The Fierce Business Babe Podcast Ep 255: Business and Travel Tips

Today, we will be diving deep into business and traveling. I will be sharing with you my tips and tricks to have my business running in the background while I travel and how you can start to shift your business to create this for you as well.

Business & travel Tips

By: Melissa Lin

Today, we are talking all about travel and business. I will be diving deep into traveling while running my business along with some of my biggest tips and tricks to have your business run for you while you travel so that you aren’t working into the wee hours of the night while on vacation, trying to handle all the things that can come up in your business. I recently spent time traveling and my business kept running, and I mean fully running, in the background while I was traveling. I spent the week at the San Juan Islands, while my business ran for me.

I had so many of my audience, while I was traveling and doing these things, reach out and asked how I was able to do it. They saw I was busy throughout the day doing so many things, mostly touristy things and just exploring, so many reached out and asked me like, “Melissa, are you spending hours and hours at night trying to catch up on things like business and work? Like, what are you doing? How are you able to do that? You know, are you staying up into the wee hours of the night getting no sleep? And how can they start to also do that in their business if that's the case? If I'm not working while traveling, like how can they do the same?

Non-Negotiables

So to answer the question in case you're wondering, no, I wasn't working into you know, wee into the late hours every single day while I was on vacation, the only thing I really did were my non-negotiables in my business. If you've been in my audience for a while, or if you follow me over on Instagram or Facebook or my community center, then you probably know some of my real big non-negotiables in my business are, such as supporting my clients and my team. That is something that is so huge for me. Then I have a few others. Another one is adding value somewhere on my platforms. Then, of course, selling. Selling is always non-negotiable. It happens every day in my business. So really the only things I did were my non-negotiables. Most of those non-negotiables, not all, but some of them are automated and I'll be sharing more about those in a minute.

So, I would say when I was traveling, I spent less than one hour per day throughout the work week actually in my business and it was solely to support my clients and then check in with my team. But that was about the only thing I did while I was traveling around, because that's a huge non-negotiable for me. It happens every single day, no matter what, my clients always get to be supported. I'll definitely always check in with my team.

Go For It

I remember, and it's so crazy because it literally feels like it was yesterday, but I remember just a few years ago, feeling stuck in my nine to five. As many of you know, it was more of a five to five, I worked so much as an engineer and I only had one week of vacation each year, like literally one week of vacation, five working days. And that's it. And here I am, you know, recently got back from a full week of travel and the coolest part, I didn't need to use any of them “vacation days”. What's even cooler, and I absolutely love this, and I want to help you do this too, is my business was still running in the background that entire time.

So what I mean by that is whenever I travel, our clients are always supported, right? Whenever I travel, sales are still made inside of the business. We still have cash flow coming in new cash flow, new sales coming into the business. Whenever I travel, we still have dozens and dozens of new leads coming into our community each day, new podcasts listeners, new people coming to my Instagram and to our lead magnets and different things. All because, you know, number one, I chose this lifestyle. I decided to start my business and for some that's the hardest part. I kept going and they kept going. Even when it felt hard, even when others told me I couldn't do it, I kept going. Really, it all started with me deciding to go for it. That's the first part. That's the first step. And guess what you can do.

You Can Take Time Off

So I have a lot of new listeners that are actually outside of the United States, which is really cool. I actually support clients globally right now, and I absolutely love it. I wanted to share with you just in case you may not be aware. My experience has been that, here in the United States, a big stigma that I've seen and that I've experienced is that most have actually been taught, you know, whether it was in high school or maybe in their nine to five, or middle school or from family or from maybe our friends, parents, you know, that we, in order to be successful need to, and I'm going to say the dreaded word we need to hustle. This means, you know, the stories that we're putting into our heads was that, you know, for our first, X number of years, maybe two years at a new job or three years of a new job, or even six months at a new job, we need to put in extra time to prove ourselves, right? This means that not using our one week of vacation and cashing it in instead, like how many of you have cashed in extra vacation time that you've had, or not used it? Some companies have “”use it or lose it. That's something that my mom says “Use it or lose it”. I don't think her vacation days are, but she uses all of her vacation days. She was just up here for a few days last week visiting. But, this is something that is taught and it's put into our heads that that's what success looks like. Instead of using your vacation days, it looks better to cash it in because we feel that it looks better to the boss if we're always in the office.

