Christopher J. Falvey is the co-owner of Unique NOLA Tours. Having a passion for everything New Orleans in the many decades before he moved to the city in 2006, he saw a need for more intimate experiences for the millions of tourists that come to the city. He soon found that to be more rewarding than the software development company he had founded in 2001. Christopher has two decades of experience building companies from the ground up in myriad sectors such as tourism, accounting, and the record industry.
Tell us about your childhood and where you grew up
I grew up in Chicago. I started my first business when I was 19, a web design company in 1995. Well ahead of the curve there.
How did you get started as an entrepreneur?
After the dot-com bust of 1999-2000, there was so much work that had been ignored for pie-in-the-sky dreams. We picked up on that consulting and then built various software products. I’ve been in software all my entrepreneurial career, last building software for the tours and activities industry. Then I decided to start my own tour company with my partner.
What is one business lesson you would tell a startup founder?
The single most important thing I learned this year is that finding the right team of contractors/employees is absolutely worth the investment of time and heartburn it causes. Rather than hiring (in our case) any/all tour guides that apply… we put an effort into making sure we had ones that are flexible, willing to learn, nice, and available (“the best ability is availability.”) Our 2022 hiring practices was not easy (not having enough guides at times because we were pickier)… but the end result is the best team we’ve ever had.
