Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 173 - Stick to the plan if you want to make money
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome back to the Travel Agency in the Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Kay. We are on day one seventy-three. Let me guess. Some thoughts that you have in your head late at night, early in the morning. say. Yeah, let's let's think about, especially if you're new or if you've been in a slump for a while. Let's go through some some thoughts you may be having. If you resonate with these thoughts that I'm about to spew out at you, I don't know how to say that. Stick around, but if not, okay, skip today. It's fine. Maybe my niche is wrong. Maybe I should stop focusing on resorts and pivot to ocean cruises. Or maybe I should do luxury private like I'm thinking of like Paul Kogan. Maybe I need to switch host agencies. Maybe I need to do buy that maybe I need to buy that new course that I saw on Instagram that teaches me how I can finally get leads. Maybe I should sign up for that training. That has nothing to do with what I do. We're gonna talk about all the highly destructive mid-year disease stuff called strategic whiplash. You were going strong in January, we're getting to the middle of the year, maybe things aren't perfect, and you're like, and this happens primarily when things aren't going as you wanted them to in your business. So then you're like, well, better change my niche because somebody I don't know. and has no idea how I run my business, is telling me on Instagram that I need to do this now. Don't worry, we all fall for it. I'm gonna tell you why changing your business strategy is not it's like super dangerous to do and it's a form of self sabotage and some people leverage it to make millions off of you. Congrats play it's like Every aspect of the industry. Okay, so be very, very discerning when you're checking those emails, okay? Strategic whiplash happens when you are mistaking like physical fatigue, signs of early burnout, slow market sea cycles for a broken business model. Like you have those combinations happen. And when you have those combinations happen, instead of sticking with what works, you're like, I gotta completely change, right? Something's wrong, and then you see on social media someone else is successful in some random niche that has nothing to do with what you do, and so you're like, ⁓ I need to do that, and then all of a sudden, because you just looked at their post or liked it or whatever, all of a sudden, all this stuff's being thrown at you. Sign up for this training for this, okay? And yes, travel trends change, and if you're new Whatever travel trends are going on in the industry that are related to how you want to do your business, that should be something you should develop like full expertise in to last over the years. Okay? Anyhood dolls, because you're tired, you're on the verge of burnout, or in the middle of burnout, maybe you didn't hit your annual revenue goals. Your brain just looks for the escape hatch. Even if you're like mid-level successful. Like maybe you like got close to like 100K or broke 100,000 in revenue last year, and now this year is not going how you planned, because you're like to the moon, baby! And then you're like, it's not going to the moon. What's happening here? And then you do the same thing. Like, just because an advisor makes more money or more bookings does not mean you're gonna not gonna fall for this trap. You're not smarter than the average bear. When you have this borderline burnout or midst of burnout, slow market cycles. The plan is the problem. That's what you think. You convince yourself that if you just pivot your brand, if you just change your target market, if you just redo your entire website, success is gonna be easy again. It's a psychological, like a mirage. That destroys any momentum that you might have before it even has a chance to like really compound again. So let's break down the psychological reality of why pivoting feels so attractive when you're stuck like making under 25k, or maybe your booking numbers are half of what they were last year, or th or two-thirds of what they were last year, or you thought you were gonna double your revenue and you're just at the same level as last year. Because this will happen to you. It's happened to me. It's happens to all of us. A strategic pivot gives your brain a cheap way to give an instant hit of fake progress. The moment you declare, I'm currently redoing my website or rebranding to focus on ultra luxury wellness retreats when you were just like doing whatever, the normal stuff. You instantly release yourself from the pressure of having to close a sale today. Because now you're like, ⁓ well, I have to rebrand. I have to redo this. You give yourself an excuse to stop prospecting because you are working on the new brand. It feels exciting because it resets your timeline and it pushes the requirement of you generating financial results down the road. I have recently changed niches and it's like a slow, slow phase out. And I started first once I realized I'm gonna change and do things this way. I started first by removing pages on my site that had to do with my main niche because I have other agents on my team and they don't want to do that niche either. So I'm like, okay, well I'm just gonna remove the I'm gonna hide these pages for now. I'm still doing the niche that I want to move away from. I'm just not accepting new business from that niche any anymore. I was through like the beginning of this year, but then I was like, okay, I I really don't ⁓ feel like this is right for me and my business model anymore. And so now I'm like pivoting in a different direction. This will happen too. And it wasn't because I just want you to know, just because you're having a slow sales cycle where you didn't hit your goals, doesn't mean you have to pivot. Okay. You can pivot. Just make sure that you're not doing it because you need to make more money. I could stay in my niche and I could make 10x money that I'm doing now. It's just no longer aligned with my values. Anyway, you give your re like when you are rebranding and stuff. That's just an excuse to not actually go out there and market yourself because you're like, well, no, I'm doing this. I gotta build all this up. ⁓ here's the computational cost of that pivot every single time you switch your niche or change your core marketing channel. Like, there's a re Like I said, you're gonna have to like change social media channels over time, but if you just do it for no reason. Because somebody told you you need to be over here now or