150: Standing Up For Your Business
This episode is brought to you by our awesome partners: Pet Sitters Associates, Start Scale Sail, & Texas Pet Sitters Association
Summary:
Too often we can become the doormat for our clients as they try and change how we operate our businesses. Today, we discuss a few recent instances of this in our business and what it means to stand up for your business. We share why it’s hard to do that and what it takes to start overcoming them. Natasha answers, “How do I overcome imposter syndrome?”
Topics on this episode:
Why we’re talking about this
What it means to know the why behind your reasons
Valuing ourselves
Ask a Pet Biz Coach
Main take away? Make sure you know the why and reasons for your policies and procedures so you can stand up for them.
Links:
Check out the Texas Pet Sitters Conference and get signed up today!
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Email us at: feedback@petsitterconfessional.com
A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
clients, business, payment, policies, people, services, pay, dog, pet, procedures, contract, walked, standing, trained, upfront, thinking, push, sitter, pricing, potential clients
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin, Natasha
Meghan 00:17
Hi, I'm Megan.
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, welcome to Episode 150
00:32
below.
Meghan 00:33
If this is your first time joining us welcome and if you have been along with us for the journey over the past year and a half about 150 episodes, we are so glad you've joined us again today, we have a whole back catalogue of interviews and topical episodes 149 episodes that cover a ton of topics in the pet care industry. And you can go back and listen to those anytime at pet sitter confessional calm.
Collin 00:57
We also want to thank the Texas pet sitters conference and our wonderful patrons who helped make this show possible every single week. Today we're talking about standing up for our businesses. And this is really because for us personally, there's been a recent wave of challenges and not necessarily confrontations, but just questioning from potential clients and even existing clients who are looking at our policies and the way we run and operate. And in trying to push back against that and trying to run it their way. Yeah, so
Meghan 01:29
while back we had someone who confronted us about pricing. So we had a meet and greet with a guy and his dog and his grandma. And his grandma was pretty blatant, when she found out how much we charge. And
Collin 01:44
I've never had somebody look me dead in the eye and say, That's way too expensive. These aren't children. How could you charge that much we were leaving.
Meghan 01:53
Yeah, she flat out said that we're too expensive. And she actively walked to her car
01:57
and said and
Meghan 01:59
and then another one recently, we had a client who was about to book us again, we had watched his dog one time a few months back and he was about to book us again as a repeat. And he asked if we could give him a reduced rate. Because he was going to be quote, a frequent flyer,
Collin 02:15
I guess he was trying to lure us in with some quantity over quality pricing. For his perspective, which it turns out, it was a good thing that ended up not happening because he has to unfortunately get rid of his dog. And it's really sad. But I'm glad we didn't compromise with him on price with the prospect of future bookings.
Meghan 02:35
And then this morning, we had a potential client contact us about her dog coming over this weekend for boarding. And we were trying to set up the meet and greet. And she then sent me a message saying that she wanted to pay after her dog was picked up. And in the meet and greet form I have in there where you can submit your credit card information so that we have it on file the meet and greet is free. It's just as a precautionary of I would like to have your credit card on file so I can charge it when you drop your dog off or when services are rendered. And she wanted to pay afterwards. Well, that's not how we do things we for boarding and housesitting, we have 50% deposit to reserve your dog spot. And then the other 50% do is when you drop your dog off, and I told her that politely, but we haven't heard from her since. So that really got us thinking about why we require payment upfront. So I asked in our sitter confessionals Facebook group if you guys require payment before services are rendered or not, because there really is no industry standard with this or the best way to handle payment. Everyone has their own unique business everyone can do whatever they want with their businesses. We have just been seen at least once a week people in a bunch of the Facebook groups asking, you know, I had walked this dog on January 1, but now it's February and I still haven't gotten payment. What do I do? So yeah,
Collin 04:03
we have decided that we don't want to have to be responsible to be chasing people down for payment. I know that's the whole point of the invoicing thing is doing a retrospective charge or bringing people's account balance up to date on a weekly basis or some people do do monthly. It doesn't seem that's just not something that we want to be spending our times. Doing. So to prevent that we have this policy that for boarding and housesitting, as Megan mentioned, we do a 50% deposit do in order to reserve that spot. And then at the time that the service starts the rest of the 50% is due for dog walks daycare and drop ins. It's the full payment when they book. So right when they walk the door everything needs to be up to 100% of what's going to be due for that that service. And we weren't alone in this. We that the results of that survey that Megan said that she sent out About 56% of the respondents require payment before the services rendered, while 36% said that they do not require that. And then there was some discussion in the comments about hybrid approaches, depending on whether it was for a holiday or a normal visit, or what what other services were involved in that,
Meghan 05:19
whatever is going to work best for you do that we're going to get into the broader point here in a minute. And so this is a very specific thing about getting payment. If you have clients, new clients, then you require payment for upfront. That's great. If you know, existing clients you are more a little more lenient with, that's fine, too. Every business is going to do what they want.
