It’s fair to say that the goal for most entrepreneurs is Time and financial freedom. I spend most of my time talking about financial freedom, but today, I want to talk about time freedom.
By now, most of you have heard me talk about how I took time off from the business, but in case you haven’t, here is the backstory.
2023 was a strange year for me. Crisp Accountancy celebrated 10 years in business (beating the odds of business failure rates is always nice); my wife fell pregnant with our third child at the same time we discovered our baby niece was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumour.
We decided not to share the news of our pregnancy for as long as possible (at a certain point, the bump is too big to hide!) as it felt insensitive to the rest of the family, given everything else going on.
We knew that our wider family support might not be as strong as it was previously as everyone was rightfully concentrating on our neice - this is what we wanted, too! As well as it being an incredibly tough time mentally for my wife trying to deal with a cocktail of scrambled emotions, she also had a very tough time physically with this pregnancy from an early stage.
It became very obvious to me early on that my family would need me a lot more over the coming months. It wasn’t just out of necessity that I decided to take this time off. I WANTED to concentrate on nothing but my family. There is nothing like receiving the horrific news of any family member being diagnosed with cancer, especially one so young, to refocus your priorities. I am an all-or-nothing kind of person. I knew I couldn’t be half in the business.
Then there was a third, less important driver. I wanted to test the business. How would it work without me? I had always been so involved and so present because it’s what I love, but this was a great opportunity for the team to grow and for us all to identify what areas of the business need more attention from me to flourish without me.
What did this time off look like?
I got the same response every time I spoke about this time away from the business. “Yeah, but you are still going to be working, right? You are just telling people you are off?”
I have been in business for 12 years. I am a workaholic and love what I do (no secret to anyone who knows me). So, this response was totally understandable. Even the people closest to me, my family, and my business coach all expected this to be the case.
To be completely honest, deep down, I even thought this was how it would play out for me. My wife and I talked about the fact I could still work “on the business” but just on my own time.
The reality was that this didn’t happen at all. I did virtually no work at all for the business for 1 week shy of 3 months.
15th October was my last day in the office before my Out Of Office went on, calls on divert, and all notifications turned off. Monday 8th Jan was my first day back in the office and when I switched everything back on.
The team knew they could WhatsApp me on my personal number if there was something they really needed me for - this happened 3 times, each time needing my attention for 5/10 minutes. These were situations with my personal clients I had forgotten to update them on. - 30 Minutes.
I carried out two client mentoring sessions - I mentor a few clients personally, nobody else can cover this, and I didn’t want to let these clients down - 2 hours time.
3 sales calls - potentially big important clients that the team knew I would want to handle - 1.5 hours.
Once a fortnight, approve bank payments - The team sets everything up, so 1 click on my auth app - 15 minutes.
Reviewed weekly update videos from my 3 direct reports. In all honesty, these were much more for their benefit, to hone their self-analysing skills and to focus on moving the business forward. I did catch up on all of these eventually but most weeks, especially around the birth, I didn’t watch these. There was never any action needed from my side. - 3 hours
So, in total, over 3 months, I spent 7 hours and 15 minutes in the business. That’s less than a day’s work over 3 months - pretty good going.
What did I spend my time doing? I managed to squeeze in some golf the first two weeks, and then it was a lot of waiting around for Alfie to show up, so plenty of reading time. Lunches with my wife. Generally, I take it easy during the day and then look after the girls outside of school hours. Once Alfie showed, it was all a blur of no sleep, bottles and dirty nappies (glamorous, haha). The last three weeks over Xmas, when the girls were off school, and we had started to settle into a routine with Alfie, were amazing, with so many great memories.
Could I have done some work in those first few weeks? Yes, but I felt setting my boundaries and sticking to them was important.
Plan, Plan and Plan some more
Let’s be clear. This didn’t just happen. I planned for this meticulously for six months. Also, I was starting from a pretty strong position. The business had just celebrated its 10th year, we had a team of 10, two of whom had been with me almost since day 1. Parts of the business already ran like a well-oiled machine without me.
The starting point was a hard cut-off date. Babies are not known for their timekeeping on arrival, so blocking out a date at least six weeks before the due date SHOULD be plenty (The baby actually arrived two weeks late after being induced…). This had to be a hard cut-off; otherwise, it would never work.
Next was to work on my Stop Doing list. If you have never done one of these, get to it! I use this exercise at least once a quarter and encourage my team to do the same. Three-column headings on a page. Carry on, Delegate and Stop. Now, list every task you do in one of those columns. Keep this open on your desk for a week to make sure you capture everything.
Stop Doing - These are tasks that no longer add value. Why are they still being done at all? Scrap these straight away.
Delegate - For this purpose, these were tasks that I could easily delegate with very little training, or I could set up an automation to take care of these.
Carry on - These tasks are the ones that I enjoy or feel I add the most value to, so it makes sense to keep these with me. For this purpose, these were the tricky tasks that needed planning to cover whilst off. This is where I spent my planning time.
