Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 193: The Travel Advisor's Guide to finding your Founder's Story
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome back to the Travel Agency in your podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K. We are talking all about storytelling in your marketing this week. Starting at day 191, if you're curious. And today is all about your founder's story, telling the story of your why behind your travel business. Okay. Hmm. This took me a long time to figure out my why. There's actually a book, I think I've mentioned it in past episodes. Simon Sinek has ⁓ gosh. I can see the cover of his other book called E Leaders Eat Last, but he has another book called Finding Your Why. And there is another guy, his name is Dr. Arthur Brooks, and he talks about the default mode network and like dopamine addiction. And the default mode network is the one that contemplates the why in your brain, something like that. And then the dopamine addicted side is the how and the what and the when. And so finding your why is very important and telling your why is also super important. But when you start as a travel agent or anything like self-employed, do you know your why? It yeah, it can be tied to your mission statement, but deep down do you know why you went into what you did? Not the polished version, the real, real reason. So today this episode is gonna help you find yours. People don't just book with a travel advisor for logistics. They book some with someone that they trust. And trust is built faster through a story than through credentials. I could sit here and be like I could tell you the awards I've won as a travel agent. I could tell you my degree. I could tell you other successful businesses I've started. But that's that you're gonna be like, don't care, you know what mean? And that sounded I wish I'm not gonna edit it out, but I wish I did edit that section out in retrospect, 'cause that sounds really braggy. Like y I could tell you how many groups I've done, I could tell you how many clients I've served, I could tell you how much in bonuses and how much I earn, but that's not gonna help you feel connected to me. That's that's no. And you're gonna be like, bitch, I don't care. Stop bragging. You know? Or I can tell you the nightmare that I had gone through every step of the way and all the failures and the mistakes I have made building my travel agency up and then crashing burning and having to rebuild it again. Like that's Something people would remember because I can teach you valuable lessons and reflections that you can take with you rather than being like, ⁓ I just do this step one, step two, step three, step four, and I have all these things. You're not gonna remember it all, you're not gonna implement it yourself, and you're not gonna feel like you can even do it. Anyhood. Your founder's story. The honest account of why you do the work that you do is one of the fastest ways to build trust because it shows people the human behind their itineraries. And this is how, if you're struggling to find a niche, this can be how you could eventually choose a niche yourself. Is when you focus on your founder's story. Okay? Most advisors either don't want to tell the story. Or they tell like a flattened generic version, like I've just always loved travel and I want to help people and I always did the itineraries for our family vacations. I hear that all so many times. No shade to advisors. That is a big part of the why, but what's the deeper why? Like, and that can help you really niche down in what you want to offer. That's not a story, what I just said. I've just always loved travel and I always booked our families' travel and I always managed their itineraries. And I want other people to do it too. That's a caption. Real founder story has specificity, which I mentioned yesterday, a turning point, and something at stake. So let's get some questions and a little handy dandy notebook out. ⁓ There's three questions that surface your real story. What was happening in your life, question number one, right before you started this? Not the highlight reel, the actual content. Maybe you were burnt out in your previous career. Maybe you took a trip with or without booking through a travel agent, and that changed how you saw the travel industry. Just any moment that helped. Like maybe you helped a friend plan something and you realized you were better at it and happier doing it than anything else that was going on in your life. Okay? Wanna know what was happening in my life right before I got into travel? I'll share it. It's great. It's grand, it's lovely. I spent like fifteen or so years bouncing around trying to figure out my career and I just knew I wanted to do something with weddings. And then I had briefly a very successful cleaning business. because like I've got many twists and turns. So when I was twenty-nine I fell while I was work at work and that turned into like eighteen months of me not being able to walk because I had some hypermobility issues too. So I had to have surgery, took forever to get diagnosed, and then I was put on all these limit limitations that basically pulled me out of hospitality. So I was like, okay, I can't have a desk job. No one's gonna hire me around here anyway, because I quote, don't have experience in a desk job. If you're listening, like you're probably like, what do you mean? I get it. So, ⁓ I needed something that had like lightweight, kept me on my feet, but also not too strenuous, and could make decent return on the investment and keep me physically active, and that was a cleaning business. So I started that and I built it to 11 employees and a manager, and then I sold it to take this butler job for a billionaire because I got to do event planning and managing the