The Firecircle 5x5 Method™ Guidebook

This section guides you to slow down and get intentional about why your tourism business exists (or why you want to start a business) and who it is truly for. You’ll work through your purpose, understanding the market, your competition, your strengths and challenges and how to identify the best opportunity and market fit, not as abstract concepts but as practical decision-making tools. The guide invites you to reflect on what kind of business you want to build, what success looks like for you, and how your business fits within its local context, land, and community.

You’ll explore how clarity at this stage saves time, money, and energy later, and how a strong vision becomes your compass for everything you’ll do in starting and growing your business. The journaling space encourages you to capture ideas, questions, and early decisions that will anchor the rest of your planning.

Brand in this guide goes far beyond logos and colours. This section focuses on how your brand story is built through your uniqueness, your values, deep core human themes and the five senses and how these distill down to capture hearts and minds. You’ll work through what makes your experience distinctive, how to articulate it clearly, and how to position your business so the right customers - the ones who share your values - find you.

You’ll reflect on how your story shows up across touchpoints, from your website and booking flow to the way guests feel during and after the experience. The journaling prompts help you refine your message, identify what to emphasize, and ensure your brand feels aligned rather than forced.

This section brings your vision and brand into the day-to-day reality of running a tourism business. You’ll explore the systems, structures, and decisions that support consistent delivery, including creating order in the chaos of your day and structuring your ‘front’ and ‘back’ of house systems and processes for ultimate operating efficiency and positive guest and host experiences.

Rather than overwhelming you with complexity, the guide breaks operations into manageable components and helps you think practically about what you need now versus what can evolve later. You’ll reflect on where friction exists, where clarity is missing, and how small operational improvements can significantly impact guest experience and sustainability. The journaling space allows you to sketch processes, note gaps, and begin shaping an operational approach that supports both your guests and your wellbeing.

Experience design sits at the heart of tourism, and this section invites you to be intentional about every stage of the guest journey. You’ll explore how the physical environment and products build, buy and provide to your guests create the platform for your guest experiences. 

The guide encourages you to think beyond activities and logistics, and focus on the physical aspects of your business, from location, to the way your buildings are designed on the inside and out, to the equipment and amenities you provide your guests with as part of their time with you, to the smells and sounds and textures that impact their sensory experience. You’ll reflect on how your values show up in your design and presentation, and how small details can elevate or detract from what you offer. Journaling prompts help you map the guest journey, identify moments of impact, and align the experience with your brand promise, creating something that feels thoughtful, authentic, and memorable.

This section demystifies the financial side of tourism businesses and helps you build confidence around numbers. You’ll learn how to price your products competitively, explore your target audiences more fully, learn how to build partnerships and packages, learn how to cost your products and how to project your sales and expenses using seasonality, inventory, demand and price for easy cash flow management. 

You’ll reflect on how financial clarity supports better decisions, reduces stress, and enables growth opportunities such as investment or expansion. The journaling space allows you to note assumptions, track ideas, and begin shaping a financial picture that aligns with your goals and capacity.