I am inspired by all that Beth Santos has created. It was an honor to speak to her for my podcast after meeting her in NYC at the Travel and Adventure Show where we were both speakers. Her LinkedIn says that she is disrupting travel for women but I believe she is changing the world for women! You can watch our interview on YouTube, read the transcript below or listen on your favorite podcast platform.
Wanderful‘s book club will discuss my new book, BRAVE-ish, on Dec 16, 2023. I hope you will join us and I cannot wait to read her new book, Wander Woman, coming on March 5, 2024. Learn more below about Wanderful, Wanderfest and see you in Utah for Women in Travel Summit in April 12-14 2024.
Another title for this interview was “Maximum Beth: Disrupting Travel for Women, Changing the Wander World Worldwide – A Community Builder’s Journey” If you are traveling in Boston, make sure to eat at her Ula Cafe. Thank you to Beth Santos for making time to share her incredible journey!
Listen or watch our interview on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or your favorite podcast platform
TRANSCRIPT from our interview below: (filmed Sept 28, 2023)
Lisa Niver:
This is Lisa Niver and I am the author of Brave-ish, One Breakup, Six Continents and Feeling Fearless after Fifty. I am so beyond thrilled and excited to be here today with Beth Santos. Hello Beth. Welcome. Thank you for being here.
Hi. Thanks so much for having me.
Lisa Niver:
Oh my goodness. It is. I’ve been researching you and it’s hard to sum you up because you are a force of nature. I appreciate that your social media is called Maximum Beth, because I think you are constantly at maximum capacity, what you’ve accomplished for women. I know you focus on women in travel, but I think that you are really changing women in business and women entrepreneurship for everyone, so thank you.
Beth Santos:
Aw, I really appreciate that. That’s really sweet. Maximum Beth is what they called me in college, so the name stuck and I like to keep busy.
Lisa Niver:
One of the things I noticed since you brought up college, let’s start there, is that you have a lot of places that you worked in conjunction. Being in an acapella group is a very specific kind of music where everyone’s piece makes a big difference. You really have to bring everyone along or it doesn’t work.
Beth Santos:
Absolutely. That’s an interesting insight. I also did crew in college, which is very similar to that. Everyone works as a team. Everyone has to put in their unique part, and you make something. That’s how I’ve always viewed leadership. Honestly, in running a business, you are salesperson, number one. When I say sales, it doesn’t always mean financial. It also means you have to sell this idea to every single person that works with you, who collaborates with you. Your team has to believe at least close to as passionately as you do about the work that you’re doing. Otherwise, you’re not going to get as far as you want to go.
Lisa Niver:
I did wonder about that. How did you get involved in crew? It’s a tough sport. 4:30 AM workouts.
Beth Santos:
It’s funny. My husband now is just like, really? You were an athlete. My current hardcore workout is pulling weeds in my garden. But no, I loved it. I actually did it in high school first. I grew up in coastal New Hampshire and so you would do any kind of workout if you saw the view that I went out with. We would do afternoon workouts when we were kids. It’s just something that I fell in love with. When I went to college, I thought I’m going to keep this going. 4:30 AM Yes, it’s pretty rough. But also there’s a lot of comradery in it, to all be together and to see the sunrise. It was a really magical time in my life. I don’t know if I could do it now, but I loved doing it then.
Lisa Niver:
I’ve read a lot of research about women CEOs that make a big impact. Most of them come from an athletic team background and understand how to bring people together and what coaching is required.
Beth Santos:
Yes. I believe that. Absolutely.
Lisa Niver:
You’ve brought together a hundred million women with Wanderful. That is incredible.
Beth Santos:
Thank you. Yes, it’s been a lot of fun. It all comes from, when we first started, I was in business school and I was interacting with the startup ecosystem. A lot of businesses start with an idea, and then the second thing they’re trying to do is they’re trying to build a customer base. For us, it was always the opposite. We always had this community and this understanding with each other. It started from when I began blogging and built an audience and then realized we have all these women who are having a lot of the same pains. Let’s create something that addresses that. It evolved organically in its own way. It’s been really fun to just continue to serve the community and to give them great ways to connect with each other and to feel confident and supported in travel, which isn’t always how the travel industry makes us feel as women.
