Chris Hoskins — Independent Representative · Meridian, Idaho
Rep-created website submitted for compliance review · buildyourtravelbiz.com · (208) 703-5448
All six pages of the site are reproduced in this document in navigation order.
For people who are good at their careers
and still feel trapped by them

You don't need another job. You need something that's actually yours.

I help corporate professionals start their own home-based travel business — with real training, someone who actually answers the phone, and none of the hype you've been scrolling past.

Text me the word BUILD

No pressure call. No slide deck. Just a straight conversation about whether this makes sense for you.

An empty open-plan office late at night
You already know this room. The question is how many more years you want to know it.

The raise came through and nothing changed. The title changed and nothing changed. You've built something genuinely impressive — and you don't own a single piece of it.

That realization is not a crisis. It's information. What you do with it over the next two years is the only part that matters.

Before anything else

Let me be direct about what this is.

You've been pitched before. You can smell vagueness from a mile away, and vagueness is exactly why you've said no to everything so far. So here's the whole thing, up front, before you give me a minute of your time.

  • 01
    It's a home-based travel business. You'd be starting your own.

    You'd be an independent business owner selling travel to other people and earning commission on what you sell. Not an employee. Not a contractor for me. Yours.

  • 02
    There's a startup cost and a monthly fee.

    Both are published in writing, along with a 30-day refund window and a first-year guarantee on those fees. I'm required to sell at the published price — I can't discount it and I can't bribe you to join, which I think is a good rule. I'll send you the documents and you can read every word before you decide anything.

  • 03
    Yes, it's a direct sales model. Yes, there's a team-building side.

    I'm not going to dance around that or invent a euphemism for it. Building a team is optional — plenty of people never touch it. If you want that path, it's there, and I'll teach it.

  • 04
    It is not passive, and it is not fast.

    Anyone telling you otherwise is either lying or hasn't done it. This is a business. It behaves like one: slow at first, awkward while you learn, compounding if you stay.

  • 05
    I won't show you my commission checks.

    Partly because I'm held to advertising rules that prohibit income claims. Mostly because a screenshot of my result tells you nothing about yours, and you're too smart to be moved by one.

Honest filtering

I'd rather have five of the right people than fifty of the wrong ones.

Most people who reach out to me aren't a fit, and I tell them so. That's not a sales tactic — it's the only way I can actually be useful to the people who are.

This is probably for you if

  • You've got a demanding job and five to ten focused hours a week — not forty
  • You're coachable but not naive. You ask hard questions and expect real answers
  • You're thinking in two-to-three-year horizons, not two-to-three-month ones
  • You genuinely like people and can hold a conversation without a script
  • You've been quietly researching ways out for a while now
  • You want a mentor who will tell you when you're wrong

This is not for you if

  • You're looking for passive income. This is not that, at all
  • You need it to replace your salary this quarter
  • You want someone else to do the work and cut you in
  • You're mainly here for discounted travel for yourself — that's genuinely not what I sell
  • You need total certainty before you'll move on anything
  • You'd resent being told the truth about your effort level

What you'd actually be building

Three things, and they compound in that order.

i.

A business you own

Not a side hustle app that pays per task. An actual independent business, with your own customers, that you can build at whatever pace your life allows.

ii.

Skills that transfer

Sales, marketing, client service, follow-through. The skills that make people money in every industry — and the ones a corporate job rarely lets you own end to end.

iii.

Clients who are yours

People who come back to you because you handled it properly last time. Those relationships belong to you — not to an employer — and they don't disappear when somebody decides to shut a site down.

The actual difference

Everyone sells the same thing at the same price. What you're really choosing is who trains you.

The product is identical no matter who you sign up with. The company is identical. The price is identical — legally, it has to be. The only variable is the person on the other end of the phone at 9pm when you're stuck.

I've personally helped five people start. Five — which is small enough that you'll actually get my attention. And I'm part of a wider team of close to three hundred agents that meets every week, so you're not learning this from one guy in Idaho with an opinion.

A 30-day onboarding path

Not a folder of PDFs. A sequenced week-by-week plan, so you always know the single next thing to do.

Weekly team training — Wednesdays, 6pm Mountain

Live, recorded if you miss it, and built around what the team is actually struggling with that week.

