I’m shutting down the company at the end of February.
Got your attention? Good. Read the fine print if you’re a client. The business of coaching, training and mentoring is alive and well. But I’m shifting the legal housing of it, to the New! Improved! Appropriately named! G2G Investments.
We will still trade as PG Tops Strategic Coaching in the short term but in our new legal home. But PG Tops Travel and Tours, my beloved CC who I have nurtured over the last 17 years, will cease operations. It’s bittersweet.
In December 2008, I did my first transactions as a newly minted closed corporation PG Tops Travel and Tours. I was a tour guide with a minivan, no clients, lots of ideas but fundamentally clueless about how I was going to do this. The name PG Tops was thought up by my cousins while chomping croissants in France, and it stuck. I liked it, and I went to town with it.
I listened to everybody in that first year. Kept changing direction, kept fiddling with my products, kept looking for the actual sweet spot. I had a rough idea of taking backpackers on wine tours, and my van had wording on it like “Chuck Norris” and “Blue Steel”. I was determined to have fun and not take myself too seriously.
Fast forward 10 years. I no longer had funny slogans on my vans. The business no longer serviced Swedish backpackers off Long Street but offered high-end inclusive packages to luxury travellers from the United States. I had a big team, and we were clear on what our product was, who our customers were, and where our boundaries were. We had a 27-page SOP document, an integrated IT system, high-end graphics content, an internal training school and a sizeable depot near the airport.
2019 we killed it. 50% growth year on year, and the prospect of an even bigger 2020. Then… well, we all know what happened.
Covid forced a rethink. Take off your founder cap, put on your shareholder cap. And I decided to look after everyone equally to the best of my ability. Clients, suppliers, staff. I felt like I did right by everyone… and when the dust had settled and we were trading again, almost two years later, I was no longer a tourism business. We housed all my legacy clients with other companies, most notably Classic Escapes, the business my wife still runs. And PG Tops became a tourism company masquerading as an educational and professional services firm.
I thought why not? Keep the structure, with all the merchant facilities, the bank accounts set up, the VAT sorted… and, seeing as Covid cost us a bundle, a significant accumulated loss to leverage for tax purposes.
Last year, however, I was given cause to ponder. I like celebrations. Birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, the sunrise, the plane touching down after a rough flight, high fives when my team scores a try. And work anniversaries!
Only, my company didn’t really have one. I kind of sort of started trading in this new identity around March 2020, but then we played with the Shoshin Walks identity, still did some PG Tops travel stuff on the side, and also ran the coaching business. So it was messy and didn’t really give the opportunity to ring a bell and celebrate milestones.
And I’m big into milestones, hey. Lead measures that move you toward your bigger goals, all that. A revolution around the sun counts, so as of 1 March 2025, we are going to go forward celebrating the birth and rapid evolution of G2G Investments!
What does it mean? Good to Great! Goals to Glory! Gains to Gratitude! Take your pick… it’s about striving harder, not accepting the merely good, about setting goals and hitting them, about celebrating the gains, being grateful for all that is and not obsessing about all that isn’t… and it’s about believing that we’re all capable of holding two opposing truths simultaneously: Sometimes Good is good enough, but you’re always trying to punch just a wee bit above your weight because the Greatness happens in the zone of discomfort…
The fun stuff with this, of course, is designing a new logo. Figuring out the investment mix between sweat equity and actual equity. Which businesses and which life cycles to play in, who to play with, and what the hell does the model look like, never mind the checklists, the exit plan, the entry plan, the playbook, the critical question, the troops…
Hey, it’s gonna be fun. Excited to see what year 1 will bring.
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