The sun is shining. You’re sitting in the garden, feeling the warmth on your skin, enjoying your coffee (or gin!) or maybe an ice cream while the kids play around you.
But does it feel like you’re squeezing it in?
Like you have to do the day job; have to keep the clients happy and the social media going, and try to snatch that little bit of time out when you can?
Maybe there’s even some guilt or pressure there (which has certainly come up many times, chatting to my business owner clients and friends) – like there’s a million things you ‘should’ be doing work-wise. And sitting in the garden with a book or feeling the pressure from your in-laws to go for a family walk isn’t one of them!
It’s so easy to look at Facebook or Instagram and feel triggered by other people who seem to take weeks or months off, isn’t it? Quite frankly, I wouldn’t want to be one of those ‘laptop lifestyle’ type people, where they’re working by a pool. When I’m off, I like to be off and not working at all.
But it’s hard switching off from your business, taking proper time out and being able to actually afford to stop. And if you’d love to NOT have to work so much over summer, there’s two sides to it!
The first part is to what extent the business can continue and the money can keep coming in, without you working in it so much – whether all your products and/or services need your personal input, or whether any of it can happen without you.
It might be that you’ve got a team that can support you. It might be that you’ve got passive income products or funnels set up, that keep things going without needing so much input from you.
If you’re reading this, I’m guessing there’s a good chance this is hardly a brand new concept and that adding more time-leveraged products, services and funnels to your business is on your ‘want-to-do’ list. Which is all good.
But on top of that – and this is the real crux of it – is the financial aspect of not being an employee. When you’re an employee and you don’t work, you get paid to take 5.6 weeks of statutory holiday every year (and some people get more than that).
We all know that as a business owner, it can feel really hard to take time out of your business.
My business year runs from August to July and when I looked on my planner, I’ve taken two weeks and three days ‘annual leave’ in this last year. Maybe you’re the same; maybe you’ve really taken hardly any time at all or maybe, you just want more!
I think the whole idea that you started your business because you want to take all this time off is a bit of exaggeration. For us ambitious female business owners, I don’t think the real end goal for many of us is really to sit on a beach forever, drinking cocktails and doing nothing. We’re here to do work with purpose and meaning and to make a difference in this world. Maybe it’d be nice for a while, but in reality we’d soon get bored (and probably end up buying the bar or resort and turning it into a retreat!).
BUT doesn’t have to feel like a total dream, for you to be able to take the time off that you really want, especially over summer.
So here’s 3 simple steps you can use, to help make sure you’re only working the hours you really want to:
#1. Ringfence the time you want off + make it non-negotiable
I know this might sound obvious. But in the same way you’d submit an annual leave request as an employee, to make sure you get the time off you want in August or over Christmas – it’s a bit like doing that for yourself!
Decide how many weeks you want off; when you want to take them; and plan them into your calendar for the next 12 months NOW.
I’d suggest booking a minimum of 4 weeks now and if you want more, book more.
I mean actually get your wall planner or diary or calendar right now and block out the days or weeks you’re going to take off. Ringfence that time and make it non-negotiable (no “oh I’m supposed to be off that week but I’ll just add this client call on the Thursday afternoon, it’ll be fine”. It’s not fine because you’ll spend all day knowing it’s coming at 3pm and having it at the back of your mind, rather than switching off and properly relaxing).
I’ve already started to do this for next year because as I said, our year starts in August and I’ve already booked a week off in December and a week in March.
Why? Because otherwise, it’s so easy for it simply not to happen. If you want to be off in August – and you’ve kind of set the intention in your mind, but not in the calendar – you can guarantee your diary will still fill up with calls and meetings and client work and deadlines and everything else. Even if you book in less than usual, it still takes up time and headspace that means you can’t get a proper break when you’re off. So block it out and make those dates non-negotiable.
#2. Figure out how you’ll get paid
The next step is then to work out how you’ll get paid. Because – obviously! – during the time you’re not working, you still need to be able to pay all your bills, your mortgage, your lifestyle costs, your business expenses and so on.
And to be fair, if you’re going on holiday when you’re off, your costs might even be higher with day trips and activities and meals out and general spending money while you’re there, on top of all your usual expenses of running your home and business.
So for you to still get paid and take the same monthly salary from your business, we need to make sure you’ve got a buffer or slush fund – basically that you’re leaving some cash in the pot – to cover the weeks and months when you’re not working.
I use a simplified version of Profit First to do this with my clients where each month, we put 55% of what we earn into a separate ‘Business Owner’s Pay Pot’ account (with other accounts that we use for expenses and tax). We then set up a regular, automated Standing Order from the owner’s pay pot account into their personal bank account, for a fixed amount of money each month.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re paying yourself £1,000 or £10,000 or £50,000 each month…the key thing is that the amount is CONSISTENT.
