270: Knowing Your Numbers
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Summary:
We frequently talk about “knowing your numbers”, but what does that mean? What numbers do you need to know so you can determine if your business is healthy and growing? We discuss the five key financial numbers to know, as well as other areas to dissect to make sure your business is staying on track. From sales to website hits, we take a broad approach to look for red flags so we can make the necessary changes. Then, Natasha O’Banion answers, “How do I know if my marketing messages are landing?”
Main topics:
Why know your numbers?
Financials
Website and Social Media
Google My Business
Client numebrs
Ask a Pet Biz Coach with Natasha O’Banion
Main takeaway: Knowing your numbers helps you make better decisions. It helps you know when red flags start popping up so you can change course if needed.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
clients, business, numbers, people, service, website, money, charging, paying, posting, spend, pet, month, buying, track, review, confessional, monthly, pet sitters, expenses
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin, Natasha
Meghan 00:10
Hello, I'm Meghan I'm Collin and this is Pet Sitter confessional an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Hello, and welcome to another episode. Hello, number 270, where today we're going to talk about knowing your numbers
Collin 00:27
to 70 is a big number it Yeah, it is.
Meghan 00:31
If you have enjoyed any of the past 269 episodes, we appreciate you. And if you would like to financially support us just with a few dollars every month, and join
Collin 00:43
our monthly patreon group, you can head on over to petsitter confessional comm slash support, we're doing a monthly member meetups, we are going through a podcasting course. And this is all helping us put on an upcoming business retreat in August. So Megan, and I realized that we haven't really over the last 10 years taken a moment to step away totally, and spend a weekend planning and focusing on big questions and big concerns that we have as individuals, as business owners and as other hats that we wear. So we are setting aside the weekend of August 26 27th and 28th of this year 2022 of this year, to completely disconnect from our business and go out and ask big questions about ourselves. And then more importantly, plan and strategize how we can move forward, we'll talk about things that we want to continue doing things we want to stop doing things we want to maybe pick up and and change how we're doing things. And that's both on a personal and at the business level. And here's the thing,
Meghan 01:51
we don't really want to do this alone when we can, but we don't want
Collin 01:56
to know. So we really want you to be there. I know it's coming up in August can be kind of busy and crazy. And maybe you already have your planned weeks off or whatever for the rest of the year. That's totally fine. But if you are available those weeks and wants to come to Kansas City with us for a weekend of brainstorming and mastermind, we would absolutely be thrilled to see you there and work together on our personal and on our businesses as well.
Meghan 02:24
So if you would like to join us for this weekend, please let us know you can email us at feedback at petsitter. confessional comm or social media just let us know. And we'll give you the details. We also want to thank our sponsor pet sitters associates. So obviously this episode is titled knowing your numbers. And that's a phrase that gets thrown out a lot. We have said it a lot of times on this podcast know your numbers. Yeah. But we've never actually said what that means what numbers, what do you need to know. So today, we're going to talk about what numbers you need to know to help you make better decisions, it helps you know, when Red Flags start popping up so that you can change course, if you feel like you need to. It also helps you step out in confidence in your business. And so the first one we will start with is what most people think of when you hear about knowing your numbers, and that's your finances.
Collin 03:14
Right. But to throw a curveball in here, it's not the finances that you're thinking of. We're not going to start off by talking about your business finances, your personal finances. Yeah, do you know personally, how much you need each month? How much maybe you want to set aside to retire or that you're gonna need for taxes? You see, knowing your personal finances is absolutely crucial. Because you're self employed, you control both the income and and the outflow of that money. And if you don't know where your money is being spent, you're actually not in control.
Meghan 03:47
We're going to do a whole episode on budgeting. But these are some get ready for that. But there's some basic questions that we'll need to answer here. So how much do I need for my housing? How much do I need to save for retirement? whatever age you deem that necessary? Since we're self employed, we can determine whatever it is, right? How much do you need for food for clothing or personal supplies? And then how much do you need for traveling or your car? And then what you need for your health medications or insurance, that sort of thing?