This means that if we do take a day off, and this is the big one, I see this everywhere, even with my friends who are nine to fives, when I was in my nine to five, all around I see this. So like, even if we do take a day off or, you know, a vacation weekend, we're expected to be available by both phone and email, which really doesn't sound like a vacation if you can't truly unplug. But that is the experience here in the states. Like we are almost taught not to take vacation. Unlike other areas in the world where, you know, months of R&R are recommended. I highly recommend months and months of R&R. Of course, you know, I want to unplug when I'm on vacation. So, this is what most of us have been taught. That's one reason why I wanted my own business, so that I could call the shots. Such as traveling like all of last month while my business continued to run, and actually grow as a matter of fact.

I want to share an experience with you. It was a few years ago. I was full-time in my business and I was traveling with Ryen and his family. We went to Spain and Morocco, and I'm trying to think back.... I believe I had about 8 to 10 coaching calls that I had scheduled during my vacation time traveling. We were gone for about two weeks and I wanted to continue to support my clients. Again, this was a few years ago, so not how we run things now in my business. We were going to be traveling for about two weeks and going into the trip, I scheduled about three quarters of the day of one of our days in Spain for me running coaching calls instead of being out and actually experiencing this amazing, amazing, amazing space in Europe that I had never been to before. Actually, I don't believe I had been to any place in Europe before this trip. Three-quarters of a day working, which is amazing. I love my clients. We're still happy to support them and like going into that, if I were to do it again, I would have definitely pushed the calls or rescheduled them outside of the vacation time. I had so much time. I knew this trip was coming. It was expected to come. I bought my plane tickets like six months prior. It's not like it was a surprise visit of like, here you go, surprise, you want a free trip tomorrow? I knew about it. And my expectation for myself back then, a few years ago, is that even on vacation, like my mindset was, I still want to support my clients. You know, back then I was worried that my clients would get mad at me, that they would feel unsupported if we moved one of our coaching calls. You know, all of the stories that come up and it's funny, I was sharing you know about my trip with some of my clients while I was coaching them back then, while I was in Spain and one of my clients was like, Melissa, let's not have this call today. Like go and experience Spain, go and we'll reschedule. No worries.

I want to share this experience with you because your clients will not get mad at you and they will not be mad at you for taking R&R for resting, for filling your cup, for going on vacation, you're allowed to move calls around. You're allowed to reschedule. You're allowed to do these things. This is why you started your business and you're allowed to enjoy it and have fun and play while you build your business. It's not this or that. You can truly have it all. You can have both. It's definitely here for you. Again, your clients are not going to be upset or mad at you for being human and wanting to enjoy your vacation. This is probably why you also started your business in the first place, right? Freedom of time. And guess what? You can have it now. You can be building your business while enjoying those amazing perks.

How To Start Shifting In Your Business

So big question. You're probably asking, well, “Melissa. What can I start to shift? What do I need to do in order for my business to better be prepared for travel, vacation time, time away, or even just to unplug from social media for a day or two? So now I want to go into some of the things I recommend. The things I wish I would have done a few years ago when I traveled to Spain. The first thing I do recommend that you do is prep your clients. So, let them know you're going on vacation or let them know what the expectation is. Again, they're not going to be mad at you. They will not be upset with you.

The way that we did this in our business, we let all of our clients know in all of our containers ahead of time that I'd be traveling and what their expectations were. So for us, in this case, even though it was quite a bit of time, nothing really changed. We were still supporting clients fully. This is one of my daily non-negotiables. Then, of course, I have my team who supports my clients as well. Some amazing support coaches as well, supporting the team. So my clients were fully supported. Then, we also made sure that if I did have any coaching calls, they would all occur, when I was in the states, or schedule them outside of my travel plans. So in this case, I didn't have any coaching calls until I was back in Seattle again. We prescheduled, we knew this trip was coming and so we planned around it and in July was a little bit of a longer month. So the schedule just worked out very nicely for us. While I was gone, I believe, a few of our programs had some support group coaching calls and some co-working sessions run by support coaches and other things like that. So you definitely are able to move things around in your business. You can take a week off from coaching calls for your group program. I've done this in the past. Two years ago or so, after this Spain experience, that was the last time that I did that. My next trip, after that, I definitely made some shifts and made some changes for a lot of my clients. We moved, you know, the coaching call one week later or moved it to, you know, like maybe if it was a 12 week program, we added a 13th week and that's when the coaching call was going to be.We just shifted a week. So you definitely can do the same. So the first thing that we did was we prepped our clients and we let them know multiple times in multiple ways, on a coaching call in our calendar, in our container, in emails, in Slack, everywhere.

