Month: June 2026

Taking Time Off: A Business Owner’s Guide to Switching Off (Almost)

Every business owner I speak to says the same thing: “I need a holiday.” And yet, when it comes to actually booking one, taking time off, and being fully present somewhere other than their inbox, most of them find a reason not to.

I’ve been running Get Ahead for over a decade. I’ve had to learn, sometimes the hard way, that taking time off isn’t a luxury. It’s a business decision. The planning, prioritisation and delegation that makes a holiday possible are the same disciplines that make a business scalable.

Here’s what I’ve learned, and what I now share with every business owner I work with.

Why do so many business owners struggle to take time off?

Because the business feels like it needs them. And often, it genuinely does, but usually because systems, handovers and trusted support haven’t been put in place yet. The business isn’t the problem. The infrastructure around it is.

When I talk to owners who haven’t had a proper break in years, it’s rarely because they don’t want one. It’s because the idea of stepping away feels riskier than staying put. That’s the thing we need to solve.

What does good preparation actually look like?

It starts well before you pack. I’d suggest a minimum of four weeks’ lead time if you’re going away for more than a few days. The core areas to address are:

  • Priorities: what absolutely must happen while you’re away, and what can wait
  • Delegation: who is responsible for what, with clear authority to make decisions, not just to escalate
  • Systems: are your CRM, accounts, files and shared drives in order? Can someone else navigate them without you?
  • Communication: who is your point of contact for clients, and what’s the protocol if something genuinely urgent arises?

The key word in that third point is delegation with authority. Handing tasks to someone and then remaining the bottleneck for every decision isn’t delegation. It’s just distributed stress. Trust the people you’ve briefed, and let them get on with it.

What about HR considerations when you’re the one stepping away?

This is something business owners with small teams often overlook. Before you go:

  • Make sure any team members or contractors have a clear point of contact in your absence, with the authority to make day-to-day decisions
  • Set clear expectations about what warrants contacting you and what doesn’t
  • Check that any outstanding HR matters (appraisals, onboarding, contracts) are resolved or safely deferred
  • If you use a virtual team, ensure they’re fully briefed and have everything they need before you leave

The businesses that run smoothly in an owner’s absence are the ones where the team has been trusted, briefed properly, and given room to act. Not the ones where the owner is fielding WhatsApps on the beach.

How do you handle the personal side of being away? The dog, the cat, the house?

This is where our Lifestyle Manager service comes in, and honestly, it’s one of the things I’m most proud of offering. The mental load of a holiday isn’t just professional. It’s personal.

Sorting pet care, ensuring the house is looked after, managing deliveries, handling the things that pile up at home while you’re away: these are all things that can be handed off. A good Lifestyle Manager takes the whole list, not just the work side of it.

When the personal logistics are sorted, you actually get to have a holiday. Not just a change of location where you’re still mentally juggling everything. And knowing that Sydney (aka The Prince) is in good hands and enjoying himself means that I can too!

Do you ever stay contactable while you’re away?

Yes, deliberately and on my own terms. I make sure someone knows how to reach me if something genuinely needs a call. In practice, in all the years I’ve been running Get Ahead, that call has never come.

But knowing it’s possible if needed means I can actually relax. It’s a safety net I’ve chosen to have, not a leash. There’s a difference. And building the right team around you is what makes that distinction possible.

What’s your pre-holiday checklist?

Here’s what I work through before I go anywhere:

  • Goals reviewed: what needs to be done before I leave, and what can genuinely wait
  • Delegation confirmed: named people, clear responsibilities, authority granted
  • Systems in order: shared drives, CRM, accounts, inboxes all accessible and up to date
  • Social media scheduled: posts queued for the duration, evergreen content repurposed where needed
  • Client communications sent: anyone who needs to know I’m away has been told, with a named contact
  • Virtual support briefed: telephone answering, email management, any ongoing tasks handed over with a proper brief
  • Personal logistics sorted: pet care, house, anything domestic that would otherwise be sitting in the back of my mind

What’s the business case for actually taking the holiday?

You come back better. Clearer thinking, more energy, more perspective on the things that actually matter. Every owner I know who has properly stepped away and come back says the same thing: they could see the business more clearly from the outside than they ever could from inside it.

The planning that goes into a good handover also tends to reveal gaps in your systems that you’d been papering over. It’s an audit you didn’t know you needed.

And frankly, if your business can’t function without you for a week or two, that’s the most important signal you could have about what to fix next.

How can Get Ahead help?

Whether you need telephone answering and email management while you’re away, a virtual assistant to keep things ticking over, or a Lifestyle Manager to handle the personal side of life, we’ve been helping business owners take proper breaks for over a decade.

Talk to your local Regional Director about what cover would look like for your business. You might be closer to a real holiday than you think.

www.getaheadva.com or call 0330 223 7580

Rebecca Newenham is the founder of Get Ahead, an award-winning virtual assistant and outsourcing franchise she launched in 2010 following a successful career in corporate retail buying. With a team of over 90 virtual assistants and franchisees, Get Ahead provides flexible marketing and business support to SMEs across the UK. A passionate advocate for flexible working, Rebecca is also a Franchise Consultant at Ashtons, helping founders scale with clarity and confidence. She hosts LinkedIn Local Guildford and is a Baby Naming Celebrant, proof that a purposeful career doesn’t have to fit a single mould. At the heart of everything Rebecca does is people: connecting them, supporting them and helping them build businesses that genuinely work for their lives.

