096- Learning to say 'YES'
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Summary:
We covered saying ‘no’ and setting clear boundaries, but what about saying ‘yes’? Today, we break down every facet of saying ‘yes’. From overcoming the fear of the unknown, to the right reasons to say ‘yes’, we share some of our learned experiences. Natasha O’Banion joins the show to answer “How do you keep you and your staff organized?”
Topics on this episode:
Follow-up from last week
What to say yes to?
Importance of a mission statement
Why say yes?
How to say yes?
Who gets to say yes?
When to say yes?
Switching your mindset
Ask a Pet Biz Coach with Natasha O’Banion
Main take away? Start saying YES to the things you want and need in your life.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
business, clients, people, weekend, pet, opportunities, hiring, pet sitters, mission statement, confidence, travel, burned, talk, starts, pandemic, months, plate, decision, associates, bookings
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin, Natasha
I'm calling and I'm Megan. And this is petsitter. confessional, an open
Meghan
and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter brought to you by pet sitters associates. Welcome everyone to Episode 96, where Today we are going to talk all about saying yes, we appreciate you listening to this episode. And if you're not already subscribed, feel free to hit the subscribe button wherever you're listening to this right now.
Collin
But first, we wanted to do an update and some follow up from last week's episode. So last week, we did an ask us anything and thank you so much to everybody who sent in questions and for all the wonderful feedback. So one of the updates that we want to talk about It's actually an ongoing update for us. We've talked about goal settings in Episode 19. And then a follow up to that in Episode 77. Well, we are here to celebrate that we passed one of our goals for 2020 was it which was actually gaining in passing 100 clients for our new service area,
Meghan
which was pretty crazy, because of the pandemic and everything that's gone on the past five months, but we've really seen a resurgence of new clients, the past, I would say about six weeks. And so we were able to pass that 100 client goal. So that's pretty exciting.
Yeah. And here's to many more for the rest of the year, I guess.
Meghan
Yeah. And so we hope that you guys are able to reach some of your goals that you have set for this year as well. We know that this year has been really, really crazy. And we just kind of want to move on to 2021 but, but hopefully you're still able to achieve some of them that you set for yourself and your business. So
Collin
let us know how your goals are coming along for the year. We also wanted to do an update about a question from last week about what we were doing to prepare for the future and what kind of our outlook was. So part of looking to the future is looking to other industries, especially for us pet sitters. And one of the biggest driving factors for our busy seasons is the travel industry. So looking ahead, what is the 2020 2021 travel seasons look like?
Meghan
Obviously, travel is light years away from pre pandemic levels, but it's slowly starting to creep back in. We are seeing people going camping a lot more right now that's a way to socially distance and kind of get out of your home for a weekend or two,
Collin
right. But there are three major sectors that are seeing a positive outlook and the first one of those are planes. So right now, at least here in the US airports are the busiest that they have been in five months. Can you believe that five months recently to ESA screen Nearly 832,000 people over one weekend at airport checkpoints, which is first time it's done that since middle of March, and so that should tell us that people are slowly becoming more comfortable traveling and more likely to get out there, whether it's just for a weekend or possibly long trips. The second major factor here are hotels. So what are hotel bookings looking like? Well, recently, the Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson said, we see folks are increasingly willing to step out in travel, which is great for us. Now, they did see their worst earnings last quarter q2, but that means it can only go up from here. And so 91% of Marriott's global properties are now open, which is amazing with the China properties leading the charge. So as people become more comfortable, as people have better ways of practicing social distancing, disinfecting rooms, all of that the we're going to see hotel bookings go up and up. So some things that some market watchers are saying is that as in terms of pace of recovery, leisure travel is going to lead corporate travel. So when it comes to marketing our services, make sure we're including leisure travel terms as opposed to talking to corporate people.
Meghan
For example, when you're talking to potential clients, you might want to suggest weekend trips to the lake while it's still warmer weather, or just even statewide travel versus catering to the business clients who are not really going to be traveling for conferences and everything. And we just had a few CEOs of the pet care conferences on and they've all gone online now. So that is why that is happening as well throughout the business world.
