5 Big Opportunities to 2x Your Tour Business in 2024

Nikki:
All right, guys. Well, we'll get started. We'll let people keep trickling in here, and I'll let them in. But hi everybody, I'm Nikki. I am here with ResmarkWeb, I'm the marketing director, and thank you all for joining us. We're so excited to have you. Today we have Josh Oakes with us, cofounder of the Sunshine Tribe and successful Ex Tour business owner. I want to make this a little interactive, so drop a one in the chat if you're familiar with Josh. Now, I know some of you are, so I'd like to see some ones in there. But yeah, if you know Josh, if you're part of the program the Sunshine Tribe, drop a one in the chat. Cool.

Lauri Williamson:
Hey, Mercedes.

Nikki:
All right, cool. One and a half, someone halfway knows he does.

Lauri Williamson:
Hey, Mercedes.

Nikki:
Cool. One and a half, two halves equal one. All right, guys, cool. I'm assuming a lot of you guys do know who he is, and if you do, you know the impact that he has on the tour industry. He has a wealth of knowledge in the short amount of time that I've known him, he provides so much value to the industry, and we are so grateful to have him on this training. So thank you, Josh. Just a bit about him to help you understand maybe why you should be listening. So if you don't know who Josh is, Josh has a deep love for adventure, coastal living, and surfing. During his tenure as the founder and former owner of MPT Travel Group, Josh spent a decade cultivating a thriving multi-seven-figure tour business. Through MPT he curated exclusive experiences, offering clients really a money can't buy adventure in Melbourne, Australia and other global destinations.

But in June 2017, Josh made the strategic decision to sell MPT for a seven-figure sum. Following this success, he co-founded the Sunshine Tribe, which a lot of you are familiar with, a platform dedicated to helping tour and activity business owners, travel professionals, and small tourism enterprises worldwide build streamlined, highly profitable, and valuable businesses. Josh's expertise and passion continues to shape the future of the travel industry. All right, guys, so I'm going to kick it off to Josh, but make sure you stay until the end, because for everybody who registered, you will get a gift, and I will explain it at the end. All right, Josh, I'm so ready to kick it off to you. Go ahead.

Josh Oakes:
Cool, thank you very much. I guess I can just share screen.

Nikki:
Yep, you should be able to.

Josh Oakes:
Very cool intro, by the way. I should ... Oops, I think I just shut, oh yeah, I did too. I just shut down my slides. Let's get back in there then. There we go. So yeah, thanks for the intro. I think I couldn't say it better myself. Am I coming through nice and clearly? Everyone just give me a thumbs up if I am, and let's just kick those off. Oops. So just be a little gentle with me, guys, it's just kicked over 5:30 AM here in Australia, so just slowly waking up. A couple of strong coffees and I'll be good to go. But anyway, so thanks, Nikki, really appreciate it. Really appreciate working with you guys.

Can I just get you to mute everyone, Nikki, if that's cool? I think there's a few people with a bit of background noise coming through. But yeah, it's an amazing partnership and relationship with the team at Resmark. Obviously Brandon, who's here in the room, has built an incredibly successful tour and activity business, which has been around for decades and are members of my inner circle coaching program. But of course he's got so many other things going on, including Resmark and ResmarkWeb. And so yeah, there's a lot of great opportunities to work together. We have a lot of fun and love supporting you guys, and I appreciate your support as well.

So sales, it's the lifeline of any tour business. And God, there's just so much I can talk about, so much I'd love to say about sales, what I've learned over the journey. You know what, actually, I was having a look at something. I'm just going to stop those for a second. Hopefully you're seeing my screen. Oh yeah, okay. So to give some context about, what I love doing is speaking to tour business owners. And I was having a look just before the call, so I've had over 530 conversations, deep dive conversations with tour and activity and experience business owners over the last couple of years that have gone really deep into their businesses, the challenges that they have, the things they're great at, the things they suck at. And it's been fascinating, and so I've learned so much and I've been surprised so many times. And one of the things I've learned over the journey is that the thing that people struggle almost more than anything else with in their tour business is sales.

They can run incredible experiences, they can deliver streamlined operations, but when it comes to sales, so many people just find it intimidating and overwhelming. It's the thing in their business that doesn't come naturally to them. So I was fortunate that I learned, I don't know how it happened, but I learned over the first few years running my business that the thing I loved most about it was sales. I love selling, I love teaching people how to sell, and it served me really, really well. So let's dive into this topic here. Five big opportunities to, I guess at minimum, 2X your tour business in 2024.

So obviously the people in this room right now will be doing one of these four things. I'd be surprised if you weren't. If you are running tours, activities, experiences, events, yeah, then you're going to be right at home here and you're going to get, hopefully take some really valuable insights away.

So what I really want to try and do is shift your mindset, open your eyes, maybe change perspective, and lay out a plan for the way that you are going to really significantly grow your business, certainly over the next 12 months, but then think about it as a long-term plan as to how you are going to take it to the next level and then a level above that. And a lot of that's going to come through diversification of sales plus a few other things that we'll talk about as well. So I don't even need to spend too much time here. Nikki did a pretty fantastic job, better than I could do it myself. I started a tour business back in '09, Melbourne Private Tours. At the time it was just a bit of a dream. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I had no business experience, tourism experience, no startup capital or networks or support, not a lot going for me. I just figured that it might be a good idea to showcase my corner of the world to as many people as possible. Didn't know who my ideal customer was, which markets I'd be tackling. But I launched Melbourne Private Tours, and a couple of years of pain. I could describe it in a lot of other ways, but in those early days it was just me, man with a van, just hustling, grinding, trying to get some traction and get a few things going. And it probably took me a couple of years to really figure it out. And what I did through that middle time in business, I diversified a lot. So by the time it came to 2017 when I transitioned out of my business, I had Melbourne Private Tours running a bunch of really premium private inbound travel experiences.

