Charting Your Course for Success in 2025 and Beyond

Why Tour Operators Should Watch

Kick off 2025 with clarity, strategy, and purpose! Join us for a dynamic webinar designed to equip you with the tools to craft a winning annual plan, communicate it effectively with your team, and monitor your progress every step of the way.

We'll dive deep into:

👉 Creating a Clear Annual Plan: Define actionable goals and set a strategic direction for the year.

👉 Effective Team Communication: Learn techniques to ensure your team understands and aligns with the company’s vision and goals.

👉 Execution and Tracking for Success: Discover powerful methods to track your progress and pivot when needed.

Additionally, we’ll explore why enterprise value is more meaningful than top-line revenue and how it aligns with your broader personal and company vision. You'll also learn about goal planning, KPI setting, and valuable tools to help you and your team stay focused and driven.

Prepare to enter 2025 with a roadmap for sustained growth and measurable success!

@17:29 - Nikki DeSantis (Resmark)

So we're so excited to be here with Andrea this month for charting her course for success in 2025.

I cannot believe we're already in 2025 But it is a great time to really be joining these webinars get as much information as you can To get us excited for this year.

Last time we had Andrea on was last year in January, so January is a great time. We're so excited.

So just a maintenance like I said if you can mute yourself when you come in that would be great But of course if you have a question I want to keep interactive.

sure Andrea did too. I'm you yourself Keep your videos on let's let's learn and have fun. It's so much better when we're able to like see your faces and engage So the replay will go out tomorrow and an email will be sent with any of the links Andrea is sharing today So just so you know keep that in the back of your mind if you missed something And then real quick a quick plug our next

webinar is on January 23rd. So we usually do one webinar a month, but this time we're doing two. And this one's special too because we're going to be talking about simplifying your guide scheduling process.

So it's going to be a great one. If you want to register, I'll drop the link at the end of this training to join.

Alright, so I'll do the good stuff guys. Whether you're coaching the replay right now or you're like you watching it live.

This session, I really hope empowers you. And like I said at the beginning, like just gets you motivated for the year to come.

Our guest speaker today is somebody who we love. She brings so much energy and passion to the conversation. If you don't know Andrea, she is with Cultivate Advisors helping business owners achieve clarity and purpose in their companies.

She actually has her own proven track record of success as she founded Journeys Within, which is an award winning South.

Asian Tour Company. Under her leadership, the company expanded to not one, not to five countries. After its acquisition by Wild Frontiers, Andrea continued to bring her expertise to grow the U.S.

operations, which is where she's at now in the U.S. So we're incredibly fortunate to have Andrea again this month.

And I hope you guys gain a lot of insights out of it. With that being said, Andrea, I'm going to pass it over to you.

@17:29 - Andrea Ross (Cultivate Advisors)

Awesome. Thanks, Nikki. And hi, everybody. I always get nervous when I get introed. I'm like, oh, that's a lot.

Like, I feel like I need to caveat that, like, I failed a lot too. So just take it all to the grain of salt because we're all here to learn.

Oh, there we go. Two weeks into our calendar between the end of December and the start of January, where we just get.

to like plan things out, but actually we don't have that. So this is it. We're in January, in 2025.

It is time to really set those goals to be intentional, both as a leader within your organization and in your business, how we're going to take this to the next level, you want this year to look like.

So I'm excited you're all here. I applaud you for being here. I know early January, everybody's circling back. So it's a tough time of the year.

As Nicky said, I'm Andrea, I was based in Southeast Asia for 10 years. I ran a tour operation there.

I had a DMC, Phil Sarana Hotel, and a restaurant and have played in a lot of different parts of the tourism industry.

I now proudly work for Cultivate Advisors and work with other travel companies around the world, working with them to grow and scale their business and to kind of create the life that they want as an entrepreneur and business owner.

Cultivate Advisors, our slogan is propel your business. on the expectations. We want to help people take their business to where they want to take it.

Some people, they want to keep it a solar printer. That's great. Other people want to build an empire with you, whatever your goals are.

In terms of today's plan, you will notice I am speaking quickly. That is because I have a lot to cover.

So I am going to talk quite fast, but feel free to come off mute. Feel free to put questions in the chat.

Mickey monitors the chat. She can always interrupt me and say, hey, we have a question here. I will take questions at the end as well, but feel free to come off mute and add insight or ask a question because it can be interactive.

Don't get discouraged just because I'm talking very, very fast. The plan for today is to do a quick talk about kind of the planning mindset, where we are and where we need to be as leaders.

Then we're going to walk through our planning methodology and we are actually going to be working with our planning playbook.

And Nikki is going to drop that into the chat. for you and I'll talk a little bit more about it, but this is a tool that you guys can use.

My suggestion on how you utilize today is we're not going to be able to, I do this as a workshop at various conferences and I will say it usually is 90 minutes to two hours.

