Show notes:

How to take 3 weeks out of your wedding business. Last week I got back from the USA having taken a full three weeks out of the business. No access to emails, no social media and time to be completely present with my family. This is the most time I have had off since 2016 and wow was it needed. I know it feels scary to walk away, but today I share how I made it happen.

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Time Stamps

00:12 – Taking a Break: My Three-Week Holiday Experience

02:21 – Preparing for a Holiday: The Importance of Planning Ahead

09:42 – Preparing for a Digital Detox: Strategies for Boundaries

12:24 – Lessons Learned from Taking a Break

18:01 – The Importance of Being Present

Transcript:

Becca Pountney

00:00:00.160 – 00:22:19.910

I recently took three whole weeks away from my business to go on holiday. Yes, three whole weeks. I deleted my email accounts, I deleted my social media and I was fully present on my holiday. How did I do it?

Well, in today’s episode, I’m going to walk you through all of the preparation and everything that happened that allowed me to take a full three weeks off and the lessons I learned in the process. I’m Becca Poutney, wedding Business Marketing expert, speaker and blogger and you’re listening to the Wedding Pros who Are Ready to Grow podcast.

I’m here to share with you actionable tips, strategies and real life examples to help you take your wedding business to the next level.

If you are an ambitious wedding business owner that wants to take your passion and use it to build a profitable, sustainable business doing what you love, then you’re in the right place. Let’s get going with today’s episode.

I first started my business way back in 2016 and although I’ve had plenty of holidays since then, if I’m completely honest with you as a self employed person, if it’s really difficult, I’m sure you know this, to take an actual holiday.

Because although in the past I’ve taken time off, let’s be honest, we’ve all checked our email, done a little sneaky check on our social media, or even continued posting throughout the holiday. Ask yourself seriously, when was the last time you took proper time off? And by proper time off I mean you did nothing to do with your business.

No emails, no phone calls, no social media posts, no looking at what’s going on online. Well, if you’re anything like me, looking back over the last however many years since 2016, let’s be honest, it’s never happened.

But this year I decided something needed to change. We were going on a huge family holiday. I’d been planning it for a year.

I’ve been looking forward to it for a year as well and I knew that I didn’t want to ruin it by half. Working on Holiday As a self employed person, it’s really hard for us to switch off. I’m always thinking about what’s going on in the business.

Even if I’m not supposed to be working, things are popping up on my phone. All of my social media is integrated into my business.

So even if I’m doing personal things, it’s still popping up and I’m still seeing it and I didn’t want to be distracted on holiday. I was going to my favorite place on earth, Walt Disney World, and I was Taking my family for a holiday of a lifetime.

And I wanted it to be the holiday of a lifetime. And what I didn’t want to happen was that I was present, but my mind was elsewhere.

So at the beginning of this year, I decided when I go on holiday, I’m going to make sure I take a full three weeks away from the business. And I’m going to be honest with you, that felt a little bit scary. Probably the thought of that for many of you is also terrifying.

But I decided it needed to happen.

And so I’m going to walk you through the preparation I did, the way that I made it happen, and the lessons I’ve learned from doing it, and why I will definitely be doing it again. Okay.

So the first thing is that in order to take that time off, I knew it was going to take a whole lot of preparation before I went because I didn’t want want it to be obvious that I was taking the time off other than to my clients and my members and people that work with me.

So if you are someone that just listens to this podcast or follows me on social media, you may not have even realized until I got back that I wasn’t actually here.

And you definitely probably didn’t realize because even my closest friends didn’t realize that even though I was present everywhere, I wasn’t actually doing it myself. So I knew I had to prepare in order to make this happen. I didn’t want to take a break, for example, from the podcast.

I didn’t want my members to have nothing for three weeks. I didn’t want no social media to be happening for three weeks because, you know, it’s not interesting to you that I’m going on holiday.

You just want the content, you want the learning, you want to carry on as normal. So I looked at everything that would be happening. I made sure that I blocked out the time in my diary, obviously, so no one could book a call.

I also made sure I blocked out a couple of days after I got back because I knew that I would be jet lagged and need time to recover. Now the main things in my business that need to keep going all of the time are the podcast. This obviously comes out every single Thursday.