Collin
And then finally, and this was probably the area of travel that really took the biggest hit the fastest are cruises. And weirdly enough, recently, the CEO of Royal Caribbean Richard fine said 2021 bookings were through the roof. And he attributes this to the fact that people are frustrated with staying at home and really needing a vacation. The entire cruise ship industry has basically been shut down and been ground to a halt since the pandemic started. But bookings are growing in Australia and China and around the globe starting really in November is where they're seeing a lot of the bookings pick up through 2021. Obviously, all this is taken with a grain of salt. This is what we know now, given the projections going on in the future. But these are promising. And we all know that these things can change on a dime, but this should give us hope that people are wanting to travel and they are starting to look for ways to do that.
Meghan
So now on to our main topic today of saying yes, we have covered say no, about two weeks ago, we talked about saying no setting some clear boundaries. And some people may struggle with saying yes to things because saying yes can sometimes mean you're working more or you're changing from your status quo. Today we just want to talk about when you should say yes and your business, and what kinds of things you should say yes to. Sometimes we get afraid to say yes to things because of the unknown, or we feel inadequate. And we're not saying you should say yes, just to please people or until you're burned out. That is not a good thing that's not healthy.
Collin
That's why we had that entire episode on saying no, was to avoid that very thing.
Meghan
And we're also not saying that you should say yes to everything, saying yes is about bringing about good things and good people into your business things that you want things that you need.
Collin
The idea to talk about this topic was really Megan's idea. And I thought it was a very interesting approach to this because it does take us from a no mindset into a yes mindset. And so many times we do focus on saying no, and I think that is because we as an industry, we are caregivers. So we really like to say yes, but sometimes we can lose our way which is why so many of us are out there saying no say no Say no more. Often, but we need to remember that yes is a very powerful thing to say that yes can be very beneficial to both us and our business. And so I appreciate the fact that Megan, you want to talk about this today and talk about all the good things, because sometimes it can feel like the word we shouldn't be saying, because we're worried about where it can lead us.
Meghan
So hopefully some of these steps will help you when saying yes. The first one is what to say yes to. So there's two pretty broad categories. First one is the clients that you want. So the ones that treat you and your business with respect the ones that are policies, the ones that honor your prices, and don't ask for a discount every time. We actually have one of those and this past weekend, she had asked if we could do a visit for free. That was a hard No,
we love all of our clients. It's just frustrating.
Meghan
Yes. And also you want to say yes to self care, and this looks different for everyone. But ultimately It means more time for yourself to do the things that you want to be doing, whether that's a vacation, meditation, prayer, whatever that looks like for you saying yes to more self care.
Collin
So part of saying yes to these things include saying yes to boundaries, which we have talked about quite a lot, and many people talk about as well. But setting appropriate boundaries means you're saying yes to those. Now, that inherently means you say no to some things. But you have got to put those boundaries in place and affirm those and have those in black and white so you can be reminded of them.
Meghan
You should also say yes to new opportunities. That could mean being featured in a local magazine or a newspaper, having a new service area. And then what do you want to change about your services? Do you even want to change them? If so, say yes to that. Also say yes to things that let you run your business the way that you want to it is your business. You can say yes, you can say no, but say yes to more Money, say yes to less time working in your business, say yes to less hassle. Say yes to better clients and awesome staff. But how do you know what these things are?
Collin
Are they in your mission statement? Do you even have a mission statement? And the really important thing here is, do you have a mission statement for your business? And do you have a mission statement for your personal life? Here, what we're trying to arrange what we find most important in our life and in our businesses life, and align those. And so if you don't have something like this, you will say yes to everything. If you don't know what what do they say, if you don't know what you stand for you're fall for anything. This is where the rubber meets the road on that. Having this statement, yes, for others to know. But really, more importantly, it's to remind you of where your values are, what you want to accomplish in this life, that mission statement can help you and whenever you have that in in place, it's easier to know when to say yes to things.
