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Day 114 - the TA's Monthly Review · Travel Agency in a Year

• Rachel K: Welcome to day 114 of the Travel Agency in a year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K. If you don't know who I am, I'm a travel agency owner helping travel advisors really learn how to run a business, become the CEO of their business. The podcast is free for you to consume. It's a lot of information. If you're interested in any courses, mentoring, coaching, services, head on over to elevatewithrachelk.com. For those of you coming back, thanks for joining yet again. I know people are... pretty well die hard about this podcast for I don't even know why. Because I have such a soothing voice. I have a face for radio. No, I'm kidding. ⁓ Anyway, today is the monthly review. Now know you're thinking, Rachel, why are you talking about this three and a half months in to this podcast? So if you don't know how I operate, I like to go from the big, big goals and funnel it down to the little goals and the little steps that you can take each day. So I've already done I've talked about the importance of the annual review at the very beginning of this podcast. We've already gone in depth around day 85 ish through 90 and early 90s about the quarterly review and what things you need to be looking out for and then strategies you can develop as a business owner because unless you are a W2 employee at a travel agency, you are your own business. Please keep that in mind. And now we're gonna funnel it down even further to monthly reviews. Because it's, in my experience for me, and this, can fight me in the comments, I don't care. But for me, it's better for me to start with the big overall picture, work backwards to, okay, now what can I do today or tomorrow? What's one thing I can do today that's gonna get me towards that big goal in a year or three years or five years? This was something my dad taught me. ⁓ shoot, probably when I was going through my quarter life crisis. I think I was around 22 or 23 years old, but I remember I was in his home office and he was telling me this. He's like, what do want to do with your life? And I was like, I don't know. And he was like, okay, where do you want to be in five years? I was like, well, I want to have a home. I want to be a homeowner. And he's like, okay, what do you need for that? I was like, I need good credit and a down payment. And he's like, all right, how are you going to get that? I was like, well. need to pay my credit cards down and need to save some money for the down payment. And how are you going to make that money? Like he just had me work backwards and he was like, okay, so what can you do tomorrow? That's going to get you to that home that you live in five years from now. That's what this whole podcast is about. And I do have a 52 week program for $35 a month called the success circle. is a companion to this. podcasts, they kind of like coincide with one another. That teaches you more and like has more structure of like, here's what you can do this week. It takes about two hours a week is the goal to help you with your business. So you can consider it like your CEO business development time. Anyway. All right. The monthly review. It's very similar to the quarterly review and very similar to the annual review. and it's important to consistently review and track your data so that you can make informed decisions and over time, let's see if this comes up in future, da da da, talk about partnerships, I think probably in three months from now, we're gonna touch on, yep, we're gonna touch on, ⁓ nope, it is about two weeks from now. I've got every episode written out like the notes of it, how to make decisions for if it needs to be an immediate action or a future action. The monthly review helps you start practicing that. The weekly review, the monthly, the quarterly and the annual review really gets you in that mode of I'm the owner of this business and I can control the outcome. You can't control everything, but you feel like you have more control if you have your plan set up. And you can't really plan anything if you don't have past data. So I've said this a bunch, if you're in like a health and fitness plan, you don't just start out being like, I'm gonna be Arnold Schwarzenegger, period. You don't like you can have that as your goal and also you need to compare if like look at however old you are, what shape was Arnold in? What were his measurements? What were his height? If you weren't the same height, then you got to like scale it up or down, right? You're probably not going to have the same frame as him, but you know, get an idea of the goals that you want. want your torso to be proportioned a certain way, so on and so forth. And I don't know why I chose Arnold because I know it's mostly women that listen to this podcast. So anyway, but from there, you would have to take your current measurements so you can compare and contrast. And then you can see, okay, I am this far off in terms of my bicep measurement. My biceps are too small compared to his. And now, because he is taller than me, and his biceps, I'm just throwing out imaginary numbers. He has 25 inch biceps, but he's also six inches taller than me. I don't even know how tall he is. Therefore, I should probably aim for like 14, 15 inch biceps. Right now, I'm at a 12 inch bicep, fully flexed. Then you would start to develop your plan and as you start working out, it's probably gonna take you a couple years to get there, right? But as you start working out, you would consistently measure how much has my bicep grown doing this workout over the last month or the last two months? Am I seeing progress? Is it stagnant? Is it my diet? The same thing needs to happen in your business. So it's important to do a monthly review. What are you tracking in your monthly review? Are you hitting your goals? Are you tracking towards your annual and your quarterly goals? So like if you have