Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 251: Why Every Travel Agency Quarter Will Not Look the Same
Transcript
- Rachel: Welcome to the Travel Agency New Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Kay. Today is day two hundred and fifty-one. If you don't know who I am, 251 days in. I'm a travel agency owner and I offer Mentoring and stuff, but also this free podcast. If you're curious about what I have to help you build your business, just go to elevatewithrachelk.com. I'll probably have something in the description as well. today, again, day 251, thinking in seasons, not just days. One of the most useful shifts a CEO can make heading into a review is just a temporary, deliberately zooming out from the daily thinking into seasonal. My phone just beeped. Sorry. even just for the length of the review process. It's totally fine. I have so much stuff going on over here so I don't forget what I'm talking about. So with the day to day, I don't even like to do day to day. I like to do weekly on a day-to-day basis, and then I break down the daily tasks the night before. We've talked about this. Anyway, you're making decisions on the during the day-to-day that's based on what's urgent right now and today. Today's inquiries, today's tasks, today's small fires, today's social media comments you gotta respond to. That mode is necessary for actually running a business, but it's a terrible lens for the quarterly review. Because it zooms in so tightly That you lose the actual shape of the last 12 weeks. reviewing a whole quarter through a day-to-day lens is like trying to understand a novel by reading one rando paragraph and being like, got it. You'll notice some individual details, but you'll miss the arc entirely. Also, this brought up to my mind: I used to write papers for people in college. And my brother hired me to write one and it was for the invisible man. And I read the first two chapters. He was at community college though, so this I was like, this'll be a cakewalk. I re this is what I used to do. I used to read the first two chapters. I would pick a random middle one and maybe read two in the middle, and then I would read the concluding chapter, and I could write like a twelve page paper on a book about that. and he was happy he got like a ninety-eight and it took me like no time at all. And then I did it again for an ex-boyfriend who hated he was taking a women's lit class and he was like, Why am I in this class? I hate my life. And he was like an older student. And I was like, well, I'm really good at writing, so I'll do this. I did the same methodology. I don't know how I have this magical ability. He got accepted into the English program because of my papers that I wrote for him. They're like, You're an excellent writer, and you are really good at something with critical thinking or something. And then he told everyone that he did it himself and I was like, I hate you. I'm just kidding. I was like, I don't think we're really cut out for each other. Anyway, seasonal thinking asks a different set of questions than daily thinking does. It's not like what do I need to do today? But what was the overall shape and direction of this last season of my business? And when I talk about like marketing strategy versus content strategy, I like to plan the marketing strategy quarterly, especially if you're newbie. and then on an annual basis. This is what I want to happen over the course of this year, and then I Break down my content strategy by quarter, what the overall themes are, and then I go further into month, and then I do monthly, and I'm like, here's what I'm focusing on. I like to start with the big picture and then break it down. Thanks, Dad, for drilling that into my brain. was this a season of building? Questions. Was this a season of building? A season of steady or steadying, because you went through a major wave, influx of business, a season of recovery, a season of growth. Naming the actual character of each past quarter rather than just its numbers gives you a fuller and more honest picture. And back to the old farming. A planting season involves a lot of unseen effort, and I've talked about this so much. You gotta prep the soil. First, you gotta test the soil. Is it clay soil? Is it sandy soil? Is it loamy soil? What's going in this soil? And do you need to add certain fertilizers, slash manure, slash compost? Do you need to till it? You gotta prep that ground. And you're putting all this work into dirt. You don't have anything yet. Judged purely, if you saw some rando playing around in the dirt, you'd be like, Well, they're not gonna do anything. And then they put the soil. Like that's the soil. They put the seeds in the soil. So if you were just watching someone and you'd never farmed before, kinda like most people you don't know don't just build travel agency businesses, planting season looks super disappointing. Even though it's exactly it is the most important work. Understanding the quality of your soil, like staring at the soil to be like, how much sun does it get during growing season? Does this tree put shade over it? Hmm, I don't know. You look nuts because nothing's happening except you're just digging around in the dirt. And it's the same thing when you're building your travel agency. Everyone thinks you're nuts because you're just like working on the CRM. You're watching all these training videos, but no money has come in yet. And it looks really disappointing from unknowing eyes. Even though that's what makes a future harvest possible. The growing season is where the earlier planting starts showing early. Sometimes it's uneven results. But there's real progress. There's not a full return yet, because it's growing. The fruits are not there yet. The harvest season is where the sustained earlier effort of monitoring the plants growing, pruning as needed, making sure maybe you decided to do some companion planting. So making sure things are going well together, there's no pests, all that fun stuff. Then you get the harvest season. That's where the numbers show up in your travel agency. So the growing season is when you're like getting the inquiries and booking the clients and maybe you're collecting fees if you charge fees, but it's like fees are not the bulk of your revenue, right? So you're like, woo-hoo, I've gotten maybe five thousand dollars in fees this first year. Hooray. But there's still no payoff. And so people in the growing season are still looking at you like, me sh