5 ideas to prep your small business for a holiday break
This time of year, when you’re feeling the pull between growing your business and taking time off to actually enjoy the holidays, it's suuuper common to feel like:
a) you *need to* work through the holidays to keep the business from stalling, or
b) you *have to* put your business on hold for a month to have time to take a proper break and be present with your bestest people
I want you to know that neither of these is a limiting belief, a mindset issue or anything like that. It’s just that the brain likes to think in these absolutes, because it makes the information and solution feel clear – even if not ideal or desirable.
But there IS a happy middle ground!
You can make space to enjoy this time of year *and* still keep your business humming along. It just takes some planning and prep ahead of time.
And don’t worry – the point here is not to give you *more* to do before your break. The very first two tips I’m going to share help you reduce your workload to make space to prep your business for your holiday break.
1 – Drop down to your Minimum Viable Effort
A mistake I often see – and that I used to do myself! – is that when we’re about to take time off from our business, we still try to do All The Things in the weeks leading up to the break. And maybe we also try to prep All The Things for when we’re away.
This is draining, and takes so much time and energy, which probably means that part of your break goes to just recovering from all the work you just did. Time off shouldn’t be something that we do just to recover from all the work we’ve done – I think we all actually deserve to have the energy to do fun things during our breaks!
Because I used to have this issue in my photography business, I came up with a way that I could feel more at ease and in control before taking a longer break from the business.
The way I do this is through my Minimum Viable Effort (MVE). MVE is what I call the bare minimum of tasks and activities that I need to do in order to keep my business humming along.
I’ve written an in-depth blog post about how you can figure out the Minimum Viable Effort for your small business here>>
But essentially, you create your MVE by picking the most impactful 20% of the tasks and activities you normally do, because the 80/20 rule (Pareto principle) states that you already get 80% of your results from just 20% of your efforts. So you can essentially free up 80% of your time to still get 80% of the results. With that freed up time, you can also prepare the MVE for the time you’re away, and do whatever else that you still want to have time for.
For example, in my photography business, I’d drop down to my MVE in the time leading up to vacation, so that I’d have time to also prep my MVE for the time when I’m away. In this way I theoretically spent 20% of my time on the MVE for the current week, 20% on the MVE for the week I’m away, and was still left with 60% of my work time to wrap up family photo session edits and print orders.
So – knowing *your* Minimum Viable Effort will help you keep your workload manageable when you’re prepping for holiday time off, PLUS it helps you prep for your time away without having to do All The Things.
This way you don’t exhaust yourself, and don’t need to spend all of your vacation just recovering from your work push.
Side note: Why not stick to your MVE for the first week when you’re back so that being back doesn’t feel as overwhelming?
2 – Make the work as easy (and fast) as possible to do
What it looks like to make the work easier to do depends highly on 1) what the tasks are that you pick as your MVE, and 2) how you best get things done.
Some examples of making the work easier to do could be to batch like tasks together, to automate whatever you can, to schedule things out, and maybe even to outsource some things – even if it’s just to software.
3 – Identify “risk factors” that may pull you back into work
If you’ve done the business thing for more than 5 minutes, you probably have a pretty good sense of what usually pulls you back into work. So the key is to think of, maybe even make a list of, a few common risk factors. Then make a plan for how you can prevent them or disrupt them when they happen.
For example:
Does having IG on your phone make you want to scroll? Delete it, or move it to a different spot in your phone. (Or maybe you have a personal acct vs business acct – log out!)
Does bringing your laptop to your holiday trip to your parents entice you to get some stuff done? Leave it at home. Or maybe give it to your partner or someone else that you’re with during your trip, and tell them to only give it to you if you can make a solid argument for why you need to do smth.
Do email pings call your name? Remove email notifications from your phone.
Do you worry about having made a mistake in content you’ve scheduled out? Double-check your scheduled content before you head for your trip.
4 – Ease your mind
If you’re not used to taking time off, your brain might come up with all kinds of scenarios about why it’s not a good idea. So what can you do to ease your mind about the scenarios it brings up?
Some examples:
Communicate to your clients and audience that you’re taking time off. Set expectations with your clients or customers plenty of time in advance.
Could you hire a VA to take care of certain duties while you’re gone?
Would you like to block off some “take care of business” days just in case? If nothing’s come up, you’ve just got extra unplanned time off 🙌
5 – Know what you want to do during your vacation
If you take some time to define what you want out of your vacation, and make some actual plans and prep to do those things, it’ll help you want to stick to your intentions to stay away from the business.
I’m going to place a stack of books on our coffee table, to remind myself to read more than I watch TV 😅
If trying all of these ideas seems like too much to implement at once, and I’d have to recommend just *one* idea to try, it would be to drop down to your Minimum Viable Effort. It’s such a great tool you can lean on whenever you need to free up your time, but don’t want to worry about a huge dip in your business’ progress.
If you’re thinking that a Minimum Viable Effort would be great for you, but you don’t want to spend a ton of time figuring it out or second-guessing yourself, this is totally something we can figure out through my 1:1 coaching 👍