100- 100th Episode Q&A!!
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Summary:
We cannot believe we are celebrating 100 episodes! What an awesome journey it’s been, so far. We reintroduce ourselves and then dive into some great listener questions. Natasha O’Banion answers, “How do I provide promotion opportunities for my employees?”
Topics on this episode:
100 Episodes!!!
Re-introducing ourselves
Q&A
Natasha O’Banion Ask a Pet Biz Coach
Main take away? THANK YOU for listening and supporting us and start getting those policies in place that will help YOU run your business.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin, Natasha
Meghan 00:17
I'm calling and I'm Megan. And this is pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter, sponsored by pet sitters associates. Hello, everyone, welcome to Episode 100 100. How did that happen? 123 100 thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate you coming along this journey with us of learning more about what it means to be a pet care provider. And here we are Episode 100. And we hope that you join us for another hundred episodes and beyond.
Collin 00:56
Right yeah, it's been such a wonderful journey and there's we've lost learned so much. And I hope you've learned something along the way too.
Meghan 01:03
We wanted to kind of do a little reintroduction of ourselves since the last time that we did was in episode one. So I am Megan. I am the wife of Collin. I am a mom of two small kids. They're about to be three and five years old. And I am a pet sitter bookkeeper, scientist. Everything is everything.
Collin 01:28
And I am Collin, and I am husband to Megan and father of two beautiful children. I'm a biologist by day and a pet sitter by day as well. And at night and podcaster and everything else thrown in as well. We've been pet sitting for going on nine years now.
Meghan 01:44
And we've loved it. We started off doing house sitting and drop ins primarily going to other people's homes. But that was about the first four years but now the past four or five years since we've had kids, we've really transitioned into boarding and daycares And that really just fits our schedule better. Not having to shuffle the kids around and the dogs can just come to us,
Collin 02:06
which is something that we've loved about the life of a pet sitter is that it is adaptable to whatever you want to make it is that you can make something fit your needs. As far as our podcast, we started our podcast a little over a year ago at this point, and we did it as a way to bring on other people's voices and start telling other people's stories. And so if this is your first time listening to us, welcome, thank you so much for choosing to listen to us today. On our podcast, you will find that we bring on voices and people from all across the experience spectrum coaches and experts in the field who have been petsitting for 20 or plus years and have really honed in and have thought about processes and hiring and firing and what it's like to be in the business.
Meghan 02:56
But then you'll also hear from people who have only been in the business one or two years. We really wanted to get the range of people, because everybody has a unique story and different experiences that they've been through.
Collin 03:07
So we wanted to really make sure that we were getting a diverse voice from the petsitting community. We all have things that we can learn from everybody from the person who's been in it for 20 years, to the person who's been in it for two months. We all have things to learn from everybody, so why not share it?
Meghan 03:24
Today's main topic is a q&a. So for our 100 episodes, we wanted to get some of your questions and answer them on air.
Collin 03:33
And the first one is actually from our Patreon supporter, Jennifer, Jennifer, thank you so much for your monthly contributions to making this show possible. And if you want to learn more about what it means to be a Patreon and all that entails, check out the show notes or head on over to our website at pet sitter confessional comm forward slash support. Jennifer's question is she'd be interested in to know what a typical workday looks like for Megan and I specifically when scheduling do we Given an exact time that will be at a client's house, a window of time, or just morning, midday, and evening, and any suggestions on how she could approach scheduling in a more efficient way, or Sandy would appreciate any advice.
Meghan 04:13
So typically, we do give windows of time. That really helps for us as a buffer of not committing ourselves to a specific time, but it also allows the owner to know of when we can expect to arrive.
Collin 04:27
Right. So there's still some specificity there. And the window depends on the kind of service that we're getting and how busy we are for a certain day. So a typical window for us would be around one hour, we will see you between nine and 10 o'clock. Now, there are instances where we need to be giving medications or other things at very specific times. So we shuffle them to the front of the queue and work around that schedule.
