The trouble with a well-made plan is that life enjoys editing. Teresa Fox had left a corporate career of roughly 24 years with a severance package, an appetite for useful work and a new idea: a skincare franchise in South Florida. She was franchisee number nine. Her territory was open. Miami, just down the road from her Fort Lauderdale home, was meant to provide the larger footprint that would help the business find its feet.
Then the Miami investor, who had committed to seven stores, pulled out. The franchisor asked Fox not to launch until it could rebuild that market. Almost two years had passed. Money had been invested. More dangerously, so had identity. Fox had already begun to picture herself inside the new business.
But while waiting, she had picked up something she thought might be pleasant and temporary. She began planning travel for other people. It was supposed to keep her busy until the real business opened. The temporary occupation became Slyfox Travels; the real business remained a floor plan.
“When the rug gets pulled out from under you, you can look at the rug and go, ‘What are you doing to me, rug?’ Or you can look toward the window or the door and think, ‘Okay, what’s next?’”Teresa Fox
Fox's great talent may be an impatience with staring at rugs. During the COVID era, her Fortune 400 employer offered early retirement to workers with tenure. At first, the company declined her application because it considered her essential. A second round came. This time she received the package, and with it a rare luxury that does not fit in an overhead bin: time.
She used it agreeably. Tennis was played. Friends were met for lunch. Trips were taken. Six months later, Fox discovered that leisure, like dessert, becomes rather less thrilling when served as every course. “I’m not cut out for this,” she remembers thinking. Her mind wanted somewhere to go each morning, even if her body did not.
The new kid learns to make a friend
Long before Fox managed teams or arranged private drivers, her family moved about every three years. By the time she finished high school, she had lived in three countries. Madrid was one childhood home. Saudi Arabia, where she spent part of her teenage years, was another. Repeated relocation supplied a social education with no elective option. You could be the shy new child in the corner, she says, or you could make a friend.
She chose the friend. The habit survived into adulthood as curiosity, a word that can sound soft until one watches it do commercial work. At travel trade shows, she may sit across from representatives of Rwanda or Mongolia without having a client currently asking for either. The meeting is still worth her attention. The point is to find the touchpoint, listen well and resist treating another person as a slot in the diary.
At home, the practice is less formal. Fox lives in a Fort Lauderdale high-rise and smiles at people in the elevator. Her husband calls her approachable. She calls herself the weirdo who smiles at everyone. Some neighbors have become friends; a few have become clients. It is networking stripped of its lanyard and restored to ordinary life.
“I think the first thing is being genuinely curious.”Teresa Fox on building relationships
Curiosity now governs the way she plans. Fox says her clients are often executives, couples and families with high expectations and limited time. Some arrive through wealth managers and other advisors. They are not looking for the gaudiest room or a list of addresses that can be found before breakfast. “They don’t need to be impressed,” she writes. “They need things to be right.”
Right can mean the privately owned property absent from the usual list, the person waiting on arrival or the quiet correction of a problem the traveler never learns existed. It also means memory. Fox's sharpest description of her service is not about inventory: “I remember how my clients travel, not just where they’ve been.” The line explains why travel advice can still matter in an age that places a booking engine in every pocket.
Structure is freedom wearing a sensible shoe
The leap from company employee to independent operator is often presented as a joyous escape from calendars. Fox has a less romantic and more useful view. Corporate life came with a framework: performance indicators, expectations and someone higher up the organization defining what counted. Entrepreneurship removed the boss and the scorecard at once. On an uncertain Tuesday, either can begin to look rather attractive.
She kept the parts of corporate life that travel well. High-stakes decision-making came with her. So did strategic vision and two kinds of leadership experience, both managing teams and delivering as an individual contributor. She had also worked remotely since around 2011 or 2012. She knew that getting dressed for the day changes the day, even if the commute is only a corridor.
Fox blocks personal time and schedules exercise. “Whenever” is not considered a serious appointment. The routine is modest, but its purpose is large: structure protects freedom from dissolving into distraction. A second career need not reject everything learned in the first. Reinvention is often less demolition than selective packing.
The considered yes
Fox's career contains an earlier rehearsal for the virtues of a calculated detour. While living in suburban Detroit, she heard from a recruiter about a job that suited her, except for one requirement: a move to Pennsylvania. She declined even to interview. Six months later, the recruiter returned. The position was still open, and the employer would consider New York instead, closer to its Wall Street headquarters.
Her children were heading to college. Fox was divorced and not yet 50. She could remain single in the suburbs or move, with a strong job, to New York City. The company gave her a year. She accepted, reasoning that both sides would have time to discover whether the arrangement fit.
The move became one of those decisions whose consequences refuse to stay inside the professional column. She loved living in New York. She met the man who became her husband, Dr. Martin Fox. The job eventually ran its course, but the yes had already paid dividends no compensation plan could calculate.
This does not make Fox a disciple of reckless affirmation. She weighs pros and cons, risk and reward. She also trusts intuition and argues that people overestimate the permanence of many choices. “There are so few decisions that you’re going to make that are irreversible,” she says. If a route proves wrong, course correction remains available. The important distinction is between a considered yes and a frightened no dressed up as prudence.
A return is also a journey
Travel has given Fox an elegant way to join her past to her present. She returned to Madrid as an adult after having lived there as a child and was surprised that she had stayed away so long. The architecture and the warmth of the people felt familiar; the city itself felt newly legible. Now she recommends Madrid as a soft landing for younger honeymooners or first-time visitors to Europe who assume the correct answer must be London, Paris or Rome.
In April 2026, she visited South America for the first time and crossed Chile from Patagonia to wine country and the Atacama Desert. There were waterfalls, glaciers, horseback riding and even snow. In Santiago, her mind wandered to a comparison between the city's early development and that of her hometown, St. Augustine. She admits the historical parallel appeared to excite her more than anyone else in the group, which is an excellent definition of genuine curiosity: interest that does not require applause.
For Fox, the common desire across luxury and non-luxury travel is connection with a place. Her luxury clients tend to want the entire experience handled and service that anticipates what comes next. They want comforts, but they also want an itinerary made for them rather than the ceremonial selection of package one, two or three. Other travelers may want the same depth while doing more of the work themselves. Budget matters. So does delegation.
Her work now extends beyond individual trips. As Fora's South Florida Chapter Lead, Fox helps independent advisors meet, learn and build supplier relationships in person. In March 2025, she joined the board of the American Red Cross Broward County Chapter, adding civic service to a career already organized around connection. Earlier volunteer work included the Junior League of New York and the founding committee of the Suite Dreams Project.
“Trust in the things that you know you can deliver in a way that is uniquely your own.”Teresa Fox
There is no tidy moral in a franchise that does not open. Fox had advantages and says so plainly: severance, time and a stable household. A safety net gave her room to move, but it did not choose the direction. She still had to endure disappointment, release the identity she had begun to build and take seriously the small business she once considered a pastime.
Her story works because it refuses the fantasy that reinvention requires forgetting everything. Fox did not become a different person when she became a travel advisor. The girl who learned to make a friend, the manager who led remote teams, the woman who moved to New York and the entrepreneur who waited on a South Florida storefront all arrived together. They simply found a new itinerary.