MBA1656 The Best Time To Take a Break

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Hey oh. Welcome to the 100R where business is pleasure every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode you will learn when is the best time to take a break. We are pretty much always busy in business. We're running full speed ahead every day of the year. But of course we need to take a break. We need to recharge the batteries at some point. When is the best time to take a week off or maybe even two? Well that's what we get into in today's lesson. How to choose the right time so you don't 1 leave the business when you're needed most or 2 don't plan a break and then be forced to take a break because you're so burnt out. You want to make sure you put this in your calendar and you take care of yourself so you can take care of the business. This is going to be a really practical lesson as always, so make sure you take some notes and you can start plugging things into your calendar as you listen. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. When is the Best time to take a break. Let's jump into it. The first thing you need to consider is when is the busiest times or times of year for your business. Some businesses are incredibly busy in the summers because their products and services tend to lean towards the summers. You might be in the pool business or in the travel industry or in the camping industry. So you get the point. Every company has a different time of year where it's really, really busy. This might be right before Christmas. This could be Black Friday or Cyber Monday. One of the easiest ways to kind of understand when is really the busiest time in your business is to just take a look at your Google Analytics look at when do you get a spike in traffic during the year. Just look out throughout the year. When do things start to spike up in terms of traffic to your site? Once you know that, it's good to know that you should steer clear of these times. Do not take off during these times. This is when your business is in full force. All hands on deck. Let's make sure we deliver. But just like you have busy times, you have some slow times in your business and you're gonna do the same thing. Look at Google Analytics and look at the opposite. When you see dips and you know your business well, you know your niche well. But for example, in our business, the last week in December and the first week of January is really the slowest time of year. Right after Christmas and the week of New Year's, things start to kick back up the week after New Year's. But for those two weeks, it's about half the traffic or speed or busyness in our business. So for us, that is a clear time for us to take a break because not much is going on. Also our users and how they use the product is a slow time as well because not a lot of people run webinars through on a webinar software webinar ninja.com, but not a lot of people run webinars during that period. There are some, but but not as many as usual. So that's one way to decide when to take office. When is it not so busy at your business? Another thing to consider are product launches or new things that you're launching in your business. If you know, for example, you're launching a new product or a new service at the end of March, don't schedule time off during a launch or even leading up to the launch. The two weeks before the launch. The week after the launch should be block booked. I think a good time to take off is a week after a launch, because you're going to need it. You're going to be really, really tired. You've put a lot into this new product, this new service, and you spent a lot of energy and you've had a lot of stress making sure it's a successful launch. You don't want to go on vacation immediately after because there might be some things you need to take care of after the launch, as the dust settles, taking care of customers, making sure everything's okay. A week later, you're good to go. I highly recommend you take a look at your calendar and make sure you plan launches like this around days that have low significance in your life. So, for example, don't plan a launch around or during, right before, right after, you know, your anniversary, your partner's birthday, a special holiday that you and your family love to celebrate. That might be Easter or a Fourth of July or New Year's. The point here is that don't make things difficult on yourself. You have control over when you do what, as long as you plan ahead. And this is why I really believe you should plan out your whole year in advance and pop things in your calendar so you know what you're doing when. So there's no confusion, there's no surprises. Next thing to consider is when other people on your team are taking off, especially in the same kind of department. So we use a HR software called HR Partner. And what I like about the software is that everybody can see when everybody is going on leave. So there's like this calendar and you could see, oh, I see that Maria is going to be taking off for two days during this week. Or I see that Mark is going to be taking a week off then. And this allows every department to say, okay, I should not take off during the same time somebody else is taking off, because we don't want to have too much downtime in any particular department. So being a founder, you want to make sure other managers on your team are going to be working or not off when you're off, because you want to make sure you have people that are going to be holding the fort, making some, you know, high level decisions for you when you're gone. Because when you take off, you want to be able to really shut off and not worry about answering texts or messages or Slack messages or whatever it is. So even if you're not using an HR software like HR Partner, you could just simply ask everybody that's in your department or for you as a founder, the other managers involved, hey, anybody else in management, you're gonna be taking off this week? No. Great. I'll be taking off. Can I rely on you guys to hold down the fort while I'm gone? Yes. Great. Now, one of the beauties of being an entrepreneur is that you get to choose when you wanna do what you wanna do, which is really awesome. And it has a lot of perks. For example, Nicole and I, we never go on a vacation, whether it's local or otherwise during a high season. There's no reason for us to, you know, go on a vacation and pay high season rates. We can get incredible deals on shoulder season, low season. And the only reason why it's low season is because that's when most of the people around the world that work in jobs have off. For example, one time we took a few days off early October. This is considered a shoulder season. You know, hotels, accommodations, resorts, they are dying for customers when it's a slow time. And they will give you incredible rates, they'll give you great deals, they'll even bundle things for you. And you could literally spend 50 to 60 to 70% less than you would normally pay during high season. And you could see this as a cost savings or you could see it as, hey, I can stay longer, I can have a longer vacation for the same amount of money if I go during a slow time. This also includes, you know, being able to take off during the week. A lot of people, they start their vacation maybe on a Friday or a Saturday and they leave on Sunday to try to bridge the weekend. You don't really need to do this. You can start your vacation on a Monday and that way the bulk of your hotel nights are during the week. And guess what? It's cheaper. Then take advantage of the fact that you have flexibility. Now these are some tips during the development of your business as you're growing, as you're building. But there's a way for you to take off any time you want, no matter what time of year, what you're launching, what season, whether it's busy or slow in your business.

