142: Setting Boundaries
This episode is brought to you by our awesome partners: Pet Sitters Associates, Start Scale Sail, & Texas Pet Sitters Association
Summary:
We have so many demands on our time and attention. By setting healthy boundaries, we create more time and space for doing what we actually want to be doing. We discuss how boundaries are a way to take back control from the things demanding our attention. Natasha O’Banion answers, “How do I make time for friends and family during my busy times?”
Topics on this episode:
Feeling overwhelmed
Internal vs external boundaries
Setting priorities
Ask a Pet Biz Coach with Natasha O’Banion
Main take away? When we allow outside forces to influence us, we are no longer in control of our own life and businesses.
Links:
Episode 141: Pet Transportation with Claire Harris
Episode 90: Knowing your worth
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
boundaries, clients, business, pet sitter, pet, people, sitter, set, life, priorities, friends, day, talking, put, family, important, minutes, year, office hours, social media
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin, Natasha
Meghan 00:17
Hi, I'm Meghan.
Collin 00:18
I'm Collin. And this is pet sitter
Meghan 00:20
confessional, and open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Hello, and welcome to Episode 142.
Collin 00:32
Hello,
Meghan 00:33
thank you so much to our sponsors, Texas pet sitters Association, and pet sitters associates for sponsoring this episode. And thank you also to our Patreon members. If you would like to learn more about supporting us each month with the price of a cup of coffee, you can go to pet sitter confessional.com slash support
Collin 00:52
in case you're just joining in for the first time, or maybe you missed last week's episode. On Wednesday, we got to interview Claire Harris, owner of pets to places and we got to talk all about what it means to run an effective and efficient pet taxi service. I love the discussion around the importance of customer service. And then we finished about talking about franchising, and whether it's right for everybody, and what that process looks like for her.
Meghan 01:18
So that was Episode 141. And you can go back and listen to that at any time. Today though, we are going to be talking about boundaries. This all started because there is a new social app called clubhouse. Yeah, if you haven't heard of it, it's an audio only platform. So people can go in and create quote rooms and connect with others who have similar interests to yours. There's only about a million people on the platform right now. But that only a million well. But that is rapidly growing each day. And right now it's invite only so kind of how Facebook started out in 2005. Have you had to invite people for them to join. And clubhouse is still in the beta version right now. But as soon as Caitlyn and I got on, we were instantly overwhelmed. That's an understatement. Yeah, I mean, it's not a complicated platform, really, it but it's yet another platform, another social platform,
Collin 02:17
I think there were just a few things that stuck out immediately to us as we got on. The first one is that anyone can ping you to join a group at any time. This is if you have the notifications turned on. But any of your friends can, if they're connected with you, if they join a group, and they're they're enjoying the conversation, they can send an invite to you to join that it's all voice as Megan mentioned, which means there's no text, no comments, no recording at all. So whatever happens happens, whether you're there for it or not.
Meghan 02:47
So not only does it interrupt your day to let you know people are talking. But if you don't join and stay on for the entire conversation, you'll start to think that you're missing something, or there is a group that sounds good, like building community for your business or something related to pet sitting or pets or something. But you're in the middle of working on tax preparation or putting the kids to sleep or walking a dog and you miss it. Well, you missed it. It all happens in real time. And it is not recorded.
Collin 03:19
Obviously you can turn off notifications to the app. And it's not all bad. There have been some amazing conversations going on. And some a lot of great networking. There just again, as with all things, these pros and cons that go along with it.
Meghan 03:34
It gave us a lot of anxiety, though, I think especially me I mean, the FOMO factor is real fear of missing out if you don't know what FOMO is, you know, with kids and the dogs in the house, and multiple jobs at all hours of the day. It's very rare when we have a quiet moment to not only listen but engage in a conversation. And you couple that with maybe the room that you want to go in conflicts with another meeting that you have or another priority you have in your life.
Collin 04:02
Right well and as podcasters we love that you can listen to these episodes or any other podcast. Whenever you want on your time, you can pause you can replay at your leisure. The clubhouse takes instant gratification to a whole other level, which got us talking about how you leverage a platform like that for good and not for evil.