So the fact that I have about 45 minutes is why I'm speaking so quickly. But what I really want for today is have somewhere to take notes, have a pen and paper, jot things down and I'm giving you this playbook.

You can download it. It's a PDF. You can print it out and schedule time. If there's one thing you do because of this webinar today, schedule two hours sometime this month in the next few weeks where you sit down and you really focus on planning out your gear.

If you want to do that with me, shoot me an email. We can do it together, but really be intentional about setting the time to make a plan.

So why is that important? Why do we need to come into New Year with a planning mindset, and why as entrepreneurs is it even more important that we're really dialed into where we want to go.

I was watching free if my kids the other night, and the thing that jumped out at me after I got past the idea that he might fall and I was going to watch him die was that he planned his route out to the finger and toehold for the entire route.

He didn't just start climbing half dome and hope for the best. He mapped it out. He went and did it with ropes.

He went over it in his mind hundreds of times. Making that plan was why he could successfully take all the ropes off and climb a mountain.

We as business owners have to do the same thing. If we just charge ahead into the next year, as fun as that sounds, we inevitably may not end up where we want to be.

We may not get the hand holds and the foot holds that we want and need in order to be successful in our climb.

But most entrepreneurs don't necessarily have a plan. They have a lot on their to-do list, but they don't necessarily have a plan.

And what we see when we're entrepreneurs is everybody sees our success. But what people don't see is the fact that we failed, is the fact of how much we've sacrificed, the hard work we've put in, the persistence, the tears.

And I think it's important that we get into that planning mindset to understand, to reach success, to climb that mountain, and we really do need to be external in how we plan that out.

We also know that a parial journey is not a straight line. I don't know where you guys are this week or today or this hour or this minute, but sometimes it sucks.

Sometimes it's the most fun you've ever had. Sometimes it's so empowering and wonderful, and sometimes you just want to go back to bed.

So accept that in the planning as well, there are going to be ups and downs, and that's completely okay.

But we need to know where we... want to go in order to make this journey feel worthwhile. So it's time to work on the business.

Like I said, goal for today is to give you an overview of what I suggest you do when you plan those two hours and you turn off your phone and you turn off your computer and you really focus on where you want your business to go in 2025.

So let's jump right into the planning methodology. In that document that Nikki put in the chat, you'll see on the first or second page there's an introduction to our annual planning.

It'll be quite important, which I've already explained a little bit, and then it'll go into kind of the stages that we break down in our annual planning process.

I'll tell you I am a huge fan of this. I make my kids do this, they don't love it.

I, my husband and I do this, we sit down and come up with our personal goals and how we're going to achieve them.

There is something very, very rewarding about being will just sit down and make a plan and break it down into various levels.

So today we're going to start with the vision and lng-term goals. We're going to jump into what that means our annual macro goals should be.

We're going to identify some KPIs. That's usually the scariest step of this process, but I'm going to walk you through it.

Then we're going to start talking about initiatives, which I happen to think is the most fun step of this process.

And then we're going to talk about implementation. So this is the process we're going to talk through today. I'm going to give you a little bit of insight into each of these processes.

then like I said, you have that workbook so that you can sit down, take your notes from today, and really build this out.

So let's jump in. The first step in our planning methodology is to go big picture, is to really think about your vision and your long-term goals.

You're why? Why are you doing this? We all have choices every day, right? We choose whether we want to go and work at a corporate environment.

want to have our own business choose what we want to do with our time and energy. And you guys have chosen to be entrepreneurs.

So what's the why behind it? And what do you want in the next three, five or 10 years? And I like to look at this from both a personal vision perspective and a shared company vision statement.

That's because your personal vision statement might be very different than what maybe not very different, but might be different than what you want to share with your company.

I have an amazing client right now wants to exit. She has a two year plan for exit. We're not going to tell her team that, right?

That's going to scare them. It's going to change the dynamic of the office. But we also know that's her personal vision statement.

Her personal vision is in two years she's able to exit her business. Her shared company vision is in the next two years she wants to be able to hand off more to her leadership team.

She wants to create, you know, clear SOPs. So we've created a vision within the company that's going to allow it

to be easier to hand off. That's the company vision. It feeds into her personal vision, but it's good to separate them because sometimes when I was thinking about getting acquired, I didn't necessarily share it with my team until it was an appropriate time to do that, but I knew that was my vision and a lot of my goals aligned with me being able to exit at some point.

Again, this is in the workbook, so jot some notes down now, but be prepared when you get to a notebook to really dive into not just your why, but your why for you personally and then your why for your company.

One thing I like to do when I talk about the company vision, and this is going to sound a little woo-woo, but sometimes I think woo-woo is good, is to really close your eyes and think if I walk into my office in three years, where do I want that to look like?

