For self-employed parents and business owners, summer holidays can mean a real mixed bag of fun times and stress. Usually the holiday starts off with great plans and good intentions but at some point, the novelty wears off, any routine’s gone out the window, and you’re sitting on the floor with a laptop balanced on your knees, half-listening to a client call whilst children talk, very loudly. You’re just trying to hold everything together, and most days, it sort of works.

Summer holidays can be tough for working parents who are trying to balance business and childcare. There’s no HR department or line manager to negotiate flexible working with, and often there’s no one else to pick up the slack if the business needs attention if you’re out with the children or away on holiday. Summer holidays as a self employed parent can be tough.

We see this every summer and so many business owners we work with are in this position. We just want to say: it is hard and you’re probably doing it better than you think.

Balancing business with holiday childcare

It’s likely that when you started your business, somebody told you about the potential cash flow worries and the likely difficulties in finding your first clients, but nobody really tells you about school summer childcare worries. Six weeks of school holidays is like a deadline you didn’t agree to, and there’s no colleague who can quietly cover your afternoon if someone’s ill or they don’t like the camp you’ve booked them into. We’ve all been there.

When you’re the business owner it’s just you. You’re the person who has to find childcare, and you’re the person who has to keep the business running whilst you do it. That’s two jobs demanding your attention at the same time.

Then there’s not only the practicalities to deal with – there’s the emotion too. Especially guilt. Guilt sits just under the surface, whichever way you turn. Take an hour for a work call, and there’s a small voice telling you the children deserve more of your attention so you take the afternoon to go to the park and a different voice reminds you about the invoice that still needs sending or the email that’s been sitting in your inbox since Tuesday. Wherever you are, some part of you is convinced you should be somewhere else.

If that sounds familiar, please hear this clearly: it doesn’t mean you’re doing things wrong. It just means that you’re one person trying to do the work of several people during the one stretch of the year when both halves of your life are pulling you in different directions.

What helps a business owner with summer childcare?

We could give you lots of the usual advice that seems to include ‘get up earlier’, ‘group your tasks’, or the quite unhelpful ‘embrace the chaos’. The problem is that none of these suggestions addresses the root cause, which is that you cannot do two very different roles at once.

We think that the more practical advice is to be honest with yourself about what you have to do during the six weeks of the summer holidays. Your clients need you. The big decisions about where the business is heading need you. Being present for the important bits of your family’s holiday needs you. Everything else is important but it doesn’t necessarily need you to do it.

Take bookkeeping. Invoices need to go out and payments need chasing but you don’t need to do these tasks personally. They just need to be done properly, by someone you trust. So you could hand these tasks over to someone else.

The same goes for the smaller jobs such as answering emails in your inbox, scheduling appointments or the endless small admin needs that quietly pile up. It’s rarely the reason you started your business, and it’s almost always the first thing to suffer when a school pick-up runs late or a sick day throws your week sideways.

If you’re a SME Owner with parenting stress – let some of it go, just for now

Our guidance is this. You don’t need to vanish from your business for six weeks and you definitely don’t have to ignore your family either. Look at all the tasks that need to be done and be honest about which genuinely need you to action them. Then put support in place to complete all the tasks that don’t need you – just for over the school holiday period.

This is exactly why we do where we can help. The Hour Hands team takes on bookkeeping and the admin that keeps quietly nagging away, so you can concentrate on your clients and strategic decision making and meeting your family’s needs, whilst we keep things ticking over. It’s not because you can’t do it, it’s because you have other priorities at this time.

We say “handing over a few tasks, even just for a few weeks, might be the kindest thing you do for yourself, your family and your business this summer”.

If you’d like to discuss the possibility of outsourcing some of your tasks, and of course, how we maintain regular contact with you to ensure that you remain in control of all aspects of your business, let’s talk. We’re happy to share some of our numerous testimonials and create a package that works well for you.