Today we’d like to introduce you to Nicole Sahbaee & Tyshana Richard. Them and their team share their story with us below:
The founders, Nicole and Tyshana, met in 2014 while Nicole was pursuing an Education degree and Tyshana was pursuing a Film & TV degree at Howard University. In the spring of 2015, they both decided to participate in Alternative Spring Break (ASB), an annual service trip hosted by Howard University. During the first ASB meeting they found out that they were placed on the same trip to St. Louis, MO and they never looked back from there.
Each year they committed to participating in ASB where they traveled to Detroit, MI, St. Croix, USVI and Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. In addition to the ASB trips, they kept their adventures up by traveling to Cuba, Panama, and South Africa together. It was during their Junior year, while they were in Cape Town, South Africa that they recognized the need for an HBCU Alumni travel community and that’s where the idea of En Root Travel began.
The two waited until they graduated in 2018 to start putting their efforts in motion and planning the very first En Root Travel trip to South Africa, the place where it all began. Nicole and Tyshana began to set the foundation for the business and planned the trip. When they arrived to South Africa in 2019, they had a wonderful time with just a handful of participants. It’s really been amazing for them to see how much the business has grown since then. At this point they’ve hosted 10+ trips throughout the Caribbean, Africa, within the States, and more. In 2019, when they incorporated the business they were just a 2 person team figuring out how to spread the word about the experiences they wanted to give to fellow HBCU Alumni and now they’ve grown to have a team of interns, trip planners, ambassadors and more who represent En Root Travel. The founders stated, “It’s incredible to take a look back and see how much we’ve grown and how many people we’ve been able to positively impact in such a short period of time.”
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It definitely hasn’t been a smooth road, there were a lot of obstacles we’ve had to overcome and gaps we had to bridge to get our business to the point it’s at.
In 2019 our biggest struggle was learning what it means to be a business and how to manage it properly.
In 2020-2021, it was the struggle of maintaining our business during a pandemic with no end date and no means to travel.
In 2022, when we started bringing on team members, it was how do we navigate Employer – Employee relationships properly.
Although we’ve had many struggles to figure out and overcome, we always find a solution and the challenges we’ve faced have only made us stronger as a business and a team.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
What sets us apart is our intentionality. We are very intentional when it comes to curating a trip. We spend months planning our trips and making sure they are as seamless as possible. It’s extremely important to us to provide a safe and fun environment where our travelers can learn, get to know each other, and have a memorable experience. We are also very intentional when it comes to our service projects on trips. We make a huge effort to participate/create service opportunities that meet the needs of the community by working with partners on the ground.
Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
Resilience. There were so many reasons that we could have hung it up and just said it wasn’t going to work out throughout the pandemic, navigating financial matters and simply having an enormous workload for two recent grads who were also beginning their own careers in demanding industries.
With all of those factors we still chose not to give up because we believed in our vision and at the end of the day we know that we have a friend to turn to when things get hard or complicated.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.enroottravel.com
- Instagram: @enroottravel
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/enroottravel
- Twitter: @enroottravel
