ASLU 016: Prepping Your Creative Business So You Can Take Time Off
As the summer months are upon us Episode 16 of the And She Looked Up Creative Hour is all about how you can prep your creative business to take some time off.
For many of us, one of the reasons we gravitate to running our own creative business is so we can have some flexibility in when and how we work.
Some of you might want to be able to take the entire summer off to spend time with your young children. Others might look forward to spending a month (or two or three!) working and playing in a sun destination during winter. Maybe you like to travel in the shoulder season when kids are back in school and airfare and accommodation are cheaper but the weather is still good. You could be planning maternity leave or an extended trip. Or maybe you just want to take a 2 week vacation at the same time as your partner.
It’s all entirely possible. All you need is one thing: some preplanning!
How you go about prepping your business so you can take some time off or reduce your hours is going to depend a lot on the type of business you run and when your peak busy season is. But it can (and should!) be done.
So let’s dive in.
Listen To the Episode
Here’s a direct link to Episode 16 - or you can listen via the players below:
Summer is, for a lot of us, a natural slowdown period in our businesses. There always tends to be a drop in productivity during the summer months even if you continue working through them. It’s hot, the kids (if you have them) are out of school, the good weather beckons you outside, your clients are all taking time off so… why not join them?
Unless… you’re a wedding photographer, a face painter, or you sell your hand made goods or art at summer craft and farmer’s markets or you teach art at children’s summer day camps… well for you maybe your summer is actually winter or fall or spring.
However your business works you need to build in downtime. We all need to time to disconnect, recharge and refill our creative well. It’s critical to our mental health and to avoiding burnout - and both of those are critical to us maintaining a financially healthy business too!
Whether you want to work fewer hours per day during the summer or take a small or large block of time off at a predetermined point in the year, the key - regardless of when you choose to step away - is simple:
Plan Ahead
Planning ahead when you want to take time off is critical. It’s the entire key to having some successful and rewarding downtime. It’s what will ensure that your clients or customers, your suppliers, and your community stay happy and engaged and, most importantly, stay with you so your business’s finances stay healthy!
The further out you can plan the better. If you can block out time off even as far as a year in advance, you can make almost any length of time away from your business very manageable. But at mininum, you’re probably going to want to plan at least 3 months in advance.
Embrace The Natural Dips In Your Business
All businesses have natural ebbs and flows - times of year when it’s always busy, and times when it slows right down. The easiest way to take time away from your business is to embrace the natural dips in your industry and plan downtime during those periods. See if you can match your vacation time up with when your clients or customers are quiet.
If you’re a maker, you’re probably very busy during the fourth quarter as people start their holiday shopping. This could be your biggest period of revenue generation so you’re not going anywhere! In fact, you’re probably getting ready to ramp up your inventory levels in August and September as you prep for fall and winter craft markets and a barrage of on-line shopping.
If you’re a wedding photographer, your busy season will be the summer with perhaps a smaller bump at Christmas and New Year’s or even Valentine’s Day. So maybe you’ll plan your downtime for January – go skiing or take a vacation to Mexico or Hawaii.
If you’re a coach or teach workshops or host events or do public speaking, your natural downtime is probably the summer when clients go away for their own vacations. So you might as well take a vacation too!
If you have kids, you’ll probably want to spend your down time with them – when can you do that best? Is it spring break? Or summer vacation? Maybe you split your down time based on their schedule and your business’s natural dips – like taking 2 weeks off during summer break and another two weeks off during your natural downtime for a little rejuvenation.
You might also want to work less during summer vacation without taking time off – especially if your kids are home with you. Instead of working an 8 hour day, maybe you’re only going to work a 2 or 3 hour day – you can scale down how much work you do with a little planning.
If you can plan out in large time blocks up to a year ahead, that can be really helpful. This will depend on the nature of your business. Define what an emergency is. Sometimes a client emergency isn’t really an emergency.
Work Backwards to keep customers happy
One of the most important things when you’re planning to take time away is creating a strategy that keeps your clients and customers happy and one of the best ways to do that is to work backwards on your calendar and then communicate, communicate, communicate. And then communicate some more!
How far in advance you start informing your customers of your plans will depend in part on your business and on how long you’re going to be away for. If you’re closing up shop for a month, you’ll need to plan further in advance than if you’re going to be gone for the standard two weeks.
Plan when you’re going to be gone, identify some critical dates and then start counting back on your calendar:
last day you can accept orders
last day you can ship out orders
last day you can book appointments
last day you’re available for client support
Once you’ve identified these critical dates, think about how much notice you’ll want to give your customers. It might be weeks or even months.