Meghan 04:23
As with any social media platform, it's so easy to get on there on clubhouse or Facebook or Instagram and scroll mindlessly for hours. We've done it and I'm sure you have to. But we need to start setting boundaries because when it comes to social media, you use it or it uses you really. The world is full of distractions and things vying for your attention, people, things, dogs, everything is vying for your attention and it's becoming increasingly difficult to set boundaries, not only personally but within your business. However, it really is crucial All
Collin 05:00
which got us thinking about all of the demands on our time and our attention in both life and in our businesses and how it's, it's really getting worse. And so this conversation around boundaries comes down to a couple things. And one of the first things we want to address is what do you what do we mean when we are talking about boundaries,
Meghan 05:20
there are two main types, external and internal. So first external boundaries that you have to deal with, there are behaviors, materials, social and physical. So behaviors, the behavior boundaries define what you will and will not do in terms of actions. So it could be eating, or shopping, working long hours, or not working long hours. And then materials. So the material boundaries define needs in terms of places and things and a property. So the clothes that you wear, the car that you drive, the money that you spend, things that you buy for your business, those are the material boundaries that you deal with,
Collin 06:01
then there are those social boundaries. And these are related to the social rules, societal norms, things that we all experience, like, everybody tends to have some certain family rules that we all follow. Like, anytime we were going over to my dad's you take off your shoes, before you enter the house, societal laws work codes of conduct friendship, understandings, or other cultural customs. And then the last external boundary that we can categorize here is about the physical. So physical and spatial boundaries related to my personal space. So privacy and body, so things like hugging, touching, pushing in, we've all heard that phrase, invading somebody's personal space, that's a boundary that we need to help set up not just in our lives, but respecting others as well.
Meghan 06:48
And then on the other side, you have internal boundaries, which are emotional, spiritual, and mental. So the emotional side, you can guess deals with feelings. So anger, love, happiness, all of the feelings that we feel are emotional boundaries, and then spiritual. So if you believe in God, or if you don't believe in God, or a higher power, any religious or spiritual custom that you have falls into this category. And the last one is mental. So mental boundaries, your thoughts, your beliefs, your values, things that I mean, there's a lot to consider here as far as mental, because there is your ideas, your opinions, your choices, things you do, things you don't do, and expectations and decisions that you make every single day.
Collin 07:34
And for each of those categories that we just talked about there, it's at each one of those, you're deciding on things that you will do, and also things that you will not do. Because ultimately, boundaries when we are setting up our boundaries, they control access, the boundaries, control access to our time, and attention. So don't let anyone else dictate your time. You dictate your time and attention.
Meghan 08:01
And as entrepreneurs, we don't answer to somebody else we answer to ourselves. So we get to dictate how we spend our time, we get to dictate how we run our businesses. And that's the ultimate freedom here is we get to decide what we do when we do it, how we do it. Not everyone needs or deserves access to you.
Collin 08:19
And that one that's really, really difficult. I think from just I know, just speaking for me at a personal level is I love giving people access. But it's important for me to understand that not everybody needs that access to me on any of those boundaries that we just walked through. And it's actually important that I specifically restrict certain people to those boundaries, specifically making the difference differentiation between clients and friends. Not everybody in my life needs to be a friend. It's okay to treat people some as clients as friends and making that boundary that distinction really clear.
Meghan 08:53
Well, I'm a lot of people talk about Facebook friends, so whether to have your clients as Facebook friends, some people say yes, some people say no, I think a majority of people probably say no, just because as the political world is getting more and more heated every day and thing, people are just disagreeing and going crazy. It's just best to have those clearly defined lines of you're a client of mine, and you need to stay as such and not not necessarily a friend,
Collin 09:21
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Meghan 10:12
By setting boundaries, we are protecting ourselves from outside influences that we don't necessarily want or need. When we allow outside forces to influence us, we are no longer in control of our own life and business. So why are setting boundaries in pet care so hard? There's a lot of reasons for this. So obviously, we are a service based industry we serve others we are constantly give give giving of ourselves to others. And we enjoy doing that that's, you know, we enjoy taking care of the pets we enjoy. Some of us enjoy the customer service aspect of it. But we are always giving to others. And additionally there is a the stress of perception of competition. So we don't ever want to miss a client or opportunity to earn someone's business. We want our clients to come back, which can lead us to allowing clients to sometimes run over us we act like a doormat we say yes. And we kind of bow at their their whim and fancy because because we want them to come back. We we appreciate their pets, we love our pets, and we want them as repeat clients,
Collin 11:28
right? I mean, just think about us. Several years ago, we would get a client with at the end of each one, we would sit there and go Okay, would we book this one again? Many times we'd say no, this one is absolutely not. We're never booking this one again. And then next time comes around. We're feeling guilty. We're feeling bad. We know we want the business. So we say yes to them. And we immediately regretted because we didn't want them to book again. But we said yes. Because we felt like we needed the business. We were stressed about losing them and wanted them to come back continue to use us.
