Hey, it's your travel industry best friends, Robin and Jen from TIQUE. We're obsessed with practically anything that touches your business and allows you to scale to the level of success that you've always dreamed of. With Robin’s background in sales and marketing, and Jennifer's experience as a management level HR professional, we grew a small itinerary creation company into a multi-million dollar travel agency, and now we aim to help others skip the hard stuff and get right to the big wins. We're probably recording this with a glass of wine in hand, so pour one up with us, grab a seat, and join us to talk about all things travel and business.
Welcome to the first episode of Tique Talk, where we are going to have no frills conversations about the obstacles we had when we started in the travel industry, and how we took an efficiency based approach to modernize and streamline our business. Through creating boundaries, processes, cultivating relationships, and updating our initial website and logo, we scaled a daily itinerary creation company to a tried and true full service agency with 13 independent contractors and a full time support staff.
If you're looking for advice on how to increase your productivity, work smarter not harder, and level up your sales game you've come to the right place! Today, we are going to share a little bit more about our why, and share more about each of us so that you feel right at home each time you tune in. So, let's do this!
Jennifer: Robin, I'm gonna start with you. Will you share a little bit about your background, and this is pre-travel, what did you do to get into travel?
Robin: Yeah! So, when I was in college I was one of those girls who changed their major a million times because I wanted to do everything. I just really couldn’t decide on one specific path. So, I ended up finally settling into a psychology degree which I found incredibly fascinating. It was like probably the only class that I really, really loved going to. So, I stuck my little steak in the ground on psychology, and after college was a little bit confused about what to do with a psychology degree. I did not want to work in a lab, so I became a leadership development consultant. I was working full-time around the country doing a bunch of different tasks, everything from recruitment to finance to, you know, membership retention processes, and everything in between – that also showed me that I liked my hands in a bunch of different pots. So, once I was done traveling, I transitioned to a full time corporate marketing and sales job, which I really loved.
I fell into the trap of loving psychology, of marketing and like how you get people to jump at specific things. I was pretty decent at sales. I can talk to just about anybody. So I really enjoyed it. After my husband's very interesting job took us from North Florida and Jacksonville up into Green Bay, WI, I was working with Jen at the time, just doing part time sales and general admin stuff. Like helping you comb over audits for trips for the clients who are doing the itinerary creation with us. So that's how I kind of weaseled my way into sales, by honestly working with you at the start of Explorateur Travel, and I really loved it. It was such an interesting industry to me.
I won't say that I came into it with this huge love of travel. I've never really been anywhere except the Caribbean because I'm from South Florida, and places domestically, like I had never been to Europe and all of that.
So the whole like, I wanted to travel the world thing kind of came after I fell into this industry. So yeah, from there I started booking travel full-time, and now we transition to Tique.
Jennifer: We'll definitely get to that in a minute. We're going to share our story about how we actually changed our paths a little bit during COVID, as many did.
So, I'll share a little bit about my background. I studied abroad in Italy, like many others did, but I had never left the country before that. So it was a really interesting situation for me. I didn't even have a passport. I had to figure out how to get a loan. But when I got there I absolutely fell in love with travel and being somewhere that pushed my limits. I came back home, obviously, and still wanted to travel the world, but didn't have any real goals or any, you know, plans to do so.
When I graduated college, I also became a leadership development consultant. Robin and I actually worked for the same company doing leadership development traveling around the country and it entailed everything she mentioned: budgeting, recruiting, all of that on a really large scale. We were changing hotels or dorm rooms every single night. So, it actually really prepared us for the travel world. Maybe that's why fams never bothered us, because we don't mind moving every day. But after that, I transitioned to a recruitment role for call centers and administrative physicians, and then went into HR from there for a large hospital corporation. As I was getting deeper into my career, it just wasn't what I envisioned for myself, like putting on a suit every day or setting up panel interviews. It just wasn't hitting the mark for what I wanted to do long term down the road. It didn't give me the creativity that I was looking for and it didn't give me the availability to travel like I was hoping to do once I was in a season of life where I actually could afford to travel.
