Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 160 - Why TAs have small tests before big changes
Transcript
- Rachel K: Welcome back to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Kay. Thanks for coming back. Day 160, small tests before big changes in your travel agency. in my experience with me being a travel advisor myself and with helping other travel advisors build their business, I see a lot of them that are just like, I need to do a complete 180 my business. Total change, total change, total change. That creates huge stagnation in your growth of your travel agency because you're actually not really doing anything to bring money in. You're just constantly redoing stuff. So let's talk about why it's important to make small, tiny changes before you do a complete overhaul of your business. I have mentioned in so many episodes that running a business is essentially your eighth grade, nope, third grade science fair project over and over and over and over and over again. If you don't like science, this might not be for you. The metaphor I mean. So the small tests in your business are like modifying the independent variables in your third grade science fair project. We've all had to do science fair projects, hopefully. And you can't just take someone's business model and plan 100% and copy it because you are not that person. Okay. You're not going to be 100% identical to them. So, what areas can you make science experiments and do your science project? I've got my I feel bad. I'm looking down if you're watching this on YouTube. I'm just like reading my notes on my handy dandy notebook, which by the way, I got a brand new one. If anybody cares. So you can implement your Science Fair project in your marketing department, communications, your processes, your pricing, or your offers. All of these are different experiments at any time, and you have the freedom and the free will to run the your business however you'd like. And you can take the general principles, just like a science fair project when you're in third grade. You know gravity exists, right? But you're gonna do some kind of science fair experiment to further prove gravity and maybe something else added to it. Like, I've only known one person with the Science Fair project that it actually went to like the National Science Fair and it actually made a difference in the world of science. And honestly, it was such a BS project. It was handwriting analysis. Anyway, I remember that. She we went to middle school together in high school, and I was one of her subjects in the experiment. And I was like, this is some BS. Anyway. So you can take the models that someone else teaches you and also know you have the right to modify the independent variables. If you do it exactly like them, then what happens is we're just a sea of NPCs. You don't know what an NPC is. It's a non playable character in a video game. They have no personality, they have they're just there running into walls and they're mindless little drones. Don't be the NPC in your life or your business. Alright, so what is the why for your small tests in any of these areas? I don't know how your business is running. I don't know how you do things. I don't know what you need to test. So we're just gonna do general why and then the how and then I think a little vocabulary lesson today. Refresher. So the why behind the why for your small tests in your business and not big dramatic overhauls. It mitigates risk. Big changes can lead to sweeping failures, huge costly mistakes in both your budget and your reputation. If you do a small little tweak slowly over time, that helps to mitigate the risk of your ultimate sweeping change. So, like for me, I'm completely changing niches. I'm still doing groups, I'm just not doing weddings. And I had to take small tweaks and build off of like my wedding guests and be like, hey, do you want to do a birthday group? Do you want to do family reunion and get groups that way rather than constantly doing weddings? And then I've also completely added on to my niche even further. And I'm slowly testing this year different marketing tactics to pull myself away from social media. ⁓ It is 2026 at the time of recording, and I feel like with the amount of AI that's being pushed out all over on every social media platform, going local with your marketing is going to be much more beneficial for travel advisors, especially travel advisors that provide a higher touch level of service and they implement fees. ⁓ I have a whole reason for that. So these are tests that I'm doing this year in my own travel agency. And I'm not doing like complete overhaul. Like I said, I'm still doing groups and I'm just moving to like birthday groups instead of weddings. And like I'm making low-cost investments in local advertising and local networking. Instead of completely just changing everything. ⁓ You can isolate the variables when you're doing small tests much better. So, what is the one thing that you can do to drive a shift in performance in like your lead generation, for example? Your one thing could be cross-posting to another platform if you do social media marketing. You're already on one platform, the one tiny small change to see if it can do create a shift in your lead generation performance, cross-post it. That's it. That's an example. ⁓ also by doing small tests, you're essentially creating a snowball effect, which is awesome because when you are completely changing something or you're adapting to things, you don't want to do it 100% right out of the gate. You want to do small, tiny little things and get that ball rolling down the hill. It's just like I use ⁓ exercise a lot as a reference to this. So it's just like when you start a new exercise program, you're not gonna go all in and do like Crazy Ultimate Warrior. What was that show that was in the nineties? ⁓ gosh. I'm blanking. It was like a bunch of America people. I remember it. A bunch of America people, and they would like have these obstacle courses. What was that show? And then they would like they had these big things, big sticks with things on them. And they try to knock each other off. What was that show? All right, I'm I'm digressing here. Anyway, you don't go into like Ultimate Warrior, crazy boot camp, hardcore. Power lifter workouts when you haven't worked out in a while and you don't go from like if you have always walked and you're like, I'm gonna run a marathon. You cannot do that. You have to take very small steps to prevent injury and burnout and to get you to actually do what you want to do. It's the same thing here in your business, small tiny tests. And you start to develop those habits and you like the habits and the habits are working for you and then you just add another habit on. This is why I have mentioned in