Latest / Travel Agency in a Year / Day 167 - The Travel Advisor's High-Performance Framework
Transcript
- Rachel K: Welcome back to the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Kay. Today is day 167, and we're gonna go over the hustle to high performance framework. For you as a travel advisor, I'm not gonna talk like that the whole episode, but I might go in and out, because this is the last episode in a big batch, and I'm starting to get a little loopy. I'm not editing any of this, by the way. I never edit anything. It's fine. All right. ⁓ So first off, let me preface this by saying, back in twenty four, maybe. End of twenty-four, I would say, possibly. Back in the TA toolbox days. I was talking to my business partner and I said, Hey, we should rename our Facebook group, which no longer exists, ⁓ Side Hustle from from Side Hustle to Success. And she was like, I'm kinda hesitant on it, but we'll we'll try it out. And I was like, Okay. This may have been early twenty-five. I don't remember anymore. So we did it. And she called me panicking. Because people misinterpreted the messaging and they're like, How dare you call what we do for a living a side hustle? I work for Fora. Yeah, I'm calling you out Fora. You have a fucking blog post about how you can be a travel advisor as a side hustle. I hope you've taken it down. I'm not a fan of Fora. I'm sorry. If you're a Fora travel advisor, I'm sorry for your experience. Why am I not a fan? I interviewed with them when they first started and I was like, This is a not a host agency. This is a weird I don't know. It's fine. Sorry for calling you out, Fora. I disagree with how you run things. It's fine. You're probably never gonna hear this episode anyway. And if one of your advisors sends it to I mean, sorry, like I don't align with your business practices or your model in any capacity. And I found that really funny how for advisors were like, How dare you insult our profession when at the time I think I still have the screenshot of it, actually, Fora had multiple blogs about how travel agents are side hustlers. So anyway, she called me freaking out because people were leaving our group in droves and so offended. And it's like, this is from side hustle to success. This is taking away the stigma that travel advisors are side hustling and this is a side gig because you can make a legitimate career out of this. Okay? Fight me on it. ⁓ I've done it. Okay. I've done it. I know plenty of other people who have done it. And they've been doing it for five plus years to multiple decades. Like it is a totally legitimate it was on the game of life when I was a kid and it was always the career I wanted to get. Okay, it's a legitimate career path. So let's take away the hustle culture from being a travel advisor and let's talk about building a high performance framework for you as a travel advisor. Let's talk about it. The compare and contrast. Hustling measures velocity. A high performance framework measures capacity. You can still Hustle in the sense that you like go out and network ⁓ and you work very hard that can still be like you can call it like I'm hustling, you know what I mean? but you have to have a high performance framework to it. You have to have a strategy in place. Hustling, like the side hustle mentality, is like sitting on Reddit all day long or in travel Facebook groups all day long, waiting for someone to ask about something and being like, I can do that. I'm a specialist and I don't charge a fee. That's hustling. That's like desperate for business. You have no real way to get. Leads because you don't really have a framework. Let's change that today. High performance Scaling. I can't read my own handwriting. Measures capacity. So let's talk about what examples of this I'm referring to. Hustlin' is working a 10 hour day to go out and find and close three clients. Okay. Hustlin' is being on like Reddit or travel Facebook groups, like travel subs on Reddit or travel Facebook groups that aren't even your own and just going through posts. over and over and over again to maybe get three trips booked and you spend ten hours doing that. That's hustling. There is zero room for expansion. Like you might be able to get five trips in one day in a in a 10 hour day. But you better hope that there's no travel issues. You better hope nobody else has any questions. Cause you're just, well, maybe if I hustle, quote unquote, capacity, high performance framework would be spending like two hours one day next week tightening up a workflow, one workflow that you have. So that it can handle 50 clients without you even touching it. That means you've created capacity to serve 50 clients. And this is why workflows are highly, highly recommended and often offered as a service to travel advisors because If especially if you want to get into group travel and you get those workflows in place exactly how you want ⁓ Don't worry about it being perfect, but just like the basics in place. Guess what? You can have five groups of 60 people, all in different phases, like a week or two apart, a month apart, whatever. But you now you've got three hundred people that you can serve without even touching it. And that Is terrifying at first when you do it, trust me, because you're like, Did it work? Do they read the emails? But after a while you're like, it was in an email. But that's building capacity. 