Why Entrepreneurs Need Vacations Without Email or Voicemail

I just returned from a one-week vacation at the beach with my husband and family. A whole week of lazing on the beach, swimming, body surfing, eating in hole-in-the-wall restaurants, and generally having a good time. How many times did I check voicemail and email? I checked email once just to make sure there were no major issues developing without my knowledge.

Many entrepreneurs don’t take enough vacations. They proudly tell me that they’re just too busy to take time off. This always amazes me, I mean, isn’t freedom one of the reasons you started your own business? Those that do take vacations take their smart phones and laptops along with them to let interruptions ruin their serenity.

What has happened to Work Life Balance? Or is it just a myth? Don’t we want to enjoy our lives and live the good life?

Many business owners miss out on living the good life. They reach a point where immersing themselves in the business without taking time off leads to burn out, lack of creativity, and high stress.

We all need to regenerate and recharge our batteries – a vacation without work can do this for us.

Don’t make the excuse that nobody can do your job except you – this just means you don’t want to delegate and give up control.

Don’t make the excuse that you can’t afford to go on vacation because you’d have to pay someone to do your job while you’re gone - this just means you aren’t charging enough for your product or service.

Don’t make the excuse that responding to email and voicemail on vacation is just the way entrepreneurs work – this means you are too scared to create the boundaries you need to enjoy your life.

If you’re ready to take a vacation without interruptions, I’ve devised a list of suggestions to help you live the good life.

Rules of the Road – Take your vacations the restful way

1. Plan your vacation in advance and inform key people as the time draws near.

2. Set realistic expectations with your clients and vendors. Let them know that you are planning a vacation without interruptions so that they don’t expect you to answer their calls or emails while you are gone.

3. Send an “Out of Office” Email blind copy to all your current clients and vendors advising them that you will have limited access to voicemail and email and that you will respond to their questions when you return. Give them a contact in your company who can handle emergency situations, or delegate to a Virtual Assistant.

4. Create an Autoresponder that will automatically notify those who email you that you are out of the office.

5. Create a Voicemail message that advises callers that you are out of the office. Let them know that their message is important, but if it can wait you will talk to them when you return.

6. Leave your blackberry and laptop at home.

7. Create a detailed week by week “how to guide” for employees or virtual assistants on how to handle possible issues should they come up. You can reuse this guide each time you vacation.

Grow Your Business and Prosper!
Suzanne Muusers
Business Coach for Entrepreneurs & Financial Advisors
Scottsdale, Arizona
http://www.prosperitycoaching.biz/

The Economic Stimulus Package - 5 Ways to Invest the Rebate in Your Business

Uncle Sam has your best interests in mind this year by doling out a sizeable chunk of change to each tax payer to spend on whatever your heart desires. There is some debate as to how helpful the rebate will really be for the economy, but that argument aside, you have the ability to do something REALLY great for your business with the funds.

How much do you get? Provided you paid taxes and filed a tax return for 2007, you may be eligible for up to $600 per taxpayer, $1200 per couple, and $300 per each dependent child.

Entrepreneurs can be a lazy bunch. They are known for working day in and day out on the technical aspects of the business, and not looking at the big picture. They can ignore the long term plans for business growth just to keep up with the daily grind. They can ignore the need for knowledge growth and can lose sight of the need to delegate. They can also let themselves off the hook for doing those key actions that really grow the business.

Here are some ways you can get the most out of the rebate:

1. Hire a Virtual Assistant – What tasks are you doing day in and day out that are really not your cup of tea? Consider your hourly rate versus the administrative tasks you are performing. If your rate is $100 per hour and you spend five hours per week on bookkeeping, then you are spending $2000 per month on tasks that can be delegated for far less.

2. Rebrand your business – Is your brand exciting? Do you stand out from the crowd? If not, consider hiring a professional design company to rebrand your business. The easiest way to attract the best paying clients is to present a professional business image.

3. Invest in Your Business Skills - Take a workshop – What skill do you need to upgrade? Look around for workshops and seminars to help you improve skills you need to grow yourself and your business.

4. Invest in YOU – Are you happy with your life? Are you stuck in “all work and no play”? What could you do to improve your personal life? You could take a Life Planning Workshop, invest in a counselor to work out some old issues still plaguing you, or take a mini vacation.

5. Hire a Business Coach – Remember when you where involved with sports in school? The coach didn’t let you get away with slacking. Having a business coach to help you brainstorm ways to bring in new business will help you grow your business because you’ll be accountable to someone and they won’t let you off the hook if you’re not doing what you say you’ll do. Go to the International Coach Federation, click on “Find a Coach”, and enter the key terms for the type of coach that would be most helpful to you.

Whatever you do, don’t fritter away this tidy sum of money. If you chose to invest in your business it will pay off big time!

