Sitting at the feet of : a Group Travel Millionaire

Mike Zirbel went to work for a little family theme park down in the Ozark Mountains of Southwest Missouri called Silver Dollar City. It was 1974, the same year People magazine printed their first issue with Mia Farrow on the front cover. Silver Dollar City assigned Mike the Group Travel sector as a minor portion of his work, the rest of his week he spent doing general sales. “I took to Group Travel like a duck takes to water. My first travel convention, I was hooked. I saw what these people were doing, the honor among their businesses, and providing a great service. I decided that when I grew up, I wanted to be a tour operator.”

At Silver Dollar City, he blossomed in the Group Travel field and was promoted to Tour and Travel Manager in 1977. There he got involved with the National Tour Brokers Association. Knowing his love for the industry, Peter Herschend (Vice President of Silver Dollar City) asked Mike in ‘79 if he would start his own Group Travel business in Branson with the help of Silver Dollar City.  That sounded great to Mike, but he wanted a career at Silver Dollar City. Herschend found uniqueness in Mike’s contribution to the Group Travel industry—no one else at the park could perform Mike’s work. Herschend thought if he set Mike free to his own devices, Mike could expand the business into something special. As an incentive, Herschend offered to keep Mike on as a Silver Dollar City employee as long as Mike represented the park at all of the annual Group Travel conventions.

Silver Dollar City gave Mike his first dual-business card:

R. Michael Zirbel
President Ozark Mountain Tours Travel Inc.
Representing Silver Dollar City

complete with the Silver Dollar City logo. He represented the family hotspot through the International Travel Industry where about a third of the operators came from Canada.

In ’83 Mike ended up on the board of directors for NTBA as the chairman of the Allied Membership. The board oversees two divisions of membership: tour operators who buy the product and the allieds or supplies that sell the product to the tour operator. Their “product” combines sight-seeing, hotels, rich restaurants, motor coach, tour guides, admission tickets—everything it takes to make a motor coach tour work.

Then came 1988, when Peter Herschend complimented Mike’s work and asked him to retire from Silver Dollar City in order to go into the business full-force. Mike agreed. As the first Group Travel receptive service in the state of Missouri, Mike’s business exploded. His was the first company in Southwest Missouri to gross over a million in Group Travel sales in under a year.

Business boomed in the nineties. From 1992-1995, they handled two-thousand tours per year and when Mike sold the business in 1999, they had operated 14,447 multi-day tours for tour operators all over the United States and Canada.

His wife graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Missouri with a degree in Special Ed. She wanted to teach. A group of California investors offered to buy Mike’s company. “The funny thing about being a success in business is that you know what you have to do to get there, but once you get there, everything that you have is not all sweetness and light. The desire to grow the business is a goal. It’s a very attractive goal. When you reach that goal and there’s no goal higher, it’s a little disenchanting.” When the investors offered to buy Mike out for good money, his wife’s desire to get out and his own desire to undergo change melded. From there, it was an easy choice.

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Ten days later, Mike had no job and no direction. He had sold the business and his wife found a teaching post immediately. Early in Mike’s schooling, he drove busses to pay his tuition during summer breaks.

“I thought, ‘Well, now I can get relicensed and start driving. In 1996, three years before I sold the business, I had a very difficult customer. That very difficult customer was extremely demanding. I could not get my favorite driver. They were going to give me somebody I’d never heard of, so I said, ‘That won’t work.’ I talked to the owner of the company because back then you had to have a sponsor in order to get relicensed as a B Class driver. I asked Steve, the owner of the company, if he would allow me to use their best equipment and drive my own tours when necessary. He said that he would, provided that if they needed a driver and didn’t have one, they could call on me and I would drive for them under contract. I said, ‘yes.’”

That’s how Michael Zirbel became an undercover boss fourteen years before Undercover Boss debuted its pilot episode.

He drove that very difficult tour and after he sold the business in ‘99, he got back in touch with that early contact. “I told him I sold the business and I’d like to drive on a more permanent basis.” They offered to let him drive part-time, but since Mike worked out of Branson and they worked out of Kansas City, it became impractical for him to work full-time four hours away. So they sent him special assignments and he agreed.

During that time, a company called Maupintour called him up. Mike had crafted their tours for twenty years or more. They asked Mike about the new owners of his company. He shared whatever he knew about them, which wasn’t much. “They weren’t happy with that answer. They asked me if I would run their programs for them. Back then it was a half-a-million dollar contract. So I thought about it for about two days and after I talked to my wife, she said, ‘If that’s what you want to do, that’s fine, but don’t ask me to be any part of it.’” Mike said, “It’ll be church over here, and state over there.” She agreed and he jumped right back into business again.

He’s owned and operated Always Branson Tours, LLC since 1999, but now the tours he runs operate more on an upscale, continuing basis. “You could buy an economy tour, motor coach ride, lodging and the basics most of the time with no food or you could fashion a totally inclusive package where they don’t have to reach for their wallet from the time they leave until the time they get back unless they want to buy a pair of shoes.” That’s his work now—upscale all-inclusive tours. He tries to keep the same clients, picking up no one new if it can be helped. “At my age, what am I going to do with them in ten years? But I normally end up with a new client once a year.”

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Eventually a decision point will arrive where he will decide either to keep on working through old age or to sell once more to investors. “It will have some value, although it’s a paper chase. The value is exactly what the people that buy it want to put into it.” Right now his clients buy his work. If investors buy the company, its relative success will depend on whether they deliver on expectations. Clients know when they book a tour with Mike that they’ll get everything and more for the money. They trust him and he feels honored when someone sends him a check for a hundred thousand dollars. They know Mike will take care of them, but if Mike sells, can the same be said for “Joe or Dick or Tom or whoever?”

Though Group Tours languished for a time, Mike’s noticing a resurgence among our younger generation. I mentioned Megabus giving rides to hipsters for a buck. He chuckled and nodded, all too familiar with our generation of vagabonds who hope to learn and grow by seeing the world. According to Mike, that’s the best way to fill life up with joy: travel. To this day, Mike works custom driving with Viking Trailway buses for trips, both for his own tours and for school trips. That’s how I met him—I was chaperoning a group of college students to a conference and stopped to ask one more normal guy about his expertise.

Turned out our “lowly” bus driver had started two multi-million Group Tour companies from the ground-up in his short span on the Earth. That’s why you always Ask the Experts—otherwise you might never find out how much your bus driver really knows.


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PS> Everyone spends a significant amount of time on somethingYou might be an expert worthy of an interview, so send an email with your area of expertise to lanceschaubert [at] gmail.com


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  1. SATFO Roundup | Lancelot Schaubert

    […] A Group Travel Millionaire […]

Quick note from Lance about this post: when you choose to comment (or share this post with your friends) you help other readers just like you.

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Well, see, your comments & sharing whisper a few things to those who come after you:

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