This may be advice that goes against both your intuition and what we’re sure your parents taught you growing up, but sometimes, it needs to be play first, work later! Yep, you read that right! We’re telling you that to have a successful business, you need to take some holidays!
Have you ever felt burned out growing your business? We know we have! In the early years growing Abundance Global, our team and especially our founder, David Dugan, was working his butt off. And so naturally, he started to get really, really burnt out. This happens to so many entrepreneurs, and that’s typically when they start looking at other, newer opportunities. That’s when, as we’ve mentioned before, you risk having an affair on your business with the next bright shiny object.
With all the people Abundance Global coach and mentor, every month we get profit, loss and balance sheets. We get piles and piles of this data every month, and that means we can really see what works and what doesn’t. And what we’ve found in our experience working with hundreds of clients, is that it doesn’t just take a day off here and there, it takes weeks of holiday time. Typically, and especially when you’re starting to get to that burn-out phase, it takes six weeks of holiday time to renew yourself to a working and successful level.
Being an entrepreneur is an unbelievably difficult job! It might just be the hardest job on the planet. That holiday break (what we like to call ‘renewal time’) is just as important and productive as your working (or ‘strategic’) time. It’s time for you to rest, to renew, to get your body back into a state of health and to let the mind settle into place as well. But the benefits of this aren’t just when you’re on the holiday itself. Think about the week before you go on a holiday. You suddenly become very clear on what tasks are truly important. You learn to delegate, you learn who the best people to handle certain tasks are, you set structures and systems in place so this can work in your absence. These are all things that will continue to benefit you when you return from holiday as well! It’ll have made your team stronger, provided a standard operating procedure for things you might not have had it for before, basically all the same skills and reprioritising you need to really scale a business!
We’re not saying that as soon as you get your business off the ground, you take off for a 2-month resort retreat and never even glance at your email. Don’t forget, that the right strategy at the wrong time is very much the wrong strategy. What we’re saying is, start prioritising your own renewal time. Don’t let yourself get to that stage of burn-out where you’ll start running your business into the ground without even realising. Take a break. Get some rest and relaxation. Your team, your clients and your business will thank you later. And it’ll more than likely thank you in that back pocket in a way you may not have ever realised it would.
Now if you know any entrepreneur who is putting in so much effort and work without ever taking a break. If they’re risking their health, the happiness of their family and their relationships, and their own peace of mind… pass this message on to them! We really believe entrepreneurs are the backbone of every country on the planet, so we want to make sure that their businesses and this incredible community of entrepreneurs are going to be here for the long haul, with sustainable and scalable businesses.
If you need some help holding yourself accountable to this, we’ve got an amazing little support network in the form of a private Facebook group full of people prioritising that rest time and kicking goals in their business because of it! Join us at https://www.facebook.com/groups/AbundanceGlobalEntrepreneurs
