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ISS BLOG – My Sabbatical From the Self-Storage Business: Why I Needed It and What I Learned From the ExperienceISS BLOG – My Sabbatical From the Self-Storage Business: Why I Needed It and What I Learned From the Experience
Imagine what it would be like to simply walk away from your job for a while, maybe to pursue a hobby, travel, spend time with family or simply rest. A sabbatical can be restorative and change your perspective on life. It can also be challenging to turn off “work brain.” A self-storage owner and developer set out to pursue personal growth. He shares how he planned for a break, what he did while away from his businesses and what he learned from the experience.
10 Min Read
For me, taking a real break is difficult. Not working is a foreign, even offensive, concept to me. In my family of very proud farmers and truck drivers, the badge of honor was always “I can work harder than the next guy.” And I’ve done that my whole life—from the hayfields in my home state of West Virginia to the mountains of Northeast Georgia as a young college grad to when I finally planted the flag as a self-storage pro in Virginia.
I’m the guy who thinks about work when I’m not working. I’m addicted to emails and texts. I have blue-collar pride and a chip on my shoulder. I want to do well, and I’m scared of failure. I hate losing more than I love winning. I work hard every minute I’m awake. I worry about my own performance constantly. I struggle with anxiety over work-related everything. And I always have. Can you relate?
I began researching the idea of a sabbatical after hearing some friends and colleagues discuss the benefits of their own experience with an extended professional pause. An ambitious pastor friend took off for 90 days and described it as life-changing. A builder friend said his sabbatical changed his whole perspective on life and family. I watched TED Talks and listened to podcasts. I wanted to do it right. I had no idea, really, how to get started. But I was committed, and that’s usually the best first step when targeting any goal.
The Challenge
My companies aren’t employee-heavy; they’re too “me-heavy.” I’m the decision-maker and, for better and worse, that’s a weight on me and everyone around me. I generally cast the vision and shoulder a lot of the load. Prepping my teams to carry on in my absence was something I hadn’t done before. Luckily, some of my closest business allies were 100% supportive and able to step in, allowing me space for my mysterious professional intermission.
Financially, I knew I had enough to make it happen. But like many business owners, I still feel regular financial pressure. Allowing myself to “pocket some chips” after removing them from the table was really just a decision point. Making peace with more self-focused spending than I was used to took some time.
I’m tough and experienced. I’ve been through very difficult, even uncommon, life experiences. Now in my late 40s, though, I still had some fears of this new thing I was doing. What if I didn’t accomplish what I wanted? What if I couldn’t stand not working? If everything crashed and burned while I was gone, could I live with such failure? I really wasn’t sure of what to expect.
Then there’s my personality. I’m sort of up and down, as a rule. I have to be able to produce, move, even struggle or I get frustrated. My regular busy world of shuffling between family and multiple businesses suits me. It was going to be radically different for more than two months. I was going to do this, but I was worried and unsure of my specific direction. Fear. Anxiety. Self-doubt. The challenge was real.
Creating a Plan
I knew I needed goals for this new chapter, and I had a lot to consider. On the personal side, my children are getting to the age where they need me less. I’m having trouble adjusting to that. My window with them is shrinking. My wife and I are so busy with kids’ activities that we seldom have peaceful, fully present time together. Frankly, while I’m a worker through and through, I probably have always placed too high of a value on my own performance. I needed some rest.
Professionally, things were changing for me. Over the course of 20 years, I had gone from barely getting and scrapping for every deal to administering my own clumsy mini-empire. I’d grown my self-storage feasibility business from a few dozen projects per year to hundreds. I’d gone from having nothing to invest to meaningful development and ownership partnerships.
“What’s next?” is a big question, and I needed real time to contemplate my next steps. I structured my time away from business into four categories: family, mission, passions and adventure.
I knew I would feel the tug of work. The little anxiety machine we all carry in our pocket had to be shelved. At the suggestion of a few close friends, I bought a phone with a new number and made it available to only my family. For the first time in 20 years, I turned off my old cell phone. I gave it its own sabbatical on a shelf in our kitchen. And I didn’t load my work email onto the new one. I was really doing this thing!
I put real plans into motion and on the books! I signed up for a church-mission trip to Tanzania. I booked an African safari hunt. I scheduled a fishing trip with my oldest son. I rented a house in Montana for a getaway with my wife and some tactical fly-fishing. I ordered some books to read. As a songwriter, I planned to go to Nashville, enter some contests, do some writing and performing, make some contacts, and join an industry group. I mapped out 70% of my days at least six months in advance. I wrote a detailed plan and started to get excited.
