How to Take a Sabbatical with WordPress Entrepreneur Kim Coleman

In this LMScast episode, Kim Coleman discussed the value of sabbaticals for business owners, especially those in the software and WordPress industries.

Kim described how sabbaticals provide a significant chance for entrepreneurs to recharge and obtain a fresh perspective by taking a step back from the daily grind. She also discussed her cooperation with Jason, her husband and company partner, emphasizing how sabbaticals may allow for team growth and the testing of their ability in handling business problems alone.

Kim also talked about a project she worked on during her previous sabbatical, Site Wide Sales, a WordPress plugin designed to make running sales and promotions on websites easier. Entrepreneurs may benefit from sabbaticals by using them to make important decisions and start big projects without always needing supervision.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of L M S Cast. Today I’m joined by a special guest. My business partner at LifterLMS. One of them, her name is Kim Coleman. She’s also the founder of paid memberships pro as well as site wide sales. They started an agency called stranger studios a while ago, evolved into a product company.

It’s been quite the journey. I’m super lucky to have Kim, uh, on the crew here at LifterLMS with Jason. Today, we’re going to talk about sabbaticals. We’re going to talk about entrepreneurship. We’re going to talk about partnership. Welcome to the show, Kim.

Kim Coleman: Thank you. What a great intro, Chris. That was awesome.

Chris Badgett: Thank you. Hey, this is episode 400. I’ve had a lot of reps. It may be even a little higher than 400. You’re getting ready to go on a sabbatical to China, Tibet, and Bali. And give us a high level of how long are you going and what are your plans there? And then we’re going to bring it back to business.

Kim Coleman: Sure.

Yeah. We leave tonight. It’s my best friend from college and he’s going through a emotional work life balance change. And we were like, we’re better to go than to Tibet to a place where like the homeland of meditation and Buddhism and looking at oneself and one’s place in the universe. So that was the foundation of shaping our trip.

So we’ll be spending a few nights in Shanghai. Tulasa and doing a private tour with a bunch of temples and locations and Everest and really cool places. And then we’re going to wrap up the trip in Bali with a week of just relaxation after, well, 20 day, 20 day trip.

Chris Badgett: Wow. That sounds super epic. Tell us about, you brought the idea of sabbatical into LifterLMS.

I knew what it was, but I took one recently and you initiated, you and Jason kicked off the concept. What does a sabbatical do for an entrepreneur. Particularly software entrepreneur, WordPress entrepreneur? What is it? What are the benefits? Why do it?

Kim Coleman: For sure. So for us, we had been, we started our agency, you mentioned in 2006.

And from that time until really when I took my first sabbatical last year, was it last year? Yeah. Last summer. Okay. So 2022 summer, I really had no extended break from my work. We were growing our team, growing our family and we got to a place where we really could take that time and step back. We had enough team in place to handle the day to day operations. Things going and all the projects we had and all of our things we were accountable to try to remove myself from all that day to day, which is interesting to do for someone that’s been leading the ship as long as you have been.

Mostly working all day, every day, not really taking full weekend breaks and a lot of our vacations not even taking a full break from work. So when I took my first sabbatical, I told myself that I wouldn’t interact with our team, that I would really step back and only be available in case of major emergency.

I think it’s unique because I do work with my husband, who I also live with. So he was always there to reach out to me if something was really needed, but He tried not to do that too often, but

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And one of the things of the entrepreneur personality type is that you can’t turn it off and you don’t know how, and I think something about that is you had a project, you were off, but you were working on a project on your last sabbatical with site wide sales.

I was working on a book project on mine. And can you tell us a little bit about the project aspect while taking the break? I think we’ve lost Kim for a second. She should be back. No, you’re back. You’re back. It’s good. Hey, that’s what editing is for. And.

Kim Coleman: I think it’ll be fine. I hope it doesn’t keep happening.

I’m asking Jason to make sure the kids aren’t being crazy.

