Transcript [EN]: The 30 Day Things to Do Challenge for Tour Operators - Intro and Day 1 (124)

today's episode of the torpreneur podcast is kindly sponsored by checkfront the booking platform trusted by over 5 000 tour and activity operators around the world this month checkfront is offering an exclusive 90-day free trial for tourpreneurs find out more at checkfront.com forward slash torpreneur welcome to the tourpreneur podcast travel industry veteran shane whaley will take you on a journey with fellow tourpreneurs sharing their tips ideas insights and success stories to inspire you to make your tour business the best it can be and now here is your host shane whaley hello and welcome to episode 124 of tourpreneur today we are going to introduce the 30-day things to do challenge for tour operators that we're running in association with our friends at checkfront i'm really excited for this one uh welcome to the show angela hill director of marketing hello angela hi shane thank you for having me absolute pleasure welcome back to tourpreneur kyla steves who is a content marketing specialist at checkfront hi kyla hi shane and big welcome to ryan lansbury who is making his debut on the podcast ryan is the training manager at the technical support team at checkfront welcome ryan hi shane thanks for having me absolute pleasure so we have a 30-day challenge and i was really excited to find out about this when angela and i was talk we're talking about it because one of the things that i have heard from our listeners members of our community is two things first of all a serious overwhelm because many of us over the last six seven eight months i've been on webinars we've been attending virtual events been reading lots of books some of us have gone on courses and we all have a stack of action notes but many of us are feeling very guilty because we haven't got to that to-do list and actually implemented what we've learned the other thing i'm hearing as well from many entrepreneurs is a lack of motivation because let's be honest the hits keep on coming right europe is now into a second lockdown u.s cases are up i'm not sure what the numbers are like in canada but it just seems that every day is a blow for the travel industry and many of our listeners just feel defeated so i was excited to find out that you'd set up this challenge kyla because it gives us something proactive to do doesn't it something that is under our control where did this idea come from to actually launch a 30-day challenge yeah so the idea behind the challenge has basically it was inspiration for my own life where it's been a really crazy year and we're coming to the end of it and thinking back like there were a lot of things that i wanted to do that i didn't get around to do and i understand that for touring activity operators what you initially set out to do might have been completely derailed because of the pandemic but the thing is it's the end of the year it's not too late to catch up on your to-do list and head into 2021 feeling good that's why we decided to create this 30-day thanks to do challenge for touring activity operators where every day there will be one small task for you to complete that'll make a positive improvement on your business the restrictions from the pandemic have really turned a lot of travel experiences businesses on their heads and the amount of information being fed virtually might be leaving you feeling overwhelmed as you said shane so everyone's telling you to do this and that to stay afloat so how do you keep up with it all so we wanted to provide some tactical small wins you can do easily in a couple hours or less and don't worry there are some fun tasks designed to lift your spirits too and we want to do this challenge through the month of november live with the tours and activities community community before we all turn our focus to the holidays absolutely and when i heard about this idea in this challenge i also thought well let's do something radically different on the podcast in order to help members of our community that want to complete this challenge let's release wait for it a daily podcast which is something we've never done on the show before and i felt it would just be a good idea as you send out the challenge for the day as i understand how this works for those who sign up and it's completely free to sign up um you get an email from checkfront every day with that day's challenge and i thought well cool you can also listen to your favorite podcast and hear us discuss the challenge as well as something to help encourage our listeners as we go through the 30-day challenge there will be um some of our traditional episodes going out so we actually have a meet the res tech check front edition that's scheduled to go out next week as well as well as our normal programming um but what i will say to our listeners is if you're not taking part don't unsubscribe from the show just swipe delete for the daily pod that's all you've got to do is just swipe that in your app and and that will be what you don't have to listen to it but i know most of you will want to get on this challenge i know angela when we mentioned this in our tour our entrepreneur facebook group we got a lot of really positive feedback to the idea yeah you know shane i think you kind of said it perfectly when you said people are overwhelmed we all moved to this virtual style of education and interaction and it's really just distracted us and so i think that the challenge is going to resonate because it is very actionable very tactical and it is small movements which i think those compound and we'll leave everybody with a really good feeling at the end of the month yeah this isn't you know these tasks and i've