So, I quit my corporate job and took a three month sabbatical from life and went to Europe and popped around to different Airbnbs and ultimately I had decided to open a small boutique itinerary creation company called Explorateur Travel. At that time it was not a booking company, it was just a day to day itinerary creation company. The vision would be that people would come to us and we would plan their trips, their tours, their dining but they would handle all of their flights and hotels. Because I honestly didn't want the liability of it. Which is funny now that we've been post 2020, I think that 2016 Jennifer knew something that I didn't know was coming. But, I ended up falling in love with the travel industry, going under a host, and of course Robin and I’s paths crossed again, and that's when we started working together.
But it all started with a love of travel that I didn't know how to quench, or a thirst for travel that I didn't know how to quench, rather. And I wanted to travel for free. And that was really my only goal when I started a travel agency. I wanna travel for free and I want to experience the world, and it wasn't to make a lot of money, it wasn't to have a big team. It was very singularly driven.
So, I would say we have achieved a little bit of that here and there.
Robin: We’ve definitely achieved that. It's interesting to think about where we were in 2014, and what we're doing now. I think I could have expected you to eventually get into booking travel, but now it's like with Tique, it's just so different. So I mean, again, we'll get into the transition of all of that, but yeah, very very interesting times. We've had very similar paths crossing in so many weird ways. Like the same sorority, same job out of college, same psychology degree, and same enneagram (obviously). But if you sit down and talk to us about where our skills lie with the business. We're super different in terms of what you love, what I love about the business, and running the business, – which makes a good partnership.
Jennifer: Of course, but yeah, it's always so interesting because as similar as we are, we're also incredibly different in certain aspects. So, very much we need to do an episode on partnerships and how to maintain balance, because I think a lot of people probably have that question of like how do you balance between two personalities? We'll tackle that in the future.
Alright, so now we're going to share a little bit of our background as we transitioned to a travel agency in the traditional sense where we actually went under a host. Robin mentioned she was doing some administrative pieces, she was also, she's actually minimizing her role she was very largely in charge of social media. Because that's just not my strength, and it is very much hers.
In 2018, we actually went under a host, which opened up a lot of doors for us. We didn't really know what we were looking for in a host, and I don't even know, Robin, if, like, it had been in your brain to start booking travel at that time. Was that even a thought?
Robin: I don't think it was, not until maybe late 2018 after the move. Actually, you reached out and you're like, listen, you're going to be bored up there. So, like, let's get you doing something. Because I can't sit still ever. And I left my job at the time and I couldn't just stay in, and not have a bigger role. So that's when you were like, listen, you'd be really good at it.
Jennifer: I think sometimes travel finds people in very unconventional places. I don't think too many people come out of either high school or college or whatever their educational background is, and I don't think too many people are graduating and being like “I'm ready to be a travel agent or a travel advisor” – whatever your title that you go by is. So, I think it's really funny how it just finds you.
Robin: Well, I never knew travel agents were even a thing. I feel like there was a very large part of my generational age range, whatever you want to call it, who didn't know that it was a thing? And that’s of course where Tique kind of got started, because I was just so sick of being like, “yeah, I book travel” and everyone my age saying what is a travel advisor? Didn't they, you know, go down with the Titanic way back in the day and it was a no. Still, very much a thing. Still very relevant.
Jennifer: You're important.
Robin: We’re important, and we do cool things.
Jennifer: We did ultimately sign up with a smaller host and it was a really good foundation for us. It was an opportunity where we didn't have sales volume and we hadn't been part of a consortia. We didn't even know what a consortia was to be really honest with you at all. We knew nothing about the infrastructure of the industry. We just knew about how to find great restaurants and how to find good tours. Or we thought we knew, now we know a lot more, obviously, but we thought we knew. And I think that's how most people start at anything they think they know and then they're like, man, I'm embarrassed for my first version of that. You should be. That's how you grow.
Robin: You look back on this in a year and be so embarrassed. Just truly.
