When was the last time you took two full weeks completely off from your business? And I'm not talking about going on vacation. I mean actually being on vacation, not answering emails, not checking Slack, not scheduling those one or two calls that simply couldn't wait. And I also mean that back home, your business was running smoothly problems were not just piling up waiting for you to come back.
Today we're talking about the two-week absence test and how this test reveals the type of company you've built. And we're also going to talk about those sneaky stories we tell ourselves, like things are gonna get better next week, and how actually they keep us stuck. I'm Carolina Zuleta. This is the Visionary's Pursuit podcast. Let's jump in. .
Just about every business founder that I've ever coached has had two goals. One is they've built their businesses because they love building businesses, they care about money, they're ambitious, they wanna have an impact, and also because their number one value is freedom. And yet, I often see how the strengths that make them incredible businesspeople are the same habits that hold them back from living with freedom.
When I work with my clients, one of the concepts that I love teaching them is that when we're creating a vision for ourselves, we shouldn't choose between this or that.
We shouldn't choose between business growth or freedom, That the real goal is to have both our business growth and our freedom and a lifestyle that we really enjoy. So that's why I decided to create a masterclass called "The Six Founder Habits Costing You Freedom: How to Reclaim Your Time Without Slowing Your Company's Growth."
In this masterclass, I'm gonna go deep into what these six habits are, how they show up in your every day, how they are strengths for growing a business, but also how they are keeping you stuck. I'm going to show you how to transform them into better thoughts and beliefs, because what I want is not just entrepreneurs who are building incredible businesses, but human beings who are living incredible lives.
The class is free. It will be an amazing return on your time investment, I want that every single founder can look at this and take it for themselves and not make these mistakes. I'll be teaching the class on September 16th and 17th. The link to sign up is in the description. Go grab your seat, and I'll see you in the class.
So in the master class, I'm gonna go way deeper around these habits, but today I want to give you some food for thought too so we can start having a conversation about what it looks like to be a business founder that lives with freedom. So it's interesting, right? I have mostly two different types of clients. Some of them are corporate executives, and some of them are business founders. And it's common that I'm having a conversation about how exhausted they are or they're overwhelmed or burnout because the truth is that our lifestyle today, everything is going so fast.
But those who work in corporate, they feel like there's something outside of their control that is creating the circumstances for them to have this burnout. Maybe it's the company policy, a terrible boss. They're doing too many roles at the same time. But the founders, the founders don't believe that something outside of themselves created this problem. They know they created it. But the problem is that they tell themselves that it is temporary. " Oh, it's just a busy season. It will get easier. In a couple of weeks, we're gonna be in a better place." Those are two very different stories, but they produce the same result.
Years and years can go by without us making real change to have meaningful freedom. So I want you to take a moment, and if you started your own business, ask yourself: Am I living with the freedom? Do I experience the freedom that I want in my day-to-day?. And this connects with the two-week absence test, which is a common thing entrepreneurs say, or I've heard it in multiple books and podcasts.
That is the question, can you take two full weeks off from your business and be completely disconnected while your business is still thriving?.
And if your answer is, "Oof, I haven't done it in a while. It's so hard to take that time off," I want you to take it a little bit deeper and maybe reflect on what are the fires that will get started or the problems that will arise because you're not there and there's nobody to solve them. One of the things I hear often happen is people are extremely busy so they can go on vacation, and then when they come back, it's 80-hour weeks to catch up on the two weeks that they were gone.
That's not really having freedom. That's simply procrastinating some of the work two weeks later and then doing it all at once But I think where we need to start is being honest with ourselves and analyzing where are the bottlenecks? What are those areas of the business that are still 100% dependent on us? You know, I have a client who's an executive in a, a small business, and she recently experienced this problem the other way. So the business founder had something happen and had to leave the company for a couple of weeks.
So my client is a very empowered leader, super resourceful, you know, she's amazing. So she took it on. She's like, "Okay, my boss is not here. I'm gonna start making decisions." And she started taking action, moving the team forward. Actually, she was very excited about the results she was creating.
But when her boss came back, she said, "Oh, no, no, you're taking this, the direction I don't want you to take it." And in a way, almost blamed my client. But from my perspective, I think it's the problem from the CEO that is not giving clear direction, so when she's gone, the employees can actually execute towards the direction that she wants.
A company doesn't pass the two-week absence test simply because people kept working. It passes it when people can make good decisions in your absence, when the decisions they're making are taking the business towards the vision you have for that business.
Your job as a founder is not simply to assign tasks or projects or work. But the biggest job I think business founders have is to provide context, vision, how we make decisions, how do we measure success, what does success look like for our business? And then we give freedom to our team to execute on that.
Another observation I have is that many of us, I see myself doing this at times as well, we tell ourselves a story to cope with the pain of having our business depend on us, and the story is very simple. It's something around the lines of, "Ah, it's gonna get easier. You know, this is just a season.
We're gonna start getting new clients, and we're gonna take some time for everything to stabilize. We just need to push through for the next one or two months, and then we're gonna be on the other side." And when we tell this story, I know we believe it. But if we take a moment and we look back, how many times have we told ourselves the same story and nothing has changed?
I bet that for many of us, if we're fully honest, it's been years. what I want you to consider is that this story is not necessarily optimism, but it's a way of disguising, of hiding procrastination.. Because when we tell ourselves that next week is magically gonna be easier, what we do is we postpone those things we consider hard or uncomfortable. So we say, "I'll deal with the wrong employee next week," or, "You know what? Right now, we just need to keep them. We need to get through until we have a break, and then I'll sit down and give them the proper training or fire them." or that client that's straining the team, we tell ourselves, "Okay, we'll, we'll have that tough conversation later on.
Telling ourselves that next week, next quarter, next year, things are gonna get easier, many times is not optimism. It's procrastination disguised as optimism. I think I've shared this in another episode, but I think it's also relevant for this episode.
In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins describes his conversation with Admiral James Stockdale, who survived more than seven years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Collins asked Stockdale, "Who were the people who didn't survive, who died?" Stockdale said, "The optimists." Because they repeatedly predicted that they were gonna be rescued during Christmas, during Easter, in the summer. And when those deadlines came and went and they weren't rescued, they lost hope. Stockdale said they ultimately died of a broken heart.
This conversation later became the Stockdale Paradox that says the following: "You must maintain unwavering faith that you will ultimately prevail and simultaneously confront the brutal facts of your current reality." yes, we have to believe there's gonna be a moment in the future where the pressure, the overwhelm is not gonna be there, that we're gonna have more freedom. But we really need to also look at the current problems we have and solve them today so that beautiful future that we want actually happens.
Give yourself a deadline. When are you going to take those two weeks off without having to connect at all with your business and that you know your business is going to thrive? Give yourself a deadline and then create a plan of the things you need to change, fix, the people you need to hire or train so you can actually get to that deadline and be able to take those two weeks off. Don't just keep telling yourself it's gonna be Find a way of making it easier
So let me go back for a moment and talk about what I believe are the two most important jobs a CEO, a business founder has. The first one is to create a vision, to create the context in which this company is going to happen, and to communicate it clearly and multiple times to their employees until they can embody, become part of this vision.
They have to answer questions like, where are we going? What matters? What does success look like here? How do we make decisions? How do we prioritize when we have competing priorities? a good vision should allow your people to make decisions when you're not in the room..
And the second part of the job of a business founder is to put extraordinary people in positions of real ownership. And I don't mean just delegating, I mean transferring ownership to these amazing hires..
The first time I managed a team, I worked for a small company in which more than half of the employees reported to me. the business founder hired a mentor for me, someone that was helping me learn how to manage people. And one of the advice this man gave me that has stuck with me throughout years was the following: "Your job is to put A-plus people in every seat and then create the circumstances so they can operate like A-plus employees.." That's what we need to do as business founders, learn how to find great talent and recruit them, and also create the environment where they can thrive
Going back to the story of my client, I believe she's an A+ employee. She's amazing. But the environment they're creating for her is not allowing her to thrive because there's no clear expectations, there's constant founder interference. This founder changes her mind and takes the business one way and then the next and there's no clarity as to where they're going. Or her boss wants to approve every single thing she's doing. Why hire such an amazing employee to not allow her to perform at her best? And I think it has to do with those habits, those leadership habits I will be teaching and talking about in my master class on September 16th and 17th. That if you haven't signed up yet, the link is in the description. Go grab your seat..
We as business founders can turn princes and princesses into frogs by not creating the right environment for them to operate at their best.
One of the entrepreneurs I most admire is Richard Branson. He has built over 40 companies across five business sectors and five continents. And yet, if you follow him on social media, he lives with freedom. You see him often spending time with his family or being at the inauguration of one of his hotels and being the first one to jump in the pool wearing the tux-tuxedo, traveling, playing sports, living a life of true freedom and adventure. Because I admire him so much, I love to read about how he thinks, how he operates, how he makes decisions. and one of the things he says is what I was just talking about. Hiring extraordinary people isn't enough if you don't allow them to behave like extraordinary people he said, and I'm paraphrasing "Listen, if I hadn't learned how to hire extraordinary people and allow them to behave like extraordinary people, and I was controlling one business, I probably would only have one business today.
But because I've learned the skills, I have 40 businesses over five different continents. Someone else that I heard in an interview that also stuck with me who talks about this is J.J. Abrams, the director of Star Wars. When they asked him if he was scared of doing the new Star Wars movies, because, you know, Star Wars has very real fans that are very critical of anything that's created under that brand, he said, "No. No, because I'm surrounded by extraordinary talented people. It's not all on me."
And yes, as a director of the film, he didn't have to be the best cinematographer or custom designer or composer or editor. He found the right people for each of those jobs and allowed them to give their best to the movie. And I think this is the same thing we need to do as business founders and CEOs.
And when we do that, that's how we create the optimal circumstances for us to be able to go and take those two weeks off and really enjoy and be present in whatever else we want to do. from this episode, here's my challenge to you. Look at your calendar. Decide when you're gonna take those two weeks off.
Create a plan. Look at all the things that you need to fix, what new hires you need to make, who do you need to train, what systems or processes you need to create, and start working on that diligently, so one day you can have it all. The vision of growing your business, having impact, making lots of money, and living with freedom.
And if this episode resonated with you, you cannot miss the class I'm teaching on September 16th and 17th. Go to the link in the description, grab your seat. I promise you it's gonna be a life-changer. All right, my friends, that's all for today.
I'll see you next time. Bye.
