When life hands you lemons; the adage says you make lemonade. You swing at a curve ball. But let’s be real here for a moment. When you get lemons, sometimes you just want to wallow in a pity party. But then, you need to pick yourself up again, reinvent yourself, and carry on. It’s called entrepreneurship and it is what we do. Let me explain.

While on one hand, I am the eternal optimist. There is always a bright side. On the other hand, I am always waiting for the other proverbial shoe to drop. Maybe that is simply cautiously optimistic. In any event, that is likely the reason I have always tried to have (at the risk of sounding too MLMish) multiple streams of income.…

The reminder came to me yesterday. Allow me to explain.

I was talking in length with a good friend of mine on my monthly phone call within to catch up, solve the world's problems and in short, tell each other how smart we both are. (Hey! We all need applause, even if we have to give it to ourselves.)

During our chat he was interrupted by an incoming call and he asked me if he could take the call if only to tell the caller he would return the call later. Of course I suggested that he do so at once before he lost the opportunity. (Incoming calls are all potentially important. Treat them as such but not at the expense of the current…

Annually a company needs to be reminded of the need for a SWOT analysis.  The SWOT acronym indicates Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The traditional SWOT looks at Strengths and Weaknesses of a business (internal factors) and tries to thereby ascertain the relationship with Opportunities and Threats (factors external to the agency). Doing an annual SWOT analysis is a good pre-requisite to a marketing plan and assists with developing the appropriate goals for your travel practice.

Generally speaking, your travel practice has certain strengths that justify its existence. These strengths give rise to opportunities that your competition may not be able to challenge. On the other hand, your agency probably has weaknesses that provide an opening to your competition where they are better capable than you…

An expert in adventure and wildlife destinations worldwide, Jane Behrend started her own travel marketing company in 1989 after learning the business as an account executive in public relations and advertising sales. She started off as the Southeast USA sales rep for African Travel, Gametrackers Botswana, and 4th Dimension Tours before helping Volcanoes Safaris relaunch tourism to Rwanda and Uganda in the North American market.

In 2008, Jane re-branded her business as Emerging Destinations, a company that represents cool companies in cool places around the globe. She chose the name because her passion is working with areas where tourism is relatively new and still off the beaten…