Alignment = Profit: Fix Your Calendar, Systems, and Client Boundaries

Hey there! Welcome to The No BS Travel Advisor. This is the solo edition. Just me, Marcie Muensterman, my mouth, my mistakes, and the real stories from 19 years in this wild-ass industry. There will be no guests here. No censorship, no filters, just the truth behind how I burned out, rebuilt, and finally learned to run this business like the CEO that I am. And if you're an independent advisor who suspects your host might suck, hate Working for free and appreciates a well-placed F-bomb, you're in the right damn place. So let's go. Hey y'all, it's Marcie, your No BS Travel Advisor Coach. And today we're going to talk about the thing that's quietly but actively draining your business. We've talked about so much in the last couple of weeks in Solo Podcasts, and we're going to keep revisiting some of these themes. And today is kind of one of those, how do we truly level up faster than we did last year, or even faster than we did last week without the burnout, without feeling overbooked, without being underpaid? I know a lot of you are still sitting there like, I can't figure this out, Marcie. And oh my gosh, you guys, I am so tired today. I have struggled doing this podcast because my brain is in all of these other places. I am you. So never ever feel alone. It's like I have all All these goals, I have all these things I want to do, right? And it's like, how do I manage all of that time? And while I hire a lot of help to manage mine, I still get headaches in the very top of my brain from all the ideas and how little time I have to roll them out. So I don't want you to feel like, oh, she has all her shit together all the time. In fact, I can tell you this: I still struggle with some of the very things. That I talk about on this show. The one thing that I continually have to come back to is if I'm struggling, it's because of the choices I am making. I used to blame everyone, my travel agent owner, my colleagues, my clients, my family. I mean, we've all blamed our kids for a few things over the years, right? We've all blamed our husband for not helping us around the house. We love to blame. A toxic host, even though we're the ones that signed the contract. We'd love to blame the addiction to social media when in fact we're the ones that have all the apps on our phone. So the thing that I can tell you is, A, you're not alone. You can sit there with your coffee. We are, we are in it together. Okay. We are commiserating, but it is no one's fault but your own if your business is not where you want it to be. Life happens and things happen and things slow it down. But it is you that has to motivate yourself, has to dedicate the time, has to prioritize your business. It is not going to get done by anyone else. You say you want freedom, but your calendar is total fucking chaos. You also have this tendency to say yes far too much. You think you have to go to every training. You think you have to show up at every event. You have to go to every supplier lunch. You have to go on every fam you're invited to, every conference that's out there. Guys, you don't have to do any of that shit. And in fact, I would challenge you to think about the return on investment of that stuff. And we're really going to get into that because there is something missing, but it is not another trip. It is not another flight to another country. It really isn't those things. Every time you go somewhere, you are giving up not only money to go because nothing is ever free. But also your time. Every choice you make to say yes to something that you aren't in alignment with is saying no to something that could move your business or life in the direction you want it to go. So the stuff we're going to talk about here, it really can be for any entrepreneur. It can be for anyone who feels out of control in their life. And I was inspired to do this podcast because I was a guest on Mary Beth Lynn's Gold Couch series this week. I spent an entire amazing, incredible 90 minutes with hundreds of travel advisors and Mary Beth, and we discussed what alignment actually means. All of the Gold Couch series will be available in quarter 1 next year in case you did miss it. You will need to re— wait until she releases those episodes on her website. We should totally encourage her to do a podcast too, as if she has all the time in the world. Because these Gold Couch Series events were so amazing. And I was just lucky enough to be a guest on her last one. When I sat down with her, I was just listening to all of the things that they tackled in the series. But the one thing we were discussing this week that really just, I wanted to keep talking about it, is alignment in your business, which means then getting alignment in your life. And I don't mean like the cute little Pinteresty kind, like where everything matches and the brand colors are on and the font is beautiful. I mean, like real alignment, like your everyday choices that lead you to the next thing so that you can accomplish the goals you have everywhere, not just in your business, but in your relationships, in the goals you have set as a family. Because what she