Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 172 - Why being a "Good" travel Advisor is keeping you poor
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K. Today is day 172. Why being good is keeping you poor. Mah. We've kind of had similar topics in recent episodes. this is a very uncomfortable conversation that I've been ⁓ noticing with some advisors that I like help out. and it's a harsh paradox that can keep you trapped. So let's consider this. We're gonna talk about why being a super great, super helpful, detail-oriented travel advisor is the exact reason why your annual take home. Is staying stuck where it's at. Okay, you have let your technical competence become your golden cage. This episode, woof, it gets it gets there. It gets there. So when you are like making less than 20 grand a year, 25, less than 50, less that less than what you were making to replace your income, I want you to think about this. Your ⁓ biggest craving right now is emotional validation. And some advisors break through six figures and still have that desperate need for emotional validation. You want to feel like you're a real professional and people actually take you seriously, but because your revenue isn't providing that validation, you look for it by hiding under administrative perfectionism. You'll spend three hours formatting and reformatting. A beautiful proposal. PDF. You spend an entire morning checking five different supplier portals. To save a client 40 bucks on a basic all-inclusive stay. You already know the resort, being like, well, maybe I can save them forty dollars three hours later. First of all, you're cutting your own commission. And secondly, like just send it on. They're either gonna like the price or not. And like nobody cares about 40 bucks. You tell yourself you're doing this because you provide, quote, elite high-touch luxury service. But if you look at your calendar from I can't remember subjective or objective, like objectively, not in it, like look at it like it's someone else's business. You're using your busy work to hide from the high stakes tasks that actually drives revenue, which is typically preparing to start passing this off to other people. And even if you've passed this off to other people, if you're heavily monitoring it, you are still seeking that validation. And if you are extremely picky, that it's still it's you haven't grown. You've just you're paying someone else to maintain the same. Like nothing's changed, right? So this is also for all of you advisors out there who are like I was told if I hired a VA, my life would give be given back to me and I'd have all this time. That is very true. And also it's never gonna happen if you are constantly dissatisfied with what they're doing. and constantly nitpicky and feeling like you still have to do it all, which that happens too. ⁓ so you're and you are either way, you're trading the ability to scale for like the cheap immediate comfort of monitoring everything and having a super organized desk. Like in both case like they're dip kind of different scenarios. Like you either have busy work that you're doing ⁓ your own that you don't necessarily need to do, or you're monitoring all this. into like ad infinitum what I can't say ad infinitum and you're just constantly like this isn't good enough this isn't good enough I might as well be doing this so let's go from the artisan to the architect so get past any income ceiling where you're stuck because I hear this from advisors on all parts of the income spectrum like revenue spectrum and they're just like I don't know how I can grow I don't know how I can grow this is a huge part of it You have to go undergo a radical shift from artisan to architect. So the artisan is like handcrafting. You know, when you go to like farmers market or craft fairs, they're like custom curating and like mulling over I don't know why I'm like carving imaginary wood, but like they're very, very involved and that is an art. ⁓ and they make everything from scratch. You, as a travel agent acting as an artisan, you approach every single inquiry like it's a completely unique work of art. You reinvent your proposal style, maybe. Or you spend hours custom typing every single email. Or you have these like standards that are like nearly impossible to meet with your service level, and you treat every client like it's an and trip like it's a masterpiece. The problem with the artisan model, your income is permanently capped by your personal physical stamina. And even if you have like VAs and you're constantly that so there's Mary Beth Lynn's assistants at work and she does teach very well how to hire to be able to scale. And I think she's got a tagline that is review, not do. Yes, you need to review, and you shouldn't like once the training is through, you should be able to trust your VA enough or whomever you've got employed with you to Let them let them mess up. Let them mess up. ⁓ and not monitor or have to like write every single email that they gotta send. Nobody's gonna be perfect all the time. But that's part of being a leader, being the captain of your ship. People are gonna make mistakes and you just step in, teach them, and fix it. So anyway, back to the artisan. If you are already exhausted working 24 7, it feels like, and you're doesn't matter how much you're making, okay, you physically cannot work more hours, however much money you're making, you cannot grow your business. You're stuck. Your business model has zero, zero leverage. And I stress this a lot in many episodes. But an architect. Doesn't build the house with their bare hands. The architect designs the blueprint so that the structure can be built reliably and predictably and repeatedly. So you you, as an architect, could hire an artisan that treats every email they answer like it's a masterpiece, as long as they don't take forever, you know. But you are not the one doing that. You cannot be the one doing that. So you have to stop viewing your travel agency as this collection of custom tasks and nobody does things the way that I do them. Well, then you're never gonna scale. You're you're gonna burn yourself out. If even if you're making like one, two, three hundred thousand dollars a year and you're like, nobody does what I do, how I do it, you're gonna burn out and you cannot scale. You can have slight differences, but if you are like adamant about a certain like certain things and only you