SEATTLE — When it comes to running a home-based business, strike the word home-based from your vocabulary, entrepreneur Jennifer Doncsecz, president of VIP Vacations, told agents attending the "Keeping the 'Business' in Your Home Business" seminar at Travel Weekly's CruiseWorld and Home Based Agent Show.
Her attorney works from home, but he doesn't call himself a home-based attorney, she said.
• One of Doncsecz's key points: Have a plan. That's what transforms selling travel from a hobby to a business. She advocated setting business hours and dressing professionally, an approach that helped her win her first clients: mothers at her daughter's preschool. They wanted to buy travel from someone in a suit, she told her audience.
• Learn, learn, learn, Doncsecz said, and that means not just taking the training the travel industry offers but going into the broader business world for inspiration.
• Think about what your business looks like, Doncsecz told agents. Your website, blog, business card and email should reflect your brand. And part of that is making sure that your email is your own, not a Yahoo or a Gmail address.
• Know your own numbers, she said: Don't rely on tour operators or wholesalers to tell you your sales with them.
• Travel agent entrepreneurs wear many hats, Doncsecz said; they include accountant, marketer, advertiser, human resources and many more. You have to know how everything in your business works, be it a GDS, QuickBooks or your customer relationship management system, but you should also outsource things like accounting, if it means freeing yourself up to be more profitable.
Doncsecz has five inside agents who work from her now-expanded home office. Each drives a car wrapped with a Sandals ad, and she projects sales of more than $6 million from her inside agents. She has about a dozen outside agents who generate additional sales.
Follow Kate Rice on Twitter @krtravelweekly.