It’s a safe bet to say that Monica Teplis is probably the only Power List leader who appeared in a James Bond movie. “I was a bikini girl in ‘Goldfinger,’” said Teplis, president and chairman of Teplis Frosch in Atlanta. “It was a scene when Goldfinger was playing cards at a pool and I walked by.” Although she had no speaking lines in that film, Teplis did speak two lines in an episode of the 1960s TV series “The Saint."
But her acting career ended when she came to Atlanta from London in 1972 and began selling travel. “We did gambling junkets all over the world,” said Teplis, “but people kept asking if we did corporate travel. So we started doing business travel for gambling clients.”
A big leap for the company, said Teplis, came when a group arrived in Yugoslavia in the early 1970s only to find the casino had changed hands and was trying to change its financial commitment. The trip was aborted but Teplis and her late husband, Nate, honored everything: hotels, sightseeing, etc. “That gave us a solid reputation,” she said, “and all those customers started giving us corporate business."
Teplis Frosch is No. 55 on the 2015 Power List.
“That was the best thing that ever happened to us,” Teplis said. “All the new business enabled us to expand.”
In the 1990s, the company opened an onsite office in Las Vegas and that remains its only location outside of Atlanta. “We won a few large accounts there, and so the office remains viable,” she said. Today, more than 60% of the agency’s business comes from outside Atlanta.
Teplis Travel, Teplis said, focuses on small- to medium-size companies with $100,000 to $10 million in sales. “All of our growth has been organic,” said Teplis. “We lost some clients who went with larger agencies but got lost in the shuffle and came back. They like the way we do business.”
As of Jan. 1, Teplis Travel became a fully owned subsidiary of Frosch Travel (No. 18 in the Power List). “We needed to partner with someone who had a global presence and they have their own offices internationally,” Teplis said. “Even though our clients aren’t large, some have employees in Asia and elsewhere, and we need to service them properly.
“We did talk to other companies about a sale but liked the fact that Frosch is family owned. They are keeping our management team in place, as well as all of our agents. We can now operate the way we always have, except under a larger umbrella. And we can partner with Frosch on larger accounts.”
Teplis Travel will remain very much a family operation, said Teplis, with her son Gary in place as CEO. “He started at 16 delivering tickets, she said, “and worked in accounting before going into management.”
View Teplis Frosch's entry in the 2015 Power List.