basically explained to all of us is our business is like a house. And if you don't have a proper foundation and you don't have a proper frame, And you don't ever put the doors or the windows on in the order that they need to be put on, you are never going to have the house that you desire. She also talked about where that house is. Is it in the country? Is it an apartment in the city? Is it, you know, along a busy highway or is it in a campground? And if our house is not where we want it to be, we're going to have to pivot and figure out where we're going to live instead, or where essentially where we're going to operate our business instead. And these things can change over time, depending on where you are in your business. And anything can be changed at any time, as long as you have a plan and a workflow. And a workflow is the step-by-step process in which you run your business. And every single bit of your business has its own workflow. So having alignment in your business means knowing what you sell in this world of travel. What is your fee pricing? What are your office hours? How do you organize your systems and your email and your marketing? Are you in alignment with your host or your travel agent partnership? Are you selling the hotel through the vendors that you have chosen and you enjoy working with? Are you focusing on your boundaries? And most importantly, are you attracting aligned clients? Because if All of these things are out of alignment, you will spin your wheels. If even one pillar is off, you will feel that unstable, rocky, like you're— like if you're in a car and the tire goes flat, like it pulls you in this off direction. Like that is going to happen because you're going to get more exhausted trying to get it back on track. You know, I always compare it to like going off the rails. You're no longer conducting your own train when we let all of this stuff get out of alignment. Because you become overscheduled, you feel super underpaid for the time you invest, and you're wondering, you're sitting there just wondering, like, I work all these hours and I'm not making any money, and I'm always on for people and I'm always answering, and I just can't get my shit together. And that's what her entire Gold Series is about. So I— or Gold Couch Series is about. So if she releases it in quarter 1, you have to go listen. But We all know that all of this stuff is compounded in your business by having another job, by being a mom or a caretaker or any other obligation that we commit ourselves to. I want you, I want you to feel like the CEO we all know you are and can be. Then your business has to work like a business. If that's what you want in your life, you have to take back control and This is not a scavenger hunt of random tasks. In fact, for the most part, it is a very standard workflow that most of us need to be operating in. Now, you might operate in different hours than me. You may operate in different locations. Maybe you need to work in a coworking session. Maybe you like to work at Starbucks. I like to be in my office. That's where I like to be. I don't like to be out and about trying to work on my laptop anymore. I used to do that. I used to work in my basement. I used to work with my breastfeeding child on top of me, but I no longer do that. I dedicate a certain amount of hours every day to my business in my office, and that is where I'm most productive. So today I am going to walk you through some of the reasons you are completely out of alignment and a few ideas on how to get back into alignment, tighten up your time, kill the fake busy. I'm putting that in quotes, fix those workflows and set some boundaries that actually Stick. This is how you will reduce time wasting, because I don't know if you guys know, but you waste an enormous, and I mean enormous amount of time. I want you to get back on track without adding more to your plate. Now that doesn't mean that when you're getting things set up that you won't have to stop something to start something. So one of the biggest things I always teach my clients how to do is to put an out of office on. You have to put this out of office on. For the length of time you need to implement a change. And you might be like over there, like, what do you mean an out of office? I can't just go out of office. I have clients. I have this. Yes, you do. But if you do not actually put up an out of office and block the time, you will never implement new processes. You will never implement new workflows. You will never set new boundaries. You will never finish that course. You have to turn things off to get things organized. So as with every episode of the podcast, I have to remind you that it takes fucking time to make change. And the longer you put it off, the more miserable you typically are going to be because you're just going to be circling the drain the same way you always circle the drain. There's no stopper because you're not making the changes. Time is the most valuable thing we have, and we have to give it back to ourselves before we can keep pouring it into others. We have to work on our business from the overflow and not from whatever's left over. So one of the