Meghan 11:59
Well, and that's not to say that now we're perfect. And we say No, I'm saying no to all the clients we don't want all the time right now. We still struggle with this a little bit. It also though, doesn't help that the perception of pet sitting and dog walking is that it's not a legitimate business. I'm sure you guys have experienced this as well. You have a family or a friend that you know you you say I am a dog walker, or I am a pet sitter, and they go. So what's your actual job? What do you actually do? Like, no, I am a pet sitter, I make a full time. I am full time I make a good income as a pet sitter. Yeah. And just today, we were talking with family about a seven figure pet sitting business and they didn't believe us. They didn't believe that was actually possible.
Collin 12:46
They flat out just gave us those stairs like you're actually you're joking, right?
Meghan 12:50
Yeah. So people take advantage of us in this business because they don't see us as legitimate. And sometimes it's true, we doubt ourselves, we don't value ourselves as pet sitters or see ourselves as legitimate. So then we don't set the boundaries that we need.
13:08
So when's the best time for us to set boundaries?
Meghan 13:13
Well, obviously, now or yesterday, as soon as possible, don't wait until there is a problem, right.
Collin 13:20
And there are a few reasons why. boundaries, both personal and business boundaries are so good for our business. The first one here is that it gives you good mental health, you stop having to mentally juggle a ton of unhealthy relationships with clients, the toxic ones, you stop having to worry about whether they're going to contact you or not, or what kind of complaint they're going to have. You know, it frees you up mentally to invest in yourself and in other places where you actually want to be. It also helps improve your emotional health. Again, you're cutting through the highs and lows of this emotionally intense job already. And then adding into that the emotions that run high whenever you have a client or whether you have these unhealthy boundaries, also helps us avoid burnout, which ultimately is what we're all trying to do. We're all trying to avoid burning out in this job because we so love it and we're so passionate about it. You stop over exerting yourself needlessly and always giving, giving, giving of yourself by putting up these appropriate boundaries so that there's more of you at the end of the day, for yourself and other things that you want to be doing.
Meghan 14:25
setting boundaries is also a great way to have a positive influence on others. So you may not realize this, but people do see you and notice you in the world you learning to respect yourself will set the stage for others to respect you as well. You can't possibly expect others to respect your boundaries. If you don't first respect them yourself. And then it helps in clarity and decision making. So having clearly lined out your boundaries, make hard decisions a little bit easier. So letting go of a client, even though they're really bad for you. We just talked about That, and but you like them personally, they become like your friend, almost. But it makes those decisions easier if you have clear boundaries in your contract, the decision has basically been made for you, if you have a client who is not respecting your pickup and drop off times or your key policy, then you can point to your contract and tell them you have to let them go, it just makes it a lot easier.
Collin 15:26
It's also interesting is that when we get these boundaries set up in our lives, we gain a little bit more autonomy, because we're not dependent on others for validation. And it allows us to know that we can stand firm in our own decisions, because we know who we are, that actually goes into this last point here as it develops our identities that we know who we are, because we've defined what we will or what we will not do in our lives in all of these different areas, when we can stand up on our own confident in ourselves and the decisions and we know why we're making those decisions, because we have the line clearly in the sand about what we will do in our spiritual life, what we will do in our mental boundaries, what we will do in our social and our physical boundaries, when we know those, we learn more about ourselves, we become more self aware, and how we fit into the world around us and how we have agency over our own actions, in our business and in our personal life.