Lisa Niver:
Absolutely. So 2009, kind of the beginning of the blog ecosystem you started Wanderful.
Beth Santos:
Yes.
Lisa Niver:
Then you came up with the Women in Travel Summit, which is about 10 years old now, right? This is going to be the 10th year?
Beth Santos:
Yes! We started our very first one in 2014. This year is our 10th one. And then we’ll have done it for 10 full years next year.
Lisa Niver:
It’s really incredible. And 500 people came to Puerto Rico?
Beth Santos:
Yes. Over 500. It was our biggest one. It was 550 people and 50 million impressions.
Lisa Niver:
You are a force. And then you invented something else new in New Orleans. Tell us about WanderFest.
Beth Santos:
I started with a travel blog. I was doing a lot of my own travel which developed into an online magazine, which then developed into a community. It was actually over COVID that we leaned even more into the community aspect of things because none of us could travel anywhere and we all wanted to be in touch with each other and to share our travel stories. So we’ve really built out a lot since then. We’ve been evolving for forever. I feel like every year we’re a different company. Women in Travel Summit (WITS) was something that came about kind of happenstance. It’s a travel creator summit. So in 2014 we had been thinking– we’ve started this travel blog. It’s turned into something. We’re seeing a lot of other people and other women that are building travel blogs.
Let’s bring everyone together. And then it took off. WITS has been around now for 10 whole years. And we thought, our biggest event is a travel creator event, but actually our community is mostly travelers, just women who love to travel. We have a very outspoken and very important component of our community that’s content creators and small business owners. But if you look at sheer numbers, most women are just travel lovers. And so we thought, let’s bring them together and celebrate travel and sisterhood. We got an outdoor plaza in New Orleans. We had music, it was a celebration of travel with the context of travel being culture and being world culture and being the experience of trying new things.
It wasn’t all travel workshops; we did a second line parade. We learned about the history of the New Orleans Baby Dolls. We really leaned into local culture. We had music. We had the first and only all women brass band that did a performance that we all danced to. We had all sorts of like small woman-owned businesses that had tables. It was a lot of fun kind of bringing everyone together. The weather was not the best. It was very, very cold. That’s the only thing I probably would change for the future. The day before the event, it was 75 and sunny, we woke up that morning and it was 39 and the wind was so strong that cinder blocks were being pushed by the wind across the stage.
The weather was horrible and a lot of the women went to the mall next door. At Forever 21, they bought hats and coats and then came back to the festival. As a traveler, you learn that the weather is weather. If you travel to Rome for the first time and it’s raining, you still have to go and enjoy it. You don’t just say, oh, I’ll come back next time. So that’s what I love about travelers.
Lisa Niver:
I love that because I agree that you have to take advantage of what it is. Particularly as women, there’s a lot of things that we can’t control and we have to keep moving forward. And so for anyone who’s listening, we’ll link to all of these amazing things that Beth is talking about WITS, the Women in Travel Summit, and Wander Fest. And during Covid, you invented a cafe as well?
Beth Santos:
I didn’t invent it. I actually took over Ula Cafe. It’s a cafe that’s been in our neighborhood in Boston for the last 15 years. It was being sold in the middle of the pandemic. My husband and I looked at each other with no restaurant experience whatsoever except waiting some tables in high school and college. We saw a community gathering space. Community is something that I have always felt a calling for in my professional career. I feel pretty good about my business capability and knowledge. And I thought, maybe we should do it. And we did. We took it over. We’ve been running it now for two years. It’s taught us so many things. There were so many lessons to learn along the way, but I actually think it’s made me a stronger business owner, even for Wanderful too, because these are two very, very different businesses.
And at the core it’s about community and connection. I think for both of them, you know, Wanderful is online and international ULA Cafe, which is our cafe is in person and face-to-face. But I think at the end of the day, both are tools that you use to connect with others on a human level. But the business model is wildly different. Learning both of them so intimately has actually supported the other ones. We’ve gotten better at our marketing with the café. For Wanderful, we’ve understood business economics better and been able to apply those to some of our products and services. It’s been great to be able to run both side by side. But for the first couple months, it was a pretty wild story. All the things that we had to learn <laugh>
Lisa Niver:
And there are so many different kinds of regulations and food safety and staffing for a café!