looked through them it's not like get to number one in google for your search ranking uh it's not take a hundred photographs for your tours i mean these are actionable practical things that we can do during these 30 days so looking at the the 30 days there's a couple of rules that you had here so you say do it in whatever order you like you can even play blackout bingo what did you mean by that i just meant that if there was something that you wanted to do first you can go for that first like you can just make it more fun by doing the tasks in whatever order you like because we're doing it live entrepreneur it's actually a better idea to follow along in the right order yes yeah because we will be discussing the task at hand here entrepreneur every day as i said you'll be sending out emails to uh people's inboxes with resources for that day to help as well and i think you said here to have fun with it and i think that's an important thing as well i think this for tour operators who complete the 30 days they're going to be really set up well for 2021 aren't they kyla yeah i think it's just doing small little things every day kind of gets you back into the habit of doing these useful things for your business and it just hopefully this will just give you the motivation to keep at it one small task at a time absolutely and what i will say to those of our listeners who for whatever reason are unable to take part in the challenge in november you might want to do this in january next year and whilst i urge you to try and do it in november because we'll be sharing things in the facebook group and on social about that day's challenge if you can't do it in november because of other commitments then maybe in january you can go back sign up now get get the emails get the pdfs and you can come back the magic of podcasting is that this podcast doesn't disappear these episodes will be around you know january february march next year if you wanted to do it then as well so although we really want you to do this in november it will be there for future months so anything else to share before we we get into day one yeah this is gonna be a really fun challenge to do to follow along with so if you want to share your progress feel free to do that on instagram or twitter just use the hashtag tour operator challenge and we'll share it on checkfront too marvellous and also to sign up to the the challenge you can go to tourpreneur.com forward slash challenge that will take you through to the intro and day one show notes and you can sign up for that there again i want to reiterate this is free and also you don't have to be a check front customer to take part as long as you're a tour operator um there are a few days in this i think it's fair to point out that are about working with your booking software whoever you're using and if you're not working currently with the booking software then just skip those days but there's going to be things in here even if you don't have booking software so day one organize your booking dashboard yeah so day one is all about um you know for the 30 day challenge is to get organized on your booking dashboard now this the challenge really came from a lot of feedback that we heard from operators around the world about how busy things can get you know once things get picked up on the front desk their first instinct is often to get you know multiple tabs open or set up lots of bookmarks i've heard one customer even setting up bookmark uh folders for each just staff name so they can see all the tabs they need to open up for the day but those that spent a little bit of time to get the most of their dashboard found that they can come avoid common issues such as context switching so having tons of tabs open causes this issue where you might lose track of where you are so you can free up some time and provide you a little bit of stress relief and know that you're prepared as guests arrive for the day you talk on here with the day one challenge about best widgets to include can you share a bit more about that yeah i mean there's lots of different widgets to to use and lots of different booking systems offer hopefully around the similar similar widgets some of the ones that i find a specific feature that i find is super helpful for our operators is having an account specific dashboard so if you as an admin log in you may want to see more reports around you know booking volume or individual booking actions that have happened such as a booking log um or more revenue based things like a booking volume or bookings by month whereas your staff members might need to have a separate one more around intake or helping people with um on the phone so like a customer calendar or an inventory calendar and i think it's fair to say so for many of our listeners right now we're not taking bookings because we're in lockdown and because of the pandemic but now is still a good time to actually look at your dashboard and say okay if i was taking bookings if this was peak season how would i want my dashboard to look yeah absolutely yeah and again there's lots of different widgets that that are available and each each tour operator might have some specific workflow workflow so explore the widgets that are offered in your booking dashboard if you you have one or just the apps as well that you might use if you're not using a booking system you can always look at just some of the apps and look at the individual dashboards to make sure that those are optimized brilliant so we'll see you on day two sounds good thanks for listening to the torpreneur podcast be sure to visit torpreneur.com to join the conversation and access the show notes including links to the resources mentioned on today's episode this is