Author Jillian Johnsrud: The Case for Mini-Retirement

Jillian Johnsrud (00:00)

There's a huge crossover in what preparation looks like to take a month off as a business owner and what preparation looks like to pass your company off to someone or to sell your company, because either way, it has to be able to run without you. And if you're like, everything would fall apart if I'm not here. That's a real risk. I was speaking, by the way.

Gene Marks (00:25)

I gotta interrupt you. That's me. That's me. I mean, like, if I go away and I'm, you know, part of the reason why I'm working is because if I get hit by a bus, my company, it's gone within 30 days, you know, which basically means my company doesn't have that much value. If that's the case, that's a risk.

Announcer (00:39)

Welcome to THRIVE, a Paychex Business Podcast. Your blueprint for navigating everything from people to policies to profits. And now your host, Gene Marks.

Gene Marks (00:49)

Hey, everybody, it's Gene Marks. And welcome back to another episode of the Paychex THRIVE Podcast. Today we are talking not just about retirement, but mini-retirement. So, this is, I was telling our guest today, Jillian, that my wife, who is amping up for retirement, this is like an episode that she really wants to watch and listen to. So, I've already built up these expectations for our guest, Jillian Johnsrud. Jillian is a writer, a speaker, a coach. She's the author of Retire Often, and also, she is the host of the Retire Often podcast, which Jillian does. I'm assuming Jillian from Montana, where you live, of all places. Is that right?

Jillian Johnsrud (01:28)

Yes, it's lovely in the summer here.

Gene Marks (01:31)

Yeah, I mean, it is, it's a beautiful, beautiful place to be. And I'm jealous already. How, tell me about the podcast itself or, you know, how often do you do it?

Jillian Johnsrud (01:41)

So, it's a little sporadic. I decided to do this because a lot of people love the idea of a mini-retirement, but then they have all of these concerns of, like, how would it actually work for me in my situation? So, on the podcast, I just feature people’s stories, what their mini-retirements were, like, the logistics, how they figured out the employment, and the money, and what they did. And my hope is that in hearing lots of different stories, people go, oh, okay, yeah, like, that part of it, I see how that could work for me.

Gene Marks (02:12)

Yeah. Oh, that makes sense. Well, that's great. I mean, and you're right, that sounds like a great idea for the podcast is just to have stories of people that are doing this. So, let's talk about the this of this, which is mini-retirement. We all know about retirement. Talk to me about what mini-retirement is.

Jillian Johnsrud (02:31)

I define a mini-retirement with three characteristics. The first, it's a month or longer. I find that a month is kind of the minimum effective dose. Some people take three months or a year, but at least a month or longer. The second one, stepping away from your primary career, stepping away from your nine to five. And the third one is to focus on something that matters to you.

Gene Marks (02:54)

So, when you say like matters to you, does that mean volunteering somewhere, or just doing nothing at all, or mental health, or all the above?

Jillian Johnsrud (03:03)

It can be all of the above for people. So, travel is a really big one right now. Burnout, recovering from burnout, time with people they love, really, it's experiences that maybe don't fit into nights and weekends is usually what people focus on. Or things that they know there's an expiration date, like this thing they want to do or experience isn't going to wait until full retirement, whether that's 65 or 70. You know, maybe that's like hiking through Ireland with their parents, or, you know, their kids are a certain age and you could do this really cool trip with them. But if you wait another 10 years, like, the opportunity might pass you by.

