If You Ran The Same Business Next Year, Would You Hit Your Goals?
This is part three of our series on the off-season. Read part one here or watch the whole series here.
Most tour operators work incredibly hard all season long—guiding tours, answering emails, managing bookings—yet somehow end up in exactly the same place financially when the year wraps up. Same revenue numbers. Same profit margins. Same problems. Just more exhausted.
There’s a comfort trap that many of us fall into. We’re busy, so we tell ourselves we must be successful. But being busy and building a business are not the same thing. You can work really hard all year and still end up exactly where you started, just more tired.
That’s why one question matters more than almost anything else: If you ran the exact same business next year that you ran this year, would you hit your goals?
This question cuts through all the noise and forces you to look at results, not just effort.
The Problem With “I Want To Make More Money”
Here’s the real issue—most of us don’t know what we should change because we don’t have clarity on our goals. If you don’t have a clear idea of what you want to happen next year, you’re going to struggle deciding what to do to get there.
For example, what are some of your goals over the next year? If you said something like “I want to make more money” or “I want to grow my business,” that’s not a goal. That’s a wish. Wishes are vague. Goals are specific.
And if you want to build a real business, you need real goals.
The SMART Framework For Tour Operators
Your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Here are some examples of SMART goals for tour business owners:
Revenue goal: Increase annual revenue from $180,000 to $250,000 by December 31.
Profit goal: Improve net profit margin from 25% to 40% by the end of Q1.
Bookings goal: Grow direct bookings from 30% to 50% of total revenue by the end of the year.
See the difference? These specific goals tell you exactly what success looks like. You can know whether you hit them or not. And more importantly, having specific goals like this allows you to determine key performance indicators—metrics that track your progress as you move toward that goal.
Without these high-level SMART goals, you’re just wandering. You might be working hard, but you have no idea if you’re actually getting closer to where you want to be.
Goals, Tactics, and KPIs: Understanding The Difference
A tour business owner should have three to five high-level goals. But goals aren’t the same as tactics.
A high-level goal might be to increase company revenue by $150,000. A tactic you might choose is to launch a new tour that generates $150,000 in annual revenue. But that’s not the only path to get there. You might also redesign your sales page, optimize your Viator listings, add a new distribution channel with local hotels, or build email automation.
These are all good things to do, but they’re not goals. They’re actions you can take to reach your goals.
The goal tells you why you’re doing something. The tactic tells you how. Or as we sometimes put it, the tactic is a hypothesis on how you can bring about that change.
Without goals, it’s easy to just be busy—to fill your days doing stuff because you’re a hard worker. But you don’t know if it’s actually moving the needle or what needle it should be moving.
Tracking What Matters: Key Performance Indicators
The third element you need is KPIs—key performance indicators. These are the metrics that tell you whether your tactics are actually working.
Many operators aren’t tracking much except total revenue, but that’s like driving a car by only looking at the odometer. You need more data than that.
Here are some example KPIs tour operators should consider:
- Conversion rate: The percentage of website visitors who actually book. This tells you if your sales page is working.
- Average order value: How much the average customer spends per booking. This tells you if your upsells are working.
- Profit margin by product: Essential if you’re focused on growing profitability.
- Customer acquisition cost: How much you’re spending to get each booking.
For any given goal, you want to select a small number of key performance indicators—actual metrics that keep you honest and tell you if your tactics are working or if you need to adjust in real time.
A Real Example: Connecting Goals, Tactics, and KPIs
Let’s walk through a practical example using 90-day sprints, which is what we recommend at Guest Focus.
Say your goal is to hit $250,000 in revenue next year, up from $180,000 this year. That’s about a 40% increase. Your Q1 tactics might look like this:
Tactic 1: Redesign your sales page for your best-selling tour and improve conversion rate from 2% to 3%. That alone could add $20,000 in revenue with the same traffic and no additional marketing spend.
Tactic 2: Audit your pricing and increase prices by 10-15% or introduce variable pricing during peak season. If you’re doing $180,000 at current prices and average a 15% increase, that gets you to $207,000 in annual revenue—again without increased marketing spend or developing new products.
Tactic 3: Build a post-booking email automation to reduce no-shows and include one or two upsells. Fewer no-shows means more profit, and increasing average order value means you don’t have to spend more to get more customers.
Each tactic has one or two KPIs you’ll track over the quarter. In monthly meetings, you run those numbers and see if the hypothesis is working. If it is, double down. If not, ask why.
What we love about this approach is it helps you answer the question: What should I NOT be doing? It gives you permission to scratch things off your to-do list or put them on the shelf. Focus your resources and attention on just these things. If something isn’t contributing meaningfully to your tactic, KPI, or goal, that’s when discipline comes in to say no.
You Can’t Read the Label From Inside the Bottle
Here’s a hard truth: You can do a lot of this yourself. You can set goals, come up with tactics, identify KPIs. But the one thing you can’t do is see your own blind spots.
When you’re running your tour business day to day, you’re too close to it. You’ve been making the same decisions, following the same patterns, and you don’t always realize what’s holding you back—even when it’s right under your nose.
Our team of coaches has worked with over 2,000 operators from around the world. They can look at someone’s business and within 20 minutes spot problems and opportunities that can have a massive impact. It’s not just because they’re smart—it’s because they did this in their own businesses for years and have worked with so many other business owners just like you.
One of our clients sat down with their coach with a goal of increasing profit. They had all kinds of ideas and tactics. But the coach asked: Why are you capping your group size at 12? Are there days when you’re selling out? Could you increase this by three people per tour?
The coach also asked: Why do you have two guides on these tours? Are there ways to maintain the same quality experience with one staff member?
Just by implementing these two tweaks, the operator added $24,000 in profit in one quarter—which paid for their coaching multiple times over. That was just 20 minutes of insight plus a couple hours of implementation.
So Let’s Come Back To The Question
If you ran the exact same business next year that you did this year, would you get to your goals?
If the answer is no, we invite you to book a call. We have a limited number of mentors and spots, and here in the off-season, those spots fill up fast.
Head over to guestfocus.com/checkin and we’ll set you up with a tour business mentor who can sit down with you. You don’t have to come up with KPIs, tactics, and goals in a vacuum. Someone can highlight those blind spots—the things you don’t know you don’t know. Those often have the biggest impact.
Book a call today. Our calendar fills up fast, so visit guestfocus.com/checkin for a no-commitment chat to see if mentorship is right for you.



