Jade Boyd: You can simultaneously deliver incredible value and an amazing experience to your clients, even when you’re unplugged, offline, on vacation, taking time off for the holidays.

I’ve talked with a few business owners recently who are feeling kind of stressed about the holidays. It is totally a busier season and at the time of recording this, it’s early December, even though this is going to air later in December, but it is going into a busy season where there’s a lot of extra stuff that’s on our calendars and It can feel pretty unrealistic to take time off and still make time for the things that need to get done.

And in this episode, I want to talk about how to plan to take real vacations and real time off while also showing up for your business and having things run smoothly behind the scenes while you’re not physically present. If when you stop working, you stop making money, then you are effectively trading time for money, right?

When you scale your business, you move away from trading time for money and into creating value for money.

And I see the correlation in productivity here because productivity isn’t about how much you cross off your list. It’s about the results that you get, right? So in your business results or being productive, we measure that in profit. That’s the ultimate bottom line in your business and how you can tell if the things that you’re doing are actually productive or not.

So when you make that shift away from trading time for money and into creating value for money, then you start to see your business change. And when your business is set up to scale, when you’re creating value for money and not trading time for money, you can simultaneously deliver incredible value and an amazing experience to your clients, even when you’re unplugged, offline, on vacation, taking time off for the holidays.

And in this episode, I want to give you some tangible tips on how you can take real time off as a service provider, especially if this year that seemed unrealistic, or it seemed like it just made your life harder to take time off. I want to give you some tips for doing that better in the future. And many clients come to me because they are in a time famine.

They literally cannot imagine what it would look like to take a week off, let alone the entire month of December or two weeks for the holidays or a full maternity leave. So when you’re building your business and perfecting your craft trading time for money is just a part of the journey, right? Everyone starts at that point and there’s nothing wrong with doing that.

But if you are at that point in your business where you’ve maxed out the amount of time that you’re willing to trade and you’re desiring the type of business that does allow you to take real time off and extended time off without sacrificing how much you’re paying yourself each month or how much your business is making each month.

Then this episode is for you.

So there are five things that I wanted to cover in this episode, and we’re just going to dive right in. So the first thing that you can do to take real vacations is to plan your time off in advance because the further you have to prepare for that time off, the more time in advance you have to prep, the easier it’s going to get to set your business up for you to walk away.

So this is the very first step thinking about how much time do you actually want to take off next year? And this year, if you’re feeling like you didn’t have enough time off for the holidays, how can you make it so that you’re planning ahead of time next year so that you are able to take more time off and truly unplug during the times that you need to take off?

And that really starts with strategic planning. And at the beginning of the year, it’s really easy to get into this mindset because we’re all thinking about our plans for the year and it can be really exciting to open the new planner or print off the wall calendar and start planning for things and I think it’s the perfect time to think about how much vacation time you want to take off and when in general you want to take those trips or the time off that you need to have during that year and my suggestion is to take at least four weeks off a year.

If you’re a business owner, your goal should be to create the type of schedule that you dream of having, because you have complete control over this. You make the rules, right? So don’t limit yourself in the time that you want to take off. I think it’s easy to leave a corporate job or a nine to five and still be in the mindset of like, I have to work really hard if I want to take time off, or I need to get somebody’s permission if I’m going to take time off, or two weeks off is the best that it gets, but that’s not the case. And for business owners, I suggest taking at least four weeks off throughout the year.

Advice that was given to me that I really like is that if you take the fifth week of any month off, that is four weeks a year. And there’s roughly one month per quarter that has five weeks in it instead of four. So it can spread out the amount of time that you’re taking off and give yourself those breaks throughout the year.

So if you’re struggling to know like which weeks I want to take off. And struggling to actually take time off because whoops, there’s six months goes by and you haven’t taken a single day off planning ahead of time, even if you’re not going anywhere to do a staycation or an unplugged vacation where you’re at home doing something other than business.

Fifth week vacations, super smart. I’ve tried that in the past and outside of scheduling actual vacations will do that in my business and it’s worked really well for me. Also, research shows that. The benefit you get from taking time off actually peaks on day eight. So random days off that you’re taking throughout the year, if they’re not a full week or a full week would be typically eight days.

If you’re taking five business days plus the four weekend days in a row, that would definitely qualify as eight days off, right? If you’re just taking one day off and then immediately jumping back into work, it’s not enough time for your body to rest and recover and reset before diving back in. And this is especially true if you’re finding yourself working an unreasonable amount of hours, like if you’re working 10 hours a week at this point, then you might not need as much time off because you have more flexibility in your work week.

