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Katie Anthony, former co-owner of Anthony Travel, founded the sports travel agency with her husband John, over a shared love of sports, travel and hospitality. The couple met as undergraduates at the University of Notre Dame and are big fans of the Fighting Irish.
New York-based On Location Experiences acquired Anthony Travel, considered the largest provider of college sports travel management services, in 2016. On Location was then acquired by Endeavor in 2020.
Katie spoke with Inside INdiana Business about starting a business 35 years ago, female leadership in the workplace and what she describes as “stupid luck.” This article has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Especially since you started the business at such a young age, what has been your experience growing a business from scratch?
Notre Dame was actually one of our first collegiate accounts. All of our business growth has come from people we worked with at one university, who then switched universities, whether athletic directors or coaches, and took us with them. So if an athletic director has been at one school, he’s worked with us and he’s going to a new school. He just hires us right away there. We have nearly 100 universities that use our service to plan their athletics trips. I would say most of that came from just happy customers.
What exactly is your business model?
We do a little bit of everything. So at our colleges and universities, we are on campus. We have two to three people who serve the athletic department. They help them travel all over the country and do all this. Then we do big sporting events like the Super Bowl or Final Fours or ball games. The third part is taking 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 acts as organizer, manager and promoter of the games. In 2023, the Notre Dame versus Navy game brought 40,000 American football fans to Dublin and around 10,000 people booked our travel package. This year we have Florida State playing Georgia Tech on August 24th and Iowa State vs. Kansas State in 2025.
Were you the first person to get into this type of business? And how is the market now?
In fact, we were one of the first. We haven’t had much competition for a long time. There still isn’t as much competition on a daily basis as it’s very complicated to take a team somewhere, right? It’s not something where you call the local agency like, “Hey, I’ve got 40 football players; they need to come here on Friday. It takes a lot of logistics and planning to travel with the equipment. When they lose they want to go home and when they win they are excited, so it’s a lot of different things. There are a few other companies that do this, but again, we have almost all schools. But in the events business there is a lot of competition. A lot of people are doing this 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 incredible. Travel is a heavily female industry. We were leaders in a variety of things like work from home, remote work, part-time schedules, etc. For a while when we started the business, everything was easy. Everyone came in, you had paper tickets, we had to deliver them to campuses or mail them. Everything changed, but we managed to keep good people when everything went online. We could also keep people in their homes if they moved. Having offices for two and three people who are part of the schools’ athletic departments but still work for us has also worked well for us. We were doing things early that other people weren’t doing. I also loved the fact that we are very feminine in our management and our workers.
How has staff retention been in your company?
We have many people who have been with us for many, many years and are very happy about it. It’s probably one of the things that means the most to us, people who have been with us for 25-30 years, who obviously would have had opportunities to go other places. But I hope it’s because we treat them well and really value our people. My husband likes to say, “I want to be everyone’s second job.” Because when they get hired for their first job, they don’t quite 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 stuff, go look. We had people leaving and coming back. Like, “Wow, we didn’t know what it was like out there.” So I guess I’m just trying to be very respectful and treat people well. We were very lucky to keep our good people.
What was mentoring like for you and what is it like for the women you work with at your company?
I hope I have been a good mentor to women as a mother of four who are also extremely involved in the South Bend community and various non-profit organizations. I always try to sponsor many things and dedicate my time, so I hope I was a good example. One of the most meaningful things for me is that my team nominated me for the Athena Award, which I received a few years ago from South Bend. I’m not really into awards and things like that, but what meant a lot to me was that the women in my office did this.
Because we’ve always had so many women in management, I think we’ve had really strong mentors and good mentors for our younger women. Our controller in South Bend, the number one accountant, started as a receptionist in our LaFortune office on campus. If you can do the work, we’ll move it. So I think people see that too and know that there are a lot of opportunities for good, hard-working people.
Did anyone encourage or support you as you built this company with your husband?
That’s a great question. I worked for some incredible women. One that comes to mind immediately is Carolyn Woo, dean of the Notre Dame School of Business. So for 10 years, when John and I got back together, I worked for the university while we were also building the business. Carolyn Woo, simply a phenomenal female leader.
I was on the board of the Community Foundation in South Bend and considered Rose Meissner an excellent female leader. I really enjoyed working with her. I would say my younger sister was a mentor to me. She had her career and came to work for us about 25 years ago. And I just think she was a phenomenal leader. I learned a lot by watching her.
Notre Dame has had some fantastic leaders. I didn’t exactly work for them, but I worked with them and in a way for them. Micki Kidder, vice president of undergraduate enrollment at Notre Dame, is another exceptional female leader. I didn’t really have any bosses who were women other than Carolyn because I was doing this business, but I had some great mentors in the nonprofit volunteer space.
The principals of the schools my children attended were also excellent female leaders, Susan Richter and Suzanne Wiwi, exceptional leaders in their own right. And my mother, Marianne Walsh, who was one of the first female CPAs in the city of Detroit, one of the first women to work for a major accounting firm, and then had nine children and kind of ran the house. My mother was a good mentor and hard worker.
What would you say is a mistake you see young women making today?
I think it’s more of a social problem than just young women. Everyone always sees that the grass is greener. It’s the thing about social media, always thinking that someone has something better. Instead, just set your own path. Know what you love, don’t worry about what other people love. Do what you like.
I also think that women really wait a long time to start a family. Because you feel like you’re giving up and you have a great career and you know you have to give up, but you don’t have to give up anything. You can do both and do both very, very well. There are sacrifices you will make, but it can happen. You don’t have to sacrifice one for the other.
When you look back on your career, were there any challenges that felt like a defining moment?
Wow. That’s an interesting question. You’d be too young for this, but airlines used to pay travel agents a 10% commission on every air ticket booked and that made up the vast majority of our revenue. You didn’t charge people to book a ticket because you received that money from the airline. Then the airlines decided that no, everyone can go online, we are not going to pay travel agents anything anymore. So we had to start charging people. It was a complete change in the industry and many travel agents simply closed their doors because they couldn’t afford it. We had to develop an entire business model that was different from what had already been done. I also think about events that were extremely challenging. Organizing a big event is a lot of work. So those were defining moments that turned out to be great.
Were there any courses or certifications you had to take to deepen your knowledge about entrepreneurship?
My husband and I were accounting students at Notre Dame. We had some basic financial skills in this area, but honestly, we were so young and so innocent back then that a lot of that was down to knowing how to treat people. A lot of it was pure luck. In fact, we weren’t these brilliant businesspeople. We simply saw something good that we loved. We love traveling. We love sports and treat people well, both on the employee and customer side. Always trying to do the right thing, always trying to be honest, going the extra mile even when it didn’t make financial sense. But no, we didn’t have any entrepreneurial training. They didn’t have entrepreneurs back then. That was in 1989, when we started the company, a long time ago.
What do you love about being 60?
I am retired. But I mean, you never fully retire. We sold the business in 2016, but my husband still runs it. At 60, I was like, it’s time to just focus on other things. I’m still involved because I’m very involved in helping certain groups and clients, but technically I’m a 60-year-old retiree. I stay as busy as I want.
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