Jennifer: I think about the first month of Tique though, too. Like, I just logged into our old website and I almost sent you a loom of our old website because I was like, no, she's not even, she's not even going to gleam joy from this. It's gonna make her skin crawl.
Robin: Oh my gosh, it's come a very far way.
Jennifer: I'm gonna send it to you because it's gotta be documented somehow. It needs to be in our historical documentation. So, but my point was we were, since we are part of a smaller host, they were actually an agency as well, but we were operating as our own brand. So, it's a little bit different of a dynamic than most traditional hosts where I don't think too many hosts have everyone under them operating under the brand. We were one of 11, I want to say, in a group at the time - they've grown since then. And we went off and we've become independent since then. But when we were under that host, what we started to realize is that we were booking things that were not necessarily aligned with the rest of our hosting agency. And when we went on fams, we were looking for a different product than the rest of our agency was looking at.
So it became clear to us at that time that we wanted to shift to a network that had a little bit more of an experiential focus that had, what I ultimately know now, as like a DMC approach rather than a wholesaler approach. I just didn't know what that was then.
We did go independent in 2019 and then we changed to travel joy, which was also a big move. We didn't even know why we were changing to traveljoy, we just knew we had to get out of the CRM that our host had provided for us. We just needed another option because we couldn't be under that CRM anymore. So, I'm going to let Robin tackle this because we started using travel joy, and I am perpetually resistant to any technological change.
Robin: She did have a meltdown before this podcast because of the technology. So Jen is not the tech person, but she tries hard to learn systems once I tell her that there are systems worth learning.
Jennifer: I do. I try really hard because I know it's important for the functionality of our team, but it's not natural to me. Which is hilarious because my brother is like total techie and I'm like but let me tell you all the feels, like I can articulate it but I cannot execute anything on a computer. So,o we changed to TravelJoy and Robin found these amazing functionalities that I had no clue about because I didn't even beta test the dang thing. I just like started sending them money and was like, here we have to put our clients in this, in this, you know, floating thing in the interwebs. So, share a little bit about that change, because to me, this is a huge catalyst of what came years later that we didn't even realize was gonna be on our horizon.
Robin: Yeah, so, so much of what I was doing was inside of our original CRM platform, there was just no capabilities for emails and like true client management, like a CRM stands for like client relationship management tool or whatever. And that just wasn't really the case. Truly the only functionality we got, which maybe there is something out there that we just didn't know, but the only functionality we got out of that platform was paying out commissions and tracking how much money we were bringing in.
But to me, I've always been very systematic, very process-oriented. My dad's an engineer, so I always blame it on that. But that's just like how my brain works, I'm an organized person. Like things have to fit into a box and flow for me to be able to make sense of them.
So I created kind of like these one off, like client Excel spreadsheets. that I would use to track where my clients were at in the booking process, like what were they booking? So that was another thing. It wasn’t all just numbers. It was the client's last name, their number of how much money they were spending with me, and then my commission payout. But I wanted to know where they were going. Were they going on a Caribbean honeymoon or were they going to a, you know, a true Italy anniversary trip or something like that? And it just wasn't in that CRM.
So, I was making all these Google Docs. I saved all these e-mail templates inside of Gmail and that was great for the time being, I'm just I'm always trying to work smarter, not harder. So when travel joy came up, and I forget, I don't know if I found it, if you found it, who found it and sent it to us, somebody had to have. But when I looked at it, number one, it was so much easier to use. It was just a more intuitive platform. But yeah, when I dug into the capabilities of managing your clients on their status of lead to booked to who was waiting on what from me. All the e-mail templates you could store, the forms, the contracts. Everything just makes so much more sense because truly, I don't even, if I think back to when you first started booking, I don't, I think we sent Esign Genies, but it was kind of weird and wonky. So yeah, that really sunk my teeth in travel joy.
Because again, like, when I think about, like, what makes me happy and business and where I feel like my zone of geniuses, it's in organizing and processes, but it's not necessarily in, like, the actual client work. I liked researching travel destinations, of course, but, I don't know, I've just always geeked out more so in the actual business operations than I ever did in the servicing of clients and booking the trip.
