“I vowed I would never write another book,” says Bruce Poon Tip about the ordeal of penning 2013 bestseller, Looptail: How One Company Changed the World by Reinventing Business – his account of founding adventure travel business G Adventures (initially as Gap Adventures) in 1990, with just two maxed-out credit cards and a loan from his sister, and turning it to a multimillion-dollar company based on ‘community tourism’.  

“The writing process was horrible,” says Poon Tip, who was a panellist at the 2025 ICAS Annual Conference. “I always said there would have to be some burning desire to say something for me to wade into those waters again.”

Fast forward to today and we are just a few months away from the publication of his new book, Communityship. What happened? “Covid,” he says. “ I had to write about what it did to my business and what it did to my views on culture and community – the ideas and the words were bursting out of me.”

From hero to zero

G Adventures began 2020 in rude health. The Toronto-based company had 28 offices worldwide and 2,200 employees. Its 200,000 travellers a year could choose from 750 tours in more than 100 countries. Revenue had been CA$570m (£311m) in 2019 and Poon Tip was a pioneer of purpose-first business. His Ted Talk, “Beyond the Triple Bottom Line”, was lauded, he’d started non-profit, community impact partner Planeterra and had a cabinet heaving with business awards. Life and growth were good; and then “on 13 March 2020 revenue went to zero overnight”.  

Lockdown had arrived and the travel sector was the first to feel the economic impact. Poon Tip went from planning future growth to survival and mass lay-offs. “We did five rounds of redundancies over six months,” he recalls. “It was like a zombie apocalypse.”

It wasn’t just the direct employees who were affected by G Adventures’ sudden loss of custom. As a community tourism-led travel company, the ripples were huge and devastating.

“We came out of Covid in debt, and we had to be really profit focused, money focused and growth focused”

“There were hundreds of people who had given up other forms of livelihood to be part of our transformational economy. And suddenly we had no revenue, so they had no income. We were telling them, ‘Sorry, your family can’t eat this month.’”

He cites one porter in the Andes who used to carry the customers’ backpacks. “He had no money,” Poon Tip says. “We’d pulled him into this economy with us and now he had nothing. This was no longer about a business, this was a humanitarian crisis. It had to be a shared responsibility, so we came together and pulled every possible lever that we could.”

Poon Tip reached out to clients who had travelled with them in the past. “We started going to our customers for donations which I would match – and they gave.”

The seed for ‘communityship’ had been planted: Poon Tip knew he needed to start hiring for shared values and shared responsibility.

“Communityship celebrates [difference], and that’s powerful, especially when you take that on an international scale. We’d always tried to transcend cultural barriers and cultural differences. Now I realise that had made us weaker.”

Looking back now Poon Tip can see that the culture of “like-minded people” was stifling the growth of the business. “It’s about how you include and how that makes teams stronger,” he says. “This is a whole new philosophy for me – personally and for the business.

“We had the opportunity to be different post-Covid – an opportunity I didn’t have in 2020 when the company was huge. We were growing 32% in the months leading up to Covid. It was just win after win. But I felt stuck and I didn’t know why. I think my views were changing but fighting for airspace. Covid let them come out.

“The pandemic was both the toughest and the best thing that ever happened to us.”

There was still, however, the not insignificant issue of money to deal with. While there was a big opportunity for Poon Tip to change the culture of G Adventures, there was also a huge black hole in the company’s coffers – a situation that tested even Poon Tip’s steely nerve and entrepreneurial optimism.   

“We came out of Covid in debt, and we had to be really profit focused, money focused and growth focused.”

For the first time in the company’s history, G Adventures first had to borrow from banks, then take private equity investment. “People might think that my toughest time was when I was living in a garage apartment and dodging my landlord,” says Poon Tip. “But that wasn’t nearly as tough as building back a company that was driven by profit to pay back bankers  – that was the worst feeling in the world.”

Tipping point

Poon Tip’s mental health and resilience were pushed to their limits. “I almost lost myself,” he recalls. “I actually held a conference [in June 2025] and I had a T-shirt printed that said, ‘ME AGAINST EVERYONE’, which I wore because I felt like the company had gone so far in another direction that we had to bring it back. Communityship helped me focus – it was the path we needed to stick to.”

G Adventures was caught in an interesting culture clash. On the one hand Poon Tip was building a great new culture in the company; on the other the banks held the purse strings. A difficult line to straddle?

He answers by first stressing his gratitude for the bail-out: “The banks literally gave us money to survive. Props for that. We wouldn’t have got that without my 35 years of experience and reputation, but they gave us millions of dollars and I’m very grateful.”

“The world has changed and become so divided politically that diversity of thought is now gold”

But of course the loan came with conditions: “It came with strings, and with them sitting on the board. And with them controlling our spend and putting us into special loans, we have to justify every penny that we spend.

“And it came with them not understanding our business, and our banker changing every month because people get moved, and you’re explaining your business again and they don’t care – they’re just trying to prevent us from spending anything so that we can pay them back, right? I got it, but it was horrible – we couldn’t do anything without approval.”

It wasn’t just the spending controls that Poon Tip chafed against – there was a whole new world of corporate governance that, as a maverick founder, he had never had to deal with before: “I’d never had to answer to a board and suddenly I was in front of people telling me I couldn’t do things.”

Poon Tip admits he didn’t initially deal with it very well: “There were all kinds of stand-offs – me not showing up for board meetings and throwing tizzy fits everywhere!”

Governance for good

One might think Poon Tip would be relieved that the company is now coming out of the financial woods of the pandemic with growth higher than before lockdown. But he’s in no rush to go back to his swashbuckling ways – on the contrary, he believes the checks and balances, the learning about governance, imposed on him are responsible for the growth.

“We’ve just come off our best year ever in 34 years. Our last quarter is up 20% year on year and we’re 30% beyond 2019 numbers now. Coming out of the pandemic, we got better, we got more corporate governance. I learned a ton about silence. I’m so thankful.”

Poon Tip recently gave a speech to the investors thanking them for “being very gracious and super-patient with me”.

“Even though [the situation] caused me to go off the edge a couple times, they gave me leeway for being this kind of savant entrepreneur that thinks differently,” he says. “Even though it was super-frustrating, I’m so grateful for them, because I learned a ton in the process.

“I think we’re way stronger in every capacity as a business because of the experience. Honestly, we’ll be paying [the debt] back still for a little bit, but it was worth every penny.

“Of course it was frustrating to have to explain my business to a new banker every couple of months and having to ask them to approve a budget. But now we are all happy, right? They are just blown away by us, our culture, what we’ve done, how we performed, how we came out of it and how our people are so dedicated and resilient. I’m also just grateful for what they taught me and my teams about corporate governance and responsibility. I’m different because of the experience.

“And we can still get so much better. I’ve never been more motivated, worked harder or been more excited to be here. Who would have thought that 35 years in? The pandemic was the best thing that happened to our company and corporate governance has made us bigger and greater. Who would have thought five years ago I would say either of those things?”

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