a quarterly goal of like I want 30 bookings and I do these numbers to make it easy, that means you should book 10 trips every month. That means you should be sending out and working with at least two clients each week, two to three clients to get that 10 trips a month. at a minimum, but what is your conversion rate? You should figure that out from your annual business review. I have an idea of that. And if you're brand new, if you're tracking this data, you can say I talked to 30 people, I closed five trips. That means five out of 30, I have a 1 sixth, whatever that percentage is, closing rate. I would imagine that's like 18%, I don't know, 16 % maybe. Closing rate. and you track that over time. So you're gonna have your wave seasons and this is how you can find your individual wave season, which if you don't know what wave season is, it's typically the beginning of the year, usually around Christmas time through like March. Travel advisors typically get the majority of their bookings at that time, regardless of their niche. However, over time you can find your own personal wave seasons based on your niche, based on who your ICA is. And based on ⁓ ideal travel dates, like do you focus on booking high season for your niche or low season for your niche or are you a shoulder season girly like myself? I'm a big fan of the shoulder season. And that can help you determine because if everyone's wanting to book trips for like the Caribbean, April, May or like maybe October, November before Thanksgiving kind of time. And you know that they typically have a certain timeframe booking window where they'll book like six months to 12 months, 15 months out. Before I get into this whole monthly review thing, I do also want to say myself and other advisors have noticed trends in booking that used to be pretty consistent, like six to 12 months out for trips. However, people at the time of recording this have noticed that their clients are booking trips like three months out. So it can shift, but that's why you track this monthly data. again, booking goals, how many consultations did you have, your overall revenue, especially if you charge fees, but what commissions come in, ⁓ your social media stats, any client feedback, any issues with automations or workflows or your CRM in general. You'll want to track this a little bit, like look at the numbers over the week to kind of see, okay, this is trending and this is what's working. Don't stop everything to fix everything every single week or you're never going to go out and get new clients because you're be like, oh, I need to tweak this. need to tweak that. Wait till you get a little bit more feedback. And that's kind of what the monthly and the quarterly reviews are for. Quarterly is more of like, am I tracking towards my annual goals? Monthly is more like am I tracking towards my quarterly goals and also the notes I've made over the last few weeks is there a consistent pattern here? So we're gonna get into pattern recognition about 10 days from now in the podcast episodes So you can help decide if this is an immediate action or future action I do know there are a lot of travel advisors out there who especially when they first start out, get in that trap of perfectionism and constantly trying to optimize and fix all of their workflows. And then they struggle to get any clients because they aren't marketing, they're focusing on their systems. And that's kind of like a fear-based little bit might be tied to like a fear of marketing in general, but just know that those things aren't bringing in money. So when you do your monthly review, and you see all of this data in your different departments. What I like to do is structure it like have the separate departments quote unquote. So you're to have your financial department and that's going to be revenue. Just how much money did you bring in? Marketing is going to be how many consultations did you get? Operations is going to be How many issues did you have with all the different software you use? Or just maybe you only use one software. How frustrated are you with your web host? Like your website host? Did you have issues with your internet system? Your cell phone? Like when I used to do these reviews, I still do them, but like I'm saying back in, shoot, maybe 21 or 22, I was... in a very rural area living on a few acres and there was one cell phone tower. that was a mile, maybe a mile and a half away, about a mile and a half away from the house. You would think that cell phone tower being that close would mean that I'd have good reception. Now there were some factors. I was at the bottom of a hill in a brick home surrounded by a bunch of trees. Also, it wasn't an 18T tower. It was a shared tower. Lastly, the vicinity that it was in, was surrounded by ⁓ government housing because I was like racking my brain. Why am I losing signal, especially in the summertime and especially afternoons and evenings? I was getting to a point where I'd have to do client calls like with my phone dangling on the ledge of the bathroom window. Weird on speaker and it just sounds like I'm probably taking a dump or something, you know? Like it does not sound professional. and phones, calls would just drop, drop, drop. And I had to make the decision and I had to stop and do some research and it took like probably a month or two because I was also doing everything else in my business. So I had to make the decision, I've got to figure out a way to get better cell phone reception service because having a landline doesn't make sense either. And then... I was talking to a client who also lived in very, very rural North Carolina and they said, can get a cell phone extender, signal extender. You got to get it approved. So then I had to do all the research on that and I purchased that. And then I went from like half a bar to zero service sitting in parking lots in town to take client calls to having like four to five bars on my phone. And I had to make that