Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 260: Audit Your Travel Agency Tech Stack: Keep, Kill, or Consolidate
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome back to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Kay, and I'm just a travel agency owner helping you build a business that builds you up and step into the CEO mindset. Let me put my headphones on. I kept my headphones off for a few seconds if you're watching this on YouTube. Cause this beautiful streak of white. I'm loving it. I'm loving it. Okay. If you have any questions about how it can help you, I do offer some programs and mentoring, customized one-on-one mentoring, head over to elevate with rachelk.com. Today, since it's a whole year of episodes, we are on day two hundred and sixty. So we've been doing systems tech Audits today is all about the tool bloat and auditing the tech stack. So the next days 258 through 263, I tend to cluster concepts together. And it's all about your systems audits, your tech stack audit, and your tools audit. So that you don't have your computer explode on you and you're like, shoot, and lose days of work. Okay, so we walked through yesterday your processes and going through them, even if you have them all set up and done and templatized, it's nice to always go back through because you never know when a link is broken for some reason. Or if a process you thought was amazing turns out to have like three extra clicks your clients don't want to do, and then you're like, well, why aren't they why aren't my leads filling this out? Probably something too complicated. So we talked about walking through that yesterday. Today we're gonna look specifically at the software running underneath all that because there is A very large and well-documented amount of waste sitting quietly in most businesses' tech stacks, including travel agencies, and possibly yours. Ba ba ba. So this isn't a quirk for a small business. This is common. It's a documented industry-wide pattern. SASS is software as a service. Okay, so SASS Management Research. What software is a service, like a CRM. Okay. Including recent like index reports has consistently found somewhere between roughly one-third, let me read this, one-third and one half of software licenses a typical organization pays for go unused or significantly underused in any given period. A third to half of the software licenses. Think about that. so some of the more detailed analysis, analyses, analysis, someone comment the plural of analysis this is they put the figure as high as like the upper forty percent once you count for tools purchased just in case, like software just in case. Accounts never deactivate were deactivated after like a role change or duplicate tools and software doing the same job under different names. So like maybe you signed up for Calendly and you paid for the annual Calendly and then you also signed up for QED on a monthly basis. Me personally, I realized I accidentally created two Calendly accounts. and I had a reason when I did this in the beginning, and then I switched and forgot, so all the links were broken to schedule a call because the account that I had that I canceled. was the one that had the links. And I was like, whoops. So that's kinda like the processes, but now you also need to look at the software you're using. And the pattern behind this waist is almost always the same regardless of the size of your travel agency. It's far easier to add a new tool or software than it is to remember to cancel an old one. I've been there, I if you're new, you're like I'm not there. You might, you might that might happen to you someday. And if you've been in the game for a few years you'd be like, yup Well, I had four Canva Pro accounts at one point. so adding a subscription has been an obvious trigger, a new need or like a new recommendation or free trial that you thought would be useful, and then you forget about it. But canceling one has no natural trigger at all. Nothing forces you to revisit it, so just keeps renewing month after month, year after year, long after its usefulness has faded. And this I my conspiracy conspiracy time. Yeah. I think this genuinely came from the gym model, like the Planet Fitness model. They charge so low for like memberships. I think it's like ten dollars a month, because they know people are gonna forget about it because it's such a low cost, and they're not gonna notice it until it's been six or twelve months that they've just given away up to $120. And then there are going to be a very small percentage of people who actually utilize. That, but all of those other unused gym memberships subsidize the cost for that avid gym goer. It's pretty common practice. And I feel like it's spread to every industry with the subscription model, even with like Netflix and Hulu and all that fun stuff. And you think to yourself, it's only like regarding streaming services, you think to yourself, well this one service is only twelve dollars a month, but then you have six of them and you really don't even watch any of them, and you can always start them back up at any time. You can cancel and restart, but the idea that you have to cancel and restart the programs is so much more difficult. Even if you see, I'm spending $120 a month on streaming services, you might be hesitant to cancel because you're like, Well, what if the price goes? Up. But what if you never need to use it again? Mm-hmm. Ahaha. Sorry. Alright, so many software as a surface management platforms do illustrate this consistently. This is not a you issue. This is not a travel agent-only issue. This is like just a thing. In one commonly sighted cited pattern. A mid-sized organization built a full inventory of its software spend by pulling actual building and cred billing and credit card records. And they weren't like relying from their memory of a list from the team. And they discovered several forgotten ghost subscriptions nobody had actively mentioned when simply asked to name their tools and software services they use from memory. In several of these documented cases, businesses running. This kind of full audit have found savings in the range of 30 to 35 percent of their total software spend simply by identifying duplicate tools performing the same function, licenses nobody was using, and subscriptions that had quietly outlived their purpose. Interesting. So, this consistent finding across case studies is worth repeating. When people are asked to list their tools. From memory, they reliably undercount what they're actually paying for. Once you pull everything from the real billing records, it's almost always higher and sometimes significantly so. And this is my argument why I'm not a fan of paying for annual stuff for savings. I prefer to do monthly because this is just me. You can fight me, I don't care. Yes, you save money signing up for the annual subscription. But I like the monthly subscription because you will catch these things much sooner if you keep seeing it like on your credit card bill statements or your business bank account statements. Me personally, I put everything on my business credit card and paid off on a weekly basis so I can catch those more easily. rather than Doing the annual billing, you're not going to notice it, and then you'll see that one bill, and you'll be like, it's too late to cancel, just keep it another year. As an example. Alright. So, why does this matter even more for smaller businesses? Because you gotta have the operating expenses and the revenue coming in. So you might assume this is purely not a problem for you. The underlying mechanism from