Collin 04:21
Yeah, once you know those numbers, you'll really have a much better idea a much better picture of how financially healthy you are. You are not each month that can usually spur you on to change things in your business prices, all sorts of things. But what about those finances in your business? Right? That's the thing that a lot most people think about. We will encourage you to all for all the numbers that we talked about here and will remind you throughout is to break each of these numbers down out monthly, quarterly and annually. And that's really important because you'll start to pick up seasonal, annual monthly trends in your business. So you'll be able to predict when things are going to go up When things are going to go down, you'll be able to track how things are going on a much more precise manner.
Meghan 05:05
And obviously, we all know that the holidays, you know, November, December, those are obviously busier months, we get a lot of money coming in. And then usually January, February, it slows down summers busy, like we have general trends in our industry. Yeah, but this will really help you to put numbers to
Collin 05:21
use specifically in your area, just one weird fluke for where we live is during playoff seasons. And when the chiefs are in in them, we get a lot of business during that time, because people are traveling, either going to games, all sorts of things. So we get a little uptick. That's something that you don't really know or pick up on, unless you're tracking it,
Meghan 05:39
we're gonna break down five numbers that you really need to know. The first one is your sales, so your revenue. And obviously, this is referring to the amount of money that your company receives from doing business from doing the dog walks and the petsitting. It's the amount of money that's brought into your business because of this.
Collin 05:56
So when you're breaking these down on a monthly, quarterly annually basis, that also helps you not just track to see what happened in the past. But it also helps you do projections for what to anticipate in the future. So what's a projection? Well, you've actually done this constantly. I know you have because we do it all the time. It's something like, Hmm, I made $100. Today, based off of my services, if I made $100, every day, for the next month, I'd have $3,000. That's a projection you are projecting based off of past experience and knowledge, what's going to happen in the future. And then what's really neat here is that you can see whether you hit that or not, and then ask that big question, why, and start making changes and start reaching out for those financial goals.
Meghan 06:39
So the next question would be, if you made $5,000, it would be $5,000 of what was it all dog walking? Was it all pets any? Was it all pet taxi? And so here's what we do, we break out our sales by service type client, and then service area, we then calculate the percent each makes up of the total business sales. And this is really needed, because we're trying to move away from so many petsitting clients and really trying to focus more on our middays and our new service area. And so once you start tracking the numbers, you can really see exactly what's happening, the tangible impacts of your marketing initiatives, whether that be boots on the ground or social media, you can also see your changing client needs or seasonal fluctuations, like we just talked about. The next
Collin 07:23
number you need to know and understand are your expenses. So what does your business spend money on because again, we have the separation between our personal side, and our business side, and our business has things that it is spending money on. So maybe you're tracking mileage for the business, maybe you're buying supplies, you're taking trainings, you have ongoing memberships, there's business, travel conferences, the advertising that your business is doing, what are you actually spending money on? And when is that money being spent? Are you buying the ad spots for Christmas in June? Well, then you know, you need to have the sales to support that revenue to support that spend and backtrack from there. And what this starts to get us out is understanding how expensive your services are for you to render. And that will help you with your pricing and whether or not to even offer those services if they start going above and beyond what this next number is, which is profit.
Meghan 08:17
We talked all about profit first in Episode 215. But we're gonna recap it a little bit here. So it's calculated by taking your revenue, the money you're generating, and then subtracting the cost of doing business. So if you buy any leashes, if you buy a dog treats, whatever it is, and then along with other items, like your taxes or anything else you're buying, that would be your profit. So it's your revenue, minus your cost of doing business. Obviously, you should be tracking this on a monthly basis as well. And then quarterly and annually, you should be tracking all your numbers this way, just so you have an idea of what's going on in your business. Well, in a lot of times, you'll see people bragging about the revenue in their business. So if they made $100,000 in their business last year, like that's great, good for you. But you also have to balance it out with Well, what were their expenses. So if they had $100,000 business, but they had $80,000 in expenses, that's a little different.
