The Right Person at The Right Time

Ever have someone turn up in your life at exactly the right time?

It’s one of those things you only recognise with hindsight (got to love that 20:20 hindsight). At the time, your gut just tells you to go for something, and later you realise why it was the right decision.

I’ve always trusted my gut instinct without really knowing why it was usually so accurate. Turns out that’s probably my autistic pattern recognition quietly doing its thing.

Anyway, I digress. Get used to that. My storytelling has a habit of wandering off down little side roads before eventually finding its way home.

After our first year of Global Affair, Steve and I were stuck.

Between us we already had other businesses, and they were pulling us away from what we really wanted to build. Too many times I’d be sitting in a meeting while a prospective travel client called. I was already working well beyond full-time and, like many parents of children with additional needs, I also had another full-time job navigating the world for my family.

If Global Affair was ever going to grow, I needed help.

That’s where Clare made what would become her now rather fateful appearance. A friend of a friend. Someone I vaguely knew through our husbands. Another SEN mum. Like me, she had a son and a daughter, although her son has Down syndrome.

She wanted to return to work but needed something that fitted around her family. Just like I did.

Thankfully, travel consultancy isn’t a typical nine-to-five job. It can be done almost anywhere, making it surprisingly flexible for parents whose lives rarely follow a predictable schedule.

Over the following year, something lovely happened.

Clare discovered she genuinely loved helping people find the right holiday. Not just booking one, but building it with them. The more we talked, the more we realised we shared the same ambition: helping more families, particularly those with additional needs, discover that travel really could be for them too.

We had so many ideas.

Too many, in fact.

Like most small businesses, though, we kept running into the same two obstacles: time and money. It’s frustrating knowing exactly where you want to go but not yet having the resources to get there.

Then Clare did something incredibly brave.

Something I’m not entirely sure I would have had the courage to do myself.

She offered to invest in the business and become a director.

For me, it was one of those rare, instinctive “hell yes” moments.

Her belief in Global Affair has allowed us to grow in ways we simply couldn’t have managed alone. She’s the reason we’ve been able to invest in our website, develop our ideas and move the business away from being simply somewhere that sells holidays into what we always wanted it to be: a travel consultancy built around people.

We’re still growing.

We’re still building around our families.

In fact, I’m writing the first draft of this on my phone while curled up on the sofa rewatching Spider-Man with Alex. The new film is coming out soon, so obviously we have to watch them all again in chronological order before we go to the cinema.

It’s the law.

So yes, Clare arrived in my life at exactly the right moment. She was brave enough to believe in both me and the business when it mattered most.

I gained a business partner and a friend.

And you gained an amazing travel consultant.