Abbie Heaton from The Personal Travel Consultants in partnership with Blue Bay Travel says corporate anniversaries can offer multiple opportunities
For years companies have been celebrating when their business reaches a core milestone. An anniversary provides an opportunity to take stock, review what’s worked well and consider how we can improve. However, it’s also a useful opportunity to thank our consultants and the customers who helped us reach this key milestone.
As a young business, one of our key focuses for this year has been recruiting new starters to join The Personal Travel Consultants and to support them whilst they set up their own enterprises. As we approached our year anniversary it gave us a great opportunity to reflect and canvas our agent partners for feedback to find out what they’ve enjoyed about working with The Personal Travel Consultants.
Understanding our strengths will help us motivate other new homeworkers, who may be unhappy with their current situation, to make the move.
For 2022, incentivisation has been important and our commission split on self-generated leads came up as a key benefit of working with The Personal Travel Consultants. However, interestingly, it seems the pandemic has seen people prioritise work-life balance just as much as financial benefit.
Like other homeworking enterprises, the PTC division showcases the ease of working from home, and how individuals can be empowered to have the confidence to set up their own business. Running a business, especially a travel business, isn’t easy but it seems like the pandemic encouraged lots of travel agents to reassess their priorities and consider embarking on their own ventures.
We used a birthday conference as part of our key events and activities to celebrate our first anniversary and integrated positive messaging into events and partnerships. We’ve tried to tie together past, present and future using the wider network and brand trust of Blue Bay Travel to elevate the position of The PTCs brand.
Our hope is our conference inspired pride in our past and confidence in our future. Alistair Rowland, our CEO, ran through a state of the nation which highlighted key challenges, but also opportunities available for our agents. He explained clearly to our team where we are now, but also where the business is going. It helps to clearly signpost to the team and the wider industry what our vision is, because without that direction we’d never arrive at our destination.
We’ve used our first anniversary to really celebrate and reinforce what’s most important about the company – being able to work around your life, not being tied to a rota or an employer. It also gave us an opportunity to review some of our challenges, for example, we’d had feedback that for agents adapting from an agency environment can prove a little daunting and so the support our network offers, in terms of regular catch ups, admin support, mental health support and even offering software and hardware, can really help those who are feeling a little jittery about making the leap. Regular training, events and opportunities to collaborate with the wider team are vital.
The best anniversaries propel existing efforts to drive business goals, such as increasing consultant retention and driving sales. We’ve undertaken a core strategic review and held events which have allowed us to deepen supplier and agent relationships and set a direction for our future. We’re using the last year as a platform to leverage us toward continued success in the future.