Cecily North: Treat The Side Thing Like A Business

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Cecily North owns Traveling North Agency, is a certified travel advisor, and — as she puts it — is “also a librarian in my other life,” with a background in conducting research that turns out to be the actual job. She hosts Life Between Flights, a podcast for new travel agents. On Unscripted Small Business with host Zaneta Chuniq Inpower, she was unusually specific about how long it took to get this right.

It Took Me Three Years To Figure That Out

“I really for the first year and a half or so didn’t work it as a business. I had friends and family and a couple people that were booking stuff with me, but I was not really looking at it as I need to make lots of money. And so that was really my mindset in the beginning. And now that’s another thing I talk about on the podcast — if you really want it to be successful, you need to treat it like a business. And it took me three years to figure that out. And then since then it’s just exploded since, but it definitely took a lot of crying in my car to figure that out.” — Cecily North

Three years is a long time to be doing the work without the framing, and the honesty about the emotional cost — “a lot of crying in my car” — is what makes it useful rather than merely rueful. This was not a realisation she reasoned her way to. It was the residue of an extended period of things not working while she worked hard.

The phrase to hold onto is “I was not really looking at it as I need to make lots of money.” The absence was not effort. It was intent.

The Difference Between A Hobby And A Business

Cecily identifies the specific mechanism that keeps a side thing a side thing, and it is a customer-base problem:

“I think a big thing is figuring out how to get clients. That’s a really big thing starting out. Like everyone thinks, I’m going to do this, and all of my friends and family are going to book with me. And I found that friends and family are not the best clients, because they tend to overstep boundaries and they tend to just think you’re going to do it all for free. And you know that you’re just getting the perks of it and you’re just getting the experience — and really it’s like, no, I need to be making money.” — Cecily North

The trap is that friends and family are simultaneously the easiest customers to acquire and the ones least likely to establish that you have a business. They validate the service and invalidate the pricing at the same time.

Her line for it is clean: “if you’re expecting me to do all of this work for free, then that’s not really a great relationship.” And the fix is not a better rate card, it is a different pipeline:

“So I’m really passionate about networking and getting your information out there. And even if you feel like you’re bad at networking, at least trying to do it on a consistent basis. Because those referrals — your friends and family can only go so far. You really have to get your name out there.” — Cecily North

She names social media and a website, but is clear where it works best for her: “I find in-person networking or even virtual networking is a really, really great way to start getting those referrals and start getting people to actually work with you that are willing to pay you.”

What She Started Charging For

The concrete version of treating it like a business is a fee she knows costs her some enquiries:

“I’m in Colorado and where I’m at, there’s definitely a market saturation for travel agents. There’s a lot of us around. And I find, for me, because I do charge a one-time new client fee, that seems to be a barrier for a lot of people. And I also find that there are travel agents that just — that’s their advertising, is I don’t charge a fee.” — Cecily North

She holds the position anyway, on service grounds: “my clients obviously don’t have a problem paying for it because they know that they’re going to get top level service.”

What makes this more than a pricing anecdote is her point about transparency. Some agents, she says, put their fees on the supplier side, so “their clients never even see that they’re paying an additional fee. It’s just wrapped into taxes and fees from the supplier.” Her choice is the opposite: “I tell you upfront that I’m charging you this one time fee.”

The fee also buys her the freedom to do unpaid work without resentment. She does dining reservations, finds private chefs, “things like that where I’m not making any money off of it. I just do it as part of my services.” A business with a clear paid boundary can be generous inside it. A hobby cannot, because everything is on the wrong side of the line.

Running A Podcast As Part Of The Business

The show exists because of a gap she could name precisely:

“A lot of podcasts around travel talk about destinations. They talk about companies to work with. They talk about marketing, but they don’t actually talk about the business — how to start a business, how to do the bookkeeping, having SEO, are you going to do your website?” — Cecily North

She is explicit that the audience is her own earlier self: it is what she “wished I had when I started, because I really was kind of trying to figure it all out. I felt like I was really on my own and I didn’t really know where to go to get all of the help that is out there.” The goal is that agents “cannot feel so alone when they’re starting out in their business.”

That is the strongest available case for a business podcast, and it is worth separating from the usual one. It is not a content channel bolted onto marketing. It is expertise she already had, aimed at a gap she personally fell into, for an audience she is credible with. The content costs her very little to produce because she is not researching it.

Advice For Year One Founders

On niching, she is refreshingly against premature specialisation:

“When we’re first starting out, I think a lot of people are like, I’m going to take any client that I can get. Anybody that wants to book with me, whatever they want, I will do it. And that’s great for getting started and kind of getting an experience and understanding how the process works.” — Cecily North

She started with Disney and Universal “because that’s what I knew,” which is the sensible order: start where your existing knowledge is, take broad work to learn the process, then narrow once you know what you are good at and what pays.

On credentials, her view is that the time requirement is the point rather than an obstacle: some certifications “take up to two years, but it’s really because they want you to be experiencing it and actually working with clients on certain things… to know that you have the experience in order to complete that certification.” Her verdict: “I think they are all very worth it.” Continuing education credits are submitted annually or biannually, alongside supplier certifications and conferences.

And the closing honesty about reading habits is worth keeping, because it punctures the founder-reading-list genre entirely: “I’ve got a four year old. So my level of reading right now is… And it’s funny because I work in a library, so you would think that I’m reading all the time.”

Connect With Cecily North

Cecily North runs Traveling North Agency (travelingnorthagency.com) and hosts Life Between Flights for new travel agents.

Related listening: Ali Raymer on why you need an advisor, not an agent, and Jeff Revilla on live podcast theatre.

Cecily North concedes AI is good at building travel itineraries and competes on what happens when something goes wrong at midnight in another country. My business is [describe]. Split what I do into the parts AI already does well, the parts it will do well soon, and the parts that require a reachable human. Be honest about the first two.

Cecily says it took three years to start treating her agency like a business, and that everything changed after. Here is how I currently operate: [describe your pricing, your hours, how you handle clients, whether you track anything]. Tell me which specific behaviours are hobby behaviours, and what the business version of each looks like.

Cecily's niche came from noticing which work kept arriving rather than from choosing one. Here are my last twenty clients or projects: [paste]. Find the pattern I have not noticed, tell me which segment is most profitable relative to effort, and what I would have to stop doing to lean into it.