The US was my key market, UK, New Zealand, and a few other international markets. And then I'd launched a dedicated corporate side of the business, MPT Corporate Events, with a real emphasis on team building experiences, client engagement. I'll tell you a little bit more about those through the workshop or the webinar. But that reminds me as well, Nikki, if anyone's really curious to dive deeper into this particular channel or topic, I think it was about two years ago now I did a dedicated webinar with Brandon specifically on growing your corporate side of your business. So if anyone's keen or interested to learn more about that, I'm sure you've got the replay handy somewhere, they might be able to just reach out and flick in the link over to get the replay for that particular webinar. Sorry to put you on the spot, but I'm sure that would be okay.

So then the other thing we did, I'm just going to grab this. So that was Melbourne Private Tours, which was the cornerstone of the business. Then there was MPT Corporate Events. And then really the third, for want of a better way to describe it, prong to the business or division of the business, was my outbound multi-day. So probably it was around 2014, I launched a couple of really deep dive, immersive, multi-day outbound adventures, one to southern Spain and one to southern Africa. And these were really premium price, back in 2015 these were like 11,000 per person, and that was a really profitable and exciting additional division of the business. And when I sold the business, this was one of the real exciting opportunities that the current owners identified for growth. So that was it. There was Melbourne Private Tours, MPT Corporate Events, and there was MPT Worldwide Journeys running those outbound tours as well.

So where am I? So, so, so. When I started, it was probably like a lot of people in the room here, the vision compared to the reality just didn't really stack up. And I'd had this dream of this beautiful, professional experience business with a fleet of vehicles. And the reality was just me, one man with a secondhand beaten up Toyota van running private tours, working 60-hour weeks and doing everything else and wearing every hat, operations, delivery of service, marketing, business development, customer, guest experience, bookkeeping, and everything in between. And it took me a little while to really figure it out. And if I fast forward to the time that I sold the business, it was a very different picture. I had a fleet of luxury vans, I had a great team, back office team, general manager, operations manager, reservations team, and then a really good network of tour guides. And it was a great business, it was really fun to run, but I sold it for a bunch of reasons.

One is I felt like after 10 years I was ready for, it was probably eight, nine years really, I was ready for a new challenge. I had a great opportunity, a really good offer for the business. I had already started mentoring a bunch of tour business owners. I was really enjoying, it seemed like a logical progression. So I sold the business and the rest is history, and here I am now. So that's the highlights version of how I got here.

So sales. I told you a few seconds ago, it's the thing that came most naturally to me. It was the thing that excited me the most. Business development, diversification of sales, conversion, everything about it, it came naturally, I really enjoyed it. And I loved teaching my team as I grew and got the support around me to grow sales. And it's something I love teaching people now, because it staggers me that the one element of a small and growing tour business that is most critical is the one element that gets neglected the most in the conversations that I have. And the other thing that over those 500-odd conversations that I've had since I launched my inner circle coaching program is the unhealthy reliance that tour business owners have on just a couple of channels. So I'm curious, now, you might make a liar of me here, but if we can get, just pop in the chat. Who ... I'm trying to think of the best way to do this, who would say that their major sales channels are either direct sales or sales through OTAs?

I'm really curious to know. And while you're doing that, I'll just talk about my experience with tour business owners. And I would say that 90% of the conversations I've had with tour business owners, I've found that they are heavily reliant on either OTAs, sometimes up to 95% of their business relies on the bookings from one or two OTAs, or it could be directs. They do a huge chunk of direct bookings, which obviously are incredible and a critical component to any tour business. But there is this really, really strong and heavy reliance on either direct bookings or OTA bookings for the sales that flow through their business. So what I learned, and I can't even see the chat there, Nikki, but yeah, because I'm sharing, oh, I can see it there. All direct OTAs and some direct, mostly direct, direct, direct, direct. Okay, cool. Yeah.

So on that note, really quickly, again, something that people might find really valuable. I think it was two weeks ago, Brandon and Nikki, was that right? Yeah, last week or two weeks ago we had Brandon come onto my weekly inner circle coaching call and did the most wonderful deep dive on how to optimize your website, how to drive more sales through [inaudible 00:15:38]. Top tips, tactics, strategies for keyword optimization, a lot of DIY stuff. Anyway, so it was an amazing session and if anyone, I know a lot of people on the call did see it who were in my coaching program or what happened, but again, I'm sure you've got the replay there, I'm sure people would love to see that session. So yeah, just while I remember it. So anyway, just to give some context now, what I learned through my own experience and what I've learned through the experiences of hundreds of others that are in my coaching program. Diver-

Brandon Lake:
Looks like Josh may have cut out there.

Nikki:
You were so still, Brandon, I didn't know if it was me, so I didn't want to chime in there. Yeah, it must be the 5:30 AM wifi. I'm sure he'll come back in a minute.

Brandon Lake:
Yeah, looks like he's going to try to rejoin.

Nikki:
He hopped off. He'll probably jump right back in.

