The combination of seven-day workweeks and the pressures of starting a business leaves little chance for taking a summer vacation for some new entrepreneurs.

Much like parents leaving their child with a baby sitter for the first time, the thought of taking time away during a business’s formative years is unthinkable. Some first-time business owners don’t want to miss out on an opportunity with an important client, or perhaps they don’t have a system in place that allows the business to run without them. But they can only rationalize their free time away so long before it hits them that somehow, they must take a vacation.

“Our oldest daughter was 16 when Bonita first took a Saturday off, and my daughter thought it felt so odd for both of us to be at home at the same time,” said Kevin Clark, who owns and operates By Design custom furniture in Clive with his wife, Bonita.

Kevin Clark started working in the furniture business in 1976 while he was completing his education at Iowa State University. His wife, a teacher, decided to join him in the business about a year later. He said they worked seven days a week in the beginning, later cutting back to six.

“I’m not a big believer in absentee ownership,” Clark said. “Being there is part of the magic. You’re working there alongside them and working hard to keep the focus.”

Clark said if he could go back in time, he would have hired more help for the business earlier on, instead of trying to do so much himself for about the first 10 years.

“One of the biggest mistakes I made was not getting office help sooner,” he added. “I tried to do it all: the selling and receiving and the books and delivering, when I could have been focusing more of my time on managing and getting the important things done.

“I studied marketing, but we had no retail experience at all,” Clark said. “Starting out, you have to invent everything, and a lot of your lessons are painful ones.”

Other business owners agree that it’s difficult for a person to know to expect before taking on entrepreneurship. Jennifer Sayers started her graphic design business, Bijou Grafix, about 10 years ago, and it wasn’t until a few years in that she had enough help trained to allow her to take some time off.

Sayers said she never intended to be a business owner, knowing that it would mean working long hours without much time off. But she changed her mind after she was downsized by her former employer.

“When I started, I thought I would work enough to make enough money to pay the bills and make a comfortable living,” Sayers said. “I didn’t plan on the business growing as quickly as it did, and I was constantly trying to keep on top of it all.”

But Mike Beecher found out that even when the workload is not heavy, vacations are not an option. Beecher left a 32-year career in television news to start a public relations business about a year and a half ago.

“Early on, I had plenty of free time because I didn’t have a very large client base, but that meant that I also didn’t have a lot of income,” he said. “That wasn’t the time to take a vacation because I was building a business.”

Beecher was fairly accustomed to working without taking many vacations. Although he regularly earned about four weeks of vacation time working in a managerial role at TV stations, breaking news took precedence over scheduled time off.

Sayers got so wrapped up in the momentum of her business that she didn’t pay attention to her life outside work and networking. She estimates she was putting in 90-hour workweeks during the first few years of her business.

“You wouldn’t want to work those hours for someone else, but it’s exhilarating and exciting because you’re starting your own business,” Sayers said. “But that feeling doesn’t last forever.”

Like Clark, Sayers also wonders why she waited so long to hire people to work for her. When she decided to do so a few years into her business, it brought her immediate relief.

“That was the most wonderful thing in the world, especially to get a good, trained person in who could come in and handle everything, cover the phones, do the work and get to the point where I could walk away from it and go out of town,” she said.

Still, Sayers said, when she decided to take a long weekend away from the office, she was very careful to run it past her clients and schedule around deadlines that were already set.

“It was weird taking time off,” she said. “If I took a long weekend, I would e-mail all my clients way ahead of time, telling them that I would be out of the office for a couple of days. I asked them if they had any projects around that time to try to schedule them around that.”

Over time, Sayers has realized that her clients are very understanding about her taking vacations. Last April, she took on a business partner Valerie Peter, at Bijoux Grafix, and now, vacations are more routine

“Next week I’m going down to the lake with a group my girlfriends,” Sayers said. “If I’m gone for a week, I usually check in two or three times to see how things are going. Part of it is because I would like to see if anything fun is happening.”

Earlier this year, Beecher also brought in a partner, Tami Wiencek, to help him expand his business and share some of the workload. Wiencek, a former television news anchor, operates a branch office in Waterloo, and the pair is planning to open an office of Beecher & Wiencek next in Sioux City.

“Tami and I have been taking some three- and four-day weekends, and I have a couple of longer trips planned with my family for this summer and fall,” Beecher said. “We like the balance of our careers now, as opposed to the structure of our careers in broadcasting.

Beecher said vacation time is a benefit he and Wiencek will emphasize as they expand and hire additional help.

“We’ll build vacations into our employee benefits plan,” he said. “In today’s busy world, it’s important to treat people like they deserve some time off. You get so many days on the planet and some of those should be vacation.

“When you own your own business, you realize how valuable your time is. Time is precious for income reasons and it’s also precious when you don’t have your work hat on.”

After nearly 30 years as business owners, the Clarks have also achieved a balance between work and vacation time that’s better suited to them. Although their store is open seven days a week, they no longer work weekends. Their 18 qualified employees make it possible for the Clarks to travel for work and pleasure. They travel two weeks a year to trade shows and have taken weeklong to 10-day trips with their family to places like Alaska and Europe.

“But even at this stage, it’s still beyond my comprehension when people say that they’re taking a three-week vacation,” Kevin Clark said. “We have good people, and they don’t need us looking over their shoulders.

“I’ve heard that if your business is so well set up and so well run, you should be able to be away from it for a year. We’re not quite to that point. But we are fortunate that we can be away as much as we are.”

TAKING TIME OFF

Many small business owners struggle with the issue of taking time off. According to a national survey complied this spring by OPEN, the small business division of American Express Co., 67 percent of small business owners expect to take a break of at least a week this summer, although a third of those plan to combine business with pleasure. More than half of the business owners planning a vacation said they intend to check in with their business at least once per day.

Of those with vacation plans, 42 percent said they were concerned that an important client or customer would not receive an appropriate level of service in their absence. Other major concerns reported were missing an important new business opportunity, poor staff judgment calls, equipment or operational breakdown, security and who will manage the business in their absence.