How to Take Time Off as a Business Owner

0:00This episode is sponsored by Belay's Solutions. You can find out more at BelaySolutions.com.

0:33Shortino, who's one of our very favorite people on the planet. She's the CEO of Belay Solutions. She's also, I didn't know this till before the show, her name, Shortino, means little shot. She just found that out because she just came back from Italy. But she used to be my executive assistant back before she became a big shot. And so she'll always be a big shot to me. So I don't know what the Italian equivalent of that is. Patricia, welcome to the show. Oh, thanks for having me, Mike. I'm going to go actually go to my Duolingo app and try and find out what Big Shot means in Italian. I think so.

1:06And I think maybe you should change your name. I mean, I think it's just a pivotal moment. My question is, how do you say bad dad joke in Italian? That's my question. Well, you can't even get that communicated in English, so I'm not sure Italian is going to help you. Oh, dear. All right. We're going to be talking about all things delegation. And I literally don't know anyone who is more of an expert than Tricia because she leads a veritable army of executive assistants who are like this Zen army, this ninja army of people that just know delegation and how to support executives in their leadership roles.

1:45So Megan, I know you're going to start the question asking. I've got a bunch of questions myself, but I'm going to give you the first shot at this. Yeah, well, first of all, you know, if you have been around Business Accelerator or Full Focus for any length of time, you know, we are passionate about delegation, particularly for business owners. I mean, we, I feel like are, you know, singing the, from the songbook of every business owner needs an executive assistant because there's almost no way that you can get more leverage in your business by then by handing off those activities that are in your drudgery zone or your disinterest zone, you know, part of that freedom compass concept that we talk about so much in business accelerator, um, then handing them off to a really capable executive assistant or virtual assistant.

2:31And so this partnership is critically important, but it's also one that can go sideways in a lot of different ways. And we want to help you learn to maximize that, and especially through delegation, because I think that's the biggest reason that most people decide to hire a VA or an EA to begin with. So, Tricia, as we're getting started here, tell me what you think the biggest barriers are that keep business owners and leaders from taking time off. Because that can be one of the things that seems most elusive for a business owner. You know, the idea of an unplugged vacation can just seem like a pipe dream.

3:10Oh, gosh, yes. And I've been there. I think we've all been there. The time and place where you think there's nobody else who can critically make a decision. There are actual tasks in the business that rely on me so I can't step away. I think it has a lot to do with not setting up the right people and processes in place to allow you to step out of the business. And then I think some of it is a little bit of our ego getting in the way. I have to be here. The business can't go on without me. So it's gaps in processes and decisions and ego. So you're saying we're going to have to work on this before the vacation comes if we want it to be successful.

3:51Absolutely. I mean, right, there's certain things you're going to want to put into place that will allow you to truly step out of the details and the decisions of your day-to-day and allow others to lead the business in your place so you could truly be on PTO. Oh, we used to call PTO, I don't know if you have this, we used to call it pretend time off because you were actually pretending you were off, but as the executive, you were kind of working anyway. So we're trying to avoid the pretend time off part and actually have real time off. We want real time off. That's what we're taking a stand for today.

4:28That's right. Well, let's drill down this into a little bit more. So if those are the barriers, how do you get around the barriers as an executive so you can truly be unplugged? I think one of the things that we teach our coaching clients and practice ourselves is that this unplugged time is necessary for mental and physical and spiritual and emotional rejuvenation so that when you show up at work, you're not burned out. You're not drained. You're bringing your best energy to your team. So how do we get around these barriers? Yeah, I think first of all, you have got to have the right people in place, the right team members in place to allow you to step out of the business and take that actual time off.

5:12And that really will mean, it can mean a variety of things depending on what kind of business you're in. You're a small business and you're a solopreneur. It's very much could be somebody like your virtual assistant. There's also things if you're in a medium or a larger size business where there are decisions you're putting off to another officer in the business, another director your manager. You're putting things in place and people in places that can step up and act as you so that you can truly take that time off. And you don't have to worry about the businesses stopping because I have to send out the cash flow report every Wednesday.

5:49And so I got to take myself off PT on Wednesday to send out cash flow reports. No, you've delegated those things to other people inside your organization. So I think critically, it's who you have on deck and having the right people that you trust to do those things for you. I have a follow-up to that, Megan, before you get to the next question. And that is, how do you get past the ego barrier? Because I think a lot of business owners, a lot of business leaders derive a lot of significance from feeling like the business, they would never say this out loud, but the business is dependent upon them.

