This one’s under the Automation pillar of the Biz Bloke framework (Alignment, Acquisition, Automation, Authority) — and no, it’s not just about software. Read on to get your tips.
G’day, Biz Blokes and Biz Ladies. Are you taking enough leave as a business owner?
Let me paint you a picture. It’s a Tuesday afternoon in January. You’re sitting on a beach somewhere up the Coral Coast, drink in hand, and your phone buzzes. It’s a staff member asking where the insurance renewal paperwork is.
Then it buzzes again — a client who “just has a quick question.” Then again. And again. By Thursday you’ve mentally checked back into the office, your partner has stopped talking to you, and the holiday you spent eleven months promising yourself has quietly evaporated.
Sound familiar? Wouldn’t you rather be with me, sailing? (That’s my wife in the pic btw, not me)
For most small business owners, the annual leave fantasy goes something like this:
“One day, when the business is big enough, organised enough, and running smoothly enough, I’ll finally take a proper break.”
The reality is that “one day” never arrives on its own. The business that needs you desperately today will need you desperately in five years too, because you’ve been building your business based on some incorrect rules. It’s time you deliberately and systematically build it to run without you.
As the ‘Lifestyle Business Architect’, I know that eight weeks a year is not a pipe dream. It’s a design problem. And like most design problems, it’s entirely solvable if you’re willing to do the work upfront. My own life is proof of that, with a 4 day work week and the ability to take 12 weeks off every year.
What’s really holding you back from switching the business off and going on a break?
Before we talk about solutions, let’s be honest about the actual problems. Most business owners who struggle to take holidays will point to business, cashflow, or staff reliability as the culprits. Those are real, but they’re usually symptoms of something deeper. If you solved these issues, new issues would magically appear to take their place because the underlying cause isn’t solve:
- The business runs on your personal knowledge. Pricing decisions, supplier relationships, client quirks, the way the software actually works in practice versus how it’s supposed to — it all lives in your head. The moment you leave, a dozen small decisions a day either don’t get made or get made badly. (This isn’t a deal-breaker, but you need to acknowledge it anyway).
- You’re the face of the service – not just the face of the product. In service businesses especially, clients often buy you — your judgment, your relationships, your reputation. If you’re a financial planner, an architect, a physio, or a consultant, your clients may actively resist being handled by anyone else. You’ve built something valuable and accidentally made yourself the bottleneck. Once again – not fatal. But we do need to make some adjustments.
- There are no real systems — just habits. Things get done because you’re there to do them, or because your team has learned to watch what you do and copy it. That’s not a system. That’s a stack of cards waiting for a bad day.
- Your team doesn’t have the authority to make decisions. Even if you have good people, you may have inadvertently trained them to escalate everything upward. If every problem lands on your desk, that’s not a staff problem — it’s a structure problem.
- You genuinely feel guilty about leaving. This is the one nobody says out loud. But plenty of business owners feel obscurely responsible for their team’s livelihoods in a way that makes stepping back feel selfish. That’s a mindset worth examining carefully, because a business owner who burns out doesn’t help anyone.
A lot of these issues will manifest based on your daily mood. If your footy team does poorly, your business probably has a bad day too. If you’re on a banger of a week, your business probably does better. That’s a sign that you’re the business – not the Architect of the business. And that’s no good.
Automation is a mindset. But it has nothing to do with software or AI
Don’t freak out and think I’m a luddite. I obviously love AI and automation software. But they’re just a few tools in a basket. Our goal is not to ‘create the best CRM ever’. Our goal is to spend time on the beach. Don’t forget it.
When the Biz Bloke framework talks about Automation (The Third pillar of my lifestyle business coaching system), we’re not just talking about Zapier and accounting software — though both have their place. We’re talking about systematically removing your personal presence from every part of the business that doesn’t genuinely require it.
That means three things working together: systems (documented processes that anyone can follow), people (staff who are trained, motivated, and empowered), and structure (a business architecture that doesn’t route every decision through you).
Get all three right, and your holidays become actual holidays. Get one wrong and you’ll still be answering emails from a sun lounger, with an angry sheila or bloke who thought their spouse promised them a vacation.
How do we get you, the business owner, on holiday right now? Let’s start with some shorter term goals.
1. Do a “Break Test” on Your Business
Here’s a confronting but useful exercise. Imagine you were hit by a bus tomorrow — not fatally, but badly enough that you couldn’t work for six weeks. What would break first? What decisions would grind to a halt? Which clients would immediately start panicking? What would your team simply not know how to handle?
Write the list down. Every item on it is a risk — both to your business continuity and to your ability to ever take a real break. This list becomes your automation project backlog.
