How to start a tour company

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my newsletter readers, Christine, who's an entrepreneur in Kenya and she's a tour operator. So she takes tourists around in Kenya who are visiting and shows them a good time and shows them the country. Pretty new business and wanted my advice on growing it. So she has 3 main target markets that she's going after. One are the tourists, so international tourists looking to view the country. The second are honeymooners, so people coming just after getting married and on vacation. And the third are corporate clients, and they're often coming for different team-building activities. So Christine, having been on a number of trips myself internationally, and I've never been to Africa, but I've gone to a number of different countries on trips, especially when you're coming off of cruise ships or you're looking for tour offers to go with, the biggest thing that I think you can offer is service. Most of the time when you land, and I'm thinking especially off of cruise ships, when you land, you get off and there's a thousand different tour operators coming at you and you don't know how to differentiate one from the other, and the biggest fear that you're gonna have is that you're going to make a mistake and go with the wrong person, you're going to have a bad experience. Some people are worried about safety depending on the country that you're going into, but for the most part it's having a bad experience and being stuck for a whole day with a tour operator who's not going to give you either good value or good service. And it's really, really hard to tell what a good service is going to be from a bad service just from landing on, you know, going to the dock or going to the airport and seeing the people kind of pitching you their different ideas. So it's the biggest fear that people are going to have, and for agents who are going to be referring you, for international travel agents who are booking trips on behalf of these guys, it's also really hard for them to tell who's going to provide good service or not. So service, 5-star service, excellent service is really going to help you stand out. So there's a couple different ways that you can do it. The first thing I would do is I would put people in uniforms. If you have somebody in uniform, and I appreciate that it's very hot in Kenya, so, you know, short sleeves, shorts even, but something that looks professional. If you did that, right away you're gonna stand out from everybody else who's coming at you. So I've been to a lot of different cities and countries, and again, you're pitched by all sorts of people, and they often look, you know, they're in regular street clothes. You don't really know if this is a company or just some guy in the back of his van that you're getting into. So if you had professional sign, professional uniforms that people are into, you're already setting a standard of service that's higher than everybody else, and it's gonna be a lot easier for you to get the North American clients who are looking for some kind of trust, and people put a lot of trust in that service and having uniforms. The next thing, make sure everything is clean and make sure everybody you hire is super friendly. So clean, again, if they're in uniform, make sure the uniforms are clean. Whatever vehicle they're coming to pick people up in, make sure those are clean because a lot of times they're not, in a lot of countries that I've been to at least. Make sure the signage is clean. It's not all scuffed up and people handing you photocopies of things that don't look very professional. You want to have a professional image and you can even charge a premium. People who are on vacation or who are honeymooning or corporate, they are looking to spend money. When I get off on a cruise ship and I'm landing in a country, I want to spend money, I want to have a good time. I'm just worried that I'm going to spend it with the wrong person. So people would pay you a premium to ensure that they're going to have a really good experience. And that's why people on cruise ships often book through the cruise operator because they know they're going to get a pretty good experience and it's been vetted by the cruise ship before. But it's a huge, huge price increase and they're willing to pay it. So if you can immediately off the, off the boat or people landing on their plane or however they're getting there, show them that you look highly professional and guarantee they're going to have a good experience, you're going to be able to charge a premium and get more business. So again, everything must be clean and you want people to be friendly. Greet with a smile, ask people how they're doing. You know, you want to train anybody who's working on the front lines dealing with customers to be friendly, answer questions, make it a good time. People are there to have fun, so you want to make sure you're having fun people who you hire as well. Something that I would also encourage you to do, and I don't know how feasible it is, but I would try to hire expats or students from the countries that you're trying to recruit from. So for example, if you're trying to attract Americans to come in and sign up, I would try to get an expat American or American students to be there selling your services for you. If I see somebody who is more like me, you're more likely to sign up with them. And a quick example, when I went to Japan, I was the only guy from North America who I could see in Japan. Very Japanese-centric, which is great, and immediately you're faced with culture shock. So you're not quite sure what to do, you may not understand the language, you're walking around, you're not quite sure where you're going. And there was another guy who I met on the streets who was from North America, and immediately you make friends because you're the only two who are the same and everybody else is different. This is a big culture shock, and immediately we were able to strike up a conversation, start talking. He introduced me to where he was hanging out and gave me some recommendations. So I could see the same thing happening where it could be a big culture shock for somebody from North America coming to Kenya, not knowing where to go, not knowing the language, the culture. So if you had somebody working for your company who was from North America or UK or Australia who spoke the language, who understood the culture, and could speak with people on their own terms in their own their own culture, it'd be a lot easier to get people to sign up. So if a tour operator came to me in any of the countries that I landed in and it was somebody from the US or Canada or Britain, I'd be a lot more willing to start talking to them and it'd be easier for me to sign up with them. If they were clean-cut, friendly, in uniform, and looked like me, it'd be a lot easier for me to want to do business with them. So just because there's so much culture shock, it's an easy way for you to stand out. Now you still want to provide the Kenyan experience, right? People are there to experience Kenya. But if you had some people on the front lines who are more like the people who you're selling to, as much as you can relate to your customer, the easier it is to be able to sell them. So I'd look at if there's any expats or students from the countries to be able to bring them on board to be on your front lines as well to help talk to customers. The last thing I would do then is also get on TripAdvisor and encourage people to leave positive comments. So whenever we do any of our travels, we'll always go on TripAdvisor and see what are the most common things that people do, what's getting the most feedback, and we're trying to plan our day, right? We may not have a lot of time in whatever city we're going to, whatever country, so you want to make sure it's time well spent and you're getting kind of the maximum value from it. So TripAdvisor is a great place to go, and if we see that one tour operator is getting tons of great remarks for the great service they have and how friendly everybody is and how clean everybody is, I'm gonna go and book with those guys even if it's at a premium to everybody else. And I'll probably even do the booking in advance to make sure I get my spot so then there's less sales that you'll have to do when people get there. They're already pre-booking and that'll help with a lot of your cash flow issues as well because people are paying upfront and you're delivering the service whenever they arrive in your country. So hopefully that helps. It might be a little different than what you were expecting, but I think there's a real opportunity for you to be able to stand out using that 5-star service methodology and be able to get a lot of those people to come and want to work with you and pay you more money than they'd be paying the other guys. So hopefully that helps. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up below, and I also look forward to hearing your comments if you want to leave one under the video. And stay tuned for the next episode.