The Latest from get Ahead

Why SME Projects Often Stall, And the Missing Piece That Makes Them Work 

I spent nearly two decades working in supply chain and project management at Morrisons. In that time, I was part of projects most people would find genuinely daunting: integrating the Safeway business after the acquisition, implementing Oracle across manufacturing sites, and building new supply chain teams from scratch. 

What I learned from those experiences – and what I see confirmed every week in my work with SMEs across Yorkshire – is this: the biggest risk to any change project rarely lies in the strategy. It lies in the structure around it. 

Specifically, in what’s missing from it. 

The moment every growing business recognises 

There comes a point in the life of most growing businesses where change stops being optional. 

A new CRM system needs implementing. An operational process needs redesigning. A reporting framework needs rebuilding. A new service line needs launching with proper structure behind it. 

These projects are sensible and often genuinely important. The leadership team agrees the objective. The budget is broadly understood. Someone is asked to lead it. 

And then, quietly, something happens. 

The project slows. Decisions drift. Tasks get started but not completed. Months pass, and the business finds itself asking the same question it was asking at the beginning: why hasn’t this moved forward? 

What large organisations know, and that SMEs rarely have 

When I was part of the Safeway integration, the project didn’t succeed because the strategy was brilliant. It succeeded because there was an entire infrastructure of people keeping it moving – project managers, operational coordinators, finance oversight, communications leads, administrative support. 

Each of those roles played a small but essential part. They weren’t the headline act. But without them, nothing would have come together. 

In most SMEs, those roles simply don’t exist. 

Instead, the project sits alongside everyone’s existing responsibilities. A director sponsors it. A manager contributes when they can. A supplier delivers their specific piece. Individually, everyone involved is capable. But the connective tissue that holds the whole thing together is missing. 

The keystone nobody talks about 

In architecture, a keystone is the single stone at the top of an arch that holds everything else in place. Without it, the structure collapses – not because the other stones aren’t solid, but because there’s nothing binding them together. 

SME projects have their own version of the keystone. It’s rarely the most visible part of the work. It’s the unglamorous, practical coordination layer that makes everything else function. 

It’s the person who orchestrates the meetings and keeps momentum between them. The one who translates a good idea into a clearly articulated operating model that everyone can actually follow. The one tracking actions, chasing progress, making sure decisions are documented and communicated before they get lost in someone’s inbox. 

It’s budget and resource tracking that’s genuinely up to date. Stakeholder management that keeps everyone aligned as the project evolves. The discipline – quiet but essential – of making sure that the right things happen at the right time. 

None of these tasks feel like “the project.” But without them, the project doesn’t really happen. 

This isn’t a leadership problem 

I want to be clear about something, because I see it misdiagnosed all the time. 

When SME projects stall, it’s rarely because the leadership is weak or the vision is flawed. It’s a structural consequence of growth. Most SMEs don’t have the scale to employ dedicated project teams for every piece of change work. Most senior people are already running the business day-to-day, at full capacity. 

The strategic thinking exists. The expertise exists. The intention exists. What’s missing is the operational structure that keeps everything moving – and that gap doesn’t close by itself. 

Where the right support changes everything 

This is where external support – the right kind – makes a real difference. 

Not consultants who produce a report and disappear. Practical, operational people who understand how change actually works – and who can step in to provide the coordination layer that most SME projects lack. 

At Get Ahead, this is something we see first-hand. Every project is different, and every business has its own pressures and priorities. But the pattern we return to again and again is the same: once the missing glue is in place, projects that were drifting suddenly regain momentum. Not because the strategy changed, but because the structure around it finally exists. 

The support might look like project coordination and orchestration. Process mapping and operating model design. Communication and stakeholder management. Budget and resource tracking. Sometimes it’s simply someone who makes sure things actually happen – consistently, at the right time, without the business owner having to carry all of that themselves. 

Change doesn’t just need vision – it needs structure 

Most SME leaders I work with have no shortage of ideas for improving their business. Better systems. Better processes. Better ways of working that would genuinely free them up to focus on growth. 

The ideas aren’t the obstacle. The gap between idea and operational reality is. 

Bridging that gap is detailed, unglamorous, genuinely important work. The coordination. The communication. The tracking. The quiet discipline of making sure things actually happen, in the right order, at the right time. 

That’s the keystone. And in many growing businesses, it’s the piece that makes everything else possible. 

If you’re leading a change project that’s lost momentum – or planning one and want to get the structure right from the start – I’d love to have a conversation. 

Get Ahead’s team works across the full range of project support – from coordination and documentation to process design and stakeholder management. We provide the glue that makes change stick. 

 Get in touch: fiona@getaheadva.com  

About the Author 

Fiona Ibbetson is the Get Ahead Regional Director for Yorkshire, supporting over 40 active clients each month with flexible, expert-led outsourcing across marketing, HR, finance and business support. She joined Get Ahead in 2018 and has since built a thriving regional network serving businesses from sole traders to multi-million-pound organisations. Before joining Get Ahead, Fiona spent 20 years in senior management roles in the fresh supply chain sector, including at Wm Morrisons, where she led large teams and oversaw complex planning and operations across multiple sites. That background gave her a strong grounding in commercial awareness, stakeholder management and operational efficiency. Fiona’s areas of expertise include consultative client management, board-level support, operational capacity and helping leadership teams protect their focus as their organisations scale.