Meghan 16:26
So that's the why how do we actually do that? How do we actually set up boundaries for our business success and personal life? Well, it's deceptively simple. I feel like
Collin 16:37
Yeah, no, it really is. It really is. It's, it's the simple ones that are the hardest kind of break this down into four ish steps. So you have to establish them, which is what we've been talking about here, decide what you want your boundaries to be. And this should be relatively simple. Since you're the one running your own business, you get to decide what you will or you will not do and these different categories that we've been discussing, you then have to state them, you then have to declare them basically, which is important because you were telling others about them as as we've mentioned, you were telling your clients in your the contracts, you're putting them on your standard operating procedures. You're also telling friends, family, you're telling co workers, you're telling staff members what these boundaries are. And then we are committing and we are persevering. This is the really hard part. This is where we all fall down. Sometimes this is where having support comes into play. Knowing that changing can be hard, but give yourself three months to make it work and keep trying. And then finally, this last step is really, really essential in actually setting these boundaries. And making them real is asserting your rights, remind others of these boundaries. And remind them often, if you're talking about clients here, have them sign a contract every year just as a yearly thing. Being a new client being an existing client. The contract is going to be need to sign every year to remind you of what the boundaries are and what the expectations are.
Meghan 18:11
It's crucial to also know your priorities as well and rank them. So this includes even which services you offer. So for instance, we offer five services we offer housesitting, daycare, dog walks, drop ins and boarding. So while we offer those five services, we currently primarily provide two of them daycare and boarding. But we really want to start pushing the other two dog walks and drop ins, and then a little bit of house sitting as well. So knowing our priorities, of wanting to know and knowing the services we offer now, knowing the services that we have the most clients in right now. But also knowing where we want to be going helps us position ourselves for where we want to be going. So for instance, we want to be doing more dog walks and drop ins. So we have put those things higher on our website than the other services. So once you know where you are going, you can start saying yes or no to the appropriate things. So we want to push more of the services that we want. And we'll start saying no to the services that we don't necessarily want to provide anymore. So if everything is always the most important, how will you ever make a decision if you always make this is just an example. But if you always make all of your services, the highest priority? How will you ever know which ones you want to push more than the other ones? And I think I really suffer from this. So I always think that everything is the most important and everything has to get done. Yesterday,
Collin 19:49
we used to do this thing where we'd come up with a task that he would need to get done and we'd ask each other Okay, on a scale of one to 10 How important is it to you that this gets done and Megan was always a 10. But but again here, as a business owner, we you get to decide what criteria makes them number 1234, etc. that is all you and that should be very freeing and extremely empowering, if not a little scary sometimes,
Meghan 20:21
Yeah, I was gonna say a little scary, but it
Collin 20:22
can be a little overwhelming. No, we don't want to fail, we don't want to fail. We don't want to rank them incorrectly, we don't want to be moving in the wrong direction. But on the other hand, again, setting boundaries is all about giving you back control, resting control from people from places from things from social media, from events, from other things and the surrounding world resting control from that and bringing it back to you, that's all that boundaries are doing. So you get to decide that you get to decide how you want to be spending your time and what those boundaries are, it does take time to figure this part out. And that's fine. And it takes time. Because a lot of times we haven't even thought about how we would rank these we've maybe have never put thought into what are my priorities for my business, I've looked at my numbers, I know what I like doing. But what should or shouldn't be a priority. It may also take time because you're trying to change the direction that you're wanting to go. Setting up new boundaries, new goals, new objectives for your business, and you're trying to adapt and change those over time as things are changing around you. So give yourself time allow yourself to have time to think about the criteria that go into ranking the priorities for your business.
Meghan 21:37
So we know how to set boundaries and why we should be setting them. But enforcing them is really the key to all of this safeguard your time and spaces. Get support, have a an accountability buddy, if you know a fellow dog walker in your town, or a neighboring town or even you know anywhere, then let them know what you want for your business, have them hold you accountable and vice versa, if they are willing, have them hold you accountable to what you have set so that you can succeed.