things that I teach my clients how to do is choose one thing per week. Turn your out of office on for a day, a week, whatever you want to do to get these things done. I want you to make these small changes over time. I know you can't shut it all down for 6 months, but maybe you can. I don't know. Because I want you to remember something. A lot of you see the results of how far I've come or how far Mary Beth has come. We tell our stories, but it took years. And in many cases, we put off the changes because it's easier to ignore them and keep doing it the way we've been doing it, because it is getting done even though we're miserable, our relationships have sucked, and we're exhausted all the time. We're not getting any sleep. If you want to build alignment, you have to turn your calendar into a profit and your effort into results. The one thing I do know is you have to start Absolutely prioritizing yourself. Because what I see in the women especially that do this business is that we prioritize everything everybody else needs over ourselves. From the day to day, we do it every day. We put our own businesses on the back burner. We put our own needs, our own sleep, our own menopausal outrage on the back burner. We put our own misery, our own burnout. Our own exhaustion to do all these things for everybody else. The thing is though, no one is going to change that. And no one is going to hold you accountable to that change except for you. You have to start showing up consistently for you. You want more clients? You have to market yourself with your face every single day more often. You have to make it a priority. You want more time? You need to figure out your office hours. You need to decide when you're going to do those jobs, and then you're not going to do other things when you've blocked time for your business. So let's rip the bandaid off because until you start managing like a CEO and building your business like a CEO, you will just spin and spin and spin and spin. And you may need to pull the car over, y'all, because this is a note-taking episode. We are going to talk about the busy trap. All right. We are all so busy. I hate the fucking word busy, busy, busy, busy. I'm busy. I can't do that. I'm too busy. I'm too busy, Marcie, to take my courses. I'm too busy, Mary Beth, to get my assistant stuff in order. I'm too busy, Lori, to do the Mexperts 101 that I've been promising myself I would do. You make an excuse that you are too busy literally while you are sending us messages, sending, posting on Facebook groups about how busy you are. Some of y'all are literally doxxing me in Facebook groups. When you could be selling more travel, training your advisors, being nicer. Alas, here we are. You're confused though, that doing anything else, typing up that post, scrolling on the TikTok, just scrolling, not even, even interacting, just scrolling. Even if you're looking at travel stuff, you think that this version of busy is appropriate. Or maybe you're doing something inside your business. But it doesn't have any return on investment. You're just sitting at your computer, literally not knowing what to do next. And you're just waiting on someone to contact you for a trip when you could be out networking, when you could be creating valuable content, when you could be building out your newsletter, but you're not, you're just sitting there and you're calling it busy. Right. Um, you stop the presses in the middle of working on a proposal to answer some one-off email that a client who ghosted you Just wrote you. Is that a valuable use of your time? You have to start evaluating your version of busy. Stop bullshitting yourself. Take accountability for how you spend your time and then reinvest it back into your business. You're doing everything and nothing at the exact same time. You are not making a profit on anything that keeps you busy that is not moving your business forward in some way. And you have to recognize what those tasks are. I feel like I could write a whole course on this, and in fact, my courses very much talk about the wasted time and calling it busy that so many advisors get trapped in. So we're going to talk about some of those bad habits that make you feel busy, but are really just keeping you fucking broke, man. Broken time, broken money, stuck on the hamster wheel. It fucking sucks. So if it doesn't lead to revenue, better relationships, or a stronger travel advisor reputation, It's just bullshit. It doesn't need to be done. Just a few day-to-day time wasters that you guys participate in is answering calls and texts and emails and PMs at all hours of the day, like 24/7. You are not a 911 dispatcher. You're allowed to have office hours. Set your office hours, implement your office hours, tell everyone what they are. Set the expectation of when you work during consultations, or if you do respond to a PM. Say, hey, my— I'll get back to you tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM when I get in. You check email all day instead of batching or checking it a couple of times a day. You rewrite the same client responses over and over and over because you refuse to use templates and automations. You quote in