6:19They're the linchpin. You know, if they're not there, the whole thing falls apart. How do you personally get past that? And how do your executive assistants coach their bosses, their clients to get past that? Yeah, that's a hard one. I mean, it took me many, many years to realize that it doesn't all hinge on me. And actually, it was one critical thing you said to me, Michael, years and years and years ago is, and I say this to this day, we are not emergency room doctors. People will not die on our watch. And it can wait till I am back. Now, if you're an emergency room doctor, I'm sorry. You might have a hard time taking some PTO.

7:03But for us business leaders, like what critically, what are we missing here, right? What is so important you can't actually just close your laptop and put your phone away for a few days and the business run without you? So I think you get to the place where that mindset starts becoming reality. And then it became a challenge for me to say, you know, how can the business thrive without me? actually my ego is now am I even a great leader if I have to micromanage my leaders and so my ego now tells me if I have to be in my business every day I have not done my job to empower others to do their jobs I think that's really good

7:51you know uh trisha as you were talking the other thing i thought of was that sometimes working on vacation can actually be an avoidance strategy and i think we have to be honest about our with ourselves about that because maybe your kids are driving you crazy maybe you don't like your spouse that much. Maybe you don't like the people you're traveling with as much, you know, whatever it is, you can avoid that by kind of playing the work hard. And I think it's important to be honest with ourselves when we're using work to avoid things, and kind of do business with that, because it's not a good coping strategy.

8:27Avoidance is never a good strategy, period. But it can really damage your relationships if you're not careful. So I think that's one of those things to just be self-aware of? Am I getting something out of this that is actually not healthy and what might I want to do about that? Oh, gosh. Absolutely. That is such a great point, Megan. I think that we've become so attached to our work or our devices or whatever that looks like that we have struggled as leaders in the society even about what does it look like to be still? What does it look like to not work? Or we've overdefined what work means in our life, and it's become an all-consuming thing that we actually don't know who we are outside of work.

9:15And you guys speak so much into that, but I think we really got into the place where we need to realize that life is way more than what our job tells us we are from 8 to 5 Monday through Friday. So important. You know, one of the things that we also work with our clients on is helping them get clear on the things that they need to hand off and then getting those things out of their head and on paper. And we use a tool for this called the Vision Caster that helps our business owner clients articulate what it is that they want to delegate to somebody else. And I think a lot of times that barrier of, you know, well, if I'm not there, it won't get done is really because the process lives in our head.

9:52You know, we haven't taken the time to memorialize it on paper. We haven't taken the time to then explain it to somebody and then to refine their performance and executing it. And so we just tell ourselves the story of, well, since that hasn't happened, and oftentimes we're not even aware of that, we just can't hand it off. And so I think that's another tool for getting around these barriers that we're talking about. You know, I just got back last night as we're recording this from a four-day visit to a monastery that was in a very remote location, and there was no cell service. and it was heaven on earth.

10:27But that's not usually how it is. You know, I didn't have any choice about being unplugged. I was just unplugged by force of circumstances. And it was really great because it took the decision-making out of my hand. But most vacation places, I mean, there's hardly any place you can go on earth, particularly if you're connected to Starlink. I'm not. But you can get cell service in literally any part of the, on the planet almost. But what do you do to intentionally protect your time off so that you're unplugged? I think there's probably a lot we can learn from your practice. Yeah, for me, it started with my email.

11:01Email was always the thing that I would go on vacation, but I just couldn't help myself from just popping in there and viewing what was happening in my email. So I really had to come up with a really good strategy on how I was going to handle email. So we have our foldering system and all that, you know, that many of you probably have in place when you are an executive and using a virtual assistant. But for me, I had to take it next level. So I actually use a pause inbox function that the Google suite offers and many other email tools offer them where literally your email inbox is on pause. And so no email will come into the inbox.

11:42And so what my virtual assistant would do, and this is just one example, She will unpause it, filter, repause. Unpause it, filter, respond, folder, and then repause it again. So she's going in there and taking chunks of time to review the emails that are in there, handling everything that she can handle, and then pausing it again. So I actually can't see anything that's happening. So that's worked for me. Also removing all notifications for any email apps on my phone. And I've even gone to the drastic measure of deleting my Gmail app from my phone certain times too. So for me, really being unplugged is have a great system in place for your emails, how they're handled, providing templates for your virtual assistant.

12:29Consider, if you need to, the drastic measures of pausing and unpausing, removing email apps from your phone, and certainly taking off the notifications when it comes to email. That was the biggest thing for me. And then my virtual assistant is also running through other communication channels to really take care of things. She's representing me on Slack groups and handling those communication efforts so that I can truly be out of the know, if you will. And so I'm not incented or enticed to kind of step back in and peek. No peeking. Okay, I've got to ask a question because my head's kind of exploding.

