DGS 166: The Importance Of Vacations

If you want to scale your business, you have to let go of controlling everything. How? Plan a vacation. Vacations are ESSENTIAL in owning and running a business. Yes, really.

Property management growth expert Jason Hull and DoorGrow Operator Sarah Hall explain the importance of vacations when running a property management business.

You’ll Learn…

[00:38] Where is Jason this Week??

[01:47] Why Should You Take a Vacation as a Property Manager?

[02:53] Schedule Your Vacation in Advance

[04:08] How to Prepare Your Team (p.s. You are Not as Important as You Think

[06:21] Making Sure Your Business is Scalable

Tweetables

“Vacations are essential. You’ve got to be able to take a vacation and relax, otherwise you’ll burn out.”

“If you don’t schedule time to make sure that you are healthy mentally and healthy physically and taking time to relax, the whole business will suffer.”

“It forces your team to step up and level up because they can’t lean on you anymore. So by taking vacations, it actually improves your team.”

“I realized I’m not as important as I thought I was in my own business. Which is humbling.”

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

DoorGrow Academy

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowClub

DoorGrowLive

TalkRoute Referral Link

Transcript

[00:00:00] Sarah: Vacations are essential. You’ve got to be able to take a vacation and relax, otherwise you’ll burn out. 

[00:00:05] Jason: All right. Welcome DoorGrow Hackers. So today’s going to be a little bit of a different episode. I’m on vacation. And where are we? 

[00:00:16] Sarah: Acapulco. 

[00:00:17] Jason: Acapulco. So this is going to be a little different episode. I’m doing this from my phone. So hopefully this turns out. You’re not going to– I’m not going to read my manifesto, my normal intro. Just know that if you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to grow your business and you do things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker, so. And, uh, you want to do things differently, alright? That’s like the short version. 

[00:00:38] All right. So, we’re sitting here at the Banyan tree resort in Acapulco, which is like the number one resort. It’s really nice. We are by the little pool near the bay here. This is the ocean. And, uh, what are we drinking? We’ve got the best mojitos that I’ve ever had. Which really sucks because once we leave here, I will forever feel like all other mojitos are not as good because these are the best ones I’ve ever had, so we’ll have to come back to get a good Mojito I guess, so. They’re really good. 

[00:01:14] Anyway, what we want to talk about on today’s episode is vacations, the importance of vacations. So one of the things I’ve noticed in dealing with and helping and talking to thousands of property managers is that there’s a general lack of taking vacations. And this is one of the things that I coach clients on doing. So I’ll let Sarah talk. So I’m here with my fiance, Sarah, who’s also the operator at DoorGrow. She’s amazing. She’s already helped us save hundreds of thousands of dollars and figuring out things and really getting operations dialed in. So why do you think managers should commit to taking vacations? Like I’m in such a state of overwhelm, I’m completely part of the day-to-day operations. I don’t have the support that I need. How am I going to take vacations? 

[00:02:02] Sarah: So I’m also a property manager and vacations are essential. You’ve got to be able to take a vacation and relax, otherwise you’ll burn out. It’ll just keep going, your business. You’re always going to have things to do. You’re always going to have your endless to-do list and your things that need to get done and you would like to get done and things that you know is gonna happen to move your business forward. So that will never end, ever. So, if you don’t schedule time for yourself, then your business will suffer. If you don’t schedule time to make sure that you are healthy mentally and healthy physically and taking time to relax, the whole business will suffer.  So make sure you take some time for yourself. Plan family time. Plan vacations. Plan little trips.

[00:02:53] Jason: To really make sure we drive this home. I want to point out that just scheduling a vacation. Schedule it out in advance. Give yourself plenty of time to prepare. If you haven’t taken one in the last two or three years, do it right now. Sit down with your partner, your spouse, whoever, especially if they’re involved in the business with you and say, “let’s just schedule it.” Because just by scheduling it and setting that intention, you have to figure out how to make it work. Set it out 90 days out. You can pretty much change everything significant related to this in the business in the next 90 days. Schedule a vacation schedule six months out if you feel like there’s no possible way you could do this. But schedule the vacation and then do everything you need to do to get ready for it. If you have a team, even better. You can start meeting with your team and say, “Hey, look, I scheduled a vacation. It’s in the next 90 days. It’s on this date and we need to make sure we are ready for when I’m going to be gone because I’m going to be gone.”

