Who’s Allowed to Bug You Over Christmas?

When did you last take a week off and leave the laptop at home?

Not in the bag “just in case”. At home. Off. Off? Scary thought, right?

If you had to think about it, you’re in good company. Most of the partners I sit across from don’t so much take leave as move their desks to a spot with a better view. The Peninsula house gets a second screen. The hotel room gets your out-of-office message and, by about nine each morning, your full attention anyway.

The Christmas shutdown is roughly eleven weeks away. It’s the one stretch of the year when most professional firms in Melbourne properly close, and it’s the stretch where you find out how much of your firm runs on you.

How a ship lets the captain sleep

On a merchant ship, the captain isn’t on the bridge for most of the night. He’s asleep. Someone else has the watch.

That works because of a document called the master’s standing orders. Before the captain goes below, the officers who’ll keep the watch have read them and signed them. They set out, in writing, what the watch can handle alone. And they list the exact circumstances in which the captain gets woken: visibility closing in, another vessel coming nearer than a set distance, something on the bridge failing. There’s nearly always a last line too. If you’re in any doubt, call me.

So the captain sleeps. Not because nothing can go wrong at sea overnight, but because everyone aboard knows what happens if it does, and the list of things worth waking him for is short and agreed before anyone needs it.

Most firms don’t have standing orders.

They have a managing partner with his phone on the bedside table.

Is yours an owner-dependent business?

An owner-dependent business is one where too much only moves when one person touches it. Business brokers worry about this because it drags down what a firm is worth on sale. I worry about it for a plainer reason. It’s why you can’t switch off, and it’s often why the technology ends up set up badly, because the systems got built around whoever was always there to answer.

If the laptop is coming with you regardless, we’ve written separately about keeping it safe on the road. This post is about the firm you leave behind.

I’ve only been able to leave the laptop at home and off the last few years. I remember the first time I did it and thought the sky would fall in. But I kept telling myself, “trust the process, trust the team”. And it was handled. And I got a real break. It was amazing and each time I take time off now, I am a little less apprehensive.

Here are the five questions I’d ask if I sat down with you before the shutdown. Each one has a good answer and a worrying one. You’ll know which you’ve got.

1. Who reads your inbox while you’re away?

A good answer: a named person has delegated access to your mailbox for the fortnight, and anything that belongs to the firm rather than to you (enquiries, accounts, client instructions) already lands in a Microsoft 365 shared mailbox that more than one person watches. Your out-of-office gives a general number, perhaps some key contacts for specific needs and a return date.

A worrying answer: “Nobody. I just keep an eye on it.”

This matters more than it sounds, because email is where trouble actually starts. In the Australian Signals Directorate’s 2024–25 factsheet for businesses, the most common cybercrime businesses reported was email compromise, at 19% of business reports, followed by business email compromise fraud that cost money, at 15%.

An absent partner’s inbox is useful to the people behind those numbers. It’s unwatched, and the out-of-office has helpfully told them so.

Beware: “I’m in Europe until 12 January with limited access. For urgent payments please contact Sarah in accounts” is a briefing note for an invoice fraud. It says who’s gone, for how long, and who to impersonate a request to.

Tip: Keep the external out-of-office to three things. You’re away, when you’re back, and a general number. Names and travel plans go in the internal version only.

2. When something small breaks, who gets the call?

The printer jams. The meeting room screen won’t connect. Someone’s locked out of their account on the 29th.

A good answer: there’s one place your staff take it, they know the number without looking it up, and it isn’t you.

A worrying answer: “They usually message me and I tell them who to ring.”

That’s you as the switchboard. And it’s worth seeing it for what it is. Your staff aren’t messaging you because they can’t solve a printer. They’re messaging you because you’ve always answered, quickly, and for years the fastest route to a fix has been you.

I run a help desk, so you’d expect me to tell you to ring one. The point is narrower than that. It shouldn’t be you, whoever it is. And if your IT is looked after from outside, ask now what hours they’re actually staffed between Christmas Eve and the second week of January, and who picks up. “We’re on call” can mean a person or a voicemail.

3. What can your team decide without you?

This is the standing orders question, and it’s the one that decides whether you get a holiday.

A good answer: it’s written down. An associate can agree a deadline extension. The office manager can approve spending up to a set figure. A senior adviser can reschedule a client review without checking. Everyone knows where the page is.

A worrying answer: “They know what I’d want.”

They probably do. But “they know what I’d want” lives in your head, and anything that lives in your head travels with you to Noosa. Nobody on your team wants to be the person who guessed wrong while you were away, and an interrupted holiday costs them nothing compared with that. So they check. Give them the page and most of those messages stop, because you’ve removed the risk of guessing.

4. If a client asks for you by name, can anyone else help?

A good answer: the history is somewhere shared. File notes, the last few emails, what was promised and when. Someone else can open it, read for five minutes, and pick up the conversation.

A worrying answer: “They’d have to wait for me.”

Look for the logins too. A client portal, a platform account, a supplier login that only you know. That’s a key to the building that exists on your keyring and nowhere else. A password manager with shared vaults fixes that without anyone needing to write a password on a sticky note, which is the other way firms solve it.

5. If something goes wrong on 28 December, who decides?

The reason this one matters isn’t that Christmas is especially dangerous. It’s that nothing stops for it.

The Signals Directorate’s Annual Cyber Threat Report 2024–25 records more than 84,700 cybercrime reports to ReportCyber over the year. On average, one every six minutes.

At that rate, a two-week shutdown spans more than 3,000 reports. Those come from individuals as well as businesses, and they’re self-reported, so if anything the real number of incidents is higher. Your office being closed doesn’t take you out of that count. It just means fewer people are looking when something arrives.

A good answer: there’s a short written list of what counts as “wake me”. A suspected breach. Anything touching client money. Systems down for more than half a day. There’s a named person on duty for the firm, a named person on duty for the IT, and both have each other’s numbers. The backups have been restored at least once this year to prove they work, not just checked to see that they ran.

A worrying answer: “The IT guy has my mobile.”

One specific thing to check this week. If the only phone that can approve a sign-in to your firm’s main admin account is yours, then a problem on the 28th either waits until you’re back or wakes you up. There should be at least one other way in that doesn’t depend on you being reachable, held by someone accountable and recorded somewhere you can find it.

Tip: Write your own “call the master if” list. Five lines, no more. Give it to the person running the office over the break and to whoever looks after your IT, and ask them both to read it back to you.

If you’ve never written a continuity plan, that list is the first page of one, and our guide to surviving the unexpected covers the rest.

What this won’t do

Making a firm less dependent on its owner won’t mean the phone never rings. Some things should reach you, and a firm where nothing ever does is one where something’s being hidden from you.

And if you’re a very small practice with no second senior person, there’s a limit to how much you can hand to your own team. That’s where the list matters most, because the things you can’t delegate inside the firm have to be covered by someone outside it.

Back on the bridge

The captain still gets woken sometimes. That’s the system working, not failing.

What he doesn’t get woken for is the printer.

That’s the aim for your break. Not a phone that never buzzes, but one that only buzzes for something on the list, so when it does, you put the drink down rather than the whole holiday…

If you’d like a hand writing that list for your firm, we’ll sit down with you before the shutdown, work through who gets called for what, and give it back to you as a single page your team can keep. It’s an hour in October, and it’s much cheaper than one on the 28th of December. Talk to us about it today.