Meghan 04:52
Well and also we're able to give a one hour timeframe because we live in such a small city if you have a wider radius And a lot of clients, you might extend that to two and maybe three hours,
Collin 05:05
especially depending on the level of care that you're needing to provide to a particular client. If they are very, they have a lot of needs that need to be met or have very labor intensive medications or feeding regimes or there are a lot of pets to be taken care of. Those windows may need to be bigger. And then as far as advice for scheduling, so that you know you don't forget anything or you're not constantly stressing.
Meghan 05:27
What we do is on the very busy weeks or weekends, we not only have our digital calendar that we use that we outline, you know, by 30 minute or one hour increments of who's going to be where, but we also do a paper and pen style, and that really helps my brain kind of know who is going to be where and what we need to delegate to each other.
Collin 05:50
Getting it down on pen and paper really helps you see that really most of the time you're not as busy as you think you are. It also helps you plan out and adjust the schedule a lot easier. Then on your typical app, the apps are really great because what they allow you to do is set those one hour or 15 minute reminders ahead of time, what would really want to make sure is that we're off boarding as much of the memory and scheduling part of our brain onto something else. And having both physical and a digital copy really helped do that. And then to that I will add doing nightly and morning reviews of what you're doing the next day, and then doing another review of what you're doing that day. doing small reviews periodically will help you stay on top of it. So you don't feel like anything is slipping through the cracks.
Meghan 06:36
Our next question is how do you recommend firing a client who is just too high maintenance and disrespectful of your time and policies? First you want to look at are they really violating your policies, if so, point to those specific policies that they are violating, because if they're not being met, then you can't continue service and let them know that keep it short. All you have to say is this is For example, this is my drop off time, you were one hour late, therefore, I cannot continue service, you can keep it short. And if they continue to break policies or if they're disrespectful to you or your staff, all you have to say is there's been a violation of these policies and it's grounds for dismissal. A listener asked what certifications are necessary or best to have to stand out in this industry. There are so many different types from different places, and it's very confusing. Yes, we would definitely agree that there are tons of certifications. It's a very unregulated industry. And so you can take as many trainings and as many certifications as you want, you can plaster them all over your website. But ultimately, we recommend that the minimum getting pet CPR and first aid certified it is crucial as a pet care provider to know what to do in an emergency situation with a pet in your care. Other than that, it really depends on the services that you offer, and you can seek out others certifications as well. If you are wanting to specifically dog train or have offer behavioral services, you can go to a professional society and join that before seeking out a certification. But as always, get the appropriate local and state business licenses to make sure that you're doing everything aboveboard. Ultimately, though, don't focus so much on the certifications to make you stand out. It needs to be about your quality of service and the services that you provide. This industry is customer service based. The dogs are cute, the cats are fluffy, but they do not pay your bills. So it's really customer service focus on that make the process of onboarding as seamless as possible.
Collin 08:41
Our next question is about what to do when you are sick and specifically what to do if you have a an independent contractor or an employee's staff member that calls in sick. Really the answer here is staffing is hard. But we've seen work is building in a few layers of redundancy. To make sure that everything gets covered, without second thought, from, there's the saying three is to two is one, one is none. What this means is when you have three of something, if one breaks, you really only have to. Same thing to go with staff and yourself included. If you break if your leg breaks, you need to be able to have a backup to pull in and cover that.
Meghan 09:25
Or even if you're just wanting to go on vacation, having a backup sitter is necessary so that you can take breaks yourself,
Collin 09:31
right? So if you're a solo sitter, you need a backup. If you hire a staff member, they need to have a backup. Either you provide that backup. So now you're hiring to people or that person that you hired needs to be able to provide a backup for themselves in an instance where something goes wrong and sometimes that means that you are the backup. And if you don't want that then you need to look at other staffing options. However, if the behavior of missing Services becomes chronic, and they're just being irresponsible and maybe time to have some serious conversations with them about their work and look at replacement.