13:09I didn't know Gmail had a pause function. I mean, first of all, we use Gmail, but I don't use that as my client. So maybe I could be forgiven for not knowing about that. But that's making me reconsider. That sounds amazing. But here's a follow-up question. What in the heck do you do with text messages? Because you can't put an out-of-office message on a text message, at least on iPhone. You can't pause it as far as I know. But do you have any hack for that? Um, my hack is probably going to be not, um, received well by many. My hack for text messages is I don't use text for work. So what are you doing?

13:46So don't some clients? Never. No. No. What? Okay. You got to say more about this. No, I do not use text for work. I rarely get text messages for work. I have an executive team text group where we will text like urgent executive team things, which are the things I should get texts on. Other than that, I do not share my cell phone or use my cell phone or texting for my work. So I use Slack. I have an office line phone number. We use Grasshopper. We have an office line where people can call and leave me voice messages that my assistant will read and get to. But I don't use my phone number for work.

14:25Okay, let me tell you a hack that actually works, but I've gotten, I'm not using it right now, and I've gotten sloppy. But this works if you use it. So Google, you can sign up for a free Google voice number, and they can text your Google number. But here's the kicker. You can set it up so that those text messages come to your email inbox, and then your assistant can process them just like a normal email message. and you can even put an out of office message on it. But I got sloppy. I didn't like to check two email inboxes or two text message inboxes. So I just decided to start giving my number out to other people and now it's a mess.

15:08I hate to say it. True confession. Yeah, reset. Maybe it's time for a reset. Yeah, maybe it's time for a reset. I'm a text hoarder. I don't like people texting me. Yeah, maybe it's time for an intervention. Probably.

15:24Okay, Tricia, this is one of those areas that I think business owners, especially if they're coming out of the corporate world, are often unaware that a VA or an EA can be helpful with. And that is planning your travel. So talk to me about how you use your VA to plan your personal travel. Obviously, she's planning your professional travel. But let's talk about the personal side. Yeah, I mean, part of the reason I'm able to take Great BTO is because my virtual assistant has helped me plan the PTO. She's done the right things to make sure my calendar's blocked. And depending on the trip, she's working with a travel agent.

16:04I think, you know, you might think, well, I'm going to work with a travel agent, so it's delegated. But it's really not. There's still a lot of decisions you're making inside that travel creating process. Like, what activities do you want to do while you're on this vacation? or which hotel would you prefer? So I actually use my virtual assistant to collaborate with my travel agent and she can make a lot of those decisions on my behalf because she actually knows all of my preferences. She knows that I like to sit in the window seat and not the aisle. She knows I want a king bed. She knows I want the room with the balcony and the view.

16:38So there are certain preferences that my virtual assistant can collaborate with my travel agent. And so she's really the one project managing, if you will, my virtual assistant's like project managing my vacation with my travel agent. And then there's some of those, you know, quick weekend getaways that aren't that elaborate where she's doing all of the planning. She's hunting and filtering hotel recommendations, transportation, car services, all of those things. And because, again, she knows my preferences, she can easily book those things for me and And then maybe send me a consolidated list of here are three great restaurants right near your hotel.

17:19Here's an Italian. Here's a Mexican food. Here are your options. What would you prefer? And she's able to take care of that for us. So I think without having my virtual assistant helping me with those things, I just don't know that the time would be as well spent or enjoyed without her going through all that for me. Or I'd be spending countless hours during the evening hours or my weekends planning my trips. So it makes for great time. I think a lot of people have a mental barrier. And I know I did when I was in the corporate world, big corporate world. I thought there was this iron wall between personal and professional.

17:56And that if I ask my assistant to do something that was personal, I felt like I was imposing upon them. You know, like literally, you know, I got to the place where I thought, if I ask her to get me a cup of coffee, that's just, you know, it's condescending. It's, I don't know, part of the patriarchy. I don't know what I thought. But at any rate, I just thought I just can't do that, let alone have her run errands that were personal or do other things that were personal, like planning a vacation. How do you get past that mental barrier? And in fact, probably some corporations have policies against this, which sounds archaic and stupid to me, but I'm just one man.

18:31I'm with you. I think it's extremely archaic. I mean, it's silly. I mean, we view it as, you know, your virtual assistant is supporting you as a whole person. And so they're supporting your work activities. And some of your work activities should revolve around your personal activities, not the other way around, which I think is, you know, where we are, where a lot of people are, is like their personal lives revolve around what their work life is. It's really flipping the script and having it go the other way around. And if you're focused on your personal life having priority, then of course you would leverage a virtual assistant to help you make sure that those priorities are taken care of.

