Coe Juracek Shares His Best Business Trip Hacks

The job of the road warrior — traveling the world as a client relationship manager, salesperson, or support professional, not as an outlaw in the 1981 postapocalyptic midnight flick Mad Max— isn’t an easy one. It often means long drives or longer flights, going from customer to customer, saying or doing the same thing again and again in every place you land. If you don’t come to the job with the right frame of mind, it can be enough to drive you over the edge. But professional road warrior Coe Juracek doesn’t see it like that. In fact, he loves his job — and as a result, excels at it.

Here’s how Coe Juracek makes the most of work travel and how he became the best road warrior he can be.

“I have two kinds of typical days because I feel like I’m on the road about half the time,” says Juracek of his working life as a senior managing director of investor coverage at real estate investment firm Crow Holdings Capital.

“So there’s a typical road day, which is almost just typical in its being atypical.”

For Juracek, the typical “road day” involves getting up early, checking in with his office, fielding questions from clients, prospects, and his team, and then either hopping on a flight or heading to a meeting or conference. Most of the time he’s jet-lagged; half the time he can’t remember whether the 9 o’clock on his watch is a.m. or p.m.

“The regular pattern is whatever the flights dictate you do. And then it’s seeing all the best conference rooms and hotel rooms around the world,” Juracek shares.

His work requires him to be a professional globe-trotter. The Texas-based investment management professional regularly finds himself in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, meeting with people who represent large investors to consider partnering with the company.

It can be physically and mentally exhausting, Coe Juracek readily admits. And it would truly be a hard slog, except for one thing: He loves it.

Love It or Leave It, Says Coe Juracek

You have to love it, he insists, otherwise you’re destined to fail. The first step to being a successful road warrior is quite simply that you have to enjoy the travel and the challenge.

“No. 1 is that I enjoy it,” says Juracek. “I really, really enjoy the stimulation of meeting people around the world and interacting with what are truly different cultures. I mean, we’re all the same, but we are not the same.”

Coe Juracek: Learning During Business Travel Is ‘Fun’

The second thing that makes a good road warrior is inquisitiveness — a real passion for learning and connecting with other people. Juracek, a world history major in college, says he has always had an innate desire to learn about different cultures, and this has proved invaluable in his job.

“When I’m sitting in a meeting with a Korean versus an Emirati versus somebody in Santiago, Chile, they’re all people, but they expect different interactions,” says Juracek, encouraging fellow road warriors to do their research about where they’re going and who they’ll meet ahead of time. “Trying to learn those things and make connections is super fun. It just is fun.

“If it wasn’t fun, then it’d be a slog. But because it’s fun, that automatically, it’s like nothing much is a chore — even when I have slept zero hours on the flight to Seoul instead of sleeping six to eight, like I try,” Juracek adds. “It’s like, ‘Well, OK, I’m going to be really tired, I’ve been here before.’”

If he’s had a hard flight or hardly slept, instead of moping or complaining on arrival, Juracek chooses to take a positive attitude — and soaks up some local culture and cuisine.

“Let’s go drink some soju [a popular Korean beverage] and have some fried chicken,” Juracek says. “And then it’s just dive in and try to learn the little things. Hopefully you have a little bit of time to see a palace or something, if you can squeeze it in. And then obviously, on the professional side, it’s about being knowledgeable about the business and being plugged into the team. Because, in the end, my team’s job is to be the contact point for the firm to the investor universe.”

Know Your Stuff, Coe Juracek Advises

Enjoying the travel, having a thirst for knowledge, and keeping a positive attitude, is how you keep yourself going and interested when traveling for work, says Coe Juracek. But you won’t be successful as a road warrior unless you know your product and believe in your company.

When you’re out there on the road trying to convince people to buy your product or service, you have to believe in what you’re doing and who you’re representing, says Juracek.

“There are a lot of companies that are really good,” Juracek observes. “They can sit in a room and explain why their results are fantastic, and they are objectively good. So it’s a knife fight for capital, which it is, because it’s a total zero-sum game. If I get that dollar, somebody else didn’t. I win, you lose. There’s no prisoner’s dilemma like, ‘Maybe we can both win.’ You win or you lose on this dollar.”

But what may be attractive for one client in one country might not be persuasive to another prospect who lives and works on the other side of the world. That’s why, for Coe Juracek, being the best road warrior he can be is a subtle mix of skills and attitudes. You need to know your stuff, for sure. But you also need to understand the culture in which you’re operating. And you need to move from country to country with a positive attitude — and a thirst and excitement for finding out what lies around the next corner in the road.