How many people do I have working for me? When I pick up an article that's written about us, what does it say?

When I talk to one of my clients and ask them why do you work with others? what's their answer, right?

So allow yourself to really sit in that space of three years, five years, ten years. What does that day look like for you?

What do those answers sound like? And that will help you craft a little bit where you're trying to get what that vision of the company is in three, five, ten years.

I want to stop for a minute. I didn't used to have this in my presentation. I used to go from vision and we were right on to macro goals.

But I've started really talking more about enterprise value. And the reason for that is that a lot of times people focus on the exit.

And I'm the same way. I talk about exit a lot with my clients, but one of the things I've realized is that if you increase the enterprise value of your business, you actually may choose to not exit.

You may choose to go out of the world six months of the year. You may choose to semi-retire, but still have your business.

A enterprise value is a way for us to increase the value and the efficiency of your existing company so you can then make a choice of whether you want to continue to grow it, whether you want to sell it, or whether you want to step back and allow your team to run it.

So I bring this up today because as we talk about vision and company vision, it's really important to start by identifying your freedom point.

What is it from the day to day in your company? And again, I am not just talking about exit.

What do you need within your company to allow you as the owner of the company to be able to step back from the day to day and have more freedom?

So we're not going to get into that today but I like to put it out there because I like to get the ball rolling and people thinking about that.

The next important thing when you think about the enterprise value of your company is really working out for what your market value is.

And one of the things that makes a big difference in market valuable in value is your multiples. Everybody thinks, okay, somebody's gonna come in and they're gonna look at the revenue I bring in for my business and they're gonna look at the profit I bring in for my business, tell me what my business is worth.

That is actually not how it plays out when you get down to it. What happens is people come in and look at the revenue of your business and they look at the profit of your business and then they look at the enterprise value of your business.

Do you have a marketing plan in place that runs without you? Do you have a team in place that is managing their own leadership opportunities?

Can your company run successfully without you being there in the day-to-day details? That's what creates enterprise value. So at Cultivate, we've actually created a health assessment and I can give you a link to that at the end of the call but you can go in and it gives you some questions to answer about how are...

How are my sales? I'm recruiting my productivity. Because if the health of these things is high, your enterprise value is high and your multiplier becomes higher.

And then whether you want to exit or whether you want to stay on, you have an organization that can manage without you in the day-to-day and free you up to do what you want to be able to do.

So I'd just like to touch on that because as we work on the next, as we work on the next steps, this annual macro goal, it's important to be thinking about those enterprise value indicators and thinking, okay, where do I need to set goals around marketing?

Where do I need to set goals around my financials? Where do I need to set goals around the crew?

It gives you kind of a framework to have those thoughts. So we're going to jump into the annual macro goals.

Really today, want you to kind of think through what are the three most important goals need metrics you need to hit this year.

One of the reasons I like macro goals is not just to say yes to things, not just to drive the company, but they allow us to say no to things as well, right?

If I'm setting macro goals as I want to increase my revenue, I want to get to a certain profit margin, and I want to get my team say to a certain size.

If something comes up that sounds fun, and I think as entrepreneurs, we love shiny things, right? We're the octopus of the working world.

We love to find shiny and new things. We love to have new adventures, and often it's hard for us to say no when we see those shiny things.

By setting our macro goals, it allows us to really focus on what's important, on what we need to accomplish in order to get to that vision.

So I like to see our macro goals as the staircase we are going to take to get to our work.

Why? If our why is I want to create a business, I can tell you my why when I had it.

I wanted to create a business that had a certain level of revenue, certain level of profit margin, and it really was a proponent for sustainable tourism.

That was one of my lives. I wanted to go in. was based in Southeast Asia. I wanted to make sure positive impact on my community and on the area I was working in.

So my goals had to align with that vision. They had to balance out that vision in order to be the stepping stones to get there.

So when you think about those macro goals, I really want you to be thinking about, does this get me to my vision?

Does this help me accomplish my why? And if not, do I need to adjust my vision or do I need to adjust my goals?

The other thing I see a lot with goals is I see people say, I want to, let's give an example.

want to get active campaign and have a successful email marketing strategy, right? That people come to me with those kind of goals all the time.

And I want, I have to back them out and say, that's an initiative. That's a tactic. That's how we're going to get to something.

But what is that getting you? Where is that marketing campaign taking you? Oh, well, I need more clients or I want to repeat clients, right?

have these great clients. They travel with me once and then I never hear from them again. want to start marketing campaign in order to get those clients.

Okay, great. Let's set a very tangible, trackable goal that says I want to repeat, I want to increase my repeat clients by 20%.

And now, integrating active campaign and building out a newsletter mail list is going to help you achieve that macro goal.

But that macro goal a big picture idea that I can share with my team and then they can all come up with tactics and initiatives in order to get there.

