Compared to the high octane growth of some modern-day start-ups, the development of Lonely Planet has a romantic, old-fashioned air to it.
“The books are so meticulously put together now, but they were so rough and ready then,” says Wheeler. “It was hand-to-mouth in those early days; it wasn’t like a dot com start-up. We took on our first employee after two years. It wasn’t exactly a rapidly growing business.”
“Looking back it was a lot of fun. Some of the books were done because no-one else had done them, others weren’t quite so sensible. Of the first 10 books, I wrote five of them.”
Wheeler initially faced the Catch 22 situation of not being able to grow the business without spending time in Melbourne but not being able to add new titles without going overseas.
He overcame that by carefully picking the right contributors around the world so that the Australian market never equated to more than 10% of the business.
“In the late 1970s we’d go travelling and start seeing books with people and we weren’t sure how they got them,” Wheeler recalls. “That was a very pleasant.
“For the first 10 to 15 years everything we did turned to gold. It was a wake-up call when we made a mistake.”
Straying from the knitting
Wheeler’s first mistake provides a salutary lesson for start-ups on the importance of sticking to their knitting.
Lonely Planet published six guides for cycling and walking enthusiasts. The books hugely added to their costs and underlined the fact to Wheeler that he wasn’t a globe-trotting dilettante anymore. He was the co-owner of a burgeoning business.
“We let our focus go awry and our budgets went through the roof,” he says. “It was a wake-up call that we had to be a bit more professional. We had grown and grown, hadn’t put a foot wrong and everything was fun. But we had created problems for ourselves.
“We did a lot of production from overseas offices, which duplicated a lot of what we did here. We needed to tighten things up a bit.”
Greater pain was to follow in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the US.
International travel was severely impacted, not helped by the subsequent SARS scare and the Iraq war, and the number of Australians travelling overseas fell by 13%. Lonely Planet ended up making 80 staff redundant. The honeymoon was well and truly over.
“That was obviously a painful time but after 12 months things improved,” says Wheeler. “A lot of people just stopped travelling and it’s not like we could just concentrate on our cookbooks. We did travel books.
“It wasn’t a nice experience.”
The departure
The Wheelers gradually removed themselves from the running of Lonely Planet before deciding to sell the business. In the early 1990s the couple had the opportunity to sell to Microsoft but, wisely in hindsight, turned down the offer.
“Microsoft had a vision that everything could be on CDs,” Wheeler says. “That mode was a big success at the time, but it just didn’t seem feasible to us. Plus the net came along in the next year and killed it dead.”
Lonely Planet had an uncertain interaction with new digital age – its model is still based predominately on books – and Wheeler adds: “I’m not sure we got (online) right. It’s a work in progress. People continue to buy the books, which says something.”
When the Wheelers finally sold, in 2007, the price, believed to be around $200 million for a 75% stake, wasn’t as big a surprise as the buyer – the commercial arm of the BBC.
“We’d been talking (about selling) for a few years – the time was right,” says Wheeler. “The BBC just popped out of the blue.”
Wheeler hasn’t exactly retired to the golf course, still regularly blogging for Lonely Planet and, of course, travelling. He and Maureen have also set up the Planet Wheeler Foundation, which funds more than 60 projects in the developing world.
“I don’t have the urge to start something up again, but I’d be open to offers,” he says. “I don’t think I want to just sit in front of the TV. You’ve got to do something you’re enthusiastic about. How can you convince anyone of your idea, your hobby, if you’re not passionate about it yourself?”
