Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 178 - Reclaiming Your "Why" When Travel Logistics Overwhelm You
Transcript
- Rachel: Have you ever found yourself like chilling around 1 32 p.m., maybe 4 p.m., at your desk or your dining room table, wherever you work, listening to the worst looping elevator music because you've been on hold with one of your preferred suppliers for like two hours? Or maybe you're drowning in like tracking your commissions. Commissions are not getting paid as you suspected. Typing out your terms and conditions, you gotta update ⁓ stuff like that. Or ooh, the worst one is when you're like, I have all these trips I'd like to quote with my preferred supplier, and I can't get into the portal because the server's down or something crazy's happening. So that's probably why you're on hold, waiting to get through to a rep, and you're just like, this is my nightmare. You might find yourself blankly staring at your computer screen. Putting your head in your hands maybe, asking, why am I even doing this? This is like the worst career path ever. I left my stable corporate nine to five. And this is the daily grind, and I'm so far behind on everything else. When the heavy admin weight of running an independent travel agency builds up, it's so easy to lose sight of the magic of why you got into this. So for day 179, nope, 178 of the travel agency near podcast, today we're gonna take a step back. We're gonna pause, we're gonna strip away all the boring admin paperwork and actively reclaim your why. I have done a previous episode about Simon Sinek's finding your why and how important it is. And today you might have forgotten. your why. So we're gonna talk about reclaiming it. We're gonna break down why the old brain gets omer overwhelmed by all the administrative friction. Why data entry is not the core of your identity, and how to reconnect with the genuine passion that drove you to start all of this in the first place. This is something like outside of the sales and marketing, the amount of administrative work, so many TAs that I've like mentored and coached over the years is like I did not realize this was thing. So let's fix all that today. The mindset issue. That causes us to hit that wall of burnout during those busy and so boring operational cycles. When you first decided to become a tr travel agent, ⁓ you didn't do this because you had a burning passion for tracking confirmation numbers or commissions or bookings. You didn't do this because you loved reading the fine print TNCs or sorting through insurance policy options. and figuring out which supplier you wanted to partner with, all that fun stuff. You started this because you love travel and you love planning. You love discovering. You might love certain cultures. ⁓ and you love to help people. But since you're an indie, indie agent, you get to wear every single hat in your business, which is what this whole podcast has been about. You are marketing, you are sales, you are the accountant, you are the CSR, you are data entry, you are the CEO, you are the gatekeeper, you are the secretary until you can start outsourcing these things. So during those heavy, heavy operational months. The admin tasks do skyrocket. And this could just be like certain days of the month, certain weeks in a quarter. You spend like 80% of your day. Doing like data entry and fixing errors and like why isn't my commission in yet? And like, God, I hate that so much. Booking bonuses that have been promised. I got booking bonuses that suppliers told me they were gonna pay out two years ago, and they're still like working on the process. And I'm like, this is ridiculous. And it's so frustrating to go back and forth, and slowly over time, your brain begins to associate your business intensely. With all that nonsense you don't want to be doing. ⁓ you look at your desk and you don't see creativity, you see stacks of paper and high stress and digital chores and a to-do list of like the most boring, redundant things, even just like setting up your workflows. You're like, nah, this is my nightmare. So when You start to lose that connection to the joy of what you sell. Your energy drops. You start to sound transactional in your client calls rather than like inspirational. ⁓ you start pitching any you stop pitching anything that's like creative or out of the box. Cause you don't want the extra work. ⁓ this is actively stunting the growth of your agency. So many things stunts the growth of your agency, by the way. ⁓ you have to remind your brain that this is just part of the vehicle, but not necessarily the destination of being a travel agency owner. So let's get over this operational fatigue. Mm-hmm. I have talked about this with like your cycles. If you are a woman listening, ⁓ even if you've gone through menopause, like if you have a vague idea of your cycles in the past. your hormones still fluctuate, just not at the same level to where you menstruate and yeah, sorry, TMI. But certain phases of your cycle you should be focusing more on admin stuff because you are too tired and feel too gross to do a lot of the marketing, especially if it's like in person or video marketing. ⁓ So that's one way, but if you're just in full on, like I don't want to do any of this admin stuff, and you're not at a place where you can hire someone, let's talk about your what your daily labor actually produces. And I do talk about this a lot, like stop doing a bunch of boring admin stuff because it's not making you money, and also you need to do the bare minimum of that, how you have your bare minimum set in your business. So you are not reframe. You're not an order taker whose primary value is typing in credit card numbers. ⁓ man, I hate those days where you're just running payments all day long. If that's all you were doing, you would be nothing more than a human keyboard. Okay. So you are creating core memories for your clients. Remember that. This is just part of the process. They gotta pay for it. Think about any itineraries or proposals you're like working on right now. You aren't just booking a flight and hotel room or a flight and cruise and pre- and post stay. You're designing a honeymoon that a young couple has been dreaming about for months or years, and it's the trip where they finally get to breathe a sigh of relief after months or years of wedding planning and celebrate their new lives together. You're organizing, maybe, depending on your niche. Bucket list multi generational trips where grandpa gets to sit on the balcony of his cruise cabin, whatever, with the grandkids and watch the sunset over the ocean. Like that's a core memory for those grandkids and that grandfather. You are organizing solo soul searching trips for someone who's like recovering from a major loss or life transition. And you're providing them with the exact physical space and safety to help them heal and rediscover themselves. All the whole times, the confusing, frustrating, chasing down commissions, the system crashes, the annoying fine print you have to understand. That's not the core of your business. That's simply the toll, the operational toll you pay, to step up to be able to create create these life changing trips for these people. And because of that, your work has deep lasting meaning. You can change the trajectory of how people experience the world, how they connect with their loved ones, and how they rest their souls. What? When you look at your desk through this lens, like my desk, if you saw it right now, it is probably like yours, piles of papers everywhere and like all these different things going on, and so many little admin things that you're working on. That admin work ceases to be like a soul-crushing chore, and you change your instead of I have to, I have to run this credit card payment. I get to run this credit card payment because this is creating the honeymoon of this couple's dreams by running this payment. So that's like a reframe that you should take, right? And it's just the necessary steps of doing this. So your action for today. Don't look at an invoice, don't reply to the emails, don't pull up the Travify, Traveljoy, Turn, whatever. Well, you might need to pull up Turn or Travel Joy. ⁓ go into your emails, like archived emails, past clients, go to your Google Business reviews or your Facebook business page reviews and find like or text messages maybe from a past client and find that glowing thank you from one client. Find one where the client wrote back to you after their trip and said something like, Thank you so much. This vacation was Absolutely perfect because of you and my family will never forget it. Read that message very slowly, line by line. Do not scan it. Read the words, re-experience how it felt the day you first got that message from that client. Remember the pride that you felt, the relief, and the sense of accomplishment that washed over you when you realized all those boring administrative tasks for that one trip and all that hard work made a tangible and beautiful impact on their life. The pictures that they're gonna be looking back on decades from now, that's because of you. What? Take a screenshot if you want to of that review or message, whatever. Print it out, frame it, put it on your wall. You could do that with every like five star review if you wanted to. You could print them all out after you screenshot ⁓ frame them and put ⁓ on the wall. This is gonna help remind you exactly who you are, who took this brave leap to start your own business and the immense impact you have on other people's lives. So let's reclaim that fire and that passion today. And let's get ready for the final piece of the mindset reset before the next quarter starts. Okay? You have a wonderful day. I'll see you tomorrow for day one seventy nine.