151: How to Take a Vacation from Your Business

Hi everyone. Welcome to this episode of the Professional Creative. Now I have taken a little bit of time off to just enjoy summer and travel with my family and so I thought that this episode would be perfect for today. It's all about how to take a vacation from your business. And if you're like me, it took me a really long time to figure this one out. So I. I'm glad to talk about this today, share with you what I've learned and give you some actionable steps so that you can set yourself up to take a vacation from your business as well. Are you ready to dive in?

I'm Bonnie Christine and this is where all things creativity, design, business and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains, running a multi seven figure business and doing the most creative and impactful work of my life.

When I first set out to become

an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today. I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast.

So many times when we are entrepreneurs, stepping away from our business feels completely overwhelming. It feels like if we step away, everything is going to fall apart or maybe at minimum it's just going to stop being productive, meaning we have to be there in order for the business to produce. And so I want to share today how to take that time away from your business without any guilt and without any chaos. You know, it wasn't that long ago when I truly could not take a true vacation or break away from from the business. And this was really before I had any help. And I could not literally, or I felt like I literally could not take a step away from customer service and questions coming in from my memberships students. And so it was really, really difficult. And I remember specifically this one vacation where I had taken the morning to work and then I met up with my family in the afternoon to spend some time on the beach and I was reading a book and now I think reading books on vacation is totally fine. I personally do all the time still. And I was reading this book called Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz and the whole premise of this book is to get you to a place where you can take 30 days away from your business without anything falling apart. And it was such an aha moment for me because I was so far away from that. I was on vacation and still very much just tied to the daily to do's and the inbox and all of that kind of thing even while I was away. And so that was probably a five or six years ago. And highly recommend the book Clockwork. It's so good for so many reasons, but that was the first time that I really found that I, I really needed to figure this out and I'm so glad that I did. You know, we can all feel just so extremely busy and like this is an impossible task to step away. And also sometimes we have to address the fact that we don't really want to step away because we love what we and it doesn't necessarily feel like work. And that's true for me as well. Oftentimes I love it so much it doesn't feel like a drag. It feels like, you know, sometimes a really amazing part of my day. I mean always an amazing part of my day to do what I love. So because of that we work really hard, we don't take a lot of time off, and then when we do, oftentimes we feel guilty. But I am here to tell you that vacation is so incredibly important. Your family is most important of all and time for yourself is so incredibly important. I eventually realized that taking time away, truly away, actually gives me some of the best ideas that I've ever had for my business. So oftentimes just kind of stepping out of the day to day allows you to think on the business rather than just be in it all the time. And that more and more I'm realizing is the true power of an entrepreneur. It's when you can really think about the business and stop being in it so incredibly much that some of just your most impactful ideas come. So, so many times when I'm away, I will have revelations, I'll get clarity and I'll have a lot of really good ideas. So before I move on, I want to make sure you know about today's Freebeam. We've set up a template for you to set up as a vacation autoresponder for your customers so that you can put that on your inbox and take care of your customers, your students, your members while you're away. And it's not just a out of office. It's a really good template that also covers some FAQs for your people explains when you'll be back. It's a really good automation. And so I want you to hop on over to professionalcreative.com, download that template, it's totally free for you and have it in your back pocket for the next time that you go on vacation. I want you to just imagine being able to truly take a break and relax, come back to your business after vacation, refreshed and more productive than ever. This is just a necessity for your well being and for your business's well being as well. So I'll walk you through how to make it a reality. The thing that I think is so interesting is when I actually took time off for the first time when I came back, I was better. My family was better, my team was better. I think they needed the opportunity to work without me there as well and my business was better for it. And so then I, I really proved myself wrong and started to be able to do it more and more. So to get started first, I just want you to be really gentle with yourself. Know that you deserve time off from your business guilt free and task free. I want you to decide to take a break and commit to it unapologetically. Okay, commit to it unapologetically. I also, if you have a team, I also dealt with some guilt early on after I would take some time off. I just felt so guilty that I had this team doing work for me that, you know, in my mind I still felt was mine to do. And here I was taking a break and I just really had to work on my mindset around that because the team wasn't feeling that way. We had many conversations about it it and they encouraged me to simply stop, stop feeling that way unapologetically. Go. Don't feel guilty. And that they were glad to be doing what they were doing. And so that was really helpful. So I want you to decide to take a break and commit to it unapologetically. If you are a busy entrepreneur like me, you'd rather spend your time on the work you love and growing your business than on a mountain of paperwork. Now, when my team started growing, I knew that I needed something to make complicated business tasks like payroll simple and personal. That's when I found gusto. Gusto has been a game changer for my business. It's like having a fairy godmother for all the less glamorous parts of running a business. With gusto, I can handle payroll and minutes and manage benefits and time off requests as well as all