So that when you’re deciding how much money to take out of your business each month, you’re not going to take all of the 55% that comes in.
For example – let’s say you’ve run the numbers and 55% is about £6,000 a month, which you decide to pay into your ‘Business Owner’s Pay Pot’ account. You might then decide to take £4,500 as your monthly salary or dividends, transferred by Standing Order into your personal bank account, leaving the surplus £1,500 in your pay pot account.
This means that by the time you’ve been running this system for 3 months, you’ve actually got a whole month’s worth of pay sitting in reserve.
So if you want to take some time off – or maybe a launch doesn’t go as well as planned, or you catch something nasty and have to clear your diary for a week unexpectedly – you can still pay yourself that regular amount.
And the same is true regardless of whatever actual numbers are true for you right now!
#3. Put the support in place that you need!
The final step here is look at what support you need, to actually be able to stop and take time out of your business.
It’s so easy for people to say they can work anywhere in the world – the whole laptop lifestyle, ‘digital nomad’ thing – but who really wants to be sitting on a Greek beach with their laptop, posting on social media?
I don’t know, maybe some people do but certainly not me! And maybe you’re the same. When I go on holiday, I stick my phone in the safe in the hotel room, so I’m not tempted to look at it. I like to completely switch off. But I can only do that because I’ve made arrangements for things to happen behind the scenes without me there.
So a proportion of my social media content is scheduled in advance (I use SmarterQueue, a brilliant tool that lets you post things automatically and can even recycle some of your content). And on top of that, I’ve also got support from an office team who will deal with customer enquiries, progress cases and actually make sure that my business continues to run and that my customers or clients are happy and are up to date with what’s going on, without me needing to be there.
Of course, I realise that not all businesses have office staff! But if you don’t, as a minimum, you can think about putting an out of hours office reply on your email and maybe having somebody who can go in and check messages for you. If you run a Facebook group, maybe you want to make somebody else a temporary admin, so they can keep an eye on things and moderate the group for you.
Maybe it’s just paying a VA to do just a couple of hours a week while you’re away, to reply to essential stuff in your inbox and deal with anything urgent that crops up (the right Virtual Assistant really can be amazing and is such an affordable way to give you that peace of mind!).
Because let’s be honest, it’s very rare that you can actually just walk away, put nothing in place behind the scenes and then not have to check it. None of us wants our business to crumble in our absence.
And the problem is that if you don’t set these things up behind the scenes, it’s so hard to step away for any length of time, let alone to properly switch off. So by getting these foundations in place, it means you can relax and get on with enjoying your life.
And this is exactly what I do with my clients, inside Rock Solid™!
Using my Rock Solid™ framework, we work through ALL the things you need to do to get your financial stuff working behind the scenes for you – on autopilot – with the systems and processes you need so that you can get on with living your life.
Because when you KNOW you’ll get paid the same amount of money each month, whether you’re on holiday or not, you can actually enjoy your time away. Instead of spending 3 weeks in the run up to your holiday hoping you will have enough money…or worse case, not taking a break at all, because you can’t afford to not work!
You don’t have to worry about that because it’s all dealt with. And that’s just one small part of work we’ll do together. We’ll get all your financial foundations in place, so you’ll be free to live life your way, knowing you’ll always have enough money to pay for it.
You’ll know that if anything happens to you (or your income), your family will keep their quality of life and not need to worry about paying bills or leaving their home.
And you’ll know at a glance how much you have to spend on holidays, days out, gin and the other things that make life fun, without ever feeling guilty or worried about how you spend your money.
So if that sounds intriguing, here’s where you can get all the Rock Solid™ details now!
I take all my high-level 1:1 clients through the Rock Solid™ process as part of my Asset Mastery and Magnetic Wealth™ programmes, or you can simply work through it all in your own time as a self-study programme, and it really will make a massive difference.
Plus when you join Rock Solid™ by 12th September – and you then want ongoing monthly support to keep taking huge action towards your financial goals, once you’ve got your financial foundations all in place – you’ll get £100 off your first month inside the Asset Accelerator in September. So once the kids are back at school, we can get to work on seriously building your wealth!
Here’s to finally being able to take off all the time you desire next summer (and whenever you like), feeling absolutely confident that the money stuff is all taken care of!
Until next time,
Claire
p.s Got questions about Rock Solid™? Or want to explore other ways I can support you to take control of your finances and get everything in place to grow your wealth? Just click here to message me personally on Facebook!