Embark on a voyage with me, Morris Sims, alongside Cindy Minor, as we set sail on the inaugural episode of the Travel Masters Podcast. Chart a course with us through personal transformation, from my own evolution from chemical engineer to working with travel professionals, to your upcoming adventure in carving out a niche in the competitive travel industry. We’re your seasoned guides, navigating you through the seas of growth, effective planning, and the bustling ports of group sales and legal know-how. Every adventurer needs a map, and this episode unfurls the parchment to reveal the treasures of client acquisition, marketing mastery, and the fine art of seamless operations.
Become your own Imagineer with the Clarity Principle, your first step to success. As we share tales of strategy and the importance of knowing your 'why,' you’ll find yourself steering closer to your vision of an ideal travel planning enterprise. We’ll regale you with the art of conversation that opens doors and debunks the myths about the relevance of Disney Travel Experts and other travel in the digital age. Prepare to expand your horizons, make new allies, and book those Disney Dreams for clients who’ll look to you as their trusted guide.
With the Travel Masters Learning Community at your side, your quest to build a thriving business is just beginning.
Embark on a voyage with me, Morris Sims, alongside Cindy Minor, as we set sail on the inaugural episode of the Travel Masters Podcast. Chart a course with us through personal transformation, from my own evolution from chemical engineer to working with travel professionals, to your upcoming adventure in carving out a niche in the competitive travel industry. We’re your seasoned guides, navigating you through the seas of growth, effective planning, and the bustling ports of group sales and legal know-how. Every adventurer needs a map, and this episode unfurls the parchment to reveal the treasures of client acquisition, marketing mastery, and the fine art of seamless operations.
Become your own Imagineer with the Clarity Principle, your first step to success. As we share tales of strategy and the importance of knowing your 'why,' you’ll find yourself steering closer to your vision of an ideal travel planning enterprise. We’ll regale you with the art of conversation that opens doors and debunks the myths about the relevance of Disney Travel Experts and other travel in the digital age. Prepare to expand your horizons, make new allies, and book those Disney Dreams for clients who’ll look to you as their trusted guide.
With the Travel Masters Learning Community at your side, your quest to build a thriving business is just beginning.
Would you like to have a place where you can learn from people in the travel industry and some of the best business gurus out there, folks that can help you in your travel business? Would you like to have a place where you go hear from those folks? Well, you found it. This is it. Welcome to the Travel Masters Podcast. I'm your host, morris Sims. Welcome to the Travel Masters podcast. We're here to help travel advisors and travel agency owners get what they really want from their business. I'm Morris Sims, and I'm going to be your host for our podcast.
Morris Sims:
I'm an ex-chemical engineer turned life insurance agent. I got to tell you selling life insurance was a lot more fun for me than being an engineer. After a few years, they asked me to teach other people how to do what I was doing. And well, long story short, we wound up in New York City for 20 years. That was quite a change for a young Alabama boy. I retired after 20 years as the vice president and chief learning officer, where my team and I trained over 12,000 agents and their managers to be independent business owners and sales professionals. Now I'm not one to stop working, so I started my own business and I was blessed to find a sweet spot with travel professionals that I was able to help Now. So I started my own business and I was blessed to find a sweet spot with travel professionals that I was able to help Now I've got several travel agency consulting clients and I'm the co-founder of the Travel Masters Learning Community, where we provide opportunities for travel professionals to become more effective, efficient and to get what they want from their business.
Morris Sims:
On this podcast, I'm going to be interviewing guests that I believe are going to have a message that can be of help to you our travel professional community and I'll do some solo episodes as well with some other stuff that I really think can help you and your business. So, with all that said, hey, let's get this party started with today's episode. What do you say? Hey, thanks for joining me. We thought maybe our first show should focus on just exactly what this podcast is designed to be and how it's going to help you. Also, in this show, we're going to show you a practical way to build a clear foundation for your business. If that sounds good, let's go ahead and do it. You ready, here we go.
Morris Sims:
First, I guess you should know a little bit about me. I don't know, it's a long story, but it all comes up to today and after being in business and teaching business people and professional salespeople to improve their business, their operation, my partner, cindy Minor, and I began working together on her travel agency and we found that we were able to have a positive impact on a lot of people. We discovered a significant need among travel advisors in general to learn more about running a business and professional sales. That gave birth to the Travel Masters Learning Community, and Cindy and I founded that together. This podcast is an outgrowth of the Travel Masters Learning Community. We want to share with everyone some of the things that we're learning inside Travel Masters and I hope that we're going to be of service to you and your family in helping you grow your business.
