Tea with the Queen

[00:00:00] Emma: Welcome back to Tea with the Queen. Today I want to talk about running your business during school holidays
[00:00:24] it's the bane of a lot of business owners existence and it has been the bane of my existence as well. But one of the reasons I went into having my own business is so that I could spend more time with my littlest daughter who is now 10.
[00:00:38] My husband is also a school teacher, so school holidays are very important in our house. And when I first went into working for myself, I decided to take all of the school holidays off. I thought, you know what? There's no point in going into business if you don't really get what you want. So I pulled out the calendar and I crossed off all of the school holidays.
[00:00:57] That's what I thought that I wanted. That's actually not what I wanted. We don't actually have any family here on the East coast. And so we are very reliant on ourselves. And so the school holidays, me having the school holidays off worked for everyone in my family, except me. Because what happened after school holidays is the reality.
[00:01:18] The reality is actually. I needed to get some work done in those school holidays. The reality was I was so time crunched when I got back that I had to work twice as hard just to get everything back on track. That's not a holiday. The family felt like a holiday, but I felt a bit wrecked. And so I had to work out how I reframe, how I wanted to work and how I wanted it to work for me, even though I had in my mind, it should have worked this way.
[00:01:44] We also, a lot of our, clients, a lot of our ideal clients, a lot of our target market, they are also juggling business life, school holidays as well. So one of the decisions we made very early on in our business is that we wouldn't schedule any group stuff for school holidays. Now that gets particularly tricky around Australia when all the school holidays are out of sync, but we try our very best to, to not do that.
[00:02:10] And so what do I do now? Once I've realized actually having all the school holidays off doesn't serve me. Well, after many years of trial and error, we have now landed on a rhythm that works for our family. And I thought I'd share that with you along with some things to think about, because we're all not lucky enough to have school holidays off.
[00:02:29] I get that. What we do now is We all take the first week of the school holidays off, and this is great because I know in 10 weeks time, I'm going to get a break, and that's perfect. So we take the first week off, so that's 5 the first 5 days, and this is for the shorter school holidays. I'll talk about the longer school holidays later, but for the shorter 5 days.
[00:02:49] So we are enrolled in schools, so we only get two weeks off each term. So I take the first week off. Normally that first week we have a little holiday house. We go to that holiday house where I can still work, but I try not to work in that first week. Then in the second week, I don't schedule clients on the Monday, but I either come back from our holiday house and Evie and Mark stay there, or I stay there and do some work, but I normally work.
[00:03:19] A lighter second week of school holidays. So I make sure that I don't feel like I miss out on fun because I know that they're doing fun stuff. So I might say to them, Hey, Tuesday, I'm going to work for a couple of hours in the morning. And then in the afternoon we'll go and do something together. So I'm either working from my home office or from the beach or doing things that are non client facing.
[00:03:40] Before I go any further, I want to appreciate and acknowledge the privilege that I have had and that it's taken me years to get this right. If you're in your first year through to your seventh year, you may not have nailed this yet, but it's coming. And what I will say to you is experiment as much as you possibly can.
[00:03:59] It's like during the school term. During the school term, we've got ourselves into a beautiful rhythm. I work school hours on, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, but I work longer days, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and we use before school and after school care to make sure that that can happen. we've played with that rhythm.
[00:04:15] We've tweaked that a little bit over the years, but now we're in this beautiful rhythm. You just have to work out What works for you. First of all, as the business owner and as someone trying to get self care in and what works for your family. And those two things might not match. And that's okay.
[00:04:30] That's okay. You just got to work out what the balance is, right? You got to work out how much time do you actually want to take off? are you better off taking So for me, I take school holidays, and then I have a couple of days across the course of the quarter where I take some time just for me. I go to the cabin on my own.
[00:04:49] I do some thinking. I do content creation, whatever it is. So I do that outside of school holiday time. Yeah. And so, um, I I think there's a privilege here that needs to be acknowledged that I'm in a place where I have worked through this and gone through the mess in the middle of my business and my business is in a good spot where I can actually make some of these choices.
[00:05:10] Yeah. And I realized that not everyone is in that same place or can make this work, but what can you do? So what will work for you and what will work for your family? There's a couple of things that you may have already That you may be worth reconsidering or trying, remembering that you can change it at any time if it doesn't work for you.