Collin 09:17
Right. And again, looking at that profit margin to see I offered the service for $15. But that $15 service actually ended up costing me 20, with taxes with taking things out with saving for things paying back then all those things, or gas or gas right now is a big one, right? So if you have employees, exactly. So all of a sudden that $15 service is no longer profitable for you. So you have to decide, do I still offer the service? Do I change my service radius? Maybe do I raise my prices or look at ways to cut costs?
Meghan 09:48
And so talking about and looking at your profit margin is very important. It's the ratio of your profits to your revenues expressed as a percentage. It really represents the amount of revenue earned by your company and it's converted into profits. So
Collin 10:05
for this one, a higher profit margin would be better. That's what a lot of companies like to see. So if you charged $25 for a walk, and you subtract out taxes, expenses and everything in your solos, you're not paying wages out of this, maybe you're left with something like 16 or $17. That's a 64% profit margin on that service, which is very good.
Meghan 10:23
Yeah, what is expected of what is a healthy profit margin,
Collin 10:27
it really depends on the kind of service, the kind of industry that you're in, when it gets to services, those tend to have a typically healthier profit margin, because there isn't so much or as much product product or expenses going into that most of that for the services is going to be wages and income that take a bite out of that.
Meghan 10:47
Well, especially if you're just a dog walker, or a pet sitter going into people's homes, you don't have a brick and mortar store. So your expenses are going to be much lower. Yeah, absolutely. The last number that you really need to know is your cash your cash on hand. Obviously, it's all the money that you have in your checking and savings accounts. It's not necessarily paper money that you have. But it can be Yeah. So a healthy level of cash provides your business with a lot of opportunity, it frees your mind to deal with the daily operations, and maybe even some, some strategic planning. So it's good to know exactly what you have in your bank, and how much you are saving, so that when something unexpected happens, like, oh, I don't know a pandemic, you can know how much you have in your accounts,
Collin 11:31
right or, or to cover unexpected things like fire an accident or a potential lawsuit or something like that. It also helps you take advantage of opportunities that come up when you need to spend money, something like an unexpected Dog event comes up in your area. And they really need a bunch of sponsors. Well, if you had three or $500, that you could take advantage of that opportunity to sponsor that, to then generate more business, that's going to be really good for you. Or maybe you have your favorite equipment, your leashes, your harnesses your shoes that you absolutely love for your business, that you that go on sale, that there's a bargain that you find on them, having cash on hand helps you buy those quickly and not lose out on that opportunity.
Meghan 12:14
We've talked about this before, but I just want to reiterate that we firmly believe in separating your business and your personal expenses, this is going to be huge when it comes to tax time, there's going to be no discrepancy on what was for what. And so this is we're talking specifically here about your business checking and savings account.
Collin 12:32
Exactly. And that's another good point is that in our personal lives, we should have some money saved away, we should also have money saved away in our business to cover business expenses. So having three to six months of an emergency fund in your business to cover if everything stops, like you know, when would that happen? I don't know. But again, if you want to all of a sudden buy a vehicle for the business or these other things that you want to be able to take advantage of having a healthy amount of cash on hand really helps you have that security. When it comes to paying for services, many dog walkers and pet sitters will charge their clients before they do the service. Or they may charge them while they're rendering the service. There are still a subset of people who do a lot of invoicing in their business. So if you are in the business of invoicing, you really need to have a good handle on your accounts payable. What is this? The accounts payable is the money you are owed. From a sales that you have generated that you have already rendered that people owe you money on. You can basically think of it as the outstanding invoices, the money that you haven't collected yet for something that you've already done. Basically what happens is, you may and this happened during the pandemic, where people had all these outstanding invoices that were they were kind of neglecting, and then they looked at their books and they realized how many 1000s of dollars they had not collected yet. So keep a tight eye on this and run a tight ship with your accounts payable to make sure that you are continuing to get that money coming in. And you're tracking down people who do owe you money.