Morris Sims:
We're going to interview owners and advisors, as well as other specialists, to capture ideas and concepts that you can take away today and help your business grow right now, because growth is so very important to any business. See, there is no standing still. There's no hold. Steady as she goes, boys, it doesn't work. There is no look. Keep doing what we're doing. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Morris Sims:
In business, especially today, you have to be engaged and working hard to grow your business, why? Well, the way it works is, if you're not growing, you, truthfully, are going backwards. Yeah, we and our guests are going to show you practical ways that you can begin to grow your business. Sometimes we'll use direct instruction and teach you something, and sometimes we'll just give you a living example of how it can work and what other advisors and other agency owners have done. Example of how it can work and what other advisors and other agency owners have done. Each time I record an episode, I ask the guest what have you got for us that you'd like to teach our audience today? See, I want our guests to teach you something that is practical, something to help you and your business grow right now, not, you know, down the road after you buy their book and do this, that or the other. I want them to give you something that's going to help you today.
Morris Sims:
Here's some of the topics that we're going to be exploring. The clarity principle is a topic we're going to hit on today. Planning for yourself and your business Travify We've got some of the best folks at Travify coming to talk with you and share their ideas. Group sales how do you make that happen? The legalities of running a travel business. Well, that's something everybody's got to know and we've got some great attorneys to chat with you. The difference between professional sales and all the rest of those folks out there finding more people to talk to Key question for anybody in any kind of any form of service providing sort of a deal like. We are where you got to find the right people to work with, right. We're going to give you some ideas about that Staying visible and making marketing automatic so that you don't have to worry about it every day it happens.
Morris Sims:
How do you use systems in your business? How to build the best systems and then how to use them in your business. How to build the best systems and then how to use them in your business, because systemizing things and creating systems is how you grow. It's also how you begin to let go and have more free time for yourself. That's another topic.
Morris Sims:
How to help your prospective traveler decide to book their trip that's a big one. How are you going to help them make a decision decide to book their trip that's a big one. How are you going to help them make a decision? How to avoid growing crickets in your office? Did you know you can grow crickets. Well, you can, and we're going to show you how to avoid that, why we should eliminate the word quote from our vocabulary with clients and prospects. That's a show I could talk about an hour on. Just by that Quote ought to come out of the dictionary. It shouldn't even be there anymore, and we've got a whole lot of other topics besides that. But those are just a few ways that we're going to be able to create a show, create an episode that's going to help you grow your business.
Morris Sims:
The Travel Masters podcast is here to help you do just that to help you grow, because there ain't no backing up, there's only growing and going forward. So with that, here's a quick business principle that I believe can help you in your business. I've shared this with a lot of groups all over the country and always it's eye-opening. So here we go you ready? I call this the clarity principle. The premise of this principle is that you and I must have a clear, real vision about a lot of things in business. But the first three things to become totally clear on are these you ready? Number one get really, really totally clear about what it is you want from your business. Now I'm not talking about. Well, you know, when I get to here, I'm going to buy a brand new car. When I get there, I'm going to get a house. Next time I go, I'm going to get a houseboat or a new house or a new boat or whatever. I'm talking about the big picture here.
Morris Sims:
What does your ideal day really look like in detail? If you could make it whatever you wanted it to be, if you had a magic wand and you could say poof, this is the way I want to live my life forevermore. What do you want to do? You want to get up and play golf every day. You want to just spend time with the kids and the grandkids and not, you know, work on anything. Okay, whatever it is, what do you want to do? What does your day look like? What do you want to do when you get up? Who do you interact with all day long? How do you spend your time, and how much time do you spend in the business and how much time do you spend doing other things? Don't worry about how you get to that point. Just worry about what you want it to look like. What do you want it to feel like? What do you want it to sound like and smell like. Use your senses, all your senses, create that vision, that picture, that movie, if you will. What do you want? Now, it's not what somebody else tells you that you should want. It's not what the world says your next step should be.
Morris Sims:
The question was what do you want from your business? Okay, so spend some quality time thinking on purpose about that, do some brainstorming and see what you can come up with. Number two now that you know what you want. After you figure out that first one, now that you know what you want, the next question is to answer, to become really clear about why you want it. Now some guy in the back of the room just stood up and said Morris, don't be stupid, I have bills to pay and a family to support. That's why I want to have a successful travel agency. That's why I want to be a successful travel advisor. And you know that's absolutely right, it's correct, it's true, it's right, it's honorable, it is a good answer to the question.