previous episodes, test things out for like six, eight weeks. when you're doing smaller tests, you also develop the habit of being more adaptable to major market shifts and changes in the travel industry. If you want to pick up on that shift, you are far more adaptable than someone who just does a complete overall in their business or someone who refuses to change. And adaptability is a very good thing. The trait to possess. Okay, so how? How do we do this? How do you do the small tests? You I want to identify the bottleneck. That's and then you create your hypothesis. Don't worry, we'll get into the science experiment terms in relation to business here in a minute. You're gonna test one variable, just one. Give it sufficient time. Like I said, six, eight weeks. It's not gonna be overnight. Analyze and scale from there. So for the full science experiment, why did I write down science experience? Science experiment metaphor when it comes to your travel agency. And we're just gonna go order. And this is like third grade stuff here, second, third grade stuff. ⁓ number one, you have your observation. Remember this. are you having flashbacks to your elementary school classroom? Because I am. Observation. This is the data you collect from like your weekly and monthly. This is ⁓ Paying attention to social media marketing trends. This is your observation. This is paying attention to possible shifts in trends and travel and seeing if that aligns with what you want to do. Trends in your ICA's general profile of how they make decisions. How is that changing? their your ICA's economic situation, how is that changing? And how is that going to affect you? Observations. So this is all this data you're collecting, right? That's the observation. Then you form from said observation a hypothesis. What is a hypothesis? You welcome. I wrote it down. It's an educated guess slash prediction that you think will happen with your business if you do so something a certain way. As an example, I am moving to more local marketing and networking and pulling off of social media with my travel agency. And I have my reasons for that based on my observations of how the social media Stuff is just becoming a nightmare, especially with like an excessive amount of like AI content being produced. So I'm like, I'm gonna pull back and I'm gonna focus more on local marketing, networking, really going heavy with referrals and loyalty programs in my travel agency. And I have my reasons based on my observations, and it's in my hypothesis, which I'm not gonna share all the details with you right now, okay? However, I'm in the middle of testing this local networking referral loyalty program. We'll see how it goes. And I had to write out I think I can generate this much revenue and garner this many sales and go into these types of group travel. And I'm working on that right now. And I'm giving myself a full year. Okay, which leads to the experiment. What is the process that you're gonna do? So the hypothesis outlines what your prediction would be if you do something. And then the experiment is like, how are you going to do that exactly? What steps are you going to take? Then you have the variables. The variables. ⁓ there are the parts that you can change, like when or how you do something. And there are independent variables, which are the ones you choose to change to test your idea. So an independent variable can be your hours of operation. You can change that at any time. An independent variable could be how you show up for people, like in terms of your lead generation and marketing. It can be the type of content you create. It can be so many different things. Dependent variables. Are what changes based on your test. So dependent variables would be ⁓ bookings earned, new clients earned, revenue generated, fees collected. If you are testing the hypothesis of fees and what fees work, so on and so forth. Now, then we have the conclusion. I really like ⁓ young Frankenstein, the Mel Brooks movie. And so every time not every time, but a lot of the times I will hail Docta. I kid that was terrible. But like I remember what's her name? Frau Glucker? Her name is like Mrs. Glue. That's why the horses always freak out. And she's like, in conclusion anyway So your conclusion is another review. Did your hypothesis work? Are you testing it? Is it aligning with what you predicted the outcome would be? It doesn't mean that you're gonna like if you're like, I'm gonna do a billion dollars in sales this year, you don't wanna do it like that. That's like weird manifesting stuff, which you do you. If you want to see like I want a 20% increase in overall lead generation, and that should lead to ⁓ if your conversion rate's 60% and you got a hundred clients, you want a hundred and twenty. So then 60 per sorry, hundred leads, and you got a hundred and twenty because you did a twenty percent increase, so now you have a hundred and twenty leads and And you have the standard like 60% conversion rate, that is 72 trips. And if you have the average commission of a thousand dollars a trip, then that should lead you to the conclusion of $72,000 in gross revenue. And so your con like your conclusion when you're doing your monthly and quarterly reviews is kind of like: are you on track for that? This is why I like to do this sort of thing in the quarterly review and not just monthly. Like monthly, it's just like at a glance. Like, do I need to do some final push to get more leads now? what fires do I need to put out? Sort of thing. And the quarterly review is more of like, is this hypothesis hypothesizing? Is this this is this experiment experimenting? and then you can make Tiny little adjustments, if need be. So you determine in your business what you want to test. Why does it matter to you, how you want to do it, and what equals a success for you? If you are riding the struggle bus with that, you welcome this podcast exists. I give you so many different ways you can test things and implement things and If you want to join any of our programs, the most cost effective one for everyone that I have is $35 a month. It's called the Success Circle. And you can hop on calls. ⁓ we do, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six on average, live calls a week. Or not a week, a month. And ask me any questions. And me and other agents will just spit facts all day long. No big deal. Okay, so that was day one sixty. I hope you found found that to be helpful. Please don't force yourself to make big old changes all at once in a complete overhaul. Thanks for listening and subscribe for daily notifications ⁓ because these episodes will drop daily. And you can always come back once this full year is done. 365 episodes of Pure Rachel K at your disposal. Is that the right word? All right. Anyway, have a good day.