Meghan 10:09
The second part of the question is, what about when you are sick, the dog walker, maybe you're a solo dog walker or Solo Solo pet sitter, again, have that backup, get plugged into the pet care community group in your area, if there's a Facebook group, or if there's not start one, and you'll be able to reach out for help from them and vice versa. It's always great to network with people in your area.
Collin 10:34
This next question is not necessarily a fun one, but it's one that we encounter periodically. What do you do when you believe one of your own clients is being neglected or physically abused at the hands of their owner? Right off the bat, we have to say that the signs are obvious, call it in and report it to the appropriate authorities in your local area immediately. However, it's when the signs are more ambiguous that it gets really, really hard. And this is because how people treat their animals differs geographically based on background based on their upbringing. Many people treat their pets as though they are property instead of family. Whether that's abuse or not depends on exactly what they're doing. I grew up around folks whose dog was no higher or lower on their affection scale than their tractor. And they love their tractor. The dog ate had water, but it never went to the vet. And it was expected to work on the farm or work around the house. So if you're comfortable before you reported, try having a conversation with the owner about their care routine. So without asking directly are his Fido on tick or flea meds? Just ask what tick and flea meds are they on? This is assuming that they are on one and if not, they will tell you then you need to have a recommendation to put into place and start that conversation at that point. Obviously, always Ask for up to date shot records, even if they're not staying with you. It's a good way to get that background information without having to ask directly. And then you can always run questions by their vets. If you ever have any questions about the dog, and you're not able to get a hold of the owner,
Meghan 12:16
most of the time we see this question come up around food and feeding. As you mentioned, many people grew up feeding their dogs, people scraps, and many do today. We have seen dogs come over with nothing but mac and cheese and hot dogs for the week. Would that be considered abuse? Well, maybe to some but not to others. So you can talk to the owner about the diet without being accusatory people can get really touchy about their dog's weight. So be ready for some pushback. It may happen. Ultimately, if you feel 100% as though there is something wrong, go with your gut and call someone. It's very important.
Collin 12:53
Yeah, couldn't agree more.
Meghan 12:55
On the topic of going with your gut. We got this question. Hi. I'm wondering if you guys would be open to discussing listening to your intuition or gut instincts when meeting a new client, the client had an unhealthy emotional attachment to the dog, I found them extremely high maintenance, not respecting my boundaries asking for more than the average client. So I'm wondering how one would come to declining their request for service when I don't have a solid reason, we feel you on this one, we always want to be following our gut. But it's really hard to have that policy in place of, you know, we will provide service unless I just don't feel like it or, you know, you're just not really a good fit as a client. That's not very professional to say. But sometimes it's how we feel, though, start putting those small policies in place that you can point to set your expectations for communication. So if you are used to an update one or two times a day, but the client is expecting three to four times a day, always communicate that. And if you don't want to, you don't have to take them on as a client. And this is why boundaries are so important. The state in the office hours, the hours of contact that the client can contact you, if they don't agree to those or continually break them, have those hard conversations and let them go. If however, you can't find ways to put some of the things in black and white, remember that you can always say, unfortunately, this isn't going to be a good fit. You can try X or Y sitter in the area. Or you can say something like, it looks like your dog may or may need a different style of care that I can provide. So you can try X or Y sitter, just know that you 100% do not owe them an explanation, especially if you feel unsafe, or like the hassle is just going to be outrageous.
Collin 14:40
Yeah, as Megan said, Here, it's about sitting down and thinking about exactly what some of these irritations are, or exactly what some of these gut feelings are, and really trying to put those in black and white make small policies around them. The boundaries is an excellent example if in your policies and procedures you have my contact hours are between eight and 6pm. And then that, then the client signs that if they continually contact you outside of that, copy and paste that text and send it to them and say, these are my contact hours, thank you. And if they continually break that, you can let them go. That is okay. That is that is why you run your business, don't let them run your business for you.