Josh Oakes:
Oops. Am I back?

Nikki:
Good.

Josh Oakes:
Yes, no, it looks like I dropped out there for a second.

Nikki:
Okay, [inaudible 00:17:20].

Josh Oakes:
What was I saying? Tell me, Nikki, where was I? I was talking about diversification of sales, is that right?

Nikki:
I think so, yeah.

Josh Oakes:
Yeah. Okay. How much did you hear? We'll just try to pick it up where I was.

Brandon Lake:
You were just jumping into the pie chart and talking about the various channels, I think, when you started to break up.

Josh Oakes:
Okay, cool. All right.

Brandon Lake:
Back up a little bit before that, maybe.

Josh Oakes:
Righto. Let me share a screen again and we'll jump back in there. All right, so back to this chart. So this was the breakdown of revenue when I sold my business. And on that note as well, if any of you has any desire or ambition to one day transition out of your business, from my experience, the more diverse your channels of bookings and sales are, the more value your business is going to have, the more appealing it's going to be to a potential purchaser down the line. From my experience. And again, to reiterate, what I would say is of critical importance is to be able to generate as many direct sales as you possibly can. But having a diverse range of sales channels is critical. So when I sold the business, I did about one point ... What was that, probably about 1.4 million through travel agents and travel partners. And that was ... Well, I'll talk about that in a second.

Probably 600,000 or so was direct, probably 500,000 to 600,000 or so was through my corporate side of the business. Partnerships and collaborations was growing, that was probably around about 8% or 9%, so let's say 300,000 to 400,000 through a range of partnerships and collaborations. And in the last few years I ran my business, we and my team got really great at identifying really fruitful revenue generating partnerships and collaborations, and we were just getting that going, which was exciting. Again, another great opportunity for growth for an interested party in your business. Hotels and accommodation providers was a standalone channel. And then this other area here I really could dedicate to our email marketing or list building strategy. So this beautiful wagon wheel of sales, four to six channels, all driving consistent bookings and inquiries.

Just what I would ask, and I should have probably mentioned it at the start, I'm absolutely super cool with anyone jumping in with questions at any time. So if you've got any questions about sales or anything that we're talking about, don't worry about leaving it to the end. We can just jump in, make it interactive, and weigh in with some questions. So that was what my business looked like, and I found that once I really focused on driving sales through a bunch of channels, that's when the magic happened and I grew really, really quickly.

So I thought it might be good just to dive in a little deeper into some of these channels just to get a sense of how it all worked. Out of interest, who does a lot of bookings via travel partners or travel agents? I'm really curious to know. Just let me know in the chat if you've got a strategy in place. I talk a lot about strategy in sales, so just jump in the chat while we're doing this. I thought it'd be really important just to highlight this before we dive in any deeper. So one of the things that a lot of people do really, really badly as well is pricing. The reason I talk about this before we dive into diversification of sales and business development and opening up new sales channels is, there's no point doing all this work if you figure out that your pricing's not optimized and you're leaving money on the table.

And a lot of, again, through conversations that I've had with so many tour business owners, one of the struggles they have and the unknowns they have is pricing. And some of the things that they do is they allow the marketplace to dictate their pricing. They have literally no idea how to price. They look around at the competition, get a sense of where they might fit into the landscape. "There's a couple of guys over there doing things a little cheaper, those guys are a little more expensive. I don't have the confidence to go in with those prices to match them, so I'll just slot in here somewhere in the middle, and I just base my pricing of what my competition around me is doing." Which I believe to be a big red flag and a big no-no.

And a lot of reasons for that. I guess one of the main reasons is, you have absolutely no idea what the guy or the girl down the road, how they're running their business. So you might be basing your pricing structure off a competitor down the road who's running their business into the ground, it's why they're unprofitable. You don't know what their fixed costs are, you don't know if they've got expensive office space, you don't don't know if they've got big lease payments on vehicles, you have no idea what are the financials of their business. So you are potentially just basing your pricing on the pricing of someone else, who has based it on someone else who is running their business into the ground.

So what I would always suggest, and again, we can dive deeper on this, but just a really super quick overview here. This is something that I have in my program for my coaching program members, but super, super highlights version. With all of your pricing, really what you should be doing is, and this one applies more to private tours, but some of the key features of this pricing calculator are going to be, obviously you can punch the different PAX numbers per tour. You can create prices based on a specific number of people per experience. But the key is here to figure out first of all what your cost of sale is, your on tour expenses.

Some of those, let's say if you had a group of eight, you're running a private tour for eight. There are going to be per person costs, others are going to be costs that apply irrespective whether you've got two people or eight people. But basically, in a really simplistic way, you're going to crunch out your cost of sale. And once you've got your total idea of the specific costs that are incurred to run the experience, then that's the time when you would apply gross profit margin. For people on a program I've got a few different options set up for them. There's 20%, 30%, and 45%. I always went with about 45% gross profit margin for all of our tours and activities. Just works really, really well for my business.

So the next step, once you've costed out your cost of sale, is to apply gross profit margin. And the way to do that, it's really business specific. You've got to get a feel for what feels right for your business. Can you extrapolate that out based on the number of trips you anticipate running per month or per year? And basically you just choose a gross profit margin to apply to those costs of sale. So I know, for example, if I'm going to run a trip for eight, my gross profit margin is going to be $1,400 based on a 45%, going to be $776 based on a 30% gross profit margin, and so on. So that would be the most important part of play, your gross profit margin. And that is protected, your margin is protected before you even consider building in a commission level to be able to work with resellers.

