Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / DAY 291 | The Travel Advisor New-Year Readiness Check
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency View Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, travel agency owner, helping you get way past the six-figure revenues. That's the goal. I mean, you gotta do the work, but I'm here to support you. If you'd like to know how else I can help you build your travel agency, head on over to elevate with rachelk.com. Today is day 291, the new year readiness check. So we should be about halfway through October. And before the holiday season gets super duper hectic because we are like two weeks-ish away from Halloween and then Thanksgiving and then Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year's, that all plus wave season. Today's episode is all about doing one simple but important thing. Knowing where all your information actually lives. So when you do your year end review, it isn't a scramble in the mid middle of the busiest, personally, most personally demanding season for a lot of us. Especially if you have another job and there's like corporate holiday parties and this silly white elephant thing going on and Maybe you're married and your spouse has the corporate parties and you gotta get an outfit together, or just like you know, all the things. So on top of wave season, there's also your own, the holidays have their own wave. The year-end travel you might have, client gifts if you do that, personal commitments, like I just listed off, layered on top of all the business stuff. Trying to simultaneously gather a full year's worth of financial and business data during the same window can set you up for rushed, lower quality version of the review process that we've built out from like days 247 through 257. You don't need to have your full year-end review today. We still have a couple more months. We have 74 days. So yeah, about two and a half months left. You just need to know. where everything actually is and confirm it is accessible. Don't be Rachel a few years ago and be like, I forgot my password for this. we talked about creating a PL statement, but that's gonna be super important for your CPA. But your full year financial records, your revenue, your expenses, your commission statements, the fee invoices, all of that. Do you have a general running PL? Can your accounting software generate a full PL that's accurate? your marketing data across the year, your lead sources, conversion trends, any standout campaigns that you might have had from doing your quarterly reviews. Are you doing your quarterly reviews? If you aren't, you should consider joining the success circle. Your next round is in January. All of the notes from your quarterly reviews that you've already completed this year, like your to-do list, is it close to to done? For each category, just do a quick check. Do I know exactly where this info is? Can I access it right now without digging or waiting on someone else? Or Searching through like my password manager or you know what I mean, like that nightmare. Do you print stuff off and then delete it, and now you have no idea which stack of papers has the information you need? If the answer is no, I cannot easily access this information for any aspect of your business, like a report you'd need to request or generate. Maybe you don't even know how to do that in your travel CRM. A login that you've forgotten, that's me. Even with password managers, I'll change it and not update it. And then I'm like, how do I get into the software? Folders if you print everything that's become disorganized, your desktop files, your do you have everything backed up on your hard drive? But is it organized? Handle all that now. while there's still the bandwidth rather than discovering it during busy, busy, busy time and your annual review. Trust me, been there, done that. If you completed the whole systems tech tools audit from days two fifty eight through two sixty three, this should be so much easier because it's only been like a month maybe than it would have been a year ago. Because you've already consolidated and organized much of what a year end review will need in terms of like Systems tech and tools. If you haven't gotten to that audit yet, go back and listen to those episodes. This readiness check is a good small-scale preview of exactly what the full audit and why that full audit matters. Okay. I have a little rice cake here. I'm gonna take a bite. I'm not trying to be ASMR about it. Nope, it's gonna be too crunchy. You do not need to hear me chewing. So, today's a shorter episode. It's important to have well god, I need to expand upon this. It's five minutes. Let's add more. Okay, one second. I'm gonna edit this out. I'm eating rice cake. Alright, so maybe you are a brand, brand newbie travel agent and you're like, I have no idea where to find any of this information. you should be able to go if you do social media content creation. You should be able to go to the platforms where you post your social media content to generate leads. And you can look at the entire year. There should be on your insights, it's somewhere, it's typically on your insights. You might have to go, it depends on your platform, they kind of vary, but it's almost always called insights. And I think in TikTok, it's a separate thing. It's TikTok Studio. On YouTube, it is Analytics. Instagram is you click dashboard, like if you're on your desktop, and then you can