Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 159 - Integrating Lessons for a TA's Quarterly Review
Transcript
- Rachel K: Welcome to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K. Thanks for coming back. Today is day 159, and it is Integrating lessons from your quarterly reviews as a travel advisor. Okay. So you should be, it's my recommendation to do like weekly data collection, monthly reviews, especially quarterly and annual reviews in your business. As a travel advisor, I have a plethora of reasons for it. If you don't know who I am, I do mentor and coach and offer courses for travel advisors. I also own a travel agency. And I help build my team up as well. This whole podcast is just little bites sized episodes daily to help you become the CEO in your travel business. Okay. So integrating lessons from your quarterly review. So when you're doing your quarterly review, you should assess, let me make sure I got it all written down, five different areas in your business and a little bit of yourself. We'll get into that. Number one is your sales and revenue for the past three months, the goal versus the reality of the situation. And you also need to look at maybe why you didn't hit those metrics. That's why there's five different areas to assess. You can't just say, ⁓ I didn't hit my sales. It's everyone else's fault. Don't be the victim. There are a number of reasons why you may or may not have hit or missed or like exceeded your sales goals and bookings for the last quarter. You also want to ⁓ keep an eye on your cash flow, your financial health, like the business's financial health. Can you survive a crisis where you may not be generating revenue for months or maybe a year or two? Don't scare yourself. Just are you spending everything you make or are you able to put money aside? Another area is lead generation performance compared to your prior quarter. And you may have implemented like a new lead magnet, you may have changed your marketing strategy to generate new leads. You may have started paying for ads. You may have stopped paying for ads and started marketing on a new platform that's free. I don't know what your process is. However, you want to compare your lead generation to your prior quarter. I I wouldn't do this if you are completely switching niches. It's really hard to compare and contrast. For example, I used to do strictly destination weddings for I think like six years or so. I was trying to tell my aunt Sharon about this. Hi aunt hi aunties. Anyway, she's like, How long have you been doing this? How long have you been a travel agent? Because she knows I'm switching niches like this year. I'm phasing out of weddings, and it's not because I'm burnt out on weddings. It's for totally personal reasons and value misalignment. Okay. So if you want to do weddings, don't worry. Like you can do weddings. but it's hard for me to compare lead generation performance from the prior quarter or quarters. Like this year, I'm actually like a new travel advisor essentially because I've completely changed niches. I can't say for certain that I'm doing worse or better than the destination wedding lead generation. So If you have been in the same niche for a while, you should be able to easily look at the data of how many new leads you received, how many of those converted, which is the next area you need to assess your conversion performance and your client experience. So with conversion performance, I will say in my own personal experience, I started questioning how many weddings I wanted to do a year because I was doing like 20 to 30 for a couple of years. And I'm like, this is. Too much because I also did planning for a lot of them. I'm like, this is not for me. I don't need to make this much money. I'm fine. So I think back in 24, I decided I didn't want to do more than 10 to 12 weddings a year. based on my average group size. I was like, that is plenty of revenue to come in. And I was also really starting to build up Elevate with Rachel K, which is where you can go if you need like coaching, mentoring, or courses that I offer. I started doing that back in 23. So I didn't produce new content. Back in the day, years ago, I went to TikTok and I was solely, I was I was marketing on like TikTok, a little bit of YouTube, Pinterest. and I think I tried the Facebook group, but I was like, my ICA doesn't even want to be on Facebook. So this is a waste of my time. So I focused heavily, heavily, heavily on TikTok because that's where I was getting the most aligned leads and having a very high conversion rate. So That being said, when I decided in 24, I think around mid 23, I started phasing off on my regular posting of content on TikTok. And in 24, I was like, I don't know if I want to continue this. And then in early 25, with the whole scare of TikToks being banned, I was like, I gotta redo everything with my marketing. And I know I don't want to do weddings anymore. I don't even know if I need to be on TikTok. So I did notice over time because my content, your content is evergreen when it's short form video like that. And because I wasn't putting new stuff out, people were still finding me and I was still like taking on weddings. And I found those that came from TikTok were less and less aligned with my current ICA because they were Getting old news, if that makes sense. So I would have TikToks. I remember there was one I made way back in either fall of twenty twenty or twenty twenty-one. And I like just did one of those trending sounds and I just like pointed to texts on it or whatever. And it was like average budget for a destination wedding with 50 guests in different destinations. And people were coming to me and scheduling calls, and they're like, Is that is that correct? I'm like, No, that's four-year-old information, or you know what I mean? Like that is old info. That is not correct anymore. So I found that my conversion was going down because I wasn't getting close to what I would deem to be my aligned client because my content wasn't refreshed. So if you are looking at your conversion performance and if you have been a little stagnant in updating your content and your conversion performance is down, that's definitely a sign