Lisa Pomerantz decided to follow Dave Matthews Band around Europe after college. Along the way, she got inspired to write a business plan that merged her passions of travel and music.
“I wrote an incredibly embarrassing business plan,” she says of her company’s humble beginnings as a fan booking service. “It was so embarrassing that the last time I read it, I promised myself I’d never look at it again.”
This painful-to-read plan evolved into what is now Madison House Travel, a full-service travel booking company that caters to the likes of Jack Johnson, Wilco, Vampire Weekend, and Of Monsters and Men.
“I was doing it all wrong, by the way,” Pomerantz says. When the band members returned to the U.S., she followed them to Boulder, Colorado with the plan in hand. She was hell-bent on meeting with the band’s manager. “He told me he was the wrong person.”
But the next 30 minutes led her to the right one. When Dave Matthews himself joined their table, she felt too out of place and got up to stand at the bar where she met a man, who had a band named String Cheese Incident. He offered Pomerantz the chance to book his band’s travel.
“I totally shrugged it off like, ‘No thanks, I’m waiting out for the big guys,’” Pomerantz remembers.
Two months later, she called the man from String Cheese Incident back. He gave her office space and $2,000 to start booking fan travel. This was back in 1999. She booked over 10,000 package tours that year, charging over $1 million on an AMEX card.
“I got a package in the mail one day with this huge suitcase. It was my black card invitation,” she says. “I was 25 years old. “
Over the next three years, she booked tailored fan experiences throughout the U.S., as well as a unique trip to Costa Rica. “I was just dropped in Costa Rica. I had to find a venue; find the beer. I had a root canal for free.”
Then the dawn of the Internet happened. It became the difference between fans letting you do your job and fans fact checking every quote you gave them. “It got old fast, so I decided to just do travel for bands,” she says.
Madison House Travel is celebrating its 16th birthday. Pomerantz was one of the first members of the WeWork Meatpacking community and hasn’t left the coveted location since it opened in 2011.
“I am the kind of person who has to have camaraderie in the workplace,” Pomerantz says. “Working from home has never been an option for me. I am a firm believer in spending money on office space and bedding. You spend two-thirds of your life in those places; you better make it a place you genuinely want to be.”
Sebi—her pup and O.P. (original pup, as he’s referred to) of WeWork Meatpacking—loves his office space, too.
“In the morning, when I try to get him out of bed, he doesn’t flinch when I offer food or a walk. But when I say ‘Want to go to work?’ he launches out of that bed like a cannon,” she says.
While Pomerantz hates generalizations and gender stereotypes, she does think women are more intuitive when it comes to anticipating what people need, which is crucial when booking travel for 30 guys on the road.
“The tour managers really rely on me to figure out what will make the touring process the most comfortable for the band,” she says. The show must go on, and it makes things a little smoother when those 30 guys are well fed, accommodated, and transported.
“I have been called a travel therapist on more than one occasion,” she says.
Photo credit: Lauren Kallen