Meghan
Our mission statement for our personal pet business is love all dogs love all people serve both with excellence.
Collin
And so we say yes to things that align with that. We say yes to things that allow us to do that better every single day. That could be new training. That could be a new service that we provide. That could just be we say yes to allowing more time to love on a dog during a visit. Those are the things that allow us to say yes, and that's kind of our guiding principle. through everything that we do.
Meghan
Why do you think we should say yes,
Collin
because it's good for you. It's good for you and for your business. We all want more of what's good for us. We all want to gain confidence. When you say yes, you can discover new skills. You can learn you can grow and it really gets you out of your comfort zone sometimes, right? I love that you said it helps you gain confidence. Because many times we act in our business act on our personal life out of fear for not being competent enough. And so when we start to open ourselves to the possibility of saying yes, that starts triggering this, okay? I said yes to that one small thing and the world didn't end. Okay, I feel a little bit better about myself, because I was able to handle that situation. And that I said yes to. And obviously, you have to go into the situations with as much information as possible when you do this. But you will never gain that experience. You will never gain that competence if you always say no to new things. And so that confidence part is so huge, and I think is just really important in this conversation.
Meghan
Before we talk about how we say yes, we have a message from our sponsor. As pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members, pet sitters associates is here to help for over 20 years. pet sitters associates has provided thousands of members with quality pet care insurance. If you work in the pet care industry, or you want to make your passion for pets into a profession, you can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom and running your business. Learn why pet sitters associates is a perfect fit for you and get a free quote today at petsfit LLC comm you can get a discount when joining by clicking membership petsitter confessional and using the discount code confessional at checkout to get $10 off, check out the benefits of membership and insurance once again at petsfit llc.com.
So how do we say yes?
Meghan
Well, I think that's pretty simple. You just say
Collin
yes, do but that's scary.
Meghan
It can be but if you do it on your own terms, if you do it on your terms versus somebody else's terms. It's a little less scary,
Collin
right? And that comes down to that confidence and that confidence comes from having that mission. statements. So you know, you can say yes to things confidently, because it aligns with what you believe and what you want the outcome to be.
Meghan
Yeah, a lot of people get caught up in the pros and cons list, which is a good thing to do. But many times we don't, or we aren't able to take into account all of the possible options or outcomes, because a lot of times they're infinite. So we end up saying no out of caution, and this isn't a knock against doing a full on analysis of a decision. But you ultimately should be aware of the limitations of gathering information and that no one can ever take everything into account. Like I just said, there are infinite number of possibilities. So build a good support team around you and have people that will come alongside you and help you make those decisions. Remember that decision trees are only as good as the info that is going into them. So don't get caught up on all kinds of solutions. Obviously, you need to look at the data and the numbers, but you can't always take into account intangible things when deciding to say yes. So things like will this make me happy? is a good question to ask
Collin
and know that as we begin to open ourselves up, we start stepping out in more competence as we are anchored in the the whys. You may get burned. We've all been there. Whether that means that you end up overextending yourself one weekend, maybe the offer opportunity that you said yes to just didn't work out or wasn't as good as it first appeared. Or maybe that person you said yes to hiring didn't work out.
Meghan
And we've heard stories of that as well.