Gene Marks (03:43)

So, I'm going to partially impress you here. So, since COVID, so my wife is an executive director of a small nonprofit. She can work, you know, she works from home. She's virtual. My company, I have 10 employees, and we've been virtual since 2005. Don't even ask, because that's crazy that we've been virtual that long. But since COVID we have taken almost the entire month of January and gone away places for a month. So, we were in Florida for two months because, as you know, COVID never reached Florida. And then we, and then we did London for a month. We did Stockholm for a month. Last year we did Bergen, Norway, for a month. And this year we are leaning towards Madrid, Spain, for a month. We get like an Airbnb for the month. Yeah, isn't that cool? And we go and we basically chill out in that place for the month, you know, like, together. So, I'm sure you're like, okay, that sounds pretty cool. That's, that's got the mini-retirement kind of vibe about it. But here's where you're not going to like me. We work. Here we go. And yeah, we're, I'm working remotely. I mean, you know, and, and so is she. So, the rule is, right, not that there's any hard and fast rules, but when you define mini-retirement, there's no work, right? Nobody's going, oh you are completely disengaging yourself. Is that usually the requirement of doing such a thing?

Jillian Johnsrud (05:05)

I mean, if you have to choose between not doing those things or doing them with work, I would do them with work because it is a great experience. But I would say there are some benefits if you're able to scale back the work a little bit, if you're able to kind of maybe improve your systems, your processes so that instead of working, you know, 40 or 50 hours a week in Madrid, you can scale back, maybe you're doing 20 or 30. For most small business owners, especially for your first or second mini-retirement, I don't encourage people to do zero work because it's usually more stressful to do nothing. I encourage people start with maybe 10% of what you normally do. So, if you work 40 hours a week, do at least four. Because I find for most business owners, checking in in the morning for 30, 40 minutes an hour, doing the most essential tasks that they really didn't feel like they could fully pass off, making sure stuff isn't burning down actually allows them to fully pivot and be more emotionally present in whatever it is they're going to do that day versus just being like, don't look, don't look, don't look, it's probably fine, it's not burning down. You know, I think that 10% of work can actually make your mini-retirement more restful in a way.

Gene Marks (06:26)

I think you're right. I really do. Besides that, I mean, I listen, I like my job. Like I enjoy doing the work. Like I, you know, I look forward to, you know, the few hours a day that we do that work because we do prescribe to that. We don't work the full 10 hours. Plus, we have a time difference. I mean, if we're over in the UK or in Norway, it's a six-hour time difference. So, you know, you can only go so much. The other thing that we do is we, we tend to, we'll try to keep the mornings open to do stuff around the town, you know, walking around and checking out sites. And in the afternoons, we'll park ourselves like a coffee shop somewhere, which is cool, you know, and then it's like morning time on the east coast and we'll just sit there in a coffee shop for like five, six hours and we're working. But then every time you look up, you're seeing all the action going by and you're like, dude, we're in Norway. This is so cool, you know, I mean, so it's fun, you know what I mean, to do that. I guess there is a balance. And I appreciate your takeaway, which is you don't have to go completely cold turkey and not do any work. Because I think a lot of business owners hear that and they're like, oh my God, I can't imagine ever doing.

Jillian Johnsrud (07:24)

There's a lot of risk and it's a lot more stressful because if you work at Google and you're going to take a month off, Google will still be there when you come back. Like, they will be fine. It will exist. But there's more fear when it's something that we've given so much of our life to build. On the flip side, if you're like, I can't imagine not working 40 hours a week, like, I would go crazy. Well, then I feel like this is something you probably gotta sort out because you either need to figure out how to exist outside of your work or you need to die at your desk. Those are the only two options. So, a mini-retirement can be a great opportunity to practice. How do I fill my time in meaningful and enjoyable ways that give me, like, happiness and purpose outside of my employment? If at some point you either want to retire or you might need to retire due to health reasons.

Gene Marks (08:24)

Yeah, that's really a good point. How do you explain this stuff to your employees or to your managers? Like you're just going to disappear. And again, only this, you know, this, obviously, this conversation is so near and dear to my heart. Like, I don't explain anything. Like I'm like, hey man, I'm still available if you need me. There's no, they have the Internet in Norway, in Sweden, so, you know, in Spain. So, but, but, you know, for some others, you know, they, they're more in the office all the time and then they disappear for a month or so. What advice do you have for business owners to communicate what they're doing? Because I'm sure a lot of employees raise an eyebrow.

