Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 263: Turn Your Travel Agency Audit Into a 90-Day Action Plan
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, travel agency owner, helping travel agents build their business. If you have questions, go to elevate with Rachel K.com. I do mentoring and I got like a 12-month program that is heavily tied to this podcast, by the way. Today is day 263 from audits to action. Preparing yourself for next quota. Okay, you may have already done your quarterly review, but guess what? The next quarter doesn't start until October 1st, so there's still time to implement these changes. Mm-hmm. Alright, turning everything that you found if you decided to do the to do everything from this last week. Day 258 is where this starts. Everything that you found this week into a real workable plan for the next quarter. Rather than a long list of observations that doesn't get acted on. No, I bet you you got you could easily cancel those subscriptions you didn't need, but everything else you're like, that's a tomorrow problem Don't worry, I love tomorrow problems. the most common reason a business audit doesn't lead to real improvements isn't the lack of insight, it's usually that findings never get translated into specific prioritized plan. And I'm about to just say this. My dad used to say this to me, I'm gonna say to you, I've said it before, and I know I'm you're gonna cringe and I don't care. If you fail to plan, plan to fail. Even if your plans don't go according to plan. Anyway, a list of 20 friction points or like outdated subscriptions with no clear next step attached to any of them just sits there. I mean, you like I said, you might cancel the subscriptions, but everything else. You're like, Kind of like a few days ago, I was talking about how I need to upgrade my phone. And I'm like, I'm gonna do it this week. I need to get it done this week. But I had to have a plan for it. And I kind of sat and thought about it. I was like, All right, I'm gonna do it this week. So You might not do anything, and then it never really gets stressed, and then the next audit surfaces even more problems, and then you become more and more inefficient, and eventually quite client satisfaction will go down. It's a snowball. So gather everything you found across the last few days. If you did them, it's okay. I recommend you do them. I can't force you to do anything. You can go back and re-listen to the episodes if you need to to gather this info. Okay, but quick recap: any friction points in your client journey experience from the moment they want to book a call with you until they come back from the trip. Any software that's flagged as kill or consolidate, feedback from your team or your clients. your hardware for each item quickly estimate two things. How much impact would fix this, like for each friction point item? How much impact would fixing this actually have? How much effort would it genuinely take? This gives you four rough categories. There is, here, let me let me I'll use my dry erase board. Do do do I Okay, and I've got my little dry erase board out here. So you're gonna have high effort and low effort, because this is gonna help you prioritize things, and then you're gonna have low impact and high impact. This is not it's fine. Doo do do do do. So you have and you can have a combination of these things. So think of this like you can be low effort and high impact. It can be high effort and low impact. Low effort, low impact, high effort, high impact. I hope you can read my handwriting because it's terrible. But they all can cross-reference each other. But that helps you figure out. which category they need to go into. So low effort, they're things that can g easily get done this week. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes. There's no reason to wait on a fix that takes less than twenty minutes. That goes into the low effort, regardless of impact. It should be a higher impact. You can prioritize the low effort ones and high impact first. So that's gonna be number one. And I'll do this here. Let me start this over. Well, if you're listening in the car, you're not gonna notice. Okay, so low impact and high sorry, low effort and high impact are things you can do this week. If it takes less than 20 minutes but it's gonna change your business, do it. Get it done. I feel like Shia LaBeouf. Just do it! And then you have high effort and high impact. And this could be like completely switching CRMs, but it will also have a high impact. Those are like the single project for the quarter, the single big priority for the quarter in terms of ops operations. Especially if you're like consolidating your tech stack or like migrating your CRM, anything like that, rebuilding your client journey, those should be not done in the same quarter. That's a lot to do. but they would mean meaningfully support like several different aspects of your business all at once. Then there's low impact. low effort or could be high effort, regardless, they can be deprioritized or dropped all together if you want to. I mean low impact items, period. That could just be like a FOMO or shiny object syndrome getting to you and you think it's gonna make this huge change, but when you look at it objectively, you might realize I don't need to do any of this. Not everything the audit surfaces deserves any kind of action. So say you're like, I could I could upgrade my phone. And that's a low effort thing, right? But then you start seeing you say it out loud and your phone hears you. And so then when you do your doomy scrollies. you start