077- Reassessing 2020 Goals
Summary:
We open with Collin’s epic ankle story and move into taking another look at our goals for 2020. Things definitely haven’t gone the way we anticipated, and that's ok! By creating S.M.A.R.T. goals and objectives for you and your business, tracking and modifying goals is easy. Natasha O’Banion joins us for the “Ask a Pet Business Coach” segment, where she addresses the question, “Which is best for my business, ICs or employees"?”
Topics on this episode:
THANK YOU for being such an amazingly supportive community
Collin’s ankle
Taking time to reassess your goals
S.M.A.R.T.
Ask a Pet Business Coach with Natasha O’Banion
Main take away? The power in creating S.M.A.R.T. objectives is that they’re clear and you know without a doubt of whether you’ve accomplished them or not.
Links:
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Email us at: feedback@petsitterconfessional.com
A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
employees, business, goals, reassessing, work, clients, pet sitters, sitters, set, bookings, pet, service, months, contractor, year, lockdowns, pandemic, company, thinking, dog
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin, Natasha
Collin 00:17
I'm Collin
Meghan 00:18
and I'm Meghan. And this is pet sitter confessional an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Hello, and thank you for joining us today. If this is your first time, welcome. Hello. I wanted to say a big thank you to our listeners and our followers on social media. We've done a lot of interviews over the past 10 months. And lately we've seen a lot of you going to the interviewees social media page and commenting how much you enjoyed the episode, or what you took away from the episode. That's really cool. This is truly a supportive And we're all trying to build each other up. So thank you for not only supporting us but supporting people that we've had on the show and giving them as much love as you have. Today we are going to be talking about reassessing goals specifically for the year 2020. Before we got into that, I wanted Collin to tell a little story about what happened to him a few days ago. unrelated to unrelated sitting
Collin 01:25
Yeah, completely unrelated. So a couple days ago, I decided I was going to go out for a jog. For the first time in a little while. I usually go out for a bike ride, but I didn't feel like doing some maintenance on it. So I went out, made it about 100 yards from our door and hard fell fortunately fell into the grass but my left ankle just decided it did not want to ankle anymore. I heard a loud pop and I felt the pop as I went down. And so I hobbled slash, crawled 100 yards back to the house and went and got an X ray later. And they found that there was thankfully, no breaks or fractures, it was just sprained.
Meghan 02:12
And the bruising is basically from your toes up to your ankle bone
02:16
in black. It's real bad.
Collin 02:20
So
02:24
I don't know if there's a moral to that story or not. It just hurt a lot. It was not fun.
Meghan 02:29
Be careful when you run.
Collin 02:30
Yeah, well, I think on that, since we do rely on having healthy bodies, when we do go do these extracurricular activities or do those kind of things, doing them well, and trying to do them as safely as possible? And having those backup plans and those backup sitters and kind of things in place before you do that? Because you never know what would happen. Thankfully, we have boarding dogs this weekend and not walks or how sits otherwise you know, yeah, we would be kind of in a pickle to get those taken care of.
Meghan 03:02
Right. And so with that this past weekend has actually been the busiest weekend of our year so far,
Collin 03:09
which is crazy to think about being June and we finally hit our busiest weekend.
Meghan 03:15
It was very surprising. And so actually a ton of those were actually last minute requests. We had, I think five or six in the span of two days. Yeah. And so we weren't able to accommodate all of those because of your ankle. But, but we were very busy this weekend and very thankful for that.
Collin 03:34
But it wasn't just us that's been getting increasingly busy. We've been noticing and hearing from a lot of pet sitters, that they are becoming increasingly slammed. Some people even busy all the way through the end of July,
Meghan 03:47
right like Mary last week's episode on Friday Episode 76. Mary had said she has bookings all the way through July. And so obviously this is going to depend on certain parts of the country, certain parts of the world, whether you've opened up Again or not, but there are a lot of sitters that are reporting almost overly booked
Collin 04:05
an onslaught of bookings. I think you could call it. Yeah. Which is good.
Meghan 04:09
Yeah, because it means business is back open for now. But it also means that we didn't really get a slow transition back into many of the coping skills that we use as pet sitters for care routines in general.
Collin 04:23
Right. So we went from having hardly any bookings at all, and maybe having quiet mornings where we were able to drink coffee or listen to music or meditate or pray throughout the day, and have quiet moments, to not having that anymore. With fully booked schedules. We didn't have that nice slow transition to implement, and keep some of these coping and keep some of these self care practices in place.
