Q&A with Anthony Travel co-founder Katie Anthony
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Katie Anthony, the former co-owner of Anthony Travel, started the sports travel agency with her husband John, out of a shared love for sports, travel and hospitality. The couple met as undergraduates at the University of Notre Dame and are huge fans of the Fighting Irish.
New York-based On Location Experiences acquired Anthony Travel, billed as the largest provider of collegiate sports travel management services, in 2016. On Location was then acquired by Endeavor in 2020.
Katie spoke to Inside INdiana Business about starting a business 35 years ago, female leadership in the workplace and what she describes as “dumb luck.” This article has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Especially since you started the business so young, what was your experience growing a business from scratch?
Notre Dame was actually one of our first collegiate accounts. Our entire business growth has come from people that we worked with at one university, who then switch universities, either athletic directors or coaches, and they take us with them. So if an athletic director has been at one school, he’s worked with us, and he goes to a new school. He just hires us immediately there. We have almost 100 universities that employ our service to plan their athletics travel. I would say most of that has just been from satisfied customers.
What exactly is your business model?
We do a bit of everything. So at our colleges and universities, we are on campus. We have two to three people who serve their athletic department. They help them get all over the country and do all of that. Then we do large sporting events like Super Bowl or Final Fours or ball games, The third piece is doing fan trips to sporting events.
My husband, John, co-founded the annual Aer Lingus College Football Classic which opens the college football season each year with a game in Dublin. The company serves as the organizer, manager and promoter for the games. In 2023, the Notre Dame versus Navy game brought 40,000 American football fans to Dublin and about 10,000 people booked our travel package. This year we have Florida State playing Georgia Tech on August 24 and Iowa state v Kansas State in 2025.
Were you the first people to get into this sort of business? And what’s the market looking like now?
We were actually one of the first. We didn’t have too much competition for a very long time. There’s still not that much competition in the day-to-day given that it’s very complicated to take a team somewhere, right? It’s not something where you’re calling your local agency like, “Hey, I have 40 soccer players; they need to go here on Friday.” There’s a lot of logistics and planning that goes into it, traveling with the equipment. When they lose they want to come home versus when they win and they’re in high spirits, so it’s a lot of very different things. There’s a couple other companies that do it, but again, we have almost all the schools. But in the event business, there’s a lot of competition. A lot of people are doing that kind of work these days, but we still say we’re the best.
What was your experience as a woman leading and growing the company?
It’s been awesome. Travel is a female-heavy industry. We were leaders in a variety of things like work from home, remote working, part time schedules, etc. We just had to because that’s part of the industry. For a while when we started the business it was all walk-in. Everyone walked in, you had paper tickets, we had to deliver paper tickets around campuses or mail them. It all changed, but we could keep good people when it all went to the internet. We could also keep people at home if they moved. Having two- and three-person offices that are part of the athletic departments at the schools, but still all working for us, also worked well for us. We were just doing things early that other people weren’t. I also loved the fact that we were very female heavy in our management and our workers.
What has staff retention looked like at your company?
We have a lot of people that have been with us for many, many years and feel so fortunate about that. It’s probably one of the things that mean the most to us, people who have been with us for 25-30 years, who would have obviously had opportunities to go other places. But I hope it’s because we treat them right and we really value our people. My husband likes to say, “I want to be everybody’s second job.” Because when they’re hired for the first job, they don’t really understand what a great place it is, right? You’re always looking and now in this world, you get a lot of pings on LinkedIn, you get a lot of things, you go look. We’ve had people leave and come back. Just like, “Wow, we didn’t know what it was like out there.” So I think just trying to be very respectful and treat people well. We’ve been very lucky to keep our good people.
What has mentorship looked like for you and what does it look like for the women that you work with in your company?
I hope I’ve been a good mentor to women as a mother with four children, who are also extremely involved in the South Bend community and a variety of nonprofits. I always try to sponsor a lot of things and dedicate my time, so I hope I’ve been a good example. One of the most meaningful things to me is that my staff nominated me for the Athena Award, which I received a few years ago from South Bend. I’m not big on awards and stuff, but what meant a lot to me was that the women in my office did it.
