Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 271: Refining Your Niche: Going Deeper With Confidence
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, with ElevateWithRachel K.com. You don't know who that is? Of course, it's me. It's me. I'm a travel agency owner and I want to see all of you get to multiple six figures minimum in revenue. So we're gonna take this seriously and treat this travel thing not even close to a side hustle, but an actual business. And that's part of what this podcast does. Today is day 271. Refining your niche and going deeper with confidence. Whew! Yesterday we talked about refreshing your knowledge through the BDMs and the tourism board trainings, and maybe you need to update your trainings with specific brands. Today we're gonna zoom out to the bigger question. What does it actually mean to go deeper into your niche and how do you build genuine confidence as you do it? Now, this comes from research in economics and just like general career research. Specialization tends to produce disproportionate returns compared to generalization. This is why people are just now figuring out in 2026 you need to niche down, and it's like a big thing. It's been a thing since the dawn of business. Like this is This is a very basic business concept. If you went to college for any sort of business degree, they will talk about specialization over generalization. And this is particularly helpful in service-based and expertise-driven fields. Like, I don't know, being a travel advisor. You are a service-based business owner. And the term advisor, you are advising. You are the sage, wise wizard in the woods, helping your clients get to their dream vacation without having to die in the swamp along the way. Mm-hmm. I hope you've been listening past few episodes, because that's kind of the theme I've got going on. A travel advisor who's known deeply for one specific type of trip. Like multi-generational safaris, adults-only all-inclusives, adventure honeymoons. They become the obvious referral in that specific category. In a way, a generalist advisor covering everything under the sun rarely achieves. This is kind of like well I've talked about this in the Sweet Spot 2 success. which is a mini course on how to figure out what your knee should be. And I use the metaphor of car dealerships. Like if you want a brand new Forerunner. You're gonna go to a Toyota dealership, right? You're not gonna go to a Honda dealership for brand new Toyota Forerunner or a Toyota Camry. If you have no idea what you want and you just need something to get you from point A to point B, you're probably gonna go to a buy here, pay here where they just have a random mix of vehicles on the lot. Who do you trust to have a more reliable vehicle? The dealership that only sells. in the family of brands like Toyota Lexus or like Nissan Infinity as examples. Or the buy here pay here that's got cash for clunker cars, right? Why would you not do that in your travel agency? Anyway, this also echoes the focusing versus the trend chasing convo convo, I'm just talking to myself. I'm just talking at you in these episodes. Feel free to comment. I don't see I never get notifications anyone's commented, but when I find them I reply. Anyway, the focus versus trend chasing conversation from day 226 of the travel agent senior year. If there's You don't have to you don't have to chase trends, right? If you are focused and honed in. Depth in a defined area compounds in ways that breath, width, not depth, width, breadth, simply doesn't. So what does going deeper actually look at like? Well, there's different ways to do it. Going deeper isn't just accumulating more general knowledge about your niche, it's building specific and differentiated expertise that a client couldn't easily find within a quick search. This is one of the reasons why I went hard on the El Dorado Royale complex for weddings, because I A knew enough of the staff that I could WhatsApp them be like, where are you working this week? And then tell my clients, go see Giovanni. He's at Kick Bar until Wednesday or Monday or whatever, and he switches over to Gaviotas. He will take care of you. His nickname is Sasswatch. Sam Squanch. things like that. And I I could easily sell that resort. So easy. But anyway. A client can't find that on Google search. They'd have to read thousands of TripAdvisor reviews, and they still wouldn't trust it because it'd just be one rando person who had a good time mentioning one bartender, right? So this might mean personally experiencing more properties or destinations within your niche firsthand, building those direct relationships with specific suppliers, partners who serve that niche particularly well, developing genuinely refined judgment about the small details. Details that separate a good trip in this niche from a truly great one. The kind of nuance that only comes from real repetition and attention over time. So going deeper, if you are basing this off the You're a Wizard Harry story framework, the challenge, the client, the covenant, the client is the hero, you are the guide serving and fulfilling the covenant, getting them to their dream vacation. This doesn't mean you have to know every single resort brand under the sun in the Mexican Caribbean. This means you have to be able to pick and choose how this journey happens for your hero client that gets them the results they want. You don't have to know every single property or every single adult only all inclusive. But you have to know a handful of them super duper deep. So, where does the confidence