Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 226: Why a travel advisor should mind their own business
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome back to the Travel Agency New Year Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, with elevate with Rachel K dot com. And I'm a travel agency owner. That's what this podcast is about. I'm helping travel advisors become the CEO of their business. And today is 226. Focus beats the trends. Why doubling down on your offers? What's going to win? Yesterday we talked about not comparing yourself to competitors. And I've done other episodes like Comparison is the thief of joy. Today, a related idea. Chasing every travel trend will almost always make you less money than getting excellent and deep at what you actually offer. And this is like the foundation of why so many of us in like the I don't know, course, coaching, mentoring sphere. For travel advisors are like niche down. You've got a niche down. This is any business you start, even if you fail as a travel advisor, you have to have one offer you are get you get really, really good at before you expand into other offers. Trends are exciting. because they feel like an opportunity that you can't afford to miss. But every hour spent building content for positioning. Around a passing trend is an hour not spent deepening what you're already known for. Trend chasing also has a hidden cost beyond time. It dilutes the brand. If your content jumps from like ski trips to bachelorette getaways to whatever destination went viral this month, your audience has a much harder time understanding what it is you actually do and what you specialize in. And specialization for service-based businesses in general is what makes referrals and repeat business easy peasy lemon squeezy because they're gonna you're the go-to for that thing. Okay. real world actual big companies to help you understand. Lego, not Lego my ego, but Lego, is a very well documented case. In the early 2000s, the company drifted away into a wide range of ventures. LEGO Land, which I have been to and have no memory of it. Video Games, which my son is of an age where yes, we had all those games, and I love those games, by the way. All the little Easter eggs in them. Clothing other spin-offs like the Lego movie, chasing growth outside of its core product and came dangerously close to bankruptcy as a result. The company's recovery centered on refocusing on its actual core product. The brick the bricks themselves and the creative, open-ended play that they enabled. That refocus, rather than continued diversification, is widely credited as the foundation of Lego's turnaround into one of the most valuable toy companies in the world. And I grew up, I don't know how old you are, but I grew up in an era pre-the weird Lego-themed sets, which I think still exist. I will tell you, I'm just gonna talk about Legos, how much I loved Legos when it was just the giant bucket of random stuff and those really thin like platform things that you could like build houses and stuff on. And me and my siblings, we had like an above-ground pool, nothing nothing fancy. But when we moved to Missouri, we had a pool and we had Legos and we would build the craziest yachts for Lego people and we would pretend that our pool was the ocean. And we wanted to make sure that they were like capable of actually floating. So we had to find the platforms where they you could put bricks underneath and like build the actual structure to get it to float instead of just the flat plat because the flat platforms broke. But we would have like customized little kitchens and stuff. Because we didn't have a set where it's like, this is gonna build you the Death Star. Now when my son was old enough to start playing with Legos, that's when a lot of those custom Legos. Sets were out. There were some before, but it was more like, here's a house, here's a fire truck, here's a city block thing. but by the time he was old enough, it was when they were licensed with Star Wars. and he got he had like the Harry Potter castle, and also at Christmas ability, look at all these Legos you got. Let's build them together, and it just turned into be building them. I had so much fun though. I'd be like, let's just do this together. And then he'd get bored and I'd be like, the secret compartment. So that was kind of cool. But anyway, I remember being like, why can't I just get a regular bucket of Legos and just build whatever I want? You know? and then they kept going further and further away from that. And it was exciting at first, but it was like I don't need to play another Lego video game. I already played this Lego video game. I know it's gonna happen. You know? And this is like it was a the Lego video games, I think they had Lego Star Wars or my son and I had Lego Star Wars and like Lego Batman. Maybe Lego Lord of the Rings. I don't remember if that was a thing. But we had like three of them, and I was like, this is just like if I played any other game but in Lego, I don't really care about that. So And what I'm I just went on a tangent there. Let's get back to business. What I'm saying is you do not need to chase everything going viral. You do not need to chase every new system set up for your success. Because we're all different, And you need to just sit down and focus on your work. And everyone that's like miraculously doing really well out of nowhere, the overnight successes. It's because they put their head down and they focused on what they wanted to offer and they blocked all the other noise out. So what you need is genuine excellence and depth in the offer that you've already built or leaning towards it in the first place if you're newer. The niche that you understand deeply, the