Welcome to Salesy with Meghan. Today, Meghan sat down to talk about how she is taking off almost three months this summer.

Meghan expresses her vulnerability with a life update to her listeners and provides steps on how she started to prepare herself to taking time away from work.

It’s not about removing clients or not wanting to serve clients, but it’s about shifting focus and feeling comfortable stepping away from your business when the time calls for it. And how proper planning can be used to your benefit to get you ahead in your business.

The benefits of proper planning also allow you to take some time off so you can rejuvenate yourself and come back fresher for your work.

You can properly set yourself up to take necessary time off without “ghosting” your business or your clients, but rather so that you can come back and serve them even better.

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Transcription:

At the original time of writing this podcast script, I was planning to spend three months off social to write my book. At the time of recording this, I will give you a life update as well. Um For those of you who don’t know, unfortunately, my second dad who helped raise me in high school passed away in May. Um at the time of recording it, it’s only really been like four or five days, which is so weird. I’m also still kind of in shock if I’m being honest and I started back in October of last year. I laughed at myself because I didn’t even know what life was going to look like, really planning to take time off. And I wanted to spend the majority of the summer to write my book, which I’m still actually doing. But there’s also, you know, I am watching my family go through active grief. And so I’m also taking time to just be there for them. And I understand it’s a privilege as a business owner to be able to do this. I also wanted to be mindful of if I was going to take a step back that it wasn’t going to affect my clients and it wasn’t going to affect people. I admire the people who are able to just do a social break and ghost their feet and do all those things. But I couldn’t really bring myself to do that. I have carefully curated a very strong community over the last five years. And part of me honestly feels a lot of guilty to not be serving you guys in the same capacity live. But the other part of me also understands that when it comes to life and business and all these things that a lot of times when I do something and it feels really scary that leadership is going first. And so as a business owner, the majority of my time is serving my clients and showing up on social media. And the question was not just removing clients like we do have some programs ending at the time of you listening to this, it would be in June in the month but in May, it’s like, ok, it’s a month out, there’s also just a lot of prep that went into being quote unquote off so that there wasn’t a gap in content. Is it hard to be batching and getting ahead and doing all those things? Yes. And to be honest, it was a different type of focus that I needed. It also was something that was needed because I also just took the last week off because unfortunately, my dad did pass suddenly it was a major heart attack and then he was in the IC U and I had to step away from my business, but my business couldn’t crumble. And that’s a larger conversation that I think people aren’t having. When you are on Instagram Threads, emails. We have a blog. We have this podcast, you know, we are still doing linkedin, we’re doing Pinterest, we’re also doing medium and substack with our blogs and there’s a lot of just content going out and we’re still a small team. We are not a massive team. We don’t actually have a full time marketing person. You’re uh you’re listening to our full time marketing person. So that’s the first thing to think about. One thing. My dad always says that I really didn’t care about as a kid, but as an adult I really rested in is proper planning, prevents piss poor performance or poor performance, depending on what audience it is. And the thing about my dad is that like he is a planner by heart, he is an analytical buyer. He’s an analytical person, he is an engineer, but he is a planner. And while unexpected things happen as business owners, there’s a lot more control than you realize when you have been doing this for a couple of years. You understand market cycles, you understand growth and proper planning prevents piss poor performance because it’s a consistency game. There has been a really big confusion around consistency and what does it look like? And what does it sound like? And I think as business owners, we have forgotten that consistency isn’t just every single day. I think there’s a lot of people out there who really think that like, if you did something daily you’re going to be the best at it. And while it comes to like selling and those types of things like that’s really important, that’s something that I think a lot of people don’t fully think about is that being consistent in your sales is building the momentum you want. But there are things in life where you couldn’t do every single day, like you can’t work out at 100 and 10% capacity every single day without an like an injury. And a really big part of consistency is planning. So when we came back to this, the first thing that we thought about and this is something that’s been active with the team is coming to the year with a full year plan and how do we get a quarter ahead on stuff? So what we would be working on because, you know, it’s the rule of 90 days, what we work on in May, we yield the results in June, July, August. I had to count that off my hands. We yield the results in August and so in May, we would be actively working on what’s supposed to be happening in August and that whitespace does give you more freedom. It gives you time to unplug and be with it. It’s a lot of work to get there too. And so before we could be a quarter ahead, we started a week ahead, getting a month ahead, getting two months ahead. And that is a lot of planning. That’s a lot of sitting down. It’s also like I said, a lot of focused work. What are the things that I need to get off my plate? Whether it is completely deleting the task or what are the things that need to be delegated so that I