Career Coaching Secrets

Sahara Rose De Vore on Redefining Travel for a New Generation

• Davis Nguyen

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In this episode of Career Coaching Secrets, host Rexhen interviews Sahara Rose De Vore, founder of the Travel Coach Network. After solo traveling to 84 countries, Sahara created the first ICF-accredited travel coach certification program.

Her ideal clients are women in transition with a passion for travel. Sahara's top marketing channel is media and publicity, with additional success on Facebook and Instagram. She plans to expand her business by launching HireTravelCoach.com and licensing her program to travel advisors.

Sahara advises new coaches to build a solid foundation for their brand. She also notes that her biggest challenge is expanding her team from freelancers to full-time employees to keep up with growth.

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Sahara Rose:

That's a great question. We are working on creating a license for our certified travel coach course that is specific to travel advisors, travel agents. It's them, travel agents, learning how to implement travel coaching into what they do. We're going to be selling that to travel agencies.

Davis Nguyen:

Interesting. That is very interesting. welcome to career coaching secrets the podcast where we talk with successful career coaches on how they built their success and the hard lessons they learned along the way my name is davis win and i'm the founder of purple circle where we help career coaches scale their business to hundred thousand dollar years hundred thousand dollar months and even hundred thousand dollar weeks before purple circle i've grown several seven and eight figure career coaching business myself and have been a consultant at two career coaching businesses that are doing over a hundred million dollars each whether you're an established coach or building your practice for the first time You'll discover the secrets to elevating your coaching business.

Rexhen Doda:

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Career Coaching Secrets Podcast. I'm your host, Rejan, and today's guest is Sahara Rose Devor, a TEDx speaker, global wellness travel advocate, and founder of the Travel Coach Network, where she's redefining the why behind travel and empowering people to use travel as a tool for healing, growth, and transformation. After solo traveling to 84 countries and researching the deeper emotional benefits of travel, Sahara created the industry's first ICF-accredited travel coach certification program, training a global community of coaches to help others align their journeys with purpose and personal evolution. With her vision to reshape how we market, plan, and experience travel, Sahara leads a movement that's turning meaningful exploration into career path, proving that travel isn't just about where you go, but how it changes who you are. And it's a pleasure for me to have her on the podcast today. Welcome to the show, Sahara.

Sahara Rose:

Hi, Regine. Thank you so much for having me today.

Rexhen Doda:

Thank you for coming. It's a pleasure for us to have you on. I want to know how this all got started. Basically, you've been to so many countries, which I love. I also like to travel a lot. But what inspired you to become a travel coach?

Sahara Rose:

Yeah, so I started traveling right outside of university. I actually studied hospitality and tourism management. And I... It was my very first day. I didn't come from a family that traveled at all. No one traveled for business. We didn't take very lavish vacation. And so travel was just never something that was on my mind until I had to finally figure out like what I wanted to focus in for school. And that took me about three years into university to figure out, hey, travel is interesting. I will join a program and travel. So it was on my very first day in my international tourism course that we introduced ourselves and went around the room and I had met a lot of foreign exchange students and heard about how many countries they've been to. And I was really in awe and curious about how easy it was to travel within Europe and Asia and South America because of how close the countries are together. It's just so different in the U.S. that I said I want to be able to travel when I graduate from school in two years. And so that day I decided to change my money mindset. I was a broke college student at the time and didn't know how I was going to be able to afford my travels, but I figured it out. And two years later I graduated. And that was the very first backpacking trip I went on. It was to Western Europe. And I thought I'd come back home after that and figure out my life and work for a company and make my mom proud that I got a good job and title. I knew that sitting in a corporate office wasn't going to be for me, and I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew that I wanted something different and that travel was really feeding me in different ways that I didn't expect. So I continued my journey for the next 10 years, traveling to 84 countries, as you had mentioned in the intro. i still struggled for the majority of that time to figure out what my career path could be i didn't want to do anything i'd heard about or learned about and i didn't want to plan books plan trips for people or book trips for people they want to be a travel agent a flight attendant work in hotels i said there has to be something more meaningful that i can do with this love of travel and i didn't know what that was going to look like but i gave myself time and i always said by the time i'm 30 i'll figure this out or i'll force myself to figure this out And so when I finally turned 30, I bought a laptop for the first time and traveled with that in the north of Spain. And I started Googling how to start an online business. What are people doing? And that's when I came across the coaching industry. And I didn't see travel coaching anywhere, but that I had a gut instinct, a gut feeling that this is what I wanted to do. And I ran with it. And here we are. How do

Rexhen Doda:

you get the ICF to create a certification just based on your idea, for example, since this is quite new?