all these case studies, it's easier to add than to cancel. That's the underlying mechanism, applies at any size of a company. So solo travel advisor with even six or eight recurring software subscriptions can be looking at genuinely meaningful monthly waste if even two or three of those are duplicative or unused. Is it duplicative or duplicative? Duplicitous. What does duplicitous mean? Anyway. Anyway, that waste compounds every single month. It goes unreviewed. And this is vital to building a business to manage your finances very, very well, especially in the beginning phases. Because I believe I've said this in past episodes. I may have just said this like randomly on social media. But if you pull out any kind of financial support at home or another job If you want to make pay yourself like a $60,000 a year salary, like salary W2 employee, you have to have four times the revenue coming in just to cover that salary. So you're looking at probably around $260,000 a year to pay yourself a $65,000 a year salary, pay all of your taxes, and this is like an SWARP structure, pay your business taxes, pay all of your expenses, and have money set aside for when you're going through a slow period, which could be anyone. From six to twelve, maybe even eighteen months. So these little things can add up very quickly, is what I'm saying. So Pull all of your statements, your bank statements, your credit card statements. And it's really, really important to be familiar with your money, not psychotically watch it necessarily. Just check in with your banks, with your credit cards on a weekly basis. And I know there's a lot of fear around that because if you aren't, if you don't feel like you're making enough money, you're gonna be hesitant. To check, and you're going to be hesitant to fulfill your financial obligations. and you might not want to actually look. You might just be like, Well, I can automate all my bookkeeping, I can just connect my bank to QuickBooks and it's done and it's all categorized. That's great and all, but automations. Doing your bookkeeping can't catch duplicate accounts. Even if you hire a bookkeeper, there's a chance that they won't understand if you had Mailer Light and Flowdesk necessarily, they may not understand why you don't need both of them. Okay? So once this inventory is built of the software that you are paying for. Sort every bit of software into one of three cap categories. And this is like the Komari method. If you need to declutter your house, let's declutter your software. Okay? So kind of the Komari method. Does it bring you joy? Does it bring money into your business? So the keep are the essential, actively used, clear, ongoing purpose that you couldn't easily replace. It'd be a pain in the behind. Keep that. Kill the subscriptions if you aren't using it, if it's a redundant service, something low value enough that canceling it doesn't create any kind of real disruption. So this could be, man, with the advent of AI, I wonder how many people are paying for like a Claude service and a chat GPT service. Like, kill one of those. And then there's consolidate. If you standardize one set of software That would save you money and simplify your workflow, even if it requires a bit of transition effort. At the time this is being recorded, I'm gonna talk about my host agency. They I found out last week or just a few days ago, they're gonna be completely switching their CRM. And the CRM they're switching to is one I have already purchased and have been implementing in my business for years. And I'm excited to see where it goes. But I also have another CRM because at the time, when I invested in this first one, there wasn't a lot of CRM capabilities. There were like some things, but I primarily used it for like itineraries. And then I invested in another low-cost CRM for all the workflows, payment forms, lead generation forms, blah blah blah. So now I'm in this boat with you all right now. I think it's gonna be a full switch in just a few months. And I'm not sure what this new rollout's going to look like. And I don't know what new features this old software I've used forever is going to be adding for me to just step away from this other CRM. And also, this other CRM has group pages and all this inventory and stuff and all the automation setup all the way through November of next year. So I'm like, well, I have to keep paying for this, I think, because I don't want to confuse my clients. And there's also potential to see what's going on with this, so I could cut out these expenses. And it's awesome for me because I pay for myself and for all of the agents on my team to have this itinerary software and the other CRM. So it'll be a cost savings for me, which is nice, but I'm just like, how is this gonna work? And do can I consolidate them all into this one CRM? Do I want to consolidate them all? I might hang on to my vacation CRM and through 2028 just in case. Because this was recorded in 2026, if you're coming here years later. So anyway, as you go through your own audit of the software you're using, always be honest. Especially in the third consolidation category, it's really common to keep two overlapping tools, like the example I just mentioned, simply because switching fully to one feels like a hassle. Yup, that's why I'm like, I might just keep this for another year. Even when the overlap is costing you real money every month. So a call and consolidation decision made once, even with like a little bit of short-term friction and frustration, tends to pay for itself pretty quickly compared to indefinitely paying for two tools doing variations of the same job. No, I'm not projecting your business onto me. I'm just realize that this is all like aligned. I'm just like talking about my own business. And now I'm like, hmm, maybe I should go through the hassle, but I also have subagents and I don't know. I don't know. I gotta think about it. I have a few weeks. Okay, so a caution. One important nuance. Cheaper isn't automatically better. Sometimes a single slightly more expensive platform that replaces three disconnected tools, which you know, I know a lot of agents I mentor are like, turn. Turn is the best. Is anyway, so that versus three disconnected tools is actually more cost-effective and time-effective choice because it reduces not just subscription costs, but also the hidden cost of your own time spent manually moving information between disconnected systems. So evaluate the total value of each bit of software, the cost, the time saved, the workflow simplicity when used together, not just the monthly price tag in isolation. Okay. Alright, so your tech inventory from your actual billing records, build that up, not just your memory, because if you're like me, I have had too many accounts. Like another example, I had a had a VA for a while and I kept her email around for an additional year just in case. And now I'm like, I don't need that account at all. So but I was paying an extra I don't know twenty bucks a month or so. That was two hundred and forty dollars. And no That's not a huge you could be like, that's negligible amount of money. Yes, it is. But also when you are under a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, every dollar counts towards getting you your salary. Okay? Alright, tomorrow we're gonna talk about this with the actual software, sorry, hardware tools. Ooh, I love this series. If you want to comment, have any of you fallen to the trap of like oopsie daisy? I'm paying for upgraded ChatGPT and upgraded Claude and some other service, go ahead and comment. Otherwise, have a wonderful day.