At TBR Global, we are constantly striving to improve our service.
We know that to continue to offer the sector-leading quality that saw us recognised with the Business Travel Awards Best Ground Transportation Award 2015, you have to innovate at every opportunity - and sometimes the best place to find that innovation is outside the industry.
That's why we've appointed Sean Majewski as our new Head of Corporate Travel.
Sean comes to TBR from a hugely successful career with various travel management companies, and we're confident his customer-centric background will prove a perfect fit and boost to our company ethos of putting the client first.
Name: Sean Majewski
Age: 30
Job title: Head of Corporate Travel
Favourite TBR vehicle: BMW 7 series
For the past 15 years, Sean Majewski has been guided by one key principle.
Keep your customer happy, or don't keep your customer.
It's a simple truth realised by the 30-year-old when he first discovered his professional path - a path revealed thanks to high school work experience at a travel agent.
The Lanarkshire resident explained: "From that first day with Going Places, I was fascinated with travel and working with clients. Right away it made me realise that the highest thing you have to rank within your job is customer satisfaction.
"I joined Thomas Cook's apprenticeship scheme at 17 and that was a fantastic grounding in the importance of keeping your clients happy."
"Before too long I built up a regular customer base at Thomas Cook. They'd come back and ask for you, wait for you to be free and that was a great feeling, and a reassurance that you were doing the right thing."
To say he was doing the right thing was an understatement.
At the age of just 19 Sean was made customer services manager, running a team of people focussed on keeping clients happy - but his ambition wasn't sated there. His early 20s saw him move to American Express, giving him his first taste of corporate accounts, high-end leisure travel, and the unique pressures associated with such clients.
"Business travel is very, very demanding," he said.
"The people you're booking for, their diaries are jam-packed. It's absolutely vital that everything must be spot on, and if it's not, that it's fixed right away.
"I used to enjoy putting right any problems with the least amount of fuss possible."
"I had times when the assistant you've been working with has booked the wrong date, or wrong ticket and I had to use my contacts and experience to fix that for the customer."
"The corporate side of things was what I really enjoyed. I think it's because you never knew what you'd get from one day to the next."
"You could be doing Glasgow to London one minute, then a round-the-world, then a very detailed itinerary."
"You're always under pressure, something I thrive under. I've always really enjoyed getting what they're looking for, and getting that end product, then meeting and exceeding expectations."
Though he ruefully admits he never booked travel for anyone famous, there is one trip that stands out down the years, and one that gave him an another important lesson in the demands of corporate clients.
Sean said: "One of the more expensive trips that stand out from back then was one to Las Vegas because it was so ridiculously expensive. A husband and wife wanted to go to The Wynn Hotel. They wanted a private villa for seven nights and it was around £12,000. I remember getting the quote and thinking 'they're never in a million years gonna go for this."
"I gave them the price and she said 'let's get it booked' - I almost fell off my chair."
The experience taught Sean that what clients care about is quality and reliability of service, two of TBR's watchwords.
His ambitious nature saw him move onwards and upwards, first to Jigsaw Travel, then on to Chambers Travel where his talents saw him reach the lofty position of Strategic Relationships Manager.
Working with corporate clients at both travel management companies naturally meant dealing with everything from booking flights and accommodation, to chauffeur-drive companies, where he first came into contact with TBR.
He said: "I was always impressed with how efficient and helpful the TBR team were. When I started to look for my next opportunity, I looked at the company and the phenomenal growth they've enjoyed, and realised what an opportunity the company represented.
"I've always been very ambitious, I've never wanted to stand still, and I've always wanted to progress as much as I can within the company I'm working with, and I know TBR has huge potential. In the interview they told me the number of staff they have now compared to this time in 2014 and it's doubled in size in a year. You just need to look at it and see how it's taken massive strides and I know it'll continue to grow, and to be part of that is a brilliant opportunity."
A big chance no doubt, but also, Sean confesses as we speak during his third week in the job, a steep learning curve.
He said: "It's significantly different to what I'm used to. For a decade I was travel management so to switch to this, doing what I do now, it's completely new. The first couple of days was difficult to get used to the change I'll admit. Now I'm loving it."
To date he's been getting a grounding in his department's fundamentals, monitoring emails, replying to emails, dealing with quotes and booking in cars, giving him the knowledge he needs to effectively lead the team.
Sean said: "If I had to pick one process i've been wowed by the most by it's the control call. That's when the controller will call the client one hour before to make sure they have the right itinerary, the correct contact, correct name on the name board, the right standard of car, that they'll be on site at least 15 minutes before the required time, so just having all these steps in place to make sure the customer is getting the service they're paying for.
"The main thing is that the client will never be let down. It's very indicative of how TBR go about their business."
As well as being impressed by existing standards, he has already implemented an innovation of his own, an early alert system for clients,
He explained: "For me a very important thing is to keep the client up to date with events, whether that's airline strikes or airport closures. I've signed us up to an alert system so that if anything like that is going on I'll get an alert and if I think it'll impact the business we send that out across the globe."
This was most recently demonstrated during the tragic Tunisia Bardo Museum attack.
"I got an alert right away to say this was happening and then communicated that to our teams so they can check if that will affect our clients, our teams," he said.
"They check do we have anybody out there, do we need to give them the heads-up their transfer may be affected and so on."
We contact our clients to say 'we know this is happening, we'll keep you informed. That's because clients, especially corporate clients, they want to know We know what's happening. It's reassuring for the client that they're not calling us to say 'I've heard there's a bomb threat', it's good we can go to them and say 'we know this is going on just now, we've spoken to your driver, your pick up will go ahead as normal'.
"I think it's always good to reassure the client because there's nothing worse than if you're far away from home, in a strange city. It's part of our job to reassure them we know everything's in place and they'll be picked up as they'd expect."
Off-duty the father-of-two enjoys cooking, football and spending time with his two sons, aged three and nine.
A golfer of self-confessed meagre ability, he laughs that he doubts he'll be playing 18 holes with TBR CEO and former pro Michael O'Hare anytime soon.
But while his skills with a nine iron may be in question, his zeal for customer service is not in doubt.
He said: "I'm looking forward to making more improvements, and bringing my TMC background to the table and add more diversity to the team."
