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 READ THE TRANSCRIPT IF YOU PREFER - BELOW 

 
Are You Running Your Travel Business, or Is It Running You?

Ros: Welcome back to the Travel Agent Achievers podcast. Everyone, I'm Ros here, the host of course. Now I've been a little bit obsessed with something over the last couple of weeks. In particular, the last few days, I would say, because I've recently launched a travel business scorecard.

And as I'm sitting here recording this episode, we've had many advisors already complete it. Now, before anybody quotes me on this as industry research, this was sent out to my own database of emails for travel advisors all over the world and also on our social media pages. This is a very early snapshot of

The people who have already filled it out and chose to take a few minutes just to have a look at their business. So I just want to be very clear. As I'm going through their answers, there's some really interesting patterns that have started to emerge. And what's fascinated me the most, I would say, isn't necessarily where travel business owners are potentially struggling or

worried about certain things because that's all over the place. for some advisors, the challenging area in their business might be understanding the client experience, which is what I call my 67 steps. It's the process from beginning to end. For other travel business owners and advisors, it could be in the numbers and understanding them or knowing how much they're selling or understanding their profit margins. It's okay.

And then for others again, it's the marketing, it's the systems, or getting really clear about who they want to work with, their ideal client. Now there isn't one big flashing red light saying this is what's wrong with travel businesses today. There's nothing like that going on. But it's underneath the results that there is something that I have found is very consistent.

And I am not able to see who are filling out these results. I made that very clear as I was putting this together that the results are you. If you want to see what's happening potentially underneath the hood of your own business, you're able to complete the scorecard. It is free. It'll give you, you know, some ideas and different results.

But if you want those results then sent to your email, absolutely. You can get those sent to your email. And based on your results, I can then give you some access to some different resources as well. So totally up to you. But what I am seeing that is consistent is something that I see a lot of time in the conversations that I've had. I've seen it in coaching different travel business owners. I've seen it with our achievers mastermind members. I've spoken about

It from stage as well. And rather spectacularly, I managed to prove it inside my own business as well this week. So today isn't an episode where I sit here and read a bunch of percentages to you. I want to talk about the numbers, what they actually look like when you're running a travel business. And I want to give you a way of stepping out of the day-to-day for a moment and look at what you've actually built because

What you're doing is incredible. I know what it takes. I'm walking in the same footsteps with you as a travel business owner as well. But what I really like is the opportunity to reflect sometimes. So here's the big question that I want you thinking about as we go through today's episode. What have you already built in your business that you shouldn't need to do anymore? That's the one question. I just want you to keep thinking about that.

the reason why I created the scorecard is because when I have conversations with travel business owners or even just business owners in general, it might be things like, how's business? And what I hear back are a few different things. One is it's either quiet, one is it's crazy. others will say, I'm so busy. Bookings are fantastic, I'm flat out, I've got more inquiries than I can handle and I love at different times as well that I get the opportunity to hear from advisors that say I've had our biggest month ever or I've had our biggest year ever. And that is really exciting because it means that you're moving forward. And I love that. But then I also think about it and say, Well, none of that actually tells me whether the business is working. Like, and when I say working, there's different layers to it. 

I might hear that, you know, you're selling travel, which is great, and that's very important. You might be an absolutely brilliant travel advisor and you still have a business that potentially relies almost entirely on you. I remember when I first started as a travel business owner, and one of my business coaches at the time said, Ros, what you've effectively done is created a job for yourself.

True, right? And you can have a million dollars in sales and you may not know your profit. You could have a beautiful client feedback from somebody, but no documented client journey as to how that actually happened. You can know exactly who your ideal client is and have marketing completely stop the minute you get busy. You could have systems, right?

But it still requires you to do everything along the way and press every button. But this is why the scorecard is only 15 questions. It asks you what exactly or actually exists in your business right now, not how good you are at your job, because you already know that, right? And I already know that for you as well. The scorecard was deliberately designed to look at the whole business rather than letting us choose the thing that we think we need to fix. And that is something that also comes up quite a lot. When I hear advisors say, I just need to do my marketing. I just need to send out an EDM. I just need to, that's what we think. And without evidence and fact, we're guessing a lot of the time. We're creating that job. Whereas when I think about things, I often challenge myself as well. And I say, how?

Can I do things differently? And let's look at the evidence. Let's look at the facts. It's why we record our monthly sales. It's why I have a look at the commissions, the service fees. I look at the data to actually understand what's actually going on inside the business compared to just thinking or guessing what needs to be fixed. So there are two different measurements.

