Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 258: Why Travel Advisors Should Audit Their Systems, Tech & Tools Before
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency New Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Kay. Today is day 258. We are closing into getting down to less than a hundred days of this. I as always, thanks for coming back. Thanks for joining all the newbies. If you don't know who I am, my name is Rachel K. I'm a travel agency owner, and I help travel advisors build a legitimate business. Okay? That's what this podcast is all about. And there's so much with regards to business development. That's why there's 365 episodes. So We're gonna be talking about, we just wrapped up CEO Mindset series for the quarterly review. And if you followed along, you should be ready to start next quarter with a real clarity. Like your numbers are reviewed, your lessons have been named, your number one priority has been chosen. there's a piece of that preparation we haven't really touched on yet. We're gonna go over this next few days. And it's super easy to skip out on because it's not as emotionally resonant as reviewing your growth or celebrating your wins. It's auditing the actual machinery behind your business, your systems, your tech, and your tools. I like how I pronounce that as your. So these three words, terms get used interchangeably a lot. Let's separate them cleanly because each one needs a slightly different kind of audit. Number one is a systems. They are your processes, the repeatable sequence of steps behind something in your business, regardless of what software runs it. So your process may be schedule a consultation. Once they schedule the consultation, then you have a general script of how the consultation call goes because you should be fairly niche down. From there, you'll probably send an agreement with them to sign off on T's and C. D's and C's, your terms and conditions, and provide personal information for those traveling on the trip. Maybe pay their fee if you do that and the invoice for that, and so on and forth and so forth. Those are your systems. Doesn't matter what software you're using, that's how your business operates. How you do your content batching, the rhythm that you do it in, that's like your s your systems. A system can exist entirely on paper with no tech involved at all. Because you can still have your systems that same exact way without having your exact CRM and your exact website. A website's a website, it's a website. A CRM is a CRM, is a CRM. Tech is the software and the platforms running underneath your systems and like run it for you, like your CRM, the wholesalers and suppliers that you work with, their booking engines, your email marketing platform or email platform in general, your scheduling tools, your content and design software. Canva. We all use Canva. And then the third one is your tools, which is a super broad category. Every individual I'm gonna tell a joke no one gets every individual resource you rely on, technological or not, from a specific spreadsheet template to a physical planner to a subscription service to this very pen I hold in my hands to if you have a podcast, your microphone setup, your headphones that are those are your tools, your ring light or whatever lighting you use, the little GoPro thingy gimbal things for your phone when you're doing Site tours. I've got this lovely handy-dandy gooseneck thing that I use for like when I'm just talking to the camera for short form content. You're supposed to be able to wear this around your neck. I feel like it would not be safe. The little mics, those are your tools. Your laptop, your cell phone, your mouse, your printer if you print a lot of stuff. Your notebooks. Those are your tools. And the joke that I had earlier, by the way, I instantly thought of Steve Martin and the jerk. I love that movie. It's not one of my favorites, but it's like a nice go to. And when he's built his millions of dollars and he's like, I don't need anything. this thermos and this lamp and like those are your bare minimum tools. If you've seen the movie you might get a chuckle. You probably don't even get what I'm thinking in my head if you've seen it. But anyhood, that's neither here nor there. So full audit looks at all three of these systems, tech, and tools, because a breakdown in any one of them can drag down on the other two. Your laptop crashes and you don't have a backup or a desktop, you're kinda SOL that day, and you have to stop everything, and then you're behind on work because you gotta go get a new one. Probably why you should do this audit. That's like a pretty important reason to audit your tech, right? maybe for some reason you have a super important client consultation and every pen is out of ink. What? And you need to write it down with a pen for some reason. I don't know. You could also have a really great system and then it's running on the wrong tech, and that's just inefficient. So great tech with no real system behind it. You've bought all the fancy software programs, but