Meghan 15:23
But again, if the client is doing everything, right, they just irritate you, or whatever you can just say, this is not going to be a good fit for me. Right before we continue, we want to give a shout out to our sponsor pet sitters associates. As pet care professionals, your clients trust you to take care of their furry family members, pet sitters associates is geared to help with over 20 years of pet sitters associates has provided thousands of members with quality pet care insurance. If you work in the pet care industry or 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 the perfect fit for you and get a free quote today at pet sit llc.com. You can get a discount when joining by clicking membership pet sitter confessional and use the discount code confessional at checkout to get $10 off today. Check out the benefits of membership and insurance once again at pets@llc.com. The next
Collin 16:21
question is asking about payment. Do you pay a percentage or set rates for sitters and pack leaders? Honestly, this 100% depends on you and your finances. Obviously providing a flat rate is a lot of a better financial situation for the pack leaders in the centers. Because it's more predictable income however, that's a huge burden on you. So going with the percentage makes it a lot more flexible and may incentivize them to actually bring on new clients again, here you really looking at your own personal books, looking at your own clients in your own market area to see exactly what's going to work best for you. That's gonna take some thinking and I think would need a lot more different factors. But that's our take on that.
Meghan 17:06
A listener asked what do you do when clients are late for drop off or pickups? It goes kind of back to what we just said policies again. So what are your pickup and drop off times? Did they sign the contract? Did they sign the policies, obviously, not everybody is going to read your five pages or however long your contract is, that's just going to happen. Most people don't read it, they just go ahead and sign. So either reminding them of I have this drop off time or this pickup time and obviously you don't want to keep reminding the same clients over and over again, one or two times is okay. But if they keep breaking those policies, you just need to say, here, here it is page three, paragraph, whatever, circle it. This is the policy, you have broken it
Collin 17:54
right and you can set those up to be automatically sent through your email provider if they're late and Automatic reminder gets sent out to them with that direct reference to the policies and cite it for lateness. We've seen this implemented a few times where there is a clause in the contract that says if they're late more than five times a month, or whatever you want, you are within your rights as a business owner to terminate services to them, they're no longer eligible for you to take care of their pets. Another great way to dissuade this kind of behavior are late fees, have it be $10 for every five minutes that you're late or power again, however, you want to make that work for you. Set late fees that increase with the with the amount of time that somebody is late for picking up their pet.
Meghan 18:43
Unless they're very rich, that's probably going to dissuade them pretty fast from picking up their pet
Collin 18:48
late Exactly. And we actually had this exact thing happened to us and we turned it into an interesting opportunity that might not work for everybody. But we did want to share this. We had a client It was consistently an hour or more late for pickup, every single time they would have their dog Stay with us. And it's just because of their work and meetings that lant ran really, really late. So one day, Meg and I were kind of fed up with us. So I asked, Hey, can I take your dogs home for you in the afternoon, taxi fees apply. And they were thrilled, they were so happy that they wouldn't have to worry about the stress and concern and burden for picking up their dogs from daycare. Because it was it was stressful for them. We were able to take that off their plate, we made a little extra money. And yes, now I was having to drive the doc home. But it was better than sitting around home waiting for an hour, hour and a half wondering when they were going to show up. So we didn't have to fire them and instead up charged and added an additional service.
Meghan 19:52
The next question is maybe the pandemic is showing that we always have to be prepared and creative for difficult times. Do you agree? Yes. We couldn't agree more. Many of us pet sitters pet care providers have found ourselves fully unprepared, both personally and in our business for something like this. I think more people will be keeping six to 10 months of operating expenses moving forward. I know the Dave Ramsey system that we went through nine years ago, he suggested one of his baby steps is creating a six month emergency fund. First, it's $1,000. And then six months,
Collin 20:28
right? Including personally and for your business.
Meghan 20:31
Right. So we are a lot of us are running our businesses tighter, we are saying no, a lot more because we were burned out before all this happened. We do not want to end up in the same place. We are being more efficient. We are keeping an eye on our expenses.
Collin 20:46
I think this is really good for the industry as a whole and for us business owners to really get us into shape. And to really have us again, like Megan said, keeping an eye on those expenses, saying no and really being a lot more disciplined and how we run our businesses. Because we found ourselves lacking and with really, really leaky ships.