can focus on the things that require the most out of me. And then what are the systems to extend the content so that we are not having to always create content, but we can use something like a long form podcast with that. And so while this other piece of like doing planning rain, and I figured out really fast that we needed someone to start coming in and helping scheduling, just starting with like scheduling and eventually handing off more stuff to them. And what does that look like? And then what do we need to let go for me? Because we just need someone who can sit there and schedule because that’s a part of the planning and the consistency is that we live in a world where you don’t actually have to be live on social as much as you think you can schedule your threads through hoots, you can schedule a podcast, you can Precor them. And I think there is a different level of confidence when you are planning ahead and you’re working on things that are timeless, that are concepts that people are always going to want to come back to then versus being in the trendy. And in the now there is a little bit of insecurity though of, is this still going to be relevant? 36, 12 months from now, if I’m working 3 to 6 months ahead, are these things going to be relevant? And that’s where we talk about evergreen content versus non evergreen things. A lot of what we teach inside of sales emission income and scale to five K are business principles and the principles of business don’t change as much as how you do it, how you do it in that application often though happens with people planning and having a year plan is a business principle. Consistency in your marketing is a business principle, how you market, how you implement your plan, what tools and Softwares that you’re using is the difference in it. And so with that, we just brought on someone to do scheduling and starting to do it. And we also went back to looking at our content and again, how we’re expanding it. It’s really easy to talk about the strategic side of everything. For me, I think very strategically, I went to business school. I managed, I have an operations, brain at heart. I think part of me probably could have suffered through an engineering degree if I really wanted to. I’m not terrible at math. And now that I know, but the other side is mindset. Something that I think about a lot is, well, it’s kind of two pieces of this. It’s putting first things first, beginning with the end of mind are kind of the same, it’s the same concepts from Stephen Covey where it’s begin with the end of mind so that you can put first things first and what are your priorities and what are your most important things? But the other side of that is also just as a business owner, preparation and planning is truly luck. There are a lot of people who just want to get lucky in business and as you continue to grow in business, you feel like you got lucky. But then you think about all the hours like I have spent so many hours in my office staring at just the wall. I’m staring at now, staring out the window, being in my chair, there’s been different offers, chairs, there’s been different notebooks like there is a lot of preparation that comes into it. But the mindset is you have to have confidence in your craft and your expertise. And you also have to be, you know, we could overmark, we could just be releasing the podcast, the emails and all this stuff and really have no consideration for sales. But it’s that other piece of like, how do these things come in and really like, what are the important things that I’m talking about that are things that are timeless. There is a benefit of being in business for five years and doing this and really understanding things a little bit deeper. But at the end of the day, like, I’m not building a business to have my whole life be focused around business. I as recently had that reminder of like your business fits into your life and life is the first thing first. And when we allow business to be all consuming because we’re not planning because we’re not people who make commitments because we fear commitments because we are in a society that fears commitments. You’re doing a disservice to yourself and with so many people who are getting bored of their businesses. My question is, where do you find other fulfillment and having a mindset around like boring businesses make billions because they plan because they put first things first because they begin with the end in mind because the founders are passionate about what they do, but they don’t expect the novice, the newbie passion to sustain them. They understand that eventually it’s going to become routine. It’s going to be a lot of these concepts that we talk about the rule of thirds. You’re going to have a third, good day, a third, medium day, a third, bad day. And So my mindset is, is just to continue to work and to batch and batch like tasks together like today, I’m batching a bunch of podcasts together. But also understanding that when you take time off, you are rejuvenating yourself and that you are thinking about the priorities and these founders who we idolize in pedestal like Bill Gates, he takes a week off a year just to read and just to hang out. And it’s less about like how can work, expand to everything that I’m doing and more about the work that I do matters. I’m going to get to a place as a business owner where I am going to be doing typically less but doing it better, getting better at it. You know, it’s like the first time you run a mile versus the 100th time or the first time you play pickleball versus the 100th. And that having this space and having this white space allows me to continue to go deep in my passions. Am I like completely ghosting my business? No, we have sales, we have the summer sales event that’s currently going on that we were promoing all of may. We have all these other things and that’s where there is a larger conversation of consistency and commitment and how you’re building it. So if you are someone who wants to take time off, my best recommendation to you is to start getting ahead and start planning and start just rooting in the mindset that you are a planner. If you have specific questions about this, go ahead and send me a message on Instagram and I hope you have a great rest of your day.