And from that point, now, this side of this worksheet over here has an automatic 25% commission built in. So after the gross profit margin, I then built in a 25% commission that allowed me to work with effectively anyone. And that's what I would generally recommend in a perfect world scenario for everyone running tours or activities, to have a commission level built in that allows them to work with any type of reseller and still run really, really profitable trips. So I know it's a really quick high level overview and it probably doesn't make exact ...

Speaker 7:
No, it does make sense.

Josh Oakes:
Pardon? Was there a question there? I'll assume, if you've got a question jump in and ask me, but the nuts and bolts of it would be, with your pricing, that you're going to figure out what your cost of sale is. You are then going to apply a gross profit margin that feels good for your business, which could be something like 20%, 30%, or 45%. And once you've got that gross profit margin applied, that then becomes this price over here. And after that, so you would see these prices here reflected in these retail rates over here in this chart, either like a total price for the trip or broken down into a per person price. And then you would see that there's that 25% commission built in after the gross profit margin is set.

So look, I've got a lot of stuff I could help people out with if they want to learn more about pricing, how to optimize pricing, I'm happy to share. But I guess the crux of it is that before diving into sales, it's really, really important that you figure out what your optimal tour pricing is before you start having all this level of success and then realize that there's money left on the table. But anyone can reach out to me with questions on pricing and I've got some really short workshops I can send over to help them on that as well.

Let's continue. So diving into some of those channels. So one of the core channels for me was agents. And as I showed you on that pie chart, about 37% of my bookings came via agents and travel partners. So by agents, I'm not talking about OTAs, I'm talking about DMCs, so destination management companies, I'm talking about inbound tour operators. I'm talking about, it could be cruise planners, it could be travel consultants, independent travel designers, both domestically in your destination or international agents that are sending bookings into your destination. So again, this is a high level overview, but it's just an identification that this is a really opportunity laden channel. I.

Thought I'd just pop this in here. It's a bit of a rough report that I pulled recently just to show a few people in my program, and it really highlights how immense the opportunity could be. So for me, agents, DMCs, inbound tour operators were by far my biggest channel, but I could break that 37% down into a whole bunch of smaller agents and the key accounts that I won in my business. So to give you some context, in the first nine months of our financial year, so our financial year in Australia runs to June 30. So my number one agent sent me about $230,000 in bookings in the first nine months of 2017. Next was $151,000, $146,000. So basically my top 10 agents sent me ... Whoops, top 10 agents sent me about over $1 million in bookings in that first nine months.

Top 20, probably about $1.4 million, something like that. So it's an amazing way to run a business. The beauty of agents, first of all, it's consistent. So those numbers were pretty much identical in 2016 and 2015. When I sold my business, it was incredibly exciting for the company that bought it to see that almost guaranteed revenue just sitting in my bookings calendar for the next calendar year. So generally speaking, I could open my bookings calendar up on January 1 of each year and I could see $1 million in bookings six to nine months out sitting there. So obviously it's like the holy grail for a small tour business owner to have those relationships built that are going to drive consistent, almost guaranteed bookings year on year.

And the beauty of agents as well is, once you've built that relationship and you become that preferred supplier, then it's the agent really who's out there marketing, promoting, pounding pavement, marketing your experiences, and you are just getting the rewards from it. So there's some grinds to build those relationships initially, but once they're built, then effectively you could say almost your job is done. So for a lot of ... And I'm going to talk about some of the strategies to build those relationships a little later in the webinar, but suffice to say that for me was, you can make really intelligent business decisions. You can buy new vehicles, you can recruit, you can do trade shows, you can do marketing activities when you've got this almost guaranteed annual income. And it's pretty much guaranteed unless you do something and screw up an account or a business flounders.

So some things there may be beyond your control, but ultimately, yeah, for me, I was, not fortunate, but I'm grateful that I really doubled down on this channel in the early days to build these relationships. And for anyone who's running a really small tour businesses, "Yeah, great for you, Josh, but it's just me, I'm one guy running walking tours or I've just got one vehicle." Pretty much every one of these relationships I've built, when I approached them for the first time, that was literally how I approached it, was me with one, maybe two vehicles, this capacity to run one or maybe two tours per day. By the time I sold my business, on Sundays I was running up to 15 or 20 individual private tours per day. So we grew together, these relationships grew over time. And yeah, it's very, in many cases, very personal. They know my business intimately and I knew theirs intimately as well. So agents would be one channel that I would 100% be investing time and energy to grow.

Added to that, the corporate market was another really key channel of mine. And I guess for any of you out there, again, if you want to deep dive into this, Nikki and Brandon have got a great training that I did for them a little while back on how to grow the corporate side of your business. But I think many or most people running tours or activities or experiences would have a corporate offer, something that they could tweak or iterate that would appeal directly to the corporate market. And what I found, probably after I think three or four years that I started to see a little bit of an increase in inquiry from corporate decision makers, like executive assistants or sales marketing managers or company owners, saying, "Hey, I'd like to look at that wine experience," or, "I like the look of that foodies journey that you run. Do you think it'd be a good fit for me and for our team?"