service level that you've created and refined if you've been in it for a while, the specific kind of trip that you plan better than anyone else could, like pretty much anyone else you know could. That depth is what earns the referrals, the repeat clients, and a reputation that a scattered, trend-chasing content strategy rarely builds. So this isn't an argument for never ever adapting. Markets and interests do shift. And like if you so for me with ICA and destination weddings, I had one that I focused on hard, but she was 28. Now she would be like 38, you know, or 36, something like that. So I have to if I want to still attract a twenty-eight year old, that ICA is a different person because generations shift, okay? So, some evolution is healthy in your business because you have to be able to adapt to different interests and markets based on your avatar and the service you offer in keeping that all aligned. You might have to pivot away from specific. So I did a lot of resorts. You might have to pivot from certain resort brands and pivot to different resort brands that align with the new ICA you've had to tweak a little bit. But this is why we spent some time earlier, I think day 221, evaluating new offers carefully, then reactively. Don't ever react, respond. Get that in your head. Am I reacting or am I responding? The distinction is between like a considered filtered decision to grow in a new direction. And reflect reflexively chasing whether it's just trending this week or this month or maybe even this year because it feels urgent in the moment. So that's the difference we're going for. You can still highly niche down. Focus, focus on that niche, focus on that avatar. Approximately every four-ish years, niching in that, to keep your content fresh. I will tell you from experience, to keep your content fresh, you do need to reevaluate your avatar if you want to keep your product. that you're offering like your main product for your niche, you do need to reevaluate your avatar and see how you can get them together. So you will need to do like a copy refresh like every four to five years on your website. It's gonna be minor tweaks. And Your messaging is going to change just slightly in your content strategy. But it's not a complete overhaul, it's just minor, minor tweaks because your avatar has changed with time, you know. So let's say 10 years ago you could use the pain point, or 20 years ago, let's go 20 years ago, 2006. Pre-smart phones. Smartphones didn't exist, but websites did, and the internet did. and we're gonna focus on destination weddings because that's just what I think about. It's either that or cruises, which I know nothing about. But for destination weddings in 2006, that avatar is completely different than the modern day 2020's destination ideal client avatar. and their pain points are gonna be somewhat similar, but how you speak to them is going to be different. So in 2006 you could put on your website trying to attract a 28-year-old. So let's see, an 88. How old was I in 2006? Okay. 28 year old. So they would have been born in the 70s. I I I let me math that. Sorry, one second. Two thousand six minus twenty eight. Yeah, they would have been born in seventy eight. Which if you were born in seventy eight, you're like, What do you mean, I'm I'm still twenty-eight? Don't worry, I do the same thing. I like to pretend it's just two thousand six all the time in my brain at home 'cause I'm like, I'm only twenty three. Great Anyway, so in two thousand six Someone who was 28 might have had internet access at home. They might have signed up for Netflix, getting their DVD in the mail. And so instead of like for their pain points, they can't stream anything. They can't binge anything. And if someone still has copy about relating to someone born in 1978 as though they are 28 years old, that is not going to relate to someone born in 1998, that is now 28 years old. Because by the time they were 10, smartphones were around. Became the norm, and so their pain points and how they react to stress is gonna be slightly different. Okay. Like you can't you couldn't DoorDash back then. You couldn't like if you ordered something on Netflix, you waited when it became available, the DVD, and then you had to wait for it to come in the mail. And you were like pretty cool if you even had Netflix back then. You're probably just going to Blockbuster or family video. anyway. That's why you need to be able to adapt and like adjust over time. That's one of the many reasons. Let me see where I'm at here, because now I got all these tabs open. Here we go. That is why you need to be adapting. Also, your favorite brands that you work with, they completely they could completely decide to sell and completely change who they are. They could go bankrupt. Like those are also reasons the market's going to shift. All right. But just because someone is saying, I made all this money booking this type of travel and you should book this type of travel too, doesn't yeah, you could probably make money, but if they're like hyper specific and they're like, This is my niche, this is what you need to niche into if you want to make money, that doesn't necessarily mean it's true for you. And if you already are happy with what you're doing and good at what you're doing, there's no reason to add anything else until you get your business to a point where you don't have to be doing the day-to-day of this type of travel. And then you can expand into new offers. All right. Tomorrow we're gonna tackle People that never launch in the first place. Everything needs to be perfect before it's ready. No, it doesn't. Pobity's nerfic. I think we are on day 226. This was day 226 of the travel agent senior podcast. Have a wonderful day.