[00:05:30] This is the beauty of why I think experimentation works really well. So first of all, in the school holidays, Can you work shorter days? My clients tend to decide if they want to work in the morning or the afternoon. Most of them say, I do a few hours in the morning. The kids have a slow morning.
[00:05:49] They get themselves together. They do quiet activity in the morning. And then after lunch, we go and do something. We get them out of the house. We go down to the beach or we go and kick a soccer ball or a footy ball. We go to the local park and we wear them out for a few hours down there. And then we do it all again.
[00:06:04] That's the first thing. I use a schedule. So if Evie is home for some reason and I'm solo parenting, I use a schedule. So I actually physically print out my calendar of what my day looks like. Let's say it's a Tuesday and I will show Evie the bits of where I am. I have calls or I have something that I need to do.
[00:06:23] And then she writes a schedule out that matches my schedule. She loves it because she gets involved. And also she knows here's when the mum's on a call. Here's when she's not, here's what we get to do after that. and so she knows that she has activities set for that time. There are a myriad of school holiday programs that you can tap into.
[00:06:42] School holiday programs are the best. They take them on excursions or they do incursions and there are so many available locally, through council, or with friends, or whatever. Feel free to use those guilt free we feel so guilty because we're like, they're on school holidays. I should spend every minute with them.
[00:07:00] No, you don't need to, you don't need to. You got to get some work done. So use school holiday programs guilt free. The other thing that I love is swapping with other parents in a similar situation as yourself. There are a lot of people now working from home. And if you are a small business owner, chances are you might work from home.
[00:07:16] And so they're juggling as well. So I like to swap time. So I will take someone's kid for the morning one day, and they will take my kid for the morning another day. Okay. Being able to swap with other parents the same space as you works really well as well. My little secret is using our local library.
[00:07:34] We have a beautiful brand new library. I don't know if you've been into a library in ages, but the new ones are phenomenal. They are not all can't talk. They have a section for people working. They have pods for people doing quiet work. They have spaces for, Kids reading out loud. And so sometimes we just go to the library together.
[00:07:55] I get some work done and I'd go, let's, I got to do an hour. He will go off and read a book or listen to something. Perfect. Now everyone runs to their local library. the use of family support is really We don't have any. And so I wish we had family support, right? Uh, but we have pseudo aunts and uncles and, uh, one of our aunts and uncles loves to have a day with Evie or a sleepover with Evie or something with Evie in the school holidays.
[00:08:23] So we set that up for her when we both have stuff on as well. The school holidays. Yes, they're about the kids, but also if your family, so my husband is a school teacher, he gets school holidays off. So actually doesn't get a break from kids. So I always try and make sure that he gets a couple of days to himself and I get a couple of days to myself that makes our family system work.
[00:08:45] So that's what I do from a school holiday perspective. As we're coming up to school holidays, what will you try? I did tell you that I would tell you what we do over the longer school holidays. Our school finishes, pretty late. So my husband finishes like on the 20th of December or something and Evie is not far behind or not a little bit further ahead.
[00:09:04] So we take the full month off. I take the full month from that point onwards off. And so I'm really resting and resetting and rejuvenating for January. That's Towards the end of January, I start to get a bit itchy feet. That's just me. And so I really want to get into things in the last two weeks of January, but I, I take a lot of that time off.
[00:09:24] That's for late nights and sleepovers and all the things as well. As you think about this, what will you set up? What will you set up over the school holidays? How can you use your support systems better? How can you use other parents doing the same juggle better? What might work for you as a family and not work for you as a family?
[00:09:45] Of course, as our kids get older, they probably won't want to be a part of us. I've got two older children and by about 13 they were sorting themselves out. So this is just kind of for primary school and maybe first year of high school. But still significant and significant. It's worth planning for. It's worth having a plan and then being flexible about the plan.
[00:10:06] I hope this one's helped a little bit about me and how we make it work over here in Emma McQueenland. my business manager is also my sister, but she lives in Western Australia. So their school holidays are a bit skewiffy to me. And so how I make that work is, I take the first week and she takes her week and it works out because she's in another state.
[00:10:26] So there's always someone on deck for running my business as well. Thanks Love to hear what you think. Have you got any other suggestions? I'd love to hear about them. Please shoot me a DM, shoot me an email, whatever works for you. Love to hear it.
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