Getting Ready To Take Time Off This Summer As a Business Owner (+ How I Take 3 Weeks Off Every Year)

Do you want to take time off this summer? How confident are you that your current booking process (your business, your tools, your systems), could run without you for a week?

Like, if you closed your laptop right now and didn’t open it again for seven days, would people still be inquiring? Would leads still be moving? Would anyone actually pay you?

If your stomach just did a little thing, keep reading.

I want you to walk away from this blog with one very clear idea in your head: your business should do the work for you. You should not feel like you are chained to a computer 24/7. If I had to sum up what I help everybody who works with me do, it’s this: do more in less time and not let your revenue suffer.

Now, let’s start with why bookings slow down in the summer.

Rather listen? Check out my episode on how to complete a Summer Systems Audit below.

Two Reasons Bookings Slow Down (And Only One Is Your Problem)

When bookings are slow, it almost always comes down to one of two things.

One: you’re not getting enough leads. Not enough inquiries are coming in. That’s a marketing problem and I’m going to be honest with you, that is not what I help with. I am not a marketing specialist. If you need more eyeballs, that’s a different conversation.

Two: you’re getting leads, but they’re not turning into booked clients. You’re getting ghosted. People are telling you you’re too expensive. They’re not sure if what you offer is going to solve their problem. That is a systems problem. Those are things you can absolutely work on and improve.

What I want you to understand is that when you decide to take time away from your business, if you have conversion problems, they get exposed faster than normal. Because when you’re inside your business every single day (manually managing client communication, manually following up, manually pushing things forward), you don’t really know your system isn’t efficient. You’re constantly picking up balls before they drop. But the moment you step away, you come back to chaos.

Most of the time, you are not losing leads because you’re too expensive. You are not losing leads because someone was price shopping. Instead, you are losing your leads in between them being interested and them being committed because you are not giving them the easiest path to say yes.

My Three-Part System For Getting Ready To Take Time Off This Summer

I’ve built my whole process around three pillars (I call this my Love Your Leads process). When all three are in place, your booking process runs whether you’re at your desk or at the pool.

Pillar One: Instant Inquiry Response

When someone fills out your contact form, something needs to go back to them immediately. Immediately. Because your instant inquiry response is your first opportunity to stop any doubt before it starts.

Here’s what I want you to do: go look at your auto-responder email when we’re done here. Because it is not sufficient to say “thank you for inquiring about my services, I’ll contact you in 48 hours.” You have to give it some depth. You have to give them an action they can take. They need to be able to go get immersed in your work, in you as a human, in you as a business owner, in your offer and what it can do for them.

They did their job the moment they filled out your contact form. Your job is to make sure the next step is obvious.

If you want to take time off this summer, or really even if you don’t, this instant inquiry response should:

• Sound like you
• Set expectations clearly
• Build momentum without needing you live

Pillar Two: Intentional Communication

Every single email in your client experience has a job. Your job is to figure out what that job is.

When you pre-plan your communication and automate it, every lead stays on track because you’re consistently communicating with them at every step. That means that nothing stalls and nothing falls through the cracks because you happen to be unavailable.

The problem with not pre-planning your communication is that when you want to take time off this summer, everything stops. Your leads are sitting there going, “I want to pay you money but I don’t know how,” and you don’t even know it.

When you don’t consistently communicate with leads, it creates doubt. It breaks the trust and excitement they felt when they were on your website, looking at your work, imagining themselves as your client. If they contact you super excited and then you take days to respond, that excitement just… leaks out. It disappears as fast as it got there.

But when you do strategic communication and you do it well (when it shows off your personality, anticipates questions they’ll ask and stays consistent), it reinforces the confidence they had when they decided you were the person they wanted to work with.

Even if they inquired with multiple people, there’s still a reason they filled out your contact form.

One of my clients, Roxanne, was spending an hour to two hours on every single lead making custom Canva proposals from scratch. She’d go to their website, grab the logo, get all the information about the business. All of that customization was eating up the time she needed to actually follow up and close the leads she already had.

Knowing this, we created a template for her inside Systems in Session. It now takes her less than twenty minutes to customize each one. She had her first ten thousand dollar month and was fully booked out for two months. In the first five proposals she sent out, four people booked within 48 hours of receiving each one.

With Roxanne, she had been giving away add-ons for free, or not selling them enough, simply because she wasn’t asking people if they wanted them. Once we added those to the proposal with a price tag, and I made her raise her prices, she was presenting people with the opportunity to pay her more money from the beginning.

The first time someone added an add-on, she messaged me saying she thought something was broken because they paid more than she asked. It wasn’t broken. They booked her video add-on.

Sometimes people are ready to work with you. Sometimes they’re ready to pay you more than you were going to ask.

Pillar Three: The Invitation to Book

This is the part that makes you the money. This is what gets people to say yes.

