Dear SaaStr: How Much Vacation is Normal for an Early Stage Startup CEO?
I’ve gotten worse at this. I think many of us have. I can tell you I never skimped on my own vacations as CEO — except in the first year of my second start-up, when for a while I was sort of on my own.
In fact, I probably took more true vacations as CEO than I do now because I needed them more, and I insisted everyone on the team take them.
But … the key is (1) having a strong management team, (2) having a right-hand person as part of that team, and (3) that you won’t really 100% disconnect.
Take ’em once you have a few good VPs, at least. They’ll know how to execute. They might even be OK with you not being around the office that week. You actually often see things seemingly work even better when you take a week off as CEO, if you have a very strong team under you.
And you’ll get time to think about the business more strategically than you can with 50 distractions a day.
(vacation image from here)