One-to-one with me in week one

We map your specific situation: your hours, your network, your goals. Then monthly check-ins after that.

A private group chat that's actually active

Ask a question at 11pm, get an answer. This is where most of the real learning happens.

Scripts, templates, and language

You shouldn't have to invent how to talk about this. I'll give you what works and help you make it sound like you.

Feedback you didn't ask for

If something you're doing isn't working, I'll say so. Politely. That's the entire value of a mentor.

Your first month

What actually happens after you say yes.

Days 1–3

Setup and orientation

You get enrolled, get access to the training platform, and we get on a call to build your specific 30-day plan. You'll know exactly what you're doing before you tell a single person.

Week 1

Training and language

You work through the core training and we practice how you'll talk about this — in your own voice, not a script you'd be embarrassed to read out loud.

Weeks 2–3

Your first real conversations

You start talking to people. Some go badly. We debrief them and adjust. This is the part everyone wants to skip and nobody can.

Week 4

Rhythm

We look at what happened, what you learned, and what your sustainable weekly cadence actually looks like against your real calendar. Then you keep going.


Testimonials

There aren't any on this page. That's deliberate.

I've helped five people start. I could ask all five of them for a glowing sentence, put their first names and a photo underneath, and you would have no way whatsoever to check a word of it. Which is precisely why testimonials on sites like this one are worth almost nothing.

So here's what I'd rather do. Ask me on our call and I'll put you directly in touch with somebody I've worked with. You can ask them anything you like, and I won't be on the line.

Ten minutes with a real person beats a quote I wrote and they approved.

Next step

Start the conversation. That's the whole ask.

Not a commitment. Not a demo. A conversation where you ask me every hard question you have, and I answer them straight — including the ones where the honest answer is "this probably isn't for you."

Fastest way to reach me

Text me the word BUILD and I'll get back to you personally — usually same day.

Text (208) 703-5448
A quiet home workspace in morning light
My story

I had a heart attack at my desk at thirty-seven.

I'm not opening with that for effect. It's the reason I do what I do now, and burying it three paragraphs down would be its own kind of dishonesty.

Eleven years at a bank I thought I'd retire from

I spent eleven years at one of the largest banks in the country. I started at the absolute bottom — entry level, no title worth printing — and got promoted about seven times over ten years until I was managing a team of bankers.

I want to be clear that I was good at it. The benefits were excellent. The retirement plan was excellent. I assumed I would retire there.

I also drove to the same building for eleven years and had to talk myself into walking through the door most mornings. It was a heavily HR-managed environment — everything careful, everything processed, everything on somebody else's schedule. For lack of a better description, it felt like working with Mister Rogers.

Then they shut our site down. Big round of layoffs, severance packages, and I was one of them. Eventually everyone was.

Here's the part that surprised me. I wasn't shocked, and I wasn't upset. I felt relief. An enormous amount of weight came off my shoulders in that meeting, and that's when it occurred to me I'd been carrying something heavy for a very long time without noticing.

I didn't understand how bad it had been for me until it was over.

Then I rebuilt the same thing with a different logo

I went into another corporate job, also in finance. Different building, same feeling. Sitting at a desk all day, on calls all day, pushing products I didn't necessarily believe in.

December 12, 2022

I was at my desk, on a sales call, when it started.

I was born on December 8, 1985. So I was thirty-seven years and four days old.

Lying in a hospital bed, the first thing I thought needed to change wasn't my job. It was everything around it. I'd been sitting down all day, every day, for years. I smoked. I ate badly. I had been prioritising my income over my health for so long that it genuinely hadn't occurred to me those two things were in competition.

Then the other thoughts arrived, in the order I imagine everybody gets them. What would my kids do without me. What would my family do. Is my life insurance actually set up properly, or do I just assume it is.

I quit smoking. I started going to the gym. I followed the doctor's orders and changed how I ate.

I want to be honest about the sequence, because most versions of this story skip it. I did not have a revelation and quit my job the next morning. I fixed my body first, and that took months. Only once that had settled down did I start looking hard at what I was doing with forty-plus hours of every week.

You spend more time with your employer than you do at home. It's worth being deliberate about who that is.

I overcorrected first

I stayed about four more months, in a different role, working from home rather than going back into that office. It was still wrong. So I left.