Then I doubled down and really focused on growing that side of the business, and it grew really, really quickly. And so a lot of the things, and there's just so many different needs for the corporate market. So I learned that I could create experiences that appeal to, for company Christmas parties or end of financial year events, team building experiences, reward and recognition programs, partner programs, client engagement events, pre and post-conference tours and events, company incentives, management retreats. And even those of you that run remote experiences where you might be two or three or four hours from the nearest gateways, well, again, you can create products that are going to suit corporate decision makers. Let's say for a management retreat, you might have a really great experience that is just too far to take on a day, and you're not going to have a lot of success selling that to a company that is based two or three hours away. But if you can create a package, like a management retreat where it's end to end, it's a seamless experience, you've gift wrapped it with a bow, and this is the way it works.

You get them out for a day of activities on day one, there's accommodation and a team dinner on that evening, and then day two there's a morning activity, and then back to the office. And you've thought it out, it's seamless, it's end to end, and you could present that to a whole bunch of corporate decision makers in various destinations that would really, really resonate with them. So yeah, I would challenge all of you to really consider whether what you do has some resonance with the corporate market in some sort of capacity.

And the beauty of the corporate market as well is, it solves that challenge that so many have about seasonality and about being top heavy on weekends or certain times of the week. So for me, to give you an example, before I launched our corporate side of the business, let's take the month of December. December was an incredibly busy month, but everything came from December 20 to December 31 where international visitors started flooding into town, and it made December the busiest month of our year, but only in those last 10 days. And the first 20 days of December was really, really quiet. So when I launched MPT Corporate Events and I doubled down on company Christmas parties, I realized that I'd hit the jackpot because every company wants to run their Christmas event between December 1 and December 19. And once December 19 hits, they all want to get out of the office and go on holiday.

So literally it was, December 1 to December 19 we just went gangbuster with corporate events, everyone took a breath, and then the flood of international visitors started coming into town and we turned our attention to inbound premium private tours for international visitors. So it made December this beautiful, beautiful month of sales. And added to that, the corporate market, they want to do things on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, not on a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, where obviously your leisure visitors want to do things on weekends. So great way of ironing out seasonality.

And then the other one that we really started getting traction with was our partnerships and collaborations. So I saw this as a completely standalone sales channel. And we had a lot of success. So I guess a couple of questions you could ask yourself, where does your ideal customer hang out? Which type of businesses share your customer? And where are those fishing holes, where are you going to find them? So both online and certainly in the real world. So that could be a whole bunch of different types of businesses. So it could be, let's say for example, if you run foodie walking tours in one city. Well, in 10 other cities there could be someone running foodie walking tours, a similar type of tour, different destination. Absolute perfect type of partnership or collaboration. How can you help each other and support each other to drive bookings and sales for each other?

Or it could be the same destination. You could be in a city running walking tours, foodie walking tours, and there could be another operator running wine tours out of town but picking up in the same destination. So same destination, different type of experience, serving the same customer. How could you partner, how could you collaborate? The way I see partnership and collaboration, partnership is more like, how can you support each other in driving bookings for each other? Collaboration is, how could you actually create something together and market it and promote it? That's just the way I see it. So there's two types of obvious.

And there is legitimately, if any of you can't sit down and think of 30 or 40 or 50 types of potential partnerships or collaborations from same experience, different destination or same destination, different experience, I'd be really, really surprised. Then the other one could be clubs, groups, societies that have got a passion or an interest in your niche. If you do outdoor adventure or outdoor activities, there are birdwatching societies or rock climbing clubs. What sort of groups are really passionate or interested in your niche? That could be locally, it could be domestically, it could be internationally. Or membership organizations, I used to crush it with West Coast US country clubs. Had a great strategy there to drive group bookings from West Coast country clubs. And golf clubs, things like that. Could be school groups, could be university groups.

Again, if you've got university groups or school groups that have food science programs or environmental programs and you run something that you could create a tailored experience for a school group or a university group, again, literally limitless opportunities. And I would be surprised if anyone in the room couldn't think of 50 types of businesses that they could potentially partner or collaborate with to drive bookings or inquiries. And again, without doing a deep dive on this, one of the key things here is to formalize it. You might start with a conversation, "Hey, we should have a chat. You do this, I do that. I'm sure we could have a lot to talk about."

And then to move it along to the point where stuff actually happens, you might be the one to take the bull by the horns, so to speak. And actually after that initial conversation, just formalize it in a partnership proposal where you might spend a little bit of time and create something that has, for example, a bit of an executive summary about how you see this thing coming to life. What the problem is, if there is a problem that exists, it could be that a particular market doesn't have this type of thing. That could be a problem. What the solution is that you propose, who the target market is, what the partnership requirements could be between you and this potential partner or collaborator, and what are your thoughts on a timeline so that things can get moving along. Who's going to be responsible for it? What are you going to do, what are they going to do? Have you got any rough projections on how you might see you guys actually creating, driving sales and revenue? And then what you see as the immediate next steps.

And to actually formalize it with a proposal that you can both agree to, document it, things are going to happen a lot more quickly. Because what happens, what we generally see with partnerships, is that people have got all the intentions in the world. They're like, "Great, great, sounds amazing." And then just nothing happens. People get busy, go back to their own lives and their own businesses. No one is taking the responsibility to drive it forward and nothing happens. But if you can actually take it from initial conversation to partnership proposal to document it, and to do it in a professional way with timelines, all that kind of stuff, then the likelihood of something happening is significantly greater.