Collin
A lot of times, unfortunately. So here's the key instead of retreating, and saying no more often because you were burned. You're not gonna let that happen again. So I'm saying no in those situations, learn from what happened. Learn why you got burned. really spend time figuring out what exactly happened. Ask yourself, did you have all the info that you needed going into it? Did something change along the way? Or was it something that was just totally out of your control? Don't let the bad things that happen when you say yes, inhibit you from saying yes, again, in the future, when you are able to reflect on what happened when you were able to put in that time. That is what starts this gaining confidence, starts flexing that muscle a little bit so that you can say yes, with more surety next time,
Meghan
right? Because no two situations are the same. If you're hiring, no two people are the same. If you are serving a client, no two clients are the same. And with that, So who are we saying yes to
Collin
say yes to the clients you want, especially those that respect you. And to do this, think of the top 510 clients that you have? What if you got 20 more of them? Wouldn't that be awesome? Wouldn't it be great if you had 20 more Your top clients in your business? Would you say yes to them? Would you be able to say yes to them to bring them on to serve them? I think we would all want that. seek out those kinds of clients. Think about who exactly your client is. Build that profile, build that, that all build that data that you have on the people that you want, and then start saying yes to them more. And the biggest one of who we are saying yes to is ourselves. This is probably the one that's most neglected. And the one that needs the most care, actually, because we do get burned out in this business. We do not take time for ourselves, but we need to say yes to ourselves more. It's about taking more time for self care, because everybody in this business wants to be working less and getting paid more. And again, here we are anchoring ourselves in that mission statement. So we're saying yes to the right things. Many times we feel like we just have to say yes to everything. And when you saying yes to everything you end up saying no to yourself, because we never leave enough time for ourself. We never leave enough time for ourselves when we are so busy saying yes to everything else. We need to be top of the line there for who we're saying yes to and then saying yes to the right things. It's not just that we say yes to everything that comes across our plate. We're not Yes, people. We are the right. Yes people to ourselves. I did want to take a brief aside here to talk about employees. Here we are discussing about saying yes to ourselves and who we say yes to in all of them. But what if you have employees in your business? Are they empowered to say yes, and I asked that question, because many times we don't explicitly tell others, especially people who we've hired, what they can say yes to. So out of out as this may sound familiar, out of an overabundance of caution, they say no and defer the decision to you. What As the student, this puts more things on your plate, if they don't know that they can change a drop in schedule or make alterations to a care plan. If they don't know that they can say yes to that. They'll tell the client No, and then put it on your plate to say yes to or to make changes to they'll defer it to you. Or they'll say, I don't know. Yeah. And we all want more time back on our plate, and we hire people, so that we can get that but if they're not empowered to say yes to certain things, we have to take on that responsibility. So we end up having to say yes, for every single person that we end up hiring, when you bring on somebody to hire, as part of the training as part of that onboarding process. Let them know that they can say yes to where do they have control where empower them by allowing them to say yes, obviously, you have to retain control and you have the ultimate say, nobody's taking that away, but by giving some decision making down to them and allowing them to say yes to certain things that actually shuffles things. off your plate as you trust them, you empower them by trusting them and giving them that wonderful tool of saying yes to things. So you don't have to worry about it.
Meghan
The final component of saying yes is when to say yes, everything here really boils down to two things. The first one is when you want to learn. So you want to learn a new skill and your business, if you want to become a dog trainer, the past five months have probably really allowed you to do that. And the second thing is when you want to grow, so when you want to grow your business, you want to get more clients, you want to get the right clients, you can say yes to those things. This is all about switching your mindset around. If you are saying no to something, think of it as you are saying yes to something else. For example, if you have a client that wants to book last minute, but you say no, you are then saying yes to a little more free time to work on yourself or your business. It's really all about perspective here.
Collin
Which is huge, because again, we are we get wrapped up in our brain about if What if We say yes to the wrong thing or no to the right thing we need to get out of that headspace and realize that everything that comes across our plate for decision is an opportunity. When we say yes to things, we're saying no to other things. Conversely, when we say no to something we say no to that last minute client, we are inherently saying yes to separate opportunities, more free time, less headache, dealing with a last minute client and more opportunities on the other end.