Chris Badgett: It’s hard to share the internet with a family. I get it. I’m just going to step it back and to the last question, which is one of the hallmarks of the entrepreneur personality type is your brain, your desire to solve problems. You can’t turn it off and you don’t know how.

So on your last sabbatical, you worked on a project called site wide sales. When I went recently, I worked on a book. And I, I really needed that for me anyways, but I wanted to ask you with the last sabbatical and maybe this one’s different focus, different purpose, but tell us about working while suppose while being off on sabbatical, how was that different?

Kim Coleman: I think for me, that sabbatical was a dedicated period of time to work on a product that needed someone. It needed. All of my skills, development skills, marketing skills, all those pieces of things, it had been a product that we started, migrated it to be a little bit more multi purpose. It was originally built as a flash sales plugin for paid memberships pro only.

And then we saw like a greater need. So we built it out for Edd and for WooCommerce, and then we just put it up for sale and crossed our fingers and didn’t really focus on it because of how much time paid memberships pro needed. Pandemic took a lot of our effort. doing really well. So we didn’t want to take our eye off of what was the price horse, what was going really well for us.

So when I set out to do that sabbatical. It was in response to a lot of people on our team saying, what are we doing with this thing? And, and are we focused on it? Is this still a product we want to sell? And so I was like, you know what, I’m tired of us saying, what are we going to do? How are we going to do this?

Let me just devote six weeks of my time to figure it out, figure some things out, get it into a little bit of a better place. And what would that look like? It’s also a hybrid thing because I have been working with my husband for my entire professional career. I graduated college. I started doing agency work and within three months, Jason quit his full time job and was doing that with me.

So it had been a long period of time working with someone else who has lots of business advice, lots of business acumen and just like myself, but it was always a exchange for someone else to say. No, we should do it this way, or I veto that, give Jason the CEO role. And I’m like, okay, you manage the business.

You have final say of these things. And I manage and run our house in addition to all the things I do with work. So it’s important that we have that division so that somebody can be a final say, or else it’s always a stalemate. But with Sitewide Sales, I wanted a period of time to say, no, I’m going to make whatever decisions I want to make for this product.

I’ll consult you if I want to, if I want to get your input, but what does it feel like for me as a professional adult to not have to answer and check things in with somebody else, especially my husband? And what will that feel like for me? So it was a little bit of a life journey, I’ll say, which was interesting.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So that’s like autonomy, some autonomy over the project. I felt the same way, right? In the book. It’s like, I’m just doing this. I’m doing it my way. I get, I totally get that. Tell us just Looking at site wide sales, what’s a flash sale? If somebody doesn’t know, what does the product do? How would you describe it to somebody who’s selling courses, membership sites, e commerce?

Well, how could they use it?

Kim Coleman: Sure. We showed it to a few of our WordPress product friends and someone was like, remember that like Ronco electric food dehydrator that you just set it and forget it? And I was like, yeah. And they were like, that’s what this is to me. It’s setting up a sale in advance, setting up a flash sale in advance.

So it has a few components. One is a banner that it can be placed in three locations on your site. So you’ll see banners pop up at the top of a site or at the bottom or in a corner of the site. And then it offers you to build a landing page. So some people want the banner experience that then goes to a landing page that either has a focused checkout experience or a focused single product, whether that’s a downloadable product.

Or a collection or a category of products in WooCommerce. So create some more focused buying experience from your normal websites, buying experience, especially when you’re only putting a few things on sale. And then it has logic related to discount codes and coupon codes and automatically applying them.

So you set the start end date or start date and time of your sale and date and time of your sale. It makes your coupon code, do some things on your site. Within WooCommerce, it puts the coupon code can automatically apply throughout the store. So if people are browsing your shop, they can see strikethrough pricing on all the sweatshirt category of things within the normal results of the shop or the category, also on the single product page, and then it carries through that logic to the checkout page.

So people don’t forget to apply a coupon code. Yeah. So banners, coupon code, logic, landing pages. Then one final thing it does is Sets up who can see the sale. So I know for membership sites in particular. When you have the sale on membership, some of your existing members are logging in and they might come across the fact that you’re running a deal and then reach out and then ask to have that sale pricing applied to their regular price membership.