And then I just wanted to touch on briefly a few other, what I call standalone channels as well. So having a really great strategy in place to grow bookings through hotels and accommodation providers, I found that this channel complemented agents really well. Because agents, massive opportunities, but it's a bit of a slower burn. Things like hotels and accommodation providers, more low-hanging fruit and quick wins. So what I did is I doubled down initially in my business on hotels and accommodation providers to start getting the sales flow through the business, and then working concurrently on my agents and growing agent relationships concurrently, which took a lot more time, but bore significantly greater fruit. Others, other thoughts and suggestions, a lot of people do social media. I've seen a lot of people have success with a Facebook group. And by that meaning, I guess even in the way that I run a Facebook group, I've got a public Facebook group called How to Grow a Tour Business.

I know it's obviously a different type of business and industry, but I've got this public group, I fill it with my ideal customer, people who run tour businesses. I don't run it as the Sunshine Tribe, it's just a group for people who want to grow tour businesses. In that group I create value, I spark conversations, I help people, I position myself as a definitive authority in that space. And then organically I pull people out of that group and I enroll them in my coaching program. And I've seen really great strategies work with tour and activity business owners as well. So if you are running a food tour business and you've got a food lovers New York group, where you're filling it with people who love foodie experiences in lots of cities, but certainly in New York. And you position yourself as the definitive authority, finger on the pulse, access to inaccessible foodie type experiences. You're sharing insights and new destinations and all this sort of stuff, and you are positioning yourself as the definitive authority for people who love foodie experiences in New York. Organically, you're going to be able to pull people out of that group and sign them up for your trips.

That's like the overarching idea. And I'm talking about not a Facebook page or a business page where you're promoting your business, I'm just talking about filling a group with your ideal customer that isn't necessarily related to you and the experiences that you run, just that you are the definitive authority in that space. And then the rest will happen organically. And then having a really great email marketing strategy as well, or even a list building/email marketing strategy where you're bringing people into your world on a consistent basis, your ideal customer, you are warming them up, and you are turning them into customers through an email marketing strategy.

And then what you are going to do over a hopefully short period of time is you are going to start building out that wagon wheel, where you've got this beautiful pie chart, where you've got direct sales, which is not 95%, it's like 25%. It's growing, but there's less of a reliance on it. And then you've got agents, and then you've got the corporate market, then you've got strategies to grow sales through hotels and accommodation providers, and all of a sudden you've got six or seven consistent channels that are driving bookings and inquiries, and that's where the magic's going to happen. And speaking of magic, the other thing I've learned through all the conversations I've had with tour and activity business owners is that, generally speaking, I hear so many times, "Yeah, I tried that, didn't work." "Yeah, I tried that, had some good conversations, nothing happened, got dejected, moved on."

Anyone experienced that? Anyone had that feeling or that experience? "Gave that a go, had some interesting conversations, nothing happened. So then I'll revert back to what I was doing before." And for me, the reason is that people are terrible at follow-up and they don't have a follow-up strategy in place. So for me, it's key. And it applies to hotels and accommodation providers, it applies to the corporate market and decision makers there. It applies to agents as well, product managers and independent travel agents as well. So having a really great follow-up strategy in place is one of the most important things that you can do. And you will win business. I showed you that report, and there's companies in there sending me $150,000, $200,000 a year in bookings. And after a couple of years I was literally banging my head against the desk saying, "Why won't they acknowledge me? Why won't they take me seriously? We're a perfect fit." And I fell into that trap of thinking a great conversation would translate into bookings.

So I learned over time, and you know what, if I could go back to when I started my business armed with what I know today, I would have had a lot more success. I've got no question about it. But follow-up is key. Remembering that, so some general observations, it's a middle to long distance race. You're not going to click your fingers, wave a magic wand, and things are just going to start happening. So a lot of operators have got unrealistic expectations. "But what do you mean? We had a great conversation. You said you loved my product and now I've sent you two emails saying, 'Just following up,' I sent you all my information. You've ghosted me, I haven't heard back from you. What went wrong? I don't understand it." And that's because they've got unrealistic expectations. There's busy agents or product managers dealing with hundreds of different types of products. They're busy, they've got other stuff going on, and the process of onboarding and loading up a new product is laborious and time consuming.

So they think that because they had a great conversation and someone's excited about what they do, boom, it's just going to translate into a flood of bookings. And that's just not the reality. Remembering as well, when you're getting dejected, sometimes it's literally just about being in the right place at the right time. Because circumstances can change all the time with suppliers. Different directions, different focus and emphasis on destination, suppliers letting them down and looking for the alternatives. Many, many different things. So you are legitimately always only an email or a phone call away from a big, big win. So that should spur you on.

So what I would say with your follow-up, whoops, these are automated as best you can. Get a really great automated strategy in place that you can stay front of mind 12 months of the year with fresh and exciting updates about what you do. So you are in pole position every day of the year for when they need to pull the trigger on a new experience. Front of mind, unforgettable, and you're ready in that box seat for when they're looking to give someone a chance or an opportunity. And try and with your messaging, sometimes agents, sometimes corporate decision makers, they just don't think outside the box. They're like, "No, no, we've got someone already. Thanks very much." And you're always trying to encourage people that what you do is sufficiently different, unique, that there is a place in their plans for you in conjunction with an existing supplier. They're like, "Oh yeah, good point, I didn't think about it that way. Sure, we'll give you a chance." So that's just a few observations over time from my own experience and the experience of others that I've helped.