decision. Like, can my company afford this at this time? This is like a $600 investment. But the return on the investment is I will be able to handle more phone calls and serve my clients better. So that's kind of like the monthly review. Like what can you take? What actions can you take to slowly get there? That is part of your monthly review decisions like does your phone work? Hasn't been working is your internet working? Do you have any trips coming up? How are you gonna manage that? Do you have a colleague that can help you or do you have a set way for your clients to communicate if they are traveling? What's going on with that? So I like to do it per department and track Here's how much money we've got because the royal we, this is how much money the business has. This is how much came in last month compared to the month prior. We are now averaging, like the month prior you're maybe averaging $300 a week. Maybe now you're averaging more like $600 a week. That doesn't mean stop working, okay? That's like 30,000 a year, people, calm down. But you're seeing that growth. And so it's like, what you were currently doing and have been doing over the last month or two is still working. Keep doing that. Then you can look at, I have enough money in my profit account? Do I have enough money in my tax account? If you are doing the profit first method, you'll have like your little different account set up. How are my operating expenses? What's supposed to be coming in down the road? What is my... ⁓ total sales so I can kind of anticipate the revenue coming in. How many more bookings do I need to get to hit my goals? Then you go into your marketing. Which method is working best to bring these people in? What kind of content on whatever platform is working best to get these people in? What kind of programs have I instituted to get more referrals? And is that working? Where is everything coming from in terms of your leads? And subsequently, subsequently your clients, you could even go way in depth if you want to and just be like, do I need to tweak my consultation? Like if you're struggling, if you can get them on the phone with you or in a meeting with you, but you're struggling to get them to book with you or like pay your fee, sign off in your terms and conditions, whatever, before you do the proposal, that's the time you need to look at your consultation process. Are you still nervous about it? it like a newer niche you're pivoting to? Are you asking too many questions and not asking enough? Are you talking about your own trips on the call? Nobody cares about your own trips unless they specifically ask. and you could possibly tweak your consultation. So that's kind of like what you look at for your marketing. Then your operations, again, I went on a tangent about it, your phone service, your internet service, backups for emergency, your crisis protocols, do you have all that stuff kind of in place? Are your workflows work flowing? Are they flowing through for you? If they are, are you getting client feedback of like, is great information or are they marking your emails as spam? That's gonna be a problem down the road if they mark your emails as spam, regardless of what, how amazing your workflows are until you would change CRMs and like use a completely different email. Like once you're marked as spam, it's really hard to get out of there. Okay, so those are things you can consider on your monthly review. Then you need to determine what do I need to tweak for the next month to make it better, to get me closer to my goals. You could do this monthly review and you could be like, I've surpassed all my goals. That just means keep doing what you're doing. This shouldn't take, especially if you are collecting data on a weekly basis, and it doesn't have to be I mean, you might be the type of person that needs it all presented in front of you. You could just write it down in a notebook. You will start to remember, like, OK, when you check it enough, especially for me with marketing analytics, I'm like, OK, I'm seeing consistent growth. ⁓ I'm blanking. don't know why I just started blanking. But anyway, sorry. Once you get used to tracking it on a weekly basis, when it comes to this monthly review, it shouldn't take you more than 90 minutes max. Now, once you have all this information, and also don't forget, we're always inundated and we're being marketed to ourselves, anything you want to make an investment in. A, do you have the money? Is your revenue tracking? Okay, this is also part of the monthly review. Okay, I have the money, yes, great. B, is it gonna help you with your marketing? Is it some kind of training that's gonna make you feel more confident in closing the sale? Possibly, I don't know, this is you, not me. Or, and or, because it could be both, C, Is this going to make my workflows easier? Is this going to give me more time back for this investment? And that's more like, like templated workflows would be a good example of that. Or like I love me experts and I think it's a valuable investment because it does help ease my workflows. And there's so much training available and information available. I just look like a pro selling Riviera Maya. And then I would determine, okay, I have the money. It is gonna help me move the needle forward to bring in even more money. I can purchase this next, like on the first of the month, if you're doing this at the end of the month as an example. Now if any of that stuff's not right, and you're not really, if it's more of like a FOMO-y thing, like ⁓ I'm feeling the pressure to invest in this, maybe sit on it for a while. That's not an immediate action you need to take. We're gonna dive deeper into all of that. in future episodes. The next few episodes are gonna be about cold approaching, creating win-win partnerships, strategy adjustments to your content if you are riding the struggle bus. Thank you for stopping by. And let's hang out tomorrow. See ya, have a great day, bye.