Back to the salt mines
Owning a microbusiness can be hazardous to your vacation plans

All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy, or so the old saying goes. If that is indeed true, then lots of owners of microbusinesses appear to be leading deadly dull lives.

According to statistics released in July by Washington, D.C.- based management consulting company Gallup, 20 per cent of microbusiness owners in the U.S. reported not taking any vacation in the previous 12 months and another 20 per cent say they took a week or less. Gallup considers microbusinesses to be those that have five or fewer employees – including the owner.

While these stats track the vacation habits of American microbusiness owners only, they are instructive for any microbusiness owners in Atlantic Canada. Isn’t taking time off from work important to re-charge your batteries and ward off burn out?

Another stat Gallup culled from tracking U.S. microbusiness owners suggests that is the case. It found 29 per cent of all microbusiness owners who did not take any vacation time in the past year strongly agreed they were less satisfied with their standard of living and struggled to balance their work and personal life.

However, Gallup’s polling of the microbusiness owners turns up another interesting finding: there are a large number of them who purposely didn’t take vacation. That’s right, Gallup found that of the microbusiness owners it polled that hadn’t taken any vacation during the past year, 39 per cent said they had the ideal job.

So what are we to make of so many microbusiness owners who aren’t taking time off from work? “This polarization may point to two groups of microbusiness owners who take little to no vacation, those who are energized by their ideal job and might choose not to take time away from it, and those who are struggling and might not be able to afford to take time away,” Gallup says.