I've been happily self-employed (freelance web development) for two years. Last year I took about 2.5 months off to work on my own project. It goes like this:
- start saying no to everyone
- spend about a month winding down existing projects
- enjoy your break, do something you love for a while
- when you get below $X in savings, ask around for work
Basically, there is a one month spin-down period and a one-month spin-up period. You have to have pretty good deal flow (i.e. you are already telling people no most of the time) to try this, and it's still stressful when you start to worry about whether your savings will last. But as long as your work doesn't inherently require you to be on call, you can wind things down and shift responsibilities around. As long as you're considerate of your customer's needs when doing this, they'll be willing to accommodate you. And you can practice this whenever you wind down an existing project in order to switch to a more interesting and/or lucrative one, a skill you ought to be practicing at least a couple of times a year if you're an excellent programmer.
I think this works if you're a one man shop...once you hire employees, though, things change. A lot. You have to keep your business running because your devs have trusted you with their family's financial well-being; you have a responsibility to keep the business healthy.
How much "keeping things running" is actually needed? I'd imagine disappearing completely for a couple months wouldn't work, but what about a couple months of signing on only on Monday mornings?
I think that's contingent on your business model and the maturity of your company.
I can only speak to my biz: most of our revenue is service (although we're trying to migrate to product). So we have three primary "departments," if you will: sales, production, service/support. I've chosen to staff out "production" first with kickass developers. But somebody has to take care of sales and service. Service/support, we've automated that pretty efficiently and only bother devs with processed support issues.
Sales, however, still requires the cultivation and management of client relationships. You can't just phone that in, and the way we've grown our business has been via relationship (i.e., referrals and word-of-mouth). So even if I was 100% out of production (which I'm not, yet), there's still the bizdev side.
At least that's how it is now; two years in the future I'll probably have a different answer and perspective. A lot of this stuff you just figure it out as you go; there's not a book out there that tell you how to run your biz.
- start saying no to everyone
- spend about a month winding down existing projects
- enjoy your break, do something you love for a while
- when you get below $X in savings, ask around for work
Basically, there is a one month spin-down period and a one-month spin-up period. You have to have pretty good deal flow (i.e. you are already telling people no most of the time) to try this, and it's still stressful when you start to worry about whether your savings will last. But as long as your work doesn't inherently require you to be on call, you can wind things down and shift responsibilities around. As long as you're considerate of your customer's needs when doing this, they'll be willing to accommodate you. And you can practice this whenever you wind down an existing project in order to switch to a more interesting and/or lucrative one, a skill you ought to be practicing at least a couple of times a year if you're an excellent programmer.