Sounds like you need a required PTO plan for yourself. Even if it is just 14 days a year that you completely switch off and don’t touch your work will help with what is sounding a lot like burnout.

The other thing is diverting some of the profits into hiring a second in command to cover for you when you take said PTO. give them a good salary of 100k or so and have them run all of the stuff you don’t want to do and teach them how to do everything for when you go on vacation.

10% of my EBITA each year is divided up between my employees based off of tenure and seniority. I’d rather give that money to my employees than the IRS lets be honest, and they deserve a cut of the profits each year. We put the rest into expanding the company, but they get the first cut of the EBITA from the year.

Depends on the legislation, but I would likely decline to hire. It just feels like to high of a risk. Though I wouldn’t mind this specific example, but that is because we have already built company policies for full pay transparency. We don’t ask the “salary expectations” question, we just state the pay and don’t negotiate. If you don’t like the pay we offer, that is fine we’ll move on to the next applicant.