Grow Your Business & Prosper!
Suzanne Muusers
Business Coach for Entrepreneurs & Financial Advisors
Scottsdale, Arizona

http://www.prosperitycoaching.biz

Did you work more than 40 hours this week? What’s wrong with this picture?

* Since when did it become a crime to work less and enjoy life more?

* Why does it seem that work life balance is only a pipe dream in this country?

* As business owners why do we proudly say “I’m swamped with work” or “I worked 12 hours yesterday”?

I was at a networking event and I overheard a popular entrepreneur say that she was up until midnight taking care of business matters. She said it proudly as if it proved that working long hours means she is successful. Everyone nodded agreement and provided their own horror stories.

A client mentioned to me today that last week she took Monday and Wednesday off to get needed rest. Upon returning to her practice she was asked by her office mate how she could do it - take time off during the week when she could be seeing patients. She replied that she enjoyed her time off by going hiking, going out to lunch, and getting errands done. She was able to schedule clients for other days without a problem. Her office mate replied that he should do that sometime. But will he?

Owning your business means that you are in control of your life. You have FREEDOM. You can make your own hours. Take breaks when you want to. Go to your child’s soccer game in the middle of the day. Why must we be locked into the traditional business model of “work too much” with no work life balance?

Having a business should afford the business owner a certain amount of benefits not available to salaried employees. In my opinion, a business exists to work for the business owner. You, the entrepreneur, are taking risks just by being in business. It follows that your business should give you tax breaks, flexibility, and FREEDOM.

If you are working more than forty hours a week, you may be working inefficiently. What are you doing that can be delegated to an hourly employee so that you can concentrate on being the face of your business?

How would it improve your life if you could take Friday afternoons off? How about if you only worked 4 days a week? This is all possible with time management, delegation, and work life balance.

Grow Your Business and Prosper!
Suzanne Muusers
Business Coach for Entrepreneurs and Financial Advisors

http://www.prosperitycoaching.biz

Business Goals and New Year's Resolutions – WHO do you want to BE in 2008?

I've written about New Year's Resolutions in a recent post and here we are almost to the end of 2007. Have you thought about your business and where you want to take it? I know exactly where I'm going because I just updated my business plan.

Here are a few of the questions I asked myself while working on my business plan:

What do I want to do differently in 2008?
This year I want to do more writing about things I'm passionate about. Being an entrepreneur in the business world; characteristics of successful business owners; the benefits of a positive attitude. I also want more time for reading. I have a stack of books with topics that range from internet marketing to learning to train our brains to be more efficient. I just need to carve out time.

What do I want to delegate?
I definitely want to do less administration. Less bookkeeping and reconciliations. Oddly enough I'm fairly good at accounting. This is all thanks to my best friend Laura Klump who taught me how to keep a perfect set of books. I will be delegating the PR side of my business especially since I'm not good at Public Relations. I can help my clients promote themselves any old day, but I don't seem to be great at it for my own business. I don't want to delegate marketing because I LOVE IT! My mantra is: Keep doing what you're good at and delegate the rest.

WHO do I want to BE a year from now?
I want to be a wiser and better-rounded person. For the past 3 years I've had my head down while building this coaching business and now that I have a smoothly running machine I can take my foot off the accelerator and ease up a bit. This means I can devote more time to BEING a better friend, sister, auntie, wife, and community resident.

What exciting vacations do I want for 2008?
I don't know about exciting, but I want to go to Rocky Point Mexico at least a few times this year. There's nothing better than staying in a house on the beach with close friends and cooking and drinking wine on the patio while watching the wildlife go by. While I love the fancy resorts, I also crave simplicity and authentic relationships. That's what going to Rocky Point gives me - Time, space, great seafood, sand, ocean, and sunsets.

Take some time in the next few days to do some business planning and thinking about WHO you want to BE in 2008.

Grow Your Business and Prosper!
Suzanne Muusers
Business Coach for Entrepreneurs and Financial Advisors
http://www.prosperitycoaching.biz/

The 4-Hour Workweek – Tim Ferriss - Book Review

This book review is about The 4-Hour Workweek, written by Tim Ferriss, a self-described serial-entrepreneur, scuba diver, tango dancer, and world traveler. The book is about how to live a meaningful lifestyle without delaying retirement and without wasting your life. This book has many "coach-like" tools and techniques which leads me to believe that Mr. Ferriss has at one time had a business or life coach who guided him in developing these principles.

As entrepreneurs we often dream about freedom – freedom to live a life of our own choosing, freedom to travel internationally to exotic locations, and freedom to create our own schedules.

Why should we wait unit age 65 to live the life we want? Why should we slave year after year to make someone else’s dreams come true when we can take control of our lives and live the dream now?

Ferriss breaks people down into two groups: the Deferrers and the New Rich. The Deferrers (D) work like the devil 80 hours a week to make the money to finance a highbrow lifestyle. They slave, save, and then retire. The New Rich (NR) design their business to finance a more meaningful lifestyle that includes travel, hobbies, and outsourcing.