the DMs for unqualified, unaligned clients just because they want some ideas. And then you wonder why you're getting ghosted. You multitask on Everything and finish nothing. You're letting clients call the shots instead of sending a scheduling link and using your qualifying guides to build out a wow proposal for them. Like I said, you're just shooting off those quotes in the DMs and you wonder why you are not closing more sales. You are letting them drive the train and they are off the rails and you are not doing anything to get it back on because you're afraid of what they might say or think. Or they might give you a bad review. You're afraid of being in charge. When you quote unquote quickly schedule something, like if you have somebody reach out and they want to go on a last-minute holiday vacation in less than 2 weeks and they want it for $2,000, you don't say, unfortunately, I'm not available for that vacation. Please reach out to me in the new year for your holiday vacation for next year. I do not operate. In last-minute vacations, stop quickly checking on things, quit quoting so fast, because then it's going to turn into the 2-hour spiral of looking at flights, down the rabbit hole of TikTok reviews, and you're not focused on what you need to be focused on that day. You're letting these people derail you because you'd rather chasing information down rabbit holes than actually focusing on what could actually move your business forward. Which is getting your calendar under control for 2026. You scroll for inspiration. I love this one. I talk to people all the time. Well, I was just scrolling, just trying to get inspired. But then you're sucked into some like comparison game of all these other advisors doing all these other things, or you're copying and pasting their shit, which we should stop doing. You're also taking what you see and trying to post it everywhere on every platform. Instead of really just honing in on one social media platform where you know your potential clients are, and then doing that very well. If you have taken my Facebook groups course, I tell you, do this for a year. Consistently show up in your Facebook group for a year, 2 to 3 times a day, following my Google content calendar, which you can mostly copy and paste. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Schedule, schedule, schedule those posts for a year. Build up one social media platform. I did Facebook for 6 years. 3 years ago, I added Instagram. 6 months ago, I added TikTok. Creating content for all those platforms is fucking exhausting, you guys. I don't actually need to do all that, but I do choose to do that because it moves my business forward. But it was one platform at a time. And just so you guys know, I am trying to start a blog next year. I used to blog so much back in the MySpace days, and I really enjoyed it. And I used my Facebook group as a blog for this entire length of time. And so I plan to go get all of that content and repurpose it into a blog. The only reason why I'm capable of doing that is because I already have everything automated in those other places. And I'm going to be reusing the content from my Facebook group to create new content in a blog in a new space. I am not going to rewrite everything. I'm not going to start from scratch. And I am going to dedicate a year to making it work. I'm not going to do anything else new except for the blog. You have to be okay not being on every platform everywhere all the time. But if you're going to be somewhere, you need to be consistent. Your fellow colleagues who are more consistent than you, but maybe not as good at being an advisor as you, have more success, probably. I just say this probably because we will never really know. We're not on the inside. They might have more leads. They might have more relationships because of their consistency. You could be a better travel advisor who specializes in Disney, but nobody would know that because you're giving away business to somebody else who is more consistent. And if you're going to compare anything in your life to anyone else, it has to be the consistency. How do they show up compared to how I show up? I don't want it to steal your joy. I just want you to really think about how you're showing up, because how you show up matters to your prospective clients. Showing up builds trust. None of you would even be listening to this podcast if I didn't show up in other spaces and you weren't Able to message me, and if I wasn't approachable, and if you didn't know who I was, right? Many of you got to know me well before I started the Maximizer Travel Advisor Facebook group, way before I ever had a podcast, right? Because of how I show up in places and how I help and how I give back. And that has to be part of your brand if you want to build something sustainable. And when you're constantly trying to create brand new content all the time in every space. It is going to drain you. It's not a valuable use of your time. You can template out some of that stuff. You can put it in a place like Trello to organize it and reuse it constantly. If you have the Facebook private group, you know, you have access to 500 post ideas, post