How to Take Summer Hours Without Losing Clients

Rachel Cook: Growing up in the river realm of Virginia, summer was always a magical and memorable time of the year. The river realm is literally an area of Virginia where there are rivers everywhere. Nearly everyone I knew lived close to the water. And you either had a boat or you knew someone who had a boat. So I have so many memories of going out on the boat and going fishing, going for a boat ride, taking the boat out to a little isolated island where we would jump off the boat and swim up to the beach. So many incredible memories. And this was just part of growing up for us. But the reason we were able to do that so much during the summer is because my dad instituted summer hours in his business very, very early on. By noon on Friday, the office would empty out. Every single employee had finished up whatever needed to be finished before the lunch hour. And then everyone was gone. They were out on the water, out on the boat, enjoying their families. Having longer weekends, that was the norm all summer long. And in fact, because we grew up with so many other entrepreneurs, my dad's friends were all entrepreneurs. We just kind of knew that was the standard when you worked for yourself. You got to take summer hours, you got to enjoy more time off to actually enjoy the season. Now, I didn't really understand this as a business decision when I was a kid. Clearly, I just knew that my family was a little bit different. Most of my friends growing up didn't have entrepreneurial parents, so their parents were still going to work all day on Friday, and they didn't have long weekends, every single weekend to go out on the boat. But I have taken this lesson to heart. I have implemented summer hours in my business every single year as a small business owner. Now, I hear the fear from a lot of small business owners when I bring this idea to them. They're worried that if they're less available, they'll lose clients, they'll lose people. And I understand that fear, but I'm here to tell you it is not true. You are not going to lose clients because you set summer hours, because it's not an availability problem. It's a communication problem. It's a boundaries problem. And we can fix that communication problem in an afternoon. So I want you to consider this your permission slip. This is what this week's episode is all about. Giving yourself permission to take summer hours and actually create some magic and memories for yourself.

Narrator: Are you ready to grow from solopreneur to CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host, Rachel Cook, and I've spent the last decade helping Women entrepreneurs start and scale service based businesses. If you're serious about building a sustainable business, it's time to put the strategy systems and support in place to make it happen. Join me each week for candid conversations about stepping into your role as CEO, hard lessons learned along the way and practical, profitable strategies to grow a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout.

Rachel Cook: Hey there, CEO Rachel Cook here, founder of the CEO Collective and host of the Promote Yourself to CEO podcast. And I hope you're excited about this topic today. I know this is one of the things that I always kind of accept it as a given just because it's something I grew up seeing modeled for me. But the more I talk to other small business owners, the more I realize that so many of us seem to believe that we have to make our business fit someone else's expectations of what it should look like. And that is not true. You can make your business work for you, and that includes giving you the schedule you actually want. So today's episode is your permission slip to make summer hours for yourself. This is something I was actually just at my chiropractor who's also been a client, Dr. Lisa Griffith, who I have known now for, I want to say six years, maybe even more. And I was in just for my regular adjustment. And she is in a new season of life, but because her kids are getting a little bit older. And we were talking about how she's thinking of changing up her summer hours so she can enjoy more time with her kids and plan her schedule so that they can do all the fun things that she wants to be able to do with them now that they're a little bit bigger. And I was like, yes, please do that. Make that a priority for yourself. So summer hours are a really simple, pretty universally accepted boundary for small business. This used to be the norm everywhere I looked when I was growing up as someone who was raised in an entrepreneurial family, very tapped into the local business community, like so many people that I knew growing up who owned small businesses, all had summer hours. So it's a really, really easy boundary to set. It's a really easy thing to put in place. And if you've ever struggled to kind of rein it in a little bit with your calendar, if you've ever struggled to reduce your availability even just a little bit because you're worried about how your clients will perceive it, this can be a great way to test that out and see how your clients actually do respond. Because chances are it's gonna be just fine. Okay, if you are service based, especially the kind of service based business that's highly relational high and your clients really are used to you being accessible, being reachable five days a week. This is a season that can really take a toll on you. It can make it feel really exhausting because you've already set the expectation to those clients that you will answer everything within. I've seen people literally say, well, I try to respond to messages within an hour. What? There is