Jillian Johnsrud (09:01)

Yeah, it's important to get ahead of the story whether you're an employer or an employee. Like, you want to craft this narrative and you want to highlight the benefits. So, I'll take it from an employer stance. I usually get to talk to on the side of the employee. But there's a lot of benefits for businesses and for companies to have, whether employers or employees step outside of the business for a period of time and be unavailable. One of those is a thing we know we should be doing, and we just don't want to, which is documenting things and cross-training. Systems aren't very resilient when you have one, one piece that like holds all of, all of the information, all of the company culture, all of the knowledge rests in one person. If that one person disappears, you have a really fragile system. So, if as an employer you're going to step out, it provides a lot of opportunity for other people to understand your job, to understand your roles. And usually, you're better off not finding one person to try to fully replace you, but saying, okay, here's 12 different things, 12 different types of work I do as an employer. How can I divide these 12 things up? And it makes your company more resilient because you might get sick, you might get the flu, you might have a heart attack. There might be periods when you're unavailable. And it's helpful if other people know how to do parts of your job, but that, those are the things like we know we should be doing, but it's like a hassle and it's time intensive and it's annoying. But a mini-retirement provides the right motivation. And for your employees, I would, I would kind of pitch it as the opportunity to learn some new skills, to cross-train, to move into different areas in your absence. Because one of the predictors of employee satisfaction is do they feel like they're learning new things, are they trying new things, are they growing their skill set? And your absence provides a perfect opportunity for them to take on new responsibilities.

Gene Marks (11:11)

You know, speaking from an accounting perspective, you know, one of the internal controls that sort of standard among any accountant will tell you, particularly for people in the financial side of a business, is you need to require vacations, at the very least. Because when people take vacations that are working with money, you have to have somebody that fills in their role. And you know, you, maybe you wouldn't be surprised, but if there's any fraud or shenanigans going on, usually gets uncovered that way, you know, so that's just an internal control. So, a mini-retirement is a, you know, is not only a benefit but also, you know, strongly encouraged or even required among some employees, whether they are out of the office for a month so we can cross train people, not only fulfills the ability of other employees learning new skills but also provides that internal control. Is this, and again, you know, I don't want to disrespect it in any way, but like, this seems like a sabbatical. I mean, am I, is that like a wrong word? Is it? I mean, it's a sabbatical, right? I mean, if you were. Well, go ahead. What are you going to say? I mean, maybe I'm...

Jillian Johnsrud (12:13)

I think there's lots of different terms you can use. I think sabbatical, career break, gap year, hiatus. And I think all of them have slightly different connotations. And so, I always tell people, go with the one that like you like the one that feels like it resonates with you and is most accurate. I use mini-retirement because there's not, there's not as much maybe secondary meanings. Like sometimes for a sabbatical people think about academia or working on other professional projects or that you might come back to the same career. Or with a mini-retirement, you might come back to the same employer or not. You might come back to the same career or not. Some people use them to, as a kind of a transition to pivot into a new career. So, I like that term as just kind of a general, neutral one. But whichever one like you feels kind of resonates with you, I would go with that.

Gene Marks (13:06)

The only issue I have with the term is that I think you're, the idea is just so good that, you know, employees of any age can benefit from it, you know, and, and even offering it as an employer, as a benefit to your employees. Why can't a 35-year-old or a 40-year-old take a mini-retirement? It's just that it has this connotation saying that was, I'm only 40 years old, I'm not retiring yet. You know, like, yeah, so it's like, you know, you kind of associate it more with like, you know, an older generation of workers. But putting that aside, say you are, you know, you're running your business, okay? And Jillian, you, you've got 10 employees, 50 employees, 100 employees, and you're like, hey, I want to have, I want to offer this as a benefit to my employees because I think this is a great thing, provides them balance, you know. You know, it's just, it's a good thing. Construct for me this benefit. Like say you were running your own, like how, what would, how would this benefit? Who would be eligible? How long would it be for? What would be some of the rules around a mini-retirement benefit for your employees? If an employer is like listening or watching this and saying, this is the kind of thing I might be interested in offering, what advice would you have?