prompts. Many, many of them, again, like I said, can be copied and pasted. You can then take those ideas and turn them in. To a weekly newsletter, into future Instagram posts when you're ready to do that. You don't have to do that because you have a Facebook group. I had only my Facebook group for the majority of the last 6 years. I think something else we really waste a lot of time on is making everything pretty. Miranda and I talked about this in our Besties episode, but you guys spend far, far too much prettifying everything, spending time in Canva when you're not graphic designers. Is a huge waste of your time, especially if you have traveled. You have content photos, you have your face. You could take a selfie with a coffee mug and turn it into a travel post, but you insist on trying to brand everything and prettify everything instead of just getting it done. You just overthink the shit out of everything too when it comes to social media. You overthink your captions, you overthink the photo, you overthink the formatting, you overthink You just, oh my gosh, the overthinking. And there, then you never do it. You get stuck in, you know, paralysis because you don't have a process. You don't have a system to just get that information out to your people in an authentic way. And you get bogged down by things that do not fucking matter. And you worry about chasing trends and what other people think more than you actually are focused on the person you're trying to reach and connect with. And attract into your business that aligned audience. You don't need to be a dancing travel agent to be successful in social media, but you spend so much time doing all this crap to, to match others' energy and do all this. It's just insane what you spend time doing. That is a huge time waster. Pick one thing, one social media platform, one person to follow. Doesn't have to be me. Invest in learning from somebody and get yourself established. Set up a footprint, be consistent and show up every day in that space, see what happens after a year, not a week, definitely not a day, not even a month, not even 3 months, a year, give it a year of consistent show up. And when I talk about time wasting, y'all, it's like, I'm talking to myself too. I love a scroll and I love to get bogged down into a Facebook comment war. So don't feel like, oh my gosh, Marcie, you're really going at it today. You chose violence today. I'm talking from a place of experience, y'all. And the next one is like really one of those things that makes my heart hurt for myself and my family because I wasted a lot of time in those first 8 years just answering the phone during the most inappropriate times when I really didn't need to answer the phone. I told myself, this is how you have to run a business, but answering the phone during dinner or Christmas lunch or your daughter's 1-year-old birthday party. It's fucking gross. And nobody bothered to tell me that until my husband was exploding like a volcano about it. It is a huge waste of time to respond instantly. You are training those unaligned clients to contact you any hour of the day, any time of the day. You could, you could have just had a baby and you're responding to clients. I did that. I had a baby and then I was texting with clients like within 24 hours. Somebody take the fucking phone. Most of the time when someone reaches out to us, they do not need an immediate answer. It is very rare to have a 5-alarm fire in our business. Now, some of you might have had a rough year and some of you might say, no, Marcie, I have an emergency every week. Well, then something is going wrong. You're not setting up expectations so they can take care of themselves while you are their support system. And it's probably because you have been responding 24/7. for so long, you just think everything's in a fucking emergency, and it's not. It's not an emergency. You do not have to jump through fiery hoops of hell to do this job well. I just made that up. I'm really proud of myself. Stop responding instantly. It is a huge waste of time. You've got to start figuring out automating reminders through your CRMs, your forms, your follow-ups, because If you don't, you're always going to feel like you're replicating what you've already done, that work you've already done, or you will feel like, gosh, all I do is the same activities. And I feel like I'm always retyping this and I'm redoing this. And it's like, no, we need to automate that work. If we're out of office, put an out of office on. If you've got the automatic text back option on your phone, use it. If you are using your business page or your Instagram page and somebody messages you, use the automation to let them know what next steps they can take. This will reduce your need to respond right now, but you have to set all that stuff up. You have to take the time to get to know those systems and how to use them to maximize your time. We've got to stop answering 24/7 because that allows that client to control our schedule instead of enforcing the very boundaries that we're trying to establish. And when you break your own rule, When you break your own boundary and get mad at that client, they're