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Posted by Bob Brown on 12 Aug '13
Are you going on holiday - will there be a business to come back to?
In my experience there are three types of business owners. The first never go on holiday, either no one can take over or they don’t trust people to, the second go on holiday but check emails each day and are available whenever their staff want so they never really relax and the third go on holiday and really relax, come back refreshed and super charged to achieve more.
When I work with business owners I help them move to being the third type of leader. This is partly about succession planning and partly about quality of life.
What is succession planning? Well it is developing more people who can do key roles so you as business owner are not critical to the business and you are also not reliant on other key staff. This means that if you want to sell your business in the future you will be able to.
But even if you never want to sell the business, life balance means you should be able to take time off and relax and all the evidence is that you will have a more successful business if you take time out. After just 6 weeks with no break people tend to get into a reactive mode where issues are difficult whereas after just a couple of really relaxing days with NO work at all, not even checking emails, then people return and the to do list looks easy and things are challenges not problems – they move to proactive rather reactive.
There are other elements in achieving a business you can leave, like identifying repeat income streams if you currently rely on selling individual items or your time; and training your customers to not always expect you to be available.
It can be done, after all being in control of your time must be one of the key benefits of running your own business rather than being employed. We have a business owners time system which can help you and we can support you to get in place. You can download the tool for free here.
We provide lots of practical support for solopreneurs in our Solopreneur Growth Club so that you can take a holiday.