Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 264: The Calendar Capacity Audit: Getting Ready for Wave Season
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome back to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K. I'm a travel agency owner. By the way, if you're like, who the heck is this lady? And I help travel agents scale to multiple six figures and beyond. My personal travel agency goal sounds a little Dululu, but in five years I want $20 million in gross revenues, not booking sales, commissions coming in. Join me on this journey where you can be like me. No, I'm kidding. I mean you could. Anyway, if you have any questions about how I can help you, head over to elevate with rachelk.com. I'll probably have a link in the description as well. Today is day 264 of the Travel Agency in the Year podcast. If you're brand new, again, this is one episode a day for an entire year. They're about 20 minutes long on average. Sometimes they're like seven or eight minutes, sometimes they run closer to 30. And there are just different episodes about becoming the CEO of your business. Something to listen to if you are, you know, driving to your nine to five and you're like, I hate my life, I want to become a CEO of my travel agency. Alright, this intro is weird. It's getting out of hand. Alright, we're gonna do a few episodes about your calendar capacity and auditing your calendar for the upcoming wave season. So this episode should air right around the end of September. And wave season is coming. If you're a new agent, we'll talk about it in a second, but if you've been through it before, you already know the volume of inquiries and bookings during the first few months of the year is sometimes genuinely overwhelming if your calendar isn't ready for it. So today we're gonna talk about auditing your capacity before the wave hits. Okay. This has to do with service operations and planning. Guess what? You are a service based business owner. So this is a well established concept in service operations called capacity planning. Essentially, it's matching the amount of work coming in with the amount of time and attention you actually have to give it. And this is how automations are born. But also, since we're hitting wave season, most likely you're going to have to have some sort of consultation. consultation, right? People like to get to know people that are going to be doing business with them. Businesses that do not plan for capacity in advance tend to experience the same predictable failure pattern during a heavy, busy season. So their response times might slip. the quality of service drops for everyone. So let's say you get like 30 new inquiries for travel trips in January and you already have 10 clients you're servicing, everybody involved is gonna get crappier service if you aren't prepared. not just the newer clients and you the business owner since many of you travel agents, advisors, consultants, whatever you like to refer to yourself as, are a one-man band, burn out. You're gonna burn out right when the highest value opportunities of the year are landing in your inbox. So wave season, by definition. Is a predictable surge, which means it's also entirely possible to prepare for it in advance rather than reacting to it in real time. Now, wave season also is dependent upon your niche and who you serve. It might not be the typical like January to March, although a lot of people just want to book trips that time of year anyway. They got their Christmas bonus and they're setting up their PTO for the year and they need to request it off, so they want to have everything planned. That is one big reason for wave season. Maybe they're getting their taxes done and they're like, woo-hoo, I got a big fat refund. And so they want to spend it by treating their family to vacation. Some other niches, though, like destination weddings, your wave season, yes, it's gonna hit. Engagement season typically starts around the holidays and goes through the spring. However, late summer is also like a secondary wave season for destination weddings. Okay. So what does a capacity audit in your calendar actually look like? Look backwards, number one, look backwards. If you've been through it w at least one prior wave season and you were actively marketing, because I know a lot of travel advisors that I work with, yeah, you may have gone through four or five wave seasons, but maybe you weren't marketing. So you're like, well, it didn't really do anything different for me. So you were actively marketing and you've been through this last wave season. How many inquiries did you receive during that window last time? How long did your average response time hold up as your volume increased? Where did things start to break down in your travel agency? Was it in the discovery calls? The proposal turnaround? Or the pipeline follow-up? I think we built it back. I have my notes here. Good. Day 186 of this podcast. So about 80 episodes ago. There's a lot of episodes here. If this is your very first wave season. You want to estimate conservatively based on your current inquiry trends, and then you want to multiply for the expected seasonal increase. Then build in a real buffer since the first estimate during a genuinely new type of surge is more likely to run low than high. What does that mean? Let's back it up for both. You're a seasoned travel advisor and you're preparing for an actual wave for this wave season. In my experience, for me, I realized my big wave season for weddings, it really started breaking down in the follow-up and servicing current clients when I was getting six, eight, ten consultations a week. And I wasn't getting that many every week, but even just like four or five consultations for destination weddings in one week is a lot. That's for me, my consultation is an hour long because I do talk about the actual wedding day and planning for the wedding. Or I did. So that's already five hours a