Collin 22:12
And I would say one of the best ways to enforce them is to not have to enforce them at all, and put them in your slps and put them in your contract. So that you are not having to remind others or you're not having to remind yourself of what they are, they're in black and white, they've been signed and dated. And you just have to put those in front of somebody else and not have to reinvent the wheel every single time.
Meghan 22:33
But also know that and we've experienced this, basically, whenever you send a client a contract nine times out of 10, they're not going to read it right. So maybe put some things in bold, or if they just don't read it, you know, you'll have to reference the the paragraph number when something comes up that you need to remind them about.
Collin 22:52
But again, that's the important part. There's something to reference, there's something to offload the burden of having to remind somebody because it's already there. And you just have to copy and paste it and send it over
Meghan 23:03
with that, though, know that you can't do all the things. No one can by themselves. So even the best plumber in the world may not be able to fix a car. It's kind of an extreme example. But no one knows everything about everything. There are only so many hours in the day to learn things and to do things and to figure things out for yourself. And even the biggest names out there. Even the CEO of major corporations have only 24 hours in the day, everybody gets the same amount of time every single day. So learn to say no when you feel overloaded or on are just on the brink of being hashtag done.
Collin 23:45
To me saying no is the biggest and best boundary that we can set up in our lives. That is the one tool that we have, that we have complete and total agency over to start setting those boundaries of what we're willing to do and what we're not willing to do. Empower yourself to say no more often and more frequently than you feel comfortable doing. By saying no, we are making the game those hard lines in the sand we are putting in we are communicating to others around us about what those boundaries are. And by saying no, you are giving yourself the ability and more freedom to say yes to things that you want to be doing.
Meghan 24:21
If you'd like to learn more about saying no, we actually did this as part of an episode back in Episode 90. And we will have that link in the show notes. Okay, so we've covered the basics of setting boundaries, but what does it look like specifically in the pet care industry? So we talked about this a lot but having office hours and not only having them but sticking to them and I am preaching to the choir right now. Because it's something that Collin is really still trying to work with me on. I don't see a real need for office hours because I'm basically on my phone all the time, which is incredibly unhealthy. And I understand that so I know that I we Need to get better at having and sticking to office hours and make make your office hours known. So we have them on our website, we have them on our social media, just make them know and tell your clients, I'm only available to respond to requests and to book within these hours. So have them in your email signature everywhere. So even if you're taking a vacation, have them have that known on your social media. And so part of setting boundaries is taking a vacation. Even if it's a staycation, even if it's just blocking off time where you are not going to have any clients for a day or two. You need to do that to prevent burnout in this industry.
Collin 25:46
Well, this just came up recently, this past weekend, we were trying to get away just as a family for a little bit. And we blocked off the time we had an all lined out. And then as it invariably happens, one of our really favorite and best clients reached out to us and said I need you for these days. And that just happened to overlap when we were expecting to be gone.
Meghan 26:07
And we were very tempted to not take the vacation.
Collin 26:11
But for a hot minute we were sitting there going, oh, maybe we say no to this or maybe, you know, we split and some of us are gone one day and what the other person comes and catches up with us the next day. And it was like No, no, no, we sat this time apart, we need to stick to this, we need to go ahead and say no, like this is something we are committed to. So we said no to them. That was something that helped us reaffirm that boundary that we were trying to trying to set
Meghan 26:38
well, and it also helps to let your clients know well in advance of you doing a vacation. Some sitters let the clients pick their backup sitter. But other others go through the process of getting them a backup sitter themselves, we have a couple on hand that we refer to when we are not able to be a sitter,
Collin 26:53
another tool that you can use here is something called a schedule boundaries. So this is whenever you go into your calendar of choice, whether that's a paper and pencil, or that's digitally on your phone. But you go in and you physically block off time on your schedule, you put everything on there, everything that you're going to be doing every single day throughout the week. And this, you know, you start off by putting everything on there to show yourself where your time is going. And what you're doing this is things like not just putting when you're doing the drop in visit, but showed the drive time to and from that show the lunch that you're doing, show the time that you're doing emails, show the time that you're having office hours, show all of that on there. So that you have a physical display of where your time boundaries are, where you can and where you cannot start something this helps you prevent from over booking or over committing to things because it actually shows you truly where your time is going and what you're investing in.
