Remember when home-based travel agents weren’t taken seriously? When suppliers – and certainly other agents – tended to regard them as dabblers and “not the real thing”?
Morris Chia with Rhonda LaFosse
Regional Sales Manager & V.P. Tim Morgan
Well those days are long gone, as TPI’s President & CEO Morris Chia is proud to point out. And it’s partly because of TPI and its army of independent agents that the image has changed.
“We now number over 800 advisors and are present in every province except Quebec, where we hope to expand soon through a joint venture,” Chia told me at the Toronto Summit, one of 9 such events held recently across the country. The summits, a combination of team-building, networking, education, trade show and pep rally, are complemented by the organization’s annual conference this November in Playa del Carmen.
TPI advisors Heather Wilkinson,
David Wass, Monique Powell
and Norma Lehrbass
To what does Chia attribute TPI’s success? “Our difference is our team: nearly 50 staff in our head office in Winnipeg and across Canada who are dedicated to the success of our advisors. We don’t deal with or want the end consumer: our customers are our advisors and we invest in people.”
The company, which has no sales minimums, offers a tiered structure with advisors and referral reps which is intended to allow advisors to build their businesses faster – one TPI advisor last year made, according to Chia, $300,000.
Door prize winner Michele Smith
with Michele Palma of Uniworld
Aurora-based advisor Heather Collins told me that she joined TPI because, “They were one of the 1st, very well established, and they know what they’re doing.”
And in an interesting what-goes-around-comes-around angle, some TPI agents have even opened up their own bricks and mortar agencies. Perhaps that will be the next stage in the evolution of the home-based agent?
Some of TPI’s nearly 50 staff who serve 800 advisors
