11 September 2024
Young Female Franchisee of the Year proves you don’t need a background in travel to be successful booking holidays
What happens when you win Young Female Franchisee of the Year and your business goes from strength to strength?
In the case of Jennie Mills, a former globe-trotting professional scuba diver, she decided to launch another franchise, in a completely different field: travel.
And despite being new to the industry, Jennie has taken on her new role as travel consultant like a duck to water!
For nearly a decade the young entrepreneur has been at the helm of a property restoration company, a franchise called Rainbow Restoration. Alongside her team, Jennie is called in to help families whose homes have been severely damaged by floods, fires or burst pipes.
Now turning over £2m and employing 20 people, Jennie took the leap and launched her travel agency with The Travel Franchise in February 2024 and in just five months she took 70 holiday bookings!
If she continues at this pace, she’ll win the company’s Money-Back Challenge where they refund your franchise fee if you earn a set amount of commission in your first 12 months!
“I've got my other business to a point where I've got three managers in place now, so I can pinch time in the daytime to do any travel research,” says Jennie.
“Initially there was a lot to learn, particularly trying to get my head around the various travel suppliers. As for the actual booking, I tend to find that most people book holidays during the evenings and weekends anyway.”
Jennie opted to invest in The Travel Franchise because of its reputation for helping train and support people completely new to travel. Not only do all new recruits have access to a huge head office support team, but each one gets a personal business development manager (BDM) as soon as they finish the company’s five-day virtual training.
“My BDM is always there to support me and answer my questions. There is always support at hand. Plus, I’m still in close contact with the other consultants who I trained with - we’re always discussing what we're doing and what bookings we've made to help each other out.”
Although Jennie’s former job as a diver took her all over the world - she once dived with American actor Ben Stiller and helped facilitate the daredevil antics in none other than Hollywood blockbuster Mission Impossible - there are still many places she wants to explore.
And because she joined on The Travel Franchise’s most popular ‘Elite’ package, she gets two free overseas mentorship retreats included in the one-off £14,995 fee (plus the chance that this may be refunded!). It means that next month she’s jetting off to Crete - and it won’t cost her a penny.
On this trip, Jennie will join over 80 other franchisees on a five-day training retreat where travel experts and entrepreneurs give invaluable tips and tricks on how to grow a travel business fast.
Once she’s ticked off Crete, Jennie will be off again – courtesy of head office – on a more exotic long-haul training retreat. This time she’ll join a smaller group of established consultants on an ‘Elite Experience’, a trip aiming at honing consultants’ entrepreneurial skills and business plans.
And because Jennie signed up to the company’s Cruise Division, she’s already enjoyed two Seminar at Sea cruises where cruise experts train franchisees on the art of selling cruise holidays, one of the most lucrative sectors of the travel industry.
“I'd never been on a cruise when I started and I just assumed that if I'd not been on a cruise I would never be able to sell cruise holidays. But that’s not the case because there's plenty of people that have never been on a cruise and they sell lots and lots of cruises. My partner and I are now big fans and I’ve gone on to make several sales, including a honeymoon to Alaska on board Princess Cruises and city break on Virgin Voyages.”
Just five months into her new business, it seems that Jennie is making an impressive splash in the travel market.
“I'm really enjoying it. It’s very different to my other job. Rather than dealing with families in crisis I’m having very different conversations with my new customers. It’s much nicer talking to them about lovely holidays. It’s more like a hobby than a job.”
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