from one beautiful intuitive platform. We've been using Gusto for over five years and I cannot recommend it enough. It's important to me that my team feels cared for and valued and Gusto helps me do that. Their platform is so easy to use and my team loves how easy it is to hop on the app anytime, see the status of their pay, their time off, and even therefore a 1k contribution. So whether you're a fellow artist, a small shop owner, or anyone who values creativity and team spirit, Gusto is there to help you simplify the complicated parts of your business so that you can focus on what you do best. When you're creating a business that you love, every bit of help counts. If you're ready to transform the way that you handle payroll, benefits and HR, visit bonniecristine.com Gusto that's bonniecristine.com gusto and join over 300,000 business owners, including me, who found their perfect partner in Gusto. Next, before you go, you will feel so much better if you really focus on finishing your current business. So close all of those open loops, honor all of your existing commitments before you leave and if possible, delegate any tasks might technically need to be done while you're gone to someone else. And if you don't have someone else to delegate to, you can still take a break. Absolutely, we'll talk about that. But I think it's really important to just get all of those kind of loose ends wrapped up, tied into a pretty bow before you go so that you can fully ease into the break. Next is set up your autoresponder. So this is an automatic email and it goes out anytime someone contacts you. And our template today that you can go download is so good, it's going to answer all the common questions that you get and inform your clients of your absence. Now, I also love to use an autoresponder to kind of set an example for the people in my audience. Again, I'm unapologetically taking time away and I encourage you to do the same thing sometime. We have an autoresponder that goes up every weekend because, listen, I think that we are in an age where people expect an immediate response. And that is possible for really large companies that have people working, you know, 24 hours a day from all over the world in customer service. But when we're a small business, it's not possible and it shouldn't be expected. And so we would oftentimes have two or three emails come in over the weekend from a single person like, why haven't I heard back from you? Well, it's because it's Saturday and we're with our family. So we decided to set up an autoresponder that says that. It says, hey, we're taking this time off this weekend to be with our families. We hope you will do the same and we'll get back to you first thing on Monday morning. And so it's a really beautiful opportunity to just show people how you live, how you have balance in your life, how you take time off and how you hope they do as well. So if you don't have anyone to delegate anyone to, you really take care of that. With the autoresponder, I'm completely off. I'm enjoying some time away. I will be back to you as soon as I return on such and such date. And then I want you to genuinely take time off. Set up some rules or boundaries. Give yourself permission not to fake your presence in your absence. Do you know what I mean? Like scheduling posts. And I'm not sure how you do this, but I know that many of us kind of fake our presence even in our absence. And I think it's just, that's okay. But I also think it's really valuable to just truly be gone, truly step away again. I think it's a beautiful example to set for other people who, if you kind of fake your presence in your absence, right. Someone might think, how do you do it all? How are you always on? I need to always be on as well, right? Like they might not realize that you have these things working in your absence. And so permission to truly be absent. Trust that the break will be as beneficial for your business as it is for you. And then this is my favorite tip, you've got to ease back into it. So don't come back on day number one with a bunch of, I don't know, scheduled interviews or podcasts or zoom calls, like, start back. But give yourself a few administrative days to kind of catch up and you will have things that have kind of collected while you're gone, things that you need to get caught back up on. We oftentimes feel like we're kind of jumping down the rabbit hole to say when we come back from time off. So don't forget this. Just go ahead and schedule a couple of head down days is what I like to call them, where I'm truly just kind of getting back up to speed. Then you can go back into full force on day three or four, back from your vacation. Okay. If you do have someone to delegate to, someone on your team or maybe a virtual assistant I have a previous episode, it's number 49, all about delegation and SOPs. So SOPs are standard operating procedures and they are truly like long term, your ticket to vacation from your business. While what we're talking about today may mean that your business kind of halts while you're away, that's okay. But eventually I would love for you to have the goal to where everything continues to run beautifully in your absence. It is going to still create income, it's going to still run and that is through a team that you have trained via standard operating procedures. And so I want you to have that as your long term goal even if you're not there. Now take, take a listen to number 49 so that you can wrap your mind around creating SOPs. Because even if you're a one woman show, a one person show, you can begin to create these trainings, your SOPs now, so that when you do have someone who can step in and help you, you've got this training library of how you do everything you do in your business. I think one of the pitfalls that all entrepreneurs believe at some point is business will crumble without them. But the reality is that your business can and will survive your absence if you just plan a little bit. Taking time off is needed. It's not a sign of weakness. It's a strategic move to ensure your long term success, your mental health, your well being and the balance that is really necessary for you to feel really good in your business all, all the time. So it is a necessity, my friends, be gentle with yourself. Finish your current order of business, set up that autoresponder, genuinely take time off and ease back into your work. When you come back, your well being is worth it. So don't forget to head on over to professionalcreative.com we will link the template, the autoresponder template for you that we've designed in the show notes of today's episode. Wait to hear where you go. Tell me all about it, my friends. Create the beauty that you want to see come alive in the world. And remember, there's room for you.