Get with the Plan!

Having a business plan means setting goals and strategies to attain them—and writing all that down! Indeed, most experts agree that having a business plan is essential if you are to be successful selling travel. You need a roadmap that details your resources, your strategies and your goals for a specified period of time.

Here are four examples of top agents who have developed successful business plans. As you’ll see, some are remarkably detailed, numbers-oriented plans that they refer to on a constant basis. Others focus on specific marketing or sales goals and use their business plans only as rough guides for their business.

The Time Manager

David Walsh, an independent affiliate with Avoya Travel in Bradenton, Fla., focuses on a business plan that helps him figure out how many contacts he and his team — he has two other agents working with him — need to make to achieve an annual sales goal.

“Regardless of what you are doing, the numbers are pretty consistent,” he says. “Just from experience we had a good sense — if you are taking phone calls or making phone calls, if you are contacting customers — of what it’s going to take to make one sale. Based upon that, we already know what on average it would it take to hit a sales goal.”

In the case of Avoya, Walsh gets all his customer leads from his host agency, so he doesn’t have to worry too much about the marketing part of his business plan. At the same time, he does need to be able to serve a certain number of leads to achieve his sales goals. Walsh says he develops his business plans on his own, though he turns to Avoya for help in sales training and managing his business, especially if he finds he isn’t achieving the goals he has forecasted in his plan.

When Walsh first created his business plan he ended up doing three altogether — for one year, three years and five years. But he continually revisits those plans every few weeks to a month. “It’s a working document that I imagine at the end of five years will get some major revisions,” he says. “It is a reminder, a road map of what you set out to do versus where you are. It’s a super important tool.”

Walsh’s business plan also shows the impact that time has on the business — namely his own time. From the beginning he had to acknowledge that one person can only do so much. “So duplicating me was one of the goals. After one year I wanted to have at least one other agent, after three we wanted to have yet another agent. And we are there, we are meeting that plan,” he says.

Walsh’s plan is a written document that he revises all the time. “It is kind of step by step, and the first year it was week by week,” he says. “We learned how many calls we can take. How many cycles of phone calls and emails it takes to close a transaction based upon that number of how many phone calls we need to make.”

Indeed, Walsh is constantly measuring whether his plan is successful based on the numbers. “I look at how many of these are my own customers, how many came from Avoya, how many of them are repeating as customers,” he says. “You learn to pay very close attention to every number.”

The Metrics Man

Gary Smith, who has owned a Cruise-One franchise in Eugene, Ore., for the past 10 years, is no stranger to business planning. He has an MBA and teaches business planning in a local community college in his role as an educator in small-business development.

Even with that background, however, he says he still seeks out advice, especially from a local Small Business Development Center, a program set up by the federal government’s Small Business Administration. There are 1,800 centers to help people with small businesses, including travel agencies, and the advice is free.

For Smith, it’s all about the goals in his plan. “I’m extremely goal oriented,” he says. “I set goals in a couple of different areas. The first one obviously is financial. The second part you might call efficiency.”

Smith owns a $2.2 million franchise with two employees, and so he closely monitors performance by the numbers. He sets goals in net commissionable revenue, sales volume, number of individual reservations, actual dollars per reservation and average selling price. He also examines percentage of revenue from different sources, primarily commissions from cruise lines, tours, travel insurance and shore excursions.

Internally, Smith measures the average hours it takes per booking and total hours per salesperson versus number of bookings completed to see whether his agency is maintaining a normal level of efficiency. “If our goal is to increase 20 percent in volume, I have to have enough labor hours budgeted,” he says.

Smith works off a one-year written business plan that he develops every November for the following year. He constantly refers to his business plan on a weekly if not daily basis. “My plan is all pretty much automated in Excel,” he says. “I literally have a dashboard sheet that shows graphically every one of the metrics exactly. I can see the month versus comparative month over the past two years and where we are year to date. Every time we sell something Excel updates the charts.”

Smith also never changes the plan after it’s been finalized. “I keep the original budget spreadsheet and a variance spreadsheet that compares the two,” he says. “I can see what we budgeted, what we actually did and where we were off, so we can plan better for the future.”

The Networker

Brian Blumhorst, who owns Thorin Travel in San Antonio, Texas, a Nexion affiliate, has been in business for five years and admits that he didn’t have a business plan when he began his agency, which focuses on cruise sales. “I kind of stumbled into the business at first, so I didn’t really start with a business plan,” he says. “I also wasn’t overly successful right off the bat.”

Through his affiliation with Nexion, however, he began building a business plan and getting everything in place. “Once you get the resources and the support, you can be a little bit more of a confident and successful travel agent,” he says. “That’s what led me to build a business plan that I could actually implement and then set goals, create expectations for myself and hold myself accountable to them.”

For Blumhorst, his first business plan goals were very simple like finding new clients through networking and making a list every week of different places and organizations where he could network. Indeed, his main goal initially was to reach out to new clients in the most simple, basic way in order to promote his group travel business to San Antonio retirees.

After a few months he started setting goals for having a web presence, using more social media and tailoring different trips to meet the demands of his clients. Unlike other business plans, however, Blumhorst’s plan didn’t really set specific targets for revenue. “I didn’t really want to hold myself to that…because sometimes you get too caught up in the money,” he says. “Everyone wants to make money, you want to make a living, but ultimately it was more about making contacts and growing a client base.”

Blumhorst says he turned to Nexion for business-plan coaching sessions and brainstorming some new ideas. “We’d reflect on some of the things we had tried, whether or not they’d panned out or were viable, and whether we should keep pursuing it,” he says.

What’s Blumhorst’s best advice for those developing a business plan? First, he says you have to hold yourself accountable. Don’t be afraid to tell yourself that something is not working. Second, never be afraid of support from your host or suppliers, and never be afraid to ask questions from suppliers. Finally, don’t be afraid to try as many different avenues of networking as possible.

The Marketing Planner

Michael Consoli, who has owned a Cruise Planners agency in Atlanta for the past 12 years, admits that he didn’t really start doing an annual written business plan for his agency business until 2004. That was prompted, he says, by a combination of the training provided by Cruise Planners and a class on business plans offered by Cruise Lines International Association that he attended.

For Consoli, the most significant thing in his business plan is coming up with a marketing budget and then figuring out how to use it. “When you first start a business, most people don’t think you need to have a marketing budget,” he says. “So determining how much you are going to allocate for marketing is a little scary. But coming up with a marketing budget is a first step.”

Consoli says he now sets specific financial goals in his business plans. “I didn’t at first, but now that I have years of history I can come up with an increased goal every year,” he says. “And I develop the goals that I have with my business development teams from the cruise lines I sell.”

Where does he get advice to develop his plan? Consoli says he turns to Cruise Planners and his cruise BDMs to develop a written plan in October or November for the following year. “I do it on a step-by-step basis,” he says. “I come up with the amount of business that I want to gain that year. Then I come up with the amount of money I am going to allocate to marketing. Then I write a business plan specific to each vendor that I sell and how I am going to get that business.”

For Consoli, a business plan is an essential part of his success. “I think that many people become very quickly overwhelmed about how they are going to make their business work,” he says. “Having a business plan gives you that baby-step approach of small goals and how to achieve those goals that lead to the successful big picture.”