Meghan 27:51
Well, and it's also if you look at it and it is so crunched by the minute I think I Gary Vee reference one time that he's got his schedule down to every five minutes Gary Vee does it. Well, and so if you if you look at it, and it's blocked off by every 15 minutes, or whatever, and you look at that, and you go, oh my gosh, I cannot handle this. This is why I'm not happy in my business. This is why I feel burned out, right? This is why I can't take on anything else in my personal life because I am investing so much into my business. You can look at your full schedule and or whatever. If it makes you feel overwhelmed, you can go Okay, I need to now take some things off my plate.
Collin 28:37
Right? Because sometimes adding things to your plate that time can feel kind of nebulous what really is an hour a week that I feel like I have time for that was putting it down in actually blocking off that time in your calendar amongst both your business and your personal life and physically see how time constraint most of us actually are. You'll start setting up some boundaries. pretty quick.
Meghan 29:00
The biggest thing that a lot of us struggle with and something that we talked about the beginning is email, text, your phone. It's a big one we are consumed with our devices these days. Many of us basically run our businesses on our phones we do, right? Whether it's the booking software, or posting to social media and answering emails, we are on our phones a lot. And I'm sure you are too. So this relates to the office hours don't respond to inquiries outside of your office hours. That is incredibly hard. And I am not an expert at that at all. But we can all improve in this area. set certain times of the day where you check your phone, turn off notifications, turn off Facebook notifications, Instagram notifications, wherever else you are prone to waste a ton of time. turn those off and only check those during certain times of the day where you're about to be posting on social media or you just want to engage with other people.
Collin 30:00
Part of that is bringing intentionality to these apps that we find ourselves sucked into. So as you said, right there, turn the notifications back on, or go into Facebook, when you're going there to do something already, not just because you're bored, or there's a little bit of downtime, putting intention ality back into that, so that it's not controlling you.
Meghan 30:21
Yeah, so I tell you this sometimes, when you are working, work, be productive, not destructive with your time. So just switching from task to task, when you see notifications pop up, wastes so much time, when I turn on the Do Not Disturb on my phone, and I just strictly focus on a task, even if it's for five minutes, I am so much more in the moment than with a Facebook notification pops up and I go to that app real quick. And then I go back to what I'm doing that is incredibly inefficient. And I, I am just so much more productive when I turn on Do Not Disturb and focus. Even if it's for five minutes on that task.
Collin 31:03
Yes, switching costs are huge. And I don't think we really account for them a lot of an hour a day. But when you go from task to task to task to task task, or as you mentioned, you're on your phone answering an email and a Facebook drops up. So you've clicked on Facebook, and then you're answering that. And then you get a text message and you go to that, and you keep switching from one thing to another. Our brains have a hard time keeping up and you have to get back in the mode and the mindset of what you were originally doing, again, this intentionality thing, and bringing some purpose back into this and focus so that we can be productive with these with again, with these healthy boundaries that we're trying to set up.
Meghan 31:37
Yeah. So when you are on social media, use it productively for your business, have a goal when you open the app, say, I'm going to be in here for 10 minutes or whatever, or I'm going to engage on 10 people's posts. But what about boundaries that aren't tech related?
Collin 31:52
Well, we alluded to it, one thing that you can do is say no to more clients, and get rid of the bad ones faster. Really. I know for us, we try and hang on to clients that are just honestly a bad fit for a really long time. And they caused so many headaches. And we've talked about why we do that. Because I feel like they're friends, we feel like we need to commit to them, we are afraid of losing them all of those things. Saying no impacts those social boundaries that we've talked about, as well as our emotional ones. We know who we surround ourselves with both of our clients, both in our personal life, those those will impact our emotions throughout the day, whether we admit it or not, we are impacted by what people are bringing into our lives.
Meghan 32:32
And then also be mindful of purchases that you're making for your business and make sure that as you add stuff, it's actually helpful and you're not just accumulating clutter. So we wanted to purchase some video equipment for the podcast last month. And after thinking about it for a few days, because we don't really like to make rash decisions. We like to think about our purchases. But we realized that we didn't need every item on the list, we were kind of just buying to buy, we really only needed I think three of the five things.