never really going to understand it. But if you start setting those expectations, reminding them occasionally of your business hours, having it in every single email, posting it on your Facebook group, sharing it on your website, you're going to have more success. You're going to free up so much of your time. And even if they still message you in the middle of the night, you know you've told them when you'll be back in. We need to take a page out of the Italians' books, okay? I work with a lot of Italian vendors and they will put an out of office on. And I was talking to one of my clients this week about it because I was trying to get just some adjustments made to her proposal and it was just taking like days and days and days and I was getting really impatient. I'm going out of town this weekend. I really want to get it done. And I just told her Italian time is so real, man. And when they're out of office, when they go on holiday, they do not work. They do not pick up their phone. Nothing is an emergency. They don't care. Their life and their families and their time outside their work is so much more important than the client, than the work, than anything else they do. And I love that culture so much. I try to embrace it myself, but it is really tough. But they don't say yes when they mean no. They don't say, we'll get that back to you today, when they know they're probably not going to get it back to you for probably 3 more days. They will straight up Tell me to be more patient. I need more time. You're being impatient. It's like we need to embrace this mindset that we'll get to it. It will get done, especially if we are building out workflows that make it easier to get that done. But that means blocking the time, setting up those workflows. And in that time telling them, hey, I'm working on some changes in my business. It might be a few days until I get back to you. Setting up that automated response. Stop the, can you just check this real quick? Like when somebody's, oh, I just want you to check this cruise for me real quick. I've never been a cruise person, but you guys say it's so easy. It takes 5 seconds. Nothing takes 5 seconds. Nothing takes 5 seconds. It just doesn't. You're lying to yourself and your actual aligned client will wait for you. During the Gold Couch series with Mary Beth, we talked briefly, not even long enough about The fact that advisors feel like they need to go to their travel host conferences, every single supplier webinar, supplier lunches, BDM events. I'm all for building relationships. I really am. But going to Vegas for 3 days, spending $3,000, being away from your family is not usually a good use of your time or your money and has very little return on investment. The other thing is you go to these events and you have no plan. You just go like speed dating through all the vendors. You collect all this tchotchke bullshit, you get their card, and then you do nothing with it. So what was the point? You do not have to go to any of these. I have not been to a single official conference since 2013. I have not missed out on building relationships because I build them one-on-one with the BDMs that I want to meet. That are important to me, that are within my niche. If I'm going to a meeting, it better be fucking productive. So stop showing up for Monday morning meetings with your agency owner when A, you don't have to. Nothing can be mandatory as a 1099. And B, if you're not learning something or you are not getting something out of it, like of real value, real value from that meeting. Stop attending. Our time is too precious to be sitting around in stupid meetings when it could have been an email, just to hear the sounds of our own voices. If you're listening to this podcast right now and you are getting zero out of it, turn it off. You need to be getting something from who you're learning from, who you're getting coaching from, who you're mentoring with. You need to be getting something from The experience with the BDM, driving 45 minutes to lunch, sitting through a 2-hour lunch presentation that they did for you last week in a group agency meeting is not a valuable use of your time. Sitting here in your car listening to me talk may not be the best use of your time this week. Turn it off. If you're going to networking events just to be seen and you have no goal and you have no intentional way of connecting, Meeting people doesn't pay your bills. You have to move those relationships forward. You have to have a plan for what happens after you meet someone. Are you getting them in your email funnel? Are you making sure they're added to your Facebook group? How are we moving this relationship forward in a way that could potentially serve my business? Now, don't misunderstand. I know sometimes we're building relationships just to build them and in hopes that maybe eventually somebody will book something, but if you're going to actual business meetings, networking groups, conferences, you need to make sure that what you put into it, your time and your money, are getting out of it. And it needs to be good investment, not a negative investment. And sometimes you might say the same, well, I won't