Time-Out

You may think you can't take a vacation. But sometimes you need a break from your company -- and your company needs a break from you

In February 2000, Jo DeMars went out to lunch and didn't come back to work for four months. The president of DeMars & Associates Ltd. had been feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and drained of creativity -- not a terribly productive state for someone who had recently told her staff that she wanted her company to make the Inc. 500 list in five years. "I didn't have anything left to give," recalls DeMars, whose $1.5-million company, in Waukesha, Wis., manages warranty-dispute-arbitration programs for major automakers. "I found myself getting so wrapped up in the day-to-day tasks that I couldn't be strategic." That's a painfully common complaint among CEOs of growing companies, but very few take the dramatic step that DeMars did.

For DeMars, and for Louis Ravenet, CEO of Baltimore-based Invoke Systems, going AWOL was the first step toward transforming their companies. And although we're not recommending a four-month lunch break for everyone, there's certainly enough evidence to suggest that a brief sojourn not only is good for you but can be good for your company, too.

Demars had grown her business, now 13 years old, by meticulously managing every aspect of the company's operations. Over the years, however, she had become a classic micromanager, always letting herself be drawn back into tasks that she supposedly had delegated to others. "She'd delegate, but she'd still want control," says Natalie Fleury, a compliance-process manager. DeMars's employees, many of them in their twenties, were apprehensive about making their own decisions and sought her approval for everything. She took on tasks willingly, often motivated by the desire to protect her staff from the less pleasant aspects of business, such as dealing with abusive clients. "I never wanted them to worry," she says, "so I took a lot of it on myself."

"I found myself getting so wrapped up in the day-to-day tasks that I couldn't be strategic."

Those well-intentioned instincts were DeMars's downfall; she became so overwhelmed with minutiae that she lost sight of the big picture. Increasingly, she would fret about issues that she now understands were meaningless. "If someone came in with a wrinkled shirt, I'd think, 'Well, this "business casual" just doesn't work, and I've got to find another solution," she recalls. "A lot of it was making mountains of molehills, and when you do that, you suddenly have a mountain range in your life." The same attention to detail that had served her so well in the past was now eating away at her ability to keep things in perspective.

"I was burned out and exhausted," DeMars says. "I remember reading an article several years ago about CEOs taking sabbaticals, and it sounded great, but I just didn't know how anyone could do that. I thought I would be letting everyone down because everyone in the world needed me there -- I was like Atlas."

But by the end of January 2000, DeMars had reached the breaking point. Morale problems were infiltrating the office, and DeMars's health was suffering. Then she opened her E-mail one morning to discover that a key client was cutting back its budget for her company's services. She called her husband, Derek Prentice, in London. (Prentice has his own London-based consulting company and spends half of his time in the United Kingdom.) "I'll never forget that call," says Prentice. "She said, 'Come now; I'm not going back to work.' I dropped everything and packed my bags."

At Invoke, an $8-million Web-development and content-management company, CEO Louis Ravenet faced an entirely different dilemma but ultimately settled on the same solution as DeMars. He had grown Invoke with a core group of dedicated employees who were happy to work 80-hour weeks for their charismatic and highly creative founder. Ravenet jokes that one of his company's most successful software applications is named after him: Tyrant. Nonetheless, Ravenet had begun to feel that his company was outgrowing his particular set of talents. What then-10-year-old Invoke needed most was structure, organization, and sound management principles, none of which were Ravenet's forte. He also realized that he was becoming dangerously indispensable to some of his customers. "Once I was out flying, and I got a call from the tower telling me to come down immediately," he recalls. "As soon as I landed, a security guard handed me the phone, and it was a client. I spent the next hour and a half on the phone with him." It was a clear signal to Ravenet that he was probably not the best person to guide Invoke into its next phase. So in June 2000, Ravenet announced to his staff that he was taking a leave of absence; he would devote his attention full-time to iCommunicate, an Internet company he had recently founded, and leave Invoke in the hands of a newly hired chief operating officer. His staff was less than thrilled.

"I thought I would be letting everyone down."

Demars and Ravenet had no intention of bailing out of their companies permanently, and they had very different reasons for stepping away, but both CEOs used the opportunity to fill in management gaps that, left unattended, most certainly would have hindered their companies' growth.

The first thing DeMars did when she decided to prolong her lunch hour was to call a meeting with Sean Zielinski, her general manager; Joseph Geck, a consultant who had worked with her in the past; and Prentice. Prentice agreed to spend two weeks every month at DeMars, where he would develop a new marketing and business-development plan -- projects that his wife knew were important but for which she could never seem to find the time. As a consultant, Geck had begun to implement a set of processes and standards to help the company more efficiently manage its 17 employees, 36 independent contractors, and 300 volunteer arbitrators. Now DeMars was counting on him to continue that work and to step in as her temporary successor.