By Sherrie Funk

If you’ve been following this column for the past three months, in writing your home based business plan, you’ve answered questions regarding your basic home based agency concept, done an agency summary and a market analysis. Now you’ve reached the point where you are trying to write a description of what it is that your agency actually does or sells. Now is the time to take a step back and reflect.

What’s the view from 40,000 feet? What’s the “big picture” overview of your suppliers or the services you offer? How would you categorize them and describe them for a reader who’s unfamiliar with the travel industry? The starting point is a clear statement of what travel products you will sell and what services your agency will provide. Focus on those areas that make your agency unique and desirable to customers.

Another issue to consider is whether you hope to sell travel on a one-time or infrequent basis (as some of the big Internet agencies do), or whether repeat sales are the goal.

Competitive Comparisons
As a general rule, your plan should always address potential problems, including the strengths of your competition, rather than avoiding any mention of them. The fact that you can recognize where legitimate problems might exist reflects well on your management abilities.

Sourcing
All travel agencies are dependent on their relationships with their suppliers. Your business plan should address the type of vendors and suppliers you will use and, if possible, identify them by name. Knowing which vendors and suppliers you want to use and what travel products or services they can provide is an important part of growing your business.

Suppliers
The travel industry is full of suppliers that we buy travel products from for our customers. Some of these include cruise lines, tour operators, airlines, hotels, car rental companies, travel insurance, rail companies and motorcoach companies.

Vendors
There are other types of businesses that travel agencies depend on to deliver additional services and products. Some of these include accountants, media (newspaper, radio, and television), printers, GDS providers, Internet service providers, telephone services, advertising specialties, banking services, utilities direct mail services, including mail shop services and U.S. Postal Service, couriers and overnight delivery services.

Future Services and Suppliers
Successful small and medium size agencies generally find that other agencies will eventually discover their formula and attempt to imitate them. Particularly if you have done a good job of identifying an important unmet need in your target market, you’ll find that copycats seem to spring out of the woodwork all too quickly, and some of them may even threaten your hard-won market share.

So, small to medium size agency owners need to embrace and seek out change, rather than avoid it or wait until change is forced upon them by competitors. One way to do this is to constantly be on the lookout for ways to expand your agency by offering new suppliers or services to your customers. This can be something as simple as adding a booking engine to your Web site, or adding a supplier for Europe river cruises rather than offering only motorcoach tours of Europe.

Your business plan should address the future in some fashion, by outlining the opportunities you see for growth beyond your current capabilities.

Sherrie Funk and husband Charlie own Just Cruisin! Plus, Nashville. They founded the Travel Agent Management Academy to educate owners and managers about the techniques that have been instrumental to their agency’s success