Meghan
And I love this quote, I don't remember who said it, but the quote is saying yes, is a tiny word that can do big
Collin
things, big things in your business, big things in your personal life. We can't forget here that when we are operating as a business, we are inextricably linked to the business with our personal goals, our personal values, the things that the outcomes that we want, that when we say yes to things in our business, it means it will affect us, personally. And so these big things, these big opportunities, are made possible by being able to step out encouraged by being able to step out in confidence and say yes to them, and then learn from that experience. So
Meghan
what is the best? Yes that we've said in pet care? For us personally, I think it's when we made the move here to Missouri. We said yes to daycare and boardings. Previously, when we were in Texas, we had been doing drop ins, dog walks, house sets, and we have kids now young kids. And so that's really not possible anymore. And so we we had done a little bit of boarding we had never really done daycare, but we said yes to those things. And it's been really great. Yeah, it is allowed us to be home more to be with our kids more. And so saying yes, has allowed us to have the best of both worlds to be home and to be with dogs, right.
Collin
Yeah, I mean, as we're recording this, we just came out of a weekend where I was doing a house it and then multiple drop ins For the entire weekend, and it was a reminder of why we said yes to doing boarding and daycares in our home. And that that is our primary focus. Because when we said yes to doing the when we said yes to doing the house it and yes to those drop ins, it meant that I personally, was saying no to family time, I was saying no to time with the kids. And I was saying no to time with Megan, this is getting at that bout of understanding that mindset of taking advantage of opportunities and know that when you say yes to things, you have to say no to others. And knowing that balance really gets back to that mission statement. Now, this was for one weekend, and we realized it wasn't going to be forever. So we said yes to it. We realized it was going to be hard. But we said yes to it, knowing that that's not something we do. As a general rule for the way we run our business.
Meghan
We would love to hear what kinds of things you have said yes to particularly in the past five months at this point. endemic, you have had to pivot your businesses we've had to pivot. And so what new opportunities have you taken? What new experiences? What new skills have you learned and had grown in confidence about during this time, you can call us at 636-364-8260? or send us an email on our website. Today's question with pet business coach, Natasha opionion, is about staying organized. So here's Natasha,
Collin
how do you go about keeping yourself and your employees and staff organized?
Natasha
time schedule? time schedule is so great thing about being a self employed person or entrepreneur is you have to act like you would ask if you were still in any of your old day jobs, you know, what do you do when you clock in? at nine o'clock in the morning? What do you do after this test? What do you do at 10 o'clock? What do you do at 12 o'clock? When do you eat? When do you feed yourself? You know, when do you stop running around when you get some air conditioning, you have to be on a timescale. In that way, you know what you're doing, the employees know what to do. And they also know what's expected. If you're just winging it and rolling up and it's like, oh, yeah, we'll see this on books as well. Okay. All right, maybe tomorrow at 10. Let's talk about deeper like time windows. That's my time windows are so important. First am shift goes out between 10 and 12. So if you want him to do a morning walk, it's gonna be 10 and 12. I've had clients that I've coached that you know, say, Oh, we take some this seven men, we take some at nine, and then we take 711. And like, Wait, what? I'm like, so someone calls you What do you tell them? We're like, we just take whatever time they say. And I say, Well, what if like five o'clock, nine o'clock? What do you do? You can't be everywhere at nine o'clock. They're like, Oh, we just like, try our best and then you know, just go from there. And I'm like, What the heck? Right? So you gotta have time windows to say what's your morning window and Well, what's your midday window you know, 12 to three or loving to three. What's your evening window won't be there, but between, you know, six and nine. So keeping yourself, keep your expectations clear, keeping your system clear. It's going to keep your business clear. No one likes going to work, where they're like, I don't know what these people want out of me. I don't know what I'm really doing. I'm just here. I think I'm doing a good job. I think I'm walking properly. You know, nobody wants that feeling. So putting your expectations very clear, making your system clear. So everyone's always on the same page, you and the customer.
Meghan
If you would like Natasha to be your personal pet business coach, you can go to her website, start scale sale, calm and use the code PSC 20 for 15% off any of her coaching. We also did a full length interview with her in Episode 59. If you want to go back and listen to that, we appreciate you listening to us today. Talk about Yes, and thank you to our sponsor pet sitters associates for this episode. We appreciate you taking your most valuable asset your time listening to us today and we hope you join us again for another episode. Thank you. Thanks