know for a while, Marcie. Well, I can tell you from personal experience, most of the time conferences are a waste of every bit of your time and money. And going to award functions where it's just a schmooze fest And an alcoholic one at that. Not worth it. Not worth it because you're leaving your family. You're having to walk away from your business for a week. You want to add a couple of nights for site inspections or whatever. It just adds up, adds up. That bill racks up. You're out of the office longer. You're distracted. So you're trying to do all of it from the beach, from your phone, from your laptop in the transfer, and you're not able to concentrate. You make mistakes. It's not worth it, guys. Think about it long and hard before you say yes. If your agency conference is on a Carnival cruise and you don't sell cruises, don't go. Stop saying yes to that stuff. I know sometimes you go because you're chasing that validation. You have that award you have to accept. I don't care. Stay home. You don't even have to work if you stay home. In fact, I am a big believer in resting. Stay home and rest. Rest is valuable because when you look at your profit and loss statement next year after going to 3 conferences, You're gonna go, what did I learn there? You're gonna evaluate it and you're gonna be like, ugh, I didn't even get anything out of that. And I spent like almost $10,000 going away to conferences this year. What a waste. Not worth it. Not worth it. At the end of the day, not honoring yourself, not aligning yourself with the things that you want in your business, which are different than what everyone else wants in this business, is the biggest waste of time ever. Because when you don't put yourself first, when you try to be like someone else or you try to do everything that someone else is doing, you will never ever feel success in that. And success looks so different for everybody. And those BDMs and those hosts and those travel agency owners, they all have their own set of goals. So of course they want you to sell more and they push you to sell more and they're excited for you when you sell more and they'll invite you to more things and you might win this award over here or do that event over there. But is it in alignment? Is selling that product in alignment with where your business is niching to? Is partnering with that host who pays you 60/40 in alignment with your financial goals? Is continuing to say you're free and that you'll answer the phone 24/7 in alignment with your time that you actually have allotted for this business? Alignment in your business is the foundation for your future success. But you have to know what you want. You have to know your own mind and your own goals so that you can honor yourself. Because every day that you do this job unhappy, stressed out, burnt out, exhausted is a wasted day. It's a wasted day. Every quick thing that you do for someone else that ends up taking 2 hours is so far outside the boundaries you want to set It really tells your brain, your brain, that your time is not valuable. And then the people around you also realize that you don't value yourself or respect your own time, your own boundaries, your own calendar. You cannot demand respect for your business when you treat your time like it's optional. We've got to quit accepting a tchotchke pen with a logo from some brand we don't sell instead of planning our next steps if we do attend a conference. If you don't have a plan for the marketing to your aligned client, or you just come home from this event and disappear for weeks, don't post anything, don't do anything with the information you have obtained, you blame the algorithm. But really it's just your lack of consistency and your lack of ability to control the time you have to market to the person who is most likely to want to work with you. This is a discipline problem. And honestly, guys, if you can't trust yourself to do the things you're supposed to do, why would anyone trust you with their vacation? When you don't have a plan, when you don't have a workflow, when you don't have a system, you have zero foundation. You're just duct taping shit together. It shows. It's a chaotic mess. Mary Beth showed us a very messy house drawing and asked us, you know, would your client want to come in here? The door's off, the windows are hanging and broken, and there's dog hair everywhere. And well, there's dog hair everywhere here, but you know what I mean? Like, it's just the laundry's all piled up on the couch and this obviously thousands of things are going on and you want somebody to come through and sit down and talk to you about your vacation. You want somebody to give you that attention that you want to give them, but you don't have anything in order in your business house. Your workflows are off, your systems are crazy, your foundation's cracked. You just can't have what you want without consistency, without workflows, without systems. And you will never have the freedom that you're most likely looking for in this industry until you have that foundation set up, until you have everything in alignment. As Mary Beth said the other day, you're trying to decorate this house