Meghan 04:48
So we didn't really have a chance to adjust accordingly. And if you're currently slammed, throwing together a schedule or routine for your day, that includes self care is very important. Whether that's five minutes to just sit there and breathe. Or if you aren't slammed think about what that schedule looks like for you. What's really important, though, is that you stick with it. Self Care in this industry is crucial.
Collin 05:12
And I know it sounds really weird to be talking about self care. So suddenly, after all of us, we're without anything for about four months. However, we're here right at the beginning of reopening for us who have been able to do that ensuring that we have those practices, those best practices in place before we get to that burnout point in a couple months, is really going to help you throughout the rest of the year,
Meghan 05:39
because hopefully the second half of the year will look better than the first half of the year. And that goes right into our topic today of assessing reassessing your goals for this year. So we are halfway through the year. Thank God most of us just want to move on to 2021.
Collin 06:01
But let's all delete,
Meghan 06:02
right. So we wanted to take the time to reassess the goals that we have for our businesses. Way back in Episode 19, we discussed goals for 2020. I think it was the very last episode we did of 2019. That seems like four years ago, yes. We talked about how to set them how to achieve them, and expectations that we had for them. And we asked some of your goals as well. And many of you had great ones you wanted to increase income, you wanted to diversify, you wanted to hire employees. And then of course, take more time for yourself. That's really what we all want is to keep running our businesses but also have a lot of time for ourselves
Collin 06:42
and then
Meghan 06:44
the pandemic hit, and it really brought us all to our knees
Collin 06:47
within the course of 72 hours in some cases could to a complete standstill. Right and we were left looking at those goals that we had made. Going almost laughing at them. Yeah. Going what on earth Crying them mostly crying, going, there's no way this is I can't believe this. And through some of those early times, we said, No, let's set this up. Let's set those goals aside for a little bit, then just survive right now that's kind of forget those put those out of mind. And we're gonna need to go into survival mode, I think now is a good time to bring them back out and look at them and just just be honest with ourselves and see where we are. See if there's any way to meet them even a little bit or readjust them accordingly.
Meghan 07:30
There are two ways that you can go about reassessing your goals. The first one is if you had goals, reassess them. What that looks like, if you had SMART goals, and we'll go over that in a minute SMRT goals that we had talked about in Episode 19. It makes it a little easier to reassess. You can see your tracking. You can see if it was an achievable goal or not. And you can see if you want to move that goalpost a little bit to further that same goal. Just in a bigger way,
Collin 08:01
if you didn't set SMART goals and again, as Megan said, we we do want to touch on that, again, it's still a good time to reassess where you are mentally, personally, and financially for you and your business where you just thought you would be ballpark kind of figures. And you can do this just by saying, what did I think 2020 was going to be like, and then now here sitting in June, go over those last six months actually like, and then if the next six months are like that, what will happen? If what happens if it's worse, maybe better, and plan for each one of those scenarios moving forward. So while we are reassessing and planning for those different outcomes, if it's the same, if it's better, if it's worse. I know one of the big topics that keeps coming up in a lot of discussions is about diversifying these past six months. I think really laid bare the need for diversified income streams for us as business owners, where if we were just doing walks, that wasn't enough, or if we were just doing daycares or just doing one thing, many of us had to pivot to doing 12 different things, just to keep a little bit of income coming in. And so, while we're doing this reassessment, what are some ways that have been discussed, Megan, that you've heard for diversifying?
Meghan 09:27
I've seen several people set up online shops. I know that rescue rope leads has really worked hard on her shop during the pandemic. Also, poop scooping was a really big one is a really easy add on service that you can do
Collin 09:40
by ants are already in your books as having their names, locations and contact information and they were stuck at home with their dogs
Meghan 09:47
and the dogs are still pooping, right?
Collin 09:48
That didn't change.
Meghan 09:50
Also, mobile grooming was a good one that you can go to the client and have minimal interaction with them.
Collin 09:57
Especially since many of the brick and mortar grooming locations, were not able to be up and operational. So a lot of pet sitters and dog walkers allowed or provided, quote unquote, emergency dog grooming where you kind of bathed them and did a little bit of trimming, nothing really serious, but it kept the dogs looking great and was a service that you could provide. Many of us also considered looking at how to slim down or lean the business. So reassessing how many employees you needed to provide service moving forward,
Meghan 10:34
also about software. I know some people suspended their software during the time when they basically had no clients or didn't need as many features of the software as possible
Collin 10:45
insurance as well was something that was paused. Now that obviously you can't keep those moving forward. But reassessing what you actually needed as a business to fully operate versus what you didn't
Meghan 10:56
also when you are reassessing make sure that you take a step back You breathe, and you reassess, the goals that you had for 2020 are very likely not going to be achieved. And that hurts for a lot of us but it's just it's the reality that we have to sit in that this year is likely not going to be as good as profitable as fun, as fun as last year as the previous year.