you have zero system. that's chaos with a nice interface. It's pretty, but it's still chaos. Either one left unexamined for too long becomes very expensive. It's either in wasted money, wasted time, or both. And we all know time is money, and I'm not a fan of wasting both time and money. That's worst case scenario. So let's talk about Toyota's production system. There's a well known practi well, you're like, what are you I don't know this practice. It's a well known practice. Not really. In well, it's it is, but you probably don't know what it is. it's Called Kaizen or Continuous Improvement that's worth understanding that Toyota uses in their production system. Toyota managers regularly conduct what's called, like a I don't know if I'm pronouncing this right, Gemba walk. Gemba meaning the real place. No, it didn't glitch out. I just took a pause. So instead of reviewing their operations purely through reports and dashboards, managers physically walk the actual production floor, watch the real work happening, ask genuinely curious questions rather than accusatory ones, and look for any friction or waste or breakdowns firsthand. And the first thing that comes to my mind, because you're like, how does this apply to a travel agency? If you scale, which hopefully you will be, at least to having an assistant. Right, if you scale enough where you can kind of step out of the business for the day-to-day operations, you should practice this walk and like monitor them. And it's not micromanaging, you're not going to be doing it all of the time. It's kind of like the only example I can come up with in my head to liken it to general experience of people. We all went to school, elementary school, junior high, high school. And the teachers would always have a some like a sort of an audit. We're like the superintendent, Super Nintendo. Superintendent. If you watch The Simpsons, I love Ralph Wigum. Hi Super Nintendo Chowbers! Okay, anyway. Cat spread smells like cat food. I am turning red. I'm so embarrassed. I just said Super Nintendo instead of superintendent. Like the superintendent or the principal probably would have like a little audit team sitting in the classroom and like kind of reviewing. They would send this person in, if you remember, I remember. They'd just kind of sit in the back of the classroom and just take notes. And the teachers would always be like, be cool, be normal. And we were like, What? Well don't be normal, be act like you like me. But just for this week, then we can go back to normal. it's kind of the same in my brain. Anyway, their Kentucky plant at Toy Toyota's Kentucky Plant reportedly generates like a million improvement suggestions a year from its own workforce through this type of culture, with a striking percentage of them actually implemented. And that number is like Almost unbelievable until you understand the mech mech little mechanism behind it. This isn't an annual audit event. It's a constant built-in habit of walking through the actual process on the ground rather than assuming everything's fine because nobody's complained loudly enough to force a review. So This is actually pretty foundational to what assistance that work teaches review, not do. You should be reviewing the process and not doing. And it's so tough to do it on a daily basis because I've had conversations with colleagues of mine about this. process. It is very important to review and like have a thorough understanding of reviewing what your VAs are doing. And also it's like if I'm reviewing what they're doing all the time and it takes them four hours to get all this done I gotta take however much time reviewing it. And it's but it's also important because then you can catch issues, right? Now you don't need a factory floor to do this. It's regularly and deliberately walking through your own actual processes, even if you don't have anyone helping you, it's just you, rather than just assuming that they're fine because you're used to them is exactly what surfaces the friction that you've stopped noticing simply because you live inside it every day. it's important even like your website, for some reason links can randomly break and you can be like this link was working and now it's not. So it's important to just like go to your own website and click on everything. Do that like once a month. Like, are my links working? Does this lead contact form make sense? little things like that, just the functioning of your website. And it can be all of your other processes. go through it as a client. Like I always I don't know if I've said this in this podcast. I think I've said it in the success circle. And I know for a fact I say it to all of the agents on my team. You create a fake test account in your CRM to set up your workflows and test them and test them regularly. And I've had people not test them and then they send off a form they never completed or saved. So then it's just a bunch of empty form fields and the client doesn't know how to fill out the form and it's like you have to do these kinds of regular audits. And trust