My membership, which is running all of the time and I have live videos every single week in there and then my social media posts and my tips and things like that that go on online. I also have the Wedding Pro agency where we run people’s social media accounts, we write blog posts and all sorts of other projects as well.

So I knew all of the things that needed to happen. And the first part of this year was dedicated to making sure I had a plan for each of those things before I went. So let’s start with this podcast.

So I ensured that I did a whole load of recording. I batch recorded everything before I went.

I worked with my editor, who’s absolutely amazing, and he made sure everything was edited before I left the country so that I could upload everything, I could schedule it all ahead of time.

I could create the graphics for social media, I could send off the video recordings of the episodes to my social media team member who could clip them up for reels. And all of that was done before I left the country. So that’s why the podcast could keep going out every single week.

So, yes, it took a bit of extra effort to make sure I got further ahead, but it was great to get further ahead. And actually I got so far ahead I still had a couple of weeks in the bank even when I got back.

So I knew I didn’t have to do something straight away within a few days of getting home, because I knew that would be stressful as well. So that was the podcast taken care of.

Inside my membership, I have my weekly video and I decided I didn’t want that to stop, but I also wasn’t able to do it. So I asked in my members lounge if other people would be willing to take a turn doing the video for me each week.

Now, this gave them an opportunity to step up and go live, practice going live, to talk about what they’d learned in their business, to raise their profile in the group. Three amazing people volunteered. And so I sent them the instructions, explained how to do it, put it in the diary and just left them to it.

Now, I’ve built up a lot of trust over time with my members.

I know them really well, so I knew that I’d be able to trust them to get on and do it, that I wouldn’t need to monitor it because a lot of this is about letting go, which is a little bit scary and it can be difficult. So they covered that and then the social media aspects right before I went.

So about three weeks before I left, I actually hired a brand new team member. And I’m going to be talking about her a lot, I’m sure, over the coming weeks.

And her main focus for me has been reels and tiktoks and short form video content.

Now, I took her on and explained to her that basically within a week of her starting with me, I was going to Be leaving the country for three weeks and maybe we should start after I got back now. She was like, no, absolutely not. Let’s get this sorted, let’s get going.

And so we basically arranged a two hour session at my house before I left the country where she came around for two hours and we recorded content for two hours. She planned it all out and basically that then gave us content for the whole three weeks I was away.

So if you have seen content popping up over the weeks of April, me in my house, me talking about business, me reviewing businesses, all of that was recorded before I left and then I just handed it to her. She had access to my social media accounts and my social media scheduling so that she could continue posting those videos while I was away.

They weren’t time sensitive. She could reply to comments, she could monitor the inbox on social media as well. And case anything came through.

Everything on my end was automated in terms of payments and things like that, if anyone signed up to anything. And so that meant that I had consistent content going out all of the time while I was away. So that covered that off as well.

The final thing obviously was my email inbox. Now I decided that I would just put an out of office on my inbox and explain that I was not going to be answering emails until a certain date.

But I do have a support email that I set up about six, six months ago that my team can access. And this was no accident.

I set that up to start creating these boundaries for myself and also to ensure that there was somewhere people could go while I was away.

And so we set up supportney.com that on my out of office it said if you’ve got something important, one of my team need to help you with something, send your email to supportcapounty.com and someone will be monitoring that. Now that email address was monitored for the entire time that I was away.

So if anyone did have an urgent query, if it was an ongoing wedding pro agency client that we were still continuing to do work for, they had a point of contact that wasn’t me.

And then if they got my out of office and they realized that I wasn’t here, it gave them time and knew when I was coming back and so they could wait for my return, which most of them did. Now I did instruct my team member.

So one member of my team, I explained to them, you are going to be the person that is the boundary between me and work. And so if something is urgent because we are close to our businesses and we don’t want Things to fall apart.

So, for example, if a client is very unhappy or, you know, something major happens, I’m going to allow you to decide whether or not to contact me. I kept WhatsApp on my phone so that I was contactable from friends and family, and so they had my number.

And I said, if something urgent happens and you feel like you can’t deal with it and you need me, then WhatsApp me and I will trust that process so that I don’t stress.

And so I knew having that in place meant that I could relax and not worry about anything because I knew if something that important happened that she would be in touch. Now, as it happened, nothing particularly important happened. No one was in touch with me.

There was one little tiny thing where the wrong podcast episode went out at the wrong time and I quickly edited that from when I was away. That probably took me 10 minutes one day.

So that was the only tiny bit of work I did because that was a fairly major problem and I was the only one who had access to it. We fixed it though, within 10 minutes and that was it. So in a full three weeks, I did 10 minutes and nothing else.

Now, I also realized very early on when I was planning my time away that I have no self control. Don’t know about you, but I have literally no self control.

So I knew that if I kept social media on my phone for personal use that I would absolutely look at what was happening going on in my business. I would absolutely look at the posts, I would do all of that kind of stuff.

So I made the decision that I was going to have to remove social media from my phone entirely to stop myself being addicted essentially and looking at it. I actually don’t need social media while I’m away. I didn’t want to post about being away while I was away.

I wanted to be with my family, otherwise that would still be work. So I just got rid of all the social media apps and then I got rid of my email off my phone for the same reason.

Because I know in my heart that if I saw an email coming to my inbox, even if I didn’t open it, I would be thinking about it. If I did open it and didn’t action it, I would be worrying about it.

And so for me, the only way to have that boundary was out of sight, out of mind, and to not have it on my phone at all. So that was what I did. That was all the preparation that led up to it.

So it wasn’t just a oh, on day one of My holiday, I’m switching everything off and not worrying about it. A lot of preparation went into making that happen, but it was well worth it.

And actually a lot of those systems that I’ve now got set up would work again in the future a lot easier because I’ve done it once and I now know it works and I can do it again. I did have one panic. I’ll be honest, I did have one panic.

So the day before we flew, like the night before we flew, we went and stayed in a hotel and I suddenly thought, oh, what if something actually important or personal, because I have some personal stuff wrapped up in my work email comes through to my email and it’s not something that can be forwarded on. So, for example, maybe it’s an automated message saying that my website’s gone down, something like that.

So we did add my work email to my husband’s phone so that he could look at it if required. So he had it on there. I think he very occasionally looked at it because he doesn’t have the same connection to it as me.

So he can see something and ignore it and not. It won’t affect his holiday in any way, shape or form because he doesn’t really understand it that he did have it on his phone.

I don’t think he looked at it very often, but it just gave me that peace of mind that there was someone with it on their phone if something absolutely major urgent came through and he could have told me and we could have dealt with it, but as it happened, nothing happened, we were fine. So that’s the preparation. And I want to encourage you to consider your own business because your business will probably look very different to mine.

But are there ways that you could put processes in place for yourself to make those boundaries clearer? In order for you to do the same thing, you know, you’ve got to look at what goes on regularly in your business.

Are there things that you could automate? Do you have someone in a team or could you take on someone in a team? Or could you hire someone for a short period in order to cover off that time?

If you have an important holiday coming up, could you schedule things ahead so that you don’t have to be there? And actually, is it a big problem, you not being in the business or not?

I think the thing is we put ourselves front and center and we think, oh, we’ll lose out on work if we’re not here. We, we. And you might, you might lose out on work if you’re not there.

But I can tell you, you will also lose out on precious memories and time with your family if you’re not 100% present because you’ll be worrying and about what’s going on in your business constantly if you continue to work while you’re away. So that’s all the preparation I did.

Now I want to walk you through some of the lessons that I’ve learned on the other side of it, having done it and I really did enjoy it. I promise you that I was the most present I’ve been with my family in years. I wasn’t distracted.

I had no reason to just mindlessly scroll on my phone because I had no social media and I couldn’t even use work as an excuse to do that. And some of the lessons that I’m going to take forward as well.

So the first thing I learned is that having a team is essential and absolutely amazing. The best thing, thing I’ve done in my business is outsource things and bring on members of my team. Why? Because otherwise I am doing it all alone.

And actually in life things happen all the time.

Now this was a planned holiday, but actually I could be sick, I could go to hospital, something could happen with one of my family members and overnight I would need that support. And if I didn’t have anyone in my team or anyone around me that could help, that would make it incredibly difficult.

Also, having a team has allowed me to set up some of these processes in order to give myself those boundaries. So things like the simplicity of having a support email address is huge because that doesn’t cost me very much.

