When Keeping 100% of the Commission Stops Adding Up
Vanessa McGovern argues that the 100% commission model can eventually constrain advisors who are ready to scale—and that the split is only one part of the equation.
Vanessa McGovern. Photo: Courtesy of Global Travel Collection
For almost a decade, I worked inside a 100% commission model—and I believed in it. In many ways, I still do. What shifted my thinking wasn’t losing faith in that model; it was a change in vantage point. When I came to Global Travel Collection, I started seeing what that commission model quietly costs advisors trying to scale.
Here’s the test I put to advisors who are wrestling with growth: could you take on three more $250,000 clients tomorrow? If the answer is no, consider why. In most cases, it isn’t a sales problem: the demand and talent are there. It’s a structure problem. I call it the invisible ceiling.
When you’re starting out—building your book, learning the business, booking $200,000 a year—every dollar matters, and keeping all of it is exactly the right math. Bootstrapping teaches you the business in a way nothing else can. At that stage, it’s the right answer.
But somewhere on the road to seven figures, the math starts to change. And in a lot of cases, the math actually breaks.
It may not immediately show up as a problem. Instead, it shows up as a feeling: you might feel as if you’re already at capacity and that the idea of more clients reads less like opportunity and more like pressure. I’ve watched genuinely talented, ambitious advisors say some version of “I don’t think I want to grow.” Not because they lacked drive, but because they were already overwhelmed.
Here’s what a 100% commission model actually means once you’re operating at scale: you keep all of the commission, and you also carry 100% of the technology, the marketing, the accounting, the staffing, the systems, and the 11 p.m. problem-solving.
When you’re small, that’s manageable. When you’re trying to build something that lasts, it becomes the thing standing in your way. Eventually, your own capacity becomes the constraint.
Think about the businesses in any industry that manage to grow past their founder: they almost never bring in help because something is breaking. They bring in help because they’ve realized the business can no longer run on one person’s personal capacity. So they build the infrastructure of a real company: operations, systems, support, and resources that let the business grow. It’s not to rescue the business, but to let it grow without any single person having to be everywhere at once.
That’s the threshold every serious business eventually reaches: the point where its future can’t rest on any single person’s shoulders.
Most advisors try to grow by doing more themselves, and that effort becomes the very ceiling they hit. The ones who break through don’t work harder or become superhuman. They stop being the only thing holding it all together. None of this makes the commission model wrong. For the right stage of the travel advisor’s journey, it’s exactly right. There’s no wrong answer here.
But every advisor deserves to know the ceiling is there—to choose with eyes open rather than mistake a structural limit for the edge of their own ambition. Our industry has trained us to obsess over one number: the split.
The more important question is what kind of business (and what kind of life) that number lets you build.
Vanessa McGovern is the senior vice president of partner product, marketing and events, at Global Travel Collection.
