I am not talking about “LIFESTYLE” but about the type of people we hire and what we are asking them to do. The typical day for our staff includes going to work and coming home to a busy office that is filled with people. But what does a lifestyle director do? Basically they oversee the day to day operations.
The typical day of our staff is a multi-hour drive to work and back home where they spend the majority of their time. If they don’t have time to do what they do every day they get promoted to another location. We have an on-call roster that includes a lot of different people, so they spend a lot of their time out of the office. I am also a part of this on-call roster.
The lifestyle director has a role that is quite different from a typical day-to-day role. They have to be highly efficient and they are the ones who make the decisions about who gets promoted. For a lifestyle director the day-to-day things you do are more focused on you. You are the one who decides about your vacation, how your employees are treated and what is done and said in the office. That day to day is the one that you have to think about.
This makes an office manager or a culture director a lot less fun than, well, a lifestyle director. That’s not to say that they don’t get a lot of fun too. A lifestyle director is really good at making the day-to-day decisions, and a good lifestyle director can have a lot of fun doing so. I think that day-to-day decisions are a lot more fun than the day-to-day decisions that a lifestyle director makes.
What is a lifestyle director to do when the day to day decisions are so fun? They can really get into the thick of it, so they can take a few more of those day-to-day decisions on the job. So they can have fun while working in the office, and if you have a business with a lot of deadlines and such, a lifestyle director can really get into the zone around them.
It turns out that there is a ton of advice out there on how to run a lifestyle office, but it doesn’t seem to be very well-organized. A lot of these books have been written by people who have actually run their own businesses, and in my opinion they are just plain wrong. I have been in the exact same situation and it was a lot easier than it is currently.
There are a lot of people who are in the lifestyle industry who have no idea what a lifestyles director is, or how to run one. That is probably because it’s a “person who does something for you” without knowing anything about it. A lifestyle director is a person who does that for you. Essentially, it’s an HR manager that helps you run your business with the people you hire.
The lifestyle industry is so small that you can get by with someone who is only doing your business but doesn’t know anything about it. Now that we are into our fifth year of working in this industry, I can confidently say that we have had our best and worst years. We have had some good years, some bad years, and some amazing experiences.
Good years: For the most part, they are pretty good. The bad ones are a little more complicated. For example, we have been working with an organization that is only on the second floor of a building that is only on the third and fourth floors. Now, normally, I would have thought that we would have a problem with that but I have never been there and we have never had a problem with it.