Think it cost me £5amonth to have that email address. That email address only lives on my computer.

I don’t have it on my phone, but my team have access to it and it allows them to actually step in and it allowed me to put that on my out of office so there was a place that people could go that wasn’t just me and I didn’t have to give them access to my own email. It also meant that they could get on and do things on my social media and look like I was doing stuff as well without me having to.

And that’s been huge. So with my social media, I wouldn’t have had time to edit and put out and schedule all of those videos ahead before I went, I would have burnt out.

But knowing that someone else was doing it for me and just getting on and doing it was incredible. So huge. Thank you to my team.

If any of you are listening, because you made it possible for me to have that break and you made it possible for me to have that clear boundary between work and holiday and to be that buffer. So a huge thank you to you. You did an amazing job.

And if you’re listening to this, I encourage you to start thinking about at what point in your business bringing on a team member, a freelancer, a VA or something like that is important for your business because it is huge. Now, in order for you to be able to hand stuff over to a team, you have to be able to trust people and you have to be able to let go.

I mentioned this earlier, it’s really difficult for us as business owners to let go because we want everything done perfectly. And there was stuff that was imperfect when I was away there the occasional typo on a post or the tag was missing, you know what, no one died.

It doesn’t matter. It was okay. Done is better than perfect. And I wanted to entrust my team to get on and do things without me.

Because if I can’t trust people who work with me, what is the point? If I have to micromanage people, I might as well just do it myself.

And so if you are going to have people do stuff, you do have to let go a little bit. You do have to trust the process.

You have to realize we’re all human and we all make mistakes and it’s okay, it’s not going to impact your business long term. The second thing I learned was that although it felt scary, three weeks away from my business didn’t ruin my business.

I think sometimes we tell ourselves if we take time away, we’ll lose money, the business will fail, people won’t respect us, we have all of these lies in our head. But actually it didn’t really matter. For me, three weeks feels like ages.

But for most people who are just going about their day to day life, they probably didn’t even notice. And three weeks isn’t actually that long when it comes to business. So you know, things that people may have thought were reasonably urgent.

Actually when they had the choice, they decided they could wait until I got back. They didn’t need to contact my team. Not everything needs to be done tomorrow and it’s okay, people will wait for you to come back.

So if you are thinking about it in that terms like oh, my whole business will collapse if I take time away, well, believe me, it won’t.

As long as you’ve done some preparation, as long as you’ve got some processes in place and as long as you’ve told people what’s happening and communicated Then it’s going to be okay. And for me, that’s the big lesson.

My business could continue without me for three weeks, and I need to learn from that because actually, I need to do this more often. I need to take more time off. I need to have better boundaries, and my business won’t fail. And other people can do things as well as I can.

People can help me in my business. Maybe they can even do things better than I can, and that will continue to work.

My next lesson was the importance of being fully present with my family. I don’t think I realize how distracted I am all of the time when I’m with my family. I love my family. We spend a lot of time together.

I take the kids here, there and everywhere. But I always have work on my mind. Mind. I always have notifications from social media about work popping up in my brain.

And I’m always thinking about the next thing, the next thing that needs to get done. Who needs help with this? People are popping into my mind left, right and center.

And to have that taken away for three weeks and to be fully present was the best gift I could have given to my family and the best gift that I could give myself. Because we were in that little bubble all by ourselves. The only contact we were getting was via WhatsApp.

If people needed us to talk to friends and family and we could just be. We didn’t need to worry about collecting content.

I didn’t need to worry about posting pictures and telling other people about what was going on, because we were just happy in our own world, having a great time together, getting to know each other better again, spending some quality time together, being fully present, not looking at a screen half of the time. And it was amazing. And let me encourage you, it’s the best gift you can give to the people you love is to be fully present with them.

The next time you go out for dinner with a friend, have you got your phone on the table? Are you constantly checking it?

Or are you going to turn it off and put it in your bag and be fully present for that friend to listen to them, to engage with them, to talk with them. Because that is a gift that you can give to someone.

And I don’t think I realized how much that needed to happen in my family and how beneficial it really was. And I definitely will need to be doing that more often over weekends, over holiday times, not to be so distracted.

