PROFITABILITY, RUNG TWO OF THE GROWTH LADDER
Booked out and still not making money?
Profitability is where we fix what your business keeps rather than what it earns. Pricing, product margin, the true cost of every channel, and what it actually costs you to serve one guest. It starts with a Profit Leak Analysis, then runs as fortnightly coaching with me.
Thirty minutes, free, no pitch.
Done with you, fortnightly, one to one. Six-month minimum.
When people ask me about Aquaduck, I usually tell them revenue was up 36.1 percent in ten months. It is the number that sounds best at a dinner party.
The number I actually care about is the other one. Net profit per passenger went up 200 percent.
Those two numbers are telling different stories. Revenue is what came in the door. Net profit per passenger is what we kept out of every single person who stepped onto that boat, and it is the one that decided whether the business was worth owning.
Here is one piece of how that happened. When I took over, merchandise was doing $63,000 a year. Three years later it was doing $308,000. Same boat, same passengers, same crew. We were selling to people who were already there and already happy, and nobody had ever treated that as a real part of the business.
That is what this rung is. Going through the business looking for the levers nobody has pulled.
WHERE THIS COMES FROM
on
The two numbers most operators cannot separate
Almost every operator I meet knows their revenue to the dollar.
Ask them which of their products makes money and the room goes quiet. Ask what it costs them to put one guest through the most popular experience they sell, all in, and they will estimate. Ask what a Viator booking costs them compared with a booking through their own site, in dollars rather than percentages, and almost nobody has done that sum.
Not all products are profitable. Your most popular experience is very often your least profitable one, because volume hides it and the top line looks healthy the whole time.
Which of your products actually makes money?
What does one guest cost you, all in?
What does a platform booking cost you against a direct one, in dollars?
This is the single biggest issue in tourism, and it has almost nothing to do with marketing.
Thirty minutes. Which rung you are on.
About three weeks. Leaks named, sized, in order. You can stop here.
Fortnightly, one to one. Six-month minimum.
STEP ONE
It starts with the Profit Leak Analysis
Every Profitability client does this first. No exceptions.
It is a fixed-price diagnostic that runs about three weeks. I go through your numbers, test your pricing and your product margins, size your channel costs in dollars, and personally interview three of your customers and three of your suppliers. You get a written report with the leaks named, sized and put in order, and a guarantee that I will identify at least $35,000 in uplift or the analysis is free.
I ask for it first because I cannot coach you on decisions I have not seen the numbers behind, and you cannot judge whether the coaching is worth it until you have seen what is actually wrong. Six months of sessions built on a guess helps nobody.
Plenty of operators do the analysis, take the report and go and do the work themselves. That is a legitimate ending and it is not a failure.
STEP TWO
How the coaching runs
Fortnightly sessions with me, one to one. Six-month minimum, which is twelve sessions. Most operators stay twelve to eighteen months, because the action plan is longer than six months of work.
Your program is shaped by what the analysis found and the three goals we agree in the first session. The structure stays the same. What changes is what we spend the time on inside each session.
We walk through your Profit Leak Analysis together. Set the three goals. Agree the one number we track every fortnight.
Your last twelve months of revenue and costs. We separate the noise from the signal and find your actual gross margin.
The contribution margin of every product at your average group size. This is the session most operators tell me later was the one that changed the conversation.
Commission rates, the real cost of a direct booking against a platform booking. You leave with a true cost per booking for every channel you use.
When you last reviewed them. What your input costs have done since. Where the gap is. You build a repricing plan with specific numbers and specific dates.
What it takes to move 5, 10 or 20 percent of your bookings across. Website, email list, repeat guests, partnerships.
Current runway, target runway, a twelve-month cash forecast. You stop running the off-season on feel.
Hours worked. What only you can do. What you do because nobody else has been shown how. A plan to give you back five hours a week inside 90 days.
We rework the answer until it would survive being said out loud to a guest at the end of a tour.
Which channels return real bookings for your business. Which are eating your time so you look busy.
What your people need to know to run a normal week without asking you. The three procedures worth writing first.
You build it. My job is to make it specific and to get the order right. It goes home with you.
Between sessions you get virtual assistant support for execution, so the work actually happens rather than waiting for you to find a Sunday.
What changes
You will know your real gross margin, most likely for the first time.
You will know the contribution margin of every product you sell at your average group size, which means you will know which experiences are quietly losing money on most departures.
You will know what every channel costs you per booking, in dollars.
You will have a repricing plan with specific numbers and specific dates.
You will have a realistic target for shifting bookings to direct, and the practical steps to get there.
You will have a twelve-month cash forecast that replaces feel with numbers.
You will have given yourself back at least five hours a week.
You will own a twelve-month profit plan you built yourself, that you understand well enough to explain to your accountant.
FOR OPERATORS ABOVE $1M
Business Improvement Coaching, for operators above $1M
The work above $1M is a different conversation, so it gets its own name and its own shape.
This is for operators who have a team, moving parts, and decisions in front of them that are bigger than the day to day. Pricing structures. Channel decisions. Hiring. Expansion. Succession. Exit planning. You know enough to know what you do not know, and the cost of getting the next decision wrong is larger than the cost of getting help to make it right.
The structure is the same, the depth is not. Sessions work on the decisions in front of you rather than a curriculum, and the analysis that precedes it goes deeper because there is more business to go through.
