How to Turn Your Travel Business Dreams into Reality

Here’s a question: do you dream about your travel business on a regular basis? I don’t mean, “I’d like to sell more travel next year.” I mean really dream about it.

Can you picture what your business looks like three or five years from now? Who are your clients? What kinds of trips are you selling? How much are you earning? How many hours are you working? Are you still doing everything yourself? Are you leading a team? Are you traveling more? Do you have more freedom?

Can you actually see it? Can you feel today what it will feel like then?

I think dreaming is an important part of entrepreneurship. In fact, I think we underestimate just how important it is. Most meaningful businesses start in someone’s imagination long before they exist in the real world.

But dreaming in the early days alone isn’t enough. We need to keep dreaming in a very specific way, and we need to connect these dreams to actions.

There’s a progression: Dream it, see it, understand why you want it, and then work backward to today. That last part is where things sometimes fall apart.

Dreaming vs. Visualizing

There’s a big difference between passive day-dreaming and visualizing.

A dream says, “Someday, I’d love to have a multi-million dollar travel agency.” But a vision gets specific. A vision details out what the agency sells, how many clients it serves, what its average booking value is, how many bookings it takes to reach that number, where the clients come from, what you personally do each day, what you’ve hired or outsourced and no longer do, and more.

The clearer you can make the picture, the easier it becomes to recognize what must change to get there.

Then Ask Why

Once you have a clear picture that you can see, there is another layer that matters even more.

Why do you want it?

Maybe you want financial independence, or to finally leave your corporate career, or to build something you can pass to your children one day, or the freedom to travel eight weeks a year, or maybe you simply want to prove to yourself that you can build something meaningful from scratch.

There is no right answer for everyone, but there does need to be an answer for you.

“I want to make $150,000 a year” is a goal, and personally, I think goals are overrated.

“I want to make $150,000 a year so Jillian and I can travel more, I can control my schedule, and I can build something that gives my family more freedom” is motivation. The number is irrelevant. It’s the “so...” part that matters.

Goals tell you where you’re going, but it’s your why that helps you keep moving when getting there stops being fun. And trust me, at some point, it will stop being fun, at least for a little while.

The Danger of Living Too Far Ahead

Watch out though, because there's a trap in all of this. Sometimes thinking about our future becomes a very productive-looking form of procrastination.

We make vision boards, we redesign the logo, we research the CRM we’ll need when we have 2,000 clients, we imagine the assistant we’ll hire when we reach $750,000 in sales, we plan the group travel division we’re going to launch someday, and so on.

Meanwhile, there are three proposals sitting in our inbox waiting for follow-up or a phone call to a client who hasn’t booked in a while that we could make.

The future is exciting and today can be boring and hard. Unfortunately, businesses are built mostly in the boring parts: the follow-up call, the client note entered into the CRM, the email campaign you actually send, the supplier training you complete, the referral you remember to ask for, the prospect you contact even though you would rather spend another hour perfecting your website.

Dreaming matters because it gives direction to your work, but the work still needs to happen.

A Simple Way to Connect the Two

Here’s an exercise I’d encourage you to try.

1. Write your three-year picture.

Take 15 minutes and describe your business three years from now. Be specific. Revenue, clients, niche, schedule, team, travel, lifestyle. Don’t worry yet about whether you know exactly how to get there.

2. Write your why underneath it.

Why would achieving that vision meaningfully change your life?

Go deeper than money. What does the money allow, what does the business allow, what does success actually give you?

3. Ask what must be true one year from now.

If the three-year vision is going to happen, where should you reasonably be twelve months from today?

Maybe you need 75 active clients, maybe you need a 40 percent proposal close rate, maybe you need a defined niche, maybe you need to finally start consistently marketing.

Now the dream is becoming a plan.

4. Bring it down to the next 90 days.

What are the two or three outcomes that would move you materially closer?

Not twenty things, just two or three.

5. Finally, ask the most important question: What does today need?

This is where the magic happens, because you cannot build your three-year business today. You can, however, send five follow-ups, call one past client, finish one training, publish one piece of content, ask one happy traveler for a referral, or improve one step of your sales process.

This is how a real business, your future business, is built!

Keep One Eye on the Horizon and One on the Road

Entrepreneurs have to live in two places at once.

Part of us has to live in the future. We need to imagine something that doesn’t exist yet and believe strongly enough in it to keep moving toward it.

But most of our time has to live right here in the today.

Dream about the agency you want to own, visualize it in ridiculous detail, ground it in a why powerful enough to pull you through the difficult stretches, and then come back to today and do the next thing that moves you toward it.

The TL;DR: Dream big, work today. Repeat.