With the holidays upon us, I wanted to send everyone a friendly reminder to take time off. “Work to live, don’t live to work!”
I have been advising the readers of this blog for some time to build boundaries around time. The holidays are a great excuse to unplug and recharge with your family and friends. You need to realize that you are your most important business asset and refreshing yourself will give your business an immediate upgrade.
Thanksgiving is a good excuse for four or five days out of the office. These tips are applicable for your thanksgiving break, but more time is better. Apply these tips again for a real chunk of time off say between Christmas and maybe past new years day.
Here are the most important takeaways from The Unplugged Vacation:
- Set clear expectations with clients and staff. This means alerting your team and clients that you will be away and unreachable. This means putting on that auto responder and emailing important clients ahead of time.
- Delegate. Get your team together. You go over what you need them to focus on while you’re away. You need to give everybody enough detail, enough instruction to do what you want them to do. Guess what you’re doing? Delegating. Often, there are additional delegations that are happening in these meetings, and you might come back with less on your plate overall.
- Don’t take work calls or check email. This feels like a foreign concept to many accountants, but you are not at the beck and call of your business. It will not crumble if you set proper boundaries. This is a practice in discipline, and you can do it. Take the time you deserve for yourself. Clients will respect you for it, and if they don’t, they were probably bad clients you don’t want anyway! Oftentimes vacation can highlight when you need to prune the fat with unproductive employees or disrespectful clients. Without those people you end up having capacity for better. Better yet however, everything runs without a hitch in your absence and you realize you can let go of more tasks in your day-to day, not just on vacation. It is a win, win.
For more insight and sample emails and sample delegation lists, download the full book for free here.
PS – Whenever you’re ready, here are 4 other ways we can help:
- Seller FAQ: Answers to the questions sellers are asking. From practice value, to timing, we’ve got you covered.
- Strategic Guide to Selling your CPA Practice Video: The how-to of selling a CPA firm.
- Accounting Practice Academy: If you’re looking for benchmarks, our 8-week workshop has a community of established firm owners that will help you get perspective, reduce your owner hours, and raise your bottom line. email ibrennan@poegroupadvisors.com with “APA” and we will fill you in on the details.
- If you want to chat about your exit strategy, email bball@poegroupadvisors.com with “strategy call” or request a call here.