Jillian Johnsrud (14:16)

So, there is, what's currently being offered. There's a couple hundred companies in the U.S. that offer sabbatical program of some sort. And what it normally looks like is after three to seven years, people get one to maybe three months off. Sometimes it's partially paid, sometimes it's unpaid. I think Bank of America offers a 25% pay, which is really clever if you want it to technically be unpaid, but that is enough money to cover their health insurance co-pays, their, you know, all of those automatic deductions that 25% covers. So, from kind of the accounting back end of HR, it makes it a little bit easier, so you don't have to deal with those logistics. What I would recommend, So, in my book...

Gene Marks (15:05)

I'm glad you're saying this because I was literally going to come back to you being like, okay, that's fair enough, what Bank of America is doing. But yeah, what would you do? Would you offer fully paid?

Jillian Johnsrud (15:11)

What would I do? I would do a month off every single year for every single employer.

Gene Marks (15:19)

Every year?

Jillian Johnsrud (15:21)

Every year.

Gene Marks (15:21)

Oh my God, that's very generous. Now what about, what about sort of like vesting, like, I mean, does that, if I work for you and I've been working for you for two weeks, I'm automatically eligible for that benefit? Or would you make me...

Jillian Johnsrud (15:34)

I would do after a year. After your first year. Yeah.

Gene Marks (15:38)

Okay.

Jillian Johnsrud (15:38)

So, after every year.

Gene Marks (15:41)

Would you make it? And again, there's, obviously there's always budget considerations, but if you had your druthers, would you make it fully paid or would you make it partially paid? What would you do?

Jillian Johnsrud (15:50)

Yep, fully paid. Because your cost, your worst-case scenario, it's about 7.5%. So, if you think about your total benefits and the total amount you have to pay to have really competitive pay, 7.5% isn't an enormous cost. And that's...

Gene Marks (16:07)

What do you mean, 7.5%?

Jillian Johnsrud (16:09)

So, if you think about 1/12 of someone's income is about 7.5%, 8%.

Gene Marks (16:17)

I see, I see where you're getting.

Jillian Johnsrud (16:19)

So, but that's your worst case because the reality is you're either going to pay an extra 7.5%, either through additional employees, or you're going to lose 7.5% of productivity. But I don't think that's actually what happens because you have that cross-training because other people step in because the person who's taking a month off. I mean, we just do. We work harder before we leave to get everything, all the ducks in a row, and we work harder when we get back to get everything caught up. I think that's your worst-case scenario, I think your actual cost is going to be much lower. But there's a lot of benefits to everyone taking a month off every year. One of the things that you mentioned was, you know, the security of people kind of getting locked out of the system and double-checking. But on the other side of that, if everyone takes a month off, you will see who your high performers are. There are some people that when they step away for a month, they're doing three people's jobs. And the 10 people around them on their team, they're probably doing 10% of everyone else's job in addition to their own. You take them out of the mix, everyone actually has to fully do their own job because you don't have Sally here who's doing everyone's stuff for them. So it kind of pushes those responsibilities back where they should be. And you go, gosh, we really need to take care of Sally. Like, Sally needs a break because we need her at this, like, 150% that she shows up at. And on the inverse, you have some people that when they leave for a month, you think, what the heck does this person even do? Like, there is no work to divide up. Like, they're doing 25% of a job. And then when they come back, you can be like, okay, so we're gonna, like, increase your scope of work a little bit because we think you can handle some more. Or you're like, yeah, that was fun. We're probably done. We're ready to part ways. We need another Sally and less of you. So, there's all these benefits to forcing essentially, people to step out for a month.