In the scorecard. One is the foundation, and this is some of the things that you could hand to somebody else. What you might have in your business or what might exist already is knowing who your ideal client is. You might have your client journey. There's the processes, the templates, the marketing, and the numbers. So this is some of the stuff that you could hand to somebody else, right? Then you've got the independence side on the other axis, which is whether anything happens when you're not in the room. So, where what happens if you go on holidays? What happens if you're not there for a day? Does the booking move? Does marketing continue? Does somebody else actually own anything within your business that they can take care of for you? can you have a week where work stays within working hours? I was very clear last week where I said I was so excited I was working on the weekend and doing certain things. Now I caught myself saying that because when I looked at my weekend, there were a few hours and I was so excited to get something done. You know, Jackson was off at a friend's football match, Clint was at the gym, and I went, you know what? I really want to get stuck into this, and I'm okay to do that. But it's the work that I look at from a client perspective as well that we need to put boundaries around. So I didn't want to combine those two things into a score. So the foundations and the independence, because it was really around having the strong foundations, but a lot of it still relied on us. So if we rely on or we look at just those two things, we can often hide something that's incredibly important and that's the gap. And the gap is exactly what's started showing up in this first series of results. So before I tell you what it is, I need to tell you what actually happened here this week. So this is I sent out the scorecard, right, to our email database. People started completing it. That was fantastic. And I looked at the results and I went, hang on, where are where are the results? What's actually happened here? People started completing it and that was fantastic. But there was one little problem. The button that was supposed to send people a copy of their results, it wasn't working, right?

So here, a security setting in our system had changed shortly before I sent it out. So we had a number of people complete the scorecard during that initial period, and there were several that didn't actually get their requested results. They got nothing, right? Which is exactly what you want when you're talking about a great client experience, right? But I picked it up pretty quickly and I I then needed to fix it. So

What I thought was relatively straightforward, there were extra layers to it. Apology, emails had to be written, contacts had to be manually important, emails had to be individually edited because I couldn't change them in bulk. And it took us a couple of days to actually work out what had happened. And guess who eventually it all came back through? Me. Right? I'd built the scorecard to measure whether your business could run without you.

And then spent a couple of days proving that mine couldn't. You know, here's one I'm sharing that with you though. It's it doesn't mean that my whole business is broken, right? It showed me a weak point, a single point of failure that I hadn't properly identified until something went wrong. And that's what I want the scorecard to do for you. Find the weak point before you needed a crisis or something major to happen to show you where it is.

So for most of us, the problem is that we run our business from inside the cockpit, right? We're on a plane and we run the business from inside there. The loudest thing that happens gets our attention. And in travel, what's normally the loudest thing? What's the thing that is mostly there? It's the client, right? The flights change, somebody needs a quote, a passport hasn't arrived.

A supplier needs something, a final payment has to be done, there's an urgent email, something needs fixing. Nobody rings you on a Tuesday afternoon and says, Roz, I'm really concerned that you haven't documented your booking process. Right? Your conversion rate doesn't send you an urgent email. Your marketing plan doesn't ring you because you haven't looked at it for three weeks.

Your profit margin isn't sitting in your inbox with urgent as the subject line. The business doesn't shout, clients do. So the urgent is what gets done. And the structural things inside our travel business are well, they sit quietly underneath. And that's why we need the helicopter view. Sometimes we just need to get above the business, step out of the cockpit and look at it, all of it, potentially at once.

This is where the results that initially came in became really interesting for me. When I looked at the overall results, and as I said, and there weren't names there, but when I looked at the overall results, a number of the weakest areas, there wasn't an individual answer. If I looked at the stats and in percentages, if 29% of people came up with needing to fix their client experience or to work on their client experience. 25%. So a quarter of the results were around looking at numbers, understanding profit management, how much you're selling each month, where are the sales coming from, right? 21% marketing, 17% on systems, and 8% on ideal client, right? So your customer journey, all of the things were there.

Those percentages, they need to be considered really carefully because when I look at these numbers, it reminds me of conversations that I've had many, many times. A lot of those conversations can be around Ross, I need more clients. And when the questions come back about how many inquiries are you getting each month, the response might be, I'm not really sure.

When I ask what is the conversion rate? The response is, I've got a check. Or it I think it's 80%. When I ask what the average booking value is, that is also an unknown. How many of last year's clients have booked again? I don't know. But then I ask, do we actually know that you have a marketing problem? When the initial question is, or the statement is, Ros, I need more clients, do we actually know that we have a marketing problem?

Or are we just trying to fix the loudest problem that we think is happening inside our business instead of the right one?