But let’s go one stop further. Why make this a thought exercise? Go home for a day, and just let something break. Come back and fix it. Go home for two days and work on your SEO without any contact. See what breaks. Rinse. Repeat.
Quick Tip: Don’t try to solve the whole list at once. Prioritise by order — there’s absolutely no point solving the most important system if it’s not the first to break.
2. Record Everything You Do for One Week
Carry a notebook or use your phone’s voice memo app and log every task you perform for seven working days — every email written, every decision made, every client call taken, every problem solved. Don’t edit yourself; just capture everything.
In fact, go and grab Clockify from clockify.me. Just time track everything.
At the end of the week, go through the list and mark each item with one of three codes:
- ‘D’ for delegate (someone else could do this with training),
- ‘P’ for process (this should be a documented process),
- ‘S’ for software (you can replace this task with automation software such as Zapier.
- ‘M‘ for me (this genuinely requires you… forever).
Most business owners are shocked to find that 70-80% of their week falls into D or P. And that’s not ok in the long run. It’s 2026. Let’s start being the lifestyle business Architects that we’re meant to be.
3. Pick One Process and Write It Down
If you can’t do 1 or 2, at least start with something that happens repeatedly and that you currently handle personally. Onboarding a new client. Responding to a pricing enquiry. Handling a supplier invoice. Preparing a weekly report.
Write it out, step by step, as if you’re explaining it to a capable new employee on their first day. Be specific. Include the tools used, the templates referenced, the decisions that need to be made along the way and the criteria for making them.
Some activities won’t be captured by one week of time-tracking. My favourite example for new clients is staff training. They only need to do it when someone quits. But oh boy, when it happens, that’s 3 months of their time wasted on a new hire.
Quick Tip: Use Loom (free for basic use) to record yourself walking through a process on screen. Basically, double your effect by making a video version of yourself. It’s faster than writing and often clearer. And your staff or outsourced contractors will feel more connected to you as a person. Your team can reference the video, and you can transcribe it into a written process later.
Most of us will be working in the short-term for now so. But if you’re ready, take on the challenge of becoming the Lifestyle Business Architect.
The single biggest thing holding most small business owners to their desk is that they haven’t built a team capable of operating without them. Sometimes that’s a hiring problem. More often, it’s a training and authority problem.
Training needs to be deliberate, not ad-hoc and you-driven. Shadowing you and picking things up over time creates dependence, not capability.
Every role in your business should have clear documented responsibilities, a defined scope of authority, and regular structured feedback. New staff should be onboarded against a written process, not just handed to whoever’s least busy that week.
And with today’s staff, I actually recommend a full-on video training course for every step. They respond better to the content, and watching a video doesn’t feel as hard as reading an ops manual.
Authority is equally important. Decide, explicitly, which decisions your team can make without you — and communicate that clearly. A client services manager who has to escalate every complaint is not managing anything. Give your people genuine decision-making power within defined parameters, and back them when they use it.
Quick Tip: Let your staff make decisions without you. Praise them if they’re right, and don’t scold them if they’re wrong. We want them to work without you. If you punish them for it, it’s never going to progress.
It doesn’t matter how great your automation is if your personal hours are still linked to the product or service.
This is the structural change that matters most in service businesses, and it’s also the hardest one for most owners to make psychologically.
If your business model is essentially selling your time and expertise directly — and you’re the only one doing the work — then your holidays are automatically capped by how long you can stop billing. And unless you’re charging $1,000 per hour, you probably aren’t able to take any holidays.
You need to either bring in other service providers who can deliver in your absence (employees, associates, or carefully chosen subcontractors), or restructure your offering so that not everything requires your personal involvement at the delivery stage.
Even a physiotherapist can decouple their hourly rate by introducing home-based exercise training programmes into their service so that every second appoint is location independent. Hello telehealth. It’s a major step forward.
This might look like:
- bringing on an associate who can service ongoing clients while you’re away.
- It might mean building out a lower-touch service tier that your team can deliver with minimal supervision.
- It might mean accepting that some of your revenue will pause during your absence — but building enough into your margins across the year to fund that pause without stress.
None of these are easy changes. But they’re all choices. The alternative — being perpetually essential to every piece of work that goes out the door — is also a choice. It’s just one that ensures your holidays will never quite happen.
Make your clients see you as a human.
I’ll always remember the first time I used a business coach (Yes, even business coaches have business coaches!), and he said “we’ll do 48 sessions per year, because I take 2 weeks of at Christmas, and 2 weeks of in May.”
It was bold, simple, and absolutely understandable.
One of the most common reasons business owners feel they can’t leave is fear of what clients will think. What if someone needs something urgent and can’t reach me? What if they feel abandoned? Will they move to a competitor?