nothing that any of my clients could ever send me that actually needs a response within an hour. I am not saving lives here. Right. There's nothing that is that urgent. So I think this is one of those times where you really want to recalibrate your boundaries and reset expectations. If you have set the standard that you're going to respond instantly to people, then guess what? They're always going to expect you to respond instantly. If you've set the standard that you're available Friday at 5 o'clock for a meeting, then guess what? They're always going to expect that you will take that meeting at 5 o'. Clock. But if you declare out loud and let everyone know, hey, it's summer. I'm really excited about this time with my family and I know that we. One of the things that's gonna make our relationship work as a client and a service provider is to clearly tell you, here's when I'm working, here's when I'm not, and here's what to expect with my communication during this season. This is how you stop white knuckling your own calendar. Okay? This is how you stop being scared that you need to be on call for every single client. So this is your permission slip. And guess what? The permission is coming from you. It's not coming from me. As I shared, my parents ran their businesses this way. So this isn't theory for me. This is something I grew up watching. Everyone enjoyed more of an extended weekend where they would get Friday half days. And it never caused upheaval in the business as far as clients because they communicated this early and often. By the time school was out, which was kind of the, you know, uh, official summer is here marker. By the time Memorial Day rolled around, summer hours were set. And that meant that they were announced everywhere. They had updated their website, they had updated the email auto replies. Everybody's email footers had a note in their about summer hours. They had updated their automated voicemail system. There was a sign on the door to the office letting people know what the hours are. So it was very clear it didn't apologize. There was no long explanation, just we are currently on summer hours. We are available Monday through Thursday from 9am to 5pm we take off from from noon to one for lunch every single day. Friday, we are available by appointment only from 9am to 12pm no apology, no long explanation, just a new normal stated plainly before the season started and available for everyone to see, to hear, to get that information if they were trying to get support. So it really is that simple. The whole move is for you to decide your hours and then we need to uh, make sure we are communicating it everywhere. Your clients are communicating with you well before summer is underway. So you don't need to have a local business, you don't need to have a brick and mortar business. You don't even need to have an official office that people come to probably if you're anything like me, that's not how your business works, right? I mostly work from my home office. I work downtown at Common house, I work at co working spaces. So it's not like I'm going to put a sign on the door saying closed summer hours. But there are people who need to know what to expect from me. So this is one thing that I make sure I really communicate via email for the most part. And I'm gonna walk you through a little bit of that. Okay? So one thing I make sure I always do. Of course my team knows what my summer hours are. I've updated my model calendar. I've communicated that with everyone on the team. Then I go in and I update my email autoresponder. This could be your out of office messenger, but I find that during the summer months people are used to things taking a little bit longer. In the summer months I like to use an out of office autoresponder. It doesn't always say out of office. It often says like, hey, here's what's going on right now and here's quick links if you need anything from me. But this is where you can let people know, hey, we're enjoying our summer. Which means things are slowing down just a little bit. We'll be checking in email once a day, but you can expect that it'll take a day or two to hear back from us. In the meantime, here's a couple links of what you might be looking for. That little autoresponder does a lot of work. It takes the pressure off because people get it as soon as they email in. It lets them know what my hours are, what my response time is, and I give a little mini faq. Here's the top things you might be, you know, emailing us about. And that just takes so much of the pressure off. It just really does. Then I make sure that I'm communicating that to my clients. So I send an email out to my clients before summer hours start. I make sure in my business, we use a community called Circle to host the CEO Collective and everything else. So we make sure that's posted in there. We add it to our client newsletter. Every Monday, we send out a newsletter to all of our active clients so they're getting the update, any changes that are happening. So we've now communicated proactively via email. We've posted in our community. There's an autoresponder up and ready to go. Okay, so that is really all it takes. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. Now, what about when you're actually taking time off for a vacation? Summer hours just kind of handle the normal week if you're going to be a slower response time or you're going to take a day off. By the way, guys, you can also institute summer hours even if you do plan to work. But you just need a hard reset on people's expectations and availability. Let's say you're trying to protect more of your time to do deep work during the summer. In the last episode, we talked about how you can use a season strategically. Maybe you want to keep a day for yourself just to work on a project. You don't have time for the rest of the year. Your clients don't need to know that. Just tell them, hey, I'm on summer hours, no longer available on Fridays. That can be a way to reset expectations and it can be so incredibly easy for you to do. Okay, now what about when you're actually gone for a longer stretch of time? Okay, if you are gonna be out of town for a week or two weeks or longer for vacation. Again, I like to plan this in advance. If I'm only going to be out for a week, it's usually not that serious. It's not going to require a whole lot of planning or effort because I already work well in advance for a lot of things. But if you're going to be out for probably two to four weeks, I like to make sure to communicate that as clearly as possible. And this is where I will proactively tell my clients in advance. I'm going to be out of office from this date to this date. I will check back in on any emails once I arrive on this date. If you need Something before I leave, get it to me by this date. I actually worked with one of my clients who just did this. They're taking, um, a sabbatical in August. And so they've started communicating to their clients that they're going to be taking a sabbatical. And anything they're working on needs to be ready to hit a pause point before a certain date. So those clients have to get certain information to them, and they have to have certain things done before in order to make sure that they continue on the right timeline. So it's all about clarity, right? It's all about having clear dates, a clear path, clear deadlines. I've already done this for a big trip that we are taking to Italy. We're going to Italy for almost a month. And so I started talking to my clients about this month ago, um, months ago. They know well in advance of what's happening. I'm gonna do a whole episode about how we are planning for a month in Italy. So no one is panicking that I'm gone because everybody knows this is a trip we have been planning. Everyone's gonna be well taken care of. They all know how I'm gonna be checking in. They're all gonna know all the details. More is coming about that. So let me pause here for a second. Everything I just walked through, the summer hours, the out of office autoresponder, the way you communicate it so that you keep your clients calm, you keep everybody feeling like you're being a strong leader here. This is the front end of something even bigger that helps you protect your time, your energy, your capacity. This is how we build stronger boundaries in our business. The on demand CEO retreat is a great place to start if you haven't gone through this process with us. It's bundled with the client growth engine right now, and it's the last time it'll be available at this price point. The price will go up in the fall. So I encourage you to take advantage of that program because it is designed to help you build, build and maintain your real capacity instead of constantly feeling like you're trying to keep your head above water with your business. M. Okay, back to how I practically make this happen. This has to do with my calendar. And I've shared this before, like I live and die by my calendar. But it's not just opening my Google Calendar and scheduling stuff willy nilly inside of it. I use what I call a model calendar. So I use Google Calendar for everything. And one of the things I love about Google Calendar is I can make multiple calendars and then toggle them on and off. My model, uh, calendar is kind of my ideal week. It doesn't show actual appointments, but it does show here's when I'm doing M this in my business and there's real reasons why I love this the biggest is that it makes sure that I don't drop a ball throughout the week. There's certain things you have to keep an eye on every single week in your business. You need to dedicate some time to marketing, you need to dedicate some time to sales. You need to dedicate some time to client delivery. If you have a team, you need to dedicate some time to managing your team and making sure that they have everything they need to keep moving forward. Right? So all of those are blocked into my model calendar. I know what my blocks of time are gonna look like and I have themes for those blocks of times. And at this point they're really theme days. So I know my Monday theme is my CEO day and that kicks off with my CEO date where I'm checking in with my 90 day plan, checking in with my 12 month plan. Then I have Tuesdays are usually a client facing day if I have any clients who need a one on one with me or I need to check in on clients or I'm building strategy maps for clients. Wednesdays are content days and that way I always have time blocked out to create content, whether it's podcast or newsletters or emails or anything like that. And then Thursdays are CEO collective days and that's when I do all the work to take care of all my clients inside of the CEO collective. That gives my week shape. It makes sure that I know exactly what I need to stay focused on each and every week. It helps me see my capacity each and every week, right? If Tuesdays are my client facing days and I only have four available times for clients, I know exactly what that capacity looks like. The other reason I really encourage everyone to have a model calendar is it's not just for me. This is something that other people can use to both help me manage my calendar, to know when I'm available. And right now, during the summer months, this is how I can communicate with my husband and my kids around what I am focused on right now. So