The month of August and the holiday period around Christmas and Hanukah are supposed to be time for relaxation, downtime with family and friends, and a little fun in the sun or snow. It’s a time for the world to relax before the start of the new year or to enjoy the final days of summer. Sounds great. These are all normal and well-deserved periods for downtime. In fact, many countries take the whole month of August off and can’t be found in December. During these months, the United States works more than most countries globally, but even we take time to unwind. But not everyone gets excited about taking time off. In fact, entrepreneurs hate Christmas and August.
Entrepreneurs aren’t thinking about their vacation plans, they’re trying to cope with an additional load of stress. Investment deals slow down. Customer deals die. Employees go on vacation. Vendors take a break. Family obligations and events proliferate. For those that are also parents, kids are out of school and need extra attention. For the entrepreneur, these months can be torture. They may be scrambling to close a deal by the end of the year. They may be working hard to prepare the company for the upcoming year. The entrepreneur’s calendar is put on hold until the rest of the normal world comes back from recess.
As entrepreneurs, we have enough stress throughout the year trying to win customers, bring on employees, raise money and sign deals with vendors. We may have enjoyed, or even taken advantage of these breaks in our “past lives”, but once you become an entrepreneur we can’t understand how this ever made sense. We also don’t understand how the world could be insensitive to our efforts by taking time off when we need to get shit done. We console ourselves by feeling lucky we don’t live in France, where many can’t be found for the better part of the summer. We say to ourselves, “how can a whole country can take off weeks at a time?“
It used to bother me to no end that customers, vendors, employees and investors would say “well it will be hard to get something done in August”, or “we’ll have to wait until the new year because December really slows down.” Don’t they understand what we are going through? Don’t they understand how important it is to keep the ball moving forward?
Come to think of it. This doesn’t only apply to August and holiday time. How often do friends and colleagues ask, “are you off for Columbus Day?” Or Martin Luther King Day? Or President’s Day? Or Good Friday? No disrespect to history or religion and the reasons we celebrate these holidays, but do people not get it? There are no days off. Even when the rest of the world has the day off, we do not say to ourselves “no one is working anyway so it would be a good day to take a break.” Quite the contrary. We say to ourselves (because no one else is around…) “this is the perfect time to get work done. The phone won’t be ringing and there will be no distractions.”
If in the interest of celebrating the entrepreneur, the country declared a day “Entrepreneur Day” and the offices throughout the world were closed, none of us would take it off. Even if they made it a federal crime to work on Entrepreneur’s Day, we would sneak around with disguises like a beach bum sitting on the beach with our laptops covered in palm fronds or hidden in the shadow of a low umbrella while we work on the new sales plan.
I used to say that my next venture would be to extend the twenty-four-hour day. If we can’t do that, we could try to eliminate all holidays—or at least Christmas and August—and get back to work. After all, we have a business to build!