Steps to prepare your business for the upcoming holiday

Give yourself time to be present. Give yourself time to charge the batteries, give yourself time to enjoy the gift of presence so that you can refill your gas tank and come back to rock and roll and win the Olympics

Preparing for Holidays off

The reason that we do what we do and we have the impact that we have is so that we can also utilize that business as leverage, to have an impact in our life and we have to be present. So my one thing is I don’t want you to be a firefighter. You don’t get to go on holiday, go on Christmas, go on New year, going any holiday of the year and then come back and be like, I gotta put on all these fires.You can prevent all of them. And with some focus and intentionality. You will be able to enjoy yourself, come back stronger than ever, and absolutely rock the timeframe after the holiday

We broke this down into three simple buckets for you on how to prepare your business and your life for the upcoming holiday. And the three buckets are simple. Bucket. Number one is communicate. Bucket number two is test and bucket number three is clean. Use this as a guide, add things to it that feel good to you. Take things away that might not be aligned to you or your business sync with your team. On coming up with a plan, from everybody, from you in the vision seat, CEO seat CMOs, CTOC wherever you are in the business. Or if you’re an employee in a business, bring this to the boss of the business, bring this to the top, to help everybody win and come up with your plan

Bucket #1 – Communicate

The first place that you have to communicate is with your team. So you have to make sure that everybody is aware of all the important initiatives that have to be wrapped up before the holidays. You have to be aware of everything that needs to be wrapped up before the holidays, and you have to put dates on them and close them so that they are complete. You have peace of mind and you can do the next step when we get there. Number two, do you have to let everybody on the team know what to expect when they come back from holiday? Hey guys, we’re going to be off this time. This is what it’s going to look like when we get back, this is how we’re going to come back into the office. This is how we’re going to set up a meeting. This is how we’re going to align. You have to come up with a plan to lead the team. Number three, let everybody know your availability over the holidays ahead of time. Come up with very clear communication boundaries and escalation procedures. Hey guys, I’m not going to be available for four days around Christmas and on December 27th, because that’s actually my birthday. And then number four is give your team permission to take some time off and focus on themselves and family, give your team permission, tell them to go away, tell them to ignore you.

So make sure everybody’s aware of all the important initiatives that have to be wrapped. Make sure you let everybody know what to expect when they come back from the holidays. Make sure everybody knows your availability over the holidays. And how to communicate what to escalate and then give your team permission to take time and focus on themselves and family. And my last step is make sure you ask your team on how to best communicate with your customers.

So in the bucket of communication, you have team and then you have customers. So now when we get into customers, you need to communicate to your customers. You need to lead them as they prepare for the holiday. So set them up to win while you’re away, set expectations, let them know what coming leading up to the holiday is and where you’re going to be over the holiday. Let them know what to expect when you come back from the holiday. Let them know your availability as a company over the holidays and give them permission to take time off and focus on themselves and families. You have plenty of communication channels. You probably have an email list. You probably have social media, you can have ads. You have a lot of ways to do this, but you need to treat your customers like you treat your team and you need to set expectations. That’s what leadership is. That’s what our business is. That is what we are doing. And so help them prepare and set them up to win without you so they can have wins in their life. Associated with you and then let them know when you’re coming back and what to expect when you come back so they can get excited. They can come back in, they can maintain flow with you and keep going.

Bucket #2 – Test

You need to test everything that’s going to be running well, you’re gone. Double check and triple check, just to make sure to give yourself that peace of mind, but think about all the things that we have running while we’re gone, you and all of your employees get to take some time off your ads can run, set them up, go into your ad account and set some parameters. So if it breaks, it shuts itself off. If it hits a certain threshold, it’s such itself off. That was a hard thing to say. If it hits a certain threshold, it shuts itself off. If it stops converting at it was converting, it shuts itself off. Your ads team knows how to do this, let them do it. What about your scheduled posts? Do you have them scheduled? Are they scheduled it in Facebook? They schedule it in creator studio for Instagram or your podcasts scheduled. Test them, make sure the links are live. Make sure they’re good. Test one today and get it scheduled to nobody can see it. Have it published privately and make sure it works.

Test your email automations. Do you have emails prescriptive out, check them, read them, and proofread them. Check your funnels if you have them. Check your products if you have them check your integrations. If you have them, this is a perfect time to do a full the wall audit. Of all the moving parts in your business and be aware that they’re oiled they’re working properly, or they might need a little bit of attention to run smooth if they’re ignored for a couple of days, because they’re doing their job, check your zaps. If you have integrations, like when somebody buys this, it goes here and it goes here, create some test emails and go through all of them, go through the entire business with you and your team. And ask them all, Hey, we’re going to be off. What would we need to check to make sure that all of us can not show up, not log in, not look at anything for five days and make a list and then go check and check and check and design it to run. As it’s supposed to do to allow you to do that. The reasons technology and automations are so powerful is because they are designed to replace us. They are not designed for us to micromanage every day. And then take all of our time doing it.

So utilize them to their capacity. These things work every single day. And when you are aware of them and you pay attention to them, you oil them correctly, they work. So make sure everything is functioning properly in case nothing is checked by a human for the next week and then utilize those same automations with parameters you have things like in Zapier, if one of your zaps doesn’t work, it sends you an email. You have these safety nets in place to do this, but it’s time to look at the business and time to look at the flow. As an easy way to create space. How beautiful is it that we can have our ads running during the holidays wishing our customers a Merry Christmas, a happy new year, a happy Valentine’s Day, a happy Thanksgiving. Well also generating and selling our products, which is going into our store, which is automating and sending them to our three PL and then shipping the product out, which is then triggering the emails that we pre wrote for those sequences are those broadcasts are going out that we wrote. But if you take a little bit of time to plan and you do it correctly, you get peace of mind when you are out or enjoying the reason you’re building this business and you get to come back to everything working, and then you assess and you move on. No reason to fight fires, no reason to do anything. So test everything and please test everything leaves no stone unturned. Peace of mind is a gift.

Bucket #3 – Clean

There are three places that you can clean. You can clean physically. You can clean digitally and you can clean mentally. Start physically clean up your desk, clean up your office, have all of your employees clean up. The best thing to come back to is a clean space free of clutter. Ready to see, ready to go and ready to get to work with no distractions. So use this as an opportunity, clean up the office right before you leave, maybe decorate a new thing.

Maybe remove something to create space, maybe get rid of that thing that’s been say, sitting there that you’ve been putting off. When you come back, it’s already handled.

Clean up your digital space. Empty your inbox, clean up your desktop, clean up your Dropbox. Get rid of all these extra files. Get rid of all this clutter. Have you and your employees do the whole thing, make a competition out of it. Before you guys go out of the office, get on a zoom party and have a competition with everybody’s doing it. Like who can clean their desktop, the fastest, you know, who can clean their physical space. Give your team a competition who decorated their desks the best for when they come back, but clean your physical space. Clean your digital space and then clean your mental space. When you leave that office, whether it’s your virtual office, your digital office, your laptop, wherever it is, I want you to leave everything there. So in the mental space process, whatever you have to process, do some breath, work, and write some things down. And have a notebook, have a physical medium and write out everything that’s open in your brain and don’t leave until everything that’s opening your brain has been documented. So your brain is on paper. You know what you have when you come back and then you can go be fully present. And bask in the results that you’ve created in your life and in your business.

And it doesn’t matter where you are. Give yourself time to be present. Give yourself time to charge the batteries, give yourself time to enjoy the gift of presence so that you can refill your gas tank and come back to rock and roll and win the Olympics. It feels amazing when you come back to a clean and organized space, it feels amazing when you come back to working with people that are all in the same thing.