Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 247: CEO Mindset: How Travel Advisors Should Run a Quarterly Business Review
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Kay, and I'm a travel agency owner, helping travel advisors through this podcast and some other resources, getting your business. To actually be a business. So today is day 247. The next 11 episodes, if you know, you know, I cluster topics together so you don't have to listen to 15 hours straight. You can get little bite-sized pieces every single day. We're gonna be doing CEO mindset work. If you are in the success circle, this coincides with the Q3 review. And I like to do it every 12 weeks, my quarterly reviews, not necessarily when the quarters end, because then I can just add a few weeks worth of data. Like technically week 39 is either the end of this third quarter or start of the fourth quarter. I don't quite remember, somewhere around there. But I like to have most of that information wrapped up and decisions made. And if I take like any time off. Or I'm sick or something, I have this whole buffer time to like slowly gather the info together. Alright. I also like to take the last two weeks of the year off and shut my doors in my travel agency. And therefore, I want to have the entire year wrapped up by week 50. So every 12 weeks I do a quarterly review. back to the CEO mindset. We're not doing decision-making frameworks. We've done those episodes. not more of the like basic business principles we've already covered. This is deeper, often unspoken mental work that's done to actually review the quarter of your business like a true CEO, not just an operator who happens to own the business. And this is why CEOs get paid the money. If you wanna fight me on it. They they do a lot of stuff around here. Well not here, but Anyway So a typical unstructured review, this is what it looks like for most travel advisors. If you're like, I already do a quarterly review, you open your booking software, you scroll through a few numbers, land on a general feeling of that's fine, I guess, or eesh, that was rough, and you move on with your day. That feeling is real, but it's not information. It's a mood wearing the costume of a conclusion. If you contrast that with what a structured review produces, instead of that was a rough quarter, framework gets you to something like lead volume was flat, but my conversion rate dropped by eight points, concentrated almost entirely on cold outbound leads, which tells me the issue is not visibility, it's the follow-up. What? You're like, I can't think like that ever. Yes, you can. In layman's terms, lead volume just remained consistent. My conversion rate did drop, so leads were still coming in, but they weren't converting because you were so focused on the cold DMing or cold emailing leads. And maybe you weren't following up. Maybe your follow-up system wasn't following up properly for you. So one of those two, the that was a rough quarter versus I'm a CEO sentence, one of those two can guide a decision. The other one can only make you feel bad. Which one do you think it is? that's the entire case for having a solid review framework. It turns a feeling into something you can actually act on. And all of you in the success circle that are like, man, this part is rough, it's because you have to pull your feelings out of it and just okay, what can I do differently? So if you start with the numbers, we've built systems around like marketing, finance, operational metrics. We do touch on that in days one hundred eighty eight and one eighty nine if you're new to the podcast or if you like come back sporadically instead of daily or slash there's so many episodes it's hard to remember what's where. You can check out those two episodes. lead source and conversion rate by source, revenue booked, commission earned, average trip value, response times, inquiry to booking speed. Then layer in anything specific to a possible new offer you rolled out or tracked this quarter, the way that we discussed in it was day 224. A genuine CEO level review goes further than just the operational numbers alone. If you've been paying attention to past episodes, I recommend going to get the eMyth book A. Read it. Get the revisited or revised version. Because the first version was written in the 90s, and the revised version, I think, was written in 08. So it's at least only 20 years old, right? but When you're putting the numbers together, that's like your COO putting the operational data together. The CMO, and then they can make individual recommendations. CMO is marketing, CFO is finances, CTO could be tech if you wanted to go there. CPO is people if you want to add that on. It used to just be CFO, CMO, C O O O and now all these chief operating positions have opened up I've noticed in recent years. Anyway, they put the numbers together Well, actually, this is kind of how the framework goes. Their management team, which unfortunately this is all you for the time being, puts together the numbers and submits it. And then the COO is like, okay, here's my recommendations for operations. CMO, here's my recommendations for marketing. CFO, here's my recommendations for managing the money. And then all goes up to the CEO, and the CEO will be like, okay, well, we have a surplus in finances and marketing is saying we need this, but operations is saying we need this. And based on our leads conversions and revenue coming in from the CFO, it looks like we need to invest more in