All his life, Eliseu Correia, Managing Director of ELISEU CORREIA TRAVEL, has done things completely out of the box. The mainstream does not appeal to him, and no one can fault him for being monotonous. A “rebel” and “irreverent” spirit, he has always been drawn to surprises and doing things in a different way. At the age of 42, he quit a secure career and founded EC Travel, a destination management company. His success is the result of his conviction that it is never too late to bet on oneself.
Passionate about Travel Industry
Eliseu has always been passionate about the travel industry. He lives in the Algarve, Portugal’s main tourist destination. He moved there after finishing his school in Germany, where he was born and brought up.
When he first arrived in the Algarve, his lack of experience proved to be a stumbling block in finding work. What eventually worked in his favor was his fluency in German and English. He began his career in hotels before moving to high-end management and car rental companies, including Avis. Fifteen years ago, he opened his own destination management company, EC Travel.
Looking back, Eliseu feels he was destined to work in the travel industry.
Founding EC Travel
At 42, Eliseu was in the prime of his career. He enjoyed a respectable reputation in the industry and was making good money. But after eleven years in the same company, he began to feel bored with the monotonous routine. He wanted to try something different.
When Eliseu first announced his intention to start his own company, only his wife supported him. The rest, he recalls, questioned his timing. “Now? At this age?” they asked. He responded, “It is never too late and never too early.”
“I have an idea and a plan, and I have spotted an opportunity, so with God on my side, I’ll do it,” he added.
That is how his entrepreneur journey started, and it was a rocky start. In 2010, when Eliseu launched his company, many businesses were shutting down due to the economic crisis. “I was swimming against the tide,” he says. At the time, it seemed he was opening a business with no future.
But the grim prospects didn’t make Eliseu step back. He invested all his money in EC Travel, leaving himself with absolutely nothing. According to him, he put everything he had into the venture because he believed it was going to work. “Not many believed that, but I did,” he says. He moved forward on the strength of this belief.
“And 15 years later, I’m still here,” Eliseu points out. “It’s just an amazing feeling.”
About EC Travel
EC Travels takes care of hotel contracting, car hire and transfers, and the arrangements needed to sell Portugal as an attractive holiday destination. The company has offices in the Algarve, Lisbon, and the islands of Madeira and the Azores, which allows it to cover the whole country. Eliseu points out that they operate as a wholesaler for wholesalers, the travel companies that come to them to source the product they need.
“If someone has a website and needs content, or they are a tour operator and need to build their Portugal product, whether that is 500 hotels, excursions, or any other ground service, we help them in that,” Eliseu explains. He and his team bring around 400,000 to 450,000 people to Portugal every year and have maintained a turnover of over 30 million euros annually for the past seven to eight years.
In the fifteen years since its founding, EC Travel has grown from two employees to twenty-one, and from € 6 million to over € 30 million in turnover. It has won more than eight national awards and one international award for its financial results. Also, the company has grown its customer base from around 20,000 to over 400,000.
“It has been a very sustainable growth,” Eliseu says. “We have maintained a turnover of over 30 million euros for the last eight or nine years.”
But Eliseu never wanted his company to be the biggest. “I always wanted it to be the best,” he says. That is why he has no plans to internationalize the brand or open offices outside Portugal. He wants EC Travel to be known as one of the best, if not the best, destination management companies in Portugal. “That is our positioning in the market,” Eliseu says, “and we will do everything we can to maintain it.”
Achievement: Company Built on Moral Grounds
For Eliseu, his greatest achievement is EC Travels, a company built on solid moral grounds. He can’t imagine anything he has done having more impact than this company.
He points out that EC Travels is well recognized for its social work and donations to many causes, including humanitarian, animal welfare, and sports. “I have been able to give back a lot of what I received,” he says. “It makes me very proud.”
He recalls making a deal with God when he opened the company. “I said to him, ‘If you help me with this, I will give back double to the community.’ He has kept his word, and I keep mine,” Eliseu says.
The Challenge: Being One’s Own Boss
There is a big difference between being one’s own boss and working under someone else. Eliseu explains that when he worked for a company, there was an umbrella over him. Someone else was there to face challenges, handle the consequences of poor decisions, and manage responsibilities. That protective umbrella disappeared the moment he became a founder.
“I always say to people who want to start a business that the worst part is that suddenly you have no one to blame,” Eliseu says. “Suddenly, you are out there, and you have to own your mistakes. You have nowhere to run or hide.”
“Going from employee to owner is not easy,” he adds. “It was not easy then, and it is still not easy today.” He says that the main difference between then and now is that earlier, everything felt like a drama, especially when problems arose, because he had no experience and everything was new. Now, he has enough experience to look at problems without making them bigger than they are.
Eliseu tells his friends, who are 50 and opening their own businesses, “I am not Einstein or Zuckerberg. If I can do it, you can do it. The worst thing is to reach the end of your life and say, ‘I could have done this,’ with all those projects still sitting in your drawer.”
