On laravel installation, virtual box homestead. .composer/vendor/bin is in path but laravel command is not found

From the installation documentation: "Make sure to place the ~/.composer/vendor/bin directory (or the equivalent directory for your OS) in your PATH so the laravel executable can be located by your system."

When i echo my path, the specified is clearly there as "/root/.composer/vendor/bin".

This is a fresh homestead machine, what could I have done wrong? Any help is greatly appreciated as I would love to get to work :P

PS: path errors will be the death of me