Jennifer: I think it's hilarious that you say that, because I am the person that loves pushback emails. I love the creative solution in a pinch, like all the things that you absolutely hate. It's your personal nightmare to get a client emergency call and to deal with that. However, it's my personal nightmare to set up a system. So, it's this perfect brain meld which luckily we found each other.
One time Robin came to me and she's like, why do you keep copying and pasting? I don't know, maybe we were doing a share screen or something and you had said, like I told you, I put like some email templates in the system and I was like, I just don't even have time to figure out how to use this system because I was drowning in clients at that point. Or I thought it was drowning. And you're like, yes, but if you took two days to figure it out, you wouldn't be drowning because you would actually have a system. And it took me sitting down and hazing myself into learning about travel joy.
Really, to this day, people that still are doing workflows with us, it is so overwhelming. And then you're learning. Especially this summer. I can't even imagine the people that are getting implementations because it is truly overwhelming. Now we have a video walking through them, walking them through like a mock client and exact client experience flow. We didn't have a client experience flow. Our original client experience workflow was 14 emails. Do you remember that?
Robin: Yeah, bad. And it's weekly. We were only talking to you when we needed money, which allowed us to retrospectively be like, what in the world? Like these people are gonna hate us like this isn't that luxury travel feel we want. So I think by sitting down, taking the time to go through it and like invest a little of the mental brain space back into it, you're able to pick apart the pieces where you're like, I would not like this if I was going through the process and I just spent like $5000 or $3000 or whatever amount of money on a trip with somebody. Then it's just like, oh, I guess I'll hear from them again when they need the rest of my credit card details or whatever else.
So yeah, it just became one of those things where it's like, whoa, wait a second, this can be better. Let's make it better. And it's continued to get better. I mean, it went from, what, 14 emails to, like, now it's like 50-70 something stupid. Stick around two more weeks and it will be over a million because Jen keeps pouring emails into them. But yeah, TravelJoy. That's really the bread and butter of what we do, and where our client experience workflow kind of was birthed.
Jennifer: Yeah, but it is more emails, but now there's the opportunity to send supplier emails too. So that would be like a whole can of worms.
But I think the biggest struggles that we saw when we started were navigating the host network system to find a structure that fit a growing team. That was the other thing we wanted to grow, a team. Everything in retrospect you do a little differently I would say, as a business owner, but one thing was that financially it didn't make sense to grow under that model because it wasn't going to give the ROI that it needed to have. Unless someone was really willing to take a cut on the commission structure as an IC, under a brand, under a host. So that's not to say it can't work, it's just that, that wasn't our reality at the time and that's nothing to say anything bad about our host.
But we did realize that going independent would allow for more financial growth and then also creating a client experience when the industry was focusing on quantity over quality. And that is something that, to this day, I think we still see people struggle. They think the more they pile on their plate, the more money they're gonna make. But the more you pile on your plate, the more errors you're going to make, actually is what occurs. The more money you're going to spend in client recovery, and the more you're going to be completely burnt out instead of creating boundaries and processes that level up your sales. I'm seeing you nodding.
Robin: Yeah, sales is so much relationship. There are so many statistics out there of how much more, and I don't know the exact percentage a person will spend with a brand that they know they're guaranteed a good brand experience. So when you sit there and you like, flip it on your head, you're like, OK, I want to make this salary. How do I reverse engineer that? I have to sell this many trips because my average ticket price is only X amount of dollars. And it's like, what if instead we invest a little bit more in our brand, we invest a little bit more in our client experience and our workflow, which not only will save us some brain calories, but it will also bring in a higher whatever kind of client we want. Not everybody wants the high ends. Like let's just be honest about that. It's not for everybody.
But if you take the time to sit down and really evaluate your brand who you want to attract and then instead of focusing on that quantity and like chug and burn mentality, that does not lead to a lot of burnout and I mean just no balance in life. Because then you know clients traveling all times of the day, all over the place, lower ticket probably and like different destinations. It's just a lot to manage, and instead put that effort into creating a client experience that you want to keep like people just keep wanting binging back to.
