Mar Pages is a former strategy consultant and xGoogler turned online entrepreneur, publisher, travel content creator, and advocate for female empowerment. She is the Editor of a luxury travel website Once in a Lifetime Journey, the Co-Founder of Solo Female Travelers which counts 90,000 members, and of the boutique digital marketing agency Online Group Success which specializes in online communities.
Mar is a former strategy consultant and xGoogler turned online entrepreneur, publisher, travel content creator, and advocate for female empowerment through travel.
What is Solo Female Travelers all about?
Solo Female Travelers is the oldest online community of women who travel on their own. We are passionate about empowering women to travel solo safely and on their own terms, and we do so with a combination of resources, online courses, tools & advice, a highly engaged and diverse online community with 90,000 members from all over the world, and small group tours for women to come on their own.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your business?
I started my career at JP Morgan in London and then moved to an EMEA position in a global team at Tyco which required me to travel weekly and made me realize my love for travel.
After a bit over a year, I moved to Dubai to join a telecoms management consulting firm specializing in emerging markets. The job was exhilarating and took me to most countries in the Middle East, Eastern and Southern Africa, and Asia while living between Dubai, Johannesburg, and Singapore.
After 8 years of weekly travel, I decided to change careers and took a break; I opened a small takeaway cafe and started my luxury and out of the ordinary travel blog, Once in a Lifetime Journey. I then joined Google in a global position based out of Singapore. I eventually left Google to devote myself full time to my online publishing business.
At the end of 2019, I decided to take over an online community of women who love to travel solo called Solo Female Travelers I had been a member of since 2015 and which had around 15,000 members. Along with my business partner, we have since grown the community to almost 100,000 members despite travel has been minimal in the last year.
Today, the community is supported by a portal filled with research, resources, online courses on safety, wellness, and sexual wellbeing while traveling, a proprietary safety ranking that ranks all the countries in the world based on safety for women traveling solo and most recently, small group tours for solo female travelers to unusual, expensive or unique destinations.
How has the pandemic affected you or your new business?
Given that our entire business is designed around traveling, the pandemic heavily affected our plans. The majority of our members have not traveled internationally for over a year and while we now see an uptick in travel planning and traveling in general, we expect things will not revert to normal for a couple of years.
Most notably, the pandemic affected our plans to launch small group trips, a project that we had to postpone until the beginning of April 2021 when we have finally been able to announce some for the end of 2021 and for 2022.
At a community level, we have been encouraged by the massive growth in membership at a time when two-thirds of the world remain largely closed. We have members from more than 100 countries most of whom have been in countries with restrictions and closed borders or where travel or even domestic movement, have been severely curtailed, and yet, our community has grown from 15,000 members at the beginning of the year to almost 100,000 today.
Every day we receive hundreds of member requests from women who find us through referrals, online searches, friend invitations, etc. This has helped us inch closer to our mission of empowering 10,000 women to travel the world solo safely and on their terms.
The pandemic has also kept me and my business partner separated for the last 18 months since we decided to take over the community and we have yet to see each other face to face since we launched the business together. We don’t expect that will change anytime soon as both Singapore and Australia’s borders remain closed for the foreseeable future.
If there is something we have learned is that you can absolutely have a fully remote and successful business where all team members, partners, and customers are in completely different geographies if you work together as a team and have high levels of trust.
What was the biggest problem you encountered starting up and how did you overcome it?
When we started managing the community, the biggest challenge we faced was finding ways to automate our workload as much as possible. The group was growing with more than 1,000 members every day and they all needed to be reviewed and approved. We were spending a significant amount of time managing memberships and moderation, both of which were administrative tasks.
We had to quickly design and implement the right processes to improve efficiency and expand our team of Moderators. We created a set of standardized rules and processes for everyone to follow while putting together an in-depth onboarding document with an exhaustive list of canned responses.
Besides that, we also had to face the consequences of the pandemic which we did not anticipate when we took over the community and started the business. We had to pivot fast and decided to focus on something that was evergreen and we knew would be useful in the future: providing our members with tools and resources to travel better, safer and longer.
We did that with a combination of articles, live streams, and research studies. We launched the website, built solo female travel guides, and invited experts on various topics to come live in the group to share their expertise. At the end of 2020, we launched the largest survey on solo female travel trends ever conducted and collected data to help us shape the business and better serve our members.