This is also why I have built so many resources inside Travel Agent Achievers over the years. Even when starting out, even on the podcast, I gave away so much free information. And it's why I continue to do it, giving you the step-by-steps and the action items. Because if numbers are your gap, there are podcast episodes, there are resources around KPIs, cash flow, profitability.

I've been talking about understanding your numbers since almost the beginning of the podcast. And the reason why I do that is one of the very first pieces of advice that I received when I stepped into a global role. I went in to have a meeting with my operations manager at the time, and we were at the same level. She'd been doing it for years. I still look up to her. She's an incredible mentor. And she I said to her going into a big budget meeting, and I'm talking, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars and with people based all over the world. And I said to her, what what is the one thing that I should go with? I'm really quite nervous about this. And she said, know your numbers. So I've been talking about understanding your numbers since the beginning of Travel Agent Achievers because it is the one thing that is a fact.

It is the data and the information and numbers don't lie. But if your area of opportunity is your client journey or your systems, then I did the work around the 67-step booking process. Because once you actually map everything out, you've got the understanding of what happens from the inquiry through to Welcome Home. Right. And that that can be quite detailed. It can be quite intensive in doing that work.

If it's client retention, I've got plenty of information resources, including a new cheat sheet workbook thing on repeat and referral clients. Right. But the answer isn't from me to you that I've got 400 different resources, you should go and consume them all because I don't want you to do that. It's what is it that you actually need right now? And it brings me to and something that I heard recently when I was in the Arctic on an expedition cruise. And I he overheard the expedition leader talk about being a really good potato. And it's a Norwegian expression. I picked it up only recently. What it is is the potato, right? The food source, it's incredibly useful. You can boil it, mash it, bake it, fry it. You put it in all sorts of things. It's very versatile. And the potato in Norway now has this extra little meaning, which I found fascinating because, as business owners, what I interpreted then as was: you know, business owners can be potatoes as well. We can talk to the client, we can build the itinerary, we can fix the ticket, we can check an invoice, we can do the marketing, we can post on social media, talk to a supplier, update systems, train a team, solve a problem.

And because you can do all of those things, you're very versatile as well. But because you can do all of those things, we often do them and then we keep doing them. And being the potato then feels very useful, right? Sometimes we even feel responsible. When I say that, I'm thinking of sayings like, it's quicker if I just do it. The client expects me to be the one that's doing the work.

Nobody else knows how to do it. I'll document the system and the process when things calm down. You know, you know these sorts of sayings. You might say them as well. So if the business needs the potato for everything, the potato can never leave the kitchen. That's that was really interesting to me, and why I used that analogy is because I was able to look at the travel advisor and travel advisor business owners and say, well, we can do it all, but it doesn't mean we have to do it all.

If I look at the foundations of the scorecard so far, so over 50% said that they have built things in their business, right? Which is fantastic. These are the foundations, these are the basics, these are having the reports there, it's having the data, it's having the information. But when it comes to independence on the other axes, only 34% could step away from their business.

Over 70% said that they were still carrying it all, which means that you can't get a weekend to yourself. You can't get evenings to yourself. And what you've built might be more than what you think you have. It's just that all of the things that you have built, the email templates, the extra data information, the monthly sales trackers, if you've got it.

You've built all of that, but it's just that it still all goes through you. And that's what carrying it all looks like. When I looked at the respondents and asked the question around, have you had time off? Almost 60% of the advisors said that there wasn't a single week in the previous month where they didn't work a weekend or an evening to catch up.

And catch up, we never get to zero on the task list, my friend. We just have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable around it, I think, sometimes. But there was also 50% of the people that said there wasn't one task another person in their business can handle completely from start to finish. 40% said they couldn't understand what their business actually made in profit last year. But what I did love is that.

Over 90% of those that responded could specifically describe their ideal client. That is progress, my friends. We've learned this stuff. We're doing the work. Many of you have been an advisor or a travel business owner for a very long time. And 50% of the respondents have been in business for more than 10 years. So experience alone doesn't necessarily solve the potato problem.

You're still in the cockpit, still trying to do the work and do all of the things. And this is why the Travel Agent Achievers philosophy, and I've spoken about it in very plain English for years now, where we work on clients, marketing, sales, and operations. But if I was to change the language of that a little bit more, it's how to attract clients, how do we convert them? Clients? How do we deliver the experience and how do we grow the business? Can you consistently attract the right people? Can you convert the right inquiries? Can you deliver an experience consistently rather than recreating it every single time? And can you actually grow a profitable, sustainable business around all of those things? Because these things are connected.

