Summers in the River Realm
I grew up in the river realm of Virginia, and summer was always a magical and memorable time of the year. The river realm is literally an area of Virginia where there are rivers everywhere. Nearly everyone I knew lived close to the water, and you either had a boat or you knew someone who had a boat.
So I have so many memories of going out on the boat, going fishing, going for a boat ride, taking the boat out to a little isolated island where we would jump off and swim up to the beach. So many incredible memories, and this was just part of growing up for us. But the reason we were able to do that so much during the summer is because my dad instituted summer hours in his business very, very early on.
By noon on Friday, the office would empty out. Every single employee had finished up whatever needed to be finished before the lunch hour, and then everyone was gone. They were out on the water, out on the boat, enjoying their families, having longer weekends. That was the norm all summer long.
And because we grew up around so many other entrepreneurs, my dad's friends were all entrepreneurs, we just knew that was the standard when you worked for yourself. You got to take summer hours. You got to enjoy more time off to actually enjoy the season. I didn't really understand this as a business decision when I was a kid, clearly. I just knew that my family was a little bit different.
Most of my friends growing up didn't have entrepreneurial parents, so their parents were still going to work all day on Friday, and they didn't have long weekends every single weekend to go out on the boat. But I have taken this lesson to heart. I have implemented summer hours in my business every single year as a small business owner.
Now, I hear the fear from a lot of small business owners when I bring this idea to them. They're worried that if they're less available, they'll lose clients, they'll lose people. And I understand that fear, but I'm here to tell you it is not true. You are not gonna lose clients because you set summer hours, because it's not an availability problem. It's a communication problem. It's a boundaries problem. And we can fix that communication problem in an afternoon.
So I want you to consider this your permission slip. This is what this week's episode is all about, giving yourself permission to take summer hours and actually create some magic and memories for yourself.
Are you ready to grow from solopreneur to CEO? You're in the right place. I'm your host, Racheal Cook, and I've spent the last decade helping women entrepreneurs start and scale service-based businesses. If you're serious about building a sustainable business, it's time to put the strategies, systems, and support in place to make it happen.
Join me each week for candid conversations about stepping into your role as CEO, hard lessons learned along the way, and practical, profitable strategies to grow a sustainable business without the hustle and burnout.
Your Permission Slip for Summer Hours
Hey there, CEO. Racheal Cook here, founder of The CEO Collective and host of the Promote Yourself to CEO podcast, and I hope you're excited about this topic today. I know this is one of the things that I always accepted as a given just because it's something I grew up seeing modeled for me. But the more I talk to other small business owners, the more I realize that so many of us seem to believe we have to make our business fit someone else's expectations of what it should look like, and that is not true.
You can make your business work for you, and that includes giving you the schedule you actually want. So today's episode is your permission slip to make summer hours for yourself.
This is something I was just talking about with my chiropractor, who's also been a client, Dr. Lisa Griffith, who I have known now for, I want to say, six years, maybe even more. I was in for my regular adjustment, and she is in a new season of life because her kids are getting a little bit older. We were talking about how she's thinking of changing up her summer hours so she can enjoy more time with her kids and plan her schedule so they can do all the fun things she wants to be able to do with them now that they're a little bigger. And I was like, yes, please do that. Make that a priority for yourself.
Why Summer Hours Are Easy to Set
So summer hours are a really simple, pretty universally accepted boundary for small business. This used to be the norm everywhere I looked when I was growing up as someone who was raised in an entrepreneurial family, very tapped into the local business community. So many people I knew growing up who owned small businesses all had summer hours.
So it's a really easy boundary to set. It's a really easy thing to put in place. And if you've ever struggled to rein it in a little bit with your calendar, if you've ever struggled to reduce your availability even just a little bit because you're worried about how your clients will perceive it, this can be a great way to test that out and see how your clients actually do respond, because chances are it's gonna be just fine.
The Real Cost of Always Being Available
If you are service-based, especially the kind of service-based business that's highly relational, and your clients really are used to you being accessible, being reachable five days a week, this is a season that can really take a toll on you. It can make it feel exhausting, because you've already set the expectation to those clients that you will answer everything quickly.
