“Automating Your Business So You Can Go on Vacation”

Written by Doreen Dilger, The Home Based Business Coach

As a home business owner it's important to make plans to take periodic vacations. That means a real vacation to turn off all the computers, disconnect from social media, and spend time with your family. Everyone needs a vacation. The problem is, home based business owners tend not to take very many vacations and when they do, they usually lose money. But, you can set up your business to avoid a drop off in income, and still be able to turn everything off.

Build a Reliable Team

As a small home based business owner it's imperative that at some point you build up a team. You want to eventually become the manager of your business so that you can leave for short periods of time and business goes on as usual whether you're there or not. Offer good training, a good rate of pay, and responsibility to your contractors and they'll come through for you when you're gone.

Use Automation Wisely

There are a lot of ways to automate a lot of your business. Whatever you can automate without making your business appear to be human-less, do so. If it doesn't affect directly a client, automate it. For instance, you can automate most of your bookkeeping duties and your computer backups. Think hard about automating any aspect of customer service, though. This would be better for a team to handle.

Bring in a Partner

If you cannot yet afford to outsource and build an entire team, find a business owner who is in the same boat as you - someone who does the same type of work you do. Make a deal with each other to take over work for the other while on vacation. Put it in your client contracts that your proxy will work in your place during vacations, illness, or death. Then, if anyone asks what your emergency plan is, you can point to your proxy.

 

Schedule and Be Transparent

One of the best ways to control the inflow and outflow of work is to create a schedule for submission of work, as well as deadlines that make sense. If you do last-minute requests it can be difficult to ever take a vacation, but if your clients can see right on a calendar your open times and dates and your busy times and dates, it will make it easier for them to make their own schedules with knowledge of your availability.

Build Up Your Passive Income

Passive income is money you will make from past work such as affiliate income from product recommendations, blogging, and other activities. If you build up your passive income, and pre-schedule blog posts to happen while you're on vacation, you'll find that your income will not suffer while you're gone.

As a small business owner you can easily take a vacation and keep working with a laptop, too. You literally can work from anyplace with an internet connection so you're not tied down, regardless if you have someone who can take over or not. But, why not build up your business to the point that you can go on a real vacation and completely disconnect a couple weeks a year? You can do it with these tips.