Beth Santos:
Everything was different. The building inspector would come by and we didn’t know anything about anything. But it was great. We had a great team. The group that sold the café to us, we were the underdogs. There were many other businesses that were vying for the cafe that were going to break down the café as it stood and then reopen it as a second or third store franchise. They took a bet on us. We were local in the community. It’s the café that’s five minutes down the street from us. We wanted to keep it what it was and jmake it better. We made this whole pitch deck about it and what our vision was. And I like to think that people saw something in that and that our community was really excited to support that. That’s what has carried us and a lot of humor and patience. <Laugh>.
Lisa Niver:
Yes. You have your hands in many different businesses. I love on your LinkedIn that one of your jobs is a very busy 168 hour a week job with a lot of details. Can you explain to people about this job you have on LinkedIn?
Beth Santos:
So, a few months ago, I was thinking about my role as a mom. I am tired of us not giving parents the credit that they deserve for the work that they’re doing. I run a household. Every time I make travel plans, I’m making plans for four people. I run two businesses and get dinner on the table, and I thought, I’m going to add this to my LinkedIn because this is a job too. People have done it before. If people did that more, whether they’re parents or whether they’re caregivers of another kind, we forget that we have this whole other part of our professional careers.
Part of it too was me seeing myself fully. It sounds like I do a lot and I do do a lot, but I think I, like anyone else, I’m always comparing myself to other people and the accomplishments of other people. I remember there were times when I’d be down on myself that I didn’t do X, Y, or Z. And then I think, I’ve been raising two humans at the exact same time. Why am I not acknowledging how valuable and important that work is? I put mom in chief. I decided to phrase it like a real, I’m using like air quotes real job, where I basically said, you know executive assistant, primary social planner responsible for four ongoing executive calendars. Because that’s really what it is. All the things you have to remember and do, and your brain is working a mile a minute, and you get paid for none of it. In fact, it’s pretty expensive.
Lisa Niver:
I think it’s brilliant. People are starting to recognize more and more the 168 hours of unpaid labor. I think the reason why as parents and women, the air quotes come up is because it’s not paid labor. It is real work. When your child is sick or you have to go in the ambulance with someone, you have a different impact at work the next day because part of your brain is exhausted. And concerned. And you’re trying to make so much happen in the relationship part of our lives. We talk about in business, people work with people who they like, but the people that are closest to us in our family, somehow they don’t get recognized as taking up space in our brains and our day. I loved what you did. I agree travel planning for four calendars with two kids, they’re both in elementary school right now, or littler?
Beth Santos:
The youngest is two, she’s just about to start daycare and my older daughter is in first grade.
Lisa Niver:
Those are busy times when you’re still tying shoes for people. And I believe you’re having an addition, right?
Beth Santos:
Yes. In January we have our third coming.
Lisa Niver:
We wish you happy and healthy. In Hebrew, we say B’sha’a tova, that the baby should arrive at the right time, healthy and a great addition. We know that you’re doing so much with the WITS summit, the café, Wanderfest and the ShesWanderful Community. And like me, you have a book coming out.
Beth Santos:
I love this work. I love the travel industry, I love entrepreneurship. I actually started writing this book years ago. I have like this message I want to share about, traveling by yourself. I wrote the very first chapter, the introduction, when I was pregnant with my first daughter. Then I had her and went into the whirlwind of being a parent for the first time. Then got back into it when I was pregnant with my second child and said I think there’s something here. I really want to write this. And it just so happened it was like the stars had aligned. I found an agent very quickly. She found a publisher very quickly. And the book deal was signed three weeks before I gave birth.