My whole thing is like make Expedia obsolete by giving a branded client experience that is just so high touch, amazing, that people are like, I would never book travel without Robin or Jen ever again in my life. But, and that's my goal, that was our goal. And we, you know, launched the client experience bundle when we got started on our branding services because it was just, there's so much value to be had when you take a step back and go for the repeat referral business. Then the constantly like looking for more and more, like digging through all these little dead ends of people who probably aren't going to be your best clients anyways.
Jennifer: Which ultimately you and I will have an episode on this. I've already put it in the brain dump, but, ultimately we started very low ticket and that was just kind of like probably the season of life that our friends were at, at the time, too. And then referrals grew. But it definitely didn't show our value that we were taking inquiries through facebook or things like that. And that's one thing that we've definitely put boundaries in place and we practice what we preach for sure about attracting the right client and making sure that you're creating a process that does get the right kind in the door.
But I want to go back to some of the other struggles that we saw because you and I, I think, have become over time a little bit impermeable to this. But overcoming the glitz and glamour of rewards points, to allow yourself to find the right property for a client. We could go on for days about this. I mean, I love some of these reward systems and these reward points, as some of these properties are exactly the right fit for your client. But I think the problem that a lot of advisors get caught up in is they see their rewards, they see the kickback, they see the overrides, and then they want to push only that product for someone and it becomes like they're very one-dimensional.
Robin: You begin to become more of like an order taker almost than a true service provider because ultimately, anybody can book anything online. Like let's just say that. You can book direct. However, there's a lot of overhead that is your knowledge and your expertise, and like taking the time to actually put some thought and consideration into matching a client with a destination that either works better for their budget or they didn't expect. So yeah, I fell into that a lot. I would only sell a property and I'm pretty sure I still, if they even have the rewards program anymore, have 5000 nights there because I was like, that's all I sold and people liked it. It wasn't like anyone was like, oh, I wish you wouldn't send me that. Like, people really liked the property. So no one intentionally, I'm sure is selling unless you are. I don't know. But hopefully no one's intentionally selling things like that just to get rewards points. Once you take that, like, take that out of the equation and like, just add it as a happy bonus at the end, for when you do book that really awesome property. It just makes a world of difference I think and your client.
Jennifer: This is where a psychological approach comes in, like you and I are like, OK well let's think about the psychology of matchmaking someone to the right property and it is not transactional. Planning travel is not transactional, it's very much psychological. And that could, I think, if we just did a whole course and philosophy on the psychology of selling travel, instead of the process of selling travel. Man. That would be the time.
Robin: Yeah, that would be good. Add it to the brain dump, add it to the list!
Jennifer: Then we also educated ourselves on DMCS. I think that's something that people still struggle with even when they're years into their business. Just not having access or knowing where to find the right DMC, or if they can trust a DMC. It feels very out of your control if you've gone from a wholesaler model to a DMC. But let me tell you this summer has changed the game when it comes to DMC's. I sleep like a baby knowing that they have someone else's WhatsApp number and not my phone number at 3:00 AM.
Lastly, some of the bigger struggles we saw in the beginning were deciphering the value of a consortium. We didn't, I feel like there's so much to be said on this, and Robin is smirking at me right now. But there is so much to be said on the value of of your consortium and when to use direct bookings to benefit a client to and to use those amenities to lure in a client. Or if you're actually detracting from your value by advertising those. That's that's a topic we'll definitely tackle.
And then educating clients on how travel advisors are not archaic. Robin has already touched on this, but ultimately, and this is where we're going to transition into Tique, specifically. We saw an opportunity to help the entire industry modernize their approach with a workflow model, with automation, with fresh branded graphics that didn't look like every other website on the Internet, and with a true brand identity and helping the industry, people in the industry understand what a brand identity even was. Because I am so guilty of this. I just thought when I signed up for a website, they picked the fonts and colors and that was it. Well, apparently I didn't have a brand kit and Robin to this day would be like you did what?
