15 - How to take a holiday as a Small Business Owner II

Sun Tzu 4 Small Business | Strategy and Tactics, Technology and Leadership, Management and Marketing for Small Business Owners

If you can work for 1 or 2 hours a day every couple of days, you can spend a lot longer away from your business.

We look at the technologies that we have within our companies so that we can work from anywhere, anytime.

Firstly, with have a Microsoft Windows Terminal Server. That gives us access to our accounting system, internal files, and all of our internal applications.

Confluence - confluence is remotely available which means that we can access workflows and projects.

We used to use Skype all the time, but a lot of our comms now is done through Zoom.

Slack - This cuts down on emails, and enables us to have conversations. It may be between 1 person or between a team. We have a HotLeads channel which our sales and marketing team work in. We have built workflows within the teams around slack communication.

IP Cameras - some of our customers use their cameras to monitor their staff. There are privacy issues that need to be worked through and it can be really useful for some companies to be able to see what people are doing in the company.

Telstra Roaming. This is a really good way to get access in the countries that you are travelling in. We visited 5 countries on our holiday, and we were able to get data in every country. This meant we could get an Uber or a Grab very easily. Google maps worked and we had access to emails.

Digital Dashboards - these give us the ability to monitor progress for the team, some of it in real time. This enhances accountability, performance and execution.

Power BI. We use Microsoft Power BI to grab data out of some of our line of business applications and present it to the team. Everyone has access to it and we it really helps us to drive performance.

These technologies underpin our 3P Approach to taking a holiday. Process, Profits and People. Get these 3 right and you can take a holiday. Set the goal to take a holiday and work on the 3Ps so that you can take the holiday that you always wanted to. :)