I've seen people literally say, well, I try to respond to messages within an hour. What? There is nothing that any of my clients could ever send me that actually needs a response within an hour. I am not saving lives here. There's nothing that is that urgent. So I think this is one of those times where you really want to recalibrate your boundaries and reset expectations.
If you have set the standard that you're gonna respond instantly to people, then guess what? They're always gonna expect you to respond instantly. If you've set the standard that you're available Friday at 5:00 for a meeting, then they're always gonna expect that you will take that meeting at 5:00.
But if you declare out loud and let everyone know, hey, it's summer, I'm really excited about this time with my family, and I know that one of the things that's gonna make our relationship work as a client and a service provider is to clearly tell you here's when I'm working, here's when I'm not, and here's what to expect with my communication during this season.
This is how you stop white-knuckling your own calendar. This is how you stop being scared that you need to be on call for every single client. So this is your permission slip, and guess what? The permission is coming from you. It's not coming from me.
Announce It Early and Everywhere
As I shared, my parents ran their businesses this way, so this isn't theory for me. This is something I grew up watching. Everyone enjoyed more of an extended weekend, where they would get Friday half days, and it never caused upheaval in the business as far as clients, because they communicated this early and often.
By the time school was out, which was kind of the official summer's here marker, by the time Memorial Day rolled around, summer hours were set, and that meant they were announced everywhere. They had updated their website. They had updated the email auto replies. Everybody's email footers had a note in there about summer hours. They had updated their automated voicemail system. There was a sign on the door to the office letting people know what the hours were.
So it was very clear. It didn't apologize. There was no long explanation, just, we are currently on summer hours. We are available Monday through Thursday from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. We take off from noon to 1:00 for lunch every single day. Friday, we are available by appointment only from 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM. No apology, no long explanation, just a new normal stated plainly before the season started and available for everyone to see, to hear, to get that information if they were trying to get support.
So it really is that simple. The whole move is for you to decide your hours, and then we need to make sure we are communicating it everywhere your clients are communicating with you, well before summer is underway. So you don't need to have a local business, you don't need to have a brick and mortar business, you don't even need to have an official office that people come to.
Probably if you're anything like me, that's not how your business works. I mostly work from my home office, I work downtown at Commonhouse, I work at co-working spaces. So it's not like I'm gonna put a sign on the door saying closed, summer hours. But there are people who need to know what to expect from me.
The Autoresponder That Does the Work
So this is one thing that I make sure I really communicate via email for the most part, and I'm gonna walk you through a little bit of that. One thing I make sure I always do, of course, is my team knows what my summer hours are. I've updated my model calendar. I've communicated that with everyone on the team.
Then I go in and I update my email autoresponder. This could be your out of office messenger, but I find that during the summer months, people are used to things taking a little bit longer. I like to use an out of office autoresponder. It doesn't always say out of office. It often says something like, hey, here's what's going on right now, and here's quick links if you need anything from me.
This is where you can let people know, hey, we're enjoying our summer, which means things are slowing down just a little bit. We'll be checking email once a day, but you can expect that it'll take a day or two to hear back from us. In the meantime, here's a couple links of what you might be looking for.
That little autoresponder does a lot of work. It takes the pressure off, because people get it as soon as they email in, it lets them know what my hours are, what my response time is, and I give a little mini FAQ. Here's the top things you might be emailing us about. And that just takes so much of the pressure off. It really does.
Telling Your Clients Before Summer Starts
Then I make sure that I'm communicating that to my clients. So I send an email out to my clients before summer hours start. In my business, we use a community called Circle to host The CEO Collective and everything else, so we make sure that's posted in there. We add it to our client newsletter. Every Monday, we send out a newsletter to all of our active clients, so they're getting the update, any changes that are happening.
So we've now communicated proactively via email, we've posted in our community, there's an autoresponder up and ready to go. That is really all it takes. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that.
Planning for Vacations and Longer Breaks
Now, what about when you're actually taking time off for a vacation? Summer hours just handle the normal week if you're gonna be a slower response time or you're gonna take a day off. By the way, you can also institute summer hours even if you do plan to work, but you just need a hard reset on people's expectations and availability.
