From Scarcity to Abundance
What Running a Travel Business Taught Me
When I started my travel business in 2011, I started at ground zero.
Zero clients. Zero commissions. Zero savings. I was a single mom coming off of a tough divorce. But I was determined to make it work because staying home to raise my son was the most important thing to me.
In the beginning the competition felt overwhelming. There were established travel agents who had been in the business for years. There were large agencies with resources I couldn’t touch. And then there were the online giants — Expedia, Travelocity, the entire internet — that had fundamentally changed how people booked travel. I told myself it would be impossible to compete with any of it.
But early in that first year something whispered back:
There are millions of travelers who need help. You only need a small percentage of them to do well.
I took hold of that thought and I didn’t let go.
That whisper sent me searching. I started reading everything I could find about abundance and mindset and possibility. One thing stuck with me more than all the others — a book by Catherine Ponder on prosperity. She wrote about the abundant universe we live in and something in me cracked wide open.
I started seeing the world differently. Blades of grass beneath my feet. Sandy beaches stretching further than I could see. Rocky terrain built over millions of years. All of it became a miracle of abundance rather than the background it used to be. The world wasn’t a place of scarcity and competition. It was a place of staggering, endless plenty.
And if that was true of the natural world — why would the world of opportunity be any different?
The shift that followed happened quickly.
The trickle of new travel inquiries that came my way turned into a stream. From the stream came travel bookings. From the bookings came groups traveling together. From the groups came new clients and referrals. And from there my business took off.
It all started with a shift in my mindset. I didn’t need to compete with the big agencies or outsmart the internet. I just needed to provide a valuable service to my orbit and trust that the results would follow.
They did.
I’ve thought about that whisper many times since — in business, in my writing career, and especially in the years when I was sitting in a corporate job wondering if there was something better waiting for me on the other side of fear.
Scarcity thinking is convincing because it feels so real. There aren’t enough good opportunities. Someone else is already doing what you want to do. It’s too late to start over. The market is too crowded. You missed your window.
But that’s only the reality if you make it so.
And so here I am again — fifteen years later, at the beginning of a new entrepreneurial chapter, asking the same question I asked in 2011. Will I be intimidated by the thousands of successful authors and writers already out there, or will I trust that there are enough readers for everyone — and that I only need a small percentage of them to do well?
I already know the answer. I’ve lived it. And this time I’m not starting from zero.