you are now speaking to the wrong audience with your older content and you need to update with the new. Okay, so conversion performance and your client experience. Is everyone still happy with you? Generally, you know, you're doing a great job. This was such an easy process. Or are there is there feed feedback from them that's like, well, this was hard for me to understand or this was a difficult part of the process. That's another part of your review. That you need to integrate your lessons from. Time management and your overall mindset. Were you feeling rushed? Were you feeling burnt out? Were you feeling not happy with life in general? That's another thing you should assess in a quarterly and annual review. So, based on all that information, what would be your top lessons from each of those categories? I've done more in-depth videos on the quarterly reviews. This was just a quick recap. But what are your top lessons from those categories? And when you see those top lessons, you want to assess how that lesson showed up in your business, what you're going to do differently, and the specific change you have to make to do that thing differently. Here's a really quick example. I know a lot of advisors when they're brand new, especially when they're with a host that's like, yeah, you have to do this. They're trained to be on call 24-7. There are some host agencies I found out that charge advisors if they don't answer the phone within a specific time frame, but then they don't allow their advisors to charge fees up front. That's just like smells of scam to me. But anyway. If you are a professional, there's no reason for you to be available twenty-four seven. That is going to lead to extreme burnout. And let's say you went in with that as part of your business model and a strong found like big part of your communication philosophy in your travel agency. And then you get a surge of business. And now you've gone from five clients maybe a month to 50 clients a month. And you told them all, I'm gonna be available 24-7. And now you've got 10x number of people just thinking they can reach out to you. And if you combine combine that with like ⁓ more social media content and you're just like have the mindset of I want money, I want money, I wanna make money. Then you're probably not going to get the best clients, and they're going to fully take advantage of that 24-7 on-call promise that you've made. So, in this case, if this was what you've been going through, the lesson that showed up is probably that you are not putting yourself first. And you have to put yourself first. This is just like if you were raising a child. ⁓ yes, you have to make a lot of sacrifices to make the child grow up, be healthy. And so on and so forth. And you also have to set an example for a said child by, you know, brushing your teeth, bathing, ⁓ maintaining a certain level of decorum in public, things like that. So you've got to make sure that you are okay before you can take care of something else, right? And when you have that 24-7 mindset, that can lead to extreme burnout, and then you're not happ like you're not serving your clients to the best of your abilities. So it could show up in a never number of ways. Most likely it's going to c show up as conflict between you, your client, the suppliers, the business in general. It's going to be a conflict. ⁓ what you could do differently is you can switch to email only communication. That's gonna be a hard switch to make, especially if you have clients that were used to your 24 7 promise, and then you have to say to them, nope, email only or schedule a call with me. I Trust me, I went through this years ago and it was an interesting transition. And it took two months and most people were fine with it. But however, some people were not fine with it and they were just not pleasant to deal with. ⁓ so what is gonna be your specific change? That could be email only, that could be schedule a call only, it could be a combination of both, it could just simply be for now, ⁓ They cannot DM you on socials. I remember it got so bad for me with the twenty four seven promise I hated the sound of any notifications on my phone and I had trouble sleeping because any notification, even if it was just a friend texting me, I jumped to, ⁓ now I have to deal with something. Okay, so why lessons, why are lessons learned important as a business owner? I got four reasons why you should consider this review process and why you should consider lessons, turning the lessons into blessings. Number one, it's gonna save you money in your business because you aren't reinventing the wheel and you're documenting what doesn't work for you. So you don't have to constantly invest in new processes and new courses and new consultants or whatever. Yes, I know I do that for a living for people. And I've had plenty of calls with people where I'm like, you don't need any of this. Stop it. Stop spending your money. You need to look at this and just do a quick change, you know? So it will help you save money. ⁓ the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results and you're not learning from your lessons. So integrating lessons means you're not gonna make the same mistake twice, hopefully. Hopefully you're not gonna make the same mistake twice. ⁓ the third reason, ⁓ it's a reflection, not just of your failures, but reflecting on your successes also helps you to maintain momentum in your business. When you're like, I can do this really well, keep doing the thing that you can do really well. And that's gonna help you feel good about what you're doing as a travel advisor, and it's gonna help you grow in your business. And yeah, you're still gonna have failures, but that that success is gonna help you maintain momentum. Lastly, learning your lessons drives improvement, opportunities for growth, and it can improve your processes and outcomes when serving your clients, when just managing your daily workflows, you've got to look at what you're doing. And you've got to see what lessons you can find. Okay, so that was day 159. Feel free to comment what lessons have you learned lately and how are you going to implement them? Thanks for stopping by, and I'll see you tomorrow.