Collin 05:46
So we're all trying to figure out the best possible payment structure for our businesses. Because what we're trying to do is we're trying to, we're striving for a structure that's going to provide more security, the least amount of stress and more predictability. And we saw several people in our comment section discuss the same point as well have, they actually changed how they received payments, because it helped their cash flow throughout the week, it made it more predictable for them. Because if you're having to constantly chase down invoices that you've that you've sent out, it's not a good use of our time, you can have them pay for services in advance, maybe for a membership, or these advanced packages that we see becoming increasing in popularity, where there's just a price for a set number of visits that someone pays for upfront. And they can use those whenever they need to within a certain period of time.
Meghan 06:39
Yeah, so it's about predictability, the more predictability you can bring into your business with the least amount of stress for you and for the client is going to help you in the long run. So we are solo sitters, if you can call us back, because we work as a team. Sure, but a lot of you listening as well are solo sitters. And like us, we only have ourselves to depend on. But it's a whole other thing. When you have employees, or staff or people that depend on you for payments that you can, they can go buy food and pay bills. And so it's not really prudent of you, as a business owner to go chase down people for payment, when you have payroll due every month.
Collin 07:21
And I know there's a broader discussion on top of this to have most other service based industries do payments after the fact. I mean, we were trying to think of a service that you pay for upfront before you receive it. And we couldn't think of any I couldn't think of any but maybe that's just because of our bubble that we live in. So it is kind of weird to start thinking about trying to bring that into the pet sitting world, because it may not feel comfortable. Because it's so new. It's because it's a different way of approaching those services.
Meghan 07:51
Yeah, you think about massages, you pay after a massage. You think about a car mechanic you pay after your car is done. You think about your haircut or going to the groomer, if you're, if you're not a groomer and your dog goes to a groomer you pay after the services are rendered. So it is a little bit of a mind shift. But like I said, I don't like I in my mindset, it's working for free. If I have a dog in my care, and I have not been paid for it. I feel like I'm working for free. And I don't like that.
Collin 08:21
So, so all of that to say that long intro here about pricing and about the pushback that we've been getting. Again, the impetus for this conversation is that people have been challenging our policies and procedures more and more, and we've had to defend them a lot more than we ever have in the previous nine years.
Meghan 08:45
The topic here is how we can stand up for our businesses more effectively. If there are a lot of questions that you are getting repeatedly from potential clients or clients, you need to have those on your FAQ page on your website. You need to have those as social media posts that answer those questions. You need to have them outlines explicitly in your policies and procedures. If you get a question about payment a lot, and you don't have it written in there, then put it in there. So that's step one, to make sure you have everything written down.
Collin 09:20
But as in our example, here, the lady that was pushing back against paying upfront, she hadn't seen our contract, and she didn't know that we required the 50% down the 50%. Later, she simply said, I'm sorry, I'd rather pay after I pick up my dog. And we have to respond with Well, we don't operate that way. So what this is really doing is this is saying this is trying to get at those people who look at the way you operate, how you run your business and they say, I don't agree with your terms. I don't like the way that you are operating. Let's do it. Let's do it my way.
Meghan 09:54
Okay, well, we don't want those people as
Collin 09:56
No, absolutely, absolutely not.
Meghan 09:59
And there are are going to be people if you've been in this business long enough that challenge your business, but that's why you have a contract. That's why you have them sign the contract. So if something comes up, you can say, well, you actually signed this. And here is what it says explicitly of this is when payment is due, or this is the time window that I come to walk your dog.
Collin 10:20
The really hard part about this is that most of us in the pet care industry are pet focused, not necessarily people focused, we tend to be some of a lot of us are more introverted, and have a really hard time standing up and speaking out for ourselves in stressful situations, or when people start pushing back against us.
