Summer is Here

Summer is officially here! Bare feet, cookouts, flipflops, the beach, green grass and ice cream. For our family, summer includes cooking out on the grill as much as possible and a week at the Jersey Shore which was inspired by my late mother. Spending time at the Jersey shore had been a tradition for decades and we still try to maintain it today. We also frequently enjoy trips to places like Knoebel’s and other fun places in our area of Pennsylvania. Now I'm curious now what others have planned for the summer. Feel free to leave a comment about your summer traditions or plans.

Summer is often when we take long planned vacations from work. That can be a good thing or bad thing depending on the person. I know people who haven't taking vacations in years, I'm sure you do too. These people usually either say they are too busy, or that they don't lik

e vacations. For those of us who do take a summer vacation, the vacation can be either a much needed respite from our busy work schedule or the vacation can be a challenge and stressful. While it may seem odd to some, vacation can be a challenge especially for business owners and managers. Prying ourselves away from our work for a week or two, knowing when we return, the pile of work will have increased dramatically makes relaxation sometimes difficult.

It can also be a challenge to shut down the daily work routine that we have so carefully crafted over the years. Like most routines, once we are in the routine things are great, but if we break the routine, getting back into the routine can be a challenge. Work is no different, that’s why the first day back to work from a vacation can be brutal. Regardless of all of that, it is still important for each of us to disconnect and unplug. What’s the point of all the work if we never take time to enjoy ourselves? Whatever your summer plans, I hope you have an amazing vacation on the horizon and enjoy every minute of it!

Automate Specialized Tasks in Your Business

It would be easier for us to enjoy our vacations if we could confidently leave our business behind and know it was all in good hands and would run flawlessly in our absence. Some of you have meticulously built your company in this fashion, so that it doesn’t require your daily attention. If that is you, well done.

Companies that run this well have adopted systems and resources to manage parts of their business to eliminate the need for constant employee input. A good example is ADP or Bill.com; these services provide automation to the payroll side of our businesses that require virtually zero input from our employees once it's up and running. Anybody who has ever run payroll manually, knows how much of a timesaver this type of service is. I utilize a payroll service for my business because I know virtually nothing about running payroll and the alternative would be for me to hire a fulltime employee to do this work.

These types of automation allows us to put these tasks into the hands of folks who specialize in this specific kind of work so that we don't have to worry about it. When we have less to worry about, it frees up more brain power to focus on things like business development, manufacturing efficiency, and other improvement activities.