Meghan 21:04
Yeah, I was gonna add a caveat there. We're not saying that COVID is good. We're not saying that the four months that everything was locked down and our businesses were really suffering was good. That was terrible. Yeah, no, we're not. What we are saying is the lessons that we've taken away from this. Yeah, we are running our businesses more efficiently and really better for ourselves. We're taking more self care, we're saying no more. We're saying yes to the things we want to say yes to. And we are in a better position for moving forward. Right,
Collin 21:34
this next one borders. If you do long term boarding, do you have a discounted price for that? And how do you figure that rate,
Meghan 21:43
we really went back and forth on this one, and for a long time, we did do a discounted price. But we have since not done that anymore. And here's why. They're taking up a slot for longer than a normal client and they require the same amount of care. So think about it. You have a dog's day. with you for a cut rate while others are staying for a full rate. It can also come down to what is quote extended to you is it three weeks is it three months, we had an extended rate of I initially, I had put it at seven days, but then people were booking for eight days. And so I had increased it to 10 days. And that's kind of where we were at for a long time. But we have since no longer discounted. Keeping a dog for three months is a lot of work and liability that you just don't really want to be giving away. That means you can't take a vacation for three months, you can't do anything away from your house for more than five or six hours at a time.
Collin 22:37
And again, they're taking up a spot in your booking in your care schedule that another dog can't come and take over and is going to be there for a long time.
Meghan 22:47
Now some people may disagree and give a discounted weekly rate versus a daily rate. It depends on your market and what you're willing to work for.
Collin 22:55
Right. Our next question here is what is your biggest lesson you have learned since becoming a professional pet I would have to say, hand on heart. It's teamwork. It's an ability to work with Megan, we have had to overcome so much. And we continue to have to overcome so much. We're
Meghan 23:14
just a little different or just
Collin 23:16
a little different. We have to work through our inherent differences, biases to make this work every hour of every day. And I'm not a detail person, I get grumpy with having to talk about details. Negan loves the details, and it makes me better and it took me a while to realize that it took me a while to realize that Megan has strengths that I will never have. And that's perfectly fine. Because she's my teammate. We're working together through this and on this and we have each other to rely on and so working together as a professional pet sitter and running our business has really, I would say helped me understand working with Magen a lot better and a lot faster than maybe we would have had otherwise.
Meghan 24:05
The biggest lesson that I've learned is that I am an entrepreneur and I can start and do business. We started this when we were in grad school. And so we're still in school and I wasn't really of the mindset of doing a business per se, but over the years it has developed into something really cool. And I've really enjoyed that I've learned that I'm capable of running a business and doing something that you know, my nine year old self didn't see me dog sitting and as a career, but it's pretty cool that I am able to do this and work with you and raise our kids in a an environment where they love animals. Our last question is, what are some good ways to differentiate yourselves from other sitters in your area? Most sitters provide overnight care in the client's home, but what's a couple ways that you can make your services different or offer different packages.
Collin 25:00
This gets back to one of the previous question that we had about what kind of certifications to set yourself apart. Here, once again, you can offer the exact same package. But focus on that customer service smoke focus on the small details. I doubt very few of the other centers who are offering in client home are bringing in a reliably bringing in the mail, watering the plants, picking up the poop and taking out the trash without being asked those kind of small services of home care of home maintenance or something that you can add to your packages that's just included. The the client doesn't even have to ask you to do that because you just do that automatically. This is providing care and service to the client. Megan mentioned earlier, the one actually paying the bill while you are simultaneously taking care of Fido or Kiki the cat
Meghan 25:58
also leaning into communication And quirky fun photos that are really high quality. So there are still some sitters out there that take really blurry action shots and post those and I don't know why they do. Because that doesn't really, yes, it tells the dog is running, but it doesn't tell you if the dog is happy or running away from you. Right? So and So practice good communication skills with the clients. Again, this is all about the client. Yes, we love the dogs. We love the cats, but it's the client.