Meghan 10:41
So this is a service based industry, we want to please our clients, so they keep coming back, they keep being repeat customers. So at times, we want to bend to their will a certain extent, and obviously not being taken advantage of we talked about that a few episodes ago. But at the same time, you know, I am a business, I have a business, I am a business owner, and I need to be and want to be taken seriously. So step one is having those policies in black and white, mainly for the clients, but also for us as as a reminder. So we don't have to learn and relearn, you know what's in our contract, if it's several pages long and develop new policies on the fly, we just can copy and paste terminology that we already have in our policies, and send them to the people who are challenging us and point them back.
Collin 11:34
And most of us have strong policies, we have strong procedures in place. So if you haven't gone and review those, if you haven't looked at those afresh for a while, now's a really good time to do that. This conversation that we're having is more of, well, I have that in my policies and procedures, I don't follow it. And unfortunately, what we're doing with that is we are now training the client. So going back to the payment, if you give the option to pay after the service, and you get up to the seven days or whatever it is to pay the bill, likely, the client is going to wait until the sixth or seventh day to pay the bill.
Meghan 12:11
Yeah, as human beings, we are procrastinators, at least a lot of us are, especially with our money. And I guess I'm painting people with a broad brushstroke here. Not everybody isn't like this. But if you are training people to not pay until the week after, they are probably always going to pay until the week after because that's what they're used to. That's what they have trained you to be okay with. So you are telling them that seven days late is okay.
Collin 12:41
I think it's really interesting that the punishment for not paying is that you stop services until they pay back in full, and then you can resume services. So if that is the end result, ultimately, if that is the end result of they paid, and then you do the service, why not make it standard operating procedure to do that, why not just do that upfront to begin with and avoid all the interim steps and pain and heartache. But that's just a policy that you have to stick with. And they have to stand up for in your business. Again, there are going to be these instances where people push back and we have to be able to look at what we stand for. So it starts with simply copying and pasting this pre written text that we have set out in our policies and procedures, you can use programs like text expander, that work on your computer and your phone. So you just write a couple lines or a little phrase one word phrase, and it can expand it out into whole paragraphs of text. So you don't have to worry about storing that somewhere. If you have a Notes app that you like to use, copy and paste all of the texts for different scenarios and put them in the Notes app so that you can have those easy access on hand. So you don't have to worry about again, thinking of how you're going to phrase things. And what we're trying to do here is we're trying to build as much of these tools in our arsenal ahead of conflicts ahead of things that come up so that we are better equipped to handle that and deal with that in those situations. Because if you don't have those kind of things done ahead of time, and you're not well prepared. And I know I'm speaking of to myself here, that if we don't take care of all those possible kind of outcomes and scenarios, when they do happen. I know I am more likely to cave to that person's will. Because then I don't have to put up a fight. I don't have to resist them. Because I don't I'm not prepared for that. I have to come both my anxiety of making a response off the top of my head and compound that with my anxiety for confronting someone and now I've doubled, tripled or quadrupled my anxiety over a particular situation. So it's easier to just go Okay, nevermind. You can pay later. I don't want to have to deal with that and we can move on but you are not standing up for Your business, when you do that you're not standing up for your policies.
Meghan 15:03
Yeah. And it's really speaking to your self worth and your value as a person. So you're kind of devaluing yourself, and D legitimatize. Your business, but it's really hard because we are a personal business, we are a relationship business, more so than most others out there, because we are taking care of people's babies, people's for kids. And so those positions that you take in standing up to the pushback and the criticisms that come your way, have to come from the value that you see in yourself. And they have to come from you in the value that you see in your business, that you know what you're doing, that you are a professional and that you are a legitimate business, you can confidently say, yes, you can confidently say no. And you can constantly push back when you need to, because you are coming in from a position of strength, because you've thought about all of these things, and the remarks that you have planned out, you trust in your business, and you know, your business, and you know, not to take on those clients.
Collin 16:09
So when we say sticking up for your business, we are talking about sticking up for your values as a business, but also for your personal values.