Let's say you're trying to protect more of your time to do deep work during the summer. In the last episode, we talked about how you can use this season strategically. Maybe you wanna keep a day for yourself just to work on a project you don't have time for the rest of the year. Your clients don't need to know that. Just tell them, hey, I'm on summer hours, no longer available on Fridays. That can be a way to reset expectations, and it can be incredibly easy for you to do.
Now, what about when you're actually gone for a longer stretch of time? If you are gonna be out of town for a week or two weeks or longer for vacation, again, I like to plan this in advance. If I'm only gonna be out for a week, it's usually not that serious. It's not gonna require a whole lot of planning or effort, because I already work well in advance for a lot of things.
But if you're gonna be out for two to four weeks, I like to make sure to communicate that as clearly as possible, and this is where I will proactively tell my clients in advance, I'm gonna be out of office from this date to this date. I will check back in on any emails once I arrive on this date. If you need something before I leave, get it to me by this date.
I actually worked with one of my clients who just did this. They're taking a sabbatical in August, so they've started communicating to their clients that they're gonna be taking a sabbatical, and anything they're working on needs to be ready to hit a pause point before a certain date. So those clients have to get certain information to them, and they have to have certain things done in order to make sure they continue on the right timeline.
So it's all about clarity. It's all about having clear dates, a clear path, clear deadlines. I've already done this for a big trip that we are taking to Italy. We're going to Italy for almost a month, so I started talking to my clients about this months ago. They know well in advance what's happening. I'm gonna do a whole episode about how we are planning for a month in Italy. So no one is panicking that I'm gone, because everybody knows this is a trip we have been planning. Everyone's gonna be well taken care of. They all know how I'm gonna be checking in. They're all gonna know all the details. More is coming about that.
Building Stronger Boundaries in Your Business
So let me pause here for a second. Everything I just walked through, the summer hours, the out of office autoresponder, the way you communicate it so that you keep your clients calm and keep everybody feeling like you're being a strong leader here, this is the front end of something even bigger that helps you protect your time, your energy, your capacity. This is how we build stronger boundaries in our business.
The On-Demand CEO Retreat is a great place to start if you haven't gone through this process with us. It's bundled with the Client Growth Engine right now, and it's the last time it'll be available at this price point. The price will go up in the fall. So I encourage you to take advantage of that program, because it is designed to help you build and maintain your real capacity instead of constantly feeling like you're trying to keep your head above water with your business.
Living by the Model Calendar
Okay. Back to how I practically make this happen. This has to do with my calendar, and I've shared this before, I live and die by my calendar. But it's not just opening my Google Calendar and scheduling stuff willy-nilly inside of it. I use what I call a model calendar.
I use Google Calendar for everything, and one of the things I love about Google Calendar is I can make multiple calendars and then toggle them on and off. My model calendar is my ideal week. It doesn't show actual appointments, but it does show here's when I'm doing this in my business. And there's a real reason why I love this. The biggest is that it makes sure I don't drop a ball throughout the week.
There's certain things you have to keep an eye on every single week in your business. You need to dedicate some time to marketing. You need to dedicate some time to sales. You need to dedicate some time to client delivery. If you have a team, you need to dedicate some time to managing your team and making sure they have everything they need to keep moving forward. So all of those are blocked into my model calendar.
I know what my blocks of time are gonna look like, and I have themes for those blocks of time, and at this point they're really theme days. So I know my Monday theme is my CEO day, and that kicks off with my CEO date, where I'm checking in with my 90-day plan and checking in with my 12-month plan. Tuesdays are usually a client-facing day if I have any clients who need a one-on-one with me, or I need to check in on clients, or I'm building strategy maps for clients.
Wednesdays are content days, so I always have time blocked out to create content, whether it's this podcast or newsletters or emails or anything like that. And then Thursdays are CEO Collective days, and that's when I do all the work to take care of all my clients inside of The CEO Collective.
That gives my week shape. It makes sure I know exactly what I need to stay focused on each and every week. It helps me see my capacity each and every week. If Tuesdays are my client-facing days and I only have four available times for clients, I know exactly what that capacity looks like.
The other reason I really encourage everyone to have a model calendar is it's not just for me. This is something other people can use to help me manage my calendar, to know when I'm available, and right now, during the summer months, this is how I can communicate with my husband and my kids around what I am focused on. So the model calendar turns the boundaries that are living in your head into something other people can actually see and plan around.
