Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / DAY 296 | Pre-Wave Season Systems Check for Travel Advisors
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency and your podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Kay, and this podcast is all about travel advisors scaling pet well into multiple six-figure town. Coming from a fellow travel agency owner who's been there, done that. Let's talk about it. If you have any questions on how I can help you, I offer one-on-one mentoring or group cohorts each quarter. So the next cohort will open up in January at the time of re like when you're listening to this. That is the success circle. And then there's one-on-one custom mentoring. Head over to elevate with rachelk.com for more information. Today is day two hundred and We have, I like to cluster episodes if you're brand new to this podcast. So we're gonna do some system check-in for the first few episodes, and then go from there with some more exciting information for next week. We are checking in on your systems before wave season. What's working and what was is it working as intended? Sorry. If you are new to the podcast, head back to day 258 through 263. We built out a full system tech tools audit series for you to listen to to make sure that you are actually running your business how you want it to look and now how you're being sold it should look. Today, with wave season approaching, it's time for a more focused check-in. Not quite the quarterly review, not quite the annual review, definitely not near that, but tiny little baby steps that you can take to fully prepare for those upcoming reviews. A full systems audit like the one we built out I think a few months ago is a quarterly undertaking. Right before any major seasonal surge, that isn't the time to tear everything apart and totally rebuild rebuild it. Like, you know, the week of Christmas is the next major one. That's a recipe for walking into the busiest season with half-finished changes. So, what this moment calls for is a little bit narrower, a quick and honest check on whether what you've already built is functioning the way you intended. And you do have that time after today's episode to just barely tweak it to get you through wave season if you need to. So for your pipeline process, your batching rhythm, your delegation structure, your content workflows, ask one simple question for each. Replay this episode, so I can get more listens, I'm kidding. But replay this episode with a notebook, pen, and some time. Ask one simple question for each of those systems. Is this working as you intended? Or has it drifted into something different than what you actually wanted to design? Systems do drift over time, often without anybody noticing. And if you're the only one in the organization and like you're busy AF right now, you have you're just like, I just gotta get, I gotta survive. but small workarounds do accumulate, and the original design gets slowly bent out of shape by your real world use. Real world, wheel world, I'm baba wall toad. Does anyone remember that? I'm Baba Wa Wa. That was a joke from my early childhood, and I may have just demonstrated my age, I guess. Okay. So, why does this protect both you? your sanity, not both, but your sanity and your business. So walking into wave season with systems that are secretly broken or just like drifted from the original design and you've just like piecemeal patchwork things together to survive for now because you're just not quite finished setting it all up or you started setting it up and you didn't you realize it's not working as intended. When that happens and then you have a surge in volume, like booking volume, it's gonna expose all of those cracks at the worst possible time when you have the least bandwidth to fix them. So catching catching catching and tightening those now while things are relatively calmer than the typical wave season protects both your business's performance and your own mental bandwidth once that volume. just skyrockets. So a fast practical check what is wrong with me today? A fast practical check-in could be spend 30 minutes Per major system, sometime this week, maybe on a Saturday, you do it on your own schedule, I don't care. Your sales pipeline, your batching of your tasks, if you can delegate, even if it's to like an agentic AI that you built out, client communication. Ask these three quick questions. Is this still happening the way that you wanted it to be designed? Where is the friction showing up the most? And is there one small fix in each system that you can make this week before things get chaotically busy? Do not try to overhaul things, okay? Like you I've met many I've met I've worked with many a travel advisor who get into this rhythm of if I just fix everything and completely overhaul everything then my business will take off but that is taking away significant time that you can spend marketing your business. You do not have to be perfect and also if you notice tiny tweaks that are going to affect your mental capacity. And your business's performance, fix those. Don't worry about looking pretty enough. Don't worry about using the newest, latest, and greatest CRM necessarily. Me personally, at the time of recording this, I am considering switching CRMs. My host agency is switching CRMs. And I use my own CRM. And so