can do it that well, congratulations. You're gonna give yourself a heart attack in five years because nobody else can do what I do. You are the artisan. You c you have got to shift into architectural mindset. So this means letting go of the ego attachment that says, if I don't custom write every sentence or if I don't monitor every aspect in depth, I mean yes, you need to have reports and you need to review them. Don't get me wrong there. ⁓ my service won't be deemed special. Everyone's service is special. Okay? This is not high standards. It is a fear-based control mechanism that's bankrupting your capacity to scale. You do not need a massive team. You don't need an expensive tech stack to start operating like an architect. Today, you just need the discipline to document your actions. With a s like your SOPs. Duh. We've talked about this. So first, this I think Mary Beth talks about this. I took her course a long time ago. If you need to start hiring, like it's it's a pretty good course. I like it a lot. ⁓ you should start screen recording this, like your daily tasks. Screen record how you do things. So that you can have it to train someone, okay? I talk about this also in the success circle. I think it's like ⁓ I don't even know. It's pretty early on, first f ⁓ maybe week eight, start considering recording your tasks. Saving your templates like for FAQs for when emails come in. Yes, you can buy all the teak templates you want, but when someone asks you a question and you haven't had the chance to put it on like an F U F A K F U K F U C K page. F A Q page. ⁓ my gosh. Fuck you. You don't know what sorry. You haven't been able to put it on like an FAQ section of your website yet. Like we have a whole thing of separate templates in our Google Drive under my agency that just addresses like random things that aren't necessarily like if you explained it in a workflow email and just be like, it's not common, but it's common enough. And it's not super common to put on your FAQ page. And like we have templates for like when we send final travel documents, here's the copy for that email. Like that kind stuff. Anyway. But you also want to do this like the next time you're doing any routine things, don't record typing in credit card information or anything like that. And also you can be like, okay, when I need to assign these tasks to this trick, like go get Komodo Dex. It's like fifteen bucks a month and just start screen recording your stuff. ⁓ do the task like you always do, talk out loud and say, This is why we do this, this is why we do that. And Komodo, if you pay for their subscription plan, Komodo is like they'll do a transcript too. So then you have a transcript of your audio, and you can just put all of that, like you can have them as links, or you can download them and put them in your drive or wherever you want to save them for training. And now you've got your SOPs in place, okay? Also, and I cannot stress this enough. Niche down. Niche down. Have your three to five. I call them products because I'm secretly the CEO of McDonald's. Three to five products, three to five suppliers, but your top two suppliers for pretty much everything, and then you got three backups. That's all you need to worry about. Don't worry about anything else. Don't worry about anything else. And then when you have leads come in scheduling consultations, you've got your top five, like If you do Europe, I know people are like, but I do custom Europe. Yes, you can still do like custom Europe, custom Iceland, custom whatever. And also you're gonna have your base. You're gonna have your base itinerary. This is how many days it takes. These are the DMCs and suppliers I'm going to be working with. This is the class of hotel. This is roughly the cost. So you can be so confident on your consult consultations. If you're like, ⁓ yeah, well this trip to Europe Based on the information in my experience, it typically runs around 15,000 or 15,000 per person. Okay. Also, when you are ready to hire, know that nobody is gonna be able to do it exactly how you do it in terms of time constraints. Like nobody's gonna be perfect. You are not perfect. Nobody you hire will be perfect. Please keep that mindset in place because if you are Continuously worrying about them not doing their job, like you have to be able to make quick decisions. If you hire someone and within a week you don't get a good feeling, it's time to switch to somebody else. Okay. But if you're like, I'll just stick it out, you aren't willing to give up that control. All right, so true scaling does not feel like a constant stream of like creative breakthroughs. It's boring. structural repetition. And once you can get your SOPs in place and you can outsource stuff and you can pull yourself out of doing the day-to-day, I say this all the time, congratulations. You have a real you have a real business. You aren't just self-employed. So breaking past this barrier isn't about working harder. It's just about having the maturity as an entrepreneur to drop low-value admin tasks and delegate them out. Because your ego's finding those comfortings. You're like, I'm so special. Only I can do this. Only I can do this right. Automate, templatize, hire out, delegate, whatever. So we got the 14-day challenge yesterday, if you watched or listened to day 171. ⁓ but what's one email? Or maybe. Yeah, let's what's one email that you find yourself typing out from scratch every single week? Just make it a workflow today. Or like once every few months, make it a workflow. I struggle with this and I did templatize it, but like consultation follow-up emails, I'm always like, ⁓ so great, dad-da-da. Like that's that's that's my ego attachment. Like, ⁓ the sales call was so good and we're just like best friends now. Like I would handwrite every email. And I have to use a template to save me time. Because there's there are certain days where I will have like four or five consultations in one day. And it's like I can't sit there and be like, it was so great tacky. Like I'll add like a sentence or two, but now everything else is templatized. So, ⁓ drop the busy work. Kinda tied to yesterday. You wanna get a new client? Don't mess around with busy work. Don't reformat anything, just maybe execute one new automation if you need it. But if you're like, like record screen record something today. Something easy. Alright. Thanks for listening today and I'll see you tomorrow.