How to Take a Vacation Without Abandoning Your BusinessIt's all about planning ahead.

Twenty years after starting1-800-Got-Junk?, CEO Brian Scudamore took a sabbatical. Confident that his crackerjack COO, who had been on the job for 10 months, would keep things thriving while he was away, Scudamore headed off to cooking school in Italy. "I was very grateful to her that I was able to get away for five weeks," he says.

But it didn't take long after his return for Scudamore to sense that all was not well. To his horror, he realized that the COO had overspent company funds to near bankruptcy, had been trying to turn his team against him and was scheming to oust him.