So people worry that they’ll lose money during a sale by running banners and things. So Sitewide sales hides. Existence of a promotion from logged in people based on their membership level or based on their role in WooCommerce. So it has a lot of functionality. It’s like a Swiss army knife for sales, but the thing we love about it is definitely that setting and forget it pre scheduling.

And then for us, we also can look back at all the sales we’ve run for the past five years for our site and we know, oh, like. Next week, there was a sale a week ago, a year ago, we might expect like a higher than normal contact form interactions or higher than normal renewal rate because we had a historic sale at that period.

So a lot of things, but pretty cool tool.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And we just used it at LifterLMS for a recent sale and had the biggest sale volume we’ve had since outside of Black Friday. So it’s awesome. If you’re watching this or listening to it, go check out sitewide sales. com. Did I get the URL right? You did good.

Awesome. How do you think about this sabbatical? It sounds you’re doing a lot of traveling and this isn’t at home. How are you going to deal with that part of the entrepreneur brain that like likes to work on stuff or will there be so much new and novel things that like the curiosity and the desire to figure stuff out?

You have plenty to deal with.

Kim Coleman: This one’s more of a vacation. I’ll say more exploratory, but we’re also like incorporating a lot of meditation into our temples and our visits. So I think there’ll be a lot of thought, a lot of thinking. I have a notebook that’s really important to me that I’m bringing to journal.

And I’m going to try to just see and witness and have a thought or an idea and not have to travel down it

Chris Badgett: too far. We lost Kim for a sec. Hopefully she’ll be back. She’s back. It’s okay. It’s okay, It’s all good.

I think it’s part of the universe. It’s part of the meditation. You’re actually in the meditation right now. This is a, there’s a, that’s awesome. So you were saying before you, you were off that there’s, you’re going to be journaling, your brain’s going to be busy basically with all the new things and journaling and meditating.

Anything else you want to say about your goals or getting the

Kim Coleman: most out of it? I think I’m always a sabbatical is. Like a pressure test on your team and it’s a, it’s a opportunity for them to grow in different ways than having the answer right available to them. We hired a new person in marketing that’s actually starting the day that I’m gone and we’ve been trialing with them.

So I relationship with them, but also they’re, they’re being on boarded by someone else in a more deep way. They’re being led and managed by someone else in a way that I would have been more involved in. So I love those opportunities. I know it’s hard, this might, let me paint a scenario. You can say whether this happens to you, you’ll see a conversation pop up in Slack that you know the answer to, and you’re quick to reply.

And that’s a great thing because you’re unblocking as quickly as possible for your team. But there might be someone else on your team who has that answer and could get there before you, or even a little bit later than you and fill that gap. And it’s a way for you to remove yourself, step back and not be so like pivotal to every moment in your business.

So I love that a sabbatical creates that. What did you

Chris Badgett: recommend for setting one up for success? I remember you gave me some advice. You could create a Slack channel to share, to talk across your team and stuff, which was cool. And me personally, I didn’t unsubscribe from all the channels or whatever. I just had some discipline, but I don’t know.

What other tips do you have for creating the space and just. Mostly, I think for an entrepreneur, it’s avoiding guilt while you’re gone.

Kim Coleman: What do you do? I did what you said you didn’t do and did unsubscribe from the. The day to day channels that our team uses for communicating. I didn’t want to see what was being said or not said or who was checking in or not.

I wanted to still have a Slack like experience. So I made a channel just for my sabbatical, just for the product that I was working on. And I invited anyone to come in if they wanted to, and I would post updates as if I was talking to myself. I think I thought that I would need that I would need Slack and I would need those communications more than I really ended up needing.

Uh, one thing, one story that I’ve told myself before my sabbatical was that. I like to be needed and what’s fulfilling to me is when somebody proposes something and then I get it done for them. And I really do that fills my cup. That’s still something I really like, but I worried that removing myself from my team and operating in a solo workspace, I would feel unfulfilled by it.