And here is what I want you to hear: if you create an intentional, strategic invitation to book, you can eliminate your sales calls for the times when you are unavailable to do them.

I love a good sales call. I really do. But I also have alternatives, because I’m a busy person and the people who want to work with me are busy too.

For example, I have:

• Video ask on my website
• Loom videos
• An option to ask me questions over email

All of these are ways to give people what they need to say yes without requiring both of you to be available at the same moment in time. And while we are at it…

You should never ask someone if they want a proposal. I want to say that again. You never ask. You tell them: “I’ll be sending you a proposal in the next hour. It will have all the information we discussed laid out. If you have any additional questions, please let me know.”

They inquired about your services. That means they want the proposal. The only exception is if there are red flags. If they want something you don’t offer, if it’s clearly not a good fit. Then no. But if you offer a service they need, you send the proposal. Always.

When it’s time for someone to say yes, after they’ve read their inquiry, watched your video, understood your offer, the booking link should feel simple, aligned, and obvious.

If your client hesitates at this point, it is usually not about price. Eight times out of ten, someone not booking immediately has nothing to do with your pricing. It’s because you haven’t made the process easy enough for them to say yes.

That’s on you. And that means it’s also something you can fix.

Are You Afraid To Use Automation To Take Time Off This Summer?

In my experience as a client experience strategist, most people aren’t afraid of automation, persay. They’re afraid of losing control over the experience.

If that’s you, I want to say this clearly: a well-designed system doesn’t replace you. It delivers for you consistently, whether you’re available or not.

When you sit down and design what I like to call a human-first client experience — one that doesn’t feel robotic, that sounds like you, that consistently communicates everything they need before they even have the question — that is when automation is helping your business.

Your clients have questions you can anticipate. Every time a lead asked you something before they said yes, you should be writing that down. If one person asks something and you think it was a weird question, maybe you don’t need to change your process. But if you hear the same question two or three times? That’s not them. That’s you. And you need to make sure you’re addressing that question on your website, in your emails, in your booking process before they have to ask. Because if you address it early, people will say yes faster.

What to Actually Do Next If You Want To Take Time Off This Summer

Here’s what I want you to walk away from this and do. In order:

First: Map your customer journey. Sit down with a piece of paper and actually map out what happens from the moment someone fills out your contact form to the moment they are a fully onboarded client. If you’ve never done this, you don’t actually know what your process is. You can’t automate something you haven’t designed.

Second: Lock in your Love Your Leads process (that’s the three pillars I walked you through earlier). That means your instant inquiry response, your intentional communication, and your invitation to book. These three things working together are what keep leads moving when you’re not at your desk.

Third: Build your five-minute booking process. I don’t care what tool you use. Dubsado, HoneyBook, 17Hats — all of them have a proposal or smart file or quote. All of them have a contract and an invoice. Your job is to make sure yours is set up so someone can say yes in under five minutes. Not ten emails back and forth. Five minutes.

Fourth: Build the workflows and automations. Yes, that word. Once the communication is planned and the booking process is solid, you automate the sequence so it runs without you.

Fifth: Before you put any of it out in the world, test it. This is a requirement. Test it with a fake email. Have your partner test it. Have your best friend test it. Do not build a booking process and send it out into the world without going through it yourself first.

Can I Help You Take Time Off This Summer?

Now that I’ve told you how to take time off this summer, we need to have a little heart-to-heart. Knowing what to do and having it built are two very different things. And if you’ve been nodding along to everything in this post and still don’t have it done… that’s not a motivation problem. That’s a time and accountability problem.

That’s exactly why I created Systems in Session.

This isn’t a course you buy and never open. It’s you and me, one-on-one, actually building your connected client experience from the ground up. Not patchwork. Not “good enough for now.” A system that works together (from the first inquiry all the way through to referrals and rebooking).

Here’s how we do it:

• Day 1 — Kickoff & Systems Blueprint: We review your Systems Blueprint and map your entire client experience.
• Week 1 — Finalize Love Your Leads: Inquiry response, intentional communication, and invitation-to-book assets.
• Week 2 — Booking Proposal & 5-Minute Booking Process: Proposals, contracts, invoices, and the decision flow that makes it easy for people to say yes.
• First 30 Days — Communication & Workflows: Emails, automations, and CRM workflows built together.
• Remaining Time — Testing & Expansion: Refinement, troubleshooting, referrals, and rebooking strategy.

When it’s all done, you’ll have your full Love Your Leads system from inquiry to booking, proposals that support confident decisions, onboarding that feels clear and calm for your clients, ongoing communication that prevents ghosting, and a complete delivery, offboarding, referrals, and rebooking process.

That is a complete client experience. Not five separate things you cobbled together. One connected system that runs whether you’re at your desk or at the pool.

Get the details and grab your spot at coliejames.com/systems-in-session