Steps


Winter sabbatical. This is the time we are generally parked on a bench on the boardwalk of Laguna’s Main Beach, watching the waves and the Lagunatics.  Yet yesterday we tossed computer, a small suitcase, and one very confused dog into the back of the Subaru and hit the road East.  We’re en route to Denver, currently winding through snow-skirted red sandstone mesas in Utah. A third of the way back across the country. 

While a road trip is always an adventure, the purpose of this one is to enable a new adventure altogether: We are interviewing the top candidates to manage our bed and breakfast next season. That’s right, Chris and I are looking to step away from being the active, onsite innkeepers.

Turning over the reins is going to be a huge adventure, one that in a way feels like stepping off the stepped buttes currently surrounding us into the abyss.

So much as yet unknown. Will this work? Will new managers breathe a little fresh life into our well-loved business? And will the time away from it – all the way in California – allow Chris and me to clarify the next step in our lives?

I know that the only way one moves up the ladder in the corporate world I left so long ago is to learn to delegate and to grow your subordinates by giving them the knowledge and the tools to succeed…and then getting out of their way. Not micromanaging. Not second guessing. In fact, for example, I’m almost afraid to gift the candidates with my cookbook tomorrow because I don’t want to constrain them. Yes, my 50-recipe cookbook is an example of what has worked for ME. But in rereading some of my notes to friends over the past year, I wonder if my way really works anymore, or whether someone new (and perhaps I?) might thrive by changing up the whole format of breakfast offerings.

I so hope we’re going to like these people when we meet in person tomorrow in Boulder, CO, and that they are still as eager to try this challenge as we are to have them do so. It will be a challenge for all of us. #nervous


I look forward to seeing what opens up in my life as the result of closing this particular door.

Comments

  1. UnknownDecember 11, 2018 at 11:29 AM

    Go Kim and Chris! Even though it's scary to take the first step, you are stepping onto the path toward the next phase of the life of your dreams.

    ReplyDelete
  2. GPTishDecember 11, 2018 at 2:32 PM

    So proud of you two. For what you created and for knowing you need to step back and away. ❤️❤️❤️❤️

    ReplyDelete
  3. Karin HeathDecember 11, 2018 at 2:56 PM

    Knowing you & Chris you’ll feel from your hearts to help you both make the best decision!! For your B&B & yourselves!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Kimberly Burton AllenDecember 14, 2018 at 3:47 PM

    Thanks Karin!! <3

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Making the leap

Image
Offer accepted. We are in contract. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who knows us that we found a property that can be a project. Built in 1900, extensively renovated and updated in in the mid-80s, while keeping and enhancing the original details (beautiful woodwork, floors), the house is 2600 square feet on an acre and a half, with 250' feet of waterfront on a large pond fed by a river.  The house is set up with a small apartment which has its own entrance (exterior spiral staircase) which we envisage renovating so that we have both a guest room with bathroom and the apartment. Perhaps, down the line, we'll need the apartment should one of us require live-in care. In the nearer future, perhaps we'll (gasp!) Airbnb it. Under the previous owners it also operated as a garden center, and there are greenhouses, hoop houses, and a raised vegetable bed on the property. And -- be still, Chris's beating heart-- there's a barn with a workshop, an office (origina
Read more

Transitions

Image
I write from a rental cottage in Connecticut that Chris and I took for the month of December. I've k ept the news on the down-low primarily because I don't want to tempt Fate, but we have sold the bed and breakfast, and are retiring from innkeeping. We are scheduled to close at the end of next week --the closing was delayed two weeks, resulting in more hesitation in sharing the news. Once the closing has  taken place and I know it's a done deal, then I would feel more comfor table in announcing it  I studied psychology in college because I was fascinated by how people were wired, how they thought,  what made them do what they did. Specifically, I was obsessed with why I did/thought/felt what I did, and what it meant.  Early on, I took the Myers-Briggs Personality Test (result: ENFT [Extrovert/Intuitive/Feeling/Judging]) and there was a question that has returned to me thousands of times since I first encountered it:  " Do you prefer things settled and decided, or unset
Read more

Remembering the Sacto Dixieland Jazz Jubilee on National Jazz Day

Image
Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes Dixieland jazz was my childhood soundtrack. First, the LP records (they didn’t call them Long Playing for nothing) on the Hi-Fi stereo console: Jack Teagarden, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven, the haunting soprano sax of Sidney Bechet, the seemingly improvisational, but actually well-polished lively sounds of the Firehouse Five + 2, who we could occasionally enjoy live at Disneyland as many of the members of the band were animators, illustrators, and members of Disney studios. There was“Strictly From Dixie,” Benson Curtis’s radio program of trad (traditional) jazz every Saturday at 5 PM, recorded on Dad’s Teac reel-to-reel and played back endlessly over the backyard speakers while we swam in the pool and Dad pruned the palm trees or barbecued the chicken. My parents were charter members of Orange County’s Jazz Inc. jazz club, which hosted a meeting/performance on the second Sunday of each month at a local Moose lodge. From time to time, we kid
Read more