Test Your Company's Resilience with a Sabbatical
One way to test the resilience of your company, or more specifically, how a company’s team operates without day-to-day direction from the owner, is for them to step away for a while. We’ll look at how one HELM client prepared for and executed a successful sabbatical and share what they learned from the experience.
How the idea was developed
Garland Mill, a design/build firm in northern New Hampshire focusing on high-performance homes, has been a HELM client since 2019. One challenge facing the business was the fact that the owner, Ben Southworth, was doing everything. Simply put, Ben was too involved in the operations of the company which left him feeling overwhelmed and burned out and didn’t leave him enough time to focus on leadership. It also in some ways prevented others from taking on more leadership responsibilities. As Paul Eldrenkamp, one of the HELM business consultants working with Garland Mill stated,
It was clear that Ben had a team in place that had a lot of talent, potential, and desire to do good work for the company. It was also clear that he had a long-standing habit of being involved in every aspect of every project, and not always to the benefit of the project or his team. This is not unusual in a small construction company – total owner involvement in every aspect can be a habit that helps a company establish a reputation for excellence in the early stages. But at a certain point in the development of the organization it can become a liability, something that starts to hold the organization back. It seemed like Garland Mill was at that point, and I thought that a 3-month sabbatical would be the most effective way for it to get over the hurdle. Ben liked the idea, and the team was overwhelmingly supportive (Ben would joke that they seemed a little too supportive of the idea at times).
After casually broaching the idea of a sabbatical to Ben over multiple conversations, in late 2022 Ben committed to the plan for a 3-month sabbatical in the fall of 2023.
Learning from Byggmeister’s Process
The idea of a sabbatical wasn’t new to Paul. In fact, it was a critical part of his own company’s transition process. Paul’s first career was as the founder and owner of Byggmeister Design-Build, a Boston-area remodeling company. In 2014, just over 30 years into his ownership, he had a series of conversations with his team and ultimately set a goal of handing off leadership and ownership of the company within 10 years – by 2024.
One of the first major milestones in that transition plan was a 3-month sabbatical, an idea inspired by John Abrams of South Mountain Company. The expectation was that a 3-month absence would highlight the areas in which Paul was most essential to the operations of the company, and thus the areas where the company needed to focus its organizational development work in the remaining time before Paul’s retirement. Although a full hand-off of leadership and ownership seemed a nearly unimaginable stretch – a thousand miles away – a 3-month sabbatical, while still a stretch, felt like it was maybe only two hundred miles away.
Byggmeister spent 15 months preparing for the sabbatical. Much of the time was devoted to documenting Paul’s pre-construction process—exactly how he took a project from initial contact with the prospective client through to construction contract signing—and training Rachel White (now Byggmeister’s CEO) to be able to fill that essential project development role while he was gone, with critical support from the two others on the management team, business manager Maria Washington and estimator Cador Pricejones. During the 15-month planning period, Paul and the management team were able to highlight, clarify, and organize the responsibilities and activities that previously had been loosely (and somewhat sloppily) categorized as “Paul’s job as owner.”
As a direct result of the careful planning, the sabbatical went very smoothly, and everyone came out with a high level of confidence that, despite the large amount of work remaining, a leadership and ownership transition within the hoped-for time frame seemed achievable.
Preparation
Paul Eldrenkamp leads a visioning workshop with the Garland Mill team
Garland Mill’s first step in preparing for Ben’s sabbatical was to establish a management team including Ben (owner), Matt (production manager), Molly (architect), and Sophie (office manager). They needed to begin the habit of meeting monthly to review key performance reports:
Profit and loss statements
Sales backlog updates (how many months of projects are in the pipeline)
Project development milestone updates (are projects in design on schedule? Will we be ready to start projects when we said we would/need to?)
Production issues to solve
These meetings served to get more people involved in decisions, which tended to improve the decisions (this is not inevitable, but it worked with Garland Mill). It also meant that four people—instead of just one—were learning to think like CEOs and collaborate in that thinking.
The second step was to spend the 12 months before the sabbatical filling some reservoirs for the team to draw on as needed while Ben was gone. These corresponded to the five areas of the HELM Framework:
Production: Making sure everyone on the team had access to all needed project information, that Ben had shared everything he knew about projects in the pipeline in a format and location that all had access to
Finance: Making sure that finances were sound, that there was enough money in the bank to carry them through, and that no financial decisions requiring Ben’s approval or signature would need to be made
Community: Making sure that there was enough trust and goodwill all around that the management team would not have to deal with frustrated or angry clients, trade partners, or employees
Organization: Making sure the team was not overcommitted, that the management team would have the time and bandwidth to meet regularly to anticipate and head off problems. Ben and members of the management team utilized HELM’s professional coaching services to support them with aspects of the process.
Strategy: Making sure that the team had a strong enough sense of the shared values of Garland Mill that they would be able to come to quick values-based consensus on how to handle any tough situations that came up
Reflections
The three months seemed to fly by. There were challenges for the management team to overcome (letting go of a key employee and ensuring that projects stayed on track) but overall the company not only survived the sabbatical but thrived during this period.
Ben, of course, was appreciative of the break from holding so much responsibility and oversight of his company. It also served to underscore distinct roles and responsibilities, establishing a well-functioning team. Ben reflected,
I think it has been a game-changer for me and for the team. I needed the break and I think we needed to sink into our roles and responsibilities without me around. I’m much more clear on what my job is now even though it technically hasn’t changed. The team seems much more confident and seems to have much more ownership of the work.
Upon returning to work, Ben reflected to Paul,
Your original question to me when thinking about the time after my sabbatical was something along the lines of “how will your work be different when you come back?” I recall my answer was “I don’t know”…you said that you hoped when you came back from your sabbatical that people wouldn’t be mad at you anymore and that you didn’t want to worry about money…both of those things really hit the spot for me.
On the two days I was back before Christmas the team gave me the highlights and lowlights of the time while I was away. They seemed to have taken everything in stride and I was beginning to feel that I might not be needed. I asked what I should be doing when I came back and there was silence…then Crystal, our new Business Manager, said, “Sell some jobs”. I’ve always been the rainmaker, but never considered it my “work.” I now recognize that my role in project development (sales + marketing) is really important and requires that I focus on setting jobs up for success. In addition to acting as an anti-entropy device (your words) … keeping an eye on finance, design, being visible in the community, and keeping tabs on how things are working (again anti-entropy) round out the role. The other piece for me to think about is leadership development and dealing with ownership.
Thanks again for all of the great mentoring, teaching, coaching, and encouragement. It has been so vital to my personal growth and the growth of Garland Mill. I am very grateful.
Whether you are planning for a transition (change of leadership structure, retirement, etc.), want to strengthen your team, or just really need a break, consider a sabbatical. You will need time to prepare, but the results can be well worth the effort.
At Garland Mill, Ben’s role has shifted and he has an even higher confidence and trust in the team and their ability to make decisions without involving him in everything. It has also opened up some space for them to think about growing the size of their team, to focus on a new small-scale development project downtown, and to start to envision an ownership transition strategy for Ben, which may include some aspect of employee ownership. And now they are starting to plan for the next employee’s sabbatical in 2025.
The Garland Mill team