And when he left for the trip, Jon made it clear that the team was empowered to make decisions without him.

“I unplugged, really forced all of our management team to make decisions around all the different parts of the businesses, including technology, finance and accounting, all the operations groups, so there wouldn’t be a backstop on making decisions and executing around the business.”

The way Jon went about preparing Brighton Jones for his trip shows how important it is to have the right people working with you, in the right jobs, as well as processes in place that keep your practice growing. If YOU are your whole practice, then it’s going to be impossible to get away and build a real business.

Second: Be Clear On Your Service Model

It’s rather cliché to ask, “What business are you in?” Yet, many advisors position themselves to totally confuse their target audience.

As my friend Ben Jones of BMO Global Asset management recently said on his podcast, many advisors have changed how they price their service (moving from commissions to fees) over the past 20 years, but they haven’t changed the value they deliver.

Along those lines, in my conversation with Jon, he kept mentioning “revenue” instead of “AUM.” I finally asked him why he was focused on revenue instead of the popular AUM metric and he said, “I’m in a study group with a number of other CEOs, and when they talk about AUM, I say, 'You do not pay people based on your AUM. You pay people, you pay your rent, you pay your marketing, you pay everything from a budget based on revenues.' I pay very little attention to AUM, other than the fact that the industry seems to want to talk about it a lot, and so we do track it. But we don’t do any planning based on AUM. We do all of our planning based on revenue."

Jon’s firm delivers a “personal CFO” experience and takes a “total balance sheet approach to managing the client’s life plan versus a fee for investment management.” In other words, the way he measures his business is aligned with the service he delivers—and they are extremely clear on what that service is.

If you have any hope of taking an extended leave of absence from your business, you must be very clear on your service model, your pricing must be aligned with that model, and everybody on your team must toe the line to that service model.