Robin: Poor girl. She gave you so much value.
Jennifer: She really went above and beyond. So thank you to my website designer that essentially had created a brand kit at one time. It's no longer my brand kit. It's now a Tique brand kit.
But I mean, I didn't know what a brand identity was. I just knew that I needed a website, a domain, and a place for people to put an inquiry. So that's that was really what gave us kind of this push, that nagging and kind of, I don't want to say annoyance, but knowing that the industry could do more and be better if we had access to share our insight and our thoughts with those items.
Robin: Yeah, a lot of my initial sales with clients in the beginning wasn't really selling them on working with me. It was selling them on like what is a travel advisor and how we aren't, you know, all wearing headsets in a strip mall, working for AAA.
So brand identity came down. I just, I've always been super passionate about it. Like since we first got started. I never wanted to be another advisor posting an over saturated beach picture pushing, you know these like stereotypical “travel advisor trips”. There's so much more that we could offer. And once I got into the industry, I really knew that because I was like, how can I sell Europe? I've never been there. Well, I can sell Europe really freaking well, I'll tell you that.
So, in August of 2020, when the pandemic was just at that really crappy point, I had canceled my Italy wedding. At the time, my sales went from like in the $1,000,000 range to not anything on the books for months, if not years. So I was really down. I was like, I'm not going to just not make money. I can't, I have to do something. I actually invested in a website course. I've always been super fascinated with websites and brands and designing.
But again, I was always a little bit more left brained. So I never truly liked when I was doing social media and stuff. We're done and doing all of that. It felt creative. But then once I was booking I didn't have that creative outlet. So, I kind of got back into the design specs of it all and took a course, got all the information I could on designing brands and websites and then started my own website for my health certification. I did a lot of things. I was very bored and you can tell I'm not good with free time, but I got my health certification. I was going to start doing more of a health blog and stuff because everyone seemed interested in, you know, macros at the time and all that good stuff.
So, as I was playing around with websites, Jen was in the midst of a website update, and we hopped on the call. It was just, I don't even know why we were talking at that point. It's not like I had any clients traveling. Nothing was really going on.
Jennifer: I remember.
Robin: I had reached out because you were nervous about my health blog.
Jennifer: I knew I was losing you. And I was like, her interest is waning, so how can we work together in the future, was ultimately the goal for me. How can we capitalize on all the things you're great at and continue working together? And that was the entire premise of the call. There was no agenda. It's not like I came in with a business plan. We literally just sat on a call and talked through like what you were doing and I was like, so I'm also doing a website and you not like, I I don't have the skills to do a website and travel agents need a website, and it just morphed into this conversation about potential services and you had all of these ideas about branding and websites and helping the industry in that way. Which, kind of took you away from your wellness blog, unfortunately,
Robin: Yeah. Robin Bradley. I don't know. Robinbradley.com. Look it up. It might still be up. No, I definitely stopped paying for the domain.
But yeah, I stopped doing that because it did. It excited me. The whole reason I got into travel, which is the whole reason I got intoI love travel a lot again, but I like the business of travel. I like the industry. I thought it was a very interesting industry that didn't have nearly enough resources poured into it. Because if you go online and you look up anything in terms of business resources, you will find 5000 things for wedding photographers and 5000 things for florists and stuff like that. And there's these people who are specializing in this branding and these websites for these niche industries and I'm like, I get it, but like where is that for us? Because we never had those. Sort of like, I need a website, who's doing travel advisor websites. Because like, I'm sorry, this is a different industry and a different beast than a photographer or something else.
I felt like we knew the needs of the industry, so we took all of these services that we wished we had when we launched our business and made them. I mean, I went to conferences all the time and would go late into the hours of the night talking about branding and logos and how to make a cohesive social media grid that flows and shows off your brand. And then on top of that, like with all the client experience stuff, we were telling people within our host agency originally, like about our experience and like the client experience and all of that kind of stuff.