So when we think of our goals in pursuit of our vision and our long-term plan, you'll see in the workbook we have a page where you can put your goal in and we have a great example here.

I want to have 400,000 in profit. What does communication look like for that? What department is managing that? know, you might have multiple departments, you might be a solo premier and you're like, these are all mine.

I'm not delegating this to anybody because I am everybody. So that's okay as well. But the other thing is to say, okay, if I have a sales goal of blank, what departments are involved in that?

Well, sales obviously is, but so is ops because they're creating the reviews that then get people to come back that increase sales.

So really think through those macro goals and what you want to achieve this year in order to keep you climbing to

at vision that you've now set to your why. I'm going to pause for a minute here because that was a lot of information.

Any questions, thoughts? Anybody want to ask anything? No, we're good. going keep talking fast. Okay, should I come up mute or put something in the chat?

have the chat open as well so I can see it. So now we've set our why. We've set our personal and our company vision.

We've kind of put that pie in the sky vision out there. We've now started to build the stepping stones, the stairs of macro goals that are going to take us to our why.

And now we have to really set an intention to track how we get to those macro goals because here's what happens a lot when I work with business owners is they say, okay, I was just talking to an owner yesterday and we're reviewing our goals from last year and kind of like, did we do we have it that go?

And But becoming credit was the goals that we set had KPIs to them, key and syndicators, the goal set that had key performance indicators attached to them.

We succeeded at or we failed at, but we knew we were failing and we'd had conversations about it. The goals that just kind of sat there, here you'll way that we wanted to get to.

Inevitably, we hadn't gotten to them. So it reemphasized with me that it is incredibly important to set smart goals that we can achieve, but also goals that we can track and know if we're getting to.

happened all the time when I was running my business is I'd be like, okay, next year, we want to hit 12 million in revenue.

That's my goal. I wanted to 12 million in sales and I would write that goal down. was goal oriented and then I'd get into the thicker things.

I would get into the tactic. the initiatives and I'd start working and turning and it would be about July when I'd look back and think, oh, no, well, yay, I didn't, I'm dependent up here.

But I hadn't been looking at it in a consistent way that allowed me to know if what I was doing was actually getting me to my goals that I had set.

So inevitably by the end of the year, look back and have this didn't get there moment. What KPIs do is they allow us to track how we're getting to that goal.

So let me show you an example of that. The KPI is going to push through the microplans that are going to allow us to know if we're getting to our goal.

So here's my lemonade stand example. This is my favorite example. So I have one of the most bustling lemonade stands on the planet and my revenue goal is 20 million.

We're going to serve a lot of lemonade. My actionable goal, right, what does that look like in My actionable goal is that I have to sell five million cups of lemonade in order to hit my 20 million revenue goal.

So when we talk about macro goals, these are my macro goals, right? I have a revenue goal of 20 million.

That's a macro goal. So how to break that down into KPIs? Well, I'm open 10 months of the year, which means based on my actionable and my revenue goal, I need to sell 500,000 cups a month.

That still feels fairly overwhelming to me, right? Do it. I could share that, but it feels overwhelming. I'm open 40 weeks, which means I have to do 125,000 cups a week.

I'm open 280 days a year because I have to sell 17,800 cups a day. I'm open 12 hours a day.

Now we're getting silly, right? Like now we're getting down into the 60 minutes in an hour. I've got to sell 24 cups per minute, right?

Nobody wants to get that dialed down to to the nuts and bolts. We want it a little bit broader so that we and our team can see actionable KPIs that we can hit.

So how do I break that down? I say, okay, if our average purchase is two cups, that means I have to have one patron every minute.

And that means that I need to get 720 patrons per day per store, because I have 12 stores out of that.

So I have 12 stores, which means I need two per minute per store, which means I now have a KPI of 720 patrons per day per store.

So what does this do for me? This number, I've taken it from this 20 million pie in the sky What that allows me to do is it allows me to go to my marketing and say, hey, hi,

700 plus people to come to every store every day. How are we going to do that? What they're going to ask me is, how many do we have coming in now?

I'm going to track that. I'm going to know my data because when we know our data, we're able to hit our goals.

I'm going to say, well, right now, we have 500 people coming in to our stores every day on average.

We're going to start seeing a gap there between where we want to be and where we are. We'll talk about that in a minute.

But then I'm going to say, well, my sales team needs to be able to manage 700 patrons a day.

one thing if my marketing team gets 700 patrons across the doorstep, awesome, well done marketing team. But now my sales team needs to be able to convert those patrons into buying two cups each.

But now we can start thinking outside the box. Now we can think, well, what if we did let me need to go?

So every patron was buying four cups each on average. Now we've put a new initiative in place that is allowing us to probably get less patrons across the door or increase our $20 million goal.

But we've taken that big hairy audacious goal and we've broken it down into a bite-sized piece that we know we can track and we know will get us to our goal.