That I would feel like. I’m not helping anyone. That’s all I do all day long. I help my team, I help my kids, I help my husband, I help my parents, I help my pets. And I thought that I would feel like a little bit lost and out to sea without an anchor, but I didn’t feel that, but I think having that channel helped.

I talked to myself, I also started blogging. Which I don’t Blog regularly, but I tried to journal in a public way what I was doing because I think it’s important for entrepreneurs like you, like Jason’s going to take a sabbatical later this year to share when we try something like that, to make it clear to other people, like nothing blew up our business survived.

I learned these things and I grew in these ways. I think too often entrepreneurs feel like they’re the only one in the room that can do the thing. And you might be the one that can do the thing in the shortest time for the least money, the best. 99. 9 percent perfectly, but that doesn’t matter if it’s just like eating you up inside and you’re exhausted and you’re burning out all those things.

So I said a lot there, but yeah.

Chris Badgett: This time you’re going with a friend who’s in need of some help. I wonder if your next sabbatical might even be a solo one. Just throwing the idea out there.

Kim Coleman: I couldn’t go away for 20 days solo. I think I might lose my mind. I’m very much a people person, but. Maybe.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Any, uh, any tips on how you set up your team? You mentioned you had a new team member, so you do a lot of marketing at pay memberships pro and content. Like how did you set that person up? And I know you have other people in marketing there. Like, how did you, how do you walk away with confidence?

Kim Coleman: Yeah, I took the month of August before WordCamp US to just be like a content machine and really for the first time ever, we have a six week runway, which for us, we try to, yeah, we try to publish a blog post, a newsletter once a week, and then another team member writes like a code recipe once a week and sends an email about that.

So I got us. And now I’m like, wow, that was easy. I could probably once a quarter spend three focused weeks and develop that quarter’s worth of content. And that was also a little bit difficult for me because I’m always one where if the piece is ready to publish, we should publish it. And now I’m learning, no, like there’s value in a runway because I can take this extended break and I’ve already written and approved and gotten loaded into WordPress posts that are scheduled for six weeks out and it’s.

I never thought that would be possible, not only to have that content all prepared for our team to market and get out the door, but also that I could withhold pushing publish when something was ready for the world. That’s a growth moment for me and our team will just take the wheel from that point forward.

So we did get, yeah, content queue. We have pitches and cycle work. They kept me off cycle work. So that’s a way that development kept me out of the, being needed during that break of time.

Having people in a place that can make decisions and has the access to everything that they need is really critical.

Chris Badgett: I’ll say when I went, I had a Friday touch point with Jason and you live with Jason. So when you were on your sabbatical, you guys could catch up, but I think that little like lifeline or whatever you want to call it, there’s still that, that connection.

So you can always, you can compress everything that you would need to have handled into that short conversation or whatever, which is awesome.

Kim Coleman: It was interesting experiencing it on the other side when you were out, because I was within the team and when things came up and it was, there was a few things we did have to go to for, but it’d be interesting if you experienced it on your side, having someone that you need to go to for things being out that perspective was interesting to it.

There were times where we just made decisions, rather than interrupt you, that were reversible decisions. We thought would show that extreme ownership, which is a core value here. And I don’t think anything went too far, but it was interesting to watch the moments, like only Chris can do this. What are we going to do?

Chris Badgett: Yeah, it’s awesome. Let’s talk about like mission vision a little bit. So you wouldn’t have been doing membership sites and being this niche for 12 plus years, if my math is correct. If you didn’t care about the customer, like the niche, the creator economy, helping people. Get paid and build online businesses and express themselves through a website.

Where does your passion for the creator come from?

Kim Coleman: I think it’s probably from within and my own entrepreneurial nature. I was 12 years old doing catering for my mom’s doctor’s office parties. And I said to myself, I’m going to own a restaurant. I’m going to own a bakery, I’m going to be a caterer. I’m going to do all these things.

