Could Your Business Survive 21 Days Without You? Take the 21-Day Away Test

Business strategist challenges UK founders to take the ‘21-Day Away Test’ to find out whether they are helping or holding back their business

September is when many business owners properly get back to work after the summer. Before you get buried in emails, meetings and plans for the rest of the year, it’s worth thinking about what happened to your business while you were away.

If you took a holiday in August, were you actually able to switch off? Or were you still checking emails, approving decisions, answering WhatsApps and dealing with problems from the sun lounger?

Business Strategist and Performance Coach Will Polston believes this is a useful way to see how reliant a business has become on the person who started it.

He encourages founders to try what he calls the ‘21-Day Away Test’. In simple terms, could you step away from your business for three weeks without everything grinding to a halt?

Will said:

“The point isn’t to make yourself unnecessary, it’s to see where the business still relies too heavily on you. If you go away and every part of the business  needs your attention, you’ve found the areas you need to work on.”

For anyone returning from a summer holiday, Will recommends looking back at what happened while you were away before slipping straight back into the same routine.

Below are his SEVEN steps to being able to step away from the business for 21-days.

1. Write down every reason you were contacted

Think about every call, email or message that interrupted your break. What were people asking you for? Which decisions were they unable to make while you were out of office? Did clients need to speak to you ASAP? Was someone missing information that only you had?

Don’t just put it down to being the boss. Its super important to write it all down and look for patterns. If several interruptions came from the same part of the business, that is probably where you need to start working with the team more.

2. Ask whether it really needed you

There will always be occasions when something genuinely needs the business owner’s attention, and that isn’t the problem. What matters is how often ordinary decisions come back to you simply because that is how the business has always been run.

For every interruption, ask: did this actually need me, or could somebody else have dealt with it if they had the right information and authority to do so?

If capable people are constantly waiting for your permission, the problem might not be the team…It might be the way you have set up the business.

3. Get important information out of your head

Business owners know far more than they realise such as which client likes to be called rather than emailed, why a particular supplier is used, how prices are agreed, what to do when something goes wrong and which problems aren’t really problems at all. If nobody else knows those things, taking time away is always going to be difficult and could cause a bigger problem later down the line if you aren’t able to respond.

Look at the questions you were asked during your holiday and start documenting the answers. You don’t need to spend weeks creating huge manuals  or process maps, just start with the information people actually needed when you weren’t there.

4. Stop delegating jobs and start giving people responsibility

Giving someone a task doesn’t necessarily take it off your plate if they still need you to approve every decision. To remain involved in the work even though somebody else is technically doing it, is a total waste of time. Be clear about who is responsible for each area of the business, which decisions they can make themselves and when something genuinely needs to come back to you. People can’t take ownership if you never give them the space and reassurance to do it.

5. Don’t jump straight to three weeks

If the thought of disappearing for 21 days fills you with dread, start smaller. Try taking yourself out of the business for one or two days without checking in and see what happens. Then try three or four days and eventually a week. Each time, make a note of what went wrong, what people managed perfectly well without you being there and what nearly became a problem. Then fix those things before testing it again.

6. Don’t interfere when people do things differently

I see this all the time and it can be one of the hardest parts for founders. Someone might deal with a client differently from you, run a meeting differently or solve a problem in a way you wouldn’t have chosen. That doesn’t automatically make their way wrong.

If you take responsibility back every time someone approaches something differently, your team will eventually stop making decisions without you, and worse their value in their work will drop. Judge the outcome rather than whether somebody followed your exact method, if it all came out fine, pass over the reins.

7. Decide when you’re going to test it again

Don’t wait until your next summer holiday to find out whether anything has improved. Choose another period when you will step away and use the time between now and then to deal with the problems you’ve uncovered. The aim of the 21-Day Away Test isn’t really about taking a three-week holiday, but whether you have built a business that gives you the choice to do so.

Lots of people start businesses because they want more freedom. Then years later, they realise they’ve created something that needs them every hour of the day. If the business can’t cope without you, being needed might actually be getting in the way of company growth.

So, before September gets busy, look back at your summer. If your holiday was interrupted by work, don’t just accept that it comes with being a business owner. Look at why it happened, fix what you can and see whether next time you can stay away for a little longer.