Because we’ve always had so many women in management, I think we’ve had really really strong mentors and good mentors for our younger women. Our controller in South Bend, the number one accounting person, started as receptionist in our LaFortune office on campus. If you can do the work, we’re moving you up. So I think that people see that too and know there’s lots of opportunity for hardworking and good people.
Is there anyone who encouraged or supported you as you built this company with your husband?
That’s such a great question. I have worked for some tremendous women. One that pops to mind right away is Carolyn Woo, who was the dean of the Business School at Notre Dame. So for 10 years when John and I moved back, I worked for the university while we were also building the business. Carolyn Woo, just a phenomenal female leader.
I was on the board of the Community Foundation in South Bend and I thought Rose Meissner was an excellent female leader. I enjoyed working with her quite a bit. I would say my younger sister was a mentor to me. She had her career and then came to work for us about 25 years ago. And I just think she was a phenomenal leader. I learned a lot from watching her.
Notre Dame has had some terrific leaders. I haven’t exactly worked for them but working with them and in a way for them. Micki Kidder, vice president of undergraduate enrollment at Notre Dame, is another exceptional female leader. I haven’t really had bosses other than Carolyn that were women because I was doing this business but I’ve had some great mentors in the nonprofit volunteer area.
The principals at the schools my kids went to were also terrific female leaders, Susan Richter and Suzanne Wiwi, were exceptional leaders in their own right. And my mom, Marianne Walsh, who was one of the first female CPAs in the city of Detroit, one of the first women to work for a big eight accounting firm, and then went on to have nine children and kind of ran the house. My mom was a good mentor and a hard worker.
What would you say is one mistake you see young women making today?
I think it’s more of a societal problem than just young women. Everyone always sees the grass is greener. It’s the social media thing, always thinking that someone’s got a better thing. Instead just, set your own path. Know what you love, don’t worry about what other people love. Do what you enjoy.
I also think women really wait a long time to start their families. Because you feel like you’re giving up and you’ve got this great career and you know that you have to give one up but you don’t have to give anything up. You can do both and do both really, really well. There are sacrifices that you’ll make but it can happen. You don’t have to sacrifice one for the other.
When you look back on your career, was there any challenge that felt like a make or break moment?
Wow. That’s an interesting question. You would be too young for this, but the airlines used to pay travel agents a 10% commission on every airline ticket booked and that was a vast majority of our income. You didn’t charge people to book a ticket because you got this money from the airline. Then the airlines decided nope, everyone can go online, we’re not going to pay travel agents anything anymore. So we had to then start charging people. It was a whole industry change and a lot of travel agents just went out of business because they couldn’t afford it. We had to develop a whole business model that was different from what had ever been done. I also think of events that were extremely challenging. Running a big event is just a lot of work. So those were make or break moments that then just ended up so great.
Were there any courses or certifications that you had to take to deepen your knowledge about entrepreneurship?
Both my husband and I were accounting majors out of Notre Dame. So we had some basic financial skills in that area, but honestly, we were so young and so innocent back then that a lot of it was just that we knew how to treat people. A lot of it was dumb luck. We weren’t really these brilliant business people. We simply saw a good thing that we loved. We love travel. We love sports, and just treated people right both on our employee end and our customer end. Always trying to do the right thing, always trying to be honest, going the extra mile even when it didn’t make sense from a financial standpoint. But no, we didn’t have any entrepreneurial training. They didn’t have entrepreneurs back then. This was ‘89 when we started the company, so a long time ago.
What’s one thing you love about being 60?
I’m retired. But I mean, you never totally retire. We sold the business in 2016, but my husband still runs it. At 60, I was just kind of like, it’s time to focus on just other things. I still stay involved because I’ve just been so tied in with helping certain groups and clients, but technically I am a retired 60-year old. I stay as busy as I want to be.