I usually update my model calendar every season, and I update it every season because things are changing every season.
Working With My Life Instead of Against It
My kids are all teenagers right now. They didn't even wake up this morning until 11:30. So if my kids are being teenagers, sleeping in every day, which is totally fine, I want them to be teenagers, it does give me a window where, because I'm a little bit more of an early bird, I can move my work hours a little bit earlier in the day. So there's a lot of mornings where I get up, I have my coffee around 7:00, and by 8:00 I'm already locked in. I'm already getting a lot of my work done, and I'm able to do it when the house is quiet. I don't have to worry about the kids being too loud or getting distracted or needing me. They're not even gonna worry about me until they're awake two and a half or three hours later.
So for work that is easier for me when I can be alone, when I need to record content, I can plan and my husband and I can plan around that. Since I work from home most of the time, if I need to record and I wanna record at home instead of taking everything down to the podcast studio at Commonhouse, then we'll make a plan that he's gonna take the kids out. If I have a lot of client calls, I might plan to do the things I can do at home in the morning, and then I'll leave to a co-working space later in the afternoon so I can do those calls without feeling distracted or interrupted.
So this isn't luck. This is making sure I can communicate my needs to everyone who's involved in them. I can communicate to the people in my home what's going on and what I need during those times, and we can problem solve together. We can make sure we're all on the same page.
As someone who's a highly sensitive person and honestly easily distracted, this helps me make sure I can get my best work done and not find myself feeling resentful that I can hear the kids moving around the house, or that my son is loudly playing a video game, or that my daughter is practicing her bass guitar, or whatever the kids are gonna do. This is how I can actually make sure everything is working with me instead of against me.
What to Do This Week
So here's what I actually want you to do this week, and it's just a few things. One, protect your weekly CEO date. Whatever else moves around this summer, the CEO date is a block that needs to be a standing appointment in your calendar. It stays all the time. Doesn't matter if you're doing summer hours or if you're in a busy season. This is a standing appointment to help you work on the business, to help you track against your 90-day plan, to help you track against your 12-month goals, to help you stay focused and build momentum in your business. We have a free CEO date checklist. You can get access to that in the show notes. This is one of the most powerful habits I can ever teach anybody.
The second is to set your summer hours. Before you build out your model calendar, let's decide what your summer hours are going to be. If you wanna take Fridays off, take Fridays off. Maybe you wanna take Thursdays and Fridays off. Maybe you wanna have half days. Whatever it is, sit down and really look at your calendar, look at your family, look at what's going on over the next few months, and be intentional.
So decide your summer hours, and then build your model calendar. That's how you can block things in. Maybe you decide, like me, you wanna have a client-facing day, and then you wanna have a no-call day so you can do deep work you never get to do the rest of the time. This is an internal document just for you. It's something you share with your team. It's something you share with your family. It's something you can use to communicate availability for your clients, but this is one thing that can change every season depending on what's actually going on in your life and business.
And then once you've made those decisions, go ahead and announce them. Announce what your seasonal hours, your summer hours, are going to be. Announce what the expectations are. What is the time it will take you to reply, your response time? What do people need to know about your availability? If you're only taking appointments on certain days, make sure you are clearly communicating that to everyone. You do not need to ask your clients for permission. You're the boss of your business. You just need to clearly explain and articulate to everyone how summer works in your business.
And if you want more help designing the systems that are going to support you while you're taking time off, while you're enjoying your summer season, check out the On-Demand CEO Retreat. That's what it's built for. It is bundled up with the Client Growth Engine right now. The price is going up in the fall. This is one of the best ways to start building more infrastructure into your business and more of a rhythm that makes your business actually life-proof, where you're not always scrambling to do the things you need to do. Instead, you're proactively and intentionally designing it.
Next Thursday, we're talking about how to pay for the time off you just protected. That's right, how to continue generating revenue during a slower summer season. I'm gonna share with you how we pre-sell the fall in the middle of the summer, so deposits keep coming in and cash flow is handled long before I ever get on a plane for my summer vacation. I'll talk to you then.