National Business Partnership Manager – Michael Gazal

TravelManagers has recently launched a dedicated business planning resource for its personal travel managers. National Business Partnership Manager Michael Gazal says too many people fall into the trap of only working in their business.

“At TravelManagers we want to make sure that our personal travel managers spend time working on ‘their’ business, working out what their strengths are, what they need help with, where the opportunities lie and how to capitalise on it all.”

Mr Gazal says trying to tackle that alone plus keeping the sales ticking over can potentially be stressful.

“Business planning is an important component to people joining TravelManagers and becoming a personal travel manager, so important that we designed a dedicated resource.”

The response from the personal travel managers has been outstanding.

“They all genuinely want to grow their business, while they are part of the TravelManagers business they also see the importance of taking a step back and objectively looking at how they are going, what they could do better and how to take advantage of their strengths after all ultimately it’s their business.”

Mr Gazal says while many of them have extensive experience in the travel industry not all of them have run their own business.

“This is where TravelManagers is outstanding, they see it as their role to assist the personal travel managers to maximize their potential by delivering support in aspects of operating a business that some personal travel managers may not have had previous experience in or have had only limited exposure to.”

Mr Gazal says the temptation is to think that because a personal travel manager may work remotely it means they are working in isolation.

“This couldn’t be further from the truth. We have the industry’s leading IT systems ensuring all of our personal travel managers are linked through our intranet with the various community chat sites and the training opportunities we have online. In addition to this TravelManagers has the best operational structure with our business partnership managers in each state, personal travel manager support staff with specialist skills that can be tapped into plus resources such as this business planning kit and the marketing kit to support our personal travel managers building a fledgling new business from the ground up.”

Mr Gazal says the business partnership managers (located in Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney) principal task is to assist with the transition to working remotely as a personal travel manager and to assist them to grow their business.

“The kit we’ve developed takes our personal travel managers through the journey of being objective about their business – looking at their own skills, the make-up of their clients, their product knowledge, their business acumen and their goals. It’s hugely comprehensive and they do this together with their business partnership manager.”

TravelManagers back the business planning up with marketing support, access to regular training, provision of comprehensive operational and product databases and as mentioned previously, locally based state mentoring.

“All of these are essential ingredients for ensuring a successful, profitable and professional business and we top it off with the best commission split in the industry. There is professional assistance in transitioning from a travel consultant to a personal travel manager at every step of the process.”