Collin 33:01
Yeah, again, taking that time saying, Okay, I'm not going to click the Buy Now button immediately. Because what we're doing is we we are trying to set ourselves up again, what we will do and what we will not do for the material things in our lives do, we decided we were not willing to bring in all these extra items, because we weren't even sure if they were actually needed. And then after thinking about it and doing a little bit more research, we figured out exactly what we needed and purchased the right things so that they'd be there for the right purpose for the right reasons.
Meghan 33:29
And then for your mental and spiritual health set aside time each day to pray, meditate, or just have a quiet moment to feed your spirit. Protect this time, decide what and how that moment is going to look like and the practices that you will and will not do.
Collin 33:46
And then something you and I Megan were just talking about a few minutes before we started recording was the importance of our pricing and the role that that plays in our boundaries. We see these kind of posts all the time about Should I stick to my prices? Should I haggle. Someone says you know, the client said they was too expensive. They want to pay this it's 20% cheaper, stick to your prices stop negotiating. When you negotiate on your prices, you de legitimatize your business and you devalue your services, which gets back to the fact that many clients many people don't see petsitting dog walking as a legitimate business in the first place. And this further perpetuates that cycle.
Meghan 34:27
Yeah, I haven't had much luck trying to haggle over a price that target really doesn't work that way. So it shouldn't work in this business either. Right? One place you will not have to haggle over price is the Texas pet sitters Association smooth transition and why is that because it is free? It is it is next month February 19 through the 21st. It is an awesome three day conference is packed with lots of speakers Kate McQuillan from pet sitters Ireland is going to be giving the keynote and we are so excited you can go to tea xx pet sitters.com to get registered, and you don't have to be a member of the association, you don't have to live in Texas or in the United States, it's online. And it is again free. So TX pet sitters.com. And you can get signed up there.
Collin 35:15
Well, that actually leads right into a broader discussion here about the really importance of having a community and connections to other pet sitters, to hold ourselves accountable for these boundaries that we are trying to set for ourselves. There are a ton of groups virtual and local to get connected with. We love creating slps and writing things down in our contracts so that we can offload that information from our brains, we don't have to worry about it anymore. We don't have to worry about remembering it. By having someone who knows the boundaries that we're trying to implement and set that person those people are able to remind us of those goals and remind us of those boundaries and hold us accountable. Additionally, there as a third party, they're also able to see situations that we come across without the emotions that we ourselves bring into it. And we may struggle with there may you know cut to the quick a little bit faster than we are importantly here though, is that while we are keeping the boundaries and holding those, we are being consistent, we're being accountable to ourselves, at we because we begin to value our time we begin to value our business, we begin to value who we are, and again grow this confidence grow more autonomous as human beings and see our identity more clearer and in a much better way. Then as we become consistent in keeping these boundaries, that builds habits and in the boundaries get easier and easier to keep and maintain over time because they just become part of who we are. And where we're trying to go
Meghan 36:50
some boundaries that we are working on for this year. 2021, I would like to have a healthier relationship and more clearly defined boundary with my phone and social media. I think it's fun. I love being on social media and creating content and posting. But it also is taking time away from my family when it really should not be. So I would like to have a clear definition of what my relationship with my phone and social media shop should be. I
Collin 37:19
don't know if you noticed or not, but I am a people person. Yes, people pleaser. So one of the boundaries that I am really going to be focusing on this year is my relationship with sticking to our contract and slps. And to stop making exceptions for clients just because I think we're friends. Again, that discussion around who's a friend who's a client, and how to keep them separate, because I struggle with making sure everybody likes me and making sure that my clients like me and want me to be their pet sitter. And so I tend to do anything I can to keep them around to keep them happy, or my perception of happy and served
Meghan 38:03
well. And of course we want to keep our clients happy. That's you know, we are a service based industry, we want our clients to keep coming back. I just said that earlier. But also realizing that at the end of the day, this is a business and businesses need to operate as such,
Collin 38:17
right, which is what I struggle with because I tend to make exceptions for people who I think are my friends and they're my clients.
