Tony Wheeler, Trailblazer

While most entrepreneurs begin with a business plan and startup funding, Tony and Maureen Wheeler got started with nothing more than a travel plan, a few pounds and a car.

 

“We set off from London in an old car, planning to drive as far east as it would go. We drove to Afghanistan, where we sold the car for a small profit, then carried on and ended up in Australia.”

 

That journey led to Across Asia on the Cheap, the first in a long line of travel guides written and published by Tony and Maureen. Today, Lonely Planet has more than 500 staff members, 300 authors with offices in Melbourne, London and Oakland. And it relies on Dell for all of its technology solutions.“Dell has also been a good partner. When we need things done in a certain way, they help us get there.”

Always ready for the next adventure, Tony began using computers in the early 1980s. Initially, an accounting tool, he saw it’s potential as a word processing, storage and publishing tool. “This was before desktop publishing was introduced. So we were kind of pioneering in that way.” Pioneering too was his repurposing of AutoCAD to draft the maps for his guidebooks.

 

In 1994, Lonely Planet reached two more technology milestones. First, it launched its Web site on the fledgling Internet. That same year, Tony and Maureen uploaded daily travel logs onto the Web to document their road trip across the United States in a ‘59 Cadillac. “The word ‘blog’ wasn’t invented for years. But looking back now, what we did was a daily blog.”

Challenge: When you’re traveling to some of the loneliest places on earth, technical support is always a luxury and rarely an option. “Any equipment that lives with me has to stand up to a lot of things.”

For Tony, who’s been traveling and writing with a laptop for some 20 years, reliability is the top priority, and Dell is his laptop of choice.

 

“We decided at one stage we really needed to concentrate on one particular manufacturer. And it had to be something that was robust and reliable. I’ve got to say I am very tough on them. They do have a hard life, my laptops.” On a trip to Afghanistan in 2007, Tony put his Dell Latitude through a real shock test.

 

“There is this amazing minaret right in the middle of Afghanistan, the Minaret of Jam. And I’ve always wanted to see it. But the road was terrible. I think we went 15 miles an hour for 15 hours. I finally made it, took photographs and then downloaded them to my laptop. The local people looking at these photographs were amazed. It really excited them.”

For Tony, happiness is a key part of his definition of success. Money is a component, but it can’t be the priority. “I think in business, the most important thing of all is to do something that you love doing and you believe in. I think if you go into a business thinking, ‘I’m going into this business to make money,’ it’s not going to work.”