Can reducing your hours be a step towards closing?
- Topic
- Retirement decisions
- Reading time
- 3 minutes
- Last reviewed
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Reducing your hours can be a useful experiment before retirement. It can also compress five days of responsibility into three days at the premises and two days on the phone. Test which version you are proposing before changing the business around it.
Start with the work you want to stop doing. "Three days a week" says when you attend. It does not say who quotes for the awkward job, approves purchases or answers the customer who always asks for you.
Run a bounded trial
Choose a period that includes ordinary business activity, not just a quiet week. Write down your intended attendance, the decisions others can make and the situations in which someone should contact you. Agree those arrangements with the people affected. Seek employment advice before proposing changes to anyone else's working arrangements.
Keep a simple interruption diary. Each entry needs the reason, the person who needed an answer and whether the answer required your judgement or merely information that could have been available elsewhere.
A hypothetical owner reduces attendance to Monday and Thursday. During the first week, the office calls six times because purchase limits are unclear. That suggests a decision process to fix. A later call concerns a specialist task only the owner can perform. That raises a different question: should the reduced business continue accepting that task?
The diary gives the owner-dependency test real evidence. It also avoids blaming staff for calling when the owner has never defined what they may decide.
Judge the trial against the retirement objective
At the review, ask how many hours the owner actually worked, including calls and paperwork at home. Compare that with the intended limit. Record which activities remained enjoyable and which continued to require attendance.
Then consider the operating footprint. If the remaining work still needs the entire workshop, all the services and the same opening arrangements, reduced hours may produce little reduction in the business that must eventually close. A smaller customer list does not automatically create a smaller operation.
Keeping selected consultancy work may involve a different set of dependencies. Describe that option separately instead of mixing it into the trial halfway through.
Decide what happens if the trial fails
Set the review date before starting. Agree what evidence would support continuing, changing the scope or returning to a closure plan. A trial without a review can become another way for the retirement date to keep slipping.
Do not sell equipment on the assumption that the trial will work. First identify the capabilities the smaller operation needs and confirm the wider decision with your advisers. Once surplus assets are genuinely identified, explain the proposed reduced operation to UK Auction Group. That gives the asset discussion a defined business purpose.
Explore retirement decisions.
Sources
This guide is general information and education only. Legal, tax, employment and safety decisions may need a qualified adviser who knows your situation. Read the disclaimer.