But for most people, that’s not the case. And so I would encourage you as much as possible not to take your time off in one day increments randomly when you have to throughout the year, but really plan ahead to take real time off that you are able to rest and recover. And again, you’re the boss. You make the rules.

So let’s dream big here. Do you want to take the summers off? Do you want to take the month of December off? Start out with what you really want to make happen and then backwards plan to make that possible in your business. Don’t limit yourself by what’s possible right now in your business. Set your goals a little bit higher than that and stretch yourself to see what you can accomplish and what you can get done.

The rest of the episode is going to be talking about what you can do to actually take time off, but it starts with actually thinking through how much time do you want to have off and when are you going to take it throughout the year so that you can plan ahead of time to make sure that your business is set up to run smoothly while you’re on vacation.

Okay, step number two is to plan your business strategy around your real working schedule. Do not overestimate how much time you have to give to your business and to your clients each year. Make sure that you have an accurate estimate of what that’s going to look like so that you can build your strategy around the time that you actually have to give to your business, vacations included, and taken account for.

And so that your strategy is really setting you up to succeed for the amount of time that you do have to give to your business and the amount of time where you will be away from your business as well. So when you count up all of the sick days and doctor’s appointments and birthdays and extended family weekends, or vacations that you took this year even, how much time did you really have to give to your business?

Again, we love to overestimate and think that we all just work 40 hour work weeks all year round, but that is in reality not the case for any of us. And it’s better to be realistic and honest with yourself of how much time you have to give so that you can plan your strategy around it. Because if you build your strategy around working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year, you’re setting yourself up to fail.

And when I say planning your strategy, what I really mean is planning your pricing and your offer strategy around your real capacity. And I’ve talked a lot about this in the past few episodes. So if you haven’t already listened, we talked about setting up offers that scale, setting up your marketing strategy, that scales, some things that you can do in your business to earn more and work less.

So definitely go back to the past three episodes and listen to them. If you haven’t already, because they’ll give you a good idea of what I’m talking about when I’m talking about setting up your strategy. But if you overestimate your capacity and build your strategy around that, you’ll end up hustling every week to get client work done because you’re over capacity, over the capacity that you actually have because you’ve overestimated your capacity.

But when your offers and your pricing and your marketing strategy is grounded in reality, and also takes into account the vacations that you’re going to be taking throughout the year, then your life gets easier and your strategy is effective and it does allow you to take real time off without hustling.

Okay, step three. My advice is to start batching as much as you can. And I think this is helpful in the day to day rhythms. Even if you’re not taking vacation, single tasking and focusing on one thing at a time does just help you be more productive when you’re not jumping from thing to thing to thing throughout the day, throughout the week, throughout the month, when you are able to sit down when you’re in a good headspace and crank out all of your emails or schedule all your social media posts or batch respond to your emails, if you’re doing that once a day, instead of jumping in and out of your inbox 10 times a day, it does make you so much more efficient. But also, if your business is already set up and your systems are already set up to batch things, it gets easier to batch things when you go on vacation.

So if you do want marketing things to be sent out, While you’re away, you won’t have to change anything or do extra work the week before you go on vacation. If your business is already set up on the schedule where you are batching things ahead of time and they are scheduled ahead of time every single month.

So whether you take a vacation or not you’re not changing anything, everything’s set up to go out when it needs to go out without you having to show up every single day to get that stuff done. Batching is one of the best methods for being productive because as women especially, our energy levels fluctuate all over the place in different seasons of life, in different seasons of our cycles, in different seasons if you’re a parent, in where your kids stages are at, or if you’re pregnant.

Our energy levels are everywhere. So the more that we can rely on a batching system and not rely on our ability to show up every single day with the energy that we need to get things done, the more consistent that you’ll be in the more successful your business will be. And the easier it’ll be to take vacations because you’re not reliant on any single day for the success of your business,

That’s tip number three. Tip number four is to automate everything. So, especially when it comes to your client workflows, we’re talking about serving your clients well, even when you’re on vacation. So again, this is part of your strategy. If you know that you’re taking vacation four times a year, you need to build that vacation policy into your contracts and take that into account when you are factoring how you’re going to serve your clients and what your capacity is going to be for the year.

But also, if there are communications or things that need to happen while you are on vacation with your clients, setting as much up as possible to be automated so that they’re not waiting on your response for how to pay their invoice, or they’re not waiting on you to send them times to book a calendar meeting for a discovery call.