All right. So as far as a follow-up technique or a strategy, what I would do, we're running out of time here, I have to motor through all this stuff. Having a sequence of emails. It could be monthly I would probably suggest, any more gets a bit annoying, but just a fresh and new exciting message on a consistent basis. So an email, and this needs to be an automated strategy where it makes sense for an agent to receive or a hotel concierge or a corporate decision maker to receive these emails irrespective of whether you have had a different conversation with them, or you've had that first opportunity or something like that. So an example could be email one, month one, could be a request to come in and do a live product training or a sales update for their reservations team. "I'm in town next month. Is there scope to come in and do a 30-minute presentation?"

Or you could have a digital presentation that you want to kick over to them that they would be able to, you could either do live for them online, or you send them a recorded version that they could train their team and keep in a training library for in slower times of the year, their team might be able to learn about a new product or experience. You might send them over an email with a customer story, like a little two-minute video of a customer testimonial, a great experience a customer had recently, which could be done literally on an iPhone. Grab a charismatic person on tour, flick your iPhone around for a minute or two, and just do a little recording for them of how great that experience was on the day.

Could be a special offer or a sales. You could stagger these on a month, like one a month or one every three weeks. You might have a new product feature, a couple of new product features. It could be a story-based email. "Hey, I've just realized that obviously I've been sending you emails for some time, and it struck me you don't even really know much about me and how I got to this point that I'm at. So this is why I do what I do. This is why I chose this path." And so getting to connect with you emotionally about what brought you to this, why you love doing what you do. All you ever want to do is just showcase your destination and share your little corner of the world. Story-based email to create that connection is really valuable. Could send a 12-month recap email. This is all the stuff that's happened over the last 12 months in your business.

You could just send out an email you want to organize a famil, or like a fan trip over the coming months. "Love to invite you, any days work for you?" You might not actually ever do the famil, but it's another message and staying front of mind. You might have a new piece of marketing material or a trade kit. You might be a "what's new" email. You could send something out, "This just happened," sharing a recent win. You might have a new media release, and you might just ask a quick question. It could be like a survey base, "What's missing in this destination? What would elevate my trip to world-class status?" It's something like that, that you're looking to engage them, but ask them to do a little bit of research so you can customize or tailor an experience that's going to be a better fit for them and their customers. So follow-up's key.

Then the last thing I really want to touch on briefly is having that action plan so you can bring all this back together, and you've got a plan that you and your team can get behind. So this is all great, but there's all this stuff going on everywhere. So having a plan is critical. So by plan, I mean something like this. So I'm going to run through this really quickly. A simple one or two-pager, having a sales action plan. And I can share this with you if you like. So having an overview, what's your major goal? What do you want to achieve in the next 12 months? All right, what are your sales targets? So you want to crack $1 million in sales. What does that look like?

Well, right now I'm on $640,000, so I've got $360,000 to go. How am I going to get that $360,000? Break it down, make it tangible. Well, that's 60 new bookings, so that's five a month over 12 months. The average sale $6,000 if you run a multi-day trip. That's how I'm going to hit that $360,000. How are you going to do it? Well, I'm going to list the strategies first of all. One, two, three, four, five, six, whoops, there's two fives there. That's all the strategies that we're going to try and implement that's going to get us from $640,000 to $1 million in revenue. Here's the one. Some of them are outreach related, some of them are onboarding two new OTAs. Some of them are lead gen, some of them are website optimization keywords. Am I going to go with a marketing agency or am I going to go with a freelancer? Am I going to do it in-house?

So you've got all the strategies there, and then you just get granular on each strategy. So take that first one, for example. So one of the strategies you're going to implement is going to be increase website traffic, improved SEO keywords. So who's going to be accountable for it? Well, it could be outsourced or you could do it in-house. What are the actual next steps? Get granular, document them. How much time are you going to spend? You might outsource this, so this may not be relevant. Is there any budget? Yes, how much? What's your sales goal? And then what are the actual activities and strategies that you are going to specifically undertake to reach that goal?

Next one, you're going to increase conversion. So you're going to get conversion from like 10% to 25%, as an example. Who's going to do it? What are the next steps? How much time are you going to spend every week? What's the budget, if there is one? What's the sales goal? How do you anticipate this being reflected in company revenue? And then what are the actual strategies that you're going to undertake? Bang, bang, bang, step by step. What are you actually going to do to make this happen? Then you might have an activity calendar. Then you might have an overview of budget, and then you might have, most importantly, review dates. When are you going to review this to celebrate the wins and critique the losses? So that's something that, bring it all together, you've got all these new ideas for sales and sales channels. Well, how's it all going to happen?

And then the last really quick thing that I was going to talk about is, once you have got a plan, an action plan in place, you need to get some support and get this stuff done. So how are you going to get the support around you to run some of these strategies? Because, and it can start in baby steps. Basically, if you're a one-man show with everything resting on your shoulders, you're doing everything in your business, you're like, "How the hell am I going to do all this stuff?" So everyone needs to get support in their business to be able to grow it quickly. So to get support into your business to get stuff done, it could be operations, support, sale, it could be admin, it could be bookkeeping. Everyone needs to start getting support into their business to get stuff off their plate, to get things done better and faster and cheaper than they can potentially do it themselves. That's when the flywheel is going to start spinning. That's when you're going to be able to start scaling up. And to do that, you've just got to start with small chunks.

