How to Take Time Off From Your Business (Without Worrying it Will Blow Up in Your Absence)

Hey guys. Matt Paulfsen here in this video, I want to talk about unplugging from work, taking some time off, and just creating some healthy emotional distance between you and your business for a few days. So depending on what type of business you run, it might be easy to take a couple days off here and there, or it might be very difficult, say if you're a consultant, like a graphic designer or a web developer, you might be able to just take a couple days off and it's really not a big deal to anybody because if nothing moves forward in your current projects for a couple of days, all that means is your projects are going to get done a couple of days later. But if you own a retail store where you have set hours and you don't have a big staff to kind of be there for you when people expect you to be open, it can be really difficult to take time off. I think of my friends Josh and Brittany who are storing them all. It's pretty much those two and I think one other person. And then they have to maintain over. I think it's like 100 hours a week of being open in a mall. So they're pretty much always working. I have no idea how they would take a vacation if they wanted to. This is also true for Internet businesses. You know, your websites are on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So if it's down, you know your business is closed and you're losing money. You know, that's certainly the case at MarketBeat. It's been difficult to unplug from MarketBeat in the past because if we're down for a couple hours, especially during a workday, during a work week, that's thousands of dollars. I did the math. We were down for one day. I think it was last summer or so. Our web host was having some problems. We were down for maybe 30 hours in total on a Friday to a Saturday. We lost over $15,000 because of that downtime. So of course, my natural inclination, I don't want to lose $10,000 for a day for being down or more. So I always keep a close eye on the website, make sure everything's working like it's supposed to, just infrastructure wise and make sure we've got all of our advertisers taken care of, we've got all our customers taken care of in terms of our newsletter subscribers. So if the servers are running fine and the advertisers are happy and our subscribers are happy, everything else can probably wait a few days. But until recently, nobody's really been able to do some of those things but me. So whenever I would travel, I would always have to bring a laptop with me and do a couple hours of work a day just in case something happened. And invariably something would happen and I'd end up working even though I didn't intend to. And then I wake up three hours later and oh, I just wrote a bunch of code and did a bunch of other stuff and I kind of defeated the whole point of taking time off. So I'm trying not to do that this year. One of my goals for 2019 is to be able to totally unplug more. I used to believe in the idea of being that superhero entrepreneur that did everything themselves. They didn't have big overhead, made lots of money, and that works well as long as you're willing to work all the time and drop whatever you're doing to handle an emergency. That strategy got me to about 2 million in revenue with 1/2 time employee. But if you want to become kind of an eight figure company or bigger than that, you really do need that team in place. You personally can only scale so far and only do so much in a day. And beyond that, to keep growing, you really need to build that team. So this year I'm making some changes in my business so that I can step away from it for a few days here and there and that'll just allow me to be a better spouse to my wife, to be a better father to my children, and just to be a more emotionally healthy and balanced individual. And not to say that these things are a big mess and I screwed up and you know, none of that's, it's not a problem. This is a proactive move knowing that my kids are getting a little bit older. We have a six year old and two year old and you know, they want more daddy time and I'm trying to give it to them. So my family and I, we just spent three days in Minneapolis. I didn't bring a laptop with me. I did bring my phone, I brought a small iPad so I could watch YouTube in the evenings. But it didn't work while I was there. And I was able to focus solely on my wife and my kids. And I went on some rides in Mall of America. We went to an arcade, pushed the baby in a stroller, had a good time, was able to really focus on my wife and kids. And the way this was able to really happen without me worrying about MarketBeat is I just put somebody else in charge of all the key aspects of MarkerBeat. When I was gone. So if there was an emergency to fix, it was on Will and Rebecca and Ryan to kind of have to deal with it. We did have a minor emergency when I was gone. One of our websites was down. Will was able to log into the server and fix it without me really even thinking about it. It turns out there was a hard drive that was swallowed on a server. So he logged in, deleted some stuff, rebooted it, and he was back in action. The system worked like it was supposed to. My kind of goal moving forward is to take some slightly longer breaks where I unplug and kind of stress test the business to see what breaks in my absence. So to start out, I unplugged for one weekday and two weekend days to see what happened. Worked pretty well. A week from today when I record this, I'm going to be going to Dallas for the Capitalism Conference. So I'll be unplugging for two weekend days and three weekdays when I go to that conference. And pretty much the same thing will be happening in March when we go to the Financial Marketing Summit. And then in June, my family and I are planning on taking a seven day trip where I plan on totally unplugging as well. And hopefully after that we'll be able to stretch it to 10 days or 14 days or, and eventually take who knows how long off. But really the goal is that when I take these trips, I'll be able to unwind, do something I enjoy, and then when I come back, I'll be able to review what happened when I wasn't there. That way we can look at all the balls that dropped. And I do expect some balls to drop, but we can look at them and make some changes so that next time, whatever balls did drop, don't get dropped the next time. So this is going to be an iterative kind of process, experimental. We'll see what happens as this goes along. I do have a couple of tips for you if you want to really take a few days off from your business. This is especially true if you have an online business. You can work from anywhere with your laptop. It's really dangerous because you can work pretty much everywhere. So you tend to end up working pretty much everywhere. So here are a few tips if you do want to take a few days off from your your business. One, don't bring your laptop, because if you bring your laptop you're going to be tempted to work. Two, make sure that somebody else is in charge when you're going on your trip, you can worry less about your business. If somebody is worrying about your business for you when you're gone. Third, make sure whoever that person that is in charge knows what key things need to happen in your business when you're gone. So for us it's keep the server up, keep the advertisers happy, and then keep the subscribers happy who email us and have issues. Those three things happen. It's probably going to go pretty well. Fourth, turn off notifications on your phone. It's going to be difficult to unplug if you are constantly getting messages on Slack and email and whatever other communication tools that you use. So turn off the notifications. I'm not one that says you need to delete your email app because I think that's just overkill, but I do think you should. My fifth tip is that you should set some hard rules for your email account. So my rule is, you know, it's okay to check email and forwards and emails to employees, but if there's anything that I personally need to respond to, it can probably wait until I get back. Number six, final tip is to set an autoresponder message so that people know you're gone and you're probably not going to get back to them for a couple days. So those are kind of, I don't know. Hopefully those are some useful tips if you're planning on getting away for a few days here and there. If you're young and unmarried, you can set really whatever hours you want in your business. When I was single in my early 20s, I was working full time as a web developer. I was pursuing a seminary degree half time and I was building MarketBeat all at the same time. And it worked because I was young and I was unmarried and I had no kids. So I have tons of free time and I chose to use it to pursue those things. But how you spend your time doesn't necessarily change when you're older, when you have a little bit less energy and you have especially when a spouse and children come into the picture. If you make that commitment to get married or if you make the commitment to have children, you're necessarily making a commitment that you're going to be there for them first over your business or any other commitments or priorities that you have in life. That's just the reality. If you want to have a healthy family life, your wife and your husband and your kids, they really do need to come first. If you accept that reality and that truth, think about designing your business in such a way where it doesn't require your constant attention. And that way you can be there for basketball games and football games and dance recitals and whatever else your kids end up doing. Or maybe your kid is sick and you just need to watch them at home. Or maybe your wife has something or your husband has something they want to do and you can say, hey, I'll watch the kids today. It's been really good for us to do that. If you put your business first and you give your family the leftover time, that typically doesn't work out super well. So hopefully this video has given you some ideas on how to unplug from your business and just how to keep your personal priorities where they should be. So if you have any kind of tips about how to unplug from your business or just maintain a better work life balance, I'd love for you to share them in the comments below. Thanks for watching.