The fast track to smalltown.

• Author: Carroll, Ed
• Position: Kenai Fjords Tours' owner Tom Tougas

Tom Tougas was a cruise line vice president before age 40, then cashed in his corporate career for the pace of a growing business and a small Alaska town.

At 8 a.m. on a typical summer morning in Seward, you can find Tom Tougas in the lobby of Kenai Fjords Tours' harbor-side office, amidst a sea of last-minute tour boat passengers. Milling customers in sweaters and windbreakers fill the office and form a ticket line that winds out the door-all eager to board the boats for a day of adventure.

Tougas is shepherd and sheep dog over this morning flock, helping tour company staff answer customer questions and ushering ticketed passengers toward the proper pier. The place is hectic but not panicky through these morning hours. Tougas and the counter staff move hundreds of passengers through the office for departures every day before noon. That much traffic stands out, even in the bustle of Seward's small-boat harbor.

Tougas is glad to see these people face-to-face every morning - his customers - about 65,000 of them this year. That morning hubbub brings a steady stream of challenges and the best connection to staff and customers a small-business owner can get. Tougas chucked a corporate vice presidency before he was 40 for this small-company, small-town intimacy, and he likes the rewards. And while he's regained the day-to-day customer contact, it's the connections and experience of his corporate career path that prepared him.

"I have believed for 20 years that the Kenai Peninsula was on the verge of exploding," Tougas says, and he was eager to buy into that growth when the opportunity came.

He was in an excellent position to spot opportunity: In 1986 as vice president of Alaska operations for Holland America Line, he convinced the company to dock in Seward at the northern end of its Alaska cruises. For five years, until he left Holland America in 1990, Tougas ran its extensive transportation network in Alaska. He learned where the industry was going, but he also learned that he'd rather be out on his own, free to adapt and innovate and able to stay closer to home.

A Rapid Rise

Tougas got his start in tourism in Fairbanks in 1974 working for the Alaska Overland Co., owned by the industry pioneer, Westours. He stayed with the company through his graduation from the University of Alaska in 1978, where he earned degrees in economics and philosophy. "As my boss told me at the time, that made me a useless dreamer," Tougas says. His boss thought Tougas...