they don't make no money. Why do what are they doing? And then there's the harvest. And the harvest season is where the numbers show up. The money comes in, referrals start coming in. You get the fruits of all of your labor, all of that marketing in person or online, all of that service you've built, that's your tilling the soil and everything. Understanding your niche with all the trainings, that's when everything comes to fruition. This is what looks impressive to others and everyone's like, well how'd you just do that overnight? Like you were watching me for over a year. Haha. It was all built in those quieter seasons that came before it and it rarely happens in isolation from them. There's gonna be a dormant season. There's gonna be a recovery season after a period of heavy growth or a launch, a personally demanding stretch. That's a legitimate, even necessary part of the cycle, not a failure to keep pace. And back to farming, crop rotation. So let's say you do companion planting. I'm really into like vegetable gardening, by the way. let's say you do companion planting. And you should do seasonal crop rotations. So if you are niched into let's I'm just gonna stick with destination weddings, and you want year-round fruits coming in, then if you want to avoid hurricane season, like I like to avoid hurricane season, June, July, August, or actually it's like July, August, September, and parts of October. For me, I don't like anyone traveling to the Caribbean. I try to avoid it as best I can. But guess what? I can do European weddings. there's a whole other option if I want to. I'm not gonna have as many European weddings as Caribbean weddings. So it's a little bit of a slower season. But Europe is a different crop, even though it's all destination weddings. Europe is a different crop that I could have coming up in the summertime and having that revenue coming in if I want to. And like I said it's kinda like seasonal crop rotation. You have to have the things going in at different times. So there's like cold weather plants, like I think brassicas like broccoli and cauliflower, maybe cabbage, garlic, potatoes. You can grow them, you can start planting them like in the winter and get them in early spring. And then like the tomatoes and peppers and things, depending on where you live, that's like a summer harvest. But then like the pumpkin squash and all those things, that's a fall harvest. You can treat your travel agency the same way and you can still niche down BT dubs. Okay, as you do your quarterly review, ask honestly which of these it's most resembled. Were you in a planting season, growing, harvesting, recovery season? You have to let that soil rest sometimes. Or you have to put a different crop in it. Otherwise, your soil's depleted of nutrients, and then your food doesn't grow as well. Mm-hmm. Anyway, don't assume every quarter should look like a harvest. If you want to do that, you gotta expand your garden. If this was genuinely a planting season for you, you built the story bank, you set up the batching systems for your marketing, you worked on your leadership style, you set up all of your systems. You're laying the groundwork, you're tilling the soil, you're fertilizing and amending the soil as needed, and you've planted the seeds. There's not gonna be numbers there yet. That's not underperformance. That's exactly what a planting season is supposed to look like. And judging it by a harvest season, standards will make you feel like you're behind for no freaking good reason. If it was a recovery season, maybe after a heavy launch quarter or personally demanding stretch in your life outside of the business, like maybe. A spouse got laid off, or someone passed in your family, or you had to take care of a parent who's become ill, or just life changes in general, resist the urge to judge it against your best quarter ever because you didn't have the same life. A recovery season done well is what makes the next building or the next harvest season possible at all. Trying to skip it or feeling guilty for needing it just tends to delay the recovery. This is exactly where the five-year vision comes, like becomes genuinely useful, rather than an abstract exercise where you just delulu dream and then you forget what's going on. and then a quarterly review, if you're viewing it seasonally, is a chance to ask: Does this season fit into the larger five-year arc that I'm laying out? Some quarters are meant to be building seasons. And look underwhelming in isolation while actually they are laying the real groundwork for something bigger. And honestly, no one that's a business owner, like anyone who's not cut out to be a business owner, will never understand that. And they will look at you and be like, Well, you're not making money instantly. Trust me. Can you tell? I've had I've had a lot of people in my life, well, why are you even doing this? It's been two months and you're not making a hundred thousand a year. I legit just filed my LLC. It's Well I've had the same job for twenty years Yeah Yes okay congratulations Anyway you you're really good at being a syncophant Good job sorry little repressed anger there Anyway. You're not failing when you have slow quarters and the numbers look dismal and when you're setting everything up. and that's often the most important work that you're doing. So give your quarter when you do your quarterly review a name, out loud or written down. This was a harvest season, this was a planting season, this was a building season, this was a season of being steady, or the stretch season, the recovery and rest season. The small act like forces you to step back from the day-to-day data long enough to see the actual shape of the last 12 weeks, which is information a spreadsheet will never fully capture, but a CEO can. Once you've named it, ask one follow-up question. Given what kind of season this was, what kind of season does next quarter actually need to be? And if you look at it from the like the farming standpoint, there's planting, growing, harvesting, recovery. If you are in a planting season, the next season should be a growing. Do not expect a harvesting and definitely not a recovery. so what's your what's your season this quarter? Do it honestly. Don't judge it against a harvest season in every quarter. Is it fitting into your bigger five-year plan? Let it inform where your next season should be going. Okay? Alright, I hope you had a wonderful day. Thanks for listening. I will see you tomorrow.