'Cause you can serve three hundred people rather than doom scrolling on social in a desperate attempt to get three to five bookings that day. Alright, so we've talked about bottlenecks. Those are the two. We're gonna talk about your framework. I've talked about bottlenecks in other episodes of this podcast. If you are brand new to this podcast, hit subscribe, check out the episodes there. This is being dropped daily in 2026, but there will be three hundred and sixty-five episodes. All types of content specifically for travel advisors and their businesses. So the bottlenecks, systemic drag, auditing, finding the bottlenecks in your business. There can be an information drag, a communication drag, and decision drag. I've covered all of these in depth in other episodes. I'm not even gonna reference them because this is day 167. There are already 167 episodes out. I I would have to like dig through everything. Sorry. So, an information drag is anything that you have to manually copy and paste. So, say you get lead forms and you have them set up in like JOT form, and then you have to manually copy and paste and create the profiles in your travel CRM. That is an information drag because it takes away your time ⁓ to really serve and create more capacity. Like if you can take that out, especially if you have 10 of those you gotta do a day. And it takes you 15 minutes, that's a hundred and fifty minutes. That is two and a half hours. That's ridiculous. Not two and a half, but close to two and a half hours. ⁓ anything you gotta manually copy and paste, figure out a way to streamline that workflow. Do it on the weekends, do it in your spare time, do it in the nights. Like if you're like, but I'm already doing so much, you're gonna have to put in a little more time to get this done, okay? Communication drag. You get the same questions over and over. I've covered this extensively. You can ⁓ say you get three people with these exact same questions over the course of two weeks. Now you know you need to make a workflow and you need to preemptively get that email in your workflow out to future clients before they're tempted to ask. You could also do a screen record and as part of your client onboarding that goes over all of that information as well. Decision drag. This is I see this all the time. Because I am secretly on Reddit and I am answering your questions and travel agent subs. Ha ha ha ha. Some people you know some people here listening know my username. ⁓ others do not, but I do see this a lot on Reddit where they're like, Well, this client did this and I feel like I want to do this and I don't really know what to do. And they're freaking chatting on this thread in Reddit over the course of like four hours, and that's decision drag. Like, suck it up, deal with the consequences, and the next time this happens, you already have a thing in place to prevent it from happening. That's it. It's usually tied to your SOPs, a lack thereof, or maybe your boundaries. And I see this so much on Reddit, like the travel agent subs. Where people are like, Well, this client's doing this to me. Okay, well deal with it now and change your SOPs for the next time so this doesn't happen again. Like you're gonna have to lose some battles, you know what I mean? For the high performance framework, high performers value boredom. They value peace, right? They value monotony, the monotony of scale. Because this and if you can introduce a high performance framework in your business where you are doing the small tasks that create more capacity for you to serve more and expand, even like you need to regularly be marketing and prospecting and networking. That is also a daily, small, boring task. Some people are like, I hate talking to people. ⁓ you're in a sales and marketing job. Get over it. Talk to people. Like Why are you in this industry? ⁓ but implementing this high performance framework, creating that boredom in your business, the boring business day, first of all, it's gonna lower your stress levels. Yeah, adrenaline's great, but cortisol eventually takes over, and that's bad news bears for your health. And it provides the ultimate competitive advantage. Because a lot of advisors are gonna end up Quitting because they can't they can't do what you're doing. They can't be bored. How can you do this? Build a moat. How can you be the steward? How can you have a high performance framework? Build a moat to protect your market share. And that moat is monotony. You have the same workflows, you have the same consistency. You don't have to take new courses. You don't have to pivot niches. Like that's like a personal values thing. Is that aligned with your business model? Not like, ⁓ this is trending. I better do this. The moat is monotony. And the moat protects the castle/slash empire you are building. Same thing if you want like health, you want good health, you're gonna have to get real boring in your daily routine. And that also helps you with your discipline. You're gonna have to like say no to certain foods, or staying up late, or drinking more alcohol versus water, or soda, or what you know what mean? You're gonna have to do the boring. workouts and walking and moving and stretching. You're building that moat around your body that is your temple. Your business is part of your empire. The moat is monotony. Most travel