Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 219: Why a travel advisor should create a 5-year plan
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency in the Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, travel agency owner, helping travel advisors step into their CEO mindset. This whole podcast is free. If you have any questions on how else I can help you, head over to elevate with Rachel K.com. The my favorite of all my programs is probably the success circle. And you can send me an email. If you're on that website, because I do have mentoring services as well, but I don't have them actively promoted on my website at this time. Wrapping up that landing page. All right, today is day 219. We've covered what kind of business you might want, the reality of selling one. We're gonna zoom out further beyond this year into a simple foundation for the next five. Why five years? Why five years? I don't know. My dad used to tell me, what's your five-year plan? What's your ten year? Ten seems super far out, right? Three, gonna feel rushed. One, you need to have like a general plan each year. But five years from now, seems good. It strikes the useful balance. It's far enough out to force real strategic thinking beyond like this quarter's marketing plan or this month's bookings. But close enough to still feel like tangible and actionable. Unlike a vague someday vision that never gets any real structure behind it because it's just super vague. What does the research show about a five-year plan? Great question, Rachel. There's meaningful research supporting long-term thinking as a genuine driver of business performance. Not just a nice little fun thing to do. Not just a vision board you do on a Saturday night with a bottle of wine. Research from McKinsey comparing long-term oriented companies against short-term focused peers found substantially stronger outcomes over the long-term sorry over time for the long-term focus group. Including notably higher revenue growth, stronger earnings growth, and significantly greater economic profit over the period studied. The businesses playing the long game, in other words, measurably outperformed the ones optimizing purely for the next quarter. There's also research and survey data suggesting that a meaningful share of small business owners who used some form of structured long-term visioning, like clearly imagining and planning, a goal is just a dream with a plan. I think I've said that in other episodes. A goal is just a dream with a plan. But clearly imagining, dreaming, and planning, setting goals towards a specific future state. Okay. Those small business owners that do that reported that their business later matched what they originally envisioned. I have done this. I have also not done this. And I have seen completely different outcomes. It's that's my qualitative data for you. My own personal anecdotal evidence. It's true because it happened to me. So the exercise of clarifying a long-range vision appears to correlate with actually reaching something like it, likely because it shapes the smaller everyday decisions along the way. Mm-hmm. So let's just liken this too. I do a lot of health and fitness stuff. Cause I feel like everyone's like, I could get stronger or I can lose some weight or I could stand to gain some weight. Like the I don't know. We all we I feel like a lot of people just like think about that. Thanks, Instagram, and your crazy filters and all the looks maxing making us feel inadequate. I don't know. I don't know what the reason is. anyway. If you are I'm just gonna go with the weight loss side of things. Say you need to lose 50 or 60 pounds, and you can envision yourself. whatever size that is at that weight loss, right? And you're like, I I've been there, I know what it looks like. I want to be there again. I know I know what I want to feel like. That's imagining it. But just imagining it and not having a realistic plan. Like there's no goal there. It's just daydreaming. So you can imagine all that and you can then say, okay, I need to lose fifty or sixty pounds. Let's give it two years. You could probably do it. It just really depends. We're all different on how weight is gained and/or lost. But let's just say, safely, two years. So now you have a goal. In two years, I want to lose, I want to be 60 pounds lighter than I am today. And then that makes you think this was recorded in 2026. So that makes you think every day when you wake up. Do I wanna be? that person in 2028. I'm one day closer. So you're probably less likely to like even if you are an emotional or stress eater as an example, you're probably gonna be like, I should I can eat because I'm stressed out or I'm dealing with emotions, but maybe, maybe I shouldn't be eating an entire quart of ice cream. Maybe I should switch that up to like carrots with like ranch dressing or carrots and hummus or something to replace it. You're still learning how to like you're still like dealing with the emotional eating or the stress eating in a slightly better way to help you get to that goal because you don't have to be perfect and be like I don't stress eat anymore. Like you can't do that overnight. So but it's the same thing. All right. Back to your five-year plan. You don't need a formal document. You don't need to file this with your attorney. Just honest answers to