The Team
Communication was so important. This decision could have left the team and our clients feeling abandoned. As is always my approach, complete transparency was the best way forward. I explained to my team why I needed to do this. Everyone, as expected, completely got behind the why, but there was clearly a sense of nervousness. I had been heavily involved for so long that this was to be expected. When we talked some more about all the steps we were going to take to get to this position, the mood changed to one of empowerment (but still some apprehension).
What was clear from my Stop Doing list is that we need to create a bit more structure in the team. At this point, it was all very informal; technically, all 10 of the team reported to me directly. I created a Senior Leadership Team promoting two of the team to the roles of Head of Operations and Head of People. Ryan had already been operating as an operations manager and managing workloads, but shifting him higher up and having team members report to him was an obvious move. Juita was currently working with us part-time in an admin role. She was hugely experienced in the HR and People functions from previous roles before returning back to the UK recently. Promoting Juita to Head of People will seem like overkill to everyone. Having someone in this role for a team of 10 is unusual to say the least. To me, it made complete sense. Although Ryan was totally ready for this new role, the people/HR responsibilities were new to him, and having Juita to work alongside him would solve this. ost of Juita’s time would be spent developing a training infrastructure and culture, initially to fill the gaps I would leave with my team off, but to take this much further as we look to scale the business much quicker over the next three years.
After this move I now had three direct reports. The two Senior Leaders and our new in-house marketing person.
Training
Training was the biggest obstacle to making this work. While working on a six-month plan, it wasn’t long when looking at the big list of tasks to train.
With the help of the team, we created a training plan and schedule, and I dedicated a serious chunk of my time to creating the training presentations and resources and delivering these weekly to the team.
The team had to put in a serious effort. This was a lot to take in during a short period of time, but they all smashed it out of the park.
Finances
As you would hope, this was the easiest “department” to deal with. For a long time, the team have treated our own businesses exactly as they would clients and ran the whole finance function for me, seamlessly. Bookkeeping was still done daily, payroll run monthly, a full month end with reports sent to me each month. All with no input from me.
Using one of our ecosystem partners, the team had always created payment runs for me for wages and supplier bills. They just needed me to click accept on these with my banking credentials for the payments to go. Easy.
Marketing
We had just hired a full-time, in-house marketing person to work alongside the agency we use for our socials. The timing wasn’t great, but he would need to be thrown in at the deep end a bit.
We weren’t generating consistent, profitable leads at the rate I wanted before I took time off, so I didn’t expect this to change overnight magically. The team did their best, marketing activities were still happening, and some leads were generated. I drive a lot of the content, and my personal brand brings in a lot of leads, so this was hard to deliver while off.
Overall it was OK, but if I were to take any time off again, it would need to be in a better position first.
Sales
Up to this point, I had dealt with Sales by myself. I love speaking to new businesses, and my passion and knowledge usually go a long way in helping turn leads into long-term clients.
This was a problem that I was nervous about.
Our sales process is in two stages. A short discovery call to qualify the lead from both sides first, and then if a smaller business issues a proposal straight away, if a bigger or more complex business, I would deliver a Clarity session to lay out a proposal.
We decided that two people in the team could cover discovery calls after some training. So I handed these over and it worked well, I won’t be taking these back.
The Clarity Sessions were too much to delegate. I chose to deliver a couple of these whilst off, but the others were added to a waiting list for me to speak to when I returned.
What did I Return to?
Most would expect to return to a mountain of emails, and work backed up and just generally a very overwhelming position to deal with. We all know what it can be like after taking a week off!
My situation was the opposite. Everything had worked how we planned, thanks to the team's amazing efforts. I have a dozen or so emails to action, a few meetings and calls to book to catch up with some key clients, but that was it, really.
My first week back was actually very calm. What an amazing feeling.
The service appears to have been seamless with no gaps and continuing to meet our high standards - ultimately, unless we could have achieved this for our clients, then nothing else would matter.
Talking to all the team there were obviously some areas which needed some work. I needed more support for a couple of the team from a technical/commercial perspective.
The business grew whilst off! The team had already been well-trained on our pricing and services and delivered regular re-pricing for businesses that had grown and added more value to others who needed more support through additional services. This is a great feeling to come back to!
We didn’t grow through new clients by as much as I would have liked. As I mentioned above, we still have work to do on our lead gen.
Overall, this was such an amazing experience for me. I am so grateful to the team and our clients for understanding. It was so important to me and my family. After almost 11 years, I think this was important to me too. A reset. Believe it or not, despite being a family of five, I have returned a calmer person!
This was so important to the team, too. It empowered them to drive forward. It sped up their development and gave them the confidence to do things they weren’t sure they could achieve (I was sure they could all along!).
Now, I should probably point out that I am certainly not stepping back from the business. In fact, I am back with a bang, as business is my passion - I love it! What I am doing now looks very different from my previous role. It’s clear I am not needed in certain areas of the business, so I am keeping my nose out and letting the team thrive without me. I am concentrating more on the growth aspect of the business. Producing more content, more speaking gigs and more high-value events to help improve the financial education of entrepreneurs.
About the author
Luke Desmond
Fractional CFO for Tech, eCommerce & SaaS. CEO @Crisp_Acc provides virtual finance functions. Co-Founder @getvaulta SaaS Startup for accountants.