me, every time I don't do an audit myself because I'm notoriously bad at checking my work, that's a toxic trait of mine. I definitely get someone pointing out like, hey this workflow isn't working. And I'm like, Okay, so this connects directly to like the 12-week rhythm of the quarterly reviews that I like to do. A quarter transition is like a pause point. Like you're already reviewing reviewing the numbers. You're already thinking about like what changes next quarter needs. Auditing your systems, your tech, your tools around the same time means any operational changes that you decide to make can actually be built into next quarter's plan from the start rather than getting bolted on halfway through, like once something breaks. And it gives you an opportunity if you're like, I'm gonna implement this new system. But then you gotta stop and think: like, can my tech handle it? Can my tools handle it? And can my systems adjust to it? Okay. So here's what happens when the audit gets skipped quarter after quarter. small little workarounds accumulate, kind of like duct taping leaky leaky pipes. I don't know why that's what I'm thinking of. That's fine, just put duct tape on it. A manual step that you added six months ago to cover up a gap in your system that never got fixed properly, never got fully automated, you're used to it, and it just takes you longer to do things. Or your subscriptions pile up. You aren't auditing what software you actually need. tool you signed up for something during the busy season. I'm so guilty of this by the way. And never canceled. Still quietly charging your card every month. Or you sign up for the year, realize three months in, I hate this tool, forget about it, don't cancel, and the annual renewal is about to come up. That could be another thing. Processes you set up drift from what they were originally designed to do, and they're adjusted piecemeal in the moment without ever being redesigned holistically. And it's just like you get into that mentality of like, I just gotta get this done today, I'll do this later. And it piles up more and more and more and more. None of these problems are individually dramatic because you're just like, I just gotta get this done. I'll deal with it later. But then when you have that happening bi-weekly or weekly or twice a week, twice a week over one quarter, 12, 13 weeks, that's about 25 new problems and 25 things that are slowing you down or causing you to spend more money and lose revenue. So If you leave that all unexamined across several quarters, then they compound even further into a business that's noticeably harder and more expensive to run than it even needs to be. Just for reasons that were never a single obvious crisis, just a just the snowball. The snowball. I don't know why I went to Dave Ram why is my brain I went to Dave Ramsey in the snowball debt payment and it's like the same thing, but the opposite. You're just spending more and more money. Ooh, interesting. so this isn't about chasing the latest tools or overhauling everything you've built. I'm also like that, it can be a huge time suck, especially when you need to generate revenue. you need to deal with the messy systems you have right now and be okay with it not being perfect and get the revenue in. That is top importance. 'cause plenty of what you're using pff currently is probably working exactly as it should. the goal of the audit is more discernment. We've talked about discernment in past episodes. not disruption, not Blow it all up and start all over again. But it's identifying specifically what's actually creating friction or waste in your business and leaving everything else alone. so an audit that ends with replace everything usually wasn't a careful audit at all. It was a reaction. Could be caused by some little bit of FOMO, maybe a little bit of somebody's marketing to you, and you're reacting to it thinking I gotta upgrade. So separate your review into like part of your quarterly review for your operations into systems tech tools. Process software resources. Use the Toyota Gamble Walk mindset. Like walk through your own actual processes firsthand rather than assuming that they're fine. Make this a natural part of like your quarterly audits. You can do it monthly as long as you do it once per quarter. It doesn't have to be exactly at the quarterly audit. Just don't make it something separate, you know? Like, don't make it an extra job for you. That's why I say, like, put it in around the time of your quarterly reviews. the goal is discernment from this. Keep what's working, fix what's genuinely, genuinely creating fiction friction. Ooh. So tomorrow we're gonna talk a little bit more about the client journey. Looking at my notes here with auditing your systems. Let's go into this. Let me go through my notes, you poo's. Ooh, and yep, then we're gonna do a tool auditing. Just going through my notes, make sure. team option if you have teams. Setting up the next quarter. Okay. I hope you have a wonderful day. Let me go find my spot. Here we go. I will see you tomorrow. Bye.