Feedback Form
Home Features Mastermind Videos About Advertise Blog Network Contact
   

Have A Suggestion?
Toronto Salsa Classes / Toronto Salsa Lessons Email us your ideas on how to make our website more valuable! Thank you Sharon from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for your suggestions to make the newsletter look like the website and profile younger entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez and Sean Combs!
Have A Suggestion?

Featured Ebook


ebook Famous Entrepreneurs - Modern Empire Builders


Featured Ebook

More Evan Carmichael
Have A Suggestion?

Sales Lessons From Starbucks And Dell

Lesson #5: Take Time Off to Tune Up



  Articles
Lesson #5: Take Time Off to Tune Up
   

When Orfalea first rented his little $100 per week garage near the USC campus, he was told his venture would never work. It was a pipe dream, they said. It was a business that would flunk as fast as Orfalea had in school. Still, says Orfalea, “I didn’t listen. I knew what I was going to do.”

From the way he started up his company to the way in which he ran it, Orfalea has made a business out of going against the grain. One of his trademark practices that has helped set him apart from the pack is his habit of just wandering around. “Because I have a tendency to wander, I never spent too much time in my office,” says Orfalea. “My job was going from store to store, noticing what people were doing right. If I had stayed in my office all the time, I would not have discovered all those wonderful ideas to help expand the business.”

Orfalea believed in taking long vacations. Even in his startup days, Orfalea made it a habit to take time off for himself, believing that it helped boost his productivity. “During my years at Kinko’s, I worked very long hours, but I also took frequent, long vacations,” he says. “And when I returned, the first order of business was planning my next vacation.”

How could the head of a billion-dollar operation afford to take such long periods of time off work? Precisely because “the goal was not to avoid work, but to improve my productivity,” he says. “People do not learn new things and think new thoughts by doing the same things every day for months on end. My vacation schedule also defined firm deadlines for important projects, bringing a better sense of priorities to my time in the office.”

Today, Orfalea promotes the idea of at least three weeks at a time of vacation as being effective for anyone in a leadership position. “If you go away for one week, you come back to an extra weeks’ worth of work,” he says. “If you’re gone for two weeks, you come back to an extra two weeks’ worth of work. But if you’re gone for three weeks, everyone figures out how to get along without you and the work gets properly delegated and executed. It’s better for you, better for the business, and better for the development of coworkers.”

What should businesspeople do during that time off? Orfalea suggests exercising, because people who exercise “know they are more likely to have a brainstorm while running than while running a meeting,” he says. “Unfortunately, many managers…buy people’s time rather than investing in their talent.”

Where businesspeople are able to take vacations, Orfalea warns of the importance of not letting it turn into a hectic period of out-of-office scheduling and work. “Real vacations afford adequate time for rejuvenation,” he says. “but I think employers will embrace such policies voluntarily when they recognize the bottom line benefits, such as lower overtime costs, lower absenteeism, lower health care costs, better cross-training (and therefore better customer service), and higher individual worker productivity.”



Lesson #5: Take Time Off to Tune Up

Like this article? Share it with your friends
[Get Copyright Permissions] E-Mail | Print | Post | Republish | More  


Related Articles Related Articles
Salesmanship and Empathy
  Increase sales production by tuning in to your prospect's point of view.
Five Lessons I Learned At Starbucks
  Who knew you could learn so much at Starbucks?
Selling swimming pools is the same as selling what you sell
  6 Lessons about selling Lesson # 1: Make sure the person the customer talks to on the telephone is a good representative for your business. Lesson # 2: Never assume you know what the customer’s problems (needs a...
Getting Rich Is An Exact Science
  People who do things in this certain way whether they do it consciously or unconsciously get rich. In science in order for a theory to be proven correct and accepted as fact it must always produce like results from ...
Performance Expectations - 5 Tips and 5 Questions
  Performance Expectations to clearly explain what is expected of your people is a vital and fairly obvious first step in any organisation. Yet it fails to be happen so often! So, here are some simple ideas to help y...

Related Forum Posts Related Forum Posts
Re: 7 Sure-Fire Time Management Tricks To Get More Done Re: 7 Sure-Fire Time Management Tricks To Get More Done
No B.S. Time Management No B.S. Time Management
Books You Wish Had Been Written Books You Wish Had Been Written
Dan Kennedy Marketing Methods Dan Kennedy Marketing Methods
Re: Women entrepreneur millionaires Re: Women entrepreneur millionaires
Books that should be written Books that should be written
Re: Dan Kennedy Marketing Methods Re: Dan Kennedy Marketing Methods
Tough decision.... Tough decision....

Related Forum Posts Related Businesses - Evan Elite Authors

The Evan Elite Authors program is currently in beta phase. For details please contact us.


 
Famous Entrepreneur Video
Paul Orfalea Video - Paul Orfalea, author of COPY THIS!, and founder of Kinko's, talks with James Michael Tyler about turning ADHD and dyslexia into advantages as he built one of America's best companies.
Become An Author

Paul Orfalea Picture Paul Orfalea Newsletter
Get our free newsletter to learn more about Paul Orfalea and other famous entrepreneurs!

Email:
Name: