John Shelley New Chief at Porter Briggs’ Travelier

John Shelley

Porter Briggs is adding a president to run the operations of his latest venture, Travelier.

John Shelley, founder of Cloud Council in Chattanooga, Tennessee, will take over day-to-day operations. Briggs, you may recall, is a serial entrepreneur who sold his A Briggs Passport & Visa Expeditors in 2014 to global visa provider CIBT. A Little Rock native, Briggs founded the passport business in 1996 in Washington and moved it to his hometown in 2009.

The same year he sold the passport business, he launched Travelier, a destination discovery engine. Briggs had hired Shelley and his firm to build the Travelier site, and now Shelley will officially settle in Little Rock full time as the new company’s president.

Briggs, who is self-funding the venture, will take on the role of chairman. He told Whispers that Shelley is “a brilliant and highly successful IT executive who will lead an enduring success for Travelier.”

Briggs recently spoke to the Little Rock Rotary Club, where he shared the story of how Travelier came to be: searching for an easy way to connect Swiss visitors with a list of things to do in Little Rock.

Briggs has another project he’s developing, PorterBriggs.com, an archive of Southern stories that Briggs has branded as “The Voice of the South.”

Coincidentally, Shelley’s dad is recent Arkansas Business Executive Q&A subject Michael Shelley, who ran U.S. Bank’s operations in Arkansas (when he wasn’t singing with Duke Ellington or the country group Alabama) until his retirement in January.