My next lesson was not so much a lesson, but a realization. And I talk about it in marketing all of the time. People don’t read your emails, people don’t read your emails properly.

And this was really evident to me that people did not read my out of office. I put on an out of office onto my email that was very clear. That said I will not be looking at emails, I will not look at this inbox until this date.

If you need help that from someone before then, here’s the support email address to contact. Otherwise I will reply to you on my return. That was very clear. It was an out of office. It would have gone back to anyone who emailed me.

However, when I opened up my emails first day back at the office and started looking through them, I found quite a lot of emails from people saying, hi, I sent you an email a week ago and you haven’t got back to me. Just another reminder that you haven’t got back to this email yet. Why haven’t you got back to this email yet?

I’m thinking, well, because I’ve told you, I’m not actually here. So clearly they didn’t take the time to read my out of office. They didn’t even worry about it or they didn’t believe it.

So they didn’t think that I would actually not look at my email. And I really didn’t. I did not look at my email for three weeks. And I think people don’t believe that.

They think, oh yeah, well I should probably check it every now and again. And I didn’t. I did not check it. So people don’t read your emails. That’s my next, my next learning really.

And that is the same with your marketing emails. That’s the same with your emails to customers. That’s the same with emails to colleagues. People will skim read it.

People make their own assumptions, but they may not read it. And that is just life. But that’s their problem, not yours.

I don’t feel guilty that I didn’t reply to those people because they should have read my email. If they’d have read my email and followed my processes, someone would have got back to them.

But if you’re just going to ignore my email and keep on emailing me, well, unfortunately I’m not going to be able to get back to you until I’m home.

Which of course I will now get back to them and I will explain to them that the reason I didn’t get back to them was because I was out of the office for three weeks and then I will help them. So yeah, that was my next lesson, was that people don’t read their email.

All in all, I think it was a fantastic experience for me to have that time away. Lots of things I learned about myself, about my business.

I feel like I’ve come back refreshed, like I’ve come back with a great memories, great time with my family. I’ve learned so much from being in Disney, my happiest place on earth.

I’m sure there’s a whole podcast episode where I can talk to you about some of the customer service lessons and the business lessons I learned while I was out there. But the big takeaway from me is I need to do this more often.

I’ve actually continue to take my work email off my phone and I’m going to see how that goes because actually it’s on my computer. I don’t need to be looking at it all of the time. And if I need to reinstate it in the future, I will.

But I’m going to try and continue on this path of having better boundaries whilst I’ve got them set. I have still got social media on my phone. I think that’s one that I need to work out how I do the boundaries.

Maybe I don’t look at it so much over the weekends, maybe I, I do just look at it at work time. I need to work that one out. But I think at least when I’m on a holiday, social media apps are going again. I didn’t miss it, honestly.

I didn’t miss not seeing what everyone else was doing. Why? Because I was spending time with my family, having the best time. Why did I need to know what anyone else was doing?

And I didn’t have any of those jealous feelings or feelings of, oh, what, what’s happening? What, why are they doing that? And I’m not doing that because none of it was being served to me. So I definitely want to have more of that in my life.

I love social media. I think it’s great for business, I think it’s great for catching up and community.

But sometimes we need to take a break from it and have some headspace. So, yeah, for me, the biggest lessons are I need to.

With these boundaries going forward, I need to make sure that I keep that work email off my phone as much as possible and also try and limit my social media interactions. And the big thing is I need to rely and encourage my team. Team is the best thing that I can do is to trust them to get on with stuff.

Yes, it’s going to cost me money in my business. Yes, there are things I can do myself, but actually if I want a business to grow.

And if you want a business to grow, then at some point you’ve got to let go and let other people take on some of the work for you. I hope you found this episode interesting and help.

It was a big self reflection for me, but I wanted to encourage you with it as well because I think whenever I’ve said to someone I took three weeks away, they’re like, really? How did you do that? Did you really take three weeks? I could never do that. And so I want to encourage you. Yes, you could do it.

If I can do it, you can do it. It’s about preparation, it’s about people around you and it’s about trusting the process and having those boundaries. Hope it’s been helpful.

Let me know in my DMs on Instagram what you thought about today’s episode and I’ll be back next time.