seeing ads for the newest phones and then you're like, gosh, look at those features. And then you feel like that's a high impact. That's gonna change everything. No, it's not, not really. that's not a priority. So a high effort, low impact item is something that's usually also not worth pursuing at all, at least not right now, and revisit them only if their impact profile changes later. And this can be like even courses I've offered, like this can be courses that you're curious about taking and investing in. That's a lot of high effort and most likely a low impact, because you have to really be disciplined to execute the work, right? And I'm talking about like courses. not necessarily I am a huge fan of always having a mentor, or some kind of like mentoring coaching program, but any kind of trainings. if you're like, I need to do tourism board training for South Africa, but that's not even something that you really want to specialize in. That is a high effort, time suck, low impact. So this is exactly where this audit series and the quarterly review comes together. If this system audit revealed any underlying processes for a task that you needed to delegate, and that task is genuinely messy now, this is your signal to clean up that process before you delegate it, not after. Because a confusing and like undocumented process, handed off to someone new, new, new, usually just like moves the confusing confusion to a different person rather than resolving it. And then if they're like, hey, I have a solution to make this better, you might need a little bit of an ego check, but you might also be like, I made this, it's perfect. Even though it's not. so not every quick win needs to happen today. Don't get all excited because you're like, I only have four low effort tasks that are gonna be high impact, and it's an hour of my time. I mean, if you're feeling it, go for it, but also don't burn yourself out. Spend your quick wins across the first couple weeks of the new quarter, like rather than trying to implement all of them at once. alongside all of your normal client work, all of your content creation, all of your bookkeeping. If a bigger project became your quarterly priority, give it real protected time, block it off on your coun calendar across the quarter, rather than squeezing it in whatever hours happen to be left over. Okay. Randomly. I mean, even if you don't do it at the exact time you've time blocked. Let's say you're like, I'm gonna put this on my calendar, number one CRM migration, priority, and I'm blocking off three hours a week to focus on this, and you choose your three hours, and it's like two o'clock in the afternoon, three days a week from two to three p.m. You're like, I'm doing it. But then one day you're just not feeling up to it and you want to take a nap instead. Okay, just see if you can work on it 30 minutes later. Okay, it's just I like to use time walking as a to-do list. Okay, so that was a big tech systems tool audit process, days 258 through 263. Understanding today, understanding what systems tech tools actually mean in your business, walking your own client journey as a travel agent. finding and eliminating any hidden waste sitting in a lot of software subscriptions. giving physical hardware behind your business the same honest look instead of waiting for it to catch itself on fire. Bringing your team and your clients into the process. Clients if you're solo, team if you are not, and finally turning it all into like a real prioritized plan, low effort, high impact, high impact. Low effort. sorry. High effort. High impact. Like the highest impact thing should be your priority. Whew, rather than a list of things you'd like to change but aren't going to, because you're not gonna touch that list, you're gonna toss it to side. Sort out your audit findings by the impact and the effort. Do the quick wins immediately, make the highest impact big project your one quarterly priority. What's gonna high have the highest impact first? So if it if it's migrating your CRM or rebuilding your client journey from start to finish, it's probably gonna be your client journey from start to bit finish is the highest priority because you wanna make sure that experience ties in with your marketing messaging, and then the next quarter you can implement migrating the new CRM. But you like You are a service-based business, people are your biggest asset. So focus on the client. Okay. spread your implementation realistically across time. You got three months to get this done, and document what changed, why, so that the next quarter's audit, if you choose to accept that missed admission, builds on this one instead of starting from scratch. Now, hopefully, by October 1st, you've taken some time to review the numbers. your biggest priority chosen, your actual systems, tech, tools are cleaned up, running pretty much the way they're supposed to. And that's a really strong place to start from. And that's gonna give you just knowing that it's organized is gonna give you more confidence. And liken it to decluttering your home. You are sick of all the clutter on the kitchen, counters, right? you're sick of maybe there's just too much stuff to look at. So you declutter, you sell what you don't want, or donate, or find another use for it, whatever. And having that space cleared and set up and functioning the way you want it to is so much better for your mind and your happiness in general, and it's the same thing in your business. That was day two hundred sixty three of the Travel Agency in the Year podcast. Have a wonderful day. I'll see you tomorrow.