How to Travel

Katie Hensel - Travel Made Joyful

We all dream of getting away.  What they means to you may be different from someone else.  We can all agree that travel is fun.
But where do you go, what do you do and, arguably most importantly, what do you eat?
Listen as well-travelled and addictively energetic entrepreneur Katie Hensel gives us some travel tips as she shares details of her new business, Travel Made Joyful.
Katie helps people figure out the details of travel, so that you don't need a vacation after planning your vacation.
Enjoy!

Visit Katie at: https://travelmadejoyful.com/

[00:00:00.890] - Speaker 1
You have found authentic Business Adventures, a business program that brings you the struggles, stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land underwritten by the bank of Sun Prairie. My name is James Kademan, entrepreneur, author, speaker and helpful coach to small business owners across the country. And today we are welcoming/preparing to learn from Katie Hensel, owner of Travel Made Joyful, which is the best way it should be. So Katie how are you doing today?

[00:00:26.080] - Speaker 2
I'm good. Thanks, James. I love the shout out too.

[00:00:31.130] - Speaker 1
So just so the crowd of viewers, listeners know, I've known you lots of years and you started out with Try for Kids and then can you tell us? I guess let's go way back and talk about the transition. What made you decide to shift gears? Because it's probably safe to say that these are not very related.

[00:00:56.710] - Speaker 2
Correct. I think, yeah, that's a safe bet. I started Try for Schools in 2011 and built that from an idea in my head to an organization that had three full time staff and had year round programming and events and those kinds of things and was doing a lot of good in our community in Dane County here. But I started to just think that, gosh, in order for this to be truly successful, I really need this to be able to live beyond me. And if I ever decided I wanted to do something different, I wanted to be able to make it so that it was something that was sustainable and would be able to live on. And so I kind of started putting a plan in place. We had a strategic planning committee that met and kind of started building in a lot of the processes that you'd need to make sure that a business could survive that founder syndrome that started in 2019 and then lo and behold, 2020 came around and we had a pandemic to deal with. So we were kind of trying to keep things going but also continuing to build on that foundation.

[00:02:06.370] - Speaker 2
And it was during that summer that I sort of realized a couple of things I got to do a lot of traveling, surprisingly during the pandemic, a lot of planning and things like that to make sure we could go places that were open safely. And I realized, gosh, not only do I really enjoy this, but I'm pretty good at it. We figured out how to offset a lot of our costs and things like that and I was just really enjoying the extra time with my kids and we also kind of realized that gosh, they're halfway to being out of the house at this point. And so I said, well, if I were to start a different career, I would really love to have it be a career that combined things that I really love to do, like travel and see new places with being able to spend a little bit more time with my kids while they want to be around me. And so we kind of thankfully try for schools, was able to navigate the Pandemic well and come out the other end. And so in September of 2021, I kind of started a transition, and we hired our new executive director, who's doing a fantastic job, and she made the leadership transition incredibly smooth, and that's going really well.

[00:03:19.060] - Speaker 2
So I realized, well, I now can feel free to kind of start something in this travel industry if I want to. That was kind of how things got started, and so it did feel a little bit like starting over,...