Collin 26:28
And those photos can be fun. You can dress up the dog for its birthday or for certain holidays in your area. impose those and again, you're not charging for these photo shoots. They're just included when you take care of their pet.
Meghan 26:40
I'm sure most of you already have a website but if not get one because that is a way to differentiate yourselves from other sitters have a good high quality, easy to click website and you would be surprised at the number of sitters that still do not have a website in the year 2020 get one Do one make one pay someone to get get one for you
Collin 27:03
use Squarespace. It's drag and drop. It's insanely easy to use, and having a good quality one where you're really paying attention to the details, including spelling, do things make sense? Is there consistency in branding colors or in cues throughout the website, we as pet sitters need to be promoting ourselves as detail oriented people. And that comes across in everything that we do. And nothing can turn off a client faster than multiple misspellings or hard to understand instructions on your website. So have one and then make it amazing because that's the first impression that a lot of people are going to have a view.
Meghan 27:37
Yeah, have your mom look over it, have your sister your friend, have us look over it. Whatever you need to do to get the best website that you possibly can. It's the first impression that a client makes with you and it's got to be your best one.
Collin 27:50
And now our ASPCA pet biz coach segment with Natasha Oh baby, how do I provide promotion and pay raise opportunities to my employees
Natasha 28:00
So everything has to make sense. If it doesn't make money, it doesn't make sense. If you can't afford it, it doesn't make sense. So the number one way to provide a pay raise to your employees is by providing a pay increase or receiving a pay increase from your clients. Supply and demand is obviously the biggest reason. We have this supply this demand. And we need to make sure our walkers are covered and they're taken care of. So if you can increase your rates, you can instantly give your team obviously a promotion. But if you can also do like hiking, it's really big. I know a lot of walkers and pet care providers are doing hikes now where they can put a lot of dogs together. So if you can actually train them to increase their skills, then you can make your money back. So hey, someone who previously were only comfortable walking one dog at a time. Let me go ahead and train you on how to pack walk effectively or how to run an effective pipe walk. So now I can put four dogs with you and I obviously recuperate the profits back and then you get more money when we when we make more we can give out more and that's just easiest way to do it and promotions you want to always keep in mind all the time when I'm hiring someone I'm not hiring someone for my like immediate need Walker. I am literally having an open conversation with them. I'm feeling their vibes their energy, I'm seeing where they would be a good fit. I'm telling them this is I listen, I see you in front of me. I love our vibes we're doing right now. I would love to know more about you. I would love to know about your goals, your aspirations where you see yourself, because then you can really start painting a picture for where this person is going to grow. When you can show them the vision. They can see the vision, they can help you grow your business and you can help them grow as a person. So that's how you promote. I found my manager. The first day I interviewed him and he was in another room. I was like, he's like how many of you go I said I thought manager he says what you just interview with this guy. So he will he'll be our manager What are you talking about? I said, we're going on that trip because we got a manager now. So you don't just hire just for a walker, obviously, you put them in your process, you make sure they can understand your systems use them as a current Walker, then six months, they say, You know what? I think you'd be great. taking on more tax. I think it'd be great potentially going into management role. What do you think about that? And they're like, you know what, that's cool. I say, cool. Let me train you on the phones right now. Let me train you on some email responses right now, while you're still doing dog walks. And you know what, let's start making a management position. Let's kind of sculpt this into a management position, right. And I already knew he was already integer six months ago, I already knew, right? But that's how you start to present it, because you are listening to the attributes that they had. And that's the name of the process.
Meghan 30:56
Natasha's full interview can be found in Episode 59. If you would like her to be your personal pet business coach, you can go to start scale sale.com and use the code PSC 20 for 15% off any of her coaching, we would like to once again thank our friends at pet sitters associates for making this show possible. Thank you so much for taking your most valuable asset your time and listening to us today on our 100th episode.
Collin 31:21
Thank you so so much.
Meghan 31:23
We hope you join us next time for another episode. Thank you
