A Map To Your Future (and the Pre-Work That Makes It Work)

Roadmaps have been on my mind lately. Not the glossy, laminated kind we used to keep in our cars, but the kind we build for our businesses, our clients, and even our own sanity. 

At WorldVia, our team is working on refinements to our product and development roadmap. When you’re mapping out where AIVIA, WorldVia PRO, our calendar of events, and the broader advisor platform we’re building is headed, the act of planning becomes just as energizing as the destination itself! You start appreciating how powerful a directional plan can be. Not because it predicts the future, but because it organizes your purpose and intention. 

There’s something grounding about a roadmap. It doesn’t have to predict every twist and turn, and it shouldn’t try to. The best roadmaps aren’t rigid, they’re intentional, directional, and flexible. They help us decide what matters, what doesn’t, and what’s worth building toward. 

Which makes me think about anyone building a travel business right now. 

Every travel advisor is a product owner. Your product is the experience you deliver to your clients: your expertise, your process, your style, your systems, your service. And just like any great product, it evolves. It needs to. But evolution doesn’t happen by accident. It happens through the discipline of stepping back, zooming out, and building a loose, but thoughtful, roadmap. 

A roadmap is a compass. 

It provides enough structure to guide your decisions without choking your creativity or momentum.  

 But before you build your roadmap, you need the pre-work: the Three Buckets. 

This is your mental decluttering exercise, your strategic warmup, your “organize the ingredients before you cook” moment. 

 The Three Buckets 

1. Start Doing: What would create more client value if you simply began?
2. Stop Doing: What is draining your time, hurting your margins, or stealing your energy?
3. Improve Doing: What are you already doing that works… but could work even better?

Before you start slotting ideas into the three buckets, here are some questions that can help kickstart your thinking: 

• What changes will deliver the most value to my clients with the least effort from me? 

• What do clients ask me repeatedly that I could answer proactively? 

• Where do I waste time today that I could eliminate with a template or system? 

• What part of my process feels harder than it should? 
• Which part of the client experience feels the least “wow” right now? 

Your ideas might include things like: 

• Improve my proposal process so clients get their quote faster and with clearer options. 

• Start a referral campaign I can run every month. 

• Stop recreating my emails from scratch and build templates instead. 

• Improve my destination expertise in Italy before summer. 
• Stop booking lower-value trips that drain my time and energy. 

Some items are strategic. Some are operational. Some are about mindset. All of them matter because they shape the product you put into the world. 

This exercise is deceptively simple, but if you take 20 minutes and force yourself to be honest, you uncover the bones of your next 90 days of growth. 

Little ideas. Big ideas. Nagging frustrations. Untapped opportunities. Everything gets sorted, and here’s the magic: Your roadmap will practically write itself once you do this. 

Don’t build a “roadmap” yet 

If you just do the Three Bucket exercise above, I think you’ll be shocked by the clarity that emerges and you’ll be ready for Part Two. 

Best Success, 
Jason 

PS, I’d love to hear some of the ideas you come up with using the Three Bucket exercise. Share them with me at jblock@worldvia.com.