The business is based down the road from where we live, but up until six months ago we were running our business from home. I found being surrounded by bikes, helmets and pannier bags was a constant reminder of work and made it quite hard to relax.
For us organisation and good time management have been key to maintaining a work life balance, but it's been a challenge to get there. Everything we do now - business and non business related - goes into a cloud based calendar and is colour coded. As a business we grew really quickly and often we run tours with little break in between, so everything goes in the calendar. What that helps with too is scheduling time off, because you definitely look for gaps where you should squeeze in a break.
When we do have time off I'm really conscious of packing in a lot of what I want to do. Quite often we'll finish working at 5pm, pack our bags and ride for a few hours up to a hut, camp the night and ride back the next morning. Just having that short amount of time away from the phone and email is awesome and really rejuvenating.
Given you run the business as a couple, what are some of the work life balance issues there?
From the outset we were really aware running the business together had potential to have a negative impact on our marriage. We spoke to a lot of our married friends who ran businesses together and got advice from them. One friend actually suggested Matt and I write down five rules we thought would help us work together, which we did.
What are the rules?
No business talk after 6pm. That's to make sure we have time for our 'other' life - friends, family, dinners out, reading, watching Netflix. It's really difficult to do; if one of us asks the other a business-related question after the cut-off time you really need to rely on the other person telling you to ask you during business hours. We're a lot better at this now, but in the early days we would talk business at all hours of the night and day and soon discovered we were getting burnt out pretty early on in the season.
No business talk in the bedroom, which is non-negotiable. Again, we're a lot better at this one four years down the track. We used to talk business in the bedroom and I would end up dreaming about work, then wake up and have to live it during the day, which was exhausting.
Use our strengths and weaknesses to our advantage. Matt is much better - and quicker - at bike maintenance and servicing than I am so he does the majority of that kind of thing, whereas I tend to be more detail oriented so take care of most of the client contact and tour organisation.
Delegation is another one. We realised early on that doing everything wasn't sustainable; accepting that we needed help, and asking for and finding good help was a big step for us. Letting go of our 'baby' has been hard, but sourcing good contractors and employees has made it a lot easier. We tend to delegate the 'hard' stuff - for us it's accounting and tax - and the 'easy' stuff - like cleaning bikes and helmets - so we can run the rest of the business and still have time out. Having a business mentor to help us with marketing has also helped decrease our stress.
Work smarter, not harder We're always evolving, changing and fine tuning our systems, which includes using cloud-based systems, and other user friendly programmes like Xero, Swipe and Flexitime.
Coming up in Your Business: The sharing economy - where people share access to goods or services without actually owning them - is a growing trend. What are some of the companies springing up in this area, and how are they growing markets for their offerings? If you've got a story to share, drop me a note: nzhsmallbusiness@gmail.com
