Sixteen months into dealing with Manhattan Probate Court about an inheritance without the proper paperwork, I am somewhat obsessed on the subject of succession planning—and so of course I’ve been talking to travel advisors about it.
I’ve learned: Be prepared. Franchise agreements help. Bring in an expert or two. And when the worst happens, make sure you have a support system of relationships to help your heirs find their footing in the most difficult of
So many travel advisors have shared their stories and it’s such an important topic that I will do another column on it. Stay tuned.
Melissa Shanks is only 51 years old, but already she is thinking about succession planning for her travel agency franchise.
Perhaps it’s because she took over her parents’ travel business, one of the first few hundred Cruise Planners franchises, after the unexpected and untimely death of her mother, Ronda Zeneri, in 2019.
“Losing my mom and having to just pick up the pieces helped me see the importance of succession planning, of managing the business so it can be wrapped up in a bow that someone else can take over. Because you never know,” she says.
Though her father was a partner in the agency, he never was heavily involved; he was more the initial buyer and brought in clients. It was her mom who did the client development, servicing and marketing, with seven other associates over the years. After helping out through her teenage and college years, her mother “finally convinced” Shanks to quit her full-time job and join the agency eight years ago. She expected to slowly learn the business—but just three years later, while she was still getting her feet wet, her mom suddenly was gone.
Today, Shanks feels she is just recovering from the loss of her mother, her mentor and her boss. But she does have a plan in place already for her retirement and succession.
She is hopeful that one day one of her three daughters, now aged 22, 19 and 18, will want to step up. But in any case, she is preparing by bringing on younger associates and training them to possibly take over. Unlike her mother, she handles the business end of things, selects clients and turns the rest over to her eight associates. Her goal was always to spend more time with her family and traveling, she says, and to acclimate the clients to working with her associates rather than just her.
“My long-term plan is to bring either my oldest daughter on as a silent partner, so all my hard work of building a client base doesn’t die,” she says. That way if something happens to her, she will be able to immediately make decisions about where to go from there: to keep the business running and manage it, or to convert ownership to an associate.
In her own stressful time, she was overwhelmed and suddenly overseeing associates “who all had more experience than me and were older than me.” And then Covid hit.
Shanks credits the team with stepping up to help—and the onslaught of Covid with giving her the break she needed to catch her breath. Being a franchise made things easier, too, she notes; Cruise Planners quickly helped her navigate the paperwork to replace her mom as a co-owner.
“During Covid, I woke up every day in tears and said to myself, ‘Get out of bed, travel is over but it will come back, and you have to nurture your clients,’ ” she says. “And when the travel doors opened, it skyrocketed from $230,000 in sales to $3.5 million in 2023.”
Through it all, Shanks says, she was guided by her mom’s philosophy: “It’s not about the trip, it’s not about the money; it’s about the client relationships. I didn’t know what that meant until it was all I had, until my work family really became my second mothers and helped me pull it all together. Now I understand that succession planning is nurturing relationships so they continue on forever.”
With a financial advisor and an accountant, and her Cruise Planners franchise support team, she has come up with a plan that she feels fits the needs of her agency. For now, she will be the sole owner with her daughter as a silent partner, so she can “take some time to manage the business independently, to grow and experiment, to spread my wings and see where it goes.”
She already has taken over two other CP franchises, and will split commissions with the owners for a certain amount of time. She immediately looked at the pool of inactive clients at the new acquisitions and assigned them to the six new associates who came along with those deals. “I told them to reach out to those clients three or four times and ask what they can do to help them—and 75% or more of those clients stayed with us. It’s not difficult to keep a client when your focus is on continuing a relationship. Even if they don’t buy travel today, they will remember you cared about them and, when they are ready, they will call you. That’s how you build retention, so that person looks forward to talking with you.”
Passing the Torch to the Team
For Jennifer Jacob, it was two new ventures—a successful side consulting business for travel advisors, called Tique, and a new baby on the way—that distracted her from her travel agency. The requirements of 13 ICs on one side and a successful but fledgling business on the other left her zero time for a personal life, and the new baby surely would just make that even more difficult. So she sold her agency to two of her ICs—who have grown the business to 25 ICs since 2022.
Jacob worked with Robert Joselyn as a business intermediary, drawn in by what she felt was his understanding of her predicament during their initial conversation, when she was feeling guilty about leaving the industry. “I told him I was six months pregnant and had another business and he said, ‘You’ll never get this time back and you are doing what’s right, you are transitioning to another season of life.’ ”
In subsequent meetings she and Joselyn discussed the two ways to slice and dice your numbers: one that gives you the lowest tax burden, and one that increases your valuation. “I had always gone with the first, which leaves you with very overhead heavy and therefore with a lower profitability. But that decreases the attractiveness to someone looking to take over,” she says. (For more on this, see next week’s column.)
Joselyn suggested that Jacob’s tax-efficient strategy meant that the best opportunity was with someone who had a high emotional investment in the brand and really understood her business, and that meant looking internally. So she met with the two ICs she thought most likely to succeed—and “they accepted in 24 hours, we closed in two months, and we signed the papers at my baby shower,” she says.
Jacob stayed on for two months as an available advisor for the team and remained available as needed through her maternity leave. “I did a personalized hand-off to every single client; I let them know I appreciate them and said here are the new owners. And I recommended who I thought would be an ideal match for them within the organization, and said if they ever want to pursue another itinerary here’s the link.”
And while she is no longer on payroll, she surely is still there in spirit. “I still have an away message up so if they do reach out I can still transition them,” she says. “And I still talk to the new owners probably every other day, and tell them how completely impressed I am with the way they have grown.”
Never Too Young to Start Training
At Melissa Cohn Dream Vacations on New York’s Long Island, Melissa and Brian Cohn also already have their succession plan in place. Their son Asher, who soon will be entering fourth grade, has been traveling with them since he was a baby—and they all agree he will take over when the time is right. Here’s how he replied to our Q&A for this article:
TRO: Some people want to make lots of money and some love to travel and some love to help people. Why do you want to be a travel advisor?
Asher: I want to make people’s travel dreams come true!
TRO: What do you think is the hardest part of the job? And the best part?
Asher: The hardest part is dealing with flight disruptions. The best part is hearing about the clients’ wonderful vacation experiences!
TRO: If you were the boss, is there something you would do differently than your Mom?
Asher: Take a day off once in a while and spend more time planning our own vacations.
Personally, I think he’s ready.
Cheryl’s 40-year career in journalism is bookended by roles in the travel industry, including Executive Editor of Business Travel News in the 1990s, and recently, Editor in Chief of Travel Market Report and admin of Cheryl Rosen’s Group for Travel Professionals, a news and support group on Facebook. As an independent contractor since retiring from the 9-to-5 to travel more, she has written regular articles about the life and business of travel agents for Luxury Travel Advisor, Travel Agent, and Insider Travel Report. She also writes and edits for professional publications in the financial services, business, and technology sectors.