For my maternity leave, I had time sitting and thinking and nursing and thoughts with myself. I had just talked to Dr. Anu Tarana, who published a book called beyond Guilt Trips, Mindful Travel in An Unequal World. I was talking with her about her book and she said, she’s a mother, she has two kids. And she said she wrote her books seven minutes at a time because seven minutes a day was all she had to work on it. And hearing her say that gave me the validation to say, you know what? I can do this. I don’t need to be sitting down for 10 hours a day. Granted, I did sometimes, but I felt this is something I can actually do. I started and I just finished all of the rounds of edits and all of the back and forth with the copy editors on Friday, which today is it less than a week ago. (recorded Sept 2023)
It’s at the publishing house, and I am relaxing now. They that a book is like a baby. But I actually think writing a book is like if you had to go through labor for nine months, just the labor part and then afterward, all the fun stuff happens. So it’s like the reverse of having a baby in my mind. But yes, we’re very excited. Wander Woman How to Reclaim Your Space, Find Your Voice, and Travel the World, Solo is coming out in spring of 2024 on March 5!
Lisa Niver:
That is so exciting. I love what you said about writing in seven minutes and small drips, because for my book, I did 50 challenges before I turned 50, and one of the things I always tell people is to start with very small steps. Those little things add up, just like the seven minutes of writing adds up. Just don’t give up.
Beth Santos:
It becomes more manageable when you think about that. I mentioned there were plenty of days I wrote more, but sometimes your brain stops you with those expectations so much. If you think I have to set aside four hours today to write, you’re never going to do it. But if you say, all I need is 10 minutes, then you might find that time that you needed later. You’ve been able to kind of convince yourself this is doable. I can do this. And actually to get started.
Lisa Niver:
I know you have 50 cities where you have Wanderful meetups. What’s the best way for someone to get involved? You have the Creator Summit and Wander Fest. When someone comes to the site, what are they finding? How do they get involved? What’s the best step?
Beth Santos:
Everything related to Wanderful can be found at our website, which is sheswanderful.com and that will connect you to our membership. There’s a monthly fee for members. You can be a travel member, you can be a creator member where you actually get support on your career as a content creator. There’s a small business membership. And then it lists out all of our local hubs around the world including our global events, our trips. So everything that’s going on there you can find right on our website.
Lisa Niver:
That’s amazing. And what about people that are listening to you –you’re a serial entrepreneur, you’ve done so many things and they think I, I have a small business idea. Do you have any recommendations for someone that’s thinking about it but hasn’t really taken too much action?
Beth Santos:
The first thing you want to do is you really want to just research the market and understand is my idea viable now. Back in the history books, I actually taught social entrepreneurship at a university. One of the things that you learn in entrepreneurship is never, ever start with the answer first. Don’t ever just say, I have an idea for a cool travel backpack that does X, Y, and Z, because you’re not looking at it from the problem. You should always think about your business as what is the problem that’s out there that my business is solving for. If you have an idea, I want you to actually take a step back and think about what problem is my idea solving for? And really get deep and dirty with that problem.
You need to really understand it in its nuances. Why are people facing this? Who is facing this problem? What have been they been trying to do that hasn’t been working? And that might actually change your idea around a little bit more. And then after that, what you want to do is research and see is anyone else already doing this? And if it’s not, widely used across the board, I think you have a really compelling idea that you could move on. There’s a lot of pressure now to just drop everything and start a business and leave your full-time job and take the leap and take the plunge. I see absolutely no harm in doing this part-time and working your nine to five. Work on this new business after hours or during your lunch break or whenever you have time for it, because it does take a lot of time and energy to really make this into a career and to make money from it. Unless you come from a place where money is not an issue, you should be thoughtful about how much personal investment you’re putting into this, both financial, but also time and not give yourself the pressure to have to dive in. That’s the only legit way to do it. You can do this at any pace, just like writing a book. You can do this at any pace you want to do. So those would be my primary pieces of advice.
Lisa Niver:
That is such good advice. Now, I want to take business class with you. Do you have workshops on this at Wanderful?
Beth Santos:
I used to. I haven’t done it in a while. I used to run a Prosperity Circle that I might bring back at some point. It was a mini-MBA with everything I learned getting my business degree. It was actually super useful for people building digital companies and communities and modern-day businesses especially in travel. We had a good group going. Teaching takes a lot of work. I wanted to really give my students all the attention they deserved and remembering everybody’s business in addition to running my own business was a lot. But maybe one day I’ll bring it back, Lisa.