Email Signature Reminder
You can start with a simple note in your email signature up to 3 months in advance of when you’re leaving. Something simple like “my studio will be closed from July 1-21st this summer” or “we’re taking our annual break from January 1-14th”. It sets the stage and is a gentle way to put the notion in the mind of your client.
Have a hard date for last requests
Let your clients know when the last date is for orders, bookings, shipping, support calls or communication – make sure you give them enough notice. It could be two weeks in advance of the date or 2 months. It will depend very much on your business.
communicate
When it comes to letting your customers or clients know when you’ll be away, you can’t communicate too much! Seriously - even if you feel like you’re talking about it until you’re blue in the face there will always be at least one who claims they didn’t get the message! Here are some ways you can let your community know you’ll be away:
regular newsletters - start mentioning it in your newsletters around the same time you add it to your email signature. It can be a note at the end of the newsletter to start but with subsequent newsletters it moves closer to the top until ultimately you send a dedicated email letting people know you’re going to be away
social media updates
banners on your on-line shop
a sign on your table at farmer’s markets or craft fairs
in person if you drop orders off to bricks and mortar retailers
on your blog
Don’t Forget Employees and Contractors
Don’t forget to keep employees and contractors in the loop - anyone who relies on your for regular income. If you have employees you’ll probably want to ensure they’re not planning to be on their vacation while you’re planning to be away. If you have freelancers or contractors let them know as soon as you’re able so they have an opportunity to fill the space with other paying clients.
This system of working backwards also works even if you’re shutting down for a few days at Christmas or other points in the year where you take some down time for a few days.
Letting People Know In Advance Allows For more sales!
By letting people know you’ll be away in advance, you give them the opportunity to purchase BEFORE you go rather than having them find out you’re gone only when they reach out to place an order or book an appointment - or worse, when they need immediate support! If you’re gone and they need something quickly, they’ll go somewhere else - and they may not come back!
When you know you’re going to be away for a period of more than a few days let clients who purchase from you regularly know well in advance. If you’re going to be away for the month of July and you have clients who purchase monthly, let them know in May that you’re going to be gone all of July and would they like to double their June order so they don’t run out before August? If you only give them a week’s notice that you’re going to be gone all of July, they might just say “oh we’ll catch you when you get back then” and be out of stock for July (or give your slot to a new supplier!).
By letting them know a month in advance, you’ll have to do some extra work but, you’ll keep the client, they’ll be happy and you keep your cash flow going while you’re on vacation!
You can also clear out old stock by offering a discount before you go away – let customers know you’re trying to lower some inventory levels before you leave and let them know that when you get back you’ll be ready to show them your fall products/styles etc and you’re excited for them to see what you have. It will keep them interested and intrigued! Plant seeds with them that you’ll be back and with new things! You can do the same with your on-line shop.
Budgeting
When you do your budgeting, planning or forecasting for the year, know that you’re going to have a revenue dip if you take extended time away and plan for it. Forecast over 11 months instead of 12.
Think of teachers who don’t get paid in July and August – they have to budget their income from September to June to ensure they have cash flow during those two months of no paycheques. You’ll need to do the same.
You might also want to implement some forms of passive income that could still come in while you’re away – like ad revenue or affiliate income. This is where having a blog, youtube channel or podcast can be helpful – that content continues to earn revenue while you’re on vacation.
However, these are things you’ll need to set up well in advance in order to see a decent return while you’re gone. Setting up affiliate income a week before you leave is not going to earn you very much income!
have a trusted emergency contact
Nobody likes to think about bad things happen while they’re away on vacation but, life can be messy sometimes. Which is why it’s so important to have an emergency contact who can step in if there’s… well… an emergency! They can be a point of contact, speak to your customers, contact authorities etc.
Make sure this person has contact info for you and anyone else they may need to contact on your behalf for your business. This could include your web developer, your accountant, your employees, etc. Have them contact you if they need access codes or license keys. You might also want to leave them a key to your home or your workspace if you don’t work from home.
Back up all your digital files to a cloud service like Dropbox - this makes it easy for you to access them while you’re away if need be - and to an external hard drive that stays off the premesis while you’re gone. It can stay with your emergency contact or a trusted employee or a nearby family member. That way if something happens that damages your house, studio or whatever space you work out of, you can quickly purchase a new laptop or computer, plug in your drive and be up and running in as little as an hour or two.