I made little businesses. I made handmade note cards and I tried to sell. Little handmade cards with punch paper and all this stuff. I don’t know where that comes from. My parents are not business owners or entrepreneurial really, but because I have that, there’s so many moments in life where I see someone stuck in a situation, complaining.

Their story, the story they tell themself is that I will always be here. I will always be held back. I will never achieve more. I’m at the mercy of my boss to give me more vacation time or make, give me a raise, recognize me with a promotion or a title. And it was always my attitude to say, what can you do?

And I see that in the people using our products, using LifterLMS, using paid memberships pro they’re making a decision, even if it’s two hours a night for six weeks working on their membership site while everyone is sleeping in their home, they’re making a decision to say, I can take something inside. I can control this.

I can change the story, I can make a different future for myself. And I love helping people get paid. We have stories of people that leave their day jobs and replace their income and more running a membership site, and they couldn’t be happier doing it. So I love working with the people who decide that they can do it and then make it happen and use open source tools to do it because it’s the right way to do it.

I like that.

Chris Badgett: The action takers are people that stand up and make a decision to do something. I love that. Let’s talk about partnerships a little bit. You said you worked with Jason for a very long time and I’ve been around you and your team and paid memberships pro senior work in the team at LifterLMS.

And you’re great at working with people. Um. I guess, just tell us about that. There’s a lot there’s working with your husband. There’s how do you build a great team, there’s some people want to be solopreneurs and automate everything and not have a team. How do you think about working in partnership with other people at work?

Kim Coleman: I think it took me this long to get here and I hope I’m still learning things, but there are some things I think I’ve learned that apply to relationships in general, partnerships in general. And a lot of that is. You don’t have to always chime in. You don’t have to always add a thought or advice or a comment.

There’s a lot of people who everyone’s agreeing and saying the same thing. And then they just feel the need to like jut in and say their thing on top of it. Especially working in a team with other managers and with your husband, like sometimes I just say nothing. And I think that’s a beautiful power and it’s almost more powerful than speaking is just silence and accepting and being quiet.

I try to do that with our team when people have ideas for things, not jump on it and dump all my stuff on it, just let people have their paths and drive it and feel it a little bit. So I think that’s where you’ll learn something. It’s not like me telling you what I think is going to be the success and fail of what you’re trying to pursue.

Yeah, definitely. Working in a team is like being quiet is super important. A lot of our team, I know the team that is with us now has been with us for a long time. We have team members that have been with us. Several team members going on five years, a team member, I think seven or eight years with us. The people who last longest are the people who are like us as owners.

They’re very high communication, very talkative. They share more than just their work with us. They share their life. We have a really active water cooler channel and everyone on our team shares pictures and comments. And it’s not just happy birthday. It’s like I made a quilt and all my dog got a blue and like everything.

My mom baked this yummy bread. Look at this picture. So it is. I don’t want to make it a toxic work environment. Like we’re all family here, but it’s very close and personal trying to recreate what a, uh, in person work experience would feel like as much as possible people that you want to be around. And I think that’s the people that last longest in our team are the people that we like being with.

And you could go to a barbecue on a Friday night and have a great time with these people because they just share a lot of your values. Um,

Chris Badgett: Any tips on remote work? You’ve been doing it a while and across multiple time zones. What’s really worked for you?

Kim Coleman: Time zones thing. I think you have to adapt a little bit yourself and your team has to adapt a little bit.

So luckily we’re not like beyond the, like our farthest team, I guess we’re six hours behind and then we have another person. So eight hours is our largest gap. There’s still times where some people have to wake up a little bit early and come online. And some people have to be on a little bit late in their day.

It’s not too frequent. I’m a really early riser, so it works out well for our South Africa team. So if you decide to have a team that’s far outside your time zone, and they’re working their local workday hours, think about how you can come online with them a little bit and show up. Because even though you’re the owner, you’re also like showing them that you care about their work life balance and not constantly asking them to be working after hours.

We do a lot of, we do something called a stand up, which I think really helps in remote teams. We have a specific period of time that everyone’s tries to be online and post what they’re either working on for the day or kind of wrapping up for their day. And then has that time to get comments from other people, either it’s redirection of what they’re working on or handoffs or clarifications.