So once we got our client experience in a good place, we were like, dang, there's a need here. I mean, I think there were a couple of people doing work at the time, but we really felt like we could dive in and make an impact there as well. So yeah, that's when we got started with brainstorming initial services, which granted those have changed over the years slightly, but the main bulk of things like branding, website workflow is all still very much the pinnacle of what we do.
Jennifer: It was an interesting time because certain people that had been doing workflows were actually exiting the industry. There are some other companies that do workflows and branding and websites, but we felt like we could really incorporate - I'm a legal geek, like I love legal terminology and protecting your business and so I got really deep into the functionality of travel joy and signatures and adding protective language throughout the entire workflow.
So, both of our brains started going nonstop on “oh my gosh, can you imagine if we had this when we started?” and that was the whole point of us covering the pitfalls that we saw as the obstacles in the industry. Because we truly wanted to help people skip all of that hard stuff. Like, I can't even talk about the getting an IATA process, like that was so frustrating. If I could make that process easier for anyone, I would love to do so. But also not knowing what terms and conditions to include and when to actually get a lawyer to review them and that you actually need a brand kit.
Robin: Fun fact, well, ain't that a brand. A brand is not a logo. A brand is not a logo. There's so many things that go into it, and it will have to be a whole episode with our Creative Director Amandolin because branding was just a buzzword. Like having a brand, you had a logo and some colors and some fonts and like as even now. The way that brands evolve and interact with their audience and the power of a cohesive strategic brand and what I've seen it do for businesses who invest and really take the time to learn who you are, who you want to serve. And the direction you want to take your business. This has been just completely eye opening.
Jennifer: So, there was a lot. And also, that leads us to we actually had to create a brand and an identity and a website and all of those things, within a month from. From the initial call, I looked at our LLC date today and it was September 24th, and our first call I think was August 17th – because that's when the grief really hit in 2020. Even like the Caribbean trips that we had on the books, all of those things started to fall off because people were just scared to travel, even if they could travel to Mexico. So, a lot of those, and I think you had just like had it, and frankly, I had nothing to do. And so it took us a month and we pulled it together. We launched in September, at the end of the month, and we got our first clients in October.
Robin: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it was pretty quick. I mean people in the industry kind of knew that we were good at specific things. These things we were launching weren't just stuff we've pulled out of our butts, like they were things that we were already good at. So people, you know, instead of coming to us and giving free advice, we took our love and our knowledge and transitioned into services that were super valuable and again have continued to just kind of grow and grow.
Jennifer: We get a lot of questions about where did the name come from. This is where I remember actually pacing outside my garage, like in front of my garage. And saying I think I have an idea, and you were like, I know what you're gonna say. Because I had told you that I I was sitting on this name for quite some time and I didn't necessarily know how I wanted to use it or when I wanted to use it, but the name ‘Tique (it has an apostrophe before the T). It was always about servicing a boutique business.
When you just mentioned that we're not all sitting in a call center with headphones on, what we're actually aiming to do – most of those call centers, if they're a travel agent call center, they probably already have workflows in place. They already probably have terms and conditions in place because they have a corporate lawyer. However, these boutique travel agencies don't have those resources, nor do they maybe even know they should, because they signed up potentially under a host that said, “here you go, here's an IATA Godspeed, go sell some travel”. And there wasn't really like a business training. Yes, there's CTA. And yes, there are other industry resources that are very geography based or general business based, but it wasn't always aimed towards these really experiential boutique small, potentially one person agencies.
So I looked up, in preparation for this podcast, full transparency.I looked up the actual definition of boutique and it's “a business or establishment that is small and sophisticated or fashionable”.
Robin: What do you think about when somebody says, oh, I'm going to the store versus I'm going to a boutique, you envision two different things. Like when I think of a store, I think of a target, I think about Kroger, I think of a Walmart. When I think of a boutique, I think of this little ocean magic surf shop down the road from me. Like that's a boutique. It looks different. It feels different. You know, the people when you walk in, they're typically, you know, I've lived here my whole life so they're friends or something like that. Just it feels different and the words evoke different things.
