8 minute read
Have Mission - Will Travel
TEXT BY: NICK PATTERSON // PHOTO BY: JOE DE SCIOSCE PHOTOS COURTESY: LISA HARRIS BOYD
At the Southern Automotive Conference Lisa Harris Boyd serves as the stage manager, and earlier this year she was somewhere in the middle of the three day event being held in Nashville, Tennessee when she got a call in the middle of the night. Actually, she got two calls. One was from Dubai. The other was from London, England.
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Both were emergencies and neither had anything to do with the Southern Automotive Conference, although they both were transportation related. One call was from a woman in
Dubai who had broken her foot and needed to be transported back to the U.S. The other call was from a couple traveling in London, on their way by train to Paris, who needed to fly back to America because of a family emergency. The reason they called Boyd?
In her regular job — the one she does between the annual editions of the Southern Automotive Conference — Boyd owns and operates Life Is Short Adventures, a Birmingham, Alabamabased travel planning and consulting business. The emergency calls were from clients who she had set up for
dream getaways, trips that suddenly threatened to turn into nightmares — in the middle of the night here in the States.
But did that throw Boyd? Nope. Not even at 2 a.m.
“So, the client in London…I had to cancel her train trip – or attempted to cancel her train trip – I cancelled her hotel, everything. She was leaving to go to Paris so I cancelled all of her Paris activities and got her on the next flight out of London to come home because her mother-in-law had gotten admitted to the hospital and the family was called to come home,” Boyd relates. “Thankfully I had offered her travel insurance and she had accepted it, so all of the expenses and all of the cancelled things …were all refundable because of the travel insurance. But I had to work that night to get her home and cancel as many things as I could.”
The client in Dubai with the broken foot turned out to have less of an immediate need to get out of the country, Boyd says. “She ended up staying another couple of days. But that’s another benefit of having a travel advisor work with you is that when those emergencies come up, you don’t have to worry about it, you just kind of sit back and let somebody else deal with the stress of taking care of all those details.”
Boyd took it all in stride. “It was from 2-4 a.m. I was dealing with the travel emergencies, and then 6 a.m. I had to wake up for the SAC to be there by 7,” she says, laughing at the memory. “But it was great. Still it was fine. I wasn’t even sleepy that day…I guess I
just don’t need as much sleep. I don’t know. I’m both a morning person and a night owl.”
Most folks at SAC2019, including the speakers Boyd had to prep and get onto and off the stage for presentations, had no idea she was operating on four hours of sleep; her professionalism never cracked. That might not be surprising if you consider that she’s a lifelong traveler, whose biggest journey among many was from busy ad executive to single mom to entrepreneur, among other things.
The Journey
Boyd, then Lisa Harris, worked at Birmingham-based advertising firm o2 Ideas for 17 years. She was the company’s director of client services when o2 managed the SAC, and found herself acting as stage manager. Even when management of the conference transferred to PMT Media & Events (PMT Publishing is the parent company to this magazine), Boyd remained stage manager for the yearly event.
Already at that point, she was a single mother raising two kids; a few years earlier, her husband Scott Harris, who had been senior art director at o2, died of brain cancer. “I then found myself as a single mom with two young kids, seven and nine at the time. And I was just working long hours, and I had to miss some things related to their — school activities just because my schedule wasn’t always super flexible — although o2 was always very accommodating and it was flexible up to the degree that I allowed it to be,” she says.
“So after doing that for three years — full-time single mom, full-time plus many hours working — I just started getting to a place where I needed more balance in my life, and I wanted to find something else that I was passionate about because I always loved
advertising, and I loved everything that I was doing there.
“So I did some soul searching, and over many, many months I tried to figure out what it was that I loved and what I wanted to do and where my strengths and skills were. My background in advertising, focusing on attention to detail and client service — I was trying to really focus on how I could use those in other areas that would allow me more flexibility to be a mom and to be with my kids when they needed me to be.”
Family Adventures
That thought process took her back to her childhood exploring the country in a motorhome. “I grew up traveling with my parents. With my parents I went to 49 states, and I saved the 50th state to go with my husband,” she says. “My parents were both raised in
poor families, they both didn’t have a lot of money growing up, and travel was the one thing that they always wanted to do. So they would save their money all through the year, and travel is what they spent money on. My dad would always buy a new motorhome, fix it up, and we’d take a big trip. And he’d sell it, buy a new one, fix it up…and the profit from the motor homes also kind of helped fund some travels. They both were with their companies for 20 plus-years, 25 years, so … they had built up a lot of vacation, and they saved it for the summer so we always took a big summer trip.”
Those experiences stuck with her. “I’ve just always loved traveling. I love planning trips, and I came up with the idea of starting this company, Life is Short Adventures, and I started it just to kind of find a different niche outside of what traditional travel agents do.” Leaving her corporate role for an entrepreneurial one was triggered by a book, she notes. “Chip Gaines — his book Capital Gaines — is what actually
convinced me to take the leap,” she says. “I was listening to the book on Audible, and one day I was driving home from work for lunch, and I was at the very last chapter of his book and it was in the car, and he said, ‘You know that thing that you’re passionate about? That thing that you really want to do? Don’t wait. Just go ahead and take the leap and do it. You’ve got it within you to make it
work.’ And I walked into my house, called my financial planners, turned around – didn’t even eat lunch – turned back and went to o2 and resigned.”
Pretty soon, through word of mouth and social media, Boyd had a number of clients. She’s motivated by her own experience to help that growing group take the leap into travel - and not put it off until later.
Boyd’s experience: She had not only lost her husband at age 45 to brain cancer, but she had lost her father the same way when he was 53.
“Life is short,” she says. “You know, one day your life can change forever and then you may have regrets of things that you didn’t do in life… So my motivation is to help people make their travel dreams come true, so that they actually do them and don’t put them off until retirement, because we’re not guaranteed retirement.”
Now officially a travel advisor — she works with a company called Andavo — Boyd sends clients all over the world, and has even finds plenty of time to travel the globe with her now teenage daughters. Earlier this year, she got remarried — to Mason Boyd — and now has a third child at home, her stepdaughter.
Boyd has already traveled to her 50th state — Hawaii — with her new husband — just as she had with her late husband Scott. Having traveled to all six major Hawaiian islands, she is now recognized as a destination expert, certified by the Hawaii Tourism Authority.
“Hawaii is a special place for me. I mean, it was my 50th state and I fell in love with it when I went with my husband. And then I went back this past summer and spent four weeks there,” she says.
And she loves her job, a love she wants to share with her clients.
“I think, especially here in America — first of all, we don’t receive as much vacation as people in other parts of the world do. We don’t naturally travel as much, and I think it’s really important for us as individuals to experience new cultures and see new things and get out of our comfort zone. It helps us be better people. It helps us be more compassionate, more understanding. And so many people put it off and… they have all these excuses about why they put it off. But my whole mission, really, is to help people to not put things off, and to live life now.” n
