Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 227: Waiting for 'perfection' costs you more than you think as a travel advisor
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency Near Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, travel agency owner, helping travel advisors become the CEO. Step into the CEO era. I'm switching tabs over here. You know, I wish I had like a full production team so I could have like camera angles. And also feel like you guys are like, are you filming in a rubber room or something? Because it's just a blank wall. I don't care. It's fine. Anyway. If you have questions about how I can help you as a travel advisor, we offer courses, coaching, mentoring. Head over to elevatewithrachelk.com and you can check stuff out. Shoot me an email and be like, this podcast sucks. No. So far, that is not the reaction I'm getting, so. Day 227. is your offer even ready? It's probably more ready than you even think. Okay, don't wait for perfect. Launch the imperfect. If there's a course, a package, an offer that you've been almost ready to launch for months, today's episode is aimed directly at you. And I'm also low-key speaking to myself because I have 30 pieces of content. Ready to put out into the world outside of this podcast for Elevate, and I'm just like, maybe tomorrow I'll film it. It's all like ready to go. I just gotta film it and post it. So I'm you're not alone in this, is what I'm saying. It is so easy to tell yourself that more preparation, more polish, more revisions is just being thorough. Often it's actually fear wearing a productive sounding, I'm so busy, I gotta redo everything, disguise. Because as long as something isn't fully launched, it also can't be judged, can't be criticized, and it can't fail, right? If it just never even tries. So the cost of that safety is real because every month spent perfecting something in private is a month it wasn't earning you anything or reaching a single client. Mm-hmm. So a couple weeks ago, we talked about Airbnb in one of these podcast episodes. We're gonna revisit it here. the OG Airbnb, yesterday I mentioned 2006, but back in 2007, was as far from polished as you can imagine. The founders would put air mattresses in their own living room. and built like a bare bones website, offering a place to sleep and a breakfast, purely to test whether strangers would actually pay to stay in someone's home. Their first guest paid eighty dollars for like each for a couple of nights. And that unpolished test is what gave them the confidence and the real data to keep building. Not a fully formed platform launched only once it felt finished. And also low-key, thanks for destroying the housing market. Because all these people are like, I'm a real estate business investor because they just own a bunch of Airbnbs. Ugh. Anyway, I'm not gonna go on that rant. I'm kinda mad about that. Me personally, I think that's one of the many. reasons why housing costs have skyrocketed. And also, side note, I'm relo relocating and the areas I want to relocate to are guess what? Filled with a bunch of Airbnbs that can't even get booked. So now they're doing long term leasing that are fully furnished. And it's like, no, I don't want your ugly, janky Wayfair and home goods furniture. And pay twice as much money because you made poor decisions in decor and you made poor business like this isn't even a business, it's like a weird hobby. Anyway, that's my rant about Airbnbs. And I'm sorry if you own one and you're struggling with it, but just sell the home so somebody else can start a family, maybe. Or empty the furniture out and rent it to someone at a reasonable price rather than charging three thousand dollars a month for five hundred square feet with tiny furniture that is ugly. Anyway So the whole Airbnb story before my crazy rant, behind like the core idea behind this episode, is often called the minimum viable product. Okay, you need to have a if you're a travel advisor, and even if you're like quote unquote starting as a side hustle and want to turn it into and replace your full-time career, lean startup methodology is a thing that you need to understand. Build the simplest version that lets you learn whether your core idea actually works, then improvement. is done based on real feedback rather than trying to perfect it in a vacuum before anyone's used to it. So There are plenty of of advisors like the first year or so, they don't want to deal with automations and like setting up their CRM right away because they want to make sure they thoroughly understand which supplier they want to work with and how that looks and how can they leverage the suppliers tools before they build one of the travel CRMs. That was me also, and I was so happy to have the travel CRM because once I got really really clear on like manually creating proposals, who does that? It's 2026. But I had to do it, Microsoft docs, because I don't even think Canva was a thing. And god, I do not miss those days, Val. But when s like travel CRMs started becoming more popularized, slash I finally learned about because the first few years I wasn't even on Facebook. Like I didn't even the place I worked for made no mention of any like resources anywhere for travel advisors. It was like figure it out. I was like, okay. But anyway, I already had a really strong idea of what the invoices looked like, what the copy was for the suppliers that I worked with at the time, and that helped me set up my automations because I could see what else I needed to send to people, A, and B, how they communicated with my clients. Like we used to have to use Vax a lot, so I used a lot of like Apple and like Funget vacations back in the day. But like the wording on their invoice and stuff, I was like, okay, well, this is all important information to have and to share. And then I could add on to it. So when I did finally get a CRM, it took me a few months. Well, I started with the my host agency CRM, and I'm like, this is a nightmare, I don't like any of this. And then I got my own CRM. And that was when I was like peak busy, like the busiest I'd ever been. And I was like adding all the updates as I went. It was not perfect. Anyway. You wanna learn if your core idea and how you're gonna serve people actually works rather than trying to make sure it's perfect and that your social grid is beautiful and coordinating and like you don't need all that. Is your logo good enough? I've no, you don't need all that yet. It doesn't Ready does not mean flawless. It means the core value is there. Someone could use or buy, come away with a real result from your service offering, even if the edges are still a little rough. your content doesn't need professional studio production to teach to like reach the right audience. A digital download doesn't need perfect design to be genuinely useful. I know b I sign up for these things too, just for like business owners in general. And the number of like multi-multi multi-millionaires doing like, here's this digital download, and I'm like, let me see. There's typos everywhere. But I don't care because I'm like, well, it's a general idea, you know? A new package, service package that you offer doesn't need every possible scenario pre pre-planned before your client experiences it. Because you're not psychic. You don't you are not God, you do not see outside of time, and you do not know every possible option that could happen in the first place. So this goes back to day 222. And the soft launch, that's exactly the mechanism that lets you launch something imperfect responsibly. You're not pretending it's finished, you're testing it with a smaller, more forgiving group, gathering some feedback and improving it based on actual use rather than your own endless internal second guessing. And it's still not going to be perfect, people. Put it out there anyway. You can't wait till everything's perfect. I've said this somewhere before, maybe on this podcast, and I'll say it again. It's something like sixty percent of I can't remember I can't remember now. Sixty percent of either billionaires or highly successful entrepreneurs make decisions with only sixty percent of the No Shoot. I'm not editing that out. A high number of billionaires and entrepreneurs only make decisions with sixty percent of the information. Let me let me find that quote for you. Yeah, okay. From Gemini AI, I should probably start using perplexity, successful leaders like Jeff Bezos famously advocate making big choices when you have about 60 to 70% of the total information. Waiting for 100% certainty causes slow movement, missed windows, stagnation, whereas acting early allows leaders to adjust and correct the course dynamically. Speed over perfection. Waiting for complete data and perfection means the opportunity is often gone. S yep. Real world feedback. You learn more from active ex execution than endless planning. Course correction. Adjustments made while moving are more valuable than a static delayed plan. So it's kinda like Do you actually want to play the game or do you want to be on the sidelines and be like, well, they should have done this. Well, they should have done that. Because being on the sidelines isn't gonna get you winning anything. It's just you're just a spectator. And this is your life. Do you wanna be a spectator of your life? I don't. Okay, tomorrow we're gonna shift into a different topic. What's the difference between a marketing push and just general marketing? This was Travel Agency to Year Day 227. Have a wonderful day.