Meghan 14:09
On the flip side of that is the accounts receivable and this kind of only applies to if you have products you have a an online store and you are really buying supplies in order to resell them later. If you're buying leashes at wholesale price and wanting to flip them and sell them for more to your clients. This is what you're going to need to keep track of how much money you owe others keep track of it and not over leveraged yourself in case your cash flow drops, or they all try and collect at the same time.
Collin 14:38
Before we get into some more numbers that you need to know about your business. Let's talk about numbers that just make common sense insurance numbers.
Meghan 14:45
As pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members at pet sitters associates they are here to help for over 20 years they provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. Since you work in the pet care industry. You can take your career to the next level. With flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom in running your business, learn why pet sitters Associates is the perfect fit for you and get a free quote today, at pets@llc.com, you can get a discount when joining by clicking membership petsitter confessional, and using the discount code confessional at checkout to get $10 off today, check out the benefits of membership and insurance once again at petsfit llc.com. Other than your financials for your personal and your business, there are several other numbers that you need to know about your business. And one of them is social media, knowing your social media numbers is going to really help you in crafting posts. And knowing which posts are working and which ones aren't working. It may even tell you whether to invest more or less time. So if you spend 45 minutes crafting a post that you think is really awesome, but it doesn't really do very well. And what that means is it doesn't get a lot of likes or interactions, then you may need to try something else. If you look back at what you're posting, and you see that a certain type of post, maybe one with faces, does really well than all the other ones, then maybe you start curating and posting more faces of you or your staff. But if you keep posting and posting, and you're not really getting any kind of traction, take a moment to think about why that could be? Is it the content that you're posting? Is it the specific format, or the platform that you are using? Could it be the text in your caption or too much text on your picture,
Collin 16:26
there may be a lot of reasons why your posts aren't getting the traction that you want. And you may decide that it's just not worth your time to keep up. Especially if it's stressing you out. You also need to look at your website numbers. So your website does have built in analytics that can tell you a lot about your clients behavior. And this is really, really key. How did they find you? Basically, what search terms did they use to stumble upon? Or to find your website? Do you really want to see things like pet sitter, dog walker, or maybe just the name of your company? Because they found you and they found out your information? And we're looking up more about you. You also want to look at are they on mobile, or desktop or tablet? This helps you decide how you're going to design your website and make sure you're optimizing for one platform over another.
Meghan 17:12
Yeah, I know for us, 80% of our traffic to our website comes through mobile. So we any time we do edits to our website, we always make sure to do it on mobile first so we can make sure that looks good versus desktop. Meghan
Collin 17:27
yells at me until I do it on mobile. Absolutely. That's what that means. But maybe you can answer questions like where did they spend most of their time? On your website? Was there a particular page that they're drawn to where they're spending a lot of time it could be a blog that they're reading? That means they're interested in the information that you're putting out there? Maybe it's their booking page? And for some reason that's taking forever? So is your booking page confusing? Or they just indecisive at that point. Above that, you can ask what buttons are they clicking through website analytics should be able to tell you the buttons that they're clicking on your website. And so why is this needed? Well, it's to know if your website is working. So you know where your clients are and why they're coming to you. If you hook your website up to Google Analytics, you can even see things like interest categories, which is something that I recently discovered, it lumps people into categories of interests based off of their previous search history before they found you. And so you can start seeing little windows into the kind of people that your business is attracting and the other things that they're interested in as a person.
Meghan 18:28
And then there are the numbers that you need to know for Google My Business. Amy toma just talked about this in Episode 267. But I'm going to touch on it here briefly, this will tell how people found it how people found your listing, was it directly? Were they directly searching for your pet care company? Or was it through branded content, so they search for something similar to you, maybe petsitter, St. Louis, Missouri, or wherever you're at? Or was it through discovery, they were searching for a general category, or the product that you sell. If you sell a product, my favorite things to see are customer interactions. So if they visited the website, that's really good to know, because Amy just talked about that most people are not clicking through to the website. They're just calling or emailing or whatever your Google listing says. It will also tell you if people request directions or if they call you if they have sent any messages as well. Sometimes those can be a little iffy, though, not everybody because you have to be logged into your Google account. And so a lot of times I will go in, if somebody sends me a message, I'll go in and send them back a message, but then they'll never respond because they weren't logged into their Google account. So those are still I think there's some kinks working getting worked out with those.
Collin 19:42
We're gonna close out by talking about customer data and numbers that you should know about who your clients are. And the first one is the customer retention rate. This measures the number of customers that you retain over a given period of time. Basically, we understand that getting new clients is expensive and time consuming and is one of the worst things that we do. We'd love getting new people. But onboarding, waiting for them to book and going through that entire process is costly to
Meghan 20:08
us. Well, and especially if you don't charge for meet and greets, your time has been spent going to free meetings.
Collin 20:13
Yeah, keeping existing clients is a lot less expensive than trying to win new ones. And we also know that loyal customers contribute to your business's health by providing referrals, promoting brand on social medias, maybe giving feedback to improve your product and services, writing reviews. And they're easier to sell to and upsell on charges, or new services like add ons that you can do. Once they're already hooked on for one service, you know, you can probably sell them another or third one, much easier. So it's critical to keep an eye on your customer retention rate. So the first thing you need to do to know how to calculate this is first, you have to know what timeframe you're looking at. And we've already talked about monthly, quarterly, and annual timeframes. And here are the three pieces of information that you need to know. The first one is the number of existing customers at the start of that timeframe. So we're going to do a quarterly review here. So at the start of the quarter, how many customers did you have, then you need to know the total customers at the end of that quarter. And then the third one here is the number of new customers that you got throughout that period. So
Meghan 21:17
basically, it would be if you started the year January 1, and then it would be April 30. And you would want to know, then your new customers in between that time.
Collin 21:25
Yep. So what you do here is you subtract your new customers from the total at the end of the period, then you divide that by the existing number of clients that you had at the start of it, and multiply that by that 100. And that'll get you your customer retention rate. So here's an example. I know, that didn't make a whole lot of sense. So let's say that you were doing a quarterly here, you have 50 Total clients at the end of that quarter. Throughout that quarter, you added 30 clients. At the start of the quarter, though, you had 40. So you started with 40, you ended with 50, you added 30. So 50 minus 30, is 20. Take that 20 divided by 40. Because that's how many we started with. And that gets you to a 50 50%, you only had a 50% retention rate of clients throughout that quarter. To put it another way you churned through 50% of the people who came to us you this turned away and went somewhere else. It's not really that good. We want to see a high high high retention rate for your clients because it means it's you're serving them well, and that you're meeting their needs. And if you find that you're have a low retention rate, that it's really bad, you need to start asking some questions about our my services. Okay, what's my onboarding process? Like? Do they appreciate the updates that I'm getting? Maybe my prices aren't what they expected? All these questions, we can start asking once we know how many people were churning through. But that's
Meghan 22:50
kind of hard, though, in the service industry that we're in, because if you are doing predominantly petsitting clients, not everybody goes away every month or not everybody goes away every quarter. So how do you properly calculate that? How do you don't, somebody doesn't usually somebody doesn't say, Okay, I'm not going to be using you anymore, I'm going to this pet care company, or I'm, you know, moving or whatever, they just stopped using you?
Collin 23:13
Well, that's why doing this on a regular basis is so important. So that you can see those trends. Because if you find that every single quarter, you are doing a 50 60% retention rate, then that means annually, you have gone through a lot of customers. Basically, if you are doing an annual basis, and you find yourself doing a lot of petsitting clients, you would expect that the retention rate to be much higher, because petsitting clients don't just go one time away during the year usually, then you use you two or three times. So you'd see a much higher retention rate annually than you would across quarters. So then you could capture data across quarters and go this was a holiday period, my retention rate is actually really high for that because people are rebooking, me or whatever. And again, your data, your information, your location are all going to determine what a good rate is for
Meghan 24:06
this. And this goes right into also talking about repeat clients. So what percent of your clients are repeat, what we've done in the past is just have an Excel spreadsheet. And I had listed out the months of the year and at one point I actually had the days. But to keep it more simple. I just had the months of the top, and then a list of clients going down on the side. And I would just say how many days they booked that month. And then on the right side was the revenue. But that was a different, different topic for another day. But I could just see how many times they had booked in January, and in February and on and on. It really helps to see where are they coming back time and time again.