[00:03:52] And I want you to be gone during your vacation. Like, “I’m not going to be available. You can’t hand me escalations. I can’t put out fires for you. I’m not going to be able to take care of problems. Like I’m going to be off grid. You’ll need to figure out how to handle this.” So if you have any team members at all, then you can do that.

[00:04:08] If you need more time, get at least one one executive assistant, one team member, an operator in your business. And if you need help with that stuff, talk to me, talk to our team at DoorGrow. We can get you in a place where you’re ready for that and figure out how to build out a really good hiring system. But if you set that intention, you can figure it out. You can figure out with your team, “what processes do we need for me to be gone for a week? What systems do we need to have in place for me to be gone for a week? Who needs to know how to do what in order for me to be gone for a week?

[00:04:42] And so if you set that intention to do that, what I found was when I finally just started scheduling vacations, a couple of things happened. One, I realized I’m not as important as I thought I was in my own business. Which is humbling. Like my team actually stepped up and could handle stuff without me. And it forces your team to step up and level up because they can’t lean on you anymore. So by taking vacations, it actually improves your team. The other thing I noticed was that leading up to the vacation, we got a shit ton of stuff done. Like we got a massive amount of things done: processes documented, things figured out, things changed. All this stuff that was on my plate, I had to start figuring out how to give this up in order to be prepared for it. So we had massive momentum and a massive amount of changes in the weeks leading up to the vacation Because stuff got real, and they knew I wouldn’t be available, and everybody started to freak out a little bit including myself. So I started making a lot of changes. So this is an intentional way of forcing yourself to get out of the business, which is what you want. You want to have more freedom, more fulfillment, more contribution, more support. And in order to do that, you need to be able to lean on your team, and by forcing and setting an intention of a vacation, this will allow you to have a vacation. This will allow you to create distance from the business and be able to have a business that can run without you for at least a week. Very few things can really get completely destroyed or damaged in a week, right? You aren’t going to lose clients in just one week. 

[00:06:10] So set the intention, schedule a vacation, especially if you haven’t done it in the last year or two. All right. My phone is saying we’re on low power mode, so that means it’s time to get back to vacation. So anything else we should add? 

[00:06:21] Sarah: Yeah. We also want to make sure you and your business are in a position to scale. If everything is on your plate and you can’t offload anything and you can’t trust your team and you don’t have any processes or any systems or anyone you can rely on you can’t scale. You can only handle so much. Every person can only handle so much. So, if you want more out of life and you want more out of your business, and most of us do, you’ve got to be able to figure out what to do to get yourself out of the business.

[00:06:52] Jason: Yeah, you’re not as important as you think you are. Like, that’s one of the humbling things us CEOs or entrepreneurs need to realize and learn. And the more you are out of the business and less you’re involved in it, and the more you’re able to lean on your team, the better the business actually does. And I’ve heard this repeatedly from multiple business owners and entrepreneurs I’ve helped over the years that the business and the team are happier and things are better because usually us as entrepreneurs, we’re not really good managers. Most of us are visionaries and we’re not good operators. So anyway, that’s all we’re going to do for today here for those that want some FOMO and you can see here what we’re hanging out and dealing with here in Acapulco. And until next time to our mutual growth, everybody. Check us out at doorgrow.com.

[00:07:35] We want to help support you and grow you in your business and help you have the business and the life of your dreams. And that’s what we at Doorgrow all get a thrill of doing, to support our clients. And we want you to be able to experience more of this. All right, bye everybody. Until next time, to our mutual growth.

[00:07:52] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay per lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow! 

[00:08:19] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe.

[00:08:40] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

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