040 Dedicated Business Time: Maximizing Growth Through Intensive Retreats

This week, host Regan Bashara is sharing about the concept of using dedicated business retreats or intensives to spend even more time working on your business away from the notifications and distractions of daily life and work. If you find yourself thinking that you just need a couple of days uninterrupted by clients, coworkers, or your family, a business retreat may be the solution. This episode discusses how to do that, what to consider when it comes to business tax deductions for retreat expenses, and how to keep good records about the purpose of your retreat.

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Welcome to Episode 40 of "Money Through Ease." I'm your host, Regan Bashara, founder of All Ease Accounting. And today, we're talking about how to take dedicated time to work on your business or in your business through intensive retreats, or intensives, or just retreats. I wanted to talk about this because I just got back from a business retreat with my coach, and I had an amazing time and I got so much done. This is something that I've always known that I wanted to do and never found a way to implement it. But being part of the Selling You Sales Coaching community, I have access to go on a retreat twice a year, and that's what I did this past weekend from when I'm recording this episode. I just wanted to share with you what that was like, what that experience was like, why I did it, what we did, and then encourage you to find a way to dedicate more time to work in or on your business through a retreat for yourself. And so, there are a couple of different ways that you can do this. And I especially want to talk about how you can facilitate your own retreat or participate in a retreat that someone else is offering, and make it a business expense that is deductible for you as a genuine tax-deductible business expense. So, let's talk about what a retreat is, or what an intensive might be for your business. This will be dedicated time for you to work on your business, away from your current environment. Whether you are working from home, whether you have an office space where you work, whether you own a brick-and-mortar retail business like a shop or a restaurant, and you're working in that location day in and day out, you need time away from that. What about when you're working wherever you work on a normal, regular basis? You have so many distractions, and not only that, but you have your typical routine for what you do for work. And then, distractions and notifications on top of that: the phone rings, you get emails, text message notifications. If you work anywhere in a space where there are other people—whether that's your family, friends, customers, coworkers, or employees—you might be distracted by other people constantly. So, in your day-to-day environment and the day-to-day notifications that you experience, other people interrupting you, not maliciously, but just because they might have a question? Or you have customers or clients walking into your business or calling your business. Even if you dedicate time every week, or every day, or every month to work on your business (and that would be, you know, marketing, the administration of your business, doing your business's bookkeeping), even if you schedule that time and dedicate that time to do that work on your business, you're still going to be battling interruptions and the normal workflow. Unless you remove yourself from your current environment, not only dedicate the time to do the work that is away from your day-to-day work. So, this is what a retreat can look like: getting out of your office, getting out of your home, getting out of your business—wherever you're doing your work day-to-day—and getting into a new space where you can dedicate the time to do some intense work. So, here's the benefits of having an intensive business retreat with dedicated time and a dedicated, different location to do that. The benefits to this are you have time to do focused planning. This would involve you actively turning off your distractions and notifications, making sure that you're secluded as much as you need to be. There are people who may work from home, work in an office, but they like to sometimes go sit at a coffee shop and do their work there. That's not necessarily secluded because you're interacting with the general public, and there will be people coming and going. You might run into somebody you know, and they might come over and say hi for a couple of minutes. So, are you okay with doing secluded time in a public environment like that? Even if it is away from your day-to-day workspace? Or do you need to be completely secluded and rent a room at your local library and shut everything out and turn off all of your notifications and put all of your things on "do not disturb"? Do you need to physically fly or drive to a location in another state? Do you need to be out in nature? Is it okay if you are in an Airbnb, or do you need to be in a hotel where they have a conference room? Thinking about what you would need from your environment to have the time and the space and remove distractions in order to do the focused planning of your business while you're on this retreat. Another benefit to doing a retreat would be to develop a strategy for your business. I've talked a lot about how to track whenever you develop strategies in your business. If you've got something that you're developing, like a new product or a new offer, or you want to implement a new marketing system or email system or workflow software or customer management software like a CRM, to develop a new strategy in your business. I have talked about how to set that up on your financial reports and your categories to track the efficiency of that strategy. But going on a retreat and dedicating the time to developing that strategy in the first place is also really important and can help you get a strategy together quicker than if you're just working on it for a couple of hours every week while you're also trying to do all of your other work and being interrupted all the time. So that could be a benefit for you going on a business retreat. It's time to develop some strategy for your business. Another benefit if you have employees or you have colleagues or another business that you're collaborating with, and you go on a retreat with them, this could be some great bonding time and networking time, right? If you are bringing your employees on a retreat with you to work on strategy for your business or to plan for your business, this can be an awesome dedicated time to bond with other people. You may also decide to work with someone who's facilitating the retreat. There are people whose service that they offer is a retreat dedicated to helping you strategize and plan for your business, and so you can work with somebody like that who will facilitate and pretty much just handle all of the logistics of the retreat. So you can get your work done or you can, you know, do your own thing, and you can decide all of those things for yourself and not have to hire a facilitator to do that for you. You can decide where you want to go, who you want to go with, what you want to do, where you're going to eat, where you're going to stay, etc. Another benefit to going on a retreat is, of course, creativity. And when we are in the day-to-day kind of humdrum of running a business—operating, providing services, selling products, administration, all of that—stuff that can block creativity, we need time as human beings to relax and get rejuvenated, get rest, and be well-fed, and then schedule time in order to work on creative things. So, if you go on a retreat, whether or not you need to do creative work for your