If you work from home, you probably will let a close neighbour know you’ll be gone anyway just so they can keep an eye on things while you’re away. They’ll probably be the first people to see if something happens to your house so be sure to leave the name and number of your emergency contact with them.
You want peace of mind while sitting on that beach sipping a cold drink and this will help!
Protect Yourself From Hacking
Implement two factor authentication on all your social media accounts to protect against hacking if you haven’t already done this (you should do this even if you don’t have plans to go anywhere!). Create a “trusted contact” for platforms like Facebook. Social Media security measures change rapidly but most of them make it very easy to do a security and privacy audit to make sure you’re up to date. Make sure you do those before going away.
Set Up Buffer Days
Give yourself a few extra days before and after your vacation to give yourself a some time to ramp up for your time away (ie packing, getting last minute errands down, ensuring people relying on you or covering for you while you’re gone have what they need) and to get caught up when you get back (ie going through emails and requests and catching up with contractors when you get back before your phone starts ringing again). This ensures you can truly enjoy the actual vacation!
Use an Out of Office auto responder on your email so people know you’re away. Let them know who they can contact if they have an emergency as well as when you’ll be back (remember to add a few buffer days!) and how frequently you’ll be checking in - if in fact you will be checking in at all. Remember that it’s crucial for your mental health to really disconnect for a few days!
All of this will make the re-entry process so much smoother and gentler. You’ll deal with people in a calmer way and still retain some of the effects of your holiday.
Taking a full month off might now be possible for your whole family – especially if your partner or spouse works a more traditional job. They may only be able to take two weeks. Consider expanding your buffer zone to a full week on either side of your two week family vacation. For all intents and purposes you’re away for the month but that first and last week you might check in once a day while taking your kids to visit family or friends or go camping while your spouse is at work.
Automate What You Can
Just like your Out of Office auto-responder, be sure to make use of all the automation that’s available to even the smallest of businesses.
You can schedule blog posts and podcast episodes to publish while you’re gone.
Social media can be scheduled weeks in advance.
Many business bank accounts will allow you to schedule payments not just for your bills but also to your contractors and employees.
The outside world may not even notice you’re gone! Some of these will need some prep time to work really well but, once again that’s why planning as far in advance is really helpful.
A Word Of Caution With Automation
Just to caution… sometimes world events can happen that make posting regular content on social media seem very tone deaf. This is where having that second in command or emergency contact or a virtual assistant can be really helpful. They can pause all your content and then get in touch with you to let you know what’s happened if you’re out of internet reach!
Plan Your Content In Advance
If your business relies heavily on content marketing start planning content for when you’ll be away as soon as you can.
Check out our episodes on time blocking and batching for tips on prepping content before you leave! If you publish content weekly, create an extra piece of content once a month for the four months before you leave – pace yourself and, once again, plan as far ahead as possible.
You can also repurpose and republish old content from previous years. This is also a good SEO strategy. Go through old content that’s still relevant and tidy it up, do some key word research work on it, possibly add new images or pinterest pins and republish it. Many people in your audience probably never even saw it the first time around.
Hiring Help
Hiring help can go a long way to giving you peace of mind while you’re away or allow you to restructure your days so you can be more flexible during periods where you want to work less.
Think about hiring a local teenager who can come to your house and entertain your younger children for a few hours a day during the summer months. Pay older siblings to look after younger siblings. Or put your children in daycare 2 days a week so you can put in two full days and then take the remaining three days off to be with your kids over their vacation.
A Virtual Assistant
A VA can take on some of these tasks while you’re away. They can filter your email for you and only forward you critical ones. They can respond to certain types of emails with the help of templates. They can keep an eye on your social media and respond to any inquiries or pause your social media if that’s appropriate. They might even be able to ship orders so you don’t have to shut down. They can also be your second in command if an emergency comes up. They probably won’t need to work full-time – most of those tasks can be handled with 1-2 hours of work a day while you’re away.
Once again you’ll need to plan in advance. A VA probably won’t be able to step in and cover for you two weeks after you hire them. But if they’ve been with you for a few months and you’ve been prepping them, they can probably handle some very basic tasks while you’re gone!
Create A “Going Away” Checklist
As you start to prep to take some planned time off, keep a running list of the all the things you do to prepare. This can turn into a check list that you can use for future time off. Once you have a few vacations under your belt, you’ll have a solid checklist you can refer to every time you take some time away. The whole process will get easier and let you focus on that precious downtime we all need to stay creatively inspired and productive while knowing your business is still going to be financially healthy while you’re gone and when you get back!