something, instead of like maintaining both and like testing. Or completely rewrite all of your copy on your website, especially if you're a new advisor. ⁓ you're resetting your compounding interest back to zero. All of the social media marketing, all of the email newsletters, everything's gonna change. Your audience is gonna completely change, and your audience, if they want to stick it out with you, they're gonna be super confused. Like, what is this person doing? So the reason your agency hasn't passed the baseline that you want it to be at, ⁓ isn't because your niche is inherently bad. But it's just because you haven't been staying in the room long enough for your marketing seeds to actually break through the soil. Now, if your marketing is really, really struggling and you are posting consistently, and by consistently I mean multiple times a week, and you know where your ideal client lives online, ⁓ you might have to consider doing more research on your ideal client. You might have to take a look at your copy. for your social media and just tweak it slightly for the next quarter. That doesn't mean shifting niches completely, okay? Consistency is like when you're building a travel agency, it's like you're digging for water. You can dig a five foot hole and not hit water. And then you move ten feet over and you start a new hole because you got bored or tired. And then you spend the next five years digging these five foot shallow holes. And then you're like, I don't have any water, because you wouldn't stick with one. if you really want to grow and scale, it requires you to keep digging, keep digging, keep digging. Okay? Like in for my niche change, I hit water. I was doing just fine, and then I was like, okay, now it's time to move to a different town, basically, and I gotta set up a new well. So I'm digging again, and I know it's gonna take time to get back to where I was. So to protect your agency from this strategic whiplash. You gotta be able to look if your strategy is actually broken or if you're just too impatient. Ooh. Look at your dashboard coldly. Your CRM that's got all the bookings. And I like my dashboard is like here's how much bookings, month to date, year to date, earnings, month to date, year to date. And it's got like pie charts and all kinds of fun stuff. Look at it. Have you actually executed your current marketing plan that you had in your brain? And were you doing it consistently without changing any of the variables for a minimum of like six weeks straight, up to 90 days? Like for this entire quarter where you're like at the end of Q1, day where you're like, these are my goals for marketing. I'm gonna execute them, and you pretty much hit those targets. Have you done that? ⁓ have you done any direct outreach? Have you every single week? Have you shown up on your primary social with absolute consistency? If the honest answer is no, you don't have a broken strategy, you have an untested strategy. You haven't done it. So you can't say it's a failure. You can't fire a plan if you haven't actually allowed it to run, right? Okay, so once you realize that. Second, when agents get frustrated, they look for new things to add to their business. High performance growth mindset requires you to look for what to amplify. So instead of getting like new templates and new software and new new new new new new new new new, what can you just tweak to be a little bit better right now? Because you don't need to make all these changes. Okay, so we're doing a look back, not just for the last quarter, but let's look back at both quarters. Find the one thing that works slightly well. Did you get one really good booking from like a local Facebook group or your own Facebook group? Did one past client send you a single referral? Did one specific style of post get a ton of engagement? Like, look at those things. Those are the things you need to do again. And this is why I say, I don't say it here, but I say it in the success circle. Well, I may have said it a few times. But in the success circle, I'm like, hey, are you taking are you analyzing your social media data? Hey, are you redoing similar content to the one that did best? Are you reposting it on other platforms? Hey. Have you been doing that? If something's doing really well. If like a real or a TikTok or a short does really well, why wouldn't you consider writing an ad with that piece of content? Why wouldn't you consider doing a similar piece of content and posting that? So you making more money as a travel advisor does not lie in inventing a whole new marketing funnel from scratch this afternoon or every single month. You're Income breakthrough lies in taking the one boring super unsexy thing that already worked once and do it ten times harder. The 10x. What is that book? Is it Grant Cardone? Okay. Grant Cardone, I think, as a book. I can't it's 10X something. ⁓ it's on my bookshelf. I'm not putting it in the description. Just Google Grant Cardone ten X and he's got this book and he's like, Why would you waste all your time? r going for all this crap you're being sold to instead of just focusing on what works. You're letting your ego take over and your state of psychological comfort. Also, if you want to be an elite entrepreneur or business owner, you have got to endure extreme monotony in your strategy to find that financial scale. And again, you are the architect, so you build this boring, boring business, and then you hire people to fill those positions. And then you're golden, man. You're golden. If you are feeling the overwhelming urge to pivot, especially if you're being inundated with a bunch of marketing about pivoting, recognize it for what it truly is. It's just burnout, fatigue, masking itself as a strategic insight. ⁓ you don't need a new plan. You don't need you just need to like rest. Give yourself a day of rest. Recalibrate. Commit to the blueprint you've already laid out and you are in progress of doing. Now I know not everyone, like some people do actually need to pivot. Ninety percent of you don't. Take a blank sticky note today. Write down your core niche, your primary marketing channel, in clear, big, bold letters. Put it on your monitor. Put it on your laptop in the corner where it's like not in the way. Do not change those parameters for the next 30 days. I would prefer the not the next quarter. And make sure that you stick to your plan because no one else is responsible for your business. No one else is coming to save you. And you can do it if you just do it. Nike. Nike your business, people. All right. Keep your head down, trust the process, and I will see you tomorrow. Have a wonderful day.