As a small business owner, you have the freedom and flexibility to set your own hours, ensuring a schedule that works for you and supports your business's needs. But what if what you need is time away from your small business? When you’re your own C-suite and have the final say when anything goes awry, it can be a struggle to disconnect yourself from these day-to-day demands and find the time to enjoy yourself without any work pressures.

Vacations aren’t just a valuable way to see new sights and spend important time with family; they’re also a vital tool you can use to help break your work-induced stress cycle. Being an entrepreneur is stressful and having significant, constant demands on your time can lead to stress, exhaustion, emotional dysregulation, difficulty concentrating and other factors that can impede your enjoyment of your small business. Taking time away can hit the reset button on your brain, helping you decrease your body’s stress response and improve your mood.

If you find yourself dreaming of your perfect beach vacation or simply want to take time away from your business but don’t know how to accomplish it, continue reading for guidance on how to prepare the company for your trip, set boundaries so you’re not spending your vacation time glued to your phone and other important tips.

Come Up With a Plan Before You’re Away
Most businesses, regardless of size, have busy and slow seasons tied to fluctuations in demand for their goods and services. For minimal impact on your business and an easier time getting away, scheduling your vacation for that quieter time will help you leave without excessive scheduling issues.

 

If you have a family or want to travel with your loved ones, you might get locked into the ever-popular windows of time around school breaks and holidays. In that case, it could be beneficial to tag along for a three-day weekend, schedule your participation for the middle of the week when demand is less intense or choose a destination closer to home to prevent travel time from eating into your vacation.

 

Prepare Your Employees — and Establish a Second-in-Command
Before you even think about setting up your out-of-office email response, your employees must be adequately prepared for your absence. This can entail:

 

• Deciding who’s in charge – While scheduling your time away for slow periods can help reduce the amount of work your employees will have to handle while you’re away, decision-making opportunities and problems can still arise. Identify who has the bandwidth, experience and skills to ensure daily tasks are covered, keep deadlines moving and communicate with trusted partners. As a general rule of thumb, you can hand administrative tasks to junior staff, but hold strategic work for your return or give it to a high-level employee, such as a manager.
• Training your team – If this is your first time out of the office, you must set expectations and guidelines so your employees know how to handle a variety of situations as they arise. This should include when issues need to be escalated to a manager or superior, specific instances when it’s appropriate to contact you and what they should do in an emergency, such as a fire or break-in.
• Reviewing your tasks and workload – As a business owner, it’s likely you hold certain responsibilities for yourself that your employees don’t touch. To avoid stress, review your work and decide what really needs their attention while you’re away and what can wait until you return. 

 

Set Check-In Boundaries For Yourself
As a small business owner, it can be difficult to truly unplug from the company’s daily needs and updates while you’re away. If you don’t set boundaries for yourself — and stick to them —your work life can creep into your vacation, eliminating the stress-reduction and relaxation benefits of your trip. Instead, set strict routines around how often you’ll check your email, whether you’ll call the business and how frequently and stick to them.

 

If this is your first vacation since becoming an entrepreneur, it’s natural to be worried about your absence. Remember, you prepared your employees in advance and established a second-in-command, so they’ll know what to do while you’re away.

 

Respond Only When You’re Absolutely Needed
There’s a difference between conducting regular, minor check-ins while you’re away to ensure everything is moving on track and inserting yourself into workplace issues while you’re away. Your vacation is your own time; not every problem or wrinkle that crops up requires your attention at that moment.

 

Instead of eroding your relaxation time, consider asking your employees to send daily or weekly summaries of workplace events, to take notes on what’s not working — such as pain points related to your absence — and to keep a log of emerging items that will require either your immediate attention once you return to work or can be handled later.

 

Only engaging when you’re really needed ensures you have the stress-free time you need and not only demonstrates the trust you place in your second-in-command, leadership team and other employees, but also empowers them by providing the opportunity to perform.

 

Hit Your Priorities When You Return
When people spend time away from work due to a vacation, it often feels like the entire first day back in the office is spent catching up on emails, voicemails and a million other little things that seem like they’re all clamoring for your attention. Instead of being overwhelmed by a flurry of information upon your return, try the following:

 

• Schedule catch-up time on your first day back – Trying to catch up on what you missed while on vacation can seem like an uphill battle; instead of struggling to manage your backlog in one single day, consider blocking out two to three hours during your first morning back to give yourself time to learn more about what happened while you were away, read missed messages and create a list of action items. Extending your out-of-office message for another day can also give you more time to catch up and slowly ramp back up to full capacity.
• Check in with your staff – Because your employees were managing your business while you were away, they’ll have the insight you need to know what requires your immediate attention and what’s worth looking into later. Ask your second-in-command or senior employees what major items came up while you were away or what needs looking into.
• Filter messages from those you value first – Use your email’s filtering capabilities to pull messages from your team, company partners and vendors; handle anything that appears to involve an emergency or poses an immediate business problem first.
• Delete what doesn’t need your attention – Newsletters, mass mailings and email threads where decisions were made without you can easily be deleted or archived for later. This frees up your bandwidth for more important items.

For many entrepreneurs, taking time off can be difficult. Feeling like no one else can manage the needs of your small business like you can, worrying over your employees’ abilities to perform without you and stressing over all the negative things that could happen to your investment while you’re away — a fire, flooding or vandalism, just to name a few — can encourage small business owners to stay locked into its needs instead of taking valuable time away.

 

However, vacations can support your overall health, decrease exhaustion, improve your general wellbeing and enhance life satisfaction, according to Psychology Today. All of these are things that can help better your daily life, increase your enjoyment of your business and ensure you’re healthy enough to keep running it for years to come.

 

SCA serves small business owners and self-employed individuals, providing resources to help them grow their businesses. To learn more about those offerings, click here.

 

​Articles in this newsletter are meant to be informative, enlightening and helpful to you. While all information contained herein is meant to be completely factual, it is always subject to change. Articles are not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Consult your doctor before starting any exercise program. 

Benefits may not be available in all membership levels. For more information or to upgrade your membership, please call 800.387.9027.