Most entrepreneurs tell me the thing they like best about their lives is not having a boss.
Until they want a vacation.
Take Jamie Ratner, founder and chief executive of Certifikid, a family-oriented daily deals business she runs out of her suburban Maryland home.
The mompreneur, who has 15 employees, was frantically organizing a week’s worth of daily coupon deals so she could head out of town with her lawyer husband and two young children.
When I reached her by phone, Ratner, 34, was calling the owner of the beach house she planned to rent, making sure the Internet connection was working. She didn’t want a repeat of last year, when an unreliable signal forced her to be glued to a corner of the house where the transponder was located.
“I send my deal out every day to 60,000 subscribers, so I need an Internet connection,” she said.
(I know the feeling; you can’t afford to go dark for too long, lest your audience forget you.)
Like others I interviewed, Ratner organizes her days away from work into segments. She plays for four or five hours, then checks back in with the office.
“You have to prepare like crazy to ever go on vacation,” she said.
With a $2 million-plus business that puts about $350,000 in her pocket, checking out for a week means money lost.
“You can be like people in Spain and close shop for a week,” said the workaholic. “But then you think about the revenue you could be making and ask yourself, ‘Is it really worth that?’ ”
It is for entrepreneur Larry Nelson, who unplugged for a full week a few years back on a trip to North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
“It took me three days to stop thinking and stop reaching for my BlackBerry,” said Nelson, 55, founder and chief executive of TrafficLand, a Fairfax County company that connects with more than 10,000 traffic cameras across the United States and sells those feeds to television stations, online traffic sites and newspaper Web sites (including washingtonpost.com).
“I felt great when I got back,” Nelson said. “That’s my recommendation for anyone who hasn’t figured it out yet. Turn off the BlackBerry at least once a year for at least one week.”
Joe Payne agrees.
The chief executive of Eloqua, a 400-person Tysons Corner software company, said his family has a rule prohibiting two-way electronic devices on the beach. Like Ratner, he segments his day, checking e-mail in the morning and then later in the afternoon or evening.
In between is family time.
Payne recently took a long-planned beach vacation, which happened to arrive a week after Eloqua went public on Aug. 2. The company helps clients — from the Washington Capitals to the Republican National Committee — measure the seriousness of visitors to their online sites.
“I had no guilt,” Payne said. “In any given week, I work at least 60 hours.”
Besides, he added, “if my company with 400 employees couldn’t operate without me, then I’m a bad CEO.”
Linda Roth doesn’t have a management team to turn to. The owner of a small public relations firm specializing in the hospitality industry is practically a one-woman show, which means working vacations.
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