A Behind-The-Scenes Peek At My Summer Vacation
Jul 24, 2023
Here at Profits + Prosecco, we're about halfway through our summer vacation.
I know everybody has a slightly different summer schedule. My kids’ summer vacation is ten weeks long, and we're five weeks through it. It’s crazy to think that in five weeks, they’ll be back to school. It flies by, doesn’t it?
At the time I’m writing this, my kids are three, five, and seven. It’s my youngest baby's first year of school ever; she’ll be going into pre-K. The middle one will be in first grade, and my oldest will be in second grade, so this is a really pivotal summer vacation for me. It marks the end of the era of stay-at-home motherhood and the beginning of this whole new chapter.
This is the beginning of what I always pictured summers would look like, and if I could do one thing right now in life, it would be to hit the pause button and just hang out here for a long, long time.
Behind The Summer Vacation Scenes
About four weeks into summer vacation, I realized that I’ve only had my babysitter here twice. I wanted to share that and follow it up with an explanation of what this can look like, because it's not just the opportunity to work from home that a bookkeeping business can give. It also gives you the opportunity for true presence and choice.
All that backstory is to say that this is not an accident. This is exactly what I envisioned right from the beginning, because I tend to significantly future pace my thoughts.
That can be a good thing when it comes to planning things out, but in my personal life, it can sometimes be bad. I'm always trying to picture how the future is going to go for things that I don't have control over.
Your business, though, you have a good amount of control over. I find it to be one of the areas of my life where I have the most control.
So, the entire time that I have been trying to decide what my work is going to look like, ever since I left corporate while pregnant with my first baby, I knew the kind of mom I wanted to be. For whatever reason, summer held big significance in that vision.
Not that the rest of the year doesn't. It’s just that throughout the rest of the year, I don't feel like I have a ton of freedom. And that's a choice. I acknowledge that. I made the choice to send my kids to public school, so I wake up to an alarm clock every day because I need to get my kids to school, not because I need to work on any client tasks. If it was up to me completely, if my kids weren't in school, there would be no alarm clocks, which is part of why summer is so sacred to me.
Looking to The Next Chapter
In my head, when I think of how I want to be as a mom, I really strongly picture summer vacation. I don't think that there's anything significant from my childhood about summer vacation, but for whatever reason, summer has held really big significance to me in my motherhood vision.
When I pictured what kind of mom I wanted to be, I never pictured my kids as babies. That’s part of how I’m always looking ahead to the next chapter.
The “new mom” chapter was always pretty clearly defined. It was completely composed of raising babies and being home and knowing that you want to definitely want to be there for those moments.
You want to soak up every bit of that phase that you can, but for me, I don't see their childhood as ending once they enter school. I almost see their childhood as beginning.
So you get through the baby stage, and during that time, you're pretty much just focused on surviving it. The baby stage is obviously beautiful, but it's also a ton of work.
In fact, it is so consuming that when you're in it, you end up with little coping mechanisms to make through the day, especially when you have three and you have them so close in age. All I did was babies for years, and now that I’m out of that stage, I can finally dive into my vision for summer with my kids.
For the first few years, there was no summer vacation. Summer didn't really exist. I was just a stay-at-home mom with babies. When my son was not even a year old, I found out that I was pregnant with my daughter. And then when she was not even a year old, I found out that I was pregnant with a baby that I then lost. Five months later, I was pregnant with my third.
So my first few years of being a mom, summer didn't really mean anything. Summer was just another day. But now, I get to shape it however I want.
During my summer vacations, I don't need to be trying to sign clients. My summers are probably not the best time for me to be changing processes or training or documenting anything either, as long as there’s a choice. Some things can’t wait, but anything that can wait, it does.
I knew that what I wanted for summer vacation with my kids at these ages was to be able to be call-free. And with bookkeeping, you can work whenever you want. All I need to know in advance is when I’ll need childcare to get my work done.
I feel that I need childcare if I'm going to be taking calls, for instance, because it's going to be harder for me to take that call if I’m also caring for my kids. I'm not going to be able to be in the clearest headspace for myself. I'm not going to give the greatest attention to my kids, my client, my potential client, my teammate, or whoever I may be talking to. So I choose not to purposely schedule calls when my kids are home if I can avoid it.
Those are the times when I have childcare, but that’s about it.
I find I can easily fit client work into any pocket of time. I can do ten-minute bursts on different aspects of client work while three kids are running around screaming, and they don't even know that I'm working.
Now, this is because my kids are older. Those pockets of time exist when you have a three, five and seven-year-old because I'm not needing to change diapers anymore. If they need water, they can get it for themselves. They can be swimming in the pool because they swim now, and I can be sitting on the couch right next to the pool window and watching them swim while I work.
It Can Be Simple…But You Need to Build It Early
So am I working in the summer, even though I've had roughly six hours of childcare in four weeks? Yes, I am. But if I were to clock those hours, they would be still very minimal, because I’ve erased unnecessary calls from my summer. I’ve taken maybe two sales calls this summer. I also did a Tech Talk for LIBBY, and that’s about all I needed childcare for.
It's really beautiful, because you could run a bookkeeping business over summer vacation with absolutely no childcare if you wanted, and you could do it going anywhere.
I'm having these pinch-me moments throughout summer vacation this year where I'm thinking, “Wow, when's the last time that I worked? When's the last time I thought about work? When's the last time that I fixated on work?”
I spent years in this…ahem, passionate mental obsession over work where instead of trying to pull away from it, I was trying to reel in how much I wanted to work. I was trying to find places where I could squeeze in work and not feel guilty about it.
That's not really where I am right now. I'm more in a place of allowing myself to see and enjoy the stage that I've built over the last five years of really thinking about what my life and business would look like five years from then.
This 2023 version of summer was the plan the whole time, and this is the beginning of experiencing the execution of the plan and really allowing myself to enjoy it. And not only enjoy it, but to tell others that it’s possible.
The Dream is Doable
if you are in that season of thinking, “What do I want my life to look like five years from now?” and it doesn't seem possible…if you have a knack for numbers and you think that bookkeeping could be it, I'm here to tell you that it's definitely doable.
In fact, it’s even simpler than you think. I know that it was simpler than I thought, and there weren’t programs to learn the skills back then like the programs I’ve made.
If you’re wanting to learn the skills you need to create summer vacations like this, BABs and LIBBY are what you need. BABs is about learning the skills and the efficiency. LIBBY is there for the business growth. And both can give you the ability to start a bookkeeping business and start crafting the summer vacations—and the life—that you want to live!
WORK WITH KATIE:
If you're looking for more tips for bookkeeping, insight on how to become a bookkeeper, and how to say hello to a more confident business model, enroll in Become A Bookkeeper (BABs).
To learn about the programs and get a peek behind the curtain, head to www.katieferro.com/6-secrets.
Learn how to take your bookkeeping skills and turn them into a business that allows you to replace (or surpass) your corporate salary, be present for your life, and profoundly impact your clients without selling your life in the process by joining Life by the Books (LIBBY).
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CONNECT WITH KATIE:
Website: https://www.katieferro.com/