We know that if every day we hit 720 patrons in each of our stores, that we will get to that 20 million goal.

So it's much easier for our team to then sit down and think, okay, how do I accomplish that KPI?

So KPI's are taking our big hairy audacious goals and they're breaking them down into trackable monthly, weekly, daily objectives that we can hit that are going to get us there.

Any questions about KPI's because I think this is the spot where it really does help to slow down and think it's true.

I'll give another example. for instance, I have a client who, one of our major goals for the year was to increase their profit margin.

They do great sales, but they also have to hire a lot of people because they're a tour operator, and they do a lot of service on the phone, so we have a big staff, so our expenses are high.

So we don't have a high profit. We want to increase our profit margin. So one of the KPIs we are tracking is every month we look at all the tours we've confirmed for that month, and we look at our profit margin for those tours.

Now obviously we've made some tweaks, we've added to our profit margin, we've adjusted our pricing for our clients, we've adjusted our pricing to our providers, so we've given ourselves, we've done initiatives that should be giving us that margin that we want to see, but now we are tracking it monthly to see if those changes are showing up in the numbers.

So, every month we go in and we say, okay, we booked 100,000 in tours this month, it cost us 80,000 to run those tours, we made a profit of 20,000, we hit our margins that month.

And we are looking at it month to month because that is the only way we can hold ourselves accountable.

The problem is if we wait till July and we look back, we can't sell, we can't fix it now, right?

that's happened, probably our high season has happened. Any changes we make now are going to be for next high season, we've lost the opportunity.

If I am tracking it monthly and I say, well, I've added this percentage to this, I've decreased how much we pay to our bus company, know, whatever it is, we should be seeing those margins and proving every month if we don't back in, but that's what KPIs do.

They are key performance indicators that give us insight into what's happening as we try to achieve our goals, because if we wait too long, it's too late, we're trying to be retroactive.

but instead of proactive. Any questions around KPIs? Okay. The next point I want to make as we talk about KPIs is it's important to know what we're trying to accomplish.

And I see this a lot when we work with our team, right? We'll hire somebody and say, your job is sales, but then we don't necessarily give them KPIs.

And we sometimes confuse busyness with results, right? And so I love this graph. It's saying, is this task important, or is it urgent?

If it sits in this quadrant where it's important and urgent, get it done. If it sits in this quadrant where it's important but not urgent, you need to make a time to get it done because we know as entrepreneurs that urgent always pops up, there's always something on fire.

So if something is important but not urgent, that's when you have would be very intentional about it. It's like I said, look, those two hours in your calendar to do your yearly planning, because the truth is the yearly planning is important, but it's not urgent.

There's no fire around it. It can get pushed and pushed and pushed in the next thing you know you're going into Q1 or going out of Q1 without a plan.

If it is not important and not urgent, do we really have to do it? And if it is urgent and not important, can we delegate it to somebody?

So all of my clients, I think I have this sitting on my desk above my computer and I think I tease all of them that they should have it on their desk above their computer.

If you are living down here in the not important, but urgent, you are not accomplishing and getting the results you want to get.

And that's where KPIs hold us accountable, because what KPIs should be showing us is the important. KPIs should always be sitting in this important quadrant.

They might not be urgent. It might not be urgent that you integrate active campaign in or it might not be urgent that you write that new newsletter, you know, that Rezmar is going to send out for you.

It might not be urgent that you reach out to your past clients from last year into new service here.

It is important. We have a KPI that says we're going to increase our repeat customers by 20%. That's going to allow us to to prioritize that KPI.

if we aren't hitting it, it's going to force us to stop doing the urgent putting out fires and start really focusing what's important for our business.

In terms of KPIs, I like to have two to four KPIs that I'm really focusing on. But if I have a sales team, a marketing team, and an operations team, I would have two to four KPIs for each of those teams.

And they might overlap in some ways, but I like to also delegate my KPI. APIs to certain teams. So I was, I was just saying, if you have a team member come on, it's really important that you review those annual goals that the department is assigned to.

So for instance, if my sales team, I want to increase my margins by 20%, I want to have an overall revenue of 20 million and I want to hire three more people in the sales team.

Those might be my sales team KPIs. And I'm going to share with them what those KPIs are trying to get us to.

I'm going to share those big picture goals with them so that they're bought in, so that everybody's rowing in the same direction.

I'm going to share my vision with my team too, because I want them to know, necessarily my personal vision, but the company vision.

Where are we trying to go? In three years, what do we want this to look like? In five years, what do we want this to look like?

People are excited and entertained. and empowered when they know where they're going and they know what they're working for.

If we just have people come in every day and kind of, you know, run on the treadmill of life and then leave and they don't see where that treadmill is going and we don't have ways to give them the gold star when they hit those KPIs, it's really easy for them to get disenfranchised.

It's really easy for them to get detergized. So I highly recommend that you review the annual vision and you review the annual goals of each department and then you come up with a list of the KPIs and you pick two to four with the team that they want to focus on.

It might be increasing repeat clients. It might be increasing dollar spend per client. We just came up with that KPI for a client yesterday.

We realized there's more we could be doing. They could be purchasing a second experience with us. They could be going to our gift shop.

Do we have merchandise? How do we increase or spend for each of our clients. So you come up with your two to four KPIs for that team to focus on, and then you figure out how to translate that and communicate it to the team.

Right, we don't wanna just throw numbers at people and be like, you have to sell this much this day.

I know what happens then. People get bristly and some people who are goal oriented like it, but others feel a little bit under pressure.

We have to communicate the big picture. If you're just given a KPI and you don't see where that KPI is getting you or the company, it's not fun to achieve.

But if they understand the big picture and where we're going and we're constantly coming back to, hey, we hit our KPIs for the first quarter, which means we are on track for that hairy, audacious, crazy goal that we set.

That energizes people and it keeps people engaged. So really think about what is our communication to our team? How are we doing that?

I'm holding ourselves accountable as entrepreneurs to share what's in our head. I remember my sales director once came to me and she said I think I'm a mind reader and I can read your mind but I really can't.

So can you tell me what we're trying to accomplish here? And it was a really good lesson for me because I kind of assumed everybody kind of could follow along, right?

They could figure out where my train of thought was going but that's not the case. We have to communicate.

We have to share the big picture and why behind what we're all doing every day. We also want to break down our desire cadence to measure our KPIs.

Are we looking at our KPIs daily? Are we looking at them weekly? Are we looking at them monthly? With most of my clients, we are looking at we're looking at KPIs monthly.

So just to give you kind of an insight into that, if I say my revenue goal is 20 million, I will go back and look at revenue over the last couple of years and I'll say well here's where my revenue comes in.

January is the slow month. maybe only do a million in January. That'd be right. Here it starts to pick up, so I do 5 million.

March, that's my month. We're doing $1 million that month. And I actually break it out based on past revenue.

And then I say, OK, well, this year I want to increase that by 20% or I want to get to that $20 million.

Here's how I'm going to do that. Now I have a revenue goal for every realistic. The problem with travel companies is we cannot say, I want a revenue goal of $20 million.

I'm going to divide it by $12. And that's how much revenue I have to do every month. Good luck if you do that.

You are never hitting it, right? Because we are seasonal, and it can get very, very complicated when we're trying to figure out, well, did I hit it this way?

Because my revenue goal is $2 million this month. But actually, this is my slow season. So it should be over $500,000.

And then next month should be $4 million. Take the time to break it out by month. Take the time to look at your seasonality.

Look at your past data. understand, when does my revenue come in? And there's two things with travel as well that I'm going to throw out here because not like I haven't given you enough information.

But two things with travel is I like to look at when revenue is booked and I like to look when revenue is actualized.

So in other words, when am I confirming a tour? And when are they boots on the ground? Because those are two very different things for travel.

Now, if you're an attraction, it might be slightly different. You may be getting those reservations at same month as boots on the ground.

But if you're a tour operator, that's sometimes going to be a year, 18 months ahead. So we really need to track both so that we're aware of what is our high booking season and what is our high travel season.

And I didn't learn this the hard way. I thought everybody booked in July. That was my theory. And I did all this marketing in July and I really pushed it.

And then spent in and looked and it turned out queries came in in January. I was doing no advertising in January.

I was doing no marketing in January. So I had all these inquiries coming in in January that were completely organic because I was doing nothing and then July I was doing all this marketing because that's when I thought people were shopping and I was wrong.

So when I started looking at those inquiry numbers I had a KPI of a certain number of inquiries I wanted every month.

When I started looking at those inquiry numbers I learned a lot about the habits of the clients and I then could change my marketing put money into marketing and suddenly my inquiries done because that's actually when people were booking me.

That's not when people were traveling with us but that was when people were booking with us. So really utilize to set your KPI for this year.

When you are setting KPI's you should be looking back at past data and see it in so that you can see exactly what happened in the past and how to improve it in the future.

We then want to set and hold accountable micro goals throughout the period of measurement. So like I was saying, every month we have those micro KPIs that we're trying to hit in order to get to that big end result 20 million and we share these with our team.

Most of my clients now when we send a job description to somebody, they have their their KPIs included in it, right?

So here's your job description, here's what you're doing for the company, here's how we are going to measure success and here's how we're going to track it.

And it sounds a little overwhelming. I have yet to have an employee say, I don't like this because the truth is if you are working for somebody, you want to know that you're achieving what you should be achieving.

You want to know what you are going to be judged on. Especially if there's bonuses on the line or commission on the line, you want to know what you need to achieve to be successful.