a few questions. We talked on day 217, which, like the three main business models. You can go download that episode and listen to it later while you're thinking of these questions. Which business model? Boutique? Just you? Mid-size? Maybe some help? or scaled, do you want to be closer to five years from now? Boutique's gonna be just you. I'm estimating you could probably make around three fifty, three hundred and fifty thousand a year if it's just you, depending on your niche, right? And you can set your own income goals, but I'm just trying to give you a range. Like if you're like I wanna be a millionaire, you you it's really, really hard to do that as a boutique agency. I wanna make a million dollars a year. You're probably gonna fit into the mid-size. If you're like, I wanna make fifteen, ten, fifteen, twenty million a year, that's when you're going to the scaled. And you're like, wait a minute, I can make that much money? Yeah. Why not? What's stopping you? except developing the skills needed to create that large of a business. But which one of those, boutique, mid-size, or scaled business model, do you want to be closer to five years from now? Not actually like stuck in, especially if it's like the bigger ones, it's gonna take a little bit longer. next question What does your role in the business look like five years from now? Are you still deeply hands-on? Which means you're probably boutique, or more focused on oversight, team leadership, and business development? Okay. Roughly, question number three What does your business need to be generating five years from now? And what would that require in terms of your team, systems, or niche? Hmm. If you want to make a million dollars a year. And you want to specialize in something that's like a budget type of travel, you're going to need a larger team. And because you're going to need a larger team to like book all those lower like budget bookings, that's gonna eat into that million dollars of commission a year. And are you comfortable with that, or should you maybe s change modify your niche focus a little bit more? Yesterday we the last question is this five or four? Anyway. Yesterday we talked about a future sale, like what kind of what to look for if you want to sell your travel agency, or you are approached by someone who's like, I want to sell my travel agency. is a future sale part of your vision at all? Or are you building something that you intend to run indefinitely and potentially like pass down to your children or something? A five-year plan isn't a rigid contract with your future self. It is, okay, please, like this is like your dream, what you want in five years, and start putting the plan in place to hit that goal. However, markets shift, your own interests will evolve. And travel itself can change in ways none of us can fully predict five years from now. If you've been in this long enough, you should know that, like. If you've been doing it long enough, you can just be like and someone asks you, Well, what's the weather gonna be like in November of twenty twenty eight in Jamaica? I don't know, I'm not psychic. You should get travel insurance if you're that concerned. Is it gonna be safe there? I don't freaking run the country of Jamaica. I can't tell you. I cannot tell you anything that's gonna happen. Well, what about Florida? No clue. So that's gonna happen in our industry. we can't predict everything perfectly five years out. The value of this five-year plan isn't predicting the future perfectly. It's in having a compass, a directional compass, so that your day-to-day decisions are moving you somewhere on purpose rather than just accumulating by accident. So back to the health and fitness, 60-pound weight loss, and you're like, it's gonna take two years. Nobody can predict if you're gonna have like a major injury and that's gonna slow you down, or if you're just gonna have like some crazy Vagus nerve reset and just drop 20 pounds in a week because your body's like, I'm calm. Like, we cannot predict either way. It's just a reasonable thing two years from now to help you make better decisions. And hopefully those better decisions will also fuel you much further into the future. And this is the same thing that you would do with your travel agency. If you want a big scaled agency that you can sell and five years from now you're probably going to have to be hitting like the five million in commission mark to really start getting there. And then the next five years see what you can do to get it to be truly sellable. Right? I I'm just throwing numbers out. So from there, are you gonna doom scroll all day tomorrow or are you gonna start marketing to get to that five million a year in commissions? Are you gonna sit in Facebook groups and like listen to all the chatter of other advisors, or are you gonna do something about your business and put your head down? Hmm. I don't know. Okay. Going into tomorrow. Closing out another stretch. Cause I do stretches. I don't know why. Well, maybe it's because I need 365 pieces of content. But I also don't want these episodes to be too long. But tomorrow we're gonna close out this stretch. With something every version of this five-year vision eventually needs. Ya dream team. What real leadership looks like building that dream team. This is Travel Agency in a Year, day 219. Have a wonderful day.