estate and the cleaning and some travel aspects to it and it was that was really cool. I like it was a way cooler thing to tell people I did for a living, kinda egoic, than being like, I have a cleaning business, I can be like, I work for a billionaire, no big deal. You know? And I immediately was like, I want to do travel as a side hustle. So I started. I knew I wanted to do weddings right away. The agency I worked for was like, who wants to do weddings? And I wanted to build it up and take my experience from bottling and apply that to like a higher-end travel experience for clients and all of my event planning so that I could create these international events because I cannot work as an event planner. and I cannot be on my feet 15, 18 hours a day every weekend for like three to six months out of the year. So this was the next best thing for my calling. And that is why I started my travel agency in the midst of the pandemic. I had done travel for a few years prior, but then I switched, started my own travel agency, went heavy, heavy, heavy on destination weddings, and that's what I did. So that was kind of what was happening in my life. Alright, that's really long. Sorry. What almost stopped you? For me it was COVID. COVID hit, and I was like, I mean, I could go get a crappy job and give up. Or I could just deal with the sacrifice. So every real story has resistance. There's money, doubt, a fear that you're gonna fail, a fear that you're gonna succeed. We talk about the fears in this series. I believe it's back in like day 75 or something, and then 10 days of all the different fears we get. People telling you it wasn't practical, please comment if you've heard from quote unquote friends and family members, ⁓ that little travel thing, how's that going? Like I I didn't even know anybody used a travel agent anymore. Well they do. Anyway, this is the part that advisors skip because it feels really, really vulnerable. But it's the part that makes the story land. Nobody connects with everything went perfectly smoothly and I'm just the best at everything all the time. People connect with I almost didn't do this. Because I had to deal with this resistance. And I know, I know. Some of my students are like right in that resistance point. And I, man, if you join any of our live QAs as a student with Elevate, I will I will be like, just do it. Just just jump off the cliff. You can do it. This is what you want. ⁓ yeah. Because honestly, when you're on your deathbed. You are never going to be like, man, I wish I didn't take that risk. You're gonna be like, man, I wish I didn't stay in that soul sucking career. You know what I mean? Like People regret not doing what they wanted in their life. So why are you afraid to do it? We're all afraid to do it a little bit. It's fine. Question number three. What does this work give you now that you did not expect? Not I get to help people travel. Get really specific. Maybe ⁓ I'll tell you mine. Maybe it's watching a client cry happy tears. Reading their honeymoon itinerary, if you meet them in person. Maybe it's like the freedom to build a business on your own terms, your own way, after years of being on someone else's schedule. That specific current payoff is what makes the story feel alive rather than finished in a packaged way. Okay. So what does this work give you now that you didn't expect? For me, I am ⁓ I started in destination weddings, right? The the thing I never expected was all of the wedding videos, not the photos. And I will tell my clients, like, yeah, you're never gonna watch this video again. But when they send me that video of their wedding, I cry every single time. I'm like, ⁓ it's so beautiful. And I never expected to build these relationships with these people that go on for years and years. ⁓ and connecting like I've connected with people from completely different cultural backgrounds and like learned about them. And it's just amazing. But I will say, first and foremost, those wedding videos that I get, and I'm just like, this was like 15 months of working together. And then if they have children, the baby pictures, watching them build that family that I helped put the celebration together is just amazing. Okay, so again, your founder story, caution, isn't your list of qualifications. It's not, I became a certified travel advisor and I did all this training with the tourism board and I got my credentials and then that's not what it is. That is a timeline. Okay. A story has a moment, like a scene. Like if you could picture the specific place where you were like like sitting on your couch or s or maybe at your kitchen table when the turning port happened, you're on to the real version of your story. I have so many like little glimpses of weeks before the world shut down in 2020 where I like sitting at my kitchen peninsula and I was showing my ex, I was like, look at all the bookings I have. Look at all the commission I'm gonna make this year. I'm gonna be able to quit my job. And I love doing this, and everyone's so happy, and this is just something I really like doing. And then like three weeks later, no But I had to sit and mope for a while and then make that decision to keep going. Okay, you want some homework tonight? Sure. I like constantly doing stuff. Okay, great. Actually write down the answers to those three questions in full sentences, even the messy ones. And we're we can build on this tomorrow. Okay, so the three questions again. What was happening in your life right before you started working as a travel advisor? What almost stopped you? Stopped you past tense. That's question number two. Question number three: what does this work give you now that you didn't expect? Okay. All right, this is day 193 of the Travel Agency in the Year. Thanks for coming by, and I will see you tomorrow.