Gene Marks (18:21)

I love that as well. You know, it's funny, so, because we're coming to this from, like, an employer standpoint, and you're like, okay, there's a great employee benefit to offer. And, you know, employees, you know, for, you know, we're all looking to recruit and retain talent. So this is, like, a really great benefit to consider. Like I mentioned before, there is, like, an internal control benefit for the financial people. So that's also good. It does provide, you know, the ability for other people to learn each other's jobs so they can not only cover for each other, but also you'll grow in their skills. So that's good as well. It's a culture decision. And then you're right. There is, it's a great way to really evaluate the effectiveness of your people. You're right. If somebody is out for a month and they're out of sight, out of mind, you know, I can see the owner, when they come back saying, like, why are we even employing this person? You know, or we, not that we want to fire them, but like, we should, you know, find other stuff to do that is make it more important. And then, you're right. Sometimes people walk around underappreciated and if they're gone for a month, suddenly as the owner, you're like, I can't believe that, you know, you know, all this stuff is not getting done because Jillian is out skiing in Utah, you know, for a month. We, you know, we, we need to, you know, we need to appreciate her more and give her more compensation or work with her, even offload some of her work because she's clearly being overworked. That's, these are all great, you know, great thoughts. You were going to say something, go ahead.

Jillian Johnsrud (19:44)

So, there's one more benefit, is that if you've ever had to look at like kind of succession planning, so who's going to take Sally's role? Because it's a big role and it's important and there's a lot of risk into hiring the wrong person and promoting the wrong person. Mini-retirement is a perfect opportunity. We pluck her out of the system, and we divide up like we talked about for a business owner, she does 12 different things. We divide that up. Who does a great job, who fills that role, who's a natural fit, who do we give the opportunity to kind of move into that and just see how they perform? It's a very low-risk way to test people's competency, to test their skill set in kind of a real-world setting, and see how they perform. So, when you're thinking about succession planning, many retirements provide that test ground to really see who might fit into these next promotions. If you want to hire internally.

Gene Marks: (20:40)

We're going to get, I have other succession planning questions I'll to talk to you about this. But before we do, would you be transparent with your employees about all the things that you were just telling me right now, or would you hold that close to the chest? In other words, you're giving them the opportunity to take that month off. Would you be telling them, like, hey, you know, this is a great benefit, but while you're away, it's a good opportunity for us to see how effective or ineffective you are at your job, or would you not really be saying that? I mean, because employees are going to have FOMO, some of them are, they're going to be concerned that, you know, like, oh my God, you know, if I'm out of sight, out of mind when I'm not there. How would you handle that with your employees? Do you communicate that or we're not?

Jillian Johnsrud (21:25)

I would say everything except for the person who's lazy and does nothing. I might not mention that one. The other nine. I would mention that, you know, if, you know, when you're doing... I used to, I used to work for Starbucks. We did, like, employee development plans. And people would have kind of their career mapped out how they want to progress. And we would have goals like, okay, well, I need to see that you're good at this. I need to see you're good at this thing. And mini-retirement is a perfect opportunity. Like, hey, so we said that you wanted to work on these skills. Sally's leaving, so we're going to pass you some of those skills to see how you do in them. We're going to give you a chance at this, at preparing for this next promotion and so you can work these mini-retirements into those development plans to give people that opportunity and to know that you're cross-training and you're building better systems. I think all of that is really helpful for employees to know. And if someone's like, because and I almost say, like, force every employee because some will not want to leave.

Gene Marks (22:27)

Yeah. So, you would make it. You would make it mandatory.

Jillian Johnsrud (22:30)

Mandatory. Because your very best performers, there's a lot of psychology of why they're such overachievers. They like to be really important. They like to be really needed. They like to be essential, which is amazing. And they're wonderful. They're also at the most risk of burnout, though, so we need to kind of take care of them. And you're gonna have to encourage them. Like, I know this is gonna be hard. And the first week, you're gonna hate it. You're gonna love it eventually. Week two, you'll be like, oh, this is perfect. And it will be hard. It will be hard when you leave. And it's good for us to go through this challenge of you being gone. It's good for everyone else to step up a little bit.