Meghan 16:19
Yeah, I mean, no one likes to be walked over like a doormat,
Collin 16:22
right? Right? No, no, but unfortunately, that's where we find ourselves, because we're not sticking up for our business. And we're not having these policies in place. Because we we haven't thought through the logical outcomes of our decisions, and how we are training our clients. We have not sat down and gone. Well, if every one of my clients paid me late, would I be happy? No, no? No. Okay, so what about 50%? paid me late? Would that make it any better? There's obviously a cutoff point for everybody and how comfortable you are. You know, last year, we saw a lot of people going through and digging through their books and trying to find every single $20 payment $20, late fee, and all these different aspects. Because we we took a look at our businesses, and many of us said that they were a pretty, pretty leaky ship, because we were not standing up for it.
Meghan 17:16
Yeah, we need more predictability, more stability. And we're focusing a lot of this conversation around payment, because that's what really triggered us this morning. Oh, my gosh. But it's all in things of communication and booking and meet and greets, you know, you won't stand up for something that you don't believe in. And if you aren't standing up for your business and yourself, then you were saying that you don't believe in it. If you have things written down in black and white, if you have a contract, and you continually go against them, then that says that it isn't important to you. And if it's not important to you, then why on earth would it be important to your clients, you are training your clients just as much as we trained dogs for routines and trained dogs on leads and train dogs for group walks. All of these things we train our clients through as well, what we react to, but more importantly, what we don't react to
Collin 18:14
right? Do you speak up? Whenever they drop off their dog an hour and a half late? Do you speak up whenever they don't pay you for the third time in a row? Our silence in those matters tells them that it's okay. And each time as a business owner, we are silent on it, it becomes harder and harder to speak up. And eventually, we don't overcome that we don't speak up of that ever. Because not only have I trained them that it's okay. I have now trained myself as well that that is okay. Through inaction. I have now placed a particular value on this topic, right? Again, we keep harping on the payment thing really triggered. We've placed a value on that. And now I started thinking well, who am I who am I to try and say that it's really important because I haven't said it's important the previous two years. But it's really important now and I want you to do something different. I know me this column here, I start having self doubt and I start continuing to let it slide and I will continue to try maybe again for the next client I'll keep holding up this hope of Okay, well the next client is when I'm going to change the next client is when I'll actually put it into practice. But we are habitual creatures we're creatures of habit. And if I don't have a habit of doing and following my policies for each new client, it gets harder and harder each time a new one gets brought on because I'm it's an it's a continual uphill battle because then you're trying to remember who you're following policies for who you're not. You are stretching yourself really thin across this process and you're not being true to your business or true to yourself,
Meghan 20:03
okay, well, you sound like a negative Nancy, or negative.
Collin 20:08
Norbert Yeah, sure, I don't know.
Meghan 20:12
But you're right, though we do need to be consistent because it makes our lives easier and makes the clients lives easier. And you have to be consistent with, you know, emails in your personal life and your business life. So if I let my personal emails slide for a week or two, it is super easy to also let my business emails slide for a week or two. And it's compounded on the fact that if you have people depending on you, and your business staff, employees, whatever, in whatever capacity, you have to be consistent for them, consistent with how you treat them, with how you how they interact with clients, with how they walk dogs, and from that consistency, brings strength and predictability. So when you are consistent with your clients, when you consistently speak up about things, it tells people that you value them.
Collin 21:06
Yeah, it's important to say it once get it written down, and then that hard part of then sticking to it.
Meghan 21:13
Well, I would say actually sticking to it is probably the easy part, at least for me. Because if you have it written down in your policy, then all you have to do is point to it, and send it to the client and say this is actually what it is. So I need my payment, or I have a time window or I have a lockbox for your key, you know, or I have a certain leash that's required, whatever it is, that's the easy part because they already signed the contract.
Collin 21:39
Right? I guess what I'm thinking of here is when somebody comes to you and confronts you about your drop off policy, are you going to be able to defend it, or when you give a time window of when you provide service, but they want their dog walked at 1230 to sharp? How are you going to respond when that angry customer comes and is wagging that finger in your face because you know the service that you have doesn't meet their needs, or they're trying to get you to do something that you don't want to do. Again, just an example of an angry customer
Meghan 22:12
well with this can go back to the grandma at the meet and greet, who was kind of a little belligerent about our pricing. And we just had to smile, and simply say, Okay, well, that is our price. That's what we charge and price negotiation is off the table. So when somebody pushes back against a policy that we have, are we going to stick up for it? Are we going to be able to defend it? This is really important to know, what's in your contract? What's in our contract? And why is it in there? Who put it in there? What is the reason or the example? You know, you can go out online and find tons of contracts on the internet and example procedures and copy and paste those and throw them in there. But you have to make it your own? Because every business is different. And why was it important for you to put it in there? Because you have different values because you have different goals and expectations. Our policies and contract are not going to work with anybody else's business because we have different values and expectations on when will we contact clients, our business hours, when we communicate with them? When will we accept payment.
