Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 140 - The true cost of constant new travel clients? Could be your sanity
Transcript
- Rachel K: Welcome to the Travel Agency New Year Podcast. It is day 140. Thanks for coming on back. If you like this episode, I need to do this at the end. My CTAs are terrible because I just wing every single episode with my notes. Save this episode. This is going to be a good one. The true cost of new business, like constant new business over and over and over again, could be your sanity. Mm-hmm. That's what this episode's about. If you can't figure it out, it's kind of like the client retention stuff we've talked about before. ⁓ So this is if you are a more established travel advisor, if you're brand new, we all have to go through it. We all have to build our client base. However, I don't believe that this should be a constant chase your entire career. I mean, if you want to, you can. Don't make no difference to me. But if you are an advisor who's like, I'm fine with making around 80 to 100,000 a year and that's fine. I don't need to make, I don't need to be top dog. Okay. ⁓ Once you have set up and built a client base, especially if you have a referral or loyalty program, which we've talked about in previous episodes. Repeat business has the highest ROI Why because you don't have to spend so much time and energy and effort acquiring new business. You just have the repeaters ⁓ Let's see my notes here I know I wanted to revise them, but I'm gonna read them to you anyway So once you have a larger like a large enough client base You can start promoting group trips for everyone in your client base to go on And again, you spend less time marketing everywhere, you still have to show up, you still have to like, hey, I'm alive. Maybe call or text these people. It really just depends on your business model and your marketing strategy. But posting multiple times a day, that's if you just want to make a lot of money off people quick. Like that's like the get rich quick. If I'm in your face all the time, even if it's mediocre marketing, I'm going to make a lot of money. Good luck if you are on a team of one with that strategy. will not work out. ⁓ Trust is built one conversation at a time. And friendly reminder yet again, nobody is buying the trip from you. They are buying the experience to work with you and your skills and knowledge. They are choosing to work with you. It has nothing to do with your niche. This is why you can change niches if you want to. It has everything to do with your skills, knowledge, service level, period. ⁓ let's see. We all do a lot. We all have to do everything in our companies when we're first starting out, especially. And that's why there's Travel Advisor Appreciation Month. This episode originally aired at some point in May. I believe May 20th is the day. It's day 140. I think that's May 20th. So in 2026, if you hear this after this, sorry, you missed the boat. We have our own travel advisor appreciation sale over at elevatewithrachelk.com 50 % off all courses. The membership of the success circle is not discounted. It's only $35 a month. It's like a buck 10 a day or something, buck 20. ⁓ but the code we have, if you are listening today, May 20th, 2026. YAYTAS is the promo code through the month of May. You got about 11 days left. Okay, because we are all one man band, we... Why did I put that? Why did I write that down? I went off on a tangent, like, stop selling. ⁓ We are all often a one man band. We have a lot to do, especially starting out, like I've said just a few minutes ago. Some of us prefer to stay that way because it's more of a labor of love, not just the quick money thing. Okay? So how can you, if you decide for your business model, Maybe I'll do a lot of marketing and then I'll like pull back a little bit from it because I hate marketing. Me. ⁓ Maybe I'll pull back and rely on like client retention. So you can have a loyalty program, can have a referral program, VIP program, whatever, but how do you get them actually excited to want to stay with you? ⁓ Great, we're going to talk about that. Number one, super duper clear expectations. Any vagueness or assumptions on our end as travel advisors will build mistrust. So there's a number of things. Your scope of services, not only should they be clearly outlined, they should be clearly discussed on the initial consultation call ⁓ so they know exactly what you're going to do for them. And the next steps. Are you ready to work with me? Great. I'm going to send you this form. I need to collect your personal information. Sign off on TNCs so you understand my scope of services and you agree to it. Pay a fee if you have a fee, whatever. But at least those first two. Like, I need you to agree this is what I'm doing for you. Get that signed. B, I need your personal information. Make that effort to provide that information for you. Okay? Anyway, so that's scope. The timeline. So you should be able to pull off the top of your head when you want to go so final payments gonna be around I don't know 45 60 days prior So if they want to go in March, then you know final payments can be around January Are they comfortable being able to pay for that with the holidays coming up? That's how this is gonna work the deposit typically runs XYZ because you work with a supplier or brand enough that you can just Know that's roughly the deposit and your overall timeline for the planning and onboarding. How you communicate. This should all be in the consultation. I communicate primarily via email. If you text me, I may not respond right away because my text notifications aren't on. If you call me in the middle of the day, I will not answer because I'm probably doing other work or in a meeting and I cannot have that distraction. My phone is always on silent. ⁓ So. If you need to refer back to communication philosophy, which is way back in the beginning of my notebook, oh