Oscar Hatchett’s bare feet were covered with warm sand as he scrambled from his perch on a Hawaiian beach to the phone on his hotel deck. A concerned manager had tracked down Bank One Akron/Canton’s CEO to discuss a large deal.
But Hatchett was in Day Two of his 10-day vacation-his “untouchable” time. As the ambitious manager talked, Hatchett held the phone out to the ocean.
“Whatever you want to do,” Hatchett eventually said. “Sell the bank. I don’t care. Whatever you want.”
The manager answered quietly, “I’ll figure it out myself.”
Hatchett has a rule about his vacations: For the first three days, he doesn’t call the office at all and he doesn’t want anyone to call him unless it’s catastrophic. After three days, he’ll check voicemail daily and accept important phone calls. “For those first three days, I completely disconnect. I have to.”
Hatchett generally spends vacations with his two sons, Oscar, 17, and Aaron, 10. Favorite spots are mountainous and warm, like this spring’s excursion to Scottsdale, Ariz.
“There are different schools of thought on vacations,” Hatchett says. “My view is that vacations are times when you really do owe it to yourself to renew yourself and rest and enjoy some time and intimacy with your family.”
Hatchett claims that executives who agonize over taking a vacation once or twice a year are simply afraid their staff can’t keep the business running. If you don’t delegate year-round, Hatchett says bluntly, it’s difficult to do it only once a year.
“You’ve got to have a level of confidence in your people. You can’t delegate to people who haven’t delivered before.
“If your key staff can’t run the business for five or eight days, I think that’s a reflection on your organization.”
Hatchett says it’s a top executive’s responsibility to develop “a business culture that will survive and flourish when you’re not there. That culture and vision have to be ingrained, and good decisions stem from there.”
But, as any boss knows, it’s not easy to get away. Customers and clients demand to be pampered, and they aren’t concerned with how hard you’ve struggled to take a few days off. It’s among the corollaries to Murphy’s Law that the minute you step off the plane at some exotic locale, somebody somewhere is going to need your advice. (And with communications technology being what it is, if they want you, they’re going to reach you.)
So how do you do it? How do you manage to take a vacation?
When we asked Canton-area CEOs, most of them just laughed. We didn’t realize planning a vacation was so funny.
Some bosses take regular vacations but spend a couple of hours each day on the phone. Some take only long weekend getaways, believing the business can’t do without them for a whole week. Some vanish for two weeks guilt-free.
“People are still going away, but instead of taking one week or two weeks, they’re taking short trips,” reports local travel agent Mike Reed, who says 70 percent of his clients are businesspeople. “Businesspeople are busier and busier and busier. … They’ve got the money. What they don’t have is a lot of time.”
Reed says the trend is making his job more critical-and difficult-as he tries to weave itineraries and destinations around the choked schedules of today’s executives. Harder still are married professionals.
“They’ll walk in and say, ‘We want to squeeze in this trip.’ And they’ll flip open their DayTimers and the first time their schedules are both open is six months from now,” Reed says.
Dick Zalack, who advises Northeast Ohio execs on effectiveness and personal management, has seen how difficult it is for owners and high-level managers to get away. Most of the clients he takes in at Focus Four have gone for years without a real vacation.
“So many people who do take vacations shouldn’t bother,” Zalack says. “Or you should ship their bodies freight and save money because their heads are back at the office. They call in all the time. They check their voicemail. They never unhook.”
Zalack contends that business owners who can’t take vacations are doing something wrong.
“They don’t have a business. They have a job they can’t get fired from,” he says. “There’s a whole mindset out there about building a business, but these people aren’t building anything. If they were building something, they’d be able to leave.”
In truth, there is no right way to take a vacation. Some people can’t relax if they don’t unhook, others can’t relax if they do.
The real point is to do what works for you, as the following Stark County executives have done.
Take your work with you
Bruce Soares takes two vacations a year but he doesn’t leave the office completely behind.
Soares, an attorney who heads up the real estate division at Black McCuskey Souers & Arbaugh LPA in Canton, says working vacations are simply the reality today.
In Soares’ case, when a commercial real estate deal or a bond financing transaction breaks, it won’t wait. Some deals can be delegated to a colleague in the seven-attorney department, but many have been in the works for months and need Soares to see them through.
“I view vacations as a capital investment,” he says. “The investment is in recharging yourself. But in the professional services industry, the commitment has always got to be to your clients.”
He makes phone calls to the office practically every day, allocates time to doing paperwork and, occasionally, cuts the vacation short.
Soares’ vacation mates-his wife Celeste and daughters Jenny, 16, and Becky, 13-are understanding, he says. And so, too, are his clients.
“My clients have been very sensitive. Clients don’t want to disturb you. They’re people, too. So if they need me enough to call me, I know it’s important. They deserve my attention.”
Soares typically works 10 to 15 hours during a weeklong vacation, which is better than his usual 60-hour workweek.
“You still end up being fairly refreshed when you get back. It works.”
