Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 189: The Unglamorous Numbers... Operations Analytics
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome back to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. As always, really appreciate you coming back. Today is day 189 and I'm your host, Rachel K. The operational analytical nightmare. We're gonna break this down. Tracking the operations. Okay? Because nobody cares about this. ⁓ maybe some of you do, actually. Some of the advisors that I mentor and like come to the live QA's from our courses. They are very, very much into like I understand all the operations and I fully understand like the admin side, but they struggle with the marketing. And I'm the opposite. I don't have a problem. Not that I'm like, I'm not like in all this business. I like the marketing side of things. I don't mind setting up the workflows. I hate the boring stuff. Okay, this is boring to me. ⁓ but this might might be exciting to you. Nobody dreams of tracking their response times when they imagine running a travel agency. I know because I have I own a travel agency. I started just like all every one of us did. And I was like, what do you mean? I could get free trips and discounted travel. This sounds great. And I make money and I get to help people. And then I got into it and I was like, ⁓ this is all sales and marketing. And ⁓ also I have to do everything. Else. And also, nobody teaches any of this stuff except exactly what they do. And that doesn't work for everyone, okay? Alright. So, this episode is gonna help you determine whether your business can grow past just you or whatever size team you have right now. Marketing gets people in the door. Finance tells you if you're actually making any money. Operations tells you whether your business actually works, whether it can handle more clients without you burning out or dropping balls. Okay? So, metrics to track in your COO time. I like to do COO on Thursdays. I'm not very good at it. Because if I run into a tech issue, I'm like, well now my day's gone. Okay, metrics to watch. Your average response time. I've talked about like 48 hours, 72 hours, three business days for like proposals instead of jumping into it right away. But let's actually track how long it takes you. If your average is creeping up, that's your first sign that you are at capacity, okay? What I mean by that is If you don't have that boundary in place where it's gonna take you some time to do your proposals, depending on the niche shit you're in, sometimes it can be weeks for us travel advisors to even hear back from a DMC for a custom itinerary. And it's not gonna be some janky thing chat GPT put together. Not gonna get started on that, but the ri actually let me go on a rant. Can we just rant a little bit? The number of people who think ChatGPT can put together a functional itinerary, not travel advisors, normies, is ridiculous. Because it's like none of this makes sense. Have you even seen this country before? This can't happen. But okay. Anyway. So What I'm saying, if you have that seventy-two hour or you don't have that, and you're feeling overwhelmed, ⁓ you can't keep up. Like you I say from Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, I'm right on top of that rose. Like that's a I think about that when I'm like starting to get to capacity. I'm just like, I'm right on top of that rose. I have no idea what's going on. I just say it in my head. And I'm like, ⁓ I'm at capacity right now. I've I really need to take a step back. Okay. And I used to be, and I've said this before in previous episodes, but I used to be that person that was like, I'll get this to you by the end of the day, or I'll get this to you within the next hour. Not knowing, you know, I could have a random power outage. Like the city's working on your power lines. I p And then I can't even do the work. And so now I'm failing to deliver on the promises I just made. Or something else happens and I get distracted. Life in general happens. And then I am up until midnight trying to rush through and make sure I get this to them by the next day. So that was my reason why I like, okay, I gotta institute some boundaries here and give myself a little bit more time and give them better expectations of what I'm capable of doing. And then also when you are in those rushes, even if you have that 72 hour boundary or three business day boundary, you may need to understand you are at capacity if you are like creeping up on that boundary and you're like, I can't get this done on time. If you are in that situation. Your response time esta no bueno and ⁓ you need to follow up with them be like hey I'm still working on your like follow up by that 72 hour or before and be like I'm I'm still working on your whatever itinerary and I've got a few more things to piece together and my goal is to get this to you by tomorrow or within the next two days, right? Hopefully you aren't at that point. And then implement a sort of wait list or like announce to your email list and on social media. I am at capacity, everyone. You can even set an autoresponder that is like, I am diligently working through a very busy season. Any emails now are it's gonna have a response time of like two business days. Like you're you're welcome to do that, okay. Alright, another number. Dos metric. The time you spend from the initial inquiry to actually booking. How many days on average does it take for you to take a lead to become a client? If this is becoming longer and longer, something in your pipeline is it's a bottleneck. It's and it's worth revisiting. the episode earlier this week about your booking strategy. Okay? I've known agents sometimes take six months to attempt to