Of things. So recreating an elliptical mess. It’s similar. They have the scrum meeting. So there’s a period of time. Everyone’s online together communicating about what they’re doing. Those are important having some social components to working and some meetings that are social only. We have a twice per month fun Friday, which is a games or just chit chat.

Actually, our last fun Friday was an hour of just conversation, which hasn’t happened in a long time that we don’t put a game in there in the mix. It was fun. It was just like life catch up for everyone on the team and. Someone had a baby, they brought their baby to say hi. And there’s always a dog or a cat walking by.

It brings the humanness to remote work by having some dedicated social time for your team.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. A fun one for you. You mentioned people bring their dogs. You love dogs. I’ve seen on your PayMembershipPro videos, you have a demo site, MustLoveDogs. Tell us about your love for dogs.

Kim Coleman: Oh, you’re trying to make me cry, Chris.

Chris Badgett: No, I just, I love dogs too. So I’ve just want to know more of the

Kim Coleman: backstory. I think will be harder than leaving my kids as our dogs. And it’s not, it’s because I can still communicate with our kids. Oh yeah. I had a dog growing up, but there’s something like being an adult and having your own dog, our first dog, it’s just.

It’s everything to you, just, they’re so loyal, they’re following you around all the time, they, our dogs always pop their head up and stick their head in a meeting and people just love it on our team. We have a sick dog right now, it truly stinks to be leaving her, but Jason’s supposed to be in charge of it all and taking good care.

Yeah. Dogs are amazing.

Chris Badgett: Just planting a seed. I know we’ve both had chickens before and I was thinking about, you have a chicken avatar first mascot for the brand. And I was thinking maybe Lifter could have a space Husky and I had a Husky. My wife did. His name was Porter. Just the classic. Blue eyes, laser eyes, kind of sled dog Husky.

And, uh, I was trying to figure out how to get a Husky face and a helmet, but I don’t know, maybe there’s something there for a future lifter mascot.

Kim Coleman: So I like that idea. Brands merge too. I don’t know. Did, did that Husky like chickens or not like chickens? I, I bet he liked eating chickens. Most

Chris Badgett: Huskies do cause Huskies are Wild.

Another question for you, just switching back to you. One of the things that really impresses me about you is you’re a polymath. You’re into a lot of different things. You’re a designer, you’re a developer, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a marketer. You basically can move in and out. You’re constantly like improving and then learning and all those things.

And you mentioned earlier talking about mission and stuff, people that take action, like you just keep evolving and you have all these skills. Can you speak to that, like in the sense of if somebody’s out there and maybe they’re challenged as a marketer, challenged trying to learn how to code, or they’re challenged because their design doesn’t look as good as what they want it to do, how do you level up across the board?

Kim Coleman: I think for me, it’s just been. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Recreating things that you see that work and look good to you. And then the more you’re recreating something else, the more that the principles are becoming internalized to you. Even though you might not realize it. If you’re trying to pixel perfect recreate the Netflix sign up page, you might not realize the things that you’re teaching your brain about line height, about spacing of things, about color choice.

So I think find other things to inspire you and copy the heck out of them. And don’t feel bad about that because that’s what everybody does that I talked to. Everybody’s like screenshotting someone else’s page and it’s like, they do that. I want to do that. That looks cool. Definitely. I do say there’s a little bit of fearlessness that comes with all of that.

And if you’re a person that gets held back by things that are new and bring fear to you, start there in some small way in your life, because we do this with our own customers. We put out code recipes and we literally say, you copy this, you paste this here. The code just works. There’s no tweaking. And there’s still people that have too much fear when they look at code that they can’t even.

Get that past those two steps. And it’s something they do anyway. They probably copy and paste a discount code from a field and paste it. And it’s not like the action is foreign to them. It’s just like the fact that they’re putting a name on it and calling it being a coder and they’re like, I’m not a coder, so I can’t do that.