Soares adds that working on vacation is less taxing than it was even five years ago, thanks to today’s technology. He recalls a vacation at Disney World a few years ago when he returned to his hotel room with a message about an 80-page fax. “I said, ’18 pages?’ They said, ‘No, 80.’
“Today, I would just get an e-mail or already have the information on my hard drive. It’s a lot easier to handle.”
Check out completely
Taking a vacation was easy for Neil and Dawn Tyburk in the olden days: They simply closed Greenfield Fabricating Inc. for a week and made everyone go on vacation at the same time.
But eventually the North Canton-based metal fabricator developed too many customers, and shutting down for a week became unthinkable.
Besides, the Tyburks now run two other businesses-Powder Innovations Inc., founded in 1991, and Always Travel, which opened in 1995.
Neil is president of 15-employee Greenfield; Dawn is vice president. Powder Innovations is run by their daughter, Hope. The travel agency is a start-up that they run on the side.
Neil realized it wasn’t possible to close all three just so he and Dawn could vacation worry-free. And the fact that he assumed that’s what it would take probably indicated he was a little too much in control.
“Today, it’s a lot easier because I have competent people. I want to be knowledgeable but not meddle in things,” he says.
Neil and Dawn have taken vacations in each of the last five years without worrying or calling in to check on the shop. Neil confesses that he called in a couple of years ago from Florida-but that was just to taunt his employees about the fine weather while Canton was having a blizzard.
“I’m at the point where I say, ‘Here’s where I’m going. Don’t call me even if the place burns down. What can I do from there? Call the insurance company.’ “
That might sound a bit flippant, but Neil now declares that executives shouldn’t keep tabs by phone because it keeps employees from developing. “I really think so many people are paranoid. They think nobody else can do it like they can,” he says.
“I was that way. I thought nobody could do something like I would. Well, maybe they won’t do it the way I would, but they won’t do it the wrong way either. … If you ship a quality product on time, it doesn’t matter how you achieve it.”
If you can’t relax, don’t go
Roger Mann didn’t take a real vacation last summer and he’ll skip it this summer, too.
He wouldn’t feel right venturing on a long vacation so soon after taking over in June 1997 as CEO of United National Bank & Trust Co. The Canton-based bank has 22 branches and 335 employees.
“With leadership comes responsibility, and you lead by example,” says the banking veteran. “I have a new position and with that I have a responsibility to learn as much as I can as quickly as I can. It’s a learning curve.”
Bottom line: There’s little time to spare.
Mann has taken a few long weekends in his first year, but says that if he’d left for a long vacation, he couldn’t have relaxed anyway-which is the whole point.
“How can you really go away and relax without knowing whether you’re on track to make budget and have a good year?” he asks. “I can relax more in the third and fourth quarters.”
Mann and his wife Kathleen are planning two weeklong vacations for 1998-one in November and another in December. “I’ll know by then we’ve done well and I can truly relax. If someone can’t relax completely, they might as well be at the office,” says Mann, who wouldn’t even leave his office long enough for Small Business News to photograph him on the golf course.
When he is off, he separates almost completely, trying his best not to call in for messages and status reports.
“Most of the time we get charged from work. When you start to wear down, that’s when you need to recharge someplace else.”
There’s no perfect time for a vacation
Bob and Tina Scofield bought the 356th Fighter Group restaurant in North Canton in 1990 and went for seven years without a vacation. But their four children range in age from 7 to 17, so last year the couple planned a two-week Disney vacation, realizing it might be one of the last chances for the whole family to go.
“We had dates picked out and we canceled five or six times,” Bob says. “Finally, I said, ‘That’s it. We’re going. I don’t care what happens while we’re gone. We have insurance. We’re going.’ “
The vacation really had a fairy-tale ending: Bob and Tina and children Steven, Brianna, Patrick and Spencer spent two weeks in Orlando and Cocoa Beach. Bob never called the restaurant and the restaurant never called him.
“I told them, ‘If it’s something minor, I don’t want to hear about it until I get back. If it’s major, you know where to reach me.’ “
Looking back, Scofield had rationalized every year why it wasn’t a good time to leave. He’d launched various expansion and remodeling projects almost every year, it seemed. And sales had quadrupled since he and Tina bought the restaurant, rising to more than $3 million annually.
He finally realized that if he waited for the perfect time to sneak away, it would never come.
“Owners don’t give their key people enough credit for being able to do the job you hired them for,” he says. “What I realized is that your people want to show you what they can do.”
Before his vacation last year, Scofield reconciled this issue with himself. “I decided if they couldn’t take care of the business, I had the wrong people and I’d take care of it when I got back.
“That vacation last year was just what I needed,” he says, pointing to photo highlights taped to his filing cabinet. “It was one of the best things I ever did.”
He advises other owners and presidents to just plan it and do it.
“You owe it to yourself and you owe it to your business, too. You get so blind to your business when you see the same thing every day. You leave and come back and you see it all differently.”
Earlier this year, Scofield blocked out another two weeks for vacation in September. Unlike years past, the question isn’t whether they’re going, but where.