Lisa Niver:
Is some of this business acumen in the book? Is the book a memoir? a business book?
Beth Santos:
That’s a great question. It is part manifesto, part self-help guide, and part memoir. Actually, many of the concepts that I talk about, I base them in my own real life experiences as a traveler. This is the book that I wish somebody had handed to me when I first started traveling alone. The book talks about how to do it. It also talks about the broader issues that women face when they travel for the first time and might be unprepared for including the gender dynamics in new places. Your identity, the realization that you’ve been treated a certain way in your own home city your whole life.
And then you go into a new place and you realize, wow, people look at me different here, they perceive me differently or they expect things differently from me. My book talks about sexism and about safety. I wrote about being aware of the impact that you make as a traveler when you go somewhere. I talk about reentry and the really complicated feelings that come out of coming home and realizing that you feel different. And a lot of that feeling is internal and a lot of people might not see it on the outside. And how do you reconcile that? It’s really an honest supportive real talk nonfiction about the things that people aren’t telling women when they prepare to travel the world. Why travel should be for everyone, why it’s not always marketed that way. And hopefully giving women the confidence and enough information to feel like they can do this and they can take that next step toward that travel life that they’ve been wanting for themselves. My book is available for pre-order now. You can find it on Barnes and Noble. You can find it at Target. The publisher is Grand Central Publishing, which is a Hachette company.
Lisa Niver:
You are such an inspiration. I read on your website that 85% of travel decisions are made by women and you’re providing so much information and inspiration for people to go travel, to be business owners, to take credit for all they do as chief executive of the family. I have so enjoyed spending this time with you. I appreciate you and wish you so much health and happiness with all of these incredible additions that are coming into your community and your company, the Café, a child and your new book. You definitely are a wonder, Wander Woman.
Beth Santos:
Thank you Lisa. It’s been a real pleasure and I’m looking forward to reading your book, BRAVE-ish, One Breakup, Six Continents and Feeling Fearless After Fifty. I can’t wait to dig in.
Lisa Niver:
Before I let you go, as a last question I’ve been asking people since my book Brave-ish is about challenges, I’m not sure there’s anything else because we’ve talked about a lot of things that you have taken on, but maybe instead of a challenge you hope to accomplish, maybe you could talk about a time when you didn’t feel so courageous or brave, but you had to take a step anyway.
Beth Santos:
Let me start with this, a lot of people misunderstand what bravery and courage are. We think to ourselves that being brave means you’re not afraid. Being brave means that you’re very afraid and that you do it anyway. I also believe that if there’s something that makes you nervous, that is a signal that you should do it. You should try it because, life is short. We only have so much time to make mistakes and I always tell my husband, now it’s not as funny because we have a cafe, there’s always Starbucks. Like there’s always something that you can do. I have been much more of a risk taker in my professional life than maybe a lot of people would be because, there’s always Starbucks.
All of it scares me especially, as a parent. It becomes a lot scarier because you realize I could eat ramen every day and not have any quality of life, but I’m not going to let my kids live like that. It’s really terrifying to step into the place of trying to make a business work and also trying to be a parent. In our American system, there’s not a lot of support for parents of any kind or caregivers of any kind. You do feel very alone doing that, even if you are parenting with a partner or a big family. That has definitely been the most challenging part of my career to date is finding the unique ways to balance that, to push back against the system, to push back against expectations of professionals and for professional women. And still asserting that I can have it all, that I don’t have to choose the way I want to live my life. And that just that plain and civil fact has been something that every day is absolutely terrifying. But yet, it’s almost like you don’t have a choice. You really don’t have a choice either. So you just keep pushing forward.
Lisa Niver:
Thank you so much. I am inspired and I think everybody listening is inspired that all the risks that you’ve taken and all these seeds that you have planted have bloomed into this incredible garden. And I can’t wait to be at Wanderfest and see you at the Women in Travel Summit. Thank you and I and all my listeners wish you the best.
Beth Santos:
Thank you so much, Lisa. Likewise.
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