Also, me and Jen are huge Sarah Blakely fans, and everything she did was Spanx. I took a master class and Jen took a master class from her. And one of the things she said is that when you're naming your business that names that are not words, like true words, do better. So that's why she went with something like Spanx versus, you know, something else. So naming it something that isn't necessarily a word, I think people remember it better or something like that. They just do better,
Jennifer: And single syllable, and sound with a K. So we nailed all three of her parameters.
Sarah be so proud of us.
Robin: I know, right. When she's on our podcast in three years. Oh, we'll talk about it. Yeah. Manifest. Manifest.
Jennifer: Out into the universe. But really, when I read small and sophisticated, I'm like, that's exactly what we're trying to help people do. That's what we're trying to help people achieve, is this very sophisticated service based business that people truly understand that it is a luxury service. Whether you sell luxury or travel or not. And I could go all day on that. Robin and I, the word luxury, it means so many different things to so many people, and I think it's thrown around way, way, way too much. But sophisticated is what all travel agencies should be striving for because your system should be sophisticated, your brand approach should be sophisticated.
When we started talking about the name, she was like, I dig it, let's go. And it was just like a probably a 5 minute conversation. We didn't even have to marinate on other names. We just went for it.
Robin: Yeah. No, we didn't marinate at all. No.
Jennifer: So that's where Tique came from. We get a lot of people say like TK, tick, ticue. I think like boutique, but just Tique.
So with that being said, we just talked a little bit about the vision for the industry and I want to talk a little bit before we end this of just anything in your vision, Robin, that you saw the opportunity for us to be able to elevate the industry as a whole when we start at Tique.
Robin: I think it just goes back to like that brand and client experience. I mean, I think my vision for what we wanted to accomplish in the industry, is give people that resource and that like guiding light to offload the stuff that is so important that they know they need to do but maybe don't have the time to like sit down and actually take the time – like to implement a new workflow, to reevaluate your client experiencet or to look at who do you serve and why and stuff like that. So I think there was just so much opportunity for us.
Jennifer: I'll just share a little bit about what we got when we first signed up for a host, and these are all normal things. This is a totally positive conversation, but we got access to an IATA, we got a group to discuss trips or any business things, we got systems trainings, but not necessarily industry trainings. And that's a huge gap that I think just exists in the industry. And that's not necessarily always on the fault of the industry because there are resources there. But I think a lot of people don't know where to find it when they start. So, it's something that I think a lot of hosts could have in the future is definitely a mentorship program before they actually jump into selling, but that's neither here nor there. And then we've also got once a month calls and emergency assistance. So again, all of that's completely normal for a host.
But what we're aiming to do with Tique and ultimately our community, which is Niche by Tique, is we're looking to fill in the gaps where potentially you're not getting that nurture from your host agency. We've talked a lot about client experience which is so important, but talking about evaluating your PNL and actually discussing with your accountant or your bookkeeper, a monthly analysis of where you are financially, evaluating your expenses, looking at whether a fam is going to be a return on investment, but also exploring opportunities for expanding your business, growing your business. What does that look like? How do you hire A VA?
So we're looking to peel back the layers not just in our services, but also in our community so that we're touching fully 360 degrees of the industry and talking about the things that we felt we never got addressed when we first started, simply because we didn't know where to go. So, we're creating the place to go. Tique Talk is your place to go to.
Robin: Seriously. I mean, there's so many things that we just did differently in our business that everyone was very interested in. We've always had boundaries. Boundaries have always been our thing. And if you, you know, think that you can have a travel business without boundaries, you're wrong. Stick around because there will be episodes on this for you. But we wanted to kind of negate the hustle mentality, get back into quality over quantity, and really help people lift the cloak on the resources to elevate their business. So many people are like '' I don't do business well” and I'm like how do you have a business then?
Those business trainings, it's one thing to have an idea and create these awesome services and service your clients, but it's another thing to do business well and we want to give you the tools and the trainings and the resources and the quick little tidbits and podcasts all about ways for you to do travel business, well. That's what we're all here to do, right?
Jennifer: That is what we're all here to do.
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