business, the work that you want to do, maybe you just want to take a painting class as well, and this can be, you know, a non-work-related thing that you do on your retreat that's just for pleasure and that is helping the flow of creativity so that when you go on the retreat and you do the creative, pleasurable thing, that opens you up, that relaxes you so that you can do the work that you intended to do: the business work, the administrative work, the strategy development, whatever you are on the retreat to do. Having time for creativity can help with all that other stuff, right? Another benefit to doing a business or an intensive retreat would be to develop a certain skill. So, maybe you don't necessarily need time to focus on planning or developing a strategy for your business. Maybe there's a certain skill that you want to develop as a business owner, and so you design or you sign up for a retreat that is about developing that skill. Still, maybe you want to attend a workshop or a live training with somebody, and you build a retreat for yourself around that workshop, and you attend an event for that skill that you want to develop. Maybe another benefit would be just time to reflect and evaluate what's going on in your business. Maybe you really have it all together: you've got all your systems, you've got ways to track things. But with the humdrum of daily tasks that you need to do in your personal life and professionally, in your removing those tasks from your plate, going on a retreat in order to reflect and evaluate what's happening in your business, that's going to leave you more time for the work that you're doing on your business to soak in and to really see how it's all going to play out. You can gain new perspectives about your business by putting your brain in a totally different space, a totally new space. Maybe it's not a new space; you've been there before, but just putting your brain and your body, putting yourself in a whole new space is going to help you gain some perspective on the things that you do on a regular basis on day-to-day. In your business, maybe a benefit for going on a retreat would be to get some networking. If you have a friend or a colleague, and every time you see them or hear from them, you both are like, "Oh, man, we really need to get together and catch up and blah blah blah." Finding a way to network and meet up with that colleague, meet up with that friend, so that you finally can't say, "Oh, we need to get together," like you're doing it. You're getting together. If you're traveling to a retreat, find someone who lives there that you know but you may never get to see them because you never go there specifically. Meet up with them and spend time with them. So those are all the benefits of going on a business retreat, going on an intensive, and that could be for any amount of time, you know, a weekend even, just a day where you just take off from work and go somewhere and do something specific that is going to benefit your business. And we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. So now that we've talked about the benefits of doing a business retreat, whether you hire a facilitator or you work with someone who's hosting a retreat, or if you just decide to do it for yourself and you're the one that plans it and implements all of it, either way, let's talk about how we're going to make this retreat into a business. Because, as the numbers, which as your bookkeeper, that's what I'm here to do, is to help you get the most out of your business tax deductions, and going on a retreat, doing an intensive business can be turned into a tax deduction. It's all about figuring out what is both ordinary and necessary about this retreat, about this business trip that you're doing, about this work, in order for it to be tax deductible. So, this is not a surefire way to be able to claim a retreat as a business deduction, and that is going to be up to the kind of records that you keep and ultimately up to the IRS to determine whether or not you can deduct it. But here's what I think you should do if you want to record this trip, this retreat, whatever work you're doing, as a business deduction. So, number 1: Have a plan for where you will go on the retreat, travel to and then where you're going to go while you're on the retreat and what you're going to do when you get there. Keep a record of the intent and the purpose of your retreat. If you're going to go solo, and if you have a facilitator like a coach or someone who is hosting the retreat, keep a record of the purpose of that so that your trip can be deducted as a business expense. Number 2: Keep good records of everything you paid for. This is just generally good advice through business record-keeping, but especially for a business retreat or an intensive. Keeping a record of everything, including the travel expenses, but especially activities that you planned ahead of time and that you completed while you were on the retreat. Keep those receipts, y'all, keep email confirmations of things. Number 3: Research where you're going and what you're doing and make a plan for how and why this is being done for your business. So if you are going to plan activities while you're on the retreat, make a plan and determine how this is going to impact your business. What kind of work are you going to be doing on that activity? What purpose does it serve for you to do that activity as part of this business retreat? And then number 4: After you return from your retreat, sit down and make some notes about what you did and how it impacted your business. So here are some journal prompts that after you get back from your retreat, you can sit down and answer these prompts and use that as a record for the deduction of taking this as a business expense. So, the first journal prompt will be: Why did I choose this location for a retreat for my work? The second question: Did I use a facilitator? Who was it and what kind of services did they offer me as part of facilitating this retreat? Did they only do the arrangements for where you're going to stay and make you dinner reservations, or were they working with you the entire time on your business strategy and planning? The third journal prompt is: Did I bring anyone from my business along with me? Did I bring extra family members or friends? And how much did those folks support and interact with me while I was working on my business, or did they go off and do their own thing while I was getting my work done? The fourth prompt is: Where are all the records, such as receipts and confirmations of the purchases I made for this retreat, and how am I going to record their business purpose? Are you going to write on the receipt or confirmation directly what the business purpose was? Are you going to keep a journal of that somewhere else? How are you going to keep those records and the purpose of the business expense? The fifth journal prompt is: Would I like to return to the same location and/or do the same activities on a future retreat? And the final prompt is: What did I accomplish on my retreat for my business? Maybe you came up with a plan for XYZ strategies for the next year. Maybe you worked on your financial goal for the remainder of this year. Maybe you developed a new product or a service offering, etc. If you've ever done a business retreat or a trip for any of these reasons, or maybe another reason that I haven't mentioned yet, I want to hear from you. You can leave information in the Q&A section on this episode in Spotify, or come find me on social media and share your experiences with business retreats. Please leave a rating and review where you're listening and share this podcast with another business owner. Thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.