Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 239: The TA's Doer to Leader Shift
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome back to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, a travel agency owner. And I help travel agents with some courses, mentoring, custom mentoring, one-on-one. So let's do a little bit of an update. Cause I don't really talk about myself on here. I'm just like blah blah blah. Before we get into day 239. at the time of recording this, I was very, very recently diagnosed with MCAS, which is mast cell activation syndrome and chronic inflammation. Which, if you go back to my earlier episodes, gosh, I started posting on social and I was like, I'm gonna post a clip from this episode. And I was like, my gosh, I look so sick. And I sounded so stuffed up and sick. You have been warned. The new medication that I'm taking for MCAS, hopefully it's just a temporary thing. And it does cause a lot of fatigue. And since it's reducing a lot of the inflammation in my body as well, I get fatigued, but I get a little loopy. So if you've been listening to the daily episodes, you may have noticed I've been a little more jokey lately. Okay, just deal with it. And if you aren't aware. I put the links in my profile on YouTube, but I haven't put them on Spotify or anything else. But I did start because I am doing custom mentoring for travel advisors. Some of them want help with their marketing and growing their accounts. And I had to set up social media. And now I'm like, well, screw it. Might as well promote myself. So My TikTok is at real elevate with Rachel K. My Instagram is misspelled. It is Elevat with Rachel K, because I set it up too quickly and I'm not allowed to change it yet. I also have a subreddit called Elevate with Rachel K. That right now it's just me hanging out by myself. But there's some resources there for you as well. I did add the subreddit community to my elevatewithrachelk.com homepage instead of joining the community through the software that I use. I was like, no, we're not doing that. All right, let's get into this. This is day 239. We're gonna do the leader to the doer. Nope. The doer to the leader shift. So most travel advisors start out their business. As a doer, okay. You're booking the flights, you're writing the content, you answer every single email personally, and at some point as your business grows, that identity will have to shift if you want to move out, especially from a boutique agency, and even if you want to stay boutique, but you hire anyone to help you. So we're gonna talk about this shift honestly. Because you can't be a doer and lead any VAs or any kind of assistance, right? You gotta be a leader. But why is this doer identity so hard to let go of? Because in the very, very early stages of building your business, being the doer is exactly what works, right? There is no one else to help you. Every task genuinely does depend on you. Even setting up your workflows and automations that depends on you. And the problem is this identity can quietly outlive its usefulness, especially when you start to scale and need to hire. Doing everything yourself starts to feel like competence and control, even once it's actually become the ceiling on how much your business can grow. Because if you're doing everything, at some point you will reach max capacity. There is no way for you to grow. Okay. So a doer asks, well, how do I get this task done? A leader asks, how does this task get done well, consistently, whether or not I'm the one doing it? And this is why I talk about in this podcast, in the success circle, setting up and recording your SOPs even before you're ready to hire. Start screen recording your SOPs so that you have like the basics of training someone and onboarding them in place. As you're recording yourself doing your own tasks, you might be like, there's a faster way to do this. And you might be like, hold on, revamp your process and then screen record it again. And yes, you might think, this is gonna take me an extra hour to get through doing this and revamping this one little task. But if it's consistently done well and it's much more efficient, and you have that recorded to train someone exactly how to do it, I'm like shedding like Crazy. Congratulations. It's gonna save you so much time in the future. Okay. So that is the shift in the kind of thinking that your business is going to need from you. Not just how do I get this done, but how does this get done well, consistently, regardless of who is doing it? If you know me and you've been in the live QA's for several years, you will know. That I always refer back to the McDonald's model. Ray is it Ray Kroc? Ray Kroc found these rando Swedish brothers who were like, we made this super efficient system to make burgers. And he used that rinse and repeat method that they could copy paste the same food over and over again to build his real estate empire, by the way. You need to be thinking the same way in your business. Not I mean, you can get Delulu and be like, I'm gonna have a major empire. But you also need to think, how do you get that done? Not you doing it, okay? So, what your business needs when you win the leadership. It w it's what it needs from you. It connects direct directly back to all the systems, all the batching, task by task, batching systems, dream team, all these episodes that we've covered earlier this year. None of that is working if you're still mentally operating as the sole doer and the best of doing anything and everything in your travel agency. You are overdue for the shift if you are the bottleneck. For tasks that don't actually require your specific expertise. If you that is micromanaging, and it's okay. It's okay. Let's don't beat ourselves up here. So you feel like a flash of anxiety at the idea of anyone else handling a client interaction, even just like a routine one, like setting up your email automations. Your business growth. When you are in this thing where you're like, only I can do this, your business growth has plateaued at exactly that ceiling of your personal hours and capacity. Okay? Anything like this is a sign that the doer identity has become a limitation rather than a strength. So the doer identity, and we all are, most of us, not very many of us, are like, I've been self employed my entire life. There are many people who have. I mean, I for the most of my career, yes, I have been self employed. but there are a lot of people that I work with that are like, I just left corporate world, or they're still working their full time job and want to make that shift into making this their full time income and actually building a business. But everyone starts in that door identity, regardless. You can't just like start a business and be like, I have a whole team unless you have a someone giving you tens of thousands, if close maybe close to a hundred thousand to start. A lot of us don't have access to tens of thousands of dollars just sitting around to be like, All right, I've got my VA, I've got it's all set up, and I do nothing, and I just work twenty hours a week. That's not reality for us, okay? But this doesn't mean you have to step away from the work that you love. So shifting into the leader, you don't have to abandon everything that genuinely lights you up. If you like doing the client calls and if you like making the proposals, go ahead and keep that. Plenty of successful agency owners stay closely involved in the client relationships, even as they're building out a team. The shift from doer to leader is really about being intentional with your travel business, choosing what only you should do. And then building the real structure. The kind of systems and culture that we've talked about in our dream team episodes. You build everything like That's around everything else, okay? So a quick example. In I think it's in the Group Travel Made Easy course that I have, which also I'm anyone who's in the course is great. I'm not really going to be advertising my courses so much anymore. My focus is more on the success circle program because you get so much more one-on-one time with me and the custom one on one mentoring. anyway, but in the group travel made easy course, I share my Trello boards. For group travel management. And people thought I was a little crazy, but I was like, okay, here's the group travel sales trello board, right? And then here's the group travel reservation specialist sets admin trello board. And I built this before I even started hiring anything out. I separated the tasks and I wanted to be the sales side, and I knew I wanted to hire the admin side. So when I was building out the admin side for the Trello board. I was like, what do I not care about doing but I know needs to get done consistently and well? And I built that board out on all those tasks. And I shared it, and people are like, well, why do I need two Trello's? I'm doing everything. And it's like, because if you actually want to build a business, you need to have the mentality of, even though I'm doing everything now, I am a leader and I will be hiring this out later down the road. Okay. Are you thinking like that with your travel agency? Are you thinking two steps ahead? Hmm, maybe, maybe not. I don't know. We're gonna go a little bit deeper tomorrow with this whole leading thing. Before you can lead a team or a business well, there is a more foundational shift, and it is learning to lead yourself first. So this was a short episode now that I see the timer here. Also Why do I talk with my bottom teeth? I don't like that. If you're watching this on YouTube, like I feel like I'm like Frankenstein talking, unless I'm just laughing through it. Anyway, thanks for joining me today. Feel free to share this with anybody. Subscribe. This first year you will get daily notifications, unfortunately, because there's daily episodes dropped. but yeah. Have a wonderful day. I will see you tomorrow.