Where travel advisors achieve more
03 - Choice
The Intentional Advisor™
Building a travel business that becomes more valuable without becoming more dependent on you
Most experienced travel advisors don't need to become better at serving clients.
Many need something quite different:
A business designed to make better use of the advisor they've already become.
In Part I of this series, The Plateau Loop, I explored why capable, experienced advisors can continue working harder while their businesses stop meaningfully progressing.
In Part II, The Service Paradox, we looked at something more counterintuitive: how the very behaviours that make someone an exceptional advisor can gradually make the business increasingly dependent upon them.
There is an alternative. The alternative to the Plateau Loop isn't simply working less. And the alternative to the Service Paradox isn't providing less service.
It is becoming much more intentional about where the advisor creates value - and where they are no longer required.
That is the transition towards becoming The Intentional Advisor.
Being valuable is not the same as being required everywhere
For many experienced advisors, value has become closely associated with personal involvement.
Being responsive.
Being available.
Knowing the client.
Solving the problem.
Remembering the detail.
Stepping in when something goes wrong.
These are valuable qualities. In many cases, they're precisely why clients have remained loyal for years. But there is an important distinction:
Your value to the client does not have to be measured by how much of you the business requires.
As an advisor develops, the source of their value can begin to change.
From:
Responsiveness → Accessibility → Personal Involvement → Problem Solving → Availability
Towards:
insight → Positioning → Expertise → Client Selection → Authority
The advisor remains important. But where they are important now changes.
And this leads to an important principle:
High-touch should describe the quality of the client's experience - not the amount of the advisor's life the business consumes.
The Intentional Advisor Shift™
There is a point in the development of an advisory business where becoming better at the work itself is no longer enough. The next stage requires something different. The advisor begins moving from personal effort towards deliberate business design.
That transition can be thought of as five shifts:
1. Personal Effort
At first, the advisor creates value primarily through what they personally do.
Knowledge, responsiveness, relationships & sheer capability drive the business.
This works.
Often extremely well.
But personal effort has a natural ceiling.
2. Structure
The advisor begins identifying which parts of an exceptional client experience genuinely require their expertise as well as those parts which can instead be supported by better systems, boundaries and processes.
Service becomes increasingly designed rather than recreated.
3. Selectivity
The question gradually changes from:
“How can I win more bookings?”
to:
“Which clients and which work genuinely justify my involvement?”
The business stops treating every opportunity as equally valuable.
4. Authority
The advisor becomes increasingly known for a particular perspective, expertise or way of working. Instead of continually having to demonstrate their value each time a prospect arrives, their reputation begins doing some of that work beforehand.
The dynamic changes.
The advisor pursues less.
The right clients begin arriving with greater conviction.
5. Optionality
Eventually, something much more valuable than efficiency appears: choice.
Choice over clients.
Choice over time.
Choice over pricing.
Choice over growth.
Choice over how personally involved the advisor wants to remain.
The advisor hasn't become less valuable. They've built a business that can make better use of their value.
Four characteristics of an Intentional Advisor
This isn't about creating a business devoid of personality or human involvement. Quite the opposite. It is about becoming more deliberate about where that human involvement matters most. Four characteristics begin to emerge.
Selectivity
The Intentional Advisor doesn't simply seek more business.
They become increasingly clear about the clients, problems and opportunities where their expertise creates disproportionate value.
Structure
Exceptional service isn't dependent upon constantly improvising an exceptional response. The client experience becomes deliberate.
The advisor remains present where their insight matters - without needing to be present everywhere.
Authority
The business gradually moves away from relying entirely on pursuit, referral or repeated explanation.
The advisor develops a recognisable point of view.
Their thinking becomes visible.
Their expertise begins travelling further than they can personally travel.
Optionality
The ultimate measure isn't simply whether revenue has increased.
It is whether the business has created more choices for the person who owns it.
Because growth without choice can simply create a larger version of the same dependency.
Three frameworks. One transition.
Across this series, I've looked at three different aspects of the same business transition.
The Plateau Loop explains why progress can stall even while effort continues increasing.
The Service Paradox explains how exceptional service can gradually create greater personal dependence.
The Intentional Advisor offers the alternative: deliberately redesigning the business around the expertise, reputation and insight the advisor has already spent years developing.
These aren't three separate problems. They are three views of the same transition.
From a business built around the advisor's effort...
to a business built around the advisor's value.
What changes when the business becomes intentional?
Perhaps the most interesting change isn't operational at all. It's psychological.
The advisor no longer has to prove their value by constantly being busy.
They don't have to be available to everyone.
They don't have to accept every suitable-looking client.
They don't have to personally carry every important interaction.
And they don't need to compromise the quality of their service to achieve any of this.
Instead, their experience starts working for the business rather than simply inside it.
That is a very different destination from simply becoming more efficient. And for an experienced advisor who has already spent years mastering the craft, it may be the more important one.
Where this leads
This is the transition I've become increasingly interested in:
not teaching experienced travel advisors to sell travel better, but working with them to redesign their business around the expertise, reputation and client insight they've spent years developing.
It's the thinking behind the High-Touch Advisor Method.
And it begins with a deceptively simple question:
Has becoming better at what you do made your business more freeing or simply made more people depend on you?
If you've been in travel for a long time, I'd genuinely be interested in your answer.
And if you're already thinking about what a more intentional version of your own business might look like, feel free to connect or message me.
It's a conversation I'm always interested in having.
Darren Roberts
Where travel advisors achieve more