What I got out of this book:

Does your Life have a Purpose? - What do you stand for? Are you working just to work? Are you buying new and better “things” but feel empty inside? Does your life have meaning? What are you contributing to the world? Figure out why you are on this planet and vow to live a life of meaning by contributing something of value to this world.

Create a Virtual Business and Delegate – create a company not a one person shop! Have others do the work for you. You’re a CPA that focuses on tax return preparation. A client is looking for someone to do their monthly accounting. Take this client and delegate or farm out the business. Put procedures in place for how your clients will be handled. Ferriss goes into detail about hiring Virtual Assistants (VA) to do much of your "busy" work for you so that you can concentrate on the important details of running a business.

Simplicity and Space – Did you buy a bigger house to hold all your possessions? Are your closets full of stuff you rarely use? What big-boy toys do you have but rarely use? Create space in your life to live. Clean out the clutter that prevents you from living a life of meaning.

Get Rid of Your Unprofitable Clients – when we've reached a certain level of success we can muster the courage to pick our clients based upon certain parameters, namely how much we enjoy working with them and how profitable they are. Some entrepreneurs chose to refer the unprofitable clients to someone starting out in the business, usually for a referral fee. The profitable clients are retained and used to grow the business.

Time Management – one of the major points of this book is how much time we waste by trying to "stay busy" rather than being "productive". Email is now our enemy rather than a tool to help us manage our business effectively. Ferriss points out that he checks his email only once per week. I'm not sure how easy this would be for the majority of entrepreneurs. I am certainly aware of how email is a time waster. I personally don't check or answer email on the weekends. I use that time to live my life. How often have you been "busy" the entire day, but when you look back you can't quite put your finger on what you actually got done?

Focus on Your Strengths, not Your Weaknesses – as a business coach for entrepreneurs, I support this notion wholeheartedly. All too often I hear about business owners who are trying to "fix" the things they're not good at. I'd rather see us delegate weaknesses, and do what we're REALLY good at – and do it well.

Conclusion:
The book also goes into depth about how to create a business that runs on Autopilot (MBA - management by absence) based on product creation and internet sales. Of course, automation is the key!!!

While I think this is an extremely beneficial book for entrepreneurs and small business owners, I also believe it proposes some out of the box solutions to common problems that will take some getting used to. However, I believe it will take some radical changes to "fix" our overly complicated, revenue-driven, valueless lifestyles.

This book is a good read and I recommend it for all entrepreneurs seeking a better quality of life.


Grow Your Business and Prosper!
Suzanne Muusers
Business Coach for Entrepreneurs and Financial Advisors

http://www.prosperitycoaching.biz/

5 Ways to Make More Money Utilizing Delegation

Control. Some of us have it and others don’t want to give it up. Unfortunately, many small business owners and entrepreneurs that I work with refuse to delegate tasks in order to make the business run more efficiently. Delegation is a skill that is one of the keys to business success – being able to delegate duties frees up the business owner to work on more important issues. In the start-up phase, the owner often cannot afford to hire others to take on tasks that are taking up their time. They end up doing everything themselves. Most companies, however, reach a point where profitability allows them to hire employees or to delegate work to independent contractors.

What are the key reasons for not wanting to delegate?

• By the time I show someone how to do it, I may as well do it myself
• I’m in a rush. It will take longer to do it if I have to show someone how
• I can’t afford to pay someone to do this so I may as well do it myself
• No one can do it as well as I can
• They won’t do a good job

When was the last time you worked ON your business rather than IN your business? Are you still doing data entry? If there is a way to systematize some of the processes that you are still maintaining, it may be time to delegate.

Here are five ways to start delegating so that you can work on your business rather than everyday minutia.

1. Determine what you do. Make a list of everything you are currently doing daily, weekly, and monthly. Determine what you need to continue doing and delegate the rest.
2. Look at your office administration. These days you may be able to hire the services of a virtual assistant. A VA is an independent contractor who can take on your administrative duties using their own office. You pay them an hourly rate and organize everything via the Internet.
3. Review and correct. When delegating, determine a review process so that you can check the quality of the work. Provide feedback as to how the work was performed. Change what needs to be changed and make the process better, so that eventually you won’t need to do much in the way of checking the work.
4. Investigate resistance. If you’re having trouble delegating, take a good look at why. What excuses are you making to yourself? Are you having trouble giving up control? Remember, successful entrepreneurs do what they do best and delegate the rest.
5. Get smart with your new found time. Use your free time wisely to work on strategic planning, marketing, and promotion. Block time on your calendar for these important tasks.

If you don’t yet have the budget to delegate, make a plan for when and what you will delegate. You are the business owner. It is your job to create a plan for the business to be successful. It’s time to get out of the comfort zone you’ve built for yourself and get out there and market your business.

Suzanne Muusers
Business Coach for Entrepreneurs & Financial Advisors
http://www.prosperitycoaching.biz