But it doesn't even have walls. So I know I've said a lot today, and I know that some of it's a little unhinged sounding. I think because I'm seeing so much of myself in this too— running 2 businesses, being a mom and a chauffeur and a wife, and managing all the vacations and the holidays and all the things. It can get to be very messy. It's easy to fall backwards, and I feel like I've personally fell backwards lately. Some of you guys are like, oh my gosh, you do everything. I very much do a lot, sometimes too much, but we have to be self-aware. We have to stop putting everyone else's needs first. We have to put up that out of office, take a beat, pre-K pause, as I like to say. Stole that from Mr. Williams on Instagram. Stop calling those immediate responses back to people good service. It's just mismanagement, y'all. And we need to take back our time. Stop giving our best hours to the wrong People, you don't need more hours. Actually, you need to stop giving it away like it's worthless. Stop canceling on your CEO duties. A real CEO has a lot of calendar control, and they say no to things that are not a valuable use of their time. This is your business, and we all have to start acting like it because no one's handing out gold stars for the busiest person. In fact, I feel really sorry for people who can't seem to figure out that being busy. Working all the time, there's no badge of honor in that. I used to be that person, so I feel very strongly that I can say it. You will not get a pat on the back from me because you brag that you are working 24/7. You work from the beach, you work from the plane, you work from the bathroom, you work from under your desk having a panic attack, because it's not fancy, it's not fun, and it's not freedom. You are not burned out because you work too much. You're burned out because your time has zero focus. Because your chaos is out of control. There's absolutely no profit when you are exhausted, and you will never be able to build a 20-hour workweek on a business without systems, workflows, and calendar control. You have to audit your time, you guys. You have to sit down and audit every activity you do each day for 2 weeks and ask yourself, is this activity moving my business forward, or is it just keeping me quote unquote busy to be busy. I mean, guys, time is— and for so many of us, we're spending it on the wrong damn things. We're so out of alignment. I encourage you, after listening today, to really go to your office, block the time, block 30 minutes, just turn everything else off, close all of the tabs, get out a piece of paper and write down how you want to spend your time. How do you really want to spend Even if it's not in the office, and it's totally okay if it is, because I hate being in my office beyond the times that I've allotted for the day. So if I have to come back in here after I get my daughter from school, I get real annoyed. And in fact, if I'm honest, during this podcast, I'm about an hour behind in my scheduled activities for the day. And this podcast takes me anywhere from 2 to 3 hours total per week. And sometimes I wonder, is it worth it? And the minute I feel like it's not, and it's not making an impact, I'm going to stop. And that is okay. So when you spend 30 minutes writing down all the things you want and how you really want to be spending your time, I want you to then write down as many things as you can think of that you do every day that you do not want to do that is not an absolute must-do. I mean, we're still moms, so we still have to mom. We still have to make dinner and do dishes and fold laundry. But do we? Do we really? What can you take off of your plate yourself? And then what can someone else take off your plate? Are you willing to give up some of the control over every little thing you do to have the business, have the life, have that time, and have that freedom? Because I want that for you. This business is hard, but it's still supposed to be fun. We're supposed to be enjoying it. All right. Don't let me quit this podcast. 5-star reviews. You know, leave me a note, send me a message. Those are never a waste of my time to read. I love hearing what you have to say about what you're learning. I love helping you find new hosts. I love sharing your stories, connecting. None of that is a waste of my time, but follow, download, and give me 5 stars. Then I'll know I can keep doing these solo podcasts because sometimes, you guys, sometimes I'm exhausted. Sometimes my anxiety is high. Sometimes I'm just like, oh my gosh, what am I going to talk about for another 45 minutes? How is it possible they want to still hear from me? So keep listening, keep sharing, keep telling your friends about it. I think anyone could listen to this podcast and get something out of it, but what do I know? Have a great day, y'all. All right, y'all, that is the end of another episode of the No BS Travel Advisor Podcast. Thank you so much for being here. And remember, I am not a lawyer. That is my disclaimer. I am a coach and mentor in the travel business with a Ton of big opinions. So don't forget to leave that 5-star review, and if you need anything, I'm here for you. Bye! Bye!