Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 253: The Quarterly Delegation Audit for Travel Advisors
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome back to the Travel Agency New Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel K, travel agency owner helping travel agents build their business with a weird podcast. we are on day 253. If you don't know who I am, just go to elevatewithrachelk.com. I'm on the tic-tac-toe app at real elevate with Rachel K. I have a subreddit, which I just started that too at the time of recording this. So it's just me, myself, and I over there. that's the community I'm going towards if you want a community. But anyway, today's two hundred and fifty-three, day two hundred and fifty-three, the delegation audit. Let's review talking about the dream team. Maybe you have people, maybe you don't. Okay. maybe you need to hire an upwork or Lucia or Fiverr or you're ready for a VA or an employee. I don't know what your situation is. So let's just talk about it. The delegation audit needs to have its own regular review, not just a one-time decision. Delegation needs to be handed off, like what needs to be handed off shifts on a quarterly basis as your business grows, as your own capacity changes, and as new tasks emerge that didn't even exist a quarter ago. Quarter. Quarter of water. What am I doing? Alright. If you review this on the same rhythm as your like your numbers in your quarterly review, it keeps it from quietly slipping the same way like an untracked lead pipeline slowly leaks without anyone noticing. A task that made sense for you to keep doing personally two quarters ago can easily become a genuine bottleneck by this quarter excuse me, by this quarter. Without a deliberate check in ever flagging it. And then you'd be like, Why is everything falling apart? there's a new bottleneck and it's me, I'm the problem. There's three zones of work like for this like to figure out the delegation. there's your zone of genius. I'm trying not so I'm trying so hard not to laugh right now. I need my zone of genius, son I need to be creative. But there's your zone of genius. That's the work that draws directly on your specific expertise, your relationships, your own voice. And I'm thinking of Anna Ferris in the movie Just Friends right now. If you've ever seen that movie, like I'm thinking of her. Like that's the side of you that's like, I need my space for creativity. That's why I'm laughing when I was like, God, I see so no genius. it's it's the things only you can genuinely do at the level that you do them. Which we all have the Zone of Genius and I'm just laughing about it. Don't know why, it's fine. but it's like the nuance of the client consultation or the core creative direction of your social media content being produced. Everyone's different in their zone of genius. Then there's your zone of competence. That's the work you're capable of doing well, but that doesn't actually require you specifically to be doing it. Processing payments, scheduling, consultations, meetings, personal or professional, routine email responses. That's the second zone. Your third zone is the zone of incompetence, where simply the drains, the time sucks. It's work you're either not like particularly good at, or it genuinely exhausts you, regardless of your skill level. bookkeeping. Tech troubleshooting. Tasks inside entirely outside of your natural strengths. Okay? I don't know what that is. Maybe you're really good at bookkeeping and tech. I don't know. But this is like an example of me, basically. so doing your delegation audit with your three zones of what your genius is, what your competence is, and your incompetences is a real easy way to spot how much of your actual week is spent in the second and third zones because that's exactly the time that should be available for you to reclaim. And this helps you how to decide a how you're going to delegate tasks because we're all different, and B, be able to grow and scale more because if you're more often in your zone of genius you're more often going to be bringing in the money's I don't know why I said it like that. Guys I think on day 239 I mentioned the medicine. It's four o'clock in the afternoon, quarter to four at the time of recording this, so I'm getting there. Alright. List out everything that you personally did this quarter when you're like, I need to do a delegation audit. Genuinely everything, like from a day-to-day basis basis, even the small little recurring tasks that don't feel worth mentioning, like responding to the routine emails or double-checking travel confirmations. For each one, ask yourself three questions. Again, does this genuinely require my specific expertise or relationship with whatever, whoever? aka my zone of genius or could it be done well by someone else with the right training? How much of my time did this consume across the quarter, even in small recurring doses that don't feel like much in a single moment, but it adds up over time. And how did I feel doing it? Was it energizing, neutral, or draining? If your list includes client discovery calls, itinerary building, payment processing, social media scheduling, email inbox management, trip audits, discovery calls probably stay with you. Your genuine zone of genius. You could build your business to not be like that. That's fine. Itinerary building might be partially yours and like partially partially something you can delegate. Like you could create all the templates and be like drag and drop it like this. It just depends. how custom your itineraries are versus templated. Payment processing, scheduling social media posts. Those are strong delegation candidates that you can offload to anyone either on your payroll or off your payroll. Trip audits. It really depends. Group travel audits, it also really depends. I used to have a VA put together the audit reports for each group, but I would still review them, but that just saved me time. techie stuff though, you might want to fully outsource that. I mean you can learn more. But anyway, when you do hand anything off, resist the temptation to hand over the task with zero structure and hope for the best. Document your processes, record all the things and screen record, even if it's briefly briefly, the steps that you take, the standards that you hold it to. This connects it back to all the systems that we've been talking about many, many episodes. This audit is help going to help you shift from doer to leader day two thirty-nine. Okay. And it's making it concrete and repeatable. If you know what you need to delegate, it makes it a lot easier. Doing it every quarter rather than only when you feel like you're overwhelmed keeps delegation proactive instead of reactive. And remember, reactive is not what we're going for in any aspect of our lives. Zero reactive. And it keeps your business's capacity growing steadily rather than occasional stressful bursts triggered only once you've already hit a breaking point. Okay, so list every task you did. Is it in your zone of genius, your zone of competence, your zone of incompetence? The goal is to get as much of your time into the zone of genius area, and you can delegate and outsource the rest. Alright? This was Travel Agency New Year, day 253. This was a short episode. Have a wonderful day.