So I'm a big believer in giving people KPIs and then helping them track those KPIs so they can see how they're succeeding.

And then adjusted replan is needed in pursuit of the end KPIs. Like I said, the goals that we did well at last year with the client I met with yesterday were the ones we were tracking.

Did we hit all those goals? No, we didn't, but we knew why we didn't hit them because we had KPIs set and we could say, oh, that, you know, we had a problem with this goal because we didn't hit this particular KPI.

Do we want to keep trying to do that? Or do we want to adjust and replan? And do we need to rethink how we get to that goal?

KPIs are not there just so you can hit them. They're not just gold stars. They are there so we can track our progress and know how we're doing and be proactive about it.

Okay, so just so you can take a note as you're taking notes, as you're building out these KPIs, I think KPIs are one of the more challenging things to build out.

I build them out a lot with my clients because sometimes talking them through It's really helpful. So, come into this KPI planning page in that handbook I posted at, and it really will talk you through how you're looking to do it steps you want to take in order to get to those KPIs.

If you have additional questions on it, I can send you some tracking documents that I use, some templates that I use.

Actually, I may share those but use this page to remind you what we were talking about today and then use this age to start writing them out.

What's the annual goal? What's the KPI we want to achieve to get to that goal and how are we going to measure it?

So, let's say our annual goal is the 20 million in sales and we're looking at the sales department here.

The KPI may be that we want to increase repeat customers by 20 percent because that's going to help us get to our sales goal.

KPI might be that we want to get blank number of referrals every week, or the KPI might be that we want to increase our close rate.

For every inquiry that comes in, we've been averaging a 70% to proposal rate, and we want to increase that to 80%.

So every KPI should be in pursuit of the the goal that we're setting, and every KPI should be trackable.

Those are the big for KPI. Okay, so now we've talked about our vision and our long-term goals, how to then create those macro goals, those stepping stones to the vision, how to create those KPI's, we can track our progress on those macro goals and hold the team and ourselves accountable to them.

And now we're going to talk about my favorite part. This is the the initiatives, and this is where people tend to start.

So if I get a client on the phone and I'm like, let's talk about your goals for 2025. In evidence,

we start talking about initiatives. I want to get active campaign. I want to reach out to all my past guests and see if they'll travel with us again.

want to have all my staff talk to their friends because we need to hire more people and I love my team and they're going to have like-minded individuals.

Those are tactics. Those are initiatives. Those are the things we are going to do to hit our KPIs in order to get us to our goal in order to realize our vision.

So when you hear that more specific tactic, back yourself out and think hold on what's the- if the tactic is I'm going to talk to my team about talking to all their friends because I want to hire them, the goal is I need to hire four more sales staff this year because of our increase in volume.

So a lot of people naturally come in and don't give yourself- I'm about that. Just back yourself out and think to what end.

what end am I doing this initiative? So the way I like to think about initiatives is I take my KPI, I say, okay, my profit margin is here and I want it to be here, right?

I have a 15% profit margin and I want it to be 20%. The gap is where we identify initiatives.

How am I going to get from that 15% to that 20%. There's ways I can do it, right? can increase my pricing or I can cut my costs.

I can do a more luxury market. There's a lot of ways I could bridge that gap but the initiatives are what we tactically do to fill the gap that we're seeing in our KPI.

So where we currently are and where we want to be. Less is more. I just had a client send me her list of marketing and sales ideas for the year and there were 50 things on there and I was like, okay, cool.

We are going to discern this down and come up with five. because we don't have a team of 200 people, we have a team of six, and we need to have this be manageable and less is more.

If we can focus our energy and our time on something and know if it's been successful, then we can continue to focus on it.

If we try to focus on 20 different things, we're not gonna do a great job on any of them, and we're not gonna know what actually worked and what just didn't get the attention it needed.

So break it down, be specific, less is more. Again, there's a great page in the planning book I gave you where we can prioritize company initiatives, right?

for example, their initiatives was that, right, this is in pursuit of one of their goals. And so an example is what resources do I need?

Well, I need 15K because that's how much it's gonna cost me. I need this much for the software and I need this for the flush.

Okay, what's my timeline on this and who's responsible? So we break it down to the resources that are needed, the action timeline, how are we prioritizing this against all the other initiatives we've come up with, and who owns...

Who's held accountable for it? Now, again, you may be solopreneur and you're like, cool, the answer to all those questions is me.

And that's fine, but that means you have to be even more discerning in what you choose to do because your time is precious.

So when you come in and you prioritize those initiatives, they have to be very carefully prioritizing. You have to really think about that important versus urgent.

If you have departments, so if you're not a solopreneur and you have departments, really think about it from a departmental standpoint, meet with your sales director and say, hey, our goal is to increase sales by 20%.