You are, and you can, so be fearless. And those moments and just know there’s always like a way to recover from it. I would say, yeah, I think also, I don’t, I do it in my own life. Like I like repair the toilet. I had to put like a pipe into the, the toilet was like whistling and we had to replace the innards of the toilet.

And I was like, okay, I don’t have time to find a plumber, have them come here, have them tell me what’s wrong with it. Maybe they have the part, maybe they have to come back the next day. I don’t have time for all of that, but I do have time to watch a YouTube and try it. And I would, I’m out 20 if I can’t fix it.

So I think even that it’s not just my work life, it’s figuring out how to do things in all ways. Don’t tell yourself you can’t and give yourself the grace to screw up a little bit and iterate.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I don’t know if we were on the same wavelength, I just repaired a toilet with my dad in North Carolina.

I had no idea. I’m like, all right, cool. Let’s get the part. Watch some YouTube. Hey, it’s not doing what it’s supposed to. I’m like, let’s look at the old one and figured it out.

Final question. You were talking about fear. If there’s fear or guilt, or I don’t think I could ever take a sabbatical kind of thinking going on around one, especially to somebody who’s been at it for a while, they’ve been freelancing or their WordPress product company or course creator, membership site creator, and they’ve been in business for 10 years, eight years.

What would you say to them to get them over the hump that, yes, you could do it, and

Kim Coleman: here’s how. I think you have to start with some lists. You have to make lists of the things that bring you fear. And then you have to decide. What can I do to prevent this from coming true? If this fear comes true while I’m gone, what will that mean?

How long will I carry that fear for? If this fear wasn’t present, what could I do? We just got a paper from my son’s counselor about de catastrophizing, I think, or catastrophizing. I don’t know how to say it, but look that up, because that’s a cool worksheet. I think you could use it in this scenario too.

It’s What are you worried about? What are you scared of? What happens if what you’re scared of comes true, what happens if it doesn’t? What’s the likelihood that it does? And it’s just a good exercise to take you through like these worst case scenario, best case scenario. Decisions, someone also once told me Arthur from extendify, he said, the things that give you this fear, like build a fence around the people in your team and say, you can operate within this fence, make sure it’s clear to them how much they can do, how little they can do without you around.

And there’s a lot of room, make it a big fence. And they’ll only going to come to you when something feels like it’s outside of that space. I think fear can also be like ego, and if you take your ego out of it, if you’re like, Oh, I’m the only one that can do this. No, I’m the only one that can make the SOP, make the fence and give it to my team.

And then that is still you. You can still feel proud of yourself for setting those wheels in motion, but it’s not you that has to be the one running it if there’s a process. Make a list, identify the things you’re scared of and best case, worst case, how bad can you recover from it? How will you recover from it?

And processize the things that you think your team will need for when you’re away and give them freedom within that space to, to do the thing.

Chris Badgett: Amazing. That’s Kim Coleman. She’s got a plane to catch. She’s heading to Asia literally in a couple hours. Thanks for holding the spot for the LMS cast podcast.

You can find Kim over at Paid Memberships Pro, LifterLMS, and Sitewide Sales. We’ve got Black Friday coming up, which is a great time to use Sitewide Sales, get organized, get ready. Any final words for the people or any other ways to connect with you, Kim?

Kim Coleman: Sure. I’m also on X, whatever that’s called, but I say this all the time.

If, especially for the Black Friday sale season, if you’re thinking about running a sale, you don’t know where to start, you have questions. Reach out to us on our contact form. You can use the one at sitewide sales. com. We will talk through your sale with you. I’m not lying. I will take time and I will talk with you about it.

Probably not for the next 20 days, but when I get back, I will, I want to see more sites using this product, making it easier to run sales, run them more frequently, do more experiments. So please take me up on that offer.

Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming on the show, Kim, and wish you all the best on your trip to Asia. I hope you have an amazing time.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. Go to Lifterlms. com forward slash gift.

Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

The post How to Take a Sabbatical with WordPress Entrepreneur Kim Coleman appeared first on LMScast.