There's a literary genre of piece that every July fills LinkedIn: "how to recharge the batteries in August". They're benevolent but not useful. For a founder, "recharging the batteries" is an automatic body function that, barring serious problems, activates itself when you lie down for two weeks in a cool place without a calendar.
What instead doesn't activate itself, and which is the only real reason a founder should have August, is something else: time to think. Meaning time to do the jobs that, during the year, you can't do because you're always under first-level urgency.
Four specific jobs. All low execution volume. All high autumn impact. All doable in two or three total days — not a month of hard labor. The rest of the time, sleep and eat gelato.
1. The "head audit": what you've thought without knowing it
Get a physical notebook. Yes, a notebook. Don't open the laptop.
For two consecutive mornings, one of these — say August 8 and 9, because there are fewer people around — take two hours in the morning before it gets hot and write by hand a list of all the things that "passed through your head" in the last six months that you didn't have time to examine.
Thoughts, doubts, ideas, frustrations, product intuitions, suspicions about people, market signals, conversations that left you something. All of it. Even things that seem stupid.
Write without filter. No categories. No actions. No "to-do". Just scattered thoughts.
When you've finished, take up the list the next day and do one thing only: circle three entries that seem "still true". Not the most urgent, not the most uncomfortable. The ones that, re-read coldly, continue to speak.
These three things will be the real index of your September strategy. Not the team's OKRs. Not the marketing plan. Those three thoughts, written in pencil on a notebook one August morning, are worth 70% of the decisions you'll make in the next semester.
2. The "non-operational reading": something outside your world
Find a book that isn't about your craft. Not a management book. Not a famous founder's biography. Not an AI or marketing book.
A novel, a history essay, a philosophy book, a poetry collection, a botany treatise. Literally anything that takes you outside your professional world.
Read it slowly. A week for a book that in March you'd have finished in two days.
This thing is unpopular to write on a branding and startup blog, because it seems like a gratuitous exercise. It isn't. Most truly original ideas in a company — those that distinguish you from the competitor doing the same thing as you — don't come from your sector. They come from an analogy, an angle shift, a metaphor borrowed from a distant field. Agencies that only read marketing books write flat marketing. Companies that only read sector books produce products identical to the competitor.
A distant book in August is the single most underrated activity of the Italian founder.
3. The team audit without the team
One evening, after dinner, in front of a blank page, write a single list: the names of all the key people of your team.
For each, in a single line, answer two questions:
- Are they growing, stalling, or going backward?
- What would I do if tomorrow they told me they want to leave?
It's a brutal exercise. Done alone, without HR, without co-founders. It's your private evaluation, not input for anyone.
If there are people "going backward", the question isn't "how do we make them grow in September". The question is: why did I wait until August to notice? That answer is where the real material of the quarter lies.
If for someone the answer to the second question is "I'd be relieved", there's a bigger problem. That problem doesn't get solved in September with the chat. It gets recognized now, by you, and then addressed with a plan.
None of this gets done in two hours of January while the team waits for you to decide the budget. It gets done in twenty minutes in August, alone.
4. The postponed difficult conversation
Almost all Italian founders have one postponed difficult conversation. With a partner. With an investor. With a historical customer who now pays little. With a founding employee who's no longer growing. With a vendor who should have been replaced two years ago.
It's always the same conversation. You've been postponing it for months. Sometimes for years.
August is the worst moment to have it. But it's the perfect moment to prepare it. To write, in 30 minutes on a notebook, what you'd say, how you'd say it, what you're willing to accept as an outcome, what you're not willing to accept.
A prepared difficult conversation is a conversation you can actually have in September. An unprepared one is a conversation you'll still be postponing in December.
There's no need to have it in August. There's a need to have it ready.
The thing I haven't told you yet
These four jobs, taken together, occupy between 8 and 12 hours of your August. They're not the vacation program. They're the only professional thing you should do in 30 days off.
All the rest of the time, really, lie down. Eat. Talk to people who have nothing to do with your work. Think about something else. See sunsets. Read the distant book from point 2.
Your September depends much less on how much you've rested and much more on how much you've thought. The two things are not mutually exclusive — but they often get confused, and the first gets mistaken for the second.
A real good summer. The one that makes the difference.
Thursday, July 16 we return to the branding pillar with a new episode of #BraveHistories: an Italian case that made a counterintuitive choice — leaving marketplaces to control the channel and the experience. What happened in the 18 months that followed.
Got one of those difficult conversations to prepare? We help founders and CEOs of Italian startups structure brand and identity choices in delicate passages. Let's talk — even at the end of August, if you prefer.