advisors will quit or stall out in just a few months, if not just like a couple of years. Not because they lack passion, not because they lack knowledge. Not because they don't have the financial resources to continue investing. Because they cannot tolerate absolute boredom of the daily tasks that they created. So let's get bored. ⁓ let's create boredom in your daily business. Now, if you don't address your need for adrenaline and you start to feel like, ⁓ this is so boring in a negative way instead of celebrating that, guess what you're gonna do? You're gonna break a funnel and be like, I need to tweak this, or I need to add this, or I need a new lead magnet. ⁓ shiny object syndrome. ⁓ I need to invest in that course that's been blowing up all over my Instagram and Facebook ads, because clearly. That's gonna be the solution to my problem. Even though there is literally no problem. ⁓ you're gonna switch niches. You're gonna rewrite your site copy again instead of keeping it simple. yes, you can like tweak your niches, but that doesn't mean you need a full rewrite of everything. Just keep it simple. Keep it simple. And then if you're like, okay. I'm still in this niche and I've added this product and I'm specialized in this product. That's great. After six months of it testing, remember I have an episode about small tests to implement big changes? After testing it for a while, then you can say, This definitely works. Now I need to add a little more copy to my website. Maybe a page or maybe a paragraph on a page of how I focus on this. Not Completely rewrite everything, okay? Stick to the original script, your mission statement. You stay in the course. with a boring day and leaving it alone is the exact moat that will make your agency unkillable. It will it's what's gonna save your business. And if you look at all the very, very high performing agents, ⁓ they aren't constantly switching niches. They aren't they might switch niches every few years, but they aren't like like and by every few years I mean every five to ten years. And they do a very slow, like multi year transition. Okay. They do the same thing every single day. Whether it's like I spend this many hours doing content creation, I spend this many hours serving my clients, or maybe they've outsourced a lot of that and they're just like, I literally focus on my marketing because it is predominantly sales and marketing. They do the same thing every single day. And there are too many travel advisors in this industry that don't do that. They don't they don't do it. And there's been a huge surge in travel advisors in the US specifically. I think let me Google it on my phone crot quick. Hmm. New tab. I'm gonna Google travel travel agent career growth twenty twenty six. It is one of the fastest careers per AI overview. ⁓ the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Which i it's it's showing slower than average over the next decade, but that was as of twenty twenty four. Let's see this is from Travel Pulse magazine, so questionable. Travel advisor ranked among top twenty five fastest growing jobs in twenty twenty six. ⁓ from per LinkedIn. It's ranked as high as fifth in twenty twenty five. So it we've had and I've seen a lot of people pivot into travel in twenty twenty-five and twenty twenty six. So if you're feeling discouraged right now and you've been in this for a few years and you're like, how come I'm not getting any business? There has been a huge surge of travel advisors that are like, I'm gonna be a travel advisor. And a lot of them are gonna drop like flies in a matter of years. Because They're gonna get bored. And they'll go to the next trending career, probably become influencers. Who knows? That I think is one of the fastest. I was talking to a colleague about that at the end of 2025. Both UGC and travel advisors are like in the top twenty five careers for twenty twenty six. Isn't that crazy? Isn't that so crazy? But both of them rely on resilience and discipline. And discipline is built through boring, monotonous, over and over commitment. and both of them bring a lot of people who are very passionate and not necessarily disciplined. So if you are slow this year, it could just be no matter what you're doing, you're just like, I cannot figure it out. And you've been in the industry for a while. Just know that there's like an influx in competition right now, but that doesn't mean they're gonna stick around. And if you're new, just know you better listen to what I'm saying because you won't be able to stick around. ⁓ all right. That was day one sixty seven of the Travel Agency in a Year podcast. I really appreciate you listening today. ⁓ come back tomorrow or not, come back next week. Mess around, see my episodes. On YouTube, it is the seasons are ⁓ per quarter. Just so you know, if you like made it this far, congratulations in this episode. On YouTube, they are per quarter. So season one is episodes one through ninety. Season two is ninety-one to one eighty. Season three, like it's per quarter of the year. I don't know how to do that on Apple or Spotify. So because the software I use, it's just like Put it out there. ⁓ no, I have it on Spotify. Two. And Apple. So it's like per quarter is the season. All right. YouTube is the one that's the nightmare. I I redact that statement. Okay, have a wonderful day and I will see you tomorrow.