The right engagement for a $1.2 million operator with a settled team looks different from the right engagement for a $4 million operator going through a leadership change. We agree scope and investment based on what the analysis actually finds, which is the honest reason there is no price on this page.
"Sarah has an exceptional ability to quickly understand the commercial reality of a business and then apply smart, practical strategy that actually delivers results. Her strength across business improvement, marketing, sales and financial thinking helped us sharpen our direction and significantly strengthen our market position. ... Just as importantly, she worked closely with us as owners and with our wider team, challenging thinking, building confidence and leaving the business stronger than she found it."
Who this is for
Tourism operators turning over between $500,000 and $20 million. Tour operators, attractions, cruise and charter, accommodation with an experience attached.
You know your revenue to the dollar and you cannot tell me which of your products is actually profitable. You are paying platform commission and you suspect it is costing you more than it returns. You are working harder than the profit justifies. And you have read the courses, the optimisation guides and the posts, and none of them have changed your numbers.
You want to work with someone who has run a tourism business, rather than someone who has read about them.
Who this is not for
If you are running well below capacity, this is the wrong rung. Fixing pricing on empty seats does not do much. Build the bookings first and come back.
If you have nobody with the authority to execute, including yourself, the coaching will stall. I need somebody in the business who can make a decision and act on it between sessions.
If you are in your first year, you do not have enough history for the analysis to say anything useful yet.
If you want somebody to do it for you, this is not that. Visibility is done for you. Profitability is done with you, because the decisions being made are yours to own.
What this is not
It is not a course. There is nothing to log into and nothing to consume on your own time.
It is not a mastermind or a cohort. You are not in a Zoom room with five other operators learning the same thing.
It is not generic business coaching with tourism examples bolted on. The work is built around how tourism businesses actually make and lose money, which is not how most businesses do.
And it is not a sales funnel. The Growth Gap Call is free and it is a real conversation about whether this is the right fit. If it is not, I will tell you on the call.
What you need to bring
Your last twelve months of numbers. Somebody in the business with the authority to act between sessions. And honesty, because the work only goes as deep as you are willing to go.
Availability
I deliver this myself. Every session, every analysis, every interview. That puts a hard limit on how many operators I can work with at once, and when those places are full the next one opens when somebody finishes.
That is a fact about the work rather than a sales tactic. The alternative is handing you to somebody junior, which would make the whole thing pointless.
WHAT OPERATORS SAY
In their words
"Sarah Colgate & Exceptional Experiences has been pivotal to our growth, profitability and long term success. ... Sarah has re-built our sales strategy from the ground up, reshaped our ticketing approach in ways that directly improved profitability, and led the trade and distribution strategy that has positioned TreeTop Challenge in new markets we hadn't previously reached. Just as importantly, she mentored our team in sales strategy, so the capability stays with us rather than walking out the door when the engagement ends."
"I engaged Sarah as a business mentor to give me some structure in our business. I didn't really know what I didn't know and it's super hard to grow a business with limited knowledge of the industry. That's where Sarah came in. ... I didn't feel judged in my lack of knowledge but rather felt supported in moving forward and making super hard decisions about whether our business was even viable. She helped with working through our costings and shared connections that assisted our business. ... My only regret is not knowing about her sooner."
WHERE THE METHOD COMES FROM
Everything here runs on my ProfiTune Business Analysis methodology, built over twenty-five years of running and turning around businesses and refined on every one I have worked on since.
Investment is discussed on the Growth Gap Call.
Being busy and being profitable are two different things, and plenty of good tourism businesses only find that out when the season ends and there is nothing left.
You do not have to guess at which one you are. The numbers tell the story. They are sitting in your booking platform and your accounting software right now, and they will tell you exactly which products carry this business and which ones are being carried.
So, what are your numbers telling you about your business?
Book a Growth Gap Call with me. Thirty minutes, no pitch, and I will tell you honestly which rung you are on.
Let's build a business that you love and that loves you.
Thirty minutes. No pitch.
The questions that stop people booking
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Yes, every time. I cannot coach you on decisions I have not seen the numbers behind. You can do the analysis and stop there if you want to.
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Six months minimum, which is twelve fortnightly sessions. Most operators stay twelve to eighteen months, because the plan the analysis produces is longer than six months of work.
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Because things have to happen between sessions. Weekly turns into a status meeting. A fortnight is long enough to change something and see what it did.
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Yes, and I would encourage it if you both make the decisions. No extra cost and no extra time needed.
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We reschedule. Peak season, school holidays and boat repairs all happen. The program runs at your pace within reason, and we do not keep rolling without you.
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The structure of the twelve sessions is the same, and it works. What changed is that it now starts with a proper diagnostic instead of a questionnaire, so we spend the first session on your findings rather than on working out where to look.
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The method scales, and the maths behind the profit levers gets more interesting at that size rather than less. That work sits under Business Improvement Coaching, further up this page.
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In some places, probably. Across the board, no. Raising every price is what people do when they have not looked properly. The point of this is knowing which prices, by how much, and on which days.
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Yes. Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland, the US and Canada. Everything is delivered remotely and anything quoted is billed in your own currency.
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Investment is discussed on the Growth Gap Call, once we both know what your business actually needs.