Holiday checklist: 5 steps that ensure everything runs smoothly while you’re away

Running a business can feel understandably intense at times, which is why it is imperative for you to occasionally step away from it to reduce your stress and refresh your view of the business. However, that getaway at the beach or pool could end up doing surprisingly little to keep your jitters at bay.

This can happen if you are prone to fretting that your business could fall apart whenever you’re away from it, but you can keep things running well in your absence if you follow these tips…

Put together a solid core team

“Every entrepreneur’s goal should be to build a company that can run without them forever.” Those are the words of businessman Arian Radmand. As quoted by Inc., he adds: “If your business isn’t at this point, you don’t have a business – you have a job.”

Hence, you should make sure your business has a strong foundation in the form of a solid core team to which you can feel comfortable passing the baton.

Compile an accessible database of dos and don’ts

What questions might someone want to ask you when steering the ship on your behalf? Think of as many of those questions as possible before recording the answers in a database which the temporary boss could easily find and search through when necessary.

If someone does ultimately still need to ask you something while you’re away, they should add your answer to the manual, as advised in a piece for AllBusiness.com.

Tell your clients that you will be away

Once you’ve told your employees about your plans, spread the news to the clients, too. In doing this, you can lower your chances of being left with a dauntingly lengthy list of messages when you are back, while those clients won’t be so surprised to receive out-of-office replies.

An especially good idea here would be to, before setting off, schedule times to meet back up with clients after the holiday, giving them even less incentive to reach out during the holiday itself.

Trust your employees’ judgement

This comes back to the point about having a strong team in place – but, in the back of your mind, you could still fear the possibility of them making a decision that you wouldn’t have done.

It’d be wise to build up a workplace culture whether your team don’t fear failure that could arise from making a decision on their own initiative. Rest assured that, more often than not, if you’ve recruited good workers, they will be able to decide wisely without you.

Consider falling back on an answering service

If your mere presence has often seemed to make the difference between a crucial call getting answered and… well, that call being left alone, you could implement a business call answering service.

This kind of service is available from Planet Telecom and can ensure that no call is left ringing more than three times before one of our operators answers it. Our business answering service is available at a small monthly charge.