You don't necessarily need more marketing if conversion is the problem. You don't necessarily need more clients if profitability is the problem. And you don't necessarily need another system if the real issue is that you haven't documented what the system is actually supposed to do in the first place. Now, this is another area that I recently came across when I traveled through Dubai on my way home from Europe.

Across billboards, there was the sign Dubai it. And one of the things that I love about the Dubai mentality is the willingness to look at something that already exists and ask, why does it have to stay that way? Could it be done differently? Could it be done better? Could we rethink what's possible? Even going into the Museum of the Future, which is closing for the next six months, because what they thought would take 50 years to complete. This is only five years ago. We are now at the final stages of a lot of those things. So if you wanted to do buy it in in your travel business for a moment, stick with me here. Look at the things that you do every week and challenge them. What does what's come in that has to go through me? What am I manually doing? Why does my marketing disappear when bookings get busy?

Why am I the only person who knows what happens next? Why is that process still in my head? Why am I still doing something? Because that's how I've always done it. If you were designing your business today, would you deliberately design it in that way? And that's the helicopter view. That's stepping out of the cock cockpit to say, how is my business operating and working? And would I deliberately design it this way instead of creating a job for myself. Once you've identified that gap, that's where you can then choose the right support. If you are building the foundations of your business, that's exactly why I've rebuilt the travel business accelerator. It's not throwing another hundred tactics at you, it's about understanding and building the fundamentals of the business. And if you've already built a successful business, but you're looking at these thinking, my goodness, I am the potato, I am stuck in the kitchen. So much of that work can be done faster, easier, quicker now. It's about getting it out of your head, understanding the foundations, and then taking the action to move forward. Now, there is a lot of work that we also do inside the Achievers Mastermind.

The planning, the implementation, the accountability, the systems, the numbers, the client experience, we're continually asking, what's the priority now? Because you don't need to work on everything. You just need to work on the right thing next. And that's taking away the guessing, right? So I'm gonna leave you with a couple of questions. One, what is the part of your business that only works

Because you're there.

Two, what do you keep telling yourself that you need to fix? And do you actually have evidence that that is the problem in the business? The most thing, the most important thing right now. And then the third one is what have you already built that shouldn't need you anymore? Where can you get support in your business to take things to the next level?

Or to free up the time to allow you to do the things in your business that you've always wanted to do or the reason why you did it. If you're sitting sitting around or you're listening to this wherever you are right now, and you're thinking, I actually don't know, that's a good thing. And that's exactly why I created the travel business scorecard. It is 15 questions, it takes less than three minutes, you get the result immediately.

And you get to see the foundation score, you get to see your independence score score, and you see what quadrant you're actually sitting in right now. The business area that's asking for your attention and some of the specific gaps underneath it. I will link to the resource in the show notes, but it's very simple: travelagentachievers.com/scorecard. When you get your result.

Don't create yourself another enormous to-do list, right? Just choose one thing, one process to document, one number to understand, one task that doesn't need you to come back to all the time or to come back to you all the time. What is one client touch point that you can improve? One marketing activity that needs consistency because the purpose of the scorecard isn't to tell you everything.

That might be falling over or showing up in ways that make you feel anxious, it's to show you something that you might never have gone looking for. And if you discover that you are the potato in your business, join the club. Because apparently I am still in parts of mine as well. Being capable of doing something doesn't mean you should always be the person doing it. So this week, instead of asking, what else should I be doing? I want you to ask.

What have I already built that shouldn't need me anymore? What sits underneath is something that a lot of us have in common because the weakest area for you will show up that you're not alone. And in the results that I'm seeing, you are definitely not alone. There are advisors that are selling $250,000 a year that the same problems are showing up when they're selling over a million dollars a year. It's just

How are we going to take action to move forward in the next place? With our travel agent achievers accelerator program, which I've redone because it is now 2026. In that program, I'm going to be working with advisors over the next two months on a cup every couple of weeks to check in where are you at? How is that business going? What is the one thing that you're working on? So if this is something that you also are keen just to take action on over the next three months as we lean in to the final stages of the year, getting 2026, coming to the end of it, our goals may have already changed this year. The whole certainly the whole industry is getting a bit of a shake up. There are a lot of things that are going on in the world, in business, in technology. So what are you going to work on? What are those one things or two things that you can work on and move forward in your business this year?

That's it for me for now. I'll keep you updated with the the results if anything changes, but I want you to know that you're not alone. Reach out if you've got any questions. I'm always here to support you. And I look forward to having a chat with you next time on the Travel Agent Achievers podcast. Thanks for being here today. Bye for now.