Hiring a VA to provide holiday cover for your business is a novel idea for a lot of small business owners. The work culture in the UK leans towards the “more is more” approach, with many of us accepting that if you’re a business owner holidays are something other people have. This year with most of us staying in the UK, rather than travelling abroad, the temptation to have a working holiday is even bigger than usual.
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But the last 15 months have been extremely stressful, meaning it’s more important than ever to take a break. Work culture is changing. We see more about self-care being an important part of working life and we are starting to recognise the need to take a break from our businesses, both for personal and professional reasons. After all, if we burn out it’s not going to do our businesses any good at all.

Normally at this time of year I’d have written about how to manage the school holidays along with running a small business, but so many of us had to negotiate 4 months of home-schooling that the summer holidays didn’t seem to present the same challenge this year. In fact this looks like being the easiest 6-7 weeks of the parenting/work juggle that I’ve done in quite a while.
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Our experiences since March of this year have all been different. Some business owners embraced lockdown, using it as an opportunity to take a look at marketing strategies and revamp existing processes and practices. Others have reacted to the new situation by realigning their offering – moving from face-to-face services to online. Some have been even busier than usual. A lot of us will have been concentrating purely on what absolutely needed to be done, keeping our business afloat and letting a lot of the little day-to-day things slide.