Gene Marks (23:09)

Would you, would you lock them out of your systems? You know, there, you know, some companies, like, if a woman goes on maternity leave, for example, they like, they're like, you're out on maternity leave. Your email is shut down. You're not, you know, that's part of it. Like, you're out. You know what I mean? So, you know, and it's the message to everybody else that so and so is on maternity leave and you, we don't want you responding, you focus on your maternity leave. Would you do something like that or would you encourage or at least leave it open for your employees to say, listen, mini-retirement has been a retirement. But you know, if we do have a question about this customer or something that you're working on, we do want to get a hold of you. Yeah. Would you, would you include any stipulation?

Jillian Johnsrud (23:50)

I think you should have a company-wide policy, whatever that is, whether it's locked out or someone can contact you 10 minutes a day, 20 minutes a day, whatever that amount is. Because some people will turn off their phone and disappear and go off grid for a month and other people are so enmeshed and so entangled that they will have a hard time extracting themselves from it, which kind of defeats the purpose for the company and for them. So, making it standard, whether it's like, yeah, an hour on Friday, we can check in, and we can ask you questions, but making it the same for everyone. And, and that's another side of mini-retirements that if it's going to be part of your company and part of your culture one of the benefits to employers and employees is that some people who have very demanding personal lives, they have a lot of responsibilities outside of work, don't have the same opportunities and equity to do additional training, to do certifications, to develop other soft skills because their personal life's demanding, work's demanding. And so, you can, as a company, you can just say we want this to be personally enriching and professionally enriching. So, during your month off or your two months off, like you have access to these types of classes or these courses, or we'll pay for this additional certification. And so, because you're paying them, which is part of the reason I would pay them, you can have some parameters of maybe five hours a week, you work on professional goals during your mini-retirement.

Gene Marks (25:26)

And I just have two tax things I'm going to add to this. You didn't know I was going to talk about taxes during this, did you? Number one is that if you do pay for some of those educational expenses and they don't even have to be related to the job, it could be a class at origami if you want. You know, if an employee chooses to do so, the employers do get a tax deduction. I think it's up to like, yeah, it's going to be like $7,000 next year per employee. So, the employee doesn't get taxed, and the employer gets a deduction for doing that. So, you can encourage it and pay for. That's number one. Number two, as you mentioned earlier, we talked about, do you pay? Do you not pay? You know, is it, you know, you know, whatever. But if you, if, if you call this unpaid time off, and again, there's some rules that you have to be, you know, you know, you know, with, you may be eligible for a tax credit for some of the payments that you're making for this unpaid time off for your employees. So I just, just throwing that out there that you should talk to your, you know, accountant about that are going to help ease the financial pain of somebody, you know, not being in the office. Okay, we, so there are lots of benefits. We've, you know, all the benefits of the employees. I mean, who wouldn't want a month, you know, every year to go. We get that. But then we've mentioned a whole bunch of benefits for employers. But remember, the employer, the business owner is also an employee of his or her company as well. And as an employee, the employer should also be doing the same. And it's not just to sort of set the tone in the example and, you know, you know, I'm doing the same as everybody else. But it is really important for owners of companies if they want to create a valuable, you know, company, a sustainable company. The definition of a sustainable, valuable company to me is one where an owner can walk away for a period of time and the company continues to run on its own, you know, because you've built up processes to do that. So, talk to me a little bit about that. Talk to me about the succession planning, the potential future exit planning of an owner, why mini-retirements can really contribute and help them build value in their business to do that.

Jillian Johnsrud (27:31)

Yeah, there's a huge crossover in what preparation looks like to take a month off as a business owner and what preparation looks like to pass your company off to someone or to sell your company, because either way it has to be able to run without you. And if you're like, everything would fall apart if I'm not here. That's a real risk. I was speaking, by the way.