19:08I mean, my job description for my virtual assistant very much includes supporting my whole entire self, my work life, my family life, my personal life, my date nights with my husband, activities with my kids, and then self-care. I mean, my self-care is super high on the priority list. Actually, you know, my virtual assistant right now, Cameron, is like, you know, I've learned so much to watch you take such great care of yourself. It's it motivates others and empowers others to take care of themselves. So she she does. I mean, she hair appointments, all the girl things, hair appointments, nail appointments, date nights, restaurant reservations, doctor appointments.

19:49all of them. You know, Tricia, I think this is really a performance strategy. And I think it's one that small business owners are uniquely equipped to leverage because there sometimes are constraints on the corporate side, but that's not really primarily who we're talking to on this podcast. It's not primarily who you guys serve. You know, we both serve the small business world. And what's great about that is you have more freedom. But the thing that is important to take away from what Tricia is saying, is that this is a performance strategy. If you want to perform at your very best, if you want to make the best decisions for the future of your business, if you want to lead at the top of your game, if you want to be there for the long haul, you've got to be able to take care of yourself as a whole person.

20:32I mean, I just I think about my own health and how I'm able to text my assistant Elizabeth and say, Hey, can you make me an appointment for my annual mammogram or, you know, all that stuff that we just put off because my annual physical, you know, the blood work I need to have done. I mean, how many people put off doctor's appointments that ultimately would have been life saving or at least life enhancing if they would have done because they just don't have time to do all the back and forth. It's just a lot. And so I think, for example, when you're attending to your marriage, your health, your other most important relationships, your own, you know, just mental health and well being, that is time well spent because it enables you to show up at work as your best self.

21:14And so I think these are not unrelated components. They really do work together in a self-reinforcing way. Yeah. And if you have the right virtual assistant, they enjoy those things. I mean, they enjoy truly taking care of their leader. I mean, I know my assistant enjoys knowing and she feels satisfaction from knowing that she is taking such great care of me. And sometimes taking great care of me is not meeting notes or scheduling meetings or prepping documents for podcasts. Sometimes taking great care of me is making sure I've gone to the doctor or that I've, I've have a massage appointment because my back hurts.

21:53So, you know, you find the right people who are in it to really help you succeed in life and it's easy. It becomes easy. You know, Megan, you were saying it's a performance strategy, and I totally agree with that. But it's really a service strategy, too, because I know, Tricia, you share our belief that leadership should be servant leadership. But in order to serve, it takes energy. It takes being in good shape. You can't be distracted by problems at home or problems with your health. And the more focused you can be on the people you're trying to serve, the better you'll serve them. And so a good executive assistant can serve you so that you're in better shape to serve the people you're called to serve.

22:29And I really believe that. And by the way, if this sounds good to you as you're listening to this and want to know more about hiring a virtual assistant, I just want to just take a moment before we continue the program to talk about Belay. And Trisha, I think you have a special gift that you want to talk about for our listeners. Yes. So we are giving away an e-book, Delegate to Elevate. It's going to give away some great, healthy strategies on how to delegate, how to lead well and how to take that much needed vacation y 'all need. You just need to text BA to 55123 and you'll download a free copy.

23:09Fantastic. And if you're looking for a virtual executive assistant, you can't do better than Balea. I'm not saying this because for any other reason than I have experience. I mean, Tricia, when I started this company, Full Focus, Tricia was my very first executive assistant. And now she's gone on to run the company. That's just how good she is. And she's got an army of these people. And we refer our clients to these people constantly. And we continue to use Belay for our needs. So this is the company that we use and recommend. So if you want to find out more, do as Tricia said. Go ahead and text that number, 55123, to download your free copy.

23:47And I love this title, Delegate to Elevate. I wish I'd thought of that. That's beautiful.

24:11Okay, Tricia, as we're thinking about going on an unplugged vacation, you know, tis the season, how do you go on vacation? And then that you're, you're doing this today. You're, you know, It's the Monday that you're back from vacation. You've been at the beach. Maybe you still have a little sun-kissed glow on your shoulders, and you can remember the salt air. And then you come into the office, and you immediately remember why you never take vacation because it's so overwhelming. It's almost not worth it. So how do we avoid that hit by a brick wall? It just feels like it's not worth it because there's so much to do and so much of a tsunami when we get home.

24:49Yes. Oh, that's a good one. Yes. I'm sitting in that space right now. I just got back from a vacation myself. And I have to tell you, it's been a pleasure. It has not been overwhelming. Some of the tactics we use are, first of all, Monday mornings are kind of blocked off time where I'm getting reintegrated and reading up on all things that have happened. My assistant is gathering kind of a summary of things that have happened while I'm gone. She'll reach out to other executives in my organization. ask for summaries. So I will have a nice, simple summary of anything I might have missed while I was gone.