David Mammano, the founder and CEO of college- and life-counseling company Next Step Publishing, has a nice post on Inc.'s Start-Up Blog about nice times: the one-month vacation he just took (in Sicily--great choice!). For wealthy higher-ups at larger corporations, of course, the August vacation is de rigeur, and certainly not grounds for special distinction, or even a blogpost.

But Mammano is rightly proud that he was able to take a month off despite being in-charge of his small business. "The talent, skill, intelligence and commitment of the staff at Next Step is so strong that I didn't even flinch about leaving for a month," he writes. "Each of their roles are clear. I trust them. And they don't need to be micromanaged anyway."

"And next time, maybe I'll take off two months!" he concludes.

The implicit lesson of the article is that Mammano's isn't--or shouldn't be--an exceptional situation. Rather, among your main objectives as the founder of your own business is to make yourself dispensable, at least in the short term, through good delegating, smart hiring, and able managing. That may seem strange--you want to think of yourself as absolutely essential to the business you started (and don't worry, overall you still will be)--but a company that can't survive for more than a week or two without you is a fragile company. And this way, you get to take nice trips to Sicily!

The other point we'd make is: this is what's great about starting your own business! Not to speak for every single entrepreneur out there, but one of the main reasons people list for striking out on their own is to be their own boss, set their own hours, and gain flexibility in their work-life balance. If you start your own business with those goals in mind only to find yourself unable to take more than a day, much less a month, off, then you have lost sight of why you started in the first place.

But in Mammano's case, the needs of a healthy business and healthy lifestyle perfectly coincided.