Gene Marks (27:56)

I gotta interrupt you. That, that's me. That's me. I mean, like, if I go away and I'm, you know, part of the reason why I'm working is because if I get hit by a bus, my company, it's gone within 30 days, you know, which basically means my company doesn't have that much value. If that's the case, that's a risk, right? That is a risk.

Jillian Johnsrud (28:12)

I was speaking at an event and one about mini-retirements, and one of the ladies said, I work at a company that has like five founders. They're all in their late 60s, they're all thinking about retiring. No one knows how to do their job. And once they leave, it's done. But they don't want to do the work to train other people. And I get it because there's some ego, there's some emotional, you know, challenges with that as well. But I go through the process in my book, just kind of those four basic steps of you have to simplify things. Sometimes as business owners, there's complexity in our business, but we know how to handle it and we have time and we have the bandwidth and it's not hard for us. It's easier to do it the wrong way than to like fix it and do it the right way. So, you have to add that simplicity. You have to start to automate things. And then it's the documentation. And people hate documentation because it's so annoying. And we bring a genius and a magic to our work that cannot be documented or so we like to think. And so you have to go through that process of documenting those things. But once you do those first three steps, you can do the fourth step of delegating. And I do encourage business owners, don't try to find one person who can do everything that you can do. I was coaching a mom once who wanted to find a babysitter, and she had five kids, and she homeschooled, and she was a stay-at-home mom. And she said, I just don't understand what the problem is. Like, I just need them to help them with their schoolwork, make dinner, lighthouse keeping, like, keep the kids entertained. Like, I don't know why I can't find someone to do that. And I'm like, oh my God, you've been training for this your whole life.

Gene Marks (29:52)

Like, that's a big, hard job.

Jillian Johnsrud (29:54)

Like, I don't know if you could find three people to do that. And so having that realistic expectation that we're going to try to divide this amongst people and see what skillsets can best cover this. But all of that takes a lot of work and it's challenging. For business owners, usually, honestly, like six to 18 months is about that preparation time to really get everything simplified, automated, documented. But, the great thing about mini-retirements, if you're thinking about passing your business off or selling it, you leave for a month and it won't go perfectly. Problems will arise. Things that you thought you had fixed will break while you're gone. And then you come back and you fix those things.

Gene Marks (30:41)

Yeah.

Jillian Johnsrud (30:41)

And then you do it again the next year, and you come back, and you fix these things. And you slowly, over time, create a business that is sustainable, that has value without you. Because you can build yourself a job, which is great. It's nice to have a job. But a business is a little bit different than a job. And if you want to be able to pass this on to other people, mini-retirement's a good motivation to get that stuff done.

Gene Marks (31:09)

Okay, so where are you going on your next mini-retirement?

Jillian Johnsrud (31:14)

I learned tango last year. I took a month off to learn tango and I'm obsessed with it now. So, there's a very good chance, it would be a tango-focused mini-retirement again.

Gene Marks (31:31)

Fair enough. Fair enough. Jillian Johnsrud is a writer, speaker, and coach. She is the author of Retire Often and she is the host of the Retire Often podcast as well. We've been talking about many retirements and loving this topic. Jillian, thank you so much for joining. I learned a lot and I appreciate you taking the time.

Jillian Johnsrud (31:50)

Thanks so much for having me.

Gene Marks (31:53)

Everybody, you've been watching and or listening to the Paychex THRIVE Podcast. My name is Gene Marks. If you need any advice, or tips, or help in running your business, sign up for our Paychex Thrive newsletter. Go to paychex.com/thrive. Hope you have enjoyed this conversation as much as I have, and we will see you again in the very near future. Take care. Do you have a topic or a guest you would like to hear on THRIVE? Please let us know. Visit payx.me/thrivetopics and send us your ideas or matters of interest. Also, if your business is looking to simplify your HR, payroll, benefits, or insurance services, see how Paychex can help. Visit the resource hub at paychex.com/worx. That's W-O-R-X. Paychex can help manage those complexities while you focus on all the ways you want your business to thrive. I'm your host Gene Marks and thanks for joining us.

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