Then I swung the pendulum much too far. I went from being chained to a desk all day to an outside sales job where I was pounding the pavement all day instead. Opposite problem, same exhaustion.

Travel is where it finally landed in the middle.

"Oh God, this is another one of those"

That was my honest first reaction when this was put in front of me. Oh God, this is another one of those MLMs where you have to recruit people and blah blah blah.

I'd been approached about Amway and Scentsy over the years. Neither was for me. I didn't want to buy inventory, hit a minimum purchase to stay qualified, or keep product stacked up in my garage.

My family's contribution was: "If they give you a website, you know you're in a pyramid scheme."

You are currently reading a website. I built it myself. Make of that what you will.

What actually got me past the hesitation was fairly unglamorous. I already knew several people doing it, so I could ask real questions and get real answers instead of a presentation. There's no inventory. No minimum purchase. No quota I have to hit to stay in good standing. And there's a refund window, so the downside was defined before I started rather than after.

It was the lowest barrier I had ever seen to actually owning a business.

I sat on it for a couple of days, asked a few follow-up questions, and started.

The first ninety days

The training is self-paced, which mattered, because I was doing it at strange hours around everything else. Most people take about two weeks. I pushed and finished in roughly one — not because I'm clever, but because I worked out early that training doesn't earn you anything. Opening for business does.

That turned out to be the hardest lesson of the whole thing, and it's the one I now repeat to everybody I work with: you do not need to know everything before you start. There is an effectively endless amount of training available in this industry and you could disappear into it for six months. Don't. Learn enough to open your doors, then learn the rest while you're actually working.

The first person I helped start their own travel business was a former roommate of mine, coming out of the insurance industry. He was hesitant. I think everybody is at some point — I certainly was.

Plenty of people said no. My friend in real estate wanted to stay focused on selling homes. My sister-in-law is happy where she is in the service industry. My mom passed. Various friends passed.

That's normal and I've stopped taking it personally. Most people are settled into what they've got, and there is genuinely nothing wrong with that. I'm looking for the ones who aren't.

Where I am now

I run a couple of different businesses, I'm raising a family, and I travel as much as I can manage.

I'm also building something. It's a CRM designed specifically for travel agents — clients, itineraries, payments, notes, marketing, follow-up emails and texts, with a lot of AI underneath it. Six tools in one. I'm building it because my team and I needed it and I got tired of waiting for somebody else to make it.

That's probably the most honest summary of where I've ended up. I stopped waiting for other people to build the thing I needed.

Why I help other people start

I've personally helped five people start their own travel business. Five. Not a hundred.

I'd rather give you that number straight than dress it up — and honestly, it's the reason I'm any use to you. Five is small enough that you'll actually get my attention. When you text me, I answer.

I'm also part of a wider team of close to three hundred agents that meets every single week. So you're not learning this from one guy in Idaho with an opinion. You get me, and you get them.

As for why I bother: somebody did it for me. When I started I had three or four proper sit-down meetings with people already in the business who told me what to focus on and what to ignore. That's the only reason I got moving instead of drowning in training modules.

And because I spent eleven years being managed, and another stretch selling products I didn't believe in, and I know precisely what that costs you. If you're reading this at a desk you've been talking yourself into walking up to every morning — I've been there. I'd like to help if I can.

Text me the word BUILD
The system

You're not choosing a company. You're choosing a coach.

I want to be very clear about this, because it's the thing almost nobody says out loud: the business, the product, and the price are exactly the same regardless of who enrolls you. You could sign up with a stranger on the internet tonight and get an identical product.

What you would not get is a person who has done this from inside a demanding corporate job, who answers the phone, and who has a structured plan for your first thirty days. That's the only thing I'm actually offering you — and it's the only thing that reliably separates the people who build something from the people who quit in month three.


What I commit to you

I answer

Text, call, message. Not always instantly — I have a life — but always. If you've enrolled with me, you're not going to be left wondering.

A structured start, not a firehose

A sequenced 30-day path where you always know the next single action. Overwhelm is the number one reason people quit early, and it's almost entirely preventable.

Live weekly training — Wednesdays, 6pm Mountain

Recorded for anyone who can't make it. Built around what the team is actually stuck on that week, not a fixed curriculum on repeat.