the model calendar turns the boundaries that are living into your head into something that other people can actually see and plan around. I usually update my model calendar every season and I update it every season because things are changing every season, right? My kids are all teenagers right now. They didn't even wake up this morning until 11:30. So if my kids are being teenagers sleeping in every day, which is totally fine, like I want them to be teenagers, but it does give me a window where because I'm a little bit more of an early bird, I can move my work hours a little bit earlier in the day. So there's a lot of mornings where I get up, I have my coffee around 7 o' clock, and by 8 o' clock I'm already locked in. I'm already getting a lot of my work done and, and I'm able to do it when the house is quiet. I don't have to worry about the kids being too loud or them getting distracted or them needing me. They're not even gonna worry about me until they're awake two and a half or three hours later. So for work, that is easier for me when I can be alone, right? When I need to record content, then I can plan and my husband and I can plan around that. Since I work from home most of the time, if I need to record and I want to record at home, instead of taking everything down to the podcast studio at Common House, then we'll make a plan that he's going to take the kids out. If I have a lot of client calls, I might plan to do the things that I can do at home in the morning and then I'll go leave to a co working space later in the afternoon so I can do those calls without feeling distracted or interrupted. So this isn't luck. This is making sure that I can communicate my needs to everyone who's involved in them. Right. I can communicate to the people in my home what's going on and what I need during those times and we can problem solve together. We can make sure we're all on the same page. As someone who's a highly sensitive person and honestly, even easily distracted, then this helps me to make sure that I can get my best work done and not find myself feeling resentful, that I can hear the kids moving around the house, or that my son is like loudly playing a video game, or that my daughter is practicing her bass guitar or whatever the kids are going to do. Right? This is how I can actually make sure everything is working with me instead of against me. Okay, so here's what I actually want you to do this week. And it's just a few things. One, protect your weekly CEO date. Whatever else moves around this summer, the CEO date is a block that needs to be a standing appointment in your calendar. It stays all the time doesn't matter if you're doing summer hours. If you are in a busy season, this is a standing appointment to help you work on the business, to help you track against your 90 day plan, to help you track against your 12 month goals, to help you stay focused and building momentum in your business. We have a free CEO date checklist. You can get access to that in the show notes. Um, this is one of the most powerful habits I can ever teach anybody. The second is to set your summer hours. Okay, before you build out your model calendar, let's decide what your summer hours are going to be. If you want to take Fridays off, take Fridays off. Maybe you want to take Thursdays and Fridays off. Maybe you want to have half days. Whatever it is, sit down and really look at your calendar. Look at your family, look at what's going on over the next few months and be intentional. So decide your summer hours and then build your model calendar. That's how you can block things in. Maybe you decide, like me, you want to have a client facing day and then you want to have a no call day so that you can do deep work that you never get to do the rest of the time. This is an internal document just for you. It's something you share with your team, it's something you share with your family. It's something you can communicate, um, availability for your clients. But this is one thing that can change every season, depending on what's actually going on in your life and business. And then once you've made those decisions, go ahead and announce them. Okay. Announce what your seasonal hours, your summer hours are going to be. Announce what the expectations are, what is your time that it will take you to reply, your response time, what do people need to know about your availability? If you're only taking appointments on certain days, make sure you are clearly communicating that to everyone. You do not need to ask your clients for permission. You're the boss of your business. You just need to clearly explain and articulate to everyone how summer works in your business. And if you want more help designing the systems that are going to support you while you're taking time off, while you're enjoying your summer season again, check out the on demand CEO retreat. That's what it's built for. It is bundled up with the client growth engine right now. The price is going up in the fall and this is one of the best ways to start building more infrastructure to into your business and more of a rhythm in your business that makes your business actually life proof where you're not always scrambling to do the things you need to do in your business. Instead, you're proactively and intentionally designing it. Next Thursday, we're talking about how to pay for the time off you just protected. That's right. How to continue generating revenue during a slower summer season. I'm going to share with you how we pre sell the fall in the middle of the summer. So deposits keep coming in. Cash flow is handled long before I ever get on a plane for my summer vacation. I'll talk to you then.