marketing than operations right now. And that's how the CEO makes the decisions. And we're gonna break it down even further. Anyway, pull up your goals that you actually set at the start of this quarter. You should have run them down if you were in the success circle, but if you didn't, that itself is usual useful data about this quarter started. Because if you don't have any goals, you have zero direction for your travel agency to even go. You're just floating around in the nethers. do you have a five-year vision? We talk about that on day 219. hopefully you have a five-year vision. Every time you're doing a quarterly review, an annual review, you need to ask yourself whether this quarter's actions moved you towards that five-year goal or quietly away from it. And since you are your own boss and most of you listening, it's just you. Think about your own personal actions. If you were like, I need to do quote unquote market research, and then you just end up doom scrolling for six hours a day, you're not getting anything done to move the needle. And then when you look at your numbers and you're like, I'm not getting anything done, probably should stop Doom scrolling. It can be as simple as that. Pull up your actual calendar from the past 12 weeks. Look at where your time really went. Were you in all these trainings and webinars for things that you're like, I'm never gonna sell this? Were you booking consultations? Did you have that time? Maybe maybe you didn't hit the mark on your number of consultations you wanted because you've blocked so much time for everything else in your life. And I think I've said this in past episodes, but like building this business, you are building a relationship. Like you treat it like a relationship. Every relationship, friendships, romance, familial relationships require a sacrifice. So you could if it like liking likening it to a romantic relationship, a romantic relationship's gonna have to cost you sacrificing some of your loan time. At first, because you're gonna have to go on dates, right? And it's gonna cost you time with your family. And even if you're married with children, it's gonna cost you time with your children. same thing with your business, you're gonna have to decide what you're gonna put your time towards. And let's say you didn't get as much consultations as you wanted because you only gave. All of your potential leaves 45 minutes a day for consultations. and if you are doing social media marketing, that is very difficult to get consultations. I remember people I knew in my life when I first started this, I opened up consultations and I would have them start as late as 8 p.m. Because I was like, well, I'm Central Standard Time Zone. If I have any Pacific Standard Time clients on the West Coast, that's two hours behind. If they get off work at five and I'm not available anymore because it's after 5 p.m. my time, that doesn't make any sense. Not that I get a lot of people from that time zone, but I needed to be aware of that. And then I also had to open up consultations a little bit earlier the day. Like I would do all my consultations afternoons into evenings. And I wouldn't have every single day open. I would have like every other Saturday open for the option. And I would go as far as 8 p.m. like three nights a week. And then I would stop at 6 p.m. two nights a week. And people in my life are like, why are you available twenty-four-seven? It's like I'm not available twenty-four-seven. That's my time to get new business. I'm doing other things the rest of the day. Anyway. When you pull up your calendar and you look where your time really went versus where you meant for it to go, like I have on my calendar every day. 8 a.m. Pilates bar trading. I can't even do that right now. I should probably really remove it from my calendar. It's been there for like three years. Every single day. And with MCAS, I have to be very careful with my exercise. Sometimes though, when I see that little ding on my phone go off, I'm like, I mean, I could do some kind of movement, but I haven't been committing to it. that's where I meant my time to go during that time slot, but that's not where my time really is going. Usually I am doing some kind of work right now. I'm doing some kind of work at 8 a.m. That's just how I like to do my day. And I really need to change up my calendar. It's fine. Anyway Those two, when you look at what where you meant your time to go and how you actually were spending your time, they're almost never identical. And that gap is the data point, like the most honest data point in the entire quarterly review, annual review, monthly reviews if you want to do it in the monthly review. Because you can be like, I meant to do that, but I know I'm just watching a movie or something at that time. Add one more layer that many travel advisors skip entirely, and that's the client experience data. Not a formal survey, just like an honest scan back through this last quarter's client interactions. Were there recurring compliments that you recall, or maybe it's in writing and email? recurring friction points, that's an operational issue to tackle, a theme in what clients needed help with that you hadn't fully anticipated. I take note of all of these and once a year during my slow season in travel I update my FAQs and my workflows to address all of that. I'll even tweak the days that I send out my workflows because people when I first sent it out I was like, this is a logical number of days prior to travel