actually come from? I feel like you just get used to it. Confidence in a niche doesn't precede expertise, it follows it. Like you learn from your mistakes, and you're okay with your mistakes, and you just keep going and you keep visiting that destination. If you really want to go hard on a specific niche and you learn more and more about it. developing your expertise. but you're not going to be confident in this overnight. Like if you're like, I niche an adult only all inclusives, okay, that's great. And you want to go deeper in it, that doesn't mean you cannot post any content or generate any new leads right now. And you have to be stuck doing all this training and blow all your money going to specific resorts and touring all these resorts before you can sell it. Confidence won't be developed until you actually start serving people regularly. Okay? This is psychological. Self-efficacy, the belief in your own ability, ability to succeed at something. this is from researcher Albert Bandora. He found that the single strongest source of genuine self-efficacy is the mastery experience. Actually, doing the thing, selling, closing, serving your clients repeatedly, over and over and over and over again, and accumulating direct evidence of your own competence is what builds confidence. Confidence. It doesn't matter how many times you go visit the destination, you may have to visit it once a year, twice a year, I don't know, maybe once every two years. But that is not going to build you confidence. What is going to build you confidence as a travel advisor is actually advising and serving your clients with regards to their travel. It's a byproduct. Confidence is a byproduct of doing the work so many freaking times, it's not a prerequisite for you to start that you have to feel it. It's just like when you learned how to ride a bike. Some of you might be in the age bracket where you're like, training wheels, what's that? Others may have had training wheels, and still yet, some of you probably had training wheels, elbow, shoulder pads, and a helmet. I was like in between. I didn't like the train wheels. And I picked up my brother's old little red bike instead. nobody's confident riding a bike with the when you first start riding a bike, right? D do any of us remember being like, this is gonna be nothing. No. We all fall over, but you have to get up and keep doing it over and over and over and practice riding the bike. With or without safety gear, depending on your age, with or without training wheels. Before you get proficient and therefore confident in riding a bike. And then a year later, because you're, I don't know, five or six years old, like me, you ride your bike so much, you got your feet on the handlebars and you're doing weird tricks because your confident has developed because you repeatedly practice riding your bike. Same thing with travel advising. It doesn't matter how much you travel, it doesn't matter how many trainings you do. If you are not advising people with regard to to their travel, you will not develop confidence in it. So don't start something because you don't feel confident. There's my rant. If you Don't feel fully confident. You're still building the depth in your niche. That's not a sign you're in the wrong niche. That's not a sign that you're bad at this. Remember, you're learning how to ride a bike. You're in the stage where you're gonna fall down off your bike, and you gotta get up and you're gonna cross the road and you're gonna hit that curb and fall down, and you gotta get up and keep going. And keep going, keep going, keep going. Pretty soon you're gonna be racing your friends around the block. It's the same thing. Okay, we're gonna talk about this specific tension in the next few days. I'm gonna go on a further rant about it. It's fine. So to deepen in your niche, pick one specific area within your niche where your knowledge feels the thinnest right now. Make maybe a subregion. Or maybe a specific supplier relationship. Like there's a brand that you're like interested in, but you don't know a whole lot about, and you feel like it would be pretty well aligned with your client and with your offer. Commit to one concrete action to strengthen it this quarter. This quarter, not this week. Maybe it's a training, maybe it's attending a webinar about it, a direct outreach to a BDM. Maybe you decide to create a piece of content that forces you to research and articulate what you know. Pa pa pa! Depth builds through specific and repeated and deliberate action, just like confidence, not through vaguely intending to know more over time. Alright, so what I wanted you to take away from this episode is understand that depth in a defined niche tends to compound in ways that breadth does not. Go deeper with your first-hand experience if you can, direct supplier relationships, refined judgment, not just general knowledge, accumulation. Remember that confidence follows a mastery experience, not the other way around. You can't be a master after you gain confidence. Pick one specific thin spot in your niche to deliberately strengthen this quarter. That's three months. You don't have to do it tomorrow. Set a deadline to get it done this quarter. So we're gonna go broader in the mindset conversation. Because if you listen to this, you know I love to talk about mindset because that's the biggest thing holding a lot of people back. And it's used against you in marketing towards you, by the way. Reframing tactics that CEOs actually practice. The mindset reframe. That's tomorrow. Have a wonderful day. See you tomorrow.