On the Road, Again? The Pros and Cons of Business Travel

By Mark Beckner

Business travel is the quickest way to jump-start your career, close sales, expand your network, and alter the course of your professional life.

Business travel is also the quickest way to cap your income, close doors of opportunity, limit the growth of your business, marginalize your skills, and lose your freedom to pursue personal goals and spend time with friends or family.

How can one activity produce such drastically different results? The answer is that there are two kinds of business travel – critical and non-critical. Engaging in critical business travel will transform and energize your business. Engaging in non-critical business travel will limit your ability to have a truly successful career and will detract from your overall life’s purpose and work.

Critical vs. Non-Critical Business Travel

If you find yourself in a position of recurring business travel, you must first determine what is critical and what is non-critical. You must then decide the consequences of continuing to engage in something that is wasting your time and resources. The less you travel professionally, the more income you can earn, and the more freedom you will have to pursue your personal interests.

Your travel is critical if it meets the following key criteria:

Builds your business and strengthens relationships. Engage in travel if it will improve your business. Planning week-long trips to network, meet with clients, catch up in person with old colleagues, and discuss potential opportunities is well worth your time. While these activities are not billable, and there is no immediate remuneration for your involvement, they build your business and open channels for new work to come your way in the future.

Sells a project. If you need to go on-site to make a sale, you are engaging in critical path travel. Spending a day on-site to talk through specifics around deliverables, schedule, expectations, and fees is something you should do without hesitation.

Is short in duration and has a specific reason. Are you going to kick off a project and meet the team of a new client? If so, this visit should be for a day or two at most. Never get into a situation where you are traveling to a client site on a weekly basis. In this situation, generally after you arrive on-site, you will be sitting in a cubicle, attending a few irrelevant meetings, and then flying home at the end of the week. For project-related work, you should never travel to fill space; you only should be traveling to achieve a specific purpose – and then, only for a very limited time.

How Non-Critical Business Travel Hurts Your Business

If your travel does not meet any of the above criteria, you must focus your professional energy on determining how to eliminate this travel. Ninety-nine percent of all business related travel that goes on is non-critical -- that is, anything that occurs in order to simply fill a seat, either in a cubicle or in a meeting room.

The reasons for eliminating your non-critical travel are as follows:

Limits your income and opportunities. If you are traveling weekly to a client site, you won’t have the ability to engage in other projects or work with other clients in a meaningful way. You may be able to moonlight on a project here and there, but your primary source of income will be tied to the single client you are traveling for.

If you knew you could make more money and work for more clients if you didn’t travel, would you pursue that option? Determine if the time you are investing in constant travel could be diverted and better spent on building your client base, expanding your work options, and increasing your income.

Limits your professional growth. When you are first starting out in your professional career, you will need to "do your time" and work on projects that require your on-site presence. However, as your career progresses and your expertise increases, the amount of time you are spending on the road should exponentially decrease.

There will come a point at which the only thing keeping you on the road is you. When your children wonder why you are out of town five days a week every week, you can no longer say, “Because of work;” instead, you will have to say, “Because I choose to be.” And when your income flattens out because you are on-site with a single client, and you don’t have the flexibility to engage with other clients in parallel, you can only blame yourself – you could be making more money, but you are choosing not to.

Takes you away from your interests and responsibilities. You have personal goals and dreams. Some of them are material and financial in nature, and they are the reason you are willing to put up with constant travel and the drain of your time. However, others are idealistic in nature – they are the time you spend with family, time to recreate, time to pursue meaningful experiences and connections -- and are they worth losing for non-critical travel?

9 Essential Rules of Business Travel

Whenever you travel for business, there are a number of rules you need to follow.

1. Never go to simply fill a cubicle. Many clients believe that your physical presence is required to get something done, but in reality most people who travel on a recurring basis simply end up filling space once they are on-site – just like any other employee. There is practically nothing you cannot do remotely from a delivery perspective. You must be the judge as to whether your presence is really required, but in most cases it is not.

2. Take advantage of travel to expand your network. Always let people who are in the area of where you will be traveling know that you will be in town and offer to meet up with them. This is an excellent way to keep in touch, and to keep the channels of potential work and business open, both for you and for the people you are meeting.

3. Engage in travel sparingly. If you're boarding a plane more than a few times a year, or you're traveling across town to sit at a client site more than once a quarter, you are spending too much time traveling. Technically, all of your work can be done remotely. There is nothing that cannot be done over the computer and by phone. In-person meetings must be done sparingly, and you must always weigh them against their true costs – lost productivity, downtime for attending to other clients, etc.

4. Determine your priorities. What are your goals and priorities? If you're trying to increase your income, traveling will not achieve that beyond a certain limit. If you want to spend time with your children or friends, traveling out of town every week is at odds with that. If you work for multiple clients, then spending inordinate amounts of time on-site with just one client will impact your relationship with the others. Set clear priorities and see how your travel impacts them.

5. Don’t fear losing a client. Some clients will require that you travel. Be confident in your skills, and understand that by taking one piece of work you may lose another; if you take the work that requires travel, you will never receive the opportunity to work on the project that doesn’t. You can sustain many projects in parallel if you are not traveling constantly, whereas you can only handle one project at a time if you are required to be on-site. Don’t be afraid to lose a client. Let people know your rules of engagement, and if they don’t see value in you as a remote resource, find another client.

6. Make your travel an investment. Consider every travel dollar you spend to be an investment in the health of your business, and don’t be afraid to spend money on travel-related expenses. Just as any money you spend on marketing or advertising would be considered an investment in your business, the same should be true for the money you spend on travel. Travel is an excellent means of marketing yourself and remaining relevant. If your business travel is growing your business and your network, then consider all monies spent a good investment that will eventually lead to project work and income.

7. Use your downtime to be productive. Your time on the road should be considered one-hundred percent business time. For example, if you're flight is delayed, use the time in the airport to write a blog for your website, or work on a new marketing strategy. Or if you're spending the night at a hotel, use your free time to exercise or take a walk around the town; having the chance to be healthy and to experience a new environment will allow new thoughts to form, and may even enable you to see a new direction to take your business. Don’t spend time wining and dining yourself. Don’t waste time in front of the TV in a hotel room. Be productive.

8. Plan extended trips. Interweave your personal vacation time with your business travel. If a new client is located in an area that you want to visit, pack up your family and head out there for a few weeks. If you're taking a road trip, visit multiple clients in multiple regions. By combining your vacation with business, you can take a multi-week vacation without ever truly leaving work.

9. Don’t use travel as an escape. If you are traveling on a weekly basis, or are working on a long-term project that requires you to be away from home, you may be sacrificing other personal interests and pursuits. Determine whether you're doing this out of fear of saying no or laziness of not wanting to find alternative paths to income. You don't want to be using your business travel as an escape – a way out of responsibilities at home.