I loved getting sales support into my business because it was tangible. I could give someone a roadmap. I could set them up for success, and I could give them targets, tangible targets so I could measure my return on that investment to start driving sales and getting revenue flowing through the business. And I can measure that very, very easily. So I would encourage you to think about how you're going to get sales support into your business. You can get a $6 an hour Filipino virtual assistant to run some of the sales strategies, like set up your outreach, your follow-up strategies to set up your outreach campaigns to agents and things like that. So that's one thing I would strongly recommend. Don't try and do all this stuff yourself. Even on a really small budget, just get someone in who's going to start getting a few of these strategies implemented to open up some of these sales channels that you are not having to do the work, and invest a little with very tangible performance indicators so that you can really easily measure the return on that investment.

It's hard sometimes to measure return on investment in other areas of your business, but sales I see as different. It's really revenue related, bookings related, inquiries related, it's conversion related. So I would suggest that all of you think about taking that plunge and getting someone in, if you can set them up for success with that roadmap, that action plan, to get support into your business. I'm going to leave it there because we've gone well over, and I will just stop sharing, and I'll jump over to some of these questions, I think, just quickly. Is that cool, Nikki, if we just have a couple of questions?

Nikki:
Yeah, for sure. Quite a few of them have already been answered.

Josh Oakes:
Okay.

Nikki:
But you want to scroll up just a little bit, we've got a couple that ... Let's see. Jennifer asked about CRM, what CRM are you recommending. And we had another question about Airbnb that was answered too.

Josh Oakes:
Yeah, okay. CRM is Brandon's jam. I think no one's going to be better placed to answer that one than your team. A lot of people talking about OTAs here, which, yeah, as a side note, I never did a single dollar in bookings through any OTA in the entire nine years I ran my business end to end from zero to $3 million a year, never did a single sale through an OTA. Not to say that I don't recommend it at all, but there are so many other complementary channels that are just going to elevate, accelerate your business without question. I was a bit old school. I believe, and even to this day, that if you build great relationships, you'll have a lot of success, complemented with a really, really great direct booking strategy. It's like magic. Just having a ...

Brandon Lake:
Josh, one thing I'll just add too, I love what you teach with all of these channels because they're so often overlooked. Just to add to your experience, we have two different tour companies. One is Western River Expeditions. It's a multi-day rafting company in the Grand Canyon, southern Utah, some other areas. Our other business is called Moab Adventure Center, and it's entirely just in a resort destination, tourism destination surrounded by national parks. It's a lot of visitation there. So two very different businesses. And I would say so much of what you've taught here today really resonates with me because it's, part of the reason we built our software, Resmark, was because of this channel management challenge. Knowing that we really need to focus not just on OTAs and direct sales, but there's so much opportunity on the local, what you can do locally.

Like our Moab business, we have a couple of partners, one is a zipline provider. We actually sell, they came to us saying, "Will you sell our tour?" And so we sell several hundred thousand dollars of their tour and make a decent commission, and that's additional revenue for us. In other cases, we have some hotel providers, ranch, campgrounds, different things like that, that sell our tours and are selling $100,000+ of our tours. And they really do start to outweigh some of these other channels because you have such a close face-to-face relationship with them. You have that trust, and it's a really awesome way to grow the business if you can find a platform that can support that. We've seen a ton of success with that.

Josh Oakes:
Yeah, yeah. And you've really just built the solution. Rather than go out there and find it, you've built your own solution that's going to fit the needs of a business with a strong level of diversification.

Brandon Lake:
Yeah, for sure.

Josh Oakes:
Which is awesome.

Brandon Lake:
And really building solutions to help people direct sales too, because if you're not ... Obviously these other ones eat into your margin. And I like what you talk about with pricing, because you've got to bake that in and know that some of your channels are going to cost you 15%, 25%. But the direct channel does cost, and we can't look at it like it doesn't. Because you're going to have cost of marketing and you're going to have all of that, but often when you have a well-oiled machine, especially if it's functioning well with organic search result, that traffic and those sales can come at a much better margin.

Josh Oakes:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, 100%. I'm going to have to jump off shortly and get my four kids breakfast and start diving into the pre-school thing. So if there's any other questions, Nikki, you might be able to just tell people how they can reach out to me directly. Obviously there's that offer that you have to book in one of my strategy calls or kickstarter calls.

Nikki:
Yes.

Josh Oakes:

Which I look forward to having a chat with some or many of you. And yeah, that's the link there. And some of those resources that I just ran through, because a lot of those, that was a very, very, very quick overview. And probably pricing, for example, I probably confused more people than cleared things up. But I guess it's just an awareness of your pricing, that there should be a methodology to it, a formula to it, rather than just keeping hope or just base it on the guy or girl down the road. But yeah, so there's obviously the Facebook group there that you've popped in. You can reach out to me through the group, and obviously you can book in one of those kickstarter calls if you want to jump on and do a bit of a deep dive into your business as well. But other than that, thanks for the opportunity, love working with you guys, and hope everyone got some good insights and value out of the session.

Nikki:
Thanks, Josh, for coming on. We appreciate you and everything you provide to the industry so much. If anybody has questions about Resmark, the Sunshine Tribe, reach out to us or Josh. Sent you guys the links, so we're here to help in any way that we can.

Josh Oakes:
Cool. Thanks, guys. Have a good day.

Nikki:
All right, guys.

Josh Oakes:
Okay, bye.

Nikki:
Have a good one. Bye, everybody.