Collin 11:25
And that's okay to at least admit that and to know that going into this
Meghan 11:29
and to know that you are not the only one that this is happening to right pet care providers across the world, house sitters that house it internationally, dog walkers, this is happening to everyone. So you are you are not alone in your goals not being met, but keep at it. Keep pivoting, keep shifting, keep changing, because sometimes it's necessary. The past four months it has been necessary to pivot to change what you offer to change how you offer it.
Collin 12:00
I will say I think that is really good and really healthy for the people that were able to do that, or even the people that just considered it. Because how many of us were looking to offering multiple services, multiple new services at the end of 2019, probably not many 2020 has really pushed us beyond that comfort zone, and really challenged us to be creative, to be resourceful and to come together. And it's been really cool to see and I think by far and away, everybody has been able to do that. Everyone changed something about what they did, to meet that new need.
Meghan 12:39
So now we are going to talk about smart goals. SM ma RT, what exactly they are and how to implement them.
Collin 12:47
So S is specific. Your goal has to be direct, detailed and meaningful. And some questions ask yourself whenever you are creating these, the first one that I like to ask myself as what exactly needs to be done? and with whom are you going to be working? It must be straightforward and emphasize action and the the required outcome that you're trying to achieve with your business. So M is measurable. Is it quantifiable enough to track your progress for success and really, I like to think of this one as it they have to have measures they have to have statements that will actually encourage and motivate you and will allow you to determine when the work is done. And I like that that phrase in that thinking because many of us when we set goals, if they're not measurable, we might not know when to actually stop working towards them and clear them off our plate. So when we make them measurable, it allows us to check them off. When we meet them and move on to the next one. A and smart is for attainable. You also may see achievable. Here you're thinking it is it actually realistic and do you have The tools and resources to attain it. So if you set something that is too far beyond what you can currently do without buying a lot of new equipment or without acquiring a large workforce, that's not actually attainable right now. Now, if you need those things, plan that into your work for the coming time to make it achievable, but don't set it so far out of your reach that you could never actually get to it. And that also includes, can it be done within a reasonable amount of time? Can you actually do something that you set to, within a given year, per se, are is relevant? Does it align with your company's mission? Now we did a lot of us maybe have to flex this a little bit in 2020. We maybe provided grocery delivery service or something along those lines that we didn't, we were pet sitting businesses and we had to pivot to that, but that's okay. We're reassessing our goals. And if you want to keep offering those services, maybe look at your company's mission. Look at what you were providing now and whether you want to conclude that Moving forward, because when it aligns with your mission, it's going to help you stay in the game. It's going to help motivate you help your team members, see where it fits, see how the work goes into what the company's doing and provide value not just to your clients, but to you as well. And then t is time. Does it have a deadline? For me, deadlines are really important because they are by far away one of the strongest motivating factors in my life or working. It doesn't really matter who asked me to do something, if they tell me a deadline, I'll try and get it done as much as possible. And don't just think of it as a deadline. But a start and finish time. Maybe you're looking ahead and you can't actually start working on something until Thanksgiving, that's fine. Just know that it starts in Thanksgiving so that you don't try and start working on it earlier and maybe not have the resources, not have the right marketing, not have the right season to be doing those kind of services or to meet the goals. And that's smart. These goals are specific measures. attainable, relevant and time based that may have completely glossed over many of you. I know it kind of makes my eyes roll back in my head a little bit. But these are really powerful. For one very simple reason. They are clear in all things. There's no wishy washy when you make your goals like this, they clearly set expectations for you, and allow you to communicate them to other people. That's what makes these so powerful.
Meghan 16:30
We use these to make some of our goals as well. One of the goals that we had was to reach 100 clients by the end of this year, we started the year at 76. And now we're at 90. So we are making our way there and the past, I would say month has really helped us get there but because there's only six more months, we may not get another 10 client and so we need to be okay if we don't meet that goal. But for right now we are going to leave it at 100 because I do think that is attainable by the end of the year,
Collin 17:02
especially given the rapid increase of new clients that we've seen just over very recent time period.
Meghan 17:06
Also, we wanted to increase our profits, as many of you all did as well. We are halfway through the year and we have only made about a third of what we made this time last year. And that was to be expected with the pandemic going on. So we are looking into projections for the rest of the year and how to prepare for future lockdowns because I know that you're in Missouri and possibly in Texas, that's going to be the case as well. And I know California is still under some limitations as well.