Collin 24:44
And all you would do is you'd go in Tally and you say okay, I had 20 clients and 10 of them booked me multiple times and you can decide how what that means to be a repeat client. I know when we had the dog father on pay talked about what it meant to be a repeat client to him like a full client with somebody who used All of his services. And so that's up to you. Is somebody used? If you they use you twice? Is that a repeat client? Or do they need to use you on a regular basis?
Meghan 25:09
Yeah, because somebody who uses you every Christmas, they don't use you any other time of the year, but they use you at Christmas. Is that a repeat client?
Collin 25:16
Yeah, so So let's say you look at your quarter, you have 20 clients, 10 of them booked you multiple times, that's you have you have 50% of your clients are coming back to you. And that's going to determine if you can track that over time to see if you increase that we really want to see a high number of retained clients. So customer retention needs to stay high. And repeat clients, we also want to see that go high too, because that means we have more predictability. We're serving the clients that we want to be serving. And we don't have the cost of acquiring new ones.
Meghan 25:45
Another category that I had in that spreadsheet was clients leaving a review. So I had, obviously the name of the client. And then did they leave a review? Yes, no, in that column? And then in the second column, I would have did, I asked them? Yes, no. So I would often ask clients a second time, obviously spaced out over, you know, six months or so to leave us a review again, because obviously, I want that review. I don't want to bug the client. But I would ask a second time.
Collin 26:15
And you keep track of this by going to your Google reviews, by your Yelp, on your Facebook, wherever people can review you. And you can see the names of people who are leaving reviews there. And you compare that to your total client sheet. And you can put a check mark, yes, know whether they've left a review or not.
Meghan 26:30
And this is important, because if 0% of people if your review, which that should not be the case. But no one wants that for their business. So it could be for a couple reasons, it could be that no one wants to maybe your services are not good enough, or it just could be that you've never asked before.
Collin 26:47
Hey, you know, that's probably the major reason why people have a low percentage of clients who leave reviews, because they've never asked, yeah, but they've never reached out to them. That's insanely powerful. And very moving to somebody when you say it was wonderful, caring for Fifi over the weekend, we really enjoyed our time together. If you enjoyed it, too, we'd appreciate a review, and you leave a link right there in that text right there that message so they can click it and leave a review for you.
Meghan 27:12
I will say that I don't ask I mean, you can do what you want. It's your business. But I do not ask after the first service that we provide, I at least wait until it's the second service that we have provided. Or if I know that it's going to be a daily dogwalk. Or ideally drop in, I wait at least a few weeks or a month before I do that. But if it's a pet set, I'll usually do it after the second time.
Collin 27:31
This has been a lot of numbers to think about and our businesses probably actually pretty overwhelming, giving everything that we covered from your personal to your business finances, and then to your website, in your clients.
Meghan 27:43
So feel free to listen to it again, as many times as you need. ask us any questions that you have.
Collin 27:47
Yeah, and I would just start with one of these categories, pick one to start with. If you have don't know or you're unsure of your numbers, tackle one of these to begin with, and then another one and then another one. Add that to your quarterly review or your monthly review or whatever that looks like to tackle one of these numbers set that for a goal that you have this year to better understand some of these numbers in your business so that you can end the year reviewing and looking back across all the data that you've generated, so you can make some really good decisions moving forward.
Meghan 28:16
Somebody who's really good with her business numbers, his head business coach, and Natasha Oban, Yin and she is going to answer How do I know if my marketing messages are landing?
