Million-sellers: Above and beyond

Being a businessperson

The Porters’ journey to multimillion-dollar agency began years ago, when they owned a mortgage company in Michigan. At the time, David read the book “The E-Myth” by Michael Gerber.

“The whole tenor of that book is to teach someone to go from salesperson to businessperson,” he said. “I read that book, and it changed everything because it taught me that even though I owned a business, I was behaving like a salesperson each and every day. I had no systems in my business that would allow me to step out of the craziness that I had built.”

When the Porters started selling travel, they approached it very differently than their mortgage company. They built systems and procedures for everything. Once a booking is complete, the series of tasks to take care of it are doled out to team members. The Porters are also proactive with client communication, something they said clients appreciate.

“Generally speaking, clients have to call their travel advisor and say, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’” Porter said. “We feel like we’re failures,” he said, if clients are the ones doing the outreach.

Porter encouraged other sellers who are thinking of scaling up by adding an additional advisor to consider what they could do with an additional 40 hours of capacity each week to take care of administrative tasks or busy work. In most cases, the math adds up to being able to expand. 

“Would that free me up enough to go get one or two more sales?” he said. “Because it doesn’t take a whole lot of additional monthly sales to cover the cost of the additional help.”

Specialization and upselling

Mickey McBride, vice president of partnerships for Avoya Travel in Fort Lauderdale, said business-minded travel advisors tend to be higher producers.

Whether they have an assistant or multiple other sellers underneath their agency, he said, “what sets them apart is …  they’re truly operating and treating it as a business.” He added that those advisors tend to think, “I’m more than just selling travel.”

With more advisors under them, McBride noted, an agency owner can have advisors who specialize in certain areas of travel, helping them sell more efficiently because they know the product well.

The kind of product an advisor is selling can also make a difference, McBride said. Top producers often skew toward more luxury products, which, of course, come at higher price points.

Steve Hirshan, Avoya’s senior vice president of sales, also said upselling is a good tactic. For instance, if an agent is selling $750,000 a year mostly on Norwegian Cruise Line, they might look to move some clients up to Oceania Cruises. They share the same parent company, but with Oceania, sales — and commissions — come at a much higher price tag.

“I’m not doing necessarily more transactions, but I’m starting to increase my sales,” Hirshan said.

Finding help along the way

Julie Lanham, president of Vacations to Remember in Augusta, Ga., hit $1 million in sales around the 10-year mark of her 27 years in the in business. 

She is also an advocate of bringing on help to scale business — but not in the form of independent contractors (ICs).

Bringing on ICs to help with elevated workloads is a common tactic in the industry. Lanham herself has a handful and has hosted even more in the past. But ICs often require hand-holding, she said, and they are generating their own book of business, not the agency’s.

She prefers to hire advisors and administrative workers as employees.

“I kind of act like I’m the dentist and they’re the hygienists,” she said of her administrative staff, “because they truly do all the hard work. … I just float in and talk to the clients and then float back out for the middle parts and then float back in at the end. They make me look good.”

Specifically, Lanham talks to the clients, designs their itineraries and, right before they travel, steps back in to walk them through the trip and answer any questions.

Employers can exert more control over employees than ICs. Lanham can ensure any leads that come into her agency are handled by her in-house advisors, who will follow her standards of customer service and also offer a more consistent experience to clients, she said.

Lanham currently has two full-time advisors and two administrators in her agency; she also has an assistant who focuses on marketing.

“I think there’s a lot of fear for a lot of people [about] bringing somebody on,” she said, attributing that to two factors: giving up control of client communication to another staffer and how to pay them.

Lanham outsources her payroll to a certified public accountant. She pays a monthly fee, “and it is worth every single penny, because I don’t have to think about it.”

She said it can be easier for advisors to hit the million-dollar milestone sooner today because technology has improved and they can automate a lot of their workflow.

Her advice to agency owners looking to scale up: “Don’t be scared. You have to make mistakes in business to grow. And if you don’t act, that’s probably the biggest mistake you’re going to make.”

Three paths to $1 million and more

In an industry where less than a third of agencies hit more than a million dollars in sales, New York-based host agency SmartFlyer stands out: The majority of its members being million-dollar-plus producers. 

COO Erina Pindar identified three main ways they scale beyond the milestone million: high value, low volume; high volume, middle-of-the-road value; and groups and events.

Of the first, she said, “They’ve consciously decided to take the path of high value, low volume. So maybe they’ll only work with a handful of clients, but each client has a really substantial spend annually, and they travel multiple times a year.”

That makes up a “nice chunk” of SmartFlyer’s top producers, she said.

The second group, Pindar said, are advisors who take on middle-value business at high volume. It’s an approach that leads them to employ more assistants than other SmartFlyer advisors to help handle that higher capacity.

The third category of multimillion-dollar producers are those specializing in groups and events. It’s a book of business that tends to develop over time, Pindar said. 

“Group booking is super particular, because you have to deal with contracting,” she added. “It has its own language and whatnot; it’s specific.”

For instance, she said, two advisors who specialize in groups at SmartFlyer came to the agency from the hotel side and were already familiar with group contracts. 

SmartFlyer’s advisors don’t fall into those three categories by accident, Pindar said. Top producers tend to be very thoughtful about their businesses, having multiple discussions with SmartFlyer along the way about their direction.

One of the most common pitfalls Pindar sees with agencies building and scaling their businesses is spending too much time on their branding.

“I think the most successful agents tend to do that secondarily,” she said. “They concentrate more on what their business looks like, first, and what they want it to be down the line, what kind of clients they want to work with.”

The agents themselves should be the brand, “first and foremost — before they develop other things,” she said. “The clients go to them because they are who they are, and they’re wonderful and they’re knowledgeable. That is the brand, without the fluff, at the very core of it.”