Routine and Responsibilities
Eliseu, an early bird, has imbibed German discipline. He is not someone who comes to the office at 10 a.m., goes for lunch at 1 p.m., returns at 3 p.m., and stops working at 4 p.m. “That is absolutely not me,” he says. He is very demanding of himself.
Every morning, he arrives at the office before everyone else. The first thing he does is check the news from the travel industry. He keeps himself updated about the latest developments, not only in Portugal but also in the UK, Ireland, Germany, and other markets. He also reads publications like the Financial Times. “I spend at least one hour every morning looking at what is happening in the world, because you cannot make decisions if you do not know what is going on,” he says.
After that, he focuses on the company’s operations. As their offices are spread across the country, he stays in regular touch with the teams and ensures that everything is working as it should. He then turns to decision-making, which he says is the hardest part of his role.
Eliseu points out that he is involved in everything, including finance, commercial matters, operations, and logistics. “But I prefer to look at the forest rather than the individual trees,” he adds. “I try to look at the company from above, because it is easier to make decisions when you are not directly involved in every small detail.”
In 1996, Eliseu attended a one-week business marketing strategy course at Harvard. After completing the course, he returned to Portugal with a completely different perspective on the company he was working for, in addition to hundreds of new ideas.
“One of the most important lessons I learned at Harvard was the ability to step outside myself and look at things from the outside,” he says. “That perspective has stayed with me ever since.”
The Present Leader
Eliseu is a leader who is not omnipresent but present. “I am not the old version of the boss with a whip who is checking every second, like a policeman, what people are doing,” he points out.
He compares the company to a jazz band. When a jazz band comes on stage, he explains, musicians begin by playing the same tune. As the track progresses, each musician, the saxophonist, the bassist, and the drummer, gets time for a solo. In such moments, they slightly move away from the original melody and create a new one within the melody. But in the end, they all come back together and finish by playing the same tune again. Similarly, the 21 micro companies within EC Travel are given complete independence to perform their tasks.
Eliseu says that people overseeing the companies have the freedom to approach their tasks in their own way. He does not interfere. “I just look at the end results and then share my comments,” he says. “I follow a more free-spirited leadership style.”
For him, outcomes matter more than how the task is accomplished. That does not mean he does not appreciate how the work is done. He acknowledges and celebrates every achievement. “I just give people the space to achieve their goals in their own way, not my way,” says Eliseu. And he takes care of them as well.
More than 80% of his team have been with him for more than ten years, and three of them have been with him since the very first day. “That says a lot about loyalty, about recognizing people’s efforts, and about the importance of remembering those who make a story of success possible,” points out Eliseu.
Success Is Based on Teamwork
Eliseu believes that success is always based on teamwork. He underscores that no one wins alone, and it is boring to celebrate alone. “One can only be positive and have any kind of success if one shares one’s richness with others,” he says. The first step to success, he points out, is respecting those who work in the company, those who bring in business, and those who are its partners.
Eliseu also believes in the alignment of chakras and positive energy. “If you have positive karma,” he says, “positive things will happen to you.” So, according to him, people should look at how they work, how they progress in life, and remember where they came from and the ones who helped them get there. “And always remember that at the end of the day, you should be a team player,” he adds.
In the fifteen years of running his company, he now does a few things differently than he did when he started. However, what has remained constant is his principles. “It is all about respect, friendship, honesty, and loyalty,” he says. “This has not changed.”
Plans for the Future
Eliseu wants EC Travel to remain exactly the way it is today, but updated every year. He wants it to be a better and different version of itself every year. However, Eliseu, who is now 58, is not sure how long he will be active in the industry.
Outside the travel industry, Eliseu leads a second life. He is one of the most prominent DJs in Portugal. He has won several international awards and played at some of Europe’s most iconic venues. Eliseu now intends to invest much more time in his second life than in his first.
“EC Travels is in a very mature part of its life, while my DJ life is at this moment on fire,” he points out. “It will take much more of my time and energy than EC Travel is currently taking. I am very excited about that too.”
Reality Much Bigger than Dream
Eliseu says he has achieved more than he ever dreamed. “Sometimes reality is much bigger than your dream,” he says. He is proud of what his team has achieved and the things that have happened to him on his professional journey.
“I could not have dreamed what actually happened,” he says. “I had an idea, I had a dream, but the reality far exceeded that.”
He also believes that one needs to remain hungry in business as well as humble, recognizing what one has been given. “God has been very merciful and has given me a lot,” he says.
Eliseu has absolutely no regrets. He feels he still has many things to do. “I hope to be around to do them all,” he says.
Message to Aspiring Leaders
Eliseu advises aspiring leaders to believe in themselves. “If you don’t believe in yourself,” he says, “who will believe in you.”