week taken up in my evenings or throughout my work week. interacting with people. I love people. I am an amber vert though and I do get exhausted very easily. So it just would cause other things to kind of snowball out of control. If this is your first wave season, congratulations, prepare yourself for it. Let's say you haven't really had any active marketing strategy, but you've come up with a good marketing strategy and subsequent content strategy to really push your business out into the stratosphere for thousands of people to actually view your content on social media and maybe tens to hundreds of people set up consultations. It really depends on your niche. But if you've only done like five trips to date so far during wave season, if you start actively promoting now and build up kind of like that following and exposure, I would say you could expect maybe ten additional consultations a month if you've only worked with like five people, like Expect about 10 consultations a month during wave season if your marketing's hitting and you are marketing consistently and your messaging is consistent. Okay, once you have a realistic sense of the expected volume, you can block your calendar accordingly before the season starts, not once you're already behind. And what I mean by blocking is you might want to open up additional spaces. And this goes, even if you aren't in wave season, but if you want more bookings and that requires one-on-one consultations, you gotta temporarily open up your availability. Okay. But this is going to be protecting those windows of time for discovery calls and consultations only. Okay. And then maybe changing up your proposal into a task by task batching system. That way if you were to have and close, let's say ten new trips and within a week, it would be a lot easier for for you to spend an hour in the beginning of a workday, maybe two, doing the researching for all ten trips. You should have a pretty good idea. Hopefully it takes you an hour. You're like, no, it takes me an hour per trip. I okay. But let's just say you can do 10 research portions and be like, okay, this is the sailing that this couple needs to go on, this is the sailing this person needs to go on, this is what this person needs to do. And just pick those 10 for your first proposals to send to your 10 different clients. Then you would create each proposal and then you would send them all at once. Kind of like how I do my group travel, but we're not going talk about that. Okay, we've talked about task by task batching systems back in episode 210 of the podcast. Or the other option you can do if you're gonna open up all your availability, that's one way. Another one is you can cap your availability, and this works really well for any fee based services you offer, especially if it's like larger groups. Or if you offer higher ticket concierge kind of luxury high touch white glove services, you can still get more bookings, but instead of like ten a week, you're probably gonna get three a week. But if that's what your niche is as something like group travel based or very high ticket, very luxury, big service fee up front kind of thing, you can take on three new clients and if your fee's fifteen hundred dollars, if you get those fees in one week, that's an additional forty five hundred dollars. And if you're doing groups, in my experience that's around an extra ten grand in revenue added to your book of business. Could be a lot more, but we're just gonna make it easy and say 10 grand. So you can have a maximum amount of new discovery calls that you're gonna take in a given week so that your business doesn't quietly grow past what you can deliver well. This was a mistake I made back in 21. I was like, I'm gonna take all the business I can. I had no assistance at that point. I barely had any automation set up, and I was like, I'm doing it! And I closed something like gosh, I don't remember. I know I closed like 30 groups that year, but I know I think by April I had closed. From January to April I had closed twelve groups and I was like, we're gonna keep on going. And then I got a bunch more from like April through May, and then anyway, later on in the summer. And I took too much on and I was like, I need help immediately. So I already kind of had an idea of how I was going to grow and scale. However, I was like, I need help immediately. Don't do that. Limit yourself, okay? If you need to. Alright, so this also connects back to the delegation audit from day 253. Look how all these episodes are tied together. So far we got 186, 210, and 253. If you need to go back and listen. I hope you're not driving because you need to write that down. If your capacity audit reveals that there is a like massive gap between the expected bit demand and your available time, that's a strong concrete case for bringing in support, even if it's just temporary or seasonal help, just for this window, rather than trying to absorb the entire surge personally. Now, temporary help is fine. If you want to transition into more regular, consistent help with the same person and you are hosted, if it is a contracted opportunity, contracted VA service, you need to make sure you're bringing in at least 2x the cost of that assistant in gross revenues to cover that cost, to cover for a rainy day, and any additional like additional like Google Workspace accounts, password, what is I'm thinking of one password, like one password accounts, any additional users as admin to any software you're using. So if you do get this temporary help and you decide I need this person year round minimum twenty hours a week and let's say it costs fifteen thousand dollars you have to be sure that you are going to be making thirty thousand dollars in fees and commissions in this year to comfortably afford that assistance. If you want to bring them on as employee the standard cost for business is four times. So if it's a thirty thousand dollar a year salary your