Agritourism burnout can not only impact the success of your business, but all areas of your life. It is important to take steps to ensure that you have enough “fuel in your tank” to make it through the season with a smile on your face (even if it is fake sometimes). When burnout sets in, the negative impact will be felt all the way down to the guests that visit your venue. Here are some tips to help avoid Agritourism burnout.
1. Delegate Menial Tasks It is tempting to save a few bucks and do things like cleaning up trash from the parking lot, setting up the inflatables, re-stocking your concession stand. All those menial tasks add up to a lot of hours in a given season. Spend a little extra on payroll to bring that hard-worker in early or stay late to address these tasks.
2. Be Prepared Many of us can run ourselves ragged due to poor preparation. Things like running out of change for the cash registers, not having enough staff, and running out of toilet paper can all play a big part in creating stress and adding to burnout. It is important to be organized or delegate these types of tasks to someone else who is organized.
3. Automate Systems You can also encounter burnout when you try to save money on automation. If you are still doing things like manually setting employee shift schedules, manually scheduling field trips, writing checks for payroll, and answering the phones and giving directions, it may be time to look at automating and streamlining these systems. There are many agritourism systems that can be automated and we will cover these in an upcoming blog post.
4. Hire Key Personnel It is crucial that you have at least one staff member that is highly capable and can cover for you in all areas. You just don’t know what a season will bring and you may find yourself unable to run the business for a few hours or much longer. If you have cloned yourself to some degree with one or more of your staff, this will alleviate some of the stress and burnout that comes with this type of situation.
5. Limit Field Trips
If you have field trip capacity left on your schedule at the end of the season, instead of opening up all five days of the school week to book, keep it to four and use the extra day to catch up on other tasks, or to take a few hours off, or use the extra day as a rain date.
6. Delegate your “Stressers” All of us have things that are stressful to deal with. For some, that might be employee issues. For others, it might be ordering supplies or answering incoming calls or dealing with customer complaints. Make a list of your top five stressers and see how many you can delegate to capable employees that have strengths in the applicable areas.
7. Take Some Time Off and Get Away
I laughed a little at this one, knowing that this was very difficult for me to ever do. As owners, we sometimes feel that the place will not survive without us, but that is just not the case if the steps above have been executed well. Find one of your less-crazy weekdays each week and take part or all of the day off. Even a few hours a week away from the venue can really help to reduce burnout.
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