Dr Jeff Cornwall

Rest. Entrepreneurs can never seem to get enough of it. Vacations. Not a word that is in many entrepreneurs? vocabularies. Yet true rest and real vacations are essential for the entrepreneur?s health, and quite often the business?s health.

When we first started our business in North Carolina, I met an entrepreneur who had decided that one of the fundamental objectives for her business was to be able to take six weeks vacation a year. Just like any goal, be it profit or valuation for her business, this was a goal that took her time to reach. At first she could hardly take a day off. But, she kept this goal in front of her and began to make decisions and run her business in a way that allowed her to take more time off. First long weekends. Then a week. And finally it got to the point where she could take two to three weeks off two or three times a year. The business ran well in her absence, but only because she had built in systems and hired the right people to make it work. And so you don?t think that she was lazy and did not build her business to its full potential, she became the dominant player in her marketplace and eventually sold her business at a high premium. The fact that it could run without her for extended periods and was so very profitable, provided an earnings multiple that valued her business well beyond most comparable companies in her line of work. She became one of my person heroes!
Rod Walsh and Dan Carrison wrote a wonderful article a few years back that offers some specific ideas on how to move a business in this direction. They recommend the following:
1. Admit that you are not indispensable. ?If you’re not taking time to unwind, you’re setting a terrible example for your employees. Not taking a vacation is not a sign of an indispensable business owner; it’s proof of an ineffective leader. It’s the mark of an irritable boss with high employee turnover.?
2. Begin to delegate. ?That you’re afraid to take a vacation tells us you’ve been too active in the mundane day-to-day tasks of your business and have not allowed your employees to grow. If you’re doing the same tasks as your employees, stop it immediately?you’re the boss, the leader, the visionary.? Identify tasks that others can and should be doing, and begin the process of training your employees. Once trained, let them do what they have learned. They may make mistakes at first, but use this as a chance to coach and teach, not to take back and do it yourself.
3. Start with short vacations, like my hero in the story above, and begin to build toward longer ones as the shorter ones get easier and go smoothly.
4. Choose times that don?t demand your attention. If cash flow is a worry, plan you times away between big check runs and payroll deadlines. If you have quieter times during the month or year, use them for your time off.
5. Give your employees a life line to reach you, but make very clear the rules for such contact. I did this with great success. At times they called to often or at times to little, but again use these as opportunities to coach and teach.
So being one who tries to practice what I preach, I am bidding all of you a brief farewell. I am joining my wonderful wife and two college aged kids on a week in Disney World! During the interim, please feel free to root around in my blog. I hope you can find some entries that you missed in the past that may be of interest today. So until I return on March 15, I wish you all Godspeed.