Early Exit #41: Taking Planned Time Off as A Freelancer
Get my free Notion template to better prepare for your next vacation.
You’re reading Early Exit Club — a newsletter about leaving your 9-5 job to build a $20k/month solo business your dream life by Nick Lafferty.
Last time: Building the life you want
Coming soon: My retainer pricing manifesto
On July 6th my wife and I will pack our most valuable possessions (our 15 year old dog and four favorite house plants) into a rental car and make a 6 day drive from Texas to New York.
Taking time off as a solo freelancer is HARD.
❌ There's no one to back you up while you're out
❌ Some work literally pauses while you're gone
❌ It's not a long enough time period to bring in outside help (1-2 weeks max)
This is a good test of your current systems. Can your clients operate if you’re unavailable for a week?
I’ve found the key to success here is documenting and communicating ahead of time.
I put together a free Notion template that you can grab here to better plan your next out of office time.
How to handle planned time off
Start asking questions
This is a great time to step back and review the state of your business.
During one of Loom’s Funkey Monkeys (aka their all-hands meetings with a more interesting name), our CEO Joe Thomas got a question about what types of questions Loom’s investors ask him during board meetings. Here’s what he said:
Our investors are there to hold a mirror up to us and our business.
I really like that description because when you’re on the inside it can be hard to see the full picture like an outsider does.
I wrote a bunch of questions that I asked myself out loud. I’ll include them 3 of them below and the rest in the Notion template.
Are you happy with your current clients? Should you drop any high maintenance or low paying clients?
What needs to ship before you leave? What’s your plan for getting this over the finish line?
If you get a lead on a new prospective client, when can you start working with them?
Try and anticipate the types of questions your clients will ask when you communicate your upcoming plans with them.
Create a document
Nearly everything I do for my clients comes in the form of a document.
Need me to build a new campaign? I create a document
Asked me to research something? Document
Going out of office is no different.
Documents are great because they’re one place that contains all the information about the thing you’re doing.
You can and should pack way more information in a document than you send in a Slack message.
I’m partial to Notion but you can do this anywhere you’re comfortable. The tool is less important than the content.
Use my OOO Template
I spent time creating an Out of Office (OOO) Document for my clients and wanted to share it with you lovely people.
To me, a good OOO Document answers the following questions:
What are the dates?
What happens if something breaks? Who should they contact?
What’s the status of current projects?
Who’s the DRI (directly responsible individual) in my absence?
I created a free Notion template with two sections:
A client-facing page you can complete with all the relevant information
An internal checklist to keep you on track
Grab it below.
Wrapping Up
This move is the culmination of a year-long process that I navigated entirely as a self-employed person.
I don’t have a team to back me up while I’m gone. My clients depend on me continually providing peace of mind despite major changes going on in my life.
Each of these challenges is an opportunity to evaluate your systems and improve another aspect of your business.
We’re all figuring this thing out as we go.
See you all next week,
Nick
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Have fun driving across the country!