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hi I'm Evan Carmichael welcome to another edition of ask Evan in today's episode I'm going to answer a question from one of my newsletter readers Christine who's an entrepreneur in Kenya and she's a tour operator so she takes tourists around in Kenya who are visiting and shows them a good time and shows on the country pretty new business and wanted my advice on growing it so she has three main uh Target markets that she's going after one are the tourists so International tourists looking to view the country the second are Honeymooners so people coming just after getting married and non vacation and the third are corporate clients and they're often coming for different team building activities So Christine having been on a number of trips myself internationally and I've never been to Africa but I've gone to a number of different countries on trips especially when you're coming off of cruise ships or you're looking for uh tour tour offers to go with the biggest thing that I think you can offer is service most of the time when you land and I'm thinking especially off of cruise ships when you land you get off and there's a a thousand different tour operators coming at you and you don't know how to differentiate one for the other and the biggest fear that you're going to have is that you're going to make a mistake and go with the wrong person you're going to have a bad experience some people worried about safety depending on the country that you're going into but for most part it's having a bad experience experience and being stuck for a whole day with a tour operator who's not going to give you either good value or good service and it's really really hard to tell what a good service is going to be from a bad service just from landing on you know going to the dock or going to the airport and seeing the people kind of pitching you the different ideas so it's the biggest fear that people are going to have and for agents who are going to be referring you for international travel agents who are booking trips on behalf of these guys it's also really hard for them to tell who's going to provide good service or not so service five star service excellent service is really going to help you stand out so there's a couple different ways that you can do it the first thing I would do is I would put people in uniforms if you have somebody in uniform and I appreciate that it's very hot in Kenya so you know short sleeves shorts even but something that looks professional if you did that right away you're going to stand out from everybody else who's on uh coming at you so I've been to a lot of different uh cities and and countries and again you're pitched by all sorts of people and they often look you know they're in regular street clothes you don't really know if this is a company or just some guy in the back of his van that you're getting into so if you had professional sign professional uniforms that people are into you're already setting a standard of service that's higher than everybody else and it's going to be a lot easier for you to get the North American clients who are looking for some kind of trust uh and people put a lot of trust in that service and having uniforms the next thing make sure everything is clean and make sure everybody you hire is super friendly so clean again if they're in uniform make sure the uniforms are clean whatever vehicle they're coming to pick people up in make sure those are clean cuz a lot of times they're not in a lot of the countries that I've been to at least make sure the signage is clean uh it's not all scuffed up and people hand you kind of photo copies of things that don't look very professional you want to have a professional image and you can even charge a premium people who are on vacation or who are honeymooning or or corporate they are looking to spend money right when I get off on a cruise ship and I'm landing in a country I want to spend money I want to have a good time I'm just worried that I'm going to spend it with the wrong person so people would pay you a premium to ensure that they're going to have a really good experience and that's why people on cruise ships often book through the cruise operator because they know they're going to get a pretty good experience and it's been vetted by the cruise ship before but it's a huge huge price increase and they're willing to pay it so if you can immediately off the off the boat or people landing on their plane or whever they're getting there uh show show them that you look highly professional and guarantee they're going to have a good experience you're going to be able to charge your premium and get more business so again everything must be clean and you want people to be friendly so greet with a smile ask people how they're doing you know you want to train anybody who's working on the front lines dealing with customers to be friendly answer questions make it a good time people are there to have fun so you want to make sure you're having fun people who you're hire as well something that I would also encourage you to do and I don't know how feasible it is but I would try to hire expats or students from the countries that you're trying to recruit from uh so for example if you're trying to attract Americans to come and and sign up I would try to get an expat American or American students to be there selling your services for you if I see somebody who is more like me you're more likely to sign up with them and a quick example um when I went to Japan I was the only guy from from North America who work at C in Japan um it's you know very Japanese Centric which is great and and immediately you're faced with culture shock so you're not quite sure what to do you may not understand the language uh you're walking around you're not quite sure where you're going and there was another guy who I met on the streets who was from North America and immediately you make friends because you're the only two who are the same and everybody else is is uh different for this it's a big culture shock and immediately we were able to strike a conversation start talking he introduced me to you know where where he was hanging out and G gave me some recommendations so I could see the same thing happening where it could be a big culture shock for somebody from North America coming to Kenya not knowing you know where to go not knowing uh the language the culture so if you had somebody working for your company who was from North America or UK or Australia who spoke the language who understood the culture and could speak with people on their own terms in their own in their own culture it'd be a lot easier to get people to sign up so if a tour operator came to me uh in any of the countries that I landed in and it was somebody from the US or Canada or or Britain I'd be a lot more willing to start talking to them and be easier for me to sign up with them if they were cleancut friendly in uniform and look like me it'd be a lot easier for me to want to do business with them um so just because there's so much culture shock it's an easy way for you to stand out now you still want to provide the Kenyan experience right people are there to experience Kenya but if you had some people in the front lines who were more like the people who uh you're selling to as as much as you can relate to your customer the easier it is to be able to sell them so I'd look at if there's any expats or students from the countries to be able to bring them on board to be on your front lines as well to help talk to customers the last thing I would do then is also get on trip advisor and encourage people to leave positive comments so whenever we do any of our travels we'll always go on trip advisor and see what are are the most common things that people do what's getting the most feedback and we're trying to plan our day right we may not have a lot of time in in whatever City we're going to whatever country so we want to make sure it's time well spent and you're getting kind of the maximum value from it so CHP is a great place to go and if we see that one tour operators getting tons of great remarks for the great service they have and how friendly everybody is and how clean everybody is I'm going to go and book with those guys even if it's at a premium to everybody else and I'll probably even do the booking in advance to make sure I get my spot so then there's less sales that you'll have to do when people get there they're already pre-booking and that'll help with a lot of your cash flow issues as well because people are paying up front and you're delivering the service whenever they arrive in your in uh in your country so hopefully that helps might be a little different than what you expecting um but I think there's a real opportunity for you to be able to stand out using that five-star service methodology and be able to get a lot of those people that come and want to work with you and pay you more money than they' be paying the other guys so hopefully that helps if you guys like the video please give it a thumbs up below and I also look forward to hearing your comments if you want to leave one under the video and stay tuned for next episode