close a trip. And I'm tell them, I'm like, that ship has sailed. Why are you even wasting more time? This person is just messing, playing games with your heart, making you think that they're gonna book something. So, a way you can take control of this very, very easily is. Put them through your process. This is your business. This is your process. These are what the things that you want to do, right? And so if you say it takes up to 72 hours to get the proposal to you for this itinerary for this trip, when you send that proposal, like preemptively state you have 48 hours to deposit. And also clearly you want to put prices or subject to change, all that fun stuff in there. And then from there, if they don't book, then you can start all over again. But I take a fee for this reason because if they don't deposit on time, at least I'm getting paid for my time. A and B I can charge another fee and be like, sorry dude, I did the work for this fee. You're gonna have to pay another one. Or they can go somewhere else or they can book it on their own. I don't care at that point because I've gotten at least some kind of earnings for my work. And they either make a decision to close or not. And I even tell them on the consultation. With FITs, I'm like, once I send you a proposal, you have like all I send more than one proposal. I usually send them like sporadically throughout the day. But once I send all of them, you have about two days to deposit and make a decision, right? Like it's all clearly outlined. When it is groups and contracted groups, I tell them before the proposal comes in, we need to be very clear. I'm gonna send you the proposal. You have three days, like business days, to let me know the room block flow, and I will share you my recommendation, but I don't know your people, so I will share what I can. You can revise it or accept it, right? And once the contract is requested, you need to approve my the room block flow, even if it's like my suggestion. Once the contract is requested, it typically takes up to a week. Anywhere from three to five business days to receive the contract. When that contract comes in, you have two days to sign it and provide the deposit, which is typically $50 per person slash $100 per room. You have a guest list of 100 people. That's gonna be 50 rooms. That's 50 couples, that's 50 rooms. Are you prepared to make a $5,000 deposit in the next three weeks? You know, two to three weeks. Because if you're not, we need to put a hold on this, right? That's how you need to do things so that you don't lose them. Okay? And if you already charge a fee up front, especially for like groups. even if it's a small fee, they've already made a small investment with you, so they're more likely to be like, Yeah, let's move forward, but I need like two more weeks for closing on a house or something, whatever. Can we push it off like one month? Okay, I'm gonna follow up with you the fifteenth of next month to make sure you're ready, and I will get the proposal started on the 10th or whatever, you know. All right, metric number three: the client to you ratio in the hours per booking. How many active clients are you managing right now? And roughly how many hours does each trip take from inquiry to final travel documents, post-trip, call, whatever. This is the number that tells you when it's time to institute or raise your planning fee, add a system, or bring on help. At the retire at the time of recording this, at the recording time of this, at the time of recording this, I'm actually working on a free mini course that teaches you, it should be launching in July, these numbers. So that you know what your true hourly rate is, the cost that it takes for you to get that person to become a client, also the cost it takes you to how many hours you're spending, and then your hourly rate that you're currently making right now. So then you can compare it with implementing a fee or increasing your fees. It's a it's a thing. It's a thing, it's coming out. It's called Know Your Numbers. Alright, and then your repeat and referral rate. Also part ⁓ also part of this. This is not a plug for a lead magnet, by the way. Yes, it is a lead magnet. It's a freebie I'm giving to you. anyway, your repeat and referral rate. What percentage of your bookings come from past clients or their referrals? This is the healthiest number in your whole business. It means that your service, not just your marketing, is doing the work. So if you have a high repeat, it really depends on your niche. Like if you do destination weddings, wedding guests aren't gonna come back, right? They're not gonna be like, ⁓ I need not all of them, but if there's like 120 guests for every single wedding, ⁓ the odds of them coming back to you are not as high unless they know you do other types of travel. and honestly. Do you want to take on other types of travel if you are like highly niched in destination weddings? I mean you can and you can have like the one off FITs, don't get me wrong. I've just noticed It tends to just be more groups. Like they want to do birthday groups or an anniversary trip or something like that versus I want an individual trip. And those group trips are not always super common. Also, with referrals, it has to be someone that they know that also wants a destination wedding, and not everybody wants a destination wedding, right? Anyway, so it does kind of vary from one niche to the next. Honeymoons, you can get referrals all day long because people tend to like get married in groups, like all at once, like staggering. There's ⁓ there's a saying like in your twenties and thirties, it's just like your social life is made up of attending a bunch of weddings and then in like your fifties