I am in this phase too where I'm just like slowly making that transition. And so my current travelers for next year and groups, I'm not necessarily implementing those new changes yet. but the new groups that are being created, that's all going into the new CRM because I don't want to reinvent the wheel completely. So make sure it's just small tiny tweaks. And this goes back to the capacity audit that we talked about on day 264. A tight, well-functioning system is what actually gives the capacity planning a fighting chance of holding up when you are under real pressure. And I don't want to scare you either. There's something this this could tie to your mindset because if you're like, man, if I just tweak this one thing, then my life will be so much easier, and then I can market more, and then I'll get more business. And I know many people who are like, better keep things exactly the same way, because I'm not sure I'm ready for that business. I will tell you, you will never be ready for business. You just gotta do it, okay? this was a really, really short episode. my gosh, I just saw myself on camera. My hair looks crazy. Alright. So don't be afraid to make those small tweaks to give yourself more room to market. Please don't use it as an excuse to do more training if you don't need to do more training. Okay, it's built on your business. And I could go on and on about what I see travel advisors doing there. And all I can say is until you are making about two hundred and fifty thousand in gross commissions, your primary focus should be marketing. and maintaining your systems and small tweaks to make them more and more efficient. That's just my opinion, man. Doesn't have be yours. You can start hiring sooner than that if you want to. Alright. This was just a real quick check-in episode, not a full re-audit again. Ask whether each of the core systems in your business is still working as you wanted it, as they were originally designed. Have they drifted? Fix the smallest of issues now while you have the bandwidth. And I know some of you are like, I don't have the bandwidth. Okay, let's reframe that. So these small tweaks. I'm gonna say two things because I am a complete optimist about things. and I think things take much less time than they may take in reality. other times when I'm feeling overwhelmed and I'm like, this is such a big daunting task. It's literally a five minute thing. And I'm like, why did I put that off? So I want you to understand like if you think I'll just implement five or ten new automations or something like that. That's probably gonna take you half a workday, especially if they're brand new upgrades to your CRM, or if they if you are like slowly migrating over to a new CRM, that's gonna take a lot more time than you anticipate. So then it's a question of like what is absolutely vital if you are migrating to a new CRM. To keep you in place because you can book people and add workflows and automations after it's gonna be fine. But sometimes, and I I'm guilty of this myself quite often, which is why I gotta do the method I'll talk about here in a little bit. simple tweak or Adding a new form or adding one single workflow can become weirdly overwhelming in your brain. And while it's going to lead to efficiency in your travel business, you may put it off and put it off and put it off and put it off. Because you feel like that's the daunting task. And I want you to think about this because this is like my thought process that I've learned over the years for me, and this might apply to you. When it's little tiny things like that that can really help you become that much more efficient and be able to put yourself out there. But you delay doing anything about it because you're afraid that it might not go well, or you think it's gonna take hours and hours. That could just be excuses to keep yourself from stepping into your full CEO like era, like actually building a legitimate business. And so There's also here here's another thing. It could also be maybe you have an addiction to stress and so you try to find the which you're either addicted to we're all addicted to dopamine and or cortisol. So it could be that. It could be that you If you do that, that's gonna take away your ability to have like the cortisol, adrenaline spikes of like, I need to do this for my clients. And so part of you is like, if I implement that, that's gonna take away my drug and my brain. Anyway. Do what you can, small tweaks. The small tweaks in my experience are often the simplest. For me, it's always like the easiest five minute things. And I'm just like, why once I accomplished it, I'm like, why didn't I just do this sooner? This was like a nothing burger. versus complete overhauls and I will be I have to keep me personally I have to maintain strict control and discipline on not going after shiny object syndrome because I have learned that that is absolutely a distraction to prevent me from actually running my business. If you feel the same way, go journal about it. So tomorrow we're gonna look at entrepreneurs who built unconventional systems Because you don't have to do everything exactly how everyone does it, because we are all different. And what that might mean if the status quo methods just aren't working for you. This was day 296 of the Travel Agency in your podcast. Thanks for listening.