commission must be a hundred and twenty thousand and that does not include paying yourself paying Of their expenses. So please keep this in mind. It's very important to make sure that you don't feel like you're stuck. Because there's so many advisors I've spoken with, talked to over the years that start doing these investments a little too soon. And then they're wondering why when they make, you know, like a hundred and fifty a year, they don't really have enough to keep growing and they get stuck in that hundred and fifty to two hundred a year just pit. And so 30,000 of that, let's say if your VA costs fifteen a year, thirty thousand of that is already gone. So if you're at 150, you're only bringing home 120. But then you have your expenses. Some agents I know spend fifty thousand dollars, five zero, zero, zero, zero, on travel. So now you're down to seventy in a year. Then you got maybe five to ten in other expenses. Now you're down to sixty. Then you're gonna have taxes that you gotta pay. Or if you try to do like You do an S-Corp and you dump a bunch of stuff into an IRA or SEP type of plan. You can't really pay yourself a living wage. Therefore, you cannot replace yourself. Therefore, this is not really growing. And then you start to burn yourself out because you're like, I gotta grow, grow, grow, grow, grow instead of scaling property properly. That was my long rant about that. So had nothing to do with this episode, but I was like, I'm gonna talk about it anyway. I just want you all to be careful because I see that trap all the time. The second a travel advisor makes a hundred thousand a year, they think they're a multiple Million dollar business, they don't know how to scale properly, and then they get stuck. That's what I'm saying. So, anyway, you don't want to absorb the surge personally. You could opt for temporary help. It doesn't have to be permanent, okay? The real risk of an unplanned wave season isn't just stress. It's a decline in your exact personal attentive service that I hope if you've been listening to this all year. We spent a lot of time building throughout this year on this podcast. So cast la la la la, a capacity audit nope. I'm not editing this out. A capacity audit isn't about turning away business. It can be, but it isn't. It isn't like, no, I can't take this on. It's about making sure the business you do take on this season gets the same quality of experience as the client you served during slow season, slower seasons. Also, there's two ways to go about it. Don't forget. And it kind of depends on what you have to offer. If and it depends on your revenue goals. There's so many factors to this. But just think about this. If you need a lot of quick revenue ASAP and you want to get a large volume of bookings, you need to go, go, go, open up your availability for consultations more than shutting it all off. Be available later hours into the evening, especially if you're marketing on social media and you aren't just marketing to your HOA and your Book club, you're actually getting cold clients that you don't know, they have jobs, they might be in different time zones. You can't shut yourself off to specific hours of the day if you really want to get a large volume of business. I've tried both ways myself, and during peak engagement seasons, I open my calendar up. I add in every other Saturday. I will go as late as 7 p.m. start times for consultations, not every night, but some days of the week. Because sometimes I get clients that are on the Pacific coast and so they're just getting off work. It's not common for me. I usually get Midwestern and East Coast clients. But that also gives the East Coast and the Midwest clients time to get home from work, have dinner, settle in, and then prepare themselves for the call. Okay? All right, recap. If you can, review your volume from last wave season. And even if you weren't marketing, just like have that have the data there. If you got an excessive number of bookings during wave season last year, maybe look at where it could have strained your process, even just a little bit. Or if you're brand newbie, conservatively estimate with a real buffer if this is your first one. And I would honestly. The maximum capacity, like you only allow five appointments a week or whatever in your scheduler, that's also a great opportunity for newbies to get into the wave season and get used to the wave season for your very first time around. Rather than getting sucked in, maybe you don't have your consultation like general script or your closing script objections really fine-tuned. And then all of a sudden you get like 10 consultations a week, and you're like, wow, this is great, but you're nervous and you're kind of stumbling through it. Maybe cut back and take fewer consultations on and just view it as like a time to at least practice. I don't know, maybe consider that. So, anyway, block your calendar capacity in advance. rather than reactively. So don't don't start wave season and have this massive marketing campaign and realize you only have like two hours a week available for consultations. No. Conversely, don't do this massive campaign if you're a brand new travel agent and you have too much availability. So now if you're like working your nine to five, but then you are doing consultations 6 to 8 p.m five nights a week and then every other Saturday, that is Going to burn you out as well, and you are gonna completely lose track of where you are. So find that happy medium. Okay, make a note when wave season's over, which is months from now. I'm just telling you, prepare your anus. So we're gonna be reviewing tomorrow the marketing campaigns for the months ahead. And why that review matters just as much as your calendar. Okay, this was day 264 of the Travel Agency New Year podcast. Have a wonderful day. Also, if you're watching this on YouTube, my hair is just being crazy. It just sticks out randomly. Alright, have a wonderful day.