First and foremost, thank you. As a group, all of you are so supportive of our self-care and we appreciate it so much. For those of you who are newer with us, you may not have heard the common refrain of one vacation every quarter for at least 5 consecutive days. Recruiting is stressful and we need breaks when we’re not working.

Let’s define “not working.” You’re an entrepreneur, so you can’t ever completely stop working (until you’ve fully scaled your team.) Given that, how do you shut off every quarter to decompress? There are a few rules we follow, and would encourage you to adopt:

• When on vacation, all outbound calling activity stops. You aren’t prospecting for new candidates or new clients by phone.
• Electronic recruiting or business development automation can and should continue while on vacation.
• Should a prospective client, hot candidate, or someone inside of an existing deal reach out to you – take the call and address the issues or opportunity.
• If you’ll be notifying others of your vacation, have a clever and fun OOO responder to increase your personal brand. Ask me and I’ll send you mine.

That third bullet is something we live by. If you need us, we’re available. A weird thing happens when we go on vacation – we have a lot more available time! As most of you know, scheduling is often tight with our busy calendars. Not on vacation. If you have an issue, reach out. Just because we’re on a beach doesn’t mean we can’t help you.

The fourth bullet is interesting as well, and something we’d encourage you to do. Anytime you can show a lot of personality in an out of office email, you should.