Life After the Sale: Blending Family, Business & Travel

Dilys Chan

Some people possess a natural curiosity, talent, and adaptability that make it hard to compartmentalize their talents in a single category.

Jo Kettner is most certainly one of those people. Her drive to learn has led her to pursue wide-ranging interests such as music, history, and mathematics, and helped her rise to the top of a successful software business that was eventually sold to Volaris Group.

After the sale of the business, she eventually transitioned out of the software industry and is now channeling her talents toward a second-generation family business that sees her sourcing venues across Europe on behalf of event planners.

Acquired Knowledge caught up with Kettner, the former CEO of Company Watch, to get insights about her career path and how she has drawn knowledge across different disciplines for creative problem-solving.

Learning about business through a historian’s eyes

Kettner’s business career started in an untraditional way. Before entering university, she belonged to an orchestra. During that time, she met Malcom Hiscock, one of the co-founders of Company Watch – a successful financial risk management software company that is now part of Volaris Group. Kettner had taken several math courses leading up to university, and although she didn’t go on to become a mathematician at a higher level, Hiscock remembered her for her math abilities.

Kettner went on to complete a history degree at the University of Cambridge, and then further pursued a PhD in history at UCL. Around that time, Company Watch was looking for help with research projects. Hiscock reconnected with Kettner, who joined the company as an intern and gradually took on additional responsibilities.

Right: Jo Kettner has always loved to travel, including during her PhD years when she studied Romanian history. Her new vocation in the travel industry offers her many opportunities to explore the world.

The company was small back then, so she had the fortunate opportunity to get to know the three other company founders and benefit from the mentorship that was encouraged in the small team environment. For example, although Kettner had never been trained in accounting, she learned the basics through another co-founder, Denis Baker, who did have that formal training. Baker began to mentor Kettner.

The more she understood about the company, the more she began to appreciate its work through her perspective as a historian.

«Company Watch looked to understand the financial health of companies so that our users – such as insurance underwriters or people dealing with credit applications – could put together a narrative about a company and decide whether they should conduct business with them,» she describes.

«We were putting stats in a narrative framework for people to look at, and as a historian, that appealed to me – understanding the bigger picture to help create a story.»

Beyond the work, she felt a sense of belonging among the people at the company. The team embraced what she brought to the table, which she felt might not have been the case at other companies.

“I feel grateful that some of the prejudices that you’d expect – being a woman, being younger than everyone else, being not quite qualified in the right way – none of those things really applied. And that enabled me to really grow and develop in that period at Company Watch.”

Pivotal decisions on the way to becoming CEO

By 2010, Kettner had finished her history PhD and reached a point where she had to decide: Should she continue working at Company Watch or pursue a postdoc?

«Denis made me an offer that was too good to refuse,» she recalls of her decision to stay. But further change was afoot.

«As it became obvious that I wasn’t really into the pure mathematics side of the business, I switched to helping Denis more on the operations, finance, and customer engagement side,» Kettner recalls. By that time, Denis Baker had become the CEO of Company Watch and needed help with the people aspects of the business, including human resources. Kettner took on those responsibilities and developed many of the HR policies that helped the business feel like a family.

Then she reached another decision point. While Kettner was on maternity leave with her first child in 2014, Baker asked her if she would be interested in taking the CEO role. «I knew I wanted to have another baby, so I said, ‘Let’s pick it up in a couple of years and see if it’s still right for everybody.'» By the time she came back from her second maternity leave in 2017, the offer was still on the table, so she decided to take the role.

While Kettner was the CEO of Company Watch, she presided over several changes, including embarking on an infrastructure reset. But perhaps the biggest responsibility she had involved the sale of the company.

«Denis was trying to find an exit for the company,” she explains. “So he entrusted me to run the business during the sale process to help him realize value from the business that he had spent so much time building up.»

The team at Company Watch assessed several potential buyers before settling on a sale to Volaris Group.

«The reason Volaris was so interesting was because it doesn’t do that model of flipping a business, which didn’t quite feel like the right fit for our company,» she says. «We liked the Volaris model of being able to keep the business as a whole, but have the expertise and investment of the parent company. We would be allowed to be experts in our field without having to abandon the things we had already worked hard to accomplish.»

