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Ken Kaneshiro remembers doing a double-take at the door. The Japan Air Lines sales agent was making a routine call on a struggling ticket wholesaler, but on this day the brochure racks were gone and the office was cleared out-except for a new kid wearing glasses. "Jack Tsui was sitting there alone. He said, 'How come you're visiting me? I'm not even licensed to sell international tickets,' Kaneshiro recalls. "But he seemed to already know how the business worked. He asked how he could qualify for a contract with JAL. I explained it was a catch 22 because he had to sell tickets, but he was so small he was non-competitive. I told him to try anyway, and I gave him a target that was reasonable on the high and six months to reach it."
Tsui made it in six weeks. In another year he would close in on JAL's biggest producers; in another three he would get the carrier to write its first $1-million contract with a Hawaii agency. And JAL was only one airline. At a time when $1 million in ticket sales made anybody in Hawaii a big-time agent, Tsui was winging similar deals with Pan Am, China Airlines, Korean Air, World Airways, Braniff and a growing list of other carriers plying routes out of Hawaii.
Since 1978, when he bought the struggling business from a friend, the volume of wholesale and retail tickets sold by Tsui's Panda Group companies has soared well past $100 million a year. The aggressive, unorthodox marketing, low margins, heavy volume and 20-hour days it took to accomplish that became something of an education for others in a fast-evolving business. Kaneshiro was hardly overstating it when he assessed his first meeting with a 23-year-old Tsui: "I thought, here was somebody who was going to go for it. And the market would be shaken."
UNKNOWN. Tsui hit the market with the subtlety of a 747 landing in a duckpond. He was barely out of school at McKinley High and Honolulu Community College, flying back and forth doing marketing consulting in his native Hong Kong, when he and three partners put up $2,500 apiece for an agency that was going bankrupt.
When he decided he wanted to go big...