to send this information. And I noticed sometimes a week prior or two weeks prior, people will be like, Hey, where's I need to know this information. I'm like, Yeah, it's coming in two weeks. So I had to move it up further. Little things like that. This is a qualitative later layer. So quantitative is just the numbers. Quantitative is just looking at the numbers. Qualitative is the experience and the kind of like it's not the numbers, it's the feeling. But that qualitative later layer often surfaces things that the quantitative or the numbers alone never will. Okay, so organize the review into three questions for each area. What happened? Why did it happen? And what does it tell me or you going forward? Resist the urge to skip straight to solutions before you're honestly set. Like you've got to honestly sit with what happened and why it happened. Whether, and that's where like the real insight tends to live. Yeah, it's that's where I see the most growth in my processes, client satisfaction and everything is like, this is why this is what happened and this is why. a lot of people rush past this because it's uncomfortable or they're too impatient to really sit and reflect. A review that it jumps immediately to here's my plan for next quarter, without you first genuinely sitting in, here's what actually happened and why, tends to produce plans built on assumptions instead of evidence. And we all know what assuming does. It makes an ASS of you and me. Yes, I talk like a high school counselor. Get over yourselves. Just laugh at me and go on, it's fine. a few things. 'Cause these are like common mistakes that I see that quietly wreck the reviews. As you sit down to do your next quarterly review, number one, reviewing while emotionally hot right after a difficult client call, or on the same hour you found out some launch you did underperformed, or you just text your or you just checked your social media and maybe someone's like commenting nasty stuff, that tends to distort everything. Things like that. If at all possible, give yourself a day of distance between sitting down with the full picture and any other issues. I like to build in my quarterly reviews into my PTO. And I'll just like block off an entire day early so I can do my quarterly review unbothered and I've let anything happen, happen, you know, good or bad. Secondly, comparing your numbers against an unfair benchmark, like another advisor's highlight reel, or a number that you saw in a Facebook group with zero context about that person's business model or their own timeline. Your only fair comparison is your own business this quarter against your own business last quarter. Everyone grows at different rates. Okay? Thirdly, doing this review entirely alone without any accountability, a review that never gets spoken out loud to another person, like a mentor, a mastermind, or you know, a group like the Success Circle. Even just the voice memo to yourself tends to stay abstract. Saying out saying it out loud, writing it somewhere you're gonna actually revisit it, makes it more real than just thinking or typing it. Writing is more powerful for you, your energy, your brain, your memory than typing it. Whew before you sit down and do your review. If you are not in the success circle, you gotta build out your own review formula. Sorry. I give it to you in the success circle, but you don't even get it until I think it's twelve weeks in and the first monthly review is well, you get the annual review in week one, and it's a nightmare. Cause that's like most agents are like, What do you mean I gotta review everything annually? And then I think twelve weeks in you get the quarterly review, and then sixteen weeks in you get your first monthly review, and then I think around week twenty or so we do the weekly review. Cause I like to take big, break it up into smaller pieces and Anyway, come up with your own review framework. Good luck, I'm kidding. If you can have like a set framework, that way you aren't scrambling each quarter, you can just pull everything together. Gather the numbers, your original goals, your calendar, a blank page for like any client notes, experience notes, all in one place, ready to go, before you actually schedule the time to sit with them. This alone will make the review itself feel far less overwhelming because you're not hunting for the data in the middle of it trying to reflect on it. Okay, this is why week thirty-six again in the success circle is my Q3 review, 'cause it's just like friendly reminder. You can do it now or you can do it later. I care. the next few episodes, I think today 257, goes deeper into the mindset side of this type of review. How to look at your results without your identity getting tangled up in them, because you are not your business. Even though it is your brain child, don't be a helicopter parent to your travel agency. How to actually learn from bad quarter without assigning blame to yourself or anyone else. How to genuinely celebrate what went well, how to walk away from this whole process with actual real clarity instead of just a longer to-do list. Quick recap. Pull your numbers, your original goals, your calendar, and your honest client experience notes, and put it into one place, like a packet. Use the what happened and why it happened, what it tells me structure for each area, and give yourself real distance from any emotionally hot moments before you sit down for the review. That was day 247. Have a wonderful day. I will see you tomorrow.