Straight answers, including inconvenient ones

If your plan won't work, I'll tell you. If this isn't right for you, I'll tell you that too — before you spend money, not after.

Zero pressure culture

I won't ask you to make a list of a hundred friends. I won't ask you to post things you find humiliating. If a tactic makes you cringe, we find a different one.

Room to build at your pace

Some months you'll have ten hours a week. Some months your day job will eat you alive. Both are fine. Consistency over years beats intensity over weeks.

The other half

What I need back from you.

Mentorship is not a service you purchase. It's a trade, and it fails when only one side shows up. Here's my side of the expectations.

  • 01
    Show up to what you commit to

    If you say you'll be on the call, be on the call. If your week explodes, tell me — that's completely fine. Going quiet is what kills momentum.

  • 02
    Do the awkward part

    Every person who builds anything here has a stretch of conversations that go badly. There is no version of this where you skip that and still succeed.

  • 03
    Be honest with me about your hours

    Five real hours a week is workable. Five imaginary hours a week is not. I'd much rather build a plan around your actual life than your aspirational one.

  • 04
    Represent it accurately

    No income claims, no exaggeration, no pressure on people who've said no. I hold my team to this without exception. It protects them, it protects you, and frankly it works better.

  • 05
    Give it a real runway

    If your plan is to try for six weeks and see, please don't start. Come to me when you're ready to give something a genuine year.

If that sounds like a fair trade, let's talk.

Text me the word BUILD
Questions

The questions you're actually asking.

Including the two you were going to Google privately later. I'd rather answer them here.

Yes. It's a direct sales company with a network marketing compensation structure. I'm not going to invent a softer word for it, because you'd find out in ten minutes anyway and then you'd have a reason not to trust anything else I said.

What that means practically: I earn commission when I sell the business to someone, and I can earn additional commission based on sales made by people I've personally mentored. That's the model. You should know it before you spend a dollar, not after.

No — and I'd rather explain the distinction than be offended by the question.

A pyramid scheme pays people purely for recruiting other people. There's no genuine product, no customer outside the organization, and it collapses mathematically by design. That's illegal in the United States.

Here there's an actual product sold to actual members of the public: travel. Regular people book trips, and the agent earns a commission on that booking. That's the revenue engine underneath everything.

And here's the part most people in my position won't say: the direct sales industry has genuinely earned a lot of its bad reputation. Plenty of people join companies like this, spend money, and make nothing at all. That's real and I'm not going to pretend it isn't. What I can control is how I run my own team — honestly, with real training, and without ever pressuring someone into something they can't afford or don't want.

I'm not going to answer that with a number, for two reasons.

First, I'm bound by advertising rules that prohibit income claims — and honestly those rules exist for good reason. Second, and more importantly: anyone who shows you a screenshot of their commission check is showing you their result, not a forecast of yours. You already know that. It's why the screenshots don't work on you.

What I'll tell you plainly: most people who join any direct sales company earn little or nothing, and many quit within the first year. The people who build something real treat it like a business — consistent weekly hours, genuine skill development, and a multi-year time horizon.

The company publishes an official income disclosure statement with the actual distribution of earnings. I'll send it to you along with everything else, and I'd strongly encourage you to read the whole thing before you decide.

There's a one-time startup cost and a monthly fee. I'm required to sell at the company's published price — I can't discount it, run a sale, or offer you a signing bonus. I think that's a good rule, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who broke it.

Rather than list prices here, I'll send you the official documents where every fee, term, guarantee and refund policy is written out in full. Read all of it. If a number surprises you later, I've done my job badly.

Yes, and more than most businesses give you.

There's a 30-day window where you can cancel in writing and get your enrollment fee back, less anything you've earned in that time.

There's also a first-year guarantee. If you come up short against the fees you've paid the company over your first twelve months, they refund you the difference. As far as I know it's the only guarantee like it in home-based business.

Now the part people skim, which I'd rather you didn't. That first-year guarantee has a specific list of things you have to actually do to qualify — finish the training inside your first ninety days, attend a set number of webinars, complete at least one real booking, meet a booking requirement every quarter, keep your website live all year, and file the claim in writing inside a narrow window after your anniversary. Miss any one of them and it doesn't apply.

