really quick. If I spend an hour on it, I’m probably going to come to the same answer anyway.”
Adam: “Nothing is worse than when you do all this work and you give it to a partner, you work till 2am, and the partner sits on it for two days. I never want to be a blocker in this business. If a deal approval comes on my desk, I don’t want to be the person who makes the poor PCM wait a day after they’ve slaved over this deal for a week.”
Adam on CEOs going on holiday: “I think CEOs should be able to go away, but I think they should be checking three to four hours a day. There’s no excuse to not work three to four hours a day.”
No strategy days, and the grads’ pitch that beat everyone’s
Adam says Luxury Escapes budgets by financial year, with each part of the business submitting plans for him to approve or cut. The budget assumes a broadly steady state and leaves room for ideas that turn up mid-year — including one pitched a few weeks ago by three graduates.
Adam: “We’ve done the strategy day stuff in the past. I genuinely don’t like it, as you’d be shocked to know.”
Adam: “You don’t get all your ideas in April before you budget. We’ll budget for a largely steady state with some growth, but we know we’re going to come up with these new customer-driven initiatives. If we had an idea in April and it’s not a good idea by June, we’ll kill it.”
Adam: “Three grads who’ve been with us for less than a year came up with probably one of the best ideas anybody’s ever had in the business. Having that sponsorship from a founder allows a great idea to be put into place more quickly.”
Tough when it’s going well, easy when it’s not
Will raises Canva, where co-founder Cliff Obrecht posted a Slack note to staff on lifting the company’s pace to match Anthropic’s release velocity. The note was deleted within hours after it sparked fears of job cuts, and Canva said it had no plans for layoffs. Will’s point: high expectations and a place people love working aren’t mutually exclusive. Adam’s test for mistakes is whether they were made trying.
Will: “I think the most impressive thing is to have a high-performance culture with a low tolerance for slacking that is also somewhere that people love working.”
Adam: “Canva’s been an amazing business, but obviously as you get bigger, it becomes harder and harder.”
Adam: “Is it a mistake of commission or omission? If someone hasn’t called someone back or has just been too lazy, that’s really bad. If somebody’s made a mistake of commission, like they’ve worked through the night and they’ve charged an extra dollar to somebody because they’re trying to get this done, they’ve maybe stuffed something small up, but they’ve done it with the right intentions.”
Adam on when it’s time for a senior person to go: “Once you get to four really trusted people saying the same feedback, you know it’s time.”
Scale beats brand, and why there’s no $100M marketing budget
Will’s theory is that Luxury Escapes is underinvested in top-of-funnel brand marketing. Adam ranks the business’s advantages against Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers and puts scale first: Luxury Escapes says one in two Australians travelling to the Maldives books through it, and it launched Australia’s first direct flights to the Maldives in December 2025.
Adam: “Most times scale is like a Netflix type version of scale, where it’s global scale. Our scale is not that at all. Our scale is massive scale in certain niches, which is rare. We’ve got a flight to Maldives every week and we can only do that because of our scale.”
Adam: “Our marketing budget’s $65 million a year. Ultimately most of it’s Google. But the reason we don’t spend $100 million on marketing is because we want to be a profitable business. We’re a business that just wants to grow profitability, pay dividends, and create a brand that’s around in 100 years.”
Adam on the name: “The reason we were called Luxury Escapes wasn’t customer-facing, it was hotel-facing. We want to get better hotels to work with us. Some customers go, I can’t buy from Luxury Escapes, you’re too fancy. We’re not Hermès, we sell $100 a night.”
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