As much as possible should be automated so that if somebody does reach out to you while you’re on vacation or while you’re gone for an extended period of time, it’s really clear what they need to do if they want to work with you. Or it’s really clear what the next step is to schedule a call with you and they can see your availability.

And with your current clients, automating as much as possible so that you’re getting stuff off your to do list means that there’s just less to do in general, but also less to do if you want to take a vacation,

I talked a lot about this in last week’s episode, so again, go back and listen if you haven’t already, but you can cut so much time out of your client workflow, but really any workflow in your business and create a better, more timely experience that’s worth more that you can price higher for them if you’re able to systemize and automate it.

So if you haven’t automated anything in your business yet, it’s a game changer. It will change your life. It’s so amazing. Zapier is my favorite tool for automating things. It integrates all of my software and makes things happen behind the scenes that takes hours of work off my plate every single week.

So if you haven’t started automating or if you’ve only automated a few things, look for ways that you can automate even more so that it makes taking time off even easier. Because again, work is happening while you’re gone anyway.

And tip number five is to scale your business. And this is not so much a tip as it is the ultimate way to take real vacations while serving your clients well. Setting your business up so that it’s scaling and that the time that you’re working is not connected to the amount of money that you’re making, that you’re really removing yourself as the bottleneck in your business.

The only person who has the information, the only person who can do it the right way, the only person who has the answers and knows where things are at. Remove yourself as the bottleneck in your business, and it makes taking vacations super, super seamless. And again, you can do that through creating a scalable offer or a scalable model.

And this is exactly what I teach my clients to do in my coaching program. There’s no one size fits all when it comes to scaling your business. We’ve talked a lot about scaling your business recently on this podcast, and it really is the only way to disconnect the amount of time or the amount of weeks that you’re putting into your business each year from the amount of money that you’re able to make.

I was actually listening to a book recently that was talking about setting up your business to work without you. And they posed the challenge of creating an eight week vacation as the ultimate test that your business was set up to scale, that your business could work on its own, that you could separate the amount of time that you’re working from the amount of money you’re making.

And it was written by a guy. And so I understand like an eight week vacation is probably not what you’re planning on taking next year, but I think of that in terms of a maternity leave for women. A lot of women are scared to grow their family or hesitant to grow their family because they are worried about what that’s going to mean for their business.

And their business is not set up to run for eight whole weeks without them, without having a huge sacrifice in how much money they’re making. And so setting your business up in a way that does allow you to take a one week vacation or even a one month vacation. Is a great starting point, but ultimately, the goal there is to remove yourself as the bottleneck in your business and truly put yourself in that CEO role so that you’re completely separating the amount of money you’re making from the time that you’re putting into your business.

And again, there’s a lot of different paths to scale your business. So if this is something that you’re interested in learning more about I would encourage you to check out my coaching program, The Business Edit which is a 12 month group coaching program for service providers who are at that point where they are tapped out on one on one services.

They’re tapped out on client work. They literally cannot take on any more clients. But at the same time, they want to make more money. They want to pay themselves more. They want to create that time and financial freedom that they haven’t been able to achieve yet. The program is about helping you break out of that cycle and build a business that does allow you the time and financial freedom that you’re looking for, that does allow you to take vacations when you want to and when you need to.

I hope this episode has given you some tangible tips and things to think about, especially going into the new year on how you can plan better and take more time off because you are the visionary behind your business and the amount of creative energy that you have to give to your business only increases when you take time off.

It’s not just taking care of yourself. It’s not just stepping away. or spending more time with your family. That’s the goal. It also produces so many results for your business and so much growth for you as well when you start making taking time off a regular rhythm. If you haven’t been doing this consistently, definitely DM me on Instagram if you take some time off, I’m really curious to see how it goes for you. For most people, if they haven’t taken time off in a while and actually take the full week off where they’re able to unplug, it can be truly life changing. It can prevent you from burning out. It can give you a new perspective on your business and really light you up again, help you remember why you did this thing in the first place.

It’s healthy in general in so many ways, but it’s also healthy for your business. It’s healthy for everything in your business. When you’re looking at things with a fresh perspective, with a clear head, with good energy and with that re energized mindset towards what you want to accomplish and energy towards the work that you’re doing every single day, your clients are going to feel that too.

It’s only going to give them a better experience when you’re showing up as your best you cannot be at your best if you’re never taking time off during the year. So I hope this has helped you think ahead a little bit and how you want to spend your time off and when you’re going to take your time off next year.

And giving you some tips and strategies that you can use to actually make that a reality and make that a restful thing and not something that feels like it’s just going to be more work for you. So until next time, business minimalists, take what you learned today and get 1 percent better this week.