review. If you're on Substack, I think it's also analytics. It's gonna be something called Analytics or Insights. If you have a subreddit, it's gonna be insights. And you can look like year to date or last 12 months and just know how to get that for this year-end review. Because if your account, let's say you started as a travel agent, let's say you started in February of this year. So the last twelve months in October, like if you were to do that today, or if you were to do it in December, it would be like goose egg zero nothingness until February, and then you'd see the little spikes go up and you could see the numbers. And it would show you the entire numbers for your social media metrics for the entire like last 12 months or year to date type of situation. What you can also do is then from there, you should be able to look at like last seven days, then it's like the last 28 or 30 days, and then 60 and then 90, and then last six months. So you can look at a glance what those actual numbers are if you haven't been tracking those numbers and just write it down quick. Like that's what you do for your year in review. If you're like, I'm brand new, I haven't been doing any of this. What are you talking about? in terms of your marketing. And if you do in-person marketing, you gotta have really good notes after all of your in-person meetings. and you gotta think like 80s and 90s sales reps. So if you don't know what a Rolodex is, a Rolodex was this little thing you could spin around and it had little tabs for like each letter of the alphabet and you'd put little cards in your Rollodex and it would be your leads. in your Rolodex. My grandpa had one that was really cool. It wasn't a Rolodex. It was like this metal almost like journal sized box. And then you went down to the letter and you pop the letter and it just pop open there to the exact page for all of his lead contacts or like he was like the vice president of a very big corporation, so I don't think he had leads, but you know what I'm saying. His contacts. But that's kind of what it was, and there'd be little notes of if you're doing in-person networking, this is the kind of travel they're interested in. Is this aligned with my thing? Like what kids they have, that kind of stuff. You should be keeping notes of that. If you are a new travel advisor and you haven't been keeping notes on any in-person networking and contacts you're developing, and you can put them in your CRM. You don't have to have a Rolodex. Like your CRM is your Rolodex, by the way. But just like when you're finished at a networking. thing moving forward. you can just make notes in your CRM. Like, I talked to Sally Struthers. If you know, you know. She wants to go to China and she doesn't have any children. She's single and she would prefer women's solo, like women's group travel, like single women group travel over 40 or something like that. and she has a food allergy, whatever the heck you know about her. And then you can add that into your TRAPL CRM as like a lead. Or a generally like a different one, like Flowdesk, if you have your email newsletter, and just add at add the information as a lead. Don't put them in their news your newsletter unless they ask for it, obviously. But just have that information available. Okay, so that's like the marketing side. If you need to do your tech tools systems audit, go ahead and listen, what was it? Episodes two fifty-eight through two sixty-three. Get a notebook out and just think and do your audit about that. with your finances, can you easily access your bank statements? Do you have bookkeeping software? Do you have a bookkeeper or a CPA? What does that look like? And can you easily access that information? with newer travel advisors, your primary thing to focus on. Well you need to focus on all these, so never scratch that idea. Never mind. So if you know how to access this information or at least like understand how to start tracking it now, it's going to make your annual review much, much simpler and far less frustrating than trying to scramble like, gosh, I will just tell you a quick story. Nah, it's not gonna be a quick story. Me doing my taxes, if I do my taxes without a CPA, it takes me like forever. Even when I was employed, and I was like, this will be a breeze. I had investment accounts. I had to find my mortgage whatever statements, the student loan interest statements, and gather all that stuff up. And just doing it on like turbo tax or whatever, you think this is only going to take you two hours. If you're anything like me, I always underestimate how much time things are going to take. You think it's going to be two hours, it ends up being eight, and I am burnt out and done with my life by the time I would do my own taxes. so this all comes from My personal experience of tax time and be like, This is my nightmare. Whereas if you had everything already done, you wouldn't have to take time off from continuing to build your business if you're like, this'll be I can access this and I'm gonna download this this week. I'm gonna and then I'll download this next week, you know what I mean? Than being like old Rachel scrambling forever to find statements. Like the personal property tax statement. Is that a write-off? Like that's that's how I do my taxes. It takes forever. Okay. Be prepared, is what I'm saying. New Year readiness check, 74 days left of the year. Whole new opportunity coming in. I hope you have a wonderful day. I will see you tomorrow.