Collin 17:36
Right. And I think that's a really big fear for a lot of us and should be taken into account as we start reassessing our goals for 2020. Is that potential for lockdowns down the pipeline,
Meghan 17:48
especially as we enter the fall and the winter when people are more in their homes and potentially going to contract it more.
Collin 17:55
So as we look towards that scenario of lockdowns coming going on, as we are thinking about these goals and thinking about where we were where we want to be, there are some some questions we need to be asking ourselves at this moment, about our past six months experience,
Meghan 18:12
where are you prepared financially for it? I know many sitters were but many sitters did not have a savings to fall back on. So if you were not, will you be financially prepared this time? Are you are you stocking away money now for the potential for a lockdown in the future? Right. I also know that some pet sitters during this time were just trying to stay afloat. Many of us really didn't know what the industry was going to look like on the back end of this and we still don't really know because the COVID is still very unknown. COVID It's, it's not going anywhere, so the fall will likely be a rough time again, unfortunately,
Collin 18:49
and regardless of what the virus does, we will have to be combating with the psyche of our clients. When will they feel safe? How safe will they feel going out and in with Will that process take place,
Meghan 19:02
particularly for long distance traveling, that's going to take a while it's changing the landscape of the world and pet care as we know it, things will likely never be the same again,
Collin 19:14
how we operated in 2019. And the goals that we had set for 2020 will look very differently for how we operate the rest of this year and the goals we set for years to come.
Meghan 19:24
So maybe you want to keep more cash on hand.
Collin 19:27
And how you do that, or what that looks like for you is going to be very different depending on how your business is set up and what kind of services you provide.
Meghan 19:35
Also look at streamlining your processes and making sure that they're the most efficient they can be
Collin 19:40
right because if you're paying somebody hourly to do something, if you don't have to pay them for 14 hours of work, when you can redo the process and pay them for 10. That's a way to build more cash on hand,
Meghan 19:53
also look into services that don't require as much investment
Collin 19:56
and I think one of these things that come to my mind when I think about That is looking at our service areas that we that we work in, and really investing in marketing, advertising and word of mouth advertising in a very close area to keep clients close. So you're not having to waste drive time. And maybe providing group walks in certain areas to really get more dollar per hour work out of a smaller area. So as we are setting these business goals, and making them smart for where we want to achieve and how we want to go about achieving them, I do want to make sure that we don't lose the human aspect of this, that we don't forget about our employees if you have them. What kind of goals can you meet as a community within your pet care business as meeting their needs and making sure they're taken care of Don't forget to include the goals that you want to have for building your broader community with your clients, how you stay connected with them and other local businesses
Meghan 20:59
when you go to reuse. As your goals and whether you keep them the same, or you choose to change them a little bit, give yourself grace at the end of the year. Basically, we all just want to have survived this year. And so being kind with yourself at the end of the year is really what's most important, because nobody saw this year coming. Nobody knew how to really process this year with personally or within our businesses. This is look different for everybody. But we have all been really affected by this. So give yourself grace. Be kind to yourself
Collin 21:34
and reach out for help if you need it. Don't forget that there are people out there that are wanting to willing ready and able to help you make these goals help you plan out what you're doing and and give feedback on how their year has been as well.
Meghan 21:49
Somebody who has been great at setting goals and achieving them over the course of her entire business is Natasha obion. And here she is with the pet business coach segment this week.