through seventies it's made up of attending a bunch of funerals. So there's that. When people are getting married, they're often a lot of them are getting married right around the same time, right? So honeymoon referrals are very, very easy. Not all of those people getting married want a destination wedding though. So you have that. All right. Now what do you do with this data? The whole point of this is not to obsess over spreadsheets. It's to catch the problems while they're still small. If your inquiry to booking time is quietly going from like five days to 12 for them to actually deposit, you're gonna want to know that month one, not discover it. during a slow quarter with no idea why. So this you can track over the course of the month. If you have four inquiries to bookings in one month and it takes you four or five days to close them, like to actually get them to deposit. And then the next month you have four more inquiries and it takes fifteen days to get them to actually deposit, you can see that very quickly. Because you can't I call it turn and burn. Turn ⁓ and burn ⁓ That's a really I don't mean that. No like no shade to human beings. ⁓ But that your turn and burn is slow. And so if you've ever worked in a restaurant, this is where I got that turn ⁓ and burn them, right? It doesn't matter how big your section is. It doesn't matter if you have a booth in your section. Trust me. Because people like to f honestly, I think I'm not gonna talk about that. Anyway. It matters how quickly you can serve them, give them a good time, get their table cleaned off so that another person can come in. That is turning and burning. So you have to think of this with your travel agency and your operations. Can you get them quote unquote seated at your table? That's like after the initial consultation. And They're sat at the table, they're ready to order. And then can you go up there and control it? So if you've ever worked in a restaurant, they often has have like they has they have like competitions with the service staff to sell, like whoever sells the most specials gets free dinner. Whooped, because we all have to buy our dinner. So or I don't know, something like that. Like a fifty dollar, like fifty bucks from the manager, like or a hundred dollars or something like that. If they were if the kitchen wants to push it. Okay. So you have to act like the kitchen where you have a special you want to push, and you also have to incentivize yourself to get that. So then you have to be able to control the sale and suggest that dinner. And so Some servers are good at it, some are not. But they can look you up and down and be like, you know what? This prime dip sandwich that's brand new on the menu, that's what you're having for lunch today. I c I I can feel it in my bones. And I'm picturing the per the man in my head, by the way. It's a dude who's gonna be like, yeah, and you want curly fries with that. Yeah, yeah, you do. Okay, and then you know what'd be a really good beer to pair it with? Ba da da da da da da da da. And then you're upselling, and then you're you're getting the special done, and then you make sure the kitchen staff is treated well so your food comes up on time, nice and hot and ready, and then you serve it. Turn and burn it. Get them in and out. Like 45 minutes to an hour. They're gonna tip very well. They're gonna tell more people about it. And then you're gonna get more business. And the next table can come in. Okay? So same thing with your operations. And if you see that gap, because there were some times where I'd have people I actually preferred the sections without booths because people in booths tend to linger and I'm like, get out of my section, I want another table during the dinner rush. So I liked the high top tables that were like only set two or four people, like and little tiny sections too. Anyway. But if you catch them lingering and you're just like, Come on, I would like to make more money and you're just like sitting here doing nothing, okay? That's what I want you to think about this as, like. Not this isn't some elusive secret for travel. This is like business foundations, okay? So let's set a simple standard. One metric from marketing, one from finance, one from operations. Write it all down every Friday, whatever, once a month, review it. Marketing you're not really gonna pick up on until the quarter. Finances, you'll be at least tracking, is this being consistent? And you'll be able to track over the years the ebb and flow of your revenue. And this is why I recommend following the profit first method to take care of the ups and downs. And you're just even keeled the whole time. And then operations, you really need to make sure everything's operating smoothly, review it once a month. And that's like your basic business dashboard. You don't need a bunch of different numbers. Just those three really consistently tracked ones rather than trying to track your engagement, your follows, your deposits and your w like no. Those three consistently beats tracking every little metric. Well, this video got 1200 views, and this one got 1785, and this one got two shares. Like that's a little too much. Okay. Okay, so these last few episodes have all been about tracking marketing, finance, and operations working as one system instead of three disconnected habits. We're gonna finish up. Is it has it a week? I don't feel like it's been a week. I don't know. Tomorrow we're gonna do some mindset and momentum stuff. Because you know I like to talk about mindset and momentum. And why those numbers alone won't carry you through all the hard weeks, okay? That was day 189 of the Travel Agency in your podcast. And thanks for listening and see you tomorrow. Bye.