Sahara Rose:

yeah so actually the icf accredits so their accreditation organization so i designed our program so i designed the tropical certification program and I submit it every year to ICF and it is accredited by them based off of core competencies and resource development and the hours and all of

Rexhen Doda:

that. And so right now, when it comes to the people that work with you, how would you describe that ideal client profile? Are you looking for travelers? Are there of specific ages? Are they of specific, I can't imagine the industries play any role in this, but how would you describe it?

Sahara Rose:

Yeah, that's a great question. So about 90% 95% of our students in our program and our members in our global community are women. And that's just organic. We do market to both men and women, anyone who wants to join us. But what we found is that our ideal member is someone who's going through a transition in their life of some sort. So maybe they are someone who has already been working in the travel industry, or they're in the coaching industry already. And that missing piece of travel, which is a big passion of theirs is something they haven't been able to put two and two together with, with how they serve others. We have a lot of people who come from all different backgrounds from a professional level into the Travel Coach Network, whether they're a therapist or educators, again, they've been serving people in other ways already. but they have been missing that travel element. And so when they hear the term travel coach, they're like, that's exactly what I've been searching for. I just didn't know it was a thing yet.

Rexhen Doda:

And how does the program look like? Is it of a certain length that they go through in this program? How is it like to work with you?

Sahara Rose:

Yeah, so our program by choice is self-paced and it is evergreen. Many programs out there start in end dates. As of now, we don't do that. I believe that everyone on their own journey of building a business and becoming the entrepreneur and coach, just like they're on a journey of traveling. So we don't put pressure on that. But as it's designed, it's recorded and written so that people can go at their own pace and it's dripped out to them over a certain amount of time. And our program is 40 CCE hours through ICF.

Rexhen Doda:

And How, like, when it comes to you finding the people that go through this program, or let's say you finding your clients. And before I get to that, you keep speaking in we, so do you have a team that's working with you together?

Sahara Rose:

Yeah, I wouldn't be able to do what I do every single day if I didn't have a team just because we've grown so much. I started the Travel Coach Network in late 2018 from complete scratch and is bootstrapped and built it from there. And the majority of the time it was just me or someone who I would like barter for because I didn't have enough money to pay them yet. But now I do have three consistent freelancers that help me. And then we have also other people and freelancers to help based off of projects. And the majority of the people that we do hire do come through our program and community already since they understand our mission and our vision.

Rexhen Doda:

And where would you say in terms of marketing, what marketing channel is actually working very well for you right now?

Sahara Rose:

Yeah, I love that question. And something that many people probably won't think about or say, and maybe you guys do, I would say media and publicity is a big one for me. That's something that I invested very early on into learning how to master, which is getting more visible in my business when it comes to media outlets. So Over the past almost seven years, I've been in over 250 plus media outlets, including CNN Travel and all these other bigger names through many different kind of strategies to do that so that's something we also teach our coaches to do which is to get more visible so mini publicity has done wonders for us especially larger outlets other than that social media facebook and instagram and facebook ads have done really well for us too

Rexhen Doda:

and um is your program also licensed to other coaches so are you also selling as a license

Sahara Rose:

that's a great question uh we are working on creating a license for our certified travel coach course that is specific to travel advisors, travel agents. It's them, travel agents, learning how to implement travel coaching into what they do. We're going to be selling that to travel agencies.

Rexhen Doda:

Interesting. That is very interesting. And it goes naturally to my next question, which is with your coaching business right now, which is pretty unique, what are some goals that you're working towards for the next one to three years? Do you have any specific goals that you're working towards?

Sahara Rose:

Yes. We have small and we have larger goals. One of our goals is to start because right now we have always been speaking B2B because we serve coaches. But a big part of what we do is try to make our coaches journeys a little bit easier through opportunities and clients for them. Shifting some of our marketing towards B2C to attract those consumers, the travelers to our travel coaches. And so one of the ways that we do that currently, which is just in beta mode, but we We have over 100 coaches already on it, is our HireTravelCoach.com platform, where they're already getting clients, but we haven't really talked about or done anything with it yet. So I'm excited to launch that. So that's one of the things. The others expand, like I mentioned, is into the travel advisor industry because there is so much cohesion between what we do and also a big threat to the travel agent industry when it comes to AI. So what we offer as an a great level of human approach to the travel industry.

Rexhen Doda:

Interesting. And how does, just out of curiosity, how does AI fit, for example, into this?

Sahara Rose:

Into travel coaching or the travel industry as a... In

Rexhen Doda:

travel coaching.