Natasha 28:25
Yeah, like I was saying before show and not tell. So I am going to provide you trust, we can be trusted. Okay, well, what does that even mean? You told me that you are going to come between eight and 11. Did you trust check mark, I showed up? How did you prove that to me? Is there a timestamp? Did my camera check? How do I know that you actually came between eight and 11. So you open up holes for clients to dissect your system. So that's number one, just in a pet sitter world. Number two, you told me that you were paying attention to all the detail notes that I need for my pet to have a successful visit. Well, what are they? If I were to ask you again, in a four steps or six steps and you were to bring a staff member? Are they going to do that same process? Yes or no? Then when I'm on vacation, how do I know that you even did it? Are you providing photos? Are you just telling me that it was done? Oh, so you're getting a lot of phone calls in your business and you're getting a lot well Did this happen? Did this happen? Wonder why? Because you didn't show me Do I have a photo that the water was was refreshed? Do I have a photo that my escape artists nappy is outside the cage now where did you take a photo that you actually locked it? How do I know? Did you take a photo that you gave a half a cup of wet food and a half a cup of dry? How do I know? So when you provide that show and not tell you start to receive trust. Now you told me the price was going to be $75 a day but I have these invoice now that says you're charging me for gas and you're charging me for matting fee or you're charging me to refill the food? Right? Did you tell me how much food I was going to need the successful stay? So we have to take more management over our client and the process? Because Oh yeah, I fed them. But I ran out of food and we're all yelling in the Facebook group plan. Can you believe this client went out of town and didn't even leave me enough food? Well, did you tell them how much food was going to be required? Did you ask them for the brand? Did you ask them to leave you two extra days in case of a winter storm? So these are all tangible things that your system is going to show and not tell? That makes sense.
Collin 30:40
Yeah, it does. It's it's breaking these feelings down and understanding how do I as a business want to get that trust across in this IV to show them that it feels a little sometimes redundant, of like, oh, well, I did it. But I have to show that. Because otherwise, they're not going to know because they're not there. Otherwise, they'd be taking care of their dog and not you.
Natasha 30:59
And I love you said the word redundant because everything is redundant when I'm paying you per day. I tell my staff that every day they're like why always do that? Well, there's no always because the client pays me every single day to do that step. So therefore they're paying and I have to do that step the same way and consistency. Every single day. Doesn't matter. They're going to get 1000 food water bowl pictures from us in their lifetime, because they're paying me every single day for that. And that's how you cut down on phone calls. Guys. That's how you make sure that your emails aren't going off the hinges or your time to pay software isn't overcrowded? Because you're like, Oh, do you check the software? It's right in there. Did you take me? Sure did. Yep. We could took care of it. It's in there. They're like, Oh, great. They stop asking. Oh, what am I going to get my invoice? 25th Every month always come to the 25th? Did you check it up there goes there like oh, great, thank you. They know they can almost have when your system is so good. Your clients can train and be an employee for you. Because they know how it's gonna happen. It's not a guess, you know, people who are paying per week, I mean charging invoices per week. Well, you're creating this culture in your business to provide additional communication with your client because you're invoicing them every single week. And you're asking them to change your schedule every single week, because you're providing us flexibility, where if you go on a monthly payment system, you're like, Listen, what is your month plan? What's our agenda? How much stuff do I need to cover you? Listen, knock, knock. Don't forget we're going into February. Are you taking off for Valentine's Day? Are you leaving for President's Day? Would you open that culture for your clients? Oh, I'm so happy you guys didn't invoices earlier yet. Let me go ahead and update my schedule right now go in the portal, take care of it done. So before the beginning of the month even starts. All these things that we could have pre planned for are already been taken.
Meghan 32:57
If you would like to join Natasha's monthly membership group, you can do so at start scale sale calm and use the code PSC 20 for 15% off. We appreciate you listening to this today. And if you think this would be helpful to another petsitter feel free to share it with them. We appreciate all of the shares and the love
Collin 33:16
and we really want to thank our Patreon supporters and pet sitters associates for making today's show possible. Thank you so much, everybody. Bye