Behind the scenes, we continued to reach out and connect with allies and organizations who shared our mission and explored opportunities to collaborate with companies such as UrSafe.
We also started to design small group trips for our members so we would be ready to launch them as soon as travel would resume.
In times of crisis, most companies reduce their commercial budgets whereas we decided to invest heavily in the business so we could come on top at the end of it.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
This was not the first business I started but the third and I already had a lot of experience which allowed me to put all the learnings into practice. However, I still underestimated the time it would take to manage a growing and highly engaged community.
We always think a simple task or post will only take a few minutes but then it ends up taking half an hour to an hour. It is easy to get sucked into the social media world and, without realizing it, wasting an entire day reading posts and interacting with members, especially when there are close to 10,000 of those a day.
We also decided to expand the social media presence beyond Facebook groups and started an Instagram profile, TikTok, and even Clubhouse to test out each platform and see which one would have the highest return on investment. We have since decreased the time we spend on other platforms and instead focused on growing our mailing list which also provides us with a direct line of communication with our members that does not get filtered by a third party whom we have no control over.
What is one thing that you do daily to grow as an entrepreneur?
Learn from others’ successes and failures, read about the industry, and test things out. We are big believers in failing often and fast, and do that every day, trying out new ideas, seeing how they work, and learning from them. I was never afraid or ashamed to fail and this has helped me find success in unexpected places, be a fast learner and grow.
Having a direct line of communication with your audience is also invaluable for us and allows us to test any idea by simply asking them. This unique position means we can ask questions and get answers within 24h. Never giving up on that curiosity and idea generation is key.
How do you manage running a business while traveling?
For the 15 years prior to the beginning of COVID, I traveled about 50% of the year spending a minimum of 140 nights away from home. Since I schedule my trips relatively in advance, I can plan ahead and have everything in place so my business is not affected.
If I plan to take time off, my team backs me up on most day-to-day and urgent tasks and I set my out of the office email autoresponder. If I plan to disconnect fully from work, I make sure everyone is up to date on all fronts and can take over from me, I also inform any relevant clients. I keep my phone on in case of emergencies and stipulate what those are so my team knows when to contact you. This means empowering your team to make decisions.
If I am traveling but working at the same time, I always set aside some time every day to devote to the business, even just to reply to emails or to talk to your team. I make sure I have a phone with an internet connection, either a roaming plan or an international hotspot device that works internationally, or a local SIM I buy at the airport. I make sure to install it and test it before I leave the store; sometimes, your phone settings need to be changed and the airport staff are best equipped to help you because they are used to dealing with international customers.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
Our highly engaged Facebook community is growing with 200-300 new members every day, and growing our email list alongside the group membership has been the best decision we made. We ask all our new members to provide their email if they wish to be added to our newsletter and then stay connected with them weekly via emails.
The entire membership approval process is automated allowing us to grow both the online community and the mailing list at the same time. Our small group trips are currently being promoted and sold mostly via the newsletter and the group.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
Persevere. Most businesses fail not because they are not serving a real need but because the founders don’t follow through to see it to success. It can be easy to give up if a business is not turning a profit in the first year, but the truth is that very few do.
Starting a business requires a lot of commitment and hard work and that journey can be long, lonely, and hard. It is important, and almost essential to success, to find a partner that shares the same vision and commitment and that compliments you.
I started my travel website Once in a Lifetime Journey on my own and then hired a team while I started Solo Female Travelers with my business partner Meg and I can compare the differences. Having the right partner can guarantee the success of a project, the same way that having the wrong partner will be the reason for its failure.
What is your definition of success?
Waking up every day excited about going to work in a place that changes lives and contributes to making the world a better place. A company that I can be proud of.
How do you personally overcome fear?
I have never had much fear of anything and in particular, I am not afraid to fail, I think one should be far more proud of trying something new than of succeeding and I admire those who do. Remembering that every day, and saying it out loud or to others is important. I also make it a point to celebrate the wins and also air the failures to keep on reminding myself that nobody is more of a critic than oneself.
Lastly, when making any decision, I always ask myself: What is the worst that can happen? And if I am happy to live with that worst-case scenario, then I am happy to fail and have no reason not to try. Verbalizing the worst case scenario can also help manage fear and make it tangible.
How can readers get in touch with you?
You can reach out to me at community@solofemaletravelers.club or via LinkedIn by searching for my name.
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