Million-sellers: Hitting the mark

The $1 million advisor

Back to Dr. Evil: Why is $1 million the milestone amount? 

According to Mickey McBride, Avoya Travel’s vice president of partnerships, it’s a number that indicates profitability. 

“These are smart, financially savvy business owners,” he said. “When you get to a million dollars or so, I think there’s just a really big confidence that what they’re doing is successful.”

And getting there makes what they are doing very lucrative. 

“[There’s] a big jump from going from $500,000 to selling a million,” McBride said. 

Based on conversations with agents and agency executives, many million-dollar advisors share the characteristics of being driven, motivated professionals who make themselves very available to their clients. They seek out professional development, including mentoring and continued education. And they tend to specialize. 

SmartFlyer, a host agency headquartered in New York, has around 250 advisors in the U.S. as well as smaller clusters of agents in Europe and Australia. About 200 of its U.S. advisors have hit the million-dollar sales mark.

COO Erina Pindar said the host treats each individual advisor as an agency owner, which they are as independent contractors (ICs). “We call them agencies, actually,” she said. “We don’t even call them agents.”

The host offers a “bespoke approach” to coaching them, Pindar said. While some prefer a hands-off host, others take advantage of business consulting with Pindar or SmartFlyer founder and CEO Michael Holtz. 

SmartFlyer also has a training program, TakeOff, that offers peer-to-peer mentorship and business development with the headquarters team for new-to-industry advisors.

“We take a really bespoke approach to everything, including evolving their business, because everyone’s different and we don’t really have any one generalized way to grow their business,” she said.

But there is a commonality among top-selling agents.

“They specialize in their clients, and I do believe that is a common thread across the board for all of our agents,” Pindar said. “They really believe in getting to know their clients really well and making sure that it’s not about the client fitting the destination, it’s the destination fitting the clients — and making it work for them and their needs and meeting them where they are at the time.”

SmartFlyer affiliate Barri Reisch, based in Boca Raton, Fla., is in her second year as a travel advisor and is on pace to sell $1 million in 2024. She said she’s transferred skills from her former career as a lawyer to her travel business, which she made her full-time profession in March.

Reisch sells a variety of travel. Echoing Pindar, she said she will plan whatever kind of travel her clients are interested in, working to match them with the right destination. Her attorney instincts have helped. 

“I do think some of my skill set as a lawyer transfer over,” she said. “Being responsive to clients — even if the answer is ‘I don’t have an answer yet, but it’s coming’ or ‘I’m on it’ — I think clients really like to know that. 

“And I learned early on in my career, you don’t let a client’s email linger for 24 hours. You get back to it.”

She never says no to a client’s request, and she finds that suppliers are receptive to almost anything. Like her, suppliers want to say yes to clients. She also never turns away business: If it’s a staycation down the road or three weeks in Europe, she said, she’ll plan it for clients.

Reisch said she believes her success also stems from her relationships with suppliers and her willingness to meet with them and network. She leans into relationships fostered by SmartFlyer and its preferred suppliers.

“It’s not just your relationships with your clients that matter, but the relationship with those hotels and with the suppliers on the ground,” she said. “So that when you have to ask for a favor, you’re not just some stranger behind a keyboard, you’re somebody that they’ve met.”

Reisch admits it’s not easy holding boundaries with clients when constant contact is the norm today, but she tries to keep nonemergencies to email only so she can respond in a time frame that works for her. But, she said, there are often things that need to be responded to in the moment, for which she keeps her customer service at a high level.

“It’s hard,” she said. “I think that’s something that everybody in our industry struggles with.”

Meg Smith is another SmartFlyer affiliate in her second year. Her annual sales have already surpassed
$1 million. Based in Tulsa, Okla., Smith came to the industry after a career in technology consulting.

Most of her clients come from Instagram: Her clients tag her in posts, helping new ones find her. She estimated that 80% of her leads come from the social media site and that 90% of her clients have never used an advisor before.

She said she believes her early success has come, at least in part, from her ability to get to know clients and match them with the right destination.

“I am trying to make money, obviously, but I think the relational piece is really important for me,” she said.

Also important has been leaning into SmartFlyer’s benefits. With the host agency’s reputation, she said, it’s easier to get clients extra amenities or upgrades.

Smart marketing

For David Porter, CEO of Roaming Boomers Travel Services in Scottsdale, Ariz., online marketing was integral to growing his business. Today, the agency is a top producer with its host agency, Cadence Travel, as well as with Cadence’s consortium, Virtuoso, on track to do between $18 million and $20 million in sales this year.

Porter and his wife, Carol, retired early in 2006 and set off traveling to bucket-list destinations, but the 2008 recession had them rethinking that early retirement. Considering their love of travel, they started a website, the Roaming Boomers, and attracted a loyal following.

David still points to that website, which houses scads of articles on travel he has written over the years, and his corresponding newsletter that has a subscriber base of around 9,000 as keys to their success.

Consumers find an article he’s written via a web search, then poke around on the website. Then, they often subscribe to the newsletter.

“It’s not uncommon for them to stalk us for a little bit to get to know us and see what we’re all about,” he said. “And then, lo and behold, when they have a journey that they want to take, it’s not uncommon for them to give us a call.”

The Porters’ client base has grown over the years, and so has their team (originally, David was primarily responsible for selling, and Carol would handle bookings after the sale; they brought on additional help after they reached annual sales of $6 million to $8 million). Today, about 70% to 75% of their clientele are repeat travelers and their referrals. The rest comes from that pipeline of website to newsletter to booking.

‘In it to make money’

Avoya Travel (No. 36 on Travel Weekly’s Power List), has created an entire event dedicated to its ICs who are on track to sell, or already sell, $1 million or more each year: The Million Dollar Showcase. This year marked the second showcase, held over the summer in Orlando.

Executives there described what they most commonly see among million-dollar agents.

Phil Cappelli, Avoya’s chief sales officer, said the most successful advisors are professionals who take advantage of all their host has to offer, from technology, to education and beyond. The most engaged agents tend to be big sellers.

McBride said top performers are “passionate about travel,” but they are also smart about running their businesses and building relationships with peers, suppliers and others in the industry.

“They’re not in it just to sell travel for fun,” McBride said. “They’re in it to make money and have fun while doing it.”

They are also careful about what they sell. Specialization, McBride said, is key: “You can’t be everything to everyone.” Avoya’s top performers know their specialty well, and they take supplier training in addition to Avoya training.

Or, as Avoya senior vice president of sales Steve Hirshan puts it, “Specialization is next to godliness.”

Avoya feeds leads to advisors via its proprietary Live Leads system. Most advisors have a small handful of specialties they focus on and take leads specific to those products, Hirshan said.

Outside of the realm of specialized knowledge and focused sales, Hirshan has noticed one other trait: availability to clients.

Often, when Hirshan is socializing with top-producing advisors, their phones ring. If it’s a client, “They’ll excuse themselves from the table, and they’ll get up and take the call,” he said. 

Effort, he said, is the No. 1 thing million-dollar agents have in common.

McBride agreed, saying the million-dollar target can be inspirational. 

“It’s a big, lofty number,” he said. “Just going from selling $900,000 to hitting that million, that extra zero in there, I think it stimulates those who are hungry and want to get to that.”

UPDATE: A previous version of this report used a preliminary figure from a 2024 survey from Host Agency Reviews on how many respondents reported $1 million in sales. The final number was 15%, not 8%.