Natasha 22:01
Today's question is, is it better to have employees or ICS? And why? I would say you want to think about your end game. And when you think about your end game, you want to be competitive. If you're thinking about being competitive, what would your employees want from you? So my clear cut answer is employees employees is better. Now I'm going to go deep into this a little bit to not you know, try to give my opinion so much but I would say if the question was better, better is going to be employees. You know, you don't want to work so hard for your company and misclassify your business. The IRS is not playing around. We'll just say that one more time. The IRS is not playing around. So if you miss classify your business, you can get hit with a nice bill in the mail. Now if you are running your business on thin margins, and next thing you know you get a 1200 dollar a month invoice from The IRS you owe them you know, you got yourself on a payment plan that is going to hurt and it's going to hurt badly. So I would say, let's go let's go into this. If you are requiring your employees to wear a T shirt, if you are giving them a contract or a non compete or any kind of agreement if you are telling them what to do in any fashion, so that means even what time they're coming to work, but that's how deep it goes. If you are in control at all in your business, you are an employer that needs employees. a contractor is someone who has a completely separate business. So they have their own LLC, S corp, C Corp. They have their own tax identification number, and I am literally just calling them in for a service and that's it. They're allowed to do this service however they see fit. They're allowed to use whatever software they want to they're allowed to wear without They want to because they are their own company. Best way to explain this is when I hire a cleaning service in my house, they say, Hey, this is Molly maids. And I say, hey, Molly, I need you to clean my house. She says, great, I will be there. I'll take care of it. And here's my invoice. It is a complete, please separate business. I'm not saying, hey, Molly, I have a dog walking company, I need to get my house clean, and I want you to walk my dog. And I also am going to tell you what other clients to go to. We don't control any aspect of their business that is a contractor. Simply when you hire someone to work on your house or, you know, Uber, those are contractors, you don't know when they're coming to work. You don't know what they're going to do. They run their own business and their own profile. Now if you are a normal company that has process procedures, you want to have your shirt on you want to put their face on your website. If you want to Have them you know sign. Do you even privacy for customers? Do you want to give them privacy? Those are your employees. So I don't know any pet business to be honest with you that's not running an employee status. One thing I can say is pet sitters are the only avenue of us who run a thin line. If I see you're running a pet sitting company, we're literally your clients drop in when they want to, because I have had a client that I coached on this. He says my clients dropping when they need me when they go out of town check great. She says they can actually take anyone on my software because I had to change this for her because she was controlling their booking. And I said please change it that your client can click on the employee that they are choosing and she says okay, I'll change that. So now the client one in they pay two they wanted to pick and that person came to their house. The client gave that person all the notes. The notes are not in the software if the notes are in the software That is now your business. So it gets so thin. This classification is so very thin. But should we change the whole thing for her? She's like, No, I want to stay at ICS you know, she didn't want to switch over to paying, you know, the taxes and whatnot, but it's not even that much money, it's worth it all you're doing is taking a percentage out of the employee pay to just jump into your taxes and your unemployment insurance. And only I'm going to go deeper to what's been going on now and COVID-19 and how all of our contractors are not being taken care of at all. Because they don't have that protection. Again, contractor means they completely service the customer how they want to service them employee is that you have full say so you have a system, you have an A to Z process, you know you provide the whole welfare and how I basically spend it to my customers is that we take care of our family all the way around the board. So now when I'm in COVID-19, and I want to get a loan, or if I want to get an advance or if I want to post Apply for PPP, I have all that protection. Okay, so those will be the main differences. Why employees are better by mine? Do you also do like the hourly system? I know a lot of pet sitters are asking should I pay per dog or per hour? If you're going for our it's an employee's like clear, clear cut, do you want to do per hour you got to have employees because you're tracking their hours you're tracking their, you know, their day to day, that's your employees, the employees are better reason being is because that risk factor, you always want to go into your business, like how much am I willing to risk? You know, is there going to be a gray area is somebody going to perceive something differently? I've heard a horror story from one of my other colleagues, not in my business, but in there is that she clearly had a contractor which she thought they thought, but when it came to the end of the year, and their person saw how much I'd actually pay in taxes. They told the IRS that Oh, I thought I was an employee and my employer was paying for The whole time. So she got hit with a bill. You don't even want to go through that. Protect yourself, protect your business, make sure you're setting it up for employees status. But if you aren't going to go to contract it, just make sure you're not controlling the show. Make sure it's crystal clear. Make sure you have an independent contractor agreement that says I am hiring this company, make sure that company is on the first line. Make sure you write when you're contracting the company. So have date, okay, I'm contracting from January until June, make it very clear that this is a contract of a con. You know, it's endless employment. And so I don't want to use you anymore. Make it clear. So if you had to go to the court, you had to break it down. There's no misunderstanding of the classification between contractor and employee. But number one, get your lawyer involved because I promise you you can't do that on your own. Get your employer involved. If you want to go the contractor route because there's a lot of gray areas also So state to state. So to answer your question better, would be employee.
Meghan 29:11
If you would like Natasha to be your personal pet business coach, you can go to her website, start scale sale.com and enter the code p sc 20. For 15% off any of her coaching, we thank you for taking the time to listen to our episode today. If you would like to connect with us, you can do so on Facebook or Instagram at pet sitter confessional. We also have a phone number if you would like to call us it is 636-364-8260. And you can find our pet sitter resources. We have a ton of resources from pet care providers all over the world, including insurance software gear, they use advertising methods. It's all on our website at pet sitter confessional calm. Thank you so much.
Collin 29:55
Thanks, guys.