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When you're trying to grow your business, when you're running the day to days of your business, when you're heavily involved, this is really important, knowing when to take time off, when's the best time. But ideally, your aim as an entrepreneur is to be able to have full autonomy over your time. Meaning you can step away from the business for a day, for a week, for a month, and things still move forward, they still grow. You're not required to be around. You have a team that's running things for you. That's the ultimate goal for every entrepreneur and you should strive to getting to that point. So you should be making incremental, you know, improvements or steps towards that goal. Every time you take a break, ask yourself, can I take off more than a week? What if I delay my stay for another week? Will the business collapse? If not, you're moving towards that. Okay? You don't. You feel confident your team's going to take care of things and you're good to go. You have people in place that can take care of things for you. An entrepreneur really should see themselves as an investor. You've invested the time, the effort, the money into building a business. You have to get a return on this investment at some point, which means that it's fully autonomous. You have a whole team running it for you and you can step away for good. Of course, you're going to want to check in with your team from time to time, once a month, have a board meeting. You're still the owner of the business, but the point here is, is that you need to see yourself as an investor. Invest in the beginning so you can reap the benefits later. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe. Right now it's absolutely free on whatever app you use to listen to podcasts, whether it's Apple podcasts or Stitcher Radio or Spotify or Himalaya. We're on every single one of them. Speaking of Himalaya, if you're interested in starting your first online business, then you have to check out my new audio course on himalaya.com mba. It's a 10 part audio course showing you step by step how to build your online business. From idea to implementation, to pricing your product, to launching your product, to building your website, to scaling your team. You can get a 14 day free trial of my course over@himalaya.com MBA go ahead and sign up today. You'll absolutely love it. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. The whole point of being an entrepreneur, of building a business, is that you get to have more time for yourself, to have control over your time, to do what you want, when you want to do it. That's the whole point. So this whole time off thing is not something you should feel guilty about. This is why you built the business in the first place. It's because you know that you can't buy time, right? You can't make more time. Time is a finite resource. So you build the machine to make you money and therefore you can use your time the way you want to. So don't feel guilty when you're taking time off. When you're going away, this should be the norm. You shouldn't be working forever. That's why you're building a business. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in. Tomorrow's episode Freeride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care of. Hey Fidelity. How can I remember to invest every month?

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