How to take time off your photography business (Video)
Topic: Photography Business
Time Investment: 7 Minutes
Suggested Product: BizRevamp®
Are you completely burnt down and worn out? Do you just want to take some time off? That’s OK you don’t have to be 100% engaged in your business all the time. Let’s walk through some tips on how you can do this and preserve it in case you want to come back and also how to make the most out of taking some time off. I want to talk to you today about taking time off of your business.
Now, you may be thinking “I am full steam ahead I don’t want to take time off”.
You may want to take time off in the future or you may have a friend who is struggling with it and you may want to know what to say or how to make them feel better about taking the time off.
First, I want us to accept that it’s OK to not be full steam ahead all of the time. Sometimes we just want to take a step back and work less hours or maybe we need to outsource and have some assistance until we are ready to pick up and run and go again. Maybe you just want to take time off because it’s completely and utterly overwhelming, whether it’s just the business part itself or maybe it’s the life situations that you have going on. Whatever it is you need to let go of the guilt and understand that recognizing that we need to take time off is a strength! It is not a weakness and you need to champion those that recognize this because it’s not doing any good to be a business owner if you are going to end up being worn out. Everyone is unhappy and screaming at each other and all you can do is crawl into bed and then dread having to get up and go work on your business the next day. That is a disservice to you and to your clients. If you are feeling this way or you know somebody that is reach out to them or to yourself and accept that it’s OK.
Tip #1 Don’t Make a Rash Decision
What are some tangible things that we can do in order to be able to take time off or to back off a little bit? One of my number one tips is don’t ever make a rash decision. Make sure that you always think on what you are going to do. That sounds so flippant to say, but I have a tangible action item with that. You can take a step back but still allow your online presence and your business presence to be full steam ahead. You can do this by taking little bits time and scheduling social media posts. One of my favorite systems that I’ve recently discovered is Meet Edgar.com. It allows for status updates and posts to cycle automatically on schedules on the various platforms that I wish for it to be, at any time. Any time that you just to step back whether you are going on vacation or you want to take time off, you can turn this on and it will automatically populate for you and its very little oversight. It’s very little scheduling that you are going to have to do, you simply put in the catalog and library of information schedule. You are good to go, you can turn it on and off to come and go as you please. The reason that this is important is because it will help ease your guilt because you can slowly trickle off if you are wanting to completely quit your business. It also allows you to preserve the presence that you have in front of your potential clients and clients, in case you do decide to come back. You maybe just going through a life situation and you want to be able to come back and pick up where you left off. That’s why I really strongly recommend automating your social media presence and your blog with content as much as you can.
Tip #2 Hire Someone
Another thing to consider is that you may want to hire someone. Whether it’s an intern or virtual assistant to work on some of this for you. Allow them to take some of the load of the customer service off of you, or all of it. To allow you to have a couple weeks or months off to yourself. There is nothing wrong with that. How can preserve that to our clients? We’ve put all this forward on social media, we’ve scheduled and I can put emails off to someone to be me, and do that for me. What can I do in my time off to get refreshed?
Tip #3 Unplug
Completely unplug from it, if you need to. You don’t need to tell your clients and this is critical, you don’t need to tell your clients that you are taking time off. They don’t need to know that you are laying on the couch eating Bon Bons and binge watching Scandal. That’s not their business. Maybe you want to be forth coming with that, and that’s who you are and that’s part of the brain identity, that’s great! Don’t feel like you have to! You can always have it set that you are booked or you are unavailable. Unavailable is a little better way to put forward, I am unavailable at that time. It will actually create a demand for you, but it will also provide a response without any justification. You don’t have to justify why you want to back off time or take time off from your business. It will preserve the client and audience relationship. Potential inquiries don’t believe that you are running out of business. If you are ready to come back you can pick up and keep running.
So that’s accepting that it’s OK to take time off and back off from your business. Then scheduling your social media and online presence as much as possible. Maybe outsourcing or having someone help you with the customer service and don’t feel that you have to justify yourself. Just say you are unavailable and move forward while you reevaluate what it really is you want from your business. There is no sense in us doing this if you we aren’t happy, our families aren’t happy and our clients aren’t happy.
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