The simple answer is no… if you set expectations.
Clients are far more tolerant of planned absence than most business owners assume. What they don’t tolerate well is unpredictable availability, slow responses, or feeling like they’ve been forgotten. A well-managed holiday notification — clear, early, professional, with named alternative contacts — is almost always received without much bluster at all. And if there is a complaint to such a reasonable and human request, perhaps that’s the sign of a rubbish client – not a rubbish system.
Build a client communication protocol that covers: how far in advance clients are notified of your absence, who the designated point of contact is while you’re away, what constitutes a genuine emergency versus something that can wait, and how urgent matters will be escalated.
If you’re brave – even bake in 2 x 1-week closed periods every year and notify everyone. Make it non-negotiable and your clients will accept it with open arms.
Then stick to it. The first time you reply to a non-urgent client email at 11pm from your holiday accommodation, you’ve trained them to expect it. Boundaries, communicated early and held consistently, are respected.
Increase your profit margin by 18%.
18% (52 divided by 44). That’s how much you’ll need if you want to take 8 weeks off per years without selling anything. Of course, if you have staff, or if you have an automated product, this margin goes down.
This needs to be a long term goal in your business plan. Of course, how about just taking a small pay cut? It’s also an option!
Cashflow anxiety is a real barrier to taking leave, particularly for businesses with irregular revenue. The solution isn’t just to earn more — it’s to plan differently.
Work out what eight weeks of business operating costs looks like. Add your personal drawings for that period. That’s your leave buffer target. Build a separate business savings account specifically for this purpose and make a standing monthly contribution to it, even if it starts small.
Assuming your cost to service is at least 50% of your revenue, the easiest way to increase a profit margin by 18% is to increase gross profit by between 4% and 9%. I actually have a calculator you can check out to try your own numbers. Go here, and scroll all the way to the bottom of the page.
Some business owners find it useful to run a slightly higher markup or retainer fee structure specifically to fund these buffers. Recurring revenue — retainers, subscriptions, maintenance contracts — is also worth prioritising for exactly this reason. Revenue that arrives whether or not you’re actively working is the financial foundation that makes genuine leave possible.
Test Early, Test Often. Trust, but Verify.
Don’t wait until your eight-week sabbatical to find out whether the business can run without you. Test it incrementally.
Start with a long weekend where you genuinely don’t check in. I mean turn your phone off and go to the footy. Go and get a massage. Or try one of those ‘silent retreats’. Whatever you like!
Then try a week. Then two weeks. Each test will reveal something — a gap in a process, a staff member who needs more authority, a client who needs to be re-educated about response times. Each gap you find and fix in a small test is a problem that won’t blow up during a four-week trip to Europe.
I call this the ‘Break it till you make it’ method.
By the time you take your first serious holiday — even just three or four weeks — you’ll have run enough tests to know what’s solid and what still needs attention. The business won’t be perfect. But it’ll be good enough to cope, and you’ll be able to switch off properly for the first time in years.
Are you Ready to be your own Lifestyle Business Architect? It’s time for a mindset shift.
Every practical system in this article is achievable. The processes can be written, the staff can be trained, the financial buffers can be built. But none of it will happen if you, as the business owner, haven’t genuinely decided that your time away from the business matters.
If you hide behind the ‘but that’s impossible’ mantra, then that’s that. Pack it up, because you won’t succeed.
A lot of business owners operate with an unconscious belief that working constantly is what makes them a good operator. In fact, in Melbourne and Australia generally, we tend to complain about how busy we are and wear it as some sort of ‘badge of honour’. As if it’s a good thing that we’re run off our feet!
It’s worth sitting with that belief and questioning it honestly. Is busier better? Are we not evolved apes? And doesn’t every animal in the entire animal kingdom sit around and relax when they can? What makes us so special that we’re not allowed to live and enjoy life?
The business owners I’ve seen build the most sustainable, profitable, and genuinely enjoyable operations are not the ones who worked the hardest. They’re the ones who worked the most deliberately.
Weird story time: The top 10 most successful businesses I know are all run by terrible operators. Their skill is below par, and they don’t know their product that well. How are they so successful? The simple answer is that they’re willing to offload the work and go play golf. This desire eventually culminates in them making it a reality. Eventually, they end up with absolutely incredible 2IC’s, who run the business for them.
Eight weeks a year isn’t a pipe dream. It’s a necessity if you’re going to enjoy your lifestyle business more than just working for someone else.
Start with the bus test. Write one process down this week. Have the conversation with your team. Book something you can look forward to.
The business can handle it. You just need to build it that way. Biz Blokes and Biz Ladies – let’s make this happen. (Hear about my own story where I took 9 months off!)