So many advisors think that doing everything themselves is the mark of thoroughness. If you want it done right, you must plan every detail, vet every hotel, and coordinate every transfer yourself, because who's going to care about your client's trip as much as you do? It's a reasonable instinct. Also, more often than not, it's a blind spot in your business.

It's exactly what came up when I invited Laney Sachs, owner of Ortensia Blu Travel Adventures and a repeat Top Producer Club member, to join me on The Travel Business Unpacked podcast.

Laney's path into this business was unconventional to begin with. It started as a side hustle importing olive oil from a woman she met on Lake Garda, then became a food blog featuring recipes from her Italian friends, then ceramics and table linens, and finally small group trips built around her own favorite things to do in Italy. Her first trip had nine people who were willing to pay her to take them around. By the time someone connected her to Gifted Travel Network and asked if she'd ever considered becoming a travel advisor, she'd already been planning full itineraries for free. She just hadn't realized she could actually get paid for it, or that there was a name for what she was doing.

In those early days, Laney was essentially acting as her own DMC (Destination Management Company). She and her friends handled the logistics themselves, trip by trip, and she told me she'd lie awake at night running through everything that could go wrong. Eventually, something did go wrong — she was on safari in Africa, in the one corner of the lodge that didn’t have Wi-Fi signal, when she got word that flooding in Venice was threatening a client's hotel stay. She had to spend part of her personal trip on the phone scrambling to rebook a different hotel, while also trying to enjoy the safari she was supposed to be on. Had she been working with a proper DMC, she wouldn't have even known there was a problem until after it had already been solved.

This shift is what changed her business. Once Laney stopped trying to do it all herself and let DMCs manage the details for her clients, she was able to confidently send clients to destinations and trust that they would have the best experiences and boots on the ground support when they needed it. She told me about a Morocco trip her clients still talk about, one she couldn't have built to that standard alone, because her DMC was there to help put together something she simply didn't have the relationships to construct without them. She also told me about a hotel in Portugal she wanted to rebook for a returning client, one she'd happily used before, and her DMC wrote back to say they'd pulled it from their portfolio after a recent inspection found it no longer met their standards. She never would have known that on her own.

I think about how often advisors, especially new ones, treat working with a DMC as giving something up: control, credit, the feeling of being the one who did it all. Laney is proof that the opposite is true, and being the expert on your client and their preferences is more important than being an expert in every destination. Beyond that, working with a trusted partner means that you don’t have to stay up worrying about what could go wrong or have to put out fires for others during your own well-deserved vacations.

If you love hearing stories like Laney's, tune into The Travel Business Unpacked podcast! Each episode dives deep into the real stories, practical strategies, and transformational moments that turn travel dreams into thriving careers. Listen and subscribe on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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