Business owners, will you be keeping one eye on your e-mails on Christmas Day? According to recent research 1 in 5 of us will be. I can picture it now, a sneaky look at your phone secreted under your Christmas napkin and then all hell breaking loose when you’re spotted!

These stats make for interesting reading:

• 75% of UK small business owners will work to some degree during the entire festive season
• A mere 12% of small business owners expect to switch off for the whole of the Christmas period
• Around 60%  working on Christmas Day will work more than six hours, with 18% working more than ten
• Over 60% who do take Christmas Day off will be straight back on Boxing Day

You could expect these figures for Christmas Day if they were coming from the hospitality industry, and of course retail returns with a bang again with Boxing Day sales, but these are across a wide range of SMEs. So what about other owners? Some will take the ‘down’ time to catch up on paperwork, some to think about the coming year and some may just want the excuse to escape from relatives.

For many though it’s the pressure of having to keep up with work. The ‘one man band’ may not have a choice. Larger businesses work over the festive period perhaps because the owners don’t trust their team and manager(s) to run things without them. It’s said to be the reason why so many businesses in the UK remain in ‘startup’ mode instead of scale-up.

So if you have a team but you still need to supervise and double check their every move, take a moment to think about ‘why?’ And then, what better time with the New Year approaching to think about what you’ll do to change things. 

Michael Gerber says in the E-Myth,

“If your business depends on you, then you don’t own a business, you have a job, and it’s the worst job in the world, because you’re working for a lunatic!’’ 

He’s right, because quite often, as business owners, we are lunatics. We’re control freaks. We’re demanding. Demanding of ourselves. We insist on long hours and hard work, and really, that’s the technician, in us, the person who feels that they have to do everything.

Serious business owners and entrepreneurs can take time off whenever they want and their income still comes in. They have two fundamental things: 

• They have systems
• They have good people to run those systems.

I’ll be taking a full two weeks off this festive season. I’m not saying this smugly, I’m saying it because it actually took me a while to get to this point.

To get to the point where I don’t feel guilty to get to the point where I can trust my team to do what needs to be done, where I have that level of trust. And to plan work so that I can also give my team a good break.

The trust that allowed me a totally switched off three weeks last Summer has come from having the strong systems in place that I need, having the team in place to get on and follow the systems, and achieve our goals.  We business owners talk endlessly about how to engage and reward people and what better way than enabling them to get on unhindered by our daily meddling. Ask yourself how you would like to work for someone constantly looking over your shoulder and that’s how your team will feel. Simple, logical, repeatable systems, and a good team to run them, are the root to stress-free holidays, to long weekends off, to any weekend off, and to financial and time freedom.

Holidays, for me, are absolutely vital for continuing to do good work for my clients, continuing to come up with new ideas, or better ways of doing things. That all just comes out of resting my brain, stopping the relentless running and rushing around to see clients, or to develop and deliver programmes. It’s really, really important that you take that time to rest and relax, and you can only do that, as a business owner, if you have the systems in place, if you have the team in place.

I’d love you to think about that, if you recognise yourself here. 

Simple, logical, repeatable systems, and a good team to run them.

Do one thing: Let this be your goal for 2019.

    •        you will not be working bank holidays
    •        you will not be working weekends
    •        you won’t be working 60 or 70+ hour weeks

Instead, you’ll be spending quality time with the people that you love, with your animals or whatever you love doing beyond your work.

Merry Christmas from all of the MPL team x

Do you feel like you’re drowning? Drowning in paperwork, in problems, in people stuff? And all because of your success!

When you were starting out you had a handle on everything. Now that you’ve grown you’ve had to take on more people and it’s just not the same. You feel like you’ve lost control. And like any new parent you’re finding it hard to trust anyone with your ‘baby’ - to do things your way.

If it helps, you’re not alone. There are lots of successful small business owners out there who have fallen out of love with their business.  What used to be fun, exciting and rewarding is doing great financially, but not giving you the same pleasure or sense of adventure.

Of course you've always worked hard, but in the early days that hard work was interesting and added real value to the business. Now you’re working even harder and it doesn’t ever seem to move things on.

7 Clear Signs Your Business Needs Simplifying

1. Your business doesn’t seem joined up, you have a group of individuals, but no-one is working as one team
2. Your Customer journey is over-complicated; in the past one person dealt with each customer, now they have half a dozen different points of contact 
3. You have no set ways of doing things; everyone in the team has their own way of doing each task
4. You’re great at what you do but you have no experience of managing people, and it shows. Your people are devouring your time
5. You’ve tried to solve this by promoting someone in your team to manage, but you can’t give them the development or hand-holding they need, so they’re struggling to support you and you’re waste time checking up on them
6. You have no performance measures in place and struggle to give feedback, so nobody knows how they’re doing so engagement is low
7. You’ve simply lost sight of why you started all this in the first place.

So…are you stuck? Or are you drowning?

I hope you’re neither, but if you are, let me throw you a lifebelt.

It doesn’t have to be this way. You can have time freedom and a business that runs like a well-oiled machine, manned by a high-performing team. You just need to systemise in every area of your business and develop a strong second line of management. That’s not as daunting as it sounds. 

In fact, there are only 10 steps to your Freedom - that freedom to scale, grow or sell your business, or run it from a beach somewhere if that's what you really want.

Fancy a bit of that?

Do one thing: Our Systems Mastery Programme works around you and your life, giving you the freedom to work ON your business, not IN it. Read more here: Systems Mastery Programme