Collin 23:24
And obviously from the poll that we have these kind of decisions are very different within the industry. So again, we have to be able to go through and go, I have this policy for this reason, this for For this reason, understanding the why behind it is extremely important. Make sure that your staff understand the why behind it and that it's not just a black and white text, because you are going to have to defend it down sometime down the road. Not just that it exists as a text, but the meaning behind it for you. So if you haven't done a review of that, or why or thought about the why in a long time, now's a really good time. Now that you have a chance to think back about that and start building up these reasons of why we are going to start standing up for our businesses.
Meghan 24:16
And if you have trouble being consistent in your response, let us know we would like to help and help you get systems in place for consistency. You can find us on social media at petsitter confessional or give us a call at 636-364-8260 this week's Natasha Oh Banyan pet business coach. question is how do you overcome imposter syndrome?
24:39
Oh,
Natasha 24:42
yeah. Oh my god. Every time I hear imposter syndrome, my jaw just drops. Like there's no such thing. There's no such thing as imposter syndrome. It's like it's just like the person who created doctors or the person who created lawyers or nurse like I was the first lawyer, I was a first nurse. So all you other nurses behind you. Come on, it's no such thing. Clients are going to go to who they vibe with. We all have our own natural God given Juju, or juice or special sauce, we're all different, like literally calling you and I could go toe to toe and offer the same exact service, the same exact pricing, the same exact benefits, the same exact values. But the way you do things, the empathy, you have the very calm demeanor, people may tend to clock your way because they love your vibe. Right? You are your own individual. And then maybe somebody might be like, Oh, I love the Cuckoo's in the world. I want to go with Natasha, like, her energy is always crazy. And I love doing crazy with her. And then some of my clients are like, no, she's a little bit too crazy, I'm going to call him right. So never change who you are. Because your ideal client is just an old version of yourself, the person that you wanted for your business, the services that you thought would be beneficial and valuable. Those are your clients, they have the same concerns and the same problems and they're going to flock to you. So there's no such thing as imposter. keep showing up. Keep putting yourself out there keep being your and I'm not even going to say that does self because we all hate that. A be you okay? And whatever that looks like, I'll say unapologetic, okay, we'll go with that one. But if you were curious, it was saying like, be your your most authentic self, okay, we're tired of hearing that. But be you because it's gonna go both ways. You know, you're going to be happy serving this client, because you don't have to alter who you really are. And they're going to be happy by deciding and getting the power to say, Hey, thank you for showing me who you are. And now I get to say if I want to do business with you, yeah, it's a win win. Because the thing is,
Collin 26:59
if you want to work with Natasha, head on over to start scale sale.com Check out her services. And when you're ready to work with her, use the code at PSC 20 for 15% off any of her services.
Meghan 27:11
The Texas pet sitters conference is just about two weeks away. If you haven't signed up already, you can go to TX pet sitters.com, it is completely free, you do not have to be a resident of Texas or anywhere to attend because it is all online. It is through the huva app. And they have a really great way to connect with everyone this year and have the talks on the app,
Collin 27:35
we've been having a lot of fun getting connected with pet sitters already on it, and seeing a lot of cool discussions and some fun questions that people are throwing out there. So get registered, get access to the app and start connecting with other senators from across the country and globe.
Meghan 27:50
And again, that is TX pet sitters.com. We would also like to thank our Patreon members for sponsoring this episode. On Wednesday, we're going to have Dominic Hodgson, the UK pet biz coach back on, he was on episode 112. If you haven't gotten a chance to listen to that, and on Wednesday, he's going to be talking about generational businesses and running a business with family. We thank you so much for taking your most valuable asset your time and listening to us today. We are so appreciative that you guys keep showing up every week. Keep listening. This has been a lot of fun so far. 150 episodes in and we hope to continue this for many episodes more. Thank you so much.
Collin 28:27
Thank you