Company Watch officially joined Volaris in March 2022, and Kettner remembers the milestone: “I felt really proud of where we got to as a team and achieving a sale.”

Global pandemic prompts a reflection on family & career

After being on the inside track during the sale of Company Watch, Kettner had initially planned to stay with the business after its sale to Volaris: “There was still plenty of interest there for me, and there were other skills to develop within the Volaris framework.”

But two factors convinced her to consider a career and lifestyle change. One was that her children expressed that they enjoyed being picked up from school by her during COVID, which she hadn’t previously been able to do because of the commute. The second was that as the events industry started to open for business again after the pandemic, Kettner’s husband, John, found he needed more help operating the venue-finding business that he had taken over from his retired father, called Vantage Venues.

Above: Jo and John Kettner with their children in New York and Mount Everest.

Kettner recognized the opportunity to spend more time with her family while applying her business acumen in a new way. After speaking with her husband, they both decided it was a good idea for her to join him at Vantage Venues.

Initially, she felt apprehensive about departing Company Watch, feeling guilty that she might let people down. But she came to terms with the decision and felt that the company was in a good home at Volaris: “The company was in a position to capitalize on the foundations that we’d built and there was a great team in place.”

With the support of Volaris, the senior team decided to appoint Craig Evans as the CEO to succeed her. He came to the job with deep experience in the field, after previously leading the operations of a rival company in the same industry. He also brings new ideas about how to bring Company Watch into its next phase of growth at Volaris.

“It ended up working out well because Craig brought knowledge of Company Watch’s competitors,” Kettner says of her transition out of the business.

I knew I was leaving Company Watch in good hands. It was reassuring to know the team I was leaving behind had the support of a great new parent company and CEO to navigate the company into a bright future.

Learning the ropes in a new industry

Starting fresh in a new industry wasn’t something that Jo Kettner had done in a while, but she has found it both humbling and refreshing to apply her talents to learning something new.

“It’s hard learning as you go, and it felt like I was at the beginning again to go from being at the top of a business, and then starting over again in a new industry and having to generate that knowledge,” she reflects on her time since joining the business. But she has found that her years at Company Watch helped her new endeavor.

“Because I was often the person signing off on events at Company Watch, I know what to look for and what questions people might ask when it comes to venues,” she shares. She was able to bring contacts from her previous career to use the services offered by Vantage Venues. Bringing that experience into the company helped her while she was learning to do the job.

“Now, more than two years down the line, if you ask me about a hotel for sixteen people somewhere in the west of the UK, I could list off multiple options.”

The sale of Company Watch to Volaris gave me the financial freedom to take the risk of joining the family business.

A rewarding new career

She has found the career change extremely rewarding. Working for a venue-finding company has exposed her to travel, sometimes in a way that she has never experienced before.

One of her most memorable trips? She was invited to a new hotel in France that sat on a cliff overlooking Monaco along with a small group of fellow event agents. They were able to stay there for a few nights just before the Monaco Grand Prix, where they had a chance to preview Michelin-starred restaurants and riverboat trips, all on behalf of clients. “I didn’t want to come home!” she says of the trip.


Left: Jo Kettner is finding it gratifying to serve clients in the travel industry. “Knowing that you’re making someone’s life a lot easier because you’ve taken a whole chunk of work from them. You’re able to make them look good for their internal stakeholders, and saving them the hassle is rewarding.”

It’s also rewarding for her to know that their company is making their clients’ lives easier. Vantage Venues offers their venue-finding service free of charge to end clients and collects a fee from hotels that pay for the introduction to new clients.

“If clients are asking venues for proposals, salespeople are on top of them and want to know when they’ll get answers. So, we become that barrier that helps people just focus on what they need to do.”

Perhaps the most rewarding part of Kettner’s decision is the opportunity to deepen her connection to a family business that her father-in-law originally started. She and her husband hope to nurture the business to pass on to a third generation, making the time spent with her family even more meaningful.

“It was a great decision to put family first,” she concludes.

About the Author

Dilys Chan
Dilys es la Directora Editorial en Volaris Group. Tiene una formación en periodismo empresarial, con experiencia previa cubriendo empresas cotizadas en bolsa, fusiones y adquisiciones, ejecutivos de nivel C y tendencias empresariales como productora de noticias de televisión.
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