That isn't a trick. It's the company making sure you genuinely tried before they write a cheque. But it does mean this is not a sign-up-and-do-nothing safety net, and I'd much rather you heard that from me now than discovered it at month thirteen.

I'll send you the official document with the full list before you decide anything. Read it properly — all of it.

And no guarantee covers your time, or what you spend building this beyond the company's own fees. It lowers the downside. It doesn't remove it.

No. There's a full training program, and most people on my team came from something completely unrelated — healthcare, finance, education, tech, government.

What actually predicts whether someone does well isn't travel knowledge. It's whether they're willing to learn in public, follow up consistently, and keep going through the first stretch where nothing is working yet.

That's specifically who I work with — it's the entire reason this page exists.

Five to ten focused hours a week is a workable starting point. Not five hours of scrolling with a laptop open: five actual hours. Early mornings, one weekend block, a couple of evenings. It's genuinely less time than most people spend on television, but it has to be real and it has to be regular.

No. Your business is selling travel to clients. That's the job, that's what the training covers, and that's what I'll help you get good at.

There's a separate and entirely optional path where you help other people get started too. Plenty of agents never touch it. It's a decision you'd make a year in with real information — not a condition of starting.

Not on my team. I don't teach the hundred-name list, I don't teach cold-messaging strangers with a copy-paste script, and I don't teach guilt.

What I do teach is how to talk about what you're building openly, so the people who are curious can raise their own hand. Some of those people will be people you know. Most won't be. Nobody needs to be chased.

The catch is that it's slow and it's uncomfortable, and both stay true long enough that plenty of people quit before they stop being true.

On the money side the picture is genuinely better than most businesses — there's a 30-day refund window and a first-year guarantee on the company's fees, both covered above. But you'll still pay before you earn, and those guarantees don't cover your time or anything you spend building this beyond the company's own fees.

So if you can't comfortably absorb the costs for several months while you're learning, my honest advice is still to wait until you can. The guarantees lower the downside. They don't do the work.

Because the product is identical everywhere and the mentorship isn't.

I've done this from inside the same kind of job you have right now. I know what it's like to try to build something at 6am before a full day of meetings. My training is structured for people with limited hours and limited patience for fluff, and I'll tell you the truth even when it costs me a sale.

If you talk to me and decide someone else is a better fit, that's a completely reasonable outcome and I'd rather you do that than join under me half-convinced.

I'll text you back, usually the same day. We'll set up a short call — twenty to thirty minutes, just the two of us, no slides.

You ask me everything, and I'll tell you honestly whether I think it's a fit.

If we both think it is, the next step is an informational Zoom with a couple of people from my team. That's deliberate on my part. You shouldn't have to take my word for any of this — I'm the person who benefits if you say yes. On that call you can ask them whatever you like, including the things you'd feel awkward asking me directly.

Then I send you the official documents and you go away and think about it. Nobody signs anything on a first call, and I won't chase you if you go quiet.

Text me the word BUILD
See if it's a fit

A few real questions.

This isn't a contact form and it isn't a commitment. It takes about three minutes, and it means our first conversation can start somewhere useful instead of at the beginning.

I read every one of these personally. If I don't think it's a fit, I'll tell you that honestly rather than disappear.

I'll text you first — it's faster and less intrusive than a call out of nowhere.
Be as blunt as you want. This is the answer I actually read first.
Please answer for your actual life, not your ideal one.
"Yes and it went badly" is a genuinely useful answer. So is "no, never."

Or skip the form entirely — text me the word BUILD.

Got it

Thanks — that's genuinely useful.

I read these myself, and I'll text you back personally. Usually same day, occasionally the next one if I'm travelling.

Next

I'll text you

From (208) 703-5448. Save it so it doesn't look like spam.

Then

A short call, just the two of us

Twenty to thirty minutes. You ask the hard questions, I answer them. No slides, nobody else on the line, no pressure to decide anything.

If it looks like a fit

An informational Zoom with a couple of people from my team

Because you shouldn't have to take my word for it — I'm the one who benefits if you say yes. Ask them anything you want, including whatever you'd feel awkward asking me. Listen, and leave if it isn't for you.

Before you decide

You read everything

I'll send the official documents — full pricing, terms, refund policy, the guarantees, and the income disclosure statement. Take your time with them.

In the meantime, the covers most of what people ask me on that first call.