Making Meaningful Travel Connections

When Deloitte consultant Carol Margolis announced her departure from the firm earlier this year, her colleagues were shocked. “Until a month before I left,” says the founder of Smart Women Travelers, an online community for women who travel frequently, “I thought I would be retiring with Deloitte.”

Her decision to hit the road probably should not have aroused such surprise; after all, hitting the road represented a major component of the passion and dedication Margolis brought to the profession during her 18 years as a financial systems consultant. Her love of frequent travel has sustained through 18-plus years of systems integration consulting, two children, a divorce, a second marriage and countless travel delays.

“I’ve maintained a sense of gratitude for being able to travel,” says the Chicago native. “I’m not a complainer because I’ve seen that people who complain about travel get so stressed out. They check the Weather Channel on Monday to see if it’s going to rain on Thursday when they’re scheduled to fly home. I’ve always trusted that I would get home and that has helped make my travel incredibly fun.”

The allure of travel pulled Margolis into consulting in the mid-1980s. She was a computer-savvy legal secretary working toward an accounting degree when she first worked with consultants hired to implement a financial system. “I thought, ‘How cool—they travel every week,” she recalls.

Margolis soon found a consulting job where she was responsible for implementing accounting systems and training end users. After a divorce, she hired a nanny and took her children with her whenever possible. Margolis even served as a Cub Scout Den Mother for a year while living in Chicago. “I had a project in Detroit so I could fly home on Wednesday afternoon, lead the den meeting and then fly back to Detroit the next morning,” she recalls.

Margolis left consulting to spend more time with her children when they entered high school, but as soon as her youngest graduated from high school, she rejoined the profession at a firm that was eventually acquired by Deloitte.

Throughout her consulting career, many female consultants asked Margolis for travel advice ranging from intel on the latest gadgets to the challenging emotional aspects of balancing consulting with parenting duties. In November 2008, while still with Deloitte, Margolis launched Smart Women Travelers (www.smartwomentravelers.com) to foster an ongoing discussion among women travelers.

Membership on the site increased, and Margolis enjoyed how running the new business on weekends tested her project management skills. “At one point, I realized I was too close to my business to see what needed to be done on a step-by-step basis,” she reports. It dawned on me that I needed a detailed plan that laid out exactly what needed to get done as well as what additional resources I needed to bring in to grow the business.”

In December, Margolis wrote down a list of everything she wanted in life (high income, more free time, project management activities, travel) and weighted the degree to which each desire would be fulfilled if she remained at Deloitte full-time.

“The numbers,” Margolis reports, “pointed me to Smart Women Travelers.” Today, she is working on a book for female travelers, performing speaking engagements and courting advertisers.

As her venture continues to take off, Margolis has brought in a full-time web manager and is looking for a marketing director and a research assistant. She envisions expanding the site to cover the male travel community and also developing Smart Women Travelers’ clubs within airports.

—Eric Krell