Morris Sims:
But I'm asking you to dig deeper. Dig deeper and get below the surface of that knee-jerk response to the question. Why Answer the question, then ask why Keep going? Get an answer and then ask why about that answer? For example, I want to provide for my family. Okay, why? Why do you want to provide for your family? Well, it's the right thing to do. It is the right thing to do why? Well, if you don't do it, then not good things happen, it's true. Tell me more. Well, my dad had problems covering the mortgage and actually we got thrown out of one house, and I never want my kids to have to see that. Now we're getting somewhere. You keep asking why? Until there's nothing else to say about it and you've gotten down deep into that area.
Morris Sims:
Where that why? The answer to that why? Question is wrapped in passion and fueled with emotion. It's got to be something you're excited about, something that moves your heart and your soul, as well as your mind. That kind of why gets you out of bed in the morning, causes you to jump over obstacles and do things that you might not really want to do, because your why is wrapped in passion and fueled with emotion. It's what powers you to do what you need to do to grow your business. So get really clear on that why and keep asking that question. I mean, I answered it for myself and it was why do you want to do this. Well, I want to help other people, okay, why? Well, it's something I've been doing all my life is helping other people, and I want to do that in my business. I want my business to do that. Okay, why, why, why, why, morris, why Finally got down to? I want to earn some money for my family to be able to do things that I've never been able to do with them before because I was too wrapped up in my career and my advancement in the corporate world, and I need the money to be able to do that. So that, for me, is wrapped in passion and fueled with emotion. When I can have the resources to take my grandkids and my kids to Colorado and see the mountains that they've never seen before and the Alabama border and spend two weeks down there at our place and enjoy being there and to have a place. I need the resources to be able to do those things for my kids and, even without quote-unquote resources, just to spend more time with the family. That's why that's what I really want, and why I really want it is because I've never been able to do it before.
Morris Sims:
Now the third and final step is to get really clear on how you plan to get what you want. How are you going to get there? All right, now we're going to talk practical. We're going to talk about how are you going to make that happen. We call that your strategy and it answers that. How question? Your strategy is the answer to the question how are you going to get there? It requires some work, but it results in a clear path or a map for how you plan to grow your business Big picture. Then, once that's done, then we've got to create a strategic action plan. Now we're getting tactical and that's one of our next topics.
Morris Sims:
The clarity principle says you've got to be really clear on what you want, why you want it and how you plan to get there. And that, how is your strategy. So, what is a strategy? Well, maybe you're in the business of selling blue widgets to doctors. That's going to be my strategy. I'm going to sell blue widgets to pediatricians, because pediatricians need blue widgets, and I'm going to do that by getting in front of pediatricians at their annual meeting. Whatever the case may be, you've got a strategy. Now I'm going to sell my blue widgets to pediatricians. I know where they gather and I'm going to go meet them there. Now I have a strategy. My strategic action plan is going to take that to the next step and say, okay, here's what you need to do to make that happen. Step one, two, three, four and five. So there you have it. What do you want, why do you want it and how are you going to get there? Then we begin to create a strategic action plan and, as I said before, that's going to be the topic of the show coming up. So hang on to your hat, we'll get there and we'll help you create that strategic action plan.
Morris Sims:
Your homework for this week is to take the time to actually go through these questions and answer them for yourself. Do some brainstorming some time off by yourself, with a cup of coffee or a cup of tea, or an adult beverage, if you like, but take some time to think on purpose and answer those three questions and then you can begin to build a plan to actually put it all in place. Your homework for this week is to do that and also to go out and find somebody new to start a conversation with. That's going to be your homework every time. I'm just going to tell you that's always your homework. That's what it means to run a business.
Morris Sims:
You got to get out there and talk about your business.
Morris Sims:
You're having a conversation. You got to allow the conversation to get to that point of having those folks that you're talking to say so, gee, morris, what do you do Then? You can answer their question. Well, you know, I help people plan and have the best vacations that they have ever had, and all they have to do is show up and have fun, get out there and talk to people about your business. You tell them that they're going to ask you.
Morris Sims:
Well, tell me more, tell me how, or are you a travel agent? I didn't think they existed. Well, sure they do. There are over 100,000 in the United States alone. Get out there and make some new friends and book some trips. You can do this and we can help you do it. I hope to see you next time right here on the Travel Masters podcast. Hey, thanks so much for listening. We have a lot of great episodes coming your way, so make sure you tune in and get to those Travel Masters podcast episodes that are going to help you build your business. Until next time, I'm Morris Sims for the Travel Masters Learning Community. You.