August has arrived.
Out-of-office replies are multiplying, diaries are looking decidedly patchy and there’s a good chance at least one person in your team is currently somewhere considerably sunnier than the office.
And quite right too.
Everyone needs a proper break.
But there’s a question worth asking:
When your team takes a holiday, does your business accidentally take one too?
For small businesses in particular, losing even one or two people to annual leave can make a surprisingly big difference.
We’ve probably all heard it.
During the summer months, perfectly organised businesses can suddenly find themselves stretched.
One person is away.
Someone else is covering their work.
The phone rings while they’re dealing with a customer.
An email sits unanswered because everybody assumes somebody else has picked it up.
Nothing disastrous has happened.
But the cracks start to show.
And unfortunately, your customers don’t necessarily know you’re short-staffed.
They simply know they haven’t had a reply.
While your team deserves time away from work, your business still needs to be available to the people who need it.
Potential customers are still making enquiries.
Existing clients still have questions.
Appointments still need booking.
Phones still ring.
And that last one is particularly important.
A new customer who calls and doesn’t get an answer doesn’t always leave a voicemail.
Sometimes, they simply call the next business on Google.
You may never even know they existed.
There’s another side to summer cover that often gets overlooked.
Your remaining staff.
When one person goes away, their workload frequently gets divided amongst everybody left behind.
Suddenly they’re doing their own job and covering somebody else’s.
For a few days, that’s manageable.
Over several weeks of overlapping summer holidays?
Not so much.
People become rushed. Small things get missed. Stress levels rise.
Annual leave should allow one person to recharge without exhausting everyone else in the process.
This is where smaller businesses sometimes get stuck.
You don’t necessarily need another permanent member of staff simply because you’re busy for six weeks of the year.
Flexible support can fill the gaps.
That might mean having someone temporarily:
Then, when everybody is back, the additional support can reduce again.
That’s one of the advantages of outsourcing: support can flex with your business.
And then there’s the big one.
The business owner’s holiday.
If you’re lying beside a pool checking your emails every twenty minutes, are you actually on holiday?
If your team needs to WhatsApp you every time something unusual happens, have you really switched off?
If customers can only get certain answers from you, what happens when you’re unavailable?
These are useful questions because they reveal where a business may still be overly dependent on one person.
In fact, annual leave can expose weaknesses that aren’t obvious during the rest of the year.
If everything becomes difficult whenever one particular person is absent, ask why.
Perhaps information needs documenting.
Maybe responsibilities aren’t clear.
Perhaps an SOP needs creating.
Or maybe there simply isn’t enough backup.
These aren’t failures.
They’re useful clues about where your business could become stronger.
The best holiday cover is the kind your customers barely notice.
Calls are still answered warmly.
Messages still reach the right person.
Appointments continue to be booked.
Emails don’t disappear into an inbox for two weeks.
From the customer’s perspective, it’s simply:
Business as usual.
Behind the scenes, meanwhile, your team gets something equally valuable—the ability to take proper time off without worrying about what they’ll return to.
Summer holidays shouldn’t create a choice between looking after your people and looking after your customers.
You can do both.
With a little forward planning, clear processes and flexible support, your team can switch off properly while your business continues to run smoothly.
Because everyone deserves a holiday.
Your customer service probably shouldn’t take one with you.
LiveLink Resource can provide flexible holiday cover for your calls, customer enquiries, diary and administration—without you needing to recruit another permanent member of staff.
Whether you need support for a few days, a couple of weeks or throughout the summer, we can become an extension of your team while they’re away.
So perhaps this year, you can finally put the out-of-office on…
and actually mean it.
Speaking of keeping things moving, we had a lovely little boost ourselves this week.
The LiveLink Resource blog has been named as one of Feedspot’s Top 35 UK Virtual Assistant Blogs — something we’re rather chuffed about!
We started our blog simply as a way to share some of the things we’ve learned from working alongside businesses over the years: the challenges we see, the little changes that can make a big difference and, hopefully, some useful advice for fellow business owners along the way.
So it’s rather nice to know that somebody out there is reading it!
You can take a look at Feedspot’s Top 35 UK Virtual Assistant Blogs here.
And if you’ve been reading our blogs regularly, thank you. We hope they continue to give you the occasional idea, bit of reassurance or nudge in the right direction.
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