When we brought the Aquaduck to the Sunshine Coast, I knew within about a week which part of the day I loved and which part quietly drained me.
I loved watching a busload of people light up when the vehicle drove off the road and straight into the water. That never got old.
The kids screaming, the parents filming, the captain cracking the same joke he had cracked a thousand times and it landing every single time.
That is the exceptional experience. That is the reason any of us got into tourism in the first place.
And then there was the other side.
The rosters.
The agent commissions eating 25% before I had paid for a litre of fuel.
The compliance paperwork.
The cash flow that looked fine in January and frightening in March.
The reconciliations at 11pm when I should have been asleep.
Two completely different jobs. Same business. Same person trying to do both. Sound familiar?
What you are good at and what you actually love are not always the same thing
Here is something I suggest every operator sit down and work out honestly. Take a piece of paper and draw two columns.
Column one. What are you genuinely good at in your business?
Column two. What do you actually love doing?
For a lot of operators those two columns do not match up the way you would expect. You might be very very good at the books because you have had to be, but you would rather be out front with guests every single day. Or you might love the marketing side and the storytelling, but pricing and product-level profit make your head hurt.
When I ran my businesses I was strong on sales and on the guest experience. I could read a customer, build a product, get bums on seats. The detailed financial analysis, the bit where you pull a business apart to find exactly where the profit is leaking, that was something I had to be trained in. It did not come naturally to me at the start.
There is no shame in any of this. The problem is not that you have a weak column. The problem is what happens when you try to do both columns brilliantly, on your own, six and seven days a week.
You cannot deliver an exceptional experience while you are buried in the business
This is the part that catches operators out.
The guest experience and the business behind it are not separate things. They feed each other. When the business side is a mess, the experience suffers. Tired owners make tired decisions. You stop investing in the product. You cut the wrong corners. You snap at the staff. You start saying yes to every channel that will take you because cash flow is tight, and before you know it 47% of your bookings come through someone who takes a quarter of the price and owns your customer data.
I have lived the version where I was so deep in the operational weeds that I had nothing left for the thing I was best at. And the business felt it. Your guests can tell when the owner is running on empty. They cannot always name it, but they feel it.
So the goal is not to choose one column over the other. The goal is to make sure both get done well, without it all sitting on your shoulders alone.
How you actually do both
For me there are three honest options when you have a side of the business you are not good at or do not love.
Learn it yourself. This works for some things, but it is slow, and your time as the owner is the most expensive time in the business. Spending six months teaching yourself product-level profitability while your competitor is out selling is rarely the smart trade.
Hand it to someone in your team. This is fine if you have the right person, but most operators turning over $1M to $3M do not have a finance brain sitting spare in the building. And handing your numbers to someone who has never carried the risk themselves is not the same as having someone who has.
Bring in support from someone who has actually done it. Not a consultant who has read about tourism. Someone who has owned the boat, made the payroll, paid the OTA commission, and lived the seasonal cash flow.
That third option is the one I want to talk about properly, because it is the one most operators have the wrong picture of.
Why a support person who has been an operator changes the game
There is a very big difference between advice from someone who has studied your industry and support from someone who has lived inside it.
I spent over 20 years inside the tourism industry, as an operator not a consultant. I owned and ran Aquaduck on the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast.
I took on Southern Cross Tours with business partners when it was 92% internationally dependent and had fallen apart after COVID.
I have made the payroll when the bank balance scared me. I sat across the table from an agent and felt the commission bite.
I have packed up a business when the world shut down and relaunched another one in December 2020 when everyone said it was the worst possible time.
Here is what that means for you as an operator.
You do not have to explain the basics.
When you tell me your shoulder season is killing you, I do not need a lecture about what shoulder season is. I have lived it. We get straight to what we are going to do about it.
The advice fits a real operating business, not a textbook.
Plenty of advice sounds great until you try to run it past a real roster, a real weather forecast, and a real cash flow. When someone has actually operated, the advice has to survive contact with reality before it gets to you.
You get to keep doing what you love.
This is the part operators undervalue. When you have someone alongside you handling the side you are not strong on, you get your best hours back. You get to be out front with guests. You get to build the product. You get to do the thing you actually got into this for, while the profit side gets the attention it needs.
You stop carrying it all on your own.
Being an operator is lonely. You are the one who lies awake. A support person who has carried the same risk is not just analysing your numbers, they understand what those numbers feel like at 11pm. That matters more than people admit.
What this looked like in real numbers
I am wary of throwing percentages around without the context, so here is one with its starting point so you can judge the scale yourself.
At Southern Cross Tours, working alongside my team on a business that had disintegrated, we doubled sales in 100 days and grew profit by 4,670% between May 2021 and July 2022, off a starting point in the low thousands of dollars a month. A 4,670% jump sounds enormous, and it is, but it started from a very small base. That is exactly why I always give you the starting number. You deserve to do the maths yourself.
At Aquaduck, over the same kind of hands-on period, we lifted revenue 36% in 10 months and shifted online sales from 4% to 47% of turnover. None of that came from a clever idea on a whiteboard. It came from pulling the business apart, finding where the profit was leaking, and fixing the right things in the right order.
The point of all of this
You are good at something in your business. You love something in your business. The two might not be the same, and the bits you are not good at or do not love still have to get done well, because your guests feel the whole thing, not just the front of house.
You do not have to be brilliant at every part. You have to make sure every part is handled, and you have to protect the hours where you do your best work.
For me, the smartest operators are not the ones who try to do it all. They are the ones who know exactly what column they belong in, and who get the right support for the rest from someone who has actually been where they are.
