Turnover set to soar for Yorkshire travel entrepreneurs
A YOUNG but thriving luxury ski travel company is confident of quintupling its turnover to hit the £10m mark in the next three years as demand for its services soars.
SkiBoutique was launched in 2011 by Sheffield entrepreneurs Sam and Dan Frith and Sam’s wife Rebecca. It has a 400-strong collection of superior quality ski chalets and boutique hotels in the Alps, covering Austria, France and Switzerland in 30 different resorts. As well as sourcing accommodation, the business offers a PA service planning flight transfers, arranging ski hire and booking restaurants.
“For the first three years we were bubbling along, but the business got bigger and better,” Sam Frith said.
“The business is really quite scalable. In the summer of 2014 there has been a significant change of direction. We took on more resource and two full time members of staff and started to work with a business coach to plan for the next three years and systemise the business.”
The company, based in Valais, Switzerland, has reached a turnover of just over 3m Swiss Francs (just under £2m) and is targeting an increase to 15m Swiss Francs in the next three years, which is around £10m.
“This is a big aspiration but it is definitely achievable. We are only just scratching at the surface of the business’s potential,” Frith said.
Frith says that as well as Australia, where the firm has recently launched into, Russia, China and Brazil are also “huge” markets where SkiBoutique is trying to build its business and says it is looking at the possibility of franchising the model. The firm is working on a bespoke back-end management system which will be able to host multiple websites that feed from the same database, therefore making franchising a possibility.
SkiBoutique plans to launch at least three more websites in the next 16 months.
“Russia is a huge market and we get a lot of enquires from here. It is an area crying out for a company like ours,” Frith says.
SkiBoutique currently has a team of six but plans to increase this to up to 12 in the next three years.
