This case study summarizes how Explorica, a leading educational travel services company, engaged its leaders, teams, and employees to better align around its purpose and improve performance. The company worked with Ingage to define its vision, mission, and values. This process helped coalesce the management team and staff behind a shared purpose and reduced internal tensions. As a result, Explorica saw revenue nearly double in three years, attrition drop 40%, and tension with IT evaporate. Aligning the organization around its purpose through defining and communicating vision, mission, and values helped Explorica significantly improve business outcomes.

1. Case Study: Explorica
Improving profitability by aligning leaders, teams and
individual talent to emotionally engage with their work.
© 2011 Ingage, Inc. All rights reserved. Not for distribution without attribution.

2. The question we answer
How do you engage yourself,
your employees and execs to
live and breathe your personal
and organizational
purpose ?

3. Case Study: Explorica
Explorica is a leading force in high school educational
travel services.
With revenues of $60 million, management’s focus was
shifting from growth and scale to margin expansion.
Corporate Goals:
Coalesce management team and company behind a vision
(purpose), mission, and values
Attract and retain sales and technology talent
Smooth out internal tensions

4. What was clouding progress?
Majority of staff was in telesales
and customer management…
Attrition was running
and was under 30
almost 30%
CTO was proficient but lacked
desire to be part of the team
IT was at odds with
the organization

5. Ingage was engaged
CEO and management team went through our Ingaging
Teams workshop…
Passion Pyramid Personal Priority Matrix
Balance Sheet
…and their outputs were aggregated, patterns were
identified, and collateral was generated and was
presented to the company for their comments

6. What was defined
Vision (Purpose) Create a better world by enriching every student
with a cultural experience through educational travel.
Mission To be the product leader in educational travel, helping
teachers and students discover the wonders of the
world through safe and reliable tour experiences.
Values Loyalty to our customers, teachers, partners, teammates and ourselves
Passion to empower students with learning and insight only travel can bestow
Reliability in delivering consistently high-quality experiences and relationships
Innovation in pushing boundaries and challenging the status quo

7. Impacts on Revenue and Profitability
“Our session together clearly has helped us coalesce into
a much more tightly knit, better communicating, highly
supportive and true 'team,' with quantifiable results.
We aren’t creating and selling merely a product, we are
selling a vision” —Mark Cestari, EVP Marketing & Sales, Explorica
Long Term Impact on Explorica’s business:
+ Management team, and company, rallied behind the outputs
+ Revenue almost doubled in 3 years
+ Attrition dropped 40%
+ CTO left on own accord; tension with IT evaporated

8. Other workshop/speaking clients

9. For more information, please contact:
Karen Davis, Co-Founder & Partner
303 665 4301
karen@ingageinc.com
Thank you for the gift of your time!