The Adventure
I closed out my pre-sabbatical chapter with a bang. My ProSafe group (really, four friends building self-storage) visited a new store under construction and searched for sites in the two days prior to an awesome grand opening for a facility in Richmond, Virginia. I laughed and shook hands with investors over catered barbecue as my oldest son sang country songs. It was an awesome punctuation to a lot of hard work. I told my team, “See you in 65 days or so,” and ran headlong toward sabbatical. It was a good start on a high note.
One of my key objectives was to slow down long enough to think—really think and clean up my dirty mind. I had to quiet the noise that garbles every day. Work hard. Employee issues. Needy clients. Email demands. Money shifting. All these things are so commonplace to me (and probably to you, too!) that it’s difficult to really get in a clear-headed place to develop sound strategy. I didn’t know how long it would take, but I was committed to finding that place. I found a morning rhythm of devotions and meditation. I started reading. I had spent months developing a sound plan and it was in motion.
My middle son, who had just turned 16, was my companion on some globetrotting that covered Europe and Africa. We put hundreds of miles on new shoes, hiking the rocky, thorny hills of South Africa and the streets of Paris and Frankfurt, Germany.
We woke up early every morning and exhausted ourselves in Hemingway-esque adventure. We taught kids in Tanzania the song “This Little Light of Mine” in English and Swahili (“Nuru Yangu Ndogo”) and ate more rice than we’d normally eat in a year. We saw things I never thought I’d see when I was boy in the hills of West Virginia. We survived a third-world shakedown from local police, and what seemed like an eternity in a crappy bus and the worst roads on the planet. We sampled some of the best and the worst the world offers.
After the worldwide tour, my wife and daughter and I went to Nashville, leaving our two older boys to their summer jobs. In a stroke of luck, I was able to play some original music at the hallowed Bluebird Cafe. From the same stage where Garth Brooks and Taylor Swift were discovered, I belted out an original song about emerging from addiction and got a room full of applause. The next day, I was invited to play at a local honky-tonk by a friend who had gone pretty far on “The Voice” reality TV-show. Epic.
Then on to Montana to enjoy some of the most beautiful country in the West. We saw glaciers, moose, buffalo and antelope. Together, we marveled at sunsets. We found the most amazing food in smalltown western bars and dives. It was National Geographic, reality show, foodie-kind of amazing. One of my best friends and business partners flew out to fish with me in the Missouri River, where we caught trophy brown trout and rainbows amid the up-close spectacles of Bighorn sheep scaling sheer walls and mule deer drinking from the river. As we ate lunch, eagles competed for fish above us and a mama bear and cub went swimming nearby. My adventure covered something close to 50,000 miles and every step was healing.
The Reflection
On the Friday before I returned to work, my mother said to me: “It’s a hard, cold reality waiting for you on Monday.” Thanks, Mom. As I wrote this article, I’d been back in the saddle at my businesses for about a month. And it has been hard. My body and mind recovered to a place I hadn’t been for a long time, maybe ever. Not everything went the way I would’ve dreamed, or even how I planned. There were major fires to contend with immediately upon entering my office on day one. It took me two weeks just to reacclimate to “business leader” instead of “artist adventurer.” I knew I’d have some prices to pay for being gone, and I dramatically underestimated some of them. Man, the return has been brutal. Worth it.
I will recall the two months of my sabbatical as life-changing. Along the way, I read books that gave me new perspective on life in general. From “Practicing the Way” by John Mark Comer, I learned that I had to subtract some things from my life to focus on the most important ones, particularly my relationship with God. As a result, I parted with a couple long-term clients because I realized that our values just didn’t align. Ernest Hemingway’s book “Green Hills of Africa” describes a real, nonfiction adventure but also contemplation about what matters most to deep-thinking people.
I decided that writing well is a noble ambition and have poured into my passion for songwriting. Rollo May’s “Man’s Search for Himself” gave me insight to some of my own anxieties and tendencies.
The reflection continues. I think it always will, in a sense. Warren Buffet said, “I read and I think … and so I make less impulse decisions than most people in business.” I’m angling toward that dynamic: more thinking before better action in life. My sabbatical gave me time to do both, and I will never be the same. I’m encouraging others to consider a similar experience.
My sabbatical was more than I had planned. I learned and continue to learn from my professional recess. I’m making decisions now that I might’ve otherwise avoided or been unable to initiate. It has made me better as a man, husband, friend, partner, dad and business owner.
In the Missouri River in August, while trying to drop a dry fly that looked like a grasshopper over a rising brown trout, I remembered a quote from Henry Winkler (aka “The Fonz”) about fly fishing being “like a washing machine for the brain.” My entire sabbatical was like that for me. It washed my brain of the dirt clouding my best thinking. And I really needed that!
Ben Burkhart is a family man, songwriter and outdoorsman who owns and develops self-storage. His company, StorageStudy.com, helps developers make the best investment decisions. You can find out more about him at benburkhartmusic.com. To reach him, email [email protected].
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