I love me some vacations and I’ve got a couple coming up here, so I wanted to talk about... how do you take vacations and still make sure that your business is going to be sustainable in the meantime while you are gone? How will your business operate and you not have to worry? How can you go away without being attached to your phone or email? It really comes down to having plans and operating procedures that dictate how your business is going to operate when a vacation is coming up and when it’s actually happening. Let's dive in!

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 1:01 – I love to take vacations; people say that you should build a business that you don’t need to be away from or build a life that you don’t need a vacation from but I disagree with that because even if you have the most perfect life ever people still need a change of pace and scenery in their lives. I love taking vacations whether they are close by in Florida or overseas.
• 1:59 – I wanted to talk about how do you take vacations and still make sure that your business is going to be sustainable in the meantime while you are gone. It comes down to having plans and operating procedures that dictate how your business is going to operate when a vacation is coming up and when it’s happening.
• 2:35 – I have operating procedures and plans for everything in my business and it helps in my business. There are three core plans or operating procedures that come up when it comes to vacations and time off in your business.
• 3:12 – So the first plan or vacation SOP that you should have in your business to prepare you for vacations is a vacation money plan which is a plan for how you are going to still generate revenue even when you are on vacation.  Because for a lot of business owners their marketing is very manual and that means that when they are going on vacation if they are not doing the work they are not making money and you don’t want that to happen you want your business to be still making money while you are gone.
• 3:54 – A vacation money plan could come down to a couple of things, this could come down to you down to you doing a pre-vacation launch so if your vacation is going to come up at the end of December so you can do a launch in November that will support you even in December. The other option is to design your business around recurring income where when signs up for a program with you there is a certain number of monthly commitments that they must pay so even if you are gone they’ve already committed to keep paying each month.  The other option is automated income so even if you are away you still make sales because the process of making the sales is automated. So, for example you have Facebook ads running and they are going to a Webinar and people are buying from the Webinar you don’t have to do a sales call people just buy off the Webinar.
• 6:39 – The second plan is a client fulfilment plan for while you are on vacation because you want your clients to be sustained while you are on vacation, you don’t want to go on vacation and make your clients unhappy because you are not there and they are not supported and so you need to have a written list of things that you must do to prepare your clients for you being away. How are you going to continue fulfilling services while you are gone or just warn your clients in advance that you will not be fulfilling services while you are gone.
• 7:20 – You need to have a plan for how your clients are going to be happy while you are on vacation. I use a project management software called Zoho so I would go into Zoho and open up a checklist that’s prepopulated it’s like a task list that I populate anytime I go on vacation and the first thing would be to put an email in my holiday campaign so that it notifies my clients that I am going to be away at this time so  I have Infusionsoft, I have a holiday reminder campaign where it emails out all of my clients every time I am going to be away and another step would be to update the company calendar, so I have a calendar on my website for my clients where it lists out all of the days I am going to be gone for the entire year and another step would be to send out the updated company calendar to all of the clients.
• 8:31 – Another step would be to inform the team that I am going to be away. And are you going to be fulfilling services while you are gone and how are you going to be doing that is your team going to be doing it and how can you prepare your team for it while you are gone or you are not going to be fulfilling services and how can you ensure that your clients know that and they have everything taken care of while you are gone.
• 8:59 – The third type of plan that you want to have for vacation is a team operations plan so how is your business going to operate while you are gone like for example when inquiries come in, when submits something to a support ticket, when someone emails you asking to be  featured on  your podcast or when someone emails you and asks if you can be on their podcast or who is going to manage your Facebook groups while you are gone and so these are some of the things that you have to plan out in advance. So, what are the different key areas of your business probably administrative, team, legal, customer service, content etc. list out all the categories of your business and then define how those things need to be handled while you are away by your team.
• 11:06 – Recap.

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