Meghan 38:24
So now that you know some of our boundaries, you can keep us accountable throughout the year. Please do we would love to know what boundaries you are working on. And how will you keep them once you know what they are, please let us know you can give us a call at 636-364-8260. Or you can find us everywhere on social media at pet sitter confessional or our website pet sitter confessional.com.
Collin 38:45
And we really do love getting voicemails from you and hearing from you that way. And if you call us and you have a comment or something like that, we'll even play it on the show and discuss it there and so others can hear it as well.
Meghan 38:56
Pet business coach Natasha Banyan is now going to answer the question how do I make time for family during the busy times?
Natasha 39:02
I mean this all goes back to that scale process. I remember the year that I didn't work from Thanksgiving all the way until New Year's and I felt like I made it I could maybe only serve as one person but I was like I am close from thanksgiving to New Year's I made it guys so it's still just putting priorities. I saw this like I don't know if anybody follows like cooking shows but I love cooking shows. And Chef Ramsay was on you know fixing people's businesses and you know yelling in their faces doing all this stuff that he does. And he says, you know there's all these relationships in business, you know, husband and wives doing it all together and I say your family comes first. family comes first you do not want to mix and mingle your obligations with your family and to your business. So if holidays are important to you, make sure that comes first good thing for us. Holidays is kind of like an everyday thing. We don't really care about what day of the week. It said we should be doing something. So it just depends on your family dynamic. But we have like family set days that we do not break. Okay, so that could be a Thursday. That could be Christmas that could be Thanksgiving. If you say no, guys, I'm going to be home for Thanksgiving, I'm going to be with you for Christmas. I'm not going to running around town and doings did, you need to put in your business where someone else can do those sets. If you want to keep that service irrelevant. It should not be you that's doing it. And then you can even make a good life for your team. And when I did the holidays with my team, not the same person did every holiday. They knew that okay, I did Thanksgiving. So then these guys would do in the Christmas shift. I always had shifts with everybody. So like it would be shift a the first time people would all do Thanksgiving. And then those people will be off for Christmas, but they knew they were coming on for you know, vice versa. So it's like you'd have to put systems in place where everybody when you're running a business, you want to make sure. Like I never asked my team to do anything that I personally wouldn't do. You know, if I wouldn't do it, I'm not gonna ask them to do it. So it family time is important to you as Christmas and holidays are important to you. Make sure you start to put things in your system. So next year, you know, if you say, Hey, I wish I wasn't running around as much for Christmas. I wish I wasn't running around this much, you know, going into the new year. Okay, well, what can we do for the next 12 months or 11 months to get you out of the rat race for next year? And that's going to be as learning?
Collin 41:26
Yeah, and if you keep saying my family's important, I need to spend time with them. But you never do because you're so busy really looking at these priorities and going seriously what processes What do I need to get in place today or for next time so I can really say when I say families, my number one the most important thing, it really is and I'm able to do that.
Natasha 41:48
Absolutely. And then like again, everybody has a different family dynamic and a different structure. You know, I have friends who will celebrate holidays like two weeks before the actual holiday because they know that Christmas is going to be the busy dog season and a cat season. They'll say you know what our Christmas is going to be December the first you know, put some creative things into your family life structure doesn't have to be the way that we all say has to go this this this that it just has to feel good to you. So put creative things into your life into your business that makes sense.
Meghan 42:27
Natasha runs her own dog walking business but she also is a pet business coach. If you would like her to be your personal pet business coach, you can go to her website, start scale sale.com and use the code p sc 24 15%. off her coaching.
Collin 42:42
Coming up on Wednesday we have mckaela Vargas coming on from pet marketing unleashed to talk all about websites, website design and how to make sure it's working for you and your business and not against you.
Meghan 42:53
We would also like to thank Texas pet sitters Association and pet sitters associates for sponsoring this episode. Most of all, though, we want to thank you for listening. We are so appreciated every week and if you've made it this far into the episode, we are so grateful for you.
Collin 43:08
Okay, thank you so, so much.
Meghan 43:10
We'll talk to you next time. Bye