What initiatives do we need to put in place to do that? What resources need is you need, what's our timeline and who's responsible that you are you handing that off to somebody?

Again, it's all in the book, so it's really helpful. Then you have your initiative implementation, and this is my favorite page in the handbook, actually, because we're going to build an initiative implementation plan.

Again, this goes back to you don't that you want to drive towards the goal. What's going to get you to that KPI?

What's going to close that gap? List the strategies and set the desired outcomes. Those desired outcomes are so important.

I had a client for Christmas get me a mug that says, what does success look like, and how are we tracking it?

She said, I say that at least once a meeting. When any time you think about a strategy or an initiative, what does success look like, and how are we going to track it?

If you can't answer, those things. You're not ready for that initiative. Then we need to lay out the task required to make that happen.

This is your to-do list. This is what we all do on a daily basis. We write our to-do list.

What do we need to get done today? But what we're trying to do here is start at a higher level so that our to-do list gets us to that vision instead of our to-do list just getting some fires put out.

Establish the timeline and the action plan to communicate to the team and identify and identify the resources required to complete the initiative.

And then we're going to set clear measurement for success and how often are we going to meet and monitor this.

Again, this is my favorite page in the workbook. You think about, okay, what's the initiative's name? Maybe the name is Implementing Salesforce.

What's my goal? Oh, I'll use their one. We want to implement a customer satisfaction improvement program. What goal is that lending itself to?

We want to achieve 90% customer satisfaction rate across all locations, that's my big hairy goal, right? How am I going to do that?

I'm going to put in place a customer satisfaction program. Oops, sorry. What are my strategies? I'm going to enhance staff training, going to implement customer feedback, and I'm going introduce the customer loyalty program.

Hey, what needs to get done in order to hit these strategies? What's my timeline? What resources do I need?

How am I tracking it? And how often am I going to monitor it? This one said they're going to do monthly reviews so that they can adjust the strategies and the timeline.

So you can literally take every initiative. So my client, the K-50 initiatives, I was like, no, no, no, no.

Let's break this down. This is more. Let's find five we really like that we think is going to get us to our KPIs and to our goals.

And then we went through each initiative and we wrote down the initiative name. What goal did it? It led to what goal it was working towards, what our strategies were, what our task were, our timelines, resources.

now her team knows exactly what they need to do to achieve this initiative in order to reach this goal.

And then we're going to meet monthly and look at her five initiatives and say, huh, this really isn't working.

People aren't filling out the customer feedback system. How are we going to solve for that? We're not waiting to July to say, oh, no, we didn't get any customer feedback the first six months of the year.

We're never going to be able to hit our many percent satisfaction because we don't even know how people are.

That's how people are. We are realizing it month one and we're creating a way to get people to fill it out.

So I love this page. This page gets everybody organized and in line. So that's the planning methodology. Start with that vision and long-term goals.

Jump into those macro goals that are going to be the step bones to your vision. identify what KPIs are going to track whether you're going to get to those macro goals, priorities, initiatives.

They're going to help you close the gap in where you are now in your KPIs and where you want to be.

And then talk through how you're going to implement those and delegate to your team so they have the tools they need, the resources they need, and the know how they need to go and achieve the initiatives that are going to close the apps that are going to get you to your macro goals.

And then just a little Dr. Seuss, you get a chance take it, if it changes your life, let it, nobody said it'd be easy, they just promise it'd be worth it.

schedule those two hours, sit down, turn off all the distractions, turn off the phone, turn off the computer, work through that planner that we've sent you, take kind of be like, oh yeah, remember for mentioning this, use this as kind of a framework to go and do this work to give your

of that two hours and then go and communicate it with your stakeholders. Whoever that is, if you're a solar printer, it might be your guides and your drivers.

And I'm not saying they want to hear two hours of you talking about your company's goals, but they want to understand how they fit into the big picture of what you're doing.

They will be better employees and better guides and drivers if they know what the end goal is here. So include every day in this.

The next step to this is really motivating your team and including them in the conversation. Feel free to reach out anytime.

My email is here. It's Andrea at cultivateadvisors.com. We have a business assessment. If you're curious what your health and value assessment, what your enterprise value is for your company, reach out to me and I will send you our health and value assessment that you could take for your company.

It's really helpful as you do this kind of planning because you can see like, oh, I got a score of 80 on marketing.

Great. I'm going to leave. As is, but oh my gosh, my financials are at 40 because I'm not doing the reporting.

I should be doing Use some insight into where you should be focusing because if we can rise the tide on that enterprise value It really gives you a great outcome Um, so feel free to reach out anytime we Create rising sessions.

can get on a call with me for two hours I can hold you accountable to making this 2020 plan and give you some insight and some templates Anybody I cannot believe I managed to finish on time.

Nikki. That's that's the first for me So if anybody has any questions, feel free to come up mute ask questions or put them in the chat.