JODI’S JAM

Long Service Leave? Reenergising? Recharging the batteries? A Break? Research? Call it what you will, but for us, it’s all of the above!

People have questioned how it’s even possible to leave a business for this long (10 months)!

The answer is pretty easy for us. Back yourself, back your team and back your business. We couldn’t do it if we fell short on any one of these things.

Between Jan 2019 and Dec 2021, our immediate family experienced a significant amount of trauma and grief. Summed up briefly, a major car accident (resulting in a traumatic brain injury), 2 deaths, a house fire, I had blood sepsis and that was separate to what we were dealing with in our business life. There was a few major incidents in the business also, not excluding being closed for 270 days during COVID and needing to sell our house. Throw home-schooling into the mix and what we got out of it was “life is too short”. Cliché or not, it couldn’t have rang more true.

Living onsite makes it very hard to switch off and like a lot of business owners (especially in our industry) we have struggled to get/take time off, but we really needed this for our family, the business and our future vision.

Our tagline in our business is to ‘hit the switch’ on your everyday routine. Our business promotes this, so we thought it was time to practise what we preach and spent the next 2 years preparing our team and business for 2024 without us. We spent 2 years really working on our team culture! What does team culture look like to us? I’ll save that for anther post, but essentially what we got – is an extended family in our staff. Loyalty, Trust, Fun, Hard Work, Support and the Encouragement to take a break. What sort of team encourages their managing directors to take a year off? One that understands, and more importantly has the ability and motivation to do so (manage the operations without us).

What we will get out of having nearly a year away from the business (operations) is:
– A stronger business (we have seen so many things we want to implement)
– A stronger team as they have had to lead without us
– Stronger relationships (between us, our kids, people we’ve met and our team)
– Richer memories
– Renewed energy and motivation
– We now know we can have a PROPER break and the team and business will be fine!

I leave you with the advice my passing dad gave to me – “make sure you do it, because there’ll always be a reason not to” in our case dad was referring to our trip.

DREAM BIG!