Prepped My Team

Number two, we prepped my team. So what we did was, and this is what I definitely recommend doing as well. I meet with my team, multiple team members multiple times throughout the week. Yes, my team does support me with a lot of things. We have a lot of big projects we're working on right now, especially in the summertime. What I do recommend is have some meetings at least two weeks before you depart, at least two weeks. So then you can start to prep your team and they can be there to support. You can be there to support too, in case they have any questions about anything that they may be kind of taking over for you as you travel, or if you're away from the business for a little bit. So you can prep your team, be there to help answer questions. What we did was we pre-scheduled our calendar around my vacation, again, with the coaching calls, and my team members stepped in and helped with any other things. So I had mentioned it at the beginning, right? Some of those non-negotiables that I have are clients and teams, supporting them. I definitely took care of that every single day.

Automating and Prepping Ahead

As I mentioned, we had a few things that were automated and adding value every single day was something that was automated. I already had podcasts episodes prescheduled ready to go while I was traveling. So yes, we still released brand new podcast episodes every single week when I was traveling. New Instagram captions, new content everywhere, new blog posts, new Pinterest pins while I was traveling because we prescheduled it. We prepped all of these materials ahead of time and that goes into number three. So the third thing I recommend is to have things prepped ahead of time. So again, all of our emails and most of our social media content was ready to go before I even left on my trip. I believe most of it was even scheduled. Which was so awesome and definitely our goal. Honestly there were a few, like maybe one or two, captions that weren't just because I wrote them while I was live and experiencing on some of my trips, but most everything else was prescheduled ready to go.

Same with sales, right? So, the other non-negotiable in our business is selling, selling every single day in our business. So most of that was again automated or prescheduled. If we were sending emails out, we had some sales items going out via email. Some of our lead magnets that we have surfacing through our various sources, Pinterest and in different things like that, and having them share it over on social media. So we had things prepped ahead of time.

Batch Ahead

The next thing I recommend, batch, batch, batch, as much as possible. If you know me, you know I love, love, love to batch everything, as much as possible, especially when travel is coming up. It's the worst when you're traveling and then you start to get behind by skipping a few weeks. I know my anxiety starts to kind of go up, go up, go up if I'm not my normal, like 2, 4, 6 weeks ahead. So if you're about to travel for a few weeks, I definitely recommend to prep ahead, and even more batching. So for me, instead of recording two new podcast episodes each time I sat down in a batch, I recorded three, so that I wasn't close to falling behind. That was exactly where I wanted to be when I got back from my trips.

Move Calls Around

The fifth thing that I recommend, and we've touched on this already a little bit, but I do want it to be its own area because it is so important, Move calls around if needed. It's never fun to be on a call with a team member and want to be productive, but you can't be, maybe because you hadn't planned ahead well enough or the wifi connection isn't good. Move calls around if needed. Sometimes stuff comes up at the last minute. So this is kind of outside of travel plans and things that you have plans coming up, but you know, last minute family emergencies happen and same thing here, your clients understand, you're human too. What I do say is, if you do need to move calls around, please don't make it a habit. I do not recommend that. Right? If you're canceling calls or moving them around once a week with clients, it's probably going to affect your client experience and journey for them, but they will understand as long as it's not a habit. If it happens once in a while, and it is very rare, they're going to understand.

So for example, I have a client who had a family emergency and she needed to cancel some of her coaching calls with her clients that she had that next week, but she was worried about clients getting mad and clients being upset that schedules weren't being stuck to, that things were getting switched up, that it wasn't the same routine. She was worried they would feel they were getting gypped, even though it was going to be rescheduled, not to just revoke. So, be honest with them. Be honest with your client. They're human, they understand.

Fill Your Cup

The last thing I want to say is have fun. Enjoy your trip because the more fun that you can have, and this is what I truly believe. The more fun I have, the more play I add into my day, the more successful I'm going to be. The more money I make, the more people I serve. So go have fun. Enjoy your trip. You'll get to fill your cup. Right. So if you love to travel, go travel. Go play, safely, of course, and fill your cup. It's so, so, so important to fill your cup.

This past month when I was able to travel and still feel so great because my clients were being supported, things were moving forward and it was absolutely amazing. We've gone through some tips that I recommend you start to implement if you do want to step outside of your business a little bit more. Which is definitely the goal, right? For you to be in your zone of genius and do the things that you love every single day. Along with so much more! All of these are definitely things to implement as you continue to grow your business as well.

I would love to hear about any takeaways, how things worked for you, all of the goodies you want to send my way. Send me a DM on Instagram @The_MelissaLin. I’m always going to be your biggest cheerleader, so you taking the time out of your day to spend with me truly means the world to me. I’ll see you next time!

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