shoot, I think it's like day 30 or something. Networking, marketing strategy. Travel CEO I feel like it's somewhere around a 30 Nope active listening. I Don't know. Oh There it is day 35. Well, bam Thank you handy dandy notebook day 35 is the travel advisors communication philosophy if you need to go back and listen to that we talk about what that is, but you should Have a thorough understanding of that when you are because you're gonna set clear expectations. ⁓ And your SOPs, you need to be very, very consistent in every single trip that you do. Like this is our standard process. You can add personalized touches down the road and you also need to give them the McDonald's. It takes two and a half minutes to go from ordering at the drive-through window to getting their food. They know the next window is pay. They know the last windows where their food is. They know if they're pulled up, they gotta sit there and wait, but they're gonna get fresh, hot, delicious french fries. They know every single McDonald's that they go to, if they order a Big Mac, it's gonna taste about the same. That's the consistency I'm talking about. Now you might need to be very good at maintaining or possibly resetting your boundaries. So let's do some checks. If you need to reset or reinforce boundaries as you are growing and as you develop a closer relationship with people, you might get more lax on your boundaries. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Um, so here's some signs that you need to reset your boundaries. Replying. to texts or emails or DMs outside of your normal business hours. Es tan bueno. Is that even right, Spanish? Doing more than the outlined scope of services that you and your client agree to. That's gonna get you down a nasty, nasty burnout resentment path. Delaying work that you're currently working on for last minute requests. refer back to earlier in this episode when I said, my phone is always on silent. You call me, there's no appointment scheduled. I'm not answering unless I have absolutely nothing else to do. because I have work to do. I'm not just waiting around twiddling my thumbs for you. The 24-7 on-call mindset is so toxic and weirdly heavily promoted in this industry. No, there's no reason for you to be on call 24-7. ⁓ Any resentment you start feeling towards clients that means you have allowed yourself or the client to like overstep your boundaries and Yeah, gotta fix it got a course, correct, okay Let's talk about the benefits of repeat business. Quality over volume. it's much easier work. You know the person, you understand them, you can get them better value instead of you just being like, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, all the time. Great. ⁓ Which leads to point two written down, less cold hustling. Now again, if you are newer and you're building your book of business, or you're expanding to a new niche, we have to unfortunately go through this, sorry. We all have to do it. The cold hustle. Just please, please, please book business with me kind of thing. But there's less of that once you build a big enough client base and they start coming back because you have clear expectations on how you work. It often leads to a faster sales cycle. My repeat clients, I love them because they send me texts. They know I'm gonna get to it when I get to it, but they're like, here's exactly what we want, the dates we want, and we know it's this much money. You already have all of our information, send us an invoice. We're booking it with you. Okay. And it takes like five seconds versus the consultation, which could be 30 minutes or so. And then follow-ups, preparing proposals, like... They don't need any of that once they know you're gonna do a good job for them. More predictable cash flow. If you know you have clients coming back every year for a trip, even if it's just one client, and you know their spend is like 10 to 15,000, we're like, okay, well that's about 1,500 bucks in my pocket, that one client. Cool. So you understand that that's your cash flow. If that's your only client, guess what? You gotta run your business on that 1,500. You're probably gonna be deemed by the IRS as a hobby. Just so you know. ⁓ but you have an idea. If you have 10 clients like that, you're like, I know I'm going to make at least $15,000 every single year, right? Cheaper to maintain again, you don't have to do any additional marketing. That's your time. Or if you hire someone to do your marketing for you, that's paying them for their time. ⁓ you don't have to have all that time. closing them and getting them to want to work with you because they already know the process. ⁓ If you have a lot of repeat business, you can say no to any bad clients instead of feeling that scarcity mindset starts to go away. If you're like, I know I got these people that are going to come back or refer me or both, then you can say no to people that you're like, no, I'm not booking this stupid trip that is not my niche. And if you are actually working with people you like and they like you, you have so much higher increase in job satisfaction. and support. So. Consider, consider, strongly consider the repeat client and client retention. We're gonna do a few more episodes about it going in here. A little bit, it's kind of, yeah. In a couple days we've got the client retention efforts. Yeah. All right, tomorrow's episode is going to be creating the VIP experience for your clients. Do what your suppliers do. Pay attention to what everyone else is doing to you and apply it to your business. Okay, that's the basis of tomorrow's episode if you want to skip. Thank you so much for stopping by. Do not forget, Travel Advisor Appreciation Month of May, have Y-A-Y-T-A-S, yay T-A's promo code for 50 % off courses at ElevateWithRachelK.com. Thank you for stopping by and having a good day. You are having a good day. You have no choice now, because I don't know how to speak English. Bye.