Sahara Rose:

Yeah, so... something that well let's first take a look at ai into the travel agent industry there's a lot of platforms out there that are already using ai to create itineraries and find great booking things and flight deals and all of that good stuff into the travel coaching industry where we encourage our travel coaches to use ai is into their actual business development so whether it's content creation research maybe anything along those lines and even been designing their programs, how to best serve the client, how to really narrow down their client based off the emotions that they want them to feel. So

Rexhen Doda:

it'd be more like. That is interesting because I was thinking of, and when it comes to in general, one use case that I've used it myself is I've had just chat with you and I was traveling in Florence and I just took a picture of the cathedral in front of me and the street where I was in and just take a picture and Then I asked AI, okay, this is where I am. Now be my guide and just tell me as I'm walking, show me what I need to see and tell me the history around these places that I'm walking close by. And that was very interesting. Yeah. It was just showing me, okay, on the right, you have this, just like a guide would actually tell you with just replacing that. It was kind of funny. Yeah. Right now, in terms of investments, what would you say have been some good investments that you've made in your code team business? Or what would you say there are some bad investments, if any?

Sahara Rose:

Yeah, so far for me, I wouldn't call any investments a bad investment. I'm a big believer that you can learn something from every action that you take. But I do understand there's a lot of coaches and business owners out there who do make some pretty bad investments and they see it that way. Something I hear from other coaches is spending quite a bit of money on a business coach and why I find that. That happened to me, but why I see that as a quote unquote bad investment is, especially if it costs quite a pretty penny, is because oftentimes when someone hires a business coach, they are looking for them to give them results. But as a business owner, you can't depend on anyone to get you actual results or to care enough about your business as you do. And so oftentimes people are disappointed by working with business coaches because for the money that they pay, they have a different outcome expectation. As for me, I mean, I've made investments in like, I've changed website designers a few times and have a custom built website, which costs a lot. And then that didn't, as we grew, the functionality of that changed and shifted. So I needed to reinvest into another one and then pay the other team to kind of bring part of that over while paying a new team. So there's some of the expenses, but that comes with being a business owner. And of course, I've worked with my fair share of coaches themselves, like sponsorship coaches and everything like that. And yeah, I wouldn't have preferred to pay what I did for them. But again, it's really what you want to take out of it and what you want to learn from it.

Rexhen Doda:

Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Right now, in the position that you are with your coaching business, what would you say is a challenge that you're trying to solve for next? Where is the bottleneck right now for you?

Sahara Rose:

Right now, it is just my expansion of my team. There's so much happening that is really good. in business and there's a lot of just daily tasks that need to happen too and so something that i find quite challenging as being an online business owner is versus being a brick and mortar in person business is that it's really easy to verbally say to someone or ask an assistant for something versus as an online business owner you need to type an email to them and give them the resources and the information and by the time you do that you probably could have just done the task yourself So it's really shifting your mindset around how can I truly delegate in a way that and have the right team, which I do. I'm very grateful, but we are at a point of expansion. And so really me figuring out what's the next roles that I need filled for me and how can I organize my thoughts around how they can support me.

Rexhen Doda:

Totally. And I feel like, yeah, it's definitely the right move. at the point that you are in. And it's interesting that so far you've managed to create all of this with freelancers. And yeah, I would say definitely the right move to expand to having also people full-time so they can optimize your operations. But my last question to you, and this is going to be a little bit different from the answer that I get generally from other coaches because you have a different background. From the perspective of it, travel coach, what advice would you give to other coaches who are looking to scale their impact?

Sahara Rose:

A couple different things there. First, I would recommend that they really go back to the drawing board and set a solid foundation for who they serve, what their values are, what their core message is, what sets them apart, what their brand story is, what's the framework for what they teach, what do they want to be known for. I find that oftentimes coaches will overlook or even business owners in general of any sort will overlook this step. And then even if they have immediate success, they will hit a wall eventually and or competition comes along and they haven't set themselves up in a way that enables them to move through that wall or pass that. And so then they have to go back to the drawing board. and reassess like who is my ideal client. So I always recommend to do that in the very beginning so that you set yourself up for success in the long run.

Rexhen Doda:

Thank you. Thank you so much, Sahara. And thank you for taking the time to come into our podcast today. For anyone that is listening and wants to find you or connect with you, they can go into LinkedIn and look up Sahara Rose Devor. They'll be able to find you there. Is there any other way that people can reach out to you?

Sahara Rose:

Yeah, absolutely. So if you want to learn more about travel coaching, you can visit us at thetravelcoachnetwork.com or the Travel Coach Network across all of our social media platforms. Or you can find me myself. I am Sahar Rose, the travel coach on social media.

Rexhen Doda:

Thank you. Thank you so much, Sahar. It

Davis Nguyen:

was

Rexhen Doda:

a pleasure having you on the

Davis Nguyen:

podcast.

Sahara Rose:

Likewise. Thank you so much.

Davis Nguyen:

That's it for this episode of Career Coaching Secrets. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode to catch future episodes. This podcast was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to $100,000 years, $100,000 months, or even $100,000 weeks, all without burning out and making sure that you're making the impact and having the life that you want. To learn more about our community and how we can help you, visit joinpurplecircle.com.