£800 between them, a £500 second-hand minibus, and 42 paying guests
Carl and Jakes arrived in London from South Africa with £800. Their first Paris tour ran in March 2005 off maps, packed lunches and a spreadsheet. The group is now worth £40m.
Carl and Jakes · Expat Explore · Travel · London
£40m
group touring company
How it was funded
Bootstrapped from £800 of savings
The numbers
- £800 in the bank between two founders
- £500 second-hand minibus
- First tour March 2005, 42 paying guests, £129 per person
- 12 Paris tours and 4 Amsterdam tours in year one
- £40m business, 180,000 travellers, 50+ countries
Carl and Jakes arrived in London from South Africa in the early 2000s with £800 between them. They had spotted a gap: affordable, well-organised group tours for people who could not face planning the logistics themselves.
They spent £500 of the £800 on a second-hand minibus and ran their first Paris tour in March 2005 for 42 paying guests at £129 a head, at a time when the average family holiday abroad cost £2,725. There was no business plan. There were maps, packed lunches and an Excel spreadsheet tracking who had paid.
Year one was twelve tours to Paris and four to Amsterdam. Cash flow was tight and every booking meant juggling deposits, vehicle hire and supplier relationships in real time.
When the pandemic stopped travel entirely, they told customers their money was safe and that they would ride it out together. Flexible booking and blunt communication held the customer base, and review scores came back higher. Twenty years on, Expat Explore is a £40m group with more than 85 itineraries in over 50 countries and 180,000 travellers behind it.
“We had no grand business plan. Just maps, packed lunches, and an Excel spreadsheet to track who'd paid.”
Jakes, co-founder, speaking to Business Matters
What you can take from it
Spend most of your capital on the thing that earns
£500 of their £800 went into the asset that generated revenue. Nothing went on brand or an office.
A spreadsheet is a system
Twenty years of scale started with tracking who had paid. Get the money admin right before the software.
In a crisis, over-communicate about money
Telling customers their deposits were safe protected the asset that took fifteen years to build.
Source
Reported by Business Matters, 8 August 2025. All quotes and figures belong to the original interview.