Most people wake up in the wee hours of the night with indigestion. Tom Hale wakes up with ideas — big ones. Twenty-five years ago at the age of 26, the young Californian leapt from his bed and began taking notes — eight pages of notes to be exact.

“It was a flash bulb going off in my head. By breakfast I had made up my mind and nothing could ever have changed it. When I went to bed I didn’t know a thing and when I woke up I knew I was going to quit my job, start up a company and take people on bike trips somehow or another.”

What began as midnight inspiration grew to embody all the elements of the American dream. In the beginning a small touring company that offered bike trips on the West Coast, Backroads has emerged as the premiere active-vacation travel company in the world and is considered one of the fastest-growing privately owned businesses in the United States.

An environmental planner with a Masters degree and a great job, Hale chucked it all and set out on a 5,000-mile solo bike ride — to this day, he says there’s nothing like being on a bike by yourself to really think things through. He had zero business experience, was an inexperienced traveler and wasn’t particularly knowledgeable about cycling either.

“Quite frankly, the formal environmental schooling part of it…I think I actually rebelled against that. Being an environmental planner and being in a bureaucratic sort of public-policy setting is so far from my personality in terms of how I want to live my life that I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”

Hale, in those days especially, wasn’t endowed with a great deal of patience. Other people take the slow evolutionary approach to a lifetime commitment. He made the decision to start a business and from that moment on put everything he had into it.

“I can’t say I had this ultimate goal. I can say that from the get go I recognized that this is a very good fit for me. I really like this business. When I was on my bike trip I was thinking about how I really like this, really like how I can sink my teeth into it, be fully responsible for any success or failure, be in the outdoors, traveling, hiking, biking, meeting great people, drinking great wine. The vision was more one of, ‘I’ve got to keep this thing going.’ ”

One thing he did have going for him was parents who believed in him and his ideas. His father floated him the start-up money for the business, $6,000 or maybe it was $10,000, Hale can’t remember the exact figure.

“To call my parents supportive would be an understatement when you consider what a bad idea it was going into this kind of a business at that time. I didn’t make a plug nickel for years and years and from their perspective and probably the rest of the world’s perspective, I had a masters degree and a good job and why would I want to give all that up? They didn’t even blink an eye.”

One of three boys, Hale early demonstrated what he describes as “my obsessive tendencies to get it right,” foreshadowing his business predilections.

“When I was in high school my girlfriend’s dad made her account for all her expenditures before she got her allowance and I remember thinking that is such a nifty idea — now that sounds pretty nerdy — but I began doing it myself at a pretty early age. I went to absolute extremes, keeping track of all the inflows and outflows — there weren’t very many of either — still I did that forever more. Just another one of those things — those kinds of things can be good for an aspiring businessperson.”

A natural athlete, Hale, was running trails before trail-running was cool. He still runs — his record for the two-mile still stands at Campolindo High School. At the University of Oregon he was a teammate of track star Steve Prefontaine.

While Hale considers himself “competitive to excess,” the notion of winning-at-all-costs doesn’t interest him. He’s compelled to try as hard as he can to do the best job possible. If he lost a race as a kid, he kept his perspective, used to just pick himself up and carry on, wanting to be the best, wanting to do better than anyone else in running and in business.

“If you only measure success against others you set yourself up for disappointment and under-performance. The yardstick that others present is a helpful yardstick and can be constructive but there can come a point and I think there’s come a point in our business where if that was the only yardstick we used we would not be as good. We compete more against ourselves than we do against others.”

Operating from his garage, washing pots part-time, Hale handled every aspect of the business, designing itineraries and leading the trips. His first official bike tour of Death Valley had four participants including his mother.

“It was really hard to survive in the beginning years. Survival was more on my mind than anything. We were much more seasonal than we are now. We didn’t have trips in the winter so I ran out of money every winter. Sheer perseverance and stubbornness as much as anything kept me going.”

Today, Hale’s vision translates into almost 150 active itineraries and more than 13,000 travelers, many of them repeat customers bicycling, walking, hiking and enjoying multi-sport vacations in 34 countries, from Patagonia to Thailand to France, on six continents.

“Travel has so many dimensions to it — it’s always a rejuvenating experience for me. It gets me to think a different way, just getting out of your environment. I always come back with new ideas, interesting perspectives. There’s just something about travel in the way we do it, actively, that’s so fulfilling. Walking, hiking and biking increase the intimacy factor and enrich the experience.”

Backroads, headquartered in Berkeley, is not a straightforward business. Hale deals with a myriad of issues such as importing, exporting, immigration, foreign exchange, capital equipment, and sophisticated marketing concepts. He’s been forced to learn patience.

“I definitely have a certain amount of impatience. I think that I’ve matured slightly over the last 25 years to the point where I don’t kick boxes if things don’t go my way, but I still would rather things get done more quickly than less quickly.”

A hands-on guy, Hale, who has taken between 60 to 70 per cent of the trips on offer at Backroads, is the driving creative force behind the business. Married with three young children, he says the travel business, while hugely successful — he expects 2005 to be his biggest year yet — is incredibly challenging, particularly since the cataclysmic events of 9/11 and the war in Iraq. And then came the devaluation of the dollar. That’s when, as cliché and reality would have it, the tough get going.

“I think it’s pretty full-steam ahead. I am somebody who evaluates the options, considers the possibilities and goes as far I think one needs to go — and that’s enough. I don’t need to sit on it forever. It’s never proven productive to me. I think we’ve gotten better as a company and once again I think I’ve matured to a certain respect in not letting that personality trait get the better of me and doing methodical, careful research. But when the time comes to pull the trigger I’m more than happy to do that.”

Backroads expresses its environmental commitment through contributions to various organizations including the Progressive Animal Welfare Society, the San Francisco Bay Area Greenbelt Alliance, The Nature Conservancy, Leave No Trace and The Ecotourism Society.

“I still have as much or more of a commitment to the environment, no question about it,” says Hale. “It’s